Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Page A

boarding card at the top of the Giulia ’s gangway. Then she’d gone aft, as planned, for the send-off.
   At the shipping channel, the foghorn sounded again, as the boat came around to the west and picked up more speed. Dirndls, kerchiefs, and suit coats flapped in the breeze. A few hats flew off heads, to shouts and laughter. Yarn drift-netted the sky, barely visible now. People watched as long as they could. Desdemona was one of the first to go below. Lefty lingered on deck for another half hour. This, too, was part of the plan.
   For the first day at sea, they didn’t speak to each other. They came up on deck at the appointed mealtimes and stood in separate lines. After eating, Lefty joined the men smoking at the rail while Desdemona hunched on deck with the women and children, staying out of the wind. “You have someone meeting you?” the women asked. “A fiancé?”
   “No. Just my cousin in Detroit.”
   “Traveling all by yourself?” the men asked Lefty.
   “That’s right. Free and easy.”
   At night, they descended to their respective compartments. In separate bunks of seaweed wrapped in burlap, with life vests doubling as pillows, they tried to sleep, to get used to the motion of the ship, and to tolerate the smells. Passengers had brought on board all manner of spices and sweetmeats, tinned sardines, octopus in wine sauce, legs of lamb preserved with garlic cloves. In those days you could identify a person’s nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.) Lefty’s annoyances were auditory as well as olfactory. To one side was a man named Callas with a snore like a miniature foghorn itself; on the other was Dr. Philobosian, who wept in his sleep. Ever since leaving Smyrna the doctor had been beside himself with grief. Racked, gut-socked, he lay curled up in his coat, blue around the eye sockets. He ate almost nothing. He refused to go up on deck to get fresh air. On the few occasions he did go, he threatened to throw himself overboard.
   In Athens, Dr. Philobosian had told them to leave him alone. He refused to discuss plans about the future and said that he had no family anywhere. “My family’s gone. They murdered them.”
   “Poor man,” Desdemona said. “He doesn’t want to live.”
   “We have to help him,” Lefty insisted. “He gave me money. He bandaged my hand. Nobody else cared about us. We’ll take him with us.” While they waited for their cousin to wire money, Lefty tried to console the doctor and finally convinced him to come with them to Detroit. “Wherever’s far away,” said Dr. Philobosian. But now on the boat he talked only of death.
   The voyage was supposed to take from twelve to fourteen days. Lefty and Desdemona had the schedule all worked out. On the second day at sea, directly after dinner, Lefty made a tour of the ship. He picked his way among the bodies sprawled across the steerage deck. He passed the stairway to the pilothouse and squeezed past the extra cargo, crates of Kalamata olives and olive oil, sea sponges from Kos. He proceeded forward, running his hand along the green tarps of the lifeboats, until he met the chain separating steerage from third class. In its heyday, the Giulia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Line. Boasting modern conveniences ( “lumina electrica, ventilatie et comfortu cel mai mare” ), it had traveled once a month between Trieste and New York. Now the electric lights worked only in first class, and even then sporadically. The iron rails were rusted. Smoke from the stack had soiled the Greek flag. The boat smelled of old mop buckets and a history of nausea. Lefty didn’t have his sea legs yet. He kept falling against the railing. He stood at the