“Our journey went smoothly for many days. The hot sun hung always above us; the pale passengers turned more and more brown. Small fish leaped from the water, spread wings, and flew past our bow. At night, behind us, in the churning water, green lights and yellow lights were flashing and glowing, like a boulevard. Then, on the morning of the fourteenth day, when the piles of coal had shrunk almost to nothing, the ship began to move very much faster. The sky was blue still, but the wind flattened the tops of the waves. Some man pointed upward; the plume from the smokestack no longer billowed behind us; instead—and why did this sight fill us with sudden fear?—it stretched out ahead, as if we were chasing it, as if it were a black rope we had to follow. A small cloud on the horizon began to swell over the entire sky. The day turned as dark as night. The steamer raced onward, dropping for whole moments into the trough of a wave, then rising even more steeply until it burst through a cloud of its own soot and embers. This happened several times. Then the Morgenstern, with its coal, its Jews, and its white-shirted sailors, broke into two pieces and swiftly sank.

“My young friends, I do not wish to frighten you with my story. You know I am here among you. I did not after all drown. The reason for this is that in the violent swirl of the seas, as I was tossed this way and that, my arm became wedged in a floating fragment of wood. At that hour, in the darkness of the storm, and through the night which soon followed, I had no idea of what it was that had saved me. But in the dawn, under light clouds, I clearly saw the giant timber, still round like a tree, with the grain of the wood wet and glistening. Perhaps it had been part of a mast, or a rib of the ship; but of that ship there was no other sign—no person, no object, no stain on the water. It was as if Providence had sent this timber to me and fastened me there, as a reminder of earth and of the role I had yet to play upon it. I alone had been saved.”

The room was silent and black. Most of the Hatters’ Asylum orphans were by then dozing. Those who had remained awake—Nellie, for instance, and Szypper, and one or two others—were staring at the place where the voice had been. There something was glowing, burning, then dimming, then getting red hot again. What was this? Trumpelman’s cigarette.

“Now I must tell you that on this same day, when the thirst became more than I thought I could bear, I wished to end my own life. But my arm was broken, my legs numb in the water, and I could not twist from the grip of the jagged wood. I had no choice but to drift, cursing the God who had saved me. The thirst. I cannot adequately describe it to you. The sea salt was mixed into each breath that I took. And in the seams of my skin. Crystals of salt on my hair. And the sun hung above me, licking at me, like an animal’s rough tongue.