The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  Off the train and into the crowd he felt he was walking in a swarm of bees, in their noise, in their wind, in their threat. He wanted to run through them fast but his sister held on to him as if he had become a dog on a leash. In fact they saw a grand dog on the platform, a princely hound. No country dog ever looked like that.

  He whirled through numbers—got away from Chaya—Chai—snaking through the underbrush of skirts and pant legs and, hanging on to a post, up on a ledge to give him height, called off departure times for the trains that stood out in the light, chuffing. Lovely sounds: Lafayette, Peoria, Madison. Pee-or-i-ya felt in the mouth like custard going down. Applause, that strange thing people did, banging hands together like a baby playing patty-cake. Who invented such a thing to show appreciation? A child? Did everyone in the world do that, people who ran naked in jungles and rowed boats made of tree bark? Clap? Here, in and out underfoot, beneath an endless vault bright as sky above, carved, thick with designs and carvings, he expanded. He had been asleep and now he was altogether awake. He would never slow down. In this place he was going to be happy.

  But she caught him again. She was going to herd him, her face like someone else’s—Pesye’s, Zanvel’s—with a rare anger. No words were ever worse than “for your own good.” Every sip of medicine was for his good, if he survived the taste. He wanted to gag. Then someone with a calm voice spoke so that she let go of his arm, sat them in a carriage and Asher began to count. That was the only way to hold still the streets, contain them in his mind.

  The farm was all blank space, the prairie beyond nothing but distant green and hazy horizon; in town those separate little houses and their fences and timid rows of tulips were frail as paper. Here, everything was fierce, even the air was a different color. The shadows were dark, thick, deep—solid. You could almost pick them up. Beside the stony buildings, the tops of the horses’ heads looked warm and breakable.

  Thousands of everything! He would die of it, fall into exhaustion keeping up. Thirty-four shops with signs even before they turned a single corner. Fourteen full stops. Trees here and there, but spindly and parched. Were there any trees as glad to be here as he? He couldn’t wait to tell Chaya he was never leaving. He dangled his arm over the side to feel the rush and the wind pickled his fingers.

  “Four turns,” he told them when the carriage pulled up to a halt. His sister was blind to him. The man’s face had entered her, he could see that. She was not a policeman now. Her face was stricken (he liked that word though it didn’t sound like what it was. Ick should be funny, icken even funnier). Her expression was soft as sheep’s wool and between her pretty gray eyes a new line lengthened, something worried, something bewildered. (There was be-whiskered. There was be-jeweled. What was wildered that one could be it?)

  THEN HE SAW a rat but he didn’t tell Chaya. That tail, raw and unhaired, like a string in sections—disgusting, though he didn’t know why. They had rats in the barn sometimes, but they felt cleaner—rats, groundhogs, chipmunks, prairie dogs, raccoons, everything incessantly making its way, finding what it needed, most of it still alive. Sometimes he lay in the grass and listened to them move. The ground was drilled with mole holes.

  Chaya had gone into a broad brick building, up the steps and disappeared; he followed her in and saw her being looked at up and down by a dozen men, and then they were rushing along behind a boy whose knickered legs flashed faster than Chaya could go. That was when he saw the rat bent over something it was liking for supper, hunched and busy. Its long nails were pearly in the falling light. So: no more chickens, no cows, what would a city have but horses, people, rats. And birds. There were fat gray ones with rainbows, beautiful rainbows, around their necks and their bulging chests; dozens swarmed around like the crowds in the railway station, this way and that. He would have to find out what they were called, though probably not from Chaya.

  Everything on the ground scattered when they went by. Pretend you’re a prince—he had met royalty, endlessly, in his books—and those are your people, paying homage, hurrying out of your path. Make way for the Prince of Chicago! Why not?

  8

  THOUGH SHE was honest enough to warn Mrs. Gottlieb that they had only a modest amount of money from which to pay her, the widow seemed desperate to install a living body in her rooms, as if to prove, against great odds, that it could be done. Furthermore, Chaya assured her, she would have work as soon as earthly possible.

