Bridal Chair (19 page)

Ida and Michel reached Madrid on a sweltering August day, grateful to have crossed the border into Spain but nervously aware that they had yet to pass through Spanish immigration. Conditioned to fear and uncertainty, they trembled as a Spanish officer boarded the train and demanded to see their documents. Michel handed them to him, and his heart sank as the man examined them and frowned.

“Italian. They are written in Italian,” the immigration officer said irritably. “I cannot read Italian. I will have to find someone who can translate these papers for me.”

Michel stared at him helplessly, but Ida smiled and loosened the buttons of her blouse.

“It is so very hot, isn’t it?” she asked and dabbed at the beads of sweat that trailed down her neck to her breasts. “Please, senor, do not trouble yourself to locate a translator in this heat. I will translate them for you.”

He hesitated. He was a very young man, and he wanted nothing more than to complete this tour of duty and retreat into his favorite cantina. He reflected that given the heat and his overwhelming thirst, he could easily down an entire pitcher of sangria. But he did not actually mind lingering in this particular carriage of the train. The senorita was very beautiful, her hair the color of copper and her smile so inviting. He did not see many smiles on the faces of the frightened refugees whose papers he examined day after day.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Please translate them for me.”

Ida nodded. “Of course. It will be my pleasure.”

Michel stared at her in surprise. He knew Italian was not in Ida’s linguistic arsenal. He stared straight ahead as she studied the documents and informed the officer that the government of Italy authorized safe passage for Michel and Ida Rapaport, who were students of art and would remain only briefly in Spain in order to study the paintings on exhibit at the Prado.

“This is a special student visa,” she explained. “See the seal, the gold seal. It is issued only to students. But you must know that, of course, as an officer of your rank. Surely you are familiar with such documents.”

Again she smiled at him seductively, licked her lips, and twisted a curl about her finger.

“Of course I know that,” he agreed. “And you and your husband are both art students?”

Ida looked at Michel and laughed. “But he is not my husband,” she said. “He is my brother. He has friends in Madrid so I will be often alone. You will find me on any day of this week in the El Greco gallery of the Prado. Perhaps you can show me your beautiful city if we should happen to meet.”

“Oh yes,” he said eagerly and handed the papers back to her.

Suddenly the day did not seem as hot to him. He was not on duty the next day, and he thought of how pleasant it would be to wander down the cool corridors of the museum with this beautiful woman, whose long, fiery lashes almost brushed her high cheekbones.

“Welcome to Spain, senorita,” he said and helped her down the steps of the train carriage, smiling benignly at Michel who trailed after her.

“I congratulate you,” Michel muttered as they trudged through the streets of Madrid, but there was no pleasure in his voice. “You all but stripped naked for him.”

The naive girl he had married had become a woman who knew all too well how to exploit her beauty. He had loved his bride, but his wife, this determined woman who relied so recklessly on her sensual beauty, sometimes seemed a stranger to him.

Ida shrugged.

“I took a chance and it worked,” she said. She would not apologize for using the only weapon at her disposal.

“You were lucky.” His voice was muffled by a sudden sadness.

“We were lucky,” she corrected him.

They hurried to the Spanish customs office and arranged for the crates of Marc’s paintings to be shipped to the port of Seville where they would be held until they could be loaded onto the
Navemare
. Ida made certain that
The
Bridal
Chair
was placed in the largest of the crates.

“These crates must be handled very carefully,” she cautioned the shipping agent.

“Senora, they weigh over a thousand pounds. It will be impossible to be careless with them,” he replied and laughed harshly.

Within hours, they were on an express train to Seville. For the first time in months, they were safe from danger. Mysteriously, Franco’s fascist government was unthreatening to Jews. Michel had heard it rumored that the dictator’s father was Jewish, or perhaps it was his mother, but the truth was of no importance. They would not be in Spain for very long.

Ida smiled and took his hand. “You see. Everything is working out,” she said.

“Is it?” he asked wearily and turned away to study the sere landscape as the train sped southward.

