“A trio of soldiers and officers forced their way through the confusion and headed right past us. To clear the way, the officers pushed with their sticks and hands, moving against the flow of the crowd. One young officer stood in front of me and prodded me with his stick.
“The soldier was amused at what looked like a confrontation with a simpleminded Jew, and he turned to his comrades to share the joke. They looked equally amused.
“We followed the crowd into the darkness to a vast foggy waterfront where thousands of people sat on their luggage, talking, looking at the huge metal boat with peeling paint, a boat that was as big as the entire village of Yekteraslav, maybe as big as two Yekteraslavs.
“I grabbed the arm of a well-dressed Jewish woman who was talking to another well-dressed woman seated on a trio of matching cloth suitcases. The woman turned on me in anger, but something in my face frightened her, and she stood mute.
“‘Tell me,’ I whispered, my voice cracking. ‘How do we get on that boat. Where is it going?’
“‘To America,’ the woman said. She was about thirty, not pretty but womanly.
“‘You have to get an exit visa,’ the woman said. ‘You go to the end of the dock. If you didn’t get one in your district, you go there and stand in line.’
“‘And,’ said her friend, an overflowing older woman with a very wide hat, ‘when you get in, you tell them you want to go and you pay them a bribe, and they make you wait a few days. If you don’t bribe, you wait a week or two weeks or ten, but you go, anyway. You go because you are Jewish, and they want to get rid of you as much as you want to go.’
“‘I know,’ I said.
“‘Yes,’ said the woman, whose arm I still held. I let her loose, and Abraham and I walked in the direction to the visa’ shack, stepping over sleeping families, couples huddled together. The heavy mist from the sea and the ship drifted over the crowd, a cloud that covered clumps of people, that blanketed but didn’t protect us.
“Shifting my sack from one shoulder to the next a dozen times, I finally found a long line stretching for what looked like miles. We watched the line for fifteen minutes, but it did not move.
“‘The office is closed until the morning,’ said a man we were standing in front of. Abraham and I had made the man nervous, and the fellow, a frayed creature in a gray foreign-looking suit, wanted us to be gone. ‘Go to the end and wait till it opens.’
“We nodded and moved toward the end, a hike almost as long as the one we had taken from the two women to the line itself. We sat at the rear behind two old couples and watched an old man with a long beard hugging himself hard to keep out the cold, though the night was not as terrible as others we had suffered in the last two weeks. I watched Abraham’s eyes turning into the night mist in the direction of Yekteraslav, not expecting to see anything but unable to turn away.
“‘You want a visa?’
“The voice was soft, pleading; the words in Yiddish I found hard to understand. I turned my eyes to the voice and automatically put my hand out to protect my jacket and money. The man before me was short, almost a dwarf. He was clean-shaven, and his mouth showed an incredibly jagged line of teeth, distorting his face so that he had a permanent look, which might have been a smile or a grimace of pain.
“‘You want a visa?’ repeated the little man.
“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We need visas.’
“‘And a passage on that ship?’ the little man said, nodding back toward the dock.
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘Can you pay?’ said the man.
“The old man, hugging himself, leaned into the conversation and looked at the little man.
“‘He’s a shtupper,” said the old man. ‘A pig sticker. He gets people who don’t want to leave to sell him visas, and then he resells them, taking places away from people who should be on the ships.’
“‘You don’t know,’ hissed the little man. ‘You old cocker. You don’t know.’
“‘How much do you want?’ I said, grabbing at the possibility of immediately departing from fear and memory.
“‘Maybe more than you can pay?’
“I reached out and grabbed the little man by the collar, clapping my hand over his mouth to quiet him. The feel of the wet mouth disgusted me.
“‘Just tell me.’
“‘Show me what you have,’ whispered the little man.
“I turned my back and pulled out my money, but the man had maneuvered to see it.
“‘I’ll take that,’ said the little man. ‘All of it.’
“‘Show me the visas and the tickets,’ I demanded.
“The little man pulled a crumpled package from his pocket and held it out. Inside the package was a folded piece of cardboard.
“‘That’s only one visa, one ticket,’ I said, looking at Abraham, who had said nothing, only looked like a frightened cow since we had descended into the nightmare of Riga.
“The old man nodded yes, that he had only one ticket, one visa, that we would have to make up our minds if we wanted it. I said no, and lifted my sack, stepping out of line and back into the mist and the tangle of waiting bodies. Abraham hesitated and followed. He said something to the old man, who nodded, and I called over my shoulder to Abraham to join with me. I’ll tell you the truth. I planned to find two people, get them out of line behind a shack and take their tickets and, if need be, their lives, but I never got the chance. Abraham and I huddled in the chill fog behind a storage shack on the dock, and I dozed. Being hit is supposed to knock you out. It woke me for an instant like a headache, and I found myself looking up at Abraham, who stood over me, my mother’s candlestick in his hand. He brought the candlestick down again on my head. I was stunned, couldn’t move, blood coming into my eyes. I’m sure he took me for dead. I know I was unconscious.
“When I woke up, it was just dawn. My sack was gone. The money was gone. I lurched to the dock as people were boarding the ship, and I could see Abraham in the crowd. He saw me, too, and fear was in his eyes. I tried to get on the ship, tried to push past the people crowding the gangplank, screamed like a mad bloody fool, and was thrown from the dock by ship’s guards.
“I had passed out again and lay there, in the crowd gathering for the next ship. People moved around me, waiting for me to die. Some went through my pockets. I could feel it, but there was nothing to take. Abraham, my friend from childhood, had taken everything. Obviously, I did not die. I was too stubborn to die. I crawled away that night, stole some food, and the next day, when I felt strong enough, I washed my face in stinging seawater and found a solitary man who had a ticket and a visa. His name was Vasili Rosnechikov. I became Vasili Rosnechikov, and I got on the next ship with a small sack of food purchased with Vasili Rosnechikov’s money. Two hours later I felt the boat creak and lurch and heard sailors running around and yelling, heard old women crying and being comforted by old men, heard young people laugh with joy, touched with fear of the unknown future, but I sat looking at my filthy hands and the deck of the ship, not back at the shore, at Russia. I was on my way to America to kill Abraham Savitskaya.”
The story had taken a half hour or more, but Rostnikov had not interrupted. It had been an old man’s story, a story remembered or imagined in vivid detail, the fairy tale of his life, the justification for his existence. In the corner near the door to the restaurant, Zelach had begun to slouch, losing whatever alertness he had managed to muster. Tkach, mindful of recent embarrassment, stood alert. Martin, the gunman, had folded his arms and leaned back, refusing drinks from the bottle shared by the policeman and Posniky.
“And so,” said Rostnikov, pouring himself and Posniky the last of the bottle and feeling slightly drunk, “you went to America and were unable to find Savitskaya.”
“I did not find him,” Posniky agreed, clenching his worn teeth and remembering his frustration. “I found other things while I looked. I found how to take care of myself. I-let us just say that I made a good living. I raised a family. I have grandchildren, even two great-grandchildren. I don’t show photographs anymore. I can’t remember which one has which name. But I kept looking for Abraham. I almost caught up to him in St. Louis.”