by Alan Collins
‘‘You’d better read these, Jake,’’ he said, looking very earnest. ‘‘Here, how about this: Mk 2 Grenade Usage; Assembly, Maintenance and Operation for Lee Enfield .303 Rifle.’’ He threw them on the truck seat. ‘‘And you’ll need this too: Survival Techniques for Desert Warfare.’’ Finally, he reached into the glove box. ‘‘Take this mate, and wear it all the time.’’ It was a small compass in a lovely brass case. He handed it to Jacob. ‘‘Hang it around your neck.’’ To break the tension he joked, ‘‘Of course, y’know that north is different up there to here in Australia, don’t ya!’’
Then Abe put a thick, hairy arm around Jacob’s shoulders. ‘‘I’d give me left clanger to be going’ with yer,’’ he said. ‘‘But I can’t so there’s no good wishin’. All I’m sayin’, Jake, is keep yer bloody head down and don’t be a hero. If they give yer a choice of milkin’ the cow or goin’ on manoeuvres, don’t volunteer — and that goes for the young lady too.’’
The sound of a high-powered sports car engine came closer. Jacob actually welcomed the diversion it gave from the tension of the past hour or so.
‘‘Bet that’s Daryl Aarons, Abe. You remember the bloke you nearly skittled with the truck door that time?’’ Abe laughed and his belly shook. He waited until the little open tourer drew level then gave a tremendous burst on the old truck’s massive air horns. Jacob swore he saw Daryl Aarons rise a foot out of his seat and the small car swerve across the road. The two of them fell back on the broken springs of the truck’s seat and rolled about with laughter. It was just what they needed.
On their last night in Sydney, Jacob and Peg lay close together on Peg’s narrow bed. By raising himself on one elbow he could see Peg’s haversack at the foot of the bed. He felt a momentary sadness that all Peg owned was jammed into that one pathetically small bundle. He put his arm around her and kissed her. For the next few weeks they would not be able to find courage in the shelter of each other’s arms. The shipping company would not allow them to have a double cabin unless they were married. When they had looked at the ship’s plan, Jacob was two decks down, sharing a cabin with three men at what seemed miles away from Peg.
They rarely talked about marriage. Jacob had never told Peg he loved her, nor did she declare herself to him. Yet they made love with the enthusiasm of children and the tenderness of the elderly. Marriage seemed like a burden that adults put upon themselves. If asked, which they often were, why they were not married, Peg’s forthrightness declared them to be lovers — ‘‘And that’s bloody well that!’’
Mrs Rothfield now looked upon Jacob in a new light. She no longer scolded him for untidiness nor any other shortcoming. She was, if anything, quite respectful towards him deferring to his views on the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Palestine. On shopping trips she never failed to bring back some item ‘‘to make life easier for you and — and — Pnina’’. Jacob returned to her flat at night at what she called ‘‘naughty’’ times but she never questioned him.
Jacob had delayed packing until he could put it off no longer. Abe had given him his army kitbag, made of strong, tightly woven cotton. On its khaki sides was stencilled: ABRAHAM LEWIS, NX5315189. Brass eyelets at the neck were drawn together by a steel ‘‘D’’ lock. Now he laid out his needs on the bed, shuffling them around, rejecting, substituting, until the choices seemed right. He put the mezuzah from his father’s house and Abe’s compass in a handkerchief and tucked them down the toe of a sandshoe. Mrs Rothfield had unearthed from her treasures an Arabic-Hebrew phrase book, yellowing but with a strange smell that intrigued him. He took it to please her. ‘‘Whatever else they may be,’’ she told Jacob, ‘‘Arabs have very good manners, so better not to offend.’’ In a short time, the kitbag filled out. Despite Palestine being a desert country, he had read that as in Central Australia, the nights could be very cold. He poked an extra jumper in and hoped that Peg had thought of this too. The kitbag now looked like a well-stuffed saveloy. Jacob laid it down and with pen and ink laboriously wrote his name on the other side to Abe’s.
