“Our ship?”
“Do you hear any sirens?”
We listened. The wind pressed against my ear, the way it had since we sailed. I still heard soft voices, pieces of words. But I didn’t think that was what Aunt Bina meant by sirens. I resolved to stay up in case they did sing, the captain lost control and girls weren’t affected by their song. Could I have saved the ship in time? Suppose instead I went mad—well, maybe that would have been better. Sometimes I thought I was already mad and I just held myself in, my skin a wrapper for the madness. If the madness came out, would my skin split apart?
Rose found me asleep on the deck. She made me stay awake long enough to jump up into my bunk. Rose and Aunt Bina started to sing a folksong in a whisper:
Hof, hof, hof. Nit vayt iz shoyn der friling …
(Have hope, hope, hope. Spring is not far off . . .). The other women joined them and the bunk room swayed with song in rhythm to the freighter plowing through the waves.
The boat squealed against the dock. Officials of the steamship company herded those of us who were America-bound in a single file. Aunt Bina kept asking about our luggage but the men didn’t speak Russian, only French and a very few words of Yiddish. We came into a long building where we showed our passports and tickets. They took them away. One woman who could understand French said, “Don’t worry, they will be returned when we leave.” Then we were marched into another room like the bunk room on the ship, only twenty times larger. Most of the beds were already taken and we had to split up. Aunt Bina traded some food so that she could sleep on the bottom again.
Someone laughed. “On the steamship you won’t be so eager for the bottom, missus. You’ll see!”
All these women—French and Italian, some Serbs, Albanians, Hungarians, Austrians, quite a few other Russians—were leaving their homelands. Were pogroms everywhere? Or was it only the idea of America, where the jobs would make us rich? Rose was as sociable as ever. She found Italian girls who spoke a kind of Yiddish, some who knew French and could translate back and forth with the French girls. We found out that our steamship wouldn’t leave for another three days and we were quarantined in the bunkhouse until then.
As soon as I heard we were locked in I felt a sudden fever of panic. I pulled all the doors and finally one set opened. I tried to run past the guard, then another emerged from the shadows and grabbed me. As he threw me back in the room I bit him. He yelled and lifted his hand to strike, but a young woman stopped his arm, saying something I didn’t understand.
“It’s not a good idea to draw such attention to yourself. What made you do such a thing?” she said in Yiddish as the guard locked the door.
“I’m not sure myself,” I said, shrugging. Rose came up and stared at me. Fortunately Aunt Bina had missed my attempted escape. The stranger introduced herself.
“Lena Reznikoff, of Vilna.” She made a half-bow. I judged her to be eighteen or so.
“Where did you learn French?” Rose was more impressed with this than with my outburst.
“I picked it up,” she shrugged. “You’re going to America from Odessa?”
“How did you know?”
“The ship came from Odessa. The guards are all right—if you don’t bite them.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “They let us know what’s going on. The local authorities are afraid of disease. They make the steamship company keep us here until we can leave.”
“What right have they to hold us prisoner?” I demanded.
“A firebrand, huh? We could have used you in Vilna.” Her head bobbed up and down.
“For what?”
“Never mind. Just be careful here and you’ll manage.” Lena turned and strode away.
Rose followed her across the room. I went back to my bunk and stared at the plaster peeling off the old walls, the high windows covered with wire to prevent escape. My chest felt like a stone was crushing it. The room was full of languages I couldn’t understand. Would everything be like this from now on? Half-explained, uncertain, stinking, confined? They could see we didn’t have any diseases. Why didn’t they let us out? Ephraim said Alexander Dumas wrote a book that took place near here, that it was beautiful and interesting in France. I just wanted to see. I didn’t like being locked up this way. At least if you were trapped on a ship you were going somewhere. Here they could have done anything to us.
Aunt Bina could just reach my face and she wiped me with an old cloth. After a minute she passed the cloth to me. “Keep this. Don’t worry, little one, we’ll be all right. At least you’re traveling with family.” This made me cry harder, though I tried not to make any sounds.
