Мариус Габриэль - The Ocean Liner

‘They are probably high Nazis, and too busy to leave Germany. He is going to stay with his uncle, isn’t he?’

‘It’s strange that they let their son travel so many thousands of miles all alone, during wartime.’

‘If I had a son like that , I would drown him in a bucket.’

‘Rachel!’ Masha exclaimed. ‘Sometimes you go too far.’

‘That,’ Rachel said grimly, ‘is my speciality.’

‘Wasn’t he very helpful when the submarine came?’

‘That was only because he’s in love with you.’

‘Constantly reiterating that he’s in love with me doesn’t explain him, Rachel. There is more to him than that. He has a sense of duty, of responsibility, of human kindness that someone must have taught him. And you were very rude to Miss Wolff at breakfast.’

‘She gets on my nerves, declaring she can choose whether to be a Jew or not.’

‘You know that there have been times when you and I have both wanted to pass as Gentiles,’ Masha said.

‘That was quite different. That was a question of saving ourselves from a beating, or worse. She is in no danger. She does it because she is ashamed of her Jewishness.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know that sort of woman.’

‘You’re very unreasonable. I don’t think you have the right to judge Miss Wolff.’

‘Besides,’ Rachel added, ‘I am sure she is ashamed of something else about herself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that she has the same preferences as I do, but denies them.’

‘You think she’s a lesbian?’

‘She doesn’t have the courage to be a lesbian, so she despises women who do.’

‘Not everyone has your courage,’ Masha said gently. Since receiving Dorothea’s letter in Cobh, Masha knew that Rachel had been deeply unhappy. Her raillery had become bitter; her repartee had turned to spite. ‘You’re upset about Dorothea. I wish you would talk to me, instead of bottling it up inside.’

‘What is there to talk about?’ Rachel demanded harshly. ‘I am going my way and she is going hers. It’s finished.’

‘Are you angry with her?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I feel.’

‘But you said yourself she has no choice.’

‘Women never have a choice.’

‘Under the Nazis, perhaps not. But we’re going to a country where women are free.’

‘If you believe that, then you’re even more of a soft-headed idiot than I took you for,’ Rachel snapped. Then, seeing the wounded look on Masha’s face, she deliberately dug her nails into her own cheeks. ‘I hate myself.’

Masha grabbed her cousin’s hands to stop her hurting herself further. ‘Don’t do that!’ Rachel’s sharp nails had made red marks on her delicate skin.

‘Forgive me, forgive me.’

‘I don’t mind what you say to me. Only, I can’t bear to see you so wretched.’

‘She will suffer with Vogelfänger. He’s a Nazi and a brute.’ Rachel’s eyes were full of angry tears. ‘Of all the professors, we hated him most. He’s killed one wife already. When I think of her having to submit to him—’

‘Don’t think of that. Think that she’ll be saved from something worse.’

‘I try to. But I’m full of bile and gall. I want to tear my hair out sometimes. Leave me alone, Masha. I’m not fit company for someone as decent as you.’

But Masha refused to be shaken off. She hurried Rachel to their cabin to apply a cold compress to the scratches her cousin had inflicted on herself. The Hungarian girl, silently gnawing on a dried kielbasa sausage, watched them with large eyes. ‘You’ll meet someone else,’ Masha said, trying to be encouraging. ‘That’s what I said to myself after Rudi, and I believe it.’

‘I would rather you told me to despair than offered me platitudes.’

‘At least don’t scratch your own eyes out.’

‘If I don’t, I may scratch out someone else’s instead.’

Finding Rachel unresponsive to her consolations, and remembering that they were arriving in New York in four days, Masha left her cousin with her face turned to the wall and set about transcribing the Stravinsky manuscript.

With Masha engrossed in the Stravinsky manuscript, and Thomas keeping out of her way, Rachel was thrown back on her own unhappiness. Despite all the horrors of the past years, she had clung to the dream that, once the war was over, Dorothea would come to her, and they would make a life together. Dorothea’s marriage to Heinrich Vogelfänger would make that impossible. And as for the war, which had begun so violently, it seemed less and less likely that it would end in a year, or ten years.

She wandered the ship, alone in the crowds, observing silently. As Mr Nightingale had told Stravinsky, the SS Manhattan was making swift progress. Unhindered at last by political borders or human delays of any kind, she sped across the Atlantic at a steady twenty-two nautical miles per hour, night and day.

Since she was sailing west, she was losing time constantly. Every so many hundred miles, as the ship entered a new time zone, passengers were advised to turn their watches and clocks back an hour. This meant, according to some, that they had all been given an extra hour of their lives to re-live. Whether this was true or not, it became a celebration each time, and Rachel noted ironically that the complimentary hour of life was given over in most cases to drinking and partying.

Altogether, there would be six of these hours by the time they reached New York. They became more and more animated as the Manhattan approached closer to the United States coast. Passengers crowded the public areas to drink and dance. The little refugee jazz orchestra was able to earn generous tips by taking requests. Hoffman’s Midget Marvels took to sitting on the bar in the Cocktail Lounge, all in a line, a very popular spectacle. Passengers competed for the privilege of buying them a round of drinks, and it was surprising how much they could put away, even the littlest and oldest of the Marvels, who accepted only twelve-year-old single malt.

Everyone was impressed with the speed the Manhattan was making. But one afternoon, an airliner was spotted in the sky above the ship. The arrival of this fellow traveller in the midst of the vast and empty Atlantic was somehow portentous. Passengers craned their necks at it, waving their hats and handkerchiefs in case anyone could see them from up there. The plane overtook them swiftly. In a matter of ten minutes, it had disappeared again. It would be in New York by nightfall. ‘And that,’ Commodore Randall commented to Rachel, ‘signals the end of the ocean liner business.’

There were other entertainments, which Rachel attended, longing for distraction from her dark thoughts. Madame Quo gave a talk on the history of Chinese sculpture, illustrated with a number of valuable jade figurines which she was taking with her to America.

The Reverend Ezekiel Perkins offered several of his short lectures on a variety of important subjects, including the threat of masculine women, the lies of anthropology, the evil of psychoanalysis, the menace of Negro blood, getting right with God, fighting Bolshevism, strengthening the Mann Act, abolishing dance halls, censoring the cinema, and the foundations of the Republic. There were bigots and Nazis in America too, Rachel saw.

Other than these lectures, the passengers passed the time on the overcrowded ship by playing shuffleboard, quoits or deck tennis in the few free places that were available. The gymnasiums were among the rooms that had been given over to the additional passengers, so a brisk walk around the deck was also a choice made by many, though this involved weaving a circuitous path to avoid others on the same exercise, as Rachel did.