“Why,” she asked, “did you not get water from the Bedouins that you captured, if you had already gone without it for ten days?”
“Ah!” I said, holding up my finger in the same way she had done with Hannah. “I was only able to capture them because they themselves had run out of water, and were thirstier than I was. And I did not capture them with a gun but by giving a graphic dissertation on European fountains; they were especially taken with my description of the Diana fountain in Bushy Park, and I believe that they would have followed me anywhere after I told them what goes on in the Place de la Concorde.”
“What is it like to be a British Jew in Palestine?” asked Hannah, earnestly, and with such Weltschmerz that it was as if an alpine storm cloud had rolled over the table.
“What is it like? It’s like being an Italian Negro in Ethiopia, or”—I looked at Tamar—“like living in a continuous production of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ” I had meant the allusion to “Romeo and Juliet” to be purely illustrative, but with a life of its own it turned Tamar as red as a throbbing coal, and I, a generation apart, nearly followed suit. I was caught in my own springe, enchanted—yet never really in danger, for not only did her father come to fetch me back into the world of adults but I had run those rapids before, and knew the still and deep water at their end.
I recall exactly how the children were sitting when I left them, poised to explode in gossip as soon as I had disappeared—it is likely that in my absence I was cut to ribbons by the woolly-haired boy, and perhaps deservedly so. As Tamar’s father and I climbed a broad staircase to the library, where we would discuss business, I remembered the opera singer with whom I had once fallen in love. Her voice was like liquid or a jewel. I have not since heard such a beautiful voice. But she was, oddly enough, almost unknown. I went to Covent Garden to find out in what productions she would sing. Her name was Erika, and when I inquired of the old man at the ticket office I found that he, too, was in love with her.
“I’m too old,” he said, “and you’re too young.” I knew that this was true, and I must have looked pained, because he grabbed me through the ticket window and said, “Don’t you see, it’s much better that way!”
“I see nothing,” I said. “If that’s better, then I’m sorry to be alive.”
“Wait,” he said, and laughed. “You’ll see. It’s sweeter, much sweeter.”
I went to the opera that season two dozen times just to see and hear Erika of the liquid voice. I wanted, despite the fact that I was fifteen, to marry her immediately, to run away to Brazil or Argentina, to take her with me to the South Seas, etc., etc., etc. It had been unspeakable torture to watch her on a brilliantly lighted stage, singing in a way that fired up all my emotions.
But by the time I met Tamar, I knew that a lighted stage is often best left untouched, and I knew, further, that all connections are temporary, and, therefore, can be enjoyed in their fullness even after the most insubstantial touch—if only one knows how. I was, that night, in a dream within a dream. I was young again in a room of bright colors and laughter; and all the time the dark image of a smoky continent called me away and threatened to tear me apart. I did not know then that there is no contradiction in such contradictions; they are made for one another; without them, we would have nothing to lose and nothing to love.
Tamar was the most lovely girl—and had it not been for that delicate and slim bit of silver wire, I might not have known her as well as I did. Her father agreed to the scheme, but then the scheme collapsed, and the world collapsed soon after. Six years of war. Most of the Jews did not survive. Most of the paintings did. In six years of war, there was probably not a day when I did not think of the time when I had had to sit at the children’s table, in a world of vulnerable beauty. Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.
Ellis Island
Pillar of Fire
In January, when the sea is cold and dark, crossing the Atlantic is for the brave. Seen from land during the day, the ocean is forbidding, but it is nearly unimaginable at night in a storm, far north, where the ice tumbles down gray wave troughs like tons of shattered glass.
Our hearts were suspended and we held our breath. We tiptoed around, trying not to make too much noise, so that we would not upset the sea or overturn the ship with a sudden movement. We felt that if we ourselves were silent and orderly, the sea would follow our example, and so mothers repeatedly hushed their children, everyone sat with a peculiar stiffness, and many a conversation was left dangling when the ship rolled way over to one side and paused there as it decided whether or not to return.
The quieter we became, the more the sea grew wild. In nocturnal storms from Iceland to Newfoundland, it seemed as if the world were lit up by the electricity of the sea itself. Snow batted down against the ship’s windows, and white dragons leapt into the air as breakers struck the bow. When lightning bombarded the waves through the driving snow, its fractured light illuminated the shadowed snowflakes and made them seem like endless numbers of angels propelled and directed in a dreamlike war.
I was offered money to read prayers, but I refused. The Talmud and the body of prayer, by their own decree, must not be used as a spade to dig in the ground, and, besides, when the ship swayed in storms, reading made me dizzy.
“If you won’t read prayers for money,” some of the passengers asked, “will you read them for free?”
I told them that I never ask God for anything whatsoever, since I assume that He will give me exactly what He sees fit.
“Isn’t there a prayer for those who are lost at sea?” they wanted to know.
“Certainly,” I answered. “There are scores. I myself know about a dozen.”
“Well then say them!” they screamed.
“No,” I said, “I won’t.” And I didn’t.
