Fall of Giants

Lev had been intrigued to find a bullet hole in the suitcase, and a slug embedded in a box containing a chess set. He had sold the chess set to one of the Jews for five kopeks. He wondered how Grigori had come to be shot at that day.

He was missing Katerina. He loved to walk around with a girl like that on his arm, knowing that every man envied him. But there would be plenty of girls here in America.

He wondered if Grigori knew about Katerina’s baby yet. Lev suffered a pang of regret: would he ever see his son or daughter? He told himself not to worry about leaving Katerina to raise the child alone. She would find someone else to look after her. She was a survivor.

It was after midnight when at last the ship docked. The quay was dimly lit and there was no one in sight. The passengers disembarked with their bags and boxes and trunks. An officer from the Angel Gabriel directed them into a shed where there were a few benches. “You must wait here until the immigration people come for you in the morning,” he said, demonstrating that he did, after all, speak a little Russian.

It was a bit of an anticlimax for people who had saved up for years to come here. The women sat on the benches and the children went to sleep while the men smoked and waited for morning. After a while they heard the ship’s engines, and Lev went outside and saw it moving slowly away from its mooring. Perhaps the crates of furs had to be unloaded elsewhere.

He tried to recall what Grigori had told him, in casual conversation, about the first steps in the new country. Immigrants had to pass a medical inspection-a tense moment, for unfit people were sent back, their money wasted and their hopes dashed. Sometimes the immigration officers changed people’s names, to make them easier for Americans to pronounce. Outside the docks, a representative of the Vyalov family would be waiting to take them by train to Buffalo. There they would get jobs in hotels and factories owned by Josef Vyalov. Lev wondered how far Buffalo was from New York. Would it take an hour to get there, or a week? He wished he had listened more carefully to Grigori.

The sun rose over miles of crowded docks, and Lev’s excitement returned. Old-fashioned masts and rigging clustered side by side with steam funnels. There were grand dockside buildings and tumbledown sheds, tall derricks and squat capstans, ladders and ropes and carts. To landward, Lev could see serried ranks of railway trucks full of coal, hundreds of them-no, thousands-fading into the distance beyond the limit of his vision. He was disappointed that he could not see the famous Liberty statue with its torch: it must be out of sight around a headland, he guessed.

Dockworkers arrived, first in small groups, then in crowds. Ships departed and others arrived. A dozen women began to unload sacks of potatoes from a small vessel in front of the shed. Lev wondered when the immigration police would come.

Spirya came up to him. He seemed to have forgiven the way Lev had threatened him. “They’ve forgotten about us,” he said.

“Looks that way,” Lev said, puzzled.

“Shall we take a walk around-see if we can find someone who speaks Russian?”

“Good idea.”

Spirya spoke to one of the older men. “We’re going to see if we can find out what’s happening.”

The man looked nervous. “Maybe we should stay here as we were told.”

They ignored him and walked over to the potato women. Lev gave them his best grin and said: “Does anyone speak Russian?” One of the younger women smiled back, but no one answered the question. Lev felt frustrated: his winning ways were useless with people who could not understand what he was saying.

Lev and Spirya walked in the direction from which most of the workers had come. No one took any notice of them. They came to a big set of gates, walked through, and found themselves in a busy street of shops and offices. The road was crowded with motorcars, electric trams, horses, and handcarts. Every few yards Lev spoke to someone, but no one responded.

Lev was mystified. What kind of place allowed anyone to walk off a ship and into the city without permission?

Then he spotted a building that intrigued him. It was a bit like a hotel, except that two poorly dressed men in sailors’ caps were sitting on the steps, smoking. “Look at that place,” he said.

“What about it?”

“I think it’s a seamen’s mission, like the one in St. Petersburg.”

“We’re not sailors.”

“But there might be people there who speak foreign languages.”

They went inside. A gray-haired woman behind a counter spoke to them.

Lev said in his own tongue: “We don’t speak American.”

She replied with a single word in the same language: “Russian?”

Lev nodded.

She made a beckoning sign with her finger, and Lev’s hopes rose.

They followed her along a corridor to a small office with a window overlooking the water. Behind the desk was a man who looked, to Lev, like a Russian Jew, although he could not have said why he thought that. Lev said to him: “Do you speak Russian?”