Threads and Flames (32 page)

“Later. Get up. Get
up,
I said!” She stood and hauled the girl to her feet. Then, in a voice loud enough to fill the cloakroom, she shouted, “We've got to get out of here!” Without waiting to see whether anyone heeded her or not, she plunged back to the burning factory workroom, dragging the blonde girl behind her.

They took one step forward and were swept into the roiling crowd. They had no choice but to run with them or fall, and if they fell, they'd be trampled. The stink of burning oil and burning fabric filled Raisa's nose, along with other smells, infinitely more horrible: burning hair, burning human beings.

She was tossed from side to side worse than in any storm she'd ever endured while at sea on her voyage to America. Dozens of voices battered her ears. The wave of people broke against the closed elevator doors. One woman cried out, begging the elevator operators to hear them and bring the cars up to save them. Another threw back the bitter words that if the building was going up in smoke, the elevator operators must be long gone, abandoning their cars and saving their own skins. A third protested that no, that wasn't so, they were good young men, decent, God-fearing! They must know a fire had broken out. How could they leave so many innocent people to die? How could they live with that burden on their souls? The cars would come.

And it was true, they came. The wild-eyed mass of girls rammed themselves into the tiny elevator cars, packing them to the point that the doors couldn't close. There was a frantic burst of more pushing, shoving, pulling people back so the doors closed and the cars began their descent. “Hurry back,” Raisa whispered, clinging to the blonde girl with one hand, to the shoulder of a girl in front of her with the other. “For God's sake, hurry back!”

She turned her head and looked back at the shop floor. The fire poured in through the windows, rolling across the floor, in some places reaching the oil-soaked sewing machine stations. Some of the operators who had not been able to escape from the overcrowded aisles were being herded back and cornered by the flames. Raisa saw men and women beating at their smoldering clothes in a frenzy and heard a sound out of a nightmare as the fire reached out and turned a girl's hair into a torch.

She tore her eyes away from the hypnotizing horror of it all. The people close to her weren't just waiting patiently for the elevators to finish their slow descent and return, nine floors each way; they were fighting for other ways to save themselves. There was a stairway next to the Washington Place passenger elevators, a stairway that might well be their last hope now that the Greene Street stairs were blocked by the fire on the eighth floor—their best chance, since the elevators were supposed to take only fifteen passengers at a time when hundreds were begging for their lives.

“The door is locked! The door is locked!”

Hands pounded on the door to the Washington Place stairs. They beat against the glass inset with its web of reinforcing wire, they pushed against the heavy wood door, forgetting that it only opened inward because the stairway behind it was too narrow to let it swing out. Raisa saw the hands of young girls who had kissed their mothers and fathers good-bye just that morning, of women who worked to support children waiting at home, of men young and old with sweethearts, wives, children, all in a world that lay on the other side of one locked door.

Locked because they were afraid we'd steal.
Her thoughts seemed to come to her from far away. The smoke, heavy with burning oil from the machines, was making her head spin.
What are we to them, to the owners, the bosses—what? Tools? Thieves? Were we ever
people
?

The futile hands attacking the door wavered as though she were seeing them through the ripples of the cool, rushing brook that flowed sweet and clean through the woods back home. Glukel's image flickered before her stinging eyes, the older woman's face contorted with sorrow.
Why? Why wouldn't you listen to me, Raisa, Raisaleh?
the phantom haunting her mind keened.
Was keeping your name more important than keeping your life? The Angel of Death is sleepless and he has a long memory. You stepped out of one fire thinking you had escaped him, but here you are, burning, burning, and he still knows your name!

Raisa's knees began to give way. There was hardly any air left fit to breathe. More screams were coming from the shop floor. Groggily, she turned her head to see, in spite of what she dreaded seeing. The shapes of men and women wove a hideous dance through the oncoming flames. She heard the sounds of breaking glass, wailing, prayers, and names—always people crying out into the fire, calling the names of the ones they loved. In her oxygen-starved trance, the names became garlands of burning roses that wound themselves around her arms and dragged her down.

