Black Mamba Boy (30 page)

The twenty-eight days docked in Port-de-Bouc passed quickly, spent either in Marseille with Banjo and the other panhandlers, or on the ship sleeping and resting. Even on this gigantic vessel he felt crowded and trapped; the angry refugees and the armed marines were like two armies on the verge of war. Everything had become discordant and fraught. The British crew drank the days and nights away, arguments breaking out like summer storms, and when they were particularly violent, Jama would lock his cabin door and hide in bed afraid that they would take their anger out on him. The Somali firemen would force him to open the door and tell stories to distract him, of lands where the men dressed like women and women married trees, of sailors thrown overboard after petty arguments, of stowaways found too late. One of the sailors had earned the epithet Grave Reject, as he had survived three torpedoed ships during the war, appearing on the surface of the water as if by magic even though he was unable to swim. Another sailor had been to Australia and met an old Somali man living alone in a desert outpost; he had arrived in the last century as a camel trainer and now couldn’t remember a word of Somali. Australia, Panama, Brazil, Singapore, these were names Jama had never heard before, they might as well have been describing moons or planets, but these countries were now part of his world. Then they started to talk about women.

“The thing is, you can’t trust women, look at the kind of job we do! We’re gone too long, they end up thinking that we’ve forgotten them, so they forget us,” Abdullahi said.

“That’s not true,” cut in Jama.

“What do you know about it? The only thing you do in bed is piss yourself!” jeered Abdullahi.

“I’m a married man, with a wife ten times more beautiful than yours!” shouted Jama. He did not confess he had spent only one night with his bride.

“Oh yeah? Well, if she’s that beautiful and delicious, you have left your dinner out for another man to eat,” snorted Abdullahi. Jama turned his back to all of them and sulked.

For all their stories, the sailors had to admit that Jama had chanced upon a very remarkable ship for his maiden voyage. On the twenty-eighth day, distinguished men with medals covering their chests came on board and read out a declaration to the assembled refugees. Through the many interpretations of the Somalis who had a little English, Jama learned that the British were threatening the Jews, giving them a day to surrender or be taken to Germany. One Somali said that the Germans were the archenemies of Jews, and this was a very grave threat that the Jews could not ignore. To show their serious intent, the British handed out leaflets to the refugees and wrote the threat in many languages on a blackboard, and when the British finished talking, the Jews defiantly applauded and went back to the cage. That night launches filled with Haganah agents sidled up to the boat and with megaphones encouraged the refugees to stay on board. The British silenced them with a siren but it was too late. The next day, as the six o’clock deadline approached, only a solitary self-composed little girl, around twelve years old, left the ship. The rest stood to attention like
legionnaires under their general, Mordechai Rosman, a partisan leader who had led a band of fighters out of the Warsaw Ghetto. With his long hair and bare bony chest, Rosman looked like an ancient prophet lost amid the modern world, where the Pharaoh had gas chambers, the Promised Land was subject to United Nations resolutions, and only desperate Somalis tried to wade across the Red Sea.

With only one less passenger, the
Runnymede Park
set off for Hamburg. Despite their defiance, something had been lost among the refugees; they finally realized that they were prisoners, in no position to negotiate or barter, and worst of all, they felt as if the world had forgotten them. More children were born on the way to Gibraltar, where the ship refueled. These babies were prisoners of the British, but also of their parents’ dreams. Jama was back at work but even he was infected with the melancholy of the refugees; a ship full of heartbroken people has a particular flavor, a certain spirit that is hard on the soul. Jama only had to look into the faces of the refugees to be sent back to his own nightmares, to feel again deep fear, despair, and self-hate. The refugees had been treated like animals, had been mocked, beaten, degraded by men reveling in their power, as had Jama, and that humiliation never left anyone. It sat on their backs like a demon, and these demons would intermittently dig their talons into flesh and remind them of where they had been. Jama approached the large lady one day; her daughters didn’t run around anymore, just sat quietly next to her. He pressed a couple of chocolates into the mother’s hand, she hid them in her bra and took Jama’s hand, her large brown eyes read his palm while he tried to remember his words of Hebrew.

