The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

  “I saw you all, swimming in the ocean,” she said, trying to be cheerful through the sour lump in her throat. “That must have felt so nice and cool.”

  “It was a little scary at first, then absolutely great,” said Christine. “Was that you playing music?”

  Miriam nodded.

  “It was beautiful,” said Christine. She looked closely at Miriam. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said Miriam. “I don’t like crab, maybe that’s it.”

  “You look sad.”

  “I am sad,” said Miriam. It felt good just to say it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Christine. “For being so cheery. How annoying.”

  On a burst of affection, Miriam reached out and grazed the girl’s cheek with her knuckles, a caress, and gazed into her pragmatic blue eyes. “I’m not annoyed at you, sweetheart. I’m sad at this predicament we find ourselves in. I guess it just dawned on me how really and truly stuck we are out here if they have to send a plane to bring us food. It will be days before we get back to land.”

  “I know,” said Christine, suddenly sober, understanding. “It’s serious. I was thinking about that earlier.” She yawned hugely. “I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I can’t stay awake.”

  “Of course not. After all that swimming and excitement,” said Miriam. “It’s cooling off, can you feel it?”

  “Yes,” said Christine, nodding as she looked around. She stood up slowly, balancing herself on the back of the deck chair. “See you later.”

  “Sweet dreams,” said Miriam.

  After Christine had gone, Miriam sat alone with her mound of bean-and-Spam salad. Tonight was Shabbos. The sun was going down. Back in her real life, in Israel, she might have been going out to dinner with her friend Etta, or visiting her son, Avner, and his family in Jerusalem for the weekend, or sitting upstairs on Isaac’s terrace with him, drinking a glass of wine while he drank seltzer.

  But she didn’t really miss the past. In fact, she yearned for the future, for whatever time she and Sasha had together. What would they do together on Shabbos, in Jaffa, that most beautiful, peaceful town? They might walk by the sea at sunset, cook together, invite friends over for dinner…It would be heaven on earth.

  “Miriam,” came his voice from nearby, as if she had drawn him to her just by thinking about him, or conjured him out of thin air. “Miriam.”

  Sasha made his painstaking way through the crowded slum of deck chairs and sheet tents toward her. He looked thin and pale and greasy.

  “I was just missing you,” she said, squinting up at him.

  “Here I am.” He slid onto the deck chair, behind her. His arms went around her and her head found his chest, the hollow of his neck. He smelled of old sweat and machine oil, both funky and metallic. She nestled against him and inhaled again and again with her nose against his skin.

  “Did you fix the engine?”

  “No,” he said. “They sent parts to replace the burned-out rings and wires and so forth, but the wrong connecting rod for the crankcase. Can you believe it? What a bunch of nudniks. It took us almost three hours to realize, trying to make it work.”

  “No!” said Miriam, although she had no real idea what he was talking about.

  “Yes!” he said. He lowered his voice, but it vibrated with outrage. “So stupid, such a waste.”

  “Here,” she said, handing him her plate. “Share my dinner, you have to eat.”

  Around them, the air dimmed and cooled. Leaning against Sasha while he ate, she tried and failed not to think about what Flaminia had told her about the patients who’d already died in the infirmary, their bodies secretly taken away, and the ones who would die tonight. And she tried not to think about Larry’s helicopter escape three days before, the useless engine parts, the stalled tugboats. She distracted herself from all of it with a favorite memory of her long-dead mother playing Chopin. She had played rarely, only when something inside her seemed to demand it. She’d been a formidably proper woman, but when she sat on the piano bench, she revealed another side of herself: a passionate girl, a sexual, romantic being. Her whole body would sway, her face transported, eyes half closed. She had always poured her entire self into her piano; even when she was rusty, the music was beautiful. Miriam had never loved her mother more or felt closer to her than in those moments.

  “We should play something,” she said, looking up at Sasha.

  He gave a start. “The quartet? Right now?”

  “Right now. We should play Rivka’s Six-Day War Quartet. It’s time. If Jakov is able. He’s getting worse, I think.”

  Sasha nodded. “All right.”

  They found Jakov sitting on his daybed in the living room, drinking from a bottle of water. Miriam handed him the second croissant she’d cadged.

  “Thank you,” he said with languid melancholy. “This, I can eat.”

  “That, you shouldn’t eat, because it’s bad for your heart,” said Miriam, “but I am not your mother, and you deserve a treat.”

  Jakov tore into the buttery pastry with a wolfish, beatific smile.

  “So, Jakov,” said Miriam when he’d devoured the whole thing, “do you feel well enough to play some music?”

  He looked dubious but game. “What should we play?”

  “We were thinking,” said Sasha with a note of apology, “the Weiss quartet.”

  Jakov made a peevish face, which luckily Rivka didn’t see from her seat on the long white couch next to Isaac. She was surrounded by cushions, facing the balcony doors with her legs tucked underneath her, wearing white silk pajamas and a matching white turban, and she turned to Sasha with her hand fluttering at her breastbone, “Oh, Sasha. That would be marvelous! I had given up hope of ever hearing it played.”

  “It was my idea,” muttered Miriam.

