December 1938
The alabaster moon brightens the surface of the Mediterranean and Walter leans against the rail of the Conte Rosso, staring at the shimmering light. His jacket rests loosely on his shoulders and his body feels untethered, a feather in free fall. He could jump, he thinks; his body would float in the vastness like a swirl of seaweed and then descend. As a child, Walter loved swimming across Lake Wannsee, caressed by buoyancy. His father would wait at the shore and Walter would propel his arms and reach him in a few strokes. But now he has been washed into the ocean by sorrow, saved so he can live out his days in mourning. The passengers babble about the mysterious destination called Shanghai. What a shithole! Illness and poverty await us all! But Shanghai is the promised land! Silks! Opium! Tea! The sound of laughter wafts from the ship’s bar and cackles like fireworks against the night sky.
Walter has not spoken to anyone on board and he wonders if he has gone mute. The lights of Brindisi flicker in the distance and he holds up his hands. The left is steadier than the right, even though he has chewed off his thumbnail and the raw skin throbs. Perhaps in Shanghai he will see a doctor.
Sorry, Sonia. No promise kept. This boat isn’t sailing to Palestine. Only a month ago he had promised her they would live the words of the Song in the place where they were written.
Nard and saffron, fragrant reed and cinnamon, with all aromatic woods, myrrh and aloes—all the choice perfumes.
As if poetry would save them.
At night, the boisterous chatter of cocktail parties fills the decks. Every kiss is welcomed; every stranger’s touch encouraged. Women paint their lips red and invite men to rest their palms at the small of their backs; older couples lie in each other’s arms on narrow chairs and gaze up at the stars. To Walter it all seems like a display of relief or a vast delusion. When the Aga Khan and his wife board at Djibouti Walter peers at their elegant costumes as if he is standing on the other side of a painted screen. Life has two shades of color: muted grays that cover some kind of pain, and vivid primary hues that strain to defy death. Walter can intuit how each person on the Conte Rosso is either wounded or miraculously unscathed.
He tries to utter simple phrases to his fellow passengers—pass the salt or where are you going?—but he can only stammer. The effort to speak feels overwhelming. Walter shares his cabin with three other men, two of whom entertain women during the day. The third man has a mustache and wears a brown felt hat that he only removes at night. He sneaks glances at Walter and then snaps his head away, revealing a twitch in his left eye. Walter watches his every move and decides that he won’t go to Shanghai after all; wherever this man disembarks, Walter will follow. After losing Sonia and his father and boarding the wrong ship, the code of his life will be random. Tagging along like a loyal mutt to a stranger is the perfect course for him, a roll of the dice that will determine his future.
When the ship docks in Bombay Walter is half-asleep in the cabin. His head swims with voices he can’t reach: his father calls his name and Sonia sings lieder that fade into murmurs. Walter hears the whistle and commotion on the decks above, but his thumb throbs harder than ever, and just as he imagines a Shanghai doctor standing above him with a scalpel, he spots the man with the brown felt hat fold his coat under his arm and step out of the cabin. He turns toward Walter and winks.
“Follow me,” he says. “You will be better off here.”
Walter jumps to his feet, grabs his suitcase, and trails the man down the gangplank, striding in his shadow. No one asks for his ticket; no one asks his name. Walter could be invisible. He pauses to tie his shoelace and then looks around for the man he followed, but he only spots different hats worn by other strangers. Throughout his life, he will leave out the details but will say, I followed a man wearing a brown felt hat and ended up alone in Bombay.
He wanders the streets for hours, a single suitcase in hand. The thick air and unfamiliar sounds give Walter a migraine but he can’t find a place to sit. Cows loiter on the roads and rickshaws speed past, shaking up dust that blinds his eyes. Just before sunset, Walter finds a brothel and arranges to rent an empty room. He spends his first days in India lying on a thin cot, clutching a pillow to his chest. Every morning a prostitute named Kavita brings him soap and a towel and teaches him the English words she learned from her British clients. Walter asks her to stare at his hands and tell him if they still tremble. Her eyes glance from one to the other and every day she measures the level of tremors on a chart she has drawn. After many days the line is flat.
