The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  In the hansom cab, Emilia closed her eyes to the street of pawnbrokers and newspaper vendors calling, “Stabbing most foul! On Thursday last …”

  Dear Mother, she imagined writing, What was your plan? The purse is getting thin and soon I must marry Mr. Shmolnik. My hair will be cut and I shall sport a wig like a religious woman must after her wedding day. And when the wig makes my head itch, I shall scratch like they do, digging under the wig as it tilts to one side in a drunken tremor.

  Prince’s Street

  On the eighteenth of January, in the balcony of the theater in Prince’s Street, the audience waited for the play to begin on Jewish time, an hour or so late. The pawnbroker, Mr. Shmolnik, wearing a new hat, sat with his children in the front row of the balcony. In the row behind him was a rough-stuff cutter in the boot trade, the smell of glue sealed into the seams of his gray skin. Every Thursday evening he led a literary circle in a room at the Jews’ Free School, and in his pocket he had a poem dedicated to Dina, the daughter of the High Priest of ancient Israel, or rather to the actress playing her. He’d read it aloud while waiting in the queue, and Minnie had cried. He sat in the same row of seats as Nehama and Nathan, Minnie and Lazar and their children, Pious Pearl the beigel lady, her numerous sons with their watery eyes, and her husband, who’d bet his wage packet on horses but had somehow managed to hold on to enough of his stake to buy the sixpenny tickets for the balcony. They were all eating their supper, and if the children got impatient, they’d crack nuts and throw the shells onto the hats of people seated below the gallery.

  They’d all come to see Bar Kokhba: The Last Days of Jerusalem. Nobody could say how the play would turn out, even if someone had seen it a hundred times, for scenes were rewritten to taste, and even so the actors were quite independent of their lines. As it is written: the Jews are a stiff-necked people. There was the time when the actor playing the Roman commander refused to be the villain of the piece and declared Jerusalem a free state. But however the play turned out, everyone knew that there would be a grand finale, an amazing spectacle promised before the end.

  Beside the pawnbroker and his children, a Hebrew teacher was holding a bouquet of roses. He’d come from the West End, where some of the Jewish newcomers were forming a colony among the prostitutes in Soho. He was missing three fingers on one hand and was peeling his orange rather awkwardly. Everyone had oranges. That was the smell of the theater: oranges and cigars.

  “Who are the flowers for?” the boot maker asked.

  “For Jacob Adler. He’s playing the leader, Bar Kokhba.”

  “But it was all Bar Kokhba’s fault that the rebellion failed,” the boot maker said, as agitated as if he personally was being led off in chains.

  The teacher offered him a piece of orange. “Wait till you see Adler. He makes a wonderful Bar Kokhba. So determined,” he said, as if he didn’t think it strange at all that a man should be enraged by imaginary deeds.

  The heel cutter waved his bitter cigarette as he protested, “But Adler can barely sing a note. He should never have been cast in this role.”

  “And you’re an expert?” the teacher said. “You! A boot maker!”

  “So you have something against boot makers?” He took a bite from his onion sandwich.

  “Well, you know. Some trades shrink the brain. Give one a yokisher kop,” the teacher said, meaning a gentile head. He used the Cockney slang, turning goy backward. It was a terrible insult.

  So the boot maker replied in kind, “Then teaching must turn out cripples.”

  The teacher pushed the boot maker’s shoulder as he said, “Crippled in the head, you tailors and boot makers.”

  Now someone shouted from behind them, “You want tailors, you have tailors.” And someone else was answering, “Don’t lump me with you. A Polish tailor is a thief.”

  The boot maker’s lip was split. The teacher had blood on the hand that was missing fingers. But wait—Mr. Smith, the owner of the theater, was signaling frantically: the orchestra began to play, the torches were lit. The women were shushing the men. In this play, everyone spoke in verse. Not for anything would such a drama in the mama-loshen be missed; it gave dignity to their language. Dignity for sixpence: it would be cheap at twice the price! The curtain was rising.

