“You want me to do that?” Chaya was in awe of her. Though Mr. Winkler had warned her, she was about to issue her first refusal.
Apparently Sara had only been tense before her performance. Now she softened; she even gave Chaya a snaggle-toothed smile that made her look like a small child. “Just do it slow and I’ll show you. Don’t worry, you can ruin a couple of leaves, your first day nobody’s counting.” Chaya had not budged. “It don’t just come, I can remember I was so scared I nearly”—she giggled—“I nearly peed my pants. But it will.”
Chaya sat and was handed a leaf, which turned out to be an implausible combination of dry and damp, strong, fragile, and subject to tearing. It was a mess, her first stogie. It was tumorous and leaked under her quivering fingers, and, like the first piecrusts she had mangled, its end stubbornly refused to seal. Tensile and resilient and silky smooth it was, but with a kind of nap; with an infinitesimal catch, like fur. In time she learned to have her way with this tobacco, to be, in fact, on intimate terms with it, until she saw too much of it, too many hours of the day. But for a while she actually relished it as if it were still, somehow, alive.
9
DESPITE HIS passionate desire to follow her to work, Asher needed his own occupation, and Chaya, accordingly, took him the next morning to the fortress-like school down the block and around the corner. This red-brick structure, three stories tall, windows the height of houses, was so unlike anything they had ever confronted—surely, unlike Chaya’s beloved white wooden schoolhouse, it was not built to be inviting to its constituents, small children and the motherly women who taught them—that Asher rolled his eyes when he saw it. Was that fear or curiosity or some other nameless refusal to do as she bid him? He went forward, given no choice by his sister, hand tight in hers, with the reluctance of a collared prisoner.
It was July; there were no classes. But when they finally found an unlocked front door, heavy as a palace gate, and Chaya went in search of some kind of officialdom, Asher gave a colossal tug and broke her grip. She let him go—there was no kind of trouble he could find himself in down these deserted halls with their floors that shone like spilled water, and the smell of disinfectant pricking her nose. Why did they make everything so huge, so heavy, so dark, when the small souls who would reside here were still so tender? It seemed built to intimidate. The glass of the windows was caged with something like barbed wire.
She had yet to turn up anyone in the office when Asher came racing down the hall waving his hands wildly as if to stop her before she embroiled him in anything. “I don’t want to stay here. I can do all this already.” His voice was querulous. “This is for babies!”
“What can you do?” She knew, of course she knew, that his reading was far beyond the capacity of such a place—probably beyond his teachers’—and so was his figuring, but where could he stay safe while she was at work? “There must be things you can’t do that they could teach you,” she began in the consoling voice she felt dishonest adopting with him, but Asher was already at the huge door, head down, pushing so hard his frail arms quivered, and was out and down the stony steps before she could think of a single one.
ASHER
10
WHEN CHAYA came out onto the top step to look for him, wearing her police face, Asher ran full speed down the street and ducked between two houses. And so began his career of alley-running. He looked both ways. Could it be the entire city was connected by these invisible rivers? He could see there was a second city, darker than the first. It stirred him like a secret.
He slowed to a walk, and the walk took him between privies, some open, some closed; many of their doors hung crooked, the whole little shack collapsing in on itself. The morning stank of dead animal, that corrupt sweetness, and the sizzling, sodden garbage piles that lay every few feet. All the neighborhood’s digestion happened back here: what went in at the front came out at the rear. No wonder you could stay out of sight in these shadows—he tried to imagine his sister chasing him down this narrow aisle, her skirt hem damp and staining, and failed. He suspected you could meet others who were not welcome on the street.
The first he came upon was a man so dirty he blended with the ground he was sitting on, a camouflaged animal. Asher stood before him, feet planted. The dirt-colored man was eating a handful of something he must have salvaged from a rubbish pile; surely he hadn’t cooked it, nor had anyone served him. “Good?” Asher asked, not to taunt but curious. Same food as the rats’. Same foraging place, same hunger.
The man, whose fingers were lost in an unruly gray beard, looked back at him with surprise—Asher, in short pants, could alarm no one larger than a pigeon—his eyes widening, handful of food folded out of sight. Asher, large inside, smiled to reassure him.
