City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (14 page)

The baby didn’t look so good itself—she never knew what it was, boy or girl—Leah only referred to it as
it,
barking instructions to whoever was closest when her child seemed most bent on self-destruction:

“Stop it. Get it down from there. Move that plug away from it.”

Whatever it was, the child was still covered with red spots. It had an amazingly deep, hacking cough, and it sneezed and drooled constantly as it crawled over the coats. Himmelfarb yelled and screamed when he saw it.

“What if the inspectors was to come in now? They’re always worryin’ about gettink the cholera from the coats!”

Leah would take the baby off and put it on the floor. Within a few seconds it would be back on top of the piles, wheezing and hacking its way along. She paid more attention to how many coats Esther was felling, and Esther could hear her, whispering loudly to the others:

“Look at her, the bundle-eater! A little piece of wretch like that, takink the money from our pocket. And with a whole family at home she can eat off!”

Esther blushed and kept her head to her work, face burning with resentment.
What person was there in the world who didn’t have to work?
she wanted to tell her—aside from her own father, the angel.
Who was she to add to her troubles?

Yet when the week turned, and Esther came back to work after the Sabbath, Leah was not on her stool. She got up the courage to ask the other women about it, she was so surprised, but they only shrugged, and looked uncomfortable. When she got up the courage to ask Himmelfarb, he shrugged, too—as if a flood, or some other act of nature had taken Leah away:

“What do you want from me?” he asked her, accusingly. “I don’t have room in my shop for every beggar on the street.”

She never did find out what happened to her. Leah had disappeared as suddenly and completely as if the floor had opened up and swallowed her. Esther took her place—the other girls letting her in now, on their side of the table. The laughter stopped, and much to her surprise she seemed to be the leading feller in the shop now. At the end of the day, Himmelfarb the cockroach boss always had one more coat he brought over to her. Even after nine o’clock, when all the others were slowly unbending from their places, finally ready to go home, he would still drop one more in front of her.

“A special order,” he would say. Or: “We need this one for the morning.”

“He’s sweatink you because you’re young,” her mother fretted when she came in later than ever.

Yet Esther would always sit back down and do it without a word—convinced that it must count for something, somehow. She was proud of her new status, her position as number one girl in the shop. Yet when the week was up and she went to Himmelfarb for her pay, he only sniffed at her.

“How many coats did you do?”

“One hundred an’ sixty-two.”

“And you think that is a week? I’ll tell you what a week is,
knaydl.
A week is two hunerd an’ fifty coats! You do two hunerd an’ fifty, you get paid for a week.”

Esther stood before him speechless over the blatant unfairness of it all. Yet she knew there was no alternative. There was no one to stand up for her: not the others at the shop table, certainly not her family. She realized then, for the first time, how fully alone she was.

She had to work right through
Shabbos
and into the following Tuesday to get the pay that was rightfully hers. She didn’t even bother trying to explain it to her father when she walked in the house after sunset on Friday, and worked all day Saturday—but then she noticed that he did not press her for an explanation, either.

“Un’ wie soll es gut gehen in Amerika?”
was all he uttered, the standard refrain of the neighborhood—
How can anything possibly go well in America?

It was the same lament he had made when he had lost his rabbi’s position, or when Lazar had left them, or when he could not get decent sour cream in the morning. And she resolved, then and there, to violate the Sabbath every week for the rest of her life.

When she did finally finish the week she dropped the last of the two hundred and fifty immaculately lined coats into the lap of Himmelfarb himself. He dropped three small stacks of quarters into her hand.

“Three dollars?” she said, counting it at a glance. “That’s all?”

“American children always want things over their head. I’m doink a favor keeping you on, a girl your age.”

She stayed where she was, trying to keep from crying—or letting her fury overwhelm her.

“Don’ch you like it, lump it,” he shrugged. “You think I can’t get a dozen like you?”

“He will hurry me to my death in there,” she told her mother that night, but she just rubbed her hands together nervously.

