The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  “A cholera on him.” Nehama put her fist against her mouth. How easily a life could come undone in just a few days. If only she’d sleep. Maybe then she’d wake up to everything as it was before Passover.

  “He had to go somewhere with it,” Minnie said. “A new lodger with a sewing machine won’t be hard to find. I want to see a man with such chutzpah in his face and then I’m going to scratch it out.”

  “All right,” Nehama said. Of course the missing sewing machine was the better one. Nathan had bought it after she had the miscarriage. “You go, Minnie. You tell me if you find out something.”

  “By myself? Don’t be foolish. Come on. Let’s go now. Everything can be fixed.”

  “I can’t do it, Minnie. Not again. How many times do you think a person can start from nothing? From less than nothing, from beneath the grave.”

  “You’re smarter now.” Minnie was taking her by the hand and leading her to the other room. “Here, put on your shawl. It’s raining again. If only I was a fish, I’d be ecstatic. When you have your shop—”

  “What are you talking? Without the sewing machine, we’re going to be lucky if we don’t starve to death.”

  “Cakes and blouses, am I right?” Minnie asked.

  “Books,” Nehama muttered. But she was shrugging into her coat, the shawl over her head. “Books and blouses.”

  “Who wants books? A good cake, a honey cake or a butter cake—that’s something I can make. Should we be partners, Nehama? I’ll want a striped blouse. A shopkeeper should have a striped blouse. Do you think pink or blue?”

  Nehama shook her head, but she couldn’t help smiling a little. Minnie was arguing with her about the sign over the shop and the color of the awning, and before she could look around, they were out in the street among the barrows and stalls dripping with rain.

  They went around the alley and to all the small streets that made up the Lane; the rain was gray and the houses leaned over them as they went from door to door. No one saw anything. It was Passover; on the last two evenings everyone had been inside at the seder while the moon was full and the streets as bright as by day. Did you see something? No, No, No, and then Yes. Mrs. Flacks’s youngest child, when she opened the door for Elijah the prophet to come in and drink his drop of wine, she’d seen something. What did she see? they asked, everyone excited. It was Elijah, she told them. Did he have a sewing machine? That was too funny—Elijah wasn’t a tailor, he was a prophet with a long white beard and sweets for children and maybe Mrs. Katzellen had a farthing for her to buy a peppermint as she’d seen the holy Elijah.

  Pious Pearl was holding an umbrella over her beigels at the corner of Sandys Row and Frying Pan Alley outside a shop that sold uniforms from the Crimean War and weapons from the wars of Napoleon, everything rusty and moth-eaten. The owner of the shop, twice as wide as her doorway, was standing outside looking for customers in the drizzle. Beside her was the hot-chestnut seller who, ten years ago, had seen a man fleeing on the night of the murders. It was a corner for seeing things. It was a corner for listening.

  “Chestnuts, all ’ot!”

  “Knives and sitthers to grind!”

  “Special edition, ’orrible railway accident!”

  “Did you maybe see our lodger?” Nehama asked Pious Pearl. Her voice didn’t belong to her. How could it sound so calm when she was strangling?

  “Joe with the striped bag?” Pious Pearl asked. She didn’t have to think for a minute. “I saw him on the first night of Pesach.” She’d been a bit tipsy from her four glasses of wine and the vodka both before and after, but it was no one else. They’d had a little conversation. The lodger said that Nehama had asked him, as a favor, to pawn the sewing machine for her rent while Nathan was in hospital. “It’s not true?” she asked Nehama.

  “Not a word.”

  “Maybe he took it to Shmolnik’s. Have a dozen beigels, Nehama. No, I don’t want a penny. Take it or I’ll curse you till you’re sorry you ever saw me. Here.”

  “Keep it,” Nehama said. “Curses I have plenty.”

  Minnie took her arm as they turned down toward the high road. The rain was soaking through her shawl, and she needed a drink. She wished she was Pious Pearl. She needed to be the kind of person who could drink and not throw it up before she got drunk.

