by Herman Wouk
Natalie muttered, “I’m one hell of a miscast Madonna.”
“Miscast? Hardly, my dear.” Wrapped in his dark blue travelling cloak, gray hat pulled low on his head, Jastrow calmly stroked his neat beard. “Typecast, I’d say, for face, figure, and racial origin.”
Elsewhere on the slanting deck, Jews crowded the walkways, swarming out of the fetid holds to stroll in the sun. They squeezed past lifeboats, crates, barrels, and deck structures, or they gathered on hatches, talking in a babel of tongues, with Yiddish predominating. Only Jastrow and Natalie sat blanketed in deck chairs. The Palestinian organizer of the voyage, Avram Rabinovitz, had dug the chairs out of the bilges, mildewy and rat-chewed but serviceable. The baby worshippers thinned away, leaving a respectful patch of vacant rusty iron plate around the Americans, though the strollers kept glancing at them. Since arriving aboard, Jastrow, known as der groiser Amerikaner shriftshteller, “the great American author,” had scarcely spoken to anyone, which had only magnified his stature.
Natalie waved a hand at the blue double hump of mountain, far across the bay. “Will you look at Vesuvius! So sharp and clear, for the first time!”
“A fine day for visiting Pompeii,” Jastrow said.
“Pompeii!” Natalie pointed at the fat policeman in a green greatcoat patrolling the wharf. “We’d be scooped up as we stepped off the gangplank.”
“I’m acutely aware of that.”
“Anyway, Pompeii’s so depressing! Don’t you think so? A thousand roofless haunted houses. A city of sudden mass death. Ugh! I can do without Pompeii, obscene frescoes and all.”
Herbert Rose came shouldering along the deck, a head taller than most of the crowd, his California sports jacket bright as a neon sign in the shabby mass. Natalie and Jastrow had been seeing little of him, though it was he who had arranged their flight from Rome and their coming aboard the Redeemer. He was berthing below with the refugees. The smart-aleck film distributor, who had booked most American movies in Italy until the declaration of war, was uncovering a Zionist streak, declining to share the organizer’s cabin because — so he said — he was now just one more Jew on the run. Also, he wanted to practice speaking Hebrew.
“Natalie, Avram Rabinovitz wants to talk to you.”
“Just Natalie?” asked Jastrow.
“Just Natalie.”
She tucked Louis into his basket under the thick brown blanket. Rabinovitz had obtained the basket in Naples, together with other baby supplies, and a few things for Natalie and her uncle, who, with Rose, had fled Rome in the clothes in which they stood. The Palestinian had also brought aboard the tinned milk on which Louis was living. In Rome, even at the United States embassy, canned milk had long since run out. To her amazed inquiry, “Where on earth did you get it?” Rabinovitz had winked and changed the subject.
“Aaron, will you watch him? If he cries, shove the pacifier in his face.”
“Is it about our departure?” Jastrow asked Rose as she left.
Dropping into the vacant deck chair, Rose put up his lean long legs. “He’ll tell her what it’s about.” He was smooth-shaven, bald, lean, with a cartoonlike Semitic nose. His air and manner were wholly American, assured, easy, unselfconsciously on top of the world. “Solid comfort,” he said, snuggling in the chair. “You Yankee-Doodles know how to live.”
“Any second thoughts at this point, Herb?”
“About what?”
“About sailing in this wretched scow.”
“I don’t think it’s a wretched scow.”
“It’s not the Queen Mary.”
“The Queen Mary isn’t running Jews to Palestine. Tough! It could run twenty thousand at a crack, and clear a million bucks on every run.”
“Why have we been idle for a week?”
“It took two days to install the armature. Then came this three-day gale. We’ll leave, don’t worry.”
A cold gust flapped the blanket off Louis. Rose tucked it back in.
“Herb, didn’t we simply panic in Rome, the three of us? That mob around the American embassy was just a lot of loafers, I’m sure, hoping for a little excitement after the declaration of war.”
“Look, the police were arresting people who tried to go in, right and left. We both saw that. God knows what happened to them. And at that, they probably weren’t Jews.”
“I’ll bet,” said Jastrow, “that if their passports were in order, Jews or not, they’re now quartered in some pleasant hotel, awaiting exchange for Italians caught in the States.”
