III
WITH EVERY YEAR that passed, unbeknownst to anyone in the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik grew more dissatisfied with his uneventful life. Like every other Jew, the coral merchant went to synagogue twice a day, morning and evening, he celebrated holidays, fasted on fast days, he put on his prayer shawl and his phylacteries, and swayed back and forth from the waist, he talked to people, he had conversations about politics, about the war with Japan, about what was printed in the newspapers and preoccupying the world. But deep in his heart, there was still the longing for the sea, home of the corals, and not being able to read, he asked to have read out to him any items relating to the sea when the newspapers came to Progrody twice a week. Just as he did about corals, he had a very particular notion of the sea. He knew that strictly speaking the world had many seas, but the one true sea was the one you had to cross in order to reach America.
Now it happened one day that the son of the hessian seller Alexander Komrower, who three years previously had enlisted and joined the navy, returned home for a short leave. No sooner had the coral merchant got to hear of young Komrower’s return than he appeared in his house and started asking the sailor about all the mysteries of ships, water, and winds. Whereas the rest of Progrody was convinced that it had been sheer stupidity that had got young Komrower hauled off to the dangerous oceans, the coral merchant saw in the sailor a fortunate youth, who had been granted the favor and the distinction of being made, as it were, an intimate of the corals, yes, even a kind of relation. And so the forty-five-year-old Nissen Piczenik and the twenty-two-year-old Komrower were seen walking about arm-in-arm in the marketplace of the little town for hours on end. People asked themselves: What does he want with that Komrower? And the young fellow asked himself: What does he want with me?
During the whole period of the young man’s leave in Progrody, the coral merchant hardly left his side. Their exchanges, like the following, were bewildering to the younger man:
“Can you see down to the bottom of the sea with a telescope?”
“No,” replied the sailor, “with a telescope you only look into the distance, not into the deep.”
“Can you,” Nissen Piczenik went on, “as a sailor, go down to the bottom of the sea?”
“No,” said young Komrower, “except if you drown, then you might well go down to the bottom.”
“What about the captain?”
“The captain can’t either.”
“Have you ever seen a diver?”
“A few times,” said the sailor.
“Do sea creatures and sea plants sometimes climb up to the surface?”
“Only some fish like whales that aren’t really fish at all.”
“Describe the sea to me!” said Nissen Piczenik.
“It’s full of water,” said the sailor Komrower.
“And is it very wide and flat, like a great steppe with no houses on it?”
“It’s as wide as that — and more!” said the young sailor. “And it’s just like you say: a wide plain, with the odd house dotted about on it, only not a house but a ship.”
“Where did you see divers?”
“We in the navy,” said the young man, “have got our own divers. But they don’t dive for pearls or oysters or corals. It’s for military purposes, for instance, in case a warship goes down, and then they can retrieve important instruments or weapons.”
“How many seas are there?”
“I wouldn’t know, “ replied the sailor. “We were told at navy school, but I didn’t pay any attention. The only ones I know are the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Great Ocean.”
“Which sea is the deepest?”
“Don’t know.”
“Where are the most corals found?”
“Don’t know that, either.”
“Hmm, hmm,” said the coral merchant. “Pity you don’t know that.”
At the edge of the small town, there where the little houses of Progrody grew ever more wretched until they finally petered out altogether, and the wide humpbacked road to the station began, stood Podgorzev’s bar, a house of ill-repute in which peasants, farm laborers, soldiers, stray girls, and layabouts congregated. One day, the coral merchant Piczenik was seen going in there with the sailor Komrower. They were served strong, dark red mead and salted peas. “Drink, my boy! Eat and drink, my boy!” said Nissen Piczenik to the sailor in fatherly fashion. And the boy ate and drank for all he was worth, for young as he was, he had already learned a thing or two in ports, and after the mead he was given some bad sour wine, and after the wine a 90-proof brandy. He was so quiet over the mead that the coral merchant feared he had heard all he was going to hear on the subject of the sea from the sailor, and that his knowledge was simply exhausted. After the wine, however, young Komrower got into conversation with the barkeeper, and when the 90-proof brandy came, he fell to singing at the top of his voice, one song after another, just like a real sailor.
“Do you hail from our beloved little town?” asked the barkeeper. “Of course, I’m a child of your — my — our little town,” replied the sailor, as if he wasn’t the son of the plump Jew Komrower, but a regular farmer’s boy. A couple of tramps and ne’er-do-wells came over to join Nissen Piczenik and the sailor at their table, and when the boy saw he had an audience, he felt a keen sense of dignity, such dignity as he thought only ships’ officers could possibly have. And he played up to them: “Go on, fellows, ask all you like. I’ve got answers to all your questions. You see this dear old uncle here, you all know who he is, he’s the best coral seller in the whole province, and I’ve told him a lot of things already!” Nissen Piczenik nodded. And since he felt uneasy in this unfamiliar company, he drank a glass of mead, and then another. Gradually, all these dubious faces he’d previously only seen through the grille in his door became as human as his own. But as caution and suspicion were ingrained in his nature, he went out into the yard and hid his purse in his cap, leaving only a few coins loose in his pocket. Satisfied with his idea, and soothed by the pressure of the money against his skull, he sat down at the table again.
And yet he had to admit to himself that he didn’t really know what he was doing, sitting in the bar with the sailor and these criminal types. All his life he had kept himself to himself, and prior to the arrival of the sailor, his secret passion for corals and the ocean home of corals had not been made public in any way. And there was something else that alarmed Nissen Piczenik deeply. He suddenly saw his secret longing for waters and whatever lived in them and upon them as coming to the surface of his own life, like some rare and precious creature at home on the seabed shooting up to the surface for some unknown reason — and he had never had such vivid thoughts before. The sudden fancy must have been prompted by the mead and the stimulating effect of the sailor’s stories. The fact that such crazy notions could come to him upset and alarmed him even more than suddenly finding himself sitting at a bar-room table among vice-ridden associates.
But all his alarm and upset remained submerged, well below the surface of his mind. All the while, he was listening with keen enjoyment to the incredible tales of the sailor Komrower. “And what about your own ship?” his new friends were asking him. The sailor thought about it for awhile. His ship was named after a famous nineteenth-century admiral, but that name seemed as banal as his own, and Komrower was determined to impress them all mightily — and so he said: “My cruiser is called the Little Mother Catherine. Do you know who she was? Of course you don’t, so I’ll tell you. Well, then, Catherine was the richest and most beautiful woman in the whole of Russia, and so one day the Tsar married her in the Kremlin in Moscow, and then he took her away on a sleigh — it was forty below — drawn by six horses to Tsarskoye Selo. Behind them came their whole retinue on sleighs — and there were so many of them, the road was blocked for three days and three nights. Then, a week after the magnificent wedding, the wanton and aggressive King of Sweden arrived in Petersburg harbor with his ridiculous wooden barges, but with a lot of soldiers standing up on them because the Swedes are very brave fighters on land — and this king had a plan to conquer the whole of Russia. So the Tsarina Catherine straightway got on a ship, namely, the very cruiser I’m serving on, and with her own hands she bombed the silly barges of the King of Sweden and sank the lot of them. And she tossed the King a life belt and took him prisoner. She had his eyes put out and ate them, and that made her even more clever than she was before. As for the blind King, he was packed off to Siberia.”