The Singing Fire (11 page)

LONDON, 1882

Frying Pan Alley

The grandmothers came. The west wind swept them into the channel, the mist of the river took them up. The newcomers jumped over Commercial
Street, the old divide between Jew and gentile, moving up and down and to the right along roads that turned blue on reformers’ maps as Yiddish signs were hung outside shops. Rents went up. In the backyards were workshops, chicken coops, foundries. There were Yiddish newsstands and Yiddish plays. Coffee houses opened where you could gamble in Yiddish. There were all kinds of chances and they wanted all of them. They had great hopes for their children, who were stringy as roosters, the boys almost as tough as the girls minding babies while waiting a turn to jump rope.

If you could hear a grandmother’s voice, she’d tell you why they came:
To argue about stuffed fish. You think that’s crazy? Then listen to me. Some cook it sweet, and the ones that cook with pepper think they’re better than the others. But in the
heim,
believe me, you would be grateful for anything. People that have plenty don’t leave home for the pleasure of living eight to a room in a house of prostitutes and criminals. A house? A ruin. Rats tear the paper off windows that have no glass. But in the street at least there’s a
heimisheh geshmeck,
a taste of pickles and smoked fish. Beer! Gin! Feh
—
what’s that! Someone should have a little schnapps. You write to them, Nehameleh. Just like I’m saying. Tell them how fine it is here. You think for this they’ll leave their home and their business?

But Nehama was sure that her family belonged here. She was saving part of every wage packet, and all that she’d done would be forgiven because it would have been for this: to bring her family to the free land. First Mother and Father, then sisters with their husbands and children. Enough of them to fill a house, a row of houses. She’d teach them all English and save them from lies. She wrote letters home, and her family wrote back with holiday wishes several times a year. If you held the thin paper to the light, words flew into the yellow candle flame. Whenever she wanted to jump away from the sewing machine, whenever the night called her, she thought of them and the roll of savings under a loose board.

In the sixth year of her freedom, Nehama wrote: “Dear
Tatteh
and
Mama
, may you live to be a hundred and twenty,
kein ein ahora
. I heard there are pogroms. The new czar hates the Jews. How is it in Plotsk? Will you come? I can send for you now….”

While she waited for their answer, the west wind was blowing fog
toward the Tower. It was unlike anything in the
heim
. One day the fog was brown, another green as a bottle. It was black, it was yellow, it was white as candles. At last the letter arrived.

“My dearest daughter, may no evil befall you. Don’t worry. We’re all right. Three of your sisters are pregnant,
kein ein ahora
. Your mother sees well only from one eye, all the less to see the troubles of these days. But thank God in heaven, there were no pogroms here. Of course home is home. The family, the house, the shop. Everything is here….” And in a large scrawl at the end in her mother’s hand, “Just stay well.”

Not coming? She couldn’t believe it. Nehama read the letter again. And no one was asking her to go home anymore. She held the letter until the sweat from her hands smeared the ink. She fell asleep holding it, and for the first time she heard her grandmother’s voice as a whisper in her dreams:
Nehameleh, just use your head. God gave men 613 commandments. To women the Holy One gave only 3. And why? Because a woman knows what to do. Her mother tells her what’s what and that’s how she knows. If she has no mother, then she should listen to her grandmother. Am I right? The
sound of it surprised her, but when she woke up, it was forgotten.

She was lodging with Minnie and Lazar and working as a plain sewer in a tailor’s workshop. The only reason she wasn’t a “best” by now was that women never were. The workshop was like a thousand others where all the cheap clothes of London were made by newcomers. It was in a small back room with a low ceiling, sewing machines on the table where four workers and the boss squeezed side by side, with just enough room between the table and the fireplace for a pressing table. The walls were peeling, the window looked out on a yard where chickens were slaughtered, the glass plastered with dirty feathers.

“You should be glad that you can’t smell it,” Minnie said to Nehama as she soaped seams. The window shook in the autumn wind. Lazar was pressing jackets with a coal iron, his cheeks red from the rising steam. At his feet one of the boss’s children played with broken buttons.

