by Talia Carner
In one push of arms and shoulders, the sailor hoisted himself off the ladder and onto the deck. He grabbed Batya from behind as her eyes searched the water, hoping for Shayna’s head to rise. His arm gripped her neck, almost choking her, and pinned her spine to his chest. His knee pressed into her as he pushed her toward the stairs.
“No!” Batya screamed again. But Shayna was no more.
Chapter Fourteen
The cabin Batya was led to was nothing like the first. Lined in rough-hewn wood, the tiny space contained two narrow cots fixed into the wall, one above the other like shelves, a thin mattress and a sheet on top of each. There was no ladder to reach the top cot, and she was too weak to raise herself onto it.
On a hook she found one of her muslin slips but none of her dresses, and no shoes. In spite of the warmth of the cabin, Batya wrapped herself in the frayed sheet the sailor had given her, now dry and caked with salt, and sat on the bottom cot, rocking herself. How could she face Moskowitz’s sister looking as she did, as stained with shame as she was? She wished she had followed Shayna into the water.
A pail stood in the corner, containing cloudy water. Batya lowered her head into the pail. The water seeped into her hair roots, and the image of Shayna jumping to her death gave Batya courage. She dunked her head fully and held her breath. Water filled her nostrils and bubbled into hidden paths behind her forehead, pressing. She fought the urge to breathe, but her body—or God—overpowered her and yanked her head out of the bucket. Sputtering water, she caught air. She tried again. Once more, her body betrayed her and pulled free, gasping for air.
A key turned in the lock, and a maid came in, carrying a tray containing a tin bowl of kasha with a piece of chicken and a hardtack. Despite her death wish, Batya wolfed it down, dipping the last piece of hardtack to soak up the remainder of her meal. The maid took out the tray and returned with a cup of warm tea. The cup, too, was made of tin. Batya sipped the tea, sweetened with sugar, breathing in its fragrance. Anything was better than the horror of being caged down below, but she wouldn’t give up on her death wish, even if her body’s instinct to live defied her soul’s desire to escape her misery.
A few hours later, Grabovsky barged into the cabin. Batya hoisted herself to the top shelf and scooted to the corner, shrinking her body into a ball.
“You want to cause more trouble and stay belowdecks?” He pulled her down and threw her on the bottom cot. “Is that what you want?”
Clammy fingers of dread crawled from Batya’s neck down her spine. Whimpering, she shook her head. She could never again face the rats, the cockroaches, and the confines of the cage in the darkness.
“Let’s see, then.” His gaze hooked on her as he unbuckled his belt.
She shut her eyes tight, feeling tears escaping. Expecting the assault, her body began to shake.
“Open your eyes. No man wants to fuck a corpse.” He slapped her so hard that it felt as if a rock bounced inside her skull. “Open your eyes, I said.”
She forced her eyes open to see his bulbous nose and the hair growing out of his nostrils even as she shut down her soul and deadened her heart.
Two days later, the ship reached harbor. It anchored at a distance from the piers, where it bobbed on ripples of waves. The engines fell silent.
A maid brought a clean pail of water and a bar of soap. Batya could barely wash herself. She felt feverish, and in spite of the heat she shivered. Impatient with Batya’s sluggish movements, the maid grabbed the sponge from her hand and swiped it across Batya’s shoulders and back and down her thighs. She handed her a brush, but Batya’s head hurt as if a barrel hoop were tightening it, and her arms were too weak to fight the knots in her hair.
The maid placed wooden clogs on the floor and laid out Batya’s white dress. The sleeves had indeed been cut off. Batya put it on, and, after the maid had departed, raised herself to the porthole and saw in the distance a bustling pier with long rows of windowless redbrick buildings. A gigantic steel arm lifted massive crates from a nearby barge. Farther down, the end of the pier was enclosed by a high iron-bar fence with a gate. A huge crowd of people looking like the shtetl poor—men in dark, shabby vests and coats, heads covered in black felt hats, and women in flowered headscarves, bundles slung over their shoulders—pushed and waved papers. Policemen shoved back the crowd and separated them into lines that fell apart as the crowd pressed forward again.
