The Last Days of Ellis Island Page 2

  As they climbed the stairs they were observed by several line doctors stationed at the top, who leaned over the balustrade, apparently unmoved by these cohorts of utter misery. It took a few seconds—no more than six, it was said—to seal the fate of the new arrivals. Nothing escaped the experienced, professional eye of the line doctor. With a piece of chalk he would write a letter on certain people’s clothes.

  A letter of the alphabet marked on a jacket or coat corresponded to a particular pathology, either clearly observed, or highly probable. L for lungs, B for back, E for eyes, H for heart, G for goiter. Passengers thus identified were immediately taken away for further medical examination. The result of the second diagnosis enabled the immigration inspectors to pronounce their verdict: treatment at Ellis Island; pathology unproven; benign pathology; denial of entry into the United States.

  Those who passed this stage without a problem found themselves in the Great Hall, which was furnished with rows of wooden benches, where they joined hundreds of other waiting passengers. They were going to be asked twenty-nine questions. Their future depended on their responses. Sit down here and wait until your name is called.

  Other immigration inspectors called them one by one. Sit down, again. A few minutes to answer a series of questions with the help of an interpreter. What is your final destination in America? Who paid for your passage? How much money do you have? Are you meeting a relative here in America? If so, who, and their address? Have you been in a prison, charity almshouse, or insane asylum? Are you a polygamist? Are you an anarchist? Are you coming to America for a job? What is the condition of your health? Are you deformed or crippled? How tall are you? What is your skin color? What color are your eyes and hair?

  Travelers encountering the Sphinx on the road to Thebes were not bombarded with so many questions! And if those immigrants whose answers were unsatisfactory weren’t dismembered alive or devoured by a winged monster with a lion’s body, the fate that awaited them was surely no better. At the end of the twenty-ninth question lay either Gehenna or paradise, like that game of dice that children play where you have to avoid landing on certain squares on a colored board, so as not to go backwards, skip your go, or find yourself in prison or at the bottom of a well. Here, there was only one forfeit and it was brutal. The worst that could befall anyone: America slamming the door shut in their face.

  These are just memories now. The flow of immigrants dried up a long time ago, and now a steamship docking here is an event. Yet before my eyes these images of the past still stir, present and real. Steamships arriving one after the next, disgorging sometimes thousands of passengers in a single day, with their strange clothes, the way they talked and held themselves, which gradually changed over the years. Queues of people, obedient and anxious, who had to be chivvied, hurried, guided, informed, examined. Are you worthy of becoming one of us? What benefit or risk is there for us if we let you in? What do you have to offer us? Some years the station remained open day and night to process the great tide of people. I can picture them still, all the staff who worked there, line doctors and matrons, tired and haggard, standing to face these waves of men and women who were even more exhausted, and had so much more at stake.

  After 1924, thanks to President Hoover’s successive immigration laws, the process began to change. There were fewer people to inspect, since quotas were being applied to all foreign nations, and it was now our consuls in the immigrants’ countries of origin who were responsible for the initial examination of every visa application. Anyone who was allowed to board a boat would not, in principle, be turned back upon arrival. That meant our role diminished, for we were now no more than the last links in an immense chain designed to keep out anyone who had somehow managed to dodge the checks or circumvent the procedures.

  I was never, or rarely ever, in direct contact with the new arrivals. They had left everything behind, were exhausted and debilitated by the voyage, and it was only the hope of a new life that gave them the strength to remain standing. There were many different teams of people: interpreters, inspectors, guards, and medical staff. I was responsible for ensuring that everything was in working order in the sleeping quarters, kitchens, infirmary, sanitary areas, and isolation zones. Here was where they slept, ate, washed, defecated, wept, waited, talked, held each other, struggled to calm wailing, confused children, tried not to think too much, hoped, and yearned.

  For forty-five years—I’ve had plenty of time to count them—I observed the arrival of all those men, women, and children, dignified and disoriented, in their best clothes and bathed in perspiration, exhaustion, and bewilderment, struggling to make sense of a language of which they knew not a single word. They carried all their dreams inside their luggage, packed inside the trunks, canteens, baskets, suitcases, bags, carpets, and blankets that contained everything they had brought with them from their previous life; and then there was everything they had sealed up deep inside their hearts to try to keep themselves from caving in to the anguish of separation, the pain of calling up faces they would never see again. They had to move on, adapt to another life, another language, different signs and customs, unfamiliar foods, a new climate. Learn, learn fast and never look back. I have no idea how many of them fulfilled their dreams, how many found themselves brutally cast into a daily life that was barely any improvement on the one they had escaped. It was too late to think about it, theirs was an exile without return.

  I remember the day, many years ago now, when the meaning of a few lines of verse, imprinted on my memory since childhood, suddenly became clear, a little like finding an object in your pocket that seems to be of no use, you hold onto it without quite knowing why, and then one day it reveals its purpose.

