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bars watching as the world passed by. They had no tolerance for reflection; any motion seemed sacred. Only Paul Levy was privileged to look from afar. They had taken to movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this venture of the Jews prove successful, the new state would be filled with dancers and musicians, but especially dancers, for dancing like nothing else says:
I am still alive.
And although that simple statement will appear vacuous to those for whom living has always been a right, for those who have been challenged on this score, it is the most beautiful and momentous thing to be said or heard in the world.
    Paul Levy would sometimes stand on his sway bridge and look backward over the sea along the ship’s white wake churning up green water in a continuous noise that sounded like krill or dolphins. He remembered when early in the Battle of the Atlantic he had gone to the bow of the destroyer to hide his face between the converging gray plates and be alone. He had been so exhausted, so frightened, so tired, so cold all the time, and he had always had the feeling that he was going to die. That was when he thought the song “Speed Bonny Boat Like a Bird on the Wind, ‘Onward,’ the Sailors Cry” meant that the sailors were aforeship crying as they left their homes and country. They were in the mid-Atlantic hunting U-boats and hoping for contact with a surface raider. They were going fast through waters in which there had been a storm and the clouds were trailing rapidly across the sky. As he bent forward to rest against the bow and give his sadness free rein, he realized that in the preceding days he had not been paying enough attention, that his watches and interrupted sleep had left him ignorant of the ship’s course. They had penetrated the tropics—a warm wind circled about him and he undid his coat—for the sea was green and thick. As he looked into the bow waves he saw the faithful and miraculous shape of dolphins, speaking to one another in chirps and whistles. They had great strength and endurance, and yet they were beautiful and not hard. By observing this he settled a conflict within himself, determining to be as strong as was necessary and yet not to be hard. One of them veered outward and in so doing made it possible for his eye to catch Paul Levy’s eye, and both seemed to smile without smiling. From that day forward he knew how to knit together strength and love.
    Almost as if by magic he was afforded another eye in which to look and by which to receive a reflected message from the sea. There was a girl amidships, sewing belts. She was small and delicate, with strong and graceful limbs. Using shreds from the wicker and reed she had woven a straw hat and it framed her gold hair and blue eyes in a rough warm cream color. She was pregnant. Levy could not help staring, so great was her beauty, so different from the saddened beauty of the others. She returned his gaze. The beams between them were as steady as a compass needle. The ship swayed, a water dancer, and the waters fumed and glistened to left and right. There was heat and love in the gaze, an aura of gold as with the dolphins, an interference locking them together for a moment utterly out of their power. Paul Levy felt as if he would go to her, but he turned away. She undoubtedly had a husband, and he was captain of
all
the ship—a rigor unquestioned, to which he had to keep faith.
    He did not know that she had lost her husband and believed that he was dead, and that despite the vibrant light surrounding her, the flash of her golden coloring, despite her beauty and despite the captain’s skill, she was soon to die alone. Her name was Katrina Perlé.
5
    S OMETIMES IN the frozen dry winters which made the Russian foresters fear for their young trees, Katrina Perlé’s father climbed the stairs to her room directly under the roof, and there, as the wind howled and his little