The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  Because Emilia forgot to pay attention to anything but the book and her plans, she didn’t notice her father standing in the doorway. He was not a tall man, in fact he stood several inches shorter than her mother, his face ruddy from brick dust, his beard thick and dark and long like Tolstoy’s. He wore a frock coat and trousers, though he kept every religious law, because this was the modern age. “What are you doing?” he asked. His voice was loud. It had to rise above the machines in his factory.

  Emilia dropped the book, and as luck would have it a page crumpled under it. She sat very still, hoping that Father would forget her while he picked up the book and brought it to his desk, where he carefully smoothed out the page, closed the book, and put another on top of it to iron out the unfortunate crease. Emilia crouched on the carpet, eyes lowered to her father’s boots, wiped clean of brick dust. They were his nice boots, the leather smooth and shining. The boots came toward her. A hand pulled her up by the ear.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I was reading, Father.” Why couldn’t he just smack her and have done with it? Surely her ear would come off her head.

  “These books are not yours, I believe.”

  “No, Father.”

  “You do not understand, I see, the difference between what belongs to you and what belongs to others.” He let go of her ear. It was hot as she rubbed it. “You will bring me something of yours.”

  “I don’t have anything.” After she sailed away on the boat, he would realize that he’d lost his only daughter, and then he’d wish that he could beg her forgiveness.

  “Nothing? I see clothes on your back. Shoes on your feet. Surely these are not mine. Bring me your Sabbath dress. Hannah!” he called Mother. “Hannah!”

  There always had to be a witness. That was the law, Father said.

  Mama helped Emilia take down the dress hanging high in the wardrobe, all the while shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe the fecklessness of her daughter. “How could you be so foolish?” she asked. “When are you going to learn what’s what in life? You want to read something, then take the book and hide it, for God’s sake.”

  Soon Mama and Emilia stood side by side in the study, Emilia’s hand hiding in Mama’s so that the trembling of her fingers wasn’t visible. Newspapers, paperweight, pens fell onto the soft carpet as Father swept them off his desk. The book that he’d so carefully placed there also fell and a dozen pages crumpled, but he paid no attention. He laid the dress on his desk. He pulled it flat, an arm, the other arm, the sound of a slight tearing as threads parted. Then he took scissors from a drawer and cut carefully. A torn collar, a ripped cuff. The corner of a pocket hanging loosely. “Here.” He threw the dress at her. A button smacked her on the cheek. “Idiot! You’ll wear this for Sabbath dinners. When the dress is too small, you may have another, and perhaps you’ll remember the laws of property.” Then he shouted some more at Mama, and she took to her bed.

  Emilia ran out to the garden and threw herself down. One evening Father had said she looked charming in her Sabbath dress, and she’d give anything to hear him say it again. She cried herself to sleep, autumn leaves blowing across her legs as she dreamed of Italy. She would live in a villa. There she would paint beautiful paintings of green hills and grazing goats. The ghost of the first wife sat with her while she dreamed.

  LONDON, 1875

  Dorset Street

  Dorset Street meant not only the street itself but the warren of courts and alleys off it, where fog settled from October to March, swallowing the pitiful lamps and dousing the meager fires of old cottages and gray doss-houses. Every few doors there was a public house with its magical sign—the Unicorn, the Black Lion, the Green Dragon, the Horn and Plenty. Here gin was plentiful and women smoked short-stemmed pipes, but shoes were a privilege pawned for rent.

  In one of these courts, the Squire had a house where the girls slept in small rooms upstairs and guests came into the parlor below. Now he sat there in a carved armchair, eyeing Nehama. “We’ll call you Nell,” he said. There was a table beside him, with a bowl of apples and pears on it. Several girls were sitting on the sofas, mending their stockings, as Nehama crossed her arms over her breasts, looking up at the porcelain shepherdesses on the shelf above the mirror so she wouldn’t see her naked reflection. The wallpaper had a pattern of peacocks on it.

