Refiner's Fire (3 page)

Then there was a man who could only have been a waiter in a fashionable Budapest cafe or, and this is said without levity, a professional movie usher in Strasbourg. In the background were other eyes and half-hidden faces, old suits and hats. Levy felt very little, if anything, for these people and noticed mainly that the girl played with the rail and was the only one who did not return his stare. They watched quietly from the dark shade, as he stood in bright sun.

Some men were offloading coils of rope, barrels of solvents, and hundreds of iron poles with auger ends. Levy took possession, ordering them to return the material to the ship. They looked up in disbelief and weariness, for they had been working all morning. Furthermore, they had been ordered around too much by Teutons and Anglo-Saxons, so they each spit on the ground and went back to their tasks. “Jesus,” said Levy, and ran up into the ship, where a man stopped him and then recognized him.

“You must be Pool Levy. I am Avigdor Avigdor.” From then on, Avigdor Avigdor became his right arm and he became Avigdor Avigdor's left arm. No one would move unless told to do so by Avigdor, who knew nothing about ships. Levy became used to issuing orders and hearing them echo in half a dozen languages.

“The first thing you must realize,” said Levy to his assembled seconds in command, “is that on a ship like this we will need every kind of equipment, material, livestock, and provisioning that we can get aboard. Since our cargo is human and hence very light, we can carry anything we require (if we can get it) without reference to weight. I want you to find what you can—food, medical supplies, ropes, scrap metal, lumber, tools, welding apparatus, fire hoses, wicker furniture, dowels, cloth, wire, a record player, tires, anything.”

“What is wicker furniture?” Levy explained. “I can understand,” said Avigdor, his left fist clenched and his right hand open, “food, livestocks, ropes” (he looked quickly about the bridge and superstructure to indicate his ignorance of nautical affairs), “but what please may I ask are we to do with scrap metal, tires, and wicker furniture?”

“We're going to make sure that we get these people to where they're going.”

“But how with metal and tires and furniture?”

“How indeed?” said Levy, retreating to his cabin and leaving them speechless on the bridge. Though they had learned to call him Paul instead of Pool they resented his command and suspected that he was touched. Whereas they had expected him to stay on the bridge and turn the wheel, he quickly got to know every inch of the ship and went around telling everyone what to do. Most irritating for the more than three hundred passengers was that he made them move from where they had settled so that he could draw squares and rectangles on the deck plates in bright red paint. No one, he said, was allowed to stay or even walk there.

He noticed that the people, whether Poles, Germans, Czechs, Russians, or whatever, had a very peculiar mannerism. When he spoke to them they more often than not kept their lower lips between their teeth. He went to his cabin and stared into a round mirror set into a fake ship's wheel. When he did what they did he resembled a chipmunk, or a hamster. Depending upon their facial structures they looked variously like chipmunks, hamsters, rabbits, raccoons, and even a bucktoothed puppy he had seen once in Tennessee when his father had taken him there to experience the place before Roosevelt covered it with water. They used this expression to show their bewilderment, anger, happiness, and hope—a long and difficult string of things which drove the lower lip into the path of the teeth.

The Germans had beaten them so badly because, at least in part, the Germans were so well organized. But the Germans had been beaten badly in their turn by the Americans, who were savage and rich. America was clean; everything worked; everyone was sensible and fair; they had in America methods of organization as incomprehensible to Europeans as alchemy or a dead oriental language. Therefore, when Paul Levy covered the decks in red geometry, they deferred, for evidently he had some sort of plan, and who would dare to contradict him? For several weeks trucks rolled up periodically, and at the end of May everything Paul had requested was stowed aboard the ship. This astonished him. Though he had asked mainly for junk, in Southern Italy even junk was then in short supply.

