The Singing Fire (25 page)

Emilia had replied with a quick thank-you for the present and good wishes, explaining that as she had much on her mind and much to do, there was no time to write more, and her mother should remember that Emilia was supposed to be an orphan. She had nothing else to say. It was the first Mrs. Rosenberg who’d come here from the other world.

Emilia shut the lid of the trunk. The present from Minsk was inside it: a box of scissors, paper, a small knife, inks, paint suitable for paper, stencils. Well, why not? All her friends did something, and Mrs. Abraham wanted a paper-cut. The cameo brooch she left in the wardrobe.

The ghost of the first wife climbed outside to sit on the roof, reaching up as if to draw smoke from chimneys that were cold.

Charlotte Street

At night Emilia slept in her room in Berwick Street; during the day she cleaned and painted the flat in Charlotte Street. Jacob had leased the first two floors of a house in Bloomsbury, his brother Albert already having the third. On either side were houses subdivided for rent to students and artists, who knocked on the door at all hours to borrow sugar, ink, scissors, pots, tea, cigarette papers, a shaving brush, and
Albert’s cat, said to be the best rat catcher in Bloomsbury. Mr. Zalkind, who was a wholesaler of building supplies, sent in men to fix up the house so it wouldn’t fall down around them. And while Emilia painted the walls and ceilings with designs she’d seen in Liberty’s wallpaper books, the terrible murders in Whitechapel were making headlines all around the world.

She was painting the upstairs bedroom when the first body was discovered; then the second was found not far from where Jacob was born. August ended with terse headlines in
The Times:
“East End Murders.” A letter to the editor of
The Pall Mall Gazette
deduced that the killer must be a broad-shouldered man with muscular hands and stunted thumbs, dark-complexioned, of foreign accent, middle height, wearing a flannel shirt, a silk handkerchief, dark gloves, and thin side-spring boots. Another letter, this one from a clairvoyant, said there was no doubt that the murderer was a blond American who sold organs to publishers of medical textbooks in New York. The editor of
The Times
wrote that the murderer was surely a tormented Russian Jew, perhaps a butcher, for an Englishman would never do anything so heinous.

Mrs. Zalkind had brought her maid and was cleaning the house from top to bottom, stocking it with sufficient pots and pans, silverware and dishes to separately serve meat and dairy, everyday meals and meals for Passover, so that everything would be kosher enough for even the grandfather. She came down from the upstairs bedroom, swathed in an apron, with an armful of dustcloths to shake out and a tattered game found in a closet, the Palace of Happiness. If a player landed on idleness, she was sent to the workhouse for the duration of the game. Behind Mrs. Zalkind, the maid was carrying a bucket of dirty water.

“You must remember. No shellfish,” Mrs. Zalkind said as she entered the parlor, where Emilia was painting the ceiling. “Wait six hours after eating meat before you serve dairy. We are not lax like the Dutch. I hope you remembered to rinse the brisket before and after the salt.”

Emilia dipped her small brush in the gold paint. From her perch on the ladder she could see into the dining room, where Albert was studying anatomy and Jacob writing his column. “I remembered,” she said. “The brisket is in the oven.”

At home it had always been the maid who
kashered the
meat, draining
it of blood. Emilia liked doing it herself. There was something satisfying in flopping the brisket over on one side, then the other, covering it with chunks of salt, later rinsing it away and feeling the flesh smooth and polite, all sign of violence poured away.

Mrs. Zalkind glanced down at the newspapers spread on the floor to protect it from dripping paint, each headline more lurid than the one before. “Are you writing about Whitechapel, Jacob?” she called into the dining room. “You ought to say the Jews would never do such a thing.”

He looked up, wiping his pen on a rag. The light in the dining room was green, filtered through a thin cloth hanging over the window until the curtains would be ready. “I’m writing about a lady’s shop, Mother. My readers want entertaining, and they’ll have it.”

“Don’t imagine that this has nothing to do with you, my son,” Mrs. Zalkind said. “Soon those hoodlums will be marching through the West End again, smashing glass, turning over carriages, throwing bricks, plundering and ravishing. Mark my words. Ravishing, I say.”

