Dressed in new clothes and shoes with his hair tied back beneath a new hat, with the satchel containing everything he owned held firmly on his lap, Jaap De Bos rode in a coach for the first time. He crossed Walcheren Island through the farms and muddy villages to the little port of Veere where he sat on the wharf clutching his bag and watching the fishermen unloading their skiffs and joking profanely, glad that their day’s work was done. They watched him, too, and made jokes about him, and he knew that he looked out of place. Although he had travelled only six miles, back in those days he was far home.
From Veere, Jaap took a schooner over the open water. He looked back to see the island he had never left before receding. He looked ahead to see the city of Zerikzee coming toward him. He was frightened.
When the schooner was tied fast, Jaap stepped onto the wharf and passed through the city gate into the open marketplace. There he looked for a fishmonger as Simon had told him to and asked after the bookseller Shapiro. “Why a fishmonger?” Jaap had asked.
“You can always trust a fishmonger,” Simon had said.
Shapiro was the kind of person who could not look at you, especially when he was talking to you. He looked everywhere else. This day he looked at Jaap’s book. “Oh my,” he said. He laid it flat on his table. His hands fluttered over it and descended upon it. “Oh my.” He caressed it.
Afterwards they sat at Shapiro’s tiny table in his tiny house that somehow could accommodate both of them and Shapiro’s maid servant, who boiled the cod that Jaap had brought at Simon’s suggestion with cabbage and carrots but not enough salt. Jaap slept in a dark pantry behind the kitchen.
Shapiro said, “I’ll come for you in the morning and put you in the coach to Delfshaven.”
But he did not come until after midday. Jaap waited. Every half hour or so he checked his book, which was the second volume of the Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg up in Mainz on the River Rhine, just to make sure that Shapiro had not by some sleight of hand or black magic spirited it away. When Shapiro did appear, he told Jaap that the plans had changed. “There’s a warrant for your arrest. You are accused of stealing the book.”
“But—” said Jaap.
“I know, I know,” said Shapiro putting his hand over the other man’s mouth, an oddly intimate gesture for one so wary of other people. “The letter is in Simon’s hand. I do not doubt you.” He said that he had arranged for Jaap’s passage aboard a river barge that would deliver him to Delft. “To Asher Sarfati. He will help you find your way to Amsterdam.”
But Sarfati said, “You are in danger. You must be very careful. For the time being you will wait here. I will find you passage.” When he came back, he said, “I have found you a place on a Jewish ship. It is owned by a Jew. You will be safe in his hands.”
“When does it sail?”
“A fortnight.”
For two hot August weeks Jaap sat in a dark shed. There was a hole in the ceiling where a stove vent had once been, and when it rained the water came through it, but when it did not, sunlight did, too, for a couple of hours a day. Then Jaap opened the Bible and the small Latin grammar that Simon had also given him. He put the books side by side and translated the Latin into Dutch when he could.
Finally, Sarfati returned. He said that the ship was ready to sail. Jaap would go on board before dawn and be at sea by sunrise.
“How long is the passage to Amsterdam?”
“New Amsterdam. You would be arrested in Amsterdam. You are going to New York.”
“But I thought you said—”
“You are going to America.”
The ship was a fluyt called the Swallow. It was carrying a cargo of tea, cinnamon, and cardamom from the Dutch colony of Batavia and finely woven linens from Antwerp. “We’ll bring back cotton and pelts and tobacco. Everyone wants tobacco now. Of course, you won’t be coming back. Neither will they.” “They” were the other two passengers, the widow Silver and her four-year-old son Daniel, who occupied the second berth, who sat at the other end of the table for meals and seldom looked at or spoke to the others. “Imagine a woman traveling alone,” said the captain. “Not in my day. It makes you wonder about her. I can only say that it is a good thing I am a man of honor.” He said all of this in such a way that it made Jaap think that perhaps the captain spent a good bit of time wondering about the widow Silver.
The widow was a slight, dark woman with sharp features, a thin mouth, and black hair bound so tightly into a knot behind her head and beneath her tichel that it pulled at the corners of her eyes giving her a slightly Asian aspect. The once or twice that Jaap actually saw her eyes, he was surprised at how big they were, how black they were and confident they seemed. So confident that they changed her entire affect. His initial impression of her was that she was frightened. After he saw her eyes he began to think that she was frightening. They flashed and danced.
