The Singing Fire (39 page)

The audience cried buckets of tears. There were even a couple of sniffs from the critics’ box. Emilia clapped with them, not knowing what it was she applauded as she thought about her half brothers. The older one was Gabriel, the younger Samael. Those were her father’s sons, of course. The other half brother, the one that was the miller’s
son, found his father fallen among the flour sacks after his heart gave out. Mama didn’t know what became of this half brother. He grew up, wasn’t that enough? But surely he had a name. Everyone deserves a name.

When the curtain rose on the next scene, Moses Angel was the white-haired headmaster of the Jews’ Free School. He sat at the teacher’s desk, under the map of the Empire and the portrait of the queen, telling the boys about his father. “This is how I came to be here. May his memory always be for a blessing,” he said to the boys in their rows of double desks. The spotlight on the old headmaster dimmed.

One by one, the boys stood up to face the audience, putting on their bowlers and homburgs and tall hats, and it became apparent that they had become men. Then the first of them said, “Whenever people called him the angel of the ghetto, the headmaster would say that he was nothing more than a messenger of his father’s. As it is written in the Book of Proverbs: My son, don’t forget what I’ve taught you here.”

The audience rose to its feet, and the thunderous applause shook the roof. Emilia whispered to Jacob that she must leave as she was dreadfully tired, but that he should stay among his friends and enjoy his moment. No one else would notice the ghost of the first wife on the dark platform, tearing apart a cradle made from an orange crate. Only the dead can afford to create a spectacle.

The Jews’ Free School

Ever since her twelfth birthday, Gittel had known that her first mother couldn’t be a baroness or a princess. No—she must be a singer, like Gittel, but she wasn’t shy and her voice never squeaked. One day Gittel would be sitting in the theater or a music hall and the crowd would hush as a beautiful lady came onstage. She would begin to sing, and then, as she looked over the audience, their eyes would meet, and for the first time in the illustrious singer’s career, her voice would falter as she recognized her daughter. And she would open her arms wordlessly as flowers poured onto the stage.

The girls’ choir was rehearsing in the Great Hall, still so new that it smelled of fresh pine. The material for the costumes had been donated by the trustees and made up into kimonos by the girls’ mothers. Gittel’s
was blue with roses on it. How lovely the blue velvet ribbon would be with it.

“Girls, girls! Louder, please. I wish the birds to hear you through the new roof,” Miss Halpern said. “Our Yum-Yum is feeling poorly today, so you must come forward and sing her part, Gittel.”

“I don’t know it, Miss Halpern.” Gittel had been careful to pronounce the
h
in her teacher’s name, so why was Miss Halpern frowning? She was older than Mama, her hair as gray as the fishmonger’s donkey, her blouse dark and her skirt dark and only a string of pearls for adornment.

“But I heard you myself,” Miss Halpern said. “I was coming from the drill hall.”

“Oh, but …” Gittel had come early for the rehearsal, and before anyone else arrived she’d sung every part on her own, standing in the light that came through the stained glass. “I don’t know it,” she said, scratching the back of her neck.

“Are you telling me a falsehood?”

“No, Miss Halpern. I swear I’m not.”

“Come on, then. ‘The sun whose rays are all ablaze …’ Let me hear you, please.”

Gittel stepped forward. Miss Halpern was waiting, the girls were all watching her, and she was wearing the nicest kimono of all, for Mama knew how to sew and it was just like something you might see on a real stage, but Gittel was now a fish, maybe a whitefish or worse, a carp, with its pouty lips opening and closing while the fishwife scooped it out of the water for someone’s
Shobbos
, and not a word could Gittel sing for she couldn’t breathe any more than the poor carp, dizzy in the terrible air.

Miss Halpern tapped her pointer on the podium. “I’m most disappointed, Gittel. I don’t expect defiance from my girls, but we’ll say no more of it. Just step off the stage. If you can’t be truthful, then you’ll not be in the choir. Clara, please come forward.”

Gittel stumbled off the platform and ran to the cloakroom, where no one could see her among the girls’ coats, her face puffy, her nose running, the beautiful kimono crushed as she kneeled on it. She didn’t mean to lie. She really didn’t. If her other mother was a famous singer,
then no wonder she left Gittel behind, seeing that she’d grow up to be a liar. But perhaps it was as Pious Pearl said. Her first mother was a madam in Dorset Street, and the teacher had to find out, oh yes, though she might wear a blue kimono with pink roses, there was no hiding what was underneath, was there?

