by Talia Carner
Chapter Twenty-Three
Before dawn, when the house had quieted down, Batya went to check on Nettie. She found her friend already asleep. Probably exhausted after hours of entertaining customers, Nettie hadn’t bothered to remove her smeared makeup. With her eyes closed, in the dim light of the kerosene lamp she had neglected to turn off, her beautiful face seemed ghostly. Batya registered that Nettie’s formerly full figure had lost its curves, and her hair, spread over the pillow, seemed thinner.
“You need to see a doctor,” Batya said to the sleeping girl. “In the morning I’m taking you. No more arguments about it.”
Nettie moaned. Perhaps she’d heard her. Batya touched her friend’s forehead. It was cool. No fever marked the mysterious illness that seemed to be eating her from within.
Midmorning, though, Nettie knocked on Batya’s door, waking her up.
“I went to the doctor only so you’ll stop nudging me.” Her old warm smile flickered on her face before it disappeared again. “He found nothing wrong with me.”
“Did you tell him you’re not eating?” Batya asked.
“He gave me an elixir to increase my appetite.” Nettie withdrew a small bottle from the folds of her skirt. “A few drops every day should do it.”
Batya smiled with relief. Nettie had to get better, or Freda might sell her off. “Keep your regulars from Ariana. She may be new here, but not to the profession. Her mother trained her in Hungary.”
“I’m taking care of my clients,” Nettie said, but Batya was unsure if the confidence was genuine or forced.
She rose and kissed Nettie on both cheeks, testing the temperature of the skin. It was normal. “And hide your jewelry. Those Hungarians have fast fingers.”
Nettie laughed her old laughter. “Will you stop fretting over me like a mother hen?”
Her worries assuaged, Batya put on the black dress and walked down the back staircase that opened to the recently extended corridor. Moskowitz had acquired two buildings next door, each a casa chorizo, a sausage-like row of rooms. He had refurbished the two parallel dwellings into more than a dozen new chambers, all accessible from a center portico. During the renovations he had also gutted a few rooms on the main house’s ground floor to enlarge the pavilion. In the new extra space he added nooks with upholstered raised platforms and countless pillows. Separated by sheer curtains from the main hall, the nooks offered a modicum of privacy so the girls could warm up their clients. By the time the men were eager to go upstairs to satisfy their desires, they were willing to pay more.
The other end of the corridor connected to the pavilion just past Moskowitz’s office. Batya walked in to gather his discarded newspapers, a daily task Freda had assigned her a couple of years before, to cut them up for use in the latrine. The scent of Moskowitz’s French cologne permeated the air. As he had instructed her, Batya picked up only the newspapers on the floor, never those on his chair. She rooted in his wastebasket and found a discarded pencil stub no bigger than her pinky, and she tucked it into her pocket so she could copy words in the margins of the newspapers. She hadn’t dared buy a notebook for fear of discovery—if not by Freda, then by a snooping sister.
Batya wasn’t supposed to linger in the office, only to take the papers to her room to cut, which gave her the privacy needed to improve her Yiddish reading.
Upon leaving the office she was startled when from behind her came the cry of Glikel, a brown-eyed beauty with unruly curly hair. “I was coming to get the newspapers!”
Batya swiveled on her heel. Glikel never volunteered her help, and only performed her assigned household tasks under threats. “How come?” Batya asked.
“Freda said I could cut them up this week,” Glikel replied in a defiant tone.
“Well, it will keep me busy.” Batya started toward the stairs.
“You were never his wife, so you shouldn’t have any privileges,” Glikel said to Batya’s back.
“You’re talking nonsense,” Batya said to Glikel. “What’s eating you?”
Without waiting for a reply, she continued to walk. No one thought cutting newspapers for the latrine was a privilege, nor did anyone in the house claim a superior status for having been “married” to Moskowitz in one of those make-believe shtile chuppahs like Nettie’s. Many of the sisters, though, delighted when he visited them in their chambers, as if singled out for a special honor.
