The Singing Fire (37 page)

“I am not interested in Spain,” Emilia said.

Mr. Nussbaum took no notice. He did not even have a beard. Was there a real rabbi without a beard? “Hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews were forced to become Christians, but one might question the religious fervor of someone who converts to save his neck. To this day, their descendants are called New Christians and are considered …
trayf
, we shall say. They are not kosher. They simply cannot be trusted. I should like to trust you, Mrs. Zalkind. Tell me. Why do you wish to convert to Judaism?”

“I’m going to have a child.”

“So? There are many gentiles that have children without ever converting.” She did not like his smile. It was too full of humor.

“It is a known fact that gentiles do not have Jewish children, and my husband wishes to have a Jewish child.”

“Well, in that case he should have a Jewish wife. Who will my sister marry if all the Jewish men take
yokheltas
to wed? Intermarriage is the greatest problem of our time, Mrs. Zalkind. Should I encourage it?”

“It is a fait accompli, sir, and I have a duty to my husband.” She nodded at the maid, who was discreetly placing a tea tray on the low table next to Emilia.

“Keeping a Jewish home is far too much trouble. Ask my wife. She’ll tell you. For a lady—well, you might have to hire another servant. Religion doesn’t come cheaply. Perhaps your husband ought to reconsider. Two sets of dishes for milk, meat, then another two sets for Passover.” Mr. Nussbaum cleared his throat. “And there’s the fifth set—if your husband should fancy a pork sausage, so as not to mess up the nice arrangement, you understand.”

“I have kept kosher since my marriage,” Emilia said coldly. The special frying pan and the blue plate used for Jacob’s bacon and eggs were kept in a bread box in the pantry. “My mother-in-law showed me everything.”

He leaned toward her. “Did she tell you that you may not ride in a carriage to call on your friend on Saturday?” he asked. “So inconvenient. And in the summer, when the days are long, you would not go to the theater on a Saturday evening, for the Sabbath ends at sundown. It would be very dull, don’t you think?”

“Jacob doesn’t do that,” Emilia said, stirring two lumps of sugar in her tea. But even a third would not make this interview more palatable. “It isn’t fair to ask it of me.”

“But he is a Jew already. Perhaps not a very good Jew, yet an authentic one nonetheless,” Mr. Nussbaum replied. “And whenever he does go to the theater on a Saturday evening, he is aware that he ought not. He eats pork with his fellow Englishmen and knows that he ought not and they might. It is a most unpleasant state. But presumably one that he enjoys. He shall not be pleased when you convert and require him to go to synagogue.”

“My mother-in-law would be most unhappy if we could not shop on Saturday,” Emilia said.

“It is an interesting fact that the Jewish family of a convert is often the most inconvenienced. It’s a bad business all around. My recommendation to you, Mrs. Zalkind, is that you remain a gentile.” The smell of sausages was drifting up from the cookshop downstairs. She could hear the squeal of a streetcar’s wheels as it turned the corner.

“I should prefer it, but my husband doesn’t. And I love him as much as myself. That comes from the Bible, you know.”

“Yes, and so does something about turning the other cheek.”

“Does it?” The cheek business was in the New Testament, she was sure of it. Something among the Marks or Johns or Apostles or suchlike. Mr. Nussbaum was looking at her intently. This was a test; he expected her to reveal her true inclinations as if she were Delilah, ready to deliver Samson to the uncircumcised Philistines. But she could not be Delilah, however much the minister might wish it, for she hadn’t the proper education.

“My father was an atheist,” she said. “He absolutely forbade any discussion of religion and only allowed my mother to read the Old Testament with me because he believed it to be of historical interest.”

“Ah. An enlightened man. So you are willing to be
shomer Shobbos?”
He paused as if confused by her nod, not quite realizing that he hadn’t translated the Hebrew phrase for “Sabbath observant.”

Emilia cast her eyes around his study, looking for a subject to distract him. There was a collection of oil lamps in a glass cabinet, photographs of sand and ruined walls hung above it. “You are interested in Palestine, sir?”

