In past years I had grown accustomed to meeting strangers. Once in a while readers approached to pay me compliments for an article or a story. I had girl friends and a few other friends among the writers. I had established the minimum contact necessary for existence. But aboard this ship my sense of solitude came flooding back in all its magnitude. My neighbors in the dining hall had apparently resolved to leave me to myself. I greeted them but they didn’t respond. I don’t know to this day if it was my vegetarianism that put them into a hostile mood or the fact that I chose to sit alone. The waiter did bring me food but it seemed to be made up of leftovers he had collected: mostly stale bread, an occasional chunk of cheese, an onion, a carrot. I had committed the sin of isolating myself from others, and I had been excommunicated. Each diner was served a carafe of wine daily, but I got no wine. Much as I brooded about this treatment, I could never come to accept it. One thing I knew for certain, I was at fault, not they. Eating in the dining hall became so annoying to me that I proposed to the waiter that he serve me in my cabin. He grew angry, glared, then told me to go to a certain office with a name I couldn’t pronounce. This must have been on the third day of my trip, but I felt as if I had been already swaying on this ship for weeks.
After lengthy questioning and straying, I made my way to the office where a small man sat scratching away at a sheet of paper with a pen that reminded me of my days in cheder. It consisted of a wooden holder, a ferrule, and the steel pen itself. The point looked old, rusty, broken. Every few seconds the writer dipped the pen in an inkwell that seemed nearly empty. The ink appeared dense and it kept spotting. Even in Warsaw such a pen would have been an anachronism. The sheet of paper was unlined and the writing emerged so crooked that each line rode piggyback upon the next. I cleared my throat and spoke some of the French words I knew—“Monsieur, s’il vous plaît”—but the other didn’t react at all. Had my voice grown so quiet or was he deaf? This, I told myself, was a French Akaki Akakevich, a throwback to Gogol’s times. I forced myself to wait patiently, but a good half hour went by and he still didn’t give the slightest indication that someone was waiting for him. I noticed that he was coming close to the bottom of the long sheet and this gave some hope. And that’s how it was. The moment he had written the last crooked line and blotted it with an ancient blotter, he raised his head and looked at me with eyes that could have belonged to a fish, totally devoid of expression. They were spaced far apart. He had a short, broad nose and a wide mouth. He appeared to have just wakened from a deep sleep or a trance. I started explaining to him in German, in Yiddish, and with my few words of French, the nature of my request, but his pale eyes gazed at me without any comprehension.
I said several times, “Je manger en cabine, no restaurant.”
He gathered my meaning finally, for after protracted searching he handed me a card and asked me to sign it. Then he gave me another card. The ship had agreed to provide me board in my own cabin. I asked him in sign language what to do with this card and as far as I could determine the answer was, “Hold on to it.”
From that day on I was going to America as if on a prison ship—a windowless cabin with little air—and with food brought by a man who could be a prison guard. He never knocked but barged right in, kicking the door open with his foot. He slammed down the tray without a word. If a book or a manuscript was lying on the little table, he inevitably drenched it. I tried several times to speak to him, at least to learn his name, but he never responded. He looked to me to be a native of the French colonies.
The food he brought me was always the same. In the morning—bread with black coffee. For lunch—some groats with no wine or dessert. For dinner—he threw me a piece of stale bread, some cheese, and a kind of white sausage I had never before seen in Poland. My order for vegetarian food was ignored. He never even glanced at me. I tried to give him a tip but he wouldn’t touch the bank note.
I knew already how impossible it was to explain the human character and its whims. Still, as I lay nights on the hard mattress, which was apparently located directly over the ship’s engine, I tried to deduce the reason for his surly behavior. Did he despise the white man and his civilization? Was the act of bringing me food three times a day too strenuous for him? Did he resent those who demanded special privileges? Because I threw away the meat he brought me, I actually subsisted on stale bread and cheese. The black coffee was never more than a half cup, cold and bitter. I knew that I would arrive in America (assuming they let me in, considering my appearance) looking wasted.
I had a number of choices of how to improve my lot. First, I didn’t have to spend all my time inside my dark cell. The steward on deck rented folding chairs and I could sit all day sunning myself in the fresh air. Second, the ship had a library. True, most of the books were in French, but there were several in German. But some force kept me from doing what was best for me. Somehow, I had acquired a fear of the sun and its light. The deck was too crowded with people. There was a place to play badminton, and young men ran, shouted, often put their arms around the women. I had taken from the ship’s library a German translation of Ilya Ehrenburg, but somehow I couldn’t take the impudent style of one who assumed that only he was clever while the rest of the world was made up of idiots.
