The Ocean Liner

by Marius Gabriel

  ‘There was a certain exhilaration in evading death,’ he acknowledged. ‘And now to be speeding away is also very pleasant. We are making an average of twenty-two knots. And the weather ahead of us is fine. I found this out from the steward, Mr Nightingale. The information cost me five dollars.’

  ‘Why did you have to pay five dollars?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘A sprat to catch a mackerel. There is a sweepstake of a hundred dollars. Armed with this information I was careful to buy a low number. A hundred and fifty-three.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are talking about,’ Masha said.

  ‘They are betting on how many hours it will take us to reach New York,’ Katharine said. ‘Though if you think Mr Nightingale isn’t selling the same information to every passenger who asks him, you are more naïve than I imagined, Igor.’

  He smiled sardonically. ‘Perhaps I am. An innocent lamb arriving to be shorn by the cunning Americans.’

  ‘In my experience,’ she retorted, ‘it’s usually Americans who are taken in by Old World guile and deceit.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Rachel put in. ‘I look forward to spinning my Jewish web again. The Führer made it rather difficult for us to practise our wiles.’ She glanced at Katharine. ‘You are Jewish, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am an atheist,’ Katharine replied, irritated as always by the question.

  ‘Ah. This means what, exactly?’

  ‘It means I do not care to categorise myself as adhering to one outmoded system of beliefs or another.’

  ‘One can see you have not lived in the Third Reich,’ Rachel said dryly.

  ‘Rachel,’ Masha whispered, ‘you are being impertinent.’

  ‘In the Third Reich,’ Rachel went on, ‘it does not matter how you characterise yourself. One does not enjoy the luxury of categorising oneself. It matters only how the authorities categorise you.’

  ‘I am aware of how things stand in the Third Reich,’ Katharine said stiffly.

  ‘That is very clever of you, having had no practical experience of life there, as well as not adhering to any outmoded system of beliefs.’

  Stravinsky was amused. ‘It seems it’s your turn to suffer the elder Miss Morgenstern’s ironical barbs, Katharine. Have you tired of tormenting young Thomas, Miss Morgenstern?’

  ‘I will get to Thomas by and by,’ Rachel said with a glint in her ice-blue eyes.

  Thomas looked up from his plate with a wan smile. ‘For my part, you can skip over me, Fräulein. I will donate my turn to someone else.’

  Rachel stared for a moment, then gave a sharp laugh. ‘So there is a little wit in that head of yours.’

  As they left the breakfast table, Masha took Rachel’s arm. ‘Don’t you think there is some mystery surrounding Thomas?’ she whispered.

  ‘What mystery might that be?’

  ‘He seems so young.’

  ‘He is eighteen.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s telling the truth about that. And where are his parents, for another thing?’

  ‘They are probably high Nazis, and too busy to leave Germany. He is going to stay with his uncle, isn’t he?’

  ‘It’s strange that they let their son travel so many thousands of miles all alone, during wartime.’

  ‘If I had a son like that, I would drown him in a bucket.’

  ‘Rachel!’ Masha exclaimed. ‘Sometimes you go too far.’

  ‘That,’ Rachel said grimly, ‘is my speciality.’

  ‘Wasn’t he very helpful when the submarine came?’

  ‘That was only because he’s in love with you.’

  ‘Constantly reiterating that he’s in love with me doesn’t explain him, Rachel. There is more to him than that. He has a sense of duty, of responsibility, of human kindness that someone must have taught him. And you were very rude to Miss Wolff at breakfast.’

  ‘She gets on my nerves, declaring she can choose whether to be a Jew or not.’

  ‘You know that there have been times when you and I have both wanted to pass as Gentiles,’ Masha said.

  ‘That was quite different. That was a question of saving ourselves from a beating, or worse. She is in no danger. She does it because she is ashamed of her Jewishness.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I know that sort of woman.’

  ‘You’re very unreasonable. I don’t think you have the right to judge Miss Wolff.’

