The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  After the night’s work was done, Nehama lay awake in Sally’s bed, the younger girl’s arms around her while she listened to the wind as if it were a song she’d forgotten and might remember if only she listened hard enough.

  MINSK, 1876

  Moskovskaya Street

  Winter came to Minsk, and snow rose in great drifts reflecting streetlamps while sleighs carried men of substance home from their factories and offices. In the evenings they took their fur-cloaked wives to the theater, where the choice of the season was Italian opera, the Italians being hot-blooded as everyone knew, hoping that some heat would waft from the stage to the audience. Whoever could afford to burn coal kept their cellars full, and their stoves blew smoke at the wind as it knocked bricks from chimneys. But in the garden on Moskovskaya Street, the ghost of the first wife didn’t feel the cold. She sat high in the apple tree, shaking the branches as if it were imperative to get someone out of the warm house into her garden.

  Emilia sat in her mother’s dressing room, glancing now and then at the window while she read Russian poetry aloud to please Father, who could hear it from his room. She wished that she looked like Mama, but she was nothing like either of her parents. Mama said it was a family trait to take after an aunt or uncle or great-grandfather, each generation following a circuitous path through its descendants. Emilia was golden-haired and gray-eyed like one of her aunts. She hadn’t met any of them—the daughters of a rich man are sent far and wide when they marry for the family’s honor.

  “They say your cousins look like me,” Mama said, putting down the letter from her sister while Freida twisted her hair into intricate knots. She picked up the silver-backed mirror. “A little more curl here, if you please.”

  “Emilia!” Father called. “What are you doing in your mother’s room?”

  She turned to the Russian verses again, but it was too late. As sure as the moon is jealous of the sun, he was coming out of his dressing room, buttoning his high collar. “Are you telling the child stories?” he asked.

  “Only about deportment at dinner.”

  “She’ll be eating in the kitchen,” Father said.

  “Yes, but she won’t be a child forever.”

  “Just don’t give her any of your ideas.” He wasn’t looking at Emilia, his eyes were all for Mama. On the wall above her dressing table, there was a painting with a hawk hovering high above the goats, as if considering which one would make its dinner. “Who do you think the child looks like?” he asked, switching from Russian to Yiddish. The despised mother tongue was suitable for such discussions.

  “My older sister. Exactly her,” Mama said, as if she hadn’t answered the same way a thousand times before. She began to rise from her chair but sat down when he shook his head. Father preferred her to be seated. She was taller than he, but his suit was cut by the tailor who clothed the count.

  “I believe the child looks a lot like the editor of the Minsker Journal,” Father said. “He used to be our guest much too often, I think.” Sometimes it was an editor. Sometimes their old lawyer. Or a physician. They had to have a different doctor every year. Emilia’s neck began to itch. Soon her feet would itch, too, but she didn’t dare scratch.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mama said. Why did she have to argue? It only made Father worse. The apple tree beat harder at the window. It was the first Mrs. Rosenberg, but Father took no more notice of her now than when she was alive.

  “So I’m ridiculous.” Father’s voice got quieter.

  “You know what I mean,” Mama said nervously. The maid edged toward the door. “What have your guests to do with me?”

  “So I’m asking myself.” He picked up Mama’s mirror as if to see her true face in it. Emilia tried not to breathe. He seemed to have forgotten her.

  “I’m busy with the house,” Mama said. “Such a large house needs more than one servant. If you gave me a bigger allowance, I might have a minute free to go out, but as it is …”

  “So now I’m an idiot and a miser, too. Very good. But blind, I’m not. I saw the way you looked at the lawyer. And he’s old enough to be your uncle. It’s disgusting.” Emilia wasn’t sure what was disgusting about it, but even so she knew enough to be ashamed.

  Father turned the mirror over. A gift from Mama’s older sister, the one she said that Emilia resembled, it was engraved with all the sisters’ names.

  “He was just bringing papers for you to sign,” Mama said. She didn’t sound ashamed.

