« p. 34-37: The Captain’s Dinner
Arrival
p. 37-43
The morning of July 11. We haven’t seen a ship for six days! The ship’s newspaper describes rumors of a heat wave that has stretched across America. Outside, it already feels like our shirts are painted on our skin. Somebody tells me it’s coming from Massachusetts. It’s all the same to me where it comes from, it’s terrible. Everyone begins to notice the light stink in the air: that would be the smell of New York. That could be a good thing. The sailors have a sleepless night behind them. These likable, hardworking men in bright white pants and child-like uniforms with tiny collars run busily in-between the passengers. The afterdeck is stuffed with luggage. The mail sacks are piled up as far as the deck.
In steerage, everyone is lively and in their Sunday best. Suddenly everyone’s wearing collars up to their throats, even Itzig and his sons. Only Mrs. Itzig has put on her everyday outfit, that is, a light gray dress and a white blouse.
Everybody runs over to the railing. Thin, gray streaks appear on the horizon, they’re advancing, it’s the land. A couple of ships approach from America, ships at last! A small smoke-cloud comes up to us quickly. Somebody says it’s the pilot. And there is the new world. --
It isn’t very long before the pilot is right next to us. A boat strikes out from his ship. The rope ladder with wooden rungs rumbles below on the side of our ship, and the pilot comes on board the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great.
Three fat, old specimens in city outfits, with toothpicks in their mouths, push their leader on up -- that’s the pilot. I really can’t say that I was filled with enthusiasm at the sight of my first three authentic Americans. They looked as if they would immediately introduce us to America’s three basic bad habits: gum-chewing, spitting, slovenly dress. But none of them were quite the same, and our interest was soon distracted by other things.
Now we’re seeing more ships and gray streaks on the horizon. Mountains, colors, islands. It is very clear now in the fog of heat what this powerful city was founded on. In-between New Jersey and Long Island is a large, empty space, a natural port of harbor. This harbor is peppered with an innumerable amount of small, inconsiderable pegs, red buoys and signs sticking crookedly out of the water. God knows we need the pilot.
Houses become visibile, bungalows, forests; a silver streak underneath the green, the beach on Long Island, I hear that a giant wheel stands on Coney Island.
And now, far behind the hills of Long Island, a stationary cloud climbs into the sky, a narrow fog fortress with towers and battlements, attached to the side of Staten Island’s hills. It approaches us as we turn to it. It is the southern tip of Manhattan, the city of the skyscraper.
The Moltke, from the Hamburg-America line, travels by us and away, the Italian flag hoisted aloft -- adieu! A small island glides up to us from Staten Island; it looks like a small, capricious, ragged quilt laid out flat on the sea. Standing on it is a human-like figure of monstrous proportions, the sun lighting up the green folds of her outfit -- this is Liberty Island, the Statue of Liberty, laying to port of the new world: liberty, hurrah from the heart, hail Columbia! Hurrah!!
Just behind it, of all things, lie a set of wide, lowly, red houses, half hospital, half prison. My friend explains to me that it’s Ellis Island, the frightening island of the immigrants. (About this later, more later.)
All sorts of small ships surround our flanks; we stand like a horse besieged by mosquitoes. Over there is the white mail ship and the sanitary ship, I don’t know which one that is. The yacht from the New York Herald brings on board the first real newspapers, stock prices are buzzing around us, but also other numbers: today it is 103 degrees Fahrenheit and eighty were dead by midday. All the numbers are whirring up to where I stand on the sundeck. I travel, we travel to the gigantic city, the first you get to see in America, and all the enormities therein. It grows, grows on the horizon, higher, now it looks a hand, stretching itself slenderly and slowly into the sky. I don’t know whether it’s welcoming me or threatening me.
Really, just like a hand, Manhattan climbs out of the sea into the sky. Each finger is thirty stories high and more.