“Who wouldn’t be?” He stood up and came around his desk, striding to the wall of photographs. “Here. Do you see this Roman column?” He pointed to the one fallen on its side. “If you look closely, you’ll see the Crusaders’ cross cut into the marble. This is our Holy Land. And yours, of course.”

“My father put a great emphasis on history.” She finished off her cup of tea. “But I don’t care for it, myself.”

“There is no escaping it if you become a Jew,” he said. “I shall give you a book to read. Come again in two weeks, and we’ll see what you have to say about it.”

He returned to his desk and rang for the maid, who led Emilia to the door. A
mezuzah
was nailed to the doorpost, an ancient prayer written by a scribe on parchment rolled up inside the casing. The outside of the casing was engraved with the letter
shin
for
Shaddai
, the Almighty, which allowed just enough light to shine on the special holy letters inside to entrap any demons lurking about.

Charlotte Street

Every year the Torah is read in the synagogue; every year Moses dies and the world is created again. It is all brand-new, God sees that everything is good, and then evil comes upon the world. There are those who say that evil is born when God’s judgment is not sufficiently tempered by mercy, but in any event on the Sabbath that Noah built an ark and God sent a flood to cover the generation of evil and all the earth, Emilia was polishing silver. It is also said that if you hear someone saying, Look, the Messiah has arrived, and you are in the middle of polishing silver, you ought to finish what you’re doing.

“Annie! Don’t you hear the knocker?” she called to the maid. Of course there was no answer. Annie was upstairs, nursing a toothache. Emilia went to the door herself and took in the post. There were letters
for Jacob, a magazine for herself, a letter from Minsk, and behind the postman, the ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg. The first wife made herself at home, beginning with the kitchen, where she looked into the pots on the stove before seating herself at the table covered with silverware, the polish and cloth just where Emilia had left them.

“Not you!” Emilia bolted the door to the garden. “What do you want?” She threw the post onto the table, picking up a silver knife as if with it she could attack the angel of death. “Is something going to happen to my baby?”

The ghost of the first wife shook her head as Emilia sat down, staring angrily.

“After all this time. I don’t believe it. You wouldn’t come here now.”

But the first wife was right there, standing in light so strong that in the dining room the painted willow boughs fluttered in a breeze.

“Well, you might as well go because I have no business with you.” Emilia slit the envelope from Minsk with slow dignity, the silver knife throwing luminescent balls at the wall. She took out the letter and smoothed it flat. The ink was blotted here and there in her mother’s manner, the words uneven as if she’d had a headache and was writing in bed. The ghost of the first wife read over her shoulder.

Dear Emilia,

Something wasn’t right in your last letter. Are you well? Your husband? Here all is as usual. We go from day to day and I wait for your letters.

When you are very young, every day seems endless. After a while you learn to think of tomorrow and the days fly away, then it’s years, and when you reach my age, the decades slide by before you know it. Sometimes a person can forget what time she’s in and think if she walked into a certain kitchen, she would see a girl, her head bent over a book …

Emilia folded up the letter and put it in her apron pocket. Such letters ought to be read in private, where no one, not even the dead, could see her face. In the street a student artist was bargaining with a streetwalker; would she pose for him? A bob an hour he couldn’t afford, but he’d split the proceeds of the painting with her. The French colony had
moved up from Soho, the prostitutes and the gambling clubs following. Emilia could hear the same street sounds she’d heard in Soho years ago, even the organ-grinder playing “The Marseillaise.” But this time her breasts were filling with milk instead of emptying.

“Emilia!” Jacob called as he opened the front door.

“Hello, dear,” she said, leaving the ghost of the first wife to do whatever she liked in the kitchen. But the first Mrs. Rosenberg followed behind. The dead never realize when they aren’t wanted.

Jacob smelled of herring and schnapps as he kissed her. “Look who I brought home with me.”

“Gut Shobbos,”
Zaydeh said, the deepest pleasure in his face, for what can be more satisfying than celebrating the holy Sabbath with your grandson?
“Sholom aleichem.”
He nodded at the ghost of the first wife.

“Do you see something, Zaydeh?” Emilia asked.

“What does a man of my age see?” He was the same age as her father, the same height too. “By me, seventy-eight is already an
alter-kacker.”
Old shit. That was Zaydeh with his coarse peddler’s talk.