  Whitechapel Road

  The pawnshop was long and narrow. At the very back the pendulum of a grandfather clock swung gracefully back and forth in its glass casing, though the hands on the face of the clock never moved from thirteen minutes past one. Behind the counter, the walls were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, on every shelf tattered goods with tickets hanging on string. Mr. Shmolnik had two men working for him. There was no slack season in this trade, and several women were waiting to pawn their husbands’ Sunday boots, their sheets, a clock, a wedding ring, a beer stein.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your husband.” Mr. Shmolnik wasn’t a brown man with a knot for a nose anymore. He had a gray beard and a gray face under it. Only his eyebrows were still dark. He’d never found a third wife, but somehow he’d managed, and with God’s mercy, his children had grown up. “How is he, Mrs. Katzellen?”

  Nehama wanted to kill him; it was the good inclination that was telling her to rid the world of a man that caused decent husbands to fall in the mud and nearly die, sacrificing a right hand, the hand that made a living, the hand that made love. But the evil inclination, the savage instinct, the instinct for self-preservation has more sense. It forced her to think of herself, her family, the shop that would give her daughter a future better than the street. “Awake, thank God,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “A terrible thing. I’ll never forget the sight of him falling under the cart.” Mr. Shmolnik turned his head as someone came in through the connecting door from the coffee house. Nehama could see the men playing cards, reading the racing pages. The bookie was consulting with Mr. Shmolnik; someone must have won for a change. They whispered, they nodded—what was this to her?

  “He was going to talk to you about a sewing machine,” Minnie said as the door to the coffee house closed again. She had her hand on Nehama’s arm, holding it close to her side as if she thought her friend might fly apart. “He heard you got one cheap.”

  “I know the machine you mean.” Behind him one of the countermen was taking something off a shelf. A miracle—the woman with the mole on her cheek was redeeming a suit. So the lost could be found again after all. “A beauty, if I may say so,” Mr. Shmolnik went on. “And a bargain. But now it’s gone. They go very quickly in the busy season. I give good terms. And why not? It’s a virtue, one person to help another.”

  “So tell me. Did you happen to get another such cheap sewing machine this week?” Minnie asked.

  “I did,” he said. “I can give you very good terms if you’re interested. I have it in back with a few other things.”

  “Well, as it happens we lost such a sewing machine,” Nehama said. She leaned on the counter, her elbows on the oilcloth that covered it.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, our lodger took it off with him. On the first night of Passover. I’m sure you were at the seder, a pious man like you.” She spit out pious as if it were a bit of worm. But Mr. Shmolnik did not get upset. He knew where he stood with God.

  “Let me tell you, it was some surprise when my youngest opened the door for Elijah the prophet and there stood a man with a sewing machine. I told him, It’s Passover, I don’t do business. But if he wanted to leave it inside the door, should I stop him? One sewing machine looks very much like another. Who can tell if it was yours?”

  “The lodger, his name was Joe. He talked very slow, like he was dreaming. He had a striped bag, red and black.”

  “You know, I think that was the man. I paid for the sewing machine yesterday and he had a train to catch.”

  “So you’ll give it back.”

  “Mrs. Katzellen, I paid for it. How can I give it back to you?”

  “W
hat business is it of yours to buy stolen merchandise? Are you a fence like that Mr. White down the street?”

  “A fence—that’s crazy, if you don’t mind my saying. But a copper, I’m not either. Is it my business to ask questions about the merchandise? Fortune goes up, it goes down. People need money. So a man comes and sells me his sewing machine. It’s black. It has a needle. Now you say it’s yours. What should I think?”

  “It’s my livelihood you’re stealing, Mr. Shmolnik. What does the Torah say about that?”

  “Look. Just give me what I paid for it. That’s all I’m asking you for. A profit I wouldn’t make from you.” He took some tobacco from one pocket and paper from the other and began rolling a cigarette.

  “But it’s ours, how can I buy our own sewing machine?”

  “Look, Mrs. Katzellen. If it’s charity you want, then say so. It’s a great virtue to help the poor. You want tzedakah? Then hold out your hand. I’ll give what I can. As the law says, you should never turn someone away, but God forbid you should make yourself into another beggar. You understand me?”

