The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  They walked through corrugated streets where wheels pushed mud and dung into sticky dunes the color of babies’ stools. Women lifted their skirts; children stamped on the ridges. Emilia’s eyelashes were wet. It must have been the damp from the river. It would be terrible for her mother’s hands. So it was all for the best that she’d come alone and her mother would realize it herself. Surely, she would.

  Ravens cawed, their wings clipped to keep them at the Tower. Above them chimneys scraped the sky with burnt coal while Nehama led her new lodger through busy streets, thinking that she could slip into the crowd if someone tried to grab her. She was listening for the sound of thick boots hitting the ground with a pimp’s stride and a voice calling, “Hi! You there!” But all she heard was the light click-click of her new lodger’s footsteps, the clash of a pawnbroker’s bells, someone calling “cat’s and dog’s meat,” the thud of a coffin sliding into a hearse, and her own heart beating out an old Yiddish street song: And so it turned out, when the pimp took her hand, she became as still as the walls.

  Nehama gasped for breath, a stitch in her side as she caught sight of the first Yiddish sign outside a store: “Smoked fish on special.” And over there was a bill posted on a wall, “Fireworks! Complete Orchestra! The Great Jacob Adler Plays Tonight!” Soon there were more bills and more signs in the mama-loshen, and she was pushing her way into a crowd of women in red shawls. No one could find her here. Not in Frying Pan Alley, a street like a heart that expands and contracts, taking in countless stalls and barrows and at the end of the day squeezing them out so that the walls meet and even darkness can’t reach down to touch the ground. She let the shawl slip from her head. Right behind her was the new lodger, Mrs. Levy, golden-haired and brilliant in her finery; no baby would run away from such housing.

  Frying Pan Alley

  The ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg seemed perfectly comfortable in Frying Pan Alley, which was more than Emilia could say for herself. Perhaps the dead are more adaptable because they don’t have to contend with a wardrobe. In Emilia’s trunk there were evening dresses, day dresses, and tea gowns, but not a single ghetto dress—something shapeless, colorless, and slightly higher than the ankle to sweep above the ridges of rubbish and horse dung in the East End streets where Yiddish was the official language. It was called the Ghetto by streetcar drivers, journalists, parliamentarians, and reformers, and Emilia sometimes laughed in the middle of the day, thinking that she had left the Pale of Settlement imposed by the czar only to find herself in the Ghetto. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même, she would say. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  The difference between the rich and the poor was in the number of buttons they had on their gowns. The poor couldn’t afford a maid to do them up in back. It was Nehama who helped her dress in the morning while the husband pulled trousers on over his langeh gatkes, the long underwear darned in rough ridges like scars. He told bad jokes, his wife scooped a fly out of the pitcher and poured the milk into his teacup. She had everything and nothing. A home, a husband, a place in the world, all of it secondhand like the shabby goods in the rag market. And she would offer Emilia the same fly-spoiled milk as if Emilia could swallow a drop.

  There was a stain on the elbow of Emilia’s sleeve as she bent over the trunk. It was used as a bench in the workshop; at night a straw pallet was thrown on it and there she slept. She scratched a bite on her wrist.

  “You have to squeeze bedbugs like this,” Nehama said, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. They were both in the back room, the trunk on one side of the table with its two dark sewing machines, Nehama sitting opposite. Behind her the pressing table was against the wall.

  “I’d rather be bitten. It smells horrid.” The stench didn’t seem to bother Nehama. Nothing ever bothered her. She was as steady as a rock, as impervious to delicate feeling.

  “You’ll get used to it. Listen to me. If you take that dress out of the trunk, it’s going to be covered with soot,” Nehama said.

  “I have to put things in order.” Every morning Emilia took out the contents of the trunk and put them back in again. Refolding the silk gowns on the worktable made her forget that there was no water to bathe and she was starting to stink.

  “It’s worth something, what you have in that trunk.” Nehama was looking at the gowns with a competent eye, the sort of eye that would not blink as it added tiny sums to arrive at the penny left over from a wage packet.

  “Thank you.” Emilia placed a gown of gold brocade into the trunk.