“You lost?” the man asked, demonstrating his toothlessness.
Asher considered his freedom. “No, no,” he said jovially, “I never get lost.” This felt rich, smell and all. He did not need classroom walls adorned with the ABCs, windows decorated with paper ducks in a row, cut-out flowerpots bristling with cardboard daisies. The school he needed was right here, stretching before him in both directions, unknown at either end. “Hiding.”
BUT HE came home for supper before darkness demanded it—he did not fancy sleeping in any of the crevices he could have crawled into; too many things could crawl in around him. He had hiked a good long way and back. He passed a whole family chattering in some language made up entirely of shushing sounds, gentle as rain. He passed a legless woman mounted on a platform with wheels, who was singing, though he’d have expected her to howl. He stepped lightly past a sleeping policeman, hat over his eyes, shoulders against a fence, feet out into the alley, splayed this way and that.
No one menaced him. Asher knew they were all invisible. He knew they could only see each other.
The only thing he would need if he spent his days hidden here were some books. His eyes itched for print and the odd consolation of turning the final page, completeness at war with the wish to continue. “The end.” He always said that when he closed the covers, like “Amen,” quietly to himself. Without books he would be lonely, the way his friend Mordechai, back at the farm, felt when he had no music. He knew he could find some if he walked far enough—there must be stores that sold books the way they sold food or shoes, because people needed them to live.
When he came home (seventy-four streets crossed, two turns when an alley ran out, three schools passed or sighted, six churches, two dogs at his heels, neither vicious, four yards where chickens pecked hopelessly at gravel, a rooster who tried to attack him, a man probably dead but possibly asleep facedown, unmoving even as some unidentifiable animal snouted under his pant leg and nipped at his ankles), Chaya said nothing. That meant she was stifling her words. Mrs. Gottlieb circled them silently, knowing it was not her place to intrude, laying out herring and old tomatoes collapsing toward their stems, preceded by a thin soup the color of the brine in a pickle barrel.
When Asher lay down to sleep, on the floor at the side of his sister’s bed of chairs, he called out to her, “Chaya, kiss!”
She bent to him, stared straight into his eyes, waiting, but he had no confession for her, no apology.
“You are not yet eleven years old,” she said against his face. She had to know she could not keep him.
“I am almost eleven years old,” he agreed, cheerful, and looked expectantly back. What, he did not, would not say. “Chai, I love Chicago. Do you love Chicago?”
She sighed. After their trip to that school, she had spent her first day at work. She looked very tired. Saggy and a trifle gray. “I don’t know yet, Ash. Why do you love Chicago?”
He closed his eyes to see what it was that invigorated him. “Because it goes on and on forever. Not like the farm. Like the stars at night, the Milky Way. You can’t count it.”
She kissed his nose, his eyes, one ear. “I am glad you are happy, dear. I am very glad someone is happy.”
THE ALLEYS, when he he
aded uptown, led Asher to the streets, inevitable as river to ocean. He had his bad moments with dogs, although a few followed him, sniffing, out on their own travels. Wearing his thin soles thinner, he learned to reach the soul of the city faster every day. Liveries, a staple company, an ink factory, dyers, purveyors of wine and spirits—more than one—many things he could not fathom, endless, endless the count of doorways, some closed, some open, leading to mysteries.
He crossed the threshold of every establishment intended for the public. A few welcomed, or at least did not discourage, his curiosity—what was he but a negligible boy with a dirty mug and scabby knees from his frequent tumbles across branches and protruding stones. Home at night, subject to his sister’s scrutiny, he stayed reasonably presentable. But his encounters were not all friendly. Often, shopkeepers assumed he was there to steal—for the first time, did his intentions show, or were they suspicious of all small boys who traveled alone?—and they shouted at him before he put a foot across their thresholds. They watched him carefully to make sure nothing walked out with him. Once a woman in a store that sold clocks and watches made him take his hands out of his pockets and open them to her, palms up. She sniffed and looked into his eyes accusingly. “Those could be cleaner.” Lucky she did not try to get him washed. Probably she did not want to touch him.
He chatted with the manager of a shop that sold umbrellas, portmanteaux, wallets, and money clips. “What is that?” he asked abruptly, leading with his shoulder into the open door.
