City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (20 page)

The others ignored him, more interested in the soup with its large dollops of fat swimming in the broth, its generous chunks of potato. He turned to the man on his other side—dressed like a day laborer, with a mouth that crinkled merrily when he smiled, but eyes like a wolf. He had some Russian, at least, they could talk a little, though there was something evasive about him. He noticed that one of the man’s arms was not right—that it was crippled, or withered, though one barely noticed at first the way he held it.

“They don’t like the Jews here,” the man confirmed, looking over at the lunatic artist.

“Where do they?” Josef asked, and the laborer seemed to think that was very funny, his mouth crinkling up again like the pictures of Father Christmas he had seen in Kovno.

“Besides, I don’t want to be a Jew anymore. I’m through with it.”

The laborer thought this was funny, too—though he noticed that the man never really laughed.

“I mean it,” he said. “I’m going over to the
goldineh medina.”

“You had best go,” the man agreed, cheerful as ever. “This is a charnel house, over here.”

He leaned in confidentially.

“At least, some of us are doing our best to make it that,” he added.

He wasn’t sure if the man was joking, or if he, too, were mad, but the laborer only smiled his enigmatic, merry smile again, and Josef smiled back, not wanting to offend him.

All things considered, it was still better than Old Zagare, and he slept that night in a good bed, the first one without bugs and off the ground he could remember. The next day he was even issued a pair of pants, a shirt, a jacket, and some shoes. They fit as badly as his old clothes but they were lighter, softer at least, and free of the old, familiar reek of himself.

He washed in the dormitory baths—in warm water, no less!—then dressed in his pleasurable new things and started to walk again. He walked north; he had some idea where he was and where he was going now. Sneaking up through more empires, more imperial eagles, until at last he stood at the great, bustling docks to America.

That was when he realized that he had absolutely no idea of how to proceed. He had thought only of walking, and when he had set out even the horizon had seemed so far away that it was useless to consider anything more. Yet here he was now, and he had no ticket, no money to buy one—no skills anyone here would value, and a language that would only get him deported.

Before him, gangs of dockworkers in overalls and blue work shirts were busy filling the maw of a great ocean liner, tumbling in the trunks of the first-class and steerage passengers alike. He looked down and saw one of the blue shirts, lying along the dock. Emblazoned over one of the pockets was “Jos. K.,” and seeing it was more or less his own name he put it on almost without thinking.

“Hey, you! Kalikeh! Get over here!” one of the workmen called to him. He wasn’t sure what the man was saying but he went over to him anyway.

“What are you doing? Idiot!”

He just shrugged, unsure of any other reply, of what he was supposed to be, and the man waved him on over to a huge, mysterious wooden box. The only markings on the box were fragile! and delicate! and nat. theatre of oklahoma, but it took a whole team of workmen, using all their might, to tug and push it into the ship’s hold.

When they were through, the other longshoremen leaned over, resting for a moment, then went back to moving cargo, and Joseph realized that he was now aboard the ship. No one was paying the slightest attention to him, and he wandered slowly back into the hold, deeper and deeper into the vast boxes and carriages and auto cars, piled up for their voyage to America.

He kept expecting that someone would call him out—that surely it could not be so easy to get into the vast ocean liner, and he would be apprehended, and perhaps even taken off to jail again. But no one called, and soon he could hear the whistles screaming, and the ship’s horn blaring. He wandered up onto one of the lower decks, a narrow walkway for the passengers in steerage class. People were cheering on the docks, and cheering along the first-class decks, and somewhere a band was playing. The ship’s great smokestacks belched to life, and two guns barked a salute from the great fortress across the harbor. Down below, the brightly-pennanted tugs were beginning to pull the liner irresistibly away from the docks.

They were under way—a single ship, casting off a continent.

