The Singing Fire (34 page)

The first Mrs. Rosenberg used to stand in the garden when it rained. She’d stand under the tree as if begging for lightning to cut them both down. Finally she’d caught her death there. She got drenched and died of pneumonia. Among her things was a book of psalms, a ribbon marking the place of her favorite one. Emilia’s mother had kept it, and she used to sing Psalm 137, looking up at her husband with an odd little smile as she seated herself gracefully, spreading her skirts over the piano bench.

In the reading room of the Muse Club in Mortimer Street, Emilia’s hands went to her belly without her knowing it. She was singing so softly that someone watching would have thought she was talking to herself:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
Yes, and there we wept when we remembered Zion….
Our captors required of us a song
Our tormentors asked us to amuse them saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.

Brick Lane

Mr. Berman stood by the entrance to his warehouse, watching the men unload cloth from a horse-drawn truck. In the same block of Brick Lane were a wig maker, a bookseller, a chemist, a glass cutter, an upholsterer, a woolens merchant, a matchmaker, a manufacturer of artificial teeth, and Schevzik’s Russian Vapour Baths. The road was wide, and over it the sky hung like the green awning of a well-to-do shop.

Mr. Berman was known as a kind man who gave his illegitimate sons work. Nehama could see them inside the warehouse, packing boxes for shipping. His wife had to serve them tea in the afternoon because her husband was so kind. If her hand shook and she dropped a lump of sugar, did Mr. Berman slap her? Not on your life. He only stopped her from taking a bath. It wasn’t his business that she smelled so high, the women in synagogue wouldn’t sit near her. Sugar costs money, you know.

“C’gar lights, ’ere y’ar, sir; ’apenny a box.” A man in a cap so large he seemed to have no eyes took a couple of farthings from Mr. Berman.

Nehama waited for him to light his cigar and take a slow puff. “Mr. Berman?” she reminded him.

“Sorry, missus. All I’ve got is trousers.” No one ever said what became of Mr. Berman’s illegitimate daughters.

“So let it be trousers.”

“It isn’t for you,” Mr. Berman said. “I give trousers to
yokheltas.”
That was the custom. Gentile women sewed trousers.

“Who are you to say what’s for me?” Nehama asked.

He turned to the man struggling under a bolt of cheap wool. “If you drop that in the gutter, my boy,” he said, “you’ll pay through the nose for it.”

“So do me a favor,” Nehama said. “For Nathan’s sake. He always
placed his bets with your brother.” She stepped aside for the man now balancing the bolt of wool on his head. A cart rocked on the uneven cobblestones, a bale of newspapers fell off the back. The man winced as it struck his shin.

“Then let me tell you what’s what.” Mr. Berman took a knife from his pocket and began to trim his nails, round and pink, each of his strong fingers scrubbed clean with a brush. “It’s umbrellas you should make. Don’t pay much, but that’s what Jewish widows do.”

“I’m not a widow,” she said.

“As good as one,” he answered, pressing her hand as if he could touch her for free because he was used to dealing with people that needed something from him.

“We’re starting up the workshop again,” she said.

“You didn’t sell Nathan’s machines?” He tipped back his hat. Underneath, he was bald and freckled.

“We can take up orders the same as we did.”

“So, so…. Why don’t you go to Nathan’s wholesaler? Your husband never did the slop I make.”

She’d gone to Nathan’s wholesaler last year. It hadn’t occurred to her that he wouldn’t deal with her. Another woman, maybe, but her? It was crazy. She had two sewing machines and she was as good as, no, better than some self-proclaimed tailor who’d been a rabbi in the
heim
. She’d learned to sew from the time she could walk. Cloth jumped from her fingers into the shape of a sleeve, a collar, a back, a lapel just by her looking at it. But the wholesaler wasn’t impressed. A woman was a plain sewer, a man a best, he said. Nathan, he should only live to be a hundred and twenty, was crippled, it shouldn’t happen to a dog. Thank God the Jewish Board of Guardians ran a soup kitchen, he said. Nehama had thanked the wholesaler for his generosity and assured him that if he had any worry about his place in the world to come, he need not, for surely there was a special hell reserved for him.

