Matka Slobody
By Christina McCabe
Uniformed dockhands help the first-class passengers onto the ship; women spring from horse-drawn carriages, their husbands, whose shoes are reflective as mirrors, grasping their fingertips. The women’s hats are made of crushed velvet and adorned with the feathers of exotic birds from faraway places that you will never see—Asia, South America, Australia. The men hold cigars between their fat fingers and puff on them with moustache-topped lips, little curls at the corners. The second-class passengers exude only slightly less opulence. They arrive in carriages and are helped by dockhands. The opals in the women’s earlobes are slightly smaller than those of first-class, their suitcases are fewer, their cap feathers less colorful.
These passengers do not look at you, the immigrant, who will travel in third class with the other immigrants—Irish, Czechoslovak, Italian, German. There are no dockhands to help you with your one shabby suitcase held together with your father’s old belt, no women to hold your hand while you walk the gangway. For you there is a British officer with a manifest who studies your tattered papers and grants you access to your future, your freedom: The New World. In line for inspection, you shake. Your heart beats more rapidly than ever before, even more than the time you ran from your home as the communists fired upon it; even as you sprinted through the woods, clutching an ikona of the Virgin Mary, unsure if you would reach your family who hid in the woods.
But you practiced for this moment. The butcher in Čabiny had been to the English-speaking world and taught you the phrases you would need, the foreign words that will eventually lap your ears as frequently as the winds on the ship’s deck. You practiced in front of your parents and siblings in the evenings until they too knew the English words and phrases, their meanings only faintly registering. Your children, you know, will speak English and Slovak—not the Hungarian you were forced to utter. From their very first words they will utter the language that you were so anxious to speak, that felt so wrong in your mouth, that drove you to near insanity over its intricacies. When you hear this language fall from your babies’ pink lips you will cry from the freedom they will know.
When the British officer asks for your papers, you remove your birth certificate from your suitcase and hand it over along with the precious ticket that has been in your breast pocket for over a week. When he asks for your name and you need him to repeat the question, you realize that he speaks much quicker than the old butcher. You stare for a moment or two before you tell him, Stephen Láska. You say it slowly because the old butcher did say that the British won’t be able to understand your accent. You have an accent, the old mäsiar said; this was new to you.
You’re a farmer; you’re Slovák; you’re seventeen; your cousin resides in The New World; your father is Andrej and he is also a farmer. When you answer each of the officer’s questions, your chest puffs and your chin tilts upward. You can understand some of the English words that he barks, you can affirm the pillars of your identity to him. But there is confusion over your destination—Pennsylvania—a land half a world away that neither of you have been to. This confusion makes your cheeks grow red and your chest deflate.
When the officer puts a stamp by your name on the manifest and motions towards the gangway, you can barely take a step. You feel so dizzy that you might fall into the water—the churning bay or sea, you don’t know which. On the ship you quickly turn from the tuxedoed waiters—holding bottles of champagne and trays of foods you can’t begin to name—and walk towards the stairs that the sailors around you point to.
First and second-class passengers have spacious quarters; families, couples, and even single men have their own apartments. Below decks is a room for the third-class male passengers and a room for the third-class female passengers. There are rows of bunks bolted to the floor, mattresses tied to the frames. Six feet up the walls are small circular windows letting in meager sunlight—just enough for you to find your berth, 36A, which is so close to the lavatories that the stench makes your nose curl.
Sitting on the upper deck you write a letter, the first to your family since you began this journey a week earlier, even though you don’t know when you’ll be able to send it. You write about your night in Liverpool and the wonders of a big city; about the people that you saw; the buildings that you walked by. You don’t write about sleeping at the station, but you do write about the trains and the hours spent waiting in dingy depots where you scanned foreign newspapers for any decipherable news of the war. Before you left home the United States declared war with Germany and the world fell into even deeper turmoil.
That’s why you’re leaving—the turmoil, the war. You’re seventeen, almost eighteen, and soon it will be your turn to fight for your country. You didn’t want to fight but you didn’t want to sit it out—you didn’t want to leave but you didn’t want to stay. You were being pulled in four directions, plagued with indecision, sitting nightly with your parents, discussing options by candlelight.
“We need your help, Stephen,” your mother said, her eyes tearing up under the grey hairs that strayed from her bábuška. “In America, you can help us. If you die in the war, who will help us then?”
To that, you had no answers. You’re the oldest; it’s your job. Your sisters will not have to fight, but your brothers will—heaven forbid the war is still raging when they come of age. Every night you pray for their souls, your pleas intensifying with age. You almost pity them; they will forever be stuck in what you will soon call the Old World, while you move on.
You hear the gangway being pulled, shouts in the language you don’t yet know, the thudding coils of rope being tossed onto the deck. The ship is leaving; you are leaving. When the foghorn blares you drop your pencil; it rolls away into the throngs of passengers’ feet and disappears.
