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HMHS Somersetshire, Port of Bandar Shahpur, Iran, August 1942
“A gigolo without a penis. A parfumier without a nose. A runner without a leg. A sharpshooter without an eye. An opera singer without vocal chords.”
I droned my list as slowly as possible, to consume the maximum possible tedium.
“A pilot who’s afraid of heights. A sea captain who gets seasick?”
Jacek—who was not my Jacek, but another Pole bearing the same name, and whom they’d placed in the bed next to mine—picked up where I trailed off.
“Now you’re just being stupid. We’re talking about physical attributes that are lacking. Physical attributes. Get it? Like—uh, hmm, let me think—a right-handed writer without a fucking right hand?”
I held up my thickly bandaged stump demonstratively, wrinkled my face in a cruel gesture of disgust, and turned away. We’d been trying to alleviate boredom by coming up with the most outlandish games Fate could possibly play with human ambition. This Jacek, however, was not my Jacek. My Jacek was more glib as a frozen corpse folded into an ammunition crate—where he conceivably still was—than this Jacek. I preferred conversation with my Jacek... in my head.
During the first week on the sweltering hospital ship, prior to the arrival of Jacek II, I’d conducted numerous conversations with Jacek, Igor, and Viktor in my head. I tried to conduct conversations with Danuta, too, but I couldn’t summon her voice, even when I read her letters, which they brought to me from the post office in Bandar Shahpur. Her voice had been absent since the tryst with Vera, as if the Danuta in my head was furious at my betrayal.
Throughout the endless train ride south to Bandar Shahpur, with Vera next to me—first twitching, then still—Danuta stubbornly refused to make a comforting appearance. She wasn’t with me as the first doctor unwrapped the makeshift bandages, pronounced the amputation the cleanest he’d seen since the Great War, and nodded in professional respect to the kindly British rail worker who had wrapped the tourniquet around my wrist by the side of the tracks—as if he, and not the boxcar, had done the job. With a nod in return, and a wink in my direction, the man—who had cared for both Vera and myself for three days and nights—took his leave. I never learned his name.
I imagined Danuta smiling in feminine schadenfreude as the doctor gravely examined Vera, then sent her with some urgency to another ward, and ultimately to another ship. Indeed, Danuta stayed away, deaf even to my screams during the reduction of my knee, which had only been dislocated.
As anyone who’s ever lost a loved one can tell you, absence is a powerfully palpable presence. The indentation that remains on the other side of the bed, the clothes that still hang in the closet—these things take up so much more space than their owners ever did.
Now that her voice had left me, I felt Danuta’s overwhelming absence. Not only had she fallen silent, I worried that she was fading. Her touch, her kiss, her warm breath—I used to be able to feel these things, much as I still felt the fingers of my right hand. Now, they were absent.
Jacek, I reasoned, had had nearly two decades to imprint himself on my psyche. This made his memories deeper and his wisdom—or his silliness, or just his banter—easier to summon. Danuta had been with me less than three years. Could I have expected better? What would it be like when we were finally reunited?
The HMHS Somersetshire, a converted troop transport ship, had 514 beds, a skeleton staff, and a partially closed hole in her forward starboard hull from a U-Boat torpedo. She was being provisionally repaired at Bandar Shahpur, to make her safe to sail to the nearest port with dry dock facilities for a full refurbishing. In the meantime, she held few patients and even fewer distractions.
I’d seen nothing of Bandar Shahpur on my arrival, but now had a unique shipboard perspective on what had become a strategic asset in Allied support of Stalin’s war effort. The area itself was the dictionary definition of “wasteland.” Treeless, isolated, and laughably desolate, Bandar Shahpur was a like a child’s seaside model of a port: a haphazard collection of mud-brick buildings, telegraph poles that leaned like twigs at various angles, countless lines of toy-like narrow-gauge train track that extended out into the water on a Y-shaped pier. It seemed that one wave would wash the whole thing away. Indeed, only high embankments saved the entire operation from daily inundation by the five-meter tides.
The summer heat blazed so intensely that most dock work took place at night. They initially confined me to bed, with just a round slice of porthole-framed sky, a cracked-paint ceiling, and a poor Jacek-substitute for company. After I was allowed to put weight on my knee, I slept during the day and spent every night at the deck rail, basking in the still-warm night air, and watching the beehive of port activity as the night hours slipped by.
One after the other, ships approached one of the two brightly lit berths at either side of the pier, where workers unloaded them from both the pier and sea sides. On the pier side, an endless collection of trucks, troop carriers, artillery pieces, and crates of all shapes and sizes were craned directly onto railroad cars, destined to travel north on the same railway that had borne me south. On the sea side, lighters—unpowered barges—were piled high with goods and slowly pushed by tugboats to the single lighterage wharf.