  By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

  We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

  This psalm of exile came back to me, suddenly, with extraordinary exactitude; it felt like I’d stumbled against something in a corridor in the middle of the night, and only then remembered it was there. The Sunday service, when I was a child. Reverend Hackson, with his sparrow-like silhouette in a black habit, his halting gait and jerky movements; I can still hear the reedy voice muffled in his chest that grew a little louder with each sentence until it was like a surge, a great swell that every time I was convinced would never end. In the winter cold, inside the poorly heated church, my hair still damp from my Sunday morning scrub, wedged into a jacket that every week seemed to have shrunk a little more, I could hardly wait for the service to be over, and then the weekly ritual of beef pie for Sunday lunch, so I could run off and play baseball. The words of the psalm were completely incomprehensible to me.

  In fact, when it came to rivers, I didn’t know much apart from the industrial, gray Hudson, and I didn’t see how you could hang harps on nonexistent willow trees. All I had was a vague image of candy canes dangling from the branches of the Christmas tree that my parents used to take the trouble to put up for me every year in our tiny living room. And if the land of the exodus was a desert, I couldn’t see how there could be rivers there either. The biblical words barely touched me, and I gave up going to church as soon as I could duck out of that particular Sunday obligation. I guess words sometimes dig mysterious chambers deep inside you, and what you thought was buried, forgotten, or lost forever insists on resurfacing out of the blue. It’s like they seize hold of you, and you’re entirely defenseless. At Ellis Island the harps had fallen silent. At last I understood.

  Time has stopped here, everyone has moved on with their lives, only I am still here, standing on the dock, the last witness to these manifold destinies, the hours and days of transit that definitively altered the countenance of so m
any people’s lives. Welcome to America! The anxious wait for the benediction, the baptismal certificate, the permit, the document that allowed you to become an American, from now until the hour of your death. And then the golden door would swing open. Yet for so many the door creaked, and they would have to oil it for generations to come. For the truth is, no miracle awaited them here, except whatever they made for themselves. Hard work and poor pay for the lucky ones, a squalid, noisy apartment to live in, but freedom, and the chance of a new beginning.

  These scenes took place in different areas of the main reception building, between the four ornamental turrets faced in brick and limestone, with onion domes that I imagine to many recalled the churches of their native lands. As for the rest, we are surrounded by water, glass, and metal. We have no other horizon.

  11 O’CLOCK, IN THE EVENING.

  Over time, the role of the station evolved, as did my own as my duties changed. I began here as an immigration inspector, responsible for directing the arrival of this human tide of immigrants clutching their possessions as they disembarked from the barge that ferried them over from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. This was where the steamships docked to let off the first- and second-class passengers, their papers in order, having already been checked on board, the men in overcoats with fur collars, and the women in hats with veils, and fine leather shoes.

  My knowledge of the procedures and the precise layout of the site, the suggestions I made to streamline the process, my reliability and general aptitude, meant that I rose rapidly through the ranks and was soon promoted to supervising other people and dealing with increasingly complex technical and administrative issues. I had been deputy to the commissioner for some time when my predecessor was posted elsewhere, and it was simpler to offer me his position than to appoint a new commissioner, who would probably have been aghast at the idea of moving here. I wasn’t expecting it and was already getting used to the idea of working for a new boss, all the whims and habits to which I’d have to adapt. I accepted the promotion, trying not to show too much surprise. And I soon discovered that the exercise of power and authority, however minimal and insignificant, requires a certain silence and solitude, and, when it comes to the expression of feelings, reserve. These barriers suited me perfectly. I assumed the role.

  At first glance, with its corridors and staircases so similar to the walkways of the vessels from which the immigrants had just disembarked, Ellis Island must have seemed like a labyrinth. I am probably the only person familiar with all its dark corners, for the other people who worked there had only a partial view of it, their own specific domain. Throughout the main building floated the persistent smell of Lysol, which I grew so used to I no longer noticed it. I was always scrupulous about hygiene and disinfection. It was, I confess, almost an obsession, but with passengers arriving off the boats infested with lice, vermin, and all kinds of sicknesses, it was vital. As I was only too painfully aware.

  The immigration services needed people like me, I suppose, reliable and efficient. And for reasons that I may perhaps reveal later in these pages, if I succeed in being as candid as I hope, for this is all starting to weigh heavily on me, I always declined to leave the island. Who else but I, who had lived here so long, would have been able to understand the layout of this maze? Over the years, and with the war, immigration dwindled and the flood of newcomers was succeeded first by military troops in training and then by political prisoners awaiting deportation. For some, I opened the golden door; for others, I slammed it shut on their hopes; for others still, I was a prison warden, a passing shadow, silent and severe, of whom the worst was always assumed. Serving your country sometimes takes an unexpected turn, and one is not always master of the face one shows to others.

