Days of Your Fathers (3 page)

The Austrian girl, Berta Feitel, was thoroughly puzzled by him. She was fascinated by his shimmer of charm, drunk or sober – it was too light-hearted a quality to be common among her own people or indeed among any city-dwellers – but his wild exuberance seemed to her unreal, a part acted for some purpose of his own. She longed for her father to come on deck. Having spent a wise and simple life between the schools and the synagogue, he had a peculiar gift of seeing to the heart of any human being, and he could have summed up Danno Flynn for her. But Mr Feitel was still in his bunk, continually sick though the sea was calm, and Berta had no wisdom to fall back on but the experience of her own agitated youth.

When Mr Flynn was not present, he was the chief topic in the third-class quarters. Berta was supposed to be the authority on him, since she spoke good English and had always mixed freely with Gentiles. She could not always avoid being cross-examined.

‘Oy, Berta! What has he been telling you? A doctor? That man? Of course he is no doctor! Did he tell you so, Berta?'

Her questioner laughed irritatingly, making a sound like
fee-fee-fee
through his little round mouth. He had a gross body, a pink and featureless face, and the habit of generally being right. She disliked him intensely – the more so, since it occurred to her that there was an air about doctors, Jewish or Gentile, that Mr Flynn certainly did not possess.

‘Why should he not be?' asked a small dark chess-player, coming to the rescue. ‘He is an intellectual. I do not understand all he says, but he is an intellectual!'

‘That was what you said of the grocer on the corner,' answered the fat man mercilessly. ‘And he kicked you, Jacob, scrubbing the pavement.'

The chess-player sighed at this memory, and returned to his problem.

‘At any rate he has no prejudice,' said Berta.

‘Ach, that is because you are a pretty girl!' lisped the practical man. ‘He means you to trust him. He listens and overhears what we say. He makes us drunk. Jacob, he is paid to be here!'

The chess-player looked up, startled and serious.

‘It is true,' he said. ‘I will be careful. I will be careful.'

The Jewish corner of the saloon became full of quick, restless movement. Some put their hands in their pockets to feel if letters were still there; some sighed, imperceptibly rocking their bodies; others glanced at the door. Doors were no longer innocent bits of wood for them. Bad news came through doors. Berta herself was affected. Not even on the high seas was one safe. Everywhere, everywhere there were spies.

Five days of irrigation with beer quenched the drought in Danno Flynn's interior. He continued to spend some hours a day in the third-class saloon and his hospitality was as promiscuous as ever; but he drank in half-pints instead of pints, his face was shaven, his moustache neatly clipped, and his body sportingly dressed.

When one evening he turned up in a boiled shirt and dinner jacket, a hush descended upon the saloon. The peasants shuffled their preposterous boots, stared and breathed very loudly. Such raiment was connected in their minds with the President of the Republic, or a marriage, or the excitement of a travelling salesman; they expected Mr Flynn to unfurl a banner and pull a diamond ring or a bottle of medicine out of his pocket. Israel in exodus felt all its suspicions confirmed. He was rich. He had no good right to be there.

The silence impressed even Danno. He was, for about the third time in his life, self-conscious. He had dressed himself up for a gala dinner in the first-class and saw no reason for changing merely because he craved a draught beer. He met Berta's ironical eyes, and flushed. It occurred to him that he had been guilty of wanting to be admired, that he could, after all, have drunk whisky in his own smoking-room.

‘But why wouldn't I show meself to the darling,' argued Danno loudly to himself, ‘seeing she could know me for a hundred years and never see me in the like of these clothes again?'

He drank a beer with the steward and departed hastily, wishing the saloon a noisy good-night.

Meanwhile Berta had silently vanished into the night. She was filled with cold anger at his impudence in appearing amongst them with this bold admission that he belonged to another world; that he was not of them but had power over them. At the same time she knew that she herself was the cause; even the most rabid Nazi put on his best uniform when he had to deal with Jewish girls. It was the moment to ask questions, when she was at her coldest and he off his guard.

