Prokopiev, half Jewish himself, tried in vain to explain things to Richard S. Elephant, whose response was an argument stronger than anything the captain could think up: “America has enough poor of its own and enough Jews of its own! It doesn’t need European Jews or the European poor.” Sergey Prokopiev had no way of knowing that he was trying exactly what hundreds and thousands of others in positions similar to his were trying and that at that moment, from the Bosporus to the Maghreb, via Portugal and Spain, all the way to the coasts of both American continents, huge masses of people found themselves in the same situation as his people.
Had he known, he never would have left for Florida and placed his hopes in the abstract humanism of the coast guard. Rather, he would have persuaded his people to swim to the coast of Cuba. Those who survived the sharks would have run all over the island, and the local authorities could search for them and send them back to Eastern Europe.
He took Ivo Delavale on board the Zamzam because he was already missing half the crew, and Delavale had some papers from the American army, which, the desperate captain thought, could be of general use. However, before it reached American shores, it was stopped by torpedo boats, and a gruff sergeant gave Prokopiev an ultimatum to move on in half an hour or he would give the order to sink the ship. The captain only laughed and retorted to the American that he couldn’t blackmail him or the people he was transporting with their lives and that he could go ahead and torpedo them. The sergeant grew confused, and after a conversation with his superiors suggested to Prokopiev to drop anchor right where he was until someone in Washington or somewhere else decided what would happen to the Zamzam.
“No chance,” he retorted. “My passengers are dying of starvation! Either sink us, let us through, or give us food.”
The sergeant didn’t do any of those things but again contacted his superiors. A motorboat with Red Cross markings arrived more quickly than he would have thought, and the Zamzam received a first quantity of bread and canned goods. Over the seven days that the ship would remain on that spot, surrounded by five boats of the coast guard, the Red Cross would come a few hundred times with food and medicine. The entire storage space of the Zamzam would be overflowing, and soon they were putting boxes with the emblem of international aid on deck. The captain waited for a decision from Washington, but he knew well what it would be. He had an in-depth understanding of the comfort of canned goods and their purpose and was ready to scuttle the Zamzam together with the food that had accumulated, which was enough for a year’s voyage. He saw no sense in harassing people and driving them across the sea if not one shore would accept them.
When on the eighth morning the arrogant sergeant arrived with a negative answer, Sergey Prokopiev convened a ship’s council, assembled on the basis of the homelands and countries from which the people had fled, and proposed collective suicide. Let history remember the Jewish Titanic in the Caribbean!
The people, of course, were shocked, rejected his idea, and tried to persuade him to sail back to Europe. The war would surely end before they arrived, and Hitler would of course be defeated. The captain didn’t believe in a quick end to the war or in Hitler’s defeat, but he didn’t oppose the decision of council. Regardless, they began to spy on him and kept tabs on his every move, frightened that he would scuttle the Zamzam.
The drama of the thousand Jews and their captain took place at the same time as Ivo’s personal drama. Namely, instead of the fact that he was taking part in a mission that had the approval of the American military helping the crew and passengers, as Prokopiev was hoping, the fact that Ivo Delavale had boarded the Zamzam of all ships turned out to be fatal for him. The sergeant was convinced that his papers had been forged, and he sent them as suspicious to his superiors, where they were likewise suspicious, but they couldn’t investigate the authenticity of the documents and sent them further on up. No one knew how far Ivo’s papers went and who all had them in their hands before they vanished in someone’s drawer, but in the end it turned out that he hadn’t even turned them over to the sergeant, and there was no longer any way of proving his identity. For the Americans he was just one more in the mass of European wretches who wandered the deck of the Zamzam and who needed to be avoided in any way possible because an encounter with them could be fatal, just as when on a rainy day you notice a little wet puppy in the mud at the side of the road and know that the little animal would stay there forever and give up its little ghost if you didn’t take it with you.
Because of feelings that are awakened in such situations, it was important not to look around oneself too much and to remain indifferent to the misfortunes of people and dogs.
