The Third Daughter

by Talia Carner

  “She pays the delivery boys to service her,” chimed another.

  Their gossip was interrupted by a joyful squealing. Batya looked up. A man who’d just entered the room was surrounded by a group of welcoming sisters. Sitting low, Batya had only the view of their backs—until he stepped forward.

  It was Moskowitz. He had found her!

  Batya jumped off her seat, almost spilling her drink, and was about to rush over when she stopped in her tracks. She had just been initiated with her own consent. She had allowed her soul to be sullied. Yet, looking at him before he’d spotted her, his solicitous smile directed at the girls around him, she knew that she’d never stopped believing that he was her salvation. Compared with the brutality she’d suffered since their separation, his violation of her seemed mild—and had been accompanied by kindness. Even the dress she was wearing now had been his gift.

  “Reb Moskowitz! Reb Moskowitz!” she cried out, returning to the honorific “reb” she hadn’t used since their first night on the road. Pushing through the circle of girls, Batya flung herself onto him.

  “My dear.” He guided her into the corridor, away from everyone’s sight. “You look beautiful.”

  No, she didn’t. She felt both her eyes and nose running, smearing her makeup. It no longer mattered. What was important now was to convince him to take her away from here. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and clutched his arm. “I must tell you what happened. It’s not my fault—I was beaten and locked up and—”

  “But you’re all right now, right?” The sound of his familiar, honeyed voice warmed her heart. “Have you been well-fed, as I promised?”

  “Yes, but— No!” she cried out. “Let me explain—”

  “My dear, everything will be all right now.”

  She tried to control the panic in her voice. “I understand why you no longer want to marry me, but I beg you to take me to your sister’s house. I’ll be a good maid. You saw how I worked at the tavern.” Her voice was shrill to her own ears.

  “Shhhhhhh. Listen to me.” He pulled her into the office where the Professor had written the letters, put both arms on her shoulders, and looked deep into her eyes. “I’ve had a business reversal. I owe money. Would you mind helping me?”

  “Me?” She was relieved that he talked to her, that he wasn’t shunning her. He even sought her help! “Anything.”

  “Good. Stay here, then.”

  “Stay here? In this house of prostitution?” At that moment—one she would recall many times later—it dawned on her that many of the sisters had greeted him. They knew him. He knew this place well. Yet, shouldn’t it be expected from a healthy man still searching for a bride?

  He touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “Just for a while, until I get my affairs in order.”

  The genial smile, the concern in his eyes, hadn’t dimmed. Did he believe that she was like the rest of these women? He knew that she had come from a good home—poor but decent, where both her parents had been lucky to still be alive. How could he wish her to be a prostitute?

  Batya’s head was buzzing. Of all the scenarios she’d churned in her imagination, none had involved Reb Moskowitz knowing what would happen to her. Even now, her mind refused to accept what it was telling her. Reb Moskowitz couldn’t have initiated her kidnapping. Of course he couldn’t have. Yet— “Where’s that rich sister of yours?” she asked.

  “Freda is my sister. Hasn’t she been teaching you, just as I promised?”

  Batya swatted away the hand resting on her shoulder and stepped back from him, her palms rising in front of her to fend off the evil eye. Her throat constricted. “You knew?” she whispered, still hoping he would deny it.

  His hand swept toward the pavilion past the corridor. “All these girls? I took them out of the hell of Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Hungary, and Russia, and gave each one of them a better life. They are all grateful, and so should you be. For the first time in your life you aren’t starving, right?”

  Batya’s mind ticked off the women she’d met. Nettie had told her about “the swine” who’d taken her as his third wife. Others had hinted at being tricked with the promises of jobs in the homes of Jewish families. Rochel said women had been kidnapped. Others had been “married” in a worthless shtile chuppah without a rabbi. All to Moskowitz?

  A wave of despair took Batya’s breath away, and she crumpled to the floor.

  Part II

  Buenos Aires, 1893–1894

  The night gleams at me in the dark,

  Gray and cold;

  Terrifying corpse-shadows

  Fill up my void soul.