  Mrs. Gottlieb was not relying on earthly powers: “With God’s help,” she breathed, and Chaya hoped such piety would not remind her too much of Pesye and Zanvel and the rest of the grim lot she had left behind. “I’ll tell you honestly, I hope I’m not offending, that I am not feeling very friendly toward God just now after he took my husband, olav ha-sholem, but yet you should remember who holds your good fortune.”

  Still in widow’s crepe, shamed by the very idea of sharing her tiny, dark, unlovely flat, she was nonetheless very kind. Perhaps she took to the two of them because she had no children—when she referred to herself as a barren woman Chaya blushed for her because that word made her seem the victim of a Biblical curse.

  Mrs. Gottlieb’s bosom was like the wall around old cities, an awesome barricade. But behind it, she was meek and stunned still by having been abandoned—suddenly one morning, just as she turned away to bring him his tea—by her good Nachman, who fell on the floor right here. (She gestured beside a chair.) Her husband, she told Chaya, had been in the ground now only three weeks. Her eyes, in the full light of day, had disappeared behind circles of defeated flesh. If Chaya had hoped to find high spirits after her years of woe, this was the wrong apartment. But glee and good cheer, she understood, were not a roof and a floor. Like her attention to the buildings downtown, they would come later.

  It was dark outside when she dropped a scant few coins into Mrs. Gottlieb’s hand but she could feel her wince, shamed, as they fell into her palm. “Come dear, look at this,” Mrs. Gottlieb said, perhaps to cheer herself, and showed Chaya, on the little shelf on which stood her candlesticks and kiddush cup, an old country photograph of herself as a very young woman with a mammoth bow in her hair, standing stiffly between brothers and sisters, her stern, bearded father and unsmiling mother safely between them. They sat within a scene, pillared before and grassy behind, out of something more like Rome before its fall than any vista in their own shtetl. “When I was young like you,” she said with a pale smile. She would have regretted the ripple of fear that sent through Chaya like a shiver of oncoming fever.

  Then, “Your brother, your pitsele, is very smart,” Mrs. Gottlieb murmured from behind her hand, pointing not so secretly at Asher. He had impressed her by counting the steps up to her apartment—forty-eight—and announcing the total, divided evenly by the number of landings. It was on the fourth floor, through a hallway so dark that the single gas lamp at the foot of the stairs illuminated nothing.

  “Oh,” Chaya answered her, “he is just an eager boy who loves to use his brain, far from home and hungry. He tires me out.” She wished she had not said that last thing to a woman who had no child, smart or otherwise, but she was left with her regret.

  She would herself, their landlady told them, sleep in the front room, which had no bed that Chaya could see. She would have to be planning to push her three unmatched wooden chairs together so that she and Asher could share the bed in the one lightless bedroom. This seemed preposterous to her; Mrs. Gottlieb was a grown woman, weighted with age and grief, and they were children—even she, by all measurements, was as light as a child. Her bosom must have weighed a feather. And so they fought gently, like cats with their claws drawn back, over whose head would lie where. “But you’re paying me,” Mrs. Gottlieb insisted, balling her apron in her veiny hands.

  “Not very much,” Chaya insisted to her. She wanted to say, That bed is still warm with your husband’s heat! Instead, she told her, “You will hurt yourself trying to sleep on those chairs.” She did not add that she would mortally wound the chairs
as well.

  Chaya pushed together the chairs, which were not quite of the same height. But when she’d spread a quilt over them, they served well enough, since her standards were still more Wisconsin than Chicago. The quilt hung far over the side onto the floor, and here her Asher, like a small faithful dog, made his bed, protected from the harsh punishment of the floor. This was not an arrangement anyone would call comfortable for either, but as Chaya laid herself carefully back she tried to imagine how painful it must be for Mrs. Gottlieb behind the curtain that separated one darkness from another—there was no door—to have to hear the intimate sounds of strangers preparing for sleep. How unreal the world must feel to her, whose husband had awakened beside her of a morning and then, after an instant of time like any other, no longer existed.

  “Chaya,” Asher whispered out of the silence.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “What is a widow exactly?”

