At the waiting room of the Rome airport, the customs officials called the name of each passenger. There were about thirty of them, including me. With one exception, they were all men. One at a time they stepped up to the counter with their bags and the officials inspected each piece of baggage. They were dressed in everything from their Sunday best to cast-off GI Army jackets. They all had brown, weathered features, callused hands, broken fingernails. These, it turned out, were a planeload of Italian farmers heading to Australia to start a new life as immigrants. I began to have an inkling of why the ticket price was about one-third the normal fare.
Having already cleared customs, I was leaning against one of the counters watching the Italian farmers file through one by one when I heard one of the customs men call in French, “Madam Elsing.” She was not Italian, and she decidedly did not look like a farmer. Rather, a stunning auburn-haired woman in her mid-twenties wearing a tan trench coat stepped to the counter. Years later when I saw Cyd Charisse on the screen for the first time, I was sure she was Yvette Elsing.
In a few minutes customs was through with her luggage, and she sat down near me. Thus began one of the most memorable and emotionally wrenching ten days of my life. In those first moments after we met, however, I had so many other things on my mind about getting aboard first the flight and then one of the sailing ships in Australia that I didn’t pay much more than polite and cursory attention to her.
“Are you going on this plane, too?” I asked, wondering if it was just going to be me and the Italian farmers.
“Yes,” she answered with a decided French accent. “I go to Batavia.”
Batavia was then the name for Jakarta, on the island of Java, which for many years had been the capital of the colonial empire known as the Dutch East Indies. In the recent aftermath of World War II, the Indonesians had taken up arms against the Dutch to win independence from their colonial overlords.
“Batavia?” I said, now teasing her a bit. “Are you sure you want to go there? You’re flying right into the war.”
“I had better take along a gun,” she said, a mischievous sparkle in her dark brown eyes.
“How did you ever choose an airline like this?” I asked.
“I make a reservation with KLM,” she replied, “but India does not allow any Dutch planes to fly over their country because they are on the side of the Indonesians. So this is the only way to go to Batavia by air.”
We continued talking as we waited. While her English was somewhat limited, what vocabulary she possessed she used charmingly, and always with a sense of fun. I learned she had lived the last ten years in Rabat, capital of Morocco, where her father was a high official in the French Embassy. She said she liked Americans because they were lighthearted and friendly She told me she’d had an American boyfriend in Rabat named Jerry.
“In front of my mother I say his name wrong on purpose so it sounds like ‘cherie’—’darling’ in French,” she laughed. “When I say his name like this, it makes my mother crazy.”
But now Jerry the American was gone. Only a few months earlier, with her parents’ approval, she’d married a forty-five-year-old Dutchman named Hans George, who owned and managed several radio stations in Batavia. She was flying there to join her husband. Thus they would begin their married life together.
We were now approached by a well-dressed Italian man. In perfect English, and with graceful manners, he invited us to board the airplane. We followed him out of the airport onto the tarmac. About fifty yards from the door sat our plane. I am sure neither Yvette nor I revealed it to the impeccably polite Italian man but the plane’s appearance startled us both. While we did not expect a Skymaster or Constellation, which were used for international flights at that time, we found ourselves walking toward a small, two-engine, very peculiar-looking Italian airplane with an Egyptian registry and Egyptian writing all over the wings and the fuselage. It seemed to us incapable either of accommodating thirty passengers or of flying almost halfway around the world. Now I definitely knew why the ticket price was one-third the normal fare. Even the name of the aircraft reflected its mongrel appearance. It was, I later learned, a modified plane known as a DC 2 ½.
We followed the agent up the short ladder to the plane’s rear and only entrance. If the plane’s exterior startled us, the interior shocked us. On one side of a very narrow aisle was a row often single seats, on the other a row of double seats. But most disconcerting was that, when on the ground, the plane’s tripod landing gear caused the aisle to be tilted at a precipitous upward angle. Hunching over and straining, we followed the agent up the aisle as if we were hiking up a short, very steep hill.
“Here are the bulkhead seats for you,” he said. “You will have more room for your legs.”
A few feet in front of us stood a four-foot-high bulkhead wall that separated the main cabin from a much smaller forward cabin. This area contained two seats a bit larger than ours for the crew, a lavatory, and, at the upper end, the door to the cockpit.
We took our seats at the bulkhead—Yvette at the window and I on the aisle.
“I hope the two of you have a very pleasant journey,” the agent said cheerfully.
As he left, Yvette turned to me with a faint almost winsome smile—a smile I learned to love.