  Fearful of death, I look all around

  For a glimmer, a spark somewhere!

  I stare and, creeping, crawl

  Ever nearer to the door.

  —Yiddish poem by Zelda Knizhnik, 1900

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Spring 1893

  Better that I should open the letter for you,” Freda said to Batya, holding a stained envelope that, like all the letters before it, had been passed through many hands over many months. “I should read it for you.”

  Batya trembled with the desire to grab the letter and rush to her room. She still couldn’t—wouldn’t—reveal that she could read. That secret had grown larger these past four years. It dwelled where her true self resided, untouched, her last hold of pride—and a thread of a promise. It was the part of her that clung to life against all the many hours of despair.

  A letter from her family reminded her why she was still alive.

  Sisters crowded around her. News was news, and a letter—no matter from whom it came and to whom it was addressed—was exciting and so rare. Many girls had lost touch with their families in Eastern Europe. The victims of frequent pogroms, families dispersed or perished, never to be heard from again.

  Without waiting for Batya’s approval, Freda snaked a thick finger under the fold of one side and tore into the paper. Batya cringed. Careful, she wanted to say, but didn’t dare.

  The sisters squeezed closer as Freda’s eyes scanned the page. She sighed. “Your mother died.”

  “What?” The word sent a lightning rod through Batya. Died? “How? What happened?”

  “In childbirth. Five months ago. You have a baby sister. Vida. Congratulations.”

  Died. Too stunned to cry, Batya took the letter and stumbled upstairs. When Rochel took a step to accompany her, Batya shook her head. “Later.”

  In her room, finally alone, she read the letter. Her father’s familiar handwriting spoke to her through his grief. Clutching the single page, Batya fell on the bed. Her tears soaked her pillow until she thought she had none left.

  Five months earlier. All this time she’d had no premonition. No tingling down her neck had signaled that her mother was watching her from above.

  She needed to pray, to plead with God for her mother’s departed soul. Girls didn’t say kaddish, the prayer for the dead, but there had been another women’s prayer her mother had recited for her own deceased mother from her collection of Yiddish women’s prayers, tkhines. Yet the words were elusive. For four years Batya had been trying to remember some of her mother’s utterings. She had been too young or too busy—or, Batya now admitted, too uninterested—to have memorized them. She had failed to anticipate how short her time with her mother would be. Now she regretted her ignorance.

  She walked to her dresser and withdrew a small packet of letters tied in a red ribbon. Had she not kept the letters in her dresser, a snooping sister might suspect another hiding place. Six letters in all had come through these past four years, and probably as many others had been lost. She braced herself as she took out the one letter she had read only once, for she couldn’t bear the pain of it. Her refusal to bring Surale to Buenos Aires had left her father baffled, but her mother didn’t save her tongue when she asked her husband to admonish the daughter who had dashed their hopes, all the while bragging about her good fortune.

&
nbsp; Your mother asks how you can deny your sister the chance to find happiness and riches with a good husband like yours. I know that you are not selfish, but your mother can see no other reason for your denying your flesh and blood. You know Surale’s good heart, as pure as the fresh snow and as generous as late summer dandelions. As the Good Book says, she would have turned mountains on their heads to help you.

  Batya had cried then, and cried again now. “Forgive me, Mama. Now that you are in heaven, you see for yourself. You know the truth of the fate I wanted to spare my little sister. I risked your wrath out of my love for her. Please forgive me and love me again, wherever you are now.”

  When Rochel knocked on the door, Batya let her in and fell into her arms. “I need to pray for my mother’s soul but don’t know how.”

  “But I do. We’ll have our own minyan.”

  Encroaching on men’s spiritual territory was heretical. Women weren’t allowed to imitate the religious service that required ten men for public prayer, but Batya needed all her friends’ comfort. Clutching her father’s latest letter, on which the ink had smeared from his tears—and now from her own—she could hardly speak her gratitude.

  It was late afternoon, and clients were filling the pavilion below. Rochel managed to gather eight more sisters in Batya’s room.

