The Singing Fire (16 page)

I am supposed to be an orphan. A girl traveling alone must be an orphan. If you write to me, pretend that you were the faithful family servant like our Freida and sign yourself “Mrs. Plater.”

Do not be concerned with the shakiness of my handwriting. I am quite well, it is only the table that makes my hand unsteady.

Ever your daughter,
Emilia

Frying Pan Alley

The busy season began with a small order. Nathan was in the back room finishing it, Lazar doing the last of the pressing. Soon there would be no time for reading except on the Sabbath, so Nehama sat at the table in the front room, the English book in front of her, whispering the foreign words under her breath and breaking her teeth on them. In the rooms upstairs, Pious Pearl was drunk and yelling at her sons; men argued at cards in the FPA Workmen’s Club. Outside in the street an old woman was selling lavender. A barrow clattered across the cobblestones.

Emilia was also reading at the table. She had a newspaper, turning pages in the time it took Nehama to move from one paragraph to the next. Her belly was protruding in the shapeless dress Nehama had made. She could have sewn it with some style, but she couldn’t bear to see the golden Mrs. Levy with her baby growing under a beautiful
gown. Did God have to give so much to this woman that there was nothing left for another? “How can you read with all that racket?” Mrs. Levy asked in her educated accent.

“This is hardly noisy,” Nehama said. Minnie’s son was pretending to be a streetcar, whistling and hooting as he drove from the workshop to the cookstove. The baby was sitting on his back, squealing, her hands gripping her brother’s hair. “You should hear how it is when the busy season really gets started.”

“So tell me what’s so interesting in that book,” Minnie asked as she stirred the soup. She still had only one room upstairs with no stove, just a fireplace, and as Nehama had two rooms with a stove but wasn’t any hand at using it, Minnie cooked down here and the two families ate together.

“It’s about a woman that loses her child,” Nehama said, glancing at the newspaper. Was Emilia reading the article or studying the advertisement beside it for a slim line of corsets guaranteed to gather in the most rotund belly? “Her child is a little boy about your Sammy’s age.”

“Thpoo, thpoo, thpoo.”
Minnie spat, blowing away the evil eye. “And?”

“And she’s so upset, she forgets she still has two daughters.” Nehama looked over Emilia’s shoulder as she turned the page. There were toys advertised here, trains with miniature steam engines and dolls dressed more elegantly than living children. She could sew dresses just like these if she had a child with a doll. But she couldn’t get pregnant again, though in her sleep she dreamed about the babies she’d lost as if they were growing up, and in such sleep her grief was softened. Then she’d wake up, listening to her lodger turn in her sleep, and Nehama kept her eyes closed over the envy pouring from them.

She reread the paragraph that described a mother’s crazed sorrow so exactly. She could read it again and again as often as she wished. She didn’t need a sister to tell her the story or an actor to play it for her on the stage because she had a theater here in her hands; the curtain rose when she opened her eyes and fell when she closed the book. It was amazing. Her middle sister had dozens of such books. Rich people had thousands, and lucky for them that they needn’t work or surely they would starve, their eyes eating only words.

“It’s a silly story,” Minnie said. “A person can’t forget her child.”

“That’s what my mother used to tell me,” Emilia said. “But I don’t think it’s true.”

“Your mother, she should rest in peace,” Nehama said, looking at Emilia sharply.

“Yes,
alleva sholom,”
the young woman murmured, shifting uncomfortably. The shallow wooden seat was hard for a pregnant girl. But why did she look flustered, her eyes recoiling from Nehama’s?

Nehama flipped through the pages of her book. “Here’s another story. It’s called ‘The Jewish Maiden.’ Who would think there would be a story about a Jewish girl in a book?”

Minnie looked at the illustration. “And very pretty, too.”

“Wait till you read it.” Emilia rubbed her belly. Nehama could remember touching her own belly the same thoughtful way, wondering who grew inside. “If you find a Jew in a story,” Emilia said, “you can be sure that he’s greedy and sly and ends up hanging on the gallows. A Jewish girl is always pure and beautiful and dies a real Christian.”

“So what good is the book—do you see your own life there? Better to go to the Yiddish theater,” Minnie said, cutting potatoes into the pot of soup. “There you’ll see something you won’t forget.”

