Leah's Journey (17 page)

“Arab violence,” David had said bitterly. “It was a pogrom called by a new name.”

If they struck Rosenblatts and there was violence during the strike, would David label that too a pogrom? Leah wondered. A pogrom against the poor and defenseless. Jews would not be the only victims of the hate, ignorance, and avarice that would be unleashed against the workers. Reading Eli’s pamphlets had taught her that.

The morning wore on and the girls talked less and concentrated on their work. The machines hummed rhythmically and from the pressing room they heard the repeated slamming of the hot irons. As each girl brought her finished pile of work up to Leah for inspection, Leah talked quietly to them about the implications of the strike.

“Carry very little money,” she told them. “And bring a toothbrush in case there is an arrest. It may happen.”

Bonnie Eckstein, in a new pink dress fashioned in a dressmaking class at the settlement house, smiled shyly when she came up with her work. She had thought of a stitch which would shorten the time required for embroidery finishing and she blushed when Leah complimented her.

“You’re not worried about the strike?” Leah asked quietly.

“Not now,” Bonnie replied. “I feel better knowing what might happen. But it’s very hot in here. Can I open a window?”

“You can try,” Leah said wryly and the girl smiled.

The first two windows Bonnie tried remained stubbornly closed, but she was able to force the third one open and the girls sighed with relief as a small breeze stirred the stagnant air. Leah got up then and tried the other windows, but they would not open and she turned back to her drawing board where she had begun a sketch for a shirtwaist that could be worn with slacks. If Eleanor Greenstein was appearing in public in pants, soon other women would and there would be a demand for tops that could be worn with slacks.

She worked steadily and looked up with annoyance at a sudden outburst of chatter. But that vague annoyance froze into a fear that sucked her breath away when she saw what was happening. Her pencil still poised in air, Leah watched a small stream of flame glide across the floor. The line of fire sliced the room into two halves and continued to roll on, consuming the small hills of scrap fabric that littered the floor and hungrily pressing forward. Blue sparks danced explosively upward as the fire reached a pool of machine oil and the stream of flame soared into a great fiery wave that threatened to engulf them. A girl screamed, shredding the air with her terror. Others joined her, one very young girl wailing softly like a small child who fears being heard.

The sudden crackling burst of fire jolted Leah. She jumped from her seat, dashed across the room, and flung the door open.

Smoke mushroomed in at them from the blocked hallway and they heard the pounding of feet and strangled shrieks of fear. Somewhere in the building a bell was ringing with harsh insistence; sounds of smashing glass and splintering wood could be heard. Men and women rushed down the stairwell but when they reached the next landing they began to scream.

“The door is locked. Lieber Gott, the door is locked!”

Above them a mountain of fire loomed and they rushed back, pouring into Leah’s workroom where the flames were already breaking their bounds, raging strips of fire sucking at the hems of the girls’ dresses, licking at the wood of the doors, subsiding mildly against the thrusts from the huge bolts of fabric with which the desperate girls were beating at them and rising again with renewed rage and fury.

“The windows,” Leah shouted and headed to the one opened by Bonnie only minutes before. She stood on a chair and wrested it further up as the girls clustered about her, screaming and crying. It was three stories down to the courtyard where the ailanthus tree stood, its glossy leaves impervious to the blazing fires above it. Crowds were gathering in the courtyard and the bystanders gestured wildly to the trapped girls.

“Jump, goddamn it!” a man shouted and Leah saw that workers from the neighboring factories were dashing over with bolts of cloth, mattresses, layers of goods, anything that could be spread on the hard ground.

Lina Goldstein, the little orthodox girl, the smallest and lightest of them, was the first to leap from the window with Leah lifting her to the edge and urging her forward. Then others scrambled forward, fighting now for the chance of escape. From the floors above the screams of fear had turned into wails of agony.

“People are burning up,” a girl screamed. “Human beings are on fire here.”

The girl’s own skirt was trimmed with a ruffle of flame and sparks glittered in her hair. Leah grabbed a bolt of cloth and wrapped it around her, beating out the scraps of fire with her hands. The girl had fainted and Bonnie Eckstein moved forward to help Leah. The two of them shoved the mummied form from the window and watched it land in the courtyard below.

