But Desdemona couldn't abide such irony. She grabbed Sourmelina's hands and pleaded, "You have to promise never to tell. We'll live, we'll die, and that will be the end of it."

"I won't tell."

"People can't even know I'm your cousin."

"I won't tell anyone."

"What about your husband?"

"He thinks I'm picking up my cousin and his new wife."

"You won't say anything to him?"

"That'll be easy." Lina laughed. "He doesn't listen to me."

Sourmelina insisted on getting a porter to carry their suitcases to the car, a black-and-tan Packard. She tipped him and climbed behind the wheel, attracting looks. A woman driving was still a scandalous sight in 1922. After resting her cigarette holder on the dashboard, she pulled out the choke, waited the requisite five seconds, and pressed the ignition button. The car's tin bonnet shuddered to life. The leather seats began to vibrate and Desdemona took hold of her husband's arm. Up front, Sourmelina took off her satin-strap high heels to drive barefoot. She put the car into gear and, without checking traffic, lurched off down Michigan Avenue toward Cadillac Square. My grandparents' eyes glazed over at the sheer activity, streetcars rumbling, bells clanging, and the monochrome traffic swerving in and out. In those days downtown Detroit was filled with shoppers and businessmen. Outside Hudson's Department Store the crowd was ten thick, jostling to get in the newfangled revolving doors. Lina pointed out the sights: theCafe Frontenac... the Family Theatre ... and the enormous electric signs:Ralston... Wait & Bond Blackstone Mild 10 Cigar. Above, a thirty-foot boy spread Meadow Gold Butter on a ten-foot slice of bread. One building had a row of giant oil lamps over the entrance to promote a sale on until October 31. It was all swirl and hubbub, Desdemona lying against the backseat, already suffering the anxiety that modern conveniences would induce in her over the years, cars mainly, but toasters, too, lawn sprinklers and escalators; while Lefty grinned and shook his head. Skyscrapers were going up everywhere, and movie palaces and hotels. The twenties saw the construction of nearly all Detroit's great buildings, the Penobscot Building and the second Buhl Building colored like an Indian belt, the New Union Trust Building, the Cadillac Tower, the Fisher Building with its gilded roof. To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han during cocoon season. What they didn't see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east, a thirty-square-block area bounded by Leland, Macomb, Hastings, and Brush streets, teeming with the city's African Americans, who weren't allowed to live anywhere else. They didn't see, in short, the seeds of the city's destruction-its second destruction-because they were part of it, too, all these people coming from everywhere to cash in on Henry Ford's five-dollar-a-day promise.

The East Side of Detroit was a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes, shaded by cathedral elms. The house on Hurlbut Street Lina drove them to was a modest, two-story building of root-beer-colored brick. My grandparents gaped at it from the car, unable to move, until suddenly the front door opened and someone stepped out.

Jimmy Zizmo was so many things I don't know where to begin. Amateur herbalist; antisuffragist; big-game hunter; ex-con; drug pusher; teetotaler-take your pick. He was forty-five years old, nearly twice as old as his wife. Standing on the dim porch, he wore an inexpensive suit and a shirt with a pointy collar that had lost most of its starch. His frizzy black hair gave him the wild look of the bachelor he'd been for so many years, and this impression was heightened by his face, which was rumpled like an unmade bed. His eyebrows, however, were as seductively arched as a nautch girl's, his eyelashes so thick he might have been wearing mascara. But my grandmother didn't notice any of that. She was fixated on something else.

"An Arab?" Desdemona asked as soon as she was alone with her cousin in the kitchen. "Is that why you didn't tell us about him in your letters?"

"He's not an Arab. He's from the Black Sea."

"This is the sala sala," Zizmo was meanwhile explaining to Lefty as he showed him around the house.

"Pontian!" Desdemona gasped with horror, while also examining the icebox. "He's not Muslim, is he?"