  “I’m not giving you a compliment. Listen to me. A widow that has a child coming needs money. But if you dirty everything, what good will it be?”

  “As good to me as your room is to you.” Emilia dropped the lid of her trunk, digging the key into the lock and snapping it to the right.

  “I can’t argue with that—you’re sleeping on the trunk.” Nehama knotted the thread with a quick flick of her fingers, a hint of derision in her voice.

  How could a rock know what Emilia felt?

  She’d worn the same dress all week. When she walked, and she had to walk in the street—the rooms held the heat like a baker’s oven—her gown fell in sad, ragged folds, the hem dragging in the sewage that dribbled through the gutter. People jostled her, they shouted at her to buy things. She’d never handled a kopeck, and now she had a purse of money. It was all she had, and they wanted it, they pressed her for it, they begged her for it, and she felt herself weakening, doling out a handful of coppers, feeling a flush of pleasure as she chose this or that until she looked in her hand and saw the object that had glittered in a barrow now dim and cracked and useless.

  “Look. I can make you a dress and you can save what you have in the trunk. You want it or not?” Nehama asked.

  Emilia sat on the trunk, leaning her stained elbows on the worktable. “How much would you charge?”

  “Just pay for the material,” Nehama said. Her head was bent, her eyes on the buttonholes of the jacket, the thick needle quickly drawing thread in and out. “You see the sewing machines are quiet, and Nathan went to Soho to look for work. It’s the slack season. I have time.”

  “I don’t want a gift. No, you must have a little something for your trouble. Let’s see what I have for you.” She unlocked the trunk again, looking for the sort of trinket that would appeal to someone in Frying Pan Alley. “Maybe this?” It was a beaded purse, a present from Freida. Mother had packed it so the maid’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  Nehama reached down and picked up the book that lay on top of Emilia’s dressing case. “What is this?”

  “It’s the German Bible. My mother and I used to read it together.”

  “Why not the Taitch Chumash? Let me guess. In your house Yiddish was for the maid and the greengrocer. Maybe even the tailor that made your gown.” Nehama fingered the end of Emilia’s sleeve. “It’s not bad, this dress.”

  “It was made by the best tailor in Minsk,” Emilia said.

  “My father was a tailor. He made better. And he spoke Yiddish, too.” Nehama put the book back into the trunk, and although it was the scorned German Bible, she laid it down carefully, her hands lingering for a moment over the book as if reluctant to move away from the touch of it.

  Emilia studied her, but all she could see was the same woman as before, poorly dressed and poorly bathed. Even so, she asked, “What book would you like?”

  “Something in English. About economics,” Nehama said. “Do you have anything like that?”

  “I don’t,” Emilia said. “I brought only a few books.”

  “Well, what do you have?”

  “This book is in English. Fairy Tales and Stories.”

  “That’s what you want to give me? A whole world there is and you want me to read grandmothers’ stories?” Nehama tapped the table with her thimble.

  “It’s how I learned to read English,” Emilia said. “You’d be surprised what you can learn from a grandmother’s story. Would you take thi
s for the dress?”

  The dusty light from the window could hardly illuminate the eye of a needle as Nehama threaded it. She shook her head. “If you don’t give me anything, that’s all right. It’s charity. But if I’m not going to have a good deed written in the Book of Life, then I’ll want proper payment.” She smiled at Emilia as if they shared a joke, and even if it wasn’t clear what the joke was, a person ought to laugh anyway to have some pleasure. “One book isn’t enough. I’ll have three.”

  “Two,” Emilia said. “Two and you make me a coat as well.”

  Nehama laughed. “Two and no coat.”

  “Agreed.” Outside donkeys brayed, barrows rumbled, children threw stones.

  Nehama turned back to her jackets and her buttonholes. “You should come with us to the theater. My grandmother used to say that there are two kinds of souls. There is the soul in a song, and the soul in tears. If you have both of them, you are blessed and the Holy One will hear your prayers.”

  “Personally, I think God is tired of prayers,” Emilia said, expecting to shock her landlady, for everyone knows that impoverished Jews are rich in piety.

