The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  Onstage the ragpicker found a child crying among the rags. He looked around. Is she yours? he asked. Yours? Or maybe yours. Poor little thing, the audience whispered. But who wants nobody’s child? Then you must be mine, the ragpicker said, lining his basket with a thousand pigeon feathers. And he put the baby in the basket.

  Grandma Nehama used to bring home a different guest every Shobbos, each one stranger than the one before. There was the man who had a dog, though Jews never had dogs, and it did everything the beggar did, waved hello with a paw, barked all through the grace after meals, and peed on the floor. Then there was the man who spat when he talked. He’d traveled around the world and came with his wife, who said she was the queen of beggars.

  Nehama brought her eyes back to the stage. The ragpicker’s daughter was growing up. So beautiful, the audience sighed. And see how she loves her father. Does it matter how odd he is? A father is a father. Am I right?

  The strangest guest to visit Grandma Nehama had a beard so long he rolled it up and tied it with string so it wouldn’t get away. He claimed to have a daughter somewhere and asked for money to put toward her dowry. Grandma didn’t believe him, but when you give charity it’s not right to question. So she put whatever she had into the knotted handkerchief he held out. Mama was maybe six or seven at the time. There were already a handful of younger half brothers and sisters, and she was jealous of them.

  The beggar, with his beard rolled up and wearing his seven layers of clothes, asked Grandma, “Tell me, do you have any problems?”

  She laughed. Did the beggar think he was a rabbi? But she just said, “You know I do. My daughter runs away whenever my back is turned. This one here, my oldest, the evil eye shouldn’t notice her.”

  “Come here to me,” the beggar told Mama, banging his stick on the floor. She couldn’t help but stand in front of him, trembling. “So tell me, little girl, what are you afraid of?”

  “You smell bad,” she said. Her mother shushed her.

  The beggar nodded. “You know, you’re right.” Then he put his dirty hand on her head and said the traditional blessing, “May God make you like the four Matriarchs …”

  When he left, a note was found beside the straw pallet where he’d slept: “Blessed are you and blessed is your family. Elijah the prophet was here.” Was it true? Grandma didn’t know.

  But Mama never ran away again. Because of the blessing, when she grew up and was married, she never lost a pregnancy. Nehama was counting on the beggar’s blessing to protect her baby, too. The first one she miscarried didn’t count. That was in another life. This baby was her husband’s, her beloved’s—though she would never use such a word out loud—and she awaited their child, her heart heavy with joy.

  Onstage the ragpicker’s girl was in court. Such a good girl, so fine, and yet she was falsely accused of murder. How could it be? The ragpicker cried at the sight of her in chains while the audience groaned.

  Nehama and her neighbors didn’t take in beggars for Sabbath dinner. Instead they had lodgers sleeping on the floor or they wouldn’t make the rent and then they’d all be out on the street. It was only here in the theater that they could be blessed.

  The stage was dark except for a flickering light, now on the hands of the unseen magistrate, now on the bowed head of the girl. The situation was hopeless. Only a very odd beggar, one that wasn’t quite right in the mind, would think otherwise. But the beggar of Odessa still had a voice. And what a voice—one in a million. It was, after all, not just anyone but the great eagle, Jacob Adler, who rose to his feet in the court. Who cried out against injustice. Against corruption. Against his daughter’s pain and the injuries of the poor, the lost, the defeated. Of course the audience knew it was the actor and not a beggar who spoke for them all. The magistrate was another actor, moved to fake tears by the speech. He unlocked the chains of the beautiful daughter, played by an actress who was having an affair with Adler.

  It didn’t matter. The voice of the people had risen up from the grave and come over the sea; it had come here to the cloud of smoke under the plaster ceiling; it spoke through the cloud in a mother’s voice to mothers and a tailor’s voice to tailors. It said everything that the heart would say if it weren’t shattered. Onstage the beautiful girl went free; in the balcony all the daughters and sons believed that they might go free, too. Passover could still come to them in London, for each generation has its story and is commanded to speak as if its scars are a snake that sees in the dark.

