Ellis Island & Other Stories (19 page)

I jumped from my seat and screamed. I am afraid that I startled Rabbi Koukafka quite severely, but at that moment I was not thinking of him. There was no way through the partition, so I followed after the gold and red, knocking at the glass as I went. She stopped and pressed her face up against it. Her hair through that lens was most glorious, but her face was rather distorted. Even so, it was beautiful.

“What it is?” she asked in what I thought was perfect unaccented English, but was really a mesmerizing sing-song Scandinavian. I didn’t know what to say, but I had to say something.

“You,” I said.

“Me? What of me?”

“Are you Norwegian?”

“No,” she answered,
“rather
Danish,” and moved away. I followed her and knocked on the glass again.

“Wait,” I called, afraid that before we came to the end of the partition she would disappear forever down some dark corridor.

“Come to the end, then,” she said.

I could hardly believe that she would consent to see me without something translucent between us. Yet there she stood, smiling, and the sight of her turned me upside down, spun me around, and blinded me as if a flare had burst in front of my eyes on a dark night. I didn’t lose control of myself, as I might have done, for she reassured me.

“I saw you on the first day,” I declared.

“Yes,” she said. “I do remember you. You were looking at me in the big room. I thought you were a lunatic.”

“Why have you been here for all these weeks?” I asked.

“My husband,” she answered, “was not here to meet me, as he was supposed to have been. When the Aid Society found him, he claimed that he had never heard of me, which makes sense—he is married to another woman now, and they have a child. I cannot leave the Island until I can prove that I will not be a burden.”

“Oh,” I said, not entirely unhappy about the conduct of her husband.

“Who is that?” she asked.

She meant Rabbi Koukafka, who was at the end of the hall, yelling at me to come. “Not the Assistant Commissioner!” he screamed. “Not the Assistant Commissioner, but the Commissioner himself. Come quickly. He who cuts bread in the dark has no fingers.”

“That’s Rabbi Koukafka. We’re going to see the Commissioner. They thought I was an anarchist… I’m not… Come with me.” She hopped a small barrier that lay between us, and we ran toward Rabbi Koukafka.

“Who is this?” the Rabbi wanted to know. They regarded one another in an incredulous way, perhaps because his beard and her hair were not only the same color, but the same length. I have seen similar respectful regard when a relatively shorn sheep meets a relatively hairy goat.

“I am Elise,” she said, as the three of us were herded by a bluecoat into the Commissioner’s office. Rabbi Koukafka had come to ask for more chickens; Elise had come because I had asked her; and I had come to be released.

The Commissioner was the biggest man I had ever seen—undoubtedly six feet eight inches tall at the very least, and heavyset: not exactly a stringbean. Each of his fists was bigger than my head, and he held the thick slab of mahogany that formed the top of his desk, as if it were a sheet of onionskin. His mustache was as big as a broom, and his voice was like American thunder. We had no choice but to tell the truth, since his steely blue eyes would have allowed nothing else. Rabbi Koukafka stated his case.

The Commissioner thought for a moment. “How many extra chickens would that be for each monthly accounting, Rabbi?”

“Are these talking chickens?” I interjected.

“Be quiet,” said Rabbi Koukafka. “Uh… two thousand, more or less.”

“And would these chickens be purchased alive or dead?”

“It would have to be dead, sir, since here we have no… ”

“I understand. Rabbi Koukafka, you may have a thousand extra chickens.”

“Every two weeks?”

“Every month.” That took care of the chickens. The Commissioner turned to us.

Elise told her story, at the end of which he shook his head. “You must have someone to guarantee your support. That’s the law. Don’t you know anyone in America?”

“No.”

“What about him?” he asked, pointing to me. “How long have you known him?”

“Three weeks,” was her answer.

“Would you,” the Commissioner asked me, “be willing to be her guarantor?”

“Certainly,” I said. “An honor.”

“What do you do?”

A long moment passed while I reflected on the fact that the Commissioner’s steely blue eyes had softened as he looked at Elise. “I’m a tailor.”