  “Everyone,” said Sasha. “Get your instruments out. We’re going to play Rivka’s Six-Day War Quartet that she wrote for us, in our honor.”

  They set up chairs, unfolded music stands, found the sheet music.

  Unsnapping her case, taking out her violin, holding it again, Miriam felt as she always did when she was about to play with the Sabra: happy, tense, grounded. Her violin smelled like sweet old wood and rich, oily rosin dust. She tightened her bow, plucked her strings, nestled her instrument between her chin and her shoulder, and held her bow lightly between her thumb and index fingertip as she tuned to Sasha’s A.

  She looked around at the three others: Sasha, fierce and intent; Isaac, with his serious expression that was always half funny to her, glasses on the end of his nose; and Jakov, golden tufts of hair matted, his face distended with illness, his cello leaning against his shoulder like a small, long-necked, curvy woman, his arms and legs feebly embracing her.

  They all looked over at Sasha, bows poised, waiting for his violin scroll’s slight lift and dip, which he executed now with a little quirk of his mouth as if to say, Once more into the breach, comrades.

  chapter twenty-two

  It wasn’t the best meal in the world, but when it was over, Mick felt an unexpected sense of satisfaction. The food had disappeared as fast as the service team could dish it out. Everyone had eaten well, and they had all eaten together—walkout crew, remaining crew, bridge crew, and passengers—from the same bowls and trays of food. And he’d been told that the walkouts had helped his crew collect the paper plates and napkins and stuff them into trash bags to throw down onto the loading bay. He tried to avoid reading too much into this; their newfound willingness to cooperate might be temporary for all he knew. But he felt encouraged by it, all the same.

  When the kitchen was clean and the remaining supplies from the airdrop properly stored, Mick stripped off his chef whites in the locker room. He washed and soaped himself as best he could with a two-liter bottle of water—face, armpits, groin—and wandered u
p in search of Christine.

  It was just after sunset. A crowd had gathered in the glimmering dusk on the solarium deck at the very top of the ship. He saw people lying on deck chairs, riding the stationary bicycles, huddled on the floor, talking in small groups in low voices, cigarette ends and vaping pipes glowing. Mick spotted members of the crew among the passengers, and some of the walkouts too, including Consuelo, who sat next to Natalya over in a corner, talking to several of the younger passengers. He looked around for Christine, feeling like a stranger and an outsider.

  “Hey,” came a female voice from somewhere around his knees. “Got a cigarette?”

  He looked down. Valerie sat alone on the teak decking, leaning against the outer wall of the glass solarium, drinking from a wine bottle.

  “Have you seen Christine?” Reluctantly, he handed her a cigarette. It was his last pack.

  “No,” said Valerie. “But she’s supposed to meet me up here. Want a drink?”

  He sat down next to her and took a swig while she lit her cigarette.

  “So Mick,” she said, exhaling smoke. “I think we got off on the wrong foot back there. Remember when I barged into your kitchen trying to interview you?”

  “I remember.”

  “Seems like months ago, right? Anyway, it’s okay because I ended up talking to Consuelo, who was super nice and generous with her time, unlike someone else.” She gave him a playful nudge.

  “I was working,” he said.

  “So was I,” she said.

  He gave her a sidelong look.

  She grinned at him and cheekily plucked the wine bottle from his hand and tipped some into her mouth. “What are you going to do next? Where do you go after we get off this thing?”

  Mick eased back and settled his hipbones on the deck flooring. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m leaving this job, that’s all I know.”

  “They’re letting you go too?”

  “No. Not me.”

  “But you’re leaving anyway?”

  “Yes,” said Mick.

  “How come you don’t join the other walkouts?”

  “Someone has to cook for the passengers.”

  “Why not let us cook for ourselves? I’m kidding. I’m just trying to understand it from your perspective. Do you think what Cabaret is doing is wrong?”

  “Of course I do,” said Mick, surprised at the strength of feeling in his own voice. “These are good workers, they’ve done a good job. They don’t deserve to be let go like this. Do you know what they sent in the airdrop today? The supplies they sent us?”

  “Yeah. We were joking about that earlier. ‘Let them eat croissants.’ ”

  Mick snorted. “Peanut butter, baby carrots, power bars, little boxes of apple juice, like we’re a fucking kindergarten at snack time.”

  Valerie laughed. “Not to defend them,” she said, “but they were probably just trying to give us whatever was easiest to pack, the most nutritious, whatever won’t go bad right away.”

  Mick shook his head. “I was hoping at least for real food, some charcoal to cook it with.”

  “Aren’t you glad not to have to cook?” She passed him the bottle.

  He drank, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “It’s much worse if I can’t work.”

  “I hear you, man. Some of us need our work just to get through the day.”

  “Your friend Christine’s like that too,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

  “She is. I sort of expected when she moved up to the country to live on a farm, she’d relax with the work ethic, but she just channeled it into something else.”

  “She’s a hard worker,” he said, feeling for some reason as if he had to defend Christine against her friend, even though Valerie hadn’t said anything overtly critical.