“What, my good fellow?” The proprietor, very short and wide, flattened-looking, asked him amiably. He walked toward Asher, jingling the coins in his pocket.
Asher, at the window, pointed to a silver dollar sign that sat shining on a square of dark blue velvet.
“Why, it’s to hold your mazuma!”
“My mazuma.” Asher blinked with concern, since he could not account for his. “Does everyone have a mazuma?”
The man, not a head taller, bent down to him nonetheless. He smelled waxy, of a serious kind of soap. “If you work hard and save, you’ll have it, and you can come back and spend some of it on that fellow to hold it all together. It’s pure genuine silver plate.” The man seized his shoulders and held them as tight as a punishment. “Are you a good little man? Do you do as you’re told?”
Asher tried to wriggle free but couldn’t. “Nobody tells me anything.”
“Oh, my. Orphaned, then?”
He was about to pitied, which made him feel mean. He set his mouth to look stubborn. “I never had parents. I just sprouted.” He thought that was the word, though he wasn’t entirely sure; right or wrong, it came out shprouted. “One day I wasn’t there and the next I was. Like a mushroom.”
“Or a toadstool!” The manager laughed and unhanded him. Toad? Stool? “Well, come again when you’ve made your million. The rate business is going these days, the clip might just still be there waiting for you.”
He would report this to Chaya—hadn’t she told that man with the carriage, that Still-man, that they had come to make their fortune?
One morning when the weather had begun to turn, he found his first bookstore.
The window of the shop was what Paradise might look like: Each book lay behind a cover he must have dreamed once. Their covers were plain but they were opened to show a mountain of ice above a cold-looking sea. A herd of buffalo as solid as the side of a barn. A dragon whose face was obliterated by his own fire blowing backwards, his tail the length of a kingdom. Asher devoured the pictures and all they promised; an ache of longing spread like heat in his chest. The door had a bell, a pretty tinkle, like high laughter, that was so amusing he jiggled it a few times so that he could hear it again.
It took a while for anyone to emerge, but when he did—squinting in Asher’s direction, a man with soft tufts of white on his head and above his lip, like the cotton that blows from certain trees in June—Asher had not moved. He stood before the ranks of shelves with the perfect silence of an acolyte about to fling incense from his censer, looking up. Could there be this many books in the whole world?! He had never thought about where they came from, the little chunks and slivers of the rock that Chaya borrowed and brought him—like food, like milk or weather or sleep, they simply were, and were his due. He woke, he ate and breathed, he read. Languages he sucked out of the air.
Asher was afraid to talk to the storekeeper because he knew what he needed to do, and he would not want to steal from a friend.
The old man, whose eyes appeared defective, came and stood very close to him, to see him. “May I offer you some assistance?” he asked, respectfully, as though Asher were not three and a half feet tall.
A smile, a shrug. He was safe for now from fraternizing with the man from whom he would, with joy and regret, appropriate as many books as he could hide when he came back tomorrow prepared, with stretched-out pockets and a sack; the man against whom he would commit his first Chicago robbery of something he really wanted. (The shoelaces had been a tax on nastiness.) In Christa, everything he took from the stores downtown had been for Chaya. Negligibles. Here, he was so hungry, the books would be for him alone.
11
IT SHOULD not have come as a surprise: The landlord was at the door relentlessly, and Mrs. Gottlieb, though she tried, was no breadwinner. She took in sewing, not the fancy kind that dressmakers did but fine hemming and minor repairs, until, her eyes clouded over with cataracts, and she told Chaya, “It always feels like early morning just before the sun is up. Gray. But then it never gets light.” When she couldn’t tell her stitches from the print of the fabric, that was the end of that.
Through her new friends at Winkler’s, Chaya heard about another job, at a “buckeye,” a tiny band of workers who made cigars, not quite legally, in someone’s apartment. As if she had unfilled hours to spare, at Winkler’s until five thirty, she began to go directly to Yanowitz’s place with—if she could save it from her dinner—half an apple to see her through, or perhaps a banana, gone brown as one of her tobacco leaves by then, from sitting in her pocket in the cloakroom.