“I hope so, too,” she said.
We now could hear the agent greeting the plane’s crew at the rear door. The four crew members smiled pleasantly as they passed us. These were the pilot, who seemed very reserved, the co-pilot, thirty-five-year-old Emille, whom we would come to know and like, and the young and attractive stewardess, Helene, who, we would learn, was perfectly pleasant but nearly helpless when under pressure. Her uncle, it turned out, was one of the three owners of the airline, as was the fourth person in the crew—a tall, patrician-looking Italian man.
The three owners, all good friends who had served as Italian Air Force officers during World War II, had founded the airline—Italian International Charter Ltd.—only four years before to serve routes in Europe and Africa. They had recently won a contract from the Australian government to fly Italian farmers to Australia, which was encouraging development and settlement of its lands. Ours was the airline’s first Down-Under flight and the owner accompanying us was along to observe firsthand what expansion of regular service to Australia and New Zealand might entail. He and the stewardess shared the double seat directly ahead of us beyond the bulkhead, graciously allowing Yvette and me to use the crew’s forward lavatory. At the rear of the plane was a galley and another lavatory for the passengers.
After a commotion behind us as the Italian farmers got settled—the plane shaking with their extra weight coming aboard—the pilot and Emille revved the engines and we were lurching down the runway at full throttle. Yvette grabbed my hand. The heavily loaded plane lumbered into the air for the first leg of our long journey. Once we were safely aloft, she let go of my hand.
“Yvette,” I said, turning to her. “Do you realize you have just set a precedent?”
I could tell she did not understand me, but I said no more. I was pleased she had done it.
The noise from the twin propeller engines was so loud that the only person who was able to understand you was your seat mate. I soon found it pleasant to be wrapped in this cocoon of privacy with Yvette. As that first day’s flight took us from Rome, over the Mediterranean toward Cyprus, Yvette and I talked and read, looked out the window and napped. About noon the stewardess and Emille passed out box lunches to all aboard. The Italian farmers, few of whom had flown before, did not expect the meal and had brought their own food.
Several of them were sitting on two duffel bags placed in the galley and every so often two other farmers switched places with two on the duffels. Evidently the airline had over-booked and was short of seats, which triggered a minor drama late that afternoon in which I was a principal actor.
“Mr. Stark,” the stewardess said, coming to me without warning. “It is your turn to sit on the duffel bags.”
“The hell it is,” I replied. “That didn’t come with my ticket.”
I didn’t know how much—if anything—the Italian farmers paid for their tickets but I was sure I’d paid more. Besides, I didn’t want to leave Yvette’s side.
Flustered by my refusal, the stewardess called for Emille. He started to plead with me. I felt sorry for this very nice guy because close by was the dapper owner of the airline.
“Emille,” I said, interrupting his pleading. “I’ll take my turn on the duffels on one condition.” I nodded at the owner. “That he sits on the duffel with me.”
That ended the duffel bag talk.
Yvette thought I was a hero. So did I.
Right from the beginning of the flight I did not want to leave her side. Already, I was fearful that in some way I might lose Yvette. As we flew along that first day, I told myself that I shouldn’t get too involved with her, that I was headed toward the windjammers, and not into a romance.
If someone had asked me at the time, why the windjammer was so important to me, I don’t know if I could have given a very good answer. It was something I had wanted to sail on since childhood, certainly, and I long had hungered to stand on the windswept, spray-washed foredeck of one of those big ships as it surged through the swells. But there was more to it than simply a youthful obsession with sailing ships.
When I was a young boy, I had been timid in certain physically demanding situations, and my father—a powerful and physically fearless man—pushed me to be bolder. For instance, at age five or six I was frightened by the firecrackers the older boys were lighting off on Fourth of July. My father, chagrined at my reluctance to engage in the celebrations, ushered me into the garage at my grandparents’ summer lake home and instructed me how to shoot off firecrackers until I was no longer afraid of them. As I grew older, I became more comfortable—and then came to love—vigorous outdoor activities that he introduced to me like wilderness canoeing, cliff-jumping into rivers, ice-boating, playing hard-tackle football. It was these daring physical feats—as well as hard work and good grades in school, of course—that earned my father’s high approval.
* * *
Since the time I’d first contacted them, the airline had been very vague about how long the trip to Sydney might take. When I first asked, they’d said three or four days. When I’d checked in at the airport they’d upped the count to about five days. Now, once we were airborne and there was no turning back, it became obvious it would be more than five days—way more. Emille informed us, much to our surprise, that the plane was not allowed to fly at night. He assured us, however, that overnight accommodations had been made along the entire route and the first stop would be Nicosia, capital of the island of Cyprus.