It was the fifth day of the journey. In three days I would be landing in New York. I had finally dared to rent a chair on the deck and I had another book from the ship’s library that I was anxious to read. It was a German translation of Bergson’s Creative Evolution. I also carried with me a Yiddish magazine in which I had published my latest story before I left Poland. I was so engrossed in Bergson’s work that for a while I forgot about my spiritual crisis. One didn’t have to be a professional philosopher to realize that Bergson was a talented writer, a Schöngeist, not a philosopher. This was an elegant book, interestingly written, but lacking any new concepts. “Élan vital” is a pretty phrase, but Bergson didn’t even try to explain how it came to be a creative power. I had already grown accustomed to works that evoke a sensation of originality at the beginning only to find that when the reader reaches the last page he is just as wise as he had been at the first. There had been many vitalists among biologists prior to Bergson, even prior to Lamarck.
As I sat there reading, a steward came up escorting a young woman. There was an empty chair next to mine and he seated her in it. He carefully covered her legs with a blanket, then brought her a cup of bouillon. He offered me the same but I declined. It was hard to determine my neighbor’s age. She might have been in her late twenties or early thirties. She also held a book—Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal bound in velvet. She wore a white blouse and a gray skirt. Her dark complexion was pitted from acne. I read on for a long time. I didn’t have the slightest urge to talk to her. She probably spoke only French. I still tried to grasp how the élan vital could have created or formed the sky, the stars, the sea, and Bergson himself and his beautiful phrases and illusions. For a long time we each read our books. Then she turned toward me and said in a halting Warsaw Yiddish, “You’re reading a book I always wanted to read but somehow I never did. Is it really as interesting as it seems?”
I was so surprised that I forgot to be embarrassed. “You speak Yiddish!”
“I see that you read Yiddish.” And she pointed at my magazine.
“Yiddish is my mother language.”
“Mine, too,” she said in Polish. “Until I was seven I knew no other language but Yiddish.”
“You undoubtedly come from an Orthodox home.”
“Yes, but …”
I sat quietly and waited for her to go on. For the first time in five days, someone was speaking to me. I said, “You speak Polish without a trace of a Jewish accent.”
“Do you really think so? My feeling is that my Polish sounds foreign.”
“At least your parents had the wisdom to send you to a secular school,” I said. “My father sent me to cheder and that was the only source of my education.”
“What was he—a Chassid?”
“A rabbi, a moreh horoah, if you know what that means.”
“I know. I was brought up in the same kind of household as you, but something happened that turned everything upside down for us.”
“May I ask what happened?”
She didn’t answer immediately and seemed to hesitate. I was about to tell her that she need not reply when she said, “My father was a pious Jew. He wore a beard, earlocks, and a long gaberdine like all the others. He was a Talmud teacher. My mother wore a wig. I often demanded of my father that he send me to a Polish school, but he always postponed this with all sorts of pretexts. But something was going on in our house. I was an only child. My two brothers and one sister died before I was born. At night I often heard my father screaming and my mother crying. I began to suspect that my parents wanted to divorce. One evening when I came home and asked Mother where Father was, she told me that he had left for England. I had often heard that men on our street—we lived in the very midst of poverty, on Smocza Street—went off to America. But England seemed to me even farther away than America. On Smocza Street if you wanted to say that someone was acting strange, you said he was acting ‘English.’ I’ll make it short—my father converted, became a member of the Church of England and a missionary. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes, strange. What was his name?”
“Nathan Fishelzohn. He didn’t change his name.”
“I knew Nathan Fishelzohn,” I said.
“You knew him?”
“I visited him once in his chapel on Krolewska Street.”
“Oh, my God. When I saw you with that Yiddish magazine, I thought that—many young men used to visit him. Did you even intend to …?”
“No. I went to see him just out of curiosity, not alone but with a friend of his who is also my friend, a Yiddish writer, Dr. Gliksman.”
“I know Dr. Gliksman. What a small world! Are you a Yiddish writer?”
“I try to be.”
“May I ask your name?”
I told her my name.
“My name is Zofia now, or Zosia. It used to be Reitze Gitl. Did you write Yoshe Kalb?”
“No, my older brother did.”
“This book just came out in Polish translation. I read it. So did my father. Really, the big world is a small village!”