Leaning on the ship’s railing, you feel the sun’s heat through your thin shirt, warming your belly and shoulders. Above you are the first and second-class passengers clad in pastel dresses and wool suits waving top hats and handkerchiefs. Through the cracked face of your pocket watch you see that it’s just past eleven; it’s the twentieth of April, 1917. It’s a date that you and your parents had repeated over and over again, a mantra that they surely muttered under their breaths in your absence.
To look for your family on the docks is pointless, but you do it anyway. You scan the crowd for your sisters’ pigtails, your brothers’ dusty caps, and mother’s plump face. But she is at home in Čabiny doing the washing or the mending or the cooking. You know, however, that she has stopped those things to watch the clock and pray for your safety just as your father has likely come to a halt in the fields—despite no longer having his watch—to also pray for your soul. You know he can read the sun’s position, that he doesn’t need a watch. But still, you cried when he gifted you his pocket watch, calling it “a way to remember me.”
On the deck you whisper goodbye to your family and to your domovina, even though you are far from it already, as the boat pulls away from the shore.
On the second night of the journey there is a storm that keeps everyone from the mess hall. You can smell the stew wafting through the bunk rooms and, as tempting as it is, no steerage passenger will eat even a spoonful. At night you’ll grip the metal bars of your bunk, eyes closed, breathing deeply, thinking about how your mother used to feed you warm broth when you were sick with the same nausea that torments you now. Eventually you drift to sleep, thinking of your mother and your domov.
When you open your eyes, it’s still dark outside. You can’t see him, but you hear a voice that sounds like yours—not quite a boy, not quite a man—saying hello. His hand, you finally see, rests on the railing above, waiting. “Slovák?” he asks.
You nod, doffing your cap to your countryman, offering your hand. His is calloused like yours, rough with skin that peels from the fingers and palms.
“George Kukura,” he says, and you squeeze his hand tighter.
He is from Trebišov where his family, a family of blacksmiths, still resides. Though your towns are not far apart, neither of you has seen the other’s. You dream at night of the same rolling green hills and wagon-rutted roads lined with pine trees. Both of your educations ended early in the same kind of one-room schoolhouses where you learned Hungarian and mathematics and history, so you could work in the fields or the forge.
“Where are you going?” you ask your new friend, the boy who has lived the same life as you.
“Nový York,” he says.
“That is your final destination?”
“Then I’m going to Pittsburgh,” he says. You both are.
On the deck, you and George watch the men in first and second class as they stand around areas that are off-limits to you smoking, speaking in crisp English that is carried away on the wind. Your feet rest on the railing of the deck where the spray from the waves reached during the storm, soaking the deck and splashing the windows.
“I wonder if everyone dresses like that in America,” you say. You’ve never seen anything like it—their bowties, boater hats, the pocket watches draped across the fronts of their suit jackets. “I hope they don’t,” George says as he struggles to light his cigarette—he only has a few remaining. “I went to Prešov once, and the men there didn’t dress like that.”
“Why did you go to Prešov?” you ask, suddenly jealous that the new friend you shared so much with has seen more of your country than you have.
“I went with my father. He’d made a lot of things that people in Trebišov weren’t buying: wrought iron bed frames, gates, end tables. Someone said to take the things to the city, that they would be interested.”
“And were they?”
George manages to light his cigarette and takes a long drag, savoring every last second of his diminishing tobacco cache. “We sold some things. Not enough.”
“You regret asking the question for a moment, realizing that if George had found success in his father’s business, just as if you had found success in yours, neither of you would be heading to America, into the unknown.
“What was the city like?” You almost don’t ask the question, fearing that a description of your domovina would be akin to dangling a carrot in front of a starving rabbit.
“It was beautiful,” George says, and your heart flutters. “The buildings are wonderful pastel colors. The Torysa runs along the edge of town, and there are mountains in the distance. But we belonged in Trebišov; we were country folk and everyone knew it.”
Your jealousy dissipates and a chill creeps up your body despite the warmth of the sun and how it bathes the starboard side of the boat. Out of place in your own land—a feeling that George had experienced, but you had not. A feeling that you had never experienced anywhere until recently on your journey west.
“I hope we fit in, George,” you say softly.
Beside you, George nods.
You are both where you always are after dinner, leaning against your bottom bunk, when the shouting begins. You were discussing home life and swapping stories, talking about which foods your mothers made perfectly, which siblings you were closest to and which were most likely to get on your nerves. But you abandon the discussion when the other men rise to go outside and see the source of the cheering.
You can see it from the deck. The light from her torch, cutting through the ocean spray and wrapping around the boat, pulling it closer to the harbor of New York, the New World. You watch, along with nearly all of the Majestic passengers, as a light rain begins to fall. You can see faint lights from the city’s buildings, some supposedly tall enough to reach the clouds, and though you fear it may blind you, you stare directly into the revolving light of the torch. Lady Liberty, Mother of Freedom, Matka Slobody! You’re here. The knot that had settled in your stomach almost two weeks ago loosens, your tense shoulders sink a little bit. Your ship didn’t go down at sea like the Titanic, your parents wouldn’t wait weeks for a letter that would never come, that would have sunk with you to the bottom of the ocean. You think the difficult part of your journey is over.