Charlotte Street

Emilia pushed the window a crack to let in the cool wet air. She had to be nimble when people were awake, remembering what she’d said and guessing what she ought to do, but in the night she could just sit, looking at the streetlamps and the shadows of vagrants huddled over grates. Someone with a tray strapped to his chest was selling coffee to night-walkers. The wind was coming in from the sea as she watched the moon.

“Emilia—what are you doing?” Jacob asked sleepily.

She didn’t want to talk to anybody or explain herself. She wished only to watch the moon hanging like fruit on the corner of a chimney. Tomorrow she would finish the sketch for a paper-cut. “Shh. Nothing, I just want some air.”

He sat up, the moon bright enough to cast his shadow on the wall. “Should I fetch you some warm milk?”

“I hate milk. Just go back to sleep, Jacob.” She would make a paper-cut of the London moon and send it to her mother.

Jacob lit the lamp. “You were asleep when I came home from the theater.” On the chest of drawers there was a clock; behind it shadows were cast by the moon. He reached over to the bedside table and found his spectacles and his pipe. “What woke you up?”

“The baby was kicking.” She looked at the clock. It was three in the morning. The clock was mounted in a bronze casting of Lady Time, her arms raised above her head. There in her hands rested the timepiece. One might wonder if her arms didn’t get tired.

“Is that a postcard from Minsk you have there?” Jacob asked. “You’re never yourself when you hear from that old servant of your family’s. Those Russians are too morose.”

“She’s Polish. And anyway I’m drawing the moon.” There was a pencil and a sheet of paper on her lap, a book for a desk. In the picture the moon was hooked on to the side of a ruined chimney, but it was
only the start of a paper-cut. She wasn’t thinking of anything else, not of the house with the peaked gable in Goulston Street.

“Put it away and come to bed.”

“In a minute.” Emilia was drawing a house, its windows covered over with paper. There she’d once stood, pushed aside by the carolers while Nehama cursed as her bundle of laundry fell. I want to ask you something, Emilia had said. What would you do if you remarried and it turned out that your new husband didn’t want your child?

The Jews have an orphan asylum in Norwood, Nehama had said as she lifted the bundle from the street. The matron names the babies. There has to be someplace for children to go if they don’t have a mother. But even if I was dead, I would come back from the other world to look out for my child. You think anyone could stop me?

“I have a meeting tomorrow,” Jacob was complaining. “How can I sleep with you sitting there like that?” He wore pajamas, blue silk pajamas, for he was a modern man. The moon slid behind a bank of clouds. There was nothing more to do tonight. Emilia left her drawing on the window seat.

“My father didn’t want a child,” she said. She was fair like Jacob. Their heads were golden on their smooth pillows.

“Then he was a fool.”

“Do you think so?” When she used to read aloud in the workroom, she’d hear the rhythm of sewing while Nathan and Nehama, their dark heads almost touching, bent over their dark sewing machines. They must be there still, Nehama singing and Nathan working at breakneck speed until the order was done. The baby in the orange crate, its head covered with a dark fuzz, would be there no longer.

“The child is mine—that is British law.”

“Take it out if you like.” She pulled up her nightgown so that he could see her bare legs and her bulging navel. She took his hand and held it over her belly. In the street a woman was offering the vagrants a cut rate on her services. “Come on, Jacob. Take the baby and bring it with you to the Reading Room.”

“I can feel something,” he said.

“It’s your imagination.” She dropped her nightgown. In the Jews’ orphan asylum, there would be a girl with dark hair, neatly braided, in a row of other girls learning how to mend and scrub and peel potatoes
so they could make their way without anyone in the world. “This baby goes where I go.”

“Not without me. Even reformers admit that Jewish fathers are stuck on their families. And God knows the reports are damning enough. They have no love of Jews, I daresay.”

“Then why make your wife one?” Her voice was light, as if she weren’t wondering if the girl with braided hair looked like her at all.

“Exactly because she is the mother of my child.” Jacob kissed her, and her mouth was suddenly hungry for kisses. A woman after her fifth month doesn’t get enough of them, and kisses can swallow disruptive thoughts. “The beautiful mother of my child,” Jacob said.