  “Where’s Nettie?” Batya asked her.

  “Resting. Let’s begin.”

  Recently, the light had dimmed in Nettie’s eyes. For weeks she had been forlorn, her joyful whistle silenced. Sometimes her mouth slackened; other times, her breath slowed down and she seemed confused. Just the week before Batya had noticed that one of Nettie’s regulars had selected a newcomer, Ariana, a petite blue-eyed girl who exhibited the vivaciousness Batya had always appreciated in Nettie.

  In spite of Batya’s entreaties, Nettie had refused to see a doctor. She was fine, she insisted.

  There was no time to get Nettie now. In a few minutes the sisters must rush back to work.

  Rochel began chanting. “May God remember the soul of Batya’s mother, Zelda, daughter of Tova, who has gone to the next world. May her soul be bound with the souls of our Mothers—Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. May she not be judged by her daughter’s wanton ways and be permitted to join all the righteous men and women in the Garden of Eden. Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  The sisters scattered when Freda arrived. To Batya’s surprise, Freda, who checked a girl’s menstruation pads to allow a single-day break only if the flow was heavy enough to upset the clients, pronounced that Batya must take the week off for the decreed shiva, seven days of mourning. “It’s a mitzvah never to be broken,” she said, and handed Batya a modest black dress with a black collar. “Tear only the collar to show your grief,” she ordered, “not the rest of the dress.”

  Batya covered the mirror in her chamber and folded blankets on the floor for visiting sisters to sit down on, as mourners weren’t supposed to enjoy the comfort of chairs. Relishing the feel of being fully covered by the black dress, she curled up on the blankets. Fresh tears streamed down the side of her face. It was liberating to no longer keep secrets from her mother. Now that Rochel had performed the ceremony and her mother had been accepted in heaven, Batya felt less alone.

  Lying in the semidarkness, for once certain that no client would enter her chamber, she was free to transmit questions to her mother on subjects never before even hinted at. Had her mother ever felt the sexual rapture that Batya had grown to enjoy? Not with all clients, certainly, but in her first year, with Rochel’s and Nettie’s guidance to her body’s secrets, with the sisters’ frank talks about their trade and the sensuous and seductive tango, something had bloomed in Batya. By the time she celebrated her sixteenth birthday, sometimes passion rose in her to an unimaginably pleasurable pitch.

  Clients often complained about their unresponsive wives, and the sisters speculated that married women were given to other pleasures in their lives to make up for the drought of their flesh. Had her mother’s body, forever burdened by worries and exhausted by physical labor, ever experienced sexual sensations underneath the layers of clothing she removed only in the mikveh—a body her mother had never even glimpsed in a mirror?

  Hours later, Batya stood at the open window, unable to sleep. The monotonous screeching of cicadas was broken by the hoot of an owl. The full moon, now on her side of the sky, bathed the street in silver, and she imagined her father and sisters watching the same moon even though it wasn’t possible, not in this upside-down world called Argentina. Dawn in the southern hemisphere, Rochel had long explained, was dusk in Russia. Perhaps in a few hours, in Russia, when the moon shone full and yellow like a wheel of cheese, her father and Surale would be thinking of her, comforting themselves with the myth that she was the only one of them living a tsures-free life, that no troubles plagued her. With Keyla in Siberia still visiting her husband once a month and Hedi forever the ghost, Surale must be the one taking care of the orphaned Vida and managing their father’s house. Five months ago, they had been united in their sorrow, but by now they were back to their daily struggles. Batya was alone in her grief.

  She replaced the letter in the stack and reread the first one to have arrived. How well she remembered that day, Passover eve—her fifteenth birthday. The Seder was the first time she’d seen the house closed for business. Huge tables were set in the pavilion for all the sisters, and a wayward rabbi invited to retell the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Together, they chanted the familiar songs of deliverance. The decreed bitter herbs of slavery Batya had eaten that night were the most bitter she had tasted, and the charoset the sweetest, as her heart had shared both of these symbols with her family.