  So now Ellis Island is closing its doors, like a flophouse forced out of business, or a hotel with no custom, being too far from passing traffic, or a jail with no prisoners, or all those at once. The government took the decision with the idea of turning a page on this history, and of refurbishing the island’s buildings in anticipation of the seventieth anniversary of the statue, which has enchanted the world since it was first raised in the bay in 1886. What an emblem, what a work of art, this gift from France! How strangely things turn out. In any case, over the next few years no effort will be spared in the planning of lavish celebrations worthy of a symbol that beguiles the entire world. God bless America! I can only imagine the ceremonies, commemorations, official speeches, anthems, marching bands, bugles, and drum tattoos, heel taps, right faces, parades with flags fluttering in the wind that will take place, one after the next. Perhaps I will be invited, one relic among so many others, to don my uniform for the occasion and escort eminent visitors as they gather in this place through which more than twelve million immigrants from all over Europe have passed since it first opened. Maybe I will be asked to satisfy their curiosity about how things were done, and to share some poignant anecdotes. They may be assured that I have more than enough of those. But is it even possible, in these desolate spaces, between the broken windowpanes, deserted dormitories, and worm-ridden piers, to imagine the things that once took place here?

  Anyway, this is no time for such thoughts. I am alone here now in this forsaken place; the last members of staff and the last transiting passenger left a few days ago. I feel like a captain standing at the bow of his sinking ship, but, truth be told, I was shipwrecked long ago, and I do not know now if leaving will be an ordeal or a deliverance. Ellis Island’s last guest has departed, a Norwegian sailor, ginger-haired and taciturn, a colossus who spent his time prowling around the buildings while he waited for the court to decide his fate. Finally the decision came down and he was released, welcomed onto American soil, and sent on his way.

  I’d grown used to the pungent odor of his tobacco, and we would exchange a few words when we passed each other during our respective wanderings, each conscious of being all but forgotten here on this deserted island at the edge of the world, locked in our respective roles and committed to playing them right to the end: the foreign suspect and the camp guard. No, I exaggerate: some nights I’d offer him a drink and we might play a game of chess, violating the most basic rules of my position, though I couldn’t say if I did it as a kindness more for his sake or for mine. Sometimes solitude weighs you down. When he left we shook hands like equals; then he headed off without a backward glance to his new home, kitbag slung over his shoulder and cigarette hanging off his lip. He was free. He boarded the boat and left for Manhattan. Arne Peterssen. My last prisoner.

  The curious story of this taciturn Viking has mostly faded from my memory, like so many others, and the ones that stick are not the most joyful. Why did Peterssen end up staying on Ellis Island so long, in a silent standoff like a kind of dance or duel, in which each participant was trying to move away from his adversary rather than advance towards him? I seem to remember that he had been involved in a brawl on board ship, whose hazy circumstances the investigation tried to unravel. An officer was involved, and for whatever reason, this was not something that could be pardoned. The Norwegian navy was only too happy to let go of this ill-disciplined specimen who had requested American citizenship. His application inevitably meant additional investigations and evidence to be crosschecked, that is to say a great quantity of official paperwork on headed paper, stamped every which way. And so a single ordinary evening, during which vast quantities of alcohol were consumed in one of those harbor bars where women in black stockings offer up their bodies to quell some desperate, sad, swiftly satisfied desire, was transformed into an endless legal proceeding turning on irreconcilable arguments. Apart from this one incident, Peterssen’s record was spotless, and he seemed to have always been loyal and competent. Magnanimous, America chose to pardon this lapse, which did not, in the end, concern her. It turned out that the officer in question had his share of responsibility in the brawl with the sailor that night, in one of those places where the hostesses must have witne
ssed countless such spectacles.

  The few workers still stationed on the island left immediately after him, in his wake you might say, only too eager to jump ship, to escape the ghosts and start their lives over. Richard Green, a cook, and Robert Patterson, a warden and handyman. It’s a relief. My solitude is now complete. I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, that I might finally start to write. Robert, with his quiet step, despite his size, his face creased like a sheet of paper that has been crumpled into a ball, and a disturbing scar barely concealed by his dark beard, had the art of appearing out of nowhere at any moment. I always felt like I was being watched; his wrestler’s build intimidated me, and without the authority conferred on me by a title that demanded at least a modicum of respect, I think I would have been a little afraid of him. Richard cooked for years for passengers who were obliged to remain on Ellis Island for various reasons and lengths of time—on medical grounds, or due to some issue regularizing their status, or while awaiting further interrogation. He was cheerful and sociable, and had a curious habit of ending every sentence with an inexplicable burst of laughter, perhaps intended to mask his shyness and embarrassment; but the progressive winding down of activity on Ellis Island eventually crushed his propensity to laugh over even the most trivial thing. I could never bring myself to eat what he prepared, unidentifiable morsels in brown sauces kept warm for hours that congealed on the plate in less time than it took to describe what it was. In comparison to the unsavory dishes and meager rations served on board ship, I can see that for the newcomers his food, plentiful and hot, must have seemed like manna from heaven. Ever since Richard’s arrival, in order not to upset him, I took to claiming that I was on a strict diet that I had to follow because of my supposed delicate digestion. I’ve kept up the habit. Even today, I’m satisfied with coffee, bacon, eggs, cookies, and fruit. With age, the body’s needs dwindle. Only my desire for solitude continues to grow.