The Singing Fire (2 page)

To her surprise, someone answered.

“Hello there!” A portly man pushed aside the Chinese sailor who was leaving the shop with a bird in a cage. It took a moment for her to realize that she understood him. “Can I help you?” the man asked in Yiddish. He wore a bowler and a sack coat like the foremen on the dock.

“I’m just not sure which way to go. It’s so foggy,” she said as she stood up.

“Anyone can see that you’re a newcomer, so how could you know? That’s why I’m here. I’m from the Newcomers’ Assistance Committee. My name is Mr. Blink. It used to be Blinick. Do you have any family waiting for you? A friend?”

“I came by myself.” She tried to sound as self-possessed as her oldest
sister. There were five older sisters in Poland, all of them either intelligent or married and some of them both.

“Well—don’t worry,” Mr. Blink said. “I’ll take care of everything. What’s your name, my girl, and where are you from?”

“Plotsk. I’m Nehama Korzen.”

“Such a coincidence!” He beamed. What a friendly face he had. It was all pouches, smaller ones under his eyes and bigger ones under his cheeks and an extra chin that told her this was a man who ate meat every day, as much as he liked. “I’m a Plotsker, myself. I don’t know any Korzens. Too bad. But a
landsmann
is as good as relations, right? You just come with me. First thing we’ll go to the city office to pay the entrance fee.”

“I didn’t know about any fee. How much is it?” she asked, putting her hand over her waist, where she’d sewn a hidden pocket with all the money she had. It had seemed like so much at home. But what was a ruble worth in London?

Mr. Blink stopped abruptly. “You mean no one told you? My dear child, this is terrible. How could they send you off like that—completely unprepared?”

“Nobody sent me. It was my own idea.”

“And you didn’t know. What a shame. A real pity.”

“A Jew doesn’t give up a
landsmann
to the authorities, does he? Please, don’t do that,” she said.

“You see that man standing there?” Mr. Blink pointed at someone holding a torch as he led his horse through the fog. “A policeman. But if you’re with me, he won’t pay any attention to you.”

“What will I do? I can’t go home.”

“Maybe I can do something.” He put his hand on her elbow. “I might be able to draw on the committee’s loan fund.”

“Oh, would you?” A black snow was falling on her. It smelled of burnt tobacco. She covered her nose with her hand.

“A promise I can’t give, but I’ll do my best,” he said.

“I’d be so grateful. And a job?”

“There’s always something.”

“I’m a hard worker.” She could picture the tickets to London in her mother’s hand. She’d send for all of them, mother and father, her five
sisters with their families. They wouldn’t think that she was so stupid anymore.

“But first you come home with me,” Mr. Blink said. “You have a good meal and a good sleep and things will look better. Tomorrow, I’ll make the proper inquiries.”

In the beginning, she hadn’t thought to run away. She was working with her father, sewing in the sleeves of a satin gown. He was a custom tailor, and she was the last of his daughters to work in his shop. She was singing and sewing and daydreaming about her future, which would include a house of her own and, even more important, some heroic act that would surprise everyone. She cut the thread. “Father,” she said.

“Mmm?” He worked carefully, his glasses low on his nose, a religious man in a worn caftan who was bothered by the impieties of younger men but would say nothing, showing disapproval just in his glance and the dismissal of a waving hand.

“I hear that in London a Jew can stand for Parliament,” she said. “Isn’t that something?” He agreed that it was something. “It’s the free land. Nobody has to do anything he doesn’t want.”

“But in Poland a Jew can own his grave,” Father said. “You want something more?” Nehama laughed but Father didn’t as he added, “Your home is your home. Nothing else is the same.”

The back door was open to the courtyard surrounded by small houses that were old and run-down. In them lived Nehama’s married sisters. She was always surrounded by sisters. She couldn’t open her mouth to sneeze without one of them saying, Bless you. Where’s your handkerchief? Why aren’t you wearing woolens? Where’s your head? The other sisters were all fair, like Father. Only she and Mama were dark. She’d been named for her grandmother because she was born just after Grandma Nehama died. Nehama means “consolation,” but her mother had been inconsolable. She was depressed for a year, ignoring all her fair-haired children, who pinched and slapped the baby when no one was looking. It was their duty to curb the
yetzer-hara
, the evil inclination, because she was the youngest and Mother let her get away with murder. They should have pinched harder. Nehama still had a strong
yetzer-hara
.