The girls moved quickly now. One after the other they scrambled up to the ledge and hurtled to the ground, one girl landing on another as the ambulances wailed and the crowd below moaned in anguish and disbelief, shouting names up to the prisoners of the flames.

“Sadie Greenberg—is my Sadie there?” a man called.

“Papa! I’m all right, Papa.” Tears streamed down the girl’s cheeks and her elbow was streaked with blood. Bonnie helped support her and Leah bent to heave her up to the ledge and down to the courtyard. The girl’s blood streaked the bodice of Bonnie’s pink dress and her skirt was blackened. Crazily, Leah leaned forward and wiped the girl’s cheek, wet with sweat and tears.

“Let me through, let me through!” Eli burst into the room, rocketing his way through the ranks of screaming girls. He picked up a chair and shattered a window, hacking at the strips of wood that blocked its access. Behind him, his face and hands black as coal, Salvatore Visconti worked with desperate speed. He picked up one girl and wrapped her, as Leah had done, in a bolt of cloth that shielded her from the flames. He passed the girl to Eli who tossed her swiftly down to the courtyard where firemen had at last spread a net so that the falling bodies were caught before they hit the ground.

“Eli, take Bonnie. Save her!” Leah shouted.

Bonnie, who had been working steadily beside her, had suddenly slumped to the floor and Leah felt her own lungs struggle for air as they were blocked by the invasion of smoke that had seeped in, rushing past the cloth she had pressed over her mouth.

Salvatore seized the barely conscious girl and passed her, unprotesting, to Eli. With relief, Leah saw her land in the net. New cries rose from the courtyard below. Crowds of children searching for their parents added their small shrill voices to the din.

“Mama. Mama. Please come out of the fire. Please don’t burn up,” a small boy in knickers shouted, but there was no answering call and the girl’s voice added a plea. “Come home, Mama. Please come home. We’ll be good.”

Behind them the room swirled with flames that were leaping steadily toward the window. There was very little time left and the remaining girls screamed and clawed at each other in their efforts to escape. A seamstress dashed over to the remaining window which remained sealed closed, climbed up, and hurled herself through the glass. The jagged shards ripped her body and the outline of her form in the glass was etched with her blood. Another followed after her, muttering a “Hail Mary” as she hoisted herself up, leaving ribbons of skin dangling from the glass. A third girl tried to follow but her arm caught on the shattered fragments of pane. She broke loose, thrusting herself forward, and left a bloody hunk of flesh clinging to the window frame.

The girl behind her sank into a faint and fell backward into the flames. Leah ran to pull her out and felt the fire licking at her hands; Salvatore Visconti threw himself across the girl’s burning body and beat out the flames, his body furiously rising and falling, his great shoulders heaving with sobs. Only when he lifted the slight black-haired girl in his arms did Leah realize it was his own daughter, tiny Philomena Visconti, who worked as a trimmer on the floor above. Eli took the girl from him and hurled her into the waiting net.

“She’s all right, Salvatore,” he shouted.

Salvatore nodded wordlessly, his face black with soot except for the neat lines etched by the tears of fear.

There was a sudden crash behind them and Leah wheeled around and saw the room’s central beam collapse, charred to a length of cinders that crumbled and was consumed by the leaping flames.

“Leah! Now! You must get out now!” Eli shouted.

“But what about you and Salvatore?”

“Right after you. I promise. We’ll come right after you.”

The flames were rushing toward them now, lashing tongues of scarlet and gold, licking their way furiously forward. They were sandwiched into a narrow strip of floor. From the courtyard below the frenzied crowd shouted questions and directions up at them.

“How many are you?”

“Is my mother, Channa Schiff, there? Channa Schiff!”

“Jump, damn it! The building will go any second. Jump now!”

Eli leapt to the windowsill and Salvatore lifted Leah up beside him. Poised on the parapet, they clung to each other for the briefest of moments, veiled in a cloud of gray-black smoke. Eli’s hair was dusted gray with clots of ash and his face was black with soot, matted over with sweat. But his green eyes were clear and bright and even against the acrid odor of the burning building and the scorching flesh, she smelled the fragrance of the menthol on his skin. He couched her face in his large hands and kissed her on the lips. Her fingers gripped his shoulders, but firmly he pried them loose and gently he thrust her forward.