  “A funny-looking snatch she’s got,” the Squire said with a grimace. “Never seen one like that before.”

  Nehama couldn’t help but follow his eyes and look down, wondering if there was something wrong with her. The other girls laughed. They all had bright dresses with many ruffles.

  “The Squire will get you one of these,” Fay said, pulling at her skirt. “A girl in the trade needs the clothes for it.”

  Nehama clenched her teeth so they wouldn’t chatter. It was the Squire’s pleasure and his right to look at her. He’d paid for it. That was what Fay had explained to her while they walked from the pub to the house. Nehama should have run away. If she were smart, if she were good, if she were any one of her sisters, she’d have run. But she hadn’t understood what was actually meant until she stood here naked, with Madam Harding giving a satisfied nod and Fay translating, She says the Squire got his money’s worth, no one’s had you yet. And Nehama didn’t know whom she hated more, Mr. Blink for giving her up or herself for being given.

  The Squire bit into a pear. “You think it works right, Madam Harding?” he asked the older woman who stood next to the mirror.

  “The only way to know is to try it out.” The windows rattled. The wind was blowing hard.

  “Right. I will. Just give her the broom first. Fay, tell her to lie down.”

  “You got to lie down,” Fay said in Yiddish.

  “What—on the floor?” Nehama asked. “I need a drink of water first. I’m terribly thirsty.” She glanced at the door, but even if it wasn’t locked, she wouldn’t run out naked. Could she let anyone see her like this?

  The old prostitute, called Madam Harding, pushed her to the floor, her hands on Nehama’s breasts. It was the second touch of violation, the first having been Madam Harding’s fingers between her legs, and Nehama wondered why her muscles had frozen. She didn’t kick or scream while the tallest of the girls took her on one side, the palest girl on the other. She only called out, “Why don’t you help me?” and her landsmann Fay answered, “I had my turn, too.” Nehama turned her gaze to the wallpaper with its peacocks. She couldn’t be lying on the floor like this; she was there in the wallpaper among the exotic birds and fear was just a peacock’s tail staring with many eyes.

  When the beating began, she heard the peacocks scream, and then she was unaware of the girls and their rancid breath as they bent over her. It was the linden tree she smelled, the one in her family’s courtyard, and the smoke from the feather factory, and mud when you pick up the washed linens that have fallen into it. She didn’t see the girl looking down at her with eyelashes so pale she seemed to have none, and she didn’t feel the other girl kneading her arm and leg in the rhythm of the broom handle. For when the soles of her feet were welted and numb, the handle was used on the inside of her, like a butter churn. She hardly noticed when the Squire followed it.

  Later Nehama went to sleep. The youngest of the prostitutes, a girl named Sally, gave her laudanum to relieve the pain, and when Nehama cried over and over, Don’t look at me, Sally told her not to worry, for she was wearing a thick cotton nightgown and no one could see her. It was a good lie.

  As the weeks passed, Nehama often dreamed that she was sleeping with her sisters in the old bed with the iron posts, an arm around her, an elbow in her ribs, a hand on her hair, only to wake up with the youngest prostitute lying beside her. “I was cold,” Sally would say. The other girls didn’t like Sally. “Tell me something, Nell. About your sisters.”

  And Nehama would try in her new English, fitting the pieces of language together like a puzzle that would show her a picture of something true
. But if she said, “Mine sister learn me to read,” Sally would shake her head.

  “Not that one. Tell me how they thrashed you for telling tales. How they called you a disease.”

  “The pest,” Nehama would correct her.

  “The pestilence,” Sally would add with a smile. She was called the Spanish girl because of her dark eyes and dark lashes and staccato walk as if she were dancing the flamenco, but she’d never been outside of London. She was two years younger than Nehama, and at fifteen no bigger than a child. She was small-boned and small-breasted and four feet five. She’d done well as a virgin, passing it off for months.

  Sally was disliked because she was a Papist. This she explained to Nehama one day in the quiet hour after the girls had slept and before the trade started up. Sally was sitting on the floor, brushing the hair of a wig. Her own hair fell out in handfuls, so she kept it short, and when she was working she wore the wig.