“Hey! Wake up! Move!” The blonde girl slapped her face hard, reviving her with the pain. Raisa gasped as the girl she'd dragged out of the cloakroom started pummeling her shoulder before giving her a second slap. “Your coat was on fire, stupid!” she snapped. Her face held no fear, only fight. “I'm not going to die here because I tripped over
you
!”

The elevators came up for another load of passengers and Raisa was rammed forward, into the car. The operator was a young man who begged the fear-maddened crowd not to overload the machine. He swore he would come back as long as the elevator could run, but if they mobbed the car, keeping the doors from closing, no one was going anywhere.

Packed into the very center of the slowly descending car, Raisa still had to struggle to breathe. For an awful stretch of time, she imagined that the elevator would never reach the ground floor and that she would be trapped forever in the press of weeping, shuddering, shrieking, terrified bodies. When the car finally came to a stop, it was like pulling the cork from a full rain barrel. The people streamed out across the lobby. They were laughing, crying, often both at once, and so very many of them were still calling out names, names, names!

Raisa staggered along with them. Her vision was blurred, her head throbbing, her throat raw. She'd lost her grip on the blonde girl's hand the instant the elevator doors had opened. Ahead, she saw the door leading out onto Washington Place. Her smoke-addled mind could think only of how good it would be to race out of that dark street and into the glorious, living greenery of the park beyond. All she wanted to do was breathe fresh, sweet air. She sobbed as she ran toward the door.

A big policeman loomed up abruptly before her, barring her way. He was trying to hold back everyone in the crowd who had just gotten off the elevator. “It's okay, you're safe now, stay where you are. You
don't
want to go out there!” he said. “Stay inside! For the love of God, stay inside!”

Stay inside?
Raisa thought incredulously.
Stay here? Does he think we're crazy? I can still smell the burning. I can hardly breathe. I have to get out!
Her brain reeled, alternating between stark fear and bizarre, depthless serenity, and she was powerless to control it.
I certainly
do
want to go out into the street,
she thought calmly.
I need to find Zusa and Luciana. They'll be worried if I don't meet them. It's not polite to keep your friends waiting.
She walked toward the door, ducking under the outstretched arms of the policeman who was trying to keep her inside. When he yelled after her to come back, she smiled and in her best English said, “I am sorry, but I cannot. We are going to the movies.”

Raisa stepped over the threshold and into the street. The air outside was laced with smoke, but after the inferno of the ninth floor it was pure as springwater to her. She stopped in her tracks, closed her eyes, and took a deep, blissful breath.
I didn't know you could taste air!
she thought.
And I never dreamed it could taste so good!

“Miss! Miss! My God, what are you doing?”

A rough-looking man grabbed her around the waist and lifted her clear off her feet, dodging his way around men, horses, and fire engines, jumping over snaking fire hoses and splashing through the gutter until he set her down on the corner diagonally across from the Asch Building. Raisa was too shocked to protest at first, but when he set her down and she drew breath to demand an explanation, the words died unsaid.

A body plunged through the smoke-laden air, clothes and hair ablaze. It struck the pavement on Washington Place with a dull thud that would haunt Raisa's dreams and memories forever. Another fell after it, a woman's body, the force of its descent lifting her skirts like the petals of a windblown flower. It crashed to the street only steps from where Raisa had been standing.

Smoke climbed the March sky, smearing away the failing daylight. Fire leaped behind the high windows of the Asch Building, wrapping burning tendrils around the bodies of those people now cut off from any hope of escape. Raisa could see their faces, openmouthed, twisted, crying out for help that never came.

She grabbed the man who had carried her across the street and clung to his jacket like a burr. “Why are they not
doing
something?” she demanded. “Why do they not save them, the girls?”