As Walter saunters through the city, he can hear Sonia’s voice calling to him. When are we going to Palestine, schatzi? Beggars line the streets and pungent spices waft around him but Walter cannot discern them; he can’t even smell his own sweat. When passersby veer away from lepers, Walter moves in close enough for the flies to circle his arms. The world holds no perfume and no stench; his nose is oblivious to its offerings.
Four months pass in a haze. Every afternoon Kavita shaves Walter’s face and ties his hair into a ponytail. Walter asks her to bring him some charcoal and a sketchbook. At first he only writes numbers, the tally of days since it happened. The day after the gunshots. The day after that. The futile attempt to find Sonia’s parents. The train to Trieste and the confusion at the port. The man who handed him a ticket and told him that the Conte Rosso was not sailing to Palestine, but he should board anyway. Another man who pointed to the ship and said, “Shanghai is good for the Jews.” The haze of dialects. His aching thumb. The porter’s question: Is anyone traveling with you? Not anymore.
Walter sleeps with the sketchbook nestled in the crook of his arm. When Kavita comes into his room each morning she moves the book aside and lies beside him, waiting for a response, but Walter does not break away from sleep until the afternoon. After her last client leaves at midnight, Kavita poses for him and Walter uses the shape of her body to remember Sonia. Her neck is longer than Sonia’s, her hips slimmer; Kavita’s toes are stubby like a small girl’s, while Sonia’s toes were shaped like question marks. Instead of sketching Kavita, he sketches Sonia as if she were still alive. This is a picture of my fiancée, he tells Kavita. When he opens his eyes after long naps, Walter can hear Sonia asking him if he can rub spices on her belly and if they have packed their bags for the journey home. He can feel her lips on his earlobe, her hand resting on his chest. At times he speaks to her as if they are a long-married couple. Taste this, schatzi. You like fluffy rice.
One night he falls asleep with a fresh drawing resting beneath his cheek and wakes up to the chalky smell of charcoal. Walter asks Kavita to bring him a clean bedsheet and he envelops himself in its faint whiff of lemon, soap, and women’s hands. He runs outside and the smells overwhelm him: the acrid cow shit, the lepers that reek of rotting skin, and the carnival of spices—arousing cumin, sweet tamarind, the dungy stench of hing—that fills his nostrils and saturates his brain.
Walter runs from market to market, plunging his hands into barrels of seeds and herbs. He inhales turmeric root and clutches thick chunks of it until his palms turn yellow. He rubs fenugreek seeds into his hair and chews on them until the bitter center pops open on his tongue. He hoards fistfuls of coriander seeds and sucks on them until he releases the soapy center that makes him feel giddy. He snaps apart black cardamom pods that carry the earthy smell of the Grunewald Forest he visited as a boy and he clutches the cracked pieces in his fingers and sways from side to side. In the street markets of Bombay, where the sight of the deranged and the lost is not unusual, Walter covers his head with a shawl, holds seeds and roots to his nose, and shuckles like a Jew in prayer. A merchant named Rohan teaches him the names of the spices and shows him how to use a sil batta so he can grind them in the traditional Hindu way. At night, Walter sprinkles Kavita’s naked body with the spices he’s hoarded.
With his senses awakened, Walter rises at dawn and arrives at the market when the merchants are setting up their stalls. He learns the names of every spice and in time Rohan hires him as an assistant. He lifts heavy seed sacks from a rickshaw and carries them to the stall. The muscles in his arms twitch from the effort but then grow tighter with each passing day. Walter summons Sonia a bit less and responds to Rohan’s prompts to carry a sack of hyssop from one corner to another, grind turmeric root into powder, help an elderly woman load her bags.
“I haven’t seen this one before,” says Walter. Rohan has just finished arranging the stall and the first customers meander in. Walter sticks his head inside a sack filled with pods and inhales.
“Kamal kakdi,” says Rohan. “Lotus seeds.”
“A well-known aphrodisiac,” someone says in German.
Walter leans deeper into the sack.
“Don’t you remember your own language, Walter? A handful of those pods could seduce the world.”
