— 11 —

In the cargo hold Carsie and Lilia shared one hammock. Louis sat in another, nearby. Mounded between the hammocks, caged guinea fowl, Muscovy ducks, and pigs rutted and snorted and fouled the air. Carsie pulled the few extra clothes given them by the French customs officials from the picnic basket and hung them on pegs behind the hammock.

The freighter slipped out of the bay, its mighty engines grinding as it turned and headed into the sea. Pushing into open water, the ship rocked from side to side, riding the waves up and down. Up again and down. Side to side. And up. And down. And left to right. Carsie’s stomach churned. She and Lilia rode out the afternoon in their hammock, breathing the stench of barnyard gases emitted by the animals. Carsie gulped, trying to keep her stomach in place as the ship pitched and rolled from the Straits of Dover to the southern end of the North Sea.

The ship stopped moving. Carsie struggled from the hammock and climbed to the top deck. It was night—still and dark and warm. A rat scuttled across the deck and jumped into a coil of rope on the wharf. Steamships sat farther out in the harbor with all but their running lights dimmed.

A crewman approached. Carsie waved to him. He nodded to her and slowed.

She pointed to the glitter of lights in the southern sky. “Vos shtot?” What city?

The man cocked his head and thought. “You’re speaking Yiddish?”

Carsie tried to puzzle out what he said, recognizing only the last word, “Yiddish.” Now there was no interpreter. Would people in New York speak Yiddish or...something else?

The crewman motioned for her to follow. He led her to the galley, doled out a dish of lentils, and offered a spoon. Carsie held up two fingers. The crewman smiled and nodded. He spooned more lentils into the bowl and handed her two spoons. As he bent with the bowl and spoons he pointed outward, to the city spread around them.

“London,” he said. He pointed to the bowl. “Lentils.” Out again to the city. “London.” And to the bowl again. “Lentils.”

“London,” Carsie whispered to the city. “Lentils,” she said, looking down at her dinner. She smiled up at him. “Danka.”

He smiled at her. “Thank you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Tank you?”

“Th...th...” He put his tongue to his front teeth. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Carsie said and nodded. “Thank you...lentils.”

The crewman smiled and patted her on the back. “Thank me if they stay down, young lady. If they stay down, thank me then.”

When Carsie sat, the hammock’s movement wakened Lilia. She struggled to a sitting position and peered closely at the contents of the bowl Carsie carried.

“Ugh,” she wrinkled her nose. “Chechevitsa. I’m not hungry enough to eat chechevitsa.”

“Lilia, you must eat something.” Carsie lifted a spoonful of lentils to her mouth. She settled back, self-satisfied. “A man on deck showed me where the food is. Mmmm...they’re very good.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Well, no, they’re not good,” Carsie said. “But they’re not bad.”

“Really?”

“Really. Try some.” She held out a spoonful.

Lilia chewed, felt for the second spoon and dipped into the bowl herself. “Who was the man on deck?” she asked.

“He works on the ship, I think. He told me the name of the town where we are now. London.”

“London? That’s in our magazine!” Lilia took out the magazine and scanned, the pages pressed to her nose. “Yes, here it is. We are in London?”

“Finish your chechevitsa before we go up to find Louis. I haven’t seen him all day.”

In their brief search for Louis topside they did not spot him. The girls returned to their hammock in the foul steerage cabin.

“Remember well, remember right,” Carsie whispered to Lilia.

“Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,” Lilia whispered back.

Louis Levy, afflicted by seasickness so severe he dared not move, slept curled in a lifeboat where the air was fresher.

——

Carsie and Lilia stood at the railing, Carsie describing to her sister how people busied themselves on the docks: bringing aboard boxes and large cloth bags stuffed with goods, crewmen removing a man in handcuffs from the ship’s hold and handing him over to a guard in a strange black hat, unfastening big coils of rope from around metal cleats, pulling up the gangway, preparing to get under way once more.

The freighter floated free of the dock, started its engines, and turned away from the dock. The captain called out his orders: “Half full, Mr. Krukov, half full for now.”

“Aye, Captain,” a crewman called. A bell rang twice. “Half full it is.”

Moving down the Thames the ship creaked pleasantly, sighing with the wind. Carsie spotted the crewman she had met the night before and waved him down. Clutching her coat around her, Lilia stepped behind her sister.

The crewman smiled. “Good morning.”

“Gut mor-ning,” Carsie repeated.

The crewman looked over Carsie’s shoulder and pointed to Lilia cowering behind her.

Carsie pulled her sister forward. “This is Lilia,” she said in Yiddish.

“Lilia?”

Lilia nodded without looking up at him.

“And what is your name?”

Carsie frowned.

The crewman thumped his chest. “I am Marek.” He waited. “Mar-ek,” he said again.

She brightened. “Ikh heys Carsie.” My name is Carsie. Beyond the crewman she saw Louis Levy tumble from a lifeboat and stagger to the rail. He leaned over and gagged.

“Carsie and Lilia,” Marek said. “Good mor-ning Carsie and Lilia.”

“Good mor-ning, Marek,” Lilia mumbled.

“Wohin gehen wir?” Carsie asked. Where are we going?

