The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  He’d just been hired, a new hand in the workshop. He wore a checked jacket, a hat pushed back, and boots with one sole flapping. When he glanced in Nehama’s direction, she looked away, wondering how he could walk with a light step when his feet must be wet and raw. He wasn’t a big man, not much taller than she was. A narrow face, a short black beard, eyes that had an interest in everything as if anything could be laughed over except, perhaps, a young woman from the heim you’d like to talk with.

  “So what’s going on here?” the boss asked.

  “Didn’t you see The Tailor’s Fate?” Nehama asked.

  “My fate won’t be worth a farthing if this order isn’t finished.” He was a thin man with the bad temper of someone who’s hungry but won’t let himself eat. He slept on a bench in his workshop and coughed up wool fibers.

  “Your life’s not worth much even with ten orders,” Nehama said. There was the sound of a clattering pot in the next room, where the boss’s wife was nursing one of the twins while she cooked.

  “No lip from you,” he answered. “There’s a dozen hands wanting work in the pig market.” He put out his cigarette and lit another.

  “But skilled hands, not so many.” Nehama laughed. “Didn’t your grandmother tell you the old saying, Mr. Shiller: ‘Sing while you work, win at cards’?”

  He pinched her cheek. “What should I do with you? A plain sewer that’s as good as a best I want. But your friend, Minnie, is another story. Her wages is charity. What do I need it for? So watch yourself, Nehama Korzen. Or out she goes.”

  “So?” Nehama said while Minnie shushed her. A pot fell, the babies screamed, Mrs. Shiller was crying. “Come on. I’ll teach you one of my grandmother’s songs.”

  “I’m warning you,” he said.

  Nehama leaned forward, her sewing machine silent as she took her foot off the treadle and stared at him. She put her hands on top of the sewing machine, her chin on her hands, and she continued to stare, her eyes on the gap between his yellow teeth, until he ran out of threats. Mr. Shiller then got very busy, sorting through the pile of jacket pieces cut in the factory as if the world was held in place by fifty-two sleeves and twenty-six backs. And when she began to sing, cigarette ash fell from his cigarette onto the floor.

  Nehama pumped her sewing machine again, lifting her eyes to meet the curious gaze of the new hand. “It takes more than a wage to make me someone’s dog,” she said.

  After work he followed her into the glaze of darkness outside. His name was Nathan, and as he opened his mouth to speak, he coughed, searching his damaged boots for inspiration.

  “What do you want?” she asked. Nathan cleared his throat, glancing at the stalls with secondhand goods.

  “Soon I’m going to the Jewish Board of Guardians.” He took his hands out of torn pockets to push his hat back even further, smiling at her as if it was a joke they shared, this shyness of his, and he said, “For a loan. I’m going to buy a sewing machine.”

  “You think you’ll get it?” They pushed by the seller of a nearly new left shoe and the buyer of an ounce of sugar. Shops were open till midnight, the shopkeepers standing outside calling to them: “Fresh.” “New.” “Cheap.” “Beautiful.” “Delicious.”

  “Every penny,” he said, matching his steps to hers, though he didn’t try to take her arm. And lucky for him or she’d have pushed him into the gutter. “Giving money away, they’re against. It’s hard to imagine, but the English Jews don’t believe in charity. It makes them look bad in front of the gentiles, who say that charity turns people into paupers. But a pauper isn’t just a poor man.”

  “No—then what?” she asked, looking at his eyes in the light from a dress shop.

  “He’s a poor man that expects something from the richer.” Nathan winked. “But a loan is something else. I pay him interest. I give him collateral. Well, what can I say? There’s a profit—it’s business. And Londoners believe in business more than in God.” He laughed, and she laughed with him, surprised that she could like a strange man. But then he asked her, “Where are you from?”

  And she realized that he was just like anyone. It begins with that: Where are you from? Why, I’m from there, too. What a coincidence. And her face felt like ice. “A small town. Nowhere special,” she said.

