The next day there was no one at the Hellenic Society. The whole city seemed quiet, with fewer people coming up out of the stairways that led to tunnels and many of the buildings empty. Assan found the address for the English lessons, a building on Forty-Third Street, but there was no one around the place to speak English with.
When Assan returned to the park, though, it seemed like all the buildings surrounding the two middle fingers had emptied into the trees, the paths, the playgrounds, and the broad green fields. Kids and families were everywhere—in a zoo, in rowboats, sliding around on shoes with wheels attached, at a concert of music, with dogs playing, and kids throwing, catching, and kicking all kinds of balls. Assan liked the dogs the most and watched them for the longest time.
When clouds darkened the sky late in the afternoon, the families packed up, the games of ball stopped, and the park emptied. Rain came soon after, so Assan found a covered archway and ended up spending the night there, sharing the spot with a few other men who slept on boxes and covered themselves with only their jackets. None of them spoke any of the languages Assan knew. None of the others seemed happy at all, but Assan had been stuck in the rain before and was not at all miserable. He had hidden under bridges, been in wet clothes, walked for days, even run from men in the old country who had the same faces of misery as these guys. This? This was nothing.
In the morning, Assan woke with a cough in his throat.
“These pants should fit you.” Dorothy was speaking Greek. “The boots, too. Try them on in the lavatory in the hall.”
“What is the lavatory?” Assan had never heard that word.
“The toilet. The men’s room.”
The pants fit well enough. The used boots not only fit his small feet but were already broken in. Dorothy gave him stockings, a few different shirts, two pairs of heavy pants—all felt good after so many days in his blue pin-striped suit, which Dorothy took from him for cleaning.
“What happened to that Bulgarian guy who was here Friday?” Demetri walked in with a bag of round cakes with holes in the middle and more sweet American coffee. “Assan? You look like you live in Jersey!”
Dorothy sat down at her typewriter again and put on another record. Music played in a faster tempo—Cap tee aitch eee space cue you eye see kay space—as Dorothy clattered at the keys.
“Did you see Costas?” Demetri asked.
Assan sipped his coffee and bit into a round cake, which hurt his throat but tasted good. “Yeah. He told me to get the fuck out.” Assan glanced through the door to Dorothy, who luckily did not hear his foul language.
“Hah! Costas must not have liked the way you looked. But now, you look like a guy from Hoboken, like Sinatra on a weekend.” Assan had no idea what that meant. “Costas owes me, so you go back and tell him I sent you. You did tell him I sent you, right?”
“He didn’t care who sent me.”
“Tell him I sent you.”
Assan again walked all the way downtown, arriving at the Olympic Grill when only half its seats were occupied. Costas sat on the stool farthest away from the door, reading a newspaper with a cup of coffee in front of him, so short he swung his legs back and forth, like a little boy. Assan approached, waiting for Costas to look up from his paper. But he didn’t.
“Demetri says you will give me a job.”
Costas kept reading. “Huh?” he said, writing a word on an open tablet with a pencil. There were many words on the page.
“Demetri Bakas. He sent me to see you.”
Costas didn’t move, but managed to change his focus from the newspaper and the list of words to Assan.
“What the hell? What is this?”
“Demetri Bakas. Said to see you for a job. Because you owe him.”
Costas turned back to his reading and writing. “I owe Demetri Bakas shit. Order something or get out of here.”
“He said to see you for a job.”
Costas was off the stool with fire in his dark eyes. “Where are you from?” he shouted.
“Bulgaria, but I come from Athens.”
“Go back to Athens! I can do nothing for you! You know where I was when you were jerking off in your shit-filled barn in Bulgaria? I was here! I was in America. And you know what I was doing? Getting my ass kicked for even thinking about this restaurant!”
“But Demetri said to go see Costas. So, I came.”
“He can kiss my ass and you can go piss in a hat! I feed cops here! They’ll crack your head open if I ask. Come back again and it’s the cops for you!”
Assan hurried out of the diner. What else could he do? He didn’t want trouble with any cops.
The day was as hot as ever. The roar of cars and buses was as loud as a storm wind. The chatter of so many people who all had jobs and money in their pockets and few worries clogged Assan’s ears. His throat was burning and his legs felt like bags of sand.
He was heading to Forty-Third Street and the English lessons, but stopped in a tiny, triangular patch of grass and trees as a wave of ache came over him. A new pain in his head knocked and knocked, right above his eyes. At a drinking fountain he cupped his hand to collect enough water to slurp but the fire in his throat would not go out. He saw two men sharing a bench in the shade, a bench large enough for four, and he wanted to sit down very quickly. Then a violent, invisible punch to his stomach bent him in two and sickness came out of his insides.
A man was asking him questions he could not understand as another led him by the shoulder to the shade of the bench and someone, a lady maybe, gave him a kerchief to wipe his mouth. Someone handed him a bottle of warm soda water, which Assan used to rinse and spit out. Someone yelled at him for doing that, but Assan said nothing. He leaned his head back on the bench and closed his eyes.
He thought he slept for a few minutes, but when he opened his eyes the shadows were longer and different people were in the tiny park. Americans who ignored a napping man on a bench.
Assan reached into his pocket. His American paper money was gone. Some coins remained, that was all. Just as the Chief had warned, he had stopped moving and a thief had pocket-picked him. His head ached as he sat for a very long time.
As the afternoon became early evening, he didn’t want to walk all the way up to the Central Park, but a cop came around and eyed him. So, he got moving. An hour or so later he was asleep under a park tree, his head on his rolled-up pair of extra pants.
There were other people in Demetri’s office, all wearing suits and carrying leather cases filled with papers. None of them were Greeks. Demetri was standing in the window, yelling into the telephone, in English, as he had the first day Assan saw this place. Two of the men in suits laughed at something Demetri said, others lit cigarettes. One man blew smoke rings. Assan could hear Dorothy typing, clack clack clack without the aid of the record playing music.
“Hold on,” Demetri said, seeing Assan, cupping his hand around the telephone. “Dorothy has your suit. Dorothy!”
Every eye in the office looked at Assan, his rumpled clothes, the growth of his beard, seeing another of the poor, ignorant bastards that were forever showing up in Demetri’s office. Dorothy came out with the suit on a wire hanger; the jacket and pants were crisp and fresh, his shirt folded into a square like a tablecloth. Assan took his clothes and backed out of the office, nodding his thanks. The eyes and faces of the men in the office had him feeling small, like in the old country when soldiers searched him, roughed him up, and checked his papers longer than necessary, like when the guards made him stand and answer questions over and over, or like when he and the other prisoners in the camps were lined up for the roll calls that took hours.