  The audience rose to its feet, and Lazar threw flowers down from the balcony.

  It was then that Nehama felt a familiar pain in her belly. She grabbed Minnie’s arm.

  Whitechapel Road

  A grandmother’s spirit wouldn’t be surprised to find the London Hospital between a theater and a dustheap where women collected pails of bone and ash and anything else they could dig out to sell. Nor would she be surprised that patients were in no rush to leave the hospital. Where else can a woman rest? Not a hand lifted to her. No broken glass. The doctor speaks in a whisper. At first a person wonders if she’s alive or dead. Is this her hand with no dirt on it? And a nice bed she has, all to herself. A tray with a cup of tea. The room so clean that even a fly drags itself outside to die on the dustheap. While she rests, she forgets to be afraid for everyone. Who can blame her? People say that after the world was made, God went back to heaven. But a piece of the Holy One stayed behind to bear the exile with us, and She, the Shekhina, cries with us. Let me tell you, by now she must be drowning in tears. Maybe she needs to have a rest in the hospital, too.

  There were twelve beds in the ward and twelve windows that cast rectangular shadows like doors in the wall opposite. If you opened such a door, there might be another world. One without mistakes. One without sin.

  Nathan was standing beside the bed, rolling and unrolling his cap. Minnie sat on a stool. “You’ll have another baby,” she said, speaking in a hush like all the visitors, awed by the constant swish of mops and buckets of carbolic acid.

  “The doctor said there won’t be any more.” Nehama glanced at the children visiting the woman next to her.

  “So what does he know—how many pregnancies has he had?”

  Nehama didn’t answer. She wasn’t made right. There was no getting away from it. Her husband’s child had run away from her womb. It had been like this for several days—whenever she tried to speak to Minnie or Nathan, they insisted on talking nonsense.

  “Do you remember what the dress looked like?” she asked. “The one I was wearing when we met. I think the skirt was green with a ruffle.” It was important to remember. If only she could ask Sally.

  “That was ten years ago.” Minnie’s face was wet with summer sweat. “What does it matter?”

  “Were the sleeves yellow? No, also green …” And Sally was in Dorset Street, drinking laudanum or sleeping. Maybe she had a new wig. A nice wig with real hair.

  “I got a new sewing machine for you,” Nathan interrupted. “On good terms, too. You’ll see how a jacket can practically sew itself.”

  “I’ll make another dress.” Nehama turned her head to stare out the window. “Then I won’t owe anyone a thing.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Nathan said. “Maybe it’s all for the best. My mother died after one of her pregnancies. The midwife said her insides gave out. This could be a blessing, Nehameleh.”

  She looked at him with such hatred that he stepped back. “Wait!” she called, her eyes blurring.

  “Sha, it’s all right,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Would you tell me a joke?” she asked in a tired voice. “The one about the priest and the Jew.” At the far end of the ward, a student nurse was stripping a bed.

  Nathan sat down, his face serious. “There was a priest who caught a Jew, a convert to the church, eating meat on Friday …” His hand was cold and his mouth trembled.

  The nurse in her white habit glided from bed to bed. On Nehama’s left, a woman was dying
from a botched abortion. On the other side, a mother of seven prayed that she’d lose this baby, for if it was born, she’d be too weak to work for her children’s supper and too hungry to make any milk.

  Nehama watched the shadows on the wall. She could see a beggar standing in one of the doorways there. It must be the crazy ragpicker who spoke before the magistrate in the theater, beckoning now as if he meant to give her a blessing. She should go and ask him to defend her in the Court of Heaven. Yes, that was what she would do. Just like this, it was so easy. And when the magistrate let her go free, she would find her lost babies. But what was this blocking her way? A cool fog, a damp wind that made her shiver. Someone was singing to her:

  The house is in shadow, the street is in gloom

  Dark burns the fire in its agony

  And the wind, the wind, the raging wind

  It can’t yet be seen, it can’t yet be known.