  She never knew whether Asher needed a word in English or a definition. But they were surely tuned to one another. “A widow is a wife who has lost her husband.”

  He took a minute to digest this. “Lost? He got lost coming home?”

  Now she put aside her concern for their landlady (whom she could hear praying quietly, like soft music, and then sobbing, muffling her grief in her pillow), and tried, instead, to see into her darling’s mysterious head. The only time she could tell the difference between what he really knew and what he only seemed to know was when he was curious enough to ask a question. Then she was relieved that he recognized the difference.

  And every time she dared to fear that his astounding head was hollow as a doll’s, he knocked her flat and shamed her. “No, Asher, it’s just a way to say that he died.” She paused, trying to run ahead of him. “Do you know what it means to die?” He had seen a dog die, and chickens eaten by a fox. His baby sister Sorele’s death had been dealt with quietly, outside his notice. But she had disappeared—what did he make of that?

  His own pause. A little laugh, either of comprehension or of incomprehension. “It’s too hot in here. I don’t need all this blanket. No. To die?” He was turning over and twisting and thrashing irritably below her on the floor. “To die. No. Do you?”

  CHAYA WOKE more sore than she thought she could bear. Sleeping on raw ground, on rocks and tree roots, would have been kinder. Mrs. Gottlieb was still asleep in the bedroom behind her curtain, which she could see in the fresh morning light was a faded Turkey red cloth that had probably been a bed cover, its swirling pattern meant to suggest a tapestry far grander than it had ever been. The more she studied it, and the smeared windows at the front, the worn sprigged cloth on the table—not an ill-kept house, only a house sinking under its place near the bottom of fortune’s wheel—the more she saw the motes of dust, smudge of coal, street dirt, peeling paint, smut of kerosene that hung between everyone and every thing in a room like that. There was no getting it clean. This was all too familiar. And for this she had traveled. For this she had slept on a surface meaner than a gravestone. Still, she could not help thinking, better mine than those old bones.

  Having been spared the rack in a living room thick with the daily ghosts of garlic and onion and the weekly yeast of the challah in her oven, Pearl (née Perel) Gottlieb became the first of Chaya’s fairy godparents. Chaya would never know which of Mrs. Gottlieb’s gestures of concern won her more reward than the good feeling that must have flooded her with satisfaction. No one knows, really, who (if any) are the souls keeping count.

  MRS. GOTTLIEB fed di kinder tea and bread on its way to turning stale—this was part of their arrangement but she had not been prepared for them and had in her kitchen only the sad leftovers of someone who was not much concerned just then with what she ate. Asher worked his jaws at the hard bread as if it were gristle. He was used to eating what would best have gone to feed the animals; he did not complain. Then Chaya asked him what she should do with him while she went out in search of work.

  Asher was swinging his legs as he subdued his pumpernickel. His feet dangled nowhere near the ground. “I’ll come along,” he told her cheerfully.

  But there was no way he could accompany her. She explained why. “You have to understand that the people who own stores and factories aren’t concerned that I have a little brother to care for.”

  “Why not?” He asked this smiling.

  She wondered if he were teasing or trying to disarm her. Or perhaps the absurdity of such indifference seemed to him amusing.

  “I promise to stay right outside the door, wherever you go. You can hide me.”

  “This isn’t a game, dear. And you are not a lap dog.” She was trying to primp but Mrs. Gottlieb’s mirror was cloudy. Just two weeks ago, for the days of shiva when vanity of the body was a sin, it had been covered with a cloth. And now, the widow must see a slightly different face when she peered into it.

  Asher looked deflated.

  “You can take the streetcar,” their landlady told her—“It’s easy”—and drew an elaborate set of arcs in the air, at the end of which, presumably, Chaya would find herself on a corner from which she could achieve, via cable car, the city center.