Walter pops his head out and glances at the man’s sandals.
“Who are you?”
“Be careful whom you follow next time.”
Walter looks up at a man with a mustache who is dressed for a cricket game. The man’s left eye twitches.
“You were on the Conte Rosso.”
“Until I got off, with you walking in my shadow.”
“You told me to. And then I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“See that? I’m not a stranger after all.”
Walter feels lightheaded. He has chores to do, new spices to sample. This is no time to play rhetorical games with a cricket player. Back to work. Kamal kakdi. Lotus seeds.
“Look at me, Walter.”
He glances up. The man’s twitch seems absurd to him.
“How do you know my name? I didn’t talk to you on the ship,” says Walter. “I didn’t talk to anyone.”
“I know your work.”
“What work? What have I ever done?”
The man laughs. “Join the club! All of human accomplishments are as illusive as dust. Every one of us is in the process of becoming, aren’t we, my friend?”
Walter glares. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I apologize. Subtlety is not my strong point.” He offers his hand. “Paul Richardson. I read your paper on religious desire in the Song of Songs.”
“That was a lifetime ago,” says Walter.
“Do you have any idea what you wrote? You pulled the words of the Song outside of their context; you opened all the windows. If you apply your erudition to the entire Bible, future generations will read the words in a brand new way.”
Walter grimaces. “Who are you to care?”
“I teach this stuff. An itinerant underpaid scholar or a professor of enlightenment—take your pick.”
Walter shrugs, then lowers his head into the sack and sniffs.
“I heard about your father and your fiancée. I’m very sorry. Maybe I can help you in some way.”
Walter pops his head out.
“Have we met? Before the Conte Rosso?”
Paul laughs. “In a karmic way, of course. But no, we were never introduced. I was a student at Oxford, had a fellowship in Berlin. And now I bounce around the American university system with frequent interludes in India.”
“A guru without the robes.”
“A small iota of scholarship and a whole lot of preaching to eager young students. At the end of the day, it’s a livelihood. You might consider it—academia would suit you.”
Walter shakes his head.
“You have no idea what you hit upon in that paper,” says Paul.
“I wrote it to impress my fiancée. She loved the Song.”
“Your work had traces of brilliance.”
“I wrote that paper as a romantic wink, an inside joke.”
“That was some wink, Walter. A love letter like that can alter the field of religious studies.”
“It’s yours for the taking.”
Paul grabs Walter’s hands. “Study with me,” he says.
“Thank you, but no.”
“Look. I don’t need another young man to turn misty-eyed over my stories about Hindu gods. My American students think scholarship is a slot machine for wisdom. Line up the cherries and out pop the aphorisms.”
“What makes you think I can do any better?”
“I’d love to find out.”
“You’re looking for a protégé.”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
Walter stares at Paul’s face, looking for a sign, a hint of an idea. He boarded the wrong ship, followed a man wearing a hat, and wound up here. In Bombay. He has a friend named Kavita and a job in a spice market. Isn’t that enough?
“I don’t think so,” says Walter.
“You are such a lost man.”
“I have a job.”
“You haul sacks and get high on spices. I’d call that a dalliance, a goddamn waste.”
Walter shakes his head. Go play cricket. Go off to your American students and teach them Tagore’s line about the butterfly that counts moments and tell them how my Sonia was shot. Just go—
“Please leave me,” says Walter.
“Is that what you really want?”
“Yes, it is. I never should have followed you. There were other strangers on that ship. Beautiful women. I should have trailed someone else. Or stayed until Shanghai, where no one would have found me.”
“I will leave you then. I’m sorry.”
Paul leaves and wanders off, first slowly and then more quickly, winding his way through a maze of alleys.
That night, Walter asks Kavita if she knows Tagore’s work.
“Of course,” she says. “Even a Bengali whore knows her national poet.” She closes her eyes and Walter listens to her sing in a scratchy high-pitched voice. When she finishes, she opens her eyes and takes his hand.
“Gitanjali,” she says.
“What is the song about?”