  ‘Besides,’ Rachel added, ‘I am sure she is ashamed of something else about herself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that she has the same preferences as I do, but denies them.’

  ‘You think she’s a lesbian?’

  ‘She doesn’t have the courage to be a lesbian, so she despises women who do.’

  ‘Not everyone has your courage,’ Masha said gently. Since receiving Dorothea’s letter in Cobh, Masha knew that Rachel had been deeply unhappy. Her raillery had become bitter; her repartee had turned to spite. ‘You’re upset about Dorothea. I wish you would talk to me, instead of bottling it up inside.’

  ‘What is there to talk about?’ Rachel demanded harshly. ‘I am going my way and she is going hers. It’s finished.’

  ‘Are you angry with her?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I feel.’

  ‘But you said yourself she has no choice.’

  ‘Women never have a choice.’

  ‘Under the Nazis, perhaps not. But we’re going to a country where women are free.’

  ‘If you believe that, then you’re even more of a soft-headed idiot than I took you for,’ Rachel snapped. Then, seeing the wounded look on Masha’s face, she deliberately dug her nails into her own cheeks. ‘I hate myself.’

  Masha grabbed her cousin’s hands to stop her hurting herself further. ‘Don’t do that!’ Rachel’s sharp nails had made red marks on her delicate skin.

  ‘Forgive me, forgive me.’

  ‘I don’t mind what you say to me. Only, I can’t bear to see you so wretched.’

  ‘She will suffer with Vogelfänger. He’s a Nazi and a brute.’ Rachel’s eyes were full of angry tears. ‘Of all the professors, we hated him most. He’s killed one wife already. When I think of her having to submit to him—’

  ‘Don’t think of that. Think that she’ll be saved from something worse.’

  ‘I try to. But I’m full of bile and gall. I want to tear my hair out sometimes. Leave me alone, Masha. I’m not fit company for someone as decent as you.’

  But Masha refused to be shaken off. She hurried Rachel to their cabin to apply a cold compress to the scratches her cousin had inflicted on herself. The Hungarian girl, silently gnawing on a dried kielbasa sausage, watched them with large eyes. ‘You’ll meet someone else,’ Masha said, trying to be encouraging. ‘That’s what I said to myself after Rudi, and I believe it.’

  ‘I would rather you told me to despair than offered me platitudes.’

  ‘At least don’t scratch your own eyes out.’

  ‘If I don’t, I may scratch out someone else’s instead.’

  Finding Rachel unresponsive to her consolations, and remembering that they were arriving in New York in four days, Masha left her cousin with her face turned to the wall and set about transcribing the Stravinsky manuscript.

  With Masha engrossed in the Stravinsky manuscript, and Thomas keeping out of her way, Rachel was thrown back on her own unhappiness. Despite all the horrors of the past years, she had clung to the dream that, once the war was over, Dorothea would come to her, and they would make a life together. Dorothea’s marriage to Heinrich Vogelfänger would make that impossible. And as for the war, which had begun so violently, it seemed less and less likely that it would end in a year, or ten years.

  She wandered the ship, alone in the crowds, observing silently. As Mr Nightingale had told Stravinsky, the SS Manhattan was making swift progress. Unhindered at last by political borders or human delays of any kind, she sped across the Atlantic at a steady twenty-two nautica
l miles per hour, night and day.

  Since she was sailing west, she was losing time constantly. Every so many hundred miles, as the ship entered a new time zone, passengers were advised to turn their watches and clocks back an hour. This meant, according to some, that they had all been given an extra hour of their lives to re-live. Whether this was true or not, it became a celebration each time, and Rachel noted ironically that the complimentary hour of life was given over in most cases to drinking and partying.

  Altogether, there would be six of these hours by the time they reached New York. They became more and more animated as the Manhattan approached closer to the United States coast. Passengers crowded the public areas to drink and dance. The little refugee jazz orchestra was able to earn generous tips by taking requests. Hoffman’s Midget Marvels took to sitting on the bar in the Cocktail Lounge, all in a line, a very popular spectacle. Passengers competed for the privilege of buying them a round of drinks, and it was surprising how much they could put away, even the littlest and oldest of the Marvels, who accepted only twelve-year-old single malt.