"Not everybody from the Pontus converted," Lina scoffed. "What do you think, a Greek takes a swim in the Black Sea and turns into a Muslim?"

"But does he have Turkish blood?" She lowered her voice. "Is that why he's so dark?"

"I don't know and I don't care."

"You're free to stay as long as you like"-Zizmo was now leading Lefty upstairs-"but there are a few house rules. First, I'm a vegetarian. If your wife wants to cook meat, she has to use separate pots and dishes. Also, no whiskey. Do you drink?"

"Sometimes."

"No drinking. Go to a speakeasy if you want to drink. I don't want any trouble with the police. Now, about the rent. You just got married?"

"Yes."

"What kind of dowry did you get?"

"Dowry?"

"Yes. How much?"

"But did you know he was so old?" Desdemona whispered downstairs as she inspected the oven.

"At least he's not my brother."

"Quiet! Don't even joke."

"I didn't get a dowry," answered Lefty. "We met on the boat over."

"No dowry!" Zizmo stopped on the stairs to look back at Lefty with astonishment. "Why did you get married, then?"

"We fell in love," Lefty said. He'd never announced it to a stranger before, and it made him feel happy and frightened all at once.

"If you don't get paid, don't get married," Zizmo said. "That's why I waited so long. I was holding out for the right price." He winked.

"Lina mentioned you have your own business now," Lefty said with sudden interest, following Zizmo into the bathroom. "What kind of business is it?"

"Me? I'm an importer."

"I don't know of what," Sourmelina answered in the kitchen. "An importer. All I know is he brings home money."

"But how can you marry somebody you don't know anything about?"

"To get out of that country, Des, I would have married a cripple."

"I have some experience with importing," Lefty managed to get in as Zizmo demonstrated the plumbing. "Back in Bursa. In the silk industry."

"Your portion of the rent is twenty dollars." Zizmo didn't take the hint. He pulled the chain, unleashing a flood of water.

"As far as I'm concerned," Lina was continuing downstairs, "when it comes to husbands, the older the better." She opened the pantry door. "A young husband would be after me all the time. It would be too much of a strain."

"Shame on you, Lina." But Desdemona was laughing now, despite herself. It was wonderful to see her old cousin again, a little piece of Bithynios still intact. The dark pantry, full of figs, almonds, walnuts, halvah, and dried apricots, made her feel better, too.

"But where can I get the rent?" Lefty finally blurted out as they headed back downstairs. "I don't have any money left. Where can I work?"

"Not a problem." Zizmo waved his hand. "I'll speak to a few people." They came through the sala sala again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. "You haven't complimented my zebra skin rug." again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. "You haven't complimented my zebra skin rug."

"It's very nice."

"I brought it back from Africa. Shot it myself."

"You've been to Africa?"

"I've been all over."

Like everybody else in town, they squeezed in together. Desdemona and Lefty slept in a bedroom directly above Zizmo and Lina's, and the first few nights my grandmother climbed out of bed to put her ear to the floor. "Nothing," she said, "I told you."

"Come back to bed," Lefty scolded. "That's their business."

"What business? That's what I'm telling you. They aren't having any business."

While in the bedroom below, Zizmo was discussing the new boarders upstairs. "What a romantic! Meets a girl on the boat and marries her. No dowry."

"Some people marry for love."

"Marriage is for housekeeping and for children. Which reminds me."

"Please, Jimmy, not tonight."

"Then when? Five years we've been married and no children. You're always sick, tired, this, that. Have you been taking the castor oil?"

"Yes."

"And the magnesium?"

"Yes."

"Good. We have to reduce your bile. If the mother has too much bile, the child will lack vigor and disobey his parents."

"Good night, kyrie kyrie."

"Good night, kyria kyria."

