The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  CHAPTER 2

  At the Threshold

  LONDON, 1876

  Frying Pan Alley

  Nehama saw it all dimly, the children dancing around the organ-grinder, the stall of holiday pastries and the stall of feathered masks, the jacket seller reaching up with his pole to unhook a used jacket and hand it down to the prospective customer. It was all she could do not to faint.

  “You bleeding,” a voice said in a heavy accent. “Gotteniu. Just look.”

  “A genius you are,” Nehama said in a similar accent as she turned her head slightly. A young woman stood just outside the door to the house.

  “You’re from the heim!” She looked at Nehama’s ruffled dress, stippled with blood. “Where do you live?” She spoke in a crude Yiddish, the cadence of water carriers and cart drivers.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not your business.” Nehama answered in the mama-loshen without thinking, as if the pain of the miscarriage had made her forget that the mother tongue didn’t belong to her anymore.

  “Maybe you have someone I could fetch for you?”

  “Oh yes. My grandma, alleva sholom. And while you’re at the grave, be so kind as to ask my grandpa what he does with his balls while he studies Torah with the saints in heaven.”

  “Oh, you’re so funny. I’m killing myself laughing. Too bad you’re bleeding your death.”

  “Forget it.” Nehama tried to get up so she could walk out of the alley and away from the school that was ringing its bell. She stumbled, crumpling half on the stoop and half off it.

  “Dear God in heaven, thank you very much,” the young woman said, pulling Nehama up. “Why did I have to come outside just this minute? God forbid she should die here on the step. Not to mention that I always had too much of the good inclination, God help me. Up you get, Miss Comedienne.”

  Nehama had no strength left to resist the hand on her elbow, leading her inside and up a flight of stairs to a room with flaking walls and a window stained with yellow fog. She bit her lip to keep herself from fainting as she sat on the pot the young woman gave her, leaning her head against the other girl’s knees until the rest of the baby came out. The young woman helped her to the bed, then emptied the pot out the window onto the roof of the shack in the backyard, its contents joining fish bones and a broken bowl and boots too old to pawn.

  Against the wall, there was a dresser with a few dishes, some cups, a board, bread. A shawl and a coat hung on hooks. Above the fireplace, a cheap blue china vase stood on the mantel, the sort that old clothes men gave as a premium when they paid a penny for a used shirt.

  “I’m Minnie,” the young woman said. “In the home I was Malkah, but now I want an English name. And you?”

  “Better you should call me Nehama. I’m not so fond of English names.”

  “All right, Nehama. This dress is finished. Let me take it off. I’ll get rid of it, and here, you put on my old one. You don’t have to thank me.”

  “I’m not thanking you. I just want to go.” If only she could sit up, but she was still so dizzy.

  “You’re not going somewhere with my dress. Just lie down and don’t die while my back is turned.”

  Nehama meant to close her eyes for only a minute, but she woke up on the straw pallet not sure of where she was. A paraffin lamp was burning on the dresser and a candle on the table. The red-haired young woman and her husband were arguing. It must be about me, Nehama thought groggily.

  “You see this bread? I bought it from someone that looked exactly like Shmuel the baker back home,” the man was saying. He was short, with a round chin, a skimpy beard.

  “There was no baker named Shmuel. Unless you mean Shmuel with the hump, maybe?” Minnie was about the same age as Nehama. Eighteen, nineteen. It was the coarseness of her voice that made Nehama feel she could stay here for a little while.

  “I mean the husband of Pearl. If she kept her mouth shut, you never saw such a beauty,” the husband said. Water dripped from a leak in the ceiling onto his cap.

  “No, no. He was married to Hanna-Rivka. She was something to look at.” Minnie’s sleeves were rolled up, her freckled arms plump. “You don’t remember anything.” She turned. “Let her be the judge. Tell me, my friend—who’s right?”

  “Our guest from the heim!” he said. “Come here and join us.” It must have been the dress that was fooling him. The high-necked brown dress she’d borrowed from his wife, and the Yiddish as if Nehama were some girl awaiting her betrothal. If he only realized that she was a dybbuk. A ghost that haunts the living.

  “I just, I…” Nehama stammered.

