New York City

New York City is the first American place Fidelis Waldvogel encounters and the point from which he begins his journey west with his family’s remaining fortunes in a suitcase of smoked sausage. Years later, he returns through the same city, now weakened by heart failure, and collapses at the customs gate while Delphine Watzka is beside him. The city therefore frames two decisive passages: his difficult arrival as an immigrant and the final failure of the strength that had carried him through war, work, and family loss.

First Arrival and the Journey West

In 1922, Fidelis steps off the RMS Mauretania into the crowded harbor of New York City. His family has spent its remaining trinkets, cuff-links, and best woolens to buy his passage and preserve his knives; the wild-boar sausages in his suitcase, made with a rifle and bullets he had kept hidden, represent the wealth he has left to carry across the country. He knows only a small set of English words, chosen for practical needs such as trains, work, money, land, and selling sausage. In the tumult of arrival, he relies on the quiet watchfulness that has helped him endure postwar deprivation.

At the station, Fidelis asks for a ticket to Seattle, but the first fare is beyond what he can pay. He waits by a pillar with his suitcase open and sells sausages to people passing through the station. The hours of stillness are both a way to attract customers and, for him, a relief after the motion of the sea. He sells seven links, sleeps on a platform bench with the closed case in his lap, and returns to his post the next day. The suitcase also holds his treasured knives, so the goods he sells and the tools of his trade travel together.

When he has earned more than half the fare he needs, Fidelis changes his plan. Rather than wait in New York City until he can buy a ticket all the way west, he purchases passage into the beginning of the Middle West and intends to sell the remaining sausages aboard the train. He sells one more at the station before leaving. The sausages take him through Minneapolis and across the prairie into North Dakota, where he sells the last link and gets off at Argus with thirty-five cents and his butcher’s tools. New York City is thus not his destination but the first market in a journey financed one sale at a time.

The City as a Test of Endurance

The station makes Fidelis’s immigrant arrival a test of patience and resourcefulness rather than a simple passage through a port. He cannot easily understand the spoken price of his ticket, so he asks the ticket clerk to write it down; he can then calculate the shortfall against the money he has. His response to the obstacle is practical: stand, sell, count, revise the plan, and board when he can afford to move on.

His deliberate stillness is also a form of control in a setting organized by crowds and movement. While the station’s light fades, he holds the open suitcase in his arms and sells from it. He experiences the long wait less as the torment it might appear to others than as a chance to remain steady after the sea crossing. New York City’s crowded transit space brings his private discipline into public view: strangers notice the man who holds his position for hours, while he turns that attention into a livelihood.

Return and Collapse

Years later, Fidelis arrives in New York City again, this time from Europe aboard the USS Bremen and in the company of Delphine. The exhaustion that accompanies the crossing has grown beyond his control, though he does not know that his heart has been failing for ten years. Earlier losses and shocks have strained him, but he refuses to accept that his body is ill and continues to live by habits formed around strength and endurance.

At the customs gate, the present overlays his first arrival. Fidelis remembers the earlier line and his father making sausage at home; the memory brings his immigrant beginning into the scene of his return. His cigarette falls from his numb fingers. He seems to rise and walk, but discovers that he has not moved. The city’s arrival hall, which once marked the start of a journey he could propel through work and resolve, becomes the place where his body no longer obeys him.

Fidelis recognizes the collapse as a reversal of the role he has held throughout his life. As a butcher, he has repeatedly carried out the work of slaughter; now he understands that he is the one who may not rise. Delphine bends over him, takes his hand, and tries to speak to him, but he cannot answer or move. His heart seizes, his sight blurs, and the light and its familiar music fade. New York City is not simply the setting of a medical crisis: it is where his practiced strength reaches its limit, with Delphine present as witness and companion.

Narrative Significance

The city links the novel’s two passages through Fidelis’s life without making them equivalent. At his first arrival, he is poor, hungry, and alone, but still able to turn his family’s sausage into a plan for reaching the plains. At his return, the family and life built after that journey accompany him, yet determination can no longer overcome physical decline. The recurring customs-and-station setting makes the difference legible: the first crossing opens a future; the later one brings him to the end of his capacity to keep moving.

The contrast also gives New York City a role beyond that of a geographic waypoint. Its crowded station first tests how Fidelis will survive in America, and he answers by selling, saving, and moving west. Its customs gate later gathers memory, migration, family history, and bodily failure into one scene. The city holds the threshold at both ends of his American passage: a place he once passed through by his own effort, and the place where that effort finally gives way.