“Yiddish isn’t a language.”

“Then tell me, what are we speaking?” Nehama asked. Any stupid girl could have a baby, while Nehama worked from morning till night and found herself making nothing.

“Yiddish is a jargon. You have to speak it among people who don’t know anything else.” Emilia looked from one to the other, her voice filled with righteousness. “Well, a language must have a literature. Where are the great Yiddish writers, then?”

“The same place as Goldfaden, who made the Yiddish theater just ten years ago.” Nehama had her own opinions, and they were just as good as this young woman’s. “Don’t think you know everything. I’m a little older than you, and when I left home there wasn’t a single play in Yiddish. Now there’s melodrama and history and new songs every week. No one sees more plays than the Jews. Nathan reads the Yiddish papers that come from the
heim
, and each one has a new story in it. You’ll see, we’ll have our own great writers before you look around.”

Emilia tucked a stray lock of golden hair behind her ear. “Do you think it’s possible to catch up with three hundred years of literature?” She took a sip of tea, grimaced, and added more sugar as if sugar cost nothing.

“I only know that a person yearns for his own language. Why should you think of yourself as Russian?” Nehama asked. “Someone that tries to borrow another’s soul ends up with nothing to guide him in life.”

“So you think my soul is such a superior guide?” Emilia asked bitterly. “To bring me here of all places. I was raised to be someone else.”

“You think you’re the only one?” Nehama took a page of the newspaper, folding it to make a book cover, but as she wrapped the book in it, the cover split down the back.

Emilia shook her head and reached for the book. She measured it against a doubled sheet of newspaper, turning over the edges to make a slipcover. “My mother showed me how to do this.” She paused. “My mother—she should rest in peace—told me everything, but I don’t know what I should believe.”

“Things didn’t turn out the way you thought,” Nehama said. She poured another cup of tea for them both. When there is no other comfort, there can at least be tea.

Emilia turned her head to look at the stove, where steam billowed from the pot of soup as Minnie tasted it. “My mother told me that she was married in a village near Plotsk. That would make us practically
landsmann
. Who knows if she was telling the truth? It’s just a story like the ones in that book.” She shrugged. “But if you sit beside me, I can help you with some of the words.”

From the other room Nathan was calling, “I want your help, Nehama.”

“It’s just a small order,” she called back. “What do you need me for?”

He came to the front room, frowning in the way he did during the busy season. Heaven forbid someone should tell a joke in the workshop. Nathan was a boss, and you might think he ran the business for God, as if sewing cheap jackets made the earth turn around the sun. “Lazar has nothing to press. He has wages coming to him. Should I pay him to clean his ears?”

“So let him go home. Next week we’ll have a big order and we’ll all be working fourteen hours a day.”

“I don’t know about next week,” Nathan said. When he frowned, his lips thinned, his jaw clenched. A thread fell from his beard. “I only know about today. We can finish the order tonight and get another tomorrow. Am I by myself here or do I have a wife?”

“All right. Don’t shout. I’ll be there in a minute.” Nehama put the book carefully on a shelf.

Petticoat Lane

When the busy season came, there were wage packets to spend and in the Lane sunlight glinted on second-, third-, and fourth-hand treasures: chipped china shepherdesses, shaving boxes, stuffed birds, bracelets, bootjacks, dominoes, hatpins, chessboards, earrings, butchers’ steel, saws, accordions, rusted pistols, mango boas, pins set in pink paper a yard long. Steam rose from baked potatoes and fried fish, and it was as delicious as truffles to people that ate out of a twist of newspaper in the street. Everywhere jackets and dresses hung on rails above the crowd like spirits taking in the excitement while sellers reached up with their metal poles to bring down the perfect fit.

“COATS LIKE NEW! LADIES’ DRESSES!”

“CORSETS MADE FROM THE BONES OF THE LEVIATHAN!”

Nehama was looking through the bookseller’s barrow. When she came home with a purchase, Nathan would tease her again. Another book? Who knew I married a scholar? Thank God my father is in the
heim
and doesn’t know he ought to provide board for you. She made her choice by the feel of the cover.
Pride and Prejudice
it was called, and the bookseller assured her it was the finest quality. Nehama’s middle sister had books like this. Of course the leather binding was worn and there was a page or two missing, but that was nothing to complain about—weren’t there still several hundred perfectly good pages?