Before the week was out, all my grandparents' questions about Sourmelina's marriage had been answered. Because of his age, Jimmy Zizmo treated his young bride more like a daughter than a wife. He was always telling her what she could and couldn't do, howling over the price and necklines of her outfits, telling her to go to bed, to get up, to speak, to keep silent. He refused to give her the car keys until she cajoled him with kisses and caresses. His nutritional quackery even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a result of his interrogating Lina about her stools. As for sexual relations, they had happened, but not recently. For the last five months Lina had complained of imaginary ailments, preferring her husband's herbal cures to his amatory attentions. Zizmo, in turn, harbored vaguely yogic beliefs about the mental benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait until his wife's vitality returned. The house was sex-segregated like the houses in the patridha patridha, the old country, men in the sala sala, women in the kitchen. Two spheres with separate concerns, duties, even-the evolutionary biologists might say-thought patterns. Lefty and Desdemona, accustomed to living in their own house, were forced to adapt to their new landlord's ways. Besides, my grandfather needed a job.

In those days there were a lot of car companies to work for. There was Chalmers, Metzger, Brush, Columbia, and Flanders. There was Hupp, Paige, Hudson, Krit, Saxon, Liberty, Rickenbacker, and Dodge. Jimmy Zizmo, however, had connections at Ford.

"I'm a supplier," he said.

"Of what?"

"Assorted fuels."

They were in the Packard again, vibrating on thin tires. A light mist was falling. Lefty squinted through the fogged windshield. Little by little, as they approached along Michigan Avenue, he began to be aware of a monolith looming in the distance, a building like a gigantic church organ, pipes running into the sky.

There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather's nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell's chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief.

Zizmo laughed. "Don't worry. You'll get used to it."

"No, I won't."

"Do you want to know the secret?"

"What?"

"Don't breathe."

When they reached the factory, Zizmo took him into the Personnel Department.

"How long has he lived in Detroit?" the manager asked.

"Six months."

"Can you verify that?"

Zizmo now spoke in a low tone. "I could drop the necessary documents by your house."

The personnel manager looked both ways. "Old Log Cabin?"

"Only the best."

The chief jutted out his lower lip, examining my grandfather. "How's his English?"

"Not as good as mine. But he learns fast."

"He'll have to take the course and pass the test. Otherwise he's out."

"It's a deal. Now, if you'll write down your home address, we can schedule a delivery. Would Monday evening, say around eight-thirty, be suitable?"

"Come around to the back door."

My grandfather's short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any Stephanides has ever worked in the automobile industry. Instead of cars, we would become manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanikopita and grilled cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana cream pie. Our assembly line was the grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain. Still, those twenty-five weeks gave us a personal connection to that massive, forbidding, awe-inspiring complex we saw from the highway, that controlled Vesuvius of chutes, tubes, ladders, catwalks, fire, and smoke known, like a plague or a monarch, only by a color: "the Rouge."

On his first day of work, Lefty came into the kitchen modeling his new overalls. He spread his flannel-shirted arms and snapped his fingers, dancing in work boots, and Desdemona laughed and shut the kitchen door so as not to wake up Lina. Lefty ate his breakfast of prunes and yogurt, reading a Greek newspaper a few days old. Desdemona packed his Greek lunch of feta, olives, and bread in a new American container: a brown paper bag. At the back door, when he turned to kiss her she stepped back, anxious that people might see. But then she remembered that they were married now. They lived in a place called Michigan, where the birds seemed to come in only one color, and where no one knew them. Desdemona stepped forward again to meet her husband's lips. Their first kiss in the great American outdoors, on the back porch, near a cherry tree losing its leaves. A brief flare of happiness went off inside her and hung, raining sparks, until Lefty disappeared around the front of the house.

