I hoped we could fool the lilit. Even if we slipped up, though, I had confidence in my magnificent amulet.
Shayna insisted on singing to the baby, and Yael seemed soothed by her songs, but the rest of us! Such a caterwauling would scare off my customers, I was sure. Still, it’s not good to argue with a new mother—it might sour her milk—so I held my peace and tried to get used to the horrible sentimental songs. She liked one in particular, “Ev’ry Little Movement,” and would rock the baby while humming, “Every little movement has a meaning all its own. Every thought and feeling by some posture can be shown.…” A more insipid song I’ve never heard.
* * *
Seven months passed before our old troubles from the Cohens’ shop came back to haunt us.
It was a Sunday; Sol and Shayna were at the store and Ruthie and I were home. Yael started screaming, angry and frightened in one sound. We ran to her and found a bent old woman with a naked rat’s tail leaning over her crib and tickling her under her fat chin. She was as ugly and shriveled as Shayna had said, and covered in bristly fur, but I knew her at once. Her eyes were the fiery pits I remembered. I knew we had no time to lose. I darted in front of Yael and spat out all the names of God I could think of:
“By El, Eloe, Sabbaoth, Ramathel, Eyel, Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Eloyim, I command you to be gone and let this child be!”
But the lilit just picked up Yael, who screamed and kicked out at the old woman’s warty skin with all her strength. I steeled myself and again commanded the demon to be gone, this time calling out the forty-two syllable name of God, as dangerous to those who speak it as to those it is spoken against. But the demon only grinned more broadly.
“Your prattling means nothing to me, witch,” she said. “Not even God will break a signed contract.” She shoved what I recognized as a deerskin parchment filled with writing in my face. It was a duplicate of the one I had burned a few years ago in Bialystok. But there was one difference—below our bubbe’s signature I saw my sister’s. I grabbed Ruthie’s arm and pulled her close.
The demon shot claws out of her gnarled fingers and shredded my perfect amulet. “I claim what is mine, the child Yael, daughter of Shayna, and depart, for not all the names of the heavenly host will break this contract.”
Yael was screaming her lungs out and flailing at the demon with her tiny hands balled up into fists. I realized how useless it had been to try fighting this creature by hiding the baby’s name and calling her “Alte,” by chanting the names of God.
And then I realized how to defeat the monster.
“Ruthie,” I whispered. “I need time. I can save her, but I need time. A week.”
Ruthie was no dummy. She fell on her knees and burst into stage tears. “By the mercy in heaven and earth, by Adonai and all his angels, Uriel and Zadkiel, and I don’t know the others, not like Deborah does, but I beg for the mercy shown in the past. As the Lord God spared the Jewish babies over the eight days of Pesach from his righteous wrath, I beg you to grant us eight days to say good-bye to our baby, to prepare her for a motherless life.”
I would never have tried such a stunt—for one thing, Ruthie was mangling the story of Pesach—but how could a demon resist comparing itself to God? That is the very root of a demon’s evil. It fluffed up its hideous fur, looking like a large, horrible spider. “In the name of Adonai, Uriel, Zadkiel, and all the heavenly host, I am no less merciful than your God. Take your eight days. Say your good-byes and make the child ready.”
And then she was gone.
I paced back and forth all day, wearing a hole in the carpet until Shayna came home from work. I went downstairs to talk to Sol twice, but each time I stopped outside the door to the store and went back up without even putting my head in. It wasn’t my place to tell Sol about Shayna’s previous troubles—that was between husband and wife. But when Shayna did get home, I let her know in no uncertain terms that we had big trouble, and keeping it from Yael’s father would not be right. I told her what had happened. She blanched and turned on me.
“You said the amulet would keep Alte safe!”
“Well, you never said you made a covenant with this creature! You never said you signed a contract!”
