Hannah & Emil (40 page)

As they approached the high grey walls of the ship, the crowd seethed in boiling hotspots. Beyond the turmoil, Emil saw the name of the ship painted on its military grey metal:
Dunera
. He was soon close enough to the melee to see what was happening among the men. Fights were breaking out over luggage. Up on the gangplank an elderly Jewish man was struggling to hold onto an instrument case—for a tuba, Emil thought; it was very large—as a fat soldier pulled it, jabbing with his bayonet at the elderly man, who would not let go. The case eventually slipped free of their grasps and fell the depth of the exposed hull to the dark water below. There was a momentary silence among those closest by as they watched the descent of the instrument, and then the fighting over luggage began again with more violence and energy.

Eventually, the captain, down on the docks amid the round-up, fired a rifle into the air and the crowd stilled. Emil was close enough now to Solomon to reach out and touch him. Beneath his hand he felt the rough wool of his friend's heavy winter coat and saw that his neck was moist with sweat. Somehow he had hung onto his coat, or found another. Solomon's face turned and broke into a brief, warm smile. ‘Herr Becker! Welcome to hell!'

‘What's happening here?' Emil asked.

‘Perhaps they're expecting trouble, because of the
Arandora
. I choose to hope they will calm down when we're on board.'

The captain spoke into a loudhailer, with military emphasis on every fourth or fifth word. ‘These are your orders, Fritz. Hand over your luggage to my men as you approach the gangplank. We will return it later. You cannot take it to your quarters, there is no room. Obey all orders. I will not ask twice. We do not like spies, so do not give us any excuses. And speak English, not kraut. Proceed.'

The men began to shuffle on board more quietly, murmuring questions to one another. Emil drew level with a guard. ‘I need the receipt for my suitcase!' Emil told him, but was shoved along by the crowd. It was Hannah's case. She had it when he met her. She was using it as a bedside table in her bedsit in Brussels. It was next to his face that morning when he woke. He could not just give it over to these brutes. He felt a hand on his wrist. Before he could get his other hand to it in the crush, he glimpsed another soldier, a few feet away, holding up Emil's watch to a colleague with delight. ‘That's my watch!' he shouted, but already he was being herded onto the gangplank, three abreast with men and sagging in the middle, forced to keep moving away from his watch—Benjamin's watch—and its new owner by the mass of bodies behind. He grasped Solomon's wrist, their arms stretching as men crammed between them. Someone thrust a heel into Emil's bad leg and water sprang to his eyes. Behind him a boy was crying. Ahead of him there was a sudden slowdown that threatened to topple those around him off the gangplank. Emil looked down. The strip of water between the quay and the ship was a long way beneath, dark, oily. Solomon turned back towards him from up ahead. ‘Slow down,' he addressed the surge of men. ‘The rabbi is frail. Slow down, please!'

But still they came, swarming up towards the ship, harassed by the soldiers below. Emil and Solomon reached a lower deck and were herded aft, feeling the sudden loss of air as they went down, past rolled wire, below decks, into a low-ceilinged space crowded with hammocks and tables. Soldiers were shouting at them. ‘Find a bed. Sit on it. Shut up!'

As the men descended into the bowels of the ship, hundreds pushing in behind them, it quickly became apparent that there would not be enough hammocks for even half the men. ‘Here,' Solomon said to Emil. ‘Between us, we'll take a hammock and a table, and we'll swap, every night. He who sleeps on the table can have my coat as a mattress. That way we need never sleep on the floor.'

The hold filled quickly around them, and when it was full, more crowded in, until they were huddled on the floor and in the hammocks, muttering to each other in the dark in disbelief. Emil sat on the table to reserve it while Solomon lay curled on his side in the hammock, his head balanced on the taut edge so that he could talk to Emil. ‘You were on the
Arandora
?' Emil asked. A thrum of complaint rose around them, intermittently silenced by the yap of a guard.

Solomon nodded. ‘I was near the lifeboats. The captain told me to get on one. Some of them broke as the ship went down. Ours was all right, but there was hardly anyone on it. We got some people out of the sea. Not many.'

‘Listen,' Emil said, ‘you must take the hammock for the voyage. I'll manage on the table.'

‘No, your cough is worse than ever. I'm fine. Not a scratch on me.'

‘But you must rest. It was only a few days ago. I cannot believe they have you on another ship so soon.'

‘Perhaps I'm their lucky charm. Me and the others who did not drown.'

‘Then I'm glad you're with me. Perhaps this time the ship will make it to Canada.'

‘Emil, we can go to Timbuktu for all I care. So long as we get there in one piece.'

They lay in the crowded hold all day without food, restless and sweating. There was a latrine at the rear, soon blocked and overflowing. The guards would not let them move about the ship to use another. The portholes were covered over with boards but there were gaps and they sensed nightfall, just as the engines rumbled into life and they began to move off. As soon as they left the shelter of the port they felt immediately that they were heading into rough waters. The men grew rowdy, talking loudly, excitedly, groaning, some of the boys crying, some old salts singing. Eventually, when it became clear that no food was coming, and that they must make it through the night however they chose, the men withdrew from each other in their hammocks, curled on tables, some on the floor, trying to stay away from the sloshing latrine as the ship pitched and tumbled away from England.

Emil's table was close to the latrine and it slid around in the slick of foul water from the overflowing buckets. The air was black and fetid. Solomon's shape lay above him in the hammock, so close he almost touched him when he turned on his side. He dared not speak, in case Solomon had fallen asleep. He did not have the heart to wake a man who against all odds had found some rest.

Emil stared into the thick black air above the men's heads, these prisoners pitched into their darkest moments by the lurching of the ship. The hold was peopled with all of their nightmares: violent men, shattering glass, speechless farewells on railway platforms. He slipped eventually into a sleep more like illness than rest, a place of inescapable lucidity and repetition, of loss that filled his body like a sweet, poisonous gas.

In the first moments as he sank under he immediately began a strange circular journey around the streets of his childhood. He rode the bicycle that his father built for him from scraps around the ten blocks that spread out from the apartment, the perimeter prescribed by his mother, past the school, the bakery with its wonderful morning aromas, the train station where the commuters swarmed onto the platform for trains to Düsseldorf in the morning and swarmed out again in the evening, the church, the police station. Along the river, the new warehouses and factories. As his table moved around the rolling deck it came into his dream that he could not remember which was closest to his home: the school or the shops. He became furious with himself. It was his job to remember exactly where everything was. Someone would come whom he would be charged with telling about the town, about what happened where, in precise detail, and there could be no question of simply forgetting.

He was a grown man, hiding in an apartment across the street from the trade union building. He did not know what he was hiding from, but then he saw them. It was early, and as the day's work was due to begin and workers filled the streets on the way to their offices, two lorries drew alongside the union building and disgorged what seemed to be thousands of men, all in dark, crisp uniforms. They streamed into the building while around them the workers on the street kept their heads down, even as they came to a halt to allow the men to pass. They came without end, like a plague of insects, so numerous and close together that they were a black swarm rather than a group of individuals.

Emil watched them from the window of the apartment, frozen as he saw through the windows of the trade union building the stairs and the offices filling with the black figures. Then, as the workers outside began once more to surge along the street towards their workplaces, there was his father, elderly, portly, running from the river against the tide of people on the street towards his offices. Emil remained immobile in the window as his father drew closer to the swarm, growing closer to being absorbed with every passing instant. The moment went on and on as Emil skated around the deck. The men still swarming from the lorries, his father running towards them, Emil frozen in the window. Inside his body there was a box of flickering light and dark, in which his father was running perpetually towards the building, and he was always watching, unmoving. For the rest of the night in that little box the scene did not end, only repeated, an inescapable loop.

Eventually, as the weakest chink of light crept through the boarded-up portholes and the storm eased, he finally began to leave the darkness, coming up through the layers towards his life as it was now. Solomon's voice came quietly from above. ‘How many nights would you say it takes to reach Canada?'

Emil pulled his compass from his pocket, glad that it had not been stolen from him in the night. Hans had left it behind. It had been in his pocket the years since then. He would not put it past these Neanderthals to swipe it from him while he slept. ‘They're not taking us to Canada,' he said, studying it by the weak light from the edge of the porthole. Solomon leaned over the edge of the hammock and Emil held the compass up to show him. Its arrow pointed south, not west.

By their third day at sea, rumours rippled and skirmished among the men in their hammocks and tables. Though the sky was overcast it was possible for all to see from the light at morning exercise that they were not going west. During their twenty-minute jog around the deck in which the weaker, slower men were insulted and hectored, an older man with shoulders like a wrestler's, a Nazi, said to Emil: ‘They tell me you have a compass.' Emil pretended not to hear. The Nazi pushed him. Emil punched him in the nose, blood appearing straightaway at his nostrils. The English guard beside them, Cook, a man who seemed to be of subnormal intelligence, perhaps even brain-damaged, and who took great pleasure in violence of any sort, let out a whoop. ‘That's it, Jerry. Show him what you're made of!' The officer at the bow ordered the men to keep moving and jabbed a boy close to him with the butt of his rifle.

That night, Emil lay in the hammock, trembling. He felt Solomon stand from the table and loom over him in the light from the dim lantern tied to the crossbeams above. ‘You're shaking,' he was saying. ‘Your shirt is wet. I'll take you to the infirmary.'

Emil stared past him, seeing not the men in the shadowy bowels of the ship but Papa, thin, young, running away from him on the ice, pulling a pale-headed boy on a sled. Solomon took hold of Emil's arm and pulled him gently to his feet.

Emil was aware intermittently that someone was trying to bear him along the gangways and up and down stairs. He was confused by the darkness, the soldiers that reared up out of the shadows. I am a prisoner of the British, he thought. They will put my head on a stick. Each time he attempted to take his own weight both men fell on the floor, and it took minutes for Solomon to get him back on his feet, sliding him up against the metal wall to manage it. When they finally reached the infirmary the twenty or so beds were filled with men with dysentery, bayonet wounds and one suicide attempt, his wrists bandaged. Emil stared at the man's soiled bandages as he lay there with his eyes closed and Solomon moved him on to where several men sat on wooden foldaway chairs at the end of the room. One of them noticed Solomon and Emil and stood. Solomon slipped Emil's arm from round his neck and dropped him into the chair. ‘Where are the medical officers?' Emil heard him say. He looked like he was shouting. And then he looked like Thomas. So, they were both prisoners. He couldn't help but feel relieved.