  “An excuse, you always have. Do you practice it in front of the mirror?” His voice was hardly more than a whisper, his mouth twisting as he broke off the handle with a loud snap, throwing it into her lap. And though Emilia held herself very still, Mama flinched. Then Father took the letter opener from her table and scratched the names on the silver back of the mirror. He had broken everything her sisters sent her. She didn’t have a single picture of them left. “Never forget, my wife, that I can send you both packing,” he said. In the painting above Mama’s dressing table, the hawk was very small above the green hills. There was a villa with white columns. That was where they’d go when Father sent them packing.

  “Your daughter has done nothing to deserve such an insult. And let me tell you, neither have I.” But it wasn’t true or else Father wouldn’t be looking at Mama like that. He turned his eyes to Emilia, examining her like a spot of blood in an egg, spoiling it, making it unkosher, and eggs were so expensive. She couldn’t help but reach a hand to surreptitiously scratch her neck. Shame and fear were such itchy feelings, and hatred the itchiest of all.

  Mama stood up, the ivory handle falling to the floor. “Freida,” she called. “Come back and help me off with this dress, please. I’m feeling faint. Mr. Rosenberg will have to greet the guests himself.”

  “Sit down,” he said. And she did, as always.

  “My dear husband …”

  The words went on, but Emilia wasn’t listening anymore. She was looking at the style of Mama’s new dress with the mother-of-pearl buttons, imagining that she was grown up and had just such a dress herself. When she was grown up, there would be admiration in every man’s eyes. After Emilia and Mama ran away to their Italian villa, they’d hold salons, Mama playing the piano and Emilia dressed in a white gown embroidered with rosebuds. She’d greet the guests, extending her gloved hand just so, and she would tell her admirers that she was named after the Polish heroine Emilia Plater, who had disguised herself as a man to lead a cavalry troop against the Russians.

  Father and Mama went down for dinner, his steps firm and quick, hers slower as she held on to the oak banister. Emilia reached behind Mama’s dressing table to take the book from its hiding place. One Hundred Steamships and Clippers. She was copying the illustration of a two-thousand-ton steamship with a clipper bow, one funnel, three masts, and room for fifty-four first-class passengers. Later she’d paint the drawing with watercolors and name the ship La Bella. Painting, like playing the piano, was an accomplishment that wives should have. Maybe Father would even allow her to pin the drawing on her bedroom wall. No one else would know that behind one of the first-class portholes, the one she’d paint with yellow curtains, were Emilia and her mother.

  Outside the window the first Mrs. Rosenberg would be watching from the apple tree. She shouldn’t be left behind in an empty garden. Emilia pushed aside the curtains, throwing open the window to tell Mrs. Rosenberg that she was welcome to come live with them in the villa among the grazing goats.

  The moon was a crescent in the sky, visible between the branches of the apple tree as if Mrs. Rosenberg held it in her dark lap. Emilia didn’t bless the moon. She hadn’t learned how. Her mother was too modern to teach her the women’s prayers. But Emilia didn’t need to empty her heart before heaven as long as she could speak to Mrs. Rosenberg, who shook the branches of the apple tree in answer. She knew what it was like to live in the house in Moskovskaya Street, and had left the only way she could.

  Sometimes a person has to make the best of an
unpleasant decision.

  More snow was falling. But it would quickly disappear as the roots of the first Mrs. Rosenberg’s apple tree dug down into the warm deep of the earth.

  LONDON, 1876

  The Horn and Plenty

  The streets were cold and wet, and the Sunday boots were pawned, yet in the Horn and Plenty, women stood at the bar and ate while men played draughts at the tables. They lived for the pub, the naphtha lamps, the warm stove, the posters of music hall singers, the barmaid in her orange and yellow dress, the games and the songs as cheerful as in a place where you might expect to live past the age of thirty. A woman needed a place to talk, leaning on the counter while she gave a finger of gin to her baby. The one with the long face was telling how her bloke had put a shilling on a horse, and when the horse won, they’d stand everyone for a drink. She was a casual prostitute, on the turf just now and then. The rest of the time she worked for the Squire, who was her uncle, following his whores to make sure they came back.

