The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  “Do you think I’m ugly?” Nehama asked, seating herself at the table to write up the accounts.

  “Ugly? I wouldn’t say that. Your hair is too curly, but it matters more that it’s dark.” Rivka lifted a bale of fabric onto the counter, unrolling it and checking for holes. She wore a kerchief over her hair but wasn’t too pious not to let a few golden strands fall across her forehead. “Too bad you don’t have our coloring. I mean mine and Father’s. Jewish boys go crazy for fair hair. But your eyes are nice. Very blue. And you wouldn’t be so dark if you ate eggs.”

  “I hate eggs.” Nehama erased a sum with a rubber. She added every column twice, and each time it came to something different.

  “You hate everything good for you.”

  “Not everything. I’d like a shop. I could run it.”

  “There’s no money for you to have a shop. You have to be practical about what you can do.”

  Nehama kept a list of things she might do. Page one: businesses. Importing cotton, wheat, eggs, oranges. Selling corsets, rope, kerosene, wooden barrels. Page two: occupations. There wouldn’t be so many for a woman, but never mind. She wrote them in large letters to fill up the page, all her pent-up energy making the penciled letters as dark as black ink. “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? I could be a teacher like Leah and Shayna-Pearl.”

  “You want to talk ugly? Leah’s scarred from the smallpox. It’s a mercy from God she became a teacher. And Shayna-Pearl is so bad-tempered no one could stand her for a week. Thank God that there was enough money for them to go to school. But now, unfortunately—well, when it’s the youngest’s turn there just isn’t much left. You never liked to face reality, but there comes a time when you have no choice.”

  “You could send me to school, Rivka.” It wasn’t fair. Nehama added up the accounts herself. She knew what was going in and going out.

  “And don’t I have my own children to consider? Someone has to tell you how the world works, and I can see it’s up to me. Make yourself into an attractive girl, Nehama, and your dowry will stretch further. I mean attractive in temper, not just in looks. You should eat eggs because they’re good for you and never mind if you like them. That’s what makes a nice girl.”

  “Fine. If I can’t do anything I want here, then I’ll go somewhere else.” Along the river she’d seen the large boats that carried everything a person might dream about. She could be on such a boat, the force of her desires driving the steam engine. A life that she made herself, one that was worth remembering at the end of it. “Maybe I’ll go to London. Girls don’t need dowries there.”

  “I never heard anything so stupid. You don’t know what you want.”

  “How am I supposed to know? Every time I take a step, I have a sister telling me when to lift my foot and when to put it down.”

  “Thank God, or who knows where you’d end up. Just because Mama makes you a dress in the latest fashion, you think you’re a special salami. Let me tell you, Nehama, someday you have to find out that you’re just plain beans and you give everyone gas.” Rivka slapped a roll of cotton onto the counter. “You see this? It would make a serviceable dress for everyday. The dirt won’t show on it. If you want I’ll give it to you at cost, Nehameleh, and you can save a couple of yards if you make it up yourself without any fancy-shmancy business. A mother that sees you in this will realize that you know what’s what and she’ll think of giving her son to you.”

  “I don’t like it,” Nehama said. “It looks like an old woman’s.”

  “All right. Insult me. That’s what I should expect. Just remember when you end up depending on handouts for a piece of bread that if you weren’t so stubborn, it could have been avoided.”

  Rivka went back to her bales of fabric in a huff, and Nehama added up the columns of numbers once again, hoping that with God’s help the sums would stay the same.

  On Shobbos they all sat together in the women’s gallery of the synagogue, Nehama, her mother, and all her sisters. It was a modern synagogue with an open balcony, where the women could look straight down at the Holy Torah as it was paraded in its crown of silver and its gown of velvet. Her next older sister, Bronya, was breathing noisily. Seven months pregnant and still she did business every market day, charging a few pennies to weigh goods on the scale she brought to the market square in a wheelbarrow. Her husband was a carpenter, not a bad trade, but he stank of onions. How could Bronya stand him? “Your turn next, Nehama,” she said.

