what, aside from their shared rootlessness, they had to do with him. What had become of the faith that bound him to his own kind? He wondered as well about the assertion of Jocheved’s father, Salo Frostbissen, for whose sake his daughter had been willing to shlep an ungainly impediment halfway around the world. How could the watchman have believed that the rabbi (who would be carrion were it not for his artificial preservation) was still somehow alive? It was a conviction to which Jocheved also paid lip service, if feebly, though Max could only disdain her credulity with a scorn that she assured him was mutual.
The smuggler had to exercise stealth during these visits, since the storage hold was technically off-limits to passengers—especially third-class passengers admonished not to stray from their confines, their very presence constituting an offense in the better quarters. But as the route through the ship’s entrails was lengthy and circuitous, Max could scarcely avoid the occasional confrontation with a purser or ordinary seaman. Then he would try through gestures and snatches of fractured German to explain his unauthorized presence, while the crewman, who already knew him by reputation as the lad with the refrigerated relation, would wave him past without further interference. At first Max couldn’t account for their leniency, though ultimately he came to understand that his looks were a factor in their favorable disposition, just as they had been for the railroad officials and border guards. And while Jocheved had only contempt for the comely features she shared with the smuggler, Max was, himself, not above exploiting them for the sake of survival. Of course, his face could just as easily have become a liability, particularly in steerage, where the girls were forever finding excuses to approach him, which was all the more reason not to bathe.
Once, having taken a wrong turn in the depths of the vessel, he descended through an open scuttle and found himself in a brass and lead jungle among grease monkeys swinging from exposed ducts and flues. Bare-chested toilers caked in ebony dust wielded shovels from atop a hill of soft coal, feeding the maw of a belching boiler whose flaming tongue set the dials on the pressure gauges spinning crazily. Giant turbines whined a counterpoint to the shooshing of screw propellers ploughing the unseen waves, while Max stood nailed in the hatchway by the glowering of the stokers, which chilled Jocheved’s blood. Their attention, however, was abruptly recaptured by a crookbacked immigrant in a shabby jerkin, his neck craned like a turtle peeping from its carapace. Appearing to have stumbled out of a jet of steam expelled from a whistling slide valve, he commenced asking questions he seemed simultaneously to answer, in a Yiddish the stokers couldn’t have understood. “So does it make by you a difference, the quadruple expansion of your twin-screw propulsion engine, which requires 560 tons coal a day…?” The stokers peered at the interloper with uncordial bloodshot eyes while Max made his getaway.
Another time Max climbed an unfamiliar companionway that turned a corner into a carpeted staircase, emerging into an opulence like nothing he had ever beheld. Still aboard the windward-riding steamship, he had entered a palace where lounges and plush smoke rooms bordered a grand saloon, a chandelier like a diadem dangling from its ceiling. There was a baroque dining room appointed in ornate carvings, gilt-framed mirrors, bas-reliefs, and stained glass; a library with a blazing fireplace and a marble mantel, Tiffany gas lamps the rich relations of the hurricanes that scattered shadows in the benighted quarters below. Trespassing amid all that splendor, Max could scarcely believe that such a place occupied the same planet as steerage.
In a palm court luxuriant with potted orchids beneath a vaulted glass dome, a bushy-haired man in a boiled tuxedo shirt, his rolled sleeves showing powerful forearms, was performing card tricks before an audience in evening dress seated in white rattan chairs. There followed a round of polite applause after which a slight, bird-breasted woman in puce tights appeared bearing an assortment of properties. She proceeded to manacle and strait-jacket the solemn magician, then helped him into a steamer trunk, which members of the audience were invited to encompass in chains. The darting assistant then drew an ornamental screen about the trunk and, gravely pronouncing the name of the presentation, “Metamorphosis,” disappeared behind the partition. Mere seconds after she’d vanished, however, the magician himself stepped forth to universal gasps and riotous applause. Folding back the screen,