“My future wife is ravishing,” Jacob said, smiling at Emilia on her ladder while his mother huffed at the ignorance of children, taking the dustcloths outside to shake them furiously.

Emilia was painting lilies on the ceiling because they couldn’t afford very good wallpaper. Using the smallest brush for the dots in the petals as she leaned back on the ladder, she didn’t give dinner a thought until the maid called in a small voice, “Miss! Miss! There’s a bit of smoke coming from the stove.”

The kitchen was as dark with oily smoke as if it were the Queen’s Pipes furiously burning contraband. Emilia covered her face with an apron, opening doors and windows and pouring water on the pan, which made the smoke billow up, thick with failed gravy, and she coughed till tears streamed down her face, making a path in the streaks of soot on her cheeks.

Mrs. Zalkind found her sitting at the table in the kitchen, her head in her arms. Emilia didn’t reply to her greeting. She couldn’t bear to look up but stayed at the table, listening to the sound of a mop and water sloshing, a pan scraped, orders for the butcher and greengrocer. It was too humiliating. How did her mother stand it day after day?

“I’ll never be able to do it,” Emilia said without lifting her head.

“It isn’t your fault that you can’t cook,” Mrs. Zalkind said briskly. “A girl should be taught from childhood so it comes as naturally as breathing. Gentile women have cooks and are completely dependent on them. How could you know anything? My poor son will just have to wait for you to learn, and if God above is good, then Jacob will not suffer greatly with his sensitive stomach. Wash your hands. Paint is not a wholesome spice. I brought you my cookbook, and I shall expect dinner from you today even if I eat it at midnight.” Mrs. Zalkind seated herself at the table with the patience of Job’s mother. “Do you have any carrots? Give me the knife, I’ll chop. You go to the door. I see the butcher’s boy is here with another brisket. Always buy from Greenberg’s. His is the best kosher meat.”

Frying Pan Alley

It was the first of September, a cool
Shobbos;
men who were so inclined went to the synagogue, and women sat on steps or stood in the alley, nursing and watching their children. It was the last Sabbath before the Jewish New Year, but Nehama wouldn’t sit in the women’s gallery of the synagogue. If she was there, she wouldn’t understand what was being read from the Bible since there were no women’s prayer leaders in the modern day to translate the
haftorah
into a language she knew.

Nehama and Minnie were sitting side by side on a bench pulled into the alley. The sky above was gray, and there was a warm, wet wind that lifted the fringe of their shawls. Minnie was darning socks, Nehama reading the
East London Gazette
, and Pious Pearl, who made them push over so she’d have room to sit down, was watching her boys. The women all wore red shawls, and the only difference among them was that Pious Pearl also had a wig and a kerchief over it, as if the double protection against sinfully inflaming a man’s desire would counteract the effects of her drinking. Across from them and toward the school yard, there were other benches and other women standing and sitting, for on the Sabbath the alley could make room for everyone. They spoke in hushed voices, afraid of being overheard while the bigger girls jumped rope and the boys played hide-and-seek in their tattered suits from last year’s donation by the school. The jump rope slapped the cobblestones as the girls sang:

First he bought me apples,
Then he bought me pears,
Then he gave me sixpence
To kiss him on the stairs …

“Don’t go past the school yard,” Pious Pearl called. “I’m warning you.”

The babies played at their feet, hardly babies anymore. Libby was three, telling Gittel a story while she fed her dolly, which was made from rags. In her fingers she had a treasured raisin, and when her dolly was sated, she would eat it. Libby didn’t like raisins, otherwise it would have disappeared into her own mouth.

“The murderer must have escaped from a lunatic asylum,” Minnie said quietly. “Why else would he attack that poor woman—is there something to steal from a person like that? What does it say there?” She pointed at the newspaper with her darning needle.

“She was wearing a black straw bonnet,” Nehama replied. At the end of the alley there were shadows made by the warm wind and the cool air turning into mist. “I used to know someone who had one just like it.”

“No one in this street wears a straw bonnet.” Minnie put down the half-darned sock and looked at Nehama. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

“Nothing?” Pious Pearl asked. “The gentiles are saying it was a Jew that did it. Haven’t you heard them calling our men Lipski? I didn’t want my husband to go to
shul
today; last week he was beaten up on his way home. But you know how pious he is. He thinks praying is almost as good as betting.”

