by Irwin Shaw
“Taif, old boy,” Carver pulled at his arm, “let’s eat and you can lecture the lieutenant some other time.”
“No, if you please.” The journalist pulled his arm politely away from Carver’s hand. “I welcome the opportunity to talk to our American friends. You see, my good Lieutenant, you may be very pleased with the factory and the plumbing, and perhaps, even, from one point of view, they may be good things. But they have nothing to do with the Arab. Perhaps the Arab prefers the desert as it was. The Arab has his own culture.…”
“When I hear the word ‘culture,’” Carver said, “I reach for my pistol. What famous American said that?”
“To Americans and Europeans,” the journalist went on, in his singsong, dead voice, “the culture of the Arab perhaps seems backward and dreadful. But, forgive us, the Arab prefers it. The virtues which are particularly Arab are kept alive by primitive living. They die among the plumbing.”
“Now,” said Ruth, “we have heard a new one. Kill the Jew because he brings the shower bath.”
The journalist smiled indulgently at Ruth, as at a clever child. “Personally,” he said, “I have nothing against the Jews. I swear that I do not wish to harm a single Jew living in Palestine today. But I will fight to the death to keep even one more Jew from entering the country. This is an Arab state, and it must remain an Arab state.”
“Gunnison,” Carver said, “aren’t you glad you came?”
“Six million Jews have died in Europe,” Ruth said, her voice harsh and passionate, and surprising to Mitchell. “Where do you want the survivors to go?” She and the journalist had forgotten the rest of them and were locked with each other across the table.
The journalist shrugged and looked for a moment up above the palm fronds at the dark sky. “That,” he said, “is a question for the world to decide. Why must the poor Arab have the whole decision? We’ve taken in much more than our share. If the rest of the world really wants to see the Jewish race survive let them take them in. America, Britain, Russia … I do not notice those large countries taking in great masses of Jews.”
“There are no great masses,” Ruth said. “There is only a handful.”
Taif shrugged. “Even so. The truth may be, perhaps,” he paused, a little doubtfully, reminding Mitchell of an old Latin teacher in a class in Cicero, shrewdly hesitating for effect, before telling the class whether the word in question was in the ablative or dative absolute, “the truth may be that the rest of the world really wants to see the Jewish race die out.” He turned and smiled warmly at Mitchell. “It is an interesting supposition, Lieutenant. It might be most interesting to examine it before talking any more about Palestine.” He walked over to Ruth and leaned over and kissed her fleetingly on the forehead. “Good night, little Ruth,” he said, and went to a table across the patio, with the silent, adoring Arab behind him.
“If I see you with that man once more,” Ruth spoke to the man who had introduced himself to Mitchell, and who had remained standing at their table, “I’ll never talk to you again.”
The Arab looked swiftly at Mitchell, a veiled, probing flick of the eyes, and said something to Ruth in Arabic.
“No,” said Ruth, her voice clipped and sharp. “Definitely no.”
The Arab bowed slightly, put out his hand to Mitchell and, as they shook hands, said, “Very pleasant meeting you, Lieutenant,” and went off to join his friends at their table.
“The dansants in old Tel Aviv,” said Carver. “Bring the kiddies. Good night.” He waddled over to the other table.
“Ruth,” Mitchell started to talk.
“Lieutenant Gunnison …” It was the soft, apologetic voice of Schneider at his elbow. “I am so anxious for your opinion. What did you think of ‘Stardust’?”
Mitchell turned slowly from staring at Ruth, who was sitting tense and upright in her chair. “Great, Schneider,” Mitchell said. “I thought it was sensational.”
Schneider beamed with pleasure. “You are too kind,” he said. “I will play you ‘Summertime’ once more.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Mitchell. He put out his hand and covered Ruth’s, lying on the table. “You all right?” he asked.
She smiled up at him. “Sure,” she said. “I am an admirer of abstract political discussions.” Her face grew serious. “Do you want to know what Khazen asked when he spoke to me in Arabic?”
“Not if you don’t want to tell me.”
“I want to tell you.” Ruth absently caressed his fingers. “He asked me if I would meet him later.”
