War and Remembrance (8 page)

Prisoners captured in the Germans’ November drive on Moscow make up this labor draft. Those who are dying in Lamsdorf were caught in the summer campaign. Reduced by now to walking skeletons, they collapse randomly, all over the place, day and night. Of the varied Lamsdorf horrors, one still scars Jastrow’s soul. He himself has glimpsed, in the night gloom beyond the searchlights, the small packs of prisoners, insane with hunger, who rove the frozen wastes of the camp, eating the soft inner parts of new-fallen corpses. He has seen the mutilated corpses by day. The watchtower guards shoot the cannibals, when they spot them. Prisoners who catch them kick or beat them to death. But the instinct to live outlasts human nature in these creatures, and cancels fear. The cannibals are crazy somnambulists, idiot mouths seeking to be filled, with enough cunning left in their blasted brains to feed at night, skulking in shadow like coyotes. Whatever lies ahead in Katowice, Berel Jastrow knows that nothing can be worse than Lamsdorf.

Yet it seems the column is not going to Katowice. The ranks ahead are making a left turn. That will take the draft south to Oswiecim, Berel knows; but what is there for such a large labor force to do in Oswiecim? The place of his boyhood yeshiva is a town of small manufactures, isolated in the marshy land where the Sola meets the Vistula. Mainly, it is a railroad junction. No heavy labor there. At the turn in the road, he sees a new Gothic-lettered arrow, nailed above the faded Oswiecim signpost. The Germans are using the old name, which Berel remembers from his youth when Oswiecim was Austrian. Not only is it harsher, as German names tend to be;
AUSCHWITZ
hardly even sounds like Oswiecim.

R
ABINOVITZ
returned in a rusty van loaded with supplies, followed by two tank trucks carrying fresh water and diesel fuel. This touched off a frenzy of work through the twilight and into the night. Shouting, laughing, singing Jews passed the stores hand to hand up the gangway, across the deck, and down the hatches: sacks of flour and potatoes, net bags of wormy cabbages and other stunted, gnarled vegetables, bundles of dried fish, and boxes of tinned food. The ragged Turkish crewmen brought aboard the fuel and water hoses to throb and thump and groan; they fastened down hatches, tinkered at the anchor windlass, coiled ropes, blasphemed, hammered, and bustled about. The old vessel itself, as though infected with the excitement of imminent departure, creaked, rolled, and strained at its mooring lines. Frigid gusts were driving swells in past the mole, but despite the wind, happily babbling passengers thronged the unsteady deck watching the preparations. When they went below to eat, the wind was working up to a near-gale under a glittering half-moon.

In a purple crepe dress, her face touched with rouge and lipstick, Natalie stood hesitating on the wobbly deck outside Rabinovitz’s cabin door. Close-wrapped around her shoulders was Aaron’s gray shawl. She sighed, and knocked.

“Well, hello there, Mrs. Henry.”

On the grimy bulkheads in place of the pinups were pallid yellow rectangles. Otherwise the rank disorder was as before: unmade bunk, piled papers, swirling tobacco smoke, workman’s smells from clothes dangling on hooks. He said as he closed the door, “Isn’t that Sarah Elowsky’s dress?”

“I bought it from her.” Natalie steadied herself against the doorway. “That everlasting brown wool dress of mine I’ve come to loathe, truly loathe.”

“Sarah would wear that when we talked to the authorities at Nice. She has a way with Frenchmen.”

“I hardly know her. I know so little about all you people!”

“How’s your baby?”

“Cranky. He keeps pawing at his right ear, and he’s feverish.”

“You’ve had him to the infirmary?”

“Yes. They gave me pills for him.”

“Well? And are you coming with us?”

“I’m trying to make up my mind.”

“That shouldn’t be hard.” He offered her his desk chair, and squatted on the iron deck. “Decide what’s best for yourself, and do it.”

“Why did you ever bring us aboard, anyway? You only created trouble for yourself.”

“Impulse, Mrs. Henry.” He drew hard on a cigarette. “When we sailed from Nice we had no plan to stop here. The generator burned out. I had to get an armature and some more money in Rome. I contacted Herb Rose. He told me your uncle was there. I’m an admirer of his. So —”

“Are your passengers all from Nice?”

