The Singing Fire (6 page)

There were a dozen sailors, so each of the girls had two at a time, for which the Squire could charge triple the price. They ate and drank in the parlor with the girls on their laps, while the mirror turned them into twenty-four men and their drunkenness into forty-eight as the old prostitute brought out bottle after bottle, and Madam’s playing knocked flat the statue of Diana the huntress that stood on top of the piano. The lamps were made of lion glass, each one with a frosted lion reclining after his feed.

Nehama had the bald sailor and the one with two gold earrings. She fed them bites of sausage, first one, then the other, and in the mirror framed with gilt she was perched on a knee, laughing as well as the other girls. And just as quick as they did, she offered her breasts to a mouth, expecting it to bite and pull as usual, but instead the lips and tongue were soft. And when her sailors put up a bet of three sovereigns, she said, You’re on. Pulling up her gown, she spread her ass for the bald one and licked up the one with earrings right there in the parlor with the velvet sofa. She did it in front of everyone; she saw them watching her. The gold coins sparkled. The statue of Diana the huntress wobbled on top of the piano as Madam played. The one she licked didn’t stink as she thought he would. The surprise of it made her quiver, and as she dug herself deeper into the one behind her, she lost her sense of smell. God took it away and abandoned her to the evil inclination. This was her real ruin, and she knew she could never see her mother again. How was she to understand that it was the strength of her life asserting itself?
The difference between hell and earth is that, even in the midst of misery, the body can find some pleasure to keep it alive.

Her sisters used to tell her that when Grandma Nehama was eighteen, a marriage was arranged for her. Before she left home, she visited her parents’ grave to ask their blessing, and then she traveled by boat with her aunt. At last someone would belong to her—even if it was just a widower with a young child. But on her wedding day, when she met her husband, she was not as taken with him as she expected. He had hair growing in his ears, and the speech he gave for the bride was full of warnings about the shortness of life, as if she didn’t already know it. But the baby daughter, who was nine months old, was something else altogether. She was tiny and dark and sad, and Grandma Nehama fell in love with her.

There was a wet nurse for the baby, and Grandma Nehama saw with her own eyes that milk without love wasn’t putting enough weight on the baby. And why should it? Didn’t she remember getting thinner while she was mourning, no matter how much the neighbors urged her to eat? So when the baby’s eyes were full of sorrow, Grandma Nehama gave it her own milkless breast to suck, and she did not sing to it “Sleep my child, may heaven guard you,” for this baby had already seen the angel of death. Instead she sang about the wind. It became her particular lullaby, this old song that went “Dark burns the fire in its agony. And the wind, the wind, the raging wind …” She sang from morning till night, and whether it was the sucking or the songs, no one could say, but eventually Grandma Nehama’s breasts ran to milk as thick as cream, and on it the baby grew plump.

After the night’s work was done, Nehama lay awake in Sally’s bed, the younger girl’s arms around her while she listened to the wind as if it were a song she’d forgotten and might remember if only she listened hard enough.

MINSK, 1876

Moskovskaya Street

Winter came to Minsk, and snow rose in great drifts reflecting streetlamps while sleighs carried men of substance home from their factories
and offices. In the evenings they took their fur-cloaked wives to the theater, where the choice of the season was Italian opera, the Italians being hot-blooded as everyone knew, hoping that some heat would waft from the stage to the audience. Whoever could afford to burn coal kept their cellars full, and their stoves blew smoke at the wind as it knocked bricks from chimneys. But in the garden on Moskovskaya Street, the ghost of the first wife didn’t feel the cold. She sat high in the apple tree, shaking the branches as if it were imperative to get someone out of the warm house into her garden.

Emilia sat in her mother’s dressing room, glancing now and then at the window while she read Russian poetry aloud to please Father, who could hear it from his room. She wished that she looked like Mama, but she was nothing like either of her parents. Mama said it was a family trait to take after an aunt or uncle or great-grandfather, each generation following a circuitous path through its descendants. Emilia was golden-haired and gray-eyed like one of her aunts. She hadn’t met any of them—the daughters of a rich man are sent far and wide when they marry for the family’s honor.