Rose snapped, “I wouldn’t go back to Rome if I could. I’m happy.”
Jastrow said in perfect Hebrew, “And how are you progressing with your new language?”
“Jesus Christ!” Rose stared at him. “You could teach it, couldn’t you?”
“There’s no substitute,” Jastrow smiled, stroking his beard and resuming his Bostonian English, “for a Polish yeshiva education.”
“Why the devil did you ever drop it? I wasn’t even bar mitzvahed. I can’t forgive my parents.”
“Ah, the greener grass,” said Jastrow. “I couldn’t wait to escape from the yeshiva. It was like a jail.”
Natalie meantime made her way to Rabinovitz’s cabin under the bridge. She had not visited it before. He offered her his chair at a desk piled with papers, dirty clothes, and oily tools, and sat on an unmade bunk, hunching against the bulkhead adorned with sepia nudes torn from magazines. The single electric bulb was so dim, and the tobacco smoke so thick, that Natalie could just make these out. At her embarrassed grin, Rabinovitz shrugged. He wore bulky grease-streaked coveralls, and his round face was mud-gray with fatigue.
“It’s the chief engineer’s art collection. I took his room. Mrs. Henry, I need three hundred American dollars. Can you and your uncle help out?” Taken aback, she said nothing. He went on, “Herb Rose offered the whole amount, but he’s already shelled out too much. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if not for him. I’m hoping you and your uncle will give a hundred each. That would be fairer. Old men tend to be pikers, so I thought I’d put it to you.” Rabinovitz’s English was clear but heavily accented, and his slang was dated, as though it came from reading old novels.
“What’s the money for?”
“Fetchi-metchi. “ He slid a thick thumb back and forth over two fingers, and wearily smiled. “Bribery. The harbor master won’t clear us to depart. I don’t know why. He started out friendly, but he changed.”
“You think you can bribe him?”
“Oh, not him. Our captain. You’ve seen him, that drunken bearded old scalawag in the blue jacket. If we leave illegally, he forfeits his ship’s papers. The harbor master’s office is holding them. I’m sure he’s done it often, he’s a smuggler by trade. But it’s an extra.”
“Won’t that be very dangerous?”
“I don’t think so. If the coast guard stops us, we’ll say we’re test-running our repaired engine, and head back. We’ll be no worse off than we are.”
“If we’re stopped, will he return the money?”
“Good question, and the answer is that he gets paid when we pass the three-mile limit.”
All week long, with too much time to think, Natalie had been imagining calamitous reasons for the failure to depart, and wondering whether she had done the right thing in fleeing from Rome. The prospect of a trip across the Mediterranean in this hulk was growing uglier by the day. Still, she had clung to the thought that it would at least get her baby away from the Germans. But to start by breaking the Fascist law, and trying to outrun the coast guard’s gunboats!
Rabinovitz said in a hard though not hostile tone as she sat silent, “Well, never mind. I’ll get it all from Rose.”
“No, I’ll chip in,” Natalie said. “Aaron will, too, I’m sure. I just don’t like it.”
“Neither do I, Mrs. Henry, but we can’t sit here. We have to try something.”
On a hatch cover near Dr. Jastrow, who was writing in a notebook, two young men were arguing over
an open battered Talmud volume. Rose was gone. Jastrow paused in his work to listen to their dispute about a point in Gittin, the treatise on divorce. In the Polish yeshiva, Jastrow had earned many a kiss from his teachers for unravelling problems in Gittin. The sensation of those damp hairy accolades came to mind, and he smiled. The two arguers saw this and shyly smiled back. One touched his ragged cap, and said in Yiddish, “Der groiser shriftshteller understands the little black points?”
Jastrow benignly nodded.
The other young man — gaunt, yellow-faced, with a straggling little beard and bright sunken eyes, a pure yeshiva type — spoke up excitedly. “Would you join us, and perhaps teach us?”
“As a boy, I did once study the Talmud,” Jastrow said in cool precise Polish, “but that was long, long ago, I fear. I’m rather busy.”
