by Bart Midwood
Then Mustafa unbolted the galley door and swung it wide.
“Have you seen a woman?” said Keller.
“A woman, Mister Keller?”
“A little Yid from the steerage. Black hair. A juicy bit, I’ve been told, and big in the bust.”
“Ah, yes?”
“A gentleman from cabin-class saw her sitting on the rail on the lower deck a while ago. He says that he saw her from the top deck and that by the time he got down the stairs she was gone. He says he’s sure she threw herself to the fish.”
“That is too sad.”
“He’s wrong though, Mustafa. I feel it in my bones that she’s still wandering about the ship somewhere.”
“I’m sure your bones are right, Mister Keller.”
“You see her, you bring her straight to me.”
“Aye, Mister Keller.”
“That goes for the lot of you. You hear me?”
The other Turk and the Hungarian, who were standing by the pots and stirring them stupidly, said in unison that yes they heard, and Keller stomped off and climbed up to the deck.
Mustafa waited until he could no longer hear Keller’s feet on the steps, then shut the door and bolted it and let Blima and the sailor out of the larder.
Briefly now the four men looked at Blima with a question in their eyes: What did she want to do? Did she want to return to her husband? Remain in the galley? Throw herself to the fish? What! But she couldn’t answer, not reasonably anyway, for right now she wanted to do nothing, nothing at all, wanted actually an absolute end to the business of doing altogether, to the incessant movement of life, the routine travail of always having to go from one thing to the next!
To their credit the men appeared to understand her on this point immediately and even exhibited a sort of primitive sympathy. Mustafa gave her another cigarette, the other Turk lit it, the Hungarian poured her a cup of brandy and the sailor lightly stroked her hair. Then they let her alone and fell to talking among themselves, trying to sort out the matter at hand.
The sailor took the line that he should keep her hidden and protect her, but this alarmed the cooks.
“It could go hard on us if they find her in the galley,” said Mustafa.
“Then I’ll hide her somewhere else,” said the sailor somewhat irritably.
“And what’ll you do with her when we get to Argentina? Do you mean to smuggle her through the customs?”
“I’ll keep her hidden on board and then take her back to Marseilles.”
“You have ten more days at sea, my friend, and then seven days ashore. That’s seventeen days. Then you have three more weeks for the voyage back to Marseilles. All told, that’s nearly six weeks you’d have to sneak about like a thief and worry over her. And then you’d still have the problem of slipping her through the customs in Marseilles.
“Of course,” continued Mustafa after a pause, “you wouldn’t have to go to such a lot of trouble in the first place if the husband weren’t in the picture.”
“Right you are,” said the Hungarian. “So let me go and get that little Yid and cut his throat. I’ll do a nice clean job, I promise you, and then throw him to the fish.”
The simplicity of this proposition pleased Mustafa and his eyes brightened.
“Wonderful!” he said.
And as the other Turk and the sailor said they too were pleased, the matter was settled without debate and the sailor, being the most enthusiastic of the group, began to work out the details at once.
This was how he saw it. First Janos, the Hungarian, will steal down into the steerage section, find Blima’s husband and cut his throat; then he will carry the body aft and toss it into the sea. A quarter of an hour later Mustafa will report that he saw a man leap from a rail on the lower deck. In the morning Blima’s husband will be reported missing and it will be supposed that he had committed suicide in grief over the imagined suicide of his wife. Shortly thereafter Blima will miraculously reappear and present herself to the Captain, who, being not only a sentimentalist, but a German, will surely see the whole comedy as a tragic romance, shed a tear or two and forthwith book Blima on the return voyage back to Vienna, where, as a young beauty precipitously widowed, she will be received with nothing but tender consolations, perhaps even gifts of one kind and another, and find herself free at last to marry her Yusef!
“And that, my friends, will be that,” concluded the sailor, clapping the Hungarian on the back.
“Bravo,” said the Hungarian grimly, and he took the brandy from the shelf again and poured a round, and the four men clicked their tin cups together and drank with solemn resolve, throwing their heads back.
“You’re all too good to me,” said Blima, “but I can’t allow you to do this.”
“Never mind,” said the sailor. “It’s already decided.”
“So I see. All the same, I can’t allow it.”
“Why?” said Mustafa.
“Because it’s wrong to murder. Also my husband has never tried to harm me. In his own way he has even tried to please me.”
“But he can’t. He can’t please you. You’ve said so yourself.”
“So is this a reason to murder him?”
“Listen to me,” said the sailor impatiently. “What’s his name, this husband of yours?”
“Eli.”
“And what is it about this Eli that displeases you so much that you were ready an hour ago to throw that pretty little body of yours to the fish?”
“What displeases me is that he’s not Yusef.”
“So why don’t you just divorce this Eli and marry your Yusef?”
“That’s impossible.”
“Don’t say impossible. In love all things are possible.”
“Yusef is dead.”
“Dead? Your Yusef is dead?”
“Last year he was beaten badly with a lead pipe by a man who works for my father, a beastly man.”
“Your father told this man to beat your Yusef?”