“How should I have said such a thing?” she cried. “Bad enough, a shonde, to have done it. But to say it? I grow tired of your scorn, Deborah.” She pushed herself away from the table, and in the same tired voice said, “We’d better start packing. A week’s headstart is a good one; we should be able to get pretty far.”
I gaped at her. “Goyishe kopf—what have you got for brains, girl, kasha? Maybe you think you’re dealing with a little dybbuk? No such luck—you’ve got hold of the Devil’s own right hand here. There’s no running away from that thing. You are just going to have to be brave.”
“Me?” she asked.
“I can help you, tell you how to hold on to Yael, but do it for you? No. That I cannot do. She’s not mine to hold on to, and I signed no contract. You will have to face this demon yourself.”
“Face a demon? I’m supposed to face a demon?”
I fought the urge to shake her and demand she be the woman our mama would be proud to own as her daughter. “Maybe you’d rather give up Yael?”
Now Shayna looked as if she wanted to hit me. But she swallowed her temper, as I had swallowed mine. “Of course I wouldn’t.” She sounded stronger by the minute. “But how do I fight a demon?”
A person can get tired of looking after her little sister. So guilty I’d felt, ever since Johnny Fein had hurt Shayna, that I hadn’t asked her for anything since, like she was a baby herself. But she wasn’t, she was a grown woman. And a person can get tired of being looked after, as well, of being the little sister. I suppose that’s why Shayna went with Johnny—to get away from me and out from under my gaze. I am bossy, or so they tell me. I looked at Yael again and she looked at me. I remembered Yeshua peering up at me from the cradle of my arms.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
Together Shayna and I spoke to Solomon. I told him that the best thing he could do would be to stand ready when the time came, holding the baby, and if Shayna failed or if I was wrong, run as fast as he could for shul with his daughter. It would never work, of course. The demon would catch him before he made it out the door, but what could I tell him? That he was about as useful as a groom at a wedding? Ruthie we told the truth, and to her credit, she believed. She determined quietly that if Shayna and I failed—and if we failed, we would die for our treachery—she would grab the creature’s tail and follow her wherever she took the baby. Never would she give up.
I did what I had to do. For six days I fasted, and on the seventh I went to the mikvah, bathed, and returned home. I ate matzoh with honey, prepared by Shayna, and plain fish. I lit a candle and set it on the table next to a clay bowl full of good wine. I kept a pen, ink, and paper nearby. I swallowed a mouthful of sweet wine and then I began to chant:
“I conjure you by the Lord who created heaven and earth to reveal to me what is true and to conceal from my eyes what is false; I conjure you by the staff with which Moses divided the sea to reveal to me what is true and to conceal from my eyes that which is false; I conjure you by the heavenly host, the hands of God, Akriel, Gabriel, Hatach, Duma, Raphael, Zafniel, Nahabiel, Inias, Kaziel…”
While I chanted I watched the wine intently. If I had stopped chanting even for one moment, the spell would cease, so I listed every magical name I knew, every name I could imagine, every feat of every great Jewish hero and heroine as the wine bubbled, frothed, churned, and finally smoothed out as still as glass. Then letters began to appear, as though they were being slowly etched into the surface of the wine. Without breaking my chant, I groped for paper and pen and copied the letters exactly. When no more letters appeared and the wine was still again, I finally brought the chant to an end, and the wine became plain wine once more.
I took a couple of deep shuddering breaths, feeling sick to my stomach. I had never properly bee
n trained for this and I didn’t know the safeguards that I should have had in place, that my bubbe would have had in place if she had been casting this spell. I felt very ill, weaker than I ever had before.
I called Shayna in and showed her the letters written on the pad.
“Not the Lord nor all the heavenly host will break a signed contract,” I told her. “You will have to do it yourself.”
“And how am I to do that, big sister?”
“You must force the demon to tear up the contract. Then she will have no power to take your little one. The demon does not have to listen to the names of the Lord and his angels, but she must answer to her own.” I tapped the paper. “This is her name. You must bind her with it and force her to make you free of the contract. It is the only way.”
