CHAPTER 36

Nathan walked slowly to his bunk in the wardroom and stretched out. He remembered the long days when he had lain in that bunk with nothing whatsoever to do because Mowrey had declared him incompetent, and he wished suddenly that he could tell his wife of this triumph, this discovery that he could fight the war well, better than most men. In his own way, he was strong. If Becky was huddled in some concentration camp, he was sure that she would like to know that.

The thought of his wife starving behind barbed wire was too much for him, and he caught his breath. He was shocked to find that he hoped she was dead, that he could stand the thought of death for her, but not suffering the degradation. Death, after all, came to everyone, it was part of the natural order, and so was suffering at times, but degradation was not natural, it was the ultimate perversion.

Almost certainly she was dead, he felt in his bones, because like him she would not really be afraid of death. If she was dead, dead at the age of twenty-five, her life would not be wasted any more than the life of a songbird is wasted because it is short, and beyond that, her life continued to have meaning if he could understand it, or so he tried to tell himself. But to understand his wife he had to understand her family, a fact he’d been all too slow to learn. Both her parents had come to Poland from Russia in their early youth. They were the descendants of rabbis and scholars as far back as they knew, and the survivors of pogroms over the ages. They were survivors—that was perhaps the key fact about them. Her father had survived economically by learning almost twenty languages well—there was always a place for him in some university. Beyond that he had survived by retreating into his house and preserving an attitude of aloof, often humorous detachment toward the surrounding world. Perhaps to make up for the pleasures they missed outside their house, he and his wife preserved or invented a ritual of family life which was even more elaborate than their orthodox religion. When Nathan first met them he could not get over how formal and gravely polite this husband and wife were to each other. They raised their daughter as a devoted horticulturist might tend a rare rose. They’d come to America when Becky was nine years old because they were old hands at seeing trouble before it started. Their apartment in Brooklyn was nowhere near as gracious as their house and garden in Warsaw, and Brooklyn College did not treat its professors with the respect given by any Euopean university, but America, despite its noise, clash and confusion, was safe, at least relatively safe. Professor Kochalka and his wife made no attempt to make friends in America. They continued to live as though they were in a fort surrounded by savages and had to invent all the pleasures of life for each other.

There was never a child more protected, encouraged and loved than Becky, but she was not spoiled because she tried to please her parents as hard as they tried to please her. She spoke softly, as everyone else in that house did, and when her mother was ill, as she often was, Becky soon learned to cook the familiar elaborate meals for her father. Nathan at the age of sixteen was astonished to see that before she brought her father a half grapefruit for dessert, she often carved it into the shape of a little basket, as her mother did.

Becky, of course, had to go to school, and she was perhaps surprised to find that outside her familiar fort there actually were few real savages. Most people in Brooklyn treated this gravely polite little dark-eyed girl with affection. Her teachers and most of the neighbors loved her. She was quiet but her eyes danced with mischief and she got on well with other children. It was almost impossible for people to dislike her because Becky obviously was in love with the world.

“You’re like the three monkeys,” Nathan said to her once when they were about nineteen. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“If you sit there covering your eyes, your ears and your mouth, you’re pretty helpless, aren’t you?”

“I can run. I always keep my eyes and ears open when I run. Often my mouth too.”

It was true that running was always her solution to any troubles that she couldn’t escape by smiling. She wouldn’t even argue with other students at college if their voices grew strident. She would just smile and go.

Yet she wasn’t really meek, as Nathan soon discovered. If she thought she was right she usually found ways to get her own way. She liked being the center of attention, and worked hard to earn the approval of others. She danced exuberantly and gracefully, she played the piano almost professionally, and she always dressed with a quiet elegance. Both in high school and college she was popular with groups which hardly spoke to each other.

She was transparently happy—that was always her greatest attraction. Although she was beautiful to Nathan, she was not an unusually pretty girl, but her face so often radiated a kind of delight with everything and everyone. People felt liked when talking to her and they were right.

The first conflict she was unable to escape concerned Nathan and her parents. Sometimes he thought that she expected him to move into her father’s home when they got married, like a brother. She never seemed to enjoy their own apartment much, and could not understand why he didn’t want to eat most of his meals with her parents. It was possible that the reason her father decided to go back to Poland was not only his growing homesickness, but his realization that his daughter had to learn to live without him.

But Becky was not just an ordinary bride who was too immature to leave her parents, Nathan slowly realized. The fact was that her parents’ ways of life offered a kind of serenity that she needed and which she wanted Nathan to learn. The telephone was not always ringing in Professor Kochalka’s house—the old man had installed a switch in the wire and kept it turned off almost all the time. He had disconnected the doorbell, and there was something about the professor which did not encourage people to drop in without an invitation. The radio was never turned on in that house except for special programs chosen from the newspaper. Heavy curtains closed out most street sounds. There was always a healing kind of quiet there, unlike any house Nathan had ever known, and completely unlike the crisis center his father and mother ran.

Conversation in Professor Kochalka’s house was a leisurely art. No one raged, no one tried to convince anyone of anything. The food was always prepared both to taste and look good and was served on handsome china. Although the professor was far from rich, he served good wine in crystal glasses, and the family kept drinking toasts to celebrate Becky’s good marks at school, a paper her father had just published, a wedding anniversary, a birthday—it seemed to Nathan that they were forever drinking toasts to each other. Professor Kochalka and his wife were stout, middle-aged people, but they acted almost like a courting couple, jumping to do little errands for each other, holding open doors, and exchanging compliments. Nathan admired them, and if he hadn’t wanted to spend most of his time alone with his wife, would have been a willing guest.

No, that was not entirely true. Nathan had been brought up in a house where people argued passionately, and where everyone was too busy to waste time over elaborate meals. He could not help himself from eating fast and trying to start political debates.

“You certainly have some very interesting opinions,” the professor would say.

“Do you agree with them?”

“With many parts of them. Are you a student of Kant?”

Nathan was not a student of Kant. Almost his entire education had been technical. Professor Kochalka made him feel ignorant, immature and uncivilized, the Great American Boor.

But Becky was right—her parents had invented an enviable style of life, and it was not surprising that she missed it when they went back to Warsaw. Because Nathan had many friends and several jobs and hobbies at the same time, their own apartment was always a bedlam in contrast, no matter how much he tried to learn from the professor.

Lying in his bunk now, Nathan thought that Becky might have known more real happiness in her twenty-five years than most people experienced in a long lifetime. She had in a profound sense lived well, and had added to the happiness of almost everyone her life had touched. The fact that such a life was short did not make it meaningless.

No, but the bastards still killed her or locked her up, Nathan thought, and fury shot through him like an electric shock. The image of his wife in a grave or in a concentration camp made all his attempts to accept her loss philosophically seem ridiculous. She was Jewish and the Germans had made the cold decision that the Jews weren’t really people, they could be killed like rats. And right now two German ships lay in the ice less than ten miles away.

Nathan could not sleep. He took a hot shower, shaved and put on clean clothes. Then he went to the bridge. “I’ve had all the rest I need, skipper,” he said. “I’ll be glad to take over for a while.”