He looked around the room he had occupied for so long. It was, he worked out, the fourth room he had slept in for any length of time. The first was in his old home, a room he shared with Solly; then he had lived at The Balconies, after that at the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home. Finally (was it finally? he asked himself), he had come here, to Mrs Roth-field’s flat. He gave a slight shudder and walked out on to the small balcony. He looked across the treetops to his old home. He could see, yet not see, Ruti in the room he once shared with Solly and Abe and Irma Lewis in the bedroom where Alice and Felix Kaiser once slept. A wave of fear of the unknown turned Jacob’s skin clammy in the night air. He did not want to lose the images in his mind, yet they disturbed him deeply. Back inside his room, he scrabbled through the kitbag and took out the mezuzah. He would keep it on him all the time. What if it was foolish? He put it in his trouser pocket. Then, for good measure, he threaded a cord through the ring on the top of the compass, and put it around his neck, feeling its metallic coldness on his chest. After this he repacked the kitbag and fell into a troubled sleep.
Ten
Captain Stavros Domenikos commanded the Athene. She was easily the worst ship of the many that comprised the merchant fleet of the Heliopolos Shipping Company, registered in Panama City but with Piraeus as its home port. ‘‘Captain Domino’’, as Peg called him — ‘‘because he throws a double every time the ship enters port’’ — had previously captained a wartime freighter that worked round the Dardenelles, always one step ahead of the Germans. His ship’s locker contained the flags of nearly every nation. His crew could rapidly rig a bewildering assortment of shipping company bands on the funnels.
The Athene and her wily captain were the ideal combination to run the British blockade. As she slid through the Suez Canal, she flew the flag of Liberia. Jacob and Peg, together with all the other passengers, watched the sandy wastes from below decks. Lascar seamen were the only sign of life the British could detect as they scanned the vessel through binoculars. Just another ex-wartime rust-bucket, flag-of-convenience freighter, they thought, not one of those refugee ships loaded with hundreds of Jews released from displaced persons camps, desperate to get to Palestine.
Shortly after leaving Sydney, Captain Stavros Domenikos had received a signal suggesting that if he could discreetly cross the Mediterranean and put in at Marseilles, he could make a few drachmas for the company (and himself) by taking on board over two hundred Jewish refugees and dropping them off near the beach at Haifa. Captain Domino, breathing retsina fumes, had taken a shine to the bubbly Peg. He told her, ‘‘Little Green Eyes, you and your friend can move in together in your cabin. Soon I am going to need every inch of sleeping space I can devise. No stopping at Piraeus — direct to Haifa, and you two had better be prepared to go over the ship’s side with the others.’’
‘‘Gawd,’’ Peg giggled to Jacob, ‘‘the old tub is going to look like the Manly ferry on Boxing Day.’’
‘‘It’s no joke, Pnina, what we are collecting from Marseilles are the remains of the Jews of Europe. Haven’t you see the newsreels?’’
‘‘Well, we could fit a few more of them into Australia for that matter. They could have a slap-up reunion at the Vienna Wald.’’
They leaned over the rail as the Athene nosed her way up Marseilles harbour. After a while Jacob said, ‘‘I wish we could — fit more of them into Australia, I mean — but the funny thing is, the local Jews aren’t that keen. Can you understand that?’’
To his surprise, Peg nodded. ‘‘Yeah, Jack, I reckon I can. When the war ended, some dago prisoners-of-war were released from a camp not far from our place in Bathurst. During the war, they worked on the farms and everybody liked ’em. Some of the local girls even wanted to marry them ’cause they had such good manners! Well, after the war, they were shipped off home, but after eighteen months later about forty or so of them came back. It was a different story then. Our boys were home
from the war and looking for jobs. The dagoes were the same blokes, same good manners, some brought their wives — but Jack, I tell you, the locals made their life hell.’’ She threaded her arm through his. He felt her breast snugly against it. Yet despite the pleasure of her nearness, he was not altogether convinced that the situation with these Italians was the same as for Jewish refugees.
As they got nearer their destination, he had begun calling her ‘‘Pnina’’ more often than ‘‘Peg’’. She was still shy of calling him ‘‘Yakov’’ in public, reserving it for their more intimate moments. Now he fished around in his jacket pocket and took out a clipping from a Sydney newspaper.
