Chapter 10
Enda’s ship glides up a narrow channel with high and thickly forested banks rising to port and starboard.
She elbows her way to the side, where she stands, stunned, unable to bend her mind to the idea that the journey is over and they have arrived.
That she would one day land in this place called Québec and have to face her new life had until this moment seemed abstract and unlikely: she has only got as far in her planning as disguising herself, managing to pass as her brother, and surviving the passage without being discovered.
For the last two months, her life has shrunk to the confined dim hell of the ship’s hold and its narrow set of concerns: when she would wake, what she might eat, if she would be allowed on deck, how she might wash and dress in privacy.
Now, here she is, about to be released into a strange city, alone, and her tasks are rapidly multiplying, chief among them such terrifying necessities as finding a place to stay and some way to earn a living.
Other boats, larger than hers, with taller masts, some with steam engines expressing clouds, like silent thoughts, from their funnels, are travelling alongside.
These passengers are waving handkerchiefs and calling out across the water; others are singing, a hymn of some sort in a foreign tongue; people on her own ship are on their knees, offering up prayers.
Enda sees a painted sign saying that the ship nearest to them has sailed from Germany, another from Hungary, or Italy or Lithuania or Norway.
All these ships are converging down the ever-narrowing channel, on one destination: an island, their point of entry, beyond which lie the jumble and smokestacks of the city of Québec.
The captains of each vessel are vying with each other, Enda sees, racing to make it to the harbour first. It frightens her, in a deep and profound way, that so many hundreds of immigrants are about to disembark, all at once, for surely this will make her task harder.
How can one city, one land, have enough work, enough places for all these people?
When she steps off the gangway, Enda discovers a new kind of sickness: her skull is still filled with the unquiet tipping of waves, and her legs seem not to work, to fulfil their purpose of keeping her upright.
The dockside, the stacks of luggage, the sailors looping ropes as thick as a man’s leg, the weak grey sky above her, the ranks of uniformed harbourmasters, the shoving hordes of disembarking passengers, all seem to shimmer and fragment before her.
She is forced to pause, one hand on a wall for balance.
Holding on to it, she tries to keep upright.
She is pushed one way, by a phalanx of men with blue neckerchiefs, shouting happily to each other in a harsh and yammering tongue; she is pushed the other by a severe-faced family in beaded headdresses and square-toed boots.
Enda sees that she has to join a queue to get inside the immigration building, and she takes a few tentative steps away from the wall, but it is hard to find the end of the queue when so many people are swarming and yelling, and even harder when you’re alone and there is no one to shove back when you get jostled out of the way.
Enda cannot make an inroad into these crowds; she finds herself squeezed out to the edges, nowhere near the queue.
She needs to dive in and force her way through the cross-currents of immigrants on the quay but it’s near impossible.
She cannot seem to adjust to the stability of land, its stolid immovability.
It is as if her legs are stuffed with rags, and petals of glaring brightness are blooming, disturbingly, at the edges of her vision; she staggers, her pack and fiddle sliding sideways off her shoulders, and she falls into a person to the left of her.
She is apologising as she sinks down, knees meeting stone, and she is snatching blindly for her instrument, a cold fear clutching her that it might strike the ground and break into pieces—and what a desperate omen that would be—when the person turns and catches her by the arm.
It is a woman, newly arrived, Enda supposes.
Except that she is like no one Enda has ever seen before: she is tall and strong-looking, with emphatic jet eyebrows.
Weighty black plaits are piled on top of her head like a dark coronet, affixed there with what look like tiny silver spears.
Enda, unable to stop herself staring, takes in the thick, layered skirts that pad the woman’s lower half, the floral stitching on her bodice.
Next to her, Enda feels like a very different animal: scrawny and dowdy.
The woman says something, quickly, over her shoulder, in a language that is jerking and consonant-heavy, to a man behind them.
He is bearded, with a wide-brimmed hat and a dark coat over a striped shirt, and he is also, Enda can see, from her crouched position on the dock, powerfully built, with the same angular set to his face.
He is taking in the scene around him, frowning, strong white teeth biting down on his lip, while carrying an array of bundles and boxes, as if they weigh nothing at all.
He takes a firm grip of Enda’s other arm and lifts her to her feet.
Enda might have found him and his wife forbidding, perhaps even alarming—she might have extricated herself and moved away from them—were it not for one of their items of luggage.
Slung across the man’s chest is an accordion.
It is foolish, she knows, to trust these people just because one of them is a musician, but she cannot help feeling that they will see her right, somehow, that they will take care of her.
Between them, the strangely attired couple, apparently untroubled by the shift from ocean to land, link an arm each between hers and haul her along.
Unlike her, they seem excited to have arrived, gazing around, pointing and exclaiming to each other.
Enda is trying to say thank you, and the dark-haired couple merely nod, continuing their conversation above her head.
As they shove their way into the queue, the man reaches out to tap his knuckle on Enda’s fiddle case, and Enda, recalling stories of the thieves and pickpockets who lurk on docksides, smiles nervously back.
He says a word to her, then another, still rapping on the case, as if trying out different languages on her.
He has a gaze that is both stern and also probing, as if he is able to see right into people, their nooks and crannies and all they might hide there.
It unsettles Enda, makes her shift her eyes away from his, in case he manages to glean some secret from her.
Suddenly, a recognisable word comes through the strings of syllables, like a distant signal. “Violin?” he is saying, in a heavy accent.
Yes, Enda nods vigorously, violin.
“You are a violinist?” he says, looking her over in his unblinking, assessing way. “I am a teacher of music.” He touches his palm to the accordion. “Also languages. You play in an orchestra?”
“I…” Enda hesitates, wondering how to explain the lack of orchestras on the peninsula “…no. How many languages do you speak?”
“Three. Almost four. I don’t know how many of them will be useful here.”
They are inside the immigration building now, under a kind of glass canopy, being ushered between low wooden railings, so narrow that they have to stand sideways.
Up ahead is a large, tiled atrium with a domed ceiling, at the end of which is a row of desks, at which stand stern-looking officials with pens and large ledgers.
It seems to Enda that the dome is collecting the din of what is below: the chatter of hundreds and hundreds of different tongues.
She asks the man where they have come from, and he utters a name, a complex one, possibly beginning with k or perhaps z, with multiple syllables and harsh collisions of sounds.
Seeing Enda’s incomprehension, he smiles for the first time.
“You have heard of the Baltic Sea?” he asks.
Into her mind flash the world-maps her father would occasionally draw for Liam, to test him, pointing out certain countries or rivers or seas and asking him to identify them; Enda would watch, over Liam’s shoulder, repeating the answers silently to herself. She nods, not trusting herself to speak.
“Our town is on its shore.”
“But what is your country called?”
The man grimaces, rolling his eyes; his wife, who has been regarding them keenly, raises her brows, and he seems to translate Enda’s question for her, which causes the woman to emit a scoffing, mirthless laugh.
“It is not so simple to answer,” he says. “When I was a child, the soldiers in our town square tell us we are part of Russia. Then some other soldiers in a different uniform come and they tell us we are Lithuanians. And then a third set say we are Austro-Hungarian, and—”
The man with the accordion suddenly breaks off and points, indicating that they are next in the queue. With a deep breath and a grin, he says something to his wife, who, in an awed whisper, repeats the word to Enda but Enda shakes her head, mimes incomprehension.
“Grozzle,” the man says, or seems to say, delving into a leather satchel around his neck.
The woman nods: “Grozzle.”
They look at each other, tears standing in their eyes, then the woman leans her head into his chest and gives a tremulous sigh.
Enda is still mystified until she sees a signpost reading “Grosse ?le.”