The widow’s son, on the other hand, was frightened. He was a tiny mouse of a boy who held onto his mother’s skirts or hid in them. Jaap thought that the widow indulged her son’s fear, that she should encourage a modicum of self-sufficiency in him. Later he came to believe that Daniel had come by his fear naturally. The captain did not think so. “Daniel in the lions’ den indeed. They’d eat him alive.” This he said quietly behind his hand, which seemed to be one of the two volumes he had. The other was loud and clear as if he were talking into a speaking trumpet. He was a buffoon of a man who hadn’t the faintest idea that he was a fool.
Much of what the captain said was in Yiddish, but he soon came to realize that the widow wasn’t understanding him. She was a village girl with little schooling, who only understood a few words of Yiddish. Maybe that’s why Jaap began to like her: because her background was a lot like his. Certainly, that’s why the captain fancied her: because he saw her as a peasant, coarse and unrefined.
The wooden ship at night in any kind of sea with any kind of wind was a thing alive. It creaked and groaned and nearly moaned. Its sails tried to bend its great masts as it pulled the ship with the wind and lifted its prow up and through the waves and down into the troughs. And it stank. A stench fueled by animal waste, rotting hay, and stagnate air rose from the bilge. And it was dark. The watch alone had a light up on the forecastle, one that swung from an arm attached to but held away from the mast, so that even in the roughest of seas it would not crash into the mast and shatter. If there was starlight or moonlight, it seeped but not very deeply into the holds and cabins of the ship, and if the seas were calm, then the vessel found its voice. Men coughed and snored and sneezed. They talked. They laughed. Sometimes they argued and fought, and the others tensed because the ship was a small place and anger or fear ran through it like an electrical current. But sometimes, loosened by their daily ration of rum and accompanied by a fiddle or a squeeze box, they sang, and once in a while they danced the sailor dance on supple sailors’ legs that discovered the roll and pitch of the ship and followed it. Sometimes if the night was calm enough, Jaap lying in his berth could hear the voices if not the words of the widow and her son.
Then one night the boy began to cry. Jaap turned over but could not block out the sound. Finally, he called to Daniel and then went to him. He stood on one side of the curtain that served as a door to the cabin. “Boy? Are you alright?”
Daniel cried louder.
“Where is your mother?”
Daniel cried louder. Finally, Jaap pushed the curtain aside and was met with the child’s eyes wide with terror.
“There, there,” he said. “Now, now,” he said. He sat on the edge of the bunk. He smoothed the boy’s hair with his hand. “Would you like to hear a story? Have you ever heard about Jonah and the whale?” He told the story Simon had told him when he was ill with fever, and slowly Daniel calmed down.
Then he asked a shy question: “What did Jonah eat?”
“Well, his mother had made him a lunch to carry with him.”
“What was in the lunch?”
“Some bread and cheese and an apple, I think. Yes, an apple.”
After a moment, Daniel asked, “No sausage?”
“Well, of course there was a very small sausage.”
“Could he sleep in there?”
“Oh yes, he could sleep. The inside of the whale was dark and soft and Jonah fell right to sleep. He used the whale’s tongue as a pillow. And he heard the music of the deep.”
“What’s that?”
“It sounded like this.” And Jaap hummed a lullaby that Simon had sung him when he was sick until Daniel was asleep. When Jaap got up to leave, he realized that the widow was standing just on the other side of the curtain. She looked at him for the first time.
“Thank you,” she said.
“He was crying,” Jaap said. He realized standing there so close to the widow in the narrow passage that she smelled of sex.
Three days later, it happened again. This time Jaap told Daniel the story of Noah and the ark. “How about the dogs and cats?” asked the boy. “Did they fight?”
“They were carefully selected. They were dogs who liked cats and cats who liked dogs.”
“How about whales? Were there two whales?”
“Of course. They followed along just behind the ark.”
“How about poop? What did Noah do with all the poop?”
When Daniel fell asleep, Jaap found the widow standing in the passage waiting. She was distraught. He raised his hand to comfort her. She backed away and shook her head vehemently.
Two days later Jaap heard crying again. This time when he crossed over, he realized it was not Daniel who was crying but his mother, and it was Daniel in his small voice who was trying to comfort her. The next morning the atmosphere at the table in the captain’s cabin was tense. The widow and Daniel huddled together. The captain talked of nothing, with false joviality to the mates and boatswain. Jaap watched him. When the others had left, it was just Jaap and the captain, who finally said, “On with the day, Meneer De Bos.” Then Jaap said, “I thought that you said that you were an honorable man.”
To his credit, Jaap was later to think, the captain did not pretend not to know what Jaap was talking about. “I am not an honorable man, Meneer. I am a mercantile man in a mercantile world. I am a commercial man. I am a trader. I trade one thing for another.”
“What one thing are you trading to the widow?” asked Jaap.