Somewhere, past the fence, Moskowitz’s sister was waiting for her. But how would the woman recognize Batya? How would Batya even manage to ask for her? In his hasty departure, Moskowitz had forgotten to tell her his sister’s married name.
Batya dropped down from the porthole. Once she left the port with Grabovsky, she would look for a lady waiting in a carriage. If necessary, she would scream to get her attention. Someone would help her.
The hours passed, and the air in the cabin heated up. Batya was being cooked alive. Moskowitz had said it was hot in Buenos Aires, but who ever imagined such sweltering heat? She lay on the cot, her head light, perspiration dripping from her body onto the mattress. A sudden wave of shivers made her teeth chatter. Thirst dried her mouth and felted her tongue. She was sick, she realized. Death would finally find her. Just make it come fast, she prayed. Take pity on me.
When Grabovsky opened the door, carrying her valise, the gust of air that entered with him revived Batya enough for her to try to sit up. She dragged herself after him up the stairs, through air that remained as hot and damp as steam rising from a samovar.
“For the officials, you’re my wife,” Grabovsky said. “Understood?”
She lowered her eyes in assent.
“And raise your head. Don’t look so sick, or they won’t allow you in.”
Chapter Fifteen
A sailor picked up Batya under her arms and handed her down to another who stood in a bobbing wooden boat. Grabovsky followed, as did other passengers and their luggage. When the boat was full, the sailors rowed it the length of the harbor to the pier.
The steady ground under Batya’s feet felt as if it bucked and swayed. She tried walking on legs that refused to move in a straight line. Her insides were on fire. Grabovsky’s arm wrapped around her waist, too tightly, forcing her forward. Before they reached the crowd pressing on the fence, he pushed her through the side door of a building. In a huge hall, behind a row of tables at the far end, sat officials in short-sleeved, khaki-colored uniforms. Without hesitation, Grabovsky approached a short man with bushy eyebrows whose desk was angled so he could supervise the others. Speaking in that strange language, Grabovsky presented his papers. The man raised his glance at Batya and unfolded the papers. Batya saw him slipping the money tucked in the document onto his lap before he sent a look of understanding to Grabovsky.
Outside, they walked onto a long, busy ramp paved in a black substance and crisscrossed above by metal beams and hooked ropes. The stench of rotting fish and sea salt filled the air.
Batya gathered all her strength to keep walking. In a few minutes she would say goodbye to her captor. Passing a row of warehouses, she and Grabovsky moved along with a bustling crowd of people wending their way around horse-drawn carriages and porters pushing carts heaped with boxes. All around, people spoke Yiddish or that clucking, high-pitched language.
Her head swimming, Batya searched the awaiting carriages, but no woman waved to her. “I must wait for Reb Moskowitz’s sister,” she managed to say. “She’s supposed to meet me here.”
He let out a chuckle. “I’m taking you to her.”
Batya shook her head. No way was she going with this man beyond this spot. She scanned the street as he tugged at her arm.
“You want some police officer should take you to jail?” Grabovsky hissed. “Let’s go.”
If the police were like the ones in Russia, they must be avoided; nothing good ever came of them, especially if she had no passport. Batya sniffled. She was sick, didn’t speak the language, and had no money. Her only valuable possession, her diamo
nd ring, was stashed in a drawer in some plush cabin on the ship. She relaxed her resistance; this was the very last time she would listen to Grabovsky.
As she allowed him to pull her forward, pain gripped her abdomen and she doubled over.
He muttered a Russian curse. “Next thing you die on me?” He motioned to the nearest coachman and shoved Batya up into the carriage.
The bench in the carriage was hard, but sitting offered a reprieve. Batya shrank to its farthest end. As much as she tried to disappear, Grabovsky’s thick thigh still rested against hers.
The carriage meandered along alleys through run-down buildings before stopping in front of a house that was nothing like the manor Moskowitz had described. Rather than the large polished-stone home of Batya’s daydreams, with grand stairs and ornate columns, it was a low, decaying clapboard structure.
Grabovsky tossed the coachman a coin and prodded Batya down.