‘‘Y’know, Pnina, I’ve never shown you this — but it made me so bloody angry that I reckon it helped me make up my mind to go to Palestine. When I read it I was really ashamed — I could not believe that a Jew was capable of writing this sort of junk.’’ Jacob laid it flat on the ship’s rail and read out:
‘‘I do not want this place overrun with foreigners, no matter where they come from. I can’t stand them, their outlook or their methods of living. I live Australian, think Australian and play Australian. My kids are Australian and won’t have a bar of foreign kids. Maybe that seems intolerant but I want to make it clear that I am an Aussie of the Jewish religion.’’
He spat over the rail in disgust, screwed the paper up and watched the wind whip it astern. Peg whispered to him, ‘‘I’m glad you’ve thrown it away because now, my little four-be-two, we are starting from scratch.’’ He laughed, a sound that swept away the past. He kissed her and held her close until a dark-eyed crewman with a coil of rope stopped in front of them and smiled.
By now the ship’s engines had slowed right down; the bow wave was hardly more than a curl of cream cake. Instead of the normal shouting of the Greek officers, there was a menacing calm which deepened with the approaching darkness. On both sides of the ship, steel boarding ladders were lowered; the rails slid back and the gantries started to lift off the hatch covers. Captain Stavros Domenikos stood at the port-side wing of the bridge. The Athene was not going to tie up, in order to avoid berthing fees — and, it was hinted, questions about passports. Those passengers now on board had been ordered into the so-called First Class Lounge where free muddy Turkish coffee was available. Peg and Jacob were concealed behind the lifeboat davits, straining their eyes into the sludge and detritus of Marseilles harbour.
Peg spotted them first. The sound of a crying child gave her the location; she pointed out the direction to Jacob. Self-importantly, he took out Abe Lewis’s compass and read off the finding.
‘‘East by south-east,’’ Jacob said excitedly, ‘‘I’m going up to the bridge to tell old Domino.’’
Before she could stop him, he ran for the bridge companionway. She watched him until he disappeared behind a bulkhead. Then Captain Stavros’ bellowing laugh came down to her. Jacob joined her a few minutes later. ‘‘Look,’’ he told her with some satisfaction, ‘‘the ship’s changing course ever so slightly. We’ll be alongside their boats in a few minutes. I’ve got to help them aboard.’’
Peg looked at this new Jacob, this boy turned man of action right before her eyes. She approved; this was what she had secretly hoped for. (And, she noted with pride, Jacob had said ‘‘I’’, not ‘‘we’’, have to help.) He was already standing by the opening in the rail and would not budge when the crew tried to edge him out of the way. Now the flotilla of open boats was entering the weak halo of light beside the ship’s ladder on the starboard side. The Athene was still under way; it took skill to get the boats alongside. A crewman stood on the lowest step of the ladder with a boat hook and with a lunge caught the rope thrown from the leading boat. Two more came up and moored themselves to the first. The same thing was happening on the port side.
Jacob forced his way past a crewman and ran down the ladder. He reached out to the first bundle and held it tightly. Only when he was halfway up the ladder and the bundle spoke did he realise he had a mother and baby in his arms. When he reached the deck, Peg took the baby from him. The woman, who was small and fragile looking, sank down on the deck and sobbed. When Jacob next looked around, Peg, the woman and baby had gone. He gave what help he could to the refugees that swarmed up the ladder and listened with amazement to the variety of languages. As they moved under a deck light he could see their worried, worn faces more clearly but could not judge their ages. The last of them came on board and the small boats slipped away towards the harbour lights. The Athene was now just a black, shrouded shadow, except for its navigation lights. Engines throbbed and a phosphorescent wake marked her passage out of the harbour. Soon they hit the rolling swell of the open sea. Lights came on and the refugees were herded below like dumb cattle.
Jacob shouldered aside the huddled groups and reached his cabin. The woman he had brought on board was stretched out on the top bunk, apparently asleep. On the lower bunk, Peg and the baby were making idiotic noises to each other. Peg stopped and looked up at him. She giggled at his discomfort. ‘‘You look about as useful as tits on a bull, standing there,’’ she said. ‘‘Why don’t you go to Con the steward and get some milk and a bit of something for me and his nib’s mum?’’ She returned to her baby talk as Jacob slammed the cabin door behind him. This was not what he had in mind when he went to help the refugees. When he came back with the milk and some bread rolls, Peg had fallen asleep with the baby in her arms. He took a pillow, stretched out on the cabin floor and drifted off into a dream-free sleep.