They were welcomed into Moshe Rapaport’s tiny apartment and assigned a sofa in the living room. Two other young couples, Hannelore and Leon Herzberg and Claire and Henri Dreyfus, who also awaited passage on the
Navemare
, slept on the floor in nests of blankets Moshe had scavenged from neighbors. Michel and Ida liked them at once. Hannelore and Leon, both engineering students, had managed to escape from Germany while Claire and Henri, a doctor and a nurse, had been on the run from the Nazis since their hasty wedding in Alsace. Both couples had family in the United States. They traded place names. New York. Chicago. Boston. Cities of hope, cities of freedom. The very names soothed them. The similarity of their situations, their youth, and their optimism created an immediate intimacy.

Moshe Rapaport was a rotund little man, his fleshy face deeply lined, as though new furrows had been carved into it with each new flight. He and Leah, his pleasant plump wife, could no longer count the places they had lived in since fleeing Russia. Leah seldom left the impossibly tiny kitchen where she cooked huge pots of cereal and stews for her young guests whose names she never bothered to learn. Moshe and Leah were awaiting a ship that would carry them to Palestine where their two sons lived on a kibbutz.

“But how will you get into Palestine?” Michel asked. “The British have a quota on Jewish immigration.”

“Should I worry about the British?” Moshe asked and laughed again. “I am a Jew. If I can’t come in through the door, I will climb in through the window.”

They did not argue with him. Ironic merriment, they realized, was his defense, hope his only weapon.

The
Navemare
, a Spanish cargo ship that had been swiftly converted into a passenger vessel, finally steamed into the harbor. The young people gathered their possessions and hugged Moshe and Leah, who thrust parting gifts on them—packets of food and a parcel of brightly colored bandannas that Moshe had found on the floor of yet another abandoned apartment.

“Who knows? You may find a use for them,” he said. “A Jew can find a use for anything.”

They laughed, promised to write, and rushed down to the pier, where they presented their papers and boarded.

They saw at once that the condition of the ship was appalling. Compact columns of bunks crammed the foul-smelling hold, which was crowded with elderly German Jews who had taken advantage of a special dispensation for those over the age of sixty-five. They were allowed to emigrate if they took no more than the equivalent of five American dollars with them. The disoriented elderly passengers in the cramped steerage area looked around in bewilderment and mumbled anxious queries.

“Moshe was right. We should have opted for Palestine,” Michel said ruefully.

“Oh, we’ll be all right. We’ll pretend that we’re on our honeymoons,” Leon said, and they laughed.

Ida went to the deck where cargo was being unloaded, her eyes fixed on a crate containing her father’s paintings that was being hoisted by several seamen toward a passageway.

“Where are you taking those crates?” she shouted. “They are my property.”

“They’ll be stored in the lowest hold,” a burly stevedore called back.

“No. They belong on deck. There. Over there.” She pointed to an area just above the prow.

“Who says?” he asked belligerently.

“I say.”

She rummaged in her purse and pulled out the Italian exit visas, which she waved at them. “These documents are special authorization from the director of your shipping line. Don’t you see his seal?”

He looked at her blankly and reached for the document that she knew he could not read. He fingered the gold seal and nodded.

“As you say, senora,” he agreed and instructed that the crates be lowered onto the deck.

She sighed with relief. The storage area in the hold might flood during the crossing, and she could not risk water damage to her precious cargo.

She and Michel stood on the deck and breathed free for the first time in months as the
Navemare
moved with surprising grace out into the open sea. He held her close as the coast of Europe receded from view.

“When will we return?” he wondered aloud.

“I will be back,” Ida promised.

It occurred to him, only hours later, that she had said “I” rather than “we,” a realization that neither surprised nor discomforted him.

The dangers that lay ahead assaulted them on their very first day out to sea. A rumor circulated that there was a shortage of drinking water, and passengers, in the grip of panic, scrambled to seize the containers of potable water. Distraught women clawed and shoved as they claimed bottles for their children. Two old men pummeled each other as their weeping wives attempted to separate them. Children crawled beneath the legs of adults and emerged waving carafes of the precious liquid.

