The ship is overcrowded. Third-class passengers, like him, have been moved to the cold-storage rooms and the original third-class cabins rebranded as first class. He makes friends with his bunkmates, an Englishman and a Frenchman. They all get seasick immediately. The seas in the English Channel are rough; a strong wind is blowing. The ship turns into a hospital ship. Only when they pass through the Bay of Biscay does the sea grow calm, and off the coast of Spain they start to cruise through the warm, velvety salt air of the Atlantic. It gets warmer almost by the hour, and when, passing Portugal, he finds he’s back in fit condition, he goes out walking on deck, feeling reborn, and sees that all of Europe is on this ship—Italians, Germans, Austrians, Eastern Europeans—just like twenty-five years ago, when he was on his way to the New World.

“They’re fleeing,” the Englishman explains.

“Fleeing?”

“Still.” The Frenchman nods. “They’re still being persecuted in Eastern Europe, even today. It’s only in Germany that they’re not. Ironic, no?”

“How do you know all of this?”

“They tell me.”

“You talk to them?”

“Of course.”

He would never dare. What if they ask who he is? What he did? Why he’s on this ship?

His new friends take him for an American, or maybe they just act like they do. They grumble about the Germans onboard. Their assessments are not good: they find them to be arrogant, to be shirking responsibility, to be cowardly and without remorse.

“They’re not exactly popular in New York either,” he is able to add.

Two days later they’re approaching Casablanca. The sea is calm and the air hot. They have six hours before the ship leaves. The Frenchman acts as their guide, tells them that the city is divided into two sections, the new section and the medina, the old city, which one shouldn’t venture into alone. Wide streets, horse-drawn carriages, everything bathed in white light. A boulevard runs along the ocean, past a grand hotel with Arab women sunbathing in bikinis outside. Tall, skinny palm trees line the streets. It’s the first city he’s seen in a long time that’s still intact. He’s captivated by the white townhouses with French balconies and the light that seems to come straight from the Atlantic.

He tries to stamp it all on his memory, every detail, like an image he will later have to paint.

As they near the equator the ship is covered with a white canvas. The sun beats down; the Atlantic glitters. They sail past the Canary Islands. Two days later they reach Dakar. He goes onto shore, sees pith helmets, sees black men in flowing garments, strolling through the streets and speaking French.