The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  Every house in Whitechapel sat shivah. For a week the blinds were drawn, and black crepe was draped over the fronts of synagogues.

  After the great fire of 1666, London was rebuilt with glorious cathedrals. But no property was lost in Whitechapel. Only people can die in an imaginary fire. And the voice of the people. And their lives made large enough to show them their meaning. These can die.

  CHAPTER 4

  Keener the Greatness

  1887

  Frying Pan Alley

  It isn’t true that a mother is born with her child. It may happen sometimes by an act of grace, but most often a mother is made as she struggles with her need for sleep and freedom of movement, over and over choosing to hold and feed and wrap a loudly wailing, soft-skinned being that produces marvelously pungent odors.

  The baby lay in an orange crate beside the bed. Emilia fed it, she wasn’t sure how often, because someone put the baby in her arms and someone brought the baby’s mouth to her breast. She didn’t feel the suckling. All sensation had left her, and she blessed God, for after the labor she never wanted to feel anything again. It was night; she lay in the bed with Nehama, her landlord banished to a bench in the back room, knowing that the January dawn wouldn’t come until the morning was well under way. She felt a great satisfaction at knowing something. A fact. Surely a person aware of the facts can rise from her bed. If only her limbs weren’t so heavy and her head so light. It made her want to lie here forever, feeling the shadows of day and night on her closed eyelids.

  Emilia was holding on to a postcard. Someone had tried to take it from her, and she believed that she had scratched that person, though she wasn’t entirely sure. It was important, this postcard. It held crucial information. The postcard had arrived on the day after the baby had come, and Emilia had clutched it ever since.

  My dear Emilia,

  A mother always hopes that her daughter will make herself a satisfactory marriage. A girl lives for such a short time before making her choice and then has many, many years to abide by it afterward. I know that your mother would have wished to be with you. A mother’s wishes, however, are not always respected in heaven and sometimes God decrees something else. My love is with you,

  Ever your servant…

  It was signed “Mrs. Plater,” after the young woman who led the Polish cavalry against the Russians.

  Emilia had several such postcards from her mother. The others were in her trunk, but this one she couldn’t put away until she’d figured out its hidden meaning, and first she had to swing her feet to the floor, getting herself out of bed carefully, slowly. No one must awaken. She crouched in front of the orange crate where the baby lay, waiting to feel like the child’s mother as she reached down to stroke the small hand. There should be a rush of love, a sense of duty, but she was so cold. If only there was more coal.

  The baby had lived inside her; now it was here and there was no home for it. There ought to have been a home for her child. A home and pretty dresses and a rocking horse for when it was bigger. A rocking horse, a piano, then a French governess. She’d never thought her child would live in the Jews’ Orphan Asylum in Norwood. But there was no other choice, and anyway the country air was said to be very good. In the morning she’d do it. She’d take the baby there and leave something for it to remember her by. Go to the asylum and give up the baby to the fat matron in her black dress and lace shawl, contemptuously asking why and what and so on. Whatever would one say to such a person?

  Nehama would know. She ought to take the baby there. Emilia stroked the tiny hand. How soft it was, though it didn’t feel like anything of hers. The hand was any hand. That was what she would have to remind herself. The tears on her face were just tears of tiredness as she stood up and lit a candle stub. Her fingers were stiff because she was still weak, ripping a corner off the newspaper and writing with great effort, “Nehama, please take her.”

  Emilia dropped the note into the orange crate, lifted her shawl from the nail in the door, and took her purse from the mantelpiece. She left the house quietly and ran into the street. She had to run, because if she stayed, she would be a person in endless mourning, unable to bathe or comb her hair. She must not delay; her life had momentarily thrown her off, but it had come back for her. This was the secret message from her mother. She didn’t know that she still wore her nightgown as she ran in stocking feet shredded by cobblestones. The ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg flew behind, wishing that it was time for her to speak.

