The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Since the day she was married, apparently, my mother had been harvesting grievances; it was like a dowry in reverse. Hearing her litanies of woe, my father just threw up his hands and sighed. “What do you want me to do, Tillie? Do I look like God?”

  Now, as I sat beside my father at the detention center, he was like a work of art to me. I’d never seen him in broad daylight before, quite so close up. Throughout the Russian Pale, Papa had been known as an extremely handsome man. The bones of his face, I saw, were strong and pleasingly symmetrical, his eyelashes as long as petals. As I studied him, he seemed to breathe with his whole body. The solid, muscular presence of him in his dark jacket, with his thick, ginger hair curling out from beneath his hat, awed me. My papa. I had never had him all to myself.

  I tugged on his coat. “Papa? Will Mama and Rose go blind? Will Flora and Bella?”

  Sighing, he shook his head.

  “What’s it like to be blind, Papa?” I asked, the words warming in my mouth. “If a person is blind, can they still eat? With a spoon, or only with their hands? Are they allowed to have soup?”

  He gave a mirthless little laugh, then unfolded himself and stood up. His dark, storm-gray eyes darted about. Papa was too restless for his own good, Mama often complained. Even at the Sabbath table he jiggled his leg, drummed his fingers on the tabletop. While other fathers could remain hunched over the Torah for hours, Papa studied for only a few minutes before abandoning it and heading out, looking for something to fix, something to trade. Unlike most of the men from Vishnev, he wore his beard clipped close to his face, his hat pushed back rakishly.

  Now, stretching, he surveyed the chaos of the detention center—with its crying babies and scolding women—and let out a long, low whistle.

  “Kindeleh,” he said, not to me but to the air above my head, “what do you say you and I, we take a walk?”

  He held out his hand. Its calluses were smooth, like peeled almonds. “Let’s go explore, yes?” To my great delight, he winked.

  We set out together, my father and I: he in his black coat and the dark saucer of his hat, I tiny beside him, a small child dressed the way all children dressed in those days—like miniature adults—in a long frayed skirt, a little hand-crocheted shawl, my horrid gray coat.

  Together we stepped into the leafy streets of what was then a jewel of the German Empire, the third-largest port in the world.

  Hamburg was laced with canals and ornate lakeside cafés. Its delicate spires pierced the sky like hatpins. Half-timbered houses stood four stories high, crimson geraniums cascading from their rippled windows. Oh, what a beautiful waste!

  We happened upon a square, a garden fenced with wrought-iron lace, a fountain bedecked with angels, arcaded buildings. Of course I had never, ever seen anything remotely like this before. For all his travels, neither had Papa. Until we arrived in Hamburg, no one in our family had so much as seen an indoor toilet, a streetcar, an electric light. Even the synagogue back in our shtetl had been lit only with candles and lanterns.

  Papa and I stood in the middle of Hamburg’s Neustadt quarter. “That’s something, eh?” he said, staring up at the tower of the Rathaus.

  Using the tower as a sort of compass needle, he led us from Strasse to Strasse. “Papa, look.” We marveled before the windows of the Konditorei and Bäckerei; at shops selling fabrics, soaps, ointments; at shelves of porcelain dishes filled with peppermints and glazed fruits. My world, suddenly, had gone to color. On a wide boulevard stood a magnificent entranceway. Bright pictures hung on either side. Papa stopped and pushed his hat back on his head.

  “Who builds a thing like this?” he wondered. Of course, we could not understand the signs or the language above the marquee. But Papa and I, we grasped their enticement, the visual invitation, the temptation they presented. It was late in the afternoon. A windowed booth stood stationed beneath the marquee, yet it was unmanned. Beside it, a door was propped open with a bit of brick. “Can I?” I whispered.

  Guiding me by the shoulders, Papa pushed me inside.

