The Singing Fire (19 page)

“Avram, what a thing to say!
Thpoo, thpoo, thpoo.”
Mrs. Shmolnik blew away the evil eye; it shouldn’t get any ideas from her son standing awkwardly, looking and not looking at Emilia. It wasn’t his fault that his breath smelled of bad teeth.

One of the twins was playing with a large object, banging it on the counter, while the other cried, “Mine! Mine!” pushing her sister. The grandmother gave them each a slap, and Mr. Shmolnik shook a finger. “Malkeleh, enough,” he said. “I have one for you, too.” From a shelf behind the counter, he took the prosthetic foot. “Here, take it, my pretty.”

“You see what lovely children?” Mrs. Shmolnik asked loudly. “From my son, you’ll have children as good as these.”

“Sha
, Mama,” her son said. “Mrs. Levy, I’m grateful you’d consider. Believe me, I know how it is to lose your beloved.”

“Two of them,” Emilia couldn’t help saying.

“My luck hasn’t been good.” He turned away and wiped his muddy eyes.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Shmolnik said. “A person can’t mourn forever. Well, children, the shop has to reopen. You send us a reply soon, Mrs. Levy. Don’t wait too long.” She looked at Emilia’s expansive middle. “I’ll make you a nice betrothal.”

In the hansom cab, Emilia closed her eyes to the street of pawnbrokers and newspaper vendors calling, “Stabbing most foul! On Thursday last …”

Dear Mother, she imagined writing, What was your plan? The purse is getting thin and soon I must marry Mr. Shmolnik. My hair will be cut and I shall sport a wig like a religious woman must after her wedding day. And when the wig makes my head itch, I shall scratch like they do, digging under the wig as it tilts to one side in a drunken tremor.

Prince’s Street

On the eighteenth of January, in the balcony of the theater in Prince’s Street, the audience waited for the play to begin on Jewish time, an hour or so late. The pawnbroker, Mr. Shmolnik, wearing a new hat, sat with his children in the front row of the balcony. In the row behind him was a rough-stuff cutter in the boot trade, the smell of glue sealed into the seams of his gray skin. Every Thursday evening he led a literary circle in a room at the Jews’ Free School, and in his pocket he had a poem dedicated to Dina, the daughter of the High Priest of ancient Israel, or rather to the actress playing her. He’d read it aloud while waiting in the queue, and Minnie had cried. He sat in the same row of seats as Nehama and Nathan, Minnie and Lazar and their children, Pious Pearl the beigel lady, her numerous sons with their watery eyes, and her husband, who’d bet his wage packet on horses but had somehow managed to hold on to enough of his stake to buy the sixpenny tickets for the balcony. They were all eating their supper, and if the children got impatient, they’d crack nuts and throw the shells onto the hats of people seated below the gallery.

They’d all come to see
Bar Kokhba: The Last Days of Jerusalem
. Nobody could say how the play would turn out, even if someone had seen it a hundred times, for scenes were rewritten to taste, and even so the actors were quite independent of their lines. As it is written: the Jews are a stiff-necked people. There was the time when the actor playing the Roman commander refused to be the villain of the piece and declared Jerusalem a free state. But however the play turned out, everyone knew that there would be a grand finale, an amazing spectacle promised before the end.

Beside the pawnbroker and his children, a Hebrew teacher was holding a bouquet of roses. He’d come from the West End, where some of the Jewish newcomers were forming a colony among the prostitutes in Soho. He was missing three fingers on one hand and was peeling his orange rather awkwardly. Everyone had oranges. That was the smell of the theater: oranges and cigars.

“Who are the flowers for?” the boot maker asked.

“For Jacob Adler. He’s playing the leader, Bar Kokhba.”

“But it was all Bar Kokhba’s fault that the rebellion failed,” the boot maker said, as agitated as if he personally was being led off in chains.

The teacher offered him a piece of orange. “Wait till you see Adler. He makes a wonderful Bar Kokhba. So determined,” he said, as if he didn’t think it strange at all that a man should be enraged by imaginary deeds.

The heel cutter waved his bitter cigarette as he protested, “But Adler can barely sing a note. He should never have been cast in this role.”

“And you’re an expert?” the teacher said. “You! A boot maker!”

“So you have something against boot makers?” He took a bite from his onion sandwich.

