1880: The Voyage

You hunch over to clench your spinning stomach, vomiting repeatedly into the small bin you brought just to hold your messes. How you hate the seasickness, the constant nausea. It has engulfed you like a cloud of smog surrounding a skyscraper ever since you set foot on this boat. The food they serve you -- herring, is it? – is supposed to help with the sickness. It sometimes does. Not now.  Mother leans over to wipe your mouth off, her pregnant belly bulging from underneath her too-small shirt. You feel like crying. You feel like…vomiting. You do both.1

The old man next to you pats you on the back. His rotting teeth leer at you. Repulsive. You don’t like that man, but you feel sorry for him. He doesn’t know any English but ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you.’ It was pathetic. At least you got to take English lessons for years before coming on this journey. You are fortunate. That man wouldn’t survive one day on the streets of New York with his vocabulary.2

Later that day they serve you food. With worms. You try to pick them out, but you obviously missed some, because you are even sicker that night. Your little sister, Nina, comforts you. “Don’t worry,” she soothes you, “I bet in New York they have real good doctors and they never get sick.” You know this isn’t true; you studied New York while you were still in grade school. People who go to New York still get sick. You decide not to tell her this; you’ll let her have her fantasies for a while.3

After you vomit, the old man offers you and Nina each a candy. Lemon- your favorite kind! How does he know you love candies? You whisper “Thank you,” slowly, deliberately, in English, as you pop the sweet into your mouth. He understands. Grins. Maybe you do like him.4

That night, Nina has chills and a fever. Your mother says it might be typhus. You have heard of typhus; horror stories of what happened when someone became afflicted with the disease. They were terrible, fearsome stories. “If it is typhus,” she says, “you must stay away from her; typhus is very,” she pauses to look in her Russian-English dictionary, “contagious.”5

You protest. How is anyone going to help her get better if they can’t approach her?6

They can’t, your mother murmurs, beginning to sob. If Nina has typhus, she is probably going to die, and there is nothing any of you can do to stop it.7

You feel like kicking something. You dash back to your bunk. “Fiedka, wait!” calls Mother. You pretend you didn’t hear her. You hate her now. She betrayed her own daughter. You hate her.8

“How dare she?” you mutter, catapulting onto your bunk. Some of the seaweed stuffing the mattress pokes out through the holes. It itches. You swear.9

“Don’t swear.” Your mother must have followed you. “You have much to be thankful for. You know English. You have money. You have parents. You have health.”10

“Indeed,” you mutter, “but what good is life if your best friend, your sister, your favorite person in the world isn’t with you to enjoy it?”11

Mother sighs. “I know you are very attached to your sister. But we might be losing her very soon. I don’t want you to be,” she glances at the dictionary, “surprised.”12

“She’s only eight, Mother!” you cry. “She didn’t do anything to deserve this!”13

“I know, sweetheart. I know.”14

You punch the mattress. You hate her. You hate her. Your mother sighs and wanders off.15

       A few days later, your mother is sure that Nina has typhus. She has a rash now, a sure sign of the disease. She is also losing her hearing. It is simply luck now that will decide if she lives.16

       You are sick again that night. Not only sick as in vomiting; you are also sick as in sick of this trip, sick of the typhus, sick of everything that happened to you since you got on this boat. You feel like screaming and crying, but no 13-year-olds do that. That’s only okay for little boys. So you conceal your hurt and your sickness as much as possible.17

      That just makes you hurt more.18

      The next day, your mother thinks Nina has pneumonia in addition to her typhus. She has gone completely deaf. She is surely going to die now. Now you don’t even try to hide your tears. You go to your bunk and cry all night.19

      Your mother finds you there. She brushes your long auburn hair out of your eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” You cry into her shoulder until you fall asleep. You would have been ashamed any other day to do this, but now you don’t care. You hate everything. Everything. You don’t care.20

      When you wake up, Nina is dead.21

      Dead.22

      Just like that. Gone.23

      You don’t even cry when you find out. You hurt too much to cry. Crying would make it seem like less pain than it is.24

      How could anything New York has to offer make up for this loss? How could America be good enough to be worth losing Nina? It couldn’t, you answer. It never could. 25

      You decide never to leave your bunk again until you arrive in New York. You will simply sit with the women who haven’t left their bunks at all for the four weeks you’ve been on this ship. You will sit, and you won’t move until you absolutely have to. If horrible things can happen to someone as good as Nina was, then surely they will happen to you if you give them the chance. You won’t. You will never give anyone a chance to do anything to you.26

      You quickly give up on that idea. You can’t stand sitting in one place for so long. You must move.27

      You scramble off your bunk and hurry to the deck. You hate the deck reserved for steerage travelers. It tipped and swayed and stunk horribly. Still, it is better than hiding in that stuffy, depressing space below deck. Anything is better than the space below deck. The space that still held Nina’s body. Nina’s cold, lifeless body.28

      Your mother comes up behind you. “Fiedka,” she coos, “you can’t give up hope. America will be fine. You will be fine, too. Just give yourself time to recover.” You brush her away. You hate it when people try to comfort you. It only makes things worse.29

      She sighs and waddles away, pregnant-lady fashion, like a bird about to lay eggs.30

      That evening, you hear gasps and cries, groans and whines coming from a few bunks over. You bury your head in your arms. Perhaps someone else is dying. You wonder how much more death you can take.31

      The moans get louder, the whimpers more pain-filled. They carry on for hours and hours. You hate this. What could be happening? Just as you are about to get up to complain, the noises stop. A fresh voice fills the air. It wails like a baby. Now, there aren’t any babies on this ship, as far as you know. Your curiosity gets the better of you, and you stumble out of bed to get a better look.32

      It is a baby.33

      A flailing, newborn, miserable baby, lying in the hands of an exhausted and very relieved friend of your mother’s.34

      Your eyes pop open. You have never seen such an ugly thing. It looks like a twisted, humanoid beet. Your jaw drops open. Then, suddenly, you see something that makes your jaw drop even lower.35

      You see your mother, lying on her back.36

      Finally, it clicks inside your brain: this is your brother.37

      Wrinkling your nose at its ugliness, you tentatively step forward.38

“Mom?” you ask, as if to confirm that it is, indeed, your mother. “Is that my sibling?”39

      She glances up at you. “Yes, Fiedka. It’s your brother, Nicholai.” Panting, red-faced, but very proud, she snuggles deeper into her blankets. Speechless, you amble back to your bunk. You know it looks odd, going back to bed after all this excitement, but it looks better than just standing around gawking at your baby brother. Nicholai. You love that name.40

      The next two weeks pass by relatively uneventfully. You sleep, you eat, you get sick, you feed your brother, you bathe in the bath shared by all steerage travelers (you still think that’s disgusting), you go out to the deck, you get sick, and you start all over again. Relatively uneventful, that is, until someone spotted the symbol of freedom, the beacon of hope that propelled you through these waters in the first place.41

      The Statue of Liberty is the most beautiful thing you could ever have imagined. More beautiful than in the pictures in the books back in Russia. Her torch, her crown…everything is so flawless.42

      At the same time that it raises your spirits, it lowers them, too. Nina adored the Statue. She would stare at the photographs for hours, tracing her pudgy little fingers over the outline of the Lady Liberty.43

      You scoop Nicholai into your arms. Only two weeks old, he senses that everyone around him is delighted, and his eyes glitter like diamonds in the sunlight.44

      There is an old Russian proverb: Without losing, you cannot win. You have lost now; you have lost your sister, your beloved Nina. But what have you won?45

      You have won America.46

      Was it worth the loss?47

      No. Nothing, not even America, was worth it.48