  “Of course. We’re all from someplace worse—or we’d stay there, right? My father asked me not to change my name, but I can’t make up my mind. Tell me, am I a good son or not?” He was looking at her as if she could tell him what he was and it would be true.

  But how could she like a man she couldn’t smell? Maybe he stank of onions. Maybe something nicer, like cigars. How could she tell? She’d smelled nothing for years, not the sweat of newcomers or the rubbish on the landing outside her room or the burnt wick of a candle winking out. A world without odor, a half world without flavor.

  “Let me walk with you,” he said, breathing hard as if they were running, though a person could make his way only slowly in the nighttime crowd just released from work.

  “Do I own the street? Walk where you want.” She stopped to get some hot chestnuts from a cart, and he stopped with her. “Where are you from?”

  “A wild field,” he said. “My father had a small flour mill in the middle of the countryside. I used to fish for trout in the stream. We had to travel two days to the nearest town with a synagogue for holidays.” Jews that lived among the peasants didn’t have an easy time. They were neither here nor there, and when they came to a synagogue, they were told to stand at the back as if they’d brought a disease with them. But his voice was untroubled.

  “Yes,” she said, holding out the sack of chestnuts. “I remember the holidays at home.”

  “I didn’t go to school,” he said. The warmth of his body was pushing away the cold night air. “I taught myself, and I have to tell you, a prodigy I wasn’t.”

  “My sisters taught me,” she said. The Lane was narrowing into Sandys Row, the crowd thinning, the stalls giving way to old military shops, the wind brushing her with its memory of the sea.

  “I heard a joke and I have to tell someone. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Is it any good?” she asked.

  “No, it’s a terrible joke. After all, we just met. I have to save the good ones.”

  “Tell me.” And she laughed at the joke though it was very bad because the sound of his voice was pleasant and the desire to know whether he smelled of fish or wet wool was a dark pain making love to everything she knew.

  Nathan walked Nehama home every evening with a bad joke for all occasions, even the High Holy Days. Already half the Yiddish-speaking men and most of the women had stopped going to synagogue on the Sabbath. Of course they lit Sabbath candles and kept kosher. To reformers they seemed very pious. But in the Days of Awe, when a person ought to tremble before God, there was more than one man around the corner from the synagogue, taking a break with a cigarette, Nathan among them.

  While inside, the ram’s horn sounded. The people stood shoulder to shoulder in the heat of their sins and their strivings as they had since the wind swept light into darkness, before towers or bridges or factory smoke, before girls longed to run away. And in the women’s section, with her eyes closed, Nehama Korzen could be anywhere, was everywhere, crying out with them all: “We begin as dust and we end as dust. At the hazard of our life we earn our bread. As a fragile vessel. As a shadow that passes. As a dream that flies away …”

  She was standing next to Minnie, who beat her chest carefully so as not to damage her new holiday blouse. As soon as the confession was over, Minnie leaned against the back wall. “I want a hat like hers.” She pointed to the woman sitting in front of them. “Not one feather but two. Pink like my sleeves.” Minnie was pregnant. Just enough to need the waist of her skirt let out.

  “Really.” Nehama was thinking of a time when her own waist had thickened. And when it thinned again, she could imagine that it had never been any different.

  Minnie yawned with the tired
ness of carrying two souls. “You should have a new hat, too.”

  Nehama was bareheaded, like all the unmarried women and girls. “I don’t want another hat,” she said. Her body was hers and she was full of her own strength.

  “But you do. It doesn’t matter if you’re married or not. Every girl in London wears a nice hat. You should have one with an ostrich feather like this.” Minnie made a swooping gesture with her freckled hand. “Just think of it, Nehama. A purple ostrich feather.”

  “I like blue,” Nehama said. So why should she wonder what the child she’d lost might have been?

  “Oh—it’s always blue with you. But never mind. It suits you—let it be blue.”