“Well, that’s fine. You’ll find work in ten minutes. But be careful of the sharks on the Battery when you get off the launch. Once you have proof of employment, bring it here. It will serve as a bond. Then this young lady will be free to enter the United States. You understand, Miss,” he said to Elise, “that you will not be obligated to this gentleman in any way whatsoever. Rather, he will be obligated to you.”

“Rather,” said Elise.
(Rather
was her favorite word. She thought it had about four hundred different meanings.)

“It is settled,” stated the Commissioner, sitting back in his chair.

How simple, how fast, how elegant, I thought. But there was one more piece of magic that I wanted from this giant. I asked him about the fog, wanting to know if it was always this clouded, and if it was possible to see America from Ellis Island, What I really wanted was for him to dispel the mist, since he seemed able to do anything that he desired.

“In January,” he told us, “it is usually clear. Lately, however, we have been having the strangest weather—fog and snow all the time; hail, thunder. I don’t understand it. But, in answer to your question, of course you can see America from Ellis Island. In fact, the fog today is just low-lying. Come, I’ll show you.”

We followed him from his office to a set of circular stairs which led into a domed tower. We climbed these stairs until we reached a little room at the top, where the Commissioner undid a latch and pushed open a wooden door.

We saw in front of us an infinite carpet of white fog, and, above, a translucent sparkling mist and a sky of royal blue—except for the bluecoats, the first blue that I had seen in weeks. Then a shiver took hold of me as I saw the city: a rampart of buildings on a great narrow island, windows reflecting the golden light, towers, bridges that stretched over the fog like long doubled harps.

“That,” said the Commissioner, “is America.” I saw that Elise longed for it far more than she longed for me. Still, I did not know what might happen, for, as I had found, things in the New World changed from minute to minute.

We looked down at Ellis Island and saw the peaks of the roofs and the gables projecting from the fog bank. Someone (probably one of the “anarchists”) was singing an Italian aria. Smoke came from the kitchen chimneys, and a steamer blasted signals from its main whistle. It was coming with more immigrants, among whom I would probably be when I reached the city. Undoubtedly, though, some of them would be delayed.

The steamer began a volley of whistles, the Commissioner shut the door, we descended, and that day I went to America, intending to become a tailor as quickly as possible so that I could fulfill my responsibility to Elise. For she was the pillar of fire that led me through the tangled ways of Ellis Island.

I boarded the steam ferry
John W. Wadsworth
as the sun was setting. We broke through the fog at tremendous speed and came upon open water, where we saw a golden city rising before us. The reflecting windows of a thousand buildings were a leafy bronze color that crawled slowly upward across the gleaming facades. At the center of this was a searing disc of yellow-white fire captured from aloft. In the New World, I discovered, faithful images of the sun were held up to it in an elaborate and extraordinary mirror—and we, having been told of such things as the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes, had never been informed of this wonder. Soon I was to learn that the people of the city itself were unaware of what they were accomplishing. For they were lost in a dreamlike complexity which made lesser cities seem like little mountain towns.

I walked straight into a dark forest littered with flashing lights like wild flowers. A little way in, I put down my bag and sat on it to rest. I was cold and dizzy. After all, I had never seen an automobile (except from the ship when we docked at Hamburg, and I thought that the few there were horseless wagons rolling downhill), and here were thousands of them. The buildings were too high for a European neck, such as mine, trained in one-story villages. I did not know where I was going, but only that I was hungry, and that I had to become a tailor.

I was approached by a wealthy-looking man. This, I thought, must be one of the sharks about whom the Commissioner had warned me. He was dressed in a dark coat of lustrous wool (in those days, all rich men wore lustrous wool, which came from lustrous sheep); his collar was of sable; and as he moved diamonds flashed from within the folds of expensive cloth that swaddled him and spoke his credentials simultaneously. My determination was of the highest order. I would not fall under his sway, and would ignore him completely. I began to sing to myself in Hebrew.

“You must be Irish,” he said. “I can always tell Gaelic when I hear it. It’s my native tongue.”

I stopped singing, looked away, and resolved not to answer a single question.

“Cork? No. A Dubliner! A Dubliner, like me. It’s good I stumbled upon you when I did, for if I hadn’t, you’d have stayed as hungry as a wolf for the rest of the night.”