“No. None of them. They’re Zionist pioneers, refugees now, mostly Polish and Hungarian. They’d have left from Constanta on the Black Sea — that’s the usual route — but their Rumanian fixer ran off with their money. They got shunted around by the Jewish agencies for months, and ended up in Italian-occupied France. It’s not a bad place for Jews, but they wanted to go on to Palestine, no matter what. That’s what I do, get Jews to Palestine. So, that’s the story.”

“Are you going straight to Palestine, or via Turkey? I’ve heard both rumors.”

“I’m not sure. I’ll receive radio signals at sea about that.”

“If it’s via Turkey, you’ll have to take your people through the Syrian mountains illegally, won’t you? Hostile Arab country?”

“I’ve done that before. If we can go straight home, of course we will.”

“Are your engines going to break down at sea?”

“No. I’m a marine engineer. The ship is old, but it’s French. The French build good ships.”

“What about the overcrowding? Those stacks of bunks down below — those long open latrine troughs! Suppose another three-day storm comes along? Won’t you have an outbreak of disease?”

“Mrs. Henry, these people are trained for rough conditions.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you” — she twisted the shawl in her hands — “that you may not sail? That the clearance could just be a trick to lure my uncle quietly away? It’s quite a coincidence that you got your papers right after Werner Beck showed up.” Rabinovitz made a skeptical face. She went on quickly. “Now I’ve thought of something. If we do leave the
Redeemer
— I’m not saying we will — but if we do, Aaron could insist on going straight to the Turkish consulate. There we’d wait for a signal from you, relayed through the coast guard, that you’re past the three-mile limit. If no signal comes, we’d claim Turkish sanctuary, and — what are you smiling at?”

“There’s no Turkish consulate here.”

“You said there was.”

“He’s an honorary consul, an Italian banker. A converted Jew, as it happens, and he’s been a help. The nearest consulate is in Bari, on the Adriatic.”

“Oh, hell.”

“Anyway, a consulate doesn’t give territorial sanctuary, like an embassy.” His smile broadened. “But you’ve been thinking hard, haven’t you?”

“Oh, I even had the signal.”

“Really? What was it?”

“Well —” with a certain embarrassment she brought it out — “
’Next year in Jerusalem.’
Just the last line of the Passover seder.”

“I know what it is.” His smile faded to a stern businesslike look. “Listen, Mrs. Henry, the Italians have no use for a lot of hungry stateless Jews. We’ll go. You ought to come, too.”

“Oh, I should? And why?” The swaying of the smoky little room, with the bumping against the wharf, was making Natalie queazy.

“Let’s say because your baby’s Jewish, and should go to the Jewish homeland.”

“He’s only half-Jewish.”

“Yes? Ask the Germans.”

“Look, don’t you understand that I feel no emotion about Palestine? None! I’m an American, completely irreligious, married to a Christian naval officer.”

“Tell me about your husband.”

The question took her aback. She awkwardly replied, “I haven’t seen him for ages. He’s on a submarine somewhere in the Pacific.”

He took out a worn wallet and showed her a snap of a big-bosomed dark girl with heavy hair. “That was my wife. She was killed in a bus that the Arabs blew up.”

“That’s frightful.”

“It happened eight years ago.”

“And you want me to take my baby there?”

“Jews live in danger everywhere.”

“Not in America.”

“You’re strangers there, too. In Palestine you’re home.”

Natalie took from her purse a small colored photograph of Byron in uniform. “Here’s my husband.”

Byron came alive in her memory as Rabinovitz knotted his brows over the picture. “He looks young. When did you get married?”

For months she had been shutting her marriage from her thoughts — that hazy tangle of imbecile decisions, leading to delirious labor pains alone in a foreign hospital, surrounded by strange faces and half-understood medical
babble in Italian. For all the delicious love flooding her at seeing the tiny wrinkled red baby, she had felt then that her life was wrecked. More or less, she still did. But as she sketched the story to the Palestinian, Byron Henry’s charm and dash, his ingenuity, his boyish appeal, all came back to her; also the terrific sweetness, however harebrained the thing had been, of the fleeting honeymoon in Lisbon. She thought — though she did not say this to Rabinovitz — that a crippled lifetime might be fair pay for such joy. Besides, she had Louis.

