Ellis Island & Other Stories (24 page)

I looked to my left and saw a little tailor with the face of a goat. He was humming, lost in another world. No wonder; he was blind and worked entirely according to touch. I looked to my right. There, sewing in rhythmic motions which seemed like (and could have been) exercises of the dance, was a beautiful young woman. I swallowed and looked away in puzzlement. She was shockingly beautiful—so much so that I immediately associated her with the stage portrayal of a fictional ideal. Yet such women can be real, they exist in fact, and they deserve a hearing as much as anyone else, for they, too, are flesh and blood. She was the kind of woman who frightens men, because they assume that she is too pretty for them. I, too, might have assumed that, but I was in a tight corner. After the initial shock (through which, I freely admit, I almost did not pass), I paid no heed to her beauty.

“What do you do?” I asked her, in Yiddish, holding up a tray of needles and thread.

“I’m a tailor, just like you,” she replied, tentatively offended. “Only I’m called a seamstress.”

“No,” I said. This made her angry.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean, what does
one
do?”

“What does
one
do?” She was now perplexed.

“Yes, what does
one
do?”

“In what circumstance?”

“Here!” I said, pointing to my tools and cloth.

“One sews,” she said, warily.

“But I don’t know how! Teach me what to do, or they’ll fire me.”

She went back to her sewing, and then turned to me. “You escaped from someplace,” she said bravely.

“I did
not.”

“You work for a newspaper.”

“No.”

“Why is there ink on your hand?”

“I have been known,” I said, “to touch a pen. But I don’t work for a newspaper.”

“You’re dressed like a lawyer, not a tailor. Why are you here, if you can’t do the work?”

“You,”
I said accusingly, “should be on the stage. Why are
you
here?”

“I have strong ideas about the stage,” was her reply. “The stage is vanity and stupidity, and I hope that I am neither vain nor stupid. At the moment, at least, since I don’t know English, I’m perfectly happy to do this work.”

In less than a minute, we had become enemies. It was horribly frustrating. I studied her from the corner of my eye (which made me seem cross-eyed). She was tall, her arms were long, and her hair was smooth and black—as shiny as the pelt of a seal. Her cheeks were so spacious and her cheekbones so high that when I studied them I thought of mountain snowfields. Her nose was long and straight, her shoulders and breasts finely formed, and her voice was the sort of voice with which the blind fall in love.

“I need a job as a tailor,” I explained. “Not permanently—only for a certificate of employment, so that I can get someone off the Island.”

“Oh,” she said, “I see.”

I thought that she would have nothing further to do with me, but it was not long before we had embarked together in a course on tailoring.

She was a good teacher. First, she made me aware of a lot of unrelated techniques, listing them in a hurry, demonstrating, and calling for imitation. “That’s fine,” she would say, and go on to the next thing. In this way I learned how to sit, how to end a stitch, how to thread needles, how to “lock up” my work, etc., etc. We then tried a system she devised whereby she would do most of the work on a coat and I would struggle along on what she assigned, so that in the end—with me pushing as hard as I could while she labored twice as much and corrected my mistakes—we could finish the work of two. I did my best, but she did most of it. Because of this, I insisted on giving her my pay.

“How will you eat?” she wanted to know.

“I can go without eating for a few days,” I told her. “I’m like a camel. You must take my wages, since you will have done the work.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “I won’t take anything. Let’s keep on sewing. If we don’t, we won’t get it done.”

We managed this way during the first afternoon, and did a passable job. For several days, until I got my certificate, it was much the same. She struggled to do double the work that she normally did. I helped her as she helped me.

She was generous without the slightest guile, and I fell in love with her as I had never fallen in love before. As she revealed herself to me, her physical beauty paled in comparison to what she really was. I began to think of Elise only in terms of paying back the debt I owed her for guiding me on the Island, and because I had promised.