“He didn’t offer me a good rate,” she said. He wouldn’t even look at what she’d brought to show him as samples of her work. A woman her age could pick up dog dung, “pure,” as they called it, collected to sell for tanning skins. That was what he advised her. She was too old to go on the game even to save her family. Only
dreck
and Berman—those were her choices.

“Well, then. We’ll see what I can do for you. Come inside,” he said.

Mr. Berman emptied his pockets, lining up the contents on a stack of cloth. First a bottle of milk. Then a long knife. A couple of nicely rolled fags. A packet of tobacco. A gold coin. A sheet of paper. “Dovidel!” he called to a boy with thin hair, cutting cloth on a large table at the other end of the warehouse. “That’s to be finished, I don’t care if you work all night.” Mr. Berman pointed his knife at Nehama. “I can read you like a book, Mrs. Katzellen. I can read anyone. That’s why I’m here and your husband is sitting at home. But never mind. I’ve got an order of coats for someone else. I’ll let you take it.” He sawed at the string around the tobacco. Though he nicked his finger, he took no notice. “A shilling a coat, I’ll give you.”

He usually paid half again as much. “Very good,” she said.

“Any coats not to my satisfaction and I dock you.”

She nodded. With her as best and Minnie as plain sewer, she’d make just enough to cover the week’s rent. They would all eat as long as there was no sickness. As long as the wholesaler didn’t withhold an order one week. As long as—there were any number of contingencies. She would go mad thinking of them. She might go mad not thinking of them.

She walked back along Brick Lane, following behind Berman’s boy and his cart full of cut pieces of the cheapest and sloppiest jackets. She paid no attention to the match girls’ factory, where girls with phossy jaw, their jawbones visible through decayed flesh, were coming out to get their gin as the whistle signaled the end of the day. She didn’t feel the warm wind that made women roll up their sleeves and hike up their skirts while children ran down to the Tower to play along the river. She didn’t see the sweatbaths and the sign that read, “Wednesday Evening for Ladies.” Where she walked it was the color of fog and the only thing visible was her fear.

She was at the end of it. Why did God put human beings on the earth only to torture them with misery? Her husband barely moved from his bed, and she could provide nothing for her daughter, who in time would run away. How could it be otherwise when Gittel had two mothers, both of them the kind of person who runs away from an undesirable fate? Nehama could just imagine what lay in wait for her daughter, a wolf watching the girl who jumped rope, her face still and
determined, the sudden smile with the gap, a grown-up eyetooth not yet descended. “Dear God in heaven, help me,” she prayed. “I can’t make a life for my daughter.”

No one answered. That was to be expected. Does God speak to tailors? Maybe to a custom tailor in the West End, but not to a seamstress of slop in Brick Lane, walking through the dirt churned up by a cart. But a prayer didn’t cost a penny, and what else could she do even after she’d given up praying so many years ago? Nehama walked in a fog, not hearing the wheels of a streetcar, the dog tearing skin from a piece of meat, the gulls wheeling above, the factory whistle. The street was silent, for she walked in a fog, and in that silence it was possible to hear the voice of her dreams.

Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. A child with a living mother is blessed by God. Are you listening to me? I’ve had enough talking to the walls. I’m tired of it, let me tell you. You think it’s so ay-ay-ay sitting around in this world? Don’t you recognize me? I talked and I talked until I’m blue in the face. Believe me, even eternity can be a long time
.

“Is that you, Grandmother?” Nehama whispered. “Then why are you here?” An answer could come in a dream, a way to save her husband and her daughter.

Look out for your daughter. That’s what I came to say
.

“That’s it? For this I could stay awake.” Nehama shook her head. “Maybe someone should take Gittel from me. I don’t deserve her. I don’t have what to give her. You remember the story of King Solomon. He knew the real mother, and to her went the baby. She wouldn’t let anything happen to it.”

My granddaughter. What makes you so sure that it was the woman who bore the living baby that spoke? The other one, she knew what it was to suffer. She held the stillborn child and cried till her eyes were raw. Wouldn’t she be the first to say, “No. Better the baby should live”? You listen to me, Nehameleh. What was done can be undone
.

