Chocolate Jesus

Excerpt from Yoram Kaniuk's "Life on Sandpaper," translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris, Tin House Review, Vol 12 Num 2  

"I was told to go to New York because there they were waiting to see their first Hebrew soldier. I had an ordinary seaman's certificate from the time I'd worked on the illegal immigrant ship the Pan York. I boarded an Italian ship that flew a Panamanian flag and was carrying German farmers to Alberta, Canada. The work was tough. The sea raged. There were maybe twenty passengers in cabins because it was a cargo ship.
A herd of German cows and bulls weltered in the hold. The crew, mainly Italians, stood on the bridge and pissed on the Germans, who lay huddled together drunk on the deck, shouting. In the cabin next to mine there was an American girl returning from Paris after some frustrated love story. She licked chocolates and we lay next to the porthole and the waves crashed against the glass and this turned her on. She wasn't pretty but was also not not-pretty, she had a tattoo on her ass. She was one of those girls it's good with but are quickly forgotten, and she said she was from Minot, North Dakota. I didn't see her again, but once she read a review of an exhibition of mine in the paper and sent me a photo of her with a man and five kids, and for some reason I wasn't sure whether it was her family or if she'd hired them. Maybe I'd been cruel to her and I remembered how indispensable she was up against the waves that couldn't come through the porthole. "