The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  “He means the actors wouldn’t give him more than an hour,” Minnie said to Nehama. It was a play in the new style. The actors spoke like ordinary people, like anyone right here in the Lane. There wasn’t a single rhyme. No dancing interlude. No Roman guards. No camels. No Bengal fire. They even had the script onstage because Lazar had just finished the play this morning.

  It was about a father and son, peddlers who wanted to leave London because there was too much competition. They were discussing where they should go. They’d been arguing about it for twenty minutes, and it seemed that they would continue to argue for the entire act.

  “As full of dreck as real life,” Nathan said. He was wearing his favorite and only jacket, with the yellow checks. He refused any other. This one suited him exactly.

  “That’s real art,” Lazar replied, tipping his bowler hat. Minnie was proud of it, no wool cap for her husband, who attended the free lectures on art at the library. Nehama went to the lectures on economics.

  “For such a demand you’ll have more than enough plays,” Nehama said. She liked the yellow jacket. All the others Nathan might have worn were in the coins knotted in handkerchiefs and stored under the loose board. Torchlight glinted on her husband’s face as he turned to wink at her.

  “No, Nehameleh. You’re completely wrong. Who wouldn’t want to see something like this? You watch it and you feel like your life is very long,” he said.

  Onstage, the father finally rose from his bench. He banged a fist on the rough table, looked defiantly at Lazar, and broke into song. “What does he think he’s doing?” Lazar asked.

  Nehama and Minnie clapped. The thin crowd started to swell. The actor told a funny story and everyone laughed. Sometimes it happened like this. Yiddish actors weren’t yet convinced of the new style. They were used to making up their own lines when they got bored.

  “Stop it!” Lazar shouted. He jumped onto the stage. The audience clapped harder. This was good fun. This was Chametz Battel Night.

  “You’re not paying me enough to speak these lines,” the actor said, shaking the script at Lazar.

  “You suppose anyone else would pay you more?” he asked. “You’re not even any good as a presser, never mind.”

  “And you think you’re a Jewish Shakespeare? Better you should press paper with a hot iron than put a pencil on it.”

  “A favor I did you. Giving you my best part where everyone could see you.”

  “Better my grandmother should see me at my funeral,” the actor said, picking up the small table, which he’d brought from home, and stomping off the stage. The son shrugged and followed with the bench. The stage was empty, the crowd parted, some drawn by the smell of chocolate at the stall of sweets, some to the escape artist tied in ropes and hanging from a lamppost, others to the vendors of cooked meat.

  “KIDNEY PIE CERTIFIED KOSHER BY THE CHIEF RABBI!”

  “BRISKET! REAL KOSHER! NO PISS IN IT!”

  “Very good,” Nathan said. “A wonderful play.”

  “But it’s not over.” Lazar dug his hands into his pockets as he glared at the naked little stage.

  “Now you can go,” Nehama said to Gittel. “Here, take my shawl. It’s getting cold. And don’t come back too soon. I have a lot to get for Pesach, still.”

  “All right, Mama. All right.”

  Nehama put the red shawl around her daughter’s shoulders, murmuring warnings and instructions and scratching Gittel’s back in that one spot midway between her shoulder blades where it itched whenever she got excited.

  It was just then that Nathan saw Mr. Shmolnik, the pawnbroker, across the way and said that he needed to have a word with him about getting a third sewing machine as he’d heard that Shmolnik had gotten one in very cheap. So why did it have to be that minute—who knows? It was a night for buying. A night for selling. Maybe Nathan thought he’d get a deal and tomorrow Passover was coming; it would be days till Mr. Shmolnik’s shop would open again, and tonight money burned to change hands.

  The Lane was slick with wet muck, all the dropped bits of festivity tramped underfoot. When Nathan slipped and hit the ground with a thud, he got up and made such a face that everyone laughed as he slapped his hat back on his head. He waved at Mr. Shmolnik and called to him to stop. A cart with nuns from the convent was passing by. They looked happy to be outside; they were chattering and pointing and laughing. The cart was painted with lilies for Easter, the horses in straw hats laden with flowers. But why should they go down to Whitechapel Road through the Lane tonight of all nights?

