The River Midnight (16 page)

When he came home, he sat at the table over a volume of the Talmud, swaying, chanting softly as he glanced at Emma and Izzie lying on their cot in the kitchen while he studied by candlelight, often falling asleep at the table. Mama would get up during the night and lead him to their bed, pulling off his boots and covering him with a blanket. Then she would sit at the table, spoiling her eyes with piecework in the dim light of the candle until it burned out. Sometimes Emma woke up, and her mother would tell her stories about Blaszka while Emma, wrapped in Papa’s old coat that smelled of sewing machine oil, perched on a stool beside her.

My friends used to tell secrets in the woods, Mama would say, and Emma would think of fairy tales and castles where the King always had wine for
Shabbas
and the Queen’s eyes didn’t water. In the winter, Mama would say, When the river was frozen, we used to slide on the ice. How they teased me, especially Misha, because I wanted to marry a scholar like your papa. But why shouldn’t I? For a man to study Torah and his wife to support him—there’s nothing higher. That’s what I was taught.

*  *  *

“P
APA WAS
lucky,” Emma said to Ruthie. “Scholars and rabbis ended up in the basement of the factory washing dirty old clothes with benzene, the fumes choking them. But my papa learned to be an operator on a sewing machine. At first he wouldn’t work on the
Shabbas
, and no one would hire him. But then he said that he would pray over his sewing machine. Praying didn’t help him much. In the slow season they let him go first because he didn’t make a stink about it. Even in the busy season they’d take fifty cents to rent him the machine and so much off for fines and in the end they miscounted but said that Papa lost a dollar, he was so careless. All week he looked forward to the glass of wine he had on Friday night. Wine that’s blessed for
Shabbas
is a taste of paradise, he said. When Papa was out of work, I carried finished cloaks from the contractor back to the factory. I could make thirty cents and it paid for the wine.

“That day when Papa was in the Pig Market, I had work for the day. Izzie was following me even though he should’ve been in school. I was carrying maybe thirty cloaks over my head and shoulders, all done except for the buttonholes, walking with my head bent on Hester Street. I didn’t see the contractor hurrying to the Pig Market and I bumped into him. I fell onto the stone pavement in a pile of cloaks. I was lucky. Maybe if I didn’t fall on a few coats I’d break an arm. But it so happened this was the same contractor who gave me the cloaks. He yelled, but that was nothing. He gave me a slap, too. Izzie started crying.

“ ‘Don’t think I’m going to pay you a cent,’ the contractor says. ‘You’re going to work off the cost of cleaning those cloaks.’

“ ‘You’re going to pay me or I’ll leave them right here and you can take them,’ I say.

“ ‘So you think,’ he says grabbing my arm. ‘Stealing right from under my nose are you?’

“His fist was like iron. I just couldn’t wriggle free even though I twisted this way and that. He piled all the cloaks on top of my head and was dragging me over to the cops. The cloaks were smothering me. I couldn’t see a thing and all I could smell was the glue they used to fix the collars. Then I felt the cloaks lifted off my head. I saw this fellow, he wasn’t so very old, maybe eighteen. And he wasn’t so very big, either, but there was something different about him. Even though he was thin he didn’t have the hungry look that everyone else had. Not
the scared look either. Once I asked him about it and he said, ‘I’m not alone. The brotherhood stands with me. If I fall, someone takes my place. They carry on.’ ” Here Emma turned her face from Ruthie, pressing her lips tight.

“What happened?” asked Ruthie, her voice softening.

“Well, he saved my behind, that’s all. He put his face right up against the contractor’s nose and growled about the workers’ rights and strikes and the contractor put thirty cents in my hand and just ran off. He said, ‘The boss. Look at him run, tail between his legs. A dog caught with his nose in dreck.’ The wind was blowing against the contractor’s back and his coat flapping between his legs was just like the tail of a scared dog. We all laughed. This fellow’s name was Dov Baer and we became great friends. He wore a brown fedora, and he looked like a Russian with his long hair and his canvas shirt hanging out of his pants.” Emma took a penny out of her pocket. A hole was punched in the center. “Dov gave it to me. You see this? No face in the middle. Just a hole to show that nobody should be the boss of you.”

