The Immigrants [antikvár]

The immigrants were without any deep consciousness of the role they were playing. They did not dream of history or see themselves as a part of history. They partook of a mythology of the place to which they were going, but of the fact of the place they knew little indeed. Misery absorbed them. Nausea absorbed them. The agony of their stomachs absorbed them. In the pitching, shifting, fetid cabin occupied by eight human beings, four of them adult, four of them children, measuring eight feet by eight feet, stinking of a mixture of body odor and vomit, unventilated, they were absorbed by the various degrees of their misery—and this misery appeared to them to go on for an eternity. On the small, cold, wind- and water-swept deck that was allotted to steerage passengers, there was some relief from the closeness of the cabin, but the North Atlantic in the month of December, in this year of 1888, provided small compensation for the breath of fresh air the deck granted. The deck was wet and icy cold and awash whenever the weather worsened. And the weather was not good during that passage. Most of the time Anna Lavette spent in her bunk. A dark, good-looking girl in her early twenties, she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. She had been bom and raised in the tiny fishing village of Albenga, in the north of Italy on the Ligurian Sea. Her husband, Jo-