After two days they led us into a room where they ordered us to take off our clothes. They had tubes of water that poured from above. A shower, one of the French Jews told us. This was supposed to make us clean. They took our clothes away and held them over huge pots of steam. Some women yelled for their clothing—they must have had money sewed up like I did—but yelling at the steamship guards didn’t accomplish anything. We got our clothes back, hot and damp. Hurry, hurry, the guards were gesturing, pointing to the doors.
Dressed, we went out in a large courtyard. Our men stood there and everyone rushed to reunite while the guards shouted. An enormous cart drawn by four horses came into the yard and luggage was dumped out in a mountain. Women were everywhere wailing and oy-veying. The luggage had been steamed like our clothes. Most of the featherbeds were misshapen lumps. When Aunt Bina found the crushed hatbox she sat on the ground and couldn’t move. Uncle Isadore knelt beside her, running his fingers along the brim of what had been Rose’s hat. Rose and I stood awkwardly.
“Leave those alone,” Bina said to Isadore.
“They’re not so ruined, you’ll see. The girls will help you fix them up. In New York you’ll find a milliner who can make them look like new again.”
For the first time, I saw Aunt Bina fade. She sat on the French cobblestones weeping and weeping. I’d heard people say that oceans were made from the tears of women and I’d thought the saying was silly. I looked around now and thought it was probably true. Rose put her arms around her mama.
“Maybe you should have this back,” I offered the rag she gave me.
She dried her face, “What you must think of me! Crying over hats.” She stood up, brushed the dirt off her skirts. “Boys! Ephraim, Aaron, come over and help us carry all these things—Lord knows if they’ll be any good to us now, but they’re what we’ve got. Come on, you don’t want the ship to go without us.”
Aaron and Ephraim seemed relieved to hear their mama ordering them around. We hurried our luggage out with the crowd of hurrying people, deposited it again on the dock. When no one was looking, I opened my satchel to make sure my photograph of Mama and Papa hadn’t been ruined. I had stuck it in a book I bought for a few kopecks in Odessa—Abramovich’s
Verse
. The binding seemed loose and mushy, but the pages and photograph weren’t harmed. “Thank you,” I said under my breath.
Quickly I had to follow everyone up the planks into a boat bigger than a tsar’s palace. Maybe a thousand of us—where did everyone come from? Pushing down narrow metal stairs into the hold, a moldy room with hundreds of three-level bunks. What a stench! Underneath, the ship was an abyss filled with the smell of vomit and urine, odor as thick as fog. You could have touched it except you were constantly repulsed, trying to escape the clawing fingers of this foulness. Two toilet stalls for more than seven hundred women.
Just past Gibraltar we approached a small island and thousands of flies swarmed aboard. The women on the upper bunks swatted them and struggled for breath. Anyone who could walk abandoned steerage and crowded the decks. There was a drenching storm and those who could, clung to the railings, glad to be rinsed off. Their relief never lasted long. The wind kept shifting and everything was covered with human spew. A few people had stomachs that stayed upright, some internal gyroscopic organ saved them—to eat what? We remembered the bug-shell–laced kasha from the Odessa freighter as simple, wholesome food. Flies, and probably rats, infested the steamship’s kitchen.
Rose bribed and pleaded, boosted her mother onto a third-tier bunk and left her with a small can, all she could find. Now we both had to stand in the toilet line, covering our faces with a wet cloth—and for what? A second of privacy to lift our skirts as high as we were able, and still our hems were rimmed with filth. It no longer mattered where in the tiny reeking chamber we squatted. Even the walls were splattered with urine, excrement and blood as if a child had flung mud in the rain. Near the toilet door the sharp assault of vinegar and rot caused most women to erupt from both ends at once, leaving as quickly as they could, still dripping, covered with sweat, gasping for what now seemed the better air of the sleeping shelves. Someone told me the corpse of an infant was found in a washbasin, covered by inches of filth. The crewman heaved it overboard—the only time they did anything to clean steerage.
Maybe ten days had passed, I could only remember fragments. Finally I was on deck again. Rose said it was a blessing if I didn’t remember. She said the sea was calmer and the crew had hosed down the deck because the stench was beginning to nauseate even them. We were sitting with our backs against the steamer walls. Every inch was covered with people. The strong smell of unwashed bodies rippled around my face but the breeze wiped it away for a moment at a time, making it possible to swallow fresh ocean air. Rose had a very small orange, a little dried up and mottled green. She handed the fruit to me.