All during the journey to Europe the ocean was unusually calm, and everyone thought that was a good sign. The Atlantic was never so quiet, no matter what the season, and the crew and the passengers believed that the hand of fate was involved. Luck had served them, and the dark clouds over their heads had begun to clear. Maybe it was better that America hadn’t accepted them, they thought, because who would ever go back home from such a distant land? And they would get back home for certain, the next day or in three months. Full and content, they were looking forward to Europe.
In the early evening entertainment was arranged on deck. A small ensemble consisting of a guitar, a violin, and an accordion played circle dances and other dances from various countries. There were polkas and mazurkas. A waltz floated out over the sea. A tango sounded like the sad horn of a dead tugboat; Balkan circle dances rumbled over the wooden deck. The hypnotic rhythms of dervish dances shimmered in the air, when a man became inured to fear and pain and it seemed to him that he was within arm’s reach of God and all he had to do was reach out and accept his embrace . . . There were all kinds of music and dances, but no Jewish, Hebrew, Ashkenazi, or Sephardic songs were heard. Only once did they start playing “Der Himl Lacht,” an old Klezmer song, but the audience objected. They didn’t want to hear Jewish songs because they were melancholy, no one could understand them, and it wasn’t good to sing and play something that differed so much from the other songs. They thought they needed to be like other people, and if their people had taken more care about fitting in, they wouldn’t have ended up in a situation where they would soon cease to exist. They said things like that, and only two men knew that the truth was different and didn’t have very much to do with which songs were sung and which ones weren’t.
Ivo knew because he was the only one who wasn’t a Jew. The captain of the ship knew, too, because he knew where they were sailing. But it would have been wrong to spoil those people’s joy and take their hopes away at those moments when it didn’t matter what they believed in. They had no way of influencing their fate or changing what would happen, and it was better, out in the middle of the peaceful Atlantic, in the one place where they could feel like free men, to let them live in the illusion that the war had come to an end and that their future happiness depended only on what songs they would sing.
The day before the Zamzam was to approach the coast of Portugal, Captain Sergey Prokopiev summoned Ivo to the bridge and asked him whether he knew how to command a ship. He was surprised, but it was clear to him what the question meant.
“If something happens to me, you’ll take over the Zamzam,” Prokopiev said. “The crew already knows.”
He then saw him for the last time. The next morning the captain slipped past the watchful eyes of his spies and disappeared. They looked for him and called out to him as if he were a child and had gotten lost. The confusion lasted an hour, and everyone was on his feet; no one could hear himself think from the noise and disputes. The crew waited for the passengers to calm down a little to tell them that Ivo Delavale was taking over command of the ship. The old captain had left no message or farewell letter behind, nor did anyone know how he’d vanished or where he’d gone.
“Someone should inform the family somehow,” Izak Papo, a ninety-year-old man from Bitola, said anxiously and tugged at the new captain’s sleeve. They didn�
��t know whether Sergey Prokopiev had any kin, just as they didn’t know anything else about him. Except that he was born in Russia, that his mother’s name was Sarah, and that on winter days she knitted socks without stopping. After she’d knitted socks for everyone in her house, she knitted some for a collie named Ataman. That was the only thing that Sergey Prokopiev had said about himself since he had taken command of the Zamzam a year before in the port of Marseilles. He also said that Ataman hadn’t resisted, as one would expect from an animal, but had worn his red socks whenever cold weather hit or Sarah thought that cold weather had hit. Ataman didn’t want to hurt her no matter how much he thought her care made no sense.
“That dog was smart—it shouldn’t have been called Ataman,” said Sergey Prokopiev.