Somewhere in the North Atlantic we encountered a storm that smashed windows on the upper decks, tore away half the lifeboats, and sent seawater cascading down the companionways. We heard bolts snap and we saw metal beams free themselves from their attachments. The lights went off, and though at times we were nearly upside down in the dark, no one spoke or cried out. We began to think of America, still several days off, as a wild concoction of physical laws where we would have to live permanently on raging seas in the flash of lightning and the swirl of snow. We imagined that if we built houses there, they would blow away, that we would spend our lives holding on as the floor tilted and the lights went out, that America was a place of large dark rooms in which several hundred people lay frightened to death with their eyes as wide as small plates. When suddenly the lights blinked, I saw momentarily a field of bodies—men in sheepskin coats and furs, women with shawls over their heads, sleepless children lying perfectly still in imitation of their elders—and everyone was looking at the ceiling, waiting for the water to burst through.
But it never did, and during our approach to America the sea grew calmer and calmer, as if by sailing into the lee of the continent we profited from its benevolence. The sea moderated, and the land sent out signs—not doves, but gulls as white as wave crests, who came to join us days before our landfall, and followed on vibrating wings that seemed unsteady but had been strong enough to carry them, through winter air, across hundreds of miles of sea. I was sure that I could smell land, until one of the sailors told me that the land was frozen and I would not be able to smell it even if I were standing on it. But a day from port I saw a cloud bank that seemed anchored in place over all of North America. Only on the sea was the sky clear, in patches of the palest blue, and the sea itself was as flat and glassy as oil. Then there was nothing but cold fog and blasts of the whistle. The officers doubled their watches, standing outboard on the flying bridge, listening like hunting dogs or men who are awaiting a miracle. The firs
t time our blasts were answered, they lifted their binoculars and peered out to sea. They closed their eyes like symphony conductors and strained after the sound. The echoing blast came closer and closer, our ship veered slightly to starboard, and then the many restless passengers on deck were stunned by the sudden appearance of a huge white warship heading northeast, deliberately seeking the storms that we had labored to leave behind. Black smoke and sparks flew from its stacks; it was sharp, steady, and flooded with guns; and it passed us so fast that we would hardly have known it was there but for the American flag flying from its stern, warm as fire. As the flag glided by, I thought to myself that it was the first color I had seen in the New World. It ran from us in the sea of white, until it was the size of a rose, and then a pencil stroke; and then it disappeared. I began to search again, as did the watch officers. The water was calm, we were close to shore, and we probed steadily deeper and deeper, looking for color. But everything was white.
We never did see land—because the fog was so thick—but we knew (in perhaps the same way that one knows when a piece of music is coming to a close: by constrictions, emotions, and intuitions) that we had passed the Narrows and were in the harbor. The noise of bells and foghorns made a pattern not unlike the few deductive points from which a surveyor makes a map; a pilot launch had come alongside; broken river ice flowed slowly past the ship. But still, America was not visible. Like the blind, we could only guess, for we could see nothing more than silvery water and white mist.
And then the ship’s engines stopped. After several weeks of perpetual racket, we were made to think of Heaven, for as we glided in silence we seemed to be not at sea but in the clouds. During the journey, I had noticed that people cried at different stations. Some had wept as they boarded ship; others as we pulled out to sea; some during the storms; some as we saw the warship with the beautiful banner flying from its stern. And now, after we had put the dangers behind us, some wept as the anchor chains exploded from the ship and arched into the water. For many this sound was like the bones of Europe rattling one last time, and they felt that they were finally released. I didn’t, for I had yet to see America, and was not completely sure that the white clouds, white ships, and flowing archipelagos of ice and foam were not dreams.
As if by magic, a procession of launches came from the fog. The water was calm enough for our ship to unload by lighter. After we had stepped onto the smaller vessels, our suitcases in our hands, we moved into the low-lying clouds, engines echoing off the water as if we were moving in between the walls of a high canyon. Because the Americans on the launch were about twice our size, most of us thought that we had come into a country of giants, but I guessed that it was a measure taken to impress us. Indeed, we were impressed by these red-faced, uniformed Goliaths who spoke over our heads in a strange and difficult language.
The two giants on our launch guided it to Ellis Island, where we were to be tested and sorted, and either allowed into America or sent back. When Ellis Island, the “Isle of Tears,” appeared floating in coils of mist, it did not dispel any notions we might have had about dreams, for upon it were vast domed buildings striped as regularly as coral snakes, smoking from half a hundred chimneys, and shining hundreds of electric lights from windows, porches, and doorways. When I stepped off the launch, I found that the land was covered with new snow up to my knees, except where paths had been shoveled through it in strange patterns that circled the imposing palaces like spiders’ webs.
We entered the largest building, and left our luggage in a room on the ground floor. Then we went upstairs to a cathedral-like space in which hundreds of people were already waiting, having come on the Bremen Line and docked an hour earlier. We were asked the names of the countries that we were from, and were made to sit in areas fenced off according to nationality. The room was a forest of steel barriers and wooden benches. Two chandeliers as big as locomotives hung from the vaulted ceiling. When there was no fog, it was said, one could see all of New York through the windows in the north wall. But we were still inside our bale of cotton.
