7 – Xanthos, Greece
A Hinckley Bermuda 40 yawl is the ultimate New England cruising sailboat, the kind of boat that turns heads when it sails into a harbor, turns heads while people turn to each other and say, “See that Hinckley, now that’s a boat.” When you could afford any sailboat, you owned a Hinckley. At one time both David and Nelson Rockefeller kept their Bermuda 40s on the family moorings in Seal Harbor, Maine. The boats were classics when they were built and aged gracefully, since anybody who could afford to buy one in the first place could afford to maintain it in better than new condition. Letting a Bermuda 40 get run down was as unthinkable as taking the Rolls Royce to the local gas station for a tune up and oil change.
A blue water boat built with a tile fireplace as standard equipment, the Bermuda 40 “Swift” looked as incongruous tied up stern first among the fishing boats in the tiny harbor on Xanthos as would a camel in the Alps. The rocky Greek island off the west coast of the Peloponnesus between Greece and Italy saw few yachts, and fewer built by dour Maine boatbuilders as family heirlooms for wealthy Yankees.
Lt. Chaim Levi, former second officer on an Israeli Navy coastal patrol boat, could have cried when he saw the long blue hull, the roller furling jib and the stowaway main and mizzen sails, designed so the boat could be sailed singlehanded in the roughest of weather.
With this boat I could sail anywhere in the world, he thought. With this boat, I could go to America.
Levi’s Israeli Navy patrol boat had spent three days escorting freighters and fishing boats, yachts and ferry boats, anything that could float and could carry people from Haifa Harbor westward into the Mediterranean, getting them away from the coast and the hastily armed fishing boats manned by Palestinians who’d spent three generations trying to force Jews from Israel, but were now doing their best to keep any from escaping what they saw as Allah’s punishment.
Finally, out of torpedoes and ammunition for the twin 50 caliber machine guns, with his first officer dead from a knife wound to the chest when the boat was boarded at night, Levi knew the remaining fuel was down to a few hours. When his sole crewman spotted a wooden boat powered by two huge outboard engines and crammed with gun-waiving men, Levi knew this would be the last engagement for his tired vessel. The Israeli fishing boat he was escorting was loaded with elderly people and children, one of the last boats to escape from Haifa before Lebanese soldiers, Israel’s former Christian allies, roared through the streets looting shops and raping women.
Levi stationed his patrol boat between the Palestinians and the crowded fishing boat. He and his crewman had their handguns and nothing more. Engines full forward, he drove his vessel straight at the bow of the Palestinian boat, playing chicken with the armed men the way he used to race his little outboard head on at friends when he was growing up in the small coastal resort town where his father managed a hotel for American tourists and Levi gave sailing lessons.
This time, as he had so many times with friends, Levi swore he would not swerve. The two boats rammed head on into one another, the steel bow of the patrol boat driving through the wooden hull. Locked together, the two boats sank.
Levi threw the inflatable life raft off his vessel’s stern seconds before the boats collided. The raft, an English Avon six-person model, inflated automatically when it hit the water. Levi splashed in behind it, climbed into the raft and paddled desperately with both hands away from the glossy film on the water. As he feared, the fuel ignited, sending yellow flames and black smoke into the blue sky, roasting the men thrown by the collision into the water.
Fortunately for Levi, a stiff breeze from the southeast drove his bobbing rubber raft farther out into the Mediterranean, away from what would, in other circumstances, have been the safety of the Israeli shore. Two days later he was picked up by a Greek fishing boat. The captain, no friend of Turks or Arabs, spent an evening in his cabin with Levi and two bottles of ouzo. He left Levi on the stone pier when the boat returned to Xanthos a week later, taking Levi’s worthless shekels in exchange for Euros, both of them knowing the exchange was a gift, not a business deal.
The captain’s parting present to Chaim Levi, one Levi never learned about, was the bottle of ouzo the captain left with his cousin, the corporal of the Port Police, Greece’s equivalent of the coast guard, with a request that Levi be left alone. This was a man who’d suffered enough and Greeks could sympathize with suffering, the captain told his cousin. The corporal nodded and carried the ouzo into his tiny office on the stone quay. He passed the word among the fisherman that Levi was approved, and Levi found work cleaning fish and helping to mend nets. He slept on an old fishing boat too leaky to take to sea, run aground at the edge of the harbor.
Chaim Levi introduced himself to the corporal, pronouncing the “CH” in his name with the full Hebrew guttural sound, as if he were clearing his throat before getting to the rest of his name. That pronunciation was beyond the Greek’s abilities. Levi was known among the fisherman as “the Jew.”
From the first, Levi’s eyes were on the Hinckley, standing empty at the pier for two weeks now.
“That is a fine boat,” he mentioned casually to the Port Police corporal as the two walked the fifty-meter length of stone pier that made up the town’s waterfront. “Maybe it is owned by a wealthy fisherman.”