  There was a noise. Of course there was a noise. There was lots of noise, all kinds of noise. But something startled one of the horses. Maybe it was the stall of chocolates that fell over when the men chasing each other with squirters crashed into it. Or maybe it was the juggler who dropped his plates on purpose to startle his audience. As Nathan stepped back to get out of the way of the nervous horse, he slipped again. He was flat on the ground, the driver struggling with the reins. A man jumped from the cart, a priest, and the nuns were screaming. Nehama blinked, then the horses were rearing and Nathan’s arm was sticking out from between the wheels of the cart.

  Lazar was saying something she couldn’t hear. Minnie had her by the arm and Lazar gripped her shoulders as the horses were taken out of their harness and tied to posts. Nehama was holding on to her basket. Everything for Passover was there. How can you have a holiday without what you need for it?

  She waited for Nathan to jump up and run back to her with a joke. But he was just lying there, a crumple of yellow jacket. “Tatteh!” Gittel was crying. When he wouldn’t answer, she threw herself at him. Nehama stood by, saying nothing, holding on to the basket with everything she needed for Passover except the one that mattered most.

  Whitechapel Road

  The sages wrote that it is the duty of every man to bring joy to his household with nuts and new garments on the festival, and wine to cheer the telling of the Passover story. Gittel knew that in every Jewish room in the East End, there was a table with a white cloth, a pair of candlesticks, a seder plate with a burnt egg, a shank bone, greens, bitter herbs, and sweet apples mixed with crushed nuts and wine. In the center of the table was the best cup for Elijah the prophet, who would invisibly travel from home to home, taking a drop of wine from each to share the joy of freedom.

  But what did Gittel care about holidays? Papa was unconscious. His head was banged up and no one could tell how badly. On the outside it didn’t look terrible. There was a bruise above his right ear but no blood.

  Sister Marion, who was in charge, stood by Sister Frances, the shorter of the two, stout and ruddy. She spoke like a Cockney, Sister Marion like a shopkeeper’s beady-eyed and self-important wife. They were taller than Mama, the white wimple made them more imposing, but she faced the nurses with their clean sturdy hands and immaculate aprons bleached and boiled by fallen women and orphaned girls who had no festival of freedom, holding Gittel’s trembling hand. The nurses didn’t want Gittel to stay.

  “Don’t say a word, my daughter,” Nehama murmured in Yiddish. “Leave it to me.” They stood next to Papa’s bed. There was a row of such beds. In each of them a man was maybe dying and maybe living.

  “Girls don’t belong here,” Sister Marion said. “The men are exposed when the dressings is changed. You people think you can do whatever you please. But rules is just the same for them as think they’re above such things. She has to go.”

  “Then who’s allowed?” Mama asked in the polite tone she used for lady visitors who came from the Jewish Board of Guardians to inspect their rooms.

  “His wife, of course,” Sister Marion said. “And other married female relations. A sister, for example.”

  “Oh, that’s all right then,” Mama informed her. “This is my husband’s littlest sister what’s married.” The nurses glanced at each other. Gittel was blushing. “Yes, don’t you know? Jews marry their children off dreadful young.”

  “Disgusting,” Sister Frances s
aid. The head nurse wiped her nose as if something were stinking more than the men’s wounds. But Gittel stayed.

  They spent Passover in the hospital. Mama pushed two chairs together for Gittel to sleep on, which wasn’t any worse than how many a lodger or cousin slept. Aunt Minnie and Uncle Lazar brought food. No one could eat, but the point was not to eat, only to have it so that they were reminded of the existence of food. They talked fast, as if any pause would be a door for death to enter, but Gittel heard them only now and again. Something about Uncle Lazar’s play, he’d write another act, it would be about this or that, you see that Nathan’s color is better, a little rest, that’s all. Aunt Minnie was taking things out of a basket, finding a place for them on the small bedside table, on the plate that she pushed into Mama’s hand, on the cloth she put over Gittel’s lap.

