“Yes, indeed, my good friend. You can see for yourself that I could easily travel second class. Do you think I travel third to save money? But money is garbage to me! Believe it or not, I travel third class because I like to. I’m a plain, simple person and I like simple people like myself. You might call me a democrat. I started out a small fish. A very small one, like so.” (My newfound friend put his hand near the floor to show me how small he had been.) “And then I grew bigger and bigger.” (Up went his hand toward the ceiling to show me how big he was now.) “It didn’t happen all at once. It took time. Bit by bit. Step by step. I didn’t start out my own boss. Do you think it was so easy even to find a boss to work for? A whole lot of water flowed under the bridge before I got that high up. Believe it or not, when I think of my childhood my hair stands on end! You know, I can’t even remember it. And I don’t want to, either. Do you suppose that’s because I’m ashamed of my origins? Not one bit. I make no bones about who I am. Ask me where I’m from and I’m not embarrassed to tell you that it’s a grand metropolis called Soshmakin. Do you have any idea where that is? It’s a village in Latvia, not far from Mitava. The whole place was so big that I could easily buy it all up today, lock, stock, and barrel. Maybe it’s changed or grown a bit since then — that’s something I really can’t tell you. In my time, though, the most valuable possession in all of Soshmakin, believe it or not, was a single orange that was lent from house to house to decorate the table for Sabbath guests.
“And do you know what I was raised on in Soshmakin? On whippings, beatings, slaps in the face, boxes on the ear, bloody noses, black-and-blue marks, and an empty stomach. You know, what I recall most is being hungry. I came hungry into this world, and hunger was my best friend ever since I can remember. Hunger and heartache and a cramp in the gut … but never mind! Resin, do you know what resin is? It’s something from the sap of trees that fiddlers wax their instruments with. Believe it or not, I lived on resin for nearly a whole summer. That was the summer when my stepfather, a tailor with a broken nose, twisted my arm from its socket and chased me out of my mother’s house, so that I had to run off to Mitava. Do you see this arm? It’s not right to this day.”
My new acquaintance rolled up his sleeve to reveal a soft, pudgy, perfectly normal-looking arm and continued:
“After roaming the streets of Mitava, hungry, barefoot, half-naked, and poking through garbage, I found, thank God, a job, my very first. It was being the seeing eye of an old cantor, a famous performer who went blind in his old age and had to beg for a living. I had to lead him around from house to house. It wasn’t really such a bad job, you know, but a person had to be made of iron to put up with all his crazy whims. Nothing ever satisfied him. But nothing. He yelled at me, pinched me, tore out whole handfuls of my flesh. He was always complaining that I never took him where he wanted to go, though just where that was is a mystery to me to this day. That was one loony cantor! And to top it all off, you should have heard what he made me out to be. Believe it or not, he went around telling people that both my parents had been baptized and wanted to baptize me too, and that he had risked his own neck to save me from the clutches of the Christians! And I had to listen to all those lies and keep myself from bursting with laughter! As a matter of fact, I was supposed to look glum when he told them.
“I realized pretty soon that there must be better things in life than my cantor, so I said to hell with my job and left Mitava for Libau. I went around hungry for a while there, too, until I ran into a group of poor emigrants who were about to embark for a faraway place called Buenos Aires and asked them to take me with them. What? Take you with us? It wasn’t possible. It didn’t depend on them but on the Emigration Committee that was sending them. So I went to the Committee and put on such an act, but a real tearjerker, that they agreed to pay my way to Buenos Aires.
“Search me if I know why I picked Buenos Aires. Do you think I knew a damn thing about it? Everyone was going there, so I went too. It wasn’t until we arrived that I discovered that Buenos Aires was not our real destination; it was simply a transit point from which we were supposed to be shipped still further. And we were: as soon as we landed, we were processed, taken to places where no human being had ever been before, not even in a bad dream, and put to work. You’re wondering what sort of work it was? Don’t ask! I tell you, our forefathers in Egypt never did half the things that we did, and all the horror stories about them in the Bible don’t add up to a fraction of what we went through. It says they had to make bricks out of clay and build the cities of Pithom and Rameses. Bully for them! They should have tried working with their bare hands in the godforsaken pampas that had nothing but thorns growing on them, handling monster oxen that could squash a man to death with one step, breaking wild horses that you first had to chase a hundred miles to lasso, suffering through nights of mosquitos that could eat a human being alive, living on dry bread that tasted like stones, drinking slimy water with worms swimming in it … Believe it or not, one day I saw my reflection in the river and was scared half out of my wits. My skin was cracked, my eyes were swollen, my hands were like cake dough, my legs were a bloody pulp, and I was covered all over with hair. Is that really you, Motek from Soshmakin? I asked myself. I couldn’t help laughing. That same day I said good riddance to the monster oxen, and the wild horses, and the wormy water, and the godforsaken pampas, and yours truly hoofed it back to Buenos Aires.
“If I’m not mistaken, though, there’s a big buffet at this station. Take a look at your train schedule. Don’t you think it’s time for a bite? It will give us the strength for more talk.”
Having feasted royally and washed it down with more beer, we lit up cigars again — good, aromatic, genuine Buenos Aires Havanas, too! — and returned to our seats, where my new friend resumed his story:
“Buenos Aires, you know, is a place the likes of which God never … but never mind! Have you ever been to America? Not even to New York? Or to London? No?… Maybe Madrid? Constantinople? Paris? None of them, eh? Well, I can’t really describe to you then what Buenos Aires is like. All I can tell you is that it’s a cesspool. Hell on earth. But a heavenly hell. That is, it’s hell for some and heaven for others. If you keep on your toes and wait for your chance, there are fortunes to be made. Believe it or not, there’s so much gold in the streets you can trip on it. You only have to bend down and take all you want. Just watch out, though, that your hand isn’t stomped on when you do! The main thing is never to look back. Never to have second thoughts. Never to ask yourself, can I stoop this low or not? You have to learn to stoop to anything. Waiting on customers in a restaurant? Do it! Selling in a store? Do it! Washing glasses in a bar? Do it! Dragging a pushcart? Do it! Hawking papers on the corner? Do it! Washing dogs? Do it! Feeding cats? Do it! Catching rats? Do it! Skinning them for their fur? Do that too! In short, do everything. You know, there’s nothing I didn’t try there, and each time I reached the same conclusion: working for others is for the birds, it’s a thousand times better to have others working for you. Is it any fault of my own if God made the world so that someone sweats to brew the beer I drink? Or so that someone gets cramps in his fingers from rolling the cigars I smoke? The conductor gets to drive the train, the stoker gets to shovel coal, the grease monkey gets to oil the wheels, and you and I get to shoot the breeze. What’s so bad about that? If you don’t like it, go make another world.”