Ken Follett - Fall of Giants

The sun rose over miles of crowded docks, and Lev’s excitement returned. Old-fashioned masts and rigging clustered side by side with steam funnels. There were grand dockside buildings and tumbledown sheds, tall derricks and squat capstans, ladders and ropes and carts. To landward, Lev could see serried ranks of railway trucks full of coal, hundreds of them-no, thousands-fading into the distance beyond the limit of his vision. He was disappointed that he could not see the famous Liberty statue with its torch: it must be out of sight around a headland, he guessed.

Dockworkers arrived, first in small groups, then in crowds. Ships departed and others arrived. A dozen women began to unload sacks of potatoes from a small vessel in front of the shed. Lev wondered when the immigration police would come.

Spirya came up to him. He seemed to have forgiven the way Lev had threatened him. “They’ve forgotten about us,” he said.

“Looks that way,” Lev said, puzzled.

“Shall we take a walk around-see if we can find someone who speaks Russian?”

“Good idea.”

Spirya spoke to one of the older men. “We’re going to see if we can find out what’s happening.”

The man looked nervous. “Maybe we should stay here as we were told.”

They ignored him and walked over to the potato women. Lev gave them his best grin and said: “Does anyone speak Russian?” One of the younger women smiled back, but no one answered the question. Lev felt frustrated: his winning ways were useless with people who could not understand what he was saying.

Lev and Spirya walked in the direction from which most of the workers had come. No one took any notice of them. They came to a big set of gates, walked through, and found themselves in a busy street of shops and offices. The road was crowded with motorcars, electric trams, horses, and handcarts. Every few yards Lev spoke to someone, but no one responded.

Lev was mystified. What kind of place allowed anyone to walk off a ship and into the city without permission?

Then he spotted a building that intrigued him. It was a bit like a hotel, except that two poorly dressed men in sailors’ caps were sitting on the steps, smoking. “Look at that place,” he said.

“What about it?”

“I think it’s a seamen’s mission, like the one in St. Petersburg.”

“We’re not sailors.”

“But there might be people there who speak foreign languages.”

They went inside. A gray-haired woman behind a counter spoke to them.

Lev said in his own tongue: “We don’t speak American.”

She replied with a single word in the same language: “Russian?”

Lev nodded.

She made a beckoning sign with her finger, and Lev’s hopes rose.

They followed her along a corridor to a small office with a window overlooking the water. Behind the desk was a man who looked, to Lev, like a Russian Jew, although he could not have said why he thought that. Lev said to him: “Do you speak Russian?”

“I am Russian,” the man said. “Can I help you?”

Lev could have hugged him. Instead he looked the man in the eye and gave him a warm smile. “Someone was supposed to meet us off the ship and take us to Buffalo, but he didn’t show up,” he said, making his voice friendly but concerned. “There are about three hundred of us…” To gain sympathy he added: “Including women and children. Do you think you could help us find our contact?”

“Buffalo?” the man said. “Where do you think you are?”

“New York, of course.”

“This is Cardiff.”

Lev had never heard of Cardiff, but at least now he understood the problem. “That stupid captain set us down in the wrong port,” he said. “How do we get to Buffalo from here?”

The man pointed out of the window, across the sea, and Lev had a sick feeling that he knew what was coming.

“It’s that way,” the man said. “About three thousand miles.”

Lev inquired the price of a ticket from Cardiff to New York. When converted to rubles it was ten times the amount of money he had inside his shirt.

He suppressed his rage. They had all been cheated by the Vyalov family, or the ship’s captain-or both, most probably, since it would be easier to work the scam between them. All Grigori’s hard-earned money had been stolen by those lying pigs. If he could have got the captain of the Angel Gabriel by the throat, he would have squeezed the life out of the man, and laughed when he died.

But there was no point in dreams of vengeance. The thing was not to give in. He would find a job, learn to speak English, and get into a high-stakes card game. It would take time. He would have to be patient. He must learn to be a bit more like Grigori.

That first night they all slept on the floor of the synagogue. Lev tagged along with the rest. The Cardiff Jews did not know, or perhaps did not care, that some of the passengers were Christian.

For the first time in his life he saw the advantage of being Jewish. In Russia Jews were so persecuted that Lev had always wondered why more of them did not abandon their religion, change their clothes, and mix in with everyone else. It would have saved a lot of lives. But now he realized that, as a Jew, you could go anywhere in the world and always find someone to treat you like family.

It turned out that this was not the first group of Russian immigrants to buy tickets to New York and end up somewhere else. It had happened before, in Cardiff and other British ports; and, as so many Russian migrants were Jewish, the elders of the synagogue had a routine. Next day the stranded travelers were given a hot breakfast and got their money changed to British pounds, shillings, and pence, then they were taken to boardinghouses where they were able to rent cheap rooms.

Like every city in the world, Cardiff had thousands of stables. Lev studied enough words to say he was an experienced worker with horses, then went around the city asking for a job. It did not take people long to see that he was good with the animals, but even well-disposed employers wanted to ask a few questions, and he could not understand or answer.

In desperation he learned more rapidly, and after a few days he could understand prices and ask for bread or beer. However, employers were asking complicated questions, presumably about where he had worked before and whether he had ever been in trouble with the police.

He returned to the seamen’s mission and explained his problem to the Russian in the little office. He was given an address in Butetown, the neighborhood nearest the docks, and told to ask for Filip Kowal, pronounced “cole,” known as Kowal the Pole. Kowal turned out to be a ganger who hired out foreign labor cheap and spoke a smattering of most European languages. He told Lev to be on the forecourt of the city’s main railway station, with his suitcase, on the following Monday morning at ten o’clock.

Lev was so glad that he did not even ask what the job was.

He showed up along with a couple of hundred men, mostly Russian, but including Germans, Poles, Slavs, and one dark-skinned African. He was pleased to see Spirya and Yakov there too.

They were herded onto a train, their tickets paid for by Kowal, and they steamed north through pretty mountain country. Between the green hillsides, the industrial towns lay pooled like dark water in the valleys. A feature of every town was at least one tower with a pair of giant wheels on top, and Lev learned that the main business of the region was coal mining. Several of the men with him were miners; some had other crafts such as metalworking; and many were unskilled laborers.

After an hour they got off the train. As they filed out of the station Lev realized this was no ordinary job. A crowd of several hundred men, all dressed in the caps and rough clothes of workers, stood waiting for them in the square. At first the men were ominously silent, then one of them shouted something, and the others quickly joined in. Lev had no idea what they were saying but there was no doubt it was hostile. There were also twenty or thirty policemen present, standing at the front of the crowd, keeping the men behind an imaginary line.