Fall of Giants

“I am Russian,” the man said. “Can I help you?”

Lev could have hugged him. Instead he looked the man in the eye and gave him a warm smile. “Someone was supposed to meet us off the ship and take us to Buffalo, but he didn’t show up,” he said, making his voice friendly but concerned. “There are about three hundred of us…” To gain sympathy he added: “Including women and children. Do you think you could help us find our contact?”

“Buffalo?” the man said. “Where do you think you are?”

“New York, of course.”

“This is Cardiff.”

Lev had never heard of Cardiff, but at least now he understood the problem. “That stupid captain set us down in the wrong port,” he said. “How do we get to Buffalo from here?”

The man pointed out of the window, across the sea, and Lev had a sick feeling that he knew what was coming.

“It’s that way,” the man said. “About three thousand miles.”

{III}

Lev inquired the price of a ticket from Cardiff to New York. When converted to rubles it was ten times the amount of money he had inside his shirt.

He suppressed his rage. They had all been cheated by the Vyalov family, or the ship’s captain-or both, most probably, since it would be easier to work the scam between them. All Grigori’s hard-earned money had been stolen by those lying pigs. If he could have got the captain of the Angel Gabriel by the throat, he would have squeezed the life out of the man, and laughed when he died.

But there was no point in dreams of vengeance. The thing was not to give in. He would find a job, learn to speak English, and get into a high-stakes card game. It would take time. He would have to be patient. He must learn to be a bit more like Grigori.

That first night they all slept on the floor of the synagogue. Lev tagged along with the rest. The Cardiff Jews did not know, or perhaps did not care, that some of the passengers were Christian.

For the first time in his life he saw the advantage of being Jewish. In Russia Jews were so persecuted that Lev had always wondered why more of them did not abandon their religion, change their clothes, and mix in with everyone else. It would have saved a lot of lives. But now he realized that, as a Jew, you could go anywhere in the world and always find someone to treat you like family.

It turned out that this was not the first group of Russian immigrants to buy tickets to New York and end up somewhere else. It had happened before, in Cardiff and other British ports; and, as so many Russian migrants were Jewish, the elders of the synagogue had a routine. Next day the stranded travelers were given a hot breakfast and got their money changed to British pounds, shillings, and pence, then they were taken to boardinghouses where they were able to rent cheap rooms.

Like every city in the world, Cardiff had thousands of stables. Lev studied enough words to say he was an experienced worker with horses, then went around the city asking for a job. It did not take people long to see that he was good with the animals, but even well-disposed employers wanted to ask a few questions, and he could not understand or answer.

In desperation he learned more rapidly, and after a few days he could understand prices and ask for bread or beer. However, employers were asking complicated questions, presumably about where he had worked before and whether he had ever been in trouble with the police.

He returned to the seamen’s mission and explained his problem to the Russian in the little office. He was given an address in Butetown, the neighborhood nearest the docks, and told to ask for Filip Kowal, pronounced “cole,” known as Kowal the Pole. Kowal turned out to be a ganger who hired out foreign labor cheap and spoke a smattering of most European languages. He told Lev to be on the forecourt of the city’s main railway station, with his suitcase, on the following Monday morning at ten o’clock.

Lev was so glad that he did not even ask what the job was.

He showed up along with a couple of hundred men, mostly Russian, but including Germans, Poles, Slavs, and one dark-skinned African. He was pleased to see Spirya and Yakov there too.

They were herded onto a train, their tickets paid for by Kowal, and they steamed north through pretty mountain country. Between the green hillsides, the industrial towns lay pooled like dark water in the valleys. A feature of every town was at least one tower with a pair of giant wheels on top, and Lev learned that the main business of the region was coal mining. Several of the men with him were miners; some had other crafts such as metalworking; and many were unskilled laborers.