“My Grandfather Yekhiel used to say that a person has to live with his own conscience and that’s all,” Ruthie said. “I never met him but people still talk about him. He had a printing press in the woods. It was hidden in an old hut. He printed pamphlets there during the Polish insurrection.”

“Insurrection?”

“A revolt. Against the Russians,” Ruthie said. “The January insurrection in ’63.”

“You mean like the War of Independence?” Emma asked excitedly.

Ruthie nodded. “Only it failed.”

“Is it still there, the hut and the printing press?” Emma asked. “I’d like to see it.”

“I don’t know. That was another time. It’s dangerous to hang around places like that.”

“Living is dangerous,” Emma said. “Show me? Promise.” She held out her hand. The two girls stared at each other, eyes glittering. Ruthie stretched out her own hand in promise.

I
N THE
pleasant gray of nothingness, Emma took up the garment on the table, checking that the sides were evenly matched. When she was little, Emma loved to watch her mother sew. The fingers moving up
and down, in and out so fast that Emma couldn’t see the needle. Where’s the needle, Mama? Emma would ask. And Mama would answer, You don’t need to see something to know it’s there,
mamala.
Only look what it does. Your
bubbie
didn’t like to sew, she was too impatient, but my Auntie Fruma said that I had to learn. So she taught me and I’ve never been fined for spoiling a garment. You see, you can never know what will turn out to be useful in life. And Emma would watch how the stitches ran through the cloth like magic.

D
OWN BELOW
in Blaszka, it was the eve of both spring and Purim, and Emma was arguing with Great-aunt Alta-Fruma.

“Where were you?”

“Go ahead. Smack me.” She wasn’t going to tell Alta-Fruma, who was standing in front of Emma with her hand raised, a thing. Was it anyone’s business that she and Ruthie were checking over the printing press hidden in the woods?

“God help me, what am I going to do with you?” Alta-Fruma’s hand fell. She shook her head. “Never mind. Go get ready for synagogue.”

“I’m not going.” Emma crossed her arms. “And Izzie shouldn’t either. His head is all muddled with superstition. He’s got to learn that bosses run things, not his miracle-making rebbes. People have to fight for themselves.”

“I don’t want you filling his head with your ideas. He’s a good boy.”

“I never went to synagogue at home.”

“That’s fine for America but not Blaszka. Here everybody sees who and what you are.”

“It’s nobody’s business.”

“It’s mine.”

“As long as I’m working for my keep, you can’t boss me around. The Klembas sisters were sick today and I did everything. Set the cheese. Put three rounds of butter to cool in the river.”

“And?” Alta-Fruma asked, hands on her hips.

“So the butter floated downstream. It was an accident. You didn’t have to pull my ear.”

“We can dress up,” Izzie said. “It’ll be fun, Em. I always used to go with Papa.”

She continued to scowl at her great-aunt. “I’m not going.”

“Fine. Do what you want. Come, Izzie,” Alta-Fruma said, turning her back on Emma.

Later when Alta-Fruma and Izzie came home, laughing and singing, Emma was sitting at the table, rereading
The Origin of Species.
Izzie was dressed in Emma’s clothes, a pair of brown stockings twisted and pinned to his head for her braids. Alta-Fruma wore the veils of the disobedient, deposed Queen Vashti, her green eyes looking through Emma. My mother had green eyes, Emma thought.

“I wish you’d been there,” Izzie said.

“Don’t tell me about it. I’d rather be doused with ice water.”

The wind rose, thunder crashed, and ice pellets pounded the roof. “It’s a miracle,” Izzie said, clapping his hands. Emma pinched him.

I
N THE
gray nothingness above, Emma floated from one side of the table to the other, abandoning the garment as she looked up at the Lower East Side. Past Essex Street, on Delancey, she could see the rag shop and above it the Anarchist Free Press with its notice on the door,
LET THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE BE HEARD
. The door was open. Inside, Dov was painting a sign.