He burrowed down deep into the ship, into cubbyholes below even the steerage compartments. There was a whole community of stowaways there, beneath the great, throbbing city of the boat—their numbers constantly rising or falling, more strays picked up at Antwerp, or Bristol, as patched and starved and secret as himself.

It was rough for days, and then it was calm—both ways throwing them around deep in the unbolted hold, making them retch up what little food they could scrounge. They were never sure what the weather was like in any case, the only news was in old copies of the ship’s paper, which they used over and over again. They read what they could make out from it, then used it to wipe their ass, throwing it down the bilge holes to be quickly devoured by the sharks that followed the great liner all the way across the North Atlantic.

Deep down in his hole in the wall by the hull, he studied English from a dog-eared book given to him by one of the stokers who knew of their existence, trading them food and a blanket in exchange for what little money they had left, or sex, or the opportunity for cruelty.

The stories, he slowly, gradually discerned, were all part of a series, an endlessly repeated tale called things like
Luck and Pluck,
or
Sink and Swim,
or
Fame and Fortune,
about a young boy with incredible luck. Sometimes the boy was called Ragged Dick, or sometimes he was Tattered Tom, or sometimes Mark the Match Boy, but his story was always the same, it was always about getting rich. As sure as bread, the boy in question would
rise.

He read them doggedly, over and over again, with the help of a particularly friendly ship’s engineer named Schubal, America unfolding for him a few words at a time. The one he loved the most, the one he first understood the meaning of, was
savory.
It was something that Mark the Match Boy (or Ragged Dick) was always eating:
savory
stew.

He was not sure just what it was, he could not be sure if he had ever had anything like it himself, but he could not imagine why anyone would even bother to rise—if he could eat
savory,
and live in that world of cigars, and oysters, and roasting corn, the shady characters, and the women of bad reputation, and the elevated trains, and the raucous balconies of the Old Bowery Theatre—

The stories always ended the same way, with the boy making his fortune through the device of saving a rich man’s son or halting a terrible crime, or recovering the money of a poor widow. The boy in question, the Ragged Dick or the simpering match boy, was then carted off to some distant and much less interesting place—to Milwaukee, or Boston, or New Jersey—so that Joseph was never altogether sure what the point was of rising at all.

Before he could find out, he was told by Schubal the engineer they would be docking that very night, and after it was dark he risked sneaking back up to the steerage deck, to see if he could catch his first glimpse of the new continent.

The whole ship was alive and excited around him. Up on the first-class decks, he could hear Americans in the ship’s bars, singing happy choruses of “Auld Lang Syne”—though the Jews on their deck, clustered around their few possessions, sang a mournful Russian song:

“Fire! Fire!”

Someone was yelling from the deck above. The Jews in their little circles paid no attention, but Joseph looked around anxiously, wondering if the ship could be on fire.

“Fire, fire! A terrible conflagration!”

People on all the different decks were crowding along the rails now, staring out into the darkness. Far ahead, along the rim of the world, he could indeed make out a fire, white-hot flames roiling along the whole length of the horizon.

“What could
make
a fire like that?”

“These American cities are put-up jobs. Look at Chicago—”

“Throw ’em up one day, tear ’em down the next—”

The passengers chattered away in half a dozen tongues, excited by the remote catastrophe. It was truly an incredible fire, limning their faces along the rail, looming high and white above the shore. The whole land was ablaze—the flames turning over and over on themselves like a tormented animal.

“How
can
it keep burning like that?”

Only as they rocked slowly closer through the swells could they see that there was something strange about this fire. It was an unnatural, constant blaze, burning but not consuming. Never increasing or diminishing, falling back in on itself again and again—

Soon, they could see, it split into distinct patterns and shapes—spinning globes, and obelisks and castles, and swooping wheels of fire. They shivered to watch it now, no longer quite so pleased by the disaster. What could make such a fire, they did not know.

“It’s the steel itself burning!”

“The skyscrapers!”

