The Singing Fire (3 page)

Nehama stood at the window, wiping away the dust with her sleeve so that she could look out on a street of old and crumbling houses not very different from the
heim
. It wasn’t so frightening. As soon as she got her entrance papers, she could go down and walk in the street like a free person who has no sisters. She wasn’t sure what she’d do next, but it would be something marvelous and she’d send for her family. Then she, the youngest sister, would be first.

If she was really listening, she might have heard a grandmother’s voice telling her:
You want to know about London? If only you’d listen to me
, shaynela
. I know what’s what. Believe you me. In Plotsk you had seven thousand gentiles. Here there are five million. You think Plotsk is an ancient town. After all, kings are buried in its cathedral. But that’s nothing. Whitechapel Road was a Roman highway. You think in Plotsk people are poor? Then open your eyes. When these people don’t have work, potatoes and onions are a luxury to think on while they boil a crust of bread with salt. Thieves stole the lead from these old roofs, and the water pours through. You want water? You should have it in a lucky hour. Here the water company turns on the tap for just ten minutes a day, please God. And if you just walk a little further on, you’ll come to the bank where the money of the world pours without end and everyone in this street is holding out his hands, hoping to catch some. If he has to knock a person over the head to get his, that’s good too. Be careful
, shaynela.

Barrows clattered in the street as she ran down the stairs to Mr. Blink’s pawnshop. He was presiding over his shelves, taking a pair of Sunday boots from a tired wife and giving her some coins in exchange. Waiting by the counter was a man wearing a uniform. He had a thick mustache and a dark mole on the bridge of his nose, and though he was too scrawny to be impressive, it was never a good thing to be in the vicinity of an official. Mr. Blink would deal with him. Perhaps he already had. She didn’t think otherwise, for there’d always been someone to take care of things at home in the courtyard surrounded by small houses.

“Good morning, Mr. Blink,” she said. “Have you arranged for my papers already?”

He turned toward her, his face covered with stubble like a hedgehog’s skin, and there was no friendliness in his eyes today. “Are you crazy? Didn’t my housekeeper tell you to stay upstairs, out of the way?”

“I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I didn’t understand her. I thought she wanted me to wash the floor.”

“Well, you’ve made a mess of things, that I can tell you. This man here is a police officer.”

“Perhaps I can give him something and he’ll forget it,” Nehama said, trying not to cry. “Is there a place I can exchange my money?”

“It’s too late for that,” Mr. Blink said. “You’ll have to go with him, and I’ll do my best for you from this side.”

“Don’t let him take me.”

Mr. Blink was shaking his head sadly. She should have tried harder to understand the housekeeper. Her sisters were right. She never listened.

“I told you that I’ll do what I can. I’m sorry, my dear. Very sorry.” He stood with his arms crossed, eyes filled with disappointment as the policeman grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out to the police wagon.

Whitechapel Road

They rode through the great street where carcasses swung huge and bloody, music came from every other door, and steam hung out of cookshops above the carts and carriages and hansom cabs. Business was several layers thick: stores with their glass fronts reflected passersby, on the pavement stalls were heaped high, costermongers stopped with their barrows while men called customers to see the wares inside. The high road smelled of the meat market at one end and the hay market at the other, and Nehama couldn’t hear her own thoughts for the sound of tolling bells and a marching band. It was just as well, as all her thoughts were grim.

“Mr. Blink will fix everything,” she said helplessly. No one could understand her. No one but Mr. Blink, who spoke Yiddish like a brother.

“You sound like all them other girls of his,” the policeman replied in his garbled language. “Foreigners every one. But it’s no concern of mine. I get my quid from him regular to bring you in. Right, here you go.” He was leading her toward a building that seemed too important for a newcomer’s papers. It was huge and rotund, surrounded by gardens of rhododendron bushes, standing over the street of old gabled houses like a sultan on an elephant. Nehama recognized the word “London” on the archway. The second word, “Hospital,” must mean something like City Authority. Beside the hospital was a mountain of rubbish, and on the stinking mountain women were digging for whatever they might find to sell.