And for a long while we both looked at one another in silence. Then she continued, “Smocza Street, as you know, is full of Jews. The only Gentiles around were the janitors in every courtyard. Ours would come around every Friday for his ten groschen. To hear that my father had become a goy was such a shock that I really have no words for it. When they learned on Smocza Street that our family had converted, the boys threw stones at me. Girls spat at me. They smashed our windows. Then the mission bought a house on Krolewska Street and we all moved in there. Some rich lady in England had left a fortune to have Jesus brought to the Polish Jews. There I started attending a school where all lessons were taught in English except for the Polish language and Polish history. But my parents continued to converse in Yiddish …. Why am I telling you all this? I noticed you from the very first day you boarded the ship. You seemed strangely lost. Each time I saw you, you weren’t walking but running, as if you were being chased.”
“May I ask what you intend to do in America?”
“A good question. I don’t know. I don’t know myself. Ever since the rise of Hitlerism, our school in Warsaw began to become strongly anti-Semitic. Later I was attending the Warsaw university, but somehow I lost interest. You mustn’t laugh at what I’m about to tell you, but I write too. I have a letter of recommendation to a lady professor at Radcliffe, however, I’m not sure I want to continue my studies in general. I made two visits to England. I hoped to study there, even settle there, but I soon realized that to them I would always be a Jewess from Poland. There if you don’t speak with an Oxford accent and you don’t have an earl for a grandfather, you don’t belong. I guess you aren’t a religious Jew in the accepted sense of the word either.”
“Far from it.”
“They assigned me a cabin with two Englishwomen and they’re making me crazy with their silly talk. For whom do you write? For Jews who read Yiddish?”
“Yes, those are my readers.”
“I tried reading a translation from Peretz, but it didn’t capture my interest. I liked Bialik better, but he is kind of primitive too. My father reads all the Yiddish books. As soon as a Yiddish book comes out, he reads it. I’m certain that he has read you. Where does your brother live? In Warsaw?”
“He is now in America. It’s to him that I’m going.”
“Does he have a family?”
“Yes, a wife and child.”
“Well, it’s a small world, and particularly so, the Jewish world. One time in my life I had one ambition—to tear myself away from this world as firmly as possible. I dreamed of discovering a planet where the word ‘Jew’ had never been heard. What evil did the Jews commit that one must be so ashamed of them? It was they who were burned by the Inquisition—they didn’t burn others. Now that Naziism has evolved, Christians of Jewish descent face the same danger as do the Jews on Smocza Street. Really, at times it seems to me that I’m living in one great insane asylum.”
“That’s what it is.”
“What do you write about? Where do you eat? I seldom see you in the dining room.”
I had to tell Zosia about my dark cabin and the man who threw me my bread and cheese with such resentment thrice daily, and she said:
“Come eat with me. My table is half empty. There is only one elderly couple there. He is a retired captain of a freighter owned by a fruit company. He and his wife are both quiet people but they are alcoholics. When they come down for breakfast mornings, they are both already drunk. They’re so drunk that they can’t speak properly. They stutter and mumble. They hardly eat a thing. The waiter would be pleased to have you at his table.”
“I don’t have a number for this table.”
“No one asks for any numbers. Many of the passengers are seasick and they don’t show up at the dining room.”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“What? You’ll get whatever you ask for. There’s no reason for you to lock yourself up in a self-imposed prison.”
That evening I joined Zosia at her table. I got a rich vegetarian meal. I even drank two glasses of wine. The elderly couple gave me a friendly reception. The husband, the ex-captain, muttered something inarticulately to me. I told him that I didn’t know English but this didn’t stop him from rambling on.
I asked Zosia what he was saying and she replied in Polish, “I don’t understand him myself.”
His wife seemed somewhat less drunk. After a while, the couple left the table. The old woman was suffering from seasickness. She suddenly grew nauseous. The husband tried to keep her from falling but his own legs were wobbly.
Zosia observed to me in Yiddish, “Now you can speak to me in the mother tongue.”
“I don’t believe in miracles,” I said, “but our meeting today is a miracle to me.”
“To me, too. I haven’t spoken to anyone in five days.”
Night had fallen. The stewards had cleared away the folding chairs and the deck loomed long, wide, and deserted. A concert was scheduled for that evening in the salon. Several well-known musicians were aboard ship and the passengers scurried to secure seats. Zosia and I strolled to and fro for a long time in silence. She had already jotted down her address in Boston in my notebook. And I had given her my brother’s address in Seagate, Brooklyn. We stopped by the rail and gazed out to sea. Far away, at the horizon, a ship sailed in the opposite direction—from America to Europe. Our ship’s horn grunted a greeting. Zosia said, “What an eerie sound these horns produce. It’s a good thing fish are mute and probably deaf as well. Otherwise, think of the uproar there’d ensue in the ocean. I myself grow terrified by these deep roars, especially when I am reading. I’ve resolved on many occasions to read no more Baudelaire. It’s true that he’s great—in my opinion, the greatest poet of all time. He may be the only one with the courage to tell the human species the unadorned truth. But what good is the truth if you can’t live with it? Have you ever read Baudelaire?”
“I don’t know French. I’ve read several of his poems in Yiddish translation. A dreadful translation by someone who was inadequate in both languages. Still, he couldn’t manage to destroy Baudelaire altogether.”
“I literally learned my French from him. From the day I began reading him I was no longer able nor cared to read any other poetry.”
“The same happens to me,” I said. “I fall in love with a writer and I remain faithful to him for a long time. In that sense I’m totally monogamous, so to say. My great love was Knut Hamsun. I even translated into Yiddish some of his books.”
“You know Norwegian?”
“No, how could I? I did it from German and Polish. A Hebrew translation of Pan exists as well.”
“Well, this has been a day—or a night—of surprises. Several passengers had tried talking to me, but I have no patience for all this chatter about the weather and whether the food aboard ship is good or bad. Usually when I encounter someone carrying a book, I become interested, but the few people who did were all reading trash. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a large group of German Jews on board and they all carry cameras and teach-yourself English textbooks. Their pockets bulge with maps of America or New York. I know no German, but if you know Yiddish, you can understand what they’re saying. All they talk about is business. It’s somehow hard for me to grasp how people escaping from Hitler can be so practical, so well informed, so resolute. I often tell myself that Jews are my brothers and sisters. The fact that my father has a job with the missionaries hasn’t altered my genetic cells. I’ve resolved that in America I will be to myself and to others that which I really am—a Jewish daughter. But somehow I cannot understand these sisters and brothers of mine. They are terribly alien to me. You will probably think that I sound like some self-hating Jew, and you’d be right too.”
“No. I won’t think that.”
“What will you think?”
“I’ll think that since you love Baudelaire, you cannot love such optimists as Jews are.”
“True, true. But one must love them.”
“They don’t seek our love. They have wives, children, friends. Baudelaire’s every line is an ode to death, but these Jews want to live, to bring forth new generations. If one decides to live, one cannot spit at life all the time as Baudelaire did.”
“Oh, you are right. I wander about this ship and I ask myself, ‘Where am I going? To whom? To what?’ I am neither a Christian nor a Jew. And why should I suddenly become an American? I tell myself that my goal is to rescue my parents from the Nazis, yet how will I ever manage this? My parents have one desire—that I should marry. In this aspect, they are totally Jewish. They want to enjoy some satisfaction from me. But somehow I’m in no mood to grant them this satisfaction. We’ve only just met and here I am telling you things I’ve never told another soul. You’ll surely think I’m a total extrovert when in fact I’m just the opposite.”
“I know that too.”
“How? I’ve been close-mouthed from childhood. All those who tried to get close to me in my later years complained that I closed up like a mimosa. I had a friend, a young professor, and that’s what he called me. But enough about myself. Why should you be so dejected? You’re going to your brother and he undoubtedly has connections in all the Yiddish circles. You didn’t cut yourself off from your roots. I’m convinced that you have talent. Don’t ask me how I know this. You’ll be happy in America, as much as a person of your kind can be.”
“Happy? I surely lack this kind of aptitude.”
“Come, let’s see what’s happening with the concert.”
We went below. The salon where the concert was being held was jammed. Many passengers stood alongside the walls. A crowd had gathered around the open door. Those who occupied seats at tables all had drinks before them. The performance consisted of an excerpt from some opera. From time to time, a flashbulb flared. There had been a time when I envied those who took part in such recreations. I regretted the fact that I couldn’t dance. But this urge had evaporated within me. There reposed within me an ascetic who reminded me constantly of death and that others suffered in hospitals, in prisons, or were tortured by various political sadists. Only a few years ago millions of Russian peasants had starved to death just because Stalin decided to establish collectives. I could never forget the cruelties perpetrated upon God’s creatures in slaughterhouses, on hunts, and in various scientific laboratories.
Zosia asked, “Do you want to stay here? I don’t have the patience for it.”
“No, no. Definitely not.”
“May I ask what you would like to do?”