But already they could make out the wheels within the wheels. The roller coasters and miniature trains, the whirligigs and giant merry-go-rounds, and the great tower of fire, trimmed with golden eagles. As they rocked even closer they could make out the safety lines staked far out into the water, the bronzed heads and chests of the electric bathers bobbing out under the spotlights. Soon they could hear the wild calliope chords, could smell the frying clams and beef and roasting corn.

“It’s an amusement—all an amusement!”

He stood riveted by the rail—even more astonished than when he had thought it was a fire, and despite the chance that he could still be spotted as a stowaway, and hauled right back to Rotterdam on the next boat. He kept watching, as the great ocean liner hove slowly about and passed down the whole length of the parks, stretching for miles and miles, past the last leering, electrified idiot’s face, and the blinking sign:
STEEPLECHASE—FUNNY PLACE—STEEPLECHASE—FUNNY PLACE
.

Two hours later they tied up for the night at South Street, before heading over to Ellis Island the next morning, and he crept back out on the steerage deck. A few belongings clutched to his chest, wrapped in oilskin and tied with his belt: some biscuits and tins of meat, his shoes, and the Book, which Schubal had let him have. He paused there, crouching down, until he was sure it was clear, and then he scuttled quickly and silently over to the bow.

The City lay glowing before him. The ship’s prow pointed straight up one avenue, flowing out toward the west like a river of gold. Grids within grids of flickering yellow and white light. He stood, and leaned toward it.

There was a noise behind him. He ducked back down, heaved his oilskin package over the side—and after a very long time, heard it splash into the dark water below. Then he pulled himself up over the rail, and jumped in after it.

He fell . . .

He tore through the water and sank quickly through the incredible filth and offal of the harbor. He could see, floating past him in the oily yellow light as he sank: chicken guts and horse bones, loose turds, the severed paw of a dog. Giant gray, drowned rats, floating peacefully, their heads bent over.

He closed his eyes against it and struggled. He had no idea how to swim, but he struggled, writhing and flailing his arms toward the dim light above. He began to rise back up, the gritty, corrupted water fluming into his mouth and nostrils. He spat it out, and struck for the surface.

Something large and soft and rubbery bumped against his face. He opened his eyes, thinking it might be his oilskin.

A huge pink head grinned back at him. A hideous face—slanted, vicious eyes and ears, enormous, pushed-up nostrils. Coarse black hairs waving in the current—

He struck out at it, and the face fell away—then bobbed back toward him. Only then did he realize that it wasn’t human but a gigantic pig’s head, swollen and distorted in the water. He kicked it to one side, but it hung there before him for another long moment, grinning mindlessly until the current carried it away.

He broke the water a few yards away from the boat, choking and gasping. He saw his oilskin floating nearby, trapped by the mooring lines, and he hauled it in and rested on it, then pushed his way over to the wharf.

He scraped and clambered up the rock wall, over the rats and the slippery scum, and crouched there for a moment, covered in the oily black muck of the harbor. The ship loomed silently above him, seemingly deserted. There was no one else on the pier—only the distant sound of laughter and piano music coming from the bars and the bawdy houses down the wharf.

He unbelted the oilskin, and used it to wipe himself off as best he could before he tossed it back into the water. He sat down on a piling and put on his shoes and cap, slipped the tinned meats and apples into his pockets. Then he stood up and walked quickly down the broad, golden avenue, into the new city.

Not that he had any idea where he was going.

He just wanted to walk for awhile, until he got the lay of the land—the way he had done in the Ukraine, walking around entire
goyishe
villages when he didn’t like the look of them.

He had already got the idea from the
Ragged Dick
that it wouldn’t be so easy here, and his glimpse of the myriad, glowing squares confirmed it. Instead he just walked—past all the waterfront saloons, lit up out front but dark places inside, where he could just make out the shapes of men and women shoving up against the bar, still wearing their hats and coats. Outside men with hard faces stood watching him pass, hands in their pockets, their soft words calling after him down the street.