  While they waited for the spectacle, the audience cheered the Hebrew rebels and booed the troops of mighty Rome, who were dressed remarkably like Cossacks. Rome was faltering and mustered its troops from far and near, even recalling them from Britain to fight the proud Hebrews in the Holy Land. The audience gloried in the strength of its ancestors as the great Jacob Adler sang the famous solo of the leader Bar Kokhba. They hissed as the Jewish traitor went over to the Roman side, capturing Dina, the leader’s beloved, attempting first to seduce and then to ravish her.

  In the balcony, matches flared like a hundred red eyes. Smoke threaded upward from cheap cigarettes while Nehama waited for the heroine’s tragic end. It was the same in all the versions of the play: her fate didn’t change. And why was that? she’d like to know. Already from the few books she’d read, she’d learned of half a dozen heroic types. There was the Frenchman who escaped from his miserable convict’s life to rise up to the position of mayor. Later he risked his life to save his daughter’s lover from the guns of insurrection—that was another sort of heroism. A third was the cleverness of women in the books about making a good marriage. Yet her favorite type came from the last book she’d read, about the girl who wasn’t beautiful or good but rebellious. She never compromised herself, not for love and not for God, and always she looked for a way to live. Why must the Jewish heroine throw herself off the tower?

  Minnie was weeping. Nehama wept, too. It shouldn’t be like this. Onstage, Dina stood on top of the tower, exhorting the people to continue their fight. Then—rather than give herself up to the Romans and to shame—she jumped from the tower and died her tragic death. The rebels in their terrible grief and rage set the tower on fire. A green fire it was, like flames from the other world. And the spark rising up, up to the curtains was cold. Anyone would know it. An effect of stagecraft. Only their imagination made it a fire.

  But the grandmothers who’d risen from the grave knew how strong imagination could be, strong enough to carry them over the sea with their children.

  “Fire!” someone called.

  “Where?”

  “There. Don’t you see it?”

  “The orchestra’s still playing.”

  “It’s all right. Just part of the act.”

  “Don’t sit like a bump. Can’t you feel the heat?”

  “Go back to your seats!” Jacob Adler shouted from the stage as the audience stood up. “There’s no fire. No danger. Please.” He waved to the musicians in the orchestra pit. “Louder.” The actors playing the Hebrew rebels sang. They danced faster and wilder to get the audience’s attention.

  There was silence in the gallery. “It’s all right,” someone said. The audience shifted as if people might be convinced that the alarm was false and remain in their seats.

  It was just Bengal fire. A chemical. Something used a dozen times. And Nathan was telling everyone to wait a minute. Half the dangers in the world can be avoided just by waiting. But Lazar was pushing Pious Pearl aside, and Minnie was trying to crawl over the seats, pulling her son after her. The smoke from a hundred bitter cigarettes was thickening into a fog.

  “Don’t listen to Adler! He wants to get to the door first, himself.”

  “Where’s the exit?”

  “Move. Move already!”

  “Fire! Fire!”

  “Dear God, my children. Take Mama’s hand. Hurry.”

  The audience was rising; panic swept through them in a wind of contagion carried on their breath. A trembling on your right, a curse on your left. The actors were still singing and dancing and pleading with the crowd. But the play was out of their control. It had shifted to the parterre and the gallery, and it was their turn to weep.

  “Help me,” M
innie said, trying to hold her baby in one arm, her son in the other.

  Nehama took the baby as she pushed her friend back down. “It’s all right. Just sit and wait.”

  “Go to hell,” Minnie said, climbing down over the Hebrew teacher, who was still clutching his flowers. “Give me the baby!”

  “How can you hold them both?” Nehama asked, and her last sight of Minnie was a look of hatred as the crowd engulfed her.

  Frying Pan Alley

  The house was quiet, all sound gone with the grandmothers to the theater, and only fog walked in the street. Emilia sat by the stove to get the last bit of warmth while she wrote to her mother. There was no more coal. On the stove she had a candle. It was as much light as she could afford, but it was very bright, and as the wax pooled, she rolled it in her hands. There were shadows behind her, nothing but shadows and the ghost of the first wife sitting on the bed.