  “You should sit with us. Have something to eat,” he said. “We’ll tell each other stories about where we’re from. Isn’t that what newcomers always do?”

  Nehama came to the table made from crates and boards stamped EAST INDIA COMPANY. Minnie poured her a cup of weak tea. In the shops used tea leaves were well mixed with new ones before they were sold in a twist of brown paper.

  “Does it matter what used to be?” Minnie asked. “Only that we’re strangers here, together. This is my husband, Lazar. He’s a presser in a tailoring workshop.” She cut a slice of black bread, spreading it thick with butter.

  Lazar took off his boot. A nail was sticking up, and he banged it back in with a piece of wood. Outside the organ-grinder was playing, and he hummed along. “Before we were strangers. Now we’re landsmann.”

  How Nehama hated that word. Landsmann. It meant a pimp standing at the docks or a whore that fetched a broom. “We’re still strangers,” she said.

  “Watch what you’re doing.” Nehama’s hand was trembling, and Minnie took the cup from her. “You’re spilling tea on our fine table. Look at this. No milk. Go to the dairy, Lazar. What is a room without milk? I’m not going to drink my tea with lemon like a greener. Go already.”

  When she was alone with Nehama, she leaned forward and said, “All right. Now we can talk. Tell me what’s what.” She was smiling. Nehama didn’t. The high collar on the brown dress was choking her. The cheap wool scratched her skin. She was hungry for winkles and sheep’s trotters and the loud hum of the Horn and Plenty that made her forget she was a ghost. “I have to go,” she said. “I don’t belong here, and you know it yourself. You saw what was going on.”

  Minnie cleared away the dishes, putting them on the dresser. “What do I know? That you were irregular. A dress was stained. It’s not a pestilence, it can happen to anyone. One month you bleed like a slaughtered chicken and the next—nothing. It’s the nature of girls. When I got it, I bled for two weeks. I was white as a sheet. Later it gets better, my mother says.”

  “I doubt it.” The room was making Nehama sick. She couldn’t stand the tin candlesticks on the mantel near the vase. Or the box in the corner, labeled in Yiddish, “For Passover.” A ghost ought to stay among the dead. If it comes too close to the living world, it might get trapped there, yearning for the body it can never have again. She couldn’t sit one more minute with this woman, who might be one of her sisters saying, We should have slapped you harder. “I’ll leave tonight,” Nehama said.

  “And why should you? Before you came, we had trouble making the rent. Now we can have a lodger.”

  “With what will I pay you rent?”

  “Tell me what you can do.”

  Nehama was so tired. She just couldn’t stand on her feet tonight. “If your husband brings me some finishing from the workshop, I’ll do hems. Or buttonholes. Tomorrow you can find a real lodger. There’s no shortage.”

  “Listen to me. You can’t run away naked, and I’m not rich enough to spare that dress you’re wearing. Stay with us until Passover and give me what you get from sewing the buttonholes. Then we’ll call it even.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you? The dress I was wearing when you found me …”

  “The dress? Oh, you mean that shmata. The rag I threw out.” Minnie’s eyes were as green as marshgrass. “What a mess. I can’t remember what it looked like. Can you
?”

  And the odd thing was that Nehama couldn’t. Did it have two ruffles or three? Was the skirt green? Or maybe it was blue and the sleeves green. “All right. Just until Passover.”

  “Good. When Lazar comes back, we’ll go to the Lane. It’s Purim in London. We have to drink until we don’t remember the difference between the name of a good man and an evil one. Am I right?”

  Nehama met Minnie’s knowing eyes with her own. “I’m not putting a foot outside until I can go far away. I don’t dare.”

  Minnie sat and thought for a while, drinking her tea with lemon after all because you make do with what you have at hand. “You know, women often die from too much bleeding down there. Like my own cousin, she should rest in peace. If someone died in my room, I’d put an advertisement in the East London Telegraph. It would be a religious obligation to give a relative the chance to bury someone properly before I gave up the corpse for a pauper’s burial.”

  For a minute, Nehama had some hope. No one would look for a dead whore. “But I can’t afford an advertisement,” she said. “And I don’t want any debts.”