“I’ve told you about my dark cabin. I’d like to go there. Do me a favor and come with me. That waiter has surely brought my supper and I can’t just let it sit there. I must also alert them to stop bringing me any more meals tomorrow. I don’t know to whom I should speak about it. I don’t know a word of French.”
“Oh, all you need do is inform the steward in the dining room that you’re eating at my table. I’ll do it tomorrow at breakfast. Come, let’s see what the waiter has brought you. I must tell you that Frenchmen don’t understand vegetarianism. If you told them you were a cannibal, they’d be less mystified.”
Zosia smiled, revealing a mouthful of irregular teeth. It struck me that she didn’t look Jewish. She might have been taken for a Frenchwoman or possibly a Spaniard or a Greek. The ship rolled and Zosia occasionally stumbled. Odd, but once again I had forgotten the way to my cabin. We came to a passageway and I was sure that my cabin lay within it, but the numbers on the doors didn’t match mine. Had we gone too far below? Or should we go even lower? Zosia asked, “What happened—are you lost?”
“So it would seem.”
“Well, the absentminded writer! What’s the number of your cabin?”
I told her the number, but I was no longer sure that I wasn’t making an error. We now climbed up and down staircases. We turned right here, left there, but my cabin had vanished. There was no one to stop and ask directions since everyone was at the concert.
Zosia said, “Are you sure that’s your cabin number? It seems that such a number doesn’t exist at all.”
“What number did I tell you?”
She repeated the number. No, that wasn’t the right one. On the first night of the journey I had resolved to take the cabin key along with me wherever I went, but the key was too big and heavy to carry around and I had not locked the door. Why hadn’t I at least written the number down?
Zosia asked, “Are you not by chance a stowaway?”
“Figuratively, yes.”
“Well, don’t be so perturbed. My father is just like you. Ten times a day he loses his glasses. He comes in and starts to yell, ‘Where are my glasses? Where is my fountain pen? Where is my wallet?’ Quite often the glasses are sitting right on his nose.”
At that moment the correct number came to my mind. Within a minute we were standing before my cabin door. I opened it, lit the lamp, and encountered a fresh surprise. On my table stood a huge fruit salad and a bottle of wine. Either the surly waiter had repented or someone had realized that I was being done a disservice. Or could it be that my resentment toward the waiter was a result of a whole series of hallucinations? Everything was possible. I had compromised myself before Zosia in every sense.
She winked and said, “Quite a nice meal. I would be glad to have such a cabin instead of sharing one with those two ninnies. They stay up till 2 A.M. babbling about some church in the small town to which they belong. Sometimes they both talk at the same time and both say exactly the same things, as if they were identical twins.”
I showed Zosia to the chair while I sat down on the bunk. After some hesitation, she sat down on the edge of the chair.
“Is it totally dark here during the day?”
“As dark as a hundred miles beneath the earth. Sometimes I lie here during the day and imagine that I have already departed this world and that this is my grave. But I have neighbors who shatter the illusion—a French couple. I don’t understand what they’re saying, but they quarrel constantly. One time it even seemed to me that they were hitting one another. She threw something at him. He threw something back. She cried. Strange, but every nationality cries in a different fashion. Did you ever notice that?”
“No, but I’ve never had the opportunity. I’ve been to England twice, and I never heard anyone crying there. I can’t even picture an Englishwoman crying. When my father decided that we must become Christians, Mother cried for days and nights at a time. One time Mother came to my bed in the middle of the night and exclaimed, ‘You’ll soon be a shiksa!’ I began to wail and wasn’t able to stop.”
We sat there until 1 A.M. We drank the wine and ate the fruit salad. We had grown so close that I told Zosia about my affairs with Gina, Stefa, Lena, and with my cousin. After a while, I began questioning her and she confessed that she was still a virgin. She hadn’t found the opportunity to alter that condition either in Warsaw or in England. There had been many close calls, but nothing had come of any of them. She suffered from a phobia regarding sex, she said. So great was her fear of it that she transferred it to the men too. Her one true great love had been that professor or instructor who had called her Mimosa. He even wanted to marry her but his family demanded she convert to Catholicism.
Zosia said, “To convert twice would have been too much even for such an unbeliever as I.”
“Was that the reason you broke up?”
“That and other things. He introduced me to his mother and the disregard was mutual. He himself, Zbygniew, could not make up his mind. We went so far as to spend a whole night in bed, but it never went beyond that.”
“So you’re a pure virgin?”
“A virgin yes, pure no.”
“Someone will do you the favor.”
“No, I’ll go to my grave this way.”