“Shalom!” Jama said.

“Shalom,” the woman replied, stroking the lines on his hand, nodding her approval; she saw a good life there.

Jama pointed to his chest and said, “Jama.”

The woman held out her hand. “Chaja.”

At seven in the evening the refugees gathered on the deck, everyone but a few women on laundry duty, and found whatever space they could to sit or stand around the cage. These meetings were called regularly to solve disputes between refugees, or between the refugees and the British, but sometimes the people gathered just to talk and sing. Jama, Abdullahi, and Sidney were the only crewmen who seemed interested in these powwows, and they joined the refugees whenever they were called. Abdullahi treated the meetings as a kind of theater: he shook his head, laughed, shouted out “Ajeeb!” and clapped his hands together. Jama also enjoyed the drama; the actors took him back to Gerset and its domestic intrigues and machinations. Sidney sat apart, scratching things into his notepad. Under the glare of the searchlight, ghostly figures complained about the mothers who did not clean up after their children in the latrines, the noisiness of the British marines walking along the duckwalks at night, sometimes even disputes from the war or before the war were brought up. An old man in nothing but his undergarments was squaring off with a much stronger bare-chested man.

Jama asked Abdullahi what the old man wanted. “He says this young man stole his property before the war.”

Sidney was laughing at the amateur boxers, as were some of the refugees, but Jama worried for the old bearded man. His bony legs could barely hold him up but he persisted in shoving and enraging the younger man.

The old man cried out in English, “I used to be somebody! I had a name that was respected, I owned a farm, a flour mill, a forest!”

The men were separated and a young woman stood up to speak. “I knew this man in Poland, he was a friend of my father’s, he taught Hebrew to my sisters and me. When the German and Polish soldiers came, he saved my life. He hid me in a barrel in his flour mill while the rest of my family were walked to the river and shot. I saw their naked bodies floating down the river. If it wasn’t for this man I would be in that river with them. If he says this man stole his property, then it is the truth.”

German burghers spoke after Hungarian farmers and Red Army soldiers, some described prewar lives of furs, chauffeurs, and governesses while others had known only the misery of poor harvests, pogroms, and bitter winters. Even now, good fortune was sprinkled haphazardly and confusingly, as many refugees had lost forty or fifty members of their family while others were still huddled with their children and parents. Abdullahi translated as much as he could for Jama while Sidney scribbled things down. The children were also given time to speak, and a little girl with a crooked back told the people that her family had fled to Uzbekistan during the war, and when they had tried to return to their village in Poland afterward her parents had been attacked and killed. She was now one of the many frail orphans aboard the
Runnymede Park
who believed that Palestine would be a land of peace and milk. All the refugees spoke of Palestine as a kind of empty paradise where orange trees grew and birds sang, which had no relation to the poor Arab country that Jama had passed through. There were too many here to squeeze into all the beyt al-deefs of Palestine. They had been set adrift on the dark sea, and Jama wondered where this ship would take them and where it would take him.
He had long stopped thinking of Somaliland as his home, but the refugees made him realize how precarious it was to never belong anywhere. These floating Jews—hounded, harried, and lost—had no stars to guide them, but he did.

Chaja stood up, waiting for her chance to speak; she was impatiently tapping her feet, grasping her son to her hip. A young Polish partisan was speaking about the need to fight for a Jewish state. Many of the young people had been part of Zionist groups in their villages and their hunger for a homeland now coalesced with a desire to avenge their families. The partisan seemed unable to see a future without more violence, more battles, more ghettos, more blood on the streets. “If they do not let us live on our land, we will crush them like ants, we will smash their heads against boulders and walls,” he said in heavily accented English.

Chaja pushed him aside and stepped under the huge lamp. “I have lived through Polish hell, Russian hell, German hell, and now British hell, but I swear by God that I will not condemn my children to Palestinian hell. I have lost my husband and son already, watched their ashes blow out of Nazi chimneys. I want peace, just peace, give me a little scrap of wasteland as long as my children can eat and sleep in peace. My father was a philosophy teacher but my daughters cannot even read, you think they can learn while you are fighting and smashing heads? Take your violence and murder to people who have had enough of comfort. I want nothing from guns and bombs. You think you are David from the Bible but we are not your worshippers or subjects. In Palestine there must be no war. If there is war we may as well stay in Poland, or go to Eritrea, Cyprus, or wherever the British want to send us.”

