Ellis Island & Other Stories (17 page)

We never did see land—because the fog was so thick—but we knew (in perhaps the same way that one knows when a piece of music is coming to a close: by constrictions, emotions, and intuitions) that we had passed the Narrows and were in the harbor. The noise of bells and foghorns made a pattern not unlike the few deductive points from which a surveyor makes a map; a pilot launch had come alongside; broken river ice flowed slowly past the ship. But still, America was not visible. Like the blind, we could only guess, for we could see nothing more than silvery water and white mist.

And then the ship’s engines stopped. After several weeks of perpetual racket, we were made to think of Heaven, for as we glided in silence we seemed to be not at sea but in the clouds. During the journey, I had noticed that people cried at different stations. Some had wept as they boarded ship; others as we pulled out to sea; some during the storms; some as we saw the warship with the beautiful banner flying from its stern. And now, after we had put the dangers behind us, some wept as the anchor chains exploded from the ship and arched into the water. For many this sound was like the bones of Europe rattling one last time, and they felt that they were finally released. I didn’t, for I had yet to see America, and was not completely sure that the white clouds, white ships, and flowing archipelagos of ice and foam were not dreams.

As if by magic, a procession of launches came from the fog. The water was calm enough for our ship to unload by lighter. After we had stepped onto the smaller vessels, our suitcases in our hands, we moved into the low-lying clouds, engines echoing off the water as if we were moving in between the walls of a high canyon. Because the Americans on the launch were about twice our size, most of us thought that we had come into a country of giants, but I guessed that it was a measure taken to impress us. Indeed, we were impressed by these red-faced, uniformed Goliaths who spoke over our heads in a strange and difficult language.

The two giants on our launch guided it to Ellis Island, where we were to be tested and sorted, and either allowed into America or sent back. When Ellis Island, the “Isle of Tears,” appeared floating in coils of mist, it did not dispel any notions we might have had about dreams, for upon it were vast domed buildings striped as regularly as coral snakes, smoking from half a hundred chimneys, and shining hundreds of electric lights from windows, porches, and doorways. When I stepped off the launch, I found that the land was covered with new snow up to my knees, except where paths had been shoveled through it in strange patterns that circled the imposing palaces like spiders’ webs.

We entered the largest building, and left our luggage in a room on the ground floor. Then we went upstairs to a cathedral-like space in which hundreds of people were already waiting, having come on the Bremen Line and docked an hour earlier. We were asked the names of the countries that we were from, and were made to sit in areas fenced off according to nationality. The room was a forest of steel barriers and wooden benches. Two chandeliers as big as locomotives hung from the vaulted ceiling. When there was no fog, it was said, one could see all of New York through the windows in the north wall. But we were still inside our bale of cotton.

It is hard to describe how pale the light was in that great room. Perhaps because we had been so long on the ocean, we felt that we were still sailing, floating silently toward the end of the bad weather, when clarity of air and view would break upon the wall of windows like a tidal wave. I knew that there was a tremendous noise in the hall, but it seemed quiet, in that the collective voice of the thousand people who were there was like wind or surf. Officials in uniforms of deep blue beckoned for us to come forward, and little by little, after many hours, our numbers lessened as people were led up a long staircase to the examination rooms above. They prayed as they went up. Even had we not had the sense of floating in Heaven, the idea of judgment was implicit in every angle of the place. Some had great difficulty struggling up the stairs, and at the top were led away to be sent back—since the doctors could easily see that their hearts were not strong enough for America. Others bounded up the steps, ready to face anything. Before my turn, I noticed a flash of color ahead of me. In the white room, alive with expectation, a plume of red and gold had flared up like a flame.

What was it? I strained to see. An endless file of immigrants moved slowly on the stairs, but then, as the line progressed, I saw the flash of warm color again—the long and beautiful red-blond hair of a young woman in a group of Norwegian immigrants. There was something so steady about her bravery in ascension that everyone who saw her took courage. As we watched the broken line of her progress, she became our symbol. This was an angel to follow, and follow we did. In fact, I was so impatient to get through and catch up to her that I was merely irritated by the inspections.

