Mahmoud’s father gave the rest of his family a dubious look and led them under the fence. They followed the boy to a large square building with boarded-up windows and graffiti-covered walls. One of the boards blocking the door from trespassers had been ripped off, and they pushed their way inside.
It was a mall. Or it had been once. A large open courtyard with an empty fountain in the middle was ringed with storefronts that went up for four levels. A few of the shops were lit up with lamps connected to extension cords, and others burned kerosene lamps and candles. But most of the shops weren’t shops anymore—they were little apartments where people lived. Squatters in an abandoned shopping mall.
The boy led them to an empty yogurt shop on the third floor, next to a former music store that was home to a Syrian family of six. They looked like they had been there a while. They had a tattered old couch and a hot plate, and sheets hung from ropes to quarter the space into little rooms.
The yogurt shop had no furniture and a broken linoleum floor. Something skittered away in the darkness when they went inside.
“It’s just for the night,” Mahmoud’s father said.
“You leave tomorrow?” the boy said. “On a boat? Then you need life vests. Most definitely. Or else you drown when your boat flips.”
Mahmoud’s eyes went wide, and he shivered in his soaking-wet clothes. He didn’t like any part of this plan.
His father raised his hands to his family. “The boat isn’t going to flip,” he told them.
“Or run out of gas. Or wreck on the rocks,” the boy said. “Then you drown.”
Dad sighed. “All right. All right. Where do we buy life vests?”
Josef’s mother grabbed for his father’s flailing arms, but Aaron Landau was too strong for her, thin as he was.
“No. No! They’re coming for us,” he said, his eyes frantic. “The ship is slowing down. Can’t you feel it? We’re slowing so they can turn us around, take us back to Germany!”
Josef’s father pulled his arm away and knocked over a lamp. It fell to the floor with a crash, and the light went out.
“Josef, help me,” his mother begged.
Josef pulled himself away from the wall and tried to grab one of his father’s arms while his mother went for the other. In the corner of her bed, Ruthie buried her face in Bitsy’s ears and cried.
“No!” Josef’s father cried. “We have to hide, do you hear me? We can’t stay here. We have to get off this ship!”
Josef grabbed his father’s arm and held on tight. “No, Papa. We’re not turning around,” Josef said. “We’re slowing for a funeral. A funeral at sea.”
Josef’s father stopped dead, but Josef kept a tight hold on him. He hadn’t wanted to tell his father about the funeral, but now it seemed the only way to calm him down.
Aaron Landau’s bulging, haunted eyes swept to his son. “A funeral? Who’s died? A passenger? It was the Nazis who did it! I knew they were on board! They’re after us all!” He began to thrash again, more panicked than before.
“No, Papa, no!” Josef said. He fought to hold on to his father. “It was an old man. Professor Weiler. He was sick when he came aboard. It’s not the Nazis, Papa.”
Josef knew all about it. Ruthie had begged him to go swimming in the pool with her and Renata and Evelyne that afternoon. But Josef was a man now, not a boy. He was too old for kids’ stuff. He’d been walking the outside boardwalk on B-deck instead, keeping an eye out for the man from the engine room, Schiendick, and his friends, when he’d heard a cry from one of the cabin portholes. Peeking inside, he saw a woman with long, curly black hair and a white dress sobbing as she lay across the body of an old man. Captain Schroeder and the ship’s doctor were there too. The man in the bed was perfectly still, his mouth open and his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
He was dead. Josef had never seen a dead body so close up before.
“You there! Boy!”
Josef had jumped. A woman walking her little dog on the boardwalk on B-deck had caught him peeping. He had sprinted away as the little dog barked at him, but not before Josef heard the ship’s doctor say that Professor Weiler had died of cancer.
In his family’s cabin now a few hours later, Josef still clung to his father’s arm, trying to calm him down.
“He was an old man, and he’d been sick for a long time already!” Josef told his father. “They’re burying him at sea because we’re too far away from Cuba.”
Josef and his mother hung on to his father until Josef’s words finally got through. Papa stopped struggling against them and sagged, and suddenly they were holding him up off the floor.
“He was sick already?” Papa asked.
“Yes. It was the cancer,” Josef said.
Josef’s father let them guide him to his bed, where he sat down. Mama went to Ruthie to comfort her.
“When is the funeral?” Papa asked.
“Late tonight,” Josef told him.
“I want to go,” his father said.
Josef couldn’t believe it. Papa hadn’t left the cabin in eleven days, and now he wanted to go to the funeral of someone he’d never met? In his condition? Josef looked worriedly to his mother, who held Ruthie in her lap.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Mama said, echoing Josef’s thoughts.
“I saw too many men die without funerals at Dachau,” Papa said. “I will go to this one.”
It was the first time his father had even spoken the name of the place he’d been, and it was like a winter frost covered everything in the room. It ended the conversation as quickly as it had begun.
“Take Josef with you, then,” Mama said. “Ruthie and I will stay here.”
That night, Josef led his father to A-deck aft, where the captain and his first officer waited with a few other passengers. The passengers’ clothes looked shabby, and it was only when he heard his father tearing his shirt that Josef understood—ripping your garments was a Jewish tradition at funerals, and they had torn theirs in sympathy with Mrs. Weiler. Josef pulled on his own collar until the seam ripped. His father nodded, then led him to the sandbox by the pool and had him take a handful of sand. Josef didn’t understand, but he did as he was told.
The elevator to A-deck arrived, and Mrs. Weiler emerged first, a candle in hand. Behind her came the rabbi and four sailors, who carried Professor Weiler’s body on a stretcher. He was bound up tight in a white sailcloth, like an Egyptian pharaoh.
“Hold on there.” The man from below decks, Schiendick, pushed through the small crowd with two fellow crew members. “I’m Otto Schiendick, the Nazi Party leader on this ship,” he said, “and German law says that a body buried at sea must be covered with the national flag.” Schiendick unfurled the red-and-white Nazi flag with the black swastika in the middle, and the passengers gasped.
Papa pushed his way forward. “Never! Do you hear me? Never! It’s a sacrilege!” He was shaking worse than ever. Josef had never seen his father this angry, and he was frightened for him. Schiendick wasn’t the kind of man you wanted to mess with.
Josef grabbed his father’s arm and tried to pull him away.
Papa spat at the feet of Schiendick. “That is what I think of you and your flag!”