— Yes, dearest Papa. He made off with the horse. He would have appropriated the hansom too, had it been possible to get it aboard ship; he would have shanghaied the coachman, could he have gotten away with it; he would have ripped out the cobblestones beneath the carriage wheels had he been able to, so great were his despair and anger at the rich Jews who had turned him down. He was an infinitely hungry man; and had I but taken the trouble to scrutinize that desperate, that artful hunger of his instead of mooning at him and Linka bantering in English and bringing each other up to date on their adventures, I would have had the wits to realize that it could not be sated by a horse — no, not even if it were the noblest thoroughbred.
— The horse? I will get to it in a minute… You are just like a child, Papa dear…
— In a minute… For the moment I was still gripped by fear and anxiety, although I must say, by pleasure too. I thought of my telegram that was speeding, letter by letter, through the air to you — humming unchallenged over the wires and down through the tile roof of the old post office — handed there on a gray slip of paper to Wicek — who would jump on his bicycle and pedal off with it to your office, for you to read it between consignments of flour… Such were my thoughts as we brushed through the mists of Venice, which — golden and wondrous — vanished in a violet fog. I sought to fix my mind on the rocking motion of the black waves beneath me, leaning on the railing and breathing in the new salt air. At first it was pleasant, like being an infant laid in a cradle. Little by little, however, I began to grasp that not only was the motion not going to cease, it was going to grow even greater. We started to pitch more strongly, and with it came the first wave of nausea. My body felt cold. The very soles of my feet were covered with a chill sweat. I began to vomit, throwing back to the sea all its denizens of the night before — followed by my breakfast in the hotel — and then the steak from the night train to Venice — and on and on, wave after wave until I had puked out my guts, which I would have heaved into the great ocean too if only they had been detachable — after which I buckled to the ground, collapsed on the wooden deck, and passed out…
— Yes, seasickness, of the malign nature of which I could have had no idea. To think that a man can live his whole life and never know that the sea is not just a compendium of rivers! Most of the voyage I spent drugged with sleeping powders that our friend from Jerusalem prepared for me, limply sprawled on my cot in my little cabin. Linka and Mani ministered to me with English tea, dry biscuits, and soft gruel, all conveniently easy to regurgitate. They did their best to cheer me up with funny stories about the black horse imprisoned below in the hold; it too was seasick and quite wild-tempered, kicking out to protest its destination — it was not, after all, a Zionist — and if fate had decreed that it be one, it did not wish to be of the pioneer variety — no, it would have vastly preferred to wait for Dr. Herzl to obtain his international charter from the Turks so that it could make the voyage first-class with the accompaniment of a German naval escort, ha ha…
— Ha ha ha…
— Well, we are landlubbers, solid citizens of Central Europe — is it not inhuman to toss us up and down on the waves?
— Unremittingly, for seven whole days. All the way to Crete, which is the island that ship is named for, because that is its port of call on its route to Europe and back. Indeed, legend has it that Europe was born there…
— Only one night. It is a night that the sailors spend with their wives in their shanties. I demanded to be brought ashore — where, on the sand amid some rocks, I curled up beneath a blanket and clung with all my might to terra firma, trying to put my shattered self back together while watching Mani and Linka lead the black horse in its headsack out of the hold, because the captain refused to put up with its tantrums any longer and demanded that it disembark.
— Yes, Linka too. What with my sickness and the horse they had grown quite close to each other — although now I know that it was not until that bright night — that night strewn with stars on that strange and desolate isle — that it started…
— Their romance — their love — their bond — their passion — their dependence — their pity… will that do? The minute I saw him insist on taking that horse aboard ship, I knew that there was nothing simple about him, that he was most exceedingly Mani-fold…
— They sold it that night. Some Jewish trader took them far inland to find a buyer in one of the villages.
— Where are there not Jews, Father? Tell me that Tell me!
— He asked her to help negotiate the sale. He must have sensed that a canny merchant’s daughter would know how to drive a hard bargain.
— Did I not already tell you? A wife and two children.
— Of course we did. A rather bleached-out woman, a bit older than him. A stay-at-home, vitiated by three infants who died soon after birth…
— That same night.
— I was stretched out on the sand, swaddled in my blanket, gazing up at the stars. I could feel the whole island rocking up and down in the water. When I saw them come back late at night, I understood that something had happened They seemed suddenly timid with each other — careful — even wary — and there was something too about the way Linka flung herself on me, about her worry for me…
— They had sold the horse. I envied its being able to remain behind in the mountains.
— How extraordinary that you should want to know a pointless detail like that…
— Don’t ask me. Ask Linka. She was a party to the sale.
— Three more days to Alexandria. And then to Jaffa, where we docked on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
— I had nothing left to throw up. My seasickness had turned into sleeping sickness, I simply could not keep awake. It was of course from those powders that Mani used to calm the nerves of his parturients. The morning we reached Jaffa, I was brought out on deck to revive before the Turks decided that I must be ill with the plague and could not be admitted to the Holy Land…