In the galleries above, I was taken from room to room and looked over rather carelessly. After lifting my eyelids with a button hook, a young man with a military bearing saw that I had no trachoma. Someone else made me cough and breathe. I had to take off my clothes and turn around several times. In another room, a big fat man asked if I could bend over. “Why?” I asked in turn, thinking that the only reason he wanted to know was because he himself would never be able to do such a thing. “Is it that everyone who comes to America has to be able to bend over?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What for?”

“Because when we sing our national anthem, we bend over. Now do it or I’ll send you back to Serbia.”

“I don’t come from Serbia,” I protested.

“Exactly,” he said. “But if I want to, I can ship you there, so you’d better do as I tell you.”

I bent over and was passed on to the next room.

There, a pretty woman with cold eyes asked me if I knew how to read and write.

“Of course,” I said.

“What languages?” she asked.

When I replied, “Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German, and French—and English, as you can see,” she got very suspicious and asked me what I did for a living.

“I write books,” I said. Little did I know that in America no one ever believes this, as if all the books that appear are written not by living people, but by hairbrushes, watermelons, and branding irons. She looked at me the way one looks at a madman.

“What kind of books’?” she asked sharply, closing one eye and squinting with the other.

“Stories,” I replied pompously, “essays, dissertations on Biblical poetry, political science, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“How can you make a living by doing this?” she inquired, with evident disgust.

“That’s very perceptive of you,” I said with a broad smile. “I can’t.”

“Then explain how you manage.”

“I can only say,” I offered, thinking that maybe, even if her eyes
were
cold, I might still fall in love with her, “that this is one of the unexplained paradoxes which are allowed to thrive because the universe is, on one level, wonderfully disordered.”

“Turn around,” she commanded. She made a letter on my back with a piece of chalk and motioned for me to leave. “Next!” she shouted.

“What’s that for?” I asked, trying to see what she had written.

“Nothing,” she said, and pushed me into the hall.

By this time I was elated. I imagined myself in a dressing gown, living in a palace overlooking the forests of Manhattan (which I thought would look like a cross between the Tyrol and the
Berner Oberland
), married to the Norwegian woman, after whom I was chasing as best I could. We would be on the same ferry, I thought. The ferry would burst through the fog, and there, in front of us, would be a magnificent island of fjords, meadows, and castles. Enormous oaks would hang from cliffs over the water; horsemen would gallop from place to place, bearing shields as brightly colored as illuminated manuscripts. And, I thought that I would finally get to see the American Talking Chicken, who, it was believed in my village (why not?), possessed the mildly altruistic trait of sitting down with you just before he was to be cooked, to determine the best recipe. I imagined that such a discussion would be both candid and touching.

I was lost in these speculations when I came to a window which gave out upon the ferry slip. A long, slim boat was getting up steam, and the Norwegians from the Bremen Line were about to go on board. My heart rose just as it had done when I had seen the flash of gold on the stairs. Ten minutes, I thought, and I, too, will be on that boat.

But she was not with them. How could she have been sent back? I had been able to see from several hundred feet away that she was healthy—it was one of her beauties; another was her stature; another was her tentativeness, her gentleness. Is humility out of fashion? Then to hell with fashion. She had humility in the best religious sense, like Rabbi Moritz of Oppenheim. You could feel it, as you could sense her strength, halfway across the room. The ways in which people walk and the expressions on their faces are rich and communicative emblems long neglected except by painters and immigration inspectors. But I am digressing. She did not board the ferry. My elation became apprehension. What would I do alone in Manhattan, in an emerald forest taken from a bookplate? What would I do, alone, with all the perfect weather beyond the cotton?