  Everyone was impressed with the speed the Manhattan was making. But one afternoon, an airliner was spotted in the sky above the ship. The arrival of this fellow traveller in the midst of the vast and empty Atlantic was somehow portentous. Passengers craned their necks at it, waving their hats and handkerchiefs in case anyone could see them from up there. The plane overtook them swiftly. In a matter of ten minutes, it had disappeared again. It would be in New York by nightfall. ‘And that,’ Commodore Randall commented to Rachel, ‘signals the end of the ocean liner business.’

  There were other entertainments, which Rachel attended, longing for distraction from her dark thoughts. Madame Quo gave a talk on the history of Chinese sculpture, illustrated with a number of valuable jade figurines which she was taking with her to America.

  The Reverend Ezekiel Perkins offered several of his short lectures on a variety of important subjects, including the threat of masculine women, the lies of anthropology, the evil of psychoanalysis, the menace of Negro blood, getting right with God, fighting Bolshevism, strengthening the Mann Act, abolishing dance halls, censoring the cinema, and the foundations of the Republic. There were bigots and Nazis in America too, Rachel saw.

  Other than these lectures, the passengers passed the time on the overcrowded ship by playing shuffleboard, quoits or deck tennis in the few free places that were available. The gymnasiums were among the rooms that had been given over to the additional passengers, so a brisk walk around the deck was also a choice made by many, though this involved weaving a circuitous path to avoid others on the same exercise, as Rachel did.

  And so the ship, containing as many people as a small town, and at least as much diversity, sailed on towards New York.

  HMS Tisiphone

  Rudi Hufnagel and the other survivors of U-113 had now spent two days on HMS Tisiphone. Lieutenant-Commander Cottrell was eager to get them off his submarine. He was already back on his patrol, and the five captured enemy sailors to be fed, berthed and watched were causing him a headache. There was also the question of Hufnagel’s health, which was deteriorating rapidly. The left shoulder was very swollen. He had not stopped losing blood from the injury to his right forearm, and was growing very weak. The petty officer who had tried to stitch him up was unable to stop the flow.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said to his skipper, ‘I think I’ve done more harm than good.’

  ‘You’re not a doctor, Terry,’ Cottrell said consolingly. ‘But I don’t want him to die on us. And Warspite’s let us down.’

  The rendezvous with HMS Warspite, the destroyer which was meant to pick up the Germans, hadn’t come off; she had been diverted on urgent business elsewhere. There was, however, a second destroyer about to pass within range of Tisiphone. She was HMS Amphitrite, and as luck would have it, she was equipped with an operating theatre and had a surgeon on board. There was only one drawback, which Cottrell explained to Hufnagel.

  ‘She’s in a convoy, bound for New York. Thanks to the endeavours of chaps like you, merchant ships aren’t crossing the Atlantic on their own any more. The doctor on board will fix you up, but you’re going to be at sea for quite a while longer. Probably several weeks.’

  Hufnagel gave Cottrell a hollow smile. ‘That may be preferable to a prisoner-of-war camp on land.’

  ‘It’s certainly preferable to you dying on my submarine and having to be tipped overboard. You could think of it as a rest cure. So, no objections?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Right. I’ll radio her captain and see if he’ll take you on.’

  The captain of the Amphitrite was not delighted by the request to take on prisoners, one of whom needed urgent surgery. However, Cottrell pressed the issue, describing Hufnagel’s part in preventing the Manhattan from being torpedoed, a gallant act in the course of which he had received his wound. Also, the young Navy surgeon on board Amphitrite said he didn’t mind getting a little practice. It might even help, he said, to sort out his station and get everything streamlined, ready for real action.