In spite of all Batya had learned about Moskowitz, she had still been surprised to discover that at the time he kidnapped her, he had a legitimate wife and three children. Now the oldest was soon to be bar mitzvahed. Batya had overheard Moskowitz boasting to Freda that when his son turned fourteen the following year, he planned to send him to a boarding school in Switzerland. “He should receive the education of a gentleman in a school where European nobility send their children,” he had said. “Yitzik’s son will carry no traces of the shtetl in his French and English pronunciations.”
Batya’s foot was on the first step when she heard Glikel’s demanding voice: “Give me the newspapers.”
With the girls’ tragic histories, it was a wonder there weren’t more meshugenahs in the house. Batya turned and pushed the newspapers into Glikel’s middle. “Here you are.”
Glikel didn’t reach to take them, and the papers fell to the ground. “I’ve changed my mind.” She snickered with an air of superiority and sauntered away.
Seething, Batya picked up the newspapers. She began to climb the stairs.
“Wait!” Glikel called. “Wait!”
Batya allowed herself half a turn. She let out a low breath to keep her temper in check. “What now?”
Glikel’s gaze traveled over Batya’s black dress, as if noticing it for the first time. “Sorry about your mother. May her soul rest in peace.”
“Thank you.” Batya set her foot on the next step.
“Would you do me a favor? Please?”
“What kind?”
“Ask your mother to send my regards to my parents, they, too, should rest in peace. Their names are Sigmund and Hilda Gottstein.”
“My mother is really busy sending regards to a lot of parents,” Batya said, and added with emphasis, “Parents of my friends.”
“Please. Just two more. Sigmund and Hilda Gottstein.”
There seemed no end to Glikel’s audacity. Batya looked down at the pleading face. “You’ll have to pay for it.” She pointed at Glikel’s opal ring, gleaming in blues and greens. “With this.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The eight days of Chanukah filled the week following Batya’s shiva for her mother, with their late spring afternoons in which Freda presided over the candle lighting. For fifteen minutes each evening at dusk, Batya stood with the sisters and peered into the menorah and its flickering candles. She sang the Chanukah songs she remembered from home, ate jelly-filled punchkes sprinkled with powdered sugar, and felt the bond of shared traditions with these girls who had replaced her family and whose closeness had sustained her in the days of mourning.
The first Friday evening after Chanukah presented no chance to try to visit a synagogue. The brothel was busy. Now that a gas line had been snaked to the street corner to illuminate the lampposts, Moskowitz had installed colorful lights on the house’s outside wall facing the street. The klezmers stationed by the window played as much for the clients inside as for the men roaming the street, deciding which house to enter. Some Jewish men arrived early in the afternoon, allowing themselves time with the impure kurves before cleansing from the mundane in the mikveh so they could properly receive the holy Shabbat. Many others snuck out of their homes after the family’s festive dinner and welcomed Shabbat not by doing the mitzvah of satisfying their wives as ordained by the Talmud but by attending to their favorite prostitutes.
Since Freda forbade the sisters to leave lit Shabbat candles in their rooms—and tradition forbade blowing out these sacred candles—each of the girls had to light hers in the kitchen. Many sisters had invested in silver candle
sticks; Batya’s were brass, to remind her of her mother’s. She struck a match, brought the flame to each of the two wicks, then covered her face. Saying her prayer, she communed with her mother and with all Jewish women throughout history who had suffered strife yet survived. Even if it cost her her life, she swore yet again, she would get her family out of poverty and misery, out of pogroms and repeated exiles.
The non-Jewish clients sat around the pavilion and the patio, drinking Quilmes beer and bitter aperitivos, joking, listening to the music, and conducting business. They played cards for hours, seemingly not in a great hurry to take their turns in the private chambers. The smoke of their cigars, cigarettes, and opium swirled around their heads. Batya inhaled it; tobacco was good for one’s health even if her lungs couldn’t tolerate smoking it. She loved how these smells mixed with the aroma of boiling coffee and heady perfume. She hated how they turned stale on her clients’ breath.