“Yes. Yusef was in a very bad way after the beating. Not only were the hips and legs broken in many places, but there was damage also to the spine and God knows what else. He lived on for almost six months, always in a fever. I used to visit him secretly every day. Often we talked of running off somewhere together—to France, Holland, America. But it was all fantasy. He couldn’t even stand up, much less run.”
The sailor lit a cigarette. He seemed suddenly quite ill, pallid.
After smoking in silence for a while, he said, “He knew many languages, your Yusef?”
“Oh, yes. Many.”
“And this Eli of yours, how many languages does he know?”
“One.”
“Perhaps you should teach him more languages.”
The sailor spoke these last words sharply, bitterly, and then he took his coat from the wall and went to the door.
Blima felt as if she had been struck in the face and tears came to her eyes.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I want nothing more to do with you,” said the sailor.
“Why! What’s happened? Did I say something to offend you? Please don’t go! Tell me!”
“You’re a woman who brings death to men.”
“What? What are you saying to me!”
“Your Yusef, he was killed on your account. And now Janos, he’s ready to kill your Eli, also on your account. And after Eli, who’s next? Maybe it’ll be me!”
“No, no! My God!”
“Maybe I should’ve let you kill yourself tonight. Maybe you’d got a hold of the right idea there!”
With that the sailor hurried out of the galley and slammed the door behind him.
“Pay him no mind,” said Mustafa, putting an arm around Blima’s shoulders.
But Blima shook her head and muttered something to the effect that perhaps the sailor had a point. Mustafa protested of course, but weakly, and Blima detected a note of insincerity in his tone and drew away from him and, after taking a careful look at
him and at the other cooks, ran out of the galley and up the stairs to the deck.
The sailor was nowhere in sight. The ship had picked up speed and the wind took her breath away for a moment. She turned her collar up and, holding on to the rail, began to make her way toward the stern.
“Is this what I am?” she wailed aloud. “A woman who brings death to men? My God, my God!”
And her whole being trembled with revulsion.
Below decks in the dark steerage she tiptoed through the maze of sleeping bodies until she found her husband. He was asleep on his side on the two blankets she had arranged earlier to make do as a bed. She lay down near him and gazed at his face and studied his breathing, which was quite shallow.
Suddenly he opened his eyes.
“You’re here,” he said.
“Yes. Go to sleep.”
“I dreamed you ran away.”
“Why did I run away?”
“Who knows! It was only a dream. Just foolishness.”
“I too had a dream,” said Blima after a pause. “I dreamed that a monster tried to kill you.”
“And what happened?”
“I saved you.”
“Why are you crying, Blima?”
“Who knows.”
“And you’re trembling! What’s wrong?”
“The dream frightened me.”
“You shouldn’t be frightened of dreams.”
“What should I be?”
For a moment Eli appeared to consider the question deeply, inhaling a few times importantly through his nose, then answered with solemnity: “You should be like me. Simple.”
“And if I am simple, then I won’t be frightened of dreams?”
“Correct.”
“Well, that would certainly be very nice. Only I don’t think I can manage it.”
“And why not?”
“Because I don’t know how to be simple,” said Blima and she lay her head on Eli’s chest and wiped her tears on his shirt.
“Then I will teach you,” said Eli. “So listen: First you must forget all these languages you know.”
“But I love them. I love these languages.”
“Of course you love them. But what do you need them for! Do you want to talk to the whole world or what!”
“Please, Eli, don’t touch me now.”
“Just lie still.”
“Not now, Eli.”
“Don’t push away my hand.”
“Please. No.”
“And keep your voice down or you’ll wake someone up!”
The Baron’s Gift
Argentina, 1916
Blima took the rifle from the wall and aimed it at the long fat snake crawling through the window and down the post of the little bed where the baby was having her afternoon nap.
“Hurry, Mama,” said Anchel, cowering by the stove.
Blima pulled the trigger and hit the snake and also the bedpost, which splintered and broke. Then she ran to the bed and snatched up the baby who had awakened in terror.
Mordecai, the elder son, burst in the door from outside.
“What happened!” he demanded.
“Mama killed a snake, a big one,” said Anchel and he ran to the snake and picked it up triumphantly. “Look at it!”
Mordecai slapped his brother across the back of the head and grabbed the snake and threw it out the window. “Idiot! Even after it’s dead, a snake could bite you!”
“Who says!”
“Quiet, both of you!” said Blima. “Come, Surah, take the baby outside.”
Surah, the six-year-old, came out tentatively from her hiding place behind the stove and took the baby in her arms and went to the door.
“Quickly!” said Mordecai.
“Where is your father?” said Blima.
Mordecai got red in the face and stared at his shoes.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Blima went to the window and saw her husband, Eli, a tall thin man, running toward the house from the edge of the pasture. Behind him stood a young barefoot woman, Carmela, leaning against the doorpost of one of the peasant shacks, smiling sleepily, watching him run.
“Who is shooting?” he said.
“Mama shot a snake,” said Surah from the doorstep.