Ida turned to Michel and her friends. “We must stop this,” she said.

She sprang into action. She stood on an upturned barrel, flanked by Michel, the Dreyfuses and the Herzbergs, each of them waving an improvised banner crafted of the brightly colored bandannas. Moshe had been right. They had found a use for his improbable gift.

“Stop this. Stop this at once,” she shouted.

Her voice shrilled authoritatively above the melee, and the warring passengers turned to her. Miraculously the riot was quelled. The desperate crowd stood in expectant and obedient silence.

“Form lines. One line in front of each banner,” she commanded, and they obeyed. “You will stand on these lines whenever water or food is being distributed,” she said.

There were murmurs of dissent, but the lines were formed. Day after passing day, as the
Navemare
plowed through the waves, they stood in their assigned places. The three young couples took their places each day, their banners fading in the harsh sunlight and stiffened by the salt-scented winds. Ida remained in charge. She herself carried food and drink down to the hold for invalids, and when her self-imposed duties were accomplished, she wrapped herself in her blue cape and perched protectively on the huge crates that contained her father’s paintings.

Michel occasionally sat beside her, sometimes fingering the fabric of her cloak. He remembered the long-ago day when she first wore it. She had sailed into the Left Bank café, her arms outstretched, the matching beret perched on her bright curls. “My blue-winged love,” he had thought then. The cape had become faded and threadbare. His alpine Ida, his tender lover, his sad-eyed bride, was now a regal woman whose features were chiseled into a fine sharpness, her skin wind-burnished. She ruled with impunity from her deckside throne.

* * *

The ship could not sail a direct course. The German navy had turned the Atlantic Ocean into a maritime battlefield. Their submarines lurked beneath the rising and falling waves, stalking freighters and passenger ships. The
Navemare
radio operator brought hourly reports to the captain who altered course, now turning westward, now turning eastward, to avoid the deadly torpedo fire that had already sunk so many other vessels.

“We will be at sea forever,” Claire Dreyfus murmured to Ida as they sat together atop her pyramid of crates.

Ida laughed bitterly. “I think ‘forever’ has already passed,” she said.

She wandered across the deck with her drawing pad, clutching her diminishing supply of graphite sticks. She drew ragged toddlers playing circle games, an old woman huddled in blankets, a man wrapped in a prayer shawl swaying devoutly at first light.

Day drifted into night and night into day. The sea grew turbulent and the ship plowed through a storm, heaving dangerously from side to side as the gusts of wind grew more and more powerful. It seemed to the frightened passengers that the sea itself had also declared war on them. They huddled below deck as bullets of rain spewed down and angry waves soared onto the deck. Shafts of lightning scissored their way across the heavens, and thunderbolts exploded deafeningly. Exhausted sailors sloshed their way from station to station, seawater spilling out of their high boots.

Throughout the horrific tempest, Ida, wrapped in her blue cape, her hair drenched beneath the rain-soaked, green silk scarf, scurried across the deck, cajoling sailors to cover her crates with tarpaulins. She and Michel secured the makeshift covering against the increasingly fierce gale winds. When at last the crates were safely covered, she fell into Michel’s arms and allowed him to carry her to her bunk.

The storm ended, and the Jewish high holy days began. The weary congregation stood on deck, their faces dampened by sea mist commingled with tears, and prayed their way through Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. They toasted each other with dregs of sacramental wine that tasted like vinegar.

“Next year in New York,” they said bitterly.

Dreams of Jerusalem were futile. Survival was their minimalist goal, New York their Zion, and the United States their promised land.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the worshippers gathered again. Their bodies swayed in rhythm with the newly gentle waves. An elderly cantor intoned the Kol Nidre prayer in quivering tones. Ida watched him, moved by his dignity and devotion, reminiscent of her father’s portrait of a rabbi that the Nazis had called an example of “degenerate art.”