Danno emerged from the severe cubical deck-house which contained the immigrants' public rooms. The iron plates of the main deck and the tarpaulin-covered hatches were flooded with moonlight. The
Alhaurin
, at this level a ship rather than a floating hotel, swished through the calm water while a band faintly sounded from somewhere in the towering terraces of the first-class and a light flashed on the horizon, reminding the traveller that even in the wastes of the Atlantic were the Azores.

Berta leaned over the rail, waiting for her prey and comparing herself to Judith before Holofernes. As the door of the saloon slammed, she turned and smiled invitingly at Danno.

‘How is your da?' he asked.

‘Still sick. He cannot eat or get up.'

‘I'll see him,' said Danno.

‘It's nothing,' she answered swiftly. ‘It will pass. Stay here and talk to me.'

A strand of her black hair, fragrant in spite of the saloon and the peasants and the paintwork of a stuffy cabin below the waterline, blew gently against his face.

‘What land is that?' she asked, pointing to the light.

‘'Tis Africa,' he replied, ‘with negro slaves holding up a jewel to you that you may stop and be the bride of their great king.'

‘I would rather be where I am,' said Berta dreamily.

Danno felt the wind cold against his unaccustomed shirt-front as two drops of sweat shot down his chest from hair to hair like the balls on a pin-table.

‘Then I would not be changing places with any king in the wide world,' he said.

He laid his hand over hers. It did not return his pressure, but remained warm and unresisting while Abraham looked down approvingly – or so Berta hoped – upon his handmaiden.

‘You must know all the lands we pass so well,' she suggested, hoping to find out whether he was on regular duty with the line.

‘I was always a great reader,' answered Danno cautiously, ‘and many's the beating I had for it. If it was not Father Donnelly had the hide off me for not attending to my book, 'twas my Da for not attending to the sheep.'

He told her a little of his boyhood in Connemara, of the green hills and white villages, of the glimpses of the Atlantic and the soft rain that drifted inland like smoke from the sea. As he talked, it seemed to her that her suspicions had been utterly foolish. This was the history of a David rather than a Holofernes. With the readiness of youth she swung to the other extreme, telling herself that the curse of her race was to suspect, always to suspect.

‘So that is why you came here, down to the third-class!' she cried with a warmth that surprised him. ‘You have been poor. You like simple people – true people!'

‘And what more would I need to bring me here but the sight of your face?' he answered.

‘But you didn't know I was there. And sometimes – those first days – you did not speak to me.'

‘To be sure, I did not,' he admitted penitently. ‘But 'twas the sorrow of my heart at leaving Eire and the thirst that was on me that would have floated the ship from under our feet. And, God help me, it was the barrel of beer that brought me to the third-class and no other thing at all.'

‘Have they no beer in the first-class?' she asked.

‘Devil a drop that's fit to drink!'

It couldn't be true. Dear God, what an easy little fool he must be thinking her! All her suspicions rushed back, now the harder to bear for her moment of tenderness towards him.

‘You expect me to believe that?' she cried. ‘That we … cattle … down here can get something that you cannot?'

Her face was drawn and her mobile mouth twitching with anger at her own treachery. Danno Flynn stared at the explosive young woman, his features showing a sudden and comical consciousness of guilt.

‘You cannot harm us!' she stormed. ‘You will not be listened to, do you hear me? We are not afraid of you. Nothing can happen to us now, nothing any more. We – we snap our fingers!'

She burst into tears and ran from him. Even the beating of her feet upon the deck was angry.

‘'Tis the long voyage,' said Danno Flynn, ‘and a young girl is a chancy thing. I should not have been telling her that I came for the beer.'

He climbed back to his own quarters and strolled into the smoking-room in the certainty of finding the ship's doctor. Part of the girl's unaccountable moodiness was due, he thought, to worry about her father. Mr Feitel ought to have been up and about long since, for the sea had been calm as a lake since they sailed from Lisbon.

Dr Pulberry was in his usual chair and was, as usual, alone. His little red face and little white moustache were perched perkily upon the high butterfly collar of his mess uniform. His brusque and hearty manner did not gain for him all the free drinks that he felt to be his due; he accepted
Mr Flynn's offer of a whisky with gratitude, made a joke about an Irishman, and, finding it well received, became very communicative.

