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ship swayed lightly underfoot, the stroll around the deck with the sun stroking our faces seemed more like a turn around the dance floor. Even the passengers lolling in deck chairs, soaking up the sun, seemed part of the dance.
    The ship with its barely perceptible movement began to feel like a giant yacht that had taken us all out to the middle of the ocean and then dropped anchor for a few days. It would have been hard to imagine a calmer sea, a bluer sky, or better company.
    This was no mere voyage, but a dream. “One should travel to Europe only at the end of June, the beginning of July,” remarked my neighbor on the warm bench we were sharing. His last crossing was in October, and aha … aha … did he have a tale to tell. He was as sick as a dog and vomited all the way, because the ship kept going like this—here he demonstrated with his hand how his ship had almost capsized. My neighbor spoke a meticulous English, but substituted an
s
for the
sh
sound, like one of those fully baked Lithuanian Jews whose speech was also marked by the same transposition. I was certain, however, that he was no
Litvak:
This specimen had rough hands, a broad back, a mighty head, propped on his neck like a cabbage, high cheekbones, watery-blue eyes, and thick, bushy eyebrows.
    He looked like a laborer and talked like an intellectual, choosing his words as if he were sorting chickpeas and rejecting the inferior ones. He would settle on the precise noun and then deck it out with an exact adjective and an elegant verb. His raspy voice seemed to emerge not from his throat but from some region of the heart. He pointed to a wisp of cloud still in its swaddling clothes and said that he already knew to which category it belonged since, as he explained, he was a teacher.
    “Of clouds?” I asked.
    He burst into a hearty, peasant laugh. “No! Of geography, in a middle school in Schenectady.”
    I have always loved the ring of the word
Schenectady
. Schenectady! It sounded like the cracking of a hard Turkish nut. To show him that I had a head on my shoulders, I tossed in the name of Charles Steinmetz, that famous son of Schenectady.
    What a question! Of course he knew of the electrical wizard. Now there was a man! And what a Socialist! What a noble spirit! So modest and unassuming, so friendly that he could chat up the meanest of men like a brother. My benchmate pronounced the word
Socialist
with a nostalgic gleam in his blue eyes. His hoarse voice spoke the word so tenderly that the dry term fairly quivered with emotion. He kept gesticulating with his rough carpenter’s hands until he finally let one of them drop on my shoulder in a gesture of comradeship: “Yes sir, that was a Socialist!”
    Suddenly, he pulled out his watch and, rising abruptly from the bench, said that, much as he enjoyed my company and would soon return to resume our conversation, he must now ask to be excused. It was time to go to the toilet. “Heh, heh! A person is only human.” Chuckling, he gave me another friendly slap on the back. His bowel movements were at fixed times, calibrated to the minute. Should anything ever interrupt the routine, he would immediately take some measure to get himself back on track. This was very important, because a person was no more than a machine.
    “Here, read something until I get back.” He tossed me a pack of pamphlets and, already some distance away, doubled up in laughter when he saw how dumbfounded I was by the foreign language.
    “Swedish?” I called out to him.
    “No, Danish!”
    I turned the pages. Complicated Scandinavian words, tough as nails, were underlined in pencil, with English comments in the margins. I kept turning the pages until the words assumed some familiarity and I was able to recognize familiar Teutonic roots under their Danish disguise.
    On an adjacent lounge lay a young man, belly turned up to the sun, his face smeared with lotion to prevent burning. The melting grease glistened. A second young man lay on