“Forget it,” Nehama shouted above the click-clack of her machine. Minnie’s face was drawn. They were all tired, working fourteen hours a day, and her eyes were tearing at the pain in her back. But fall and spring you worked until you fell. These were the busy seasons. Come
the cold of winter or the sweat of summer, you’d have no wages. Only time and hunger. “Let’s sing,” Nehama said. “Something from that play we saw. You know the one I mean,
The Tailor’s Fate
. It goes like this. ‘Grab a little drink,’” she sang, “‘as long as you’re among the living. Once you’re in the next world, no one’s going to give you any. There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow …’” The best machinist whistled along with her, though his eyes stayed on the cheap wool he was ballooning together under the hiss of gas jets.

He’d just been hired, a new hand in the workshop. He wore a checked jacket, a hat pushed back, and boots with one sole flapping. When he glanced in Nehama’s direction, she looked away, wondering how he could walk with a light step when his feet must be wet and raw. He wasn’t a big man, not much taller than she was. A narrow face, a short black beard, eyes that had an interest in everything as if anything could be laughed over except, perhaps, a young woman from the
heim
you’d like to talk with.

“So what’s going on here?” the boss asked.

“Didn’t you see
The Tailor’s Fate
?” Nehama asked.

“My fate won’t be worth a farthing if this order isn’t finished.” He was a thin man with the bad temper of someone who’s hungry but won’t let himself eat. He slept on a bench in his workshop and coughed up wool fibers.

“Your life’s not worth much even with ten orders,” Nehama said. There was the sound of a clattering pot in the next room, where the boss’s wife was nursing one of the twins while she cooked.

“No lip from you,” he answered. “There’s a dozen hands wanting work in the pig market.” He put out his cigarette and lit another.

“But skilled hands, not so many.” Nehama laughed. “Didn’t your grandmother tell you the old saying, Mr. Shiller: ‘Sing while you work, win at cards’?”

He pinched her cheek. “What should I do with you? A plain sewer that’s as good as a best I want. But your friend, Minnie, is another story. Her wages is charity. What do I need it for? So watch yourself, Nehama Korzen. Or out she goes.”

“So?” Nehama said while Minnie shushed her. A pot fell, the babies screamed, Mrs. Shiller was crying. “Come on. I’ll teach you one of my grandmother’s songs.”

“I’m warning you,” he said.

Nehama leaned forward, her sewing machine silent as she took her foot off the treadle and stared at him. She put her hands on top of the sewing machine, her chin on her hands, and she continued to stare, her eyes on the gap between his yellow teeth, until he ran out of threats. Mr. Shiller then got very busy, sorting through the pile of jacket pieces cut in the factory as if the world was held in place by fifty-two sleeves and twenty-six backs. And when she began to sing, cigarette ash fell from his cigarette onto the floor.

Nehama pumped her sewing machine again, lifting her eyes to meet the curious gaze of the new hand. “It takes more than a wage to make me someone’s dog,” she said.

After work he followed her into the glaze of darkness outside. His name was Nathan, and as he opened his mouth to speak, he coughed, searching his damaged boots for inspiration.

“What do you want?” she asked. Nathan cleared his throat, glancing at the stalls with secondhand goods.

“Soon I’m going to the Jewish Board of Guardians.” He took his hands out of torn pockets to push his hat back even further, smiling at her as if it was a joke they shared, this shyness of his, and he said, “For a loan. I’m going to buy a sewing machine.”

“You think you’ll get it?” They pushed by the seller of a nearly new left shoe and the buyer of an ounce of sugar. Shops were open till midnight, the shopkeepers standing outside calling to them: “Fresh.” “New.” “Cheap.” “Beautiful.” “Delicious.”

“Every penny,” he said, matching his steps to hers, though he didn’t try to take her arm. And lucky for him or she’d have pushed him into the gutter. “Giving money away, they’re against. It’s hard to imagine, but the English Jews don’t believe in charity. It makes them look bad in front of the gentiles, who say that charity turns people into paupers. But a pauper isn’t just a poor man.”

“No—then what?” she asked, looking at his eyes in the light from a dress shop.

