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his side nearby, opening a nervous eye from time to time as if to check that his companion was still there. Over his bulging chest, the man taking the sun had on a tight sweater that seemed to be choking him around the neck. He chewed gum phlegmatically. He would doze off, snap awake, and then resume chewing. When I spoke to him, he didn’t respond, and when he did deign to answer, his few words came out sleepily. Every time he spoke up to mutter three or four words, his sidekick would open a nervous eye as if to say, half entreatingly and half in anger, “Enough talking now.” He would cut him off in the middle, ending the conversation.
    The sunbather seemed somewhat put out with me. His broken nose, a collapsed, wooden ruin, snorted like a locomotive. It vexed him that I, alone of all the passengers, should not have known who he was. His companion, apparently some sort of manager, gave me a pleading look, miming me to stay away from his bread-and-butter. The sunbather fell silent, but then suddenly bestirred himself and, in open defiance of his Man Friday, laced into me, this time not sparing any words. Man Friday decided that he couldn’t just lie there while his bread-and-butter was holding forth, so he sat up, the better to keep an eye on him.
    “How come you don’t know me?” said the sunbather. “Don’t you go to the fights? You know who Barney Ross is? Well, I could have been a second Barney, if that black guy hadn’t stopped me—
a finster yor af im.
” (The Yiddish curse was for my benefit). “A black year on his black head. I could take anyone down, but when it came to that guy, nothing worked. So I gave up boxing and opened a little store, but the store failed. Then my mother, may she rest in peace, died, so now I’ve decided to make a comeback. Yesiree, a comeback!”
    Man Friday glared at his Hercules. He screwed up his face as if he had stomach cramps, but my interlocutor continued undaunted.
    “The press mustn’t find out about this. I’m going first to Paris, then to London, and after a few fights in Europe, I’m going back to get even. Damn him! Imagine, winning all those fights and then getting stopped by a black man. And you wanna know how come I know Yiddish? What am I, a Turk? I came over from Poland when I was twelve. My mother, may she rest in peace, was a pious woman. She couldn’t make me
daven
—no way would I pray! But I did wear those fringes, the
tsitsis.
”
    The greasy lotion dripped from his chin and from his collapsed nose. He fell back on his lounge, while the manager, who hadn’t uttered a word, lay back on his side. But the fighter wasn’t done yet. Again, he sat up abruptly, leaned head and shoulder toward me, and said, this time entirely in Yiddish: “Say, what kind of Jewish bastards are walking around on this ship anyway? They’d eat shit rather than admit that they’re Jews. One Hitler isn’t enough for them, the bastards.”
    Man Friday cocked an eye and the prizefighter lapsed into silence. He fell back on the lounge, and began, rapidly, to chew his gum.
4
    Aboard ship it’s easier to appreciate the individual’s worth. Under the impact of the everyday, we tend to lose the sense of drama, tragic or comic, that is everyone’s portion. The child’s sense of wonderment dulls. You become the measure of all things, the star of the play, with everyone else reduced to bit players, mere extras in the great ego-drama which plays itself out in a million boring scenes that thrill no one else but you, the lead actor. Only when death cuts one of them down like a tree in a forest do you realize that your nearest and dearest have had dramas of their own. At that point you approach the empty space and try to reconstruct the missing life. You realize that it was full of incident. Trading anecdotes about the deceased, you see that he was the star in his own drama. But had this ever occurred to you when you caught sight of your wife sunk in a daydream, or your children