  “Not me. I’m helping Father. He can’t afford to marry me off.”

  “I hear the matchmaker’s been sniffing around.” Hinda shifted her baby from one breast to the other. “I ought to give her some tips about you.”

  “There’s a fine young man on the next street to ours,” Bronya said. “You can smell him coming. Aah—dead animal skins. But a tanner can still be very pious. And just think how you can help him by collecting cow shit for tanning.”

  “Such language! Don’t tease your sister,” Mama said. “You know how sensitive she is to odors.”

  Down below among the men, the Holy Torah, which has no odor, was unrolled all the way to the beginning. The reader chanted: “And the earth was chaos and void. On the face of the deep, in the darkness, there was a great wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters …”

  She’d show them all. The time for thinking was over.

  Nehama secretly bought the ticket the day that one of her sisters pointed out the tanner and another told her to keep her ideas to herself when the matchmaker came. She didn’t consider everything she was leaving until she stood on the boat, looking back at the docks, where no one waved good-bye. The spray from the river and the rain from the heavens splashed her face, diluting her tears the way London merchants diluted milk with water and mixed flour with sawdust. And in the blink of an eye, the Vistula River, queen of Poland, flowing between green banks of willow trees, became the Thames, empress of the world, slapping the base of the Tower of London, where queens were beheaded. On the gray waters of a nation that disdained spices and ate boiled beef, steaming ships came in with the west wind, carrying perfume and elephant tusks and Sardinian sailors with great gold earrings.

  Thrawl Street

  So this was an English house. There was an iron stove instead of a tile oven, a painting of dogs in red jackets playing cards, and a large menorah with nine silver cups for oil. The menorah was on the top shelf of an open wooden cabinet, beside it a set of leather volumes in Hebrew. Nehama couldn’t read the titles, but she could write her initials in the dust.

  Mr. Blink worked very hard. All through his meal, men came to call, and for their sake he interrupted his dinner, inspecting goods and making payment from his cashbox. Nehama was uneasy though there wasn’t any reason. After all, what kind of shopkeeper back home didn’t deal with gentiles? They brought all sorts of small things: silk handkerchiefs, a gold chain, a silver spoon, a pocket watch, ivory buttons. One of the visitors smelled of the river, and one of them smelled of the sewers, and the one that smelled of freshly turned earth brought a wedding ring set with red stones. Nehama wiped the gravy from her plate with a piece of soft bread. It didn’t occur to her that it might not be kosher.

  She spent the night on a cot in the kitchen. When she woke up the next morning, Mr. Blink’s housekeeper gave her some breakfast, sweating heavily as she put the bowl of porridge on the table, and Nehama surreptitiously covered her nose with her hand. The housekeeper sniffed and muttered, pointing to the floor, but if she expected Nehama to wash it, then she was much mistaken. In truth, God alone knew what she was saying, and it was a relief when she went out.

  For a while, Nehama sat at the table, too excited to eat. People said that she had her grandmother’s eyes, and hadn’t she come by boat from someplace small to a bigger world just like her grandmother, who grew up in a small village? It was a shock, Grandma Nehama’s first view of the town with the cathedral rising high on the hill. She was young and coming to marry a man with a baby because her fam
ily couldn’t afford anything better than to make her a second wife. Standing on the boat and smelling the docks of Plotsk, she almost changed her mind, but what could she go back to? So she married the man. His daughter was a skinny baby that was fading away, and of all her children this one was her favorite because she had brought it back to life. When the daughter grew up and had five girls, it was Grandma Nehama who took care of them. It’s easier to fall in love with a skinny baby than with a hairy man, she always said.

  Nehama stood at the window, wiping away the dust with her sleeve so that she could look out on a street of old and crumbling houses not very different from the heim. It wasn’t so frightening. As soon as she got her entrance papers, she could go down and walk in the street like a free person who has no sisters. She wasn’t sure what she’d do next, but it would be something marvelous and she’d send for her family. Then she, the youngest sister, would be first.

