Melting the Snow on Hester Street

by Daisy Waugh

  But Eleana shook her head. ‘Clara is trapped …’

  ‘I will come back for Clara!’

  ‘It will be too late,’ she said simply, and retreated into the flames.

  By then both elevators had stopped. The heat of the cables, and the weight of the passengers cramming in the cars would have wreaked damage enough. But now, in desperation, the doors to the two shafts had been forced apart. It was the weight of the bodies throwing themselves into the shafts and crashing onto the roof of the cars that did the rest. The roofs had buckled under the stress. The elevators had descended to the building’s basement and – no matter how frantically they were called – they would not rise again.

  With Dora under his arm, Matz looked towards the stairway, or to where it used to be. There was nothing, just a wall of fire. The only way out was through the window, onto the street eighty foot below, or down the elevator shaft. If Dora could hold onto his shoulders, he could cling to the central coil and carry her down.

  ‘Hold on to me,’ he shouted. She nodded, barely conscious. He stretched across the dark shaft, looked down into the drop, nine floors to the building basement. It was too dark to see to the bottom. ‘Hold me!’ he shouted to her again. ‘Do you hear me, Dora? Hold me, and don’t look down.’ She nodded again.

  ‘… Not such a bad man, Matz. Eleana … a lucky girl …’ She smiled, faintly, though he didn’t see it. They were the first and the last kind words she ever had for him.

  The central cable burned hot on his bare hands – singed the flesh, But in the moment, and with the smell of burning flesh all around him, he hardly noticed it. Dora had him in a stranglehold, clinging to his neck – her swollen belly pushing her body to one side, preventing her from wrapping her legs around him. They had travelled a quarter floor, Matz’s head and shoulders still within reach of the burning factory floor – he heard his name called out. He looked up – into the ashen face of Blumenkranz. Blumenkranz, twisted in pain and fear. He lay on the ground, arms flailing towards the cable, the top half of his body protruding into the shaft, as if he might lose his balance and fall in at any second.

  ‘Beekman!’ he cried. ‘Help me! Help me onto the cable, and I can make my own way.’

  Matz glanced at him, and looked away again, continued on his journey. ‘Hold tight,’ he said to Dora.

  ‘Beekman! My legs won’t hold – Help me! I am light. I am lighter than a girl. Pull me onto the cable, won’t you? I only need to reach the cable.’

  Matz glanced again into the face he thought he hated. It was filled with fear. Matz could help him – or not. In such a moment, with one man’s blood on his hands this afternoon already – in such a moment, his hatred meant nothing to him. Taking Dora’s pregnant body with him, he hauled himself back up again – just a foot, nothing more. He would take Blumenkranz’s outstretched arm, carry the weight of him, until he could reach the cable and take hold of it himself.

  Blumenkranz said nothing. He took the arm and clung to it tight.

  Holding onto the cable with one arm, Matz reached for Blumenkranz’s small, thin body, grasped it beneath the armpits and pulled.

  ‘Take the cable!’ Matz grunted. ‘Take it! I swear I can’t hold you for long.’ Blumenkranz took the cable – but the heat singed his hands. He snatched them away and the burn marks were clear to see. He clung to Matz, refusing to let go. ‘It melts my flesh,’ he said. ‘I can’t hold it!’

  ‘And mine too!’ Matz shouted. ‘For God’s sake, grasp the cable!’

  But he wouldn’t do it.

  ‘I cannot take you both … We shall all go down. We shall fall to our death.’

  Blumenkranz glanced at Dora, at her small hands grasped around Matz’s neck: she was slipping already, he thought. She was falling anyway. She was falling, anyway. Keeping one arm tight around Matz’s shoulders, he began to pull Dora’s hands apart. Matz could do nothing. He could see, but he couldn’t stop it. He had no arm free to hold Dora any tighter. He saw what was happening and did the only thing he could: kicked out at Blumenkranz with all his strength. Kicked with one leg, and jerked a knee into Blumenkranz’s groin with the other.