“Then help me, Grandmother. I pray to you. Intercede for me with the Holy One above.”

And Nehama believed that her grandmother would. Against all logic, she came into the house in Frying Pan Alley, thinking that even if she was now fully awake, in the front room she would find Nathan whole again.

When she saw him lying in bed, the wounded arm flung over his face, she cried out, “I have no grandmother. She’s no relation to me at all.”

And her step-grandmother wondered why God in heaven had chosen the darkest of her grandchildren, the most obstinate, the loneliest to hear her. Even in the next world, it’s possible to have a broken heart.

Charlotte Street

The garden was nothing like the one in Minsk—the bushes were rhododendrons not roses, the tree was a plane tree and had no fruit, the wrought-iron fence was not a brick wall, and no ghosts walked in it, for in London vagrants were swept up by the police—but Emilia liked to work at the table by the window on the third floor, looking out on the garden. She stored her inks, brushes, stencils, and paper on shelves to her right, and there she also kept the German Bible from Zaydeh to study the illustrations for inspiration when she was tired of cutting.

“Emilia, I want your help with something.” Jacob’s desk was behind her in the shadows under the slanted ceiling, lit by a tall lamp with a glass shade.

“What is it?” She was working on a paper-cut of Samson and Delilah, painting the figures in the center of a delicate frame of flowers and trees.

“Pictures for my column. I have to choose one.” He had a sheaf of photographs in his hand. His voice was excited, his eyes uncertain.

“Let me see.” She had to smile at the sight of him in his shirtsleeves, as if writing was too hot an exercise to keep his jacket on, small pieces of paper torn from his notebook stuck in his waistcoat pockets, ready to hand when he needed them, his golden beard freshly trimmed so she could glimpse his chin beneath as he scratched it. “What are you writing about?”

“The street where I was born. It’s gone now, torn down with the clearances.” Today there was more brown than green in his eyes. He looked at her with a question, but what it was she couldn’t guess as he put the photograph on the table. “It was rather like this one.” Emilia glanced at the bedraggled square with the beigel lady sitting on a crate, a tin pail of zinc embers on the ground warming her feet.

“Was it?” she asked. The picture wasn’t any worse than something
you’d see in the newspaper. But her husband’s hand on it, his ink-stained hand, worried her. He’d taken off his spectacles and put them in his pocket. There was nothing between his eyes and hers.

“You see this school? That’s where I went.” He put down a picture of the Jews’ Free School rising high on three sides, in the center six double rows of little girls stretching as far as the eye could see. She peered at the faces as if looking for something familiar.

“You had classes with the girls?”

“No, but I used to chase them through the girls’ door in Frying Pan Alley. The old headmaster had me in his office more than a few times. He died last year, you know. I’m going to speak at the
yahrzeit
memorial.” He pushed aside her paint palette, the brush, and the rag to make room for the rest of the pictures. Small boys exercised in knickers and clean collars, front legs bent, arms held out straight as if pushing away the wretched air. Girls in a cookery class, each with a mixing bowl. A smiling costermonger, his donkey baring his teeth, too. Nice pictures, oh, so very nice. But they did not belong in her house, on her table.

“Jacob! Look at what you’re doing to my paper-cut.” A drop of paint splashed onto Delilah, a bit of yellow in the eye like a sty. Emilia put it all away on a shelf. “How can you just come here and throw aside what I’m doing?”

“It’s just a paper-cut. I’m talking to you about my work.”

“Fine. We shall talk about it.” Now there were just the photographs on her table, pictures of the East End taken with a large-format box camera, every detail clear. But only this child was hers, the one making the flutter like a brush of wings under her hand. “Your mother will be embarrassed by this. She won’t like her friends to see it.”

“My mother is always embarrassed by me. Thank God in heaven she has a physician for a son in Harley Street. Which of the photographs do you think I should use?”

“I’m not a publisher. What do I know?” She pushed the pictures away in a rough pile, making room for her brush and her palette again, noisily searching through the tray of scissors and knives for just the one to make an adjustment to her paper-cut.

Jacob was looking at her quizzically, like Samson suspecting that Delilah has an unhealthy interest in the secret of his strength. “When are you going to see the rabbi?”