I was new to this country, and I felt always on the edge of being overwhelmed by the strangeness of everything. I slept in one of the many small rooms above the Nassau Avenue tavern I was in, and five other men shared the room with me. We were all strangers to one another, and it was clearly the tradition that we continue to treat each other as strangers, even as we unrolled our sleeping pallets side-by-side, so close they almost touched. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that being strangers to each other was the rule for all people of America. The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn where I lived was largely a mix of German and Irish immigrants, with a few Poles like myself, and a dozen or so other nationalities beginning to sprinkle in. So everywhere I turned there were people not like myself, and I felt like a small fish tossed into an alien sea.
And this new man, in spite of the familiarity of his language, was a strange-looking figure even in a country of strangers. Like the crude wooden tables and chairs around us, he looked like something banged together by a peasant carpenter. He was coarsely chopped and chiseled and sawn, the various mismatched pieces of him held together with pegs and nails. His nose was crooked, and one eye was always open wider than the other. He hadn’t shaved recently, and his hair looked like it was hacked off with a pocketknife. His face was craggy and lined in a way that made it impossible to guess his age.
I was sitting at a long table a few feet from where the Irish girl had sat to wait for her husband. As the man I’d been watching stood, I called out to him in Polish, shouting over the background noise. “I think you must have a well-loved little baby of your own at home.”
I knew before the words were fully out of my mouth that I’d made a terrible mistake. The man looked down at me, and while his face was as immobile as stone, he seemed to turn gray and crumple in on himself as I watched. He pulled out the empty chair across the table from me and sat down slowly. For a long time he stared at me with an expression I found frightening, until I realized he wasn’t truly looking at me at all, or at anything else in this world. Finally he made a hunching, rolling gesture with his huge shoulders, as if throwing off some great weight. Then he turned and bellowed out to the bartender, calling him by name and asking for vodka and a bowl of cabbage soup. When the bottle and a glass were delivered to the table Mischke poured the little glass full and then emptied it in two swallows. Only then did he look at me— really looking at me now—his eyes scanning my face. “Mazowsze,” he said, guessing the general region of my origin from my accent as I’d done with him. “Warsaw?”
“Kutno,” I corrected, and then I stuck out my hand in the American fashion. “Stephan Dudek.”
He took my hand. “Mischke,” he said. In all the time I knew him, I never learned his first name.
A bowl of soup and a slab of bread were brought to the table, and Mischke began to eat. A few minutes passed without him speaking or looking at me, and I began to wonder if he’d forgotten about my existence—if the few words he’d shared with me were all I would ever get from him.
But then he looked up, his eyes meeting mine. He jabbed a finger in the direction of his soup bowl. “I showed the cook here how to make kapusniak,” he said. “It’s not bad.” He twisted around in his chair and yelled the bartender’s name again, demanding another bowl of soup “for my countryman.” Then he looked me over, examining what he could see of my body as well as my face. “You work in the docks?”
I nodded.
“You look like a strong man, and healthy.” He’d switched to English, and I got the feeling he was repeating something he’d heard in that language. He refilled his vodka glass and took a sip from it—an oddly delicate gesture on a man of his size. “You want to make two dollars and twenty-five cents a day?” he asked. “Come with me tomorrow, I’ll get you a job working on the bridge.”
My face must have taken on a silly expression, because Mischke broke into a ragged grin. Two dollars and twenty-five cents was far more than I earned on the docks, but … “You mean on the towers?” I asked. I was thinking of the dizzying height of the Brooklyn tower, only half-finished, I’d heard, and already it was taller than any other man-made thing I’d ever seen.
“Nah!” Mischke growled. His voice was full of disdain, as if he considered wrestling huge blocks of granite into place hundreds of feet in the air to be work for boys. “Not the towers. The caissons! The Brooklyn side is all done, but on the New York side there’s still months of work.”
“The caissons!” I echoed.
“You’ve heard about them?”
“I’ve heard a little,” I said, not adding that what I’d heard sounded both terrifying and incomprehensible. “But I don’t understand it too well. Something about working under the water?”
“Yes!” Mischke said with a kind of wild delight in his eyes. “Under the water, but not in the water! I’ll explain.” He took hold of his soup bowl with both hands and slid it toward me a few inches. “It’s like this: Here is Brooklyn.” He stabbed his thick forefinger down on the table between himself and his soup bowl. “And here is New York.” His finger thumped down on the opposite side of the bowl. Then he pointed into the bowl. “The soup here is the East River; a big, wide river, you know. So. To build a bridge this big, first you need two towers, one on each side, but both of them in the river, not back here on the shore. The towers will hold up the bridge, okay? Aha! But how to build a stone tower that has its foundation deep down in the water of the river?” He held two fingers together and poked them into his soup, down to the flat bottom of the bowl. “That’s the problem!”
When you order vodka from a bar in America, they give you a little doll-sized glass to drink it out of. Mischke picked up his glass and emptied it into his mouth. Then he held it upside down over his soup, lowering it slowly toward the surface. “Imagine this is made of wood,” he said, tapping the glass with a finger of his left hand. “Imagine it is big. Very, very big. But it floats, see?” He held the glass so it was just skimming the surface of his soup. “Now. You float this out to the right place in the river, and then you start laying blocks of stone on top of it. More and more stone. You start building your tower. You know what happens? This thing”—he pointed at the glass—“it sinks. The more stone you add to the top, the lower it sinks in the river. Enough stone, it goes down to the bottom of the river.” He pushed the glass down to the bottom of his soup bowl.
“Clever,” I said.
He leaned closer to me suddenly, glaring with his mismatched eyes. “Wrong!” he said. “Not clever, because that’s not the end of it.” The wider of his eyes relaxed, while the narrower one kept up a skeptical squint. “What’s at the bottom of a river, Dudek? Mud, that’s what! These towers that will hold up the bridge, they’re going to be tall, huge! Taller than the Trinity Church when they’re done! You want to build something like that on mud?”
I was new to New York, and hadn’t seen Trinity Church yet.
Mischke’s voice changed to a gravelly whisper and he smiled like someone making a sly joke. “This is where it gets interesting, young Dudek. This is where you come in. You and me, and the job we do.” Again he pointed down at the glass he was holding up-ended in his soup. “This thing, that’s the caisson. That’s French for box, because that’s what it is, a big wooden box, open at the bottom. It has air in it, right? I push it down into the river, the soup, but the air is still in it, right? Hah?”