  Blumenkranz howled in pain, and loosened his hold. Too late. He and Dora released their grasp together and they fell, their bodies hitting against the walls of the shaft, bouncing against each other until they landed, their battered bodies: Dora’s first – her child’s heart still beating inside her – and Blumenkranz’s next. They landed on people, dead already, for the most part. Dora and Blumenkranz were dead on impact. The child was dead by the time the authorities retrieved their bodies.

  Matz hung where they released him, and watched them fall, watched Dora’s head smash once, twice, against the shaft, before her body disappeared into the darkness.

  He waited, not moving, listening for a cry. But there was nothing. Nothing to be heard but the raging fire above, and the people dying below – and Eleana still up there. He clambered back up the cable into the burning room. It was quieter than it had been only moments before – disconcertingly quiet. Beneath the black smoke, wherever he turned, bodies lay: and now a jet of water was coming from the open window: they were pumping it up from the street.

  ‘ELEANA!’ he called, yet again. His voice was hoarse, and he couldn’t breath. But he could say nothing else. He stood by the open lift shaft, bent double, shirt sleeve over his mouth, gasping for breath: nobody was standing, not any more. They crawled past him, and he let them pass: to the edge of the shaft, and then to nothing – they disappeared into the black smoke. The pain of his hands, his lungs – his need to see Eleana – it was all that Matz was conscious of. He might have reached across, pulled them back from the edge of the shaft. But they were going to die up here anyway. They were going to die. And he would not leave without Eleana.

  She came towards him, dragging herself on her stomach, on her knees. ‘Oh thank God,’ she said. ‘Clara’s gone. Dead. Everyone dead …’ she choked, laid her head onto the ground before him. ‘I don’t think …’ and then nothing.

  From somewhere, Matz found some last residue of strength. He took her two arms and placed them around his neck. ‘We will go down together,’ he whispered to her. They looked at one another through that smoke, could hardly see one another, but they could feel each other, through it all; feel for certain that they were together again – perhaps one more time. Perhaps for the last time.

  ‘I love you, Eleana,’ he said. She nodded.

  ‘No matter what,’ he said.

  He carried her to the edge of the shaft and, for the second time, launched himself towards the cable. As he took the weight of them both, he felt her arms go limp. He said: ‘Can you hold on? Eleana! Stay awake – you have to hold on!’

  But she couldn’t. Her hands slipped a little further still, and he could feel her body submitting, forgetting how to fight. ‘Stay with me!’ he told her. ‘Hold me!’ But she couldn’t. Softly, she shook her head and closed her eyes. Rested her head on his shoulder.

  ‘… No matter what …’ she murmured.

  He held her: with his legs, with his teeth; he could smell his own flesh burning as he shifted, foot by foot, inch by inch, floor by floor … until the cable seemed to grow cooler, and they could go no further. A soft heap of still-warm bodies awaited them, with Dora in there somewhere, and her baby with its still-beating heart.

  At five o’clock, less than an hour since that thin plume of smoke was first spotted beneath the cutters’ table, the last girl threw herself from the window, and on Washington Place a crowd of ten thousand watched her flaming body fall. It struck against the building as it spiralled through the air, before landing with a slap, the sound softened by the cushion of bodies below. She was the fifty-ninth to jump. And after that, there was nothing much to see. No more falling bodies. Nobody alive up there left to fall; nothing inside left to burn. It was all over. The fire had burned itself out.

  47

  The day’s light had dimmed, the sunny afternoon ha
d been and gone, by the time the fire patrol released Matz and Eleana from that terrible place. Behind them, as they staggered onto the street, the top floors of the building were still smoking and the air still reeked of trauma and death, but the raging fire, at least, was long extinguished. They might have lingered, as other survivors did. They might have been transferred to the hospital. Matz’s scorched hands needed medical attention without doubt.

  Instead, they slipped away. They stumbled through the streets as if the fire was still coming after them, and they didn’t stop until they reached Allen Street. Eleana’s mother opened the door, already dressed in shawl and hat. She had heard the news and was heading out in search of them. She looked from one to the other, faces and clothes smeared in dirt and soot, a smell of burning around them. She opened her mouth to speak – but Matz and Eleana, with the faintest of nods, brushed passed her into the room.

