A slip iced, frozen into a field, landscaped with salt and sand into a neat square that separates the Great Hall from the squat ruinous barracks beyond — now housing the surviving firstborns, all of them male, menschs ingathered from all the world over to attain the protection of this primal estate: the Hospital rustjointed, the Commissary burntover; the tumuli of outlying buildings intended in their conversion for the forgiveness of staff, the insensibility of freight, crammed atop this fill like centuries of graves of centuries, necropolis rocks atop stones atop trash cramped atop the swell of this speckle, an isle sliced down the middle as if gutted for hidden treasure, which is what — only water, frozen below the lives stilled, the shocked hearts and minds of those latest arrivals still being received for the processing. Huddled hassles burning to earn free, tempesttossed Lazaruses, poor, not for long, tired, they’re always, regime export whored over to this teeming shore for a purgatory of examinations, questions, questions, sessioning questions, exams, What’s your name, your date and place of birth, have you been promised a job here, have you been promised a husband here, what do you do, are you an anarchist? these days, how can you not be; do you happen to believe in a God…followed up by a host of hearings, appeals, held in the presence of interpreters American now for maybe a week, directing their pleas at the Officers who seemed themselves gods but not to be believed in only to fear, stationed chalkfingered, busily moustachioed at the door — which is not golden gleaming but whitewashed; its shine, it’s said, comes off with blood.
A rumor was, you enter America through the mouth of the Green Eve — the exit for New York is through her, you know where.
It’d been said that Columbus, the first of their kind ever to schlep to these shores, had been buried in her pedestal, which is the shul upon which Liberty stands.
The first thing these indigenes did was change coin, barbaric practice — conversion, to redeem their souls from the shadow of their passage, to give salvation another name, yet another number and face. Money in a pouch worn around the neck, a talisman: be careful, suspicious, trust no one, know not even yourself…your left hand a stranger to your right long may it be lost; brothers, cousins, a plumber in Brownsville who sponsored your visa, he happened to’ve been given the same last name as yours, no relation save that he was the only one of ten Buchalters to answer your letters sent out as blind as you’ll be soon enough: into the wide and unknown and unknowable, unreadable, just keep your mouth shut and they won’t know your language, your cries, that of a baby just arrived to meet its father remarried, refathered, and with a roomful of new daughters of sons (kitchencornered like a roach, like a rat, toilet closeted down the hall), an uncle of late only a series of letters himself, but in the wrong ink, in the wrong hand and unsigned, Dearest Yossele without love, with demands, or just silence, rejection, better to be left alone conjugating the following verbs: To conjugate, To deport, b’shalom…to be sent ashore, dashed, sundered, washed up, your money in a pouch worn round the neck, nametag which day of the week, meet me at the port in winter at the pier, I’ll be the one in the hat — to flee from the very face of their interrogating oppressors, whose faces were theirs even then and still are, clutching what they can from their klatsch, a few rags you’d never call clothes, quilt of feathers, a rye whiskey, a necklace of sausages, money in a pouch worn round the neck, the fee for their freedom and not for their life, which if we’re talking money is frankly a waste, all these dollars a head, the littlest son traveling hidden pouchswaddled, wounded round the neck; their documents in hand held out over land as bridges of bone, of skin and hair, in wagons, in carriage and britzka, cart and droshky, laundaus hauled by horses lamed and of relations, on sonback, on brotherback, and on foot, to go among swindlers, smugglers, robbers and thieves, evils both amateur and official, travel bureaus, shipping company representatives, I want a new globe…midnight flights from burning houses cool of hearth, border crossings only a matter of stepping high over an obstructing stump; swim through the fog, piss out the flame, make no more smoke than do they.
Furtively they trek overland to the ports, to the pier, money father’s money our money mine it’s all mine in a pouch wound round the neck to choke I can’t breathe it’s the air, it’s suddenly fresh! bribes and fares, trains and hay, pump trolleys, basket and blanket hides and ruses, tradetricks and secret signs and shibboli, Uwaga! Poci
g, Achtung! Zug, 
! 
, signs such signs, inns with a highest window open just enough for that to be a sign, too, lofts, luck and prayer, which if answered is luck, the prayer that is sickness and the luck that is unremitting disease: trachoma, a disease of the eye that’s treated with silver nitrate, the same compound of chemicals used to treat photographs, to develop ourselves in their image, favus, tinea favosa, a scalp infection that results in the making brittle of hair, eventually in jaundiced balding, and can only be treated with carbolic oil, which had often been tinctured into a syringe, then injected into our hearts to kill quickly, overwhelming with pain; the survivors live on lice that themselves have lice, atop cots in ship’s bowels amid the knots of intestinal hammocks, the menschs here the womenfolk there, separation by bulwark, holy freight, sacred stock, the sanctuary of an overturned lifeboat, a boat within a boat stacked atop a ship that goes somewhere upon which one can go nowhere, lolling depression in swells, seasick and hungry and thirsty with water all around — the ocean an eye tearing in salt; to drink from an eye is abominable, as your throat might be slaked but your tongue will be blinded — and then again, that enormous and rusted metal idol standing atop a pediment tiered in the excrement of tired gulls, grasping a torch and a book, which is this book and all other books, too, neither burnt, nor yet burning.