Ship of Fools (31 page)

Lola danced grandly and severely, her features fixed in the classic erotic-frowning smile, which fetched forth ritual amorous groans from the males of her assisting company. At her last roulade of clicking heels, the others sprang up. The rehearsal over, they danced in pairs as if for pleasure, but with no pleasure in their faces, and they ignored their audience with well-rehearsed contempt.

Elsa, with her hair in a roll on top of her head, which Jenny had helped her to do and which made her look older, broader in the cheeks, averted her eyes suddenly and stepped backward as if she would hide behind her parents. Excited by the dancing, her face had fallen into a vacant, happy smile. Then alas she saw her student, with only black wool trunks concealing his nakedness, take one of the Spanish girls about the waist and begin dancing with her. Elsa's modesty suffered a shock which caused real pain at the very center of her body; it rippled out in hot waves to her fingertips. She closed her eyes and saw in fiery darkness what she refused to see by daylight—the flexing muscles of his back, the thin beautiful ribcage, the long slender legs with boyish bony knees, and worst of all, the long fine-muscled arms embracing that girl they called Concha, her body limp and yet in movement against his naked chest. No, she could not bear it. “Mama,” she whimpered, “Mama, please, let's go inside.”

“Are you sick, Elsa?” asked her mother. “Is there anything wrong with you?”

“No, no, please,” said Elsa, in an oppressed, patient voice. “The sun is so hot.”

“I give you until tomorrow,” said her mother firmly, “until tomorrow to be in better spirits, and then I shall give you a good purge. That is no doubt what you need. Here on this ship, with the lack of exercise, the indigestible food—yes, I could have a headache myself, easily. A good purge, that is what you need. But now control yourself, and come finish the dominoes with your father. As to your hair, Elsa, I don't like it so. This evening you must put it back in the old way. And never change it again without asking me.”

“Yes, Mama,” she said, meekly, and sat down with her father again. Dominoes and checkers with her father, housework that she hated under the constant advice, direction and reproof of her Mama, never to be able to call even her hair her own, to be left on the shelf an old maid at last, yes, that would be her fate, she could feel it deep within her. Her heart sank and then rose again in her and began to knock desperately against her ribs as if it were a prisoner beating against the bars, as if it were not part of her but a terrified stranger locked up in her, crying crying crying “Let me out!”

Her father, noticing her forlorn face, pinched her cheek with tenderness and said jovially, “Maybe our Elsa is in love with somebody—maybe that big solemn Swede Hansen. No, Elsa, my treasure? Tell your papa and mama. We know best.”

Elsa said even more meekly, placing a double six after long hesitation, “No, no, Papa, not that.”

Frau Lutz, glancing up from her knitting, saw for a moment framed in the doorway against the bright horizon a sight which caused her to frown warningly at her husband, indiscreet as he ever was, thoughtless as usual. Arne Hansen was dancing with Amparo. She seemed to be instructing him in the mysteries of her native dances. They passed and repassed the doorway, Hansen following as awkwardly as a dancing bear, with Amparo treating him as if indeed he were that animal and she the trainer. She seemed to be scolding and laughing at him; they would pause swaying and she would take him by the elbows and shake him. In all seriousness he would begin again, his big hands and feet getting in the way, his wet shirt sticking to his pink skin. He seemed like a man bewitched, utterly indifferent to the scandalous figure he presented to the eyes of the world.

Frau Lutz, amazed at this instance of failure in her judgment of men, a subject in which she considered herself an expert, was pleased to note that her daughter's back was turned towards this unedifying scene. She never ceased to worry, night and day, at the unbelievable hardships a mother encountered in her efforts to preserve the innocence of a daughter. Everywhere you turned, unsavory sights, immoral situations, disreputable characters, shameless behavior on the part even of those in whom you had some reason to place a little hope. Men!