The night before they were supposed to sail into port was very hard going. It was humid and muggy, as nights are for old men on their deathbeds. No one on the Zamzam got a wink of sleep. They roamed the deck in silence, shadows collided with a muffled sound above the blackness of the sea, and that Atlantic dream of peace faded from every one of their souls. Ivo decided to bypass Leixoes, Porto, and Lisbon and moor out in front of the fishing port of Figuera de Foz. He was counting on the element of surprise: by the time the Portuguese authorities, customs officials, and police assembled, the passengers would disembark from the Zamzam, and then it would be difficult to pack them back onto the ship and deport them. His plan was extremely naïve and people would probably laugh in the face of any captain who came up with something like that, but on a night when a powerful sirocco was blowing and everyone’s head was filled with confusion, no idea was foolish enough to be rejected out of hand. Not long before sunrise Ivo Delavale assembled the Jewish representatives on the bridge, told them that the time of parting was near, and requested that they make a list according to which the people would disembark from the Zamzam.
“When you set foot on Portuguese soil, our journey will be over. From that moment onward every man answers only for himself. I advise you not to tarry in the harbor. Run as fast as your legs can carry you. The farther you get, the fewer the chances that the police will catch you. I hope you’ve kept a few ducats or gold rings. They’ll come in handy. I wish you all luck,” he said, concluding his first and last captain’s address. The people dispersed in silence; the lights of a city twinkled dimly on the horizon.
The disembarkation lasted two full hours. That was how long it took for everyone to be rowed ashore in small fishing boats. Ivo Delavale was the last one to leave the Zamzam, as he thought that custom required it.
He bade a long farewell, not without sorrow, to that strange ship that had sailed under a holy flag and bore the name of a mythic well in the middle of the Arabian desert. When Abraham had driven out Hagar and her son Ishmael, the Zamzam well had kept them from dying of thirst. That name, written in faded letters on the rusty hull of a vessel whose history was unknown to Ivo—in the past it might have been a transport for opium, slaves, or weapons—had really protected those who’d sailed on her. He believed that at the moment when he bade farewell to the Zamzam.
As his boat put ashore, a terrible storm arose suddenly. It happened in thirty seconds. A wind blew up from the ocean; the wooden docks started creaking; the roofs of houses, tarps that had been covering Mediterranean fruit, the black caftans and hats of people who’d hastily fled from their homes all flew into the air. Steel drums full of oil and wooden barrels full of wine flew through the air. Earthenware pots of olive oil flew high above the sea and were then suddenly plunged into its depths. Masts of fishing boats flew through the air, as did the children of fishermen, shouting and howling; stray dogs and a few insufficiently clever cats were also seen flying through the air. A whole world flew up and away in an instant, and there could be no doubt of divine intent. Soldiers who’d waited for the passengers with their rifles at the ready began to cross themselves and then ran off to find shelter, holding their caps down on their heads. The Jews were caught all alone in the middle of the fishing port, in the crashing of masts and tree trunks, live wood and dead wood, and in the horrible droning of a wind that could only be described by someone who’d lived through the meteorology of the Old Testament.
The soldiers and policemen forgot about the Jews because in such circumstances they were of no concern to anyone. Not to General Carmona, not to his minister of finance Oliveira Salazar, nor to their Estado Novo. Far from its imperial glory, somewhere on the very fringe of Europe, it had been caught in the midst of an ordinary storm. Sensing what the storm meant, the people ran, into the wind and in all directions, and so two hours later, when the storm subsided, not a single passenger from the Zamzam was still in the port of Figuera de Foz. The ship was gone too because the sea had torn it apart. Or maybe it had disappeared, following the steps of its real captain. Those were the ’40s, and such things were possible. People, cities, freight trains, and whole nations were disappearing, and so why wouldn’t a single ship disappear too? Up into the sky, along with Chagall’s fellow villagers.
Soldiers roamed the docks in vain, their rifles at the ready, and they tried in vain to figure out whether the ship full of Jews had really existed or whether it had been an apparition, another miracle à la Fátima that the Virgin uses to warn people of something they’ll never comprehend anyway.
