Threads and Flames (12 page)

“And where do you think you're going?” the woman demanded. “You heard what I told you! The Levis don't have any female boarders.”

“Well, maybe I got the name wrong,” Raisa replied. “If you don't remember my sister, they might.”

“Who says I don't remember your sister?” A nasty cackle echoed up the stairwell, stopping Raisa in her tracks on the third-floor landing. “It took me a while, but I remember her now. She was the one everyone always said was so
pretty.
” The woman sniffed. “
I
never thought so. If you ask me, a girl's got to have a little
modesty
before you can call her pretty, not carry herself like she's too good for the rest of us! Oh, she talked to people, she smiled enough, but
I
could tell what she was thinking. Just because that fancy young fellow kept coming around here to see her all the time, she got big ideas. I suppose she thought he was going to be her ticket uptown, and I'm sure he let her think that, too. That's how those men operate, waving all kinds of promises in front of a factory girl's nose until they get what they want.”

Raisa's cheeks grew warm. She put down the bags and took hold of the banister. “What are you talking about? My sister didn't have any suitors. She would have written to us about them if she had.”

“Oh, so you think that fancy man was her ‘suitor,' eh?” The woman sneered over the old-fashioned word. “That's not what I'd call him.”

“I don't care what you'd call
anything,
” Raisa retorted. She was shouting mad. Doors on the floors above and below her began to open as neighbors were drawn by the noise. “And as soon as we can, Henda and Brina and I are going to move out of this place and so far away we won't have to listen to one
word
of your spiteful nonsense again!”

“How
dare
you talk to me like that, you piece of horse dung!” the woman screeched. “You're just like that worthless sister of yours. One fine day a few months ago she filled this whole building with such an uproar that we all thought the ceilings would come down on our heads! Weeping, wailing, shrieking like a wild beast, and over what? A letter. Who'd want to send a letter to
her
in the first place, I ask you. What sort of troubles could a little nobody like
that
have? Nothing important enough to turn my peaceful home into a lunatic asylum, believe me! At first I thought the letter came from that ‘
suitor'
of hers, giving her her walking papers, but
he
showed up while she was still yowling like a scalded cat. He hustled her out the door and no one's seen or heard from her since. He probably did what he wanted with her and now she's on the streets where she belongs!”

“Take that back!” Raisa clattered down the stairs and stood toe-to-toe with the vindictive woman. “Take back what you said about Henda!”

“Why should I?” Her thin lips curled. “My mother raised me to tell the truth and be a respectable person. Perhaps if
your
mother had taught your sister the same—”

Raisa slapped her hard. The impact reverberated up and down the stairwell, and before the echoes died away, the woman threw herself at Raisa, pulling off her kerchief, trying and failing to yank her shorn hair, clawing at her face. Raisa fought back, defending herself vigorously in an escalating battle that brought half the tenement house residents out into the hall and made the other half slam and lock their doors. Someone from one of the first-floor apartments ran into the street, calling for the policeman on the beat. The sound of his heavily shod feet was loud enough to be heard well before he entered the building, while he was still climbing the stone steps outside.

The sharp-tongued witch who had provoked the fight heard the policeman's approaching footsteps, took one last swing at Raisa, and escaped into her apartment, bolting the door behind her. Raisa stood frozen on the landing, her face stinging where she'd been scratched, her heart beating like a hummingbird's wings. One flight above her, Brina sobbed. The cry snapped Raisa out of her temporary daze. She rushed up the steps to embrace the child.

“Here, miss! Up here!” A young woman leaned over the fourth-floor railing, signaling madly. She hurried down to the third floor and grabbed both of the traveling bags. “If you don't want to wind up in jail tonight, follow me
now,
” she said, and headed back upstairs before Raisa could get a word out.

Raisa didn't need to be told twice. The policeman's voice boomed in the foyer. Lifting Brina off her feet, Raisa ran where the young woman led her, up three flights of steps to the fifth floor and into one of the apartments.