The room in which they worked was little better than a sty. The shades were drawn, though after the first few hours their view would have been nothing but darkness anyway. The tables were so crowded together it took an athlete’s contortions to pass between them, and from the kitchen at the rear, out of sight, arose the odors of the Yanowitz family’s supper, to which they were not invited. Not that his own children did not have to work alongside them sometimes, their small fingers already adept at the craft Chaya was still trying to master. She worried about them—there was one girl of perhaps ten, and a boy not much older. Did they have no school to wake up for? Once she asked the girl, timidly, and she simply laughed, with what Chaya took to be bitterness, but—if she did not enjoy learning from books—might have been sour pleasure.
The other workers were three women and four men, but by the time Chaya climbed the dusty stairs and took her place, she had given too much of her energy to the day’s work to have more than a word for any of them. She must have seemed unmannerly, but, truly, she did not care. There were, she had heard, Readers—men or women who actually read from novels to the workers in Cuban factories, and to the cigar-makers in Tampa, Florida, in a place called Ybor City, but whether such delights would have kept her keen or lullabied her toward sleep at ten o’clock when her eyes were crossed with exhaustion she could only wonder.
Her fingers were nicked and a urinous yellow, her back was in spasm when, the trolley clanging into the distance, she walked toward Liberty Street just before midnight. Her wages for the week, both combined, would have made a very stingy tip for the real dinner she dreamed of when, rarely, she passed Richelieu’s or Kinsley’s or—she had never seen it but had heard it described—the gloriously enticing Palmer House. She had begun to hold her skirt up with a length of ribbon Mrs. Gottlieb stripped off a dress she found beyond repair, but at least her shoes no longer pinched because her feet, like the rest of her
, had dwindled.
She saw so little of Asher those days she was worse than wrung out, she was beyond anger. Losing her brother to the alleys was not what she had come here to do. Then again, though he might have gone feral as a cat, he was free. She exhausted herself, sometimes to the point of near unconsciousness, her fingers thickened to calluses that could respond to nothing but the slippery thickness of leaf skin. Now, while Mrs. Gottlieb and Asher slept in silence, she was the one who lay, aching, subject to fits of weeping that filled what little was left of the night when she returned from Yanowitz’s shop. When she closed her eyes, her mother’s face loomed up, unforgiving.
When she did sleep, she dreamed to the rhythm of her work. Not that she made cigars in her sleep, but whatever phantasms she pursued seemed to rush forward jerkily, and the little dramas that happened in her dreams took place in stages, throbbingly regular—like the splitting, the pressing, the wrapping—so that she woke unrested. One night she felt herself walking a crooked path through a field. From time to time she fell and the tall grass, urgently rustling, hid her till she found her footing, and when she came to the edge of a pond—their terrible stagnant cow pond, so familiar, so foul—she peered down into its still, dark water. But no face came up to her, not hers, not her brother’s. She woke to the desolate feeling that they had disappeared. Where were they in the world? She looked around the crowded room, sad furniture hulking in shadow, and heard the sounds of the street pressing their way through the window. She had thought herself heroic, making her way to this place, but she had not come to something, she had only run away from something else. Chicago? Chicago, so full, so empty. What had she done to their lives?
After a brief autumn, an early winter had fallen like a doom upon the city. That Farmers’ Almanac had been correct: Snow piled higher than the refuse on Maxwell Street; the carts and wagons thrust up through it like hulks, the way she remembered the stubbornest survivors of their summer fields, the corn turned straw, the browned cabbage leaves, the sunflower stalks. Horses kicked up dirty slush as they tramped along and the bottoms of her skirts were ringed with filth; once her feet slipped out from under her and she tumbled into an icy puddle that soaked her through to her drawers. The sky was neither blue nor gray but as white as another swathe of snow. The apartment was so cold that any liquid—Asher’s milk, Chaya’s tea—left on the table turned to ice. She was appalled to discover that the snowflakes stenciled on their windows, which at first she thought were lovely, lived their little life inside the glass, and a long life it was. It seemed no less a blight, this winter, than it had been in Wisconsin: The pump froze, and in the stove, because Mrs. Gottlieb had compelled herself to ration the coal, the fire quivered weakly in the downdraft and threatened to die. Night fell outside Winkler’s undersea windows at four o’clock.
The Lake on Fire Page 8