  She was writing a letter slowly, warming her fingers in the melting candle wax.

  Dear Mother,

  I cannot do it. I cannot stomach Mr. Shmolnik, and I dare not think what will happen to me.

  Her dress was torn. It wasn’t very modest, but she looked down indifferently at the rip in her skirt. Nehama would never go around with a ripped skirt. She would mend it invisibly, not caring how worn the fabric was or how cheap. Emilia crumpled the letter and took out another sheet of paper. If Nehama were at home she’d make a face over wasting paper which could be turned to good use. A patch for a window crack or a sole for a shoe or even a feather in a hat if someone used her wits. But Emilia was here all alone, so she didn’t have to see any disapproving glances. She was glad to be alone. Really, she was.

  Dear Mother,

  I feel most peculiar. There is a wrenching pain in my abdomen—it must be indigestion. The food I eat is rather more greasy than I have been accustomed to.

  She had to marry. How else could she manage? That was what her landlady would say. Emilia gazed at the debris of ash and feathers and bones swept into the corner. She ought to give her child a name and a room just like this, so small that if one sneezed, the spit landed on the wall, for if one lived in a room like this, one would not carry a handkerchief. The ghost of the first wife didn’t have a handkerchief either. The dead and the poor must understand each other, and if Emilia followed their lead, she’d turn into one of them. But she had a trunk full of gowns that would fit her again. That was the difference. If only she could open the trunk and convince herself of that.

  Walking slowly to the other room, one hand on the wall to support herself, the other holding the stub of her candle, she coughed as fog seeped through the crack in the window. The workroom smelled of wool and gas jets and onions. Emilia kneeled in front of her trunk, fumbling with the key. Her eyes were running, she couldn’t manage the lock. All she could do was put her head down on the trunk and wait for someone living to find her in her hiding place.

  Prince’s Street

  No one ever knew for sure how the gaslights went out just then. But in the darkness, the audience heard the rustling of wings. And the yetzer-hara, the evil inclination, the primal instinct, rose up from every soul and became a single soul, the soul of the crowd needing to save itself. It thrashed and struggled, stepping on its own flesh to break free from the hot darkness. There were side doors, but who thought of them? This was a soul running from flames, a soul that believed in a single exit at the front, where tickets were taken and a sign read “Amazing Spectacle!” People fell as the crowd from the main floor climbed up toward the front door and the crowd from the gallery climbed down, jammed against each other, unable to get out, like twins stuck in the birth canal, killing themselves and their mother.

  Nehama held her free arm over the baby’s head so it wouldn’t smother. Under her feet someone was dying and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Was it a man or a woman—who could say? There was only a softness and the crowd trampling as Nehama was carried along, trying not to vomit as she felt herself walking on the wood floor again. If you could call it walking when your face was pressed against the cheap rough cloth of someone’s back, and your feet moved an inch forward. A man bent to help a boy fallen on the staircase, groaning as someone pushed them both down. At any moment she could drop and die beneath a hundred feet, but she had no right. Not as long as she was holding Minnie’s baby. She could not deny her longing to live even when it meant walking over someone. This instinct for self-preservation, which the rabbis called the yetzer-hara, this was her treasure now. It would save her friend’s child. So she pushed and she listened to the roar of the blind crowd. Which way? It was too dark to see. But if they were running from the sound of crackling flames, then she had to hear something else. The gasping breath of terrified mothers. A cracking beam. A cracking bone. For among the terrible sounds there might be a clue to the way out. And then, quieter than the baby whimpering in her arms, she heard the voice of her dreams:

  Children, children. There’s always another way. Use your head. Is there a small door? A side door? Always—I promise you. Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you listen? Dear God above, for this I left my grave? My children are dying. My children are killing each other. How can you bear it?

  If the grandmother’s spirit could have heard the Holy One’s answer, she would have caught the sound of weeping. But even she didn’t listen, believing that God was far away in the distant heights.

