I left Vienna on a flight to Zurich, and from Zurich on a charter flight to New York arranged by AFCR. It was the first time in my life I had been on an airplane.

I felt better equipped for this journey than I had been for the last one. When I left Czechoslovakia a year earlier I had almost nothing. Now I had two hundred and forty dollars in cash, my original briefcase, and a large new suitcase filled with clothing I had accumulated during my year in Vienna. It was not much by any measure, but it was mine, and it felt like wealth compared to where I had started.

On the long flight I had a seat next to a young man about my age. We exchanged stories. He was well dressed and well groomed, and his experience of the past year could not have been more different from mine. He had a rich aunt in Vienna who had let him use her apartment and her new convertible MG while she traveled somewhere in the world. He had family in the United States sending him four hundred dollars a month for spending money. He had spent six months traveling all over Western Europe, unhurried and comfortable. We had a wonderful time talking during that long flight, comparing our very different paths to the same destination. When we landed and went our separate ways, I never heard from him again. That Christmas I received a card from a family named Morgan, and I have always wondered whether he was somehow connected to them.

When we began our descent into New York it was a clear night. The sight from the airplane window was something I have never forgotten — lights stretching as far as you could see in every direction, the bay below, and the Statue of Liberty standing in the dark water. I had seen photographs, but nothing prepared me for the scale of it. After a year in Vienna, after everything that had come before, I was looking at America for the first time.

After we landed, an AFCR representative was waiting at the airport to help the arriving refugees. I did not need him. My friend Emil, who had worked with me at the gas station on Mollardgasse in Vienna, had arrived in New York a couple of months earlier and was there waiting for me. He took me to his apartment, where he was renting a room.

My first impression leaving the airport was seeing many well-dressed black people with large, beautiful cars. To me, a person raised on communist propaganda about the oppressed condition of black Americans, it was immediate and concrete proof of how thoroughly the government back home had lied to us. I would learn later that the situation was more complicated, that things were very different in the southern states. But that first impression stayed with me — the instinct to question what I had been told, and to look at what was actually in front of me.

The next morning Emil took me to the bus station. I had written instructions from my friend Pepa on how to get to Boston and find his apartment. I took a bus to LaGuardia and boarded an air shuttle to Boston.

The shuttle was nothing like the transatlantic flight. If the flight from Zurich had been like riding in a car, this was like riding a motorcycle in a crosswind. It was a small jet and it was turbulent. A businessman was sitting next to me. I tried to make conversation and quickly discovered something I had been avoiding thinking about — my English was not ready. In high school in Prague I had studied English, and in Austria I had learned enough German to get by, but spoken American English on a noisy airplane was another matter entirely. The businessman was patient and kind enough. He understood enough of what I was trying to say to escort me, when we landed, to the subway station at the airport and point me in the right direction.

From there I followed Pepa’s instructions step by step and made my way to his apartment building on Beacon Hill. I arrived too late. Pepa had already left for work. He was finishing a master’s degree in architecture at MIT and working part time at a firm downtown. I had a full day to wait.

I did not want to carry my large suitcase around the neighborhood all day, so I rang the bell of a ground floor apartment, hoping someone would let me leave it there until evening. An older woman came to the door. I tried to explain my situation as best I could. She looked at me, said nothing useful, and closed the door. I found out later that she had not understood me and thought I was trying to move into her apartment.

Across the street was a small shop where I managed to make myself understood well enough to leave the suitcase safely. Around midday I was hungry and found a small counter-service restaurant nearby. The only item on the chalkboard I could fully understand was ham and eggs. I ordered it, sat down, and then realized I had a problem. The sandwich that arrived was enormous, and there was no knife and fork. I sat for a moment and watched how the people around me were eating — with both hands, without ceremony. I followed their example. It was my first lesson in American culture, and far from the last.

After lunch I retrieved my suitcase and sat down on it in front of Pepa’s building to wait. After a while a young woman came out of the building. She knew Pepa, and she knew I was coming. She took me upstairs to her apartment, let me use the shower, and told me to rest until Pepa came home.

Pepa and I had known each other since I was fifteen years old. He was five years older, well educated, physically capable, and one of the most interesting people I have ever known. He had arrived in the United States before me, staying first with his father’s family in Lehigh, Pennsylvania — his father was an accomplished professor at Lehigh University — then moving to Boston in the summer after completing his one year there. Pepa already held a full degree in architecture from Charles University in Prague, and was at MIT to complete his master’s.

We spent the first couple of days catching up. He had a plan for both of us, one he was clearly excited about. He would finish his MIT degree in June, and then the two of us would spend a year traveling around the world — working on ships, taking whatever jobs we could find along the way. A great adventure before he settled into his career.

I told him I would only agree to it on one condition: we would pool everything we earned equally. Pepa was older and more capable, and I knew from experience how these arrangements could go when things got hard. He could not understand why I would insist on that. I told him that if we could not agree on that, then I needed to concentrate on building my life here — finding steady work, getting an education, establishing myself in a new country. I had spent a year in Austria. I knew how hard things could get, and I was not willing to risk starting over again from nothing.

Pepa never fully understood my reasoning, and to be honest I think he was a little disappointed. But we had a wonderful few weeks together regardless. He had found me a job washing dishes at a restaurant owned and managed by Austrians, which he had arranged before my arrival so I would have something to put on my emigration paperwork. I had no trouble communicating with them in German. The pay was minimum wage — one dollar and fifty cents an hour — and they could only give me about thirty hours a week, but it was enough. The first significant purchase I made with that money was a pair of Bally shoes. Pepa took me to the store. After the shoes I had worn through the Austrian winter, the ones with the hole in the sole, a good pair of shoes felt important.

Pepa spent those weeks explaining to me what he had observed about American culture. To him it was a science, something to be studied and tested. In Prague everyone had noticed him because of his looks. In Boston nobody gave him a second glance. To test this, he once tied his necktie behind his neck instead of in front, and walked around the city. Not a single person reacted. No stares, no comments, nothing. America, he concluded, was a place where people left you alone, for better and for worse.

After about two weeks, once he understood that I was serious about not joining the round-the-world adventure, Pepa told me he had found me a place to live. There was a recently divorced woman named Jeanne on Babcock Street in Brookline, who had a five-year-old son and a room to rent for fifty dollars a month. When Pepa had told her about me she had offered the room. His own apartment was one bedroom, and I had been sleeping in the living room. He had a girlfriend who wanted to move in.

I packed my suitcase and moved to Babcock Street.