Marek shook his head.

Carsie pointed at a distant shoreline approaching off the starboard side of the freighter. “Vu?” Where?

“Oh. France. Now we go back to France.”

“France?” Her mind reeled. Had the French decided she and Lilia and Louis should work in the camp after all? Had they rethought Herr Levy’s arrangement because he hadn’t paid? “France?” Carsie backed away from him. “France? Neyn! Neyn!”

Marek held up a reassuring hand. “No, no! Not Boulogne-sur-Mer, Carsie. We take on freight in Cherbourg.” He held up a finger. “One day. It’s okay. Okay. See?” He put on an exaggerated smile and pointed to his face. “O-kay.”

Carsie looked past Marek, seeing Louis Levy heave. They ran to his side. Bumping heads and elbows, the three of them carried him down the two steep ladders to steerage. His hands and face felt pale and clammy. He shouted out rambling nonsense syllables. Marek brought him tea and sugar water, and Louis took enough of each to calm his stomach, quieting his rant.

The ship docked in Cherbourg that afternoon, and the lack of movement helped quell Louis’s seasickness. Carsie and Lilia hid in steerage the following day, unwilling to chance a French change of heart about being sent to a work camp. Late that afternoon, an older couple descended the ladder at the far end. The man began unpacking a carpet bag.

The woman wailed, “Aaron, talk to them. We can’t travel in this...in this squalor.”

“Miriam,” the man pleaded, “I have talked to them. They have nowhere else to put us.”

Meticulously, he laid out their clothes, shoes and books, took a tea pot and left the cargo hold for the galley. The woman followed, a handkerchief over her nose.

The ship departed Cherbourg at dusk that evening, entering the Atlantic. Louis moaned again as his stomach churned along with the engines, but Carsie’s fears about being sent to the work camp stilled.

Plowing against a strong head wind the next morning, the Marseilles navigated into open ocean. Louis remained in his hammock, asleep. Marek wakened him and tried to get him up and moving. Louis resisted.

In the days that followed Lilia thrived on the ocean air and starchy food. Color returned to her cheeks for the first time in six months. Marek showed Carsie how to walk on deck in time with the waves and against the ship’s next pitch. She enjoyed the peace and promise of the journey and tried to ignore doubts and worries that eddied in her mind: their likely inability to speak the language of New York, how they would find Aunt Shalva and Uncle Moishe once they arrived, and the uncertain value of the remaining one hundred rubles in her coat pocket. She could not guess what that equaled in American money, but she knew that the U.S. charged an entry fee.

Just after first light on June 1, ocean waves swelled from six to eight and ten and fifteen feet in front of the Marseilles. The ship keeled from side to side, over hard left and hard right, sliding down the face of one wave and fighting up the back of another. Throughout the day the little porthole over the stinking animal pens dribbled water from the waves that broke over the freighter. Seawater flooded the decks and into the engine room, and took the ship’s only life boat when it receded. The sky remained as black as night, lacking the night sky’s clouds of stars.

They all clutched at whatever they could to keep from rolling into the stinking stock pens. Louis twisted his fingers in the hammock’s webbing, moaning and retching. Carsie belched and clutched at her stomach, but Marek’s lessons in the days before helped keep her seasickness at bay.

The couple introduced themselves as the Count and Countess de Kelemen, from Kiev. The Countess once again held a handkerchief to her nose and read to Lilia from one or another of the books they had brought with them; the woman and Lilia stayed together nearly all morning, neither of them suffering any effects from the sea’s ruthless pounding. The Count paced, impatient for the ship to move through the storm.

On Monday morning the storm subsided and the seas calmed. Louis lay in his hammock, weaker still from his last bout of seasickness. Lilia lay in the hammock, bored and restless. She hummed to herself, shaking a foot in time with the melody.

“Can you please be quiet?” Louis asked. “I’d like to sleep.”

“If you slept at night, you wouldn’t be sleepy now,” Lilia replied.

Louis smiled to himself. She had nerve, this little girl. He liked that.

“Where are you from, Louis?”

“From Kiev, like everyone else.”

“We aren’t from Kiev. Oh, my mother was, but she’s dead now. The Cossacks killed her. And Papa.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” A wave of nausea struck him. He belched. “Was it awful, when the Cossacks came?”

Lilia stopped wiggling her foot. “Yes. Awful. Carsie and I ran from them, before they killed us, too. Would you like some water?”

“I need air. Could you help me up, please? Would you like to go topside with me?”

Lilia grinned. “I would like that a lot, Louis. I really would.”

——

While the Count and Countess ate breakfast on the top deck, Carsie studied the Countess’s dresses hanging on pegs in steerage. She fingered the crocheted edge on a sleeve—filigreed threads woven with gold. The dress, lavender with a striped overskirt, fell floor-length with no train or bustle—the kind of dress Carsie had only seen in pictures. Its starched collar stood stiff and high, the mutton chop sleeves billowed like those sketched in her fashion magazine.

“Carsie?”

She started, and looked behind her. “Guten morgen, Countess,” she said, smiling.

“Do you know how do you say it in English, dear?”

“Y—yeh, I know how.”

