About half of the refugees Addy meets are Jews, several of whom mention Souza Dantas’s name. If it weren’t for the ambassador . . . The others are a mix of Spaniards fleeing Franco’s regime, French socialists and so-called degenerate artists, and other “undesirables” from across Europe, all seeking safety in Brazil. Most have left behind their families—siblings, parents, cousins, even grown children—and not a soul knows what, exactly, the future will hold. But despite the uncertainty, the underlying mood has shifted, now that everyone has settled on board, to one of giddy anticipation. With the Alsina set to sail at 1700 hours, the air suddenly smells of hope, and freedom.
Addy walks the length of the ship until he reaches the bow, where he discovers a navy blue door with a brass placard and laughs at his good luck: SALON DE MUSIQUE, PREMIERE CLASSE. A music lounge! He holds his breath as he reaches for the knob and is saddened to discover it locked. Perhaps someone will open it, he tells himself, stepping to the rail, watching as a crush of men and women amble by. Sure enough, after a few minutes, the blue door swings open and a young crewman dressed in white emerges; Addy waits until he has disappeared into the crowd, catching the door with his toe just before it closes. Inside, he faces a stairwell. He climbs the steps in twos.
The lounge is empty. Its cherry floors gleam from beneath a patchwork of soft wool rugs in red, gold, and indigo. Floor-to-ceiling windows along the starboard-facing wall offer a view of the port, and the wall opposite is decked with mirrors, making the room feel larger than it is. There are polished wood columns in the corners and a broad, arched doorway leading to what Addy presumes to be the first-class cabins. A leather sofa, a few round tables, and a dozen chairs are gathered at one end of the lounge, and at the other end, perched in the corner—his heart somersaults when he sees it—a Steinway grand piano.
He sizes up the instrument as he approaches. It was made in the early 1900s, he guesses, before the Great Depression, when manufacturers began downsizing to the baby grand. Addy blows on the hood, blinking as a plume of dust levitates over the instrument, gleaming in the sunlight. Beneath the keys, an elegant round stool with carved walnut legs and cast-iron dolphin feet beckons for him to sit. Addy gives the stool a gentle spin to adjust the height and settles onto the smooth, slightly worn surface. He lifts the fall and rests his hands on the keys, overwhelmed, suddenly, with nostalgia for home. Flexing an ankle, he suspends a toe over the piano’s damper pedal. It’s been months since he’s had the luxury of playing, but he has no doubt which piece he’ll play first.
As the opening notes of Chopin’s Waltz in F minor, op. 70, no. 2 fill the room, Addy tips his head forward and closes his eyes. In an instant, he’s twelve years old, perched on a bench beneath the keys of his parents’ piano in Radom, where he, Halina, and Mila used to take turns practicing for an hour every day after school. When they were advanced enough, they learned Chopin, whose name was practically sacred in the Kurc household. Addy can still recall the sense of accomplishment that had filled his heart after he completed his first étude without a single mistake. “Maestro Chopin would be very proud,” his mother had said quietly, patting his shoulder.
When Addy opens his eyes, he’s surprised to find a small crowd gathered around him. The onlookers are all very smartly dressed. The women wear cloche hats and elegant beaver-collared overcoats, the men fedoras, bowler hats, and tailored three-piece suits. There’s a hint of cologne in the air, a pleasant reprieve from the rank body odor permeating the common spaces a deck below. A different class of refugee, yes, but Addy knows that beneath the fine furs and tweeds, everyone on the boat is fleeing the same dire fate.
“Bravo! Che bello,” an Italian behind him beams as Addy’s last note settles over the lounge. “Encore!” the woman next to him cries. Addy grins, raising his hands. “Pourquoi non?” he shrugs. He doesn’t need to be asked twice.
When he finishes one piece, he’s encouraged to play another, and with each encore Addy’s audience grows, along with his gusto. He plays the classics: Beethoven, Mozart, Scarlatti, working up a sweat. He removes his coat, unbuttons his collar. As the onlookers continue to gather, he transitions to pop melodies by his favorite American jazz composers: Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin. He’s partway through Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” when the ship’s horn sounds.
“We’re leaving!” someone shrieks. Addy wraps up “Caravan” with an improvised cadence and stands, the lounge suddenly full of chatter. He reaches for his coat and follows as the crowd converges on the starboard deck to watch the Alsina push back from the dock, her engines growling. The horn sounds again—a long, guttural farewell that hangs in the air for several seconds before floating off to sea.
And then they are moving, barely at first, as if in slow motion toward an orange sun hanging low over the glittery waters of the Mediterranean. A few of the passengers cheer, but most, like Addy, simply stare as they steam west, past Napoleon III’s splendid nineteenth-century Palais du Pharo, past the pink stone forts and the lone lighthouse at the mouth of the Vieux Port. By the time the Alsina reaches deeper waters, the sun has vanished and the sea is more black than blue. The boat arcs south, and the scenery shifts to an endless expanse of open water. Somewhere beyond the horizon, Addy realizes, as the ship picks up speed, is Africa. Beyond that, the Americas. He glances over his shoulder at the long trail of foam dissipating in their wake, at a miniature Marseille. “Adieu for now,” he whispers as the city disappears.
—
They’ve been at sea for over a week and he is a regular now in the first-class lounge, which has transformed into a concert hall of sorts—a stage where the passengers gather each night to sing, dance, play whatever they play best, a place where they can get lost in the music, the arts, and forget, for the time being at least, about the worlds they’ve left behind. The piano has been pulled from the corner into the middle of the room, a few rows of chairs arranged in a half circle around it, and various other instruments have surfaced—an African drum, a viola, a saxophone, a flute. The musical talent on board is astounding. Addy just about fell from his stool one evening when he looked up to see not only the Kranz brothers in the crowd—he’d grown up listening to their concert piano on the radio—but beside them, Poland’s sterling violinist, Henryk Szeryng. Tonight, Addy guesses, there are more than a hundred people crowded into the lounge.
But he can see only one.
She’s seated to his right at two o’clock, in the second row of chairs, next to a woman with the same pale eyes, ivory skin, and square, self-assured posture. A mother-daughter pair, surely. Addy reminds himself not to stare. Clearing his throat, he decides his final piece of the evening will be one of his own, List. He glances at her between stanzas. There are dozens of pretty women on board, but this one is different. She can’t be older than eighteen. She wears a white collared blouse and, between her lapels, a gleaming string of pearls. Her finger-waved ash-blonde hair is pinned into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. He wonders where she is from, and how he hadn’t noticed her before. He’ll introduce himself, he decides, before the night is over.
Addy caps his performance with a bow, and the lounge swells with applause as he leaves the stool. Snaking through the crowded room, he glances again at the girl, and their eyes meet. Addy grins, his heart galloping. She returns his smile.
It’s midnight when Ziembiński, a director and actor whom the audience has also come to love, finally clinches the soirée with a theatrical reading from Victor Hugo’s Les Voix Intérieures. As the crowd begins to dissipate, Addy waits quietly just beyond the arched doorway to the first-class cabins, averting his eyes so as not to get caught in conversation with passersby—no easy task. After a few minutes, the girl and her mother appear. Addy rights his posture, and as they stroll by, he extends a hand to the mother. “It’s what distinguishes the gentlemen from the boys,” Nechuma told him once. “When a mother approves, then you may introduce yourself to her daughter.”