The tiny entrance had no windows, only a cutout above the door. Inside, it was dark and reeked of fried food and an open latrine. All Batya could see was a narrow, dark corridor off of which were rough wood partitions with dirty curtains that served as doors. A straw mat lay over the packed-mud floor, like in her Komarinoe home.
Batya’s eye sockets throbbed, and she pressed her hands against them to ease the pressure.
A woman with a scar across her right cheek came from one of the rooms, spraying rosewater that failed to mask the stink in the air. She grinned, and the scar twisted her mouth. Batya recoiled against Grabovsky. The woman laughed, and the scar pulled down her lower lid to reveal the eye’s reddish part.
Another woman turned away from a sink set in a nook and wiped her hands on her apron. She nudged the scarred woman away. “Welcome,” she said to Batya. “I’m Nina.”
“Are you Yitzik Moskowitz’s sister?” Batya asked. Every fiber in her body hurt.
Nina’s eyes were cold as she examined her face, and chills ran down Batya’s spine. “She’s sick,” she said to Grabovsky.
“Make her better,” he retorted.
“What is this, a hospital?” But Nina’s lips pulled up in a smile toward Batya, a smile that failed to bunch up her cheek. “Come, meydele. I’ll show you to your chamber.” She picked a long yellow fruit from the shelf by the sink and peeled off a part of its skin. “This is a banana. Eat.”
Too ill to refuse or argue, Batya simply wanted to lie down. Holding the hewn wooden planks of the corridor for support, she followed Nina while taking small bites of the fruit. Sick as she felt, she couldn’t resist savoring its sweetness and creamy texture. Like the cheesy filling of a blintze, but better, it must have come from the Garden of Eden.
Chapter Sixteen
The thin walls and the canvas curtain doors offered no privacy. Starting in the afternoon and stretching throughout the night, from the chambers on both sides, Batya heard men grunting and moaning. Feverish, she pressed her hands to her ears to block the crying of girls like her.
Now the words she’d heard from the kind boy on the ship became clear. She had been sold! Grabovsky had kidnapped her from Moskowitz and sold her to Nina. These groaning men—like the men who’d exploited her on the ship—were all paying customers. Horrified anew, Batya curled up, trembling in fear. Only when the house quieted and no man entered her chamber did sleep finally take over.
The sun was high, and the ceiling’s corrugated tin radiated heat on her by the time she woke up. It took Batya a few moments to get her bearings. Her head hurt as it had when she had been inebriated. She pulled herself to the chamber pot, and when she peed, that needle of pain had worsened, spreading upward. She was also leaking something thick and yellow that smelled as bad as the wound that her father’s old horse had once developed on his hind leg.
The scarred woman poked her head through the curtain. “Come get your tea.”
Clutching her stomach and leaning on the rough wooden walls of the short corridor, Batya followed her to the kitchen nook. A large woman with skin so black that it had a blue sheen was doling out what looked like thin pancakes. As she placed some on Batya’s plate, Batya eyed the two girls next to her, who wore only slips, their hair disheveled and their exposed chests and shoulders showing open cuts and bruises. She poured herself tea from the kettle, not daring to speak.
“Now take it back to your chamber,” the scarred woman said.
Batya sat on the bed, balancing her mug and plate on her knees. Her stomach rumbled. She picked up a pancake and chewed slowly. Could she escape this house? Where would she go to find Moskowitz’s sister? Even if she found her, would the woman still take her in after all Batya had done?
By midday, the temperature in the airless house had risen, and with it the putrid fermentation of sewer. Baking in the heat, swatting the flies that entered through the cutout by the ceiling, Batya missed the cold of Russia. Feeling too vulnerable in only her slip, she dared not take off her dress, and she lay on her cot, her perspiration soaking it through.
A girl a few years older than Batya came in. Unlike the disheveled girls in the house, this one wore a new-looking flowery summer dress, her dark hair was brushed, and she smelled of lavender.
Batya sat up.
“I’m Rochel.” The girl smiled, and twin dimples puckered her cheeks. She touched Batya’s forehead with lovely long and cool fingers to feel her temperature, and Batya wished they’d stay there.