“COWCUMBERS. LOVELY COWCUMBERS!”

“FINE WARNUTS, ALL CRACKED!”

Pious Pearl the beigel lady sat on a crate like an empress surrounded by her sacks of beigels. She wore a shawl over her head because bonnets were for the rich, and at her feet there was a zinc pail with coke embers to keep her warm. “A blessing on you, missus. You should live
till a hundred and twenty. And what’s wrong with you, mister, that you don’t buy nothing of an old woman? May all your limbs wither. May your teeth rot.”

“And how about a blessing for me?” Nehama asked.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. You’ll take …”

“A dozen,” Nehama said.

“Hmm.” Pious Pearl rubbed some vodka on a sore tooth. Then she took a drink. If it didn’t help on the outside, maybe it would on the inside. The neighbors were scandalized: a Jew drinking—and a woman, yet? But Nehama liked her.

“A copper fer a man what’s blind and lame …”

“See the strong man, only a penny!”

“What do you have in there?” Pious Pearl asked as she put the beigels into Nehama’s basket.

“A book for my new lodger. She wants to read out loud while we sew.”

“Whose idea is that?”

“Mine,” Nehama said.

“It’s not a bad thing to have someone read while you work. All the cigar makers do it. But a book with a leather cover? You’re getting too fine, Nehama. Watch out or you’ll find yourself growing upside down like an onion, with your head in the dirt and your feet in the air.” She turned to the next customer. “Beigels! Beigels! A blessing on you, mister.”

“FISH ALL ALIVE. FRESH FOR
SHOBBOS!”

“SMOKED FISH. BETTER THAN FRESH!”

Nehama’s grandmother used to shop like this in the old market in Plotsk, taking with her the oldest sister and teaching her how to figure sums in her head so she could make a good bargain. Rivka used to keep track of the money that the Women’s Singing Society had in the bank, for it wasn’t long before the glass jar became full. In a little book, she recorded how much was given out for a loan or when someone’s husband became sick or, God forbid, for a burial. Hinda, the second sister, baked with Mama every Thursday so that the women could have honey cake with their tea. The women never sang “bai-bai-bai-bai” like religious men in their ecstatic trances. They sang about the bad and the good things in life, and everything was revealed in their singing. Even
the house burning, even the police station, the bad street, and the lost child, even playing at love in the cemetery. There’s no “bai-bai-bai” for women, Grandma Nehama used to say. Not even after the grave. But that’s no reason not to sing. She was the one who saved money for the middle sisters to go to school. They tried to teach Grandma Nehama to read Russian—there were no books yet in Yiddish—but it was too hard and she gave up. If only I was thirty years younger, she’d say. This was the story the sisters would tell Nehama while they hung their laundry in the courtyard. There was no singing society after you were born, they said. Mama was in mourning and she wouldn’t have it.

Nehama was humming as she pushed her way past the fruit stall and waved to Minnie, who was struggling with the baby in one arm and her little son pulling at her sleeve for a copper to get a baked potato. “Finally I found you,” she said to Nehama. “It’s so crowded today someone must be giving out money. Look, isn’t this a beautiful fish?”

Nehama unwrapped a corner of the newspaper to poke at it. “How much?”

“Not too much considering that this is the best.” In the tightly wound mass of Minnie’s hair, a comb with paste jewels caught the sun. “Here, let me put the fish in your basket. What’s this? Not another book.”

“It was very cheap,” Nehama said, catching Minnie’s son by the shirt as he tried to dart away after some glittering thing.

“So all of a sudden you’re wanting to be a
shayner
?
”
She meant one of the fine people. Lawyers and owners of factories. People who didn’t use their own hands like the
proster
, the plain working people. “I’m worried about you, Nehama. You have a lodger from who knows where and you look at her like you have to beg a piece of bread from her. You listen to me. You have nothing to be ashamed of in front of her.”

“Who’s ashamed?” Nehama asked nonchalantly. Let Minnie watch someone else. A free person’s shame should be private. “Is it a sin to read a book? Show me where it’s written.”