  Nehama sat on the bed. The room was so small that the bed touched one wall and Sally’s feet the other. There was a window that looked into an alley, and though it was boarded up, air came through the cracks. Above the window, Nehama had pinned a theater poster that she’d found in the street, blown off a wooden post.

  “The others hate me because they’re going to hell and I’m not,” Sally said, brushing and braiding the wig. “Should I curl the hair like yours, Nell?”

  “Straight hair is better,” Nehama said. She was looking at her knees through the yellow gauze of her nightgown. Her knees looked the same as always. That was the strange thing.

  “I want to look like her. That elegant, she is.” Sally pointed her brush at the poster for Colleen Bawn, with its illustration of a young woman drowning in a cave, her locks floating on the water and a white gown billowing around her. “See the shaking waters, the rolling surf and watery effects,” the poster read. Sally sneezed. Her feet were raw with chilblains. “I’m sorry you’re going to hell like the other girls. Why don’t you get baptized in the true church? It isn’t hard.”

  “I’m a Jew,” Nehama said. “Like Fay.”

  “So? You can be baptized. Then you confess and the priest absolves you.”

  “What do you mean absolves?”

  “When you’re ready to die, you have the priest take off all your sins. You dress nice like her in the poster, and you’re buried like a beauty.” Sally was playing with a locket on a gold chain.

  “My sins are too many.” But it wasn’t sins she counted night after night, it was shillings and pounds, calculating her debt to the Squire. She must pay him off. No other thought could take precedence. “Who gave you that locket?”

  “Nobody. I rolled the captain of the ship.”

  “But you’re so small. How did you take it?” Nehama asked. “That must be worth something.”

  “Size is nothing. Didn’t you never roll no one?”

  Nehama shook her head. The last customer had been a big man. Nehama had heard herself gasp as he worked his way inside her. But she wasn’t really there. No, she was somewhere else, figuring sums. So much for rent. So much for food. Not enough left for what she owed on the dress and the entrance fee.

  “What do I do?” Nehama asked.

  “It’s easy. I’ll show you.” Sally had shown her everything. How to douse a sponge in vinegar and put it in so she wouldn’t get pregnant. How to stretch her money by eating cheap shellfish in season. How to be first when a gentleman came slumming. But she couldn’t show Nehama how to drink till she didn’t care anymore because Nehama threw up first and, as Sally said, it was a waste of good gin.

  “Don’t sit there like a ninny. Get on top of me.” Sally lay down on the bed.

  “Like this?” Nehama kneeled with one leg on either side of Sally, who was lying flat as a child in a casket.

  “No, you’re too dainty. Be a great bloke what’s had his drink.” Sally pulled Nehama forward. “That’s right. Now you wiggle. Don’t be shy. Come on.” Sally laughed. They were so close that Nehama could see the skin under smudges of rouge wiped away by the pillow. “Just when he’s most busy and he wouldn’t notice a fire, you put your hand in his pocket.”

  “Not there.” Nehama pushed the other girl’s hand from the inside of her thigh.

  Sally dangled the locket. “You don’t need to be a master gonoph.”

  “Let me try,” Nehama said, pushing Sally over as she took her turn lying down. Sally sat on her, as light as a baby, moving the locket quickly from one hand to the other.

  “Hi! Give it back now,” Sally shouted when Nehama snatched it out of the air. “That’s mine.”

  “Fine. Here it is.” But as the old prostitute walked by the doorway, paused, and returned, Sally put her hands behind her back, looking at Nehama with frightened eyes.

  “What’s this!” Madam Harding held out her hand. Her hair was dyed black, and the dye had left a line along her temple. “Trying to keep something back. You know what we thinks of that sort of thing.”

  “Not me,” Sally said, picking up her wig and brushing it furiously. “It were her. She took it from the sailor, and I was just looking at it.”