Nehama went through the doors. What else could she do with the policeman gripping her arm? The entrance was so clean it made her nostrils hurt. Women hooded in white like the sultan’s harem glided here and there. What did they do in the eternal light of gas jets, these women with their knowing looks? One of them led her to an office, where she was motioned to sit in a cane chair. Behind the shining desk an official took notes. His jacket was well fitted; a gentleman, then. Standing beside the desk was a young man whose coat fit even better, and on the wall behind him was the portrait of a short, fat woman in a crown.

“Now you might see what I’ve been telling you,” the older man
said. “This is how we stop venereal infection from spreading. Lectures are not the same as a firsthand look.” He wore spectacles while he wrote, removing them to study Nehama. He looked tired, as officials often do. “Constable?”

“I caught her soliciting, sir.”

“Mr. Blink,” Nehama said, nodding firmly to let them know that she had a connection in London, who would straighten everything out as soon as he could.

“It were a captain of the navy she approached,” the policeman said. “She seen me and run.”

“Thank you, Constable.” The official turned to the young man. “The Contagious Diseases Act allows the police to pick up anyone they might have reason to suspect of prostitution. We’ll have the examination next. If the patient shows symptoms we’ll keep her here for treatment.”

“And if not?”

“She’s released, of course. Though heaven knows we may see her here again before long.”

The official rose from his chair and came around to Nehama, moving her head to the left and right, lifting her chin as he examined her. Did she look innocent enough? “Nurse, please,” he said, opening the door.

At his call for someone, Nehama nearly fainted, thinking that it was a guard coming to take her to prison. But it was only one of the women in white robes, who took her by the arm as they walked along a corridor with many doors, following behind the official with his tired, reedy voice and the gentleman who walked bowlegged, as if he’d rather be on a horse.

“I expect to join my father in his practice after my training’s complete,” the young man said. “I don’t believe he sees many of this sort in Harley Street.”

“Quite so. I’ve been bitten by more than one. A few less hysterical ladies for me to examine would be welcome.” The older man sighed. “I’d be relieved if the Contagious Diseases Act was amended. There’s been some discussion of applying it only to women meeting sailors at the docks and those in towns where soldiers are billeted.”

“If I may differ, sir. All men have appetites, and good men are diseased.
Even my father sees them, and with all due respect, any girl on these streets is likely to offer her favors for her supper. That is casual prostitution, and she won’t seek treatment on her own, I assure you.”

“Quite so. I can’t argue with that. In here.”

He opened the door, and Nehama was more confused than ever. This wasn’t any prison cell. There was a cabinet in the room. A table with straps. A trolley with instruments.

“Up you go,” the nurse said as she turned up the lamp hanging above the table.

Nehama looked at the oak cabinet, with its vials and jars and mortar and pestle for grinding powders. This official now checking her ears and pulling on her jaw with his hand that smelled of spirits, was he a doctor? She wasn’t ill, but that was all to the good. They would write a certificate of health and Mr. Blink could bring it to the officials. Then she would get her entrance papers. Perhaps there would even be a discount and she would be able to repay Mr. Blink very soon.

“One ought to be careful of foreigners, if I may say so, sir,” the white lady said.

“I’m not sick,” Nehama said in Yiddish. “You see that, don’t you?”

“Throat’s clear,” the older doctor answered, pushing Nehama back as if she were to lie down. “Open the dress, Nurse.”

Nehama shook her head as the white lady touched her buttons. What kind of girl did they think she was? Looking in her mouth was one thing, this quite another. The lady pushed her hands aside, and Nehama jumped off the table. Enough was enough. “I’m telling you. I’m fine. Show me where to wait for Mr. Blink.” The policeman knew Mr. Blink. He could send a message. Nehama made a writing motion with her hands.

“You see what I mean, sir? Turn on you in an instant, they can.” The lady took hold of Nehama’s shoulders.

The official doctor grabbed Nehama firmly by the arm. She tried to shake him off. “Please, sir. Send a message with the policeman.”

They were lifting her back onto the table under the light as hot as the sun. The older man held her down while the lady buckled the straps over her arms. What did they think to do to her? What would they dare? She kicked the table, the doctor, the woman in white, the
young gentleman between the legs, and he gasped. The doctor slapped her. “That’s enough!”