The woman climbing down from the upper bunk woke him. She had taken the baby from Peg’s unresisting arms and was now forcing a bottle between its lips. Jacob looked at it.
‘‘How old?’’
He held up two fingers. The woman nodded her head.
‘‘Two?’’ He looked again with disbelief. Even according to his very limited experience of babies, the child should have been a lot bigger. It was pushing the bottle away and yelling. Peg woke up, quickly summed up the problem and broke off a piece of roll. She took the baby from the mother, who seemed to have relapsed into a helpless daze. With mounting resentment, Jacob left the cabin and headed towards the ship’s bow. There he took up a self-imposed vigil, frequently consulting Abe Lewis’s compass. He found this vaguely satisfying but quite useless, as he had no map to check his bearings.
On the evening of the third night out of Marseilles, Jacob, still keeping watch, heard the growl of powerful diesels above the noise of the Athene’s wheezy engine. Just as the approaching patrol boat’s lights came up, Captain Stavros Domenikos ordered total darkness throughout the ship. There was a sudden violent change of course; the Athene’s engines sent shudders through the old hull. Jacob went below, where Peg held tightly to the baby as the ship pitched and yawed with every change of direction. The mother sat on the cabin floor in utter dejection.
Peg attacked Jacob as though he were personally responsible for their present misery. ‘‘Tell that dago bastard to keep his rotten boat steady,’’ she pleaded. Jacob put an arm around her and the baby. As he did so, a strange but pleasantly pervading sensation came over him. It was a different but stronger love; it quite overwhelmed him and left him feeling what Mrs Rothfield would have called a mensch — a proper man.
Baby smells brought him back to reality. He left the cabin again. He went back to his watching post in the bow. The Athene had shaken off the patrol boat. All the next day, the refugees, ignoring the crew’s instruction to stay out of sight, gathered on deck to be the first to catch a glimpse of the Palestine coastline. Captain Stavros Domenikos told a Greek-speaking refugee that they should be off the coast by the early hours of the next morning. As the message raced through the crowded decks, it had become midnight, then only a matter of hours: some even swore they could see the coast in the fading light of that same day.
Jacob and Peg were afire with excitement of what lay ahead of them. That night they packed and repacked. They obtained oilskin cloth from a crewman and wrapped
their haversacks in it. Peg, looking at the bundles, began to cry. ‘‘Yakov,’’ she howled, ‘‘I can’t bloody well swim. What if I fall out of the boat? What’ll I do?’’
Jacob stood up proudly, knocking his head on a steel beam. ‘‘Pnina, my little country mouse, you are looking at a Bondi boy, a fair dinkum swimmer!’’
‘‘Oh, my hero! Saved from a watery grave by my very own little four-be-two!’’ She threw herself into his arms and pretended to swoon. The woman, clutching her baby tightly, shrank back from this crazy pair. She and the baby had been occupying Jacob’s bunk. It was strewn with her few possessions. Jacob saw a photograph of a weedy looking man with glasses; for one frightening moment it reminded him of Ruti’s dead father. He was grudgingly allowed to hold the baby while she gathered her stuff into what looked like a once pretty tablecloth.
‘‘Suits you, Yakov, my bloody word it does.’’
‘‘Is it a boy or a girl?’’
‘‘Got a little spout, Jack, so I guess it’s a boy — especially as his name is Joshua.’’
‘‘How do you know? You can’t even understand his mum.’’
‘‘Saw it on an official looking bit of paper. I’m not just a pretty face, y’know.’’ She turned her back on Jacob and bent over. ‘‘You can kiss my bum, Mr Know-it-all!’’
The woman looked shocked until she saw Peg turn around and give Jacob a big grin. For the first time since coming aboard, a thin smile creased her tired face.
Jacob thought it was time he assumed command. ‘‘Listen, it’s late. We’ve got to get a few hours sleep before we…’’ He wanted to say disembark, but that sounded rather pompous for what would surely be as chaotic as the boarding.
Peg said, ‘‘Before we leave the Queen Mary for a tour of the exciting Middle East!’’
Jacob took his pillow and a coat and stretched out on the cabin floor. When all was quiet, he got up, switched off the light, then bent over Peg and kissed her.
