We worked our way northwest toward Greenland to avoid heavy military traffic. Late one night, everyone seemed awake and restless. The top deck was covered in bodies huddled together in their threadbare clothing. Several old women had climbed the back ladder in knee-length nightgowns that hugged to their torsos and fluttered behind them like wind socks. They reached one hand at a time forward along the rail until they found a place to lie down. The low groan of the props churning three decks below spoke to the rocking slap of the bow skimming the water, but no one spoke. One of the few refugee passengers that I’d met, Earl Sardenski, a retired steel smelter and widower from Warsaw, was so close to the starboard side railing his free hand leaned at the wrist against the safety railing. He had a son in Atlanta who had paid for his passage. His fingers curved upward and cut the wind off the side of the ship. The ship was a fine-hair-length south of the Arctic Circle between Stromfjord, Greenland, and Baffin Island, in the Davis Strait, which was too far north for our destination but we hoped took us clear of U-boat traffic. The water was calm as black ice. The running lights were all off except for forward navigation markers; the ship slipped stealthily through the night.
Slow waves of green lights washed over the sky. Chemical-reaction green absorbed into the sable night and flowed as if the source of everything green lay somewhere up in the north. Jarred loose from the ice sheets that choke the passage through Baffin Bay, the great light diffused softly through old animal bones lodged in the ice caps, in its deep fissures and cracks, and it scrubbed the atmosphere above the top deck—some new kind of clean. Green crept over the northern curvature of the earth, pulsating ephemeral matter that rose and settled in the passengers’ eyes as they lay. We watched the slate surface of the sky waxed clean by the living motion of aurora borealis, spreading laterally, each wave drifting, dissipating, and pushed off by the next strange sheet of light. It was as if the sky were performing green miracles over our small, northern corner of the world.
“What a gift,” Earl said.
I studied his face. We had temporarily avoided whatever wild, red-eyed force that brings us all, one day, to oblivion. We probably had more in common than I dared to ask. I had endured disgrace, humiliation, loss—loss of hope, loss of self, loss of ever reemerging whole. I was left spiritually broken, alone in every sense, intimately familiar with calamity, and yet, still alive; I could still recalibrate myself to what had happened and go on.
“This looks like the dawn of Creation,” Earl said then in Dutch. Hearing him freely speak Dutch, I was cleaved open to where my family was kept, each member a burning light, both illuminating and blackening my heart. I saw Hilda floating above me in the sunny woods. Ludo chiseling all our names into stone. Edwin staining colors into a canvas. The sun calling out images from my uncle’s skin. My mother banging on the organ keys. My father palming light in glass. Thump-Drag traveling from this long story to some new, even larger epic.
Earl and I were the last to walk back into the holds that night. In the crew mess room, the majority of the passengers were awake, tired, and sickly from the motion of the ship. I sat with them and listened to them talking. A child cried in the holds. Her voice was a golden echo. I looked around and saw in their faces how their lives were in shambles. Watching them made me deeply ashamed, to have never thought of what parallel dramas of suffering were unfolding alongside my own.
I wanted to go back and shield everyone who felt sick with danger, to rescue everyone who needed saving. There were so many, I knew, who were trapped and lost and without hope, waiting for something to change. I had the training to be a boat runner, and if Holland could no longer be my home, the water would be.
It occurred to me I should have written something on the message board in Southampton, but I knew the odds were stacked against me that anyone I loved would have ever found it.
That night, in the galley, I did not yet know how I would spend my life—all the ships I would board, all the names I would assume, all the people I would take from one tumultuous place to somewhere new. Hundreds of trips. Thousands of people. A life spent working for Captain Fernandes, then Peter as captain, then for Uncle Martin, who showed up unannounced on a dock in Buenos Aires after tracking us through the Southern Hemisphere a year after the war ended.
Uncle Martin.
Uncle Martin standing at the end of a pier.
A miracle of sorts.
It was Uncle Martin who years later helped me pay for my first ship. It was on that first ship where I became a captain, a smuggler myself, ferrying lost souls from Xiamen, China, to Taiwan with Kuomintang members fleeing the mainland; from Pusan, Korea, to Fukuoka, Japan, before Seoul was occupied; from Berbera, Somalia, to Cape Town with those desperate to escape Ethiopia’s Red Terror; from one great upheaval to another.
I did not yet know how right Captain Fernandes was: how steady business would be.
It would be much later that the dreams of my father walking into the heart of our own ruined town would begin. Standing at the lip of the rubbled factory. Seeking out the gravestones of his family. Only finding one, his wife, my mother’s, whom Uncle Martin decided not to bury at sea after I left him. If my father was alive, he would have had to go back. Any man would go back. I did. I saw my mother’s solitary stone in a field of names separated by grass and clover.
I try to imagine what my father does then. Why he doesn’t go home and start again. Pick up the tools he’d once made a life with.
I’ve asked everyone I could if there was a trace of the man. “Such a tall man,” I’d say. “Perhaps at the edge of town. Trying to stay out of sight.” But no. No one knew.
I could not ask Hilda either. I found her name printed on a plaque flush to the ground in the same field as my mother. I knelt and traced each letter of her name with my fingertip.
H I L D A.
I could not ask Ludo. Both his name and his mother’s were etched into a masterfully carved wooden cross in that same field.
All of their markers held the same date.
I try to make peace with the names in that field.
I try to make peace with the names that are not in that field.
I try to make peace with my father. The industrialist, the businessman, the teller of stories, an oar over his shoulder, looking for a new place to begin again.
In the cargo hold of Captain Fernandes’s ship that first trip, I only knew I had lived long enough to have my own story to tell, and that night in the galley, under the mess hall lights, manically, with great energy, I told those people, tired old men, displaced women, and seasick children, a purged story in my native tongue, something I’m not sure all of them could understand. But in the rocking dark, they sat wrapped around every word.