“Then, let me hear it.”

Carsie’s smile faded. “Gut mor-ning.”

The Countess nodded. “You will need some English in America.”

Carsie smoothed a wrinkle from the lavender dress. “Such pretty clothes. May I ask, that is I wonder...where did you get them?”

The Countess smiled, stroking the lavender dress. “The Count bought them for me in Kiev, after we met. He was a...man with...privileges. His father had worked as an artisan for Herr Fabergé.”

“An artisan?”

“An artist who makes things. He worked in gold, making pretty candlesticks and bowls and eggs for the Czar’s wife. The children of the artisans were permitted to go to school, so he learned to read, and he learned languages—Russian, Hebrew, French, English.”

“Then he taught you?”

“Yes, that was how we courted. He was my tutor. Carsie, why is it you take such interest in our clothes?”

“I don’t know why, really, but I like clothes. I think perhaps when I go to New York I will make them.”

The Countess sniffed. “Clothes are not a purpose in life, Carsie.”

“They are purpose enough to those who publish the fashion magazines.”

“When you’re grown you will understand that making clothes is not a proper way to earn a living. The only thing clothes do is set us apart from the apes—nothing more.”

“But, what better way could there be to earn a living than to make something beautiful? Wasn’t that what...what your husband’s father did?”

“At the expense of his eyesight, his lungs, and eventually his life, my dear. Do you think beautiful clothes are worth that?”

At the noon whistle on Wednesday the ship pulled into Saint John’s harbor and dropped anchor. Crewmen scurried up and down the gangway, loading and unloading barrels and crates, taking and leaving mail and bags, signing papers, yelling, cursing, and finally hauling anchor and casting off.

The freighter turned for the outlet of the bay. They skirted a rocky shoreline, moving slower now, wary of icebergs that might lie hidden in the fog. Villages and farm land appeared before being shrouded once more in fog. Mountains, sheared off in straight walls, faced the sea. The water calmed. Lanterns of fishing trawlers and sailboats winked as the freighter made headway south. In the misty evening, a lighthouse here and there warned of danger. They found a cove and dropped anchor for the night. Navigating these waters in fog was treacherous enough—running at night was foolish.

——

Louis Levy swung his feet off the hammock and pulled himself up. His head pounded, his mouth was dry. Even so, his stomach was still and he stood unaided for the first time in days. He could do that at least, though his knees shook. He worked his way to the ladder, climbing slowly, his breathing labored before he reached the top deck. He leaned against the bulkhead, panting for a moment, perspiring, even though the night was cool and still.

The moon, waning off full, fused out any stars, lighting the shoreline in an eerie shimmer. Louis leaned once more against the rail, remembering the misery of his seasickness. He had thought he was dead. He had wished to die.

A rowboat advanced, two men aboard. Louis stepped into the shadows to watch its approach. At the bow of the freighter, Marek signaled the boat with a lantern, dropping a rope ladder over the side of the ship. Tying off the rowboat, the two men climbed the ladder to board the freighter. Without a word Marek led them down the forward hatch to cargo level.

Louis followed, inching halfway down the hatch ladder before he crouched to listen.

“Twenty cases,” he heard Marek say.

The larger of the two men from the rowboat opened a case from the stack, pulling out a bottle labeled “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.” “And no tax stamps?”

“You give me a hundred dollars, you sell it for whatever you can get.”

“We get two bits a bottle for it all over town. That’s two hundred fifty bucks from twenty cases.” He handed Marek a fan of ten-dollar bills.

“Then good for you, a hundred and a half in profit.” Marek counted his money. “And good for me. Anybody figured out yet that it isn’t the real Mrs. Winslow’s?”

The man smiled. “Tastes like it, doesn’t it? Packs a punch like Jack Johnson, though, this stuff. Got more opium in it than a Chinese den.”

Stuffing his money in his pocket, Marek stepped forward, catching sight of Louis’s feet. He stepped between the ladder and the two men, his hand behind his back, motioning Louis to move away from the cargo hold. The men from the rowboat prepared to load their cases of opium tonic.

Silently, Louis turned on the ladder, but stumbled, falling face forward at Marek’s feet.

“Ow!” he howled. “Agh, my foot, my leg.”

The larger man pulled a pistol from his waist. “Who the hell is this?”

“One of our passengers—harmless boy.” Marek smiled. “Probably looking for a place to throw up. Seasick all the way across, this kid.”

“Could be the first of many crossings for him,” the man with the gun said. “I believe he’s just been drafted to the Merchant Marines. We can get another fifty for him when we hand him over. They’ll be happy to have him.”

“But he speaks only Yiddish,” Marek said.

“Don’t matter a speck to me—or to them.” The man stepped forward and grabbed Louis’s arm. “What’s his name?”

“I forget,” Marek said.

“Neyn! Neyn!” Louis cried out as the privateers tied his hands behind his back.

“Shut up and stand still, ‘I forget.’ We have some people who want to meet you.” The man trained his gun on Louis, as he bent to pick up a case of bottles. It took less than twenty minutes to load their captive and the cases of opium tonic into the rowboat before the two men, their booty, and Louis Levy headed back to shore.