  “Debt? Who’s talking debt? I’m only saying what I would do if a person died in my room. You’re absolutely right. Today you don’t go to the Lane. You stay here and don’t put a foot out the door. In a few days, we’ll see.”

  “Only tonight,” Nehama said.

  “Tonight, tomorrow. You show me how to sew a hem. I drive Lazar crazy with my ten thumbs. But first I’ll do your hair in the new style. Curls are in fashion now. If I had a coal stove, I’d heat up rags and do mine, but what does it matter anyway? Those curls never last. You’ll see what a beauty you are when I’m finished with you. Who taught you to sew?”

  “My father,” Nehama murmured. “In the heim he’s a custom tailor.”

  “Oh, you have yikhus.” Minnie laughed, and Nehama smiled a little because yikhus meant a lineage of rabbis and great scholars and businessmen so fine they never saw a peasant, nothing like her family, but among the working people a custom tailor was the cream, someone with skilled hands who fitted gowns and coats on people of quality and so absorbed something of their honor.

  “And you?” Nehama asked.

  “My family has yikhus, too. A horse and a cart, that was our yikhus. And my uncle was a porter who carried hundredweights. The plainest of the plain. Do you know this song?” As Minnie took the pins from Nehama’s hair and began to brush it, she sang something in Yiddish.

  Nehama shook her head. “I never heard it.”

  “I’m trying to fix your hair. Stay still and I’ll teach you the song. It’s as good as anything in a music hall.” The stroking of the brush and the hands in her hair, turning and pinning, made Nehama sleepy, and for the first time, in her half dream, she thought there might be a place somewhere between depravity and a courtyard full of watchful sisters. A place where it might be all right to have a friend who wasn’t surprised and wasn’t shocked and who sang in a low, quiet voice:

  In the police station I sit in anguish

  They just want to torture me.

  For them it’s all a good laugh

  And I should entertain them.

  How is it possible to sing anymore

  When troubles are pressing?

  Oh, the strength is leaving me

  For thirst and for hunger.

  You, God in heaven, you understand

  What kind of men have arrested me.

  Send down from heaven a fire

  And burn up the whole station.

  Send me home, dear God,

  To delight in a fresh life.

  And on cruel men and cutthroats

  I’ll never look again.

  Nehama hadn’t heard any songs like this from her sisters. The melody was something new, too, and she couldn’t stop herself from joining in, though the scar on her thigh was aching. If you looked from a distance, you’d see two girls side by side at a rough table, their hair pinned up like their mothers’, one dark and one ginger. If you could hear well, you’d know that someone else was joining in, too, for even in the next world a new song is welcome.

  The Lane

  Nehama stayed and sewed, amazed that the desire for life made her eat and sleep even when she woke up to the sound of a baby crying and there was no baby there. She slept on a straw pallet, dreaming about Sally and the Squire and the Horn and Plenty. When she awoke, her eyes on the cheap blue vase above the fireplace, she listened to the creak of a bed, the sound of newspaper pushed into boots to block the holes, the bang of a kettle on a tripod in the fireplace, the Yiddish conversation of morning. “Get up. Have tea. The bedbugs bit me all night.” A month passed, and the full moon brought Passover. She ate the sweet mixture of nuts and apples and the bitter herbs on motzos, she sang the old familiar songs, strange in her mouth.

  The end of Passover came with a break in the drizzle, the sun shining on wet pavement. In the Lane a crowd listened to the street doctor holding a vial of green fire, and another crowd watched a little rat in a monk’s hood walk across a wire toward the hand holding a morsel of food. The salesman of used clothes flung a sample of his trousers, which landed on a stall of paste jewelry. The news vendor spread the weekly across his table, embellishing accounts of stranglings and stabbings with his deep voice and the flourish of his hands in pantomime of foul deeds. The throng pushed and shifted, the boot makers, the drunks, the match girls scarred by phosphorus, the beggars and the boys selling lemons. The one-man band marched beside the streetcar striped green and red, and all the while the bell foundry tolled its bells, practicing for the future.

  “WHO’LL BUY A HAT FOR TWO BOB, WORTH FIVE, SO HELP ME GOD!”