“If I was young, I’d go to London in a minute,” Mama said. The shop was small, the back door propped open with a stone. In the courtyard the sisters’ laundry hung like angels in the smoke from the nearby feather factory.

“Then you’d let me go?” Nehama asked.

“Who’s talking about going? I only meant in theory,” Mama said. Her hair was still dark, her hands scrubbed raw after baking so she wouldn’t stain the fine cloth when she came to sew.

“But in theory a boat ticket costs less than a dowry,” Nehama said.

“Don’t be silly. Sending away a child, that’s for desperate people.” Mama shook her head. While she sewed she sighed, as if it was hard to breathe in the smoky air that blew in from the feather factory.

“But I’d send for you. I’d send for everybody!”

“You and who else?” Hinda called from the other room. She was the prettiest of the sisters. “You’d better keep the price of the ticket for your dowry. You’ll need it because no one’s marrying you for your beauty.”

“So who needs beauty if you know business?” Rivka said. She was the oldest sister and had a business importing cotton. “I can’t keep the store closed more than an hour to take inventory. What are you waiting for, Nehama?”

“Go, go. I’ll finish here,” Mama said.

Nehama crossed the courtyard with her oldest sister to the small house where the store took up the front room. Rivka planned to have a real shop soon, with two stories and heavy shutters that locked out thieves and rioters.

“Do you think I’m ugly?” Nehama asked, seating herself at the table to write up the accounts.

“Ugly? I wouldn’t say that. Your hair is too curly, but it matters more that it’s dark.” Rivka lifted a bale of fabric onto the counter, unrolling it and checking for holes. She wore a kerchief over her hair but wasn’t too pious not to let a few golden strands fall across her forehead. “Too bad you don’t have our coloring. I mean mine and Father’s. Jewish boys go crazy for fair hair. But your eyes are nice. Very blue. And you wouldn’t be so dark if you ate eggs.”

“I hate eggs.” Nehama erased a sum with a rubber. She added every column twice, and each time it came to something different.

“You hate everything good for you.”

“Not everything. I’d like a shop. I could run it.”

“There’s no money for you to have a shop. You have to be practical about what you can do.”

Nehama kept a list of things she might do. Page one: businesses. Importing cotton, wheat, eggs, oranges. Selling corsets, rope, kerosene, wooden barrels. Page two: occupations. There wouldn’t be so many for a woman, but never mind. She wrote them in large letters to fill up the page, all her pent-up energy making the penciled letters as dark as black ink. “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? I could be a teacher like Leah and Shayna-Pearl.”

“You want to talk ugly? Leah’s scarred from the smallpox. It’s a mercy from God she became a teacher. And Shayna-Pearl is so bad-tempered no one could stand her for a week. Thank God that there was enough money for them to go to school. But now, unfortunately—well, when it’s the youngest’s turn there just isn’t much left. You never liked to face reality, but there comes a time when you have no choice.”

“You could send me to school, Rivka.” It wasn’t fair. Nehama added up the accounts herself. She knew what was going in and going out.

“And don’t I have my own children to consider? Someone has to tell you how the world works, and I can see it’s up to me. Make yourself into an attractive girl, Nehama, and your dowry will stretch further. I mean attractive in temper, not just in looks. You should eat eggs because they’re good for you and never mind if you like them. That’s what makes a nice girl.”

“Fine. If I can’t do anything I want here, then I’ll go somewhere else.” Along the river she’d seen the large boats that carried everything a person might dream about. She could be on such a boat, the force of her desires driving the steam engine. A life that she made herself, one that was worth remembering at the end of it. “Maybe I’ll go to London. Girls don’t need dowries there.”

“I never heard anything so stupid. You don’t know what you want.”

“How am I supposed to know? Every time I take a step, I have a sister telling me when to lift my foot and when to put it down.”

“Thank God, or who knows where you’d end up. Just because Mama makes you a dress in the latest fashion, you think you’re a special
salami. Let me tell you, Nehama, someday you have to find out that you’re just plain beans and you give everyone gas.” Rivka slapped a roll of cotton onto the counter. “You see this? It would make a serviceable dress for everyday. The dirt won’t show on it. If you want I’ll give it to you at cost, Nehameleh, and you can save a couple of yards if you make it up yourself without any fancy-shmancy business. A mother that sees you in this will realize that you know what’s what and she’ll think of giving her son to you.”

“I don’t like it,” Nehama said. “It looks like an old woman’s.”