I lived this odd nocturnal existence for my two motile weeks aboard the Somersetshire, prior to my departure for the port of Aqaba in Transjordan, from where I could travel overland to Tel Aviv. I saw the staff only occasionally, when I retired for the morning to the relative cool of the stifling ward. They seemed to barely notice my absence. Perhaps, as Viktor had accused me just weeks before, aboard a different ship in the Caspian Sea, I was “wallowing.” I preferred to think of it as adjusting to my new manual reality.
I wanted one day to write an Ode to the Hand. I would sing the praises of what I now knew to be the most sadly underappreciated and abused of our appendages. What evils we made our hands perpetuate, and how ungrateful we were for their unquestioning obedience! Like loyal lovers, family pets, and flush toilets, the hand was ever taken for granted. I would yet write this Ode, if my limping, one-handed, typewriter key pecking would ever again be deserving of the title “writing.”
My lack of a dominant hand manifested itself in those early days—and still does—at every turn. The phantom pains that plagued my stump were inconsequential compared to the pain in my face and, primarily, my ego when I punched myself for the umpteenth time while trying to scratch my nose or push hair out of my eyes. Eating, bathing myself in our daily seawater baths, dressing, using the latrine—especially using the latrine—even masturbating silently in the ward’s darkness—all were, it turned out, highly hand-centric operations.
Absence was a strict master. Unlike presence, it refused to be ignored, growing only bolder in the face of such attempts. It expanded to fill more than the space allotted it. During those first weeks without my hand and without Danuta’s voice, the absence of each fought the other for primacy in my consciousness. I’d left my hand cradling Vera’s head—much as I’d left Danuta, Jacek, Viktor, and Igor. Now, I feared that they would leave me, too.
***
It was a particularly soft evening, the night Danuta returned to me. The fingers of a light desert wind caressed my head, as my own former fingers had once so briefly caressed Vera’s. I reached up to gently grasp the hand that seemed to brush my hair, longing to bring its cool palm to my cheek. Instead, I punched myself in the ear, and simultaneous jolts of pain emanated from both my face and the stump of my right hand.
The spell broken, I cursed and turned back to my nightly port vigil. For the previous week, I’d been tracking the comings and goings of each man, and creating maudlin stories for each piece of equipment unloaded. How many ultimately inconsequential human tragedies—all of them still more consequential than my own growing collection—would play out in the back of that ambulance? Would the man ultimately driving that half-track return to his farm at the end of the war, only to find his wife and children gone? Which of the soldiers wearing boots from that crate would freeze to death the very first night they wore their newly acquired leather trophies?
My reverie and field of vision were punctuated by the bow of another ship, which slid silently by on its way out of the harbor. The noise of its engine far astern, only distantly audible, could not yet mask the sweet strains that skipped lightly across the water between the ships. It came from an open port, or perhaps from a hidden corner of the deck—I couldn’t tell, but it was unmistakable.
Vera sang Bo to sie zwykle tak zaczyna—Because thus it Begins. The song told the story of a woman ashamed to have fallen in love with the wrong man, and wrestling with her decision to end the liaison. Vera’s voice rose sweetly and clearly in the summer calm, unwavering and, I gathered, healthy. She sang as she had sung to me, though she could not have known I was there. With a quick flash of jealously, I wondered if she was singing for another man, but then I realized that Vera sang then, as she always had, for no one and everyone simultaneously.
I was flooded with an impossible mixture of joy at Vera’s apparent recovery, and with my visceral longing for Danuta, with whom I had danced to this very song on an equally mild yet imminently more memorable late summer Warsaw evening in 1938.
Then, as anyone who loves a woman might have already imagined, Danuta returned to me. As the passing ship’s stern drew parallel with me, and Vera’s voice was determinedly crushed by the engine’s heavy thrum, Danuta whispered in my right ear, as if remembering herself that evening at the Adria Club.
“That’s right, my love,” she said. “I chose you because you were the right man, and I’ve never been ashamed. Not Felix Kaspar, darling, you.”
***
Everyone has ‘If Only’s.’ If Only I hadn’t left at the end of that summer. If Only she hadn’t been seeing him when we met.
I had mine, and Felix Kaspar was Danuta’s. The big difference was that, unlike most ‘If Only’s,’ Felix not only reentered Danuta’s life in 1938, just six months or so after I’d met her—he actually moved into her house.
