The Singing Fire (15 page)

She must be mixed up. After all, when people emigrate, families can be split up for years. How are you supposed to recognize someone?

“You must have me confused with someone else,” Emilia said, answering in Yiddish as she tried to snatch her case back, but the woman pulled her closer.

“Shh. Listen to me; I’m not your cousin,” she said. “But him, he’s not your
landsmann
either. Where are you from?”

“Why is everyone so curious?” Emilia asked. “But if you must know, it’s Minsk.”

“Well, keep it to yourself or every shark you meet will claim to be a Minsker. I think you should know that man over there is a pimp.”

“A what?”

“You heard me.” A pimp—was it true? He looked so kind. And this woman with eyes like the sky of ancient Israel and her hair throwing off hairpins in the wind from the river, what was she? “There hasn’t been very much work. If a man is fat, he’s living off someone else, you can be sure of it. And you are?”

“My name is Emilia,” she said.

“That’s an unusual name for a Jewish girl.”

“Well, it’s mine. Emilia … Levy. I’m Mrs. Levy.”

“So all right, Mrs. Levy. Do you have somebody here? A relative, a friend. I can put you in a hansom cab.”

Emilia shook her head. “No one.” The woman was looking at her as if she were a new sort of insect. A girl on her own. Like a grub that eats cabbages. It has to be picked off and disposed of. “Don’t I have to register with the authorities or something?” Emilia asked brusquely.

“Aah,” the woman in the red shawl said, her face clearing. “That’s exactly why I’m here. To tell you there’s no such thing.”

A crowd of sailors and their women were tumbling out of a tavern. The woman pulled Emilia aside into a doorway where a parrot swung inside a cage. “No Jewish Council? Nothing?” Emilia asked.

“There is a Jewish Board of Guardians. They’d find a place for you. Yes, that’s where you should go. I’ll take you. And they’ll put you in a house where you can be the lady’s maid or something like that. Maybe a governess. I’m sure you’d make a nice governess.”

“No,” Emilia said. “They wouldn’t want me in a month or two.” She put her hand on her belly. “My poor husband …”

The other woman’s eyes flashed with pain—why should Emilia’s troubles matter to her?—but she just shrugged as she said, “It’s not my business if you have a baby coming. Tell me where you want to go.”

“I should get a room. I have a trunk,” Emilia said. The little purse of money under her skirt wouldn’t last forever. But she had to have a place to sleep.

“A trunk.” The woman sighed. The parrot squawked. “Well, if you have nowhere else to go, you can lodge with me. I’m Nehama Katzellen. My husband is a tailor.”

“You have a room to let?” Emilia asked. Oh, please do. She was so tired, and the frozen heart that had got her this far was starting to hurt as if it were waking up all pins and needles.

“Just a bench. Better than the floor,” Mrs. Katzellen said. The parrot looked from one to the other, eyes bright as those of a matchmaker meeting with prospective in-laws.

“How much?” Emilia asked.

“A shilling a week,” Mrs. Katzellen said. “A room will cost you six.”

Emilia wondered how many shillings a purse full of rubles would buy. “All right,” she said. The parrot drank from its little bowl and began to sing a sailor’s song.

“Come with me and hold up your skirt,” Mrs. Katzellen said.

They walked through corrugated streets where wheels pushed mud and dung into sticky dunes the color of babies’ stools. Women lifted their skirts; children stamped on the ridges. Emilia’s eyelashes were wet. It must have been the damp from the river. It would be terrible for her mother’s hands. So it was all for the best that she’d come alone and her mother would realize it herself. Surely, she would.

Ravens cawed, their wings clipped to keep them at the Tower. Above them chimneys scraped the sky with burnt coal while Nehama led her new lodger through busy streets, thinking that she could slip into the crowd if someone tried to grab her. She was listening for the sound of thick boots hitting the ground with a pimp’s stride and a voice calling, “Hi! You there!” But all she heard was the light click-click of her new lodger’s footsteps, the clash of a pawnbroker’s bells, someone calling “cat’s and dog’s meat,” the thud of a coffin sliding into a hearse, and her own heart beating out an old Yiddish street song:
And so it turned out, when the pimp took her hand, she became as still as the walls
.