Still, I made no response.

“Cat got your tongue? I know, lad, the trip was rough. You miss the people at home, and you want to go right back. I can understand that. It’s cold, isn’t it? But it’ll get colder in the night. Oh Jesus, will it get cold! At four o’clock in the mornin’, even the Eskimos will be poundin’ on the doors of City Hall, tryin’ to get near a fire.”

I looked at him in fishlike silence, which only served to goad him into offering me the entire world—if I would speak. He declared that I was deaf and dumb, at which I gave him a piercing look that made him reconsider. Finally, after promising me a job building dams in the forest, and then begging me to favor his friend the Mayor with an interview so that I could take up my post the following day as a mounted policeman in the Park, he was about to give up. He shrugged his shoulders.

I must say that, though I did not believe him for a minute, I was intrigued by his offers; it was cold, and I had no place to go. The instant I opened my mouth, he would realize that I was not an Irishman and that the singing under my breath had not been Gaelic. So I tried a famous trick that I had once attributed falsely to a noted Eastern
Tzaddik
who did not really exist.

As he was leaving, I held up my index finger, cleared my throat, and spoke. “Ah ha!”

“Now that’s more like it, man!” he said. “I’m glad to see that you recognize me as a friend. I’m glad to see that we have identical views. And how lucky it is that we share the same politics! As for religion, well, that goes without saying.” He went on and on, and somehow he led me into a restaurant. And what a restaurant.

It was so fancy that the diners were made to feel as if the waiters were about to beat them with canes, and I was not allowed to enter until they had put me in half a new suit of clothes. So what, I thought, I’m going to be the guest of the Irishman. I was astounded when I saw that in the middle of the room an entire steer was turning on a spit above a huge bed of glowing coals. Just as I was thinking that I had never seen a steer as big as this, a waiter came over, pointed to the mammoth sizzling carcass, and asked if we would like any of the special roast rabbit. I’ll say it’s special, I thought to myself. It must have weighed at least two tons. After my friend had ordered—by sweeping his hands across the menu in a gesture of victory and acquiescence—and after the waiter had disappeared into the vast and booming floor of ravenous merchants in the company of women with wonderfully exposed bosoms, I cleared my throat again, held up a finger, and (indicating my general pleasure at the surroundings) said, “Ah, ha!”

“Right!” he answered. “I knew you’d like it. This is probably exactly what you’re accustomed to in Cork. I mean in Dublin. Right. Dublin. You are obviously from the upper classes. I can tell by your demearing.” As I surveyed the tables that were like fields of green felt, and let myself drift in the ocean of sounds in the great hollow room, the waiters brought roast rabbit, rich complicated side dishes, bottles of whiskey and wine, overflowing tureens, pancakes that were on fire, and crystal glassware that rang like bells. I was very hungry, and did not notice immediately that my friend took all my food before I ate it, examined it as if it were a new baby, and then salted it profusely. Thus it was always far too salty, even for a Baltic person who has grown up (as my father used to say) astride a salted herring. So, I had to quench my thirst. Wherever I reached—left, right, or center—my hand closed upon a bottle of whiskey or a bottle of wine. I held up a crystal flask as if to ask what it was. “That? Oh. That’s called bourbon.” I drank it like water. Soon I was so drunk that I was kissing the labels. But, still, in answer to the questions of my host, I said only, “Hmmn,” or “Eh?” or “Ah ha!,” which served best to catapult him into a tintinnabulation of intoxicating promises, descriptions, and (after he himself had drained a bottle or two) song.

I was, as I learned to say not long afterward, as happy as a clam. The vast restaurant, crackling like a fire under the light and lovely arches spreading above us, became as pleasant as the blue sea around a small boat. I don’t know how much time had passed in that paradise when, flying to the outermost reaches of the universe, I cried with joy that I had been right to choose the New World, and then was brought about rather abruptly by the sight of a cleared table, two enormous waiters, and a bill that looked like the yearly accounts of my village. The sight of the huge number at the bottom made me shudder. “Give it to
him,
” I said.

“Who.”