Now we travel slowly, slowly. The sea air is gone, forgotten, it is already very hot, but we’re making our way to Hoboken.
When the ship turns, I see the hand over there open up. The middle finger splits apart, and between it I see an empty streak of air -- that’s Broadway, the largest street in the city. It shows up entirely isolated. It doesn’t look real, but instead like a thin background with nothing behind it.
Brooklyn sits underneath it all like a series of billboards. It’s something like a horizontal skyscraper, close along the harbor, several kilometers long -- I keep on expecting to see an advertisement for mineral water!
Someone from the upper class tells me that seeing the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the first time gives you the same shock as seeing the pyramids in Egypt. I prepare myself for the shock. I wish that somebody would scrape away those billboards, although there are some large things off in that direction, I mainly wait for the shock. I’ve never seen the pyramids, but right now, as I travel to New York, all I’m feeling is a bizarre mix of discomfort, aversion and astonishment, without really losing myself in it, a large and complete sigh of relief: Ah!
Manhattan turns again. Broadway goes away and now I can see the houses, large square bricks with pores, no, I can say it better, large upright Holland waffles, no, giant sieves with holes punched in, that is, sieves with an enormous amount of holes. They all stand right next to each other. You really can’t believe that people live there, that human-like creatures, with eyes, noses and hair, spend their lives behind those holes. On top of the sieves, tiny white trails of smoke flutter away. The tininess of these trails of smoke makes the sight of all these dead boxes very discomforting. I turn around to the others and let the city turn behind me quietly on its axis. I look at the city of the ship over here instead of the city of bricks.
Monstrous arenas with chimneys and poles launch off the piers into the water; from them, heavy brown islands break loose and glide into the stream of the Hudson, where we’re traveling. It’s the ferries. They carry on their backs railroad cars, wagons, automobiles, livestock and people. An island swims by with a muffled, complaining roar. Older ships with commuters on their backs steer around us. A trash barge stinks its way over on its way to an island by Rockaway; it carries the perfume New York, which we have already smelled. Now we can see the white ships, five stories high, of the Hudson line; I’m already thinking that I’ll soon be traveling on one of these palaces away from New York and out into the country. And the city of the giant sieves is moving, moving itself. The skyscrapers are gray, yellow, brownish, mostly though a monotone gray-yellow. And then I see something truly beautiful surface in the distance over the throng of holed houses. A giant red spider, carrying on its back a red prickly flower, crawls over the roofs with its long spider legs -- it’s the iron scaffolding of the new municipal building, a construction to be crowned as one of the tallest buildings in New York. The red scaffolding is beautiful; I’ve noticed something and am writing it for myself. The scaffolding is beautiful and the finished product is ugly. The energy behind these monsters interests me more than the results. We are in New York, and the shock has failed to materialize. I would be a liar if I said that I felt it.
Underneath these enormities, there’s nothing overpowering in this city. Manhattan, a sharp little beast, tries to sting us like a millipede with its innumerable piers. Kaiser Wilhelm the Great quietly glides towards the piers of North German Lloyd in-between Manhattan and Hoboken’s poisonous stingers.
On board, nobody worries about anyone else. All eyes are on the white, square space flickering in the black, broad, narrow building on the Hoboken side. A crowd of bothered people, dressed lightly, wait for our ship and wave handkerchiefs as they shimmer in the lunatic heat.
Next to me, someone unfolds a small white flag with red rectangles on it -- he gets a similar answer from the white, shimmering space.
The large words North German Lloyd, which in the night glowed and disappeared on the Hudson, are now visible by the three piers. We turn slowly to the southernmost of the three piers. In front of the open door of the wide, black building, a short, fat brute looks up at us nastily from under his hat. The people in the flickering space are now walking up to us at the exit and break out in delirious cries of recognition. Somebody answers from the ship. Kaiser Wilhelm the Great creaks with a noise which sounds like Uff! on the pier. I grab my overcoat and my handbag and walk down the plank into America.