A convert immerses herself in the ritual bath, naked before a witness who ensures that even the ends of her hair are covered by the water that changes her from flour into dough. Of course if you are dough already, it will only make you soggy like paste, the thin sort of paste used to put up theater posters.

Jacob turned out the lamp, and there were no more shadows as he covered her with kisses like the water of a
mikva
.

The Other Charlotte Street

The last new thing of the fin de siècle began when the London fog was at its thickest, yellow sulfur burning the lungs like hellfires. The British had annexed territories with gold and diamonds, and the Boers retaliated by laying siege to British towns in South Africa. The
Daily Mail
had a correspondent in Ladysmith, reporting the whiz of shells and the shrill of guns, and it was thrilling, this last new thing of the fin de siècle, when war came right into one’s sitting room.

Steam billowed through the cookshop window, carrying its odor of pork and cabbage up into the minister’s study, mingling with the smell of wood burning in the fireplace. Mr. Nussbaum was sitting behind his desk and put down the
Daily Mail
just as Emilia arrived for her appointment. There was talk of forming a Jewish Lads’ Brigade.

Zaydeh was with her, dressed like a workman, in an old wool cap and a jacket stuck together in a sweatshop with more soap than thread. He wished to see for himself whether the Reverend Mr. Nussbaum was kosher enough to make his grandson’s wife a Jew.

“Good morning, Mr. Nussbaum,” Emilia said. “This is my husband’s
grandfather, Mr. Karpman. He’s so kind as to keep me company today.”

“Please sit down, sir,” Mr. Nussbaum said to Zaydeh, pointing to the armchair opposite Emilia’s. There was no humor this morning in Mr. Nussbaum’s mobile face. “I’m so very pleased that you came today, sir. My father used to quote your treatise on the laws concerning malicious speech.”

“Me? No. It must have been someone else,” Zaydeh said quietly. He sat down, taking a Yiddish newspaper from his jacket pocket, unfolding it and smoothing it down, then engrossing himself in it as if he weren’t listening to every word, weighing and balancing and forming his judgments.

“Let us review a woman’s
mitzvos,”
Mr. Nussbaum said. He closed the scrapbook of clippings on his desk. A photograph of bayoneted men slipped out and floated to the floor. “You are not obligated by any of the time-bound commandments like formal prayer.” Zaydeh was nodding. “A woman’s first duty is to her children, though she has many other obligations. Charity, for instance.”

“Charity she knows,” Zaydeh said over his newspaper. “Doesn’t she get for me the best herring?”

“I’m sure of that, sir,” Mr. Nussbaum said, his eyebrows working themselves up and down as if to discover the wisdom that must be hidden in Zaydeh’s words. After all, he’d written a treatise.

“Don’t let me disturb you. Please.” Zaydeh waved his hand.

“Then let us consider the three commandments that are particular to women. Sabbath candles, the dough offering, and
niddah.”

Emilia grimaced but said only, “Oh.”

“Then your mother-in-law has explained it to you?” Even through the closed window they could hear the sound of a parade. It was not the parade of a Torah scroll dancing to a new synagogue but pipes and drums and marching men on their way to a ship.

“Yes, she tells me everything,” Emilia said. Zaydeh lowered his newspaper. “Everything,” she repeated. Hadn’t her mother-in-law told her about
niddah
before she got married? Surely she must have. Along with salting meat so that there was no blood in it and how many hours to wait until dairy could be served. She answered Zaydeh’s look with a shrug.

“I’m surprised your mother-in-law spoke of it. These days women among the better classes ignore this virtue, even though reformers say that the children of poor Polish Jews are born healthy because of it. However, in such private matters, one may not know everything. Please go on.”

“Is this really necessary?” Emilia asked.

“I’m sorry to embarrass you with a delicate matter, but I have to be sure that you know what a Jewish wife should. Don’t be shy—a rabbi deals with everything.”

Zaydeh rustled his newspaper and turned the page, even moving his lips to show that he was paying no attention to this. Outside the drums were beating time to “God Save the Queen.”

“Very well,” Emilia said, keeping her eyes on the collection of ancient oil lamps in the cabinet to the right of the desk. “A husband must not touch his wife during her time of month and for a week afterward or until her cloths are completely clean. Then she goes to the ritual bath and makes herself ready. I hope you’re satisfied now.”