  Accordingly, HMS Amphitrite made a brief diversion to intersect with Tisiphone the next day. In a high wind and rough seas, Hufnagel and the others were transferred to the destroyer. A line was rigged between the two vessels. Amphitrite had no breeches buoy, so they used a bosun’s chair to run the Germans across, one by one. The last to go was Hufnagel, with his legs dangling through the canvas harness around his groin. He found the experience only slightly preferable to being shot.

  Nor was the welcome on the destroyer a warm one. In contrast to the comradely, even chummy atmosphere on the submarine, the crew of the destroyer greeted the Germans coldly, as enemies. The uninjured members of the crew were sent straight to secure quarters. Two burly able seamen marched Hufnagel to the sickbay, stolidly oblivious to his gasps of pain. The young surgeon inspected him with a keen eye.

  ‘This Jerry’s half-dead,’ he said with the satisfaction of a man accepting a challenge, as though Hufnagel couldn’t understand him. ‘Let’s get to work.’

  While the doctor prepared Hufnagel for surgery, Amphitrite put on a spurt of speed to catch up with the rest of the convoy; and in this way, Rudi Hufnagel found himself in the wake of Manhattan, on his way to New York.

  Ellis Island

  Thomas, Masha and Rachel had all made their way up to the Observation Deck to get their first sight of New York. To each of the three of them, Berlin had been a great city. But New York, glimpsed indistinctly across the bay, half-shrouded in the early morning mist, was already immeasurably greater. The forest of towers and spires rose up to the sky in tints of gold and grey, with violet shadows. The tops of the highest buildings, some of which they knew the names of already, reached above the clouds.

  ‘What beautiful buildings!’ Masha exclaimed. ‘I can almost hear the roar of traffic from here.’

  Shortly after passing the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan stopped at Ellis Island, where immigration officers boarded the ship.

  All the foreigners – a majority of the passengers – were called on to present their passports and visas for inspection. Long lines of refugees formed on the deck, filtering slowly down the gangplank to the immigrant station, watched by those lucky enough to be United States citizens. Among the latter group were Dr Meese and the Reverend Ezekiel Perkins. The Reverend Perkins took the occasion to deliver some thoughts on the spectacle below him.

  ‘And is our nation ready to discard the costly lessons it learned, and once again open its gates to the refuse of Europe?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Look at this trash, most of them with little more than five dollars in their pockets, most unable to speak a word of the English language.’ He raised a plump forefinger. ‘You will say they are fugitives from tyrannical governments. But when has Europe not had its tyrannical governments? Is that justification for letting them flood our country at the rate of a thousand a day, bringing with them crime, disease, drug addiction and who
knows what else?’

  As the Reverend Perkins continued apostrophising, the aliens filtered slowly down the gangways towards the immigration station. The addition of incongruous Moorish domes had done little to soften its high red-brick walls, or its prison-like appearance. Once inside, they found themselves in a great, vaulted space where, like human cattle, they were separated into lines and processed at counters. For most, the process was tedious, but accomplished in due course. For a few, it ended unexpectedly.

  Almost the first to fall by the wayside was Thomas König. No sooner had he presented himself at a counter with his travel documents when two officers took him off and led him up the stairs, where he vanished.

  Masha was one of the few people who noticed this, and she clutched Stravinsky’s sleeve.

  ‘Did you see that they arrested Thomas?’ she said urgently.

  ‘I don’t think they arrested him. They probably just want to check his papers.’

  Masha, who was something of an expert on what an arrest looked like, shook her head. ‘They arrested him. Something is wrong.’

  By the late afternoon, most of the Manhattan’s foreign passengers had been processed and had returned to the ship. But Thomas had not reappeared. Masha, by now in a state of acute anxiety over the boy’s fate, prevailed on Stravinsky to make an enquiry about his cabin-mate. They went together to the front desks, where crowds of anxious passengers, speaking a variety of languages, were being held in check. At last, they were seen by an immigration officer in a black uniform. He led them to his office, which stank of cigars and sweat, where he faced them across a desk crowded with passports of every colour.

  ‘Thomas König is being detained until his status is clarified,’ the man told them.

  ‘What is wrong with his status?’ Stravinsky asked.