The Singing Fire (20 page)

Children, children. There’s always another way. Use your head. Is there a small door? A side door? Always
—
I promise you. Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you listen? Dear God above, for this I left my grave? My children are dying. My children are killing each other. How can you bear it?

If the grandmother’s spirit could have heard the Holy One’s answer, she would have caught the sound of weeping. But even she didn’t listen, believing that God was far away in the distant heights.

Nehama made her way to the side door, using her elbows and her knees in the accusing darkness. Beside her someone was praying to make sure that if he died it would be with the holiest of prayers on his lips. Was it someone she knew? The pawnbroker, perhaps. It didn’t matter. She must not compromise herself, not for love and not for God, and she jabbed the man with her elbow, she stepped on his feet to make her way past him. If she had to be a sister to kings and squires to save this child, she would do it. She would even listen to her step-grandmother cry.

Outside, people wandered in a daze while gentile neighbors brought them tea and blankets, their breath steaming in the cold air. There were four hundred people in the single narrow block in front of the theater and more arriving every few minutes. Nehama looked among them for Nathan and Minnie, Pious Pearl and Lazar, the pawnbroker, the baker Grodzinski and the boot maker who was president of the workingmen’s literary circle, but all she could see were the same faces over and over, all of them familiar, none of them known, until someone stopped her and made her drink some tea. The air was cold and she was hot; she was the fire burning down the theater, and the flames would eat her alive. And even when Nathan found her, that wasn’t enough to quench the fire, not even with his tears on her face and hands.

He huddled on the ground beside her, and their heads touched while his shaking fingers stroked her hand.

“Never, I’m telling you, Nathan. I’ll never walk through that door again.” They were sitting with their backs against the wall of a warehouse opposite the theater. The baby was sucking on her fingers.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“No, it’s not. I have to go in there and look for Minnie. Maybe she’s lying with …” Nehama couldn’t finish the sentence. Inside the theater the dead were laid out.

“Wait,” Nathan said. “Finish your tea. Then we’ll go.”

The tea lasted a long time, long enough for a dockworker to bring them blankets and a missionary a Bible. Nehama threw the Bible at a lantern, turning the spot of light into the darkness it should be.

“Nehama?” a voice called. “Nehama! Answer me if you’re alive ….” The crowd opened and closed like the mouth of a great fish, and out of it fell Lazar and Minnie, her hair as red as roses in the dim light of the kerosene lanterns. Her son was in his father’s arms as she fell on Nehama, kissing her and the baby as if they were both her children.

“Hersh the boot maker,” Minnie whispered. “From down the street. I heard that he fell. It could have been my baby. What would I have done?”

“Don’t think of it. We’re all right,” Nehama said. A person who has a double portion of the
yetzer-hara
is very strong. It is her duty to protect the weak. Only then did she feel the cold and begin to shiver, holding on tight to her husband and the friends who were sister and brother to her, and the children with their soft, high voices, crawling over her.

All night, the Jews of Whitechapel came through Prince’s Street, asking after friends, neighbors, cousins, brothers, people they weren’t speaking to yesterday, people whose names they didn’t know but wished they’d found out when they could.

They came in the thousands. They wore caftans, they wore kicksies, they wore red shawls and nursed babies, they held hands, they walked with crossed arms wearing the black ribbon of anarchists, they carried their prayer shawls to say morning prayers, they carried baskets of buttered bread and pickled herring.

At dawn, the police rode in on horses. “Clear out. Clear out. Now then, mister. Don’t raise a fuss. We can’t have us a riot.”

In the reading room of the theater, empty chairs were pushed against the walls to make space for the tables in the center of the room. Seventeen bodies were laid out. Two of the dead had been pregnant. One was a mother of eight children. Another her youngest son. The boot maker from Frying Pan Alley lay on a table, his poem still in his pocket, and next to him was an old man from Goulston Street, who’d saved a boy from being trampled. The boy was with his father in the Prince’s Street synagogue, saying
kaddish
, the mourner’s prayer, for the
old man, whose name they didn’t know. Sir Samuel Montagu, M.P. for Whitechapel, came personally in his carriage to express his condolences.