“All right. Insult me. That’s what I should expect. Just remember when you end up depending on handouts for a piece of bread that if you weren’t so stubborn, it could have been avoided.”

Rivka went back to her bales of fabric in a huff, and Nehama added up the columns of numbers once again, hoping that with God’s help the sums would stay the same.

On
Shobbos
they all sat together in the women’s gallery of the synagogue, Nehama, her mother, and all her sisters. It was a modern synagogue with an open balcony, where the women could look straight down at the Holy Torah as it was paraded in its crown of silver and its gown of velvet. Her next older sister, Bronya, was breathing noisily. Seven months pregnant and still she did business every market day, charging a few pennies to weigh goods on the scale she brought to the market square in a wheelbarrow. Her husband was a carpenter, not a bad trade, but he stank of onions. How could Bronya stand him? “Your turn next, Nehama,” she said.

“Not me. I’m helping Father. He can’t afford to marry me off.”

“I hear the matchmaker’s been sniffing around.” Hinda shifted her baby from one breast to the other. “I ought to give her some tips about you.”

“There’s a fine young man on the next street to ours,” Bronya said. “You can smell him coming. Aah—dead animal skins. But a tanner can still be very pious. And just think how you can help him by collecting cow shit for tanning.”

“Such language! Don’t tease your sister,” Mama said. “You know how sensitive she is to odors.”

Down below among the men, the Holy Torah, which has no odor, was unrolled all the way to the beginning. The reader chanted: “And
the earth was chaos and void. On the face of the deep, in the darkness, there was a great wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters …”

She’d show them all. The time for thinking was over.

Nehama secretly bought the ticket the day that one of her sisters pointed out the tanner and another told her to keep her ideas to herself when the matchmaker came. She didn’t consider everything she was leaving until she stood on the boat, looking back at the docks, where no one waved good-bye. The spray from the river and the rain from the heavens splashed her face, diluting her tears the way London merchants diluted milk with water and mixed flour with sawdust. And in the blink of an eye, the Vistula River, queen of Poland, flowing between green banks of willow trees, became the Thames, empress of the world, slapping the base of the Tower of London, where queens were beheaded. On the gray waters of a nation that disdained spices and ate boiled beef, steaming ships came in with the west wind, carrying perfume and elephant tusks and Sardinian sailors with great gold earrings.

Thrawl Street

So this was an English house. There was an iron stove instead of a tile oven, a painting of dogs in red jackets playing cards, and a large menorah with nine silver cups for oil. The menorah was on the top shelf of an open wooden cabinet, beside it a set of leather volumes in Hebrew. Nehama couldn’t read the titles, but she could write her initials in the dust.

Mr. Blink worked very hard. All through his meal, men came to call, and for their sake he interrupted his dinner, inspecting goods and making payment from his cashbox. Nehama was uneasy though there wasn’t any reason. After all, what kind of shopkeeper back home didn’t deal with gentiles? They brought all sorts of small things: silk handkerchiefs, a gold chain, a silver spoon, a pocket watch, ivory buttons. One of the visitors smelled of the river, and one of them smelled of the sewers, and the one that smelled of freshly turned earth brought a wedding ring set with red stones. Nehama wiped the gravy from her plate with a piece of soft bread. It didn’t occur to her that it might not be kosher.

She spent the night on a cot in the kitchen. When she woke up the
next morning, Mr. Blink’s housekeeper gave her some breakfast, sweating heavily as she put the bowl of porridge on the table, and Nehama surreptitiously covered her nose with her hand. The housekeeper sniffed and muttered, pointing to the floor, but if she expected Nehama to wash it, then she was much mistaken. In truth, God alone knew what she was saying, and it was a relief when she went out.

For a while, Nehama sat at the table, too excited to eat. People said that she had her grandmother’s eyes, and hadn’t she come by boat from someplace small to a bigger world just like her grandmother, who grew up in a small village? It was a shock, Grandma Nehama’s first view of the town with the cathedral rising high on the hill. She was young and coming to marry a man with a baby because her family couldn’t afford anything better than to make her a second wife. Standing on the boat and smelling the docks of Plotsk, she almost changed her mind, but what could she go back to? So she married the man. His daughter was a skinny baby that was fading away, and of all her children this one was her favorite because she had brought it back to life. When the daughter grew up and had five girls, it was Grandma Nehama who took care of them. It’s easier to fall in love with a skinny baby than with a hairy man, she always said.