Danuta’s father, Lech Kumiega, was a financier. This is why he knew my father—the Warsaw financial community was small enough that everyone knew or had worked with everyone else at some point. In 1933, he moved his family—his wife Marianna and their children Stanislaw and Danuta—to Vienna to pursue a new business venture. Mr. Kumiega explained the nature of this venture to me once over a sweet digestif. As suitors have done for millennia, I nodded with feigned interest as he gestured with his cigar throughout the lengthy explanation—understanding not a word and stealing surreptitious glances at Danuta the whole time.
She sat by his side, demure and just out of his field of vision. For the entire conversation, she mocked each of his gestures and mannerisms so accurately that I was forced to mask my outbursts of laughter with quasi-sneezes and coughs, which ultimately blew dessert wine all over my lap.
Danuta was sixteen, her brother just ten, when they moved to the large flat in Vienna’s Landstrasse district. Although she found the lyrical Austrian German puzzlingly different from the German she’d learned in Warsaw, she quickly grew to love Vienna’s stern beauty and endless diversions. She first saw Felix Kaspar ice skating in what was then the largest indoor ice rink in the world, near the Heumarket. His broad smile, broad shoulders, and high-jumping figure skating prowess had entranced her. He was already then a national champion, and they expected great things of him in the 1934 European Figure Skating Championships.
The next time she saw Felix was in her family’s own flat in Vienna. Felix’s father, it turned out, had business dealings with her father. Thus, the Kaspar family showed up for dinner at the Kumiega family’s residence one evening, with eighteen-year-old Felix in reluctant tow. Perhaps, on seeing Danuta, his reluctance faded rapidly.
It was to be an intensive, yet limited, year-long ‘If Only’ romance. In 1934, just before the European Championships in Seefeld, in which Felix would place 7th, the Kumiega family moved back to their flat in Praga, Warsaw. Though the fathers continued their close business cooperation, the love letters that traversed the 700-kilometer expanse between Vienna and Warsaw quickly faded in both frequency and ardor.
This should have been the end of Danuta’s ‘If Only’ story. However, Felix Kaspar had the unfortunate luck to have been born Jewish. In 1938, after Germany annexed Austria, and the wave of antisemitism that had already been sweeping the country for years intensified brutally, Felix fled, along with tens of thousands of other Jews of foresight. He showed up on Danuta’s doorstep in July 1938, his father having arranged for him to be safely hosted in Warsaw by his old Catholic business partner, Danuta’s father.
To her credit, Danuta had been forthright with me about Felix. She told me he had arrived, what he had meant to her, and why he had come. She also told me that I had nothing to worry about, that her ‘If Only’—even if he was now a proximate ‘If Only’—remained just that.
If I were to be diplomatic, I’d describe my initial behavior as sub-optimally reasonable. If I were to be straightforward, I’d just say I was an ass. To my credit, I was a disenfranchised young man in an increasingly antagonistic society, who’d recently been expelled from university. I also loved a Catholic girl who was—I felt—far, far above my station. To my discredit, I was still an ass. I ranted, raved, and broke it off with her, but not before making a few disparaging remarks about her perhaps unhealthy penchant for Jewish men.
What began with me storming out of her parents’ flat continued as a week-long self-pity binge, in which I was inconsolable and utterly unapproachable. Even Jacek had had enough of me after several days, requesting that I inform him upon my return to human society.
I was unrelieved when he brought me the news that Felix Kaspar was leaving the following week for America. Jacek told me conspiratorially that Danuta was waiting for me. Still, I kept up my infantile act. I didn’t see her for nearly two weeks, and had actually begun to accept the sad inevitability of life without her. In a vain attempt at self-commiseration and reentry into society, I took myself out for an evening at the Adria Club to see Vera Gran perform.
Danuta didn’t know I would be there, and I certainly hadn’t known about her. I actually didn’t recognize her when I scanned the room, looking for an acquaintance on whom to foist myself. Then I realized that the source of light by the bar, around whom men flitted like moths, was actually Danuta. I watched her with the incredulity of an ornithologist observing a rare species of hummingbird, ashamed of myself for being unable to look away, yet desperate for her to glance my way.
She did glance at me, of course, and as Vera Gran stepped to the microphone to begin what became our song, I mouthed its opening words across the room to Danuta: Tak mi wstyd, strasznie wstyd—I’m so ashamed, terribly ashamed.
***
“I never gave you a reason to mistrust me,” Danuta’s voice whispered in my ear, jerking me from the memory back to the deck of the Somersetshire.
And I don’t mistrust you, whatever you may have done. Come back to me.
In the distance, Vera sailed away down a moon path that first engulfed, then purified in white light the rusting freighter that carried her. With her sailed Danuta’s absence. Throughout my uneventful days of travel to Palestine, my trip from Aqaba to Tel Aviv, all that followed, and until this very day—her voice never left me again.