  Thank you for your gift of money, that first letter read. We were able to buy a new stove, thank Hashem, and a traveling rabbi has blessed it, so it should serve us faithfully until the age of one hundred and twenty. I mean, your mother’s and my one twenty, of course, not the stove’s.

  There’s another matter I consulted the Good Lord whether to tell you, and He advised me to do so. You see, your intended, the revered Reb Moskowitz, has fallen victim to a crook, and I ask that you warn him: When I finally found a money changer willing to break down the one-hundred ruble bill that Reb Moskowitz had forced upon me and your good mother, the money changer laughed us out of his store. The bill was fake. Please warn your groom that when it comes to his business associates, he should remember to employ the “honor him, yet suspect him” rule, as the Good Book teaches us.

  An old lump swelled up in Batya’s throat. Her hatred toward Moskowitz had long grown as big as if it were another organ in her body. A curse she had heard her mother direct at the czar surfaced: May he hang himself with a sugar rope and have a sweet death. The man had no soul. If she could yank out his heart and throw it to the dogs, it would have still failed to satisfy her desire for retribution.

  For her second letter home, months later, Batya had sat with the Professor and told him to write that she was in good health and eating well. Batya regretted that when Fishke had run off with Keyla too soon, it had left her able to read but not yet ready to write full sentences. Indeed, when the Professor read Batya’s letter back to her, his lyrical descriptions of her well-being and rich food were written in a flowery language she would never have been able to emulate. In subsequent letters, the Professor reported about her marriage—earlier than initially planned, at fifteen. The Professor built fantastic tales of her successful union with the devoted groom who covered her in silk gowns and jewels, of her pantries filled with provisions she shared generously with the poor, and of the Garden of Eden–like beauty of Buenos Aires.

  Batya had been grateful for the fables, even if she could never be forgiven for the lies. Telling her parents the truth would have killed them. There was nothing her simple dairyman father could have done to help her from across mountains and oceans.

  Batya had long figured out that letters like hers, sent all over Eastern Europe and accompanie
d by gifts of money, ensured that word of the girls’ good fortune would spread. The pimps, who called their organization Zwi Migdal, often traveled back to their home countries to offer poor Jewish women great jobs as shopgirls, governesses for children, or companions for aging Jewish matrons—or better yet, to “marry” them. Batya suspected that her mother’s envious tales of Pesha’s daughter, who had lived in Germany in luxury and bathed in hot springs, had made her mother more inclined to accept Moskowitz’s offer. May a fish bone get stuck in his throat. No wonder Pesha’s daughter sent money to her mother but never brought her out of Russia to live with her.

  Batya reread her father’s latest letter, mourning his wife. What is a wife for if not to keep a man in his place? he wrote, and Batya thought with fondness about her parents’ constant bickering. With all their differences—and her mother’s complaints about their financial woes—they had been suited for each other. Now Batya also understood the connection the two had shared in the dark. In the long, cold Russian winter nights of her childhood, while the family slept together on the wide loft built above the stone stove, she had heard their muffled moaning and believed it was the aches in their joints from the hard labor they endured all day. Come summertime, there had been evenings when her parents insisted on relieving their daughters from milking duties and took their time returning from the cowshed. How else had her mother been able to conceive time and again?

  Batya tied the letters with the ribbon and put them back. “God of great mercy, please protect my naïve father.” She wished she knew more prayers. Without a script, she was merely speaking to God instead of reciting the words He had prescribed for His followers. If she heard the prayers recited aloud at any of the synagogues in town, the forgotten sentences might jolt her memory. Maybe the women’s section had that tkhines book she so wanted.

  The moon moved to the other side of the house, and Batya turned away from the window. She sank back on the blanket on the floor. Moskowitz wouldn’t permit her to attend a service at the synagogue. Maybe Freda, who respected the shiva, would have, except that for all her religious adherence, the matron never attended a service herself. Better not ask. If her jailers withheld their permission, Batya would have to defy them. She’d do better to figure out a way to just go.