This is how we turned out: One became a bookkeeper in a sugar factory, another, a process writer’s assistant (the first later went off to the Academy of Art in Kraków, the second, to the Warsaw Conservatory). A third became a Hebrew teacher, a fourth worried about what he would do with his diploma in the absence of a gold medal and about how his father would receive the news were he to convert to Lutheranism. A fifth sent off his poems to the journal
Niva
and passed around the encouraging letters from its editor, the kindly Vladimir Galaktyonowicz.
As for me, I threatened to commit suicide if my father wouldn’t underwrite a steamship ticket to America.
Sonia Yakovlyevna lay stretched out on the small sofa in my cabin, her weary, danced-out feet propped up on a chair. The blond young Russian stood over her, smoothing her disheveled hair and stroking her cheek. Her eyes were closed, but it was evident that she was enjoying the touch of his gentle hands. He moved on to massage her feet with expert strokes, as if trying to erase their fatigue. He began to croon, like some sleepy-voiced singer on a phonograph record, one of Lermontov’s lullabies, “Bayu, bayushki, bayu,” adding after each verse, in recitative, the refrain from a once-popular song, “Cover your pale feet.” The steward, who had been invited to the party to add some proletarian flavoring, sat off in a corner, clutching a bottle, drinking by himself. He had a professional reputation to uphold and couldn’t afford to get too friendly with drunken passengers who might make trouble once they sobered up.
For my part, I kept repeating the words, “This is it,” which, if they had any meaning to begin with, were now lost in a drunken haze. Like a drunk who latches onto a thought that he won’t let go, I kept repeating, over and over, “This is it.” As my head cleared, the myriad thoughts swirling about in my brain began to dissipate, but one took hold and stayed firm—that those remembered sufferings from my childhood, of Lublin in 1905, had nurtured my fine young Russian shipmates and eased their way. All those tailors of my youth, the shoemakers and seamstresses, long since in their graves, had seen their bellies swell with hunger for the sake of this liberated generation. Once I sobered up, I remembered that I had asked the October Revolution to toast the Lublin of my youth. I had cursed and blasphemed, mustering all the Russian I still retained. Moscow should not be so high and mighty: It was about time that everybody knew there was a Lublin in the world and that Moscow owed it a debt. My native city deserved the Order of Lenin.
Hey, hey, down with the police.
Down with the tsarist oppressor.
That night, half-sober, we sat fraternizing in the bar. We played chess and I kept losing, but far from taking a sadistic pleasure in their victory, the young Russians turned out to be pacifist players and pacifist victors, who, after each of my defeats, sought to assure me that I was doing just fine, out of fear that I was perhaps one of those competitive players of the old school, who played the game to the death and might do himself harm if he lost. We drank Scotch and soda at a large, round table and felt the floor barely moving and the chairs slightly swaying. In fact, we forgot all about the sea. Everything seemed saturated in whiskey, which lent a lilting tone to our conversation, as though we were not talking, but slowly waltzing. The strains of an operatic medley drifted in from the ballroom—some Wagner, bits of Puccini, snatches of Verdi, reaching a crescendo with Pagliacci’s sobbing lament.
Sitting at our table, besides the Russian colony that of course included Sonya Yakovlyevna, were several other women who were attracted to our company by the lure of the exotic. One of these could claim a connection to the group—a Latvian-Jewish woman of about thirty, who, though her face was not completely rid of girlish traces, wanted very much to play the lady. She spoke six or seven languages, including a decent Russian, which she pronounced with a German accent. She had lived in America only three years and was returning for a visit to her family in Riga. Her husband was a wealthy importer, with a house in the prosperous Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and she could well afford the luxury of indulging her homesickness.