Shayna took the paper and started to sound out the name. Quickly, I put my hand over her mouth. We didn’t want to attract the creature’s attention before we were ready.
* * *
At sunset the next evening, we waited in one room: Shayna, me, Ruthie, and Sol with Yael in his arms.
And then the lilit strolled into the room. She looked like me, this time. Just like me.
Shayna started to shake. I took her hand. “Don’t be frightened,” I told her.
Then Shayna turned to look at me and I saw that she was not frightened. She was angry. I gave her hand a squeeze and hoped that she wouldn’t let anger overwhelm our planning.
The demon chuckled and spat. Her spittle sizzled and burned through our rug, my wedding present for Shayna and Sol. “Your bubbe is suffering a thousand torments as she reviews the ways in which your troubles are her own doing. You, Deborah, I will deal with later, for we have so much in common, after all.”
I shook my head—no, we have nothing in common—and heard the demon say, “Now, Shayna maedele, give me Yael. Give me the baby girl.” She cracked her knuckles and grinned my grin, our bubbe’s grin.
Sol tightened his arms around the baby while Shayna stared at the demon.
The demon smirked and displayed the contract that had been signed twice, once by my bubbe and once by Shayna. “I fulfilled my end of the contract twice, giving your grandmother powers and doing your sewing. It’s not my fault she was killed before she could use them or that the mob took your brother before I could. I’ll just have to do what I can with this one instead.” She snapped her fingers. Yael disappeared from Sol’s arms and reappeared in the demon’s. Yael began to scream and claw at the demon’s hands with her tiny nails.
“Abomination!” Shayna screamed, extending an arm and shaking her finger at the creature. “Abomination! Cursed in the sight of Adonai, Tetragammon, and all his host! Abomination! I, Shayna, daughter of Rokhel, conjure you to forfeit the child Yael, daughter of Shayna! I conjure you to release me from our contract, a contract shameful in the eyes of God and man, a contract conceived and gotten by you, the lowest of the low, the slime of worms and shit of pigs! I conjure you to destroy this contract and leave this city, leave this earth and spend eternity in the realm of unspeakable things! I conjure and bind you by your own soul, your own self, your own name—” Shayna pointed her finger at the creature’s heart and yelled, “RUMFEILSTILIZKAHAN!”
The demon turned gray and began to spin in place. “The devil told you that!” she howled. “The devil told you that!”
“Not the devil, unclean thing,” Shayna said, triumphant. “My sister.” And she seemed proud to have me by her side.
The demon spun and howled wordlessly until the very air burst into flames and it and the contract it was holding imploded into burning embers that vanished in midair. Sol leapt to catch Yael before she fell to the ground. The only sign that a stranger had been in the room was the hole in the rug.
* * *
We had Yael, ours to keep forever, but not without cost. Finding the name of the demon had been powerful magic, and the exhaustion that followed, the weakness that comes when you do a great feat for which you have never been properly trained, made me sick, sicker than I had been for many, many years. Sicker than I had been since the Old Country.
I tossed and turned with fever for days and a livid rash spread across my face and limbs. I burned so fiercely that Shayna brought in a doctor who looked me over and pronounced, “Scarlet fever.”
Scarlet fever! A child’s disease, after all—insult to injury, that was. But then again, conjuring the demon’s name had left me weak as a child. My skin burnt so fiercely that it turned bright white. Shayna held cold compresses against my skin, but within minutes the heat from my body made them feel like they’d been warming in the stove for an hour. My fever climbed every day, burning what little sense I had left. Ruthie stayed home from work for days trying to spoon broth into my mouth so I wouldn’t dry out entirely, or so I am told—for again, I don’t remember much of those days. But with Ruthie home and me too sick to do any business, we were short of money, and Shayna went back to factory work.