“Well, you know. Some trades shrink the brain. Give one
a yokisher kop,”
the teacher said, meaning a gentile head. He used the Cockney slang, turning
goy
backward. It was a terrible insult.

So the boot maker replied in kind, “Then teaching must turn out cripples.”

The teacher pushed the boot maker’s shoulder as he said, “Crippled in the head, you tailors and boot makers.”

Now someone shouted from behind them, “You want tailors, you have tailors.” And someone else was answering, “Don’t lump me with you. A Polish tailor is a thief.”

The boot maker’s lip was split. The teacher had blood on the hand that was missing fingers. But wait—Mr. Smith, the owner of the theater, was signaling frantically: the orchestra began to play, the torches were lit. The women were shushing the men. In this play, everyone spoke in verse. Not for anything would such a drama in the
mama-loshen
be missed; it gave dignity to their language. Dignity for sixpence: it would be cheap at twice the price! The curtain was rising.

While they waited for the spectacle, the audience cheered the Hebrew rebels and booed the troops of mighty Rome, who were dressed remarkably like Cossacks. Rome was faltering and mustered its troops from far and near, even recalling them from Britain to fight the proud Hebrews in the Holy Land. The audience gloried in the strength of its ancestors as the great Jacob Adler sang the famous solo of the leader Bar Kokhba. They hissed as the Jewish traitor went over to the Roman side, capturing Dina, the leader’s beloved, attempting first to seduce and then to ravish her.

In the balcony, matches flared like a hundred red eyes. Smoke threaded upward from cheap cigarettes while Nehama waited for the heroine’s tragic end. It was the same in all the versions of the play: her fate didn’t change. And why was that? she’d like to know. Already from the few books she’d read, she’d learned of half a dozen heroic types. There was the Frenchman who escaped from his miserable convict’s life to rise up to the position of mayor. Later he risked his life to save his daughter’s lover from the guns of insurrection—that was another sort of heroism. A third was the cleverness of women in the books about making a good marriage. Yet her favorite type came from the last book she’d read, about the girl who wasn’t beautiful or good but rebellious. She never compromised herself, not for love and not for God, and always she looked for a way to live. Why must the Jewish heroine throw herself off the tower?

Minnie was weeping. Nehama wept, too. It shouldn’t be like this. Onstage, Dina stood on top of the tower, exhorting the people to continue their fight. Then—rather than give herself up to the Romans and to shame—she jumped from the tower and died her tragic death. The rebels in their terrible grief and rage set the tower on fire. A green fire it was, like flames from the other world. And the spark rising up, up to the curtains was cold. Anyone would know it. An effect of stagecraft. Only their imagination made it a fire.

But the grandmothers who’d risen from the grave knew how strong imagination could be, strong enough to carry them over the sea with their children.

“Fire!” someone called.

“Where?”

“There. Don’t you see it?”

“The orchestra’s still playing.”

“It’s all right. Just part of the act.”

“Don’t sit like a bump. Can’t you feel the heat?”

“Go back to your seats!” Jacob Adler shouted from the stage as the audience stood up. “There’s no fire. No danger. Please.” He waved to the musicians in the orchestra pit. “Louder.” The actors playing the Hebrew rebels sang. They danced faster and wilder to get the audience’s attention.

There was silence in the gallery. “It’s all right,” someone said. The
audience shifted as if people might be convinced that the alarm was false and remain in their seats.

It was just Bengal fire. A chemical. Something used a dozen times. And Nathan was telling everyone to wait a minute. Half the dangers in the world can be avoided just by waiting. But Lazar was pushing Pious Pearl aside, and Minnie was trying to crawl over the seats, pulling her son after her. The smoke from a hundred bitter cigarettes was thickening into a fog.

“Don’t listen to Adler! He wants to get to the door first, himself.”

“Where’s the exit?”

“Move. Move already!”

“Fire! Fire!”

“Dear God, my children. Take Mama’s hand. Hurry.”

The audience was rising; panic swept through them in a wind of contagion carried on their breath. A trembling on your right, a curse on your left. The actors were still singing and dancing and pleading with the crowd. But the play was out of their control. It had shifted to the parterre and the gallery, and it was their turn to weep.

“Help me,” Minnie said, trying to hold her baby in one arm, her son in the other.

