Almost the Same
Christian Michener’s
From the deck the buildings looked like condensed smoke. A pale wash of sun backlit the fog in which they squatted. “Wouldn’t try it if I were you,” a voice said.
Rudolph turned to see one of the sailors leaning on the railing beside him, his broad white collar opening beneath his neck like the spread wings of a gull. Rudolph had seen the man a few times on the trip—a red, wind-beaten face; raw, rope-skewered hands—but had never spoken to any of the shiphands. Not willingly, at least. The old man had warned him about that. But somehow the sailor knew Rudolph was German. As long as he didn’t know he wasn’t Hans, which is what Rudolph’s papers said.
“Looks possible but the current will kill you.” The sailor pointed to some obscure spot ahead of them. “See those rocks?” he asked, though Rudolph could make out nothing but water and whitecaps. “That’s where you’ll end up, crushed like a nut.” The sailor turned to him. “Assuming you make it that far.”
“I wasn’t going to swim,” he said. He hadn’t once thought of it.
“Usually these things mean nothing,” the sailor said. He looked Rudolph up and down. “You’ll get through for sure if they let us into port.”
A hole widened in Rudolph’s stomach with each sentence the man added. Rudolph had been nervous about the landing but now something seemed to be happening he had missed. His cousin had written that it was scary at the port but not as bad as he might have heard. Learn your English, he had said. Rudolph had written back. Heard what? What was scary? The cousin hadn’t responded, lost somewhere in Chicago or Pittsburgh, but Rudolph had studied. For months.
During the voyage people had traded terrors and dreams. The brother opening three stores in Philadelphia. How the factories kept their doors open so you could walk right in and start working. An aunt, sent back, insisting her husband and child stay, leapt overboard halfway across the ocean.
“Don’t listen to them,” the old man had said. “They’d have no reason not to let you in.” He and Rudolph had shared a berth, windowless, stench-dense with cabbage and tobacco and salt and human piss. They had to climb onto their bunks from the ends or wade through a puddle of bilgewater.
In exchange for games of chess, the man had helped Rudolph with his English. This was his second time coming, he said. The first had been in the mines, in West Virginia. The old man coughed, a deep, hideous gurgle from his lungs. When asked what reasons might keep him from getting in, the old man only said, “You’ll figure it out. The world’s dumber than you are.”
They buried him at sea. The body had made no sound above that of the engines and waves and ship clatter. By the time Rudolph got back to their berth, the chess set was gone.
No one really knew why the delay. Scarlet fever? Cholera? Every few days someone had died on the trip but wasn’t that typical? “That one girl?” a woman said, oblivious to the girl’s mother huddled against a wall. “She’d die that day if she were in her bed at home.”
It was the old man’s voice Rudolph missed. What words Rudolph had learned in his room in Hamburg he hadn’t learned to sound right, how to say them. He had to unlearn it all.
“Unlearn?” the old man had said. He laughed. “That sounds like shoveling coal back down the chute.”
The days waiting were hot and still. When the breeze did blow, it did little but lift the stench of brine and sewage and fish over the rails. New York came and went on the horizon, like a mirage. Its bridges glistened in the afternoon sun as if suspended on light.
Two days after they had buried the old man Rudolph spotted a man carrying what looked like the chess set. He dipped into a door and Rudolph followed. The passageway was a grey soup of half-light pressing against one ashen porthole. Rudolph heard shuffling ahead and followed. He bumped his head and silently cursed, and when he adjusted to the dark he found another door and pushed on through. His eyes met the startled ones of a woman, her bonnet askew atop her dark hair, a shawl falling off her shoulder. She shook her head and mouthed something to him but it was too late. The darkness blocking half of her turned into the broad back of the man he had followed. The woman’s skirts were lifted, the man’s hand up inside them.
“What’s this?” the man said, lifting his head. Now Rudolph could make out his sailor’s shirt, his cap pushed back on his head. The sailor turned to the woman. “You set me up?”
“I’m sorry,” Rudolph said. “I’ll go.”
The woman started straightening her clothes, her eyes refusing to look up. “I have to go,” she said. “Mr. Westcott’s waiting.”
“Is he now?” the sailor asked, taking a step back. “Maybe I’ll escort you back then. Explain why you’re late.”
“Leave her alone,” Rudolph said.
“Or what?”
The man was Rudolph’s size, but after weeks in steerage Rudolph grew dizzy just climbing up the ladder. “I tell the captain,” he said.
“Tell him what?” the sailor said. He turned to the woman. “He see anything?”
“I . . . ,” the woman said. “I don’t know.”
“Wrong answer,” the sailor said, and he shoved her against the wall. “I won’t be forgetting you,” he said as he pushed past Rudolph.
The woman righted the rest of her clothes and then pushed past him too. “Satisfied?” she asked.
For the first time he caught her accent, then he saw her clothes. Nicer than his. She was not steerage, nor was she German. They had probably picked her up in Southampton or Cherbourg. What was she doing with one of the shiphands?
“I was looking for a chess set,” Rudolph said.
“A chess set?”
“It was stolen,” Rudolph said.
Now the woman seemed to notice Rudolph more closely too. He caught her eyes moving up and down his body, taking note—the split soles, the bilge-stained cuffs, his collarless shirt. He could see fury and pity and embarrassment skim across her eyes as she held her skirts lightly off the floor. “I guess you found something better,” she finally said, then spun away. But before she got to the door, she turned once more. “That was my only hope,” she said, then disappeared into the passageway.
“They’re turning the whole ship back,” a woman announced on the second night at anchor.
“You don’t know that for sure,” another woman said.
“Overheard the steward,” she insisted. “They’re unloading us for a day while the ship restocks and then we’re heading right back.”
“This ship is turning south,” somebody else said. “They’ll let us land somewhere.”
“I heard the same thing,” a man said, a husband who held his two children.
“Heard what? That they’re sending us back or it’s heading south?”
Before he could answer, another man said, “That makes no sense. If they think we’re sick they wouldn’t be taking the cargo off. Disease is disease.” The man was young, only a few years older than Rudolph. He wore a red cap, day and night, pitched steeply back on his head.
“Tell all the stories you want,” the first woman said. “I’m telling you what the steward said. They’re sending us back.”
Another woman, crouched in the shadows, erupted into sobs. Rudolph wanted to hit her into silence. He didn’t need despair. He couldn’t go back. He had found his father hanging in the barn. A lifetime of work wouldn’t pay off the farm’s mortgage, sold to the bank again and again, always on worse terms. His mother had died years earlier. The men wanting his father’s gambling debts had given Rudolph twenty-four hours to find the money. To convince him, they shot one of his horses in the leg, and Rudolph had to put it down himself. He had unearthed a small bag of coins and banknotes under a floorboard but it wouldn’t touch what was needed. He let the remaining horses out to wander the fields, deep green by then, and scattered the three pointless goats before setting the house and barn afire. Let them collect the ashes. From a hillside outside of town he spied its burning. In Hamburg he had worked for weeks to earn false papers, using up half his father’s money. Perhaps the law or the syndicate men would follow him across the water. If so, he’d keep moving. Besides, there was no Rudolph on the boat, only Hans. Even the old man had called him that.
“If we burn the ship,” the young man said, “they can’t send us back.”
“Right,” the husband said. “Burn ourselves to death. That’s the solution.”
“If you burn the ship, they’ll burn you,” the woman said.
“This isn’t Italy,” the young man said, a remark Rudolph couldn’t figure out. Did they burn people in Italy? The young man pushed off the wall he had been leaning against and started out of the room. He eyed Rudolph on the way out. “You’re no help,” he said, then left before Rudolph could say a word.
The woman had made her way over the passengers lying splayed and stupefied along the steerage walls. Rudolph could hear their bodies shifting to let someone pass and turned to see her moving toward him, carrying something in her arms.
He swung his legs over the pallet and jumped down, over the puddle, not wanting her to see where he slept. She held out a box. “You said you play?” she said.
“That my chess set?” he asked. He said it before he realized it couldn’t be true. It had been the old man’s, not his. But could a question be a lie?
“No,” the woman said. “It’s mine. Or mine to use.”
“I play. Not well, but I play.”
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “Do you think you could teach me?”
