Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(45)

Desperately trying to get away from that black backpack, she frequently longed for the noise of her family, for the chaos and the arguing, for the music of loud vodka drinkers, for the smell of incessant cigarette smokers. She wished for her impossible brother, for her sister, for her bedraggled mother, her gruff father and for her grandmother and grandfather--revered by her. She ached for them the way she used to ache for bread during the blockade. She wished for them to walk loudly down the Ellis halls with her as they did now every day, silent ghosts by her side, helpless before his screaming ghost also by her side.

During the day she carried her boy and bandaged and fed the wounded, leaving her own festering wounds until night-time when she licked them and nursed them, and rememberedthe pines and the fish and the river and the axe and the woods and the fire and the blueberries and the smell of cigarette smoke and the loud laughter coming from one male throat.

It was impossible to walk the stripped bare corridors of Ellis Island Three without hearing the millions of footsteps that had walked there on the black-and-white checkered floor before Tatiana. When she ventured across the short bridge to the Great Hall on Ellis Island One, the sense grew. Because unlike Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Ellis Three, where present life was continuing, Ellis One was deserted. All that remained in the gothic building, on the stairs, the corridors, the gray dusty rooms was the spirit of the past--of those who came before, since 1894, those who came by shiploads, seven times a day, who docked across the water at Castle Garden or who came off the planks here, right into Immigration Hall, and then trudged upstairs into the Great Registry Room clutching their bags and children, adjusting their head coverings, having left behind everything in the Old World: mothers and fathers, husbands, brothers and sisters, having either promised to send for them or having promised nothing. Five thousand a day, eighty thousand a month, eight million one year, twenty million from 1892 to 1924, without visas, without papers, without money, but with the clothes they wore and whatever useful skills they had--as carpenters, seamstresses, cooks, metalworkers, bricklayers, salesmen.

Mama would have done well here, sewing. And Papa would have fixed their water pipes, and Pasha would have fished. And Dasha would have looked after Alexander's boy while I worked. Ironic and sad as that would have been, she would have done it.

They came with their children, for no one left the children behind--it was for the children they had come, wanting to give them the halls of America, the streets, the seasons, the New York of America. New York, right across the water, so close yet impossibly far for those who had to be cleared through immigration and medical examinations before they could step on the shores of Manhattan Island. Many had been sick like Tatiana, and worse. The combination of contagious illness, no language skills, and no work skills occasionally made the doctors and the INS officers turn the immigrants away--not a lot, handfuls a day. Older parents and their grown children could be split up. Husbands and wives could be split up.

Like I was split up. Like I am split up.

The threat of failure, the fear of return, the longing to be admitted was so strong that it remained in the walls and the floors, permeating the stone between the cracked glass windows, and all the yearning hope echoed off the walls of Ellis and into Tatiana as she walked the herring-bone tile corridors with Anthony in her arms.

After the clampdown in 1924, Ellis Island stopped being the nucleus for nearly all immigration into the United States. Nonetheless, ships with immigrants arrived each day, then each week, then each month. Processing at Ellis dwindled from millions a year to thousands, to hundreds. Most people came to Port of New York with visas already in hand. Without visas, the immigrants could now be legally turned away and often were, and so fewer and fewer people risked making a life-changing, life-threatening journey only to be turned back at the port of call. But still, 748 people smuggled themselves in between crates of tomatoes in the year before the war, without papers, without money.

They were not turned away.

Just as talk was beginning to swell about closing down the largely unneeded Ellis Island, World War II broke out, and suddenly in 1939, 1940, 1941, Ellis became useful as a hospital for refugees and stowaways. Once America entered the war, it would bring the wounded and captured Germans and Italians from the Atlantic and detain them at Ellis.

That's when Tatiana arrived.

And she felt needed. No one wanted to work at Ellis, not even Vikki, who instinctively felt that her natural and prodigious flirting skills were utterly wasted on the foreign wounded men who would be going back to their home country or to work on U.S. farms as field-hands. Vikki grudgingly pulled her duty at Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Ellis but she much preferred the NYU hospital, where the wounded, if they did not die first, had a hope of pleasing Vikki--the medium-term gal--in the medium-term.

Quietly the German wounded continued to be brought to Ellis Island, and continued to convalesce. The Italian men, too, who talked even as they were dying, talked in a language Tatiana did not understand; yet they spoke with a cadence, with a fervor and a fury that she did understand. They had hearty laughs and throaty cries and clutching fingers with which they would grab onto her as they were carried off the boats, as they stared into her face and muttered hopes for life, chances for survival, words of thanks. And sometimes before they died, if holding her hands wasn't enough, and if they had nothing contagious or infectious, she brought them her boy and placed him on their chests, so that their war-beaten hands could go around his small sleeping form and they would be comforted, and their hearts would beat at peace.