Nehama took the baby as she pushed her friend back down. “It’s all right. Just sit and wait.”

“Go to hell,” Minnie said, climbing down over the Hebrew teacher, who was still clutching his flowers. “Give me the baby!”

“How can you hold them both?” Nehama asked, and her last sight of Minnie was a look of hatred as the crowd engulfed her.

Frying Pan Alley

The house was quiet, all sound gone with the grandmothers to the theater, and only fog walked in the street. Emilia sat by the stove to get the last bit of warmth while she wrote to her mother. There was no more coal. On the stove she had a candle. It was as much light as she could afford, but it was very bright, and as the wax pooled, she rolled it in her hands. There were shadows behind her, nothing but shadows and the ghost of the first wife sitting on the bed.

She was writing a letter slowly, warming her fingers in the melting candle wax.

Dear Mother,

I cannot do it. I cannot stomach Mr. Shmolnik, and I dare not think what will happen to me.

Her dress was torn. It wasn’t very modest, but she looked down indifferently at the rip in her skirt. Nehama would never go around with a ripped skirt. She would mend it invisibly, not caring how worn the fabric was or how cheap. Emilia crumpled the letter and took out another sheet of paper. If Nehama were at home she’d make a face over wasting paper which could be turned to good use. A patch for a window crack or a sole for a shoe or even a feather in a hat if someone used her wits. But Emilia was here all alone, so she didn’t have to see any disapproving glances. She was glad to be alone. Really, she was.

Dear Mother,

I feel most peculiar. There is a wrenching pain in my abdomen—it must be indigestion. The food I eat is rather more greasy than I have been accustomed to.

She had to marry. How else could she manage? That was what her landlady would say. Emilia gazed at the debris of ash and feathers and bones swept into the corner. She ought to give her child a name and a room just like this, so small that if one sneezed, the spit landed on the wall, for if one lived in a room like this, one would not carry a handkerchief. The ghost of the first wife didn’t have a handkerchief either. The dead and the poor must understand each other, and if Emilia followed their lead, she’d turn into one of them. But she had a trunk full of gowns that would fit her again. That was the difference. If only she could open the trunk and convince herself of that.

Walking slowly to the other room, one hand on the wall to support herself, the other holding the stub of her candle, she coughed as fog seeped through the crack in the window. The workroom smelled of wool and gas jets and onions. Emilia kneeled in front of her trunk, fumbling with the key. Her eyes were running, she couldn’t manage the lock. All she could do was put her head down on the trunk and wait for someone living to find her in her hiding place.

Prince’s Street

No one ever knew for sure how the gaslights went out just then. But in the darkness, the audience heard the rustling of wings. And the
yetzer-hara
, the evil inclination, the primal instinct, rose up from every soul and became a single soul, the soul of the crowd needing to save itself. It thrashed and struggled, stepping on its own flesh to break free from the hot darkness. There were side doors, but who thought of them? This was a soul running from flames, a soul that believed in a single exit at the front, where tickets were taken and a sign read “Amazing Spectacle!” People fell as the crowd from the main floor climbed up toward the front door and the crowd from the gallery climbed down, jammed against each other, unable to get out, like twins stuck in the birth canal, killing themselves and their mother.

Nehama held her free arm over the baby’s head so it wouldn’t smother. Under her feet someone was dying and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Was it a man or a woman—who could say? There was only a softness and the crowd trampling as Nehama was carried along, trying not to vomit as she felt herself walking on the wood floor again. If you could call it walking when your face was pressed against the cheap rough cloth of someone’s back, and your feet moved an inch forward. A man bent to help a boy fallen on the staircase, groaning as someone pushed them both down. At any moment she could drop and die beneath a hundred feet, but she had no right. Not as long as she was holding Minnie’s baby. She could not deny her longing to live even when it meant walking over someone. This instinct for self-preservation, which the rabbis called the
yetzer-hara
, this was her treasure now. It would save her friend’s child. So she pushed and she listened to the roar of the blind crowd. Which way? It was too dark to see. But if they were running from the sound of crackling flames, then she had to hear something else. The gasping breath of terrified mothers. A cracking beam. A cracking bone. For among the terrible sounds there might be a clue to the way out. And then, quieter than the baby whimpering in her arms, she heard the voice of her dreams: