physician dismissed the balagoula (who’d farted like a horse as his parts were handled) and summoned Max with his rubbergloved fingers to step forward, a disturbance erupted in the next line over. Even above the surflike cacophany of the hall, urgent voices could be heard calling out for assistance—as coincidentally a hospital screen crashed into Max’s, which toppled domino fashion, the wreckage revealing a knot of officials kneeling over a fallen woman. Wearing a headscarf and several layers of skirts despite the heat, she had the look of an open umbrella tossed in the wind as she writhed on the floor in the throes of a seizure. Yellow sputum bubbled from her lips, her upturned eyes as blank as boiled eggs. Heaving a sigh, Max’s doctor got leisurely to his feet and toddled over to the aid of his colleagues, one of whom was struggling to prevent the woman from swallowing her tongue. In the doctor’s absence the HIAS man assigned to him, one half of whose face was contracted in a wink, took up a piece of chalk from the box beside the physician’s stool and made a mark on Max’s sleeve. Confused, Max had yet to budge from his spot when the man yanked him roughly forward by the lapel and, looking both ways, beckoned to the fellow behind him in line. Faint with relief, Max pushed through a turnstile back into the discordant hall, past the quarantine cages where men and women who had failed their examinations were detained.
Reunited with the rabbi and once again aboard the launch, he allowed himself to appreciate for the first time the cloud-banked perpendicular city ahead of him, believing that the worst was surely over. It was an optimism that, for once undisparaged by Jocheved, was borne out by the expedition with which events began to fall into place. Pisgat, who’d assured Max that arrangements had been made at the other end, proved as good as his word. The poker-faced agent of the financier (whose name was not to cross the smuggler’s lips) was there to meet him on the North River docks in the molasses-thick afternoon sunshine. Recognizing him by the plank sarcophagus beside which he stood, the man spared the new arrival no more than a nod before seeing to it that a couple of porters transferred the casket with swift dispatch into the waiting wagon. All fortitude spent, Max was content to climb aboard the wagon himself and place his fate in the hands of his tight-lipped convoy. There was of course much to see as all around him disembarking immigrants were beset by long-lost relations or confidence tricksters posing as such, by labor gang contractors and sweatshop recruiters. There were omnibuses whose rooftop passengers had to remove their hats as they passed beneath the Elevated trestles, kiosks that invited pedestrians to descend into rumbling catacombs beneath the earth, a gothic tower on the side of which frolicked a lady fifteen stories tall in a bathing costume. But Max preferred to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, as blinkered in their way as the nag’s that hauled the wagon, which might now be mistaken for a hearse. The streets of America, he resolved, would offer him no distractions until he had first attended to the business of collecting his wits.
Gebirtig & Son’s Ice Castle on Canal Street, give or take its crenellated turrets and galleried façade, was a bookend to Pisgat’s overseas operation, the two establishments bracketing the whole of Max’s journey. It was true that the present structure was the more imposing, its breadth spanning a whole city block. A fleet of mule-driven delivery vans was parked in the furrowed thoroughfare outside and an army of laborers wheeled dollies and barrows up and down a ramp through the wide warehouse doors. But once he’d stepped over the Ice Castle’s threshold, passing from the torrid month of Tammuz into a frosty Shevat, Max relaxed in the chill environment familiar from a former life. Vertical lifts containing bales of salmon and pyramids of artichokes rose in the chromium light to the upper lofts, where the freight was slid along tramways on sledges, stored in niches carved out of the frozen ramparts like shrines; and Max, unlettered but for the Yiddish romances that Jocheved had browsed on the sly, had the reverent sensation of having entered an archive of ice. Deflated as he was, he was glad to be behind these vault-thick walls leaking sawdust like sand from a thousand