Rochel examined Batya’s bruises and stroked her back. “Poor thing,” she murmured. She withdrew out of her bag a vial of ointment. “Use it between your legs.”
Batya grabbed her hand. “I must get out of here,” she whispered. She motioned with her head toward the wall. “I’m not—I’m not that kind of a girl.”
Rochel shook her head. “You’re sick, and Nina doesn’t want you dying on her. But as soon as you are better, they expect you to work—”
“Never!”
Rochel’s tone was soft. “This is America. Their customs are very different from ours.” She dabbed Batya’s face with a rose-scented handkerchief. “You think this is bad? It can be worse. Come. Let me show you.”
She helped Batya up and led her to the front door, where she pointed down the street to tin huts. “Do you see those crates closest to the river?” She moved a dirty tendril of hair from Batya’s face. “Instead of holding cargo, they are brothels. God help the girls working there. Those units—you can’t call them houses—are as hot as Gehenom, and the clients are the poorest men, paying only two pesos, using those girls like a toilet, without even letting them wash between clients. There’re not even partitions inside, only curtains; everyone’s crowded together. On weekends, these girls must take as many as seventy men a day.” She paused to let her words sink in. “It’s called La Boca. The mouth. It is the mouth of hell.”
Batya pressed a closed fist into her mouth and began crying. She was already in hell.
Rochel led her back to her chamber. “Look, prostitution is legal here. Everyone is either a prostitute, a pimp, or a client. And the government gets its cut.”
Batya’s sobs turned into hiccups. Rochel retrieved a mug of water from the kitchen nook. She brought it close to Batya’s mouth. “Shhhhhhh,” she whispered over and over. “You want to run away. I know. But you’ll never get far. You don’t have a passport, right? You probably entered as someone’s wife.”
Batya nodded. “Grabovsky’s.”
“It gets easier. Really. I promise. This is the training house. They purposely bring the worst of men here—sailors with overgrown, crooked nails; street cleaners stinking of garbage; poor construction laborers with calloused hands. But if you behave, they’ll move you to a better home. You’ll have the good men, the ones that smell nice, get manicures, and pay well. Then you can save some money, too.” She waved her hand somewhere outside. “Many of us have regulars—judges, journalists, politicians.”
Us? Batya’s mind couldn’t reconcile this clean-smelling and caring Rochel with accepting being a prostitute. “How can
such things get easier?” she cried out.
“I learned to play by their rules. Believe me, it’s better.” Rochel swatted two flies circling her head. Her gaze traveled around the chamber, and Batya felt her pity at the dim and hot surroundings.
“You’re pretty—and blond,” Rochel said, stroking Batya’s hair as if it weren’t knotted with filth. “Just do as they tell you, and everything will be all right.”
Batya shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered.
“What would you do if you saved some money?”
“I’d send for my parents. That’s why I came here.” Batya thought of Moskowitz. If she could only find him, perhaps he would allow her to work as a maid in his big fancy house. Such a life was still a hundred times better than the poverty of the shtetl, and thousands of times better than the future of which Rochel was speaking.
Rochel hugged Batya. “Think of me as your big sister. You are not alone.” She stepped out, and through the canvas door curtain Batya heard her speak to Nina. “Don’t waste the investment. What could you get for her here, two to three pesos each, like for a black or creole girl?”
“A blonde brings more.”
“That’s what I mean. You’d do much better if you moved her to our house.”
“She’s beyond saving,” Nina said. “Did you smell her?”
“She’s sick. It will be on both our heads if she dies.”
Batya clapped her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t hear any more. God, is that Your world order? she asked. Is this what You’ve ordained for me?
Then she remembered her mother saying that it made no sense to complain to God about Himself.
Chapter Seventeen
This Buenos Aires was Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical cities of sin, which God had decreed must be destroyed by the flood. How could Moskowitz have allowed his young fiancée to venture here alone, to travel to a city where such immorality and brutality existed? There must be another Buenos Aires, his beautiful city with tree-lined boulevards, bubbling fountains, and stately mansions. The cunning Grabovsky must have taken her to another city.