Kavita pulls a sheet of paper from Walter’s sketchbook and draws a footpath crossing a river. Then she sketches a primitive boat with a stick figure standing at the helm, playing a flute. Walter lies beside Kavita and closes his eyes. He has no boat, no river, no flute. Sonia and his father are dead. Kavita, Rohan, and Paul are the only people in the world he knows. One. Two. Three. No more.
The following morning Paul spies Walter in the market, inhaling peppercorns.
“Getting off on the ambrosia again?” asks Paul.
“I asked you to leave me alone.”
Paul reaches out and grabs Walter’s shoulders. “Staying here is a mistake.”
Walter pushes away his hands.
“Suit yourself then. Disappear as if you had never been saved. One day your fingers will turn yellow from turmeric and your skin will harden into citrus peel.”
Walter pulls a shawl over his head and begins to sway.
“You look like a crazy Jew, shuckling in prayer.”
“I don’t pray.”
“You’re not like the Jews I know,” says Paul. “Not at all.”
“How would you know what kind of Jew I am? I wrote a damn paper on the Song of Songs. And I’m not dead. So what am I?”
“Smart and lucky.”
“Neither,” whispers Walter.
“If you come to America with me I’ll set you up for a brilliant career. Students will admire your erudition; you will enlighten the world about the burning heart of theology.”
Walter adjusts his shawl and closes his eyes. You will become a professor of world religions. It is your destiny, Sonia had said. But, Sonia, my love, what is destiny when the future has been rendered into ash? What now for us? What now?
“First stop New York,” says Paul. “The Jewish Theological Seminary of America.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not religious. And I’m not looking for the Bible.”
“Beyond the Bible, Walter! You will study with rabbis. Wissenschaft: the science of plumbing ancient texts. Your fingers will touch the words you need to learn. You will weave yourself into the story, morph yourself into my Jewish protégé.”
“Don’t label me.”
“Agreed. No labels for the young man with boundless potential.”
Walter scans the market stalls and alleys that are beginning to feel like home. He doesn’t have to give in. He has Kavita and Rohan. He has spices. He has charcoal and a sketchbook. He has lost everything and now he has quite enough. Dream on, Professor.
“Look,” says Paul. “I give up. If you change your mind, prepare yourself for a long train ride and find your way to Shantiniketan—Tagore’s ashram. It’s the only place where history won’t intrude on you, a sanctuary of respite where you can heal, wipe yourself clean.”
“How long do I have?”
“Forever, Walter! You can squander your life here or you can come to America and climb the steps of scholarly achievement. Write your own ticket.”
“And you?”
“I come to India every year. I will find you.”
Walter pulls the shawl from his head and drapes it around his shoulders. “Why me?” he asks. “Am I really of such benefit to you?”
“Just consider my offer.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” says Walter.
Paul turns. As he ambles off, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out the brown felt hat, and places it on his head.
Walter reaches into the barrels of spice and picks up palmfuls of fenugreek and saffron. He replaces the shawl on his head and inhales, then looks up and scans the horizon for Sonia. The back of her dress appears before his eyes, the fallen hem, her strong calves wrapped around his. Walter stands and sways in the middle of the market, praying in no words and to no god, searching for the outlines of her face.
Walter will stand and sway during his years at Shantiniketan, where he will live until the war is over. He will study Eastern philosophy with dreamers and seekers in an adobe house where the words of the Koran mingle with the Upanishads and he will learn the verb forms and idioms of English and Sanskrit. He will meditate on the myth of the eternal return and wonder if Sonia will ever come back to him. He will study the Bengali words that Kavita sang for him, and he will translate them into English. I don’t know if I’ll go back home tonight or not. I have the feeling I’m going to meet someone. And sure enough, where the footpath crosses the river, there is a boat. Floating in the boat is a person whom I’ve never seen, playing a flute.
In the hot afternoons, Walter will venture out to the plain behind the adobe and cool himself in the shade of date palm trees. In the monsoon season, he will place a shawl over his head and stand out in the rain and cry for all he has lost. And when the rain stops Paul will arrive and tell him the war has ended and it is time for them to go to New York so he can begin learning with the rabbis—all because Walter once wrote a paper on the Song of Songs to impress the woman he loved.