She paused in shock, as they meant her to. And it was then that they strapped her legs apart. They pushed up her dress. They pulled away her underthings. She screamed and pulled on the leather straps, arching her back and screaming again. Her chest was bare and her legs open and the air touched the curly hairs that no one but her sisters and her mother had seen. And the strangers watched her. The one with graying hair to his collar and the long jaw like a horse was touching her—here and here and here—while she screamed, pee dripping down her leg.

“Quiet her, Nurse,” the doctor said, and the lady tied a gag around Nehama’s mouth. She fell quiet. She turned her head to one side, looking at the cabinet with the glass front between scrolled panels, and she memorized the colors of the jars while someone put an instrument to her naked chest. Her nipples rose in the cold. Someone pulled her legs up and forced her knees further apart. The pressure between her legs hurt. She was undone.

“This girl is clear of venereal illness. You can see that her hymen is intact. She may be released.”

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to observe the untreated disease, sir,” the younger man said.

“We’ll have another patient soon enough.”

The white lady removed the straps. She pushed Nehama, sobbing, to the door. Outside the hospital the constable was waiting. She didn’t resist as he made her step up into the police wagon to take her to prison. Her sisters would never have allowed it. They would have known whom to bribe. But here anything was allowed.

Dorset Street

The sky was gray and ready to burst when the police wagon stopped, not in front of a prison but at a tavern with a sign swinging on one rusty bolt. A cornucopia was painted on the sign, and out of it fell fruits of some sort, the colors and shapes so worn they weren’t identifiable. The sign hung over a doorway, and there Mr. Blink was waiting. Somehow he’d known where to come for her, and at last everything
would be fixed. Beside him stood a young woman smoking a short pipe. She looked about the same age as Nehama’s next older sister, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. Her hair was dark and her skin pale as a doll’s, her nose long, her lips wide, and when she smiled Nehama could see she had all her teeth. She was short and stocky, a body for pulling plows and surviving famines.

“Where were you for so long?” Mr. Blink asked angrily.

“I was in a hospital,” she said, and then told him the whole story because someone must comfort her. The young woman with the pipe was nodding and smirking as if she understood Yiddish and didn’t think much of it. Mr. Blink was waving his hand to say, Get to the point. Patrons of the tavern came in and out, looking like drunks do anywhere, wounded and stinking. One of them knocked Mr. Blink’s bowler hat into the gutter, and he picked it up, rubbing away the dust on the brim, while Nehama cried out, “Why did they do that to me?”

Mr. Blink studied her without saying a word. Nehama put her hand to her hair, fallen out of its pins and hanging loose around her shoulders. Mr. Blink’s voice was sad, his eyes empty of any emotion. “So you’re no longer a good girl.”

“I’m not?” She hadn’t thought—well, something had happened but she’d hoped that perhaps it wasn’t really the thing and now it seemed that her sisters were right, she was stupid, stupid not to know.

“You know what I mean,” Mr. Blink said. “It’s too late to do anything about it.”

“What will happen to me now? God in heaven.” The rain fell, drenching her as Mr. Blink stepped back into the shelter of the doorway.

This was her punishment. Before she stepped on the boat she had made herself a thief, and then God had made her—She wouldn’t think of the word. To buy the ticket, she had sneaked into her sisters’ rooms and taken from each of them a piece of finery to sell. A pair of earrings, a blouse, a silk kerchief. From the middle sister, Shayna-Pearl, she’d taken nothing. Not because she was afraid of Shayna-Pearl’s temper but because her sister only had books and Nehama wouldn’t sell a book. She’d left a note that said her dowry should be given to her sisters so that they could replace what she’d taken. But Bronya’s earrings were the
only thing her husband had ever given her. Repayment doesn’t exonerate a sin, does it?

“I told you to stay in my rooms above the shop. And you didn’t listen. May God forgive you. Now. Well, now … What shall we do with you? To the loan committee, I can’t go. Not under the circumstances. But still the entrance fee must be paid. There’s only one thing to do. The fee will be paid by someone I know, and you’ll work for him to pay it back.”