A ten-year-old girl sat on the printer’s table, swinging her heels, sucking an orange, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as she swallowed. “Nice hat,” she said, pointing to a brown fedora on the window ledge. She belched and grinned. In the corner by the window, a black flag fluttered dustily in the breeze. The window was propped open on the three volumes of
Das Kapital
, relegated there to show the anarchists’ distaste for the dry and authoritarian Mister Marx. The knife grinder’s bell rang, a pushcart clattered over the cobblestones, a
voice sang, “Genuine dirt from Jerusalem. Buy a piece of earth from the Holy Land. Only seventy-five cents.”

A short woman in her early twenties heaved a bundle of newspapers onto the table. “So Dov, who’s your guest?” she asked.

“Emma Goldman meet Emma Blau. I found her in front of the Pig Market. What a piece of luck. She can help me translate this pamphlet into Yiddish. I’ll pay her five cents a paragraph, and she won’t have to skip school to shlep cloaks from the workshop to the factory.”

“You should get ten from him,” the woman said. “Demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. Take your sacred right with your own hands.”

“What?” young Emma asked.

“Ignore her,” Dov said. “She’s practicing her speech. Look, I’ll give you ten cents a paragraph. It has to be clear so the ordinary man can understand. Women, too. Boys, girls, all workers. And my Yiddish is no good. In Vilna my father said we should only speak Russian, it was the gateway to the world. The ghetto jargon? Who needed it? But it’s the language of the newcomers and you were born to it.”

“Are you calling me a greenie?” Emma asked, jumping down from the table, fists ready. “Take it back. Nobody calls me a greenie. I’m an American.”

“Of course you are. As much as anyone,” Emma Goldman said, ruffling Dov’s hair until it stood up in a cock’s comb, slapping away his hands when he tried to smooth it straight. “They call him the
Maggid
of the Pig Market, but he hardly looks the part of a preacher, now does he, little Emma?”

Dov put down the paintbrush. “Five cents now. Five cents when you’re done,” he said. “You go to school tomorrow, you read this book. After school you come here. Work on the pamphlet. Meet some of the others, Sally, Ed. We talk.” He handed her a red volume.
The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin.

“All that for ten cents?”

“Okay. You can wear the hat, too.”

“And I’ll show you how to waltz,” the woman said.

“Emma, we have work to do,” Dov protested.

“So what? It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance.” Emma Goldman laughed, lifting her hands for young Emma to take hold.

*  *  *

“M
AMA
, look what I have. Five cents just for translating a pamphlet into Yiddish for Dov. And a book about animals. Look how thick it is.” Emma’s mother was washing the boarder’s laundry in a tin basin. Papa was sleeping.

“What kind of pamphlet?” Mama asked.

Emma shrugged. “Something about workers. Dov says they should get paid. What are we having for supper?”

“Potatoes and onions.”

“Again?” I’ll have to nick a bagel from the pushcart for Izzie, Emma thought.

“Papa didn’t get work,” Mama said.

“I got an orange from Dov. And one for Izzie, too.” Emma held it out to her mother. Zisa-Sara put it on the shelf.

“Let me see the book.” Zisa-Sara opened it. The pages were made of fine paper, the printing clear. “I want to meet this Dov that gave you five cents and an orange, Emma. Is he a nice person?”

“Sure, Mama. I’ll bring him home. He’s a writer.”

“A writer,
nu
,” Papa said, sitting up. “That’s good. A thinker. Where does he work?”

“The Anarchist Free Press.”

Emma’s father frowned. “Anarchists. Unbelievers.”

But Mama said, “Don’t worry what he believes. If he has a kind face then he’s welcome at my table.” Mama looked out the window. “There’s Mrs. Agostino. Hello, Mrs. Agostino,” she called out in English. Mrs. Agostino looked up with a smile, waving both her plump hands. “She’s nearly due,” Mama said, “and she can hardly walk up the stairs. I’m going to run down and help her. You sit and read, Emma. Do I want my daughter to be a pieceworker when she grows up?”

I
N
B
LASZKA
the woods were green and the swallows had returned to their nests. It was early May, a week after Passover. Through a hole in the roof, the sun formed a puddle of warmth on the earthen floor where Emma sat on her haunches. She looked contentedly at the walls freshly chinked with moss and mud, the wind yelping uselessly outside. Ruthie was scraping rust from the printing press. “If my mother
finds out what I’m doing on
Shabbas
, I’ll never hear the end of it,” Ruthie said.