The other passengers were staring at him. Most of the people here spoke German, and they would hear the accent in the woman’s voice too. How had she found him among the hundreds of others, indistinguishable in the semi-shadows, darkened with their grime-splayed skin?
She looked around uncertainly. “Is there somewhere we can play?”
“Let’s go up on deck,” he said.
He surprised himself when he took her hand to lead her back to the ladder, then took the box from her as he started up. She steered him to an empty deck chair. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to be here,” Rudolph said.
“It’s the Westcotts’.”
Rudolph raised his eyebrows. “And you’re a Westcott?”
For the first time he saw her face brighten with a laugh. She wasn’t a Westcott, she said. She was their servant. Mallie.
As he watched her put out the pieces, he recalled how he had first seen her, pressed against the wall, angered at his intrusion, the fumbling under her skirts. He looked down and she stopped putting the pieces on the board until he looked up again. “He promised he would get me ashore first,” Mallie said,” before everybody else. That he would tell the Westcotts some story, give me time to get away.”
“You don’t need to explain,” he said.
“He has a mother and sister in New York. I could stay with them, then who knew? He hoped to be done with sailing soon.”
Rudolph felt sick. Was she doing anything worse than he was, taking his father’s money, fleeing, buying the false papers? “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought he had my chess set.”
Mallie paused in her placing the pieces on the board again. “As soon as he touched me, I knew he was lying.”
To Rudolph being a servant didn’t sound so bad. There was always a bed, always food, cards in the evening, a fire to rub your hands before. “Can’t you save? Then go somewhere else? The factories maybe?”
“Says the man,” she said. Mallie was thin, her face sawn sharp, but she carried her own precise beauty, and Rudolph saw each shift of emotion in her face. “What did you see in that room?” she asked.
Rudolph was too embarrassed to answer. He had seen it many times, in his memory.
“Want to see it again?”
vRudolph pulled back. He wanted a woman as much as any man but not that way. He wanted her to want him back.
“Come back to my rooms,” she said, her voice cracking. “Come see Mr. Westcott. You can see it again. Any time he wants. Without asking.”
Rudolph folded his hands, talking his heart back into calm. He looked at the pieces. He couldn’t tell her he wouldn’t mind being Mr. Westcott. But he would ask first. He would wait for an answer. “Speak English,” he said.
“Speak English?”
“We’ll trade,” he said. “You teach me English, and I’ll teach you chess.”
Once again he saw the shift in her features, the slight flick of her lips that was an almost-smile. “That sounds fair,” she said in English.
He wasn’t sure what fair meant but he had a good guess. But sounds? That one he couldn’t figure out. He noticed she had put the king and queen in the wrong place. “First lesson,” he said, and switched them around.
Two days after meeting Mallie Rudolph heard the first rattling in his chest as he coughed himself awake. It was colder up on deck but he thought the fresh air helped and it took days for Mallie to notice the cough too. At first she had laughed because he did it right after their first kiss, but then she heard it for real. She tried to hide the concern in her eyes but she had grown even thinner it seemed and she could hide nothing. Each time he saw her and longed to touch her skin he wondered if Westcott had done it instead.
They both knew that him teaching her chess was nothing more than an excuse but her English was more than that. He added up what he had—his young body and his little English—and what he didn’t want to be known—his cough and his lack of money and the burning barn and the false passport—and wondered what his odds were. He dodged the sailor he had angered, and Mallie never mentioned him again. He and Mallie told each other about their lives and talked about the chess and Mallie told funny stories about the Westcott children and Rudolph never mentioned the fire he set or his father’s swinging body but he described the farm, the green hills, the smell of oats he loved. Oats, bridle, plow, carrots, exhaustion: all words she taught him. He figured out what sounds meant. She had gone to school in Germany, back when there was money, and then her father died and there wasn’t any and she met the Westcotts there and returned with them to England as their nanny. Neither she nor Rudolph mentioned what might happen when they reached New York. The future was only a few days away but it was as invisible as the land when they had been deep in the Atlantic and they let the illusion of the endless waves have its way.
Maybe that was why, even to her, he was still Hans. Did it matter? It was only a name. It was just a word.
Rudolph shot awake, confused where he was. The pallet and walls trembled. For a moment Rudolph thought it was his garret in Hamburg. He had lived near a train station, doing what he could while he waited for his papers. The train engines coming and going had rattled the room like a beggar’s bowl.