The clatter of a sewing machine stopped cold when Raisa and Brina came scrambling in. They'd taken refuge in a three-room flat at the front of the tenement. She set Brina back on her own feet in a room mostly occupied by a big black stove. A balding man was just hoisting a weighty iron off the top of it when they came in. His face was young, but his back had the curvature of a much older person, and the arm holding the iron was deformed by twice the muscle of his other one. There was a window set into the wall between the room with the stove and the front room, allowing daylight to reach deep into the otherwise dark kitchen. Raisa saw two more men seated at sewing machines near the street windows. A third man, with a mouthful of straight pins, was busy making alterations to the fancy gown on a dressmaker's dummy in the packed front room. A little boy came out of the completely dark third room with a towering pile of cut cloth in his hands. Two more children, a boy and a girl, peeked out from behind him.

One of the sewing machine workers left his place and came into the kitchen where the presser worked. “Bayleh, what's going on?” he asked the woman who'd brought Raisa and Brina into her home.

She laid a finger to her lips. “Shhh. There's a policeman downstairs.”

“A what?” The man's red-rimmed eyes opened wide. “Oy, Bayleh, what are you doing to us?”

“Mottel,
shhh
!” the woman said more emphatically. “Did I marry a fool? Do they
look
like criminals? This girl came here looking for her sister, Henda.” She began to say more, but the sound of stumbling footsteps on the stairway outside made everyone in the apartment go suddenly still. A meaty fist pounded on the door and a deep voice boomed unintelligible words. Raisa cast an anxious glance down at Brina, but the child was just as petrified as the rest of the people in the apartment. She reminded Raisa of a baby rabbit when a fox was near, her only hope of survival to stay perfectly motionless, perfectly quiet.

After a short time, Raisa heard the footsteps clomp away, fading as the policeman lumbered down the stairs. Everyone let out a happy sigh.

“So, Henda's sister, you say?” Mottel scratched his closely trimmed beard. “I didn't know she had more than the one who—forgive me, but there was a letter and when that poor girl read it—”

“I'm the only sister she ever had.” Tears slipped from Raisa's eyes. She tried to speak, to explain the misunderstanding about her “death,” but Henda's image rose up before her. She saw her sister opening the letter, saw how the false news would have been a spear through her heart. The miserable woman from downstairs hadn't lied about everything: Henda's wild sorrow and despair must have filled the tenement.

“There, there, child, don't try to talk.” Bayleh put her arm around Raisa's shoulders and steered her to a chair in the front room. Raisa walked carefully, picking her way through a maze of twine-tied cloth bundles. The young housewife gave her and Brina apples from the milk-white bowl on the mantelpiece. Her husband hovered impatiently nearby, his eyes going from the idle sewing machine to Raisa to the clock on the wall and back again.

“Stop that, Mottel,” Bayleh said sternly. “The work will get done. What have we become if we can't spare a little pity for one another?” She stroked Raisa's short hair. “I'll have one of the children go find your kerchief, dear. Your poor hair! You must have been very sick. Such a nice color, too. It will be beautiful when it grows back. Your sister's hair was also lovely, and she always kept herself looking like a fine lady. No wonder that no-good lazybones downstairs was eaten up alive with envy! She keeps her hair the way she keeps her house. What would it cost her to pick up a broom or use a little soap? Mrs. Levi never stopped praising how neat Henda was with her things, and how she helped with the housework. All the
decent
people in this building had nothing but good things to say about her.”

“Not like that
filthy
liar.” The words flew past Raisa's lips before she could think. When she realized what she'd said, she clapped one hand over her mouth, horrified and embarrassed.

To her relief, Bayleh laughed. “What a little tiger we've got in our home! But a tiger who won't use such words again, yes? The children are listening, and they only seem to remember what we'd rather have them forget.”

“I'm sorry,” Raisa mumbled, nervously twisting the stem of her half-eaten apple. “She made me so mad with all of her lies, especially about the man.”

“What man is this?” the housewife asked.

“She said my sister had a—someone who came here to see her. He was dressed fancy, like a rich man, and when she got that letter, he—he took her away.”