After the inquest, five hearses carried the bodies to the cemetery between the lines of old women on Brick Lane. At the top of Brick Lane was the mission that had once been a Huguenot chapel and would someday be a synagogue. Above the door was a sundial inscribed
Umbra Sumus
. We are shadows. Beyond was the Old Nichol, the worst five blocks in London, but none of the Nichol gang dared come near. The old women were keening, and they would have ripped out the eyes of anyone who disturbed the mourners.

Every house in Whitechapel sat
shivah
. For a week the blinds were drawn, and black crepe was draped over the fronts of synagogues.

After the great fire of 1666, London was rebuilt with glorious cathedrals. But no property was lost in Whitechapel. Only people can die in an imaginary fire. And the voice of the people. And their lives made large enough to show them their meaning. These can die.

CHAPTER 4

Keener the Greatness

1887

Frying Pan Alley

It isn’t true that a mother is born with her child. It may happen sometimes by an act of grace, but most often a mother is made as she struggles with her need for sleep and freedom of movement, over and over choosing to hold and feed and wrap a loudly wailing, soft-skinned being that produces marvelously pungent odors.

The baby lay in an orange crate beside the bed. Emilia fed it, she wasn’t sure how often, because someone put the baby in her arms and someone brought the baby’s mouth to her breast. She didn’t feel the suckling. All sensation had left her, and she blessed God, for after the labor she never wanted to feel anything again. It was night; she lay in the bed with Nehama, her landlord banished to a bench in the back room, knowing that the January dawn wouldn’t come until the morning was well under way. She felt a great satisfaction at knowing something. A fact. Surely a person aware of the facts can rise from her bed. If only her limbs weren’t so heavy and her head so light. It made her want to lie here forever, feeling the shadows of day and night on her closed eyelids.

Emilia was holding on to a postcard. Someone had tried to take it from her, and she believed that she had scratched that person, though she wasn’t entirely sure. It was important, this postcard. It held crucial
information. The postcard had arrived on the day after the baby had come, and Emilia had clutched it ever since.

My dear Emilia,

A mother always hopes that her daughter will make herself a satisfactory marriage. A girl lives for such a short time before making her choice and then has many, many years to abide by it afterward. I know that your mother would have wished to be with you. A mother’s wishes, however, are not always respected in heaven and sometimes God decrees something else. My love is with you,

Ever your servant…

It was signed “Mrs. Plater,” after the young woman who led the Polish cavalry against the Russians.

Emilia had several such postcards from her mother. The others were in her trunk, but this one she couldn’t put away until she’d figured out its hidden meaning, and first she had to swing her feet to the floor, getting herself out of bed carefully, slowly. No one must awaken. She crouched in front of the orange crate where the baby lay, waiting to feel like the child’s mother as she reached down to stroke the small hand. There should be a rush of love, a sense of duty, but she was so cold. If only there was more coal.

The baby had lived inside her; now it was here and there was no home for it. There ought to have been a home for her child. A home and pretty dresses and a rocking horse for when it was bigger. A rocking horse, a piano, then a French governess. She’d never thought her child would live in the Jews’ Orphan Asylum in Norwood. But there was no other choice, and anyway the country air was said to be very good. In the morning she’d do it. She’d take the baby there and leave something for it to remember her by. Go to the asylum and give up the baby to the fat matron in her black dress and lace shawl, contemptuously asking why and what and so on. Whatever would one say to such a person?

Nehama would know. She ought to take the baby there. Emilia stroked the tiny hand. How soft it was, though it didn’t feel like anything of hers. The hand was any hand. That was what she would have
to remind herself. The tears on her face were just tears of tiredness as she stood up and lit a candle stub. Her fingers were stiff because she was still weak, ripping a corner off the newspaper and writing with great effort, “Nehama, please take her.”