In Setúbal, after two weeks of hiding and sleeping in the cellars of abandoned houses on the seashore, Ivo Delavale boarded the Italian merchant ship De Amicis as a stowaway. For three days and nights he didn’t emerge from a container full of oranges, and then, figuring that they could no longer send him back, he went out on deck and turned himself in. Instead of locking him in the hold, beating him up, or at least assigning him to the cook to peel potatoes, Captain Gordone and the crew split their sides laughing at a man who’d fed himself on unripe oranges for three days, and then they couldn’t believe that he was fleeing to Italy from Portugal. He told them that he was going home, that he hadn’t seen his wife in a long time and no longer cared how near he was to the front lines. The war was everywhere; it had engulfed the entire world, and it didn’t matter whether you were in Brazil or Dalmatia. Gordone shook his head: “Oh, yes, it does matter, but if he loves his wife so much, then let him go right ahead; let him see what real war is like.” Apart from the devil having gotten him to go on the hunt for German submarines with a gray-haired fantast, Ivo Delavale hadn’t really seen war or even thought much about it. In fact, he thought about it as much as the average American, as much as Diana, who, usually before her period or during a full moon, would fall into a fright about a Japanese paratroop drop on Chicago. But since the coast guard sergeant had taken his papers and he’d been continually traveling in the opposite direction from what he wanted, not knowing whether he was dreaming or everything was really happening to him, Ivo had begun to imagine war too as one more personal stroke of bad luck. Something that would spoil his plans for life but wouldn’t cost him his head. Here he saw a difference between himself and the Jews on the Zamzam. No matter how much he pitied those people, empathized with them, and was ready to help them, they were still something like Martians to him. At least as far as he was concerned, the Second World War had smashed the globe into several planets. At the time when the war began, Ivo was in America and could consider himself an American.
The fact that the funny little man in the prep school attic was Samuel F. Klein, the man from the photograph at the head of the dining hall of the beautiful Leonica, was only one in a series of oddities that had happened to him, but it was the first that he took to be a sign of fate.
“Don’t you be afraid; I’ll carry you to the sea like a sack of potatoes,” he told him and dragged him out into the night almost by force. Klein squealed like a little animal but quit putting up a fight. Hypnotized by fear, he found himself under a wide starry sky, on a cobbled pavement that reflected the moonlight and looked almost like it was plated with silver. That much silver could buy up all the souls in that country.
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��Conquistadors,” Klein whispered.
“What?” Ivo asked, turning around.
“Nothing,” said the little man, tiptoeing, frightened and enthused. His fear came from noises that echoed across through the market district, betraying every living being, and his enthusiasm was made of the silver and shadows, the gleaming cobblestones and dark upper-story porches, and the sky, which was so vast and black that the stars gleamed brightly, like a thousand suns. He felt like explaining all that to his sailor, first his discovery of the silver, gold, and precious stones and the fact that riches were more valuable to people than life itself. And why wouldn’t they be when the primeval image was so beautiful, there in the sky and on the cobblestones? And was there any living creature that would see more in its own flesh and bone than this miracle? He also wanted to tell him about the way that silver and gold are turned into money, securities, and checks, into things stripped of all beauty but that still found their backing in it. And he would also have told him that there wouldn’t be anything if it weren’t for fear. And living creatures don’t notice anything until they become very frightened and their lives hang on a thread. Klein hurried along with small steps and tried to remember everything that he had to tell the sailor if he survived that night. There was a lot, the bulk of which would be forgotten. Which wasn’t a great pity because if he thought about it, it was all babbling, and he was a babbler. That was what people thought of him, and for all he cared, they could think it because they were right. And so it was enough to repeat “Conquistadors.” And he’d already said enough, too much for what he was. He hadn’t accepted anything in life completely, nor had he thought about anything long enough to be able to say now: Look, I’ve been thinking about such-and-such all my life, and I’ve concluded such-and-such, and there is such-and-such benefit from that! There was no benefit, he thought, as he followed Ivo’s steps. Well, if that man hadn’t been in front of him, he wouldn’t have even known where to go. But Ivo certainly did. God forbid he didn’t!
The Walnut Mansion Page 35