The Glatstein Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

performance. The waiter bowed and walked off with mincing steps to tend to another patron. I was grateful that I had managed to cover up my inexperience and that my presence didn’t publicly proclaim: “Listen, everyone. This is my first ocean crossing in twenty years—and how many such trips, I ask you, do you think a fellow like me takes in a lifetime?” Though my face didn’t show it, I had the strange sensation that, for all the beneficences and transgressions of my adult years, only now had I become fully a grown-up. Indeed, it was just now, here at sea, with the floor shifting beneath me, that I finally felt myself to be my own man, secure in my own counsel.
    Sitting at a side table against the wall were two pretty girls. The waiter had already come by five or six times to remove their empty glasses and bring them full ones. They were never without a cigarette and blew out the smoke in long streamers, like hardened veterans. Between puffs they sipped their drinks. They held hands and looked into each other’s eyes like lovers, but their eyes were red and fear-ridden, as if they had already drunkenly squandered their virtue on the first night of the voyage. They moved closer to each other. Both were good-looking and fine-figured, though perhaps somewhat more buxom than the average American girl. For the most part they kept silent, and the occasional word they spoke was so hushed, hardly above a whisper, that it became somewhat dispiriting to look at them and their ample bodies, which now resembled a pair of passionate Siamese twins. The waiters looked away, as did the few other remaining drinkers in the bar. Only one roaring drunk—it was a mystery how he had managed to reach this state so early in the voyage—sat ogling the girls and laughing loudly. He kept this up until he drove them away. The two girls tottered out, arm in arm, and the drunk blew them a kiss.
    Finally, he and I were alone in the bar. He called me over and insisted that I drink on his tab, all the while telling me to my face that he hated my guts. The devil only knows why he took it into his drunken head to think that I was German, and Scotsman that he was, he detested Germans. My protestations were useless. He wanted to know only one thing: Did I, or did I not, lose the Great War? Had I suffered total defeat, or was my nose still up in the air? Pulling a greasy British passport from his breast pocket, he slapped his chest and swore that if I didn’t concede, I would pay for it dearly in the next great World War, when he would personally administer the coup de grâce. He told some witless jokes at my “German” expense, and whinnied like a horse. The man was large and sturdy, with a freckled face and powerful head and arms. His head kept drooping of its own accord with every drink, until his tongue could no longer form words. Nonetheless, he managed to order a fresh drink and promptly fell asleep over his British passport.
    I lay on my cabin bunk, rocking back and forth. Sleepily, I thought of Sholem Aleichem’s Fishl-Dovid the teacher, who was returning home for the Passover holiday in a little boat. I, too, was on my way home. Home … home … I said to myself, to the rhythm of the rocking, until I could no longer hold my eyes open.
3
    The next morning on our second day out, that famous couple, water and sky, put in its appearance. By now a fixed routine had established itself, and everything was running with mechanical precision, as though we had been traveling for months.
    I have never been any great shakes at orienting myself and now, aboard ship, for the life of me, I couldn’t quite determine where I had walked or stood the night before. The sundeck at first seemed like the exercise path in a prison yard, though bit by bit one got used to the ritual of going round and around the deck after meals to take the air, until it began to feel like a real constitutional. But since the same smiling faces floated past on every lap, and the