“Yes,” said Mitchell.
“I told him no.”
“I heard you.” Mitchell grinned at her. “They probably heard you in Cairo.”
“I didn’t want you to feel disturbed or doubtful,” Ruth said, “your last night.”
“I feel fine,” Mitchell said.
“I’ve been going with him for four years.” She played for a moment with the food on the plate that the waiter had put before her. “When I came here in the beginning I was frightened and lonely and he was very decent. He’s a contractor for the Americans and British and he’s made a fortune during the war. But when Rommel was outside Alexandria he and his friends used to celebrate in secret. I can’t stand him any more. I tell him when I take up with other men. But he hangs on. Ah, finally, I suppose he’ll get me to marry him. I’m not strong enough any more.” She looked up at Mitchell and tried to smile. “Don’t be shocked, darling,” she said. “Americans can’t understand how tired the human race can get.” She stood up suddenly. “Let’s dance.”
They went onto the floor and Schneider broke into “Summertime” when he saw them and smiled fondly at them as they danced. She danced very well, lightly and passionately, and Mitchell knew as he danced that he was going to remember this for a long time, at odd moments, swinging away from targets with the flak falling off behind him, and later, if he made it, in the snowy hills of his home state, the light, soft pressure of the bright cotton dress, the dark, curved, delicate face below his, the hushed sound of their feet on the old floor under the palms, the clever, rich music of the piano under the small blue lights strung out from the stone building. There were a million things that crowded his throat that he wanted to tell her, and there was no way of saying them. He kissed her cheek as the music ended, and she glanced up at him, and smiled and said, “There, that’s better,” and they were laughing by the time they got back to their table.
He paid the bill and they went out, saying good night to Schneider, not looking back at the table where Carver and the three Arabs sat, but hearing Carver’s deep voice rolling through the music and the darkness, calling, “Does anyone want an airfield? I’ll build it for him. Does anyone want a crown of thorns? I’ll build it for him.”
There was an old carriage waiting outside the restaurant, its driver dozing and its lights dimmed, and they climbed in and sat close together as the driver clucked to the horse and they rattled slowly back toward town. The breeze had gone down as it did at nine o’clock every night, and there was a small, warm breath of salt off the Mediterranean and every once in a while a jeep rushed past in a whistle of American wind, with its slits of cat’s-eye lights cutting a darting, frail, skidding pattern in the darkness, making the creakings and rustlings of the old carriage older and dearer and more private as they sat there holding on to each other in silence.
They got off a block from where Ruth lived because the people from whom she rented her room were intensely moral and did not approve of their boarder going out with soldiers. They walked past the corner where the Italian bombers had killed a hundred and thirty people on a Friday morning the year before, and turned into Ruth’s street. From a darkened window came the sound of someone practicing the third movement of the Brahms violin concerto, and Mitchell couldn’t help smiling and realizing that one of his strongest memories of Tel Aviv would be the strains of Tchaikovsky and Brahms and Beethoven coming through the opened windows on every street of the town, as the furiously cultured inhabitants p
racticed runs and cadenzas with never-ending zeal.
All the houses were blacked out, but there was a tiny sliver of light along one of the windows in the third-floor apartment in which Ruth lived, and they stopped in dismay when they saw it.
“She’s up,” Ruth said.
“Doesn’t she ever sleep?” Mitchell asked angrily.
Ruth giggled and kissed him. “She can’t stay up forever,” Ruth said. “We’ll take a little walk and by the time we get back she’ll be asleep.”
Mitchell took her arm and they walked slowly down toward the sea. Soldiers and whores and fat, placid couples strolled on the concrete walk along the beach, and the Mediterranean heaved gently under the moon and broke in small white rolls of foam against the beach, with a steady, foreign grumble, not like the roar of the Atlantic on the cold northern beaches of home. From a café a hundred yards away came the sound of a string quartet playing a Strauss waltz as though Vienna had never been taken, the waltz never lost to the enemy.