A rush of air engulfed her, seemed to support her falling body. As she fell into the waiting net, all consciousness deserted her. Weightless and uncaring, she rested on the ground below, shaded by the lacy leaves of the ailanthus tree.

Within seconds the last supporting beam gave way, falling across the window and blocking it. The screaming voices of two women, trapped behind the curtain of dancing flames, were heard for a few minutes more and when the debris of the holocaust was cleared the bodies of Salvatore Visconti and Eli Feinstein were found, faces down, groping backward to the trapped women. Eli’s fingers almost grasped the outstretched hand of a tiny blonde needleworker, who was buried two days later in a child’s grave.

It was almost dark when Leah stumbled home that evening. The lights of the large synagogue on Eldridge Street were ablaze and congregants were already filing in for the Sabbath eve service. Hugging the velvet bags that held their prayer shawls, the worshipers looked after Leah as she walked slowly down the street, their sad eyes paying silent tribute to her grief.

Leah’s long black hair, loose and knotted, tumbled about her shoulders and she wore a loose flowered housedress that a relief worker at the makeshift shelter had given her. Her own clothing had been scorched and shredded. She had lost a shoe in the fall from the window and she wore a man’s slipper on one foot. Her hands, covered with soft yellow burn blisters and swathed in Vaseline-stained bandages, throbbed, though she was indifferent to the pain.

Her weary path seemed mysteriously familiar, and quite suddenly she realized why. Once before she had fled from fire and loss, running barefoot then through wooded hills and brambles.

Now she trudged slowly through urban streets, her mouth bitter with sorrow. Could one taste flames? She wondered and thought that she might laugh but did not. She was, it seemed, too exhausted for either laughter or tears. Painfully, she urged herself toward the house. When she arrived, she looked automatically up at the window where Aaron, his bright hair the color of those frightening flames, so often stood sentinel. But Aaron was away, she remembered. Everyone was away. It was Friday and the apartment was empty. They would be waiting for her in that mountain bungalow, miles above the river along which she and Eli had cruised and sung and laughed only days before.

Now Eli was dead. She reminded herself of the fact as though she might forget. Dead. Her love was dead.

Through the open windows of the synagogue she heard the voices of the men at prayers intoning the mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

“Yiskadal v’yiskadash, shmei rabah…”

Silently, her lips moving, she mouthed the prayer after them and slowly climbed the stairs to her apartment. A sliver of light glowed beneath the door and when she opened it, David was sitting in the armchair, his face turned toward her, his fine thin features masked with a grief that matched her own.

“David!” She ran toward him and buried her head in his lap.

Gently he patted her shoulders and ran his fingers through her dark hair, allowing her sobs to spill forth until his clothing was drenched with her tears and his own, too, were falling freely.

“How did you know to come here?” she asked.

“The news of the fire was on the radio.”

“Eli is dead,” she said.

“I know. I went to the factory to look for you and they told me.”

“Eli and I…” New tears came, choking off the desperate words. She could not finish the sentence, nor was there any need to.

“I know.”

Gently he pulled her to her feet. Like a father caring for a small helpless daughter, he peeled her clothing off and filled the bathtub with hot water, carrying potful after potful from the stove. He led her to the steaming tub and immersed her in the soothing water; tenderly he bathed her, washing away the traces of soot and ash, the smells of fetid flesh and searing skin. He washed her long dark hair, freeing it of the smoky odors that had clung to it. Beneath his ministrations she wept, grew calm, and wept again. At last, he toweled her dry, dressed her in a clean white nightdress, and led her gently to the bed that had not been slept in for a week.

She fell asleep at once and slept heavily, waking now and then as young children do, to pound and scratch at the darkness, trembling and weeping wildly. He calmed her then, stroking her gently and pulling her down against the pillows. But at her side he lay wakeful and heavyhearted, as the velvety darkness faded into the gray, rose-streaked skies of morning.