Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Mitchell and Ruth went down the steps to the beach. A weaving British lance-corporal, coming up the steps with a girl, stiffened and saluted rigidly, his hand quivering with respect for authority, and Mitchell saluted back, and Ruth giggled.

“What’re you laughing at?” Mitchell asked, when they had passed the lance-corporal.

“I laugh,” Ruth said, “every time I see you salute.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I just laugh. Forgive me.” She took off her shoes and walked barefoot in the sand up to the water’s edge. The sea swept softly in from Gibraltar and Tunis and Cyrene and Alexandria and lapped at her toes.

“The Mediterranean,” Ruth said. “I hate the Mediterranean.”

“What’s the matter with it?” Mitchell stared out at the flickering silver path of the moon over the water.

“I was on it,” Ruth said, “for thirty-three days. In the hold of a Greek steamer that used to carry cement. Maybe I oughtn’t to tell you things like that. You’re a tired boy who’s been sent here to have a good time so he can go back and fight well.…”

“You tell me anything you want to tell me,” Mitchell said. “I’ll fight all right.”

“Should I tell you about Berlin, too? Do you want to hear about Berlin?” Ruth’s voice was hard and cold, and somehow a little sardonic, not at all like her voice as he had heard it in the whole week he had known her. The meeting with the journalist at the restaurant had started something stirring within her, something that he hadn’t seen before, and he felt that before he left he should see that side of her too.

“Tell me about Berlin,” Mitchell said.

“I worked for a newspaper,” Ruth said, her toes digging lightly in the sand, “even after the Nazis came in, and I was in love with the man who wrote the Economics column and he was in love with me.…”

“Economics?” Mitchell was puzzled.

“The stock exchange. The prophecies and excuses.”

“Oh,” said Mitchell, trying to picture what a man who wrote stock-exchange tips in Berlin in 1934 would look like.

“He was very gay,” Ruth said. “Very young, but elegant, with checkered vests, and he wore a monocle and he lost all his money at the races. His name was Joachim. He used to take me to the races and to the cafés and it used to drive my mother crazy, because if they ever found out I was a Jewish girl out with a Gentile man, they would have sentenced me to death for polluting the blood stream of the German nation. They’d have sent him to a concentration camp, too, but he was always easy and laughing, and he said, ‘The important thing is to be brave,’ and we were never questioned, and I went to every night club in Berlin, even nights that Goering and Goebbels were in the same room.

“My father was taken to a concentration camp and we decided it was time for me to leave, and Joachim got together all the money he could lay his hands on and gave it to me and I went to Vienna. I was supposed to go to Palestine, if I could, and send for my mother, and for my father, too, if he ever got out of the concentration camp. There was an office in Vienna, and it was filled with refugees from all over Germany, and we collected money to buy transportation and bribe the nations of the world to let some of us in. I slept in the bathtub and talked to sailors and thieves and murderers and crooked shipowners, and finally we got a Greek steamer that was supposed to put in at Genoa and pick us up if we managed to get there. We gave the man 75,000 dollars in cash in advance because that’s the only way he would do it, and somehow we got the Austrian government and the Italian government to look the other way, at a price, and they piled us into freight cars, eight hundred of us, and locked us in, men, women and children, lying one on top of another, and the trip took a week and a day to Genoa, and when we got there the ship never arrived. The Greek took the 75,000 dollars and disappeared. There are all kinds of Greeks, and I have nothing against them, but this was a bad one. Then the Italian government sent us back to Vienna and six people committed suicide because they couldn’t bear it, and we started in all over again.”

Mitchell stared out at the dark line of the sea where it blended in the western distance with the purple of the sky. He tried to think of what it would have been like for his sister and mother if they had been locked into freight cars at Rutland and forced to travel for eight days up to Quebec, say, to wait for an illegal ship to an unknown country. His mother was tall and white-haired and unruffled and pleasant, and his sister was cool and pretty and had some irritating superior mannerisms that she had picked up when she had been foolishly sent for a year to a fancy girls’ finishing school in Maryland.

“Let’s start home,” Ruth said. “If my landlady’s still up, we’ll shoot her.”

They turned their backs on the quiet, white churn of the waves and walked, hand in hand, across the heavy sand of the beach toward the black pile of the buildings of the city.

“Well,” Mitchell said, “I want to hear the rest of it.”

“No, you don’t,” Ruth said. “Forgive me for telling you so much. It’s too dreary.”

“I want to hear,” Mitchell said. In the week he had known Ruth, she had been gay and light-hearted, and had helped him to forget the planes spinning out of control and the dying men lying in their frozen blood on the tangled wires and broken aluminum of the Liberator floors, and now he felt as though he owed it to himself and to Ruth to take back with him some of her agony, too, not only the laughter and the tender jokes and the self-effacing merriment. Suddenly, tonight, she had become terribly dear to him, and he felt responsible to her in a way he had never felt responsible to a girl before.

“Tell me,” he said.

Ruth shrugged. “Back in Vienna,” she said, “we did it all over again. It took two months and the police caught a lot of us, and it meant hiding and running most of the time, but we collected the money again, and we found ourselves another Greek, and this time he turned out to be honest. Or at least as honest as people were to Jews without passports in those days in Europe. We got down to Genoa in only five days this time, and we boarded the steamer at night and they locked the hatch doors on us after we had paid every cent of the money in advance, and we set sail before dawn. The steamer had been built in 1887.” They were at the edge of the beach now, and Ruth leaned on Mitchell’s shoulder as she put on her shoes. “Nobody can have any idea,” Ruth said, as they went up the steps to the concrete walk above, “of what dirt is like until he has been locked into the hold of a fifty-year-old Greek ship with 700 people for over a month. People died every day, and the ship captain would let a rabbi and three other people up on deck at night to perform the burial service and dump the body overboard. The only thing we got to eat was biscuit and canned beef, and there were always worms in everything, even the water we got to drink, and everybody got sores all over their bodies, and the old people got too weak to move and the children wept all day, and the relatives of the people who died screamed a good deal of the time, and it is impossible to tell anyone who was not on that boat what it smelled like, in the middle of the summer in the Mediterranean, with a ventilating system that had been installed in Salonika in 1903.”

They turned off the beach walk and climbed slowly up the hill toward the center of the town, past the clean, white, very modernistic apartment houses with gardens and fountains and balconies that faced the sea.

“We were supposed to be let off in Turkey,” Ruth went on, her voice almost without inflection and emotion, as though she were reciting from a ledger the business accounts of an importing firm for the year 1850. “And we had given the Greek money to pay off every officer of the port, but something went wrong and we had to put out to sea again, and we started toward Palestine, although the British had patrols along every mile of coastline. But there was no place else to go. People started to get hallucinations about food, and the sailors would sell a sandwich or a lemon for twenty dollars or a bowl of soup for a gold candlestick. And three of the girls couldn’t stand it any more and allowed themselves to be taken up every night to be used by the sailors in exchange for regular meals. It was hard to blame them, but they were cursed by the older people as they walked through the crowd each night toward the ladder, and once a Polish woman with two small daughters knocked one of the girls down with an iron pin and tried to stab her with a kitchen knife she had in her bag.”