  We found ourselves in a grand red velvet foyer. From behind a tall curtain came music. There was an implicit hush. I took a tentative step through the slice of velvet. We were at the back of a hall as dark as a tunnel, filled with lazy white curlicues of smoke. On the wall opposite, two people were dancing in jiggly, lint-flecked black and white; they were alive but not alive—the culmination of a long, bright beam of dust. I was just old enough to know that what I was seeing was a picture but not a picture. It was wholly animated with light and velocity. I squeezed Papa’s hand. A vast new world within a world flickered before us. I stood in astonishment as two strangers in the most dazzling, unusual clothes waltzed through drawing rooms full of armchairs with antimacassars, curvaceous electric lamps, a voluptuous grand piano. A sylphlike lady with dark lips and a glittering gown swooned on a couch. Instantly, I wanted to be her.

  A strange, heavy palm landed on my shoulder just then, and a man began whispering to Papa in a hiss of anger. Whatever he was saying needed no translation. “Pfft!” My father laughed dismissively. But he grabbed my hand and pulled me quickly back out onto the street. “Dirty scheygitz,” he swore, tossing the end of his cigarette into the gutter. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that my father smoked. “Ah, but so what?” As he ground out the butt with his foot, he winked at me with a delicious look of conspiracy. “We got to see plenty, didn’t we, kindeleh?”

  Back at the immigration hostel, Papa described what we’d seen to the other men. Since I was too little to be left on my own, he’d smuggled me into the men’s dormitory. He placed me on his mat in the corner, where everyone promptly forgot about me. It was a bit like being in synagogue. Most of the men in the room kept their hats and yarmulkes on and bowed over prayer books. Some sat propped against the wall with their eyes shut. But Papa had a coterie of friends who seemed to have carved out a special club for themselves in the back. Their hats and jackets lay flung about. Pale tobacco smoke filled the air. Men were dealing cards and passing around a flask. Papa sat on a stool with his legs splayed out, his collar unbuttoned, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was far livelier than he ever was at home—commanding, jovial—sitting in the center of the men like a little czar, slapping some of them on the back, doling out cigarettes, kibitzing with all of them.

  “What you saw today, that was a ‘moving picture,’” a heavyset man said. He had pockmarked cheeks, and every time he slapped one of his cards down on a stool, the flesh of his jowls shook. The air around him smelled of wet wool, smoke, rotting onions. “These moving pictures, they come from America.”

  “Keep watching them, Herschel,” a scrawny man said, patting my father on the back. “In three weeks’ time, I’ll be in one of them.”

  Papa hooted.

  “What?” The scrawny man insisted, “You think I’m going to America to keep being a tailor? You can be anything you want there.”

  “Not a lot of moving pictures in Africa, from what I hear, Hersch.” The pockmarked man grinned. “What kind of Jew goes from Russia to Africa, I’d like to know. It’s not enough we spent forty years wandering in the desert already? You want you should go back for forty more?”

  “The Cossacks aren’t enough for you, Hersch?” teased another man in a torn brown coat.

  My father leaped up, kicked aside his chair, and motioned to him. “Okay, Yossi, you big macher.” Papa rolled up his sleeves and stood in a pose with his hands cocked, beckoning. “Friends.” He grinned magnanimously. “Who wants to bet?”

  The men laughed nonchalantly. My father lunged forward and began pummeling Yossi. There was a violent explosion of shouting, cheering. Stools fell over. I saw Papa wallop someone in the head, then the man in the brown coat lock his elbow around Papa’s neck.

  “Papa!” I shrieked.

  The men stopped and turned to me.

  “Stop! Don’t hurt my papa!”

  All of them, including Papa, burst out laughing. I started to cry.

&
nbsp; “Oy, you’ve scared the child,” someone said. “Very nice, you two.”

  The man in the torn brown coat released Papa and took a step back. “Saved by your little girl, Hersch. Lucky schmuck.”

  Papa looked at me. “We’re just playing, kindeleh.”

  Tears were running down my face. “Papa,” I wailed. “I don’t want you to die!”

  He gave a little incredulous laugh. “No one’s dying.”

  When I wouldn’t stop crying, he shook his head. “Ach. Come here.” I was reluctant to approach him in the midst of all the big, ungainly men, but Papa held out his arms. He knelt down and rumpled my hair. His embrace felt marvelous.