Mitchell and Ruth went down the steps to the beach. A weaving British lance-corporal, coming up the steps with a girl, stiffened and saluted rigidly, his hand quivering with respect for authority, and Mitchell saluted back, and Ruth giggled.
“What’re you laughing at?” Mitchell asked, when they had passed the lance-corporal.
“I laugh,” Ruth said, “every time I see you salute.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. I just laugh. Forgive me.” She took off her shoes and walked barefoot in the sand up to the water’s edge. The sea swept softly in from Gibraltar and Tunis and Cyrene and Alexandria and lapped at her toes.
“The Mediterranean,” Ruth said. “I hate the Mediterranean.”
“What’s the matter with it?” Mitchell stared out at the flickering silver path of the moon over the water.
“I was on it,” Ruth said, “for thirty-three days. In the hold of a Greek steamer that used to carry cement. Maybe I oughtn’t to tell you things like that. You’re a tired boy who’s been sent here to have a good time so he can go back and fight well.…”
“You tell me anything you want to tell me,” Mitchell said. “I’ll fight all right.”
“Should I tell you about Berlin, too? Do you want to hear about Berlin?” Ruth’s voice was hard and cold, and somehow a little sardonic, not at all like her voice as he had heard it in the whole week he had known her. The meeting with the journalist at the restaurant had started something stirring within her, something that he hadn’t seen before, and he felt that before he left he should see that side of her too.
“Tell me about Berlin,” Mitchell said.
“I worked for a newspaper,” Ruth said, her toes digging lightly in the sand, “even after the Nazis came in, and I was in love with the man who wrote the Economics column and he was in love with me.…”
“Economics?” Mitchell was puzzled.
“The stock exchange. The prophecies and excuses.”
“Oh,” said Mitchell, trying to picture what a man who wrote stock-exchange tips in Berlin in 1934 would look like.
“He was very gay,” Ruth said. “Very young, but elegant, with checkered vests, and he wore a monocle and he lost all his money at the races. His name was Joachim. He used to take me to the races and to the cafés and it used to drive my mother crazy, because if they ever found out I was a Jewish girl out with a Gentile man, they would have sentenced me to death for polluting the blood stream of the German nation. They’d have sent him to a concentration camp, too, but he was always easy and laughing, and he said, ‘The important thing is to be brave,’ and we were never questioned, and I went to every night club in Berlin, even nights that Goering and Goebbels were in the same room.
“My father was taken to a concentration camp and we decided it was time for me to leave, and Joachim got together all the money he could lay his hands on and gave it to me and I went to Vienna. I was supposed to go to Palestine, if I could, and send for my mother, and for my father, too, if he ever got out of the concentration camp. There was an office in Vienna, and it was filled with refugees from all over Germany, and we collected money to buy transportation and bribe the nations of the world to let some of us in. I slept in the bathtub and talked to sailors and thieves and murderers and crooked shipowners, and finally we got a Greek steamer that was supposed to put in at Genoa and pick us up if we managed to get there. We gave the man 75,000 dollars in cash in advance because that’s the only way he would do it, and somehow we got the Austrian government and the Italian government to look the other way, at a price, and they piled us into freight cars, eight hundred of us, and locked us in, men, women and children, lying one on top of another, and the trip took a week and a day to Genoa, and when we got there the ship never arrived. The Greek took the 75,000 dollars and disappeared. There are all kinds of Greeks, and I have nothing against them, but this was a bad one. Then the Italian government sent us back to Vienna and six people committed suicide because they couldn’t bear it, and we started in all over again.”
Mitchell stared out at the dark line of the sea where it blended in the western distance with the purple of the sky. He tried to think of what it would have been like for his sister and mother if they had been locked into freight cars at Rutland and forced to travel for eight days up to Quebec, say, to wait for an illegal ship to an unknown country. His mother was tall and white-haired and unruffled and pleasant, and his sister was cool and pretty and had some irritating superior mannerisms that she had picked up when she had been foolishly sent for a year to a fancy girls’ finishing school in Maryland.
“Let’s start home,” Ruth said. “If my landlady’s still up, we’ll shoot her.”
They turned their backs on the quiet, white churn of the waves and walked, hand in hand, across the heavy sand of the beach toward the black pile of the buildings of the city.