The young man with the red hat had taken the old man’s berth below him but the bed was empty. Rudolph flung his arm out for purchase and smacked his hand against the wall.
“We’re moving,” someone said in the darkness.
Rudolph grabbed his bag and leapt off his bunk. His left foot splashed in the puddle. “Where you headed?” a man said, but Rudolph ignored him.
On deck Rudolph saw dawn pulling back the night sky. He sensed more than saw the city to the distant north, a shift in the density of the darkness. Others were tripping out of their cabins and berths. They stared at each other in wonder. Did this mean they were allowed ashore, or that their passage back was beginning?
“Told you! Told you, cowards!” a voice yelled out. Through an open, round porthole above the main deck Rudolph saw the young man’s pale, distorted face. His red hat was gone. A bandage was wrapped around his head. “Told you,” he said again. He pointed to his forehead. “I almost did it, then they did this. What do you think that means?”
Rudolph had no idea what that meant. Almost did what? Jump? Burn the ship? He tried the door next to the window but they had locked the man up. The sailors were going about their business unhurriedly. They seemed to be relieved to be doing something. The ship slipped gently through waves burbling down in the dark. For the first time Rudolph tried to get into the second and first class cabins to find Mallie but the first door he tried was locked and at another passageway a shiphand stared him back out.
He went to where he and Mallie often met but a steward was stacking the deck chairs. Soon the whole ship was astir. Steerage passengers emerged from the bottom like rats escaping a flood. First a trickle, a random, curious couple or family, and then hundreds of them. Had they really been that many down below? Deckhands directed them into lines and barely organized crowds. With relief Rudolph saw the city drawing closer, the buildings and bridges solidifying in the air. A sailor gently steered him into the crowd of people being shepherded to starboard, but he slipped back out again, hurrying against the crowds to the cabins to try to find Mallie, but by now they had roped off the ship. Rudolph walked the length of it, craning his neck and being cursed and pushed aside. Just as he was about to scoot under the rope he was grabbed from behind and spun around. The sailor he had interrupted with Mallie smiled at him, and Rudolph saw another shiphand step in behind.
“And where might you be going?”
“Just getting my things,” Rudolph said.
The sailor nodded his chin at Rudolph’s bag. “Then what might that be? Not your things?”
“Yes,” Rudolph said, though he wasn’t sure what he was affirming.
“He look good to you?” the first sailor asked the other.
“A little grey in the gills, I’d say.”
“Maybe we should get him a doctor.”
“Some will be boarding soon.”
“They could look him over. See if maybe he’s got something. See if he’s OK.”
Rudolph tried to tug his arm free but the sailor held on.
“Easy now,” the sailor said. “We’ll show you the doctor and then everything will be fine.”
Rudolph couldn’t help it—he had to cough—he had been holding it back the whole time.
The sailor smiled. “Or maybe not,” he said. He nudged Rudolph back the way he had come. “This way,” he said.
The two sailors led him along the deck, now dense with people, until Rudolph realized he was being taken to where the young man had been locked up. The door to the room was open now, but other passengers were being shown inside. Some he recognized, sickly, coughing like him, one with an odd growth all over the side of his face. A few men in uniform, health inspectors, had boarded and were setting up stations in the room. Even if he was fine, Rudolph knew, there might be favors that were exchanged: the doctors taking a cut to declare him unfit.
The room was now too full, so Rudolph sat on the deck just outside the door. “We’ll come get you,” the sailor said. “No funny business.” He turned to the one man guarding the other sick passengers. “Here’s another one for you,” he said.
Rudolph pretended not to watch when the two sailors walked away, and for a few moments he rested against the wall, gawked at by the other passengers lined up before him. Soon a group of Russians came by, struggling with two steamer trunks, and in the chaos Rudolph stood and joined them, slipping away and mingling with the crowds. They were all facing towards the bow, the city before them, and he saw with horror that the sailor that had accosted him stood before them all, issuing orders, standing guard at the gangway. Someone grabbed his hand and he turned to see Mallie’s ecstatic face. She tugged him around a capstan to a quiet place by the railing. “Will you come find me?”