  Uncle Lazar had lost his hat, the bowler hat that made him somebody. It fell off when he was lifting Papa into the nuns’ cart so they could take him to the hospital. He hoped that Papa would appreciate what he’d sacrificed. Only for such a friend, a brother, would he give up that hat. Look at this odd wool thing he had on his head. Could you call it a hat? It belonged on an old man, an alter-kacker, never mind.

  So they went on, the talk hurting Gittel’s ears until she thought she would bleed if anyone said another word. But at last they were ready to leave. Aunt Minnie swept up the crumbs and wrapped the uneaten food in newspaper. Uncle Lazar put his hand on Nathan’s head, murmured a blessing, then turned away, embarrassed.

  “Let me take Gittel home,” Aunt Minnie said. “She shouldn’t get sick. Look at her eyes, she’s so tired she’s ready to fall.”

  “I’m staying here,” Gittel said. There was mud on her dress and a spot of dried blood where she’d cut her knee, throwing herself on the ground over her father.

  “Come with me. A child needs sleep.” Aunt Minnie was pinning her hat to her hair, the hatpin as long as a sword in the moonlight.

  “You should go,” Mama murmured, her eyes far away. She was touching the gold chain that Papa had given her to wear for Passover. There ought to be something hanging from the chain, a locket, a jewel set in gold, but Mama said she liked the chain just the way it was.

  Gittel folded her hands in her lap as if she were in school. “I’m staying,” she said. A person had to sit still with her hands folded. That was the rule.

  “It’s all right. Go on,” Mama told the others.

  The ward was bright with moonlight while men moaned in their dreams. Some of the moans were in Yiddish, some in English, one was in Chinese, and several in no language at all. There were two rows of beds, each with a small nightstand. Beside one was the wicker frame used to hold the canvas that wrapped a patient for hot air treatments.

  “What happens after someone dies, Mama?” Gittel asked quietly. She had to be quiet. When someone cries, people run away. It was her crying over her tatteh that had driven him into unconsciousness.

  “People sit shivah. They mourn and then they get up.” Her mother’s voice was quiet, too. The night nurse was walking between the rows of beds. Her white habit made her look like a ghost, but her shoes clump-clumped on the linoleum. It was the day nurse who washed the floor with carbolic acid.

  “I mean the person that’s dead. If his body is in the ground, how does he turn the pages of the Torah when he’s studying in heaven?”

  “Do I care?” Mama asked. “That’s God’s problem. Me, I want my family to use their hands to make a living and clap when there’s a good show at the theater.”

  “What if there’s nothing, Mama?” The biggest boy in her class said that after you die, worms eat the body and that’s all. Papa was lying in the bed, a thin line under the sheet on his way to nothing. His face was without expression, the crease in his forehead made by the bandage. If only it was worry about finishing an order or concentration on the last line of a joke. “Do you think there’s nothing after a person dies?”

  Her mother looked from the bed to Gittel, pushing her chair closer to Gittel’s before saying in a confidential tone, “I’m telling you, what you hear now, you’ll hear then.”

  “I hear Papa breathing,” Gittel said. His breathing was slow and shallow though there wasn’t anything wrong with his lungs or his heart, the physician had said. “But, Mama, I smell something.”

  “What—is it blood?” Mama stood up as if to pull back the sheet, looking around for the nurse, who had gone back to her station.

  “No. It smells like trees.”

  With a sigh, her mother sat down again, taking Gittel’s hand in hers. “What kind of tree?”

  “A linden tree when it buds.” Mama’s fingers were long and elegant. If they weren’t rough, they could be a lady’s. But a lady wouldn’t touch a dead body, and Mama would wash Papa if it came to that.

  “If it’s a linden, then it’s the tree in the courtyard of my mother’s house, may she rest in peace. Is there anything else?”

  “Roses. I smell roses,” Gittel said without any wonder that she might smell spring in Poland or summer in Russia, for when this world comes close to the other, it seems stranger that they’re separated than that they can touch.

  “We didn’t have any. But my father’s customers did. They all had rosebushes in their gardens.”

  There was a sound from the bed. Papa was smacking his lips as if they were dry. Mama poured water from the pitcher on his nightstand and held the cup to his lips. He drank like a man so old he could be in the museum. “How will we wake Tatteh?”