  It wasn’t unusual for children to be born in one family and raised by another. Parents were lost in accidents, illness, prison, and debt, and if they managed to survive, they might not be able to feed all the children they had. They considered a son or daughter lucky if it could go to childless relations who were better off. There was no legal procedure. The child just went to someone and was raised there. Sometimes people without children wanted one that wasn’t any relation at all. The prospective parents went to the Jews’ Free School, perhaps, or the orphan asylum, asking the headmaster or matron to recommend a child to them. Usually they didn’t want infants. It didn’t pay to take babies when a third of them wouldn’t reach the age of five. Better to see if it lived and how it turned out.

  Rain pounded against the window while Minnie nursed the week-old infant. She was sitting on Nehama’s bed, her own baby crawling on the floor. Nehama stood by the window, looking again at the note. “Please take her,” she said for the hundredth time. “That’s what it says. But what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Minnie moved the baby away from her breast, its face scrunched in sleep. “And I don’t care. You have to do something, Nehama.”

  Whenever Minnie nursed the baby, Nehama’s breasts ached as if she were full of milk, and she couldn’t sit still. “Sha, sha,” she murmured now, taking the baby. She had sewn a gown from the softest flannel and embroidered it with red thread to keep away the evil eye. How small the baby was in it. How warm. She fit right here, between the crook of Nehama’s arm and her hand under the head. She opened her eyes for a moment, then closed them again. Her eyes were dark, and Nehama wondered what color they would be.

  “It happens all the time, a baby and no means to take care of it,” Minnie said. “But only a shayner like that Mrs. Levy expects someone else to make arrangements. What can you do? There’s the baby. So you just listen to me. The trunk’s still in the back room. You sell what’s inside and give the money to the orphans’ asylum. They’ll put it away for her, and when she’s ready to leave, she’ll have something to start with.”

  “No, I’m telling you what the note means. That I should keep the baby as mine.” The thought had come to her slowly as the days passed. She’d been bathing and dressing and holding the baby while Emilia slept endless hours; her absence was just another sort of sleep. The thought was merely waiting to make itself known. There was no other possibility. Nehama’s arms were full with the baby to hold in them.

  “What about Nathan?” Minnie went to the stove. She had some good bones for soup.

  “He’s only the boss in the busy season,” Nehama said. Last night she’d asked him while they were lying in bed, What if by a miracle we got a child? And he’d answered, A baby that’s no relation, it’s betting on a dark horse. She’d turned away from him, her back rigid, neither of them sleeping until the moon set and the day arose slowly, sluggish in the cold of winter. Then he said quietly, If my wife gets a baby and she didn’t risk her life having it, am I going to decide for God?

  “Did you think about everything—what if she comes back?” Minnie asked.

  “Let her. Then she’ll see what’s what. You don’t give away a jewel and then expect it to be returned.”

  “It happens plenty,” Minnie said, salting the soup. “The lady of the house thinks she doesn’t want the bracelet and gives it to the wet nurse. It’s just mother-of-pearl, nothing fancy. But then it comes back into fashion and she wants it.”

  “A bracelet, maybe. But not a
child. Mrs. Levy is too fine. She can manage on her own only if she’s free. That’s why she left the note for me.” Nehama hesitated, hating her dry breasts for making her ask. “I could pay you to nurse the baby—”

  “It’s a mistake, I’m telling you,” Minnie interrupted, casting a quick glance at Nehama. “But don’t insult me. I make too much milk for one child anyway.”

  The wind rattled the glass pane, a window bag keeping out the draft while Nehama rocked the baby, swaying just the way she’d seen mothers in the alley sway their many children. The baby opened her eyes, locking on to Nehama’s as if they’d known each other from the days of King Solomon.

  The story went that there were two mothers who came to King Solomon the Wise. The women lived in the same house. In fact, they were prostitutes and the house was a common lodging house. They gave birth within three days of each other, but one of the infants died while the mother slept. No one else knew whose baby was whose, and each of the mothers said the living baby belonged to her. King Solomon was asked to judge between them.

  For weeks Nehama waited for Mrs. Levy to return. Every knock on the door made her more afraid than she’d ever been.

