War and Remembrance Read Online Free PDF Page B

past the mole.
    On the narrow afterdeck, under a flapping crimson flag with badly soiled yellow star and crescent, Natalie sat with her baby. For once the sky had cleared, and she had brought him out into the afternoon sunshine. Bearded men and shawled women gathered around, admiring. There were some thin, sad-eyed children aboard the
Redeemer,
but Louis was the only babe in arms. Perched on her lap, he looked about with lively blue eyes that blinked in the chilly wind.
    “Why, it’s the Adoration,” said Aaron Jastrow, his breath smoking. “The Adoration, to the life. And Louis makes an enchanting Christ child.”
    Natalie muttered, “I’m one hell of a miscast Madonna.”
    “Miscast? Hardly, my dear.” Wrapped in his dark blue travelling cloak, gray hat pulled low on his head, Jastrow calmly stroked his neat beard. “Typecast, I’d say, for face, figure, and racial origin.”
    Elsewhere on the slanting deck, Jews crowded the walkways, swarming out of the fetid holds to stroll in the sun. They squeezed past lifeboats, crates, barrels, and deck structures, or they gathered on hatches, talking in a babel of tongues, with Yiddish predominating. Only Jastrow and Natalie sat blanketed in deck chairs. The Palestinian organizer of the voyage, Avram Rabinovitz, had dug the chairs out of the bilges, mildewy and rat-chewed but serviceable. The baby worshippers thinned away, leaving a respectful patch of vacant rusty iron plate around the Americans, though the strollers kept glancing at them. Since arriving aboard, Jastrow, known as
der groiser Amerikaner shriftshteller,
“the great American author,” had scarcely spoken to anyone, which had only magnified his stature.
    Natalie waved a hand at the blue double hump of mountain, far across the bay. “Will you look at Vesuvius! So sharp and clear, for the first time!”
    “A fine day for visiting Pompeii,” Jastrow said.
    “Pompeii!” Natalie pointed at the fat policeman in a green greatcoatpatrolling the wharf. “We’d be scooped up as we stepped off the gangplank.”
    “I’m acutely aware of that.”
    “Anyway, Pompeii’s so depressing! Don’t you think so? A thousand roofless haunted houses. A city of sudden mass death. Ugh! I can do without Pompeii, obscene frescoes and all.”
    Herbert Rose came shouldering along the deck, a head taller than most of the crowd, his California sports jacket bright as a neon sign in the shabby mass. Natalie and Jastrow had been seeing little of him, though it was he who had arranged their flight from Rome and their coming aboard the
Redeemer.
He was berthing below with the refugees. The smart-aleck film distributor, who had booked most American movies in Italy until the declaration of war, was uncovering a Zionist streak, declining to share the organizer’s cabin because — so he said — he was now just one more Jew on the run. Also, he wanted to practice speaking Hebrew.
    “Natalie, Avram Rabinovitz wants to talk to you.”
    “Just Natalie?” asked Jastrow.
    “Just Natalie.”
    She tucked Louis into his basket under the thick brown blanket. Rabinovitz had obtained the basket in Naples, together with other baby supplies, and a few things for Natalie and her uncle, who, with Rose, had fled Rome in the clothes in which they stood. The Palestinian had also brought aboard the tinned milk on which Louis was living. In Rome, even at the United States embassy, canned milk had long since run out. To her amazed inquiry, “Where on earth did you get it?” Rabinovitz had winked and changed the subject.
    “Aaron, will you watch him? If he cries, shove the pacifier in his face.”
    “Is it about our departure?” Jastrow asked Rose as she left.
    Dropping into the vacant deck chair, Rose put up his lean long legs. “He’ll tell her what it’s about.” He was smooth-shaven, bald, lean, with a cartoonlike Semitic nose. His air and manner were wholly American, assured, easy, unselfconsciously on top of the world. “Solid