Juan Gómez-Jurado - Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

In spite of all the obstacles, Jora did all she could. She begged in the street and covered the tiny Yudel with her coat at night. She tried to avoid using the money that Dr Rath had given her. They slept wherever they could. Sometimes it was a smelly inn or the crowded entrance hall of the Red Crescent, where at night refugees covered every inch of the grey-tiled floor and being able to get up to relieve yourself was a luxury.

All Jora could do was hope and pray. She had no contacts and could speak only Yiddish and German, refusing to use the first language since it brought unhappy memories. Her health was not getting any better. The morning when she first coughed up blood she decided she couldn’t go on waiting. She screwed up her courage and decided to give all their remaining money to a Jamaican sailor who worked aboard a freighter that flew the American flag. The ship was leaving in a few days. The crewman managed to smuggle them into the hold. There they mixed with the hundreds lucky enough to have Jewish relatives in the United States who backed up their requests for visas.

Jora died of tuberculosis thirty-six hours before reaching the United States. Yudel had not left her side for a moment, despite his own illness. He had developed a severe ear infection and his hearing had been blocked for several days. His head felt like a barrel filled with jam, and any loud noises sounded like horses galloping on its lid. That’s why he couldn’t hear the sailor who was yelling at him to leave. Tired of threatening the boy, the sailor began to kick him.

‘Move it, blockhead. They’re waiting for you in Customs.’

Yudel again tried to hold on to Jora. The sailor – a short, pimply man – grabbed him by the neck and prised him away from her violently.

‘Somebody will come and get her. You, get out!’

The boy struggled free. He searched Jora’s coat and managed to find the letter from his father Jora had told him about so many times. He took it and hid it in his shirt before the seaman grabbed him again and forced him out into the frightening daylight.

Yudel walked down the gangplank and on into the building where customs officials dressed in blue uniforms waited at long tables to receive the lines of immigrants. Trembling with fever, Yudel waited in the queue. His feet were burning in his decrepit shoes, longing to escape, and to hide from the light.

Finally it was his turn. A customs official with small eyes and thin lips looked at him over gold spectacles.

‘Name and visa?’

Yudel looked at the floor. He didn’t understand.

‘I don’t have all day. Your name and your visa. Are you retarded?’

Another younger customs official with a bushy moustache tried to calm his colleague.

‘Take it easy, Creighton. He’s travelling alone and doesn’t understand.’

‘These Jewish rats understand more than you think. Dammit! This is my last ship today and my last rat. I have a mug of cold beer waiting for me at Murphy’s. If it makes you happy, you take care of him, Gunther.’

The official with the large moustache came around the table and squatted in front of Yudel. He began speaking to Yudel, first in French, then German and then Polish. The boy continued to look at the floor.

‘He doesn’t have a visa and he’s a half-wit. We’ll send him back to Europe on the next damned ship,’ interjected the official with glasses. ‘Say something, idiot.’ He reached over the table and boxed Yudel on the ear.

For a second Yudel felt nothing. But then pain suddenly filled his head as if he had been stabbed and a stream of hot pus shot out of his infected ear.

He screamed the word for compassion in Yiddish.

‘Rakhmones!’

The moustachioed official turned angrily on his co-worker.

‘Enough, Creighton!’

‘Unidentified child, doesn’t understand the language, no visa. Deportation.’

The man with the moustache quickly searched the boy’s pockets. There was no visa. In fact, there was nothing in his pockets except some bread crumbs and an envelope with Hebrew writing. He checked to see if it contained any money but there was only a letter, which he put back in Yudel’s pocket.

‘He understood you, dammit! Didn’t you hear his name? He’s probably lost his visa. You don’t want to deport him, Creighton. If you do that, we’ll be here for another fifteen minutes.’

The official with the glasses took a deep breath and gave up.

‘Tell him to say his surname out loud so I can hear him, and then we’ll go for a beer. If he can’t, he’ll be heading straight to Deportation.’

‘Help me, kid,’ whispered the moustached man. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to go back to Europe or end up in an orphanage. You have to convince this guy that you have people waiting for you outside.’ He tried again with the only word he knew in Yiddish. ‘Mishpokhe?’ meaning: family.

From his trembling lips, scarcely audible, Yudel spoke his second word. ‘Cohen,’ he said.

Relieved, moustache looked at glasses.

‘You heard him. He’s called Raymond. His name is Raymond Kayn.’

Kneeling in front of the plastic toilet inside the tent, he fought back the urge to vomit while his assistant tried in vain to get him to drink some water. The old man finally managed to contain his nausea. He hated vomiting, that relaxing but exhausting sensation of expelling everything that was corroding him inside. It was a faithful reflection of his soul.

‘You don’t know how much this has cost me, Jacob. You have no idea, that rechielesnitseh [6] … talking to her, seeing myself so exposed. I couldn’t stand it any more. She wants another session.’

‘I’m afraid you are going to have to put up with her a little longer, sir.’

The old man looked at the bar at the other end of the room. His assistant, aware of the direction of his gaze, stared at him disapprovingly and the old man looked away and sighed.

‘Human beings are full of contradictions, Jacob. We end up enjoying what we hate the most. Telling a stranger about my life took a weight off my shoulders. For a moment I felt connected to the world. I had planned to deceive her, maybe mix in lies with some truths. Instead of that, I told her everything.’

‘You did it because you know it’s not a real interview. She won’t be able to publish it.’

‘Perhaps. Or maybe I just needed to talk. Do you think she suspects anything?’

‘I don’t think so, sir. In any case, we’ve almost reached the finish.’

‘She’s very bright, Jacob. Watch her closely. She could turn out to be more than a minor player in this whole thing.’

The only thing she remembered from the nightmare was a cold sweat, being gripped by fear and gasping in the darkness, trying to remember where she was. It was a recurring dream but Andrea never knew what it was about. Everything was erased the moment she woke up, leaving her with only traces of fear and loneliness.

But now Doc was immediately by her side, crawling over to her mattress to sit with her and put a hand on her shoulder. One was afraid of going any further, the other that she wouldn’t. Andrea sobbed. Doc embraced her.

Their foreheads touched and then their lips.

Like a car that has struggled uphill for hours and has finally reached the top, the next moment was going to be decisive, the instant of equilibrium.