  Nehama was writing numbers on the back of a Christian tract while she stood at the bar with Fay and Sally and the woman who promised to stand them a drink, whose name was Lizzie. She had thin hair falling over her face, and she wore a white apron in the old-fashioned style. Nehama had a proper whore’s dress, bright and shiny and ruffled. And proper East End boots that let in water at the seams. In her pocket she had a letter from her mother:

  “My Nehameleh, you should stay well and not have any sickness from the damp. It is a bitter thing for a mother to lose her child and I will never understand what you did. How could you leave us all? Only a mother can know such pain. My eyes are so swollen, they look like bees. So you should know, I did what you asked though Father didn’t want I should give away your dowry. I split it among your sisters, and it was worse than throwing dirt on a grave. They all forgive you except Bronya as you know she holds a grudge and Shayna-Pearl because even though you didn’t take anything from her, she expected to make a teacher of you though God in heaven knows you should be married and living under your mother’s roof. Remember to wear your woolens, it’s so damp this time of year. God forbid you should take sick. Your mother.”

  Once a month Nehama wrote her mother the sorts of lies that could be expected. At night she forgot the cold while she worked the trade, and afterward she kept warm by sleeping with Sally from dawn till noon, arms around each other in the small bed they shared. Whenever she thought of throwing herself in the river, she reminded herself that the younger girl needed her. Everyone must have a reason for living. If you couldn’t hold your gin, then there had to be something else.

  “It’s a long shot,” Lizzie was saying. “That’s the only kind worth putting anything on.” Her baby was asleep, its mouth open. “If our horse places, then I’ll have me a house with a garden, I will.”

  “Not me,” Sally said. When she wasn’t working, she wore a brimmed bonnet that half hid her face. “What would I want with a garden? I’ll have a wig made from real human hair. And a dollhouse with ten rooms and three staircases, and that’s not all because I’d have a little desk, too.”

  “Why do you want a desk?” Fay asked. “You can’t write.”

  “For the drawers,” Sally said, taking a swallow of gin. She had to stand on a box to reach the counter. “For the secret drawers.”

  The barmaid put a jug on the counter for a thickset man who used to be a stonecutter and still wore the leather cap, though no one had wanted stone cut by hand for years. “What about you, Nell?” she asked. “If your horse places.”

  Nehama looked up from her calculations. “If I had a winning horse,” she said, “I’d go to the seaside. I’d take us all to the theater on the pier, and we’d have silk fans to flap like this.” She picked up the Christian tract and fanned herself like a lady. She was making an extra bit from rolling men, and she figured she could buy her freedom in—she multiplied and divided like her oldest sister had taught her—seventeen months. “If only I didn’t have to pay for the entrance fee,” she muttered. “You know what it’s like, Fay. A stone around your neck.”

  “What are you talking?” Fay asked.

  “The entrance fee for foreigners to get their papers to stay in London.” Nehama went over the numbers again, hoping she’d made a mistake.

  “There’s no entrance fee. Why do you think they call it the free land?”

  “I mean the ten pounds the Squire paid for me,” Nehama said.

  Fay laughed, all her good teeth showing and a couple of the bad ones. She wore a black straw hat that flapped as she laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. It went to Mr. Blink.” She waved her hand, and the barmaid poured another glass of gin. “It’s a finder’s fee, that’s all. He’s good at finding, he is.”

  “No entrance fee,” Nehama repeated. Then there wasn’t any Newcomers’ Committee and Mr. Blink had tricked her from the start. She’d been the fool. A bloody fool, and for that the world requires a usurious rate of interest.

  “What difference does it make?” Fay asked. “You have to make it up just the same and pay for your lovely dress, too.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Her hands were cold and her belly hot. She pushed her plate of sheep’s trotters toward Sally. “Here, you have the rest.”

  “And me?” Fay lit her short pipe. “I’m a mother’s child, too. What’s the matter with you? Doesn’t a landsmann come first?”

  Nehama didn’t answer. The Squire was waiting, and she had to make her way to the back of the pub between the rough-hewn tables of men drinking and playing draughts while they boasted of how much they’d got from coshing and rolling. The Squire smiled. He always smiled when he was annoyed.

  “Well?” he asked. His table was round, just big enough for three to sit and talk while they drank, heads close together. He was knitting another scarf, this one of gold and silver. The other one had been found on a customs agent, ankles and wrists tied together, his jaw broken.