It is hard to describe how pale the light was in that great room. Perhaps because we had been so long on the ocean, we felt that we were still sailing, floating silently toward the end of the bad weather, when clarity of air and view would break upon the wall of windows like a tidal wave. I knew that there was a tremendous noise in the hall, but it seemed quiet, in that the collective voice of the thousand people who were there was like wind or surf. Officials in uniforms of deep blue beckoned for us to come forward, and little by little, after many hours, our numbers lessened as people were led up a long staircase to the examination rooms above. They prayed as they went up. Even had we not had the sense of floating in Heaven, the idea of judgment was implicit in every angle of the place. Some had great difficulty struggling up the stairs, and at the top were led away to be sent back—since the doctors could easily see that their hearts were not strong enough for America. Others bounded up the steps, ready to face anything. Before my turn, I noticed a flash of color ahead of me. In the white room, alive with expectation, a plume of red and gold had flared up like a flame.
What was it? I strained to see. An endless file of immigrants moved slowly on the stairs, but then, as the line progressed, I saw the flash of warm color again—the long and beautiful red-blond hair of a young woman in a group of Norwegian immigrants. There was something so steady about her bravery in ascension that everyone who saw her took courage. As we watched the broken line of her progress, she became our symbol. This was an angel to follow, and follow we did. In fact, I was so impatient to get through and catch up to her that I was merely irritated by the inspections.
In the galleries above, I was taken from room to room and looked over rather carelessly. After lifting my eyelids with a button hook, a young man with a military bearing saw that I had no trachoma. Someone else made me cough and breathe. I had to take off my clothes and turn around several times. In another room, a big fat man asked if I could bend over. “Why?” I asked in turn, thinking that the only reason he wanted to know was because he himself would never be able to do such a thing. “Is it that everyone who comes to America has to be able to bend over?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What for?”
“Because when we sing our national anthem, we bend over. Now do it or I’ll send you back to Serbia.”
“I don’t come from Serbia,” I protested.
“Exactly,” he said. “But if I want to, I can ship you there, so you’d better do as I tell you.”
I bent over and was passed on to the next room.
There, a pretty woman with cold eyes asked me if I knew how to read and write.
“Of course,” I said.
“What languages?” she asked.
When I replied, “Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German, and French—and English, as you can see,” she got very suspicious and asked me what I did for a living.
“I write books,” I said. Little did I know that in America no one ever believes this, as if all the books that appear are written not by living people, but by hairbrushes, watermelons, and branding irons. She looked at me the way one looks at a madman.
“What kind of books’?” she asked sharply, closing one eye and squinting with the other.
“Stories,” I replied pompously, “essays, dissertations on Biblical poetry, political science, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
“How can you make a living by doing this?” she inquired, with evident disgust.
“That’s very perceptive of you,” I said with a broad smile. “I can’t.”
“Then explain how you manage.”
“I can only say,” I offered, thinking that maybe, even if her eyes were cold, I might still fall in love with her, “that this is one of the unexplained paradoxes which are allowed to thrive because the universe is, on one level, wonderfully disordered.”
“Turn around,” she commanded. She made a letter on my back with a piece of chalk and motioned f
or me to leave. “Next!” she shouted.
“What’s that for?” I asked, trying to see what she had written.
“Nothing,” she said, and pushed me into the hall.
By this time I was elated. I imagined myself in a dressing gown, living in a palace overlooking the forests of Manhattan (which I thought would look like a cross between the Tyrol and the Berner Oberland), married to the Norwegian woman, after whom I was chasing as best I could. We would be on the same ferry, I thought. The ferry would burst through the fog, and there, in front of us, would be a magnificent island of fjords, meadows, and castles. Enormous oaks would hang from cliffs over the water; horsemen would gallop from place to place, bearing shields as brightly colored as illuminated manuscripts. And, I thought that I would finally get to see the American Talking Chicken, who, it was believed in my village (why not?), possessed the mildly altruistic trait of sitting down with you just before he was to be cooked, to determine the best recipe. I imagined that such a discussion would be both candid and touching.
I was lost in these speculations when I came to a window which gave out upon the ferry slip. A long, slim boat was getting up steam, and the Norwegians from the Bremen Line were about to go on board. My heart rose just as it had done when I had seen the flash of gold on the stairs. Ten minutes, I thought, and I, too, will be on that boat.
But she was not with them. How could she have been sent back? I had been able to see from several hundred feet away that she was healthy—it was one of her beauties; another was her stature; another was her tentativeness, her gentleness. Is humility out of fashion? Then to hell with fashion. She had humility in the best religious sense, like Rabbi Moritz of Oppenheim. You could feel it, as you could sense her strength, halfway across the room. The ways in which people walk and the expressions on their faces are rich and communicative emblems long neglected except by painters and immigration inspectors. But I am digressing. She did not board the ferry. My elation became apprehension. What would I do alone in Manhattan, in an emerald forest taken from a bookplate? What would I do, alone, with all the perfect weather beyond the cotton?