“Go along until you get to the rush,” she told Esse. “Vait ‘til he needs you too much.”

“Ah, America the thief,” her father sighed reflexively, and went back to his paper.

Soon she was not only doing the best work, she was felling far more coats than anyone else around the table. The other girls looked on her with open jealousy, but they had no time to do anything about it. Himmelfarb, on the other hand, was ecstatic: the faster they worked, the more he increased the load, spending all day leaning over them at the table, screaming for them to go faster still.

The fatigue pressed down on her all the time now. She learned to work with it, finding her way to what energy was left in her like a swimmer trapped under the ice, fighting her way to the air pockets. At home, she insisted on eating heavily despite her father’s moaning that she would blow up like an Irisher cow. She grew broader, sturdier, more resilient.

She began to almost enjoy the extra work, at the end of the evening, alone with Himmelfarb in the shop. At least then the day was nearly over—and she tried not to think about how she was waiting for her whole life to be over, one day at a time.

She was a little nervous to be alone with Himmelfarb, but all he did was pray. She could hear him in the next room, once the machines were quiet, the only other sound the faint rustle of vermin under the coat piles.

Himmelfarb was what they called a double-harness Jew—phylacteries wrapped around both arms, carefully tied in seven knots. She had seen him once, when she peeked through the curtain of coats into the cavelike back room. He was on his knees, rocking feverishly back and forth the way her father did at prayer, shawl over his shoulders, eyes shut tightly against the surrounding mountains of cloth.

One Friday night, no less, when she was alone in the front room, working on coat number two hundred and thirty-four, he kissed her. He walked out of the back as if he were in a trance, and kissed her on the mouth.

Esther was so surprised that she didn’t move at first. She had never been kissed before, never experienced anything like it. She began to stand up—arms flailing out to each side, feeling like some ludicrous heroine in the motion pictures calling for help. Himmelfarb clutched her fervently at the waist, kissing her all over her face, stroking one hand across her cheek.

How ridiculous,
was all she could think, even then.
My first real kiss, in a subcontractor’s shop.

And yet, somehow, for all that she almost welcomed his touch. The hot, sour breath on her lips, his hand on her cheek—the touch of any other person, breaking the isolation in which she lived.

“Esse, Esse,” he was gasping, sinking down to his knees among the coats.

“Esse—you are my best feller hand.”

She started to laugh convulsively.

“Your best feller hand?”

It was all she could do to push him away; she was nearly out of breath with laughing. He groped for her, the phylacteries still tied to his sleeve.

“No.
No,”
she said with sudden contempt, standing over him.

She felt no fear, despite the fact that she was still a child then. She felt immeasurably superior to the man—now kneeling on the floor, arms still stretched out toward her. She put her coat on and strode to the door, barely pausing on her way out:

“And from now on, I want to be paid by the piece!”

Himmelfarb was afraid of her after that. He no longer screamed at her, or insisted that she stay late. It placed her all the more above the others and she reveled in her superiority—but there was nobody now for her to talk to, in the shop, or anywhere else.

It was then that a new woman had come in, and everything had changed. Her name was Clara Lemlich, and nobody in the shop had seen anything like her. It was the height of the season, and Himmelfarb had been forced to hire her, but right from the start she made him regret it.

“Hey, Himmelbum—you lump of horse!” she would yell at him, giddy, almost unbalanced in her defiance, fierce, dark eyes spinning with indignation.

“All right with you we take a few minutes to eat like decent people?”

She stuck her tongue out at him when his back was turned, insulted him to his face. She was a little thing, barely five feet, with a thick tangle of hair, pretty bow mouth in a square face. Only a girl, really, not much older than Esther herself. Himmelfarb loathed her, but she was a skilled draper, and all he did was mutter that he had hired himself a real
kochleffl.

“Ah, you should have seen me back in Russia. Then, I had fire in my mouth!” she scoffed.

