Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

Miriam stood in line near the pool with her paper plate and fork. When it was her turn, the beautiful Indian girl behind the table gave her a scoop of bean salad, which had chunks of some kind of pink meat in it, sweaty-looking, lurid. Miriam waved away the sandwich, a croissant with a white paste. She hated fish salad, unlike every single other Jew she’d ever met. If she had to eat fish, she wanted a filet.

“Can I please have just a plain croissant?” she asked the very tan Australian boy who was handing them out. Her voice sounded creaky, plaintive to her own ears. “Maybe two?”

She took her food over to the old breakfast nook. It was a mess. Most of the deck chairs there had been converted to beds, heaped with sheets and pillows. But there was Christine, sitting sideways on the only uncluttered chair with a plate perched on her knees. Miriam didn’t feel much like company right then, but it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen her.

“Hello, Christine,” she said. “Can I sit with you?”

“Miriam, hello!” Christine moved over and Miriam sat next to her with her own plate balanced on her knees, and looked dubiously at those glistening chunks of meat.

“How is it?” Miriam asked.

“Not bad, if you like beans,” said Christine. She wore a sundress and sandals and looked fresh and clean and absurdly healthy, her hair windblown and sun-bleached. “And croissants with crabmeat.” She took a bite, chewed. “Actually, this may be the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my whole life.”

Miriam plunged her plastic fork into the bean salad but couldn’t bring herself to eat it. The people around her seemed happy with their food, as if they were homesick kids at summer camp opening care packages full of treats from their mothers. Even Christine seemed thrilled. Miriam felt like a curmudgeon, ungrateful and depressed.

“I saw you all, swimming in the ocean,” she said, trying to be cheerful through the sour lump in her throat. “That must have felt so nice and cool.”

“It was a little scary at first, then absolutely great,” said Christine. “Was that you playing music?”

Miriam nodded.

“It was beautiful,” said Christine. She looked closely at Miriam. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said Miriam. “I don’t like crab, maybe that’s it.”

“You look sad.”

“I am sad,” said Miriam. It felt good just to say it.

“I’m sorry,” said Christine. “For being so cheery. How annoying.”

On a burst of affection, Miriam reached out and grazed the girl’s cheek with her knuckles, a caress, and gazed into her pragmatic blue eyes. “I’m not annoyed at you, sweetheart. I’m sad at this predicament we find ourselves in. I guess it just dawned on me how really and truly stuck we are out here if they have to send a plane to bring us food. It will be days before we get back to land.”

“I know,” said Christine, suddenly sober, understanding. “It’s serious. I was thinking about that earlier.” She yawned hugely. “I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I can’t stay awake.”

“Of course not. After all that swimming and excitement,” said Miriam. “It’s cooling off, can you feel it?”

“Yes,” said Christine, nodding as she looked around. She stood up slowly, balancing herself on the back of the deck chair. “See you later.”

“Sweet dreams,” said Miriam.

After Christine had gone, Miriam sat alone with her mound of bean-and-Spam salad. Tonight was Shabbos. The sun was going down. Back in her real life, in Israel, she might have been going out to dinner with her friend Etta, or visiting her son, Avner, and his family in Jerusalem for the weekend, or sitting upstairs on Isaac’s terrace with him, drinking a glass of wine while he drank seltzer.

But she didn’t really miss the past. In fact, she yearned for the future, for whatever time she and Sasha had together. What would they do together on Shabbos, in Jaffa, that most beautiful, peaceful town? They might walk by the sea at sunset, cook together, invite friends over for dinner… It would be heaven on earth.

“Miriam,” came his voice from nearby, as if she had drawn him to her just by thinking about him, or conjured him out of thin air. “Miriam.”

Sasha made his painstaking way through the crowded slum of deck chairs and sheet tents toward her. He looked thin and pale and greasy.

“I was just missing you,” she said, squinting up at him.

“Here I am.” He slid onto the deck chair, behind her. His arms went around her and her head found his chest, the hollow of his neck. He smelled of old sweat and machine oil, both funky and metallic. She nestled against him and inhaled again and again with her nose against his skin.

“Did you fix the engine?”

“No,” he said. “They sent parts to replace the burned-out rings and wires and so forth, but the wrong connecting rod for the crankcase. Can you believe it? What a bunch of nudniks. It took us almost three hours to realize, trying to make it work.”

“No!” said Miriam, although she had no real idea what he was talking about.

“Yes!” he said. He lowered his voice, but it vibrated with outrage. “So stupid, such a waste.”

“Here,” she said, handing him her plate. “Share my dinner, you have to eat.”

Around them, the air dimmed and cooled. Leaning against Sasha while he ate, she tried and failed not to think about what Flaminia had told her about the patients who’d already died in the infirmary, their bodies secretly taken away, and the ones who would die tonight. And she tried not to think about Larry’s helicopter escape three days before, the useless engine parts, the stalled tugboats. She distracted herself from all of it with a favorite memory of her long-dead mother playing Chopin. She had played rarely, only when something inside her seemed to demand it. She’d been a formidably proper woman, but when she sat on the piano bench, she revealed another side of herself: a passionate girl, a sexual, romantic being. Her whole body would sway, her face transported, eyes half closed. She had always poured her entire self into her piano; even when she was rusty, the music was beautiful. Miriam had never loved her mother more or felt closer to her than in those moments.

“We should play something,” she said, looking up at Sasha.

He gave a start. “The quartet? Right now?”

“Right now. We should play Rivka’s Six-Day War Quartet. It’s time. If Jakov is able. He’s getting worse, I think.”

Sasha nodded. “All right.”

They found Jakov sitting on his daybed in the living room, drinking from a bottle of water. Miriam handed him the second croissant she’d cadged.

“Thank you,” he said with languid melancholy. “This, I can eat.”

“That, you shouldn’t eat, because it’s bad for your heart,” said Miriam, “but I am not your mother, and you deserve a treat.”

Jakov tore into the buttery pastry with a wolfish, beatific smile.

“So, Jakov,” said Miriam when he’d devoured the whole thing, “do you feel well enough to play some music?”

He looked dubious but game. “What should we play?”

“We were thinking,” said Sasha with a note of apology, “the Weiss quartet.”

Jakov made a peevish face, which luckily Rivka didn’t see from her seat on the long white couch next to Isaac. She was surrounded by cushions, facing the balcony doors with her legs tucked underneath her, wearing white silk pajamas and a matching white turban, and she turned to Sasha with her hand fluttering at her breastbone, “Oh, Sasha. That would be marvelous! I had given up hope of ever hearing it played.”

“It was my idea,” muttered Miriam.