  But Nehama smiled as if this was the joke they shared, and she said, “So many prayers. They’re like the cries of the street vendors. Cheap, fresh, beautiful prayers. Who can buy them all? Tell me, Mrs. Levy, am I right?” Nehama looked at her with those bright blue eyes and Emilia wondered if she’d seen her come from the Lane with that broken clock yesterday, hiding it in the yard where a little girl was lifting her skirt to pee.

  In the evening while her landlord and landlady were at the theater with their neighbors, Emilia sat in the front room, writing a letter blotted and pierced wherever her pen lost its footing on the rough surface of the table. She wrote by the light of a paraffin lamp, shadows hiding every feature of the narrow room. This was her favorite time of day, the noise of the street smothered in darkness.

  My Dearest Mother,

  The voyage was uneventful and I have settled in lodgings. I hope that Father’s temper has improved and that you have recovered from your untimely spell of “illness.”

  My landlady and her husband have gone to the theater. Of course I did not join them. What use do I have for the Jargon? They have two rooms. I sleep in the back, which is a tailoring establishment. But do not think that I have any fear at all. My surroundings are certainly temporary. I have locked my trunk and put the key on a ribbon around my neck. My landlady shall make me a dress suitable for the ghetto, and I will save my things for a setting appropriate to them.

  I am supposed to be an orphan. A girl traveling alone must be an orphan. If you write to me, pretend that you were the faithful family servant like our Freida and sign yourself “Mrs. Plater.”

  Do not be concerned with the shakiness of my handwriting. I am quite well, it is only the table that makes my hand unsteady.

  Ever your daughter,

  Emilia

  Frying Pan Alley

  The busy season began with a small order. Nathan was in the back room finishing it, Lazar doing the last of the pressing. Soon there would be no time for reading except on the Sabbath, so Nehama sat at the table in the front room, the English book in front of her, whispering the foreign words under her breath and breaking her teeth on them. In the rooms upstairs, Pious Pearl was drunk and yelling at her sons; men argued at cards in the FPA Workmen’s Club. Outside in the street an old woman was selling lavender. A barrow clattered across the cobblestones.

  Emilia was also reading at the table. She had a newspaper, turning pages in the time it took Nehama to move from one paragraph to the next. Her belly was protruding in the shapeless dress Nehama had made. She could have sewn it with some style, but she couldn’t bear to see the golden Mrs. Levy with her baby growing under a beautiful gown. Did God have to give so much to this woman that there was nothing left for another? “How can you read with all that racket?” Mrs. Levy asked in her educated accent.

  “This is hardly noisy,” Nehama said. Minnie’s son was pretending to be a streetcar, whistling and hooting as he drove from the workshop to the cookstove. The baby was sitting on his back, squealing, her hands gripping her brother’s hair. “You should hear how it is when the busy season really gets started.”

  “So tell me what’s so interesting in that book,” Minnie asked as she stirred the soup. She still had only one room upstairs with no stove, just a fireplace, and as Nehama had two rooms with a stove but wasn’t any hand at using it, Minnie cooked down here and the two families ate together.

  “It’s about a woman that loses her child,” Nehama said, glancing at the newspaper. Was Emilia reading the article or studying the advertisement beside it for a slim line of corsets guaranteed to gather in the most rotund belly? “Her child is a little boy about your Sammy’s age.”

  “Thpoo, thpoo, thpoo.” Minnie spat, blowing away the evil eye. “And?”

  “And she’s so upset, she forgets she still has two daughters.” Nehama looked over Emilia’s shoulder as she turned the page. There were toys advertised here, trains with miniature steam engines and dolls dressed more elegantly than living children. She could sew dresses just like these if she had a child with a doll. But she couldn’t get pregnant again, though in her sleep she dreamed about the babies she’d lost as if they were growing up, and in such sleep her grief was softened. Then she’d wake up, listening to her lodger turn in her sleep, and Nehama kept her eyes closed over the envy pouring from them.

