Exodus - Leon Uris [50]
An hour passed, and two and three, and the hold began to get crowded. On came the refugees until the hold was so packed there was scarcely an inch to move in any direction.
Then they began filling up the deck space topside and when that was crammed they flooded over onto the bridge.
Bill Fry, an American and captain of the ship, came down the ladder and looked over the crush of humanity in the hold and whistled. He was a stocky man with a stubbly beard and an unlit cigar butt clenched between his teeth.
“You know, the Boston fire department would raise hell if they ever saw a room like this,” Bill mumbled.
He stopped talking and began to listen. From the shadows a very sweet voice was singing a lullaby. He pushed his way down the ladder and stepped over the bodies and turned a flashlight on Karen, who was holding a little boy in her arms and singing him to sleep. For an instant he thought he was looking at the Madonna! He blinked his eyes. Karen looked up and motioned him to take the flashlight off her.
“Hey, kid ... you speak English?” Bill’s gruff voice said.
“Yes.”
“Where is the section head of these kids?”
“I am the section head and I’ll thank you to lower your voice. I’ve had enough trouble getting them quieted down.”
“I’ll talk as loud as I want. I’m the captain. You ain’t no bigger than most of these kids.”
“If you run your ship as well as I run this section,” Karen snapped angrily, “then we will be in Palestine by morning.”
He scratched his bearded jaw and smiled. He certainly didn’t look like the dignified Danish ship’s captains, Karen thought, and he was only pretending to be hard.
“You’re a nice kid. If you need something you come up on the bridge and see me. And you be more respectful.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“That’s all right. Just call me Bill. We’re all from the same tribe.”
Karen watched as he climbed the ladder, and she could see the first crack of daylight. The Karpathos was crammed with as many people as she could hold—sixteen hundred refugees, hanging from every inch of her. The half-rusted anchor creaked up and slapped against the sides of her wooden hulk. The forty-five-year-old engines coughed and sputtered and reluctantly churned into action. A fog bank enshrouded them as though God Himself were giving cover, and the old ship chugged away from the shores of France at her top speed of seven knots an hour. In a matter of moments she was beyond the three-mile zone and into the waters of no man’s land. The first round had been won by the Mossad Aliyah Bet! A blue and white Jewish flag was struck to the mast, and the Karpathos changed her name to the Star of David.
The boat bounced miserably. The lack of ventilation in the overjammed holds turned everyone pale. Karen worked with the Palmach teams feeding lemons and applying compresses to stave off a major epidemic of vomiting. When lemons failed, she went to work quickly with the mop. She found that the best way to keep things quiet was to sing and invent games and tell funny stories.
She had the children under control but by noon the heat worsened and the air grew more rancid, and soon the stench of sweat and vomit became unbearable in the semilit hold. Men stripped to shorts and women to their brassières, and their bodies glistened with sweat. An outbreak of fainting began. Only the unconscious were taken up on deck. There was simply no room for the others.
Three doctors and four nurses, all refugees from La Ciotat, worked feverishly. “Get food into their stomachs,” they ordered. Karen coaxed, coddled, and shoved food down the mouths of her children. By evening she was passing out sedatives and giving sponge baths. She washed them sparingly, for water was very scarce.
At last the sun went down and a breath of air swept into the hold. Karen had worked herself into exhaustion, and her mind was too hazy to permit her to think sharply. She fell into only a half sleep with an instinctive reflex that brought her awake the second one of her children cried. She