  Go away, Nehama whispered. Sing with me, someone answered. The dead should stay in the world to come, she thought. But a cloud was passing over the sun, the shadowy doors closed, leaving her in this world with the white wall and the wind rattling glass. Outside the hospital, women were climbing up and down the mountain of rubbish as if it were a ladder between heaven and earth.

  CHAPTER 3

  On Your Knees

  1886

  St. Katharine’s Dock to Frying Pan Alley

  The dreams began after Nehama left the hospital. Girls without faces came off the boat, they were greeted by landsmann, they lost babies. Night after night, she felt the spray of dirty water, she smelled tea and perfume, the stink of the river, the stink of the dockworkers, and when she awoke, smelling nothing, she was afraid to lie down again. She’d grown so tired that she had almost injured herself on the sewing machine. This morning she was walking to the Lane for fish for Shobbos but her feet had taken her here instead. She stood in the doorway of a shop, sheltered from the crowd and the black ash falling from the Queen’s Pipes as she wondered what to do. A cage hung in front of the shop door, and in it a bedraggled parrot was having a drink from its small bowl of gin while Nehama bit her nails to the quick, drops of blood salty on her lip. It had been more than ten years since she’d been here. Everything looked the same and yet different, because now she understood what was said and what wasn’t.

  A few feet away men shouted, “Take me,” pushing and punching, desperate to get to the front of the crowd of dockhands while the foreman called for the day’s laborers. Five pennies an hour. Two hundred and fifty tons to unload. Blocks of indigo powder, flower essences shipped in fat, marble from Italy, osprey plumes, tea, tusks of ivory. It was a warm, slippery day and any of them might fall and be crushed. Dreaming was all very well when you were safe in your bed, but on the docks you’d better have your wits about you.

  Someone else was watching for girls traveling alone. A representative of the Society for the Protection of Hebrew Girls held a lace-edged handkerchief against her nose, keeping away from the Irishmen and their grappling hooks. Instead she stood by a man in a black frock coat and silk hat, talking to him as if she had no idea who he was. If Nehama still lived in Dorset Street, she’d have spat. The pimp was nicknamed the Hat because he’d won it from a gentleman along with the gentleman’s girl, which gave him his start in the trade. If a person came off the boat, who would she turn to—the lady who spoke only English and looked with distaste at the passengers, or the gentleman who called out in a familiar language, his face full of concern?

  He was moving toward a girl wearing a cameo brooch and carrying a leather case, new and expensive. A girl like that, wearing more on her back than Nehama made in a month, could surely take care of herself.

  “Where did you come from?” the man in the silk hat asked in Yiddish.

  The girl was walking toward him. With her uncertain, trusting face. Her hands sweating on the handle of her case. And under her dress, thighs that had no scar yet in the shape of the new moon. So it would begin.

  Nehama wasn’t some kind of saint to give up her life for a stranger. What if he recognized her? What if he told the Squire? She cursed under her breath as she pulled her shawl over her head, half hiding her face. Her feet were carrying her willy-nilly toward the pimp. Her heart was beating so hard it would surely burst and then she would find herself in the next world with her grandmother. Better to stay in this world and go to the theater after Shobbos.

  Emilia looked this way and that, but since she was not a block of perfume or a tusk of ivory, nobody was rushing to unload her from the ship. There was a mist on the river that smelled like a dead horse as it fluttered across the Tower and the great masts of ships. While other passengers ran to meet their relatives, Emilia tried not to inhale. She was pretending to belong to someone. Perhaps that man in the silk hat, who also seemed to be alone. He smiled at her encouragingly. London was not as cold a city as people said. She smiled back tentatively. The sky was busy with the smoke of factories, the dock with the shouts of foremen directing crates into the upper stories of warehouses, the hydraulic lifts rising high like iron giants.

  “Where did you come from?” the man in the silk hat called above the noise of the equipment. He spoke a rather nice Yiddish.

  “Minsk,” she said, moving closer so she wouldn’t have to shout.

  “How wonderful.” Well, she didn’t know what was so wonderful about Minsk, but he looked friendly and there was a pleasant odor about him. At least some people bathed. “I’m also a—” But before he could finish what he had to say, a woman, hurrying along, collided with him, and he turned toward her angrily.