  She waited for her strength to rise up, for the yetzer-hara to save her. But she could barely stand. If Minnie hadn’t been holding her up, she’d have fallen. How could Nathan come home and find his workshop dismantled, the good sewing machine stolen like his other hand?

  “Your bloody charity, I don’t want. How much for the machine?” she asked. Yesterday she had a shop, at least it was nearly a shop, with the sign so vivid in her mind that she could measure it with a tailor’s tape. Now she had nothing. Only a hidden stash of coins flying into Shmolnik’s till. “Just don’t say a word to anyone. God forbid Nathan should hear about it.”

  “Then let me go to the back and check what I paid.” Mr. Shmolnik told one of his men to take the next customer, a woman in a battered hat, holding a clock and a braid of hair.

  Nehama stood to one side with Minnie and waited. The door blew open and closed, the rain came in, the floor was tracked with mud, the women brought their tattered treasures and left with the rent money in pocket. Nehama sang under her breath, “The wind, the wind, the raging wind …”

  She knew the story of the song because her sisters had told her about it. When Grandma Nehama traveled by boat to get married, she was accompanied by her aunt, who frightened her from Warsaw to Plotsk. You see that girl. A lovely complexion, am I right? Consumptive. Pale skin, red cheeks. She’ll be dead in six months. Why aren’t you eating, where does it hurt? Your stomach. Aah, well. I knew a woman in Warsaw, she had a stomachache just like that and in a week her belly stuck out like a balloon. People thought she was pregnant and she wasn’t married, her family was mortified. She had cancer. The ulcers, how they stank. In a year she was dead. And so it went on through all the diseases and disasters known to humankind. The boat rocked and she said that a storm was coming just like the one she’d heard about last spring that drowned everyone on board. A middle-aged couple were heard arguing and she said that her neighbors had argued just like that and in the middle of the night the husband ran away, deserting the wife and leaving her an aguna, neither married nor unmarried, and she killed herself. The other passengers nodded knowingly, adding their own two kopecks. So you’re going to get married? Mazel-tov. Never met the groom, of course it could be all right. I remember hearing … You can be sure it was nothing good they heard. Grandma Nehama became so nervous she thought she would faint, until she was befriended by a badhan, a wedding jester going to visit his brother. As the aunt started going on about another tragedy, he broke into song. It was a sad song, the kind that makes the mother of the bride cry, about the wind and the streets and the gloomy shadows. But whenever Grandma Nehama glanced at him while he was singing, he made such faces that she laughed, and the other passengers shook their heads. She said to the badhan, Stop making me laugh. People think I’m crazy. He answered, Is that right? Well, you shouldn’t be surprised. That’s how people are. They look at an elephant’s foot and they think it’s a tree trunk. Only God in heaven sees everything. Don’t forget what I’m telling you today. So after the wedding when she held the sad baby, her stepdaughter, she sang this song to remind herself of what the wedding jester had told her. While she sang, her breasts began to give milk and the baby came to know that she had a mother again.

  Nehama had never been able to nurse her baby. She’d forgotten about it after Gittel was weaned, but now she realized that it was a sign. The end of the story was coming. If she had no life to offer her daughter, she’d lose her to the street.

  The Jews’ Free School

  From the school to Dorset Street was just a five-minute walk, but it could have been over the sea. Here was the world of shops and synagogues and the rooms of tailors in the Lane, and there the doss-houses where criminals slept after their jobs were done. The two kinds of streets were right next to each other, like the world of the living and the world of the dead, but you couldn’t cross over from one to the other. It was unthinkable.

  The girls marched to their classroom from their entrance in Frying Pan Alley, fifteen hundred of them. On the other side, the Bell Lane side, two thousand boys filed in, stamping with the new boots handed out by the Jews’ Free School at Passover. When the first bell rang, the girls put on their white pinafores, the boys their blue smock shirts. The sound of “God Save the Queen” rose above the squeal of chickens in the slaughterhouse on Bell Lane.

