“Nothing will remain, nothing!” the forty-year-old man roared from the mirror. “They’ll come, carry me off, throw me into a pit! Nothing, not even in the mirror! Tomorrow it will reflect someone else, not me! Not me? What does ‘not me’ mean? Wrong! I’ll squeeze my way in! I’ll hang on! I’ll stay in the mirror! To watch! To see what others do here! Here, in this very room! Oh-ho-ho! Let’s see them try to scrape me off the glass! Oh-ho-ho!”
The forty-year-old man with trembling jowls stiffened upright, taking up the whole mirror.
Mr. David Lingslay felt as though the earth were slipping from beneath his feet, that it was melting away like a phantom. In a last fit of self-defense he grabbed the phial of sublimate lying nearby and flung it at the mirror with all his might…
When the following morning the bellboy led Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi and the corpulent gentleman in American eyeglasses to Mr. David Lingslay’s salon, the two men waited a long time in silence.
Twenty minutes later, Lingslay appeared in the doorway to the salon. He was somewhat more pale than usual and even more stiff. Staring somewhere out the window he said in a flat voice:
“I have spent all night considering your proposal, and I have concluded that my reasoning yesterday was hasty. Indeed, why suppose that someone has to be infected? We have to hope that the doctors’ scrupulous examinations and quarantine will keep the plague in Paris. I’ll send a coded message to my secretary in New York today. The matter should not be delayed, and it would be for the best if we could set off this very evening.”
Rabbi Eliezer and the gentleman in eyeglasses nodded their heads in silence.
A cold eastern wind tossed the unruly mop of the nighttime sea with the fingers of an adroit barber.
The RMS Mauretania was going full steam with its lights out. The last contours of the shoreline had long melted into the fog. The passengers had crowded the decks for the first hour, but now they were slowly shuffling off to their class compartments. In the ship’s enormous hull two windows glowed in the row of first-class cabins, like two glowworms fastened to its ribs.
The old shammes slept wrapped up in a ball on a couch in one of these cabins, and through his dreams his lips repeated the words of an unfinished prayer.
By the table, Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi sat in an old striped tallith, like gray-bearded Neptune in a striped swimsuit, his torso swinging steadily in time to the sway of the ship as his lips whispered a prayer of thanksgiving:
“For I am Thine, Lord God, whom Thou hast taken from the lands of Egypt, from that house of servitude…”
Little by little Rabbi Eliezer’s restless eyes began to droop, and the gigantic, bulging hull of the ship swung in time to the prayer, facing Mizrach, east toward Jerusalem.
David Lingslay was lying in the port corner cabin, stretched out on his bed, a cigarette in his mouth, staring at the shadow of the lamp quivering on the ceiling. He tossed and turned, lighting his tenth cigarette from the burning stub of the ninth. The room swung like a hammock, summoning sleep, which then skittered away like ball bearings across the sloping floor of the hull. Every tilt of the floor was another mile away from Europe, from Paris, from the plague, from death – a mile into the depths, into the downy, flower-carpeted meadow of life.
An indifferent, ironic watch ticked on the nightstand: six hours since departure from Europe.
On the evening of the second day, the burning iron of the sun had utterly smoothed all the crumpled folds of waves. The ship was turning a wide arc to the west, an enchanted needle on the gigantic spinning gramophone disc of the ocean.
All decks were black with passengers.
From the upper deck a few hundred gentlemen in plaid caps, covered in blankets, were staining the immaculate blue of the backdrop with plumes of cigar smoke. The more spry gentlemen passed the time first with some golf, then a bit of tennis, then a simple game of bridge. Incorporeal stewards bearing trays balanced themselves piously between the couches, like tightrope walkers on invisible wires stretched over a precipice, fearing to lose a drop of the valuable liquid, or to breathe the slightest word or inadvertent sigh.
On the first-class deck bloated, overstuffed gentlemen fingered their beaded pendants and took in the sea, leaning back on comfortable deckchairs. Fleet-footed, guttapercha stewards distributed cool drinks. A few enterprising youths slapped together an improvised jazz band from a pair of chance trumpets, a drum, and kitchen utensils, and the young people danced themselves ragged to the caterwauling sounds of the popular music.
On the third-class decks the poorer passengers sitting on bulging suitcases caught wind of the scraps of sounds falling from above and opened their mouths wide in astonishment, like fish catching bits of bread.
Suddenly the dancers went amok. The deck cleared as if blown by a violent wind. Everyone scattered into a wide circle. In the center writhed a young man sporting a pince-nez. He had broken a lens in falling, and the staring, shortsighted eye, now exposed, gaped in horror at the fleeing crowd. The young man clumsily flapped the cumbersome fins of his arms like a fish on a sandy shore.
Seemingly from out of nowhere two men in white aprons suddenly came around a corner with a stretcher, upon which they threw the young man, twitching like a carp, and vanished back whence they came. The other lens fell out of the pince-nez and rolled along the deck.
A moment later the whole deck was a whirl of panic. The obese men, pushing each other and dropping their pendants, made a crush for the cabin stairs. For an instant all that could be heard was the clamor of voices and the clatter of doors slamming shut. Within five minutes, not a living soul was on deck.
Then a grayish man in a checkered sporting outfit rose from one of the armchairs tucked behind the smokestack. With a slow, absent-minded gait he walked across the deck and leaned on the rail.
The grayish man smoked a cigarette.
Down below, waves lapped against the side of the ship.
The following day the wind blew, and the sea swayed fearfully under its lashings.
The first-class decks were empty; drowsy, rubbery stewards ambled up and down them like butlers after a ball.
At around ten o’clock, the grayish man in the checkered sporting outfit appeared on deck.
He strode hesitantly, stumbling out of time with the wobbling of the ship. He went a few steps, made it to a comfortable deckchair near the ship’s side, and collapsed heavily into it. Taking an expensive leather-framed mirror from his pocket, he carefully studied his tongue.
His face a blank, he tucked the mirror away, and cautiously glanced around the deck. It was deserted. Having confirmed that no one was looking, the gentleman in the sporting outfit performed a few strange movements with his arm that resembled Swedish calisthenics. Then, continuing to look around, he surreptitiously felt his underarms, like a man whose clothing was pinching him.
A steward appeared on deck. The grayish man swiftly took a book from his pocket and buried himself in it. From the corner of his eye he could see the third-class deck, where passengers were crowded together and kneeling on their suitcases to unwrap their provisions and wolf down their breakfasts.
On the deck where the grayish man was sitting, stewards were putting overturned chairs back in place.
The grayish man quickly leafed through his book.
It was already well after noon when a noise and commotion reached his ears from the lower deck. The commotion was so loud that the grayish man broke off his reading and leaned over the rail to have a look downward. The lower deck was seething like a trampled anthill. He could make out a pair of white smocks weaving through the black swarm. Shielding his eyes with one hand, the grayish man saw two other white smocks at the far end of the lower deck. A third pair of white smocks was carrying a load down the stairs leading to the cabins. A chorus of laments and confusion came from below.