When the plane landed late that afternoon, we were bused to a modest hotel just outside the airport. Yvette and I were each given rooms and the farmers were ushered away somewhere else. The crew also disappeared. That evening Yvette and I dined together, on the airline’s tab, at the hotel dining room where we sampled the local fresh fish and good local wines. It surprised me that we never seemed to run out of conversation after all the time together on the plane, although we were perfectly comfortable with silences, too.
After dinner we took a walk into the quiet black night, stopping to sit on a bench in a small, dimly lit park. The conversation turned to our respective families.
“Has your father ever had an affair?” Yvette asked me out of the blue.
“I have no idea,” I said, laughing. “I’ve never really thought about it.”
What I had thought about ever since leaving the dinner table was, Do I dare make a pass at this wonderfully attractive, married, Frenchwoman? Her comment about my father’s affairs or lack of them gave me courage. Soon my arms were around her. She pressed closer against me.
“Come on over, Americans!” came a shout in broken English from down a nearby darkened street. “We have a club!”
This broke the spell of our embrace. We walked back to the hotel, and bid each other goodnight.
The next day’s destination was Bahrain Island in the Persian Gulf. As we left Nicosia and taxied down the field, I reached for Yvette’s hand. As she laughed, I held it in mock fright until we were well up in the sky.
This flight was a rough one, and some of the farmers near the back of the plane threw up. Emille and the stewardess showed them how to use the airsickness bags, but soon the stewardess was throwing up into one herself. Yvette sat down beside the white-faced Helene and asked if she could help somehow. Helene shook her head no, but I was impressed by Yvette’s thoughtfulness.
We spent that night in a cavernous RAF barracks with rows of cots—a small partitioned area set aside for the two women—and the next day flew to Karachi, Pakistan, much of the way over the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea.
At one point, Emille remarked to us in passing that neither he nor the pilot had ever flown over this part of the world before.
Yvette turned and looked at me quizzically with her wonderful smile, as if to say, “What are we getting into with these people?” We both burst out laughing.
In Karachi, we were bused to a modern hotel near the city. When we arrived in the big lobby, Emille and the hotel manager talked while we all waited. Yvette was standing close to me. The manager was looking over at us and seemed to be asking something about Yvette and me. Emille nodded yes. A bellman then approached. He took Yvette’s and my bags. He summoned us to an elevator and took us upstairs. He turned a key and opened up a spacious room of our own.
It was not the first time I’d spent the night with a girl. When I was a sophomore in high school and we lived in a house in Milwaukee on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan we, like most middle class and upper-middle class families in those days, had a maid. For a time our maid was a dark-haired, sultry-looking, nineteen-year-old girl named Sally who’d grown up on a Wisconsin farm. At first, Sally hardly acknowledged my presence and I was intimidated by her silence. But one winter evening, when my sister was staying at a friend’s house and my parents were taking a weekend trip to Chicago, I accidentally locked myself out of the house while shoveling the walk. I had no coat or gloves, and the temperature suddenly dropped and the wind rose. My hands first stiffened with cold, then began to turn white with frostbite.
Sally, up in her third-floor rooms, finally heard me ringing the doorbell. She came to the door, saw me quietly sobbing, and led me up to her rooms, where she thawed my hands in a dishpan of warm water. We talked about her uncle’s fingers lost to frostbite when caught in a blizzard on his farm, and I complimented her on the job she’d done redecorating her rooms. I could tell how much the remark pleased her. Then, as she dried my arms and rolled down my shirtsleeves, she asked me—to my utter surprise—if I’d ever slept with a girl. I burst out laughing. I told her I’d hardly even kissed a girl. We spent that night together, and carried on a clandestine romance until she left a few months later.
My romance with Sally and those that followed, however, seemed like boyhood infatuations compared with what I already had started to feel for Yvette. After that first night together in Karachi, Yvette and I had a table the next morning at breakfast in the hotel dining room. The airplane’s other passengers and crew sat at tables nearby. Our friend, the ubiquitous Emille, stopped at our table.
“I imagine your accommodations last night were satisfactory,” he said.
“They were more than satisfactory,” I replied.
Then Yvette said something in French. Emille answered in French, and the two nearly collapsed laughing.
“What did you say?” I asked her when Emille had left. But she wouldn’t divulge what it was, no matter how I tried to pry it out of her. It was another example of her impish sense of humor.