  They were silent for a while, passing the wine back and forth, listening to the conversations around them. At some point, Mick noticed Valerie’s shoulder leaning against his. He shifted away from her to light a cigarette.

  “What’s that weird music?” she said.

  Mick listened. A slight breeze blew the sound to them from somewhere nearby, a spiky, atonal piece for strings, dissonant, shivery-beautiful, squawkingly ugly, terrible and gorgeous in turn.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  It sounded as if the musicians were making it up on the spot. It gave Mick a complicated feeling he couldn’t name, the swirling coalescence of everything he’d been thinking about all day, as if they were playing the sound track to the inside of his head.

  * * *

  *

  Miriam found she knew the piece almost by heart. They had rehearsed it only twice since they’d set sail, and not for days, but she must have internalized it while she wasn’t thinking about it, because her left fingers somehow suddenly knew on their own where to go on the fingerboard, her right hand knew the bowings, the rhythms and dynamics. This had always been the greatest pleasure of her life, losing herself in a piece of music she knew well enough to play without thinking. Now that she didn’t have to agonize over the score, Miriam could hear this piece for the first time as it unfolded. Now that she wasn’t counting beats and resenting the composer for her diabolical double-stops and pretentious percussive passages, she understood the way in which Rivka had written the narrative of the Six-Day War from start to finish. The first movement described the gathering threat from all sides pressing in on Israel, still vulnerable, the Jews still ragged from the Holocaust, trying to establish their young state. Jakov’s cello sent a hostile undercurrent of tremolo from Egypt as Isaac’s viola sounded Syria’s harsh war cries and Sasha’s violins squealed a warning from Jordan, the Arab countries mustering their might to vanquish and exterminate the Jews once and for all. Miriam’s second-violin part, she realized, was filled with the quiet determination of a people who had been tested to their limits and tested again, and who had survived, and would survive again. She played her part with a visceral steadiness, holding firm to her odd rhythms, her dissonant intervals a shaky inchoate tremolo growing in force, loudening, resolving into ringing double-stops.

  And then came the second movement, Israel streaming into Egypt by air and land. A long silence, suspended, all instruments quiet, and then the violent surprise: first air strikes, then machine-gun fire across the desert. Miriam played, caught up in the drama, remembering the conquering of the Sinai. She’d met Isaac during that quick battle. She glanced at him, sitting just to her left, while they reenacted the skirmish with their instruments. He shot a look back at her, and she knew they were both remembering. Ah, the Jews. A tough, smart little army made up of people like them, classical musicians, scholars, scientists, farmers. And they had won!

  Then came the third movement, the second wave of Jewish might and cleverness: this was Sasha’s movement, and Jakov’s, the air strikes against Syria, the triumph over Jordan, after the Arab world had been told that Egypt had vanquished Israel. Nasser had lied to them, tricking them into attacking a winning army. Miriam felt the power in the ending of this movement, the strong and certain knowledge that Israel would survive.

  And then came the last movement, so soon already. Miriam had never realized how lovely it was: the short, sweet, and yet sorrowful sense of vindication, with its theme of “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” the song written by Naomi Shemer, they’d all sung it after the war: Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light, behold, I am a violin for all your songs. After six days of fighting, one thousand Jews were dead, and many thousand Arabs had been killed. The Jews had taken beautiful Jerusalem from the Jordanians, claimed it as their birthright. Israel was secure. But there was always such a cost. It had been a short but terrifying war, with so much death. Always so much death, with war, whether you won or lost, it was terrible.

  When they’d finished, Miriam tucked her violin under her arm. There, they’d played th
is damn thing for the last time. Rivka, their audience of one, gazed at them all in the light of the candles that stuttered in the breeze.

  “Yes,” Rivka said. “Oh yes—” She cleared her throat, pressed her knuckles to her eyes. “That was perfect,” she said. “You played it as I wrote it. No composer can hope for more.”

  It was true. They had played it perfectly, and the piece had come to life. Miriam had executed her second-violin part with her jaw clenched on the chin rest, her bow chopping glints of electricity off the strings in the long staccato runs, her fingertips striking the fingerboard with precise deadly blows. She had played her part so well, she surprised herself. A combination of anxiety and fear was a great focuser for the brain and fingers, and for the people in its sphere as well, it seemed. Her virtuosity had forced the other three to meet her there on the plane of pure excellence. Even Jakov, sick as he was. It had always been this way: if one of the quartet played brilliantly, usually Sasha, the other three were spurred to match it. And this time, the brilliant one had been Miriam.

  Jakov leaned back in his chair with an expression of stolid exhaustion, his cello lolling between his knees, his hands lax on his thighs with the bow dangling from loose fingers. He had rallied enough to play this difficult, demanding piece. He’d done it for them all.

  Isaac put his viola into its open case and went over to sit on the couch with Rivka. Miriam sensed, once more, the two of them enfolded in something private. She had a feeling that something was going on between them, she wasn’t sure what. Maybe now that Larry was gone, they were finding each other, finally, just as Miriam and Sasha had. Miriam supposed she was happy for them, but she felt other things about it too.

  “Those were such different times,” said Sasha. “We were so young, our country was young. We were right, and many of us believed that God was on our side.”