  Nehama made her way to the side door, using her elbows and her knees in the accusing darkness. Beside her someone was praying to make sure that if he died it would be with the holiest of prayers on his lips. Was it someone she knew? The pawnbroker, perhaps. It didn’t matter. She must not compromise herself, not for love and not for God, and she jabbed the man with her elbow, she stepped on his feet to make her way past him. If she had to be a sister to kings and squires to save this child, she would do it. She would even listen to her step-grandmother cry.

  Outside, people wandered in a daze while gentile neighbors brought them tea and blankets, their breath steaming in the cold air. There were four hundred people in the single narrow block in front of the theater and more arriving every few minutes. Nehama looked among them for Nathan and Minnie, Pious Pearl and Lazar, the pawnbroker, the baker Grodzinski and the boot maker who was president of the workingmen’s literary circle, but all she could see were the same faces over and over, all of them familiar, none of them known, until someone stopped her and made her drink some tea. The air was cold and she was hot; she was the fire burning down the theater, and the flames would eat her alive. And even when Nathan found her, that wasn’t enough to quench the fire, not even with his tears on her face and hands.

  He huddled on the ground beside her, and their heads touched while his shaking fingers stroked her hand.

  “Never, I’m telling you, Nathan. I’ll never walk through that door again.” They were sitting with their backs against the wall of a warehouse opposite the theater. The baby was sucking on her fingers.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “No, it’s not. I have to go in there and look for Minnie. Maybe she’s lying with …” Nehama couldn’t finish the sentence. Inside the theater the dead were laid out.

  “Wait,” Nathan said. “Finish your tea. Then we’ll go.”

  The tea lasted a long time, long enough for a dockworker to bring them blankets and a missionary a Bible. Nehama threw the Bible at a lantern, turning the spot of light into the darkness it should be.

  “Nehama?” a voice called. “Nehama! Answer me if you’re alive ….” The crowd opened and closed like the mouth of a great fish, and out of it fell Lazar and Minnie, her hair as red as roses in the dim light of the kerosene lanterns. Her son was in his father’s arms as she fell on Nehama, kissing her and the baby as if they were both her children.

  “Hersh the boot maker,” Minnie whispered. “From down the street. I heard that he fell. It could have been my baby. What would I have done?”

  “Don’t think of it. W
e’re all right,” Nehama said. A person who has a double portion of the yetzer-hara is very strong. It is her duty to protect the weak. Only then did she feel the cold and begin to shiver, holding on tight to her husband and the friends who were sister and brother to her, and the children with their soft, high voices, crawling over her.

  All night, the Jews of Whitechapel came through Prince’s Street, asking after friends, neighbors, cousins, brothers, people they weren’t speaking to yesterday, people whose names they didn’t know but wished they’d found out when they could.

  They came in the thousands. They wore caftans, they wore kicksies, they wore red shawls and nursed babies, they held hands, they walked with crossed arms wearing the black ribbon of anarchists, they carried their prayer shawls to say morning prayers, they carried baskets of buttered bread and pickled herring.

  At dawn, the police rode in on horses. “Clear out. Clear out. Now then, mister. Don’t raise a fuss. We can’t have us a riot.”

  In the reading room of the theater, empty chairs were pushed against the walls to make space for the tables in the center of the room. Seventeen bodies were laid out. Two of the dead had been pregnant. One was a mother of eight children. Another her youngest son. The boot maker from Frying Pan Alley lay on a table, his poem still in his pocket, and next to him was an old man from Goulston Street, who’d saved a boy from being trampled. The boy was with his father in the Prince’s Street synagogue, saying kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, for the old man, whose name they didn’t know. Sir Samuel Montagu, M.P. for Whitechapel, came personally in his carriage to express his condolences.

  After the inquest, five hearses carried the bodies to the cemetery between the lines of old women on Brick Lane. At the top of Brick Lane was the mission that had once been a Huguenot chapel and would someday be a synagogue. Above the door was a sundial inscribed Umbra Sumus. We are shadows. Beyond was the Old Nichol, the worst five blocks in London, but none of the Nichol gang dared come near. The old women were keening, and they would have ripped out the eyes of anyone who disturbed the mourners.