Her gaze rested upon her husband with baleful intensity. He was talking his usual foolishness to Elsa, playing his game without a care, understanding no better than ever the deadly seriousness of life's problems; joking with Elsa about love, of all things. What would have become of them if she had been unwise enough to depend upon him in anything for a moment? Ah, she would find a very different kind of husband for Elsa, she had made up her mind to that.

Johann, pushing his uncle's wheel chair, heard the Spanish music and went a little faster, then slowed down again as he came in sight of Lola, turning and clicking her heels. His sullen fair-skinned face, with its scanty blond stubbles of beard shining, lighted up so tenderly he looked for an instant like a young angel. He turned the chair to the rail and stopped to watch the delightful show.

“Go on, Johann,” said his uncle, for the slight joggling of the chair soothed him, and the movement against the wind helped his breathing. His shriveled flesh and his very bones were old and tired and lonely; they cried day and night for a little pity and ease and comfort. In the hospital in Mexico the nurses had rubbed him with sweet-smelling witch hazel all over, their firm young hands pressing lightly into the weariness of his shriveled muscles; they had fed him warm milk and cool fruit juices, papaya, pomegranate, lime; he sucked them through a glass tube, half asleep as if he were a baby again. In the night when he groaned and called out, a Mexican nun in her white face bands and gauzy white veil would come and minister to him, and she would swing the mattress softly on its light springs as if it were a cradle, saying under her breath, “
Ave Maria
…”

Now in the miserable cabin, Johann touched him with loathing, he would hand him a dripping cold cloth and say viciously, “Wash your own dirty face.” He set down trays of coarse revolting food beside him and went away without giving him so much as a spoon for the soup. In the long nights, when he would be in pain to ease nature, he might call and call until his throat closed and the pain in his chest shot through him like fire before Johann would rouse to bring him the vessel. The humiliation of the helpless flesh was punishment enough, without that hard, unforgiving face above him, averted in loathing.

“Johann,” he wanted to cry, “child of my hopes, what has become of you? Where did you go? Pity, a little pity, in God's name.” But there was no pity in that child. His soul was sicker than any flesh could be. Herr Graf trembled to think of its fate before God's judgment.

“Can't you see there is no room to pass?” asked Johann, stubbornly lingering. “Let me alone a minute, can't you?”

“Turn back, then, Johann,” said Herr Graf, calmly, “turn back.”

The chair was whirled about so sharply he was thrown to one side. “Don't try to kill me, Johann,” he said in an ominous voice. “My God has promised me that I shall see Germany again. Defy Him if you dare!”

“Keeping me penniless as a beggar,” Johann burst out in a fury. “Where is the allowance you promised me? Why must I ask you for money even to go to the barber?”

“What would you do with money on this ship, Johann? It would be only another temptation set in your way. I will provide the necessaries, nephew, but I will not nourish your lusts and appetites. Your soul is too precious to risk in such a way, Johann. I know too well what use you would make of money here.” He drew a long, rattling sigh, the bloody phlegm came up in his throat and he spat into his paper box.

“That's what you get for gabbing all the time,” said Johann, “you miserly old Jew.”

Herr Graf looked at his hands, emaciated, the knuckles mere knobs, the fingers so weak and limp they lay flat or curved as they fell, and thought how not so long ago they would have had the strength to thrash this boy as he deserved. For such as he there was only one remedy—to mortify the flesh until the hard knot of the will was reached and dissolved—ah, a task he might have done so well, and would have so delighted in, the saving of this now ungovernable soul. But God, who was taking away his life little by little, meant for him to suffer all affliction, all possible abasement of mind and flesh to balance the great gift he had conferred upon his spirit. From the very moment he had learned that his body was beginning in earnest to die, like a stream of pure light the divine knowledge had descended upon him that, as recompense for his death, God had given him the power of healing others. In this power his soul had been eased of its fears. To his shame now he remembered that he once feared death, he had cringed abjectly as a condemned criminal at the sight of the ax, he had prayed endlessly and incoherently, begging God to reverse his inalterable law in his, Wilibald Graf's favor; to send a miracle; to punish him for his sins in any other way, no matter how cruel, but only to let him live, even as he was, in pain, in decay, in despair—to let him live.