Emilia dropped the note into the orange crate, lifted her shawl from the nail in the door, and took her purse from the mantelpiece. She left the house quietly and ran into the street. She had to run, because if she stayed, she would be a person in endless mourning, unable to bathe or comb her hair. She must not delay; her life had momentarily thrown her off, but it had come back for her. This was the secret message from her mother. She didn’t know that she still wore her nightgown as she ran in stocking feet shredded by cobblestones. The ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg flew behind, wishing that it was time for her to speak.

It wasn’t unusual for children to be born in one family and raised by another. Parents were lost in accidents, illness, prison, and debt, and if they managed to survive, they might not be able to feed all the children they had. They considered a son or daughter lucky if it could go to childless relations who were better off. There was no legal procedure. The child just went to someone and was raised there. Sometimes people without children wanted one that wasn’t any relation at all. The prospective parents went to the Jews’ Free School, perhaps, or the orphan asylum, asking the headmaster or matron to recommend a child to them. Usually they didn’t want infants. It didn’t pay to take babies when a third of them wouldn’t reach the age of five. Better to see if it lived and how it turned out.

Rain pounded against the window while Minnie nursed the week-old infant. She was sitting on Nehama’s bed, her own baby crawling on the floor. Nehama stood by the window, looking again at the note. “Please take her,” she said for the hundredth time. “That’s what it says. But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” Minnie moved the baby away from her breast, its face scrunched in sleep. “And I don’t care. You have to do something, Nehama.”

Whenever Minnie nursed the baby, Nehama’s breasts ached as if she were full of milk, and she couldn’t sit still. “Sha, sha,” she murmured
now, taking the baby. She had sewn a gown from the softest flannel and embroidered it with red thread to keep away the evil eye. How small the baby was in it. How warm. She fit right here, between the crook of Nehama’s arm and her hand under the head. She opened her eyes for a moment, then closed them again. Her eyes were dark, and Nehama wondered what color they would be.

“It happens all the time, a baby and no means to take care of it,” Minnie said. “But only a
shayner
like that Mrs. Levy expects someone else to make arrangements. What can you do? There’s the baby. So you just listen to me. The trunk’s still in the back room. You sell what’s inside and give the money to the orphans’ asylum. They’ll put it away for her, and when she’s ready to leave, she’ll have something to start with.”

“No, I’m telling you what the note means. That I should keep the baby as mine.” The thought had come to her slowly as the days passed. She’d been bathing and dressing and holding the baby while Emilia slept endless hours; her absence was just another sort of sleep. The thought was merely waiting to make itself known. There was no other possibility. Nehama’s arms were full with the baby to hold in them.

“What about Nathan?” Minnie went to the stove. She had some good bones for soup.

“He’s only the boss in the busy season,” Nehama said. Last night she’d asked him while they were lying in bed, What if by a miracle we got a child? And he’d answered, A baby that’s no relation, it’s betting on a dark horse. She’d turned away from him, her back rigid, neither of them sleeping until the moon set and the day arose slowly, sluggish in the cold of winter. Then he said quietly, If my wife gets a baby and she didn’t risk her life having it, am I going to decide for God?

“Did you think about everything—what if she comes back?” Minnie asked.

“Let her. Then she’ll see what’s what. You don’t give away a jewel and then expect it to be returned.”

“It happens plenty,” Minnie said, salting the soup. “The lady of the house thinks she doesn’t want the bracelet and gives it to the wet nurse. It’s just mother-of-pearl, nothing fancy. But then it comes back into fashion and she wants it.”

“A bracelet, maybe. But not a child. Mrs. Levy is too fine. She can
manage on her own only if she’s free. That’s why she left the note for me.” Nehama hesitated, hating her dry breasts for making her ask. “I could pay you to nurse the baby—”

“It’s a mistake, I’m telling you,” Minnie interrupted, casting a quick glance at Nehama. “But don’t insult me. I make too much milk for one child anyway.”

The wind rattled the glass pane, a window bag keeping out the draft while Nehama rocked the baby, swaying just the way she’d seen mothers in the alley sway their many children. The baby opened her eyes, locking on to Nehama’s as if they’d known each other from the days of King Solomon.