Rabinovitz chain-lit a cigarette as he listened. “You never met any Jewish young men like him?”

“No. The ones I went out with were all determined to be doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, or college professors.”

“Bourgeois types.”

“Yes.”

“Bring your son to Palestine. He’ll grow up a man of action like his father.”

“What about the hazards?” Natalie feared she might be getting seasick, here beside the wharf. The motion was really nauseating. She got out of the chair and leaned against the bulkhead. “I hope this ship makes it across the Mediterranean, but then what? End up in a British prison camp? Or take an infant through Arab mountains, to be shot at or captured and butchered?”

“Mrs. Henry, it’s risky to take him to Siena.”

“I don’t know about that. My uncle talked by telephone to our chargé d’affaires in Rome, during his lunch with Beck. The chargé advised Aaron to go to Siena. He called this trip an unnecessary hazard for us.”

“Your chargé d’affaires told him to trust a Hitler bureaucrat?”

“He said that he knows Beck well. He’s not a Nazi. Our own Foreign Service respects him. Beck has offered to drive us back to Rome tomorrow, straight to the embassy. I don’t know what to believe, and frankly —
Oh!”
The deck of the small cabin sharply pitched and bumped. Natalie staggered, he jumped up to steady her, and she fell against him, crushing her breasts on his chest. He caught her upper arms in a hard grip, and held her gently away.

“Steady.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay.”

He let her go. She forced a smile, her arms and breasts tingling.

“The wind keeps backing around. The weather reports aren’t good. Still, we sail at first light.”

“That may solve my problem. Maybe Beck won’t come that early.”

“He will. You’d better decide. It’s a tough one for you, at that. I can see it is.”

Aaron Jastrow in a blue bathrobe, his thin gray hair blown about, knocked and opened the door. “Sorry to interrupt. The baby’s acting strange, Natalie.” Her face distorted with alarm. “Now don’t be frightened. Just come and see.”

Rabinovitz seized her arm and they went out together. In their scurry down the moonlit windswept deck, Natalie’s hair blew wildly. Louis lay in his basket on the bunk,
his
eyes shut, thrashing clenched fists this way and that.

“Louis!” She bent over him, putting both hands on the writhing little body. “Baby! Baby! Wake up — oh, he won’t open his eyes! What is it? He’s wriggling so!”

Rabinovitz took the child up in a blanket. “It’s a convulsion from the fever. Don’t worry, infants come out of convulsions.” Louis’s head was jerking above the blanket, eyes still shut. “Let’s get him to the infirmary.”

Natalie ran after him, down into the fetid gloom of the lower decks, into the miasma of latrines, of crowded unwashed bodies and clothes, of stale overbreathed air. Rabinovitz pushed past the queue jamming the passageway outside the infirmary. In the narrow white-painted cabin he thrust the baby on the doctor, a haggard graybeard in a soiled white coat. With a harassed air the doctor unwrapped Louis, looked at the jerking body, and agreed that it was a convulsion. He had no medicine to give. He reassured Natalie in a hoarse weak voice, speaking a Germanic Yiddish, “It’s that inflammed right ear, you know. It’s a febrile episode, I’m sure, nothing involving the brain. You can expect he’ll come out of it soon with no harm done.” He did not look as cheerful as his words.

“What about a warm bath?” Rabinovitz said.

“Yes, that could help. But there’s no hot water on this boat, only cold showers.”

Picking up Louis, Rabinovitz said to Natalie, “Come.”

They hurried down the passageway to the ship’s galley. Even when the galley was cleaned up and shut for the night, as now, it was malodorous and greasy. One piece of equipment, however, a tremendous vat, shone in the flickering electric light. Soup was the mainstay of the refugees’ diet. Rabinovitz had somewhere procured this restaurant boiler and installed it. Briskly he opened a faucet and a valve. Water poured into the vat, and from a nozzle at the bottom live steam bubbled up.