“Where’d you get this?”
“It’s the only unspoiled thing to eat on the ship—they have to carry them against scurvy. Try to eat. You need to, Mama said.”
My stomach contracted even though it was empty. Rose gave me a sideways glance. I tried to remember if I had vomited near her but I couldn’t ask. Her smell was strong too. At least it was familiar. I realized her smell reminded me of Sarah when she would mess herself as a baby. I gulped at the air. Rose took the orange back from my hand and peeled it very slowly. This smell was good. I closed my eyes and breathed. She put an orange section close to my lips, under my nose.
“Try, Chava, just a little.”
I reached for her hand with my eyes closed, going by the flavor of orange in my nose. Everything seemed so strong—the smell of bodies, the orange, the ocean slap, the engine smoke, the sounds of people coughing, talking, singing, the feel of Rose’s smooth hand, her long fingers, the bumps of her knuckles, the wet, smooth feel of the orange section as I took it into my own hand, the cold sweet against my lips, which were cracked and painful, I realized as the fruit touched them. I bit the section. Juice hit my tongue, teeth, the roof of my mouth, the back of my throat. The juice swelled and filled me. I’d been beyond realizing how dry and hungry I’d become. Rose was still smiling as I opened my eyes and took the orange from her hands, eating it all quickly.
“Thank you,” I said when there was nothing left.
“You’re welcome.” She stood, went to the railing and dumped the orange peel into the water.
Could I stand? I raised myself slowly and walked over to her. Looking down at the white wake of the ship made my stomach turn. I didn’t want to lose the orange she had been so kind to bring me. I looked towards the horizon. This was nothing like the Sea of Marmara or the Mediterranean. Here there was only water coming towards us from forever, going out beyond us in bright patterns.
I remembered how Mama showed me the round world in an apple. It had seemed clear then, the curve of the fruit, the curves of mountains. But now I understood why old-time sailors thought they’d fall off if they got too far from land.
A woman came up on my other side. Lena Reznikoff, who had saved me from a beating in Marseilles. I thought about how much help I’d been given and felt ashamed. I should have been able to take care of myself. I
would
have taken care of myself if they had left me alone. I pretended I didn’t notice Lena.
She waited beside me, her arms on the railing, looking out. She seemed to ignore my ignoring her.
“You were in Kishinev, weren’t you?”
“Who told you? Rose, did you tell her?” I turned to Rose but Rose was gone. I remembered how Lena seemed to know everything in the bunk room.
“Rose didn’t tell me. Not with words, anyway. I just watched you with her family. And your accent—I’m good at telling people’s accents.”
“Kishinev has an accent?”
“Everywhere does. And in Kishinev of course there’s a Moldavian accent and a Jewish accent—even if you’re speaking Russian. Isn’t that true?”
“True.” She was quiet for a long time. Maybe she wouldn’t say anything else, but then she started up again, as if we had gone to the same shul.
“It wasn’t until I was in Vienna that I found out all of what happened in Kishinev. It’s hard to get news in Russia.”
“Vienna?”
“I had to leave Vilna.”
I looked at her.
“There are very few women in the Bund so it’s easier to arrest us.”
“You were in the Bund? What about your family—did they know?”
“They were in Warsaw. They encouraged me.” She stretched her back against the railing. “Did you see the poem Bialik wrote?”
“About what?” I was amazed that a woman could be in the Bund, that her family would have allowed it. Encouraged her, she said. What kind of family was that? Intellectuals, Papa would have spat, as if the word burned his mouth.
“About the pogrom.”
“Bialik wrote a poem about the pogrom?”
“That’s how I found out. It was in the Vienna paper. I remember some pieces. Do you want to hear?”
“Yes.” I felt a flush and turned away from her as she recited: “‘My people is as grass plucked up, and how / Shall that which has no root revive and live? … / Has none a fist? … / What are they praying for? … Tell them to protest! / To shake their fists at Me and justice to demand! / Justice for all they’ve suffered throughout the generations, / So that My Heaven and Throne shall quake to their foundations!’”
She looked at me quickly and looked away. I pressed my jaws tight. Why did she tell me this?