  Motioning for the flask, he took a swig, then wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. He grabbed my right hand firmly in his. “Make a fist,” he ordered.

  Somebody laughed. The men were in a semicircle around us. A few of them had rotting teeth, breath like sour cabbage. I tried to ignore their gaze.

  “Tighter,” Papa instructed. “Like a rock. Okay. Good. Now the other one, too. Very good. Now hold them like this.” Reaching out, he adjusted me in a pose, with my fists held up close to my chest.

  “Take a step out with that leg, so that your weight is more balanced.” Papa held up his palm. “Now, when I count to three, punch my hand with your right. As hard as you can, okay? Thrust from the shoulder, not your wrist, you see?” He demonstrated with his own fist. “Like this.”

  I looked at him dubiously, then down at my fist, curled, snail-like. “It won’t hurt?”

  My father grinned, shook his head. “As hard as you can.” The man in the brown coat chuckled. I tried to envision my fist going hard into Papa’s palm. I tried to remember to thrust from the shoulder. I prayed it wouldn’t hurt. “One. Two. Three,” Papa said.

  I punched his hand as hard as I could. It made a tiny clapping sound. “Ai!” someone said, though the punch didn’t seem to have any effect on my father at all.

  “Again,” Papa commanded. “Harder.”

  “What are you doing, Hersch?”

  “Shush,” Papa said. “Why shouldn’t she know? Again,” he ordered.

  I punched again.

  “Harder.”

  Papa held up his other hand. “Now punch with your left.”

  I punched with my left.

  “Now your right.”

  I punched with my right. I did as I was told. Each time I swung, the sound of the blow grew a little louder.

  Soon a couple of men were chanting along with Papa—“Right! Left! Right! Left! Right!”—and I was punching Papa’s palm as fast and as hard as I could. My face grew hot, and I burned inside my coat, but I kept swinging. I felt strong. I felt bigger, as if my arms and fists themselves were swelling into little hammers. With each punch my father beamed, as if my blows were infusing him with oxygen, making his internal light burn brighter. “That’s a girl,” he laughed. His attention, it felt like liquid love, like apples and honey pouring down on me. The man with the pockmarked face put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Some of the men sat back heavily, watching, passing around the flask.

  “Quite a spiel, enh? Herschel’s got himself a little fighting maideleh.”

  “Hersch, she’s a natural.”

  “Not like her father!”

  “Give her a few years,” Papa chortled. “She’ll have all of you schmucks on the ropes!” But as he said this, he turned to grin at the men. For just a moment, he forgot to keep his palm up. My punch landed right on the side of his jaw with a thwock!

  “Ouch!” he cried. Oh, I was mortified. But the men chuckled. Papa staggered up and raised my little fist in the air. “Okay. Enough.” He took a swallow from the flask. “Who wants to place a bet?” He squeezed me tightly. His breath smelled sweet and smoky. “Who wants to go up against her next?”

  He swung me over his shoulder. The room spun with color and noise.

  “Take her to America, Hersch,” someone said. “Put her in those moving pictures you saw.”

  “Nah, if you’re going to Africa, keep her for yourself. You’re going to need her, Hersch. For protection.”

  The next morning, however, Papa was oddly quiet. In the dining hall, all the émigrés sat at a table. For breakfast we were given a chunk of bread. If you were a child like me, you also got half a cup of warm milk. Papa and I squeezed in along the wobbling bench.

  “Oh, the streets in America,” someone was saying excitedly. “My brother-in-law writes that they are like you have never seen, with shining gold towers that reach into the sky, as ornate as Torah scrolls!”

  “They say that in the squares there are fountains that you can drink from—not just water but milk!”

  “Every day, people in America, they eat big pots of beef stewed with carrots and dill swimming in broth!”

  Neither Papa nor I said anything. As I chewed, I kept thinking about the woman in the dark, glittering dress I’d seen dancing on the wall—imagining that I was her. I thought of the shops we’d passed filled with porcelain and silks, the apothecaries with their glistening jars of peppermints and hair pomades, the red velvet theater with its filigreed balustrades and gilt doorway. Then I thought about Mama and Papa and me and my three sisters, wandering in the desert for forty years.