The musicians broke into a tango, and Ovad, a swarthy Moroccan Jew, a building contractor, nodded at her from across the room. She sauntered toward him, her hand fanning her blond hair over her right shoulder, her eyes locked in his while he stepped forward. The music swept through Batya as Ovad took her hand and held her in a close abrazo. She didn’t like Ovad the hairy client, but she enjoyed Ovad the dancer. Her full breasts pressing against his torso, she gave herself to the illusion of romance, closed her eyes, and immersed herself in the harmony of their moves. Her sharp yet fluid steps exposed her skin through the Spanish shawl tied like a skirt, its long fringes swaying with each swivel. When she danced, her body was hers alone, and in the flow of the music, Ovad let her shine.
From the corner of her eye she saw Freda exchanging clients’ money for the tokens they would leave with the prostitutes. Every week, when Batya handed Freda her tokens, the matron deducted food and rent, leaving her just enough to entice her to continue working. The first year of Batya’s bondage, Freda had deducted the cost of her ocean passage from Russia. At least now Batya was free of that debt.
After two songs, Batya stopped dancing and gestured toward the stairs. She had to work. Besides the token, she knew Ovad would leave her a gift of money.
Half an hour later, she came downstairs to find that her new favorite regular had arrived. She took Ulmann’s hand, and the smile on her lips was genuine. A jeweler in his late thirties, Ulmann had bland facial features but hadn’t yet gone to fat as many men did, flaunting their good fortunes. He was blessed with a gentle soul: he neither drank nor danced, and cigars gave him headaches. All he wanted was to be alone with her in her chamber—and mostly talk.
Heavy rain had washed the city at dawn, and at eight o’clock the air was still cool and fragrant, before garbage would bake on the streets in the spring sun. As Batya left the front yard, a jacaranda tree weighed down by its purple flowers leaned toward her in protective blessing. A large woolen shawl covered Batya’s shoulders and arms, both against the chill and for modesty. She couldn’t help the revealing, colorful dress—she owned no modest clothing—but she had tightened her shawl with a mother-of-pearl brooch given to her by a client. Her wide-brimmed hat, though, with its swath of tulle, was finer than any common woman could afford, marking Batya as a prostitute.
Saturday mornings, she was permitted to visit the Mercado de Abasto, where farmers displayed their produce and vendors paraded soap and candles, perfume and makeup, lace and fine linens. Batya no longer required supervision after she’d learned, like many sisters before her, that there was no place to run to, no place to hide, and no better means of employment to be found in this growing city of men and immigrants. She had proven herself adept not only at learning Spanish but also at negotiating on price, so Freda trusted her to purchase provisions to supplement the meals delivered from the mess halls. The matron was especially appreciative that the butcher made it a practice to give Batya a yapa, a bonus piece of meat.
Batya looked forward all week to her walk through the market. Shabbat in Buenos Aires was nothing like Shabbat at the shtetl. Like everything else in this new world, the prohibition of labor or handling money was merely a memory. Batya was particularly fascinated by healers who offered herbs and ointments along with magic words meant to cure a baby from the cholera, capture the heart of an indifferent would-be lover, or find a pot of gold.
She had only once spent her hard-earned money on a secret wish. She had hoped to be miraculously carried back to Russia, to the shtetl, to her parents’ arms, to the sour scent of dairy products on her father’s beard. Even if they would all live in a hut whose rat-infested walls were covered with mildew and soot, whose thatched roof crawled with insects, and whose stove sputtered and smoked, they would be together. She had been disappointed when the magic words accomplished nothing, even though the soothsayer who had sold them explained that the key to their success was persistence: more secret words would bring about the magic. Batya refused to part with more money.
Batya had been toying with the idea of praying in the Sephardi synagogue where Ovad worshipped, and where there was no chance she’d encounter Zwi Migdal pimps who’d come from Eastern Europe. She entered San Telmo with its dilapidated, soot-covered tenements, sarcastically called conventillos, small convents. The hordes of poor immigrants living there—Jews and goyim alike—were no better off than they had been in Europe. The buildings with sagging staircases and walls swarming with rats and vermin were so crowded that families not only shared beds, but fifty families shared two lavatories. Unlike the good food Batya ate—though every morsel was deducted from her pay—these people lived on potatoes and hardtack.
Batya quickened her pace, careful to protect her good shoes from the open channel of sewage running along the street. She chased away a pack of children with filthy faces and heads speckled with lice eggs, begging her for pennies. There was nothing here to indicate it was Shabbat, she thought. Through the window of one of the conventillos, she glimpsed men smoking opium through bamboo pipes. She breathed in the wafting sweet smell, so different from the bitter tincture she had been given during her surgery and recovery. She wished she could buy some to float her down that river of dreams and forgetfulness, but it cost its weight in real silver, an indulgence she wouldn’t allow. Opium, she had learned, made its users lose all their money in pursuit of it.
She hurried on, ignoring the prostitutes who leaned against doorways or bent out of second-floor windows. In this overcrowded neighborhood, most operated out of rooms rented in families’ small flats or ran brothels on roofs, with only straw partitions separating each woman and her groaning, panting client from the next. Despite the squalid conditions, many of these sisters were independent, not subjugated as she was, though rumor had it that Zwi Migdal extorted protection fees from these women, too.
When she reached the Sephardi synagogue, she stood in front of the building with its ornate arched façade. Only then did it occur to her that since Ovad’s people had emigrated from Morocco, not only did they not speak Yiddish, but their Hebrew pronunciation of the prayers must be incomprehensible. For all she knew, God didn’t understand it either and wouldn’t listen to such prayers any more than He would to prayers coming from a church. She must make her way to the Ashkenazi synagogue that had been opened recently near Vella Crespo, where merchants and government clerks built villas for their lawful wives.
She would go there first, she decided, then return to San Telmo to complete her market shopping. In spite of Shabbat, she hailed a carriage to take her the twenty-five blocks’ distance.
During the ride, Batya removed her hat and pinned her hair up with four tortoiseshell combs. However, when she put the wide-brimmed hat back on, it failed to block a view of her hair, so unlike the tight head coverings married women wore in the synagogue. Virgins didn’t cover their heads, but what was the rule of halacha for a woman who was neither married nor a virgin? If Batya raised her shawl to fully cover her head, would she be deceptive, pretending to God that she was a respectable married woman? He knew well th
at she was the lowest of all humans in His vast universe.
Or maybe He knew differently. Maybe for Him, she was forever Batya, “God’s daughter,” His child. It was Esperanza, the other girl, who engaged in filth.
When Batya arrived, the Shabbat morning services were just starting. She entered the building, her eyes downcast to avoid catching the eyes of men she knew—not only her own clients but also those who frequented other sisters in the house.
Immediately to the left of the entrance rose a staircase that must lead to the women’s section. The circular wooden stairs were hard to navigate with her ample skirt. She had to lift it above her ankles and wondered how women with little children could make their way up.
Upstairs, only five women sat on the backless wooden benches. A mother and a teenage daughter huddled, the mother’s arm around her child, and from their heaving shoulders Batya guessed that they were praying for a sick relative or for the soul of a recently departed loved one. The other three women sat far away from one another, each with her eyes shut while her lips moved in a silent prayer. All were dressed in simple, dark clothes, and the stark contrast to her own colorful, high-quality attire made Batya want to shrink and disappear.
In a bin at the entrance, she spotted several bound books and was delighted to find the tkhines. Below, in the main sanctuary, some men had already started davening, their bodies swaying back and forth under their prayer shawls. Afraid to contaminate them with her gaze, she settled in the back row with her book, too far to hear, but out of the line of vision of the other women. She wished that, like the men, she could close herself to the world and hide under a talis, that white silk cloth lined with gold and silver threads and edged with fringes, the number of strands of each representing a symbol. Under a talis she could convene with God as if He were close to her, like the friend her father had found in Him. But it was God’s wish that prayer shawls be the province of men only.