“Where?” Rudolph asked. “I was looking all over for you.”
“Somewhere in the city. I don’t know. Just ask for the Westcotts.” She grabbed his wrist and pressed something into his hand. “Hold onto this. Come find me.”
Rudolph was stunned to see the pile of banknotes in his palm. More money than he had made in all his life, more than he might ever make. “Mallie, you didn’t.”
“I have to get back,” she said.
“He’ll find out,” Rudolph said. “He’ll suspect you for sure.”
“But I won’t have it,” she said. “I’ll let him search everything I have.” She threw her hands at the hundreds of people huddling against the wind. “Any one of them could have done it.”
Rudolph could see boats heading toward the ship from shore, uniformed men looking intently from the bow. He grabbed Mallie’s wrist and pushed the money back into her hand. “Mallie, I can’t. That sailor you met is trying to keep me on board. I might never make it on shore.”
Mallie froze, the money between their held hands.
“Can you put it back?”
Mallie didn’t say anything. The fire in her eyes when she had taken his hand had faded. The wind tugged her hair from across her shoulder and made her look even thinner.
“I’ll still come find you. I’ll ask for the Westcotts.”
Mallie’s steep cheeks and lips and eyes twitched in their angular landscape, flitting between resignation and hope and sadness and disbelief. “Okay,” she said vaguely.
Rudolph shook her hands. “It’ll work out,” he said. “We’ve come this far.” He was speaking German, and it felt almost foreign after their weeks together.
Mallie lifted up a smile, stiff and forced. “Okay,” she said again. “You better go.”
“Mallie, please,” Rudolph said.
“No, you’re right,” she said. “You’re right.” She stuffed the money back into a purse she had hung around her neck. She grabbed Rudolph’s hands and kissed him, but it was mechanical, like a prize you paid for at the fair. “Don’t let them stop you. Get to shore.” She pushed him away gently. “You better go.”
Mallie spun and got lost in the crowd, ignoring Rudolph when he called her one last time. He waited a moment, then wandered to the back of the ship’s crowd. He had to find a way to get lost in the chaos, avoid the sailor who was after him, slip through with the hundreds of others. He was about to ask a man to switch coats with him when he spied Mallie walking back down the steps, carrying her valise. Her walk was deliberate, her eyes staring out across the horizon. He hoped she had returned the money. She headed to the stern when suddenly Rudolph heard her name bellowed above the worried buzz of the passengers. A large man, half-bald, his collar undone and a tie loose around his neck, rushed down the steps. He called her name again but Mallie didn’t turn.
The man reached the deck and hurried toward Mallie, shoving startled people out of his way as he followed her behind a deckhouse. When neither emerged again, Rudolph rushed around the building and saw Westcott standing alone at the railing. Rudolph sprinted forward and scanned the water but only saw the froth of the ship’s slowing passage. Then amidst the grey, stirred surface he saw the plumage of Mallie’s skirt, her head emerging from it atop the swell of the water that lifted and dropped her on its back.
“Crazy bitch,” Westcott said. Rudolph saw he held Mallie’s purse, still thick with the money. Emerging from it was the top of the white queen. Rudolph had thought as he lowered the match to the barn hay at his father’s farm that he had reached the fulcrum of his future, and that all that happened afterwards would swing on that moment. But here, only months later, came another moment, another pivot on which he had to take up his fate. He grabbed the purse with one hand and swung at Westcott’s startled face with the other. He felt the collision and without looking spun and lifted himself up over the railing and jumped into the air.
He hit the water nearly sideways, and it was so cold he couldn’t figure out where his own body ended. Between the dark and the rumble and the unwieldy weight of his clothes, he seemed to be tumbling through an air-empty sky, a world without dimensions or directions. Soon, desperate for air, he started swimming what he hoped was upward. At last he felt a brush of cold, a sign of the surface, and he took in a huge, grateful gasp of air and opened his eyes. Receding behind him was the hulk of the Fürst Bismarck. His fingers of his right hand were curled as if holding his bag but his hand gripped nothing. His clothes, his books, a family picture, heading into the depths. He had a vague recollection of having thrown it overboard in his panic as he leapt the railing.