  Papa barely paid me any mind. He kept drumming his fingers on the table and glancing around distractedly. As soon as I was done with my milk, he took the tin cup from my hand and set it brusquely on the table. “Stay here and behave yourself,” he ordered. “Papa will be back shortly.”

  “Be back shortly” turned into three hours, then four. I played games with some of the other children in the courtyard until their mothers realized that I was the little girl whose family was in quarantine. Then I sat on a bench and sang to myself. I made up a song called “Waiting on the Bench.” When Papa finally returned, it was nearly dinnertime.

  This happened the next day, and the next. I grew restless. Cranky.

  Finally Papa said to me after breakfast, “Today, you come with me on another walk. Yes? I have some special business.”

  As we stepped back into the majestic streets of Hamburg, he walked so quickly it was as if he’d forgotten I was beside him. I had to struggle to keep up. A few times I stumbled in my worn, ill-fitting shoes. As we hurried, Papa kept scanning the storefronts, checking a little piece of paper clutched in his hand. I barely had time to look at the chemist’s, the butcher’s, the bakery. When we passed the shop with the windows full of peppermints, I pleaded with him to stop.

  “We don’t have time,” he snapped. Yet then he seemed to reconsider. Pivoting around, he knelt down and looked me straight in the eye. “Malka. How would you like a little sweet for the mouth?”

  The prospect was so tantalizing, I could only gulp in a mouthful of air.

  We entered the shop the way we would enter a temple. The air was fragrant with a baked, buttery sweetness that made me light-headed with deliciousness. An ornate glass case ran the length of the store. Heaps of chocolaty gems were displayed inside on silver trays. Some had walnuts nestled in them, some were molded into decorative cameos, ovals, and glistening, beveled squares. Quivering half-moons of brilliant red, green, and orange jelly sparkled with sugar beside little frosted pink and brown cakes layered with jam. I was transfixed. The woman behind the counter eyed us narrowly.

  “What would you like, kindeleh?” my father said.

  I looked from the display case to Papa. “I can have anything?”

  The counterwoman sniffed audibly, her mouth bracketing with disapproval.

  “Anything.” Pointedly, Papa ignored the woman. “You choose.”

  The decision was delicious agony. My fingers skated from one confection to another. Finally, nearly dizzy with possibilities—and sensing Papa’s growing impatience—I settled on the biggest piece I could find, a dark brown, braided block. Papa held up his finger and nodded at the woman.

  Reaching in with a pair of silver tongs, she lifted the bar out of the
case and wrapped it crisply in filmy white paper. Only then, as she walked over to an ornate machine at the end of the counter, pushed several keys, and announced “Funf” did it occur to me that we needed to pay.

  Before I could ask Papa what we should do, he knelt down, pulled off his tattered shoe, and removed a damp bill from its insole. He handed the money to the woman as if this were the most natural thing in the world. In return she gave him the little bar and a handful of coins though her eyes, fixed on him, were like bullets.

  “Come, kindeleh,” Papa said quickly.

  As he hustled me out of the shop, I said, “Papa, you found more money?”

  “Your papa always finds more money,” he said pridefully. “As long as there’s cards.” Unwrapping the chocolate bar, he handed it to me. “Now, eat.”

  The coating was thin, and when I bit into it, the shell cracked. Sweet red jam oozed through, sticking to the roof of my mouth. I had no idea what I was eating, but it was miraculous. And I was so hungry.

  For a moment, Papa watched me indulgently. Then he cleared his throat. “So you and I, Malka, we have a few secrets now, enh?” He grinned.

  My mouth was full, but I nodded vigorously. It was not lost on me that only I had been allowed to walk through the streets of Hamburg with him. Only I had been allowed to sleep in the men’s dorm wrapped in his coat. Only I had been taught to throw a punch and been given a sweet to eat—none of my sisters. And the money in Papa’s shoe: I sensed that this, too, was a secret. I felt anointed.

  But then I recalled my mother scolding Bella and Rose for whispering at the dinner table.