“Come into the dining room and sit down. Will you have some cake?” Emilia asked.

“After a walk, tea and cake is always good.”

Zaydeh was soon seated in the dining room, and the tea served. Emilia watched carefully. Something as small as tea could determine a person’s future. Zaydeh took his in the old way, with lemon in a glass, but Jacob poured milk into his teacup like any Englishman.

“Zaydeh looks a little like my father,” Emilia said, cutting the cake.

“Does he? A bigger slice for me if you please.” So Jacob still liked cake, but it didn’t signify; in that respect he already took after his grandfather.

“My father wasn’t a tall man, either,” Emilia said, though in all her memories, her father stood above her.

“You don’t have to be afraid to speak plain with me,” Zaydeh said. “An oak tree, I’m not. A cabbage, maybe.”

The ghost of the first wife laughed. She didn’t make any sound but clapped her hands to her knees and shook her head as if she needed a good laugh, any excuse would do.

“As it happens, my wife,
alleva sholom
, she made a cabbage soup
like no one else.” For a moment Zaydeh looked directly at the ghost of the first wife, pointing to one of the framed photographs on the wall. “You heard from her, maybe?”

The ghost of the first wife put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.

“I never liked that picture,” Jacob said. “It doesn’t look like my grandmother at all. It’s much too serious.”

In the days when the photograph was taken, you had to hold still for a whole minute while the shutter of the camera waited for the light to slowly form the image on the silver-salted plate. The woman in the picture wasn’t smiling, but she had clear eyes; it was remarkable how clearly she looked at them.

Zaydeh said quietly, “She shouldn’t be serious? She married a scholar and had great honor from it and then what did she have? A peddler.”

“I didn’t know you were a scholar in the
heim,”
Emilia said.

“Neither did I. Why didn’t you tell me?” Jacob asked, his hand in his pocket as if to find something of comfort there. A notebook to write down a thought or a pipe to smoke. But writing and smoking are forbidden on the Sabbath.

Zaydeh smiled at the ghost of the first wife. She would understand that the old and the dead are pleased when they can still offer a surprise. “You never know the end of a book till you read the whole thing,” Zaydeh said. “I wanted to translate the Bible into Yiddish, but a peddler has time only for calling out, Needles! Thread! Combs! One thing, I managed.
Eishes Hayil
. ‘A Woman of Valor.’ A husband recites it to his wife on
Shobbos
after the candles are lit.”

Jacob dug into his cake, avoiding Zaydeh’s gaze. “My father doesn’t,” he said. It was one thing to sit anonymously beside your grandfather while he prays, quite another to stand up and recite biblical verses at the dinner table.

“I don’t want Jacob to do it either,” Emilia said, putting a hand on Jacob’s arm. “I should be embarrassed.” He gave her a grateful glance, and if only someone would have told her the new rules of their marriage and the penalty for breaking them, she could have decided whether his gratitude was sufficient.

“You listen to me, children.” Zaydeh looked from one to the other.
“You know who wrote
Eishes Hayil
? The mother of the wise King Solomon. She was the wife of David, whose great-grandmother was Ruth the convert. She was a good
yokhelta
, too, and from her comes the Messiah.”

The ghost of the first wife crossed her arms. There it was—Ruth or Delilah, which would it be?

“I’ll fetch more tea,” Emilia said. When you can’t make up your mind, that is always a good thing to do.

Her father used to recite “A Woman of Valor” with a mocking smile. Sometimes he asked if the heroine of the verse had charmed Russian officers into sparing her family. He made it sound like a sin. Every Sabbath her mother used to take a double dose of the Lady’s Health Tonic made of water and alcohol laced with opium. While her father recited
Eishes Hayil
, her mother’s eyes would glaze over.

A woman of valor, who can find? Her worth is above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts in her. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. She is like merchant ships bringing food from afar. She considers a field and buys it. She makes strong her arms. To the needy she stretches out her hand. She is not afraid of snow for her household, they are clothed in scarlet. Strength and dignity are her clothing, she laughs at the time to come. Give her the fruit of her hands and let her deeds praise her at the gates.