“They say your cousins look like me,” Mama said, putting down the letter from her sister while Freida twisted her hair into intricate knots. She picked up the silver-backed mirror. “A little more curl here, if you please.”

“Emilia!” Father called. “What are you doing in your mother’s room?”

She turned to the Russian verses again, but it was too late. As sure as the moon is jealous of the sun, he was coming out of his dressing room, buttoning his high collar. “Are you telling the child stories?” he asked.

“Only about deportment at dinner.”

“She’ll be eating in the kitchen,” Father said.

“Yes, but she won’t be a child forever.”

“Just don’t give her any of your ideas.” He wasn’t looking at Emilia, his eyes were all for Mama. On the wall above her dressing table, there was a painting with a hawk hovering high above the goats, as if considering which one would make its dinner. “Who do you think the child looks like?” he asked, switching from Russian to Yiddish. The despised mother tongue was suitable for such discussions.

“My older sister. Exactly her,” Mama said, as if she hadn’t answered the same way a thousand times before. She began to rise from her chair but sat down when he shook his head. Father preferred her to be seated. She was taller than he, but his suit was cut by the tailor who clothed the count.

“I believe the child looks a lot like the editor of the
Minsker Journal,”
Father said. “He used to be our guest much too often, I think.” Sometimes it was an editor. Sometimes their old lawyer. Or a physician. They had to have a different doctor every year. Emilia’s neck began to itch. Soon her feet would itch, too, but she didn’t dare scratch.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mama said. Why did she have to argue? It only made Father worse. The apple tree beat harder at the window. It was the first Mrs. Rosenberg, but Father took no more notice of her now than when she was alive.

“So I’m ridiculous.” Father’s voice got quieter.

“You know what I mean,” Mama said nervously. The maid edged toward the door. “What have your guests to do with me?”

“So I’m asking myself.” He picked up Mama’s mirror as if to see her true face in it. Emilia tried not to breathe. He seemed to have forgotten her.

“I’m busy with the house,” Mama said. “Such a large house needs more than one servant. If you gave me a bigger allowance, I might have a minute free to go out, but as it is …”

“So now I’m an idiot and a miser, too. Very good. But blind, I’m not. I saw the way you looked at the lawyer. And he’s old enough to be your uncle. It’s disgusting.” Emilia wasn’t sure what was disgusting about it, but even so she knew enough to be ashamed.

Father turned the mirror over. A gift from Mama’s older sister, the one she said that Emilia resembled, it was engraved with all the sisters’ names.

“He was just bringing papers for you to sign,” Mama said. She didn’t sound ashamed.

“An excuse, you always have. Do you practice it in front of the mirror?” His voice was hardly more than a whisper, his mouth twisting as he broke off the handle with a loud snap, throwing it into her lap. And though Emilia held herself very still, Mama flinched. Then Father took
the letter opener from her table and scratched the names on the silver back of the mirror. He had broken everything her sisters sent her. She didn’t have a single picture of them left. “Never forget, my wife, that I can send you both packing,” he said. In the painting above Mama’s dressing table, the hawk was very small above the green hills. There was a villa with white columns. That was where they’d go when Father sent them packing.

“Your daughter has done nothing to deserve such an insult. And let me tell you, neither have I.” But it wasn’t true or else Father wouldn’t be looking at Mama like that. He turned his eyes to Emilia, examining her like a spot of blood in an egg, spoiling it, making it unkosher, and eggs were so expensive. She couldn’t help but reach a hand to surreptitiously scratch her neck. Shame and fear were such itchy feelings, and hatred the itchiest of all.

Mama stood up, the ivory handle falling to the floor. “Freida,” she called. “Come back and help me off with this dress, please. I’m feeling faint. Mr. Rosenberg will have to greet the guests himself.”

“Sit down,” he said. And she did, as always.

“My dear husband …”

The words went on, but Emilia wasn’t listening anymore. She was looking at the style of Mama’s new dress with the mother-of-pearl buttons, imagining that she was grown up and had just such a dress herself. When she was grown up, there would be admiration in every man’s eyes. After Emilia and Mama ran away to their Italian villa, they’d hold salons, Mama playing the piano and Emilia dressed in a white gown embroidered with rosebuds. She’d greet the guests, extending her gloved hand just so, and she would tell her admirers that she was named after the Polish heroine Emilia Plater, who had disguised herself as a man to lead a cavalry troop against the Russians.