Chaja spoke until her throat was raw and thick veins stuck out along her neck, and she brandished her baby like a weapon,
thrusting him at the partisan. Jama barely understood what she said but he was moved by her. The partisan looked so weak beside her that if Jama had to follow either of them, he would follow Chaja. He had seen how strong women were better leaders than strong men. With the Italians he had learned how to destroy, but the women of Gerset had taught him how to create and sustain life.

The refugees remained quiet after Chaja’s speech, they nursed their dreams of peace and dreams of war in silence. They were cut off from the rest of the world, unable to comprehend real life anymore; farms, schoolhouses, synagogues were all things of their imagination now. Eventually a teenage boy pulled out a harmonica and played to them, children clapped and sang “Hatikvah,” serenading their fearful parents with sweet wavering voices.

Jama, Abdullahi, and Sidney clapped along. Jama remembered sitting as a child beside his father under the gigantic moon of the Somali desert. Old men dominated the evenings, talking about trade and clan disputes until they grew tired, then the young men would take their place to sing love songs and recite poetry that gloried in the richness of their language. Jama wished that his mother had had her chance to speak out like Chaja, to show those men all the workings of her wonderful mind and all the courage in her heart.

The journey to Hamburg brought back all the memories the refugees had been suppressing for months, smothered with fanciful ideas of a Jewish heaven in Palestine. On German soil there could be no denial of what had happened, the smell of burnt corpses would return to nostrils and the pain of unending hunger would torment stomachs whatever food they
were given. Brendan the donkeyman had no time for the refugees, he called them “smelly ungrateful yids” and encouraged the soldiers to take a hard line with them. The soldiers were angry and resentful; they had been duped along with the refugees, having been told that they were only to escort the ship to Cyprus. Now they vented their frustration whenever they could, shoving the children, refusing small requests, and talking loudly as the prisoners tried to sleep. It was a forlorn ship that approached Hamburg, the long, slow funeral march had come to an end. “We have returned. We have returned to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen,” cried one man.

“I lost twenty-eight of my family here,” said an old woman. The refugees broke out in wailing and ripped their clothes, even Mordechai Rosman watched the dark land appearing through the fog with his head bowed, his arms outstretched as if on a rack. The
Runnymede Park
waited while the two other prison ships,
Ocean Vigour
and
Empire Rival,
were cleared out. British troops and German guards dragged out frenzied men and women, American jazz blaring out to muffle the screams. A homemade bomb was found on the
Empire Rival,
to the pleasure of the British; at last their suspicions had been confirmed, the purported refugees were actually dangerous terrorists desperate to injure their British guardians. The bomb was safely detonated on the dockside, but the refugees on the
Runnymede Park
would suffer for it. Batons went flying, hair was pulled out, soldiers kicked Mordechai Rosman down the gangplank, and possessions were thrown into the sea. Jama came on deck during this festival of violence, and he had never believed white people could treat each other with such open violence, without regard for age or infirmity, but in front of his eyes was proof.

“Wahollah! My God, this is terrible!” said Jama as he saw
Chaja trying to escape down the gangplank, her head bent to avoid the blows as her children skidded and tripped beside her.

The Jews were handed over to the smirking Germans, to be returned to barbed wire and watchtowers in isolated camps in northern Germany. The men from the Haganah and the boys who had thrown biscuit tins and dirty clothes at the British soldiers were arrested for unruly behavior. The
Runnymede Park
became a ghost ship. After the ABs returned it to a semblance of order, Captain Barclay told the crew that they were going to Port Talbot in Wales for dry-docking before returning to Port Said. Jama would earn eighty pounds for this journey. His aim was to return to Gerset with two hundred pounds, and buy a prize camel and a large store and house for Bethlehem, but the other sailors laughed at his plan.