The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  First he bought me apples,

  Then he bought me pears,

  Then he gave me sixpence

  To kiss him on the stairs …

  “Don’t go past the school yard,” Pious Pearl called. “I’m warning you.”

  The babies played at their feet, hardly babies anymore. Libby was three, telling Gittel a story while she fed her dolly, which was made from rags. In her fingers she had a treasured raisin, and when her dolly was sated, she would eat it. Libby didn’t like raisins, otherwise it would have disappeared into her own mouth.

  “The murderer must have escaped from a lunatic asylum,” Minnie said quietly. “Why else would he attack that poor woman—is there something to steal from a person like that? What does it say there?” She pointed at the newspaper with her darning needle.

  “She was wearing a black straw bonnet,” Nehama replied. At the end of the alley there were shadows made by the warm wind and the cool air turning into mist. “I used to know someone who had one just like it.”

  “No one in this street wears a straw bonnet.” Minnie put down the half-darned sock and looked at Nehama. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

  “Nothing?” Pious Pearl asked. “The gentiles are saying it was a Jew that did it. Haven’t you heard them calling our men Lipski? I didn’t want my husband to go to shul today; last week he was beaten up on his way home. But you know how pious he is. He thinks praying is almost as good as betting.”

  “I used to know someone who wore a wig like Pious Pearl’s,” Nehama said quietly. “What if they find her next, God forbid? You can stretch out your hand and touch the street where they found the body.” The woman who’d been killed must have been feeling good that night. She had a piece of mirror in her pocket and she was wearing a new dress. It had been torn by the murderer when he slashed her body.

  “Don’t think of it,” Minnie said. “Those streets are night and here it’s day. You can’t talk about them in the same breath.”

  “Boys! Get back here or I promise, I’ll beat you black and blue,” Pious Pearl called. “Better they should be afraid of me, who wants the best for them.”

  “Maybe she stole the dress.” Minnie peered over Nehama’s shoulder at the illustration in the newspaper.

  “If things had turned out differently, she could have been anyone,” Nehama said.

  “No one I know,” Minnie insisted.

  The little girls were chanting the second verse of their jumping rhyme:

  I don’t want your apples,

  I don’t want your pears,

  I don’t want your sixpence

  To kiss me on the stairs.

  Then he tears the leg of my drawers,

  And that’s the last of all …

  Nehama picked up Gittel and held her close. Her daughter’s eyes had turned golden from their newborn indigo, but night had long arms that stretched darkness from corner to corner. It could eat any of them alive.

  Great Portland Street

  Two months before the High Holy Days, the congregation begins to prepare for its judgment in the court of heaven. First come the prophecies of rebuke, three of them, read on the Sabbaths leading up to Tisha B’av. On this day the temple was destroyed and God’s name vanished from the Holy of Holies. The people mourn, the synagogues are draped in black. But after Tisha B’av the prophecies of consolation are chanted on seven Sabbaths, the last just before Rosh Hashanna, as the need for consolation is more than twice as great as the need for rebuke. Then the people in their exile, lonely and full of regret, arrive at the Days of Awe, when there is neither rebuke nor consolation but only the sum of one’s deeds as a person comes before the throne in the court of heaven, wondering if the King will stretch out His golden scepter to say, You may stand before Me and live.

  It was a short walk from the Zalkinds’ house to the synagogue, Jacob and Emilia strolling behind the rest of the family in the stately pace of the Sabbath, his arm through hers like a gentleman. A religious man wouldn’t do such a thing, and no wonder, for surely anyone could see the haze that surrounded them, caused by the meeting of cool morning air and the heat of exercise. She could feel the action of his hips throwing one leg forward then the other, and his lips were shaping not only words but breath that tasted—well, she wasn’t quite sure of the taste, but it was there at the tip of her tongue. This wasn’t intended by her, quite the opposite; on the way from Minsk to London, watching the sea sloshing against the porthole, she’d sworn off any such feelings. But while she’d been painting lilies and willow boughs, watching Jacob play chess with his brother or write in the notebook with the green cover, his scent had crept up the ladder like a skin of fragrant smoke that moved with her every move, a finger on her finger, a knee with her knee, a back over her back, and a taste in her mouth as if it kissed whenever she spoke.