  She looked about ten years older than Emilia, attractive in a Jewish sort of way. Dark hair and dark skin and startling blue eyes. Wearing a plain dress, not very clean. In a red shawl like other Jewish women meeting the ship. Evidently a popular color among people whose relatives traveled in steerage.

  The man in the silk hat pushed the woman away, and she nearly stumbled.

  “Oh, excuse me, sir. A pickpocket has cleaned you out,” she said. Her voice trembled, and she had her shawl over her head as if she was a religious woman overcome by modesty.

  “A gonoph? Me?” He was feeling his pockets, peering over the woman’s shoulder along the docks.

  “There he is—over there. You might catch him.” The woman pointed, he ran off, and she grabbed Emilia’s bag. “Cousin, I’m sorry I’m late. How you must have worried.”

  She must be mixed up. After all, when people emigrate, families can be split up for years. How are you supposed to recognize someone?

  “You must have me confused with someone else,” Emilia said, answering in Yiddish as she tried to snatch her case back, but the woman pulled her closer.

  “Shh. Listen to me; I’m not your cousin,” she said. “But him, he’s not your landsmann either. Where are you from?”

  “Why is everyone so curious?” Emilia asked. “But if you must know, it’s Minsk.”

  “Well, keep it to yourself or every shark you meet will claim to be a Minsker. I think you should know that man over there is a pimp.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me.” A pimp—was it true? He looked so kind. And this woman with eyes like the sky of ancient Israel and her hair throwing off hairpins in the wind from the river, what was she? “There hasn’t been very much work. If a man is fat, he’s living off someone else, you can be sure of it. And you are?”

  “My name is Emilia,” she said.

  “That’s an unusual name for a Jewish girl.”

  “Well, it’s mine. Emilia … Levy. I’m Mrs. Levy.”

  “So all right, Mrs. Levy. Do you have somebody here? A relative, a friend. I can put you in a hansom cab.”

  Emilia shook her head. “No one.” The woman was looking at her as if she were a new sort of insect. A girl on her own. Like a grub that eats cabbages. It has to be picked off and disposed of. “Don’t I have to register with the authorities or something?” Emilia asked brusquely.

 
; “Aah,” the woman in the red shawl said, her face clearing. “That’s exactly why I’m here. To tell you there’s no such thing.”

  A crowd of sailors and their women were tumbling out of a tavern. The woman pulled Emilia aside into a doorway where a parrot swung inside a cage. “No Jewish Council? Nothing?” Emilia asked.

  “There is a Jewish Board of Guardians. They’d find a place for you. Yes, that’s where you should go. I’ll take you. And they’ll put you in a house where you can be the lady’s maid or something like that. Maybe a governess. I’m sure you’d make a nice governess.”

  “No,” Emilia said. “They wouldn’t want me in a month or two.” She put her hand on her belly. “My poor husband …”

  The other woman’s eyes flashed with pain—why should Emilia’s troubles matter to her?—but she just shrugged as she said, “It’s not my business if you have a baby coming. Tell me where you want to go.”

  “I should get a room. I have a trunk,” Emilia said. The little purse of money under her skirt wouldn’t last forever. But she had to have a place to sleep.

  “A trunk.” The woman sighed. The parrot squawked. “Well, if you have nowhere else to go, you can lodge with me. I’m Nehama Katzellen. My husband is a tailor.”

  “You have a room to let?” Emilia asked. Oh, please do. She was so tired, and the frozen heart that had got her this far was starting to hurt as if it were waking up all pins and needles.

  “Just a bench. Better than the floor,” Mrs. Katzellen said. The parrot looked from one to the other, eyes bright as those of a matchmaker meeting with prospective in-laws.

  “How much?” Emilia asked.

  “A shilling a week,” Mrs. Katzellen said. “A room will cost you six.”

  Emilia wondered how many shillings a purse full of rubles would buy. “All right,” she said. The parrot drank from its little bowl and began to sing a sailor’s song.

  “Come with me and hold up your skirt,” Mrs. Katzellen said.