  “I should know it’s the sly Jewess.” The old prostitute slapped Nehama so hard her nose bled.

  “What?” Nehama pinched her nose. There was blood on her fingers, a stain on her sleeve where it dripped.

  “Don’t say another word to me with your sharp Jew tongue. It’ll cost you to have that blood cleaned off. Add it to your debt.”

  Nehama glanced at Sally. Her shoulders were hunched, her eyes panicky. Nehama’s sisters had sometimes taken the blame for her, but they were golden and strong. She was dark and her thoughts were dark as the wind blew night in from the sea, though she was as strong as any of them. “A bit of blood isn’t any worse than what else is on this,” she said.

  “Never mind your lip or I’ll tell the Squire you ruined it altogether. Take that off and the laundress will have it.”

  Nehama smiled. “A blessing on you,” she said in Yiddish. “May the cholera eat out your intestines.”

  The night of the Sardinian sailors, Nehama lost her sense of smell. Madam Harding played the piano as usual, and Nehama sang because the other girls had voices made hoarse by smoking tobacco and opium. Sometimes they asked her to sing a foreign song, but she would only shake her head and begin with “It’s a cold haily night of rain,” and everyone clapped to the beat as if they were friends in a music hall.

  There were a dozen sailors, so each of the girls had two at a time, for which the Squire could charge triple the price. They ate and drank in the parlor with the girls on their laps, while the mirror turned them into twenty-four men and their drunkenness into forty-eight as the old prostitute brought out bottle after bottle, and Madam’s playing knocked flat the statue of Diana the huntress that stood on top of the piano. The lamps were made of lion glass, each one with a frosted lion reclining after his feed.

  Nehama had the bald sailor and the one with two gold earrings. She fed them bites of sausage, first one, then the other, and in the mirror framed with gilt she was perched on a knee, laughing as well as the other girls. And just as quick as they did, she offered her breasts to a mouth, expecting it to bite and pull as usual, but instead the lips and tongue were soft. And when her sailors put up a bet of three sovereigns, she said, You’re on. Pulling up her gown, she spread her ass for the bald one and licked up the one with earrings right there in the parlor with the velvet sofa. She did it in front of everyone; she saw them watching her. The gold coins sparkled. The statue of Diana the huntress wobbled on top of the piano as Madam played. The one she licked didn’t stink as she thought he would. The surprise of it made her quiver, and as she dug herself deeper into the one behind her, she lost her sense of smell. God took it away and abandoned her to the evil inclination. This was her real ruin, and she knew she could never see her mother again. How was she to understand that it was the strength of her life asserting itself? The difference between hell and earth is that, ev
en in the midst of misery, the body can find some pleasure to keep it alive.

  Her sisters used to tell her that when Grandma Nehama was eighteen, a marriage was arranged for her. Before she left home, she visited her parents’ grave to ask their blessing, and then she traveled by boat with her aunt. At last someone would belong to her—even if it was just a widower with a young child. But on her wedding day, when she met her husband, she was not as taken with him as she expected. He had hair growing in his ears, and the speech he gave for the bride was full of warnings about the shortness of life, as if she didn’t already know it. But the baby daughter, who was nine months old, was something else altogether. She was tiny and dark and sad, and Grandma Nehama fell in love with her.

  There was a wet nurse for the baby, and Grandma Nehama saw with her own eyes that milk without love wasn’t putting enough weight on the baby. And why should it? Didn’t she remember getting thinner while she was mourning, no matter how much the neighbors urged her to eat? So when the baby’s eyes were full of sorrow, Grandma Nehama gave it her own milkless breast to suck, and she did not sing to it “Sleep my child, may heaven guard you,” for this baby had already seen the angel of death. Instead she sang about the wind. It became her particular lullaby, this old song that went “Dark burns the fire in its agony. And the wind, the wind, the raging wind …” She sang from morning till night, and whether it was the sucking or the songs, no one could say, but eventually Grandma Nehama’s breasts ran to milk as thick as cream, and on it the baby grew plump.