  It was a cool day with a warm, wet wind bringing a change, and the people who left their carriages and footmen in livery a block away from the synagogue (riding being forbidden on the Sabbath) walked in their own haze, one of greatness, the lord and the sir and the ladies in their jewels that would sparkle if there were sun but instead were muted by clouds that turned London into a city of olive skin, the hue of Portland stone favored by builders after the Great Fire.

  The synagogue had been visited by the emperor of Brazil fifteen years ago and more recently by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, who came for the wedding of a Rothschild. Today even Zaydeh would sit between his grandsons in the men’s section. Only for such an occasion would he step foot in the synagogue with the twenty-five columns of Italian marble and the rabbi who was called “Minister” in the fashion of English Jews. A nice donation had been made to the building fund, and though it wasn’t exactly an aufruf, the bridegroom’s call to the Torah, for the bride wasn’t Jewish, nevertheless Zaydeh would see his grandson go up and say the blessing for reciting verses from the Torah, and he himself was going to chant the haftorah, the reading from the prophets.

  “It’s all right, Emilia,” Jacob said, as if she’d been protesting. “We don’t have to stay long. After I go up to the Torah, I’ll wait for you on the steps outside. The Moores are having a painter for lunch. One of the French group.”

  “What about Zaydeh?” Jacob’s grandfather was walking on his own, hands behind his back, the only one in sight wearing a prayer shawl over a satin caftan.

  “Right, right.” They continued for a moment in silence, Emilia thinking about her gloves, how if only they could sit side by side in the synagogue, Jacob might pull one off and touch her naked hand, but she would be up in the ladies’ gallery with Mrs. Zalkind. “We’ll slip out after Zaydeh finishes the haftorah, then,” Jacob said.

  “How will I congratulate him from the ladies’ gallery?” Emilia asked. “And if we don’t stay until the end, then Zaydeh won’t get any cake. Your mother disapproves of it. He should have cake on his day of honor. It’s only fair.”

  “I’d do anything for him, Emilia. But this is just too embarrassing. It’s an anachronism. Parading around with a parchment scroll dressed up in velvet and crowns. The Abrahams are calling me ‘pious Yankel,’ you know.”

  “Well, you’re my Yankel, at any rate. That ought to be something.”

  Jacob grumbled, and Emilia leaned close to hear him, murmuring sympathy, her lips close to his cheek, inhaling his skin as if it were the smoke of tobacco sharp on her tongue. When they came to the steps of the synagogue, she was carrying her cloak over her arm, too warm to wear it another minute.

  Zaydeh was waiting for them. “I have something for the gitteh yokhelteh.” The good gentile girl. It fit her as if she were born to it. “You see?”

  He gave her a small Bible with a leather cover, translated into German. “But, Zaydeh, carrying?”

  “Who says I carried something on Shobbos? It’s not allowed. I was wearing it. If a woman can wear earrings, why not a man this?”

  The first letter of each verse was illuminated, and above each chapter there were tin
y illustrations inked in gold and red and green and indigo. He must have searched a hundred shops, two hundred barrows of old books to find it, and she stammered over her thanks while he smiled with shy gratification, taking Jacob’s arm. They went in together, the first generation in his fur shtrimel, the third generation in his silk hat. Someone might say there was no language in common between the two of them, but such a person doesn’t understand the longevity of the mama-loshen.

  Upstairs in the ladies’ gallery, Emilia sat with Mrs. Zalkind, holding the Bible she had once studied with her mother.

  “The woman in the blue hat,” Mrs. Zalkind whispered. “She’s the president of the Society for the Protection of Hebrew Girls.”

  “You mean the woman with the plain, skinny face?” Emilia asked.