He stood before them again the next day and chanted the awesome
Unetanneh Tokef
prayer.

Ocean spray pearled his white beard, and his blue eyes glistened as he sang the familiar, poignant words.

“
Mi
yichye, umi yamut
? Who will live and who will die?”

“Save us. Save our children,” they prayed.

Ida and Michel also prayed. They asked the God in whom they might believe to protect them, to offer them some small hope for the quiet happiness that had for so long eluded them.

Ida saw how the prayer shawls of the men were lifted by vagrant winds. She watched a father lift his small son and daughter and hold them close, drawing his tattered white
tallit
over their shivering bodies. The little girl’s hair was lemon yellow. Her father had a tube of oil paint in that exact shade. She wondered how Marc might paint this synagogue at sea. She wondered if he would be moved to lift his own voice in prayer. But he would have no need, she decided with a flash of insight. His paintings themselves were prayers.

The day drew to a close. Sunset spread its melancholy pastel rays across the upturned faces of the exhausted congregation. Mysteriously, a shofar was produced and the cantor blew the triumphant resounding notes.

“
Shanah
tovah.
”

“A good year.”

Their whispered wishes drifted through the windswept darkness.

* * *

Disease continued to sweep through the ship. Henri Dreyfus, their doctor friend, opened his medical bag and displayed its meager contents.

“Aspirins. Alcohol. Liniment. These are our weapons. How can we fight typhoid? It is as though we are shooting arrows at huge cannons.”

His voice was somber, his face drawn. He had stayed up all night, darting from one sick passenger to another.

“You’re certain that what we’re dealing with is typhoid?” Michel asked him.

“Classic symptoms. Headaches, vomiting, elevated temperatures, bloody diarrhea,” Henri replied. “I’ve seen only a few cases. I did my residency at a private hospital in Paris, which is hardly a breeding ground for typhoid. The rich are more susceptible to syphilis and gonorrhea.”

Claire remained at his side, refilling basins of water for compresses, offering soothing words of hope to the hopeless. Pale and exhausted, she stretched out on a narrow bunk, her hands resting protectively on the gentle rise of her abdomen. Ida realized that her friend was pregnant.

“There must be other doctors and nurses on board. We need their help,” Ida said.

She raced onto the deck and spoke to group after group, urging anyone with a medical background to offer assistance. There were those who came forward willingly, others who responded tentatively.

“You must help,” Ida told them adamantly, and they reluctantly agreed.

“Who can say no to that redheaded devil?” an elderly internist muttered to his wife as he followed Ida.

A psychiatrist who had worked with Freud circulated among the patients with a thermometer and a stethoscope.

“I hope I still know how to use it,” he told Henri and offered him the contents of his own medical bag, which consisted largely of laudanum and valerian.

The deaths began. The cantor was the first to succumb to the disease, his prayerful Yom Kippur query answered. He had died and the ocean was his grave. His sallow, bewigged wife trembled uncontrollably as she stood at the rail of the ship and watched as his body, wrapped in his worn prayer shawl, was lowered into the sea. A quorum of ten men chanted the Kaddish and Ida was surprised to see that Michel was among them. She wondered sadly if he was rehearsing for his own role as a mourner.

She knew that his restless sleep was haunted by dreams of his parents. He awakened, calling their names, and grasped at the fetid air as though he might pull their ghosts into his arms. She dared not comfort him. She was all too familiar with the power of nightmares. She herself awakened exhausted from the nocturnal races she ran endlessly during the brief hours of her slumber.

Day by day, the death toll grew. The deckside funerals were swift, the emaciated bodies scarcely creating a splash as they were dropped into the sea.

Ida, making her rounds of the hold, saw that the small girl with lemon-yellow hair was ill. She carried damp cloths to the distraught parents and she wiped the child’s face. It was a flower of a face, she thought, the tiny mouth a rosebud, the skin petal-soft beneath the lucent layer of sweat.