  It was the largest elementary school in Britain, and the headmaster for nearly sixty years was Mr. Moses Angel, whose single aim was to remake his students in a respectable image. Even the queen’s minister of education sought his advice. He was no relation to Miss Miriam Angel, the girl who’d been murdered the year that Gittel was born, though he came from the East End, too. Everyone knew that his father was Mr. Angel of Vinegar Yard, now long deceased, who in his day had been known as Money Moses. This Mr. Angel was transported to Tasmania for fencing stolen gold while the future headmaster was left behind and raised by someone else. Never once in his years at the school had Mr. Angel flogged a child. His students were more afraid of him than if he did.

  Mr. Angel was eighty years old now, but he still checked every clock in the school and visited each classroom in turn. “Good morning, Miss Lipshitz,” he said to Gittel’s teacher. In the dim light he looked as if he’d live forever.

  Miss Lipshitz was red with awe as she faced the headmaster. “Good morning, sir. What do you say, children?”

  The girls rose and stood beside their desks again. “Good morning, Mr. Angel,” they said.

  Leaning on his cane, he mounted the platform at the front of the class and turned to face them. “What have your girls been learning?” he asked.

  Miss Lipshitz wore her hair in a knot at the back of her head; perched on top was a navy blue bow that matched the blue of her skirt. Miss Lipshitz was seventeen, and Gittel wanted to be just like her. “We’ve been doing verses, Mr. Angel,” she said.

  “Good. I should like to hear something.”

  “Verse thirteen,” Miss Lipshitz said. “Remember your h’s, girls.”

  Folding hands over their midriffs, the girls began to recite as if they were jumping rope, some dashing on to the second line while others like Gittel were still doddling on the first, gazing at the bust of Wordsworth on Miss Lipshitz’s desk:

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze …

  Of course it made no sense at all. Clouds weren’t lonely. How could they be when they always gathered in gray masses, following as closely as the cows climbing down the steps of Old Montague Street? And a crowd of daffodils? You had only to use your eyes to see they came singly in pots or gathered in paper by flower sellers in Piccadilly. Papa said that Wordsworth would never have succeeded in the Yiddish theater.


  That was his low taste. Miss Lipshitz said that music halls and theaters in the East End were low, especially ones in Yiddish. Theaters in the West End were not low, they had plays by Shakespeare. The best students from every class were going to see Hamlet. Gittel’s deskmate, Clara, was one of the chosen. Gittel was not.

  “Well done,” Mr. Angel said.

  Their teacher beamed as Mr. Angel seated himself at her desk, putting his cane across it. On the wall behind him was the blackboard and to either side of it a portrait of the queen at her coronation, a portrait of Baron de Rothschild, the school’s benefactor, and a map of the world, largely colored pink to indicate the Empire. “I want to tell you girls a little story,” Mr. Angel said, lifting his voice above the one-man band banging cymbals in the alley. “Just yesterday a boy was brought to me for discipline because he threatened his teacher with a knife. That is a vulgar thing to do and most un-English. I will not have my students become hoodlums in Dorset Street.”

  Gittel’s first mother would be as nicely spoken as Miss Lipshitz. Gittel tried to correct her own pronunciation so that on the day she met the other mother—who would be a teacher, if not a baroness—Gittel wouldn’t put her to shame.

  “I expect you girls to lead your elders to English ways of feeling. You must begin right and go on as you begin. Speak well, and that means you must not speak the Jargon, you know I mean Yiddish, not even with your parents. Poland came with them to London. It’s here on the streets.” Mr. Angel waved at the flies that came through the windows from the barrels of smoked fish outside. “And it will defile you if you allow it.”

  Did her other mother’s street smell like fish? Gittel wondered. Or would she be disgusted?

  “Your teachers make every effort to wipe away all evidence of foreign proclivities, but you must all help them,” he said. “Only by being English in thought and deed can you defeat anti-Semitism. Remember that all Jews are judged by your behavior, not only those of Whitechapel.”

  Maybe her other mother wasn’t Jewish at all. Libby said she was, but how could she be sure?