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He sounded like an American himself, at least to Goldfarb’s ear. The RAF officer-no, the ex-RAF officer, he reminded himself-could gauge the home region and status of anyone from the British Isles just by listening to him for a couple of minutes. But American accents only put him in mind of evenings at the cinema, and all Yanks seemed to him to talk the same way.
But when he remarked that the sailor sounded like an American screen actor, the fellow laughed at him. “You can tell the difference once you learn how,” he said. “We say zed and shedule, the same as you do in England. On the other side of the border, they say zee and skedule. And when they go through a door, they go owt ”-he exaggerated the pronunciation-“but we go oat.”
“Now that you tell me, I can hear the difference,” Goldfarb admitted, “but I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.”
The Canadian shrugged. Was that rueful? Resigned? Amused? Something of all three? Goldfarb wasn’t sure. The sailor said, “Getting harder and harder for us to tell differences these days. Since the fighting stopped, we’ve looked more and more south to the USA and less and less across the ocean to England. Meaning no offense, pal, but you’ve had other things on your mind than us.”
“I know,” Goldfarb said bitterly. “Britain’s looking south more and more these days, too-south across the Channel to the Greater German Reich. The UK is turning into a pack of little Nazis because it’s next door to the big ones.”
“Yes, it’s a shame,” the sailor said. He sounded sympathetic but distant-what happened to the United Kingdom didn’t matter much to him. And the Reich wasn’t the biggest danger loose in the world, and hadn’t been for a long time. Next to the Lizards, who cared about Germans?
And, next to the sailor’s duties, he didn’t care much about keeping a passenger entertained. Oh, he was polite; he tipped his cap as he went on his way. But go on his way he did, leaving Goldfarb alone on the deck of the Liberty Hot Springs, with the Atlantic all around him.
The only long sea voyages he’d made before were to Poland and back during the fighting, when he’d rescued his cousin Moishe Russie from a Lizard gaol. He’d gone by submarine then, and hadn’t had much-hadn’t had any-chance to look out. Traveling from Liverpool to Belfast for his last RAF posting hadn’t been the same, either, for he’d hardly gone out of sight of land. Now…
Now, for the first time in his life, he got a sense of how truly vast the ocean was. The ship didn’t seem to move on it. Nothing came up over the western horizon, nothing vanished below the eastern horizon. From what his senses told him, the Liberty Hot Springs might sail on forever without seeing land again.
Goldfarb wondered if it was the same out in space. Airplanes were different. He knew about them. The sense of motion was never absent in them; neither was the sense that the journey, which by the nature of things could last only hours, would soon end. Traveling across the solar system as the Lewis and Clark had done, or from star to star as the Lizards did… Those were wider oceans than the Liberty Hot Springs was meant to sail.
A couple of other sailors hurried past him, intent on business of their own. On this ship, passengers were an afterthought. On a liner, they wouldn’t have been, but Goldfarb wouldn’t have been able to afford passage across the Atlantic on a liner. Serving his country all his adult life hadn’t made him rich.
He wondered what serving his country all his adult life had got him. In some small ways, he’d helped make sure Britain wouldn’t be occupied by the Germans or the Lizards, but he doubted that would have changed much had he stayed in London’s East End instead of volunteering for the RAF.
Of course, if he’d played along with the ginger smugglers in the RAF, he might well be on his way toward getting rich now. But that wasn’t why he’d joined. He might not know many things, but he was certain of that.
Some sort of bird flew by the ship. Pointing to it, a passing sailor said, “Land in a couple of days.”
“Really?” Goldfarb said, and the Canadian nodded. Goldfarb felt foolish; he knew when the journey had started and how long it was supposed to last, and shouldn’t have needed the bird to remind him when they would approach Canada. Using it as a sign took him back to the days before steam engines, back even to the days before chronometers, when accurately gauging a ship’s position was impossible and such portents really mattered.
Naomi came up from below and looked around. Seeing Goldfarb, she waved and made her way over to him. She’d always been very fair; in the moderately rough seas they’d met earlier in the journey, she’d gone pale as skimmed milk. She didn’t have a whole lot of color now, either, come to that.
“Won’t be too much longer,” David said, and spoke of the bird as if it, and not the steady thud of the ship’s engine, meant they would be coming to Canada soon.
Naomi accepted the news in the spirit with which he’d offered it. “Danken Gott dafur,” she said. “It’s seemed like forever.” A voyage that had been timeless in one sense for Goldfarb had been timeless in a very different sense for her. She gathered herself and went on, “The children will be disappointed.”