  Berwick Street

  A room in Soho might be rented by a woman in a nightgown. It was hardly more peculiar than most of the spectacles that met the sour gaze of landladies there: Frenchmen, prostitutes, and Jews trying to follow their betters to the West End, creating their own little ghetto among the prostitutes that worked the theater district. The shopkeepers’ signs in Berwick Street were in Yiddish, and the market smelled just like the East End, but here Jews bought gallery tickets to the English theater. They felt themselves to be more cultured than the Jews of Petticoat Lane, more worldly even if they were just as poor. Wasn’t it a short walk to see all the nice things in shops that they couldn’t afford? And the water company that served the shops of Regent Street also provided for Berwick Street. A person could actually turn a tap in the yard and have water pour from it. The ghost of the first wife saw it herself.

  The organ-grinder cranked out “The Marseillaise” while Emilia waited for her breasts to dry, sitting by the window and watching the prostitutes go in and out of the pub across the street. Every time she wondered about her child, she pushed the thought from her mind, turning her head from side to side, her breath quickening as she looked out the window for something else to occupy her. With practice, she could stop the thought almost before it arose. Her mother used to say that a woman should put her eyes on the most pleasant thing in her view; this would save her sanity. In Emilia’s room there was a bed, a table, and a wardrobe with a cracked mirror. She didn’t give the mirror a glance, attending instead to the colors outside her window. It was hardly London at all. The French children wore pink and blue hats, their coats as red as the red sky. The organ-grinder’s buttons were gold, multiplying the pale winter light into a dozen suns. The unemployed men marching from the East End to the West to riot carried banners painted in red and black, and on Purim the Jews wore masks and robes of many colors. They performed in the street, half in English and half in Yiddish, with a real woman playing the Jewish queen as she triumphed over the evil minister who ordered the death of the Jews in ancient Persia. Her hair hung down in ripples of night, no kerchief covered it, and religious men called to their sons to come inside, away from the seductions of the red sky and the immodest woman.

  When Emilia’s body returned to an approximation of its former shape, she sent a boy to fetch her trunk and bring it to the post office in Soho. There it stayed for a month in case there were inquiries, but the man who was sent to fetch it was told that no one had come to ask any questions. It was the beginning of spring, French wives were setting geraniums in their window boxes, when two men carried the trunk up to Emilia’s room, just past the market in Berwick Street.

  In the street there was a parade with violins and trumpets, and the rough women standing outside the Hound and Hare were adding their comments to the general commotion. While the ghost of the first wife watched the parade, Emilia was having a bath, her eyes closed so that she could lie peacefully in the zinc tub and enjoy the hot water, for which she’d paid extra. When finally the water turned cold, there was no choice but to dry herself off and open the trunk. Her fingers were stiff as she put on one of her old dresses, calling out to her landlady to come and help her with the middle buttons.

  Emilia faced the cracked mirror, inspecting her feet, her ankles, her hips, waist, shoulders, face. She had a more fashionable shape than before, the shoulders rounder, the chest plumper. It could serve her well and the gown even better, declaring that she didn’t belong to Soho. Her mother used to say that mud can easily swallow a woman and the world not be any different for her absence.

  The violinists and trumpeters were playing “God Save the Queen” as they led the procession to the newly dedicated Synagogue of Soho. The ghost of the first Mrs. Rosenberg leaned on the windowsill, watching the fog come off the trumpets and the sky come down to bless the men in their prayer shawls. The men danced with the Torah scroll and the women with its shadow. The men were singing wedding songs, for it is written that the Holy One is the bridegroom and Israel his bride. The women were silent as they were among men whose piety forbade them to hear the siren tones of a woman’s singing voice.

  Under the wedding canopy, everything is beautiful. Only later does the bride ask why her husband doesn’t speak to her and why he comes to her too late.

  Here and there a Jewish boy broke out of the parade to make eyes at the prostitutes standing in the doorway of the Hound and Hare.