  If she was really listening, she might have heard a grandmother’s voice telling her: You want to know about London? If only you’d listen to me, shaynela. I know what’s what. Believe you me. In Plotsk you had seven thousand gentiles. Here there are five million. You think Plotsk is an ancient town. After all, kings are buried in its cathedral. But that’s nothing. Whitechapel Road was a Roman highway. You think in Plotsk people are poor? Then open your eyes. When these people don’t have work, potatoes and onions are a luxury to think on while they boil a crust of bread with salt. Thieves stole the lead from these old roofs, and the water pours through. You want water? You should have it in a lucky hour. Here the water company turns on the tap for just ten minutes a day, please God. And if you just walk a little further on, you’ll come to the bank where the money of the world pours without end and everyone in this street is holding out his hands, hoping to catch some. If he has to knock a person over the head to get his, that’s good too. Be careful, shaynela.

  Barrows clattered in the street as she ran down the stairs to Mr. Blink’s pawnshop. He was presiding over his shelves, taking a pair of Sunday boots from a tired wife and giving her some coins in exchange. Waiting by the counter was a man wearing a uniform. He had a thick mustache and a dark mole on the bridge of his nose, and though he was too scrawny to be impressive, it was never a good thing to be in the vicinity of an official. Mr. Blink would deal with him. Perhaps he already had. She didn’t think otherwise, for there’d always been someone to take care of things at home in the courtyard surrounded by small houses.

  “Good morning, Mr. Blink,” she said. “Have you arranged for my papers already?”

  He turned toward her, his face covered with stubble like a hedgehog’s skin, and there was no friendliness in his eyes today. “Are you crazy? Didn’t my housekeeper tell you to stay upstairs, out of the way?”

  “I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I didn’t understand her. I thought she wanted me to wash the floor.”

  “Well, you’ve made a mess of things, that I can tell you. This man here is a police officer.”

  “Perhaps I can give him something and he’ll forget it,” Nehama said, trying not to cry. “Is there a place I can exchange my money?”

  “It’s too late for that,” Mr. Blink said. “You’ll have to go with him, and I’ll do my best for you from this side.”

  “Don’t let him take me.”

  Mr. Blink was shaking his head sadly. She should have tried harder to understand the housekeeper. Her sisters were right. She never listened.

  “I told you that I’ll do what I can. I’m sorry, my dear. Very sorry.” He stood with his arms crossed, eyes filled with disappointment as the policeman grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out to the police wagon.

  Whitechapel Road

  They rode through the great street where carcasses swung huge and bloody, music came from every other door, and steam hung out of cookshops above the carts and carriages and hansom cabs. Business was several layers thick: stores with their glass fronts reflected passersby, on the pavement stalls were heaped high, costermongers stopped with their barrows while men called customers to see the wares inside. The high road smelled of the meat market at one end and the hay market at the other, and Nehama couldn’t hear her own thoughts for the sound of tolling bells and a marching band. It was just as well, as all her thoughts were grim.

  “Mr. Blink will fix everything,” she said helplessly. No one could understand her. No one but Mr. Blink, who spoke Yiddish like a brother.

  “You sound like all them other girls of his,” the policeman replied in his garbled language. “Foreigners every one. But it’s no concern of mine. I get my quid from him regular to bring you in. Right, here you go.” He was leading her toward a building that seemed too important for a newcomer’s papers. It was huge and rotund, surrounded by gardens of rhododendron bushes, standing over the street of old gabled houses like a sultan on an elephant. Nehama recognized the word “London” on the archway. The second word, “Hospital,” must mean something like City Authority. Beside the hospital was a mountain of rubbish, and on the stinking mountain women were digging for whatever they might find to sell.

  Nehama went through the doors. What else could she do with the policeman gripping her arm? The entrance was so clean it made her nostrils hurt. Women hooded in white like the sultan’s harem glided here and there. What did they do in the eternal light of gas jets, these women with their knowing looks? One of them led her to an office, where she was motioned to sit in a cane chair. Behind the shining desk an official took notes. His jacket was well fitted; a gentleman, then. Standing beside the desk was a young man whose coat fit even better, and on the wall behind him was the portrait of a short, fat woman in a crown.