Subdued, the pair resumed their study. Soon, to Jastrow’s relief, they moved away. It might have been amusing, he thought as he resumed writing, to join the lads and astound them with memory feats. After fifty years, he remembered the very passage in dispute. The retentiveness of a boy’s mind! But a long voyage lay ahead. Keeping one’s distance in these crowded conditions, especially amid these tribally intimate Jews, was the only way.
Jastrow was starting a new book, to pass the time and make some use of his disagreeable predicament. In a deliberate echo of his big success, A Jew’s Jesus, he was calling it A Jew’s Journey. But what he had in mind was not a travel diary. As Marcus Aurelius had written classic meditations on the battlefield by candlelight, so Jastrow proposed to coin his wartime flight into luminous thoughts on faith, war, the human condition, and his own life. He guessed the idea would charm his publisher; and that if he brought it off, it might even be another book club selection. In any case, at his age, it would be a salutary reckoning of the soul. On this notion, characteristically combining the thoughtful, the imaginative, and the catchpenny, Aaron Jastrow was well into the first notebook borrowed from Rabinovitz. He knew the book could never be a success like A Jew’s Jesus, which had hit the book club jackpot and the best-seller lists, with its novel portrayal of Christ in his homely reality as a Talmud prodigy and itinerant Palestinian preacher; but it would be something to do.
After the yeshiva boys had moved off, the little scene struck him as worth writing down. He detailed the subtle point in Gittin which, so long ago, he had disputed in much the same terms with his clever young cousin, Berel Jastrow, in the noisy study hall of the Oswiecim yeshiva. He described that distant scene. He made gentle fun of his own gradual change into a cool Westernized agnostic. If Berel were still alive, he wrote, and if he had been invited into this dispute over page 27A of Gittin, he would have picked up the thread with zest, and argued rings around the yeshiva lads. Berel had remained true to the old orthodoxy. Who could now say which of them had chosen more wisely?
But what has become of Berel? Does he yet live? In my last glimpse of him, through the eyes of my venturesome and well-travelled niece, he stands amid the smoky wreckage of the Warsaw Jewish quarter in 1939 under German bombardment — erect, busy, aged but sturdy as a peasant, with the full gray beard of the orthodox, a paterfamilias, a community leader, a prosperous merchant; and beneath that conventional surface a steely survivor, an Ahasuerus of Christian legend, the indestructible Wandering Jew. Seven or eight years younger than I am, Berel served four years on the battlefronts in the First World War. He was a soldier; he was a prisoner; he escaped; he fought on several fronts, in three different armies. In all that time, through all those perils (so he once wrote me, and so I believe) not only did he emerge unharmed; not a particle of forbidden food ever passed his lips. A man who could care so much about our old God and our ancient Law puts to shame, in point of gallantry, his assimilated cousin who writes about Jesus. And yet the voice of enlightened humanism, speaking with all respect, might well ask whether living in a dream, however comforting and powerful —
“Damn it, Aaron! How long has he been uncovered like this?” Crouched over the basket, Natalie was angrily pulling the flapping blanket back over Louis, who began to cry.
“Oh, has it come undone?” Jastrow said with a start. “Sorry. He’s been quiet as a mouse.”
“Well, it’s time to feed him.” She picked up the basket, giving him an exasperated glare. “If he’s not too frozen to eat, that is.”
“What did Rabinovitz want?”
She bluntly told him.
“Really, Natalie! That much money! An illegal departure! That’s terribly upsetting. We must be careful with our money, you know. It’s our only salvation.”
“We’ve got to get out of here. That’s our salvation.”
“But perhaps Rabinovitz is just squeezing the rich Americans a bit — now Natalie, don’t scowl so! I only mean —”
“Look, if you don’t trust him, go ashore and give yourself up. I’ll split the three hundred with Rose.”
“Good heavens, why do you snap at me so? I’ll do it.”
Heavy vibration woke her. Sitting up, clutching over her nightgown the sweater in which she slept, she looked through the open porthole. Cold foggy fishy-smelling air came drifting in. The pier was sliding backward in the misty night. She could hear the slosh of the propellers. Aaron snored in the upper bunk. On the deck beside her, the baby rustled and wheezed in his basket.
