He said nothing of the girl he met after his release, of their short romance, or of how hungry they always were. He didn’t say her name was Nadezhda or tell of her becoming pregnant, or of their marriage just months before a boy was born, his son, named Petar. He said nothing about his young wife struggling during the birth and the midwife not knowing how to stop the bleeding. Without his mother’s milk, the boy lived only a month. Demetri did not hear of Assan’s son, Petar.
Assan said nothing of his arrest for stealing empty bottles, even though he had not stolen any empty bottles. His name was on a list, so he was again sent to prison. Assan said nothing of his fourth attempt at escape, his arrest, his year in the work camp, of meeting Ibrahim there and the night the train came by and separated them from the guards on the other side of the track and how they threw down their shovels and jumped into the river. He said nothing of the farmer who found them miles away, wet and freezing, who could have turned them in to the Party official in the village, but instead gave them hot food as their uniforms dried. He gave them some money, too—twenty levs each.
Assan and Ibrahim bought tickets for the bus to the mountains near the border with Greece. When the police came on board to check papers, they had none. But their prison uniforms happened to be the same as the ones for privates in the army, just with no patches or insignia. When Assan told the cop that they were reporting to the Army Hospital because they were carriers of typhus, the cop’s eyes went huge at the word typhus and he nearly ran off the bus.
They crossed the border high in the mountains. In Athens they earned drachmas with picks and shovels, with their hands and their backs for most of that year until Assan got the fireman job on the Despotiko, shoveling coal into the boiler as the ferry made its way between Piraeus and the many Hellenic islands.
Assan said nothing of all that, but only of being a fireman on the Berengaria with the oil bubble in the tube, and now here he was in America having jumped ship.
Demetri knew there was much more to Assan’s story but didn’t care. “Do you know what I can do for you, out of this office?”
“Teach me to type?” Dorothy was now pecking out Cap…thunk…Cue…clack…space…thunk…Cap…thunk…Double-You…clack…space…thunk.
Demetri laughed loudly. “We have good people who will help us help you. It will take time. But let me tell you right now, if you get into any problem with the law—any problem with the police—everything becomes trouble. Understand?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“Okay. Now. You are going to learn to speak English. Here is an address of a free school. It meets nights. Just walk in, sign up, and pay attention.”
Assan took the address.
“You have anything of value you can sell? Anything gold or fancy from the old country?”
“Nothing. I left everything on the ship.”
“My old man did the same thing. In 1910.” Demetri pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket. “Come back in a few days and we’ll have some spare clothes for you. Dorothy! Size up Assan for a couple pairs of pants. Some shirts, too!”
“When I’m done!” Dorothy never looked away from her keyboard. Cap. Tee. Space. Cap. Gee. Space. Thunk-clack-thunk-clack…
“You have any lines on a job, Assan?” Demetri lit his cigar in a ball of fire that came from a huge match.
Assan had no lines on a job.
“Go here. It’s downtown.” Demetri wrote something on another piece of paper and handed it to Assan. “Ask for Costas.”
“Costas. Okay.” Assan was leaving the office just as the typing record stopped and Dorothy turned it over for lesson two.
The address was very low on Assan’s palm, down where streets had no numbers and went every which way. He spent most of the day tramping the odd-shaped blocks, going round and round and passing the same points more than once. He finally found the place, a little restaurant, with a sign that said OLYMPIC GRILL surrounded by a Greek key border. There were all of four little tables connected to the wall with leather benches and eight of the pole stools at a counter. Every seat was taken and the cafe was hot. A woman was behind the counter, too busy to look at Assan until he stood in one place a bit too long. She barked at him in Greek: “Wait outside for a seat, fool!”
“I am here to see Costas,” Assan said.
“What?” the woman shouted.
“I am here to see Costas!” Assan shouted back.
“Honey!” the woman hollered, turning her back on Assan. “Some fool is asking for you!”
Costas was a short man with a brush for a mustache. He had no time to speak to Assan but did anyway.
“What do you want?”
“Are you Costas?” Assan asked.
“What do you want?”
“A job,” Assan said with a laugh.
“Oh, Jesus,” Costas said, turning away.
“Demetri Bakas sent me to see you.”
“Who?” Costas was clearing dishes and taking money from a customer.
“Demetri Bakas. He told me you would have a job for me.”
Costa stopped what he was doing and looked Assan in the eye; he was so short he had to lean back to glare at the Bulgarian.
“Get the fuck out of here!” The customers who spoke Greek looked up from their meals. The ones who only spoke American kept on eating. “And don’t come back!”
Assan turned and got the fuck out of there.
The walk back to the two middle fingers of the Central Park took a very long time. The air was so hot and thick—Assan’s shirt became wet against his back and didn’t dry. He walked and walked along one avenue, until bright flashing lights shone down on a place where nine streets seemed to collide in a storm of people, buses, yellow cars, and even soldiers on horses, or maybe they were cops. Assan had never been in the middle of so many people, with everyone going everywhere.
In a huge cafeteria, he spent coins on another sausage H O T D O G and a paper cup filled with sweet juice, ice cold, and as delicious as any drink he’d ever had—even Coca-Cola. He stood as he ate, like most of the people in the place, though he wanted to take off his shoes more than anything in the world. Across the triangle of streets and humanity, he recognized what was a cinema, with a chain of lights chasing each other around and around. Assan saw the price—forty-five cents. That was four of the smallest coins in his pocket and a larger, thicker coin that had a humpbacked cow printed on one side. Assan suddenly wanted to sit in a nice seat, take off his shoes, and see a movie. He hoped it would be about Chicago.
The cinema was like a cathedral, with uniformed men and women directing a stream of people to seats, chattering couples, and young men in groups, everyone talking loud and barking in laughter. The columns were like those in the Parthenon in Athens, modern angels were etched in gold on the wall, and a deep red curtain stood thirty meters tall.
Assan took off his shoes just as the curtain opened and a short movie appeared on a screen as big as the hull of the Berengaria. Music played as fancy words flipped and spun on the screen, appearing and disappearing so fast Assan couldn’t sound out a single letter. The movie showed ladies dancing and men arguing. Then another short movie played, with more music and flying words. This movie had boxers in it and skies full of airplanes. A third short movie showed a very serious woman saying very serious things, then weeping, then running down a street calling out a name, then that movie was over. A moment later the screen burst into vivid colors as a funny-looking man dressed like a cowboy, but not a real cowboy, and a gorgeous woman with black hair and the reddest of lips sang songs and said things that made the cathedral echo with laughter. Despite that, Assan soon fell asleep hard and deep.