“Passage,” said the captain. He said it as if that one word proved his point.
Jaap opened his satchel and withdrew from it the Bible. This he placed upon the table and then pushed toward the captain, who opened it and turned its pages and then realized what it was. “This is what I have to trade,” Jaap said.
And this is what Simon had feared when he had tried to impress upon Jaap the value of the book, not that he would lose it or allow it to be stolen or sell it for too little, but that he would give it away, that he would succumb to the sentimental gesture or noble cause, that he would be betrayed by his good heart. Of course, it is also the reason that Simon had come to love Jaap De Bos and the reason that he gave him the book in the first place.
“I want to be a Jew like you,” Jaap had said back then.
“Oh really?” said Simon, the bookseller, with the amusement that often came over him when he was talking with the boy. “I think that would be a first. Many people do not even want me to be a Jew and sometimes I am one of them. Now why do you think you want to be a Jew?”
“So I can sell books like you.”
“Christians can sell books too. Really.” The surprise in Simon’s voice was mirrored by the surprise on Jaap’s face. “Moors too. The Muslims have libraries full of books.”
Jaap ignored this last observation; he wasn’t quite sure what a Muslim was. For that matter, he didn’t really know what a Jew was except that Simon was one.
“In fact,” said the old man, and old is a relative term here for Simon was fifty-eight, but in Flanders in the early eighteenth century he was elderly, “not all Jews want to be Jews. It comes with a certain unfortunate birthright.”
“Well then, can you teach me to be a bookseller?”
Could he? Could he teach this barely literate farm boy, no matter how bright he might be, how to hold a book in his hands and know its value, how to raise money, how to buy and sell, when to buy and when to sell, for books were things of great value in those days like precious metals or gems? Somehow, he doubted it.
“I can teach you about books.”
“You are already teaching me about books.”
“I can teach you more. There is more to learn.” And this was not so much a business negotiation as it might sound but a personal one, a commitment to work together and live together a while longer, for this was in fact what the boy both needed and wanted, and the man did, too, increasingly, both to his surprise and alarm because he was a cautious, careful man, and he knew he was not being cautious or careful.
Part of Simon’s acquiescence in accepting Jaap De Bos, when he showed up on their doorstop smelling like the pig farm he’d come from, was letting his sister know that he was put upon, so he complained constantly about his smell until on the third day Rachel packed Jaap off to the public bath two streets away.
“Still stinks,” said Simon when the boy came back scrubbed pink and clean, scoured, almost sanded. He finally looked at the boy, and this is what he saw: a frightened child afraid of giving further offense, and Simon was sorry for what he had done or not done.
But not as sorry as he felt the next day when Jaap was ill with fever. The boy shivered and his teeth chattered, and Rachel wrapped him and wrapped him again in blankets because his shivering worked them loose, and she added coals one after another onto the grated fire until the air in the room was hot and the boy was soaking the blankets with perspiration, but when the boy opened his eyes it was not the woman who was sitting there beside him but the man, the one who had refused to look at him and now could not or would not stop looking at him; the man’s eyes were full of apprehension that he had killed something innocent and defenseless.
It was also Simon who sat with Jaap past dawn until the boy fell asleep, and it was Simon who was there when the boy awoke in the evening, his fever broken. Only now the old man was asleep with his chin on his chest, and he was drooling. This is what the boy said that awakened and then amused the man: “Hey, you have spittle in your beard!”
“Well yes,” said Simon, rolling his eyes. Jaap smiled and then even laughed a little, giving the man the first moment of pure joy he had had in years. Simon wiped the spittle from his beard and smiled back.
Jaap waited the rest of the day to see the widow. When he finally heard her in the passageway, he stepped out to greet her. “Widow,” he said, “you do not need to go to the captain again.”
When she looked at him uncertainly, he said, “Do not go to him. You are
freed of that.”
The widow, whose name was Sarah, did not know that she was Jewish until the day before she was married. She did not see the man she was to marry until the day of the wedding. Her father and mother had come from Eindhoven, twenty miles away, when the widow was an infant because the village had needed a blacksmith. Her father had cut his hair and sidelocks, changed his clothes, and gotten into the guild by concealing his identity. They became Catholics. They walked to mass with the other villagers. They went to confession and took communion. This was all very practical, a matter of survival, but it was also a betrayal of faith, one about which her father had felt mounting guilt, so when Sarah was fifteen, her parents took her to Eindhoven and delivered her into the hands of a rabbi, who introduced her to Judaism, and the man who was about to be her husband, the son of a cattle trader. The first words this man said to her were, “Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel.” They were very nearly the last words he said to her too.