Father and Mama went down for dinner, his steps firm and quick, hers slower as she held on to the oak banister. Emilia reached behind Mama’s dressing table to take the book from its hiding place.
One Hundred Steamships and Clippers
. She was copying the illustration of a two-thousand-ton steamship with a clipper bow, one funnel, three masts, and room for fifty-four first-class passengers. Later she’d paint the drawing with watercolors and name the ship
La Bella
. Painting,
like playing the piano, was an accomplishment that wives should have. Maybe Father would even allow her to pin the drawing on her bedroom wall. No one else would know that behind one of the first-class portholes, the one she’d paint with yellow curtains, were Emilia and her mother.

Outside the window the first Mrs. Rosenberg would be watching from the apple tree. She shouldn’t be left behind in an empty garden. Emilia pushed aside the curtains, throwing open the window to tell Mrs. Rosenberg that she was welcome to come live with them in the villa among the grazing goats.

The moon was a crescent in the sky, visible between the branches of the apple tree as if Mrs. Rosenberg held it in her dark lap. Emilia didn’t bless the moon. She hadn’t learned how. Her mother was too modern to teach her the women’s prayers. But Emilia didn’t need to empty her heart before heaven as long as she could speak to Mrs. Rosenberg, who shook the branches of the apple tree in answer. She knew what it was like to live in the house in Moskovskaya Street, and had left the only way she could.

Sometimes a person has to make the best of an unpleasant decision.

More snow was falling. But it would quickly disappear as the roots of the first Mrs. Rosenberg’s apple tree dug down into the warm deep of the earth.

LONDON, 1876

The Horn and Plenty

The streets were cold and wet, and the Sunday boots were pawned, yet in the Horn and Plenty, women stood at the bar and ate while men played draughts at the tables. They lived for the pub, the naphtha lamps, the warm stove, the posters of music hall singers, the barmaid in her orange and yellow dress, the games and the songs as cheerful as in a place where you might expect to live past the age of thirty. A woman needed a place to talk, leaning on the counter while she gave a finger of gin to her baby. The one with the long face was telling how her bloke had put a shilling on a horse, and when the horse won, they’d stand
everyone for a drink. She was a casual prostitute, on the turf just now and then. The rest of the time she worked for the Squire, who was her uncle, following his whores to make sure they came back.

Nehama was writing numbers on the back of a Christian tract while she stood at the bar with Fay and Sally and the woman who promised to stand them a drink, whose name was Lizzie. She had thin hair falling over her face, and she wore a white apron in the old-fashioned style. Nehama had a proper whore’s dress, bright and shiny and ruffled. And proper East End boots that let in water at the seams. In her pocket she had a letter from her mother:

“My Nehameleh, you should stay well and not have any sickness from the damp. It is a bitter thing for a mother to lose her child and I will never understand what you did. How could you leave us all? Only a mother can know such pain. My eyes are so swollen, they look like bees. So you should know, I did what you asked though Father didn’t want I should give away your dowry. I split it among your sisters, and it was worse than throwing dirt on a grave. They all forgive you except Bronya as you know she holds a grudge and Shayna-Pearl because even though you didn’t take anything from her, she expected to make a teacher of you though God in heaven knows you should be married and living under your mother’s roof. Remember to wear your woolens, it’s so damp this time of year. God forbid you should take sick. Your mother.”

Once a month Nehama wrote her mother the sorts of lies that could be expected. At night she forgot the cold while she worked the trade, and afterward she kept warm by sleeping with Sally from dawn till noon, arms around each other in the small bed they shared. Whenever she thought of throwing herself in the river, she reminded herself that the younger girl needed her. Everyone must have a reason for living. If you couldn’t hold your gin, then there had to be something else.

“It’s a long shot,” Lizzie was saying. “That’s the only kind worth putting anything on.” Her baby was asleep, its mouth open. “If our horse places, then I’ll have me a house with a garden, I will.”