But in his left hand he held Mallie’s purse, gripped tight in his fingers. He swung it around his neck and churned forward, not swimming so much as being pushed around, but all he saw was the grey swells of near-shore ocean. Then atop a larger wave he spotted Mallie’s blouse again, her head like a seabird roosting in its midst. He plowed through the water toward her. She said nothing as he came up to her, her face a blank of terror or disbelief or resignation. On instinct he turned her around and wrapped his arms around her chest and started to pull to south of the ship. After a few strokes he stopped. His own panic was beginning to set in. “My boots,” he said. While treading water he untied them and let them drop.
“I can’t,” Mallie said. Her skirts were too wide, too hard to fight through. “I can swim,” she said, and to his surprise she took a few strong strokes forward. Rudolph swam behind her, gagging at times on the sick salty sea the waves splashed in his face. When another wave hit them Mallie flailed, and Rudolph reached out and took her again and began backkicking to the shoreline. His shoulders ached and his strokes turned into slaps. He ducked his head under the water and pushed himself forward, enduring the terror of no air for a few moments to rest his neck and back and dodge the slap of the waves against his face.
A wave lifted them, and at its peak Rudolph could see a nest of rocks clinging to the shore. Was this what the sailor had been pointing toward, warning him about? A handful of waves crashed against them and spit upwards, their grey crests fanning into angry plumes.
He started moving shoreward again, and in a few moments he was stunned with relief to feel his feet scrape bottom. They had hit a sandbar, and he turned himself upright and told Mallie she could stand too. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she kept saying. The Bismarck was a distant darkness, the city obscure behind it. He was relieved to see none of the port boats heading their way.
“I can’t believe you jumped,” Mallie said. She shivered, a blue tinge forming around her lips. Her face was pale with shock. “He pushed me,” she said. “He took my money.”
They let the lie of the money’s source die in the salted wind. “And I took it back,” Rudolph said. He lifted up her purse, the shoulders and head of the white queen still protruding from the clasped top. A wave lifted them up again, and from its height he saw the land before them and the rocks far to their right, no longer a threat. “We can make it,” he said.
vMallie still shivered, still in shock. She glanced back, but the ship was barely visible on the horizon. She shook her head. “He’ll call the police,” she said. “He’ll find us.”
“Call the police? He pushed you. He’d never dare.”
“He’ll find you,” she said.
Rudolph reached into his pocket and pulled out his papers, sodden from the sea. He dipped them under water, then crumbled them in his hands and let them drift away.
“What are you doing?” Mallie asked. “Your name is still in the ship’s registry.”
“No, it’s not,” he said.
Mallie stared at him, wariness flitting through her eyes. She pulled her hand back uncertainly. “What do you mean?”
He gestured to where the papers had been. “That’s not me,” he said. Hans was just a sound in the air, an empty breath. You could call anything anything you wanted, but that didn’t change what it was. Nothing changed the smell of the dead horse’s skin, the taste in his mouth from the steerage air, the rustle of Mallie’s skirts in the darkened room. “Let’s just get to shore,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything. We’ll freeze to death here.”
“Who will?” she asked. “Mallie and who else?”
“Mallie and the man who jumped in after her,” he said. He lifted up the purse and its curious queen. “To return this.”
He could see the waves lay down along the shoreline’s incline. Once he and Mallie tumbled ashore, he’d have to walk its sandy grit in his stockinged feet. He had only the one pair of shoes, now sunk at the bottom of the sea. The clothes he wore were all he had left of what he had brought with him. Still, it was land, and he had more than he had dreamed with him right there. He gripped Mallie’s hand, and this time she did not pull away. “What’s the word for sand in English?” he asked.
Mallie laughed. “It’s almost the same,” she said.
“Then let’s get to the sand,” he said. His bootless feet might slip on it, but it was better than bilge-puddled steerage in a boat or the freezing water of the Atlantic. And he could hardly believe his good luck, as he let the next wave push them shoreward, that the first new thing he and Mallie would feel together would be something that sounded so close to what he had known all his life.
Christian Michener’s work appears in a good number of journals, including The Kenyon Review, Harper's Ferry Review, Image, Crazyhorse, Bellingham Review and elsewhere. He has also published a book each of literary criticism and short fiction.