“Shayna, her name is Shayna,” the mother said, her cheek pressed to the child’s feverish forehead.

“And she is
shayn
, a beauty. How old is she?” Ida asked.

“Seven, just seven.”

Ida’s eyes filled. She might have been the mother of a child who would now be seven years old. She chastised herself for the thought; it was obscene to mourn the ghost of her unborn child, not when the living, breathing child before her so desperately needed her help. Fatigue was playing vicious games with her imagination. She shrugged herself free of the thought as she ground a precious aspirin into water and fed it to Shayna. She moistened yet another cloth and wiped her spindly limbs, but the child’s temperature soared. She shivered although her body was slick with sweat. As Ida watched, her rosebud of a mouth opened in a smile, and her eyes fluttered closed as though a sweet dream had eased her way into death.

“No!
Nein
!
Nein
!” her father shouted and cradled his daughter’s small inert body in his arms.

Her young brother wept and his mother held him close.

“Shayna, Shayna.” She whispered his sister’s name into her surviving child’s ear as though mandating him to remember her always.

“Shayna, Shayna,” he repeated, his voice breaking.

She was buried within the hour, and it was Ida who stood with the small group of mourners and intoned the Kaddish, wishing fervently that she could believe in her whispered prayer. Was it a great and sanctified God who allowed a child with hair the color of lemons to die such a sad and terrible death?

* * *

Shayna’s death was the final loss of life on the
Navemare
. The illness had run its course. The voyagers had survived and dared to contemplate the new lives that awaited them. The children played circle games, lovers sought sweet privacy in the lifeboats, and even the demeanor of the seamen softened.

Hannelore and Claire joined Ida on her usual perch atop the crates. Michel scavenged blankets and canvas sacks and created a nest for the three friends who lifted their faces to catch the fleeting rays of light. Claire’s pregnancy was now apparent and she told them that she had felt the child move within her womb. Shyly, the two young women touched the soft swell and felt the tender flutter of the nascent life.

“You were very brave to proceed with the pregnancy,” Hannelore said. “My sister became pregnant just as she and her husband finally got visas to the Dominican Republic. She couldn’t bear the idea of carrying a child during such a dangerous voyage into such a dangerous world.”

“What did she do?” Ida asked, although she knew the answer.

“She had an
avortement
, an abortion,” Hannelore replied. “She is young. They’ll have other children.”

“We thought of abortion,” Claire admitted. “I’m a nurse, Henri is a doctor. We understood that we had that option and that it wouldn’t pose any real danger. We knew that if a pregnant woman was swept up in a
rafle
and sent to concentration camp, she would immediately be killed.”

“Why didn’t you do it?” Ida asked.

“I didn’t want to give Hitler another victory, another Jewish death. Henri said he would accept whatever decision I made, but I know he was relieved when I decided to carry our child. We had already taken so many risks that we decided we could take one more.”

“You don’t regret it?” Hannelore asked.

“No. Do you think your sister will regret her decision?” Deftly, Claire tossed the question back at her.

It was Ida who replied.

“She may regret it and she may not. But she will never forget it.”

They looked at her and reached out to cover her hands with their own, but no questions were asked, no answers volunteered. Ida stared straight ahead, out to the sea where quite suddenly a flock of gulls appeared, swooping down and sailing gracefully on the crests of foam-laced waves.

“Gulls,” Hannelore said wonderingly. “We must be approaching land.”

“New York,” Ida said softly, and she wondered if her parents would be aware of the
Navemare
’s arrival. She realized that it was the first time in weeks that she had thought of Marc and Bella and she wondered if she should feel guilt or relief, acknowledging that she felt neither. Soon enough, she would be swept back into the orbit of their love, their needs, their demands.

She awakened the next morning to sounds of jubilation, to clapping hands and stamping feet, to the excited laughter of children and shouts of gladness. Ida and Michel, hand in hand, rushed onto the deck and stared at the majestic statue that reigned over the harbor.