  She reread the paragraph that described a mother’s crazed sorrow so exactly. She could read it again and again as often as she wished. She didn’t need a sister to tell her the story or an actor to play it for her on the stage because she had a theater here in her hands; the curtain rose when she opened her eyes and fell when she closed the book. It was amazing. Her middle sister had dozens of such books. Rich people had thousands, and lucky for them that they needn’t work or surely they would starve, their eyes eating only words.

  “It’s a silly story,” Minnie said. “A person can’t forget her child.”

  “That’s what my mother used to tell me,” Emilia said. “But I don’t think it’s true.”

  “Your mother, she should rest in peace,” Nehama said, looking at Emilia sharply.

  “Yes, alleva sholom,” the young woman murmured, shifting uncomfortably. The shallow wooden seat was hard for a pregnant girl. But why did she look flustered, her eyes recoiling from Nehama’s?

  Nehama flipped through the pages of her book. “Here’s another story. It’s called ‘The Jewish Maiden.’ Who would think there would be a story about a Jewish girl in a book?”

  Minnie looked at the illustration. “And very pretty, too.”

  “Wait till you read it.” Emilia rubbed her belly. Nehama could remember touching her own belly the same thoughtful way, wondering who grew inside. “If you find a Jew in a story,” Emilia said, “you can be sure that he’s greedy and sly and ends up hanging on the gallows. A Jewish girl is always pure and beautiful and dies a real Christian.”

  “So what good is the book—do you see your own life there? Better to go to the Yiddish theater,” Minnie said, cutting potatoes into the pot of soup. “There you’ll see something you won’t forget.”

  “Yiddish isn’t a language.”

  “Then tell me, what are we speaking?” Nehama asked. Any stupid girl could have a baby, while Nehama worked from morning till night and found herself making nothing.

  “Yiddish is a jargon. You have to speak it among people who don’t know anything else.” Emilia looked from one to the other, her voice filled with righteousness. “Well, a language must have a literature. Where are the great Yiddish writers, then?”

  “The same place as Goldfaden, who made the Yiddish theater just ten years ago.” Nehama had her own opinions, and they were just as good as this young woman’s. “Don’t think you know everything. I’m a little older than you, and when I left home there wasn’t a single play in Yiddish. Now there’s melodrama an
d history and new songs every week. No one sees more plays than the Jews. Nathan reads the Yiddish papers that come from the heim, and each one has a new story in it. You’ll see, we’ll have our own great writers before you look around.”

  Emilia tucked a stray lock of golden hair behind her ear. “Do you think it’s possible to catch up with three hundred years of literature?” She took a sip of tea, grimaced, and added more sugar as if sugar cost nothing.

  “I only know that a person yearns for his own language. Why should you think of yourself as Russian?” Nehama asked. “Someone that tries to borrow another’s soul ends up with nothing to guide him in life.”

  “So you think my soul is such a superior guide?” Emilia asked bitterly. “To bring me here of all places. I was raised to be someone else.”

  “You think you’re the only one?” Nehama took a page of the newspaper, folding it to make a book cover, but as she wrapped the book in it, the cover split down the back.

  Emilia shook her head and reached for the book. She measured it against a doubled sheet of newspaper, turning over the edges to make a slipcover. “My mother showed me how to do this.” She paused. “My mother—she should rest in peace—told me everything, but I don’t know what I should believe.”

  “Things didn’t turn out the way you thought,” Nehama said. She poured another cup of tea for them both. When there is no other comfort, there can at least be tea.

  Emilia turned her head to look at the stove, where steam billowed from the pot of soup as Minnie tasted it. “My mother told me that she was married in a village near Plotsk. That would make us practically landsmann. Who knows if she was telling the truth? It’s just a story like the ones in that book.” She shrugged. “But if you sit beside me, I can help you with some of the words.”

  From the other room Nathan was calling, “I want your help, Nehama.”

  “It’s just a small order,” she called back. “What do you need me for?”

  He came to the front room, frowning in the way he did during the busy season. Heaven forbid someone should tell a joke in the workshop. Nathan was a boss, and you might think he ran the business for God, as if sewing cheap jackets made the earth turn around the sun. “Lazar has nothing to press. He has wages coming to him. Should I pay him to clean his ears?”