And then something happened with this woman (who would not tell me her name, which—I found out from someone else—was Hava). You must understand that we are a nation whose most profound respect is for old men, the
Tzaddikim
—whether they be rabbis, or tailors, or farmers, or whatever. Perhaps it is because they have had the time to live and to study, and that, embodied in them, is what we revere. I have always seen in them the line of my life both forward and backward; I am deeply solicitous of them; they have a special hold on me—as if they were what I really should be, as if I see in them the holiness that one can see in a child, as if each one were my own father, as if they were unnervingly close to God. I don’t know. All I do know is that they can easily break my heart.

Hava, you see, with her silver needles flying, bent over the rich and heavy cloth, working intently not for herself but for another, drew from me the reverence and the love that I had known only for the
Tzaddikim.
She became for me, in her justice, a symbol of all that I had loved and all that had ever moved me. Hava, in selflessness, became the recollection of my village, the winters there, the light that came to us suddenly from the clouds when in our frailty we thought only of the dark. Hava became all the beauty of the hart that I had seen, when a little boy, leaping over our house dizzily into the blue. Hava became everything that was good and beautiful. Perhaps one might think this was too much credit for a human soul, and that such splendid attribution could only have led to disillusion. But she was those things, and more, radiant even in qualities of imperfection. With the simplest of actions she elicited from me the deepest emotions. I watched her, with her silver needles flying, working intently—not for herself, but for another.

I did give her my wages. I pressed them into her hand. This turned out not to have been entirely contrary to my self-interest, for although I could not have predicted it, she took me home with her, since I had no place to sleep and nothing to eat.

Almost trembling, we wound our way up the stairs of the tenement in which she lived. My hands were swollen from needle punctures. All I had had to eat (after eating far too much the day before) was a twisted bread that I had taken from the bakers, and five glasses of tea, which might have made me tremble anyway.

I dreaded the ordeal of family scrutiny. The one time that I had been taken as the prospective husband in an arranged marriage (the bride didn’t know me; I didn’t know her; I had no choice; I was only sixteen), the girl’s father picked up a chair and tried to smash it over my head. What could I have done to offend him so? To this day, I am in ignorance. All I know is that I was dressed very carefully, my hair was slicked down, and I was wearing my uncle’s .25-carat-diamond stickpin. The bride turned out to have been a sweet blond girl as skinny as a violin string, but her father went into a rage, screaming, “Another fat boy! Yet another fat boy! I’ll show him!” (I was almost as slender as his daughter.) As my cousin the very incompetent matchmaker and I ran from his front garden, he appeared at the window and fired a dueling pistol at us. But that is another story.

Hava had no family: she lived alone, and had dared to take me in. Just before she opened the door, she told me that her parents were still in Russia, and her sister and her brother-in-law, with whom she had come to America, were in Milwaukee. For an entire hour, we talked nervously about Milwaukee, although neither of us knew a single thing about it.

Then she heated some boiled beef with carrots and celery, and she served not only bread and horseradish but wine. Across the airshaft was a music school in which a student quartet was sawing out lovely Viennese
quazerkas.
Even though these students were to real musicians as a chicken is to a nightingale—I thought at first that they were Chinese trying to learn Western scales—the wine that we drank turned them all into Joseph Joachims. I could not have been happier. Everything was going perfectly. Two days in America, I thought, and I am a Drake (I think I meant Duke). It is true that we were in a single cold room in a tenement, but the food was excellent; I had a job (in a way); and there was this woman, Hava, who was searingly, painfully beautiful. As the wine and I told her, she was “a veritable merry-go-round of dizzying attractiveness, numbingly tantalizing, perfectly and smoothly alluring.” I was practicing English, and, like every immigrant, I had been hypnotized by polysyllabic Latinates. Nonetheless, she blushed like an adolescent and stared at her plate. After all, she didn’t know English.

As she washed the dishes, I swayed back and forth, fodder for the violins. When she finished, she dried her hands and put on some sort of lotion that smelled like roses. Most women let down their hair when they go to bed. Hava did the opposite, and her arms at work became terribly visible, as did the flowing concave arches of her shoulders and neck. The symmetry of this viscous telegraphy, as smooth as silken ribbons, took from me my remaining will and self-possession. I was in the
primum mobile.
Then she pointed at the ceiling.

