Refiner's Fire Read Free Page B

who did pushups and could fight, and how for him being a Jew was impossible since he could not get either in or out and seemed to be hanging in between worlds which would not have him.
    They stayed together for two weeks until she took him in a turtle-backed taxi to Idlewild and saw him off on his way to becoming a captain, as he had said he was. He felt that he did not know his own mind. He was apprehensive about not returning in time to resume his commission, apprehensive about leaving the silent city which he had come to like and respect, apprehensive about rising above shafts of sunlight and clouds on a straining airplane past the rows of gray buildings in new prosperity—a good quiet place for infants after the war—apprehensive of rising into an empyrean of blue, apprehensive of heading east, apprehensive of challenging the British cordon with an old coastal freighter, and apprehensive of the dreamlike frame of mind into which he had fallen. He hardly knew what had happened, but he felt as if he were certainly rising upward.
2
    H E WAS lanky and well over six feet tall, with short blond hair and the remnants of a suntan he had picked up on the Albemarle. He was dressed in khaki pants, a white shirt, and a brown aviator jacket which he slung over his shoulder. Though only twenty-six, he had spent all his adult life in war. Darkness, danger, and combat did not bother him. It was a hot day in Brindisi. Children with nearly shaved heads and black shorts settled on the sea walls like rows of vultures. Heat was rising from the beige-colored stones, and prostitutes strolling under the palms were eyed by midget Italian sailors of the Adriatic Squadron. In the harbor, garbage scows and miscellaneous unkempt craft scuttled back and forth between ships, halting now and then to nestle against a cruiser or a minesweeper, not quite in the manner of a calf leaning on its mother but rather like the flies which settled on carcasses in the horse butcheries. Motors hummed and a brass band from one of the ships was practicing far in the distance, modulated by the waves of heat.
    Levy had arrived at a pier in the old port, and there he stood staring at the Motor Vessel
Lindos Transit,
an appalling piece of junk by any standard, more like a bombed-out house than a ship. But if it could float and go, it would do. Air upwelling about him, he was immobilized in wonder, and a group of people on the main deck returned his gaze. There was a woman who looked Bulgarian, perhaps a washerwoman, in a print dress. Above her head and a little to the right was a dark man in a felt hat, a Polish or Czech army officer. Next to him was another thick-armed giant of a woman, with gray streaks in her hair, a face of granite, and a little child near her. The child had a tiny Japanese-like face with eyes as round and small as ladybugs. In her hair was a bright white ribbon which shone against the darkness and was in the shape of a perching bird. Next to her was another stout woman, with a worried expression—and the face of an Italian condottiere in a High Renaissance painting. Above her, leaning forward to look at the American, was a thin and handsome man whose arms were very strong. Levy could see this because the man had grasped one of the many ill-placed rails and pipes which ran overhead, and was suspended like an acrobat. There was a girl of about twenty-five, a pretty girl with black curls which were blowing in the hot breeze. Above her, more like a monkey than an acrobat, was a boy in an almost Alpine jacket and a flat cap. He was scared and bewildered, as if he had just come from a pre-war French childrens book. He was, of course, an orphan.
    Then there was a man who could only have been a waiter in a fashionable Budapest cafe or, and this is said without levity, a professional movie usher in Strasbourg. In the background were other eyes and half-hidden faces, old suits and hats. Levy felt very little, if anything, for these people and noticed