  “Now you might see what I’ve been telling you,” the older man said. “This is how we stop venereal infection from spreading. Lectures are not the same as a firsthand look.” He wore spectacles while he wrote, removing them to study Nehama. He looked tired, as officials often do. “Constable?”

  “I caught her soliciting, sir.”

  “Mr. Blink,” Nehama said, nodding firmly to let them know that she had a connection in London, who would straighten everything out as soon as he could.

  “It were a captain of the navy she approached,” the policeman said. “She seen me and run.”

  “Thank you, Constable.” The official turned to the young man. “The Contagious Diseases Act allows the police to pick up anyone they might have reason to suspect of prostitution. We’ll have the examination next. If the patient shows symptoms we’ll keep her here for treatment.”

  “And if not?”

  “She’s released, of course. Though heaven knows we may see her here again before long.”

  The official rose from his chair and came around to Nehama, moving her head to the left and right, lifting her chin as he examined her. Did she look innocent enough? “Nurse, please,” he said, opening the door.

  At his call for someone, Nehama nearly fainted, thinking that it was a guard coming to take her to prison. But it was only one of the women in white robes, who took her by the arm as they walked along a corridor with many doors, following behind the official with his tired, reedy voice and the gentleman who walked bowlegged, as if he’d rather be on a horse.

  “I expect to join my father in his practice after my training’s complete,” the young man said. “I don’t believe he sees many of this sort in Harley Street.”

  “Quite so. I’ve been bitten by more than one. A few less hysterical ladies for me to examine would be welcome.” The older man sighed. “I’d be relieved if the Contagious Diseases Act was amended. There’s been some discussion of applying it only to women meeting sailors at the docks and those in towns where soldiers are billeted.”

  “If I may differ, sir. All men have appetites, and good men are diseased. Even my father sees them, and with all due respect, any girl on these streets is likely to offer her favors for her supper. That is casual prostitution, and she won’t seek treatment on her own, I assure you.”

 
; “Quite so. I can’t argue with that. In here.”

  He opened the door, and Nehama was more confused than ever. This wasn’t any prison cell. There was a cabinet in the room. A table with straps. A trolley with instruments.

  “Up you go,” the nurse said as she turned up the lamp hanging above the table.

  Nehama looked at the oak cabinet, with its vials and jars and mortar and pestle for grinding powders. This official now checking her ears and pulling on her jaw with his hand that smelled of spirits, was he a doctor? She wasn’t ill, but that was all to the good. They would write a certificate of health and Mr. Blink could bring it to the officials. Then she would get her entrance papers. Perhaps there would even be a discount and she would be able to repay Mr. Blink very soon.

  “One ought to be careful of foreigners, if I may say so, sir,” the white lady said.

  “I’m not sick,” Nehama said in Yiddish. “You see that, don’t you?”

  “Throat’s clear,” the older doctor answered, pushing Nehama back as if she were to lie down. “Open the dress, Nurse.”

  Nehama shook her head as the white lady touched her buttons. What kind of girl did they think she was? Looking in her mouth was one thing, this quite another. The lady pushed her hands aside, and Nehama jumped off the table. Enough was enough. “I’m telling you. I’m fine. Show me where to wait for Mr. Blink.” The policeman knew Mr. Blink. He could send a message. Nehama made a writing motion with her hands.

  “You see what I mean, sir? Turn on you in an instant, they can.” The lady took hold of Nehama’s shoulders.

  The official doctor grabbed Nehama firmly by the arm. She tried to shake him off. “Please, sir. Send a message with the policeman.”

  They were lifting her back onto the table under the light as hot as the sun. The older man held her down while the lady buckled the straps over her arms. What did they think to do to her? What would they dare? She kicked the table, the doctor, the woman in white, the young gentleman between the legs, and he gasped. The doctor slapped her. “That’s enough!”