“I wanted to see how it felt to be Jewish and free,” she said, her green eyes swelling with tears. More cheerfully, she said, “Tell me about your America.”
Joshua told her about Hollywood and Shirley Temple, baseball and Coney Island, Michigan and washing dishes, birds in flight, and being free. Imitating Charlie Chaplin, he even made Rachel laugh. He was walking that way when he saw the other German girls begin to leave the deck.
Rachel stepped forward. She was almost Joshua’s height. Her eyes told him to bend down. She didn’t want to be heard.
“You and me, I think we are ‘Beshert,’” she said, and she was gone.
Alone, again, on deck, Joshua tried to hear the laughter, the intermingling breath of athletes, the chatter about Jesse Owens and what foods did he really eat. Joshua tried to focus on the dawn breaking into another day.
The sky was now visible. He heard the sounds of gulls and morning birds, and foghorns of vessels in the harbor. Children awakened in their mother’s arms. There was the fresh air and the wide expanse of the seas, and the mountains on the horizon. The cries of the nation welcomed him. He felt the faint promise that, beyond that splash of blue above, the sights he would always ever after see, in the rivers, in the fields, and high atop the mountains would be her green eyes bathed in light and tears. Her eyes had seen already such misery, but still shone with hope, glittering in the grey light, singing in the rising dawn. The promise of tomorrow and the world that tore her today would only take away the fabric, maybe even the body, but not the soul away.
But how could he tell her that in a moment that he would only rise to see, much later in dreams of her and him in the square, under the swastikas in love, that although he had never heard that word, ‘Beshert,’ he wanted to tell her, through the timelessness of an embrace of souls that are immortal, that he had always known its meaning.
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