I’d been taken aback, at first, by her willingness to spend the night with me. Here was a Frenchwoman, four years my senior, who apparently didn’t mind breaking her marriage vows taken only a few months before, even as she was en route to meet her new husband. Looking back after all these years, I realize that she came from a very different cultural background than my own fairly straight-laced Midwestern upbringing. Her father was a refined and high-level French diplomat, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d had his own mistress, one who may have been openly acknowledged, as the French seem to make wide cultural allowances for a lover outside one’s marriage. I also think that Yvette’s parents, to some degree, may have pushed her into the marriage. She’d had other boyfriends, like Jerry the American, whom her mother had greeted with great disapproval. Perhaps a forty-five-year-old Dutch businessman—almost twenty years Yvette’s senior—seemed like a suitable match from her mother’s point of view, but maybe less so from Yvette’s. Besides, though she was a very considerate person, Yvette didn’t take anything about life too seriously and had a very lighthearted, carefree way about her. She told me laughingly that, on her wedding night, she drank so much champagne that she passed out and had to be put to bed.
In any case, I didn’t give this matter of her husband and her marriage much thought and we didn’t talk about it. I was so taken by her charming presence. Things were happening so quickly between us, and the plane journey itself was so jury-rigged and tentative, and we were both heading into such momentous, life-changing experiences, that Yvette and I simply lived in the moment together, thinking of neither past nor future.
On we flew, hopscotching across Asia, setting down in a new city every night. Yvette’s and my transcontinental romance deepened as we went. Emille handled our room arrangements together discreetly. At Delhi, the next stop, one of the farmers had to be taken from the plane on a stretcher and carried to a waiting ambulance due to the onset of abdominal pains, which had grown in severity ever since Nicosia. The next morning neither he nor the fellow Italian farmer who accompanied him on the ambulance showed up at the airport. When I asked the normally talkative Emille what had happened, he remained tight-lipped. It was also in the Delhi airport that we caught a glimpse of an Indian man who was surrounded by police and soldiers. Emille broke his silence to volunteer enthusiastically that we’d just seen India’s new prime minister, Nehru. As we flew across Asia, we saw a cross-section of a continent under transition from the prewar colonial world to the postwar world of national sovereignty, as in our sighting of Nehru and, later, in the situation in which we found ourselves on our arrival in Vietnam.
After Delhi, we stopped for a night in Calcutta—a quite delightful night for Yvette and me—at the fashionable Grand Hotel.
“Doesn’t this remind you of Casablanca?” I remarked to Yvette about the ceiling fans and elegant decor.
“Do you mean the city or the movie?” she asked. “Yes the movie, but no, not the city. The city is near my home. It is very dirty and poor.”
We flew on to Saigon. The French had been a presence on and off in Vietnam for one hundred years, finally claiming it as a colonial possession in the last part of the nineteenth century. At the end of World War II—and about three years before our DC 2 ½ landed—Vietnamese nationalists had declared their independence from France. France refused and the nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh took up arms in a guerrilla war against the French regime, a war for independence that much later, of course, would embroil American forces. The first Indochina guerrilla war was what our little plane flew into late in the afternoon of March 4, 1949.
As we landed, not far from us on the airfield a half-dozen four-engine transports were landing French troops. After a quick inspection by airport officials we were all put on a private bus, its destination a seedy hotel in downtown Saigon. As we trooped into the small lobby, it was the only time during the entire flight that I witnessed both the head pilot and owner in apparent confusion as they considered whether to return to the airport and spend the night on the plane or risk a bad night in the city. But Emille, once again, took matters in hand. He disappeared from the lobby for about twenty minutes, then returned and led our whole group—including the plane’s crew and owner—to the hotel’s restaurant.
We were the only patrons. The quick, subtropical twilight had already faded to darkness. Several tubs of iced bottle beer sat next to each table. Emille welcomed all of us to partake and before long, with Emille seeing that the tubs were never empty, the decibel count went up just like a stateside cocktail party. Dinner arrived—rice, and a stir-fry of meat and vegetables and sauce—and sets of chopsticks. Not one person, including the crew, had any idea how to use the chopsticks. Yvette began to laugh so hard at some of the Italians’ frustration trying to get rice into their mouths that she actually had tears running down her cheeks, although she wasn’t doing much better herself.