  “A hat with a blue ostrich feather. Very nice,” Nehama said, her voice faint. But not because Nathan had got the loan for his sewing machine and was talking about having his own workshop with a wife who would be his, too. No, she was sweating only because her new skirt was warm for the fall weather and the synagogue was packed, the women of Frying Pan Alley standing at the back, far from the railing, where physicians’ wives could look down on the Holy Torah and their husbands in silk hats bowing to it.

  “Nehama—you’re not listening,” Minnie said, fanning Nehama with her hand. “I said you need some air. Let’s go already. I confessed enough for both of us.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear.” Nehama put her arm through Minnie’s as they pushed through the praying crowd of women. “But I hope you shouted. I hear the Holy One is very deaf on one side.”

  Nehama and Minnie walked home, holding on to each other in the fierce wind. Stalls turned over, tiles were knocked from roofs, and when Nehama saw a man in a scarf, she looked for someplace to run, but it was all right. The Squire would never be out in such a wind. It shook out all her pins until her hair lay around her back and shoulders like a dark shawl.

  At home her married sisters had been shorn on their wedding days. But Nehama wouldn’t cut her hair to get married. If Nathan wanted her, he’d have to get her hairpins for a wedding present. And she would stand under the wedding canopy without a sister to lift her veil when it was time to take a sip of wine. The wind would lift her veil, the raging wind, a grandmother’s voice, her friend’s freckled hand.

  MINSK, 1886

  Moskovskaya Street

  Emilia sat in the garden as she had so many times while the ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg scattered apple blossoms and brought the fruit into a perfect roundness. It was just before her twentieth birthday, and she was reading with her tutor, Mr. Levy, in the last light before darkness fell. There was a foot of space between them. She could measure every inch by the quickness of her breathing as she listened to him turn the pages of his book. She couldn’t help but give him a quick sidelong glance.

  He looked back at her and smiled. He’d taken to wearing high boots and a loose white shirt like a Russian. “I’d make you a good husband,” he said.

  “You have a high opinion of yourself,” she answered. He’d been her tutor off and on for four years, teaching her to read English and French while she taught him German. Sometimes he went away for months and returned with no explanation. She suspected that he was an anarchist, but it didn’t matter. All he could offer her was well-worn books, and she would have a husband that could take her to Italy. Mr. Levy was a friend, and as a friend all that one could want. “A man as clever as you doesn’t need a pretty wife,” she said.

  “Then you’ll do, won’t you?”

  “Oh, get back to your book.” Emilia pouted as if she were insulted, knowing that she must be even prettier in the soft dusk. There was great pleasure in being pretty for a friend.

  She shifted a little closer to him. Mr. Levy smelled of ink.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “If I were to think of being your wife, I’d have to know where you’re always going off to. Otherwise one could only imagine what kind of man I might be getting.” She tapped his arm with the edge of her book.

  He put his hand on hers. “One that would take care of you,” he said.

  She didn’t pull away. They’d held hands before. Twice. He knew her as her husband never would. “You couldn’t take care of a mouse, Mr. Levy.”

  “I don’t wish to marry a mouse, Miss Rosenberg.”

  The second time they’d held hands was on the day that Mother was leaving to visit her sisters. On the threshold of the house, she touched her chest, gasped, and fell down the stairs. Mr. Levy held Emilia’s hand while she waited for the doctor’s pronouncement. As it turned out, Mother didn’t have a bad heart. The doctor said it was hysteria, and the train ticket was returned.

  “How can I trust you?” Emilia asked.

  “That is what a wife does,” he answered.

  The first time Mr. Levy had held Emilia’s hands was the evening they all went to the opera. Father had rented a box for his guests, who came with their wives dressed in their nicest gowns. But Mother was the most beautiful, even if she was thin.

  Between Act I and Act II, there was talk of the pogroms and sending their grown children away from Russia. Between Act II and Act III, the sons’ prospects and the daughters’ dowries were considered. In the meantime, the young sons were outside smoking cigars as if they’d been smoking all their lives, and the young daughters discussed what they simply would not accept in a proposed husband. No one bald. No one whose work involved bad-smelling chemicals. No one with a first wife. That was Emilia’s contribution. She didn’t expect Father to overhear her. He was engrossed in conversation at the other end of the box. Mother didn’t turn around. She was leaning against the railing, looking down at the stage.