Eli caught sight of his wife in the window. “This is true?” he asked her.
She nodded and pointed the rifle at the snake on the ground. “He came in the house. In the window. This means rain.”
Eli laughed. “And what would it mean if he came in the door?”
“Don’t be smart. Before the rain the snake comes out of the ground and crawls in the house.”
“This is superstition.”
“Look behind you.”
Eli turned around and looked. At the edge of the horizon the sky was dark, almost black.
“Maybe it will go away from us.”
“It is getting closer.”
“Who tells you it is getting closer?”
“My eyes tell me.”
Eli turned to Surah. “You see what kind of eyes your mother has? Your mother she has eyes like God!”
“Don’t talk like this to the child,” said Blima.
“I said something wrong?”
“You are mocking me and you are angry.”
“Ah! So?”
“So you are frightening her!”
“Am I frightening you, Surah?”
“Yes, Papa,” said Surah.
“I’m sorry.”
“I love you, Papa.”
“Don’t be frightened of me.”
Anchel ran out of the house, shouting, “Look, look! Wagons! You see, Papa?”
Impatiently Eli turned once again. He squinted his eyes, scanning the pampas.
In the distance were seven wagons in a line, just coming up out of the valley and winding their way toward the ranch.
“Gypsies,” said Blima.
“How can you tell this!” said Eli, now with undisguised irritation. “Are you a witch or what!”
“Mama’s right!” said Anchel.
Soon the wagons got close enough for everyone to see, much to Anchel’s satisfaction, that they did indeed contain Gypsies, about thirty. Blima put up a pot of potato soup for them and served it in the yard when they arrived. They had their own bowls. They were a handsome group, all with laughing eyes, except one old wrinkled woman who looked at everything with suspicion and refused the soup.
Eli told them they could wait out the storm in the barn if they liked, but a man who seemed to be the leader said they intended to continue on to the hills nearby. They knew good caves in the hills, he said, and would be safer there than in the barn.
“You could leave the children,” said Blima.
Eli glowered at her disapprovingly, but she ignored him. “We have room in the house for maybe four or five,” she continued. “The house is strong, not like the barn.”
The Gypsies held a conference in whispers and in the end left behind five children.
When the storm loomed up high in the heavens and Eli saw that many birds were flying away from it, he went to the barn to secure the shutters and the doors. Pepito, a fat bearded man in charge of the milking, helped with the shutters. He said he would remain in the barn with the cows.
“If the storm is great,” he said, “I’ll sing to them. Otherwise tomorrow they’ll give sour milk.”
In the barn Eli had forty cows that he kept for milk, but the other cattle, more than three hundred that he raised for slaughter, he had sent out to the far pasture, not more than a kilometer away, but hidden by a small hill. Tending them were three peasants, short wiry men of Indian blood.
“They should have brought the herd in by now,” said Blima.
“Maybe they’re drunk,” said Eli. “But never mind. These fellows know the land and will manage one way or another.”
The storm when it came was savage. The winds made a sound like a gigantic wounded beast. Every other moment something, only God knew what, str
uck the house—now on the roof, now on the walls, now on the shutters or the doors. And the thunder was terrible. Again and again lightning flashed in the fireplace and the crack under the door. And the ground trembled as if it were about to give way.
Meanwhile Anchel, Surah and Mordecai sat on the floor near the stove, huddled together with the Gypsy children, and Blima sat nearby, holding the baby in her lap. Now and then she told a little story or spoke a word of comfort. But Eli spoke only once or twice, and then under his breath, and kept pacing up and down, smoking his long dark cigarettes.
After nearly two hours the storm passed abruptly. Then everyone went to the door. Anchel unbolted it and Eli pushed it open. A light misty rain veiled the late afternoon sun. Bits and pieces of wood were scattered among puddles, many puddles, and lizards and snakes crawled about here and there. At the edge of the pasture the three peasant shacks were leveled, and so was the barn, and the milking cows were lying on their sides dead.
Eli put on his high boots and hurried out of the house. Near the doorstep he tripped over something, which rolled over and revealed itself as the body of the young peasant woman, Carmela, lying in a pool of blood and water with the bones in her face broken.
A hush fell over the children in the doorway. Blima thrust the baby into Surah’s arms and put on boots too and took the rifle and went out, hurrying after Eli, who was already on his way to the place where the barn had stood. Here they found Pepito dead on his back, the skin of his hands and face burnt to a crisp and the soles of his boots scorched and tattered around the nails.
“The lightning,” said Eli. “It went through the nails in the boots. Go back in the house, Blima. This is not for you.”
Blima did not reply, but gazed at him grimly, and he said no more and let her go with him. They went to the shattered remains of the shacks by the pasture. Here they found the bodies of nine peasants. In each they looked for signs of life, but found none, and they left and walked to the far pasture, nearly two kilometers, and found the three herders dead and all the cattle also dead. In a ditch Eli saw a hay wagon, toppled by the storm but still intact, and he set it upright. Blima helped him put the herders in it and they hauled it back to the house.