  “THIS WAY FOR THE SINGING DWARF!”

  Nehama felt herself more akin to the gentile girls wearing straw hats than to these strangers with their unfamiliar accents. “You’re telling me these are Jews?” she asked Minnie.

  “Not from the heim, but still Jews of a kind. Dutch and German,” Minnie said. “You have to talk English with them. They don’t speak the mama-loshen.” Jews from Poland had been arriving in a slow trickle for twenty years. After all, a flood begins with the rising of the river, but Yiddish wasn’t often heard in these streets, yet. “The Dutch sell fish.”

  “I don’t like them,” Nehama said.

  “Never mind. I’m not making you a wedding. Come with me. Let’s get you a hat and show these yekehs how to bargain. Try this one with the blue feather.”

  “Perfect for you,” the seller said. “With this hat you could visit the queen. And a special price for you today.” He had a foreign face. Nothing Polish in it. A girl arriving at the docks would never believe that he was a landsmann.

  “I don’t want the hat,” Nehama said. She wanted no finery. There were girls on either side of her, pushing in to look at the hat. Let them have it.

  “I fancy this one,” Minnie said, picking out a hat with a bunch of cherries dangling from it.

  “Even better. Suits you exactly right, miss,” the seller said.

  Minnie tried it on, tilting her head this way and that, and ignoring the big woman who squeezed beside her to reach for the hats. “Maybe I’ll take it. How much?”

  “Two bob.”

  “Sixpence,” Nehama said. The sun was warming her back. It was the first time she’d felt warm in months. Why shouldn’t she pretend for a minute that she was in the market square in Plotsk? She was only eighteen, and at home she’d have had a new dress for Passover.

  “This hat is practically new. And with cherries. Are you trying to kill me?”

  “Ten. And not another penny,” she said. Someone was playing a tune on musical glasses set up in a small barrow.

  “Give me a shilling and I’ll throw in a red bow for your hair. Such fine dark hair as you have. Red’s just the color,” the seller said.

  “Done.” The hat on Minnie’s head, the red bow on Nehama’s curls. At home, red ribbons were worn to keep away the evil eye.

  “’T
ATERS! WARM YER HANDS AND FILL YER BELLY FOR A PENNY!”

  “GIVE A PENNY FOR A LAME WIDOW WITH TEN CHILDREN!”

  “A good bargain,” Minnie said to Nehama, walking arm in arm past the man swallowing fire. “But now I have a problem. An old hat walking with a new hat doesn’t go. So you’ll help me get a new hat for Lazar, right?”

  “Can you afford it?” Nehama asked.

  “Look—it’s only a bob. A week’s rent from a lodger. What’s that? Nothing. Less than nothing.”

  Nehama shook her head. “If it was me, I’d put it away, and in a few years, I could send for my family. Then I’d start saving for a shop.”

  “You couldn’t,” Minnie said. “There’s too much to buy in London. You’d never manage it.”

  “I could,” Nehama said. “If I made up my mind.”

  “Talk is cheap,” Minnie said. She almost looked pretty, her eyes shining with mischief under the hat with cherries. “You show me what you can do.”

  “Maybe I will.” Nehama touched her new red bow. A person had her hands full with the real evils of the world without thinking about eyes gazing from the sky.

  “FISH HEADS! HAVE THAT FISH HEAD, MISTER. LOOK AT THE SMILE HE’S GOT ON HIM! HE DIED HAPPY KNOWING YOU’D HAVE HIM FOR THE THIRD MEAL ON THE SABBATH. MAKE YOU SMART, HE WILL.”

  Every Passover the story of the Exodus from Egypt is retold, but there is always another chapter to the history of a people. After the Jews stopped running for their lives, they started to complain. Every day, sand. Every day, manna to eat. It came from God, but always the same—white, plain. In Egypt they’d had onions and garlic and meat, and a person always had a job. Sure, it was no pleasure to be a slave, but is it such a joy to walk in the desert day after day? They complained and they rebelled, and in the end, God in heaven made them wander in the desert for forty years until a new generation came that was used to the sand. For them it was all normal. The sand. The freedom. In every person’s heart there is both the old generation and the new, struggling together.