  “I have a hypothetical question,” Father said in the tone that generally made his guests consider the lateness of the hour. But the box seats were very good, with royal velvet upholstery and royal velvet curtains, so no one moved. He examined the end of his cigar. “What do you do, for instance—let’s just say as a hypothetical example—if a girl is a mamzer? A bastard.” He didn’t mean an illegitimate child. In Jewish law there was no such concept. A mamzer was a child born of an adulterous union. “Maybe no one else suspects,” Father continued. “But if you do? Well, according to religious law, she can only marry another mamzer. So tell me. Do you say nothing? After all, no one else knows. But if someone finds out later … It’s wrong. Very wrong. I’m just saying. For example.”

  There was a time that her mother would have turned and faced him, but when a person lives with a battering ram, she loses some agility. Mother threw up into the velvet curtains. Everyone rushed to help her, and later Father paid for the damage. No one gave Emilia a glance as she ran outside to the carriage. Mr. Levy found her there, sitting as still as if she were already dead. Only when he held her hands did she start to shake. And after that evening Mother never left the house, though she tried when her sisters begged her to visit them.

  But now everything was normal again. Father was at the theater, Mother in bed with a headache, the maid gone to see her cousin. Mr. Levy and Emilia were alone in the shade of the high brick wall. The apples were budding; the wall was rich with ivy. She could feel the wind on her cheeks, and she knew that her spring gown brought out the fine color of her skin. Underneath the dress, her corset was laced tight against her waist and breasts, ending just under her nipples at the top and at the bottom pointing down from her belly.

  She could tell that Mr. Levy was going to kiss her. The change in his posture, in his breathing. A good girl would stand up and walk away. Or at least a girl that was chaperoned. But the ghost of Mrs. Rosenberg withdrew from the garden, and there was only the warm spring wind touching Emilia here and there. She would never be like her mother. When she was married, she would always be on guard, charming her husband. It was her vocation, the work of a wife, but until she was a wife her dreams, the nighttime dreams of a young woman, didn’t have to involve husbands.

  They were just like this. A garden, the smell of ink, a friend who could be charmed or not since nothi
ng depended on it. Who would think that such a small thing could be so inviting? As they kissed, his hand found its way down from the nape of her neck, over a bare shoulder, along the line of her bodice. Low-cut gowns were the fashion this spring, but Mother had made her put a little insert of silk there. Under his fingers the silk pressed against the mound of her breasts; her nipples touched the hard edge of the corset. Her tongue touched the edge of her lip.

  Any other day, she would have jumped up from the bench. She would have walked around the garden and chattered about anything, concentrating on the new earrings she was promised for her birthday. But Father had rented the box at the opera again. How could Mother go when she fainted at the thought of leaving the house? There would have to be a hostess, and it could only be Emilia. When Father accused her of being a mamzer, there would be no one to distract the company with a sudden, violent illness.

  She wouldn’t think of it. No, there was only the garden, Mr. Levy, his lips and his fingers, her breathing so fast it made her dizzy, her body as liquid as in a dream. The sun fell below ground. The sky was pink, it was blue, it was black. He found button after button on her new spring gown and the strings of her new corset and admired her new silk underwear embroidered with lilies, which were yet not so wonderful as her naked skin under his lips.

  Two months later the summer sun warmed branches heavy with apples. Emilia thought she was dying. She’d been sick for weeks; she was getting weaker. So tired she had to have naps like a child. And there was no one to tell, no one to hold her as she passed from this world to the next. Father was angrier than ever, Mother sleepier.

  Emilia sat under the tree, pretending to read the newspaper as Mother came into the garden. It was warm; Mother wore a blue silk dress with elbow sleeves. Emilia could see the white scar on her wrist flicker as she crossed her arms. For someone that walked around in a daze most of the time, she seemed wonderfully alert.