Nehama gasped for breath, a stitch in her side as she caught sight of the first Yiddish sign outside a store: “Smoked fish on special.” And over there was a bill posted on a wall, “Fireworks! Complete Orchestra! The Great Jacob Adler Plays Tonight!” Soon there were more bills and more signs in the
mama-loshen
, and she was pushing her way into a
crowd of women in red shawls. No one could find her here. Not in Frying Pan Alley, a street like a heart that expands and contracts, taking in countless stalls and barrows and at the end of the day squeezing them out so that the walls meet and even darkness can’t reach down to touch the ground. She let the shawl slip from her head. Right behind her was the new lodger, Mrs. Levy, golden-haired and brilliant in her finery; no baby would run away from such housing.

Frying Pan Alley

The ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg seemed perfectly comfortable in Frying Pan Alley, which was more than Emilia could say for herself. Perhaps the dead are more adaptable because they don’t have to contend with a wardrobe. In Emilia’s trunk there were evening dresses, day dresses, and tea gowns, but not a single ghetto dress—something shapeless, colorless, and slightly higher than the ankle to sweep above the ridges of rubbish and horse dung in the East End streets where Yiddish was the official language. It was called the Ghetto by streetcar drivers, journalists, parliamentarians, and reformers, and Emilia sometimes laughed in the middle of the day, thinking that she had left the Pale of Settlement imposed by the czar only to find herself in the Ghetto.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même
, she would say. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The difference between the rich and the poor was in the number of buttons they had on their gowns. The poor couldn’t afford a maid to do them up in back. It was Nehama who helped her dress in the morning while the husband pulled trousers on over his
langeh gatkes
, the long underwear darned in rough ridges like scars. He told bad jokes, his wife scooped a fly out of the pitcher and poured the milk into his teacup. She had everything and nothing. A home, a husband, a place in the world, all of it secondhand like the shabby goods in the rag market. And she would offer Emilia the same fly-spoiled milk as if Emilia could swallow a drop.

There was a stain on the elbow of Emilia’s sleeve as she bent over the trunk. It was used as a bench in the workshop; at night a straw pallet was thrown on it and there she slept. She scratched a bite on her wrist.

“You have to squeeze bedbugs like this,” Nehama said, pinching
her thumb and forefinger together. They were both in the back room, the trunk on one side of the table with its two dark sewing machines, Nehama sitting opposite. Behind her the pressing table was against the wall.

“I’d rather be bitten. It smells horrid.” The stench didn’t seem to bother Nehama. Nothing ever bothered her. She was as steady as a rock, as impervious to delicate feeling.

“You’ll get used to it. Listen to me. If you take that dress out of the trunk, it’s going to be covered with soot,” Nehama said.

“I have to put things in order.” Every morning Emilia took out the contents of the trunk and put them back in again. Refolding the silk gowns on the worktable made her forget that there was no water to bathe and she was starting to stink.

“It’s worth something, what you have in that trunk.” Nehama was looking at the gowns with a competent eye, the sort of eye that would not blink as it added tiny sums to arrive at the penny left over from a wage packet.

“Thank you.” Emilia placed a gown of gold brocade into the trunk.

“I’m not giving you a compliment. Listen to me. A widow that has a child coming needs money. But if you dirty everything, what good will it be?”

“As good to me as your room is to you.” Emilia dropped the lid of her trunk, digging the key into the lock and snapping it to the right.

“I can’t argue with that—you’re sleeping on the trunk.” Nehama knotted the thread with a quick flick of her fingers, a hint of derision in her voice.

How could a rock know what Emilia felt?

She’d worn the same dress all week. When she walked, and she had to walk in the street—the rooms held the heat like a baker’s oven—her gown fell in sad, ragged folds, the hem dragging in the sewage that dribbled through the gutter. People jostled her, they shouted at her to buy things. She’d never handled a
kopeck
, and now she had a purse of money. It was all she had, and they wanted it, they pressed her for it, they begged her for it, and she felt herself weakening, doling out a handful of coppers, feeling a flush of pleasure as she chose this or that
until she looked in her hand and saw the object that had glittered in a barrow now dim and cracked and useless.

“Look. I can make you a dress and you can save what you have in the trunk. You want it or not?” Nehama asked.