On the deck, it begins to rain harder and the first and second-class passengers rush inside their cabins while you cheer with the rest of steerage, waving your hat above your head. Languages erupt around the deck like fireworks and you hear yells of “America” with different inflections. It rains harder still, and the lights in the first-class apartments dim. You stand on the deck and stare at the light from the massive torch that doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, the light that hopefully won’t remain out of reach for much longer.
You pack your suitcase and sit with George on the edge of your bed, both of you in wet clothes, waiting for the clash of the dock, a signal to disembark.
“If we’re not going anywhere, we should at least change out of our wet clothes,” George says after a while, and you agree.
You drape the garments over the rails of your bunk, warm in your only other outfit, and wait for so long that you fall asleep with George at your side.
Yours was not the only ship to arrive in the nighttime. Dozens of ferries bring immigrants from the steamships throughout the harbor while even more take the first and second-class passengers straight to the mainland. You join, alongside George, a mass of people that walk towards the red brick building. Gypsies, Russians, men with turbans and brown skin that you had only read about in books, women with babies strapped to their backs and packages on their heads. As you climb a wide staircase up to the building you see an older man with a limp being led away by an American in a white coat—a doctor. There are others along the staircase, waiting. When you tell George, he stands up a little straighter—you both do—and you keep going.
One hour, two hours: the medical exam queue moves slowly, your stomach rumbles with hunger then churns with nerves. “I hear there’s a test,” someone says in your native tongue. Sometime later, you hear that many Slovenský are failing the inspections, and you take a deep breath and turn to George, who doesn’t look at you.
The women are taken into one room, the men in another. You watch several exams before it is your turn. The doctor looks at one side of the face, then the other. He shines a light into the nostrils and into the ears. Men remove their shirts while doctors listen to their hearts and lungs. You watch as a man not much older than yourself puts his suit coat back on, and you see the doctor beside him mark his back with chalk, the letter “P.” He is led through a different door.
You try not to shake when the doctor inspects your eyelids. You pray that your heartbeat will calm as the doctor listens, and you worry that if it beats too fast, the doctor will send you back. But you pass, and the relief that floods through your body is greater still than what you experienced when you saw her, Matka Slobody, beckoning and drawing you towards the harbor, towards your salvation. In the Great Hall you sit on a bench with George. The benches form a maze that leads to the immigration officers, the second-to-last obstacle that stands in your way of citizenship.
The last obstacle is the ferry to Manhattan; the thought of getting on another boat makes you nauseous.
“Would you rather swim?” George asks.
This trip will be short. New York City, Manhattan, grows in front of you like your father’s towering corn stalks. Uneven buildings, varying heights, topped with antennas and radio towers like the corn silk. You’re eager to exchange your koronas for American money so you can buy a stamp for the letter in your pocket and a train ticket to Pittsburgh.
In George’s eyes you see the light that must also be in your own. The glow of endless possibility, the promise of the New World, where people worked and were happy to do it, where every man can succeed, where wages are fair and conditions are good.
You don’t know what waits for you on shore, that you’ll be corrected and mocked by Americans, that most people you encounter in New York and Pittsburgh will be unwilling to help you and George, that in the steel mills where you work you’ll be called a Hunky, that your Italian coworkers will be called Dagos, that the Irish coworkers will be called Micks. You don’t know that you’ll subsist on canned corn for weeks at a time because it’s cheap, that you’ll be sending most of your money back home to your family, keeping only enough for meager food, rent at the boardinghouse, and third-hand mill clothes. You don’t know that you’ll never see your family again, all except for your youngest brother who comes to the United States for a short while after being ordained as a Russian Orthodox priest.
You don’t know that in eighty years, when you are no longer on this earth, your granddaughter will come to Ellis Island with her family. It will be a tourist site, historical. But you lived it. You sat in the halls they roam, you experienced the purgatory—endlessly fearing being pushed into America or being sent back to the land you thought you had left forever. Your granddaughter’s family will tour the medical wards that you never saw, but that you heard stories about. They’ll walk the path you took from the ferries to the main building. They’ll stop at the newest part of the Island—the wall. Made of black marble, engraved with the names of the men and women who traveled to the New World through the island, the gatekeeper. Your name is on it—Stephen Lasker—they changed it for assimilations’ sake. Your granddaughter will remove crayons and paper from the diaper bag she carries, but they’re not for the kids. She’ll show her oldest daughter how to place the paper over your name and rub with the side of the crayon, so your name is transferred to the paper.
“He’s your Didi,” she’ll say to her daughter, the one who carries your blood but not your name. “You remember him.”
And your great-granddaughter will smile, she does remember you, if only small memories—flashes of Easter brunches and a tan armchair, she remembers you as thin and serious, your wife always smiling. She’ll look to the ocean and wonder how far away Slovakia is.
THE END