I wanted to please her, so I too pointed at the ceiling. What did I know. I had read that, in America, the Eskimos rubbed noses.

“Up there,” she said.

“Up there,” I repeated like an idiot.

“That’s where you’ll sleep.”

I looked up. “On the ceiling?”

For an instant, I imagined that she could, by a single prayer, make me as light as a balloon, so that I would tuck comfortably against the ceiling, there to dream all night of the bed below and its occupant—as inviting as an Alpine meadow in bloom (without the bees).

“No, not on the ceiling, my dear man,” she said, with such affection that I would have been willing thereafter to sleep in Hell for her had she desired it. “On the roof, where you will find a tent and a cot. Any”—her Yiddish pronunciation of Annie—“a consumptive who lived across the hall, used it for taking the air.”

“Tell me something, Hava. What happened to Any?”

“Poor Any died.”

Once again, I cast my eyes to the ceiling. “What about the germs?”

“What are germs?” she asked innocently.

It was a joy to sit on the edge of her bed, close to her, holding her hand in mine, explaining the theory of bacteria and germs—a theory with which, I might add, she was really quite taken. Still, at the end of my dissertation, she pointed to the ceiling.

I stayed on the roof for two hours. It was actually several degrees below zero, and Annie had left only two blankets (no wonder she died). I eventually got so cold that I climbed down the fire escape and knocked on Hava’s window. She got up from her bed and turned on the lamp; she was wearing a snow-colored gown.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I could see through the glass that she was delightfully warm. Her skin was rosy, a color that the Russians call “blood and milk.”

I was too cold to answer, so she opened the window and I fell in, crashing onto the floor like a block of ice. Then Hava’s true humanity surfaced as she helped me into bed, drew the covers over us, and to banish the chill, embraced me with legs and arms and everything she had. “We have to get up early,” she whispered, “so sleep now.” I awoke in the morning with Hava in my arms. Snow had blown in through the open window, and a snowdrift slept at the foot of our bed, just like a white cat.

We soon discovered that splitting the rent in two makes life much easier. And since I was able to shop in the morning, she no longer had to settle for wilted and damaged vegetables, and meat that would have been passed over even by its mother. As a reward for leaving, I received a certificate of employment from Barvaz, who had found a real tailor—an old man of great skill—to sit next to Hava.

When my hands—infected from the needle punctures—healed, I picked up my pen. Within a week, I had written an eloquent plea for the oppressed Jews of Turkestan, and I was paid a great sum (all right, not a great sum but a good sum) by the
Jewish Daily Forward,
which published it under a banner headline. There was a box in the middle of the article, which the editor used to solicit contributions for the Turkestan Emergency Fund. He wrote, “To give to another without reward is the only way to compensate for our mortality, and perhaps the binding principle of this world.” At the time, I still was not quite sure of what he meant.

Since I was paid by the word, I had been very careful to make my survey of the conditions in Turkestan not only dramatic but complete. This necessitated not a few interpolations, estimates, and inventions. I was immediately attacked by a lot of sanctimonious literalists whom I led rather easily into a dizzying thicket within the paying pages of the
Forward,
which made them regret that (and wonder if) there was ever such a thing as Turkestan. I had been accused before, even in Russia, of insulting the truth. Some had gone so far as to call me a devious liar. How ridiculous! Truth is not anchored to the ground by driven piles. It can float and take to the air; it is light and lovely and delicate. It is feminine as well as masculine. It is often gentle, and, sometimes, it can even make a fool of itself—but when it does it calls down God (who protects weak creatures), and suddenly its foolishness becomes a blazing, piercing light.

I was soon able to earn a decent living writing for the
Forward.
I bought a vest in which to carry my fountain pen, and a watch chain—although I did not have a watch. I began to study English very hard, and Hava was soon able to work less: from eight until four. When she came home, we would have tea and biscuits and then go to the Jewish turnverein to exercise—she danced and swung Indian clubs, and I took up no-contact boxing. After the turnverein, we would go to the baths, and after that we would go home to read or play chess. At the end of February, we were married in a synagogue on Chrystie Street.