He, a philosopher and teacher of philosophy, lecturer in universities and before learned societies, had done this terrible thing. When? In his other world, his other life. All his false wisdom had dropped away from him like soiled, outworn rags, he had stood naked as the newly born in the steady stream of cleansing light, and the softest most loving voice he had ever heard, he had not dreamed of such love in a voice, spoke within his ear. “Heal the sick,” the voice had said, with the simplicity and directness which is the language of true revelation. And from that day he had gone about his work, knowing the truth; so long as he was able to keep upon his feet, he was to go among the sick and touch them and counsel them and heal them in God's name.

It had not been easy, for the perverse human wills of his family and friends had put every obstacle in his way. It seemed almost—and this was so dreadful a thought he hardly dared give it room in his brain—as if they bore some malice or evil intention toward the dying, as if they did not wish the sick to be healed and well again, like themselves. A friend of his sister's, a willful woman, would not allow him to touch her little grandson who was suffering from bowel complaint. “He needs his rest, he must not be disturbed,” she said angrily, and the child had died. But he had saved his sister's servant, an Indian woman who had been in labor for three days, until her eyes were mere pits in her face, and her lips were blackened and dry. “It is not decent for an Indian woman to let a man see her having a baby,” they told him. “A modest woman would rather die!” At last he had gone in boldly, pushing them aside, asserting a man's authority over them, and they gave way before him as God meant them to. He had laid his hands upon the distorted suffering belly where the child kicked and heaved in his struggles to be bom, called upon God to admit this new soul to life and to His heaven at last, and the child was born safely with three tremendous tearing pains in a very few minutes. He had breathed secretly into the mouth of an infant drowning with pneumonia, and from his own ruined lungs had poured life into the child's.

Oh, there were many: after he had been sent to the hospital, he had been forced to do good by stealth, for the doctors were bitterly jealous of his power, and hindered him by rules, forbidding him under pain to visit the dying in order to touch them and give them life again. But God guided him. He knew from God in what place and at what hour he might find the one who needed him most, and no one was afraid of him because he always said at once, “God bless you, and make you well,” and then he touched them lightly, just barely with the tips of his fingers, and was away before some prowling nurse or interne should discover him and put an end to his work. Rarely in the hospital did he have the joy of seeing his dear resurrected ones in health and strength—he was watched too closely, he could not risk a second visit. But there was one: the girl with the red hair in two braids lying behind the death screen with eyes fixed upward, her face livid and mouth half-open, burning to his touch like living fire.

“God will make you well, do you believe?” he asked her, and from the scorched mouth scarcely moving he heard the words, “I believe.” Oh blessed child of faith. He had seen that girl, recognizable by her two long red braids flying and shining in the sun, leaving the hospital with her happy family not a week later. “The doctors will think they did it, but we shall know the truth,” he had told her.

These were his memories, and this his recompense, and what were his own sufferings but a divine grace since they had been made useful to others? What was death? Why had he been afraid? There remained the greatest reward of all: immortality for the suffering bewildered soul. Immortality. It is not a matter of belief, what is there to believe? How can anyone form even an idle wish around anything so infinitely formless? It is a matter of faith—no, a
hope
, a fixed changeless longing for a continued existence in another place, under another appearance, in a different element; continued existence at least until all questions are answered, and all unfinished things are done. Is it not fairly a certainty that this is a divine impulse sent from God to guide us to Him?… And yet, this longing may prove to be merely a motive power of man's present existence, an intellectual concept related to his animal instinct of self-preservation; man loves himself so dearly he cannot relinquish willingly one atom of himself to oblivion. Perhaps the whole idea then originates in the will, that source of self-love, and is simply one more of its various and deluded activities. And what about the four-footed beasts, the feathered, the finny? Perhaps they have a corresponding source of vitality in them; or better, they do not even suspect they shall not live forever precisely as they are. Ah, there's happiness for you, there is the lucky state of being.