The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [109]
He told her everything, about his family in Russia and their escape from the pogroms and how, as a boy of seven, he had found himself alone in New York. And then he stopped. He just could not go on.
She squeezed his hand understandingly and he trembled. After calling the waiter, he ordered another bottle of the rough red wine. He poured some and tipped up his glass, drinking deeply as if it were water to give himself the courage to continue.
“How can I tell you what it felt like?” he asked hoarsely. “A child, all alone in a new country whose language I did not even speak? I was too afraid to ask for help. I waited until some more people emerged from the hall and followed them. I walked and walked but it seemed to me I was getting nowhere, that I would never arrive because there was nowhere to go.
“When night fell I found myself in a maze of streets. They all looked the same, tall, narrow brick buildings with stone stoops. I slept under a stoop that night. The next day I walked again. I did not cry anymore. There were no tears left, just a terrible gnawing hunger. At night I rooted among the garbage for potato peelings, rotting fruits, and bones like an animal. And by day I walked. One night it began to rain, a hard lashing curtain, and soon I was soaked to the skin. Only my feet in their new boots from my uncle were dry. I found a cardboard box under a bridge and climbed in. I felt secure surrounded by my four cardboard walls, I was asleep in an instant. I was awakened by someone hauling on my collar and screaming at me. I saw a face, red, distorted, fringed with a matted gray beard. It was his box, his home I was sleeping in, and I knew he meant to kill me for it, like a mad territorial beast. I jumped out and ran away, running and running into the night.
“It was suddenly colder the next day and the rain turned to snow. I turned up my collar and kept on walking because I knew if I stopped I might never get up again. I asked myself, ‘And what is there to get up for?’ I would be better off dead. Then I saw a group of men and boys carrying shovels; they were being sent to clear the snow. I ran over quickly and joined them. The pay was fifty cents a day for as long as the snow lasted. I worked alongside the men, saying nothing, just shifting the snow endlessly, and at the end of the day I collected my fifty cents and went across the street to a diner and bought myself two frankfurters with sauerkraut. My first American food. I stuffed myself full of bread and I must have drunk a quart of milk and then I went outside and threw up. I thought, ‘Such a waste, my fifty cents all gone.’ The snow stopped after a week, but by then I had food inside me, and I had found a warm grating to sleep over where the steam came up from the diner’s kitchen.”
He hesitated. There were things he could not tell her, things he would never tell anyone about the men who had dragged him screaming from his warm hideaway, molesting him, and how he had bit and scratched and punched and fought until he had escaped; how he had run through the night across a great bridge, pausing in the middle, praying for courage to jump into the deep, dark, silent water below. But he was a coward and so he lived.
“Eventually I came by the Lower East Side,” he said. “I saw an old man, a peddler, trying to push his little cart, but he was white-bearded and feeble. I ran across to help him, pushing it all the way to Rivington Street. For that he gave me a smile and a dime and asked me whose boy I was, and where I lived. I told him no one’s and nowhere. He stared at me for a long time and then he said, ‘So, it’s an orphan, and speaking Yiddish only. I am old, I need a helper. Stay by me and help with the cart and I’ll pay you