She snuggled down again beneath the coarse blankets, for it was very cold. Under way! A departure was always exhilarating; this risky clandestine slip from the trap of Nazi Europe, doubly so. Her mind sleepily groped ahead to Palestine, to getting word to Byron, to making her way home. The geography of the Middle East was blurry to her. Could she perhaps find passage at Suez to Australia, and from there go on to Hawaii? To wait out the war in Palestine was impossible. At best it was a disease-ridden barren country. The Germans in North Africa were a menace. So were the Arabs.
At each change in engine sound she grew more wakeful. The rolling and pitching were bad right here in the harbor; what would they be like on the open sea? The extra oil tanks welded on the main deck clearly made the vessel very unstable. How long to reach the three-mile limit? Dawn was making a violet circle at the porthole. The captain would have to go slow in this fog, and daylight would increase the chance of being caught. What a business, what a predicament! So Natalie lay tense and worrying, braced against the unsteady bunk through a long, long half hour, while the porthole brightened to whitish-gray.
WHUMP!
On the instant she was out of her bunk, bare feet on the icy iron deck, pulling on a coarse bathrobe. Natalie had heard a lot of gunfire in Warsaw. She knew that noise. Cold wet wind through the porthole tumbled her hair. The fog had lifted a little off the rough sea, and she saw far ahead a gray ship with a white number on its bow. From this bow came a smoky yellow flash.
WHUMP!
The engines pounded, the deck shivered and tilted, the vessel swerved. She hastily dressed, shuddering in the raw air. So small was the room that she barked elbows and knees on the cold-water basin, the bunk, and the doorknob. Aaron slept on. She would not wake him yet, she thought. He would only dither.
At the porthole an enormous white 22 appeared, blocking off the black waves and the gray sky. The gun slowly moved forward into view — not very big, painted gray, manned by boyish sailors in black short raincoats. Both vessels were slowing. The gunners were looking at the Redeemer and laughing. She could imagine why: the motley paint job, patches of red primer, of white coat, of old unscraped rust; the extra fuel tanks, spread along the deck like bad teeth in an old man’s jaw. Outside harsh voices bawled back and forth in Italian.
The deck trembled. The coast guard vessel fell away. Through the porthole Natalie saw the green crags of Capri and Ischia; then, swinging into view dead ahead, the hills of Naples, lined with white houses in wan sunlight. Through all this Aaron Jastrow slept. Turning back! She fell on the bunk, face down in the pillow. The trip she had been dreading now seemed a passage to lost bliss. The hunted feeling rose in her brea
st again.
“My goodness, what a commotion!” Aaron poked his frowsy head out of the bunk. Sunshine was streaming through the porthole, and the crewmen were cheerily shouting and cursing outside. The Redeemer was tying up to the same wharf, with the same potbellied policeman in green patrolling it. “Why, it’s broad daylight. You’re all dressed. What’s happening? Are we leaving?”
“We’ve left and returned. The coast guard stopped us.”
Jastrow looked grave. “Oh dear. Two hundred dollars!”
Rabinovitz came to their door, freshly shaved, in a stained dark suit, a gray shirt, a red tie. His face was set in hard angry lines, and he was holding out some American money. “I can only refund half, sorry. He wouldn’t leave the pier unless I advanced half. I had to gamble.”
“You may need the rest,” Natalie said. “Keep it.”
“If I need it, I’ll ask again.”
Jastrow spoke from the upper bunk. “We’ve never discussed paying for our passage, you know, and —”
Rabinovitz slapped the money into Natalie’s hand. “Excuse me. I’m going to bust in on that damned harbor master. We’re a neutral vessel. We just put in here for emergency repairs. Holding us up like this is a damned outrage!”
They were having their noonday tea when Rabinovitz reappeared at their cabin door. “I was short-tempered this morning. Sorry.”
“Come in,” Natalie said amiably. “Tea?”
“Thanks. Yes. What’s the matter with your baby?” Louis was whimpering in his basket.
“He caught a chill. Is there any news?”
Rabinovitz squatted with his back to the door, holding the glass in two hands and sipping. “Dr. Jastrow, when we left Rome so suddenly, you seemed very upset about the manuscript you had to leave behind.”
“I’m still upset. Four years of my life!”
“What was the title of your book?”
“The Arch of Constantine. Why?”
“In Rome, did you know anybody at the German embassy?”
“The German embassy? Obviously not.”