  Isha and Tzivia were at the table. Isha glanced up at them, and at once her face broke into a happy grin. She was about to climb off her chair and tumble into their arms, but she stopped short. Their faces frightened her.

  Batia’s gaze flitted nervously from one to other, taking in what clues she could. She noticed Matz’s hands, raw and weeping, and her eyes rested there. ‘It’s true then,’ she said at last. ‘What they’re saying. Is it true?’

  ‘Worse …’ Matz said simply. He motioned for the children to move, get out of the room, and they did so without a word. He sat down in the seat his daughter had vacated, beckoned Eleana to take the one beside him. ‘It is worse than …’ but he didn’t finish.

  ‘Eleana?’ Her mother looked at her hopelessly. But Eleana could not even raise her eyes. She only shook her head.

  ‘Eleana,’ Batia whispered, ‘where is Sarah?’

  ‘Sarah was on the ninth, Mama. On the ninth floor … I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Eleana only shook her head. She motioned to her husband’s hands. ‘We should clean them, Matz.’

  ‘Where is Sarah?’ her mother asked again. ‘I have to tell something to Tzivia.’

  ‘Mama,’ Eleana said, as if her mother hadn’t spoken. ‘We need the tincture – for those burns. Can you see? They are weeping. We should bandage them …’

  ‘I should go down there …’ Batia said. ‘God knows where Samuel is. And perhaps Sarah—’

  ‘Yes.’ Matz agreed. ‘You probably should go. I am sorry. We should have searched for her.’

  Batia kept gin tucked away for emergencies. She pulled it out now, set it before them – with two cups, old and chipped. From the same cupboard she produced the tincture – a cure-all: or cure-nothing-at-all. But it was alcoholic. It would clean the wound. She placed it before Eleanor, with a cloth.

  ‘I am happy you are home,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I was coming to search for you, Eleana, Matz …’ She wondered vaguely why he had been there at all. But it was not important. She would ask later, when she returned with Sarah. ‘I am going down there now. Perhaps Sarah is …’

  ‘Perhaps they have taken her to the hospital,’ Matz said. But the words rang hollow. ‘She was on the ninth, Batia. She was on the ninth … It would have been worse on the ninth.’

  It was far worse, as they would learn in the days to come. Up on the tenth, the owners had escaped over the rooftops, but on the ninth, the workers were trapped. One stairwell was locked, the other was impassable – a thick wall of fire – before anyone realized what was happening. Sarah was not in hospital. She had been dead for several hours. As Batia prepared to leave, Sarah’s body, her burned arms clinging tight to another, was being lifted from a pile of twenty or more within a few feet of that locked door.

  ‘You should go, Mama. Go now,’ Eleana said. She turned to Matz. She hadn’t asked him. Not yet. Couldn’t quite bring herself to frame the words, because she couldn’t bear to hear his answer. ‘… And Dora?’

  He shook his head. And kept shaking it – as if he couldn’t stop. She touched him gently. He didn’t seem to feel it.

  ‘I tried,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wouldn’t let her go …’

  She didn’t ask who. She didn’t care.

  ‘He pulled her off me, Eleana. She slipped from my grasp …’

  Eleana’s mother listened to this. She could not imagine what horrors he spoke of, didn’t understand. She wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. ‘I’ll go down there then,’ she said again. ‘I’ll find Sarah.’ And then, in a hurried movement, she turned and put her arms around them both: ‘I am so happy you’re here – both of you,’ she said. ‘So happy. Look after the girls. Say nothing to Tzivia. Not yet. Perhaps they will have found her …’

  ‘Batia.’ As she was opening the door into the hallway, Matz called after her urgently. ‘Don’t mention to anyone that we are here, understand?’ he said suddenly. ‘Nobody needs to know.’ She didn’t query it, just nodded her head once, and they were left alone.

  48

  The crowd outside the smoking building had swelled to twenty thousand or more by the time Batia arrived, and the police had formed a cordon around it to keep people back. Behind the cordon, a continual stream of tarpaulin-covered bodies emerged from the higher floors, from the stairways and the lift shafts and from every small nook and cranny of the building. The crowd could only watch and wonder, as the anonymous bodies were laid side by side along the sidewalk.