“A wealthy fisherman? There is no such thing,” the corporal laughed. “There are poor fishermen and there are old fishermen and there are tired fishermen and there are dead fishermen, but there are no wealthy fishermen.
“That fine boat is owned by an American whose wife had the misfortune to step on a bed of sea urchins. I myself offered to piss on her feet to soften the spines. I told him to soak her feet in lemon juice so the spines would not cause infection. He tried to pull them out himself, though and of course they broke off in her feet, dozens of them.
“He spent an hour on the telephone at the post office and they flew away in an airplane that landed right in the harbor on the water, the first time such an airplane has landed here. The great tragedy of it all is that he only paid his docking fee for two nights. He now owes me twenty-five Euros for each night for the past two weeks. That is a very serious amount of money.”
“Maybe somebody should move the boat from the dock and anchor it. That would give more space at the dock for the working boats,” Levi said as casually as he could.
The corporal nodded and held both hands in the air, palms upward.
“Who in this village knows about American boats, how to raise the sails or to start the engine?” the corporal complained, then looked down at his feet, avoiding Levi’s eyes.
“I’ve sailed such boats when the Americans visited my country,” Levi said. “I’d be pleased to help you after all the kindness you’ve shown me. I’ll do it this afternoon. Where should I move the boat? It must be someplace safe, someplace sheltered from the winds to ride unattended at anchor.”
The corporal told Levi about a cove a few kilometers down the coast from the harbor. Nobody lived there and steep rock walls protected it from the prevailing east winds.
Levi topped up the water tanks that took up most of the boat’s bilge and pondered whether he should fill its diesel tanks, too.
That would be too risky, he decided. How would I explain that?
During the next week he spent his mornings riding a borrowed bicycle over the high hills to nearby villages, where he bought all the canned goods he could afford and stashed them on the shore of the cove. Every afternoon, he rowed to the cove in one of the fishermen’s skiffs on the excuse that he wanted to make sure the boat was doing well unattended. He took fishing gear with him, telling people the small cove was the best fishing spot he’d found. Instead of fishing, though, he ferried supplies to the Hinckley.
His body ached after six days of bicycling over the hills in the morning and rowing down the shore in the afternoons, but the boat was crammed with an unappetizing collection of canned goods.
“I am sure the American will pay you well for all the care you have taken of his boat,” the corporal told Levi a week after the boat was removed from the pier. “I received a telegram from him today saying he will return in two days.”
“Two days?” Levi asked. “When was the telegram sent?”
“It was sent yesterday and sat in the post office all day. The lazy postmaster was too involved in gossip to even send a boy to let me know it had come,” the corporal replied angrily. “I should get more respect. What if it had been something important. An important message should not sit overnight in a village post office, not with me a short walk away.” The corporal calmed down as a thought crossed his mind.
“Perhaps, though, we should return the boat before the American arrives. He does not need to be worried about what might have happened to his boat since nothing did happen to it. Do you think he should have to worry about such a nothing?”
“I agree with you my friend,” Levi said, smiling, “There is no need to worry the American about a problem that never happened.”
As Levi and the corporal walked to the rowing boat, Levi looked at the trees blowing in the strong east wind and calculated how far he could sail before the American arrived.
“I think I’ll spend tonight on that boat. I’ve grown fond of it and I want everything cleaned and polished when the American comes.”
“That should get you a nice tip,” the corporal said.
“Good bye, my friend,” Levi said, taking the corporal’s large hand in both of his. “You were a friend when I needed one. In this world at this time, a Jew appreciates kindness.”
“What do you mean, good bye,” the corporal eyed Levi strangely, seeing something in his face he had not noticed before. “Do you expect the American to give you enough money to leave this island? Where would you go? A Jew will not have many friends right now. Stay here where you are welcome.”
“Oh, the American will be good to me,” Levi said. “I know he will.”
He waited until dark to raise the anchor, pulling the thirty meters of anchor chain hand over hand, not wanting to use even the small amount of diesel fuel the engine would consume to run the electric windlass that would have raised the chain. He unrolled the sails and drifted away from the island in the night breeze.
I can reach Crete in two days, Levi thought. And then it will be decision time. Continue on to what is left of Eretz Yisrael, or head west for ... whatever? Maybe one final raid on whoever is in Israel now, he thought, remembering how as an officer on the coastal patrol boat he’d studied the methods used by Palestinians to run ashore onto deserted Israeli beaches. The Palestinians were caught more often than not.
They were caught because they were not smart, and they never learned from their mistakes, Levi thought. So, maybe I’ll be the one who learned something. Jews made good terrorists once, against the British, at least that’s what the old men used to brag about. Stealing this wonderful boat and leaving Greek friends who’d opened their hearts to him in a time of need would be his first act of terrorism, Levi thought, not an especially glorious beginning.
He frowned, frowned knowing terrorists left few friends in their wake, frowned, knowing how effective, but how unloved, a terrorist is.