“Don't you think they're
trying
?” the man replied, his voice hoarse as more and more figures appeared on the window ledges eight and nine stories above the street. Neither he nor Raisa could look at one another while they spoke, for as long as their ears were forced to listen to the
thud, thud, thud
of so many impacts, their eyes refused to turn away from the plummeting shapes. “The ladders won't reach, you understand? They don't go that high! Wait, look, they're trying something else, see? They've got nets, blankets—”

“Oh, thank—”

A girl leaped from the ninth-floor ledge. She fell so fast from so far up that when her body hit the net that the firemen had spread to catch her, it was torn from their hands. Elsewhere on the two besieged streets other young women and men made the same choice, to jump instead of stand and burn. They crawled out of the windows with the fire reaching as if to pull them back inside. They clung to the ornate, frivolous decorations between the windows. They did not slip or stumble or miss their footing—they jumped. By ones and twos and threes, they chose the fall and not the fire and took one final step into forever.

The fire department nets, the tarpaulins stretched out by heartsick workmen with the bad luck to witness such ghastly sights, the horse blankets spread and held ready by ordinary people who would never think of themselves as heroes, all failed. Bodies shot down at such speed that they either broke straight through the sturdy cloth or yanked it out of the strongest grip before smashing on the pavement.

“Jesus, have mercy!” The man broke Raisa's hold on his coat and fled, making sounds like a wounded animal. Raisa stood where she was. She couldn't look away. The bodies fell, and she watched them drop. Some spun through the air like falling flower petals. Some trailed fire from their clothes and hair, young girls as delicate as newly opened roses, now flowers dying in flame.

Some did not jump. Raisa saw a young man stand in one of the windows looking down on Washington Place, a hat on his head as if he were going out to meet his sweetheart. He held out his hand and with an awful gallantry helped a girl up onto the sill, then lifted her to the other side and let her go. Two more girls followed without any sign of a struggle, consenting to the quicker, kinder death. The fourth was different. She paused in his arms and kissed him tenderly before she, too, allowed him to hold her out over the street and let her go. He followed.

Raisa's legs were cold. Without realizing it, she had sunk to her knees on the street corner, the chill of the pavement seeping through her skirt. Her eyes never left the Asch Building. She saw the fire hoses pumping endless streams of water up to flood the blaze, but it came too late for too many. On the uppermost floors of the fireproof building, the trapped girls were crammed against the windows by the flames until there was a great crash as the weight of so many bodies broke the window. They fell with fire and smoke streaming from their clothes and their hair. In the gutters, the water from the fire hoses ran red.

“Yisgadal veyiskadash sh'mei raba ...”
Raisa heard a woman whispering the Mourner's Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. It was one of the first prayers Henda had taught her, after Mama died, though her sister had been so intent on making sure Raisa memorized the words that she had never bothered teaching her their meaning. She remembered how surprised she had been when she'd finally asked Gavrel about it and he had told her that the prayer never once mentioned death or loss, but only praised God and acknowledged the wisdom and righteousness of all His judgments, acts, and decrees.

Another body fell from the heights, a girl whose clothing flamed and smoked. The material caught on a steel hook protruding from a sign on the front of the building. The body dangled there until the fire nibbling away at her dress freed her for the final drop to the street.

“O'seh shalom bim'romav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu, ve'al kol Yisra'el.”
The prayer ended by asking for peace from the eternal source of peace, but Raisa heard the mourner's voice stumble, break, and fail before the final amen. She looked around and saw that the only people standing near her were men, their eyes still lifted to the burning crown of the Asch Building. The prayer she'd heard had been her own.

She got to her feet slowly, turned her back on the last of the fire, and began the long, numb walk home.

 

 

They were waiting for her on the stoop in front of the tenement. It looked as if the whole street was out in the cold March night, waiting. While Raisa had been walking home, the news of the Triangle fire had raced ahead of her, spreading through the neighborhood as fast as the fire itself had gutted the top floors of the Asch Building. It was strange to be the only person walking when everyone else was either running uptown toward Washington Square or standing so tensely that anxiety and fear seemed to crackle over their skin like a web of lightning.