  Batia struggled to reach the front of the crush. It was eight in the evening. The sky was dark, and the authorities had yet to provide the crowd with any useful information. Was there a list of casualties? Did they know who had survived and who had not? All around were men and women sobbing openly.

  But nobody knew anything. The minutes ticked by, and then the minutes turned into hours. Still more tarpaulined bodies were pulled from the building and laid out before them. It seemed to the onlookers as if it might never end, an endless supply of corpses: first one, then another, and then another, and the minutes ticked by. But nobody knew anything.

  ‘Are there survivors? Batia asked. ‘Are there any more survivors coming out?’ Her neighbour shrugged. ‘We haven’t seen any yet.’

  ‘They must have some at the hospital?’

  ‘St Vincent’s Hospital. But there aren’t many. Five or six maybe … They’re all dead up there, ma’am. Burned alive. It’s what they’re saying. All over in half an hour …’

  ‘Five or six? Is that all?’

  The man nodded. ‘The city morgue’s not big enough. That’s all I know. They’re taking the bodies down to Misery Lane …’

  ‘How many bodies?’

  Again, the man shrugged. ‘They’re saying they ran out of coffins – had to send a boat to Blackwell’s Island to get more …’ He looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry, ma’am … You looking for someone in particular?’

  She didn’t answer him. She pushed on through, closer to the police line, where the crowd was thicker and angrier. She could see the sidewalk now. It was strewn, still, with the trifling belongings of the people who had jumped: purses and combs, hair ribbons, pay envelopes. In the grey evening light, the ground was black with their blood.

  Police officers – the very same officers who had battled with them at the picket line on this very same spot only a year before – were bent, now, over their burnt remains. Each young body needed to be tagged, their distinguishing marks noted (if any remained), and then the bodies boxed up and piled onto the waiting wagons.

  The wagons came, the wagons left – the crowd waited for news. And waited. Until quite suddenly – it seemed to Batia that it came from out of nowhere – there came a great roar of anguish – a hundred voices at least – and the crowd surged forward. The police line fell apart at once and the people rushed the building. Some ran into the open hallway, others made directly to the covered bodies and began pulling recklessly at the tarpaulins.

  Batia stood in the midst of it all, pushed forward by the force of the crowd
and uncertain where to go, what to do next … She had to tell something to Tzivia. How could she leave without finding out what had happened to the girl’s mother? At her feet lay bodies, three deep. She did what her neighbours did – pulled back the sheet closest to her.

  Beneath it were only charred remains. She forced herself not to recoil. But they were of a large man. Of someone else. Not Sarah. She pulled back the next sheet – a strange woman; the next – a body, impossible to tell what or whom. And then, frantically, wildly, nausea making her head spin, a fourth sheet. Beneath it was a young girl, less than twenty, and heavily pregnant. There was blood matted to the top of her skull, where it had struck the shaft of the lift. There was blood, oil – black smears on her face – and more blood drenching her once-white shirtwaist.

  The features, so still, took a moment to come together. It took a moment for Batia to register the similarity between Dora, her face full of light and laughter, and this Dora, dead on the sidewalk at her feet.

  She began to whimper. A policeman pushed her aside and, club aloft, threw her back into the crowd. By the time she could turn to look back, the sheet had been pulled over Dora’s face again.

  But there was no sign of Sarah. Batia would have preferred to go home, take care of her own daughter who had miraculously – thank God – survived. But she imagined Tzivia lying, waiting. There would be Isha with both her parents and Tzivia with neither. She could not return to the girl without an answer. And so she waited, until word came at last from the authorities. They were going to lay out the tagged bodies tonight, in the emergency morgue on Misery Lane, so that friends and relations could begin to identify the remains.

  When the next horse-drawn wagon pulled away, heavy with its cargo of coffins, Batia joined the section of crowd that fell into step behind it.

  49

  Eleanor bandaged his hands as best she could. They didn’t speak. Afterwards she crept into the bedroom. Isha and Tzivia were asleep on the family mattress, their arms wrapped round each other’s necks. Normally, Eleana might have sent Tzivia back to her own family’s room. But tonight she left her sleeping. She closed the door softly and returned to Matz.