“Oh.” Bayleh sucked in her breath. “I'm afraid
that
is all true.”

“No!” Raisa's hands clenched, crushing what was left of the apple to pulp and juice. “It
can't
be. My sister—”

“Please, dear, I'm not spreading evil gossip. I'd sooner cut out my own tongue than suggest there was ever anything shameful in your sister's relationship with that young man. I was here when she got that letter. I was one of the women who tried to help her, to comfort her, to get her to stop screaming and raking her face with her fingernails and tearing her beautiful hair. We were all terrified that if she went on like that, someone would call for the police and she'd be taken away to the crazy house. I'm telling you, it was God Almighty who sent that man just then. We never knew when he'd show up, but there he was, right when she needed him the most! He came bounding up the stairs, took her into his arms like a child, and spoke to her so gently, so softly that none of us could hear a word. Whatever he said, it worked a miracle. She stopped thrashing around, trying to hurt herself. She crumpled against his chest, tears streaming down her face, and let him wrap his own coat around her. He told us he was going to take her for a walk around the block, so she could calm down.” Bayleh sighed. “That was the last we saw of them.” She got a cloth from the sink in the other room and began wiping the smashed apple from Raisa's hands as if she were a baby.

“Who was he?” Raisa demanded. “How did Henda know him? Surely you wouldn't have let her go off with a total stranger?” A hundred fearful thoughts spun through her mind. She began to shake uncontrollably; Bayleh brought a quilt and swept it around her.

“You poor girl, this is too much for you, I can see that. You're exhausted! I want you to lie down on my bed and rest, sleep a little.”

“I can't sleep,” Raisa said. “I
can't.
I need to know what happened to Henda. You've got to tell me—”

“I will, I will, I promise.” Bayleh did her best to soothe Raisa's unsettled mind. “Only sleep first.”

Still protesting that sleep was impossible, Raisa followed Bayleh into the windowless inner room, sat on the edge of the bed, and took off her shoes. Oh, how good that felt! Brina's breath, sweet with apple, warmed her neck when she lay down. The child's hand clasped her own, and she fell headlong into dreamless slumber.

UNDER THE EYES OF GOD

R
aisa woke up in pitchy darkness, sandwiched between two warm, breathing bodies on an unusually comfortable mattress. She had no idea where she was or how she'd gotten there. Panic closed her throat until Brina's familiar scent calmed her a bit and she realized the child was huddled against her. Turning as much as she could in those cramped conditions, she touched the soft cloth of a woman's nightgown. Bayleh? Her sleep-muddled thoughts made that name seem both familiar and strange at the same time. Then she heard a deep, strident snore from the far side of the bed.
A man?
The happenings of the previous day came flooding back, everything from waking up on board the steamship to learning of her sister's disappearance. Toward the end of her recollections, she glimpsed the face of Bayleh's husband, Mottel, and made a good guess as to the source of that loud snoring.

“Raisa?” Brina's fingers groped over her face in the dark. “Raisa, I need to go.”

Groggy and aching, Raisa slipped out of the bed and guided Brina out of the bedroom. The first hint of daylight was stealing through the net lace curtains in the front room. The presser, the tailor, and the other sewing machine worker lay sleeping head to heels on three battered gray mattresses laid out next to the dressmaker's dummy. In the kitchen, the children snuggled together like puppies on a fat comforter leaking goose feathers at the seams.

Raisa and Brina slipped out of the apartment as quietly as they could. The floorboards of the landing creaked under Raisa's stockinged feet. As she crept toward the stairs, a pungent, unmistakable smell brought her up short. It was coming from one of the two doors on the landing, each with a pebbly green glass panel set into the wood. Raisa turned the knob and was overjoyed to discover that the tenement had toilets on more than one floor and she wouldn't need to go downstairs near that horrible woman's apartment.

Wait until I tell Glukel about this!
she thought, while waiting for Brina to finish. She recalled the outhouse and chamber pots they'd had to use in the shtetl and tried to imagine how everyone back home would react when she told them of all she'd seen since her arrival.