“Yes, they’ve had a fine time,” Goldfarb agreed. “They won’t want to get off the ship when we get to Montreal.”
Naomi rolled her eyes. “If I have to, I’ll drag them off,” she said. “Who would have thought my children would turn out to be good sailors?” She sounded as if they’d betrayed her by not getting sick.
When the Liberty Hot Springs reached Canadian waters, Goldfarb got another surprise: the scale of the country. The Gulf of St. Lawrence, protected from the greater sea by Newfoundland and the headland of Nova Scotia, was impressive, but nothing had prepared him for the St. Lawrence River itself. He had trouble seeing both banks at the same time when the ship first entered it: where gulf stopped and river began seemed very much a matter of opinion. Even when it eventually narrowed, it remained awe-inspiringly large.
“There must be as much water going through here as there is in all the rivers in England put together,” Goldfarb remarked to a sailor.
“Oh, more than that,” the Canadian said smugly.
And, fighting against the St. Lawrence’s fierce current, the Liberty Hot Springs took two and a half days to get to Montreal after entering the river. That journey alone was about as far as it was from the Isle of Wight in southern England to the Orkneys off the northern coast of Scotland-but it took in only a small bite of the vastness that was Canada. Goldfarb’s notions of scale got revised again.
Only Montreal itself failed to overwhelm him. It was a fair-sized city, sure enough. But to a man born and raised in London, that was all it was. Britain might be small, but it had plenty of people.
When longshoremen tied the ship up at a quay, he gave a long sigh of relief. “We’re here,” he said to Naomi. “We can start over now.”
“Let’s not be so happy till we get through customs,” his wife answered. She’d been a refugee before, fleeing the Reich. If that wasn’t enough to ingrain pessimism in someone, Goldfarb didn’t know what would be.
But he said, “Well, our papers are in order, so we shouldn’t have any trouble.” As she had up on deck a few days before, his wife rolled her eyes.
Clutching papers and suitcases and children, he and Naomi went over the gangplank, off the ship, and onto Canadian soil. He’d wondered if, in Montreal, he would have to deal with officials who spoke French. But the fellow to whose post he came wore a name badge that said V. WILLIAMS and used English of the same sort as the sailors on the Liberty Hot Springs.
“So you are immigrating to our country, eh?” he said, examining passports and immigration forms.
“Yes, sir.” A lifetime in the RAF had taught Goldfarb the shortest answers were the best.
“Reason for leaving Great Britain?” Williams asked.
“Too many people getting too chummy with Himmler,” Goldfarb said dryly.
Whatever Williams had expected by way of reply, that wasn’t it. He was about Goldfarb’s age; he might wel
l have seen action against the Germans himself. “Er, yes,” he said, and scribbled a note on the form in front of him. “So your claim would involve political liberties, then? We don’t often see that from the mother country.”
Naomi said, “You will see more of it, I think, as England comes closer to the Reich.”
“It could be so, ma’am,” the immigration officer said, and wrote another note. He turned back to David. “Now, then-what skills do you bring to Canada?”
“I’m just retired from the RAF,” Goldfarb answered. “I served since 1939, and I’ve been working with radars all that time. I’ll gladly pass along anything I happen to know that you don’t, and I’ll be looking for civilian work in electronics or at an airport.”
“I see.” Williams turned away and shuffled through some papers. He pulled one out, read it, and nodded. “I thought your name was familiar. You’re the fellow who was involved in that ginger-smuggling mess last year, aren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s me,” Goldfarb answered with a sinking feeling.
His old chum Jerome Jones had managed to clear away the obstacles to his emigration from Britain. What obstacles had Basil Roundbush and his pals managed to throw up against his immigration into Canada?
Williams tapped the eraser end of his pencil against his front teeth, “You and your family are to be permitted into the country,” he said, still eyeing that sheet of paper. “You are to be permitted entry, but you are also to be transported to Ottawa for a thorough interrogation. Until that interrogation is completed to the satisfaction of the authorities, you are to remain under the authority of the Canadian government.”
“What precisely does that mean?” Goldfarb asked. I should have known this wouldn’t be easy. Gevalt, Naomi knew it wouldn’t be easy.
“What it says, more or less,” the immigration officer answered. “You are not free to settle until this process is finalized.” He sounded every inch a bureaucrat.
Voice brittle, Naomi asked, “And how long is that likely to take?”
Williams spread his hands. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t the least idea. That’s not my bailiwick at all, I’m afraid.” Yes, he was a bureaucrat, all right.