Sol’s mother found it a shame, a married woman in a factory, but Shayna told Ruthie that, actually, she did not mind. “With Sol and his brothers and his parents in the store,” she told me, “all I am is underfoot. In the factory, I’m somebody. I’m good at what I do there. I’m good enough that I think that someday I’ll get to be a sample-maker, maybe even a designer.”
And she was so happy, said Ruthie, with the work she found—a modern factory, large, airy, three floors, imagine that, she said, and so high up the girls needed elevators to come and go. And so easy it was for her to get the job there, she didn’t have to pay off anybody, she said—it was like magic, like an angel was watching over her.
Too easy, in retrospect.
I don’t remember any of that. All I really remember are the dreams—every hour I managed to sleep I was plagued with nightmares, dreams in which my eyes were worms of fire burrowing through my head, or my head and hands became so swollen that I was sure they would burst, or I was falling, falling so far that I would never stop, never come to earth again. The pink rash had become raised crimson blisters. For weeks this lasted, and then … one night, late in March, the fever broke, and I sweated through three blankets. Ruthie washed linens all night, and that morning I woke up hungry. Ruthie fed me some breakfast: a little soup, a little milk, a soft-boiled egg. For two or three days she tended me while I regained my strength, and then she went out to work.
I was weak, and for most of the day, I sipped tea and tried to rest, but as morning shaded into afternoon the watery sunlight finally pulled me to my feet. Taking slow, tiny steps, I dressed myself and made my way down to Sol’s store, where I found him behind the counter and his mother minding Yael. His mother agreed with me that fresh air would do me all the good in the world, so slowly, painfully, I stepped out into the street.
The sunlight, weak as it was, was painfully bright to my eyes. It bounced harshly off cold streets, all sharp angles and hostile edges. I pulled my jacket closer around my body; when Shayna had first stitched it for me, it had hugged me close, displaying my figure, but the weeks of illness had wasted me. A chill wind cut through a near alley and I trembled.
What struck me most about the street was how quiet it was, unnaturally quiet. There were no children playing skip rope or taunting each other, no peddlers trying to sell their wares, no friends arguing good-naturedly or couples screaming at each other. Just my soft, frightened footsteps and the wind. For a minute I was convinced that the illness had taken my hearing as well as my figure.
I walked carefully, keeping one hand on the buildings for support. When I finally got to the end of the block, the sounds of street life flooded back and I became dizzy with relief. I caught a bit of life from the remaining sunshine and went where my feet took me. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I wasn’t strong enough to get there as quickly as I needed to.
But still, behind the street sounds, beneath the bustle, I heard that sinking silence.
I was three blocks away from the park when I heard the fire engines co
ming up behind me. They passed me easily and by the time I arrived at the Asch Building I barely had breath enough to push through the crowd.
The silence was gone. Screaming and roaring filled my ears and poisonous black smoke filled the sky. I didn’t understand what was happening—bundles of clothing trailing flames seemed to be falling from the sky while the few doors of the Asch Building were choked with people clawing and crawling over one another in order to get out. Once they did get out, though, they just joined the yelling throngs across the street, watching the falling bundles hitting the street with solid, damp thuds, one right after another. It wasn’t until I saw one of the bundles trying and failing to push itself to its feet that I realized what they were.
This was Shayna’s modern factory, I knew it, and I knew it had been no angel that had gotten her the job there.
I found myself out in the street where firemen were frantic with their own futility. Their rescue ladders went up seven stories—the factory was on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. One woman staggered out of the building and immediately turned and tried to run back in. The firemen had to knock her out; she kept yelling about her daughter.
I looked up. One girl stood on the window’s ledge. Already her skirt was beginning to smolder and even though she was so far above me, I swear I could see her face, unnaturally calm as she opened her purse and threw the money inside down to the street—and I remembered Shayna saying that today would be payday.
She took off her hat and sent it sailing in the direction of the park and the wind whipped her hair around her face. I could see flames as well as smoke coming out of the windows now.
Burning Girls Page 5