Though she did not know of my existence, I imagined that abandoning her would be the greatest treachery that had ever been. Am I mad? I asked myself. I’ve passed the tests. I can now get on the boat and go ashore. How can I risk everything just to stay for the sake of a woman I have seen only once, and who has not seen me at all?

When I reached the point at which those unfortunates who had not passed were shunted into the depths of the Island for further examination or to await an outward-bound steamer, my fear was nearly uncontrollable. But instead of walking to the right and down the stairs, to freedom, I stood at attention before the final judge, closed my eyes, and screamed, “I’m an anarchist!”

I would not have been surprised had I been shot right there, but I was amazed when, motioning me into the dimensionless interior, the judge looked up and said, “I know.”

“How do you know?” I asked, as my legs carried me away from him, with many others who had been rejected, down a dim corridor.

“Because it’s written on your back,” he shouted after me.

I have finally fallen into the cold dark sea, I thought, as we walked for interminable distances in echoing hallways as long as roads. At one point, we passed over a glass-covered bridge, and I saw through the panes that evening had come in blue and gray, and brought with it a delicate snowfall. So began my stay on Ellis Island.

They made us take a shower. We didn’t protest, for the water was warm and never-ending. I may have been the only one in the new group of which I had become part who had taken a shower or bath at any time in his life. There were fifty of us. We were supposed to have been men, but I had to blink in the darkness of the shower room to convince myself that I had not been subsumed in a dream of rats and mice. The shaved heads, sunken sparkling eyes, and bodies not unlike the carcasses of devoured fowls, strongly suggested Bruegel’s blind, Hogarth’s starving, and Bosch’s rodents. I was afraid to be naked in their presence, thinking that they might want to gnaw at my limbs. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the stream of clear water.

I thought that I had made a dreadful mistake, and that my red-blond Norwegian was already in New York—about to board a train for the interior, or happily sopping up the attentions of rich young Americans who could shoot guns, ride horses, and speak English without an accent, and who were taller than I was by two heads. Besides, what would a Norwegian woman want with a Jew like me? Could I marry her? She was a Christian, but I was not sure of what kind. (Since not a few Christian missionaries sent to our village had always been so terribly eager to tell us about their faith, we had endeavored to remain as ignorant of it as we could possibly be. For me, this policy proved nearly fatal when once in trying to escape a band of rowdies I told them that I was a nun. But that is another story.)

I turned to a consumptive Italian who stood under the next shower. “Excuse me,” I said, with Italian inflection. “Are you a Christian?”

“Certamente!”
he replied, insulted and tremendously satisfied.

“Can you tell me, then, what kind of Christians are Norwegians?”

“Yes,” he answered. “No
cristiani
there.
Ci sono pagani.
Devils, them!”

After an hour and a half in the showers (someone had forgotten us, but we thought that it was a custom of the country), we were taken to a white room filled with row upon row of hospital beds. Since we did not have our luggage, and did not know what was going to happen, we lay on the beds, perfectly wide awake and perfectly silent, waiting for the officials. I could see snow swirling in the space next to the windows. Was this America? I wondered if I had not fallen asleep at home and dreamed a new world from my own heart. It was not unpleasant. The sensations were strong and good; I had fallen in love (admittedly, like a madman); and I had a lot of work before me in convincing whoever had to be convinced that I was not an anarchist.

When some bluecoats came in to take us to dinner, we burst out laughing. I think it was the hysteria of the idle poor. Just lying on our beds, with nothing to do, we felt like fools. But we laughed at them, and the more we laughed, the more we laughed—until we rolled off the beds and beat the floor with our fists. The bluecoats just stood there, looking on. They were used to such lunacy, but we weren’t. It turned to tears, and with the tears we realized that we were going to be sent back. The bluecoats continued to look on impassively, and when we were all worn out they marched us upstairs to a room where we dined numbly on boiled beef, carrots, soda water, and bread. Several Jews remained in the doorway, discussing something in panic. They had missed the kosher meal. As I stuffed beef into my mouth, I stared at them.

“Come, eat,” I said.