threatening the spot examinations Max dreaded. Then he would have to dip into his funds and hand over another installment of the sweeteners that Pisgat had settled on him. But the funds were limited, and at the rate he’d had to dole them out along the route, oiling palms at every juncture, Max knew he would arrive on the other side with empty pockets. Still, bureaucratic obstacles notwithstanding, he owed Pisgat a debt of gratitude for partially clearing the way for him, because at each depot and border crossing he would be called upon once again to present his papers and explain the frozen stiff he was transporting (this was his story) to his bereaved family across the sea for burial. It was an anxious trip at every turn of which suspicious officials had to be silenced with zlotie, then marks, dissuaded from their insistence that the young man submit to disinfection and quarantine. No wonder that by the time the train reached the coast Max was fresh out of sops for insuring the secrets that lay beneath the ice and his own increasingly fusty suit of clothes.
In the louche North Sea port of Hamburg, sailors with their painted doxies and passengers on board electric trolleys ogled the invasion of the Jewish unwashed—who were hounded through the city as far as the seawall by a corps of money changers and bogus ticket agents, cheapjacks and impostors. Speaking a Yiddish he could scarcely make understood, Max once more asserted to officials that his papers were in order and the deceased already approved for transport, its ice-bound condition a guarantee against putrefaction. While all the time he thought: Azoy gait, so be it, I’ve done what I could; let them confiscate the box and everything it contains. Let them discover the contraband payload and fling me into a dungeon; it’s immaterial to me. Or were these the thoughts of Jocheved, with whom Max was so often at odds? In the end, though, the ticket was validated, the bill of lading stamped, and the casket carted by porters up the gangplank into the bowels of Rolling Billy, as the crew called the gargantuan flagship of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Max straggled behind them into the ship’s yawning hold to make certain that the rabbi was well situated among the racks of splayed and gibbeted mutton, the crates of perishables and cases of brut champagne.
He was assigned a berth in the third-class section, where he slept alongside the retching masses in a stench to which Max himself, stewing in Salo Frostbissen’s funeral suit, contributed. Two days out the ship hit a storm, and the steerage passengers, pasted against the bulkheads when not tossed into one another, declared that the vessel was lashed to Leviathan’s tail. In fair weather they fought over the gruel ladled from the common kettle into their dinner pails, only to spew it later on into the aisles, creating between bunks a moat in which the pious stood davening. Compromised laws of kashrut aside, Max was unable to eat in such an environment, though he might occasionally nibble a bit of fruit or dried fish that some shy maiden, blushing vermilion, would press upon him. Such overtures, however, made him as uncomfortable as did the viscid-eyed victims of nausea and dysentery gulping air whose oxygen was usurped by foul gases. The toilets were bogs, the showers briny trickles that Max had anyway to avoid for fear of revealing his secret anatomy. Every bodily function involved an irksome covert procedure, often in the presence of men whose exposed parts were abhorrent to the girl concealed beneath Max’s apparel, which was why he kept as much as possible to himself.
When not trying to inhale a salty breeze through a porthole below decks, he preferred to keep company with the rabbi, during spells in which he established an uneasy intimacy with his charge. In the polar climate of the ship’s capacious meat locker, Max would plunk himself down on an asparagus crate, shivering in the dense air from the ammonia compressors that was scarcely more breatheable than the Sheol of steerage. Still he preferred the solitude, where he was seldom interrupted in his meditations concerning the past that he hoped to outdistance. Picturing the basement flat back in Zabludeve Street, as vacant now as a plundered crypt, he would make an effort at shoring up his new identity, though Jocheved invariably kicked out the props. He thought about his bedfellows in third class and wondered