“Well,” Mitchell said, “I want to hear the rest of it.”
“No, you don’t,” Ruth said. “Forgive me for telling you so much. It’s too dreary.”
“I want to hear,” Mitchell said. In the week he had known Ruth, she had been gay and light-hearted, and had helped him to forget the planes spinning out of control and the dying men lying in their frozen blood on the tangled wires and broken aluminum of the Liberator floors, and now he felt as though he owed it to himself and to Ruth to take back with him some of her agony, too, not only the laughter and the tender jokes and the self-effacing merriment. Suddenly, tonight, she had become terribly dear to him, and he felt responsible to her in a way he had never felt responsible to a girl before.
“Tell me,” he said.
Ruth shrugged. “Back in Vienna,” she said, “we did it all over again. It took two months and the police caught a lot of us, and it meant hiding and running most of the time, but we collected the money again, and we found ourselves another Greek, and this time he turned out to be honest. Or at least as honest as people were to Jews without passports in those days in Europe. We got down to Genoa in only five days this time, and we boarded the steamer at night and they locked the hatch doors on us after we had paid every cent of the money in advance, and we set sail before dawn. The steamer had been built in 1887.” They were at the edge of the beach now, and Ruth leaned on Mitchell’s shoulder as she put on her shoes. “Nobody can have any idea,” Ruth said, as they went up the steps to the concrete walk above, “of what dirt is like until he has been locked into the hold of a fifty-year-old Greek ship with 700 people for over a month. People died every day, and the ship captain would let a rabbi and three other people up on deck at night to perform the burial service and dump the body overboard. The only thing we got to eat was biscuit and canned beef, and there were always worms in everything, even the water we got to drink, and everybody got sores all over their bodies, and the old people got too weak to move and the children wept all day, and the relatives of the people who died screamed a good deal of the time, and it is impossible to tell anyone who was not on that boat what it smelled
like, in the middle of the summer in the Mediterranean, with a ventilating system that had been installed in Salonika in 1903.”
They turned off the beach walk and climbed slowly up the hill toward the center of the town, past the clean, white, very modernistic apartment houses with gardens and fountains and balconies that faced the sea.
“We were supposed to be let off in Turkey,” Ruth went on, her voice almost without inflection and emotion, as though she were reciting from a ledger the business accounts of an importing firm for the year 1850. “And we had given the Greek money to pay off every officer of the port, but something went wrong and we had to put out to sea again, and we started toward Palestine, although the British had patrols along every mile of coastline. But there was no place else to go. People started to get hallucinations about food, and the sailors would sell a sandwich or a lemon for twenty dollars or a bowl of soup for a gold candlestick. And three of the girls couldn’t stand it any more and allowed themselves to be taken up every night to be used by the sailors in exchange for regular meals. It was hard to blame them, but they were cursed by the older people as they walked through the crowd each night toward the ladder, and once a Polish woman with two small daughters knocked one of the girls down with an iron pin and tried to stab her with a kitchen knife she had in her bag.”
They turned into Ruth’s street and looked up at the window just in time to see the thin edge of light under the blind disappear. They stopped and leaned against a stucco fence in front of a plain, shining white house with cactus plants and a fig tree in the front yard.
“We were on that ship for thirty-five days,” Ruth said, “and we came to the coast of Palestine between Haifa and Rehovoth, at night, and maybe someone had been bribed, and maybe it was just lucky, but people were waiting for us in rowboats and in eight hours we were all off. There was one woman, who looked as strong as anyone, a solid, sensible-looking woman, and she seemed cheerful and healthy when she got into the little boat with me, but she suddenly died ten feet off the coast, when the water was so shallow a child could have stepped out and walked ashore. Luckily, it was a dark night, and there were no patrols, and we were taken in cars to a movie theater in a little town near Haifa and put inside. The theater had been playing Betty Grable in ‘Campus Confessions,’ a musical picture, and there were signs with her in tights and ostrich plumes all over it, and the management had written all over the posters, ‘Closed This Week for Repairs.’”