Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

The little man grinned as if he’d lost his mind, and it seemed that nothing would come of their journey.

“Do you know what the name of the owner of the Leonica was?” Klein asked. “Samuel F. Klein,” Ivo said, still failing to catch on.

“Yes,” said the little man, scratching himself behind the ear. “And he wasn’t a saint but a fool. A silly fool of a Kike. And you know that and have said it several times yourself.”

He looked at his sailor, who didn’t understand. Ivo frowned, and who knew what was going through his head? Certainly something about Jews. He no longer had any idea who he was dealing with. He thought that he was one of them, but now it turned out that he wasn’t because if he were, how could he have said that someone was a silly fool of a Kike?

“His name was Samuel F. Klein,” the little man mumbled, absorbed in thought, “and did you remember what my name is?”

Ivo Delavale didn’t know whether what was happening to him was a dream or not. From that December day in 1941, when he had sailed from Florida on the tuna boat Olaf in the belief that he was going on a military mission to uncover German submarines in the Caribbean, he’d experienced nothing but marvels. At first the Olaf began to sink in front of Havana. For no reason at all, in the middle of a calm sea; it filled with water to the top in two hours, and he and three other Americans barely saved their skins. The owner of the Olaf, a white-bearded journalist, evidently a rich and a somewhat crazy man, said swearing that some Puerto Ricans had tricked him and that Puerto Rico should be flooded or at least burned because that was just one more sign that they supported Hitler, just as they supported Franco. That man didn’t know anything about the sea or about ships either because no one with any brains would think of going to pursue German submarines in a tuna boat — but Ivo realized that too late. In Havana they parted, and each went his own way. The man with the white beard went to buy a new ship, the two sailors went in search of whores, and Ivo, without a dollar in his pocket, sought a way to get back to Florida from Cuba. And so after two days of waiting he boarded the cruiser Zamzam, which was sailing under a Syrian flag and transporting Jewish refugees from Spain to the United States. After having waited for two months for the people to receive American visas and after having eaten their last reserves of food (which were meager to begin with) and spent their last money, captain Sergey Prokopiev decided to sail for Miami in the hope that the coast guard would let the Zamzam through because there were almost a thousand people on board — Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and German Jews who faced the threat of death in one way or another. Namely, the Americans didn’t believe the tales of concentration camps or that the Germans were liquidating those people en masse in their drive eastward. Fine; it was obvious that Hitler didn’t like Jews and that he’d made their elimination one of his most important political objectives. But political aims are one thing and reality is another, or so the Americans thought, convinced that Nazi ideology worked like advertisements for soft drinks. Who would really believe that sugared soda water made people happier and more potent, and who would really believe that Hitler had serious thoughts about the Jews? And if he did, that only meant he was crazy. His project would come to ruin, his state would collapse, and until then it was smarter to keep one’s distance from him and not get too mixed up with those who were fleeing in all directions for real reasons or out of fear.

Prokopiev, half Jewish himself, tried in vain to explain things to Richard S. Elephant, whose response was an argument stronger than anything the captain could think up: “America has enough poor of its own and enough Jews of its own! It doesn’t need European Jews or the European poor.” Sergey Prokopiev had no way of knowing that he was trying exactly what hundreds and thousands of others in positions similar to his were trying and that at that moment, from the Bosporus to the Maghreb, via Portugal and Spain, all the way to the coasts of both American continents, huge masses of people found themselves in the same situation as his people.

Had he known, he never would have left for Florida and placed his hopes in the abstract humanism of the coast guard. Rather, he would have persuaded his people to swim to the coast of Cuba. Those who survived the sharks would have run all over the island, and the local authorities could search for them and send them back to Eastern Europe.

He took Ivo Delavale on board the Zamzam because he was already missing half the crew, and Delavale had some papers from the American army, which, the desperate captain thought, could be of general use. However, before it reached American shores, it was stopped by torpedo boats, and a gruff sergeant gave Prokopiev an ultimatum to move on in half an hour or he would give the order to sink the ship. The captain only laughed and retorted to the American that he couldn’t blackmail him or the people he was transporting with their lives and that he could go ahead and torpedo them. The sergeant grew confused, and after a conversation with his superiors suggested to Prokopiev to drop anchor right where he was until someone in Washington or somewhere else decided what would happen to the Zamzam.

“No chance,” he retorted. “My passengers are dying of starvation! Either sink us, let us through, or give us food.”

The sergeant didn’t do any of those things but again contacted his superiors. A motorboat with Red Cross markings arrived more quickly than he would have thought, and the Zamzam received a first quantity of bread and canned goods. Over the seven days that the ship would remain on that spot, surrounded by five boats of the coast guard, the Red Cross would come a few hundred times with food and medicine. The entire storage space of the Zamzam would be overflowing, and soon they were putting boxes with the emblem of international aid on deck. The captain waited for a decision from Washington, but he knew well what it would be. He had an in-depth understanding of the comfort of canned goods and their purpose and was ready to scuttle the Zamzam together with the food that had accumulated, which was enough for a year’s voyage. He saw no sense in harassing people and driving them across the sea if not one shore would accept them.

When on the eighth morning the arrogant sergeant arrived with a negative answer, Sergey Prokopiev convened a ship’s council, assembled on the basis of the homelands and countries from which the people had fled, and proposed collective suicide. Let history remember the Jewish Titanic in the Caribbean!

The people, of course, were shocked, rejected his idea, and tried to persuade him to sail back to Europe. The war would surely end before they arrived, and Hitler would of course be defeated. The captain didn’t believe in a quick end to the war or in Hitler’s defeat, but he didn’t oppose the decision of council. Regardless, they began to spy on him and kept tabs on his every move, frightened that he would scuttle the Zamzam.

The drama of the thousand Jews and their captain took place at the same time as Ivo’s personal drama. Namely, instead of the fact that he was taking part in a mission that had the approval of the American military helping the crew and passengers, as Prokopiev was hoping, the fact that Ivo Delavale had boarded the Zamzam of all ships turned out to be fatal for him. The sergeant was convinced that his papers had been forged, and he sent them as suspicious to his superiors, where they were likewise suspicious, but they couldn’t investigate the authenticity of the documents and sent them further on up. No one knew how far Ivo’s papers went and who all had them in their hands before they vanished in someone’s drawer, but in the end it turned out that he hadn’t even turned them over to the sergeant, and there was no longer any way of proving his identity. For the Americans he was just one more in the mass of European wretches who wandered the deck of the Zamzam and who needed to be avoided in any way possible because an encounter with them could be fatal, just as when on a rainy day you notice a little wet puppy in the mud at the side of the road and know that the little animal would stay there forever and give up its little ghost if you didn’t take it with you.