She talked constantly while they all worked—ladling out advice on work, cooking, life. Mostly she told them the epic story of herself, and her struggle to get to America.

“My mother and father wouldn’t even let me speak Russian in the house because we couldn’t go to the public school, but at the same time I wasn’t allowed to read the Talmud in Hebrew—just that little
shprekl
of a holy book in Yiddish.

“I did anything I could to get money for real books: sewed buttonholes, wrote letters for mothers to America. I bought all the Russian classics. Hid them underneath the meat pan, in the kitchen. Tolstoy! Gorky! Turgenev!”

She banged out the names on the table with her forefingers—so loud that Himmelfarb turned around, but said nothing.

“What better place to hide books from a man than under a cooking pan? He found them anyway—my mother must have given it away. He burned every one, right in front of me, in the kitchen stove.
Every
one!”

She paused in her sewing again, and they all paused with her—even the men on their machines. But when she spoke again, Clara’s voice was sure and matter-of-fact.

“It took me a long time to build my little library up again. It was much harder. This time, I hid them in the attic, where there were all kinds of things. When everyone was sleeping, late at night, or on the afternoon of the Sabbath, I would sneak upstairs and read. Then, one day, when I was ten years old, our neighbor saw me.”

“What happened?” Esther whispered. She could see all of them, even Himmelfarb, listening tensely, their hands forgetting their work completely.

“Well, I was lucky, kiddo, I can tell you.”

She chuckled at her good fortune.

“He was a very kind man. He was a saint! He never told my parents. Instead, he got me more things to read: pamphlets from the Socialists, the Zionists. The Anarchists, the underground. It was a very dangerous thing. My mother and father could have gone to prison if the police found out I had such things. But what of them—they burned books! I didn’t care. It was the beginning of my political education. By the time I was a woman, I was a revolutionary myself!”

“Were you? Were you a revolutionary?”

“Well, you know, I was still young,” she chuckled, holding up a coat to examine her work.

“I wasn’t so crazy about the Zionists, I got to admit. Go live in the desert with the Arabs? I liked the idea of blowing up the Czar!

“But then, one day, there was the pogrom in Kishinev. All my old comrades were speaking against the Jews—all in one day! My neighbor, that kindest of all men, he was in town on business. Somehow, he didn’t get himself killed but they bloodied his face for him. I can never forget it: watching him coming up the road, pulling his pony cart himself. His coat in rags, his goods all burned.”

Her voice was choked with emotion now, and they were all silent, imagining the terrible scene. Only years later, after watching Clara speak from the street corners, did Esther wonder at how she could make her audiences well up with the same emotions—make herself well up—time after time.

“And I knew then, there was no revolution coming in Russia—no revolution more than killing the Jews, anyway. I knew I had to come to America.”

“And you think there is a revolution here?” one of the men at the machines scoffed.

“You wait,
bubbeleh,”
she told him, dark eyes spinning.
“You—wait.”

Esther followed her around like a moon calf. It was Clara who helped her when she first became a woman. She was lining her fourteenth coat of the day when she felt a warm flush run through her abdomen, and then something rushed out of her and began to form a dark stain across the shapeless brown shift. It was nothing her mother had ever told her about. She sat there, watching the stain spread with only the vaguest idea what it was about, while the other girls sneered and held their noses, and Himmelfarb looked away with obvious disgust.

“It’s only your monthlies,” Clara had said, smiling, and insisted on taking her out to the dirty hall bathroom and getting her cleaned up despite Himmelfarb’s bleating about the rush.

“You’re a woman now,” she said almost tenderly, smiling at Esther in the close, noisome toilet. Then she slapped her twice, quickly, first one cheek and then the other, before Esther could raise a hand.

“That’s good luck,” she said soothingly, to the girl’s stunned face. “That’s congratulations. It’s what my mother did for me.”

“It hurt,” was all Esther could say.

“Ah,
mamaleh
—life is all about pain.”

That night, she had sat down and written out to Clara the first love letter of her life: