by Talia Carner
It took only a few minutes for the officers to unfold the story to Freda and Moskowitz: Sometime near dawn, Dora had climbed out her window—probably had wriggled out between the twin bars—jumped on the roof of an adjacent lean-to, and run off to the police station. There, in Yiddish mixed with a smattering of Spanish, she begged and cried and asked for protection. She tried telling the officer of her entrapment, of the beatings, of the auction. With several policemen snickering at the polaca’s distress, the officer told her in Spanish that she must obey the law, that prostitution was legal, and that the law said she must obey her husband. Dora, of course, didn’t understand any of it, but the officer who dragged her back to the house filled in the details as he handed her back to Moskowitz. Batya watched as their jailer, not attempting to be surreptitious, tucked a gray banknote into the policeman’s palm. One hundred pesos!
During the following days, Dora was beaten, starved, and confined in a hole under the kitchen yard, where sewage seeped through the walls and cockroaches swarmed. The sisters moved in silence through their morning chores of cleaning, laundering, mending, and cooking. The lesson for disobedience and betrayal was meant to reverberate in their hearts. Indeed, while doing her kitchen duty, Batya could hear Dora’s moans through the floorboards. No one but Freda was allowed to open the top of the hole, into which, once a day, she lowered a pail of water and some bread.
The descriptions of Aida that Batya had cultivated in her head throughout the evening at Teatro Colón turned sour in her mouth. Images of the fantastically elaborate stage sets of palaces and pyramids in a vast, sunbathed desert melted into the image of Dora in the hole. The haunting beauty of the singing drowned in the muck of the girl’s loud suffering.
Four days later, Dora was brought up right after breakfast. She was dropped on a chair, splayed like a rag doll, head lolling, arms dangling at her sides, legs apart. The wild yet vacant look in her eyes told Batya that the girl had gone mad, and in a way Batya was glad for her. Escaping the torture through madness was better than feeling every iota of it.
Two hundred prostitutes from nearby houses were rounded up in the pavilion, courtyard, and kitchen. The Professor, who had been seated in Moskowitz’s office, came out to address them. He adjusted his glasses and stood silent until all the whispering died down. With great flair that matched his florid prose, his long fingers unfolded a letter he’d written to Dora’s family. Dora could no longer comprehend the words, but the sisters could.
Instead of the flowery sentences describing Dora drinking the nectar of exotic flowers, her queenly chair fashioned out of ivory from African elephants and upholstered in silk from butterflies in China, or her brilliant husband whose scholarly words were strings of pearls the whole Jewish community gathered to collect from around his feet, this letter regretfully informed Dora’s family that she had lost her virtue. Their wayward daughter had fallen in love with a Negro criminal who’d enticed her to work as a prostitute. No amount of begging by her loving husband, Yitzik Moskowitz, who had first tried to take her back, and the rabbi, who attempted to put sense into her contaminated mind, had convinced Dora to change her wanton behavior. Insatiable with lust, she was overcome by the dybbuk of Satan. All she could think about was taking more and more men into her bed.
“Your daughter is lost forever,” the Professor concluded in a theatrical voice. “You should sit shiva for her soul.”
The sisters stood squeezed together in silent shock, their expressions somber. For once, old enemies didn’t bicker; grievances were pushed aside. Close friends held each other, soul to soul connected in shared horror. Batya had known of this practice, yet hearing the words turned her blood cold.
“Such a letter will be sent to the family of any girl who tries to pull that stunt,” Freda informed the sisters. “And if your parents are deceased, it will be sent to the elders of your home shtetl or to relatives, shaming your mother’s and father’s memories.” Her glance took in the entire crowd and stopped on Moskowitz, who stood silently, his arms folded. When he nodded, she went on. “Who would say kaddish on the yahrzeit of people whose daughter veered so far from the righteous way befitting a Jewish woman?”
Before noon, Dora was sold to a brothel located far away, near a coal mine, where prostitutes were not even permitted to get up as they served, for a pittance, hordes of poor, dirty miners and even poorer, foul-smelling farmhands. Clients there weren’t protected. Before long, she would be infected by the French disease.
Batya’s ache for Dora mixed with guilt over her own failure to convince the girl of her one better option. She hoped that Dora would be able to commit suicide, although Nettie’s experience—and her own in her early days—had shown that dying could be as hard to accomplish as living.
As distraught as Batya was for Dora’s fate, she was also distressed by the fact that for the next year or two she must repay Moskowitz the cost of buying Dora. So much for saving more money for her family’s rescue.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Winter 1894
On Batya’s way to Efram’s house she passed a house with a large patio. Two dozen unkempt laborers congregated out front, no doubt waiting for their turn with the prostitutes. They passed around a jug of what Batya assumed was cheap cachaça, sugarcane alcohol. Someone played a mandolin, and the men passed the time by tangoing with each other. Their aggressive gyrating and strong hips bumping revealed their anticipation of what was ahead.
The cloud that had hovered over Batya since Dora’s episode two months earlier tightened around her like a cold blanket of air.
Before she had given Rafael her letter, Batya had to wait for Efram yet again so he could pencil on the back in Spanish, Postmaster: Please add your return address. It had been three months since Rafael had said he’d mailed her letter, and Batya hoped that the postmaster in his village had indeed complied with her request. She would know only if and when her father’s reply arrived, perhaps in a few more months.
The wait was maddening. “It will take time for my sister Keyla to receive my father’s letter with the money, and a lot more if she even decides to make her way from Siberia to join the family,” Batya told Efram when they sat down at his mother’s dining table. “Just in case my father hasn’t received the previous letter, let’s write another one. And if he did receive it, this one should urge him to act.” Without her father, a man who could work, it was likely that her sisters and their children—and now Vida—wouldn’t be accepted into the Baron’s program.
Efram put his hands to his ears. “What you’re doing is dangerous.”
“What is?” She pretended not to understand. “I want the letter to be short.”
He looked at her. “These secret letters. I don’t like it.”
She pressed herself against him. “Would you rather that I don’t come here for extra visits? Do you want to wait for your monthly stipend?”
After leaving his home with the letter in her pocket, she crossed the street to Rafael’s cart. She had visited him twice in the makeshift tent he created at night by throwing a large canvas over his cart and unrolling a thin mattress on the ground underneath. It had taken an effort for Batya to drag herself out of the house at dawn, after her night work ended and Freda had retired to bed, but Rafael had become her lifeline; God must have put him in her path to help save her family.
Rafael smiled when he saw her. He recognized her, of course, but she was never certain whether he remembered having sent a letter for her.
“Maybe you could do me a grand favor?” she asked, as if posing the question for the first time.
“Anything.” He craved her. She didn’t need to lower her eyes to check.
She repeated the instructions she’d given him last time. “I need you to mail a letter for me. My fiancé should never know, so it must be from the post office in your village.” When he nodded his head vigorously, she added, “Can you keep a secret? Our secret? No one is to know, no matter what they say to you.” She touched the back of h
is hand, and her fingers grazed, as if unintentionally, the front of his cotton pants. “I’ll bring it shortly.”
She rushed to the bank, where she converted money into two more certificates only her father could cash. She walked to a side table and, with her back to the lobby, put them in the envelope Efram had already addressed in Russian.
Then, shaking with apprehension and worry, Batya asked the clerk to write in Spanish on the back, Postmaster: Please add your return address, before sealing her letter with his red wax stamp.
Although winter in Argentina wasn’t as freezing as it had been in Russia, it was nevertheless rainy and windy—and often cold. The many rooms of the house had no heat. The open public spaces had been constructed to serve long months of hot, humid weather, and the coal stove in the corner of the pavilion failed to offer relief from the chill that blew in through the large, loosely fitting windows. The stone wall in the front of the house helped curb the heat but was porous to the moist cold that penetrated the bones. In Batya’s room, only the sheepskin rug she threw on the stone floor kept her feet—and the clients’—warm.
Standing in front of the heater in the pavilion, now empty, Batya rubbed her hands. It was summer in Russia, and she wondered what her father was doing. It was maddening to wait for his response; she must find out what could be done on her end to start the process. It was time she spoke with the Baron de Hirsch’s emissary, Señor Farbstein.
The opportunity came merely an hour later, when Freda sent her to the apothecary for ointment for her aching knees. Wearing her red coat—the only one she owned—Batya set out to also see Señor Farbstein. His name had become an incantation that could bring her family out of poverty. The man had acquired an ethereal quality when Efram reported that not only had Señor Farbstein never been seen entering a brothel, but he had joined the chorus of Jews who berated the community for allowing the pimps to support the Yiddish theaters and to subsidize the synagogues where, in return, they were given the honor of aliyahs on Shabbat.
“I heard Señor Farbstein speak in our synagogue. He’s not afraid to say that he wants to destroy Zwi Migdal’s empire. It’s a moral cesspool, he said.”
Batya cringed at these words. She was part of that cesspool. “Will he?” Batya asked.
“This corruption and graft has been going for almost thirty years,” Efram replied. “My father says that no district attorney or judge would dare tackle it. Everyone knows that the men who run the country and its civic law—the police, the judges, and the politicians—are all on Zwi Migdal’s payroll.”
Walking toward Señor Farbstein’s office, Batya told herself that he wouldn’t want to talk to her. She should just turn around before being humiliated. Just then, like an apparition, the image of her mother appeared before her, reminding Batya of her obligations. “You must give it a try,” her mother whispered as though she were nearby.
Pretending to stroll at leisure, Batya walked slowly toward the Jewish Colonization Association office. It would take a horde of righteous people from within the sex industry to bring down Zwi Migdal, she thought. The pimps would never speak against themselves, so only the prostitutes could reveal the truth. But who would dare? And who would listen to a girl in bondage? Both were as unlikely as snow in Buenos Aires. Anyone speaking out would be murdered before anything could be accomplished.
The Baron’s office was in Recoleta, the most stylish district of the city. The northeast part of the neighborhood was home to private mansions built in European styles. In its center stretched a grand cemetery, where generations of nobles and the landowning elite rested in their families’ crypts and mausoleums. The wealthier section of Junín Street passed through the heart of Recoleta and was lined with expensive stores and outdoor cafés serving the most prominent members of Buenos Aires society.
From a café-turned–dance hall wafted the music of a tango band. These dance halls, milongas, had sprouted in La Boca, but this was the first time Batya had encountered one in a fancy neighborhood. She was further astonished to see that, like in the brothel, tango was danced here in the middle of the day.
She leaned on the railing outside and watched through the large windows the silhouettes of the dancers. Unlike her favorite skimpy dance costume, the women wore long, dark dresses whose flouncing fabric allowed no hint of the bodies swaying underneath. Batya could only guess at the women’s steps, yet her muscles tightened as her body recognized the familiar rhythm.
Three men leered at her, an unchaperoned woman, and Batya was jolted from the near trance of the music. She tightened her coat and moved on until, a few blocks farther, she stopped at the sight of the Parisien building, where, she could tell by the street activity, an auction of recently captured girls was taking place on the second floor above the opulent café. Half hidden by large displays of flower arrangements that two sellers offered visitors to the cemetery, Batya watched, and cold perspiration erupted on her neck at the sight of pimps she recognized. One, a fat-bellied man in a silk shirt and striped blue suit, a diamond pin sparkling on his tie, wore a top hat and carried a walking stick that made him look distinguished. His companion, no doubt the helper who did his dirty work, had broad shoulders, his open-collared shirt and unpressed trousers revealing months of oil and food stains. The two men shook hands with a third who wore the long black caftan of an Orthodox Jew, along with dangling peyes. Like Dora before them, girls would be hauled off the boats with fake marriage documents, broken by rapes and beatings. On this cold day they were being paraded naked, their private parts probed as if they were horses sold in the market.
Batya bit her lower lip and raised her eyes to heaven. Please hit the place with a bolt of lightning. Spare the girls my life, or worse.
The men turned into a side entrance of the building, where a staircase led directly to the second floor. As Batya was about to resume her walk, a horseless carriage driven by a uniformed chauffeur stopped a few steps away. Two men descended, and from their cream-colored suits, fine straw hats, and dark skin color Batya guessed that they were Argentine judges or politicians arriving for a preview of the new merchandise. Unlike the auction conducted over Brutkevich’s barbershop, or even the one in Zitnisky’s restaurant, the Parisien auction attracted elite customers.
The flower sellers where Batya loitered sent her questioning looks. If she weren’t heading to Señor Farbstein’s office, she would have bought a red flower and tucked it in her hair. Not today. She crossed the road and entered a smaller street, whose shops were as fashionable as those of Junín Street but less flashy. She dabbed off her red lipstick and scanned the street and its shoppers. No one seemed to be spying on the JCA’s building. She approached its entrance, aware of how out of place she must look with her flaming-red coat. At the door, she paused, glanced about her, then touched the small brass plaque carrying the organization’s name and brought her fingers to her lips, as if the plaque were a mezuzah blessed with divine powers. So much of her family’s future depended upon this moment.
She stepped into the foyer, climbed up the first flight of wide steps, and knocked on the double door. A secretary dressed in a black mourning skirt and a lace-adorned black blouse opened the door. A pair of spectacles hung from her neck by a gold chain.
The woman’s smile faded, and she glared at Batya. “What do you want?”
“I’m here to see Señor Farbstein,” Batya replied, using her most polite tone.
“He won’t see the likes of you.” The secretary pushed the door to slam it.
Batya stuck her foot in the threshold. “Please.” She clasped her hands in supplication. “Please—”
“Go away.”
“I beg you—”
“Leave, or I’ll call the police.”
Batya lowered her head and took two steps back. If the police came, her visit to this office would be reported to Moskowitz. She turned and walked down the stairs.
There was no place to hide while she lingered across the street, desperate to catch Señor Farbstei
n when he left the building for his midday meal at home. Men gawked; women sneered at her and fluttered their elegant fans as if she emitted a putrid smell. Batya shrank under their gaze, yet was certain that their husbands visited prostitutes. It had become a cultural norm, a common pastime that penetrated deep into Argentine society.
The clock in the nearby church marked the passing of the quarter hour. With the fourth strike of the clock, Batya threw a last look up at the building and its many windows, wishing she knew which one was Señor Farbstein’s.
After picking up Freda’s ointment at the apothecary, Batya ambled back to the house, swaying her hips, and was rewarded when a pleasant young man followed her inside.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Batya waited two months after sending her second secret letter with Rafael, then checked with him every two weeks before his brother collected him for a home visit. Each time she reminded him to take a stroll to the local post office and inquire about a letter for her, yet he must tell no one. After Rafael’s return, even when rain poured for hours and she’d find him huddled under his canvas-covered cart, she made sure to go over, forever concerned that he might not remember what she had asked him to do or, if a letter had arrived, keep it secret. God, please watch over Rafael. So much of her life was at the mercy of a person with a limited brain.
One day, upon seeing her crossing the street, Rafael waved an envelope in the air. Quickly, Batya took the letter from him, touched his cheek in thanks, and tucked the envelope in her skirt pocket. Thank you, God! Walking away, she couldn’t bear the thought of waiting until she reached the privacy of her chamber to read it. She stepped into the space between two houses and, standing under a line of wet laundry, tore open the seal.
Why should I apply for hard work through the Baron when I have a rich daughter who wears pearls and whose house—a mansion with broad stairs—can keep us all bathing in butter? I can see you roaming with a key ring through all those rooms, with clocks everywhere and alcoves that hold fine tchotchkes. I imagine the pantries you’ve described, stocked with goose liver, cured beef, jars filled with jam and schmaltz. And those rows of pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut are waiting for me to feast every day! I can’t wait to fill my belly with them.