Emilia sat on the trunk, leaning her stained elbows on the worktable. “How much would you charge?”

“Just pay for the material,” Nehama said. Her head was bent, her eyes on the buttonholes of the jacket, the thick needle quickly drawing thread in and out. “You see the sewing machines are quiet, and Nathan went to Soho to look for work. It’s the slack season. I have time.”

“I don’t want a gift. No, you must have a little something for your trouble. Let’s see what I have for you.” She unlocked the trunk again, looking for the sort of trinket that would appeal to someone in Frying Pan Alley. “Maybe this?” It was a beaded purse, a present from Freida. Mother had packed it so the maid’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

Nehama reached down and picked up the book that lay on top of Emilia’s dressing case. “What is this?”

“It’s the German Bible. My mother and I used to read it together.”

“Why not the
Taitch Chumash
? Let me guess. In your house Yiddish was for the maid and the greengrocer. Maybe even the tailor that made your gown.” Nehama fingered the end of Emilia’s sleeve. “It’s not bad, this dress.”

“It was made by the best tailor in Minsk,” Emilia said.

“My father was a tailor. He made better. And he spoke Yiddish, too.” Nehama put the book back into the trunk, and although it was the scorned German Bible, she laid it down carefully, her hands lingering for a moment over the book as if reluctant to move away from the touch of it.

Emilia studied her, but all she could see was the same woman as before, poorly dressed and poorly bathed. Even so, she asked, “What book would you like?”

“Something in English. About economics,” Nehama said. “Do you have anything like that?”

“I don’t,” Emilia said. “I brought only a few books.”

“Well, what do you have?”

“This book is in English.
Fairy Tales and Stories.”

“That’s what you want to give me? A whole world there is and you want me to read grandmothers’ stories?” Nehama tapped the table with her thimble.

“It’s how I learned to read English,” Emilia said. “You’d be surprised what you can learn from a grandmother’s story. Would you take this for the dress?”

The dusty light from the window could hardly illuminate the eye of a needle as Nehama threaded it. She shook her head. “If you don’t give me anything, that’s all right. It’s charity. But if I’m not going to have a good deed written in the Book of Life, then I’ll want proper payment.” She smiled at Emilia as if they shared a joke, and even if it wasn’t clear what the joke was, a person ought to laugh anyway to have some pleasure. “One book isn’t enough. I’ll have three.”

“Two,” Emilia said. “Two and you make me a coat as well.”

Nehama laughed. “Two and no coat.”

“Agreed.” Outside donkeys brayed, barrows rumbled, children threw stones.

Nehama turned back to her jackets and her buttonholes. “You should come with us to the theater. My grandmother used to say that there are two kinds of souls. There is the soul in a song, and the soul in tears. If you have both of them, you are blessed and the Holy One will hear your prayers.”

“Personally, I think God is tired of prayers,” Emilia said, expecting to shock her landlady, for everyone knows that impoverished Jews are rich in piety.

But Nehama smiled as if this was the joke they shared, and she said, “So many prayers. They’re like the cries of the street vendors. Cheap, fresh, beautiful prayers. Who can buy them all? Tell me, Mrs. Levy, am I right?” Nehama looked at her with those bright blue eyes and Emilia wondered if she’d seen her come from the Lane with that broken clock yesterday, hiding it in the yard where a little girl was lifting her skirt to pee.

In the evening while her landlord and landlady were at the theater with their neighbors, Emilia sat in the front room, writing a letter blotted and pierced wherever her pen lost its footing on the rough surface of the table. She wrote by the light of a paraffin lamp, shadows hiding every feature of the narrow room. This was her favorite time of day, the noise of the street smothered in darkness.

My Dearest Mother,

The voyage was uneventful and I have settled in lodgings. I hope that Father’s temper has improved and that you have recovered from your untimely spell of “illness.”

My landlady and her husband have gone to the theater. Of course I did not join them. What use do I have for the Jargon? They have two rooms. I sleep in the back, which is a tailoring establishment. But do not think that I have any fear at all. My surroundings are certainly temporary. I have locked my trunk and put the key on a ribbon around my neck. My landlady shall make me a dress suitable for the ghetto, and I will save my things for a setting appropriate to them.