  She handed the Squire a pile of money, and he let the coins drop through his fingers, clattering on the table. One fell onto the floor. He didn’t move to pick it up. He was drinking with his old friend who smuggled tobacco and the customs agent they were bribing, the smuggler wearing his greatcoat and the customs agent his uniform. The two men were eyeing her as if they could get her cheap, being the ponce’s friends. It was the same word in Yiddish and in English: ponce. Where did it come from first?

  “That’s all?” the Squire asked.

  Nehama nodded. She’d given Sally half her take this morning. The younger girl’s cough had kept her from earning what would be expected.

  “It’s not enough,” the Squire said.

  There were two kinds of criminals, liars and thieves. Mr. Blink was one and she was the other, so she shrugged, and then she spoke in a voice that didn’t seem to belong to her but said cheerfully, “There’s not many customers about. It’s too cold.”

  “How much do you owe me now?” the Squire asked. There was another crack in the glass that covered the map of London on the wall, but the door marked PRIVAT was just the same. He sometimes took a girl there for rough pleasure after time was called and the pub emptied. “You’re the best of my girls, Nell.” The Squire looked at her fondly. There was so little fondness in this street.

  “This is everything,” she said, and hated herself because she wondered if his lips were as soft as they seemed. His hands were never chapped, nor his lips. He made up some kind of grease for his skin that he’d learned about in his sailing days.

  “Are you quite all right, then?” he asked. The customs agent stoked his pipe. “Perhaps you want a doctor.”

  She flinched. How did he know that she still had bad dreams about the examination in the hospital? “I’m very well, thank you,” she said.

  “I ought to bring you to the infirmary. You might have a disease.” The Squire drummed his fingers on the table. Nehama couldn’t keep her eyes off his hands. Whenever he slapped her, he moved so fast she couldn’t steel herself for it. He lifted h
is hand, and when she winced, he stroked her cheek.

  “I’ve ordered warm weather from Him upstairs,” she said. “Sunny as Spain it’s going to be, and the customers will queue up for miles. You think I should warn the girls to get ready?”

  The Squire laughed. “Right. I’ll want more than this tomorrow.” He scooped up the coins. “Or I’ll have the rest in trade.” He hardly ever took his own whores to bed. People said he was so rough, he couldn’t make any money from them afterward. His hand was warm, the skin smooth, his eyes fixed on hers, his face like wood pitted by water, and Nehama wished that she could part from her body.

  It must have been near her eighteenth birthday. She wasn’t sure because she was born on the full moon, and the nights were too foggy to see the sky. But she’d be eighteen soon, and she was pregnant. The sponge doused in vinegar had failed, and the Squire would get her an abortion as soon as he found out. If she died, he’d be furious. But if she lived she’d owe him the money for the abortion plus interest. And she wanted the baby. She’d never wanted anything more.

  Her sisters had told her about the time that a neighbor’s boy was khapped. Snatched away to serve in the draft and make up the kidnappers’ quota of new recruits. Khapping was a common tragedy when Mama was a young wife with a couple of babies and the czar passed a law that Jewish children must serve for ten years before they began the regular army draft. Mama was sewing the trimming on a gown when the neighbor came running in from the courtyard and Grandma Nehama listened to the story, a baby in each arm. It was a tragedy, but what could anyone do? A bribe they didn’t have. Grandma Nehama found out where the kidnappers were staying, and out she went, taking with her a hatchet. Her daughter and son-in-law pleaded with her. Murder wasn’t going to solve a thing. She would die too, there would be more khappers, and the boy would be lost anyway. Mama cried till she didn’t have any breath left. You think I’m going to let a Jewish child be taken away? Grandma Nehama asked. You think there aren’t enough graves already? It was spring, and her skirts were muddy when she arrived at the place where the kidnappers were staying, and for some reason, the mud smelled of wine. Maybe because it was just after Purim, and when people got tipsy to celebrate the holiday, they weren’t too steady with a bottle. Grandma Nehama gave the innkeeper a few groschen to keep the khappers drunk. Then she went upstairs with her hatchet and she chopped off the boy’s smallest two toes from his right foot. He was seven years old. Back to his mother he went, and he grew up to be nothing special, just a man who limped and made custom shoes for people with unusual feet. His wife visited Grandma Nehama’s grave at every festival. She was the best friend of Nehama’s oldest sister and told her what was said to the boy that night. Put up your foot. Remember that as long as you can preserve life, there’s hope.