“I used to know someone who wore a wig like Pious Pearl’s,” Nehama said quietly. “What if they find her next, God forbid? You can stretch out your hand and touch the street where they found the body.” The woman who’d been killed must have been feeling good that night. She had a piece of mirror in her pocket and she was wearing a new dress. It had been torn by the murderer when he slashed her body.

“Don’t think of it,” Minnie said. “Those streets are night and here it’s day. You can’t talk about them in the same breath.”

“Boys! Get back here or I promise, I’ll beat you black and blue,”
Pious Pearl called. “Better they should be afraid of me, who wants the best for them.”

“Maybe she stole the dress.” Minnie peered over Nehama’s shoulder at the illustration in the newspaper.

“If things had turned out differently, she could have been anyone,” Nehama said.

“No one I know,” Minnie insisted.

The little girls were chanting the second verse of their jumping rhyme:

I don’t want your apples,
I don’t want your pears,
I don’t want your sixpence
To kiss me on the stairs.
Then he tears the leg of my drawers,
And that’s the last of all …

Nehama picked up Gittel and held her close. Her daughter’s eyes had turned golden from their newborn indigo, but night had long arms that stretched darkness from corner to corner. It could eat any of them alive.

Great Portland Street

Two months before the High Holy Days, the congregation begins to prepare for its judgment in the court of heaven. First come the prophecies of rebuke, three of them, read on the Sabbaths leading up to
Tisha B’av
. On this day the temple was destroyed and God’s name vanished from the Holy of Holies. The people mourn, the synagogues are draped in black. But after
Tisha B’av
the prophecies of consolation are chanted on seven Sabbaths, the last just before Rosh Hashanna, as the need for consolation is more than twice as great as the need for rebuke. Then the people in their exile, lonely and full of regret, arrive at the Days of Awe, when there is neither rebuke nor consolation but only the sum of one’s deeds as a person comes before the throne in the court of heaven, wondering if the King will stretch out His golden scepter to say, You may stand before Me and live.

It was a short walk from the Zalkinds’ house to the synagogue, Jacob and Emilia strolling behind the rest of the family in the stately pace of the Sabbath, his arm through hers like a gentleman. A religious man wouldn’t do such a thing, and no wonder, for surely anyone could see the haze that surrounded them, caused by the meeting of cool morning air and the heat of exercise. She could feel the action of his hips throwing one leg forward then the other, and his lips were shaping not only words but breath that tasted—well, she wasn’t quite sure of the taste, but it was there at the tip of her tongue. This wasn’t intended by her, quite the opposite; on the way from Minsk to London, watching the sea sloshing against the porthole, she’d sworn off any such feelings. But while she’d been painting lilies and willow boughs, watching Jacob play chess with his brother or write in the notebook with the green cover, his scent had crept up the ladder like a skin of fragrant smoke that moved with her every move, a finger on her finger, a knee with her knee, a back over her back, and a taste in her mouth as if it kissed whenever she spoke.

It was a cool day with a warm, wet wind bringing a change, and the people who left their carriages and footmen in livery a block away from the synagogue (riding being forbidden on the Sabbath) walked in their own haze, one of greatness, the lord and the sir and the ladies in their jewels that would sparkle if there were sun but instead were muted by clouds that turned London into a city of olive skin, the hue of Portland stone favored by builders after the Great Fire.

The synagogue had been visited by the emperor of Brazil fifteen years ago and more recently by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, who came for the wedding of a Rothschild. Today even Zaydeh would sit between his grandsons in the men’s section. Only for such an occasion would he step foot in the synagogue with the twenty-five columns of Italian marble and the rabbi who was called “Minister” in the fashion of English Jews. A nice donation had been made to the building fund, and though it wasn’t exactly an
aufruf
, the bridegroom’s call to the Torah, for the bride wasn’t Jewish, nevertheless Zaydeh would see his grandson go up and say the blessing for reciting verses from the Torah, and he himself was going to chant the
haftorah
, the reading from the prophets.