Exposed to the south wind, which fills the sails and makes men skittish as horses, I felt alive, ready to take on anything, lucid and alert. Efrem brought me food and we swapped some words in Ladino. The sailors talked to each other in lingua franca, and increasingly often in Turkish, as we approached our destination. I had spoken the language since my childhood in Ragusa, and I hadn’t stopped in Venice, but what I heard now sounded strange to me, mixed with Greek, and I imagined that in Constantinople they spoke yet another variant. Or rather, a hundred variants, and more. Off the coast of Lemnos, the sailors hauled a tunafish on board. It died in the sun, struggling under their blows, amid the victorious shouts of the crew. The first time I saw a big fish dying, I was still a little boy, in the port at Ragusa. I saw it opening its mouth and its gills, twisting and leaping. It was impossible for it to turn both eyes to the sky. One eye was dazzled by the sun; the other was pressed against the stone of the dock.