There was no longer any chance of going back to the plane. We found out that after nightfall a tight and absolute curfew was placed on the entire city. We could now hear shooting echoing through the darkness, sounding as if it came from throughout the city. Maybe it was the sense of our isolation and the violence that swirled through the darkness outside that added to the devil-may-care spirit of Emille’s party. It carried on for several hours more, until we were led to sleeping quarters in barracks-like rooms with beds like wooden planks. There I, like most of the men, immediately fell into a deep, beer-induced sleep.
The next morning, as the eastern sky began to lighten and the bus pulled out from the hotel to the airport, Yvette registered the only complaint I heard from her the entire trip. She said all she heard all night was snoring and coughing from the next room, which every once in a while was punctuated by gunfire. She allowed she had not slept one minute all night.
“And you, Beel, snored louder than anybody.”
We all hustled onboard the little plane. As we returned to our seats and the engines began to turn over, Yvette looked at me with her wonderful smile.
“This is almost like coming home.”
Still, we hadn’t left the influence of Saigon and its war. After we’d been aloft for two or three hours we could see the pilot, co-pilot, and the owner having an agitated conversation in the cockpit with the door open. Apparently we were running low on fuel. The airport in Saigon evidently had not completely refueled our tanks. The pilots and owner finally decided to fly to a small airport an hour or so away.
We soon swooped down toward a postage-stamp-size square of grassy airstrip ringed by jungle and jounced to a stop in front of a few rusty metal buildings. The small staff at the airport worked quickly to refuel our plane. As the plane taxied to the end of the little field to take off again, it became apparent the added fuel plus the rough surface of the field created new sounds and new motions.
Yvette grasped my hand, sincerely frightened this time.
“This runway is too short for this heavy plane,” I teased her.
I immediately regretted my stupid and frightening joke. Taxiing to the end of the field, the pilot turned the plane into a light wind and started down the runway at full throttle. It quickly became obvious to everyone, including the Italian farmers who had never flown before, that as we lumbered across the bumpy field, the plane was too heavy and too slow. Even if we became airborne immediately, it was doubtful that we could clear the tall tropical trees that stood before us like a wall.
The Italian owner, who I found out later had been an Italian bomber pilot in World War II, bounded into the cockpit. We approached the trees at well below the necessary altitude. I could hear the stall warning go off in the cockpit.
Then came a miracle. As we approached the trees, the forest parted like the Red Sea did for Moses. Why this swath was there no one on the plane seemed to know. The cut was several hundred yards wide and extended for two or three miles. The pilot skillfully maneuvered the plane through the swath, gaining altitude and speed in the process. Soon we were at 3,000 feet.
All pandemonium broke loose. The farmers clapped and shouted. Several bottles of brandy appeared. The farmer across the aisle insisted that Yvette and I share his little flask. The Italian owner was back in his seat, having retreated from his watch post in the cockpit. This very patrician-looking gentleman turned in his seat so that Yvette and I could see him. He had a big grin on his face—and then he enthusiastically gave us the “thumbs up” salute.
Under clear skies we continued the flight that day to Borneo. Again we flew over water most of the time, in this case the South China Sea, until we made landfall on Borneo itself. This was where Yvette was scheduled to get off and take a KLM plane to Batavia, while I was scheduled to continue with the Italian farmers to Sydney. Since the crisis at takeoff we had not let go of each other’s hand.
I thought Yvette had fallen asleep, her head on my shoulder. Then she spoke dreamily. “I suppose I should feel lucky that as your lover my main competition is a sailboat.”
Now it was my turn. I had rehearsed my little speech a half dozen times and was saving it for the inevitable parting in Borneo. But now she had brought it up.
“If it weren’t for that sailboat and my hope to sail around Cape Horn,” I said, “I would follow you to Batavia. And there I would do everything in my power to break up your marriage, and I bet I would be successful.”
She said nothing, nestling closer against me. Though I’d rehearsed my speech over and over, I was having a more and more difficult time sticking to my words. Our affair had started casually enough, but in these few intense and emotional days flying across Asia toward new lives for us both, I had fallen in love with her, and, so it seemed, she with me. I had thought at first it would be easy enough to say good-bye to her and get on with my dream of a great Cape Horn sailing adventure, but now, as that moment of parting grew nearer, my sense of dread began to grow. I would be forced to choose. There was no middle ground in this decision, no room for compromise. It was Yvette, or it was a windjammer. I was quite sure I knew which way my decision would go, but I could see it was going to tear me apart to make it. And I had the feeling that my decision would come back to haunt me in the weeks and months ahead.
In this, I would not be mistaken.