“He’s a poor man that expects something from the richer.” Nathan winked. “But a loan is something else. I pay him interest. I give him collateral. Well, what can I say? There’s a profit—it’s business. And Londoners believe in business more than in God.” He laughed, and she
laughed with him, surprised that she could like a strange man. But then he asked her, “Where are you from?”

And she realized that he was just like anyone. It begins with that: Where are you from? Why, I’m from there, too. What a coincidence. And her face felt like ice. “A small town. Nowhere special,” she said.

“Of course. We’re all from someplace worse—or we’d stay there, right? My father asked me not to change my name, but I can’t make up my mind. Tell me, am I a good son or not?” He was looking at her as if she could tell him what he was and it would be true.

But how could she like a man she couldn’t smell? Maybe he stank of onions. Maybe something nicer, like cigars. How could she tell? She’d smelled nothing for years, not the sweat of newcomers or the rubbish on the landing outside her room or the burnt wick of a candle winking out. A world without odor, a half world without flavor.

“Let me walk with you,” he said, breathing hard as if they were running, though a person could make his way only slowly in the nighttime crowd just released from work.

“Do I own the street? Walk where you want.” She stopped to get some hot chestnuts from a cart, and he stopped with her. “Where are you from?”

“A wild field,” he said. “My father had a small flour mill in the middle of the countryside. I used to fish for trout in the stream. We had to travel two days to the nearest town with a synagogue for holidays.” Jews that lived among the peasants didn’t have an easy time. They were neither here nor there, and when they came to a synagogue, they were told to stand at the back as if they’d brought a disease with them. But his voice was untroubled.

“Yes,” she said, holding out the sack of chestnuts. “I remember the holidays at home.”

“I didn’t go to school,” he said. The warmth of his body was pushing away the cold night air. “I taught myself, and I have to tell you, a prodigy I wasn’t.”

“My sisters taught me,” she said. The Lane was narrowing into Sandys Row, the crowd thinning, the stalls giving way to old military shops, the wind brushing her with its memory of the sea.

“I heard a joke and I have to tell someone. Do you want to hear it?”

“Is it any good?” she asked.

“No, it’s a terrible joke. After all, we just met. I have to save the good ones.”

“Tell me.” And she laughed at the joke though it was very bad because the sound of his voice was pleasant and the desire to know whether he smelled of fish or wet wool was a dark pain making love to everything she knew.

Nathan walked Nehama home every evening with a bad joke for all occasions, even the High Holy Days. Already half the Yiddish-speaking men and most of the women had stopped going to synagogue on the Sabbath. Of course they lit Sabbath candles and kept kosher. To reformers they seemed very pious. But in the Days of Awe, when a person ought to tremble before God, there was more than one man around the corner from the synagogue, taking a break with a cigarette, Nathan among them.

While inside, the ram’s horn sounded. The people stood shoulder to shoulder in the heat of their sins and their strivings as they had since the wind swept light into darkness, before towers or bridges or factory smoke, before girls longed to run away. And in the women’s section, with her eyes closed, Nehama Korzen could be anywhere, was everywhere, crying out with them all: “We begin as dust and we end as dust. At the hazard of our life we earn our bread. As a fragile vessel. As a shadow that passes. As a dream that flies away …”

She was standing next to Minnie, who beat her chest carefully so as not to damage her new holiday blouse. As soon as the confession was over, Minnie leaned against the back wall. “I want a hat like hers.” She pointed to the woman sitting in front of them. “Not one feather but two. Pink like my sleeves.” Minnie was pregnant. Just enough to need the waist of her skirt let out.

“Really.” Nehama was thinking of a time when her own waist had thickened. And when it thinned again, she could imagine that it had never been any different.

Minnie yawned with the tiredness of carrying two souls. “You should have a new hat, too.”

Nehama was bareheaded, like all the unmarried women and girls.
“I don’t want another hat,” she said. Her body was hers and she was full of her own strength.

“But you do. It doesn’t matter if you’re married or not. Every girl in London wears a nice hat. You should have one with an ostrich feather like this.” Minnie made a swooping gesture with her freckled hand. “Just think of it, Nehama. A purple ostrich feather.”

“I like blue,” Nehama said. So why should she wonder what the child she’d lost might have been?