Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

They turned into Ruth’s street and looked up at the window just in time to see the thin edge of light under the blind disappear. They stopped and leaned against a stucco fence in front of a plain, shining white house with cactus plants and a fig tree in the front yard.

“We were on that ship for thirty-five days,” Ruth said, “and we came to the coast of Palestine between Haifa and Rehovoth, at night, and maybe someone had been bribed, and maybe it was just lucky, but people were waiting for us in rowboats and in eight hours we were all off. There was one woman, who looked as strong as anyone, a solid, sensible-looking woman, and she seemed cheerful and healthy when she got into the little boat with me, but she suddenly died ten feet off the coast, when the water was so shallow a child could have stepped out and walked ashore. Luckily, it was a dark night, and there were no patrols, and we were taken in cars to a movie theater in a little town near Haifa and put inside. The theater had been playing Betty Grable in ‘Campus Confessions,’ a musical picture, and there were signs with her in tights and ostrich plumes all over it, and the management had written all over the posters, ‘Closed This Week for Repairs.’”

“I saw the picture,” Mitchell said. He had seen it one night in Cambridge, and he remembered how some of the boys in the audience had whistled when Miss Grable had kissed the leading man.

“We were all told to keep absolutely quiet,” Ruth said, “because the British had patrols going through every town. They must have known something, because that week three men high up in the police force were suspended and investigated. It wasn’t so hard to keep the older people quiet, but it was awful with the children, and one man really proposed that a little girl who kept crying all day be strangled for the good of the others. We sat there for a week, whispering, making a noise like thousands of mice in a cupboard, and each night cars would come and some people would be taken away to a collective farm somewhere in the hills. Finally, my turn came and I stayed on that farm for two years, working in the fields and teaching children how to read and write German.

“After two years, the British gave you papers, if you managed to dodge them all that time, and I got my papers and started to work for a canning factory outside Tel Aviv. My father was let out of concentration camp in 1938, but his ship was turned back at Haifa, and he was put back in concentration camp in Germany, and for all I know he’s still there now, although he’s probably dead.

“Joachim wrote me, and my mother, from Berlin. They became good friends once I was gone, and he brought her food, and on Friday nights would come and watch her light the candles. My mother wrote me he told her he had a girl, but he was dissatisfied, he guessed he’d gotten the taste for Jewish girls.” Ruth smiled slightly, thinking of the boy with the checkered vest and the monocle many years ago, and Mitchell wondered if he had dropped a bomb near the market-analyzer somewhere in Africa, or in Sicily or Italy.

“He helped my mother get out of Germany,” Ruth went on, staring up at the window of her home, which was now secure and dark. “She came out in a Portuguese boat, and I heard she was coming and I was on the shore at Haifa Harbor when it came in. But the British wouldn’t let it dock, and after six days they insisted that it turn back, and there were thousands of people on the shore, relatives and friends of the people on the boat, and the worst sound I’ve ever heard in the world was the sound those people on the shore made when the boat turned around and started to steam toward the Haifa breakwater. But the boat never got out of the harbor.” Ruth paused and licked her lips, and spoke very matter-of-factly. “There was an explosion. We saw the puff of dirty black smoke first, then a long time later we heard the noise, and people on shore were screaming and laughing and crying. Then there was fire and the boat started to go down, and everybody grabbed at any kind of boat they could find and started out toward the steamer, and there were people who couldn’t find boats who just jumped into the water, clothes and all, and started to swim, and nobody ever found out how many people drowned that way, because bodies were washed in to shore for three weeks afterward. My mother was drowned and five hundred other people on the boat, but seven hundred were saved, and then the British had to let them in, and I suppose that’s what the people who set the bomb figured would happen. Some people would die, but some would be saved. If the boat went back to Europe, everybody would be killed. Of course, they bungled it somewhat, and they didn’t figure on the fire, and they thought the boat would sink more slowly and only a few people would be killed, but even so it was a pretty fair bargain.” Ruth lit a cigarette calmly and held the light for Mitchell. “My mother was washed up a week later, and at least her grave is in Palestine. I couldn’t tell my father she was dead, so when I wrote to him in concentration camp, I forged letters from my mother, because I had a lot of her letters and I learned how to make good copies. Even now, through the Red Cross, I write him notes in my mother’s handwriting, and if he’s alive he thinks my mother is living on a farm with a family near Rehovoth.”

Ruth pulled at her cigarette and inhaled deeply and in the increased glow Mitchell looked at her and thought again, as he’d thought so many times before, that it was a wonderful and terrible thing that the human race covered its scars so completely, so that Ruth, standing there, with the torture and smuggling and burning and drowning and hiding and dying behind her, looked, with her lipstick and fluffy, cleverly combed hair, and her soft, fragile, print dress, like any one of a thousand girls at a dance in America, with nothing more behind them than a weekly allowance from father, and two proms a season at New Haven or Cambridge.

“Ah,” Ruth said, throwing her cigarette away, “she must be asleep by now. Come.” She smiled at him, dry-eyed and pleasant, and took his hand, and they walked quietly up through the dim hallways to the apartment in which she lived. She opened the door silently and waved him in, her finger to her lips, and when they were safely in her room, with the door locked behind them, she giggled like a child who has pulled some sly trick on the grown-up world, then kissed him hungrily in the dark room, and whispered, “Mitchell, Mitchell,” making the name somehow foreign and tender by the way she said it.

He held her tight, but she pulled away. “Not yet, Lieutenant,” she said, grinning, “not yet.” She put on a light and went over to a chest of drawers in a corner and started to rummage under some scarves. “I have something for you. Sit down and wait, like a polite boy.”

Mitchell sat on the low daybed, blinking in the light. The room was small and painted white and very clean. There was a large piece of Egyptian batik in red and dark green on the wall over the bed and there were three photographs on a dressing table. Mitchell looked at the photographs—a round, smiling woman, with a healthy, simple face, Ruth’s mother, the picture taken long before the morning when the ship went down in Haifa Harbor. The other two photographs were of men. There was a man who looked like Ruth, obviously her father, a studious, humorous, rather weak face, with frail, delicate bones and shy, childish eyes. And there was the young man in the checkered vest, slender and laughing and proud of himself, with the monocle in his eye like a burlesque of a German general or a British actor.

“Here.” Ruth came over to him and sat down beside him. She had a soft chamois bag, and there was a little rich clinking as she put it in his hand. “To take with you,” she said.