This man, Shlomo Pinkus, was odd. Perhaps it had started with his vision, which was very bad. He seemed to see almost nothing but that which was immediately in front of him. He lifted coins up to his eyes to look at and held food to his nose to smell. He was a tall, unkempt man whose clothing was dirty, and he smelled. He also had scrofula. He spent much of his time picking scabs off his scalp, neck, and elbows, holding them up to his eyes and examining them minutely. He would then roll the scab into a ball between his forefinger and his thumb, and sometimes he would eat it.
Shlomo’s parents thought that maybe if he had a wife and children, he would begin to behave like a husband and a father, but no one in the community in Eindhoven wanted to give their daughter to him. His mother and father needed to find someone who was as odd as their son and as desperate as they were. The rabbi knew of the blacksmith and his wife living secretly nearby. He sent a message proposing marriage, and Sarah’s father, realizing that they had created a trap from which Sarah was increasingly unlikely to escape unless she married a Christian and compounded their sin, quickly accepted.
Shlomo and Sarah had sex one time, and it was the night they were wed. After their consummation, he rolled away from her in what seemed like disgust and turned his back. She bled and wept profusely. He went to sleep. The experiment failed badly.
The couple lived in his parents’ household, where he was treated like a freak and she was treated like the wife of a freak or perhaps as an alien or even as a farm animal, something brought in from the countryside for breeding or milking. Part of it, of course, was her complete ignorance of the rites and rituals of their faith. Shlomo’s mother, sisters, and aunts taught her these but with the contempt reserved at the time for nonbelievers of any faith. They did not think of her as one of them, not even when it turned out that she was pregnant. If anything, this seemed to be another strike against her, but it turned out to be her salvation because she was a strong, resourceful girl who needed only a purpose. The baby became her purpose, and she cared for him with intense focus and dedication.
Shlomo’s father tried to teach him the horse trade. The son stood at his father’s side as he bargained and bartered for horses, but most of the time he was picking and looking at his scabs and twisting strands of his hair around his forefinger. Shlomo’s father could see that people were distracted by this, even repelled, so he took to leaving his son at home. When the baby was born, Shlomo hardly acknowledged it. He held it up close to his face once, then rarely looked at it again.
One day Sarah asked Shlomo to hand her something, and although he was sitting just beside her, he didn’t respond.
“Shlomo?” she said. “Shlomo?” She gradually quit expecting Shlomo to respond. “I’ll put your food on the table here.” He would eat it and she would clean up after him. “I’ll just do your dishes now.”
When the baby came, she talked to him. “Let’s just get you fed, and then we’ll light a fire. Shall we get some wood?” This was almost a necessity, since the others in the household spoke to Sarah less and less. They seemed to blame her for Shlomo’s condition or associate her with it. The mother and the child formed their own tiny family. Through it all, Daniel grew, Sarah and Daniel grew closer, and Shlomo sat in the corner and picked at himself. Then one day Sarah and the baby went into the stable, and found Shlomo at the end of a rope. He had hanged himself.
He was buried the next day and the day after that, Sarah was told that in keeping with law and custom, she was to marry Shlomo’s brother. She seemed to have little choice. Her own father had died, and her mother was living in an almshouse. But there was a problem with this plan. Shlomo’s brother had left five years earlier for the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which was now the new English colony of New York, and no one had heard of or from him in almost two years. They didn’t even know if Shlomo’s brother had married or was even still alive; it didn’t seem to matter to them.
Then there was the dispute with the ship’s captain when Sarah and Daniel went aboard. Shlomo’s father counted out the amount of money he thought had been agreed upon, but was told it wasn’t enough. It did not include this and that. Oh. Clearly Shlomo’s father felt taken advantage of and wasn’t about to pay more, although it was just as clear to Sarah that he desperately wanted to be rid of her and her child. A deal was worked out. The balance would be worked off by Sarah in some kind of servitude during the voyage. The captain was saluted for his magnanimity. “We are all brothers and sisters,” he said. Sarah was shown to her berth.
When Jaap came into the cabin after his transaction with the captain, Sarah and Daniel had moved to his end of the table. Thus, the friendship that began in the ship’s passageway with a nod and a smile advanced by a degree. There would be more such advances; the next morning Jaap found a tin cup of tea at his place.
“Bedankt,” he said. Thank you.
“Austerbleift,” she said. If you please.
For Jaap and Sarah life was immediate, and talk was practical. It was about food or drink or health or clothing, about the moment, the day: the storm on the horizon or the one just past. They were seldom nostalgic. They rarely talked about the more distant past or future because the past did not hold many good memories, and the future contained as much threat as promise. This was especially true during their sea passage when living was about surviving, about making it to the other side.