  And then what? Chaya asked if she had any ideas regarding employment but she had little imagination beyond the obvious: Shopgirl. Garment worker. Do not ask what engaging ideas Chaya was hoping to hear—if Asher was not ready to comprehend the demands of anonymity, she was not quite prepared to admit that she was a farm girl (and that farm uniquely benighted), with no city skills and none but the most rudimentary understanding of how the world worked, of who pushed its buttons and pulled its levers. Her only consolation was to remember that Chicago was swarming with innocents like herself and she trusted they were somehow surviving. Was it not infinite in every way? True, she had heard the stories, discreetly, behind hands, of the ones who ended up selling their one most priceless possession to strangers, but that—surrendering themselves for a drink and a dollar—was too preposterous a fate to imagine, even for someone who had allowed a drayman to imprint his woeful body against hers in broad daylight. They must, she thought, with a primness that would later embarrass her, have wished for—come here for—the pleasures of their profession. They must have lusted themselves and been compelled to sin for its own sake.

  Now, at Mrs. Gottlieb’s table, she sighed with anxiety. After a while, sufficiently apologetic to cringe but not to be silent, she asked if—assuming she was not too occupied with her own difficulties—her new landlady might watch Asher just for today. How she wished she could have added, For an extra half dollar. But she had begun to suspect that she was going to exact favors from many, and, en route to her fortune, she was going to learn humility. “Are there—do you have any books for him to read? You will not hear a word from him all day if you have a good story for him.”

  “Ah, kleynele.” Affectionately, little one. She pondered. “I’m sorry but my Nachman had no time for any books but his siddur.” Chaya was sorry too, to have made the widow’s whole face quiver like that. Shakespeare would have served but holy books would not do.

  When Asher glared at his sister, he knew he could convince her of almost anything; his anger was far more effective than his charm. Now he turned on her with murderous, under-the-brow intensity and refused to blink. Had he held his breath until he turned blue, he could not have provoked her panic more effectively. “I will go back to Mama and Papa.” This in a strange, suffocated voice, ghostlike. “I will run off to a part of this city where you will never find me. Everyone will help a poor little pitsl.”

  He could do it, too. Run off and probably do a better job at existing than she was doing. “Where are your shoes?” she said as harshly as she could, and gestured to him to put them on. He still had trouble with the buttons. “Ganef.” Thief. “Where did you put your cap?”

  OUT THE door, into a new day. Even mean Zhitomir had been nothing like this! There was no escaping it—a king, a god, could have stood with her on that wooden stoop, high above
the street, and not been exempt from the dire stink of the stockyards. It fouled more than the nose, she could feel it strafe her windpipe as it traveled toward the lungs, an odor both sour and bitter at the same time, with something more putrid and rotten at its far edges. They were so close to the death-stalls, acres upon acres of them, that she began to imagine she could hear the shofar sound of the cattle lowing, pitifully, on their way to slaughter: What they were being forced to inhale was the smell of blood, the hopeless exhalation of captured creatures who, even without comprehension, felt their fate approaching. Futilely, she tried to hold her breath. She could as easily have held back the sun that was just then rising in a riot of flame from behind a heap of a house across the way. That sun flung down on Liberty Street a hard disclosing light.

  Movement gone mad, it showed her, up and down the block as far as she could see. Dozens—were there hundreds?—of peddlers were roiling into action, wheeling pushcarts until they found their place, pulling off whatever covered them, flinging back blankets and lids, grating, squeaking, banging. Shopkeepers raised suits and dresses to hang on hooks before the dark corridors of their stores, and the bodiless clothing swayed as it swung on its way upward, sleeves buttoned around empty air, men’s jackets collapsed a bit at the chest for want of a solid body inside. On tables, heaps of color lay flung together, sloppily piled, and precarious towers of hats, of caps, flowered scarves and aprons, though she watched one young woman who was probably her age stacking hers as decorously as if she were setting her table for visitors. Tools glinted in that new light. Coops and cages, sagging furniture—the bazaar seemed to have no policy by which anything could be refused the chance to change hands. Way down at the end of the block the food began: She could make out blocks of orange and green, could see the street already littered with rinds and cast-off leaves. And the clamor rose as unstoppably as the stench, mongers crying their wares, calling to each other, arguing. She heard chickens’ nattering that would soon be silenced, and, distant, the two-note call of a train. Coming or going? Taking or bringing? She was not sure whether she wanted to be on that train; surely she could put aside her apprehensions if she were going home.