‘Yes, I've seen the old fellow,' he said in answer to Danno's questions. ‘I know those cases – have 'em every voyage. Nerves! Funk! No stamina! Goes on being sick because it's less effort than exercising a little will power!'

Dr Pulberry, having retired from practice ten years since, considered that his job should be a sinecure. One patched up the crew. One discussed their ailments with the first-class passengers, especially the good-looking women. But one resented immigrants. At his age one resented them very strongly. If they didn't have infectious diseases they had diseases of malnutrition; and if they didn't have those they were seasick.

‘Cannot ye give him a pill?' asked Danno.

‘The usual sedatives of course! Certainly! But they don't stop him. I'll try a better cure on him soon.'

On his visit to the immigrant saloon the next morning Danno discovered that communication had become very difficult. Those passengers who had spoken English to him were absorbed in chess or meditation or excited arguments – which ceased when he drew near. Those who did speak to him, all of them fair-haired, spoke in tongues so utterly incomprehensible that Danno shouted back to them in Erse. This amusement, however, palled under the contemptuous gaze of Berta's large, clear eyes. She ignored his enquiries about her father by replying that he was better and instantly returning to her book.

Danno Flynn put a black curse upon the night that he had gone to the third-class in a dinner jacket, and passed two whole days moping in his own smoking-room and hanging over the rail for a sight of Berta as she lay peacefully on the hatch of the main deck.

Whether it was to emphasize the difference between herself and the shapeless bundles of peasant women or whether because she knew Danno would be looking, she made a habit of taking the sun for an hour a day in a yellow swimming-suit. This delightful sight led to Dr Pulberry and
other pillars of the bar deserting their usual chairs for chairs on the verandah.

‘Now I know why you went slumming! Pretty, eh?' said the doctor, digging Danno in the ribs.

‘You should not be looking at her, doctor,' said Danno severely, ‘and her Da dying on you.'

‘We'll have him up this very afternoon,' Dr Pulberry answered, rubbing his hands. ‘Sedatives won't do it, so we'll use shock. Done it before! Always works! Come down with me about four o'clock and I'll show you.'

‘Shock, is it?' asked Danno gloomily. ‘If he's a decent man, 'twould be enough for him to see his daughter parading herself the way an actress would not be doing in the moving pictures, and she paid a hundred pound a week for it.'

At four o'clock Danno accompanied the doctor into the maze of passage-ways below the third-class deck. They pushed past motionless peasant women, staring blankly at nothing, and cannoned off bands of Czech and Polish children pointing fingers at each other round corners and shouting their international word – Stikummup!

Dr Pulberry hammered smartly on a cabin door and walked straight in. Mr Feitel lay in a narrow lower berth, his shoulders imprisoned between the white rail of the bunk and the cheerless, bolt-studded iron of the white bulkhead. His face was sunken and grey, and he was breathing deeply as if the tiny cabin contained all the air that he could ever reach. Berta sprang up from the opposite bunk and faced the doctor challengingly, the distrust and anxiety of her face changing, as soon as she saw Danno Flynn, to an expressionless mask in which her large eyes burned with anger.

‘Captain wants you at once!' said Dr Pulberry roughly to Mr Feitel. ‘Up with you!'

Berta translated to her father, who struggled painfully and raised himself on one elbow.

‘What is it?' she asked. ‘What have we done?'

‘No business of mine,' said the doctor briskly. ‘You're not
allowed to land. Wireless from the Brazilian Government – and I expect you know why.'

Berta's voice as she poured out the Yiddish translation to her father was like the cry of a whole people going up to heaven against injustice.

‘On deck in ten minutes!' said the doctor unmoved. ‘Come on, Flynn!'

He left the cabin brusquely. Danno remained behind watching the sick man, who sat up, swayed and fell back again on to the pillow.

‘Whatever you want to let him alone,' said Berta slowly, as if every syllable were a tense, muscular act, ‘I will give you. Do you understand?'

‘I should not be mixing myself in this,' murmured Danno thoughtfully, feeling Mr Feitel's pulse ‘but if he goes on deck, 'twill be the death of him.'