  Frying Pan Alley

  Naturally a ghost gets to talking with other ghosts. So I tell her, Mrs. Rosenberg, you want to know why I came? For my grandchildren. And is London so different from where I was? Every day I thank God for the fog. It’s very heimish, damp and dark just like the grave I left at home. But now that summer is here, it’s too hot. Believe me, it’s a fire, and not a false alarm like what happened in the Prince’s Street theater. Just yesterday every presser was a playwright and every seamstress an actress. Today they’re afraid to be in a crowd. The theater is closed. Do they think panic is a plague like cholera? Between you and me, maybe they’re right.

  Now there’s been another tragedy. Not, God forbid, with my Nehameleh, but she can’t sleep and at night she thinks of all the tragedies in the world. This is what comes when you have no place to cry. I’m telling you it’s an illness. She gives the baby her breast to suck, praying that her milk will come and this will show that she’s in God’s favor. The nipple cracks, she bites her lip. It’s not important, I tell her. Minnie has enough milk. But I’m talking to a wall. To a brick in the road. To the wind. When you’re dead, who listens? Tell me. Be honest with me. Isn’t that just the same as being alive and talking to your children?

  In Nehama’s back room gas jets flickered, adding heat to the evening light that came through the window. “I don’t believe that Lipski did it,” she said, giving the cradle a push with her foot. Nathan had found it in the Lane and bought it with his card money. “I’m telling you, the boy is innocent.”

  “They caught him right there,” Minnie said, wiping her forehead. Everyone was talking about it. The girl’s name was Miriam Angel, like something from a play in the old Jewish theater. But she was murdered in a small East End room; it could have been any of theirs; the perpetrator was said to be Israel Lipski, her lodger. “He had the same poison on his lips as the girl.”

  “So you think the murderer poisons himself, too? Lipski was beaten up and pushed under the bed, just like he said.” Nehama started up her sewing machine again. She was tired, and the baby was whimpering with the heat. The hot coals in Lazar’s iron were just a thicker form of the air they were trying to breathe.

  “No one should have lodgers. It isn’t safe.” There was nowhere to escape the heat of their small rooms. The theater had gone bankrupt, and even in the market every cabbage had a sickening smell, the juggler d
ropped his plates, the strong man was fat and broke a bench when he sat down to rest. The singing dwarf only cried bitter tears, and nobody cried with him.

  “You want to be afraid? I’ll tell you why,” Nehama said. “Because a Jewish boy was found under the bed, he’s going to be hanged. Any one of us could be him. Look at Nathan.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Just put in that lining and don’t talk so much.” He had a bruise on his face. When he was walking home, a gentile called him Lipski and they got into a fight. Nathan’s hand was cut, too.

  “It’s because there’s no theater,” Minnie said.

  “What are you talking?” Nehama asked.

  “If there was a theater then someone would be there the night of the murder,” Minnie said. “Maybe the girl, maybe the lodger, or even the murderer. You think murderers don’t like a good melodrama? There’s nothing to do on a Saturday night.”

  “Or any other night,” Nehama said irritably. The cradle was under the table, by her right foot. She sewed and she rocked the baby, who was named Gittel-Sarah. Everything had worked out; she had a husband, she had a child, she had a means to earn a living. So why couldn’t she sleep at night?

  Regent Street

  Something as small as a gold cross on a chain could make all the difference in employment opportunities for a young woman.

  Chesham House of Liberty’s was a shop of many rooms and staircases and mirrors draped with artistic fabrics to give the impression of corridors where there were none. It had Oriental porcelain, bronzes, lacquerware, dolls, fans, handscreens, armor, inlaid cabinets, ivory, swords, Indian condiments, Arab sideboards, guava jelly, damask wallpaper, and in one small nook there was the Estate Agency department, managed by a rather large man. The two sections of Chesham House were separated by a shop that wouldn’t sell to Mr. Liberty. A humped staircase over the store connected them, and a wire attached to a receiving box facilitated communication between the two sections. The Savoy Theatre purchased the costumes for The Mikado from Liberty’s, and each was genuinely, authentically Japanese. You may depend upon it.