  Mrs. Zalkind nodded. “The very one. She thinks rather well of herself. Her husband is a German Jew.”

  It was just the same as the synagogue in Minsk. A different tongue, the same talk. The ghost of the first wife was standing behind one of the Italian pillars while the velvet-clad Torah was paraded in its anachronistic manner, the gentlemen in their tall silk hats bowing low before it as they would before a king as Jacob went up to pronounce the blessing over it.

  “For this commandment which I command you this day, it is not too difficult for you,” the reader chanted in his honor. “Nor is it too far. It is not in heaven that you should say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us so that we may hear and do it. Nor is it beyond the sea that you should say, Who shall go over the sea for us and bring it to us so that we may hear and do it. The word is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart that you may do it. See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil.”

  There were other blessings and other verses, while the ghost of the first wife stood behind the pillar, a shadow within a shadow as light came and went through a tall, arched window. She waited for Zaydeh, watching the small man in his old-fashioned garb go up to the oak platform where the Torah rested from its labor.

  The chanting of Torah and haftorah is directed by marks under the words. The marks of melody notation give the reader no choice; the words are drawn out or short, the voice rising or falling according to the notation; the reader is a vehicle; the words use him and not the other way around. A man can choose only the day he will chant, knowing the verses assigned to it. Zaydeh looked down at his grandson among the men and up to his daughter and her soon-to-be daughter-in-law in the ladies’ gallery. He recited the blessings, and then he sang in his old voice like a windblown reed:

  “You will be called a new name from the mouth of the Lord …. As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so will God rejoice over you …. And you will be called Sought Out, a city not forsaken …”

  After the Sabbath, Emilia and Jacob were married in a civil ceremony at the Office of the Registrar.

  Charlotte Street

  In the heim Jacob’s grandfather would have been called a man of the earth, someone uneducated, simple and crude. He played cards, took pleasure in food, and prayed the way a simple man prays, in between hearing the latest from his cronies in the shul, a room above a fruit store. From there to the house in Charlotte Street wasn’t a long walk, and he came often to see how the children were coming along.

  A week after the third murder in Whitechapel, Emilia was in the kitchen chopping parsley, her hands gold from painting the dining room with a border of autumn willow boughs. There was a kerchief around her head, her mother-in-law’s cookbook propped open on the table. The chicken was in the pot, cut up and covered with water. The ginger, sweet herbs, and garlic were on a plate. She had only to add the parsley and pepper and a tablespoon of flour to thicken the stew. When it was finished, she was to garnish it with lemon, parsley, and boiled carrots.

  “What are you cooking?” Jacob’s grandfather asked, looking in the pot. He spoke Yiddish. Emilia answered in German, and so they understood each other as well as most people.

  “Chicken stew, sir. The recipe is from Mrs. Zalkind’s cookbook.” She read the recipe again, adding a little garlic juice to it as she touched the page with her fingers. “What does ‘garnish’ mean?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Eating I do like an expert,” he said. “The cooking is up to you.”

  The ghost of the first wife was standing at the window, gazing listlessly at the students who carried home satchels of bones to study. A costermonger was calling, “Rhubarb! Onions!”

  The grandfather looked into the pot. “Maybe a garnish is a kind of spice,” he said, keeping his eyes on the pot as if it was rude to stare at ghosts. “You have a guest?” he asked.

  “Only you, Mr. Karpman,” Emilia said, glancing at him sharply. Soon Jacob would be back from the newspaper office, Albert from his classes, and they would be hungry.

  “I see,” he said. And she was sure he saw nothing. On the table there was a jelly roll for the pudding. It was his favorite. Mrs. Zalkind believed that a man over sixty should not eat cake; Emilia was determined to master baking so that the grandfather could have some. She tried many times before she learned to get the heat just right.

  “I’m worried for you,” he said while she added the herbs and garlic, the ginger and parsley to the stew. “The things that are going on now. For me it’s all right. Who’s going to interfere with an old man? But you, a girl?”