The lady from Riga had the manners of a grande dame and, accordingly, passed her time aboard ship in the company of the Haitian diplomat. They promenaded the deck arm in arm, carrying on a polite flirtation in French. Her good breeding was everywhere evident, in her dress, her demeanor, her olive complexion, her delicate hands and smartly shod feet. However, she had one annoying habit. Whenever she loosened up a bit, she would invoke her absent husband, working the phrase “as my husband says” into every conversation, as if to emphasize that she was a devoted wife, above suspicion, or perhaps as a necessary safeguard against indiscretion. Her delicate fingers toyed with her Scotch, and her dark eyes glistened as she looked from one person to another around the table: “
Nu, shtosz, tovarishch, nye plokho zhit na svyetye
—well comrade, it isn’t that bad, it’s great to be alive!” Sonya, on the other hand, was growing increasingly melancholy. She was the sort of woman who brightens when she is the only female among male company. Women like Sonya, when there are other women present, turn off their lamps and withdraw into the darkness.
An Englishwoman, well past forty, whom I had met through my Danish friend, was also at our table, and exclaimed in amazement: “Aren’t these Russians perfectly exquisite!” She understood nothing of the conversation, but she had one great virtue, she could drink up a storm. The blond young Russian, who in his aspect of cavalier was not only a gracious Slav but also a humanitarian, anxious over the fact that the Englishwoman was being neglected by his indifferent comrades, singled her out for his attentions. He paid her lavish Russian compliments, and though he was old enough to be her grown son, bombarded her with expressions of his love. Flushed from the Scotch and aglow from the compliments, she kept assuring me that “these Russians” were “perfectly exquisite.”
Another female guest at our table was a Finnish-American woman, whom I impressed by inquiring about the
Kalevala,
the Finnish epic, rattling off the names of its main characters, the heroes Väinäimöinen and Ilmarinen, and the arrogant Lemminkäinen. She was especially taken with me when, straining all my musical talents, I sang her excerpts from Sibelius’s
Swan of Tuonela.
Far from young and farther still from beautiful, she also boasted a long, pointed nose that seemed to have a life of its own, like a bird or some other small creature. She told me she was a nurse, and thanked me profusely for recognizing her national origins. To most Americans, she observed, the word
Finland
was a meaningless sound with no associations. To show her appreciation, she invited me to visit her in Hoboken. True, she had only a small room with a narrow bed, but even the doctors at her hospital had told her that she wasn’t ready yet to be tossed aside. It’s worth taking a chance, she urged, squeezing my hand, what did I have to lose? She, too, bubbled over the Soviet youths.
Also gracing our table was an American woman from Wisconsin, thirty-three years old and a head taller than tall. She was a French instructor at a women’s college, with the spinsterish air that seems to mark the females of the profession. To appear even more serious, every so often she would put on the pince-nez that dangled on a silver chain from her long neck. To break the monotony and restriction of the school year, and perhaps to take a vacation from her earnestness, she spent each summer in Paris, where for ten weeks, as she put it, she played the bohemian (though what that implied for an American schoolteacher, God only knows). In Paris, she said, she became a different person, a new soul in a new body. In place of the Wisconsin teacher was a woman who burned up ten weeks like a single day. The hardest part was avoiding her older students, who also “hopped over” to Paris in the summer for a taste of freedom, which is why she found it necessary to stay on side streets in second-class hotels.
Here, aboard ship, the schoolteacher felt that her Paris blossoming had already begun. When she removed the pince-nez, you saw her clever face, and her smart self-control on the point of yielding. Her old-maidish demeanor was encased in an athletic body. She radiated physical vigor, as witness her strong and alluring arms and legs. She confided that in Paris she had many close Russian friends, but they were of the “other,” White Russian kind. She was therefore pleased with this opportunity to meet the “other side of the Russian coin.”
“The Russians you know in Paris are the worn-out side of the coin,” I ventured.
Khazhev, overhearing our exchange, chimed in more ardently, blurting out in English, “They ought to be shot!”
“Why?” she said angrily. “They’re fine, upstanding, warmhearted people,” and to snuff out the light that suddenly flared up in her eyes, she slipped on the schoolmarmish pince-nez, so it would look as if her outburst were more on the order of a dry disquisition on the characteristics of White Russians. “You are all dear people. All Russians are wonderful,” she continued, taking on the mission to reconcile the old Russia with the new.
Khazhev would have none of it. With his limited English vocabulary, he stood his ground and insisted, “Your friends should be shot!”