He had refused to tell his plan because of an elegant Italian in a white suit. Paul noticed that he came to sit every day near the foot of Virgil's Column. Although this aristocrat was more than a quarter of a mile from the ship, lost in a sea of masts, spars, clotheslines, pigeons, vendors, and pedestrians on the steps and in the little piazza, Paul picked him out immediately in scanning with the ship's telescope because it was easy to recognize the front page of the
Times
of London. He couldn't be sure that the man was not simply reading an English newspaper and had no concern for the
Lindos Transit,
until he got up a head of steam and, as many ships in the harbor often did, vented it in a white cloud and a whistle which echoed off walls, buildings, and hillsides covered with hot brush and stones. The gentleman of the
Times
sat bolt upright and threw his paper down. Paul had his left hand on the whistle chain and his right supporting one end of the telescope. Each time he pulled the chain the man sat more upright and appeared more expectant and tense. Paul held off until his quarry picked up the downed paper and resumed reading. He called Avigdor to the telescope. “You see the man reading the
Times
of London?”

“How do you know it is the London
Times?
"

“The type face.”

“Oh, yes. I see.”

“Pull the chain and watch him come to life.” Avigdor pulled the chain, and later let everyone know that there was good reason to obey their strange captain.

O
N THE
second day of June the
Lindos Transit was
fully stocked with refugees, food, and a hold full of junk and tools. People had continued to straggle in until their number verged on the counterproductive. Anyway, the sound of the words “second day of June” sounded to Levy positive and energetic. He fired up his engines, called in the Italian pilot, cast off at the tide, and with a plume and a whistle he signaled the port that the
Lindos Transit was
about to sail. For the benefit of the gentleman in white he tapped out the Morse symbols for Palestine, since he had always believed that homage was due to British agents in hot places.

In bright afternoon the ship drew out of the harbor and into the Adriatic. The pilot descended, and Levy took his first real command. The wind was fabulously strong from the east, as it most often is in Brindisi port, and the waves came in hard against the bows. He passed the last salt-eroded fingers of white rock, and then they were in open sea, rolling and pitching, out of breath, suddenly so much smaller, suddenly so much colder.

He knew that everyone would be going below, and he had ordered coffee, chocolate, tea, and biscuits for them even though the extravagance was bound to hurt later and disrupt some of his careful projections. Two-page census forms in Russian, Yiddish, German, French, and English had been distributed among the passengers. Levy had said to Avigdor, “Put jokes on the form, any kind of jokes.” In the holds and corridors people were eating and laughing.

When well out to sea, the ship found its stride. Avigdor came to the bridge. “Now,” he said, “tell me what you plan to do with all this nonsense we have put.”

“We're going to fight the British—not just resist, fight. In other words, if when we approach the cordon we are attacked by a British destroyer, we will sink it.”

“Ha! With wicker furniture?”

“Shields, Avigdor, shields and breastworks. Here, steer one-twenty-six. Keep it steady. If it starts to seesaw then lock it and wait, and make the adjustment little by little.” He gazed deep into the smooth globe of the compass. “It can be done, but to do it everyone will have to work day and night for three weeks. Can they?”

“I believe they can. I believe yes.”

Even as a child Levy had been obsessed with achieving the impossible. In geography class, of which he was by all measures the shining star, he often lost his position in a “bee,” or other such exercise, due to his dreaming. For example, he had wondered if it would be possible to eat Borneo. Could you even eat just one little village in Borneo? A half a village? A quarter? How about a house? The picture of his eighty-five-pound four-foot self gnawing at the beams of a Borneo house staggered him. Could he manage even to ingest his desk? He calculated that powdered and mixed with conventional food it would take six months. “What is the capital of North Dakota?” asked the teacher. Levy, as runt of the past, was open-mouthed. Sometimes smart children drift: away, but they always come back. The teacher abandoned him to an apparent dunce's reverie. “April, what is the capital of North Dakota?”

“Sacramento!” blurted out the little girl, eager for points.

If François Villon could write on the scaffold a poem swift and sure enough to save him, could he not have eaten the platform itself? If Pizarro could subdue the vast Inca Empire with a handful of men far from home and only one casualty, then surely people had wrong ideas about the possible.

