Document 9
THE FIRST DAY IN AMERICA
New-York in the 1920’s.George, a Russian immigrant, has just landed . He has spent the whole day trying to find a job, with no success. He is now in a park...
1 I was tired from America and I slept some hours. It must have been almost midnight
when the light flashed in my face. I sat up . It was from the head lamp of a touring car choking along on the road below me. While I watched, the engine coughed and died. A man got out. For more than an hour he knocked with tools and opened the hood and
5 and closed it again.
Then I slid down the bank. In the war there were airplanes, and of course cars are much the same except, naturally, for the wings. I showed him with my hands and feet and head : “Give me the tools and let me try.” He handed them over and sat down on a bench.
10 I checked the spark plugs and the distributor, the timer(1) and the coils(2). I looked at
the feed line, at the ignition, at the gas. In between, I cranked . I cranked until I
cranked my heart out onto the ground. Still the car wouldn’t move.
I got mad. I cursed it. Then I kicked the radiator as hard as I could. The car was an old
Model T, and it started with a snort. The man came running up. He was laughing and
15 he shook my hands and talked at me and asked questions. But signs weren’t enough.
I remembered my dictionary –English-Russian, Russian-English- it went both ways. I
took it from my blouse pocket and showed the man. Holding it under the headlights,
he thumbed through.
“Work?”, he found in English.
20 I looked at the Russian word beside it and shook my head.
“Home?”, he turned to that.
“No,” again.
I took the dictionary. “ Boat. Today.”
“Come home-“ he showed me the words- “with me-“ he pointed to himself. “Eat.
25 Sleep. Job.” It took him quite a time between words. “Job. Tomorrow.”
“Automobiles?” I said. We have the same word in Georgian.
“Automobiles!” He was pleased we found one word together.
We got in his car, and he took me through miles and miles of streets with houses on
both sides of every one of them until we came to his own. We went in and we ate and
30 we drank and ate and drank again. For that, fortunately, you need no words.
Then his wife showed me a room and I went to bed. As I fell asleep, I thought to
myself : Well, now, I have lived one whole day in America and –just like they say-
America is a country where anything, anything at all can happen.
And in twenty years- about this- I never changed my mind.
George and Helen Papashvily, Anything Can Happen
(1940)
(1) timer = disributeur d’allumage – (2) coil = bobine