  “We just have to wait,” Mama said. The man in the next bed groaned as he turned over. “Is there another choice?”

  “You could tell me a joke,” Gittel said, looking away from Mama’s mournful face.

  “I’m no good at telling jokes. But it’s all right. God laughs plenty.”

  “Please, Mama. Just one.” The smell of carbolic acid mixed with roses and lindens and something else—yes, it was the smell of a stream filled with trout. The ward was a night garden, and if her tatteh only knew it he would realize that this world wasn’t such a bad place to return to.

  “All right. Just one,” Mama said, kissing Gittel’s forehead. “And then you go to sleep. I don’t want a sick child on top of everything else.”

  So Mama told one joke and then another. Every single joke of Papa’s, all the bad jokes, the terrible puns, the stories about the angel of death and the priests and the converts and the two brothers, one rich and one poor, all of them she told while Papa was unconscious. Before dawn, in the darkness between the moon and the sun, when you couldn’t even see the gold chain on Mama’s neck but just touch it as you leaned against her, she was hoarse and she was still telling jokes. She said, “And then the convert sprinkled a little water on the boiling beef and he said, Holy, Holy, Holy, now you are a fish.” She said, “You mean you’re not Moisheh from Minsk?” She met Gittel’s eyes with a promise, and she said, “You without me is like a door without a handle.”

  So the first sound that came from Papa was a faint laugh. Gittel jumped up to embrace her father, and Papa laughed again before he looked down and discovered the bandage on his arm where his right hand should have been.

  Frying Pan Alley

  The front room was just as Nehama had left it. The iron stove was shining. It had taken her a day to get it ready for Passover. The curtain hung in front of the bed, sewn in a patchwork of remnants so that when she lay with Nathan her eyes fell on pieces of their life together. The loose board under the bed was still loose, and under it were the handkerchiefs knotted around silver and copper coins. The Passover dishes were piled on the dresser, the blue glass vase was on the mantel and beside it the program from a children’s evening at the school with Gittel’s name in the chorus. Nathan’s newspaper was still on the table, Gittel’s homework, Nehama’s book from the library: The Woman Who Did.

  “Minnie! Come down!” she shouted.

  There was a clatter on the stairs, the door flung open. “My God, Nehama. Wha
t is it?”

  “Did you move a sewing machine?”

  Gittel was in school, Nehama had just come from the hospital. It was Hol Hamoed, the middle four days of Passover, when work is permitted. In the street someone was calling, “Motzos! If you didn’t get enough on Chametz Battel Night, now’s your chance! Half price, slightly burnt!” The barrow rattled over cobblestones, the voice grew fainter.

  “What are you talking?” Minnie asked. “Why would I do such a thing? Is there a reason to shlep sewing machines here and there?”

  “Then it’s gone, Minnie. There’s only one in the workshop.”

  “That’s impossible. Let me have a look.”

  “You think I’m blind all of a sudden?”

  “Maybe just a little crazy. It happens. With Nathan in the hospital …” While she was talking, Minnie walked into the back room, Nehama following, the book still in her hand. It was easy to see the workshop with a single sweep of the eyes. The mantel for the gaslight, the pressing table, the soot on the window and the paper over the crack, the rough table where in the busy season four people worked, and now only one sewing machine. “Joe’s bag is missing, too.” Minnie pointed to the bench. A black-and-red-striped bag should have been under it. The bag belonged to Joe, the lodger, who’d been training on the sewing machine and sleeping on a bench in the workshop for the last month. He was a landsmann from Plotsk. He knew Nehama’s next older sister or at least her husband, the one that smelled like onions, or so he’d said.

  “You think he stole it—I don’t believe it.” Nehama dropped her book on the table and sat down, her hands over her eyes.

  “It has to be the lodger,” Minnie said.

  “Tell me, Minnie. Just one thing. How could I forget? A person claims to be a landsmann. You offer your trust and then … Now you see what happens. You see it with your own eyes.”

  Minnie was sitting on the bench beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not a watch he put in his pocket. A sewing machine? The whole street would be looking.”