  Emilia didn’t think about the murders at all. She was too busy mixing paint and learning to cook. You keep your mind on a thousand details, and you don’t listen for the smashing of a window. She tasted the stew and added more salt. “What does it have to do with me? Those poor dead girls, they were …”

  “I know what they were. But you have a Jewish husband.”

  “So? None of the girls were Jews.”

  “You have to hear what I’m telling you. When there’s something to be afraid of, it comes to the Jews. Why did you bring this on yourself? Such a suffering isn’t for you.”

  “You think I don’t know anything about it, Mr. Karpman?” Her voice was quiet. Maybe it was even old.

  The ghost of the first wife turned away from the window, looking for the door to the garden, but the house in Charlotte Street had no garden.

  “All right,” he said, sitting at the end of the table near the jelly roll. “But I’m not a mister. You should call me Zaydeh, like my grandsons.”

  Emilia cut him a slice of cake. “How is it, Zaydeh?” she asked, watching him closely as he took a bite. A look of pleasure spread over his face. It was enough. She was not her mother. There would be no burnt odors in her house. She hardly noticed when the ghost of the first wife left, walking up the stairs to the attic and through there to the cold roof, following the path of chimney pots east toward the docks.

  Frying Pan Alley

  On the Sabbath of Repentance, during the Days of Awe, another middle-aged woman had been killed. She was wearing her whole wardrobe on her back, a coat, a skirt, two bodices, two petticoats, striped woolen stockings, a neckerchief the same color as her stockings, red and white. Perhaps she was running away when the murderer caught her. He didn’t know that she would have died anyway; she was very sick with tuberculosis and a disease of the brain.

  Even Nathan was frightened enough to cover up his nervousness with chatter. “Business is falling off,” he said, threading the needle of his sewing machine. The High Holy Days had come and gone. The slack season was over. In the front room the children were napping under a pile of new jackets.

  “People still need coats,” Lazar replied. “It’s getting colder.”

  “One thing leads to another. If no one comes to the Lane to buy, then people lose jobs. They wear old coats, and the tailors have nothing to do.”

  The victim had lodged in Dorset Street; her name was Annie. Nehama knew the lodging house. It was large, more than a hundred people slept there. They had names like Polly, Annie. Maybe a Molly or a Sally.

  Nehama pumped the treadle of her sewing machine. Of c
ourse her Sally, if she was still living in Dorset Street, would be much younger than the women who’d been killed, though she’d been on the game a long time. She might even be a madam by now. Nehama shook her head. Sally used to have a terrible cough. More likely she’d have ruined lungs like the dead woman, yet it was impossible to think of Sally as anything but the girl with thin puffs of hair, zestfully brushing a wig. And if she’d been walking in the wrong place? Nehama’s foot trembled; her sewing machine slowed to a halting pace as she imagined the gutted body described in the newspaper.

  The headlines read:

  WHITECHAPEL TERRORIZED

  MURDERER SIGHTED

  POLICE INVESTIGATION

  FULL DESCRIPTIVE REPORT

  The latest murder had occurred in Hanbury Street near Brick Lane, where twenty months ago horses with black plumes had pulled hearses from the Yiddish theater after the night of the panic. More people had died that one night than in the months of the Whitechapel murderer’s reign. But the world was mesmerized by him. It gave him names—Leather Apron, the Ripper. Who thought about a dozen and a half men and women and babies killed in one night by the fear of a few hundred of their neighbors and friends?

  “I wrote another play,” Lazar said. “It’s better than the last one.”

  “It couldn’t be worse,” Nathan said.

  Everyone knew it wasn’t very good. The writers with talent left after the Yiddish theater closed, and the actors with them. But Lazar wrote the play, and he showed it to some tailors in the Friendly Society. The play was called Malkeleh, after the main character. It was performed in a tavern the way these things used to be done, in Black Lion Yard next to the dairy. The whole time cows were mooing, but the tavern was packed. As the old saying goes, when fear reaches the sky then it rains defiance.