by Follett, Ken
On the evening of the tenth day Lev was playing cards. He was dealer, but he was losing. Everyone was losing except Spirya, an innocent-looking boy of Lev’s age who was also traveling alone. “Spirya wins every night,” said another player, Yakov. The truth was that Spirya won when Lev was dealing.
They were steaming slowly through a fog. The sea was calm, and there was no sound but the low bass of the engines. Lev had not been able to find out when they would arrive. People gave different answers. The most knowledgeable said it depended on the weather. The crew were inscrutable as always.
As night fell, Lev threw in his hand. “I’m cleaned out,” he said. In fact he had plenty more money inside his shirt, but he could see that the others were running low, all except Spirya. “That’s it,” he said. “When we get to America, I’m just going to have to catch the eye of a rich old woman and live like a pet dog in her marble palace.”
The others laughed. “But why would anyone want you for a pet?” said Yakov.
“Old ladies get cold at night,” he said. “She would need my heating appliance.”
The game ended in good humor, and the players drifted away.
Spirya went aft and leaned on the rail, watching the wake disappear into the fog. Lev joined him. “My half comes to seven rubles even,” Lev said.
Spirya took paper currency from his pocket and gave it to Lev, shielding the transaction with his body so that no one else could see money changing hands.
Lev pocketed the notes and filled his pipe.
Spirya said: “Tell me something, Grigori.” Lev was using his brother’s papers, so he had to tell people his name was Grigori. “What would you do if I refused to give you your share?”
This kind of talk was dangerous. Lev slowly put his tobacco away and put the unlit pipe back into his jacket pocket. Then he grabbed Spirya by the lapels and pushed him up against the rail so that he was bent backward and leaning out to sea. Spirya was taller than Lev but not as tough, by a long way. “I would break your stupid neck,” Lev said. “Then I would take back all the money you’ve made with me.” He pushed Spirya farther over. “Then I would throw you in the damn sea.”
Spirya was terrified. “All right!” he said. “Let me go!”
Lev released his grip.
“Jesus!” Spirya gasped. “I only asked a question.”
Lev lit his pipe. “And I gave you the answer,” he said. “Don’t forget it.”
Spirya walked away.
When the fog lifted they were in sight of land. It was night, but Lev could see the lights of a city. Where were they? Some said Canada, some said Ireland, but no one knew.
The lights came nearer, and the ship slowed. They were going to make landfall. Lev heard someone say they had arrived in America already! Ten days seemed quick. But what did he know? He stood at the rail with his brother’s cardboard suitcase. His heart beat faster.
The suitcase reminded him that Grigori should have been the one arriving in America now. Lev had not forgotten his vow to Grigori, to send him the price of a ticket. That was one promise he ought to keep. Grigori had probably saved his life—again. I’m lucky, Lev thought, to have such a brother.
He was making money on the ship, but not fast enough. Seven rubles went nowhere. He needed a big score. But America was the land of opportunity. He would make his fortune there.
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: “Russ
ian?”
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?”
“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.
After an hour they got off the train. As they filed out of the station Lev realized this was no ordinary job. A crowd of several hundred men, all dressed in the caps and rough clothes of workers, stood waiting for them in the square. At first the men were ominously silent, then one of them shouted something, and the others quickly joined in. Lev had no idea what they were saying but there was no doubt it was hostile. There were also twenty or thirty policemen present, standing at the front of the crowd, keeping the men behind an imaginary line.
Spirya said in a frightened voice: “Who are these people?”
Lev said: “Short, muscular men with hard faces and clean hands—I’d say they are coal miners on strike.”
“They look as if they want to kill us. What the hell is going on?”
“We’re strikebreakers,” Lev said grimly.
“God save us.”
Kowal the Pole shouted: “Follow me!” in several languages, and they all marched up the main street. The crowd continued to shout, and men shook their fists, but no one broke the line. Lev had never before felt grateful to policemen. “This is awful,” he said.
Yakov said: “Now you know what it’s like to be a Jew.”
They left the shouting miners behind and walked uphill through streets of row houses. Lev noticed that many of the houses appeared empty. People still stared as they went by, but the insults stopped. Kowal started to allocate houses to the men. Lev and Spirya were astonished to be given a house to themselves. Before leaving, Kowal pointed out the pithead—the tower with twin wheels—and told them to be there tomorrow morning at six. Those who were miners would be digging coal, the others would be maintaining tunnels and equipment or, in Lev’s case, looking after ponies.
Lev looked around his new home. It was no palace, but it was clean and dry. It had one big room downstairs and two up—a bedroom for each of them! Lev had never had a room to himself. There was no furniture, but they were used to sleeping on the floor, and in June they did not even need blankets.
Lev had no wish to leave, but eventually they became hungry. There was no food in the house so, reluctantly, they went out to get their dinner. With trepidation they entered the first pub they came to, but the dozen or so customers glared angrily at them, and when Lev said in English: “Two pints of half-and-half, please,” the bartender ignored him.
They walked downhill into the town center and found a café. Here at least the clientele did not appear to be spoiling for a fight. But they sat at a table for half an hour and watched the waitress serve everyone who came in after them. Then they left.
It was going to be difficult living here, Lev suspected. But it would not be for long. As soon as he had enough money he would go to America. Nevertheless, while he was here he had to eat.
They went into a bakery. This time Lev was determined to get what he wanted. He pointed to a rack of loaves and said in English: “One bread, please.”
The baker pretended not to understand.
Lev reached across the counter and grabbed the loaf he wanted. Now, he thought, let him try to take it back.
“Hey!” cried the baker, but he stayed
his side of the counter.
Lev smiled and said: “How much, please?”
“Penny farthing,” the baker said sulkily.
Lev put the coins on the counter. “Thank you very much,” he said.
He broke the loaf and gave half to Spirya, then they walked down the street eating. They came to the railway station, but the crowd had dispersed. On the forecourt, a news vendor was calling his wares. His papers were selling fast, and Lev wondered if something important had happened.
A large car came along the road, going fast, and they had to jump out of the way. Looking at the passenger in the back, Lev was astonished to recognize Princess Bea.
“Good God!” he said. In a flash, he was transported back to Bulovnir, and the nightmare sight of his father dying on the gallows while this woman looked on. The terror he had felt then was unlike anything he had ever known. Nothing would ever scare him like that, not street fights nor policemen’s nightsticks nor guns pointed at him.
The car pulled up at the station entrance. Hatred, disgust, and nausea overwhelmed Lev as Princess Bea got out. The bread in his mouth seemed like gravel and he spat it out.
Spirya said: “What’s the matter?”
Lev pulled himself together. “That woman is a Russian princess,” he said. “She had my father hanged fourteen years ago.”
“Bitch. What on earth is she doing here?”
“She married an English lord. They must live nearby. Perhaps it’s his coal mine.”
The chauffeur and a maid busied themselves with luggage. Lev heard Bea speak to the maid in Russian, and the maid replied in the same tongue. They all went into the station, then the maid came back out and bought a newspaper.
Lev approached her. Taking off his cap, he gave a deep bow and said in Russian: “You must be the princess Bea.”