She gave an embarrassed laugh, as if seized by the fear that the death sentence was real and about to be implemented. There stood all her Franco-Russian friends, lined up against the wall and bang!—they were gone! All those marvelous summers in Paris—1930, 1931, 1932, 1933—that gave her the strength to endure the harsh winters somewhere in Wisconsin, all blasted in an instant! “Why should they be shot?” she asked in a maternal voice, as if pleading for her own flesh and blood. “
Podzhalusta,
please,” she said coquettishly, in her stilted Russian, “
Ya vas lyublu, spasibo.
I love you, thank you!” Having exhausted her entire Russian lexicon, she sat back, pleased with herself, but with only one regret, that she hadn’t been able to make peace between her White Russians and the Bolsheviks at our table.
I was pressed into the role of interpreter between the young Bolsheviks and the American teacher. The blond Russian gave Khazhev a friendly chiding for his talk about shooting. “Shooting,” he said, “is not a fit subject for conversation. One should never talk like that. Shooting is often necessary, but so long as one is still talking, one doesn’t resort to shooting, and even then, not without good reason. Give the good lady to understand that we are not murderers. Shooting comes later, much later. First we talk, in a humane way, and only if we can’t find common ground, and someone poses a danger, only then, little brother, when there’s no further recourse, do we perform our revolutionary duty and apply the maximum sentence.” Thus the blond young Russian discharged his Bolshevik obligations.
As I was translating this little speech, the middle-aged Englishwoman, who by this time had lost track of the number of Scotches she had tossed off, was so moved that she leaned over to kiss her blond cavalier-cum-dialectician and exclaimed, for the umpteenth time, “You have to admit it, the Russians are cute! Perfectly exquisite!”
Couples were conversing quietly on couches along the walls and in all corners of the room. It was past midnight, the hour of laconic wisdom and meaningful silences, when eyes, hands, and nudging shoes do the talking. But in the bar of this English ship, even these muted activities were being conducted with Anglo-Saxon reserve. The hushed sounds drifted toward us from the distance, like fragments of some sentimental song, several times removed. Our table, which stood in the center of the room and which, until now, had been going full blast, also couldn’t help but yield to the spell of the murmurings. Someone at the table observed that all these disparate couples seemed to constitute one collective romance. The worker who had won the trip around the world began to whistle a Schubert song.
“Comrades,” shouted the blond young Russian, “you can stand me against the wall and shoot me like a dog for being sentimental, but what he’s whistling, that’s exactly how I feel. He hit it on the nose. Any other time, that song about nightingales would have the flavor of marinated herring, but tonight I’m ready to get on my knees and sing Schubert songs to one of these lovely ladies. Long live Soviet power, and long live love.” He snuggled closer to the Englishwoman and joined in the whistling.
It was during this lyrical outburst that I was approached by one of the Russians—as was Joseph by his brothers—who told me what was anyway obvious, that he was a Jew. He tried to be as casual as possible about the revelation, but once the secret was out, decided to go for broke and tell me everything. May the gods of internationalism forgive me, but, amid this colorful, multinational assemblage, his words sounded especially homey, redolent with the Jewish aromas of freshly baked hallah, hot, peppery fish cooling on a platter by the window, mouthwatering chicken soup with floating globules of fat, and home-made horseradish that hits you smack in the nostrils—all this, from the moment he began to unroll his genealogical chart, starting with the fact that his father was a melamed, a Hebrew teacher, in a small town somewhere in Poland.
He spoke softly and quickly. He was certainly an integral part of the Soviet group, but it seemed as if he wanted to take me aside and tell me that, although he was just like the other comrades at the table, give or take a hair, there was something he had to get off his chest. It was about his father, who was living in poverty, on the verge of starvation. He—the son from the Soviet Union, where thousands were dying of hunger in the streets (he threw this in without a trace of irony)—sent money to his father every month to help him keep body and soul together. He was lucky that he himself had been able to get out of Poland in time, had studied engineering, and was now holding down a responsible position in a factory. The factory had sent him abroad for six weeks—a shame it was only six weeks—whereas he would have liked to spend at least a few months in America. He would have learned English, well enough to speak it properly, not like Khazhev and his stammerings—this last said in a loud voice, so that Khazhev and the others could hear the good-natured jibe.