In the war, he had wanted to be a hero and was forever trying to find the proper position. At a Norfolk bar he talked for several hours with an air squad mechanic from a carrier, about which parts of an airplane engine, upon being struck by a bullet, would cause the whole to fail and the plane to crash into the sea. Paul Levy's intention had been to shoot down an enemy plane with small arms fire. Given opportunity he would have stood in the open as the planes swept by, eyeing their engines and firing with careful fury until either he or they were crushed. It never happened. He used to lie awake at night thinking about ways for one man to sink a warship. He speculated that his obsession with the impossible would some day bear fruit or kill him. He could not restrain himself from consideration of that which was feasible mainly in the magical world and, strangely enough, sometimes in this one.

He had chosen quite a task. A ship out of port is a difficult creature to sustain, much less to convert; especially if it is crowded with children, the old, the sick, the dejected, and the insane; especially if it is a quarter-century-old coal-fired coastal freighter destined to match up with a contemporary imperial warship. But a cat can outrace the best thoroughbred horse if only it can grasp the idea of racing.

It was Paul Levy's moment, to tell the old ship how to do the right and proper thing. He ignored the cries and plaints, the colors and the sea, the beautiful women who go for a captain like a sea bird for water, the captivating children, the smashing luminescence of the bow waves, the rapid winds and the sea lure, and stayed in his cabin to concentrate on the plan. His lantern swayed back and forth with the ship; its brass flashings caught his eye in a circular dance, but he tightened himself and worked. Over the sea, bright angelic winds prodded up whitecaps.

After a night and a day the infant scheme coalesced. He had laid it out while in port, but several problems had persisted, problems he knew would submit when he was again in his familiar element and could marshal the genius of the sea.

The windows of the wardroom were sparkling with spray. All the men there were in khaki as in the military, although they had forsaken its precise and terrible beauty to convey east the men, women, and children who were the sweepings of the great European war. They took for their Midway or Coral Sea a ship loaded with cynical innocents. Paul Levy spoke as waves of white rolled and battered the ship in a night hour in the Mediterranean. His plan was quite complicated and quite correct.

“First, I want the census to be analyzed. Separate the people into those who can effect the skills they claim, and those who cannot. Appoint one able man for each twenty-five who are incapacitated. He will be their captain, and he will drill them in lifeboat procedure, response to instructions in English, etc., etc.

“As for the rest, they are the heart of the matter. I want you to pay particular attention to athletes and strong workers. They will be put in the combat sections. Welders, mechanics, engineers, smiths, tinkers, will form a technical section. I want four translators who are proficient in our five main languages. Appoint five cooks. It would be best if they were professionals, but it doesn't really matter, since what we eat is important but how it tastes is not.

“At the proper moment, about three in five of the engineering force will transfer to combat. The rest will be damage controllers. I want a medical staff of at least five, and one man, preferably an entertainer, to play records and to talk over the public address system. Oh yes, if there are enough musicians and musical instruments aboard, I want a little orchestra. It will change everything, as you will see if it materializes. When combat isn't drilling it will labor for engineering. Anyone who is double or triple qualified will do double work. But there will be priorities. First is engineering and technical; second, combat. The rest, even.

“Before tomorrow, I want two things. First, five of you will circulate among all the people to wake them up and tell them that we are going to fight the British. Second, another five will do a competent analysis of the census in light of what I have just told you.

“Remember, when you awaken someone in the middle of the sea, you are awakening him from a state of special dreaming, and he can rise to anything. If you tell him that he is to fight the British you may renew the man who was beaten down. Go and do it. Tell them that we will force our way past the cordon. Tell them anything. Tell them that their mothers and fathers are poised in heaven waiting, that now is the time for the dream of the Jews. By the love of God this ship rides eastward on moon-driven waves and with escort of heaven. Tell them that. With all they've been through, they are due for some sweet language.”