My grandfather's good mood accompanied him all the way to the trolley stop. Other workers were already waiting, loose-kneed, smoking cigarettes and joking. Lefty noticed their metal lunch pails and, embarrassed by his paper sack, held it behind him. The streetcar showed up first as a hum in the soles of his boots. Then it appeared against the rising sun, Apollo's own chariot, only electrified. Inside, men stood in groups arranged by language. Faces scrubbed for work still had soot inside the ears, deep black. The streetcar sped off again. Soon the jovial mood dissipated and the languages fell silent. Near downtown, a few blacks boarded the car, standing outside on the runners, holding on to the roof.

And then the Rouge appeared against the sky, rising out of the smoke it generated. At first all that was visible was the tops of the eight main smokestacks. Each gave birth to its own dark cloud. The clouds plumed upward and merged into a general pall that hung over the landscape, sending a shadow that ran along the trolley tracks; and Lefty understood that the men's silence was a recognition of this shadow, of its inevitable approach each morning. As it came on, the men turned their backs so that only Lefty saw the light leave the sky as the shadow enveloped the streetcar and the men's faces turned gray and one of the mavros mavros on the runners spat blood onto the roadside. The smell seeped into the streetcar next, first the bearable eggs and manure, then the unbearable chemical taint, and Lefty looked at the other men to see if they registered it, but they didn't, though they continued to breathe. The doors opened and they all filed out. Through the hanging smoke, Lefty saw other streetcars letting off other workers, hundreds and hundreds of gray figures trudging across the paved courtyard toward the factory gates. Trucks were driving past, and Lefty let himself be taken along with the flow of the next shift, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand men hurrying last cigarettes or getting in final words-because as they approached the factory they'd begun to speak again, not because they had anything to say but because beyond those doors language wasn't allowed. The main building, a fortress of dark brick, was seven stories high, the smokestacks seventeen. Running off it were two chutes topped by water towers. These led to observation decks and to adjoining refineries studded with less impressive stacks. It was like a grove of trees, as if the Rouge's eight main smokestacks had sown seeds to the wind, and now ten or twenty or fifty smaller trunks were sprouting up in the infertile soil around the plant. Lefty could see the train tracks now, the huge silos along the river, the giant spice box of coal, coke, and iron ore, and the catwalks stretching overhead like giant spiders. Before he was sucked in the door, he glimpsed a freighter and a bit of the river French explorers named for its reddish color, long before the water turned orange from runoff or ever caught on fire. on the runners spat blood onto the roadside. The smell seeped into the streetcar next, first the bearable eggs and manure, then the unbearable chemical taint, and Lefty looked at the other men to see if they registered it, but they didn't, though they continued to breathe. The doors opened and they all filed out. Through the hanging smoke, Lefty saw other streetcars letting off other workers, hundreds and hundreds of gray figures trudging across the paved courtyard toward the factory gates. Trucks were driving past, and Lefty let himself be taken along with the flow of the next shift, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand men hurrying last cigarettes or getting in final words-because as they approached the factory they'd begun to speak again, not because they had anything to say but because beyond those doors language wasn't allowed. The main building, a fortress of dark brick, was seven stories high, the smokestacks seventeen. Running off it were two chutes topped by water towers. These led to observation decks and to adjoining refineries studded with less impressive stacks. It was like a grove of trees, as if the Rouge's eight main smokestacks had sown seeds to the wind, and now ten or twenty or fifty smaller trunks were sprouting up in the infertile soil around the plant. Lefty could see the train tracks now, the huge silos along the river, the giant spice box of coal, coke, and iron ore, and the catwalks stretching overhead like giant spiders. Before he was sucked in the door, he glimpsed a freighter and a bit of the river French explorers named for its reddish color, long before the water turned orange from runoff or ever caught on fire.

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

On the factory floor, my grandfather was trained for his job in seventeen minutes. Part of the new production method's genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you could hire anyone. And fire anyone. The foreman showed Lefty how to take a bearing from the conveyor, grind it on a lathe, and replace it. Holding a stopwatch, he timed the new employee's attempts. Then, nodding once, he led Lefty to his position on the Line. On the left stood a man named Wierzbicki; on the right, a man named O'Malley. For a moment, they are three men, waiting together. Then the whistle blows.

Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. This camshaft travels away on a conveyor, curling around the factory, through its clouds of metal dust, its acid fogs, until another worker fifty yards on reaches up and removes the camshaft, fitting it onto the engine block (twenty seconds). Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors-the carburetor, the distributor, the intake manifold-and connecting them to the engine block. Above their bent heads, huge spindles pound steam-powered fists. No one says a word. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. The camshaft circles around the floor until a hand reaches up to take it down and attach it to the engine block, growing increasingly eccentric now with swooshes of pipe and the plumage of fan blades. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. While other workers screw in the air filter (seventeen seconds) and attach the starter motor (twenty-six seconds) and put on the flywheel. At which point the engine is finished and the last man sends it soaring away...

Except that he isn't the last man. There are other men below hauling the engine in, as a chassis rolls out to meet it. These men attach the engine to the transmission (twenty-five seconds). Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. My grandfather sees only the bearing in front of him, his hands removing it, grinding it, and putting it back as another appears. The conveyor over his head extends back to the men who stamp out the bearings and load ingots into the furnaces; it goes back to the Foundry where the Negroes work, goggled against the infernal light and heat. They feed iron ore into the Blast Oven and pour molten steel into core molds from ladles. They pour at just the right rate-too quickly and the molds will explode; too slowly and the steel will harden. They can't stop even to pick the burning bits of metal from their arms. Sometimes the foreman does it; sometimes not. The Foundry is the deepest recess of the Rouge, its molten core, but the Line goes back farther than that. It extends outside to the hills of coal and coke; it goes to the river where freighters dock to unload the ore, at which point the Line becomes the river itself, snaking up to the north woods until it reaches its source, which is the earth itself, the limestone and sandstone therein; and then the Line leads back again, out of substrata to river to freighters and finally to the cranes, shovels, and furnaces where it is turned into molten steel and poured into molds, cooling and hardening into car parts-the gears, drive shafts, and fuel tanks of 1922 Model T's. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. Above and behind, at various angles, workers pack sand into core molds, or hammer plugs into molds, or put casting boxes into the cupola furnace. The Line isn't a single line but many, diverging and intersecting. Other workers stamp out body parts (fifty seconds), bump them (forty-two seconds), and weld the pieces together (one minute and ten seconds). Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. The camshaft flies around the factory until a man unhooks it, attaches it to the engine block, growing eccentric now with fan blades, pipes, and spark plugs. And then the engine is finished. A man sends it dropping down onto a chassis rolling out to meet it, as three other workers remove a car body from the oven, its black finish baked to a shine in which they can see their own faces, and they recognize themselves, momentarily, before they drop the body onto the chassis rolling out to meet it. A man jumps into the front seat (three seconds), turns the ignition (two seconds), and drives the automobile away.

By day, no words; by night, hundreds. Every evening at quitting time my exhausted grandfather would come out of the factory and tramp across to an adjacent building housing the Ford English School. He sat in a desk with his workbook open in front of him. The desk felt as though it were vibrating across the floor at the Line's 1.2 miles per hour. He looked up at the English alphabet in a frieze on the classroom walls. In rows around him, men sat over identical workbooks. Hair stiff from dried sweat, eyes red from metal dust, hands raw, they recited with the obedience of choirboys: "Employees should use plenty of soap and water in the home.

"Nothing makes for right living so much as cleanliness.

"Do not spit on the floor of the home.

"Do not allow any flies in the house.

"The most advanced people are the cleanest."

Sometimes the English lessons continued on the job. One week, after a lecture by the foreman on increasing productivity, Lefty speeded up his work, grinding a bearing every twelve seconds instead of fourteen. Returning from the lavatory later, he found the word "RAT" written on the side of his lathe. The belt was cut. By the time he found a new belt in the equipment bin, a horn sounded. The Line had stopped.