If the seas were rough, the three passengers aboard the Swallow stayed in their berths sometimes for many hours lost in the shadows and gloom somewhere between illness and sleep. If the day was fair and the seas were not too rough, anyone who could be was on the deck, if only to escape the stale air and dank miasma of the hold. As the seamen repaired nets, sails, and ropes, Jaap taught Daniel how to tie knots; he let the boy stand between his legs, put his arms around him from behind to hold his hands and join the ropes. “Now pull tight.”
Sometimes Sarah washed clothing in a pail of soapy salt water. “Give me your stockings,” she would say to Jaap. When Jaap and Sarah talked about anything of greater import, they did so with the same lack of affect and apology. “He didn’t even really know his father,” Sarah said.
“Why not?”
“His father had a demon. He hanged himself.”
“Did you have other children?”
“I was only bred once. That time,” she said pointing to her son. “I take Shlomo’s death partly on myself because we didn’t talk. He never talked to me, so I stopped talking to him. I didn’t think he was listening, but now I think he must have been.”
“Did you like him?”
“No. He was a hard man to like. He never looked at you and he smelled.”
They arrived at dusk on an October evening too late for the customs houses, but early enough to see the torches still burning along the Battery, lights twinkling here and there in the town. It was fair enough for the ship’s company to be on deck. The seamen were anxious to go ashore and agitated that they could not until the next day. They were drinking. Jaap, Sarah, and Daniel leaned against the gunnels and looked at New York. They were not anxious to go ashore. For one thing they did not know what awaited them there. For another, they had found some comfort among themselves.
“Where will you go?” Sarah asked.
“I have a letter of introduction.” He did not say that it was to a bookseller and was probably useless now that he did not have a book to sell. “And you will find your brother-in-law?”
“I shall try.” Suddenly the little settlement that spread out in front of them looked forbiddingly large, and her task seemed daunting. That Shlomo’s brother would be alive and unmarried and welcoming and not as odd and insular as his brother and parents all seemed improbable. And if he wasn’t these things, then what would she do? Become someone’s servant, she supposed. But who would want a maid who did not speak English, who was no longer a girl, and who had a four-year-old son?
They lingered there, the three of them, well beyond the point where they had anything left to say to each other, until the watch rang six bells, until the sailors were very drunk, until the only lights still burning on the shore were the torches. Afterwards Jaap lay on his back in his berth in the pitch-black, worrying and feeling completely alone.
After that he awoke to the scent and feel of Sarah somewhere above him. He thought at first that he was dreaming, and then he hoped to God that he was not. She was straddling him, and he could feel her soft, damp sex against his stomach, and then he could taste her lips and her tongue. She was holding his
head in her hands, and so he held her head that way too. What they were doing was not exactly sexual or at least it was not only sexual. They were holding each other and rocking together and breathing hard together and sucking in the other’s breath so as to not make noise. His stomach and his pants were wet with her, and his cock was so hard that it hurt. He reached to release it from his pants, and she reached to hold it. Her tichel was askew, and now she pulled it off and tossed it aside, and for the first time Jaap saw her hair, which was wild and thrilling. She was panting, but then suddenly she was very still except for her hand. Finally, she said, “You are not a Jew.”
“No, I am not.”
She sat back and bent her face down, and he thought for a moment that she was going to bite him or suck him, but she did neither. She examined him instead. He could feel her fingers probing his penis. Then she sat back again, and now she was rubbing her sex on him and he could feel her wetness on his stomach and on his cock until he was inside her.
“Oh,” he said.
“Ah,” she said.
What they were doing was also making a commitment, signing a contract just as surely as if they were doing it on paper. They were consummating something about which they knew little except that it was absolute. Afterwards she lay flat on him, and he felt her hard, little breasts against his stomach and her cheek against his chest and her fingers in the hair on his chest. Slowly and together their breathing eased. Finally, just when he thought that she might have fallen asleep, she said, “When we go ashore, are we going to be Jews or are we going to be Christians?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It would be easier to be Christians,” she said.
“That’s true,” he said, “but I have always wanted to be a Jew.”
Peter Ferry’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Fiction, OR, Chicago Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and Hypertext Review amongst others; he is the winner of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction. He is a contributor to the travel pages of the Chicago Tribune and to WorldHum. He has written two novels, Travel Writing, which was published in 2008, and Old Heart, which was published in June, 2015 and won the Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year award. His short story “Ike, Sharon and Me” appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, and Van Buren County, Michigan, with his wife Carolyn.