The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  “Love and honor the flag.” Mr. Angel turned toward the map behind the teacher’s desk, tapping it with a pointer. “Then you shall take a deserving part in this great Empire.”

  Gittel gazed at the Union Jack drooping in the corner. Yes, her other mother was English, and she’d be disgusted by Gittel and her low taste. She ought to stop speaking Yiddish altogether, as the headmaster said. But then she wouldn’t be able to go with her father to the theater. Ever since he’d woken up crippled, he’d stopped telling jokes. Gittel was sure that if she’d only take him to a play in the Pavilion, he would feel like himself again. And when he started telling jokes in Yiddish, what was she supposed to do? She had to laugh. Otherwise he might suspect that she didn’t think he was the same anymore.

  Mr. Angel was aiming the pointer at her. “And what is your name, child?” he asked.

  Gittel could see that Miss Lipshitz was dismayed. She’d have called on Clara, who often had her name written on the blackboard at the end of the week under the caption “Best Pupil.”

  “Answer the headmaster,” Miss Lipshitz said.

  Gittel rose from her chair, hands behind her back. “Gittel Katzellen, sir,” she said.

  “And what progress has Gittel made?” he asked Miss Lipshitz.

  Gittel couldn’t bear to meet Miss Lipshitz’s eyes. “A quiet girl. Modest.”

  “Good, good,” Mr. Angel said. “And?”

  “And, well.” The teacher paused. There wasn’t much else to say. “A lovely voice, Gittel has. Would you sing something for Mr. Angel?”

  She didn’t like to sing in public. Her throat tightened when people looked at her. “I’m don’t think I …” Her voice was barely audible.

  “You know ‘Rule Britannia.’ Now one, two, three …” Miss Lipshitz counted while the headmaster waited. Gittel loved her teacher, even if it was unrequited, and for love a person can do anything. Poets said so, and they had busts made of them.

  Gittel closed her eyes, then opened them, focusing on the bust of Wordsworth as she began to sing, squeaking along as she imagined that she was the baroness. Clara would know it. They often played that Clara was Lady Montagu and Gittel was Baroness Rothschild. But today Gittel was imagining that she was her other mother and the name was an English name: Baroness Englander. Yes.

  Outside hawkers were calling: Fish fresh for Shobbos! Jackets like new! Chairs to repair!

  Whitechapel Road

  In the hospital ward, a nurse stripped Nathan’s bed and carried away the linen while he got ready to go. A sack with his nightclothes was on the bedside table, written instructions from the doctor, the morphine and syringes. Nehama held out the new jacket. She’d got it in the Lane, a navy blue jacket with double brass buttons and one of the sleeves sewed up at the end.

  “What’s this?” he asked as he awkwardly pushed his right arm into the sleeve. His neck was stringy like an old horse’s, and his hair, though still black, was thinner on top. It made his forehead high, and before the accident he’d have said, Thank God, now someone might mistake me for an intelligent man.

  “I sewed it up to make it more comfortable for you,” Nehama said. His eyes were the same dark brown, almost the color of charcoal.

  “You think my hand is going to fall out the end?” He smiled at the joke, his new bitter smile, his voice low and sharp. His voice was new, and so was his walk, a shuffle and a hobble instead of the old light step, his eyes wandering restlessly, avoiding Nehama’s gaze as she picked up the sack.

  “We shouldn’t lose the rest of the busy season,” she said as they left the hospital. “I could be best. Really, it was always a waste for me to do the plain sewing. Minnie can do it now. I know what you’re thinking—she has more thumbs than fingers—but if it doesn’t work out, then she can go back to being the general hand.”

  “And what will I do?” Nathan asked.

  “You’ll get better. Let’s take the streetcar. You’ll be too tired to walk after lying in bed for so long.”

  “I’m as good as I’m going to be, Nehameleh. Which is to say, not much.”

  Around them the throng pushed and shifted, the boot makers, the drunks, the match girls scarred by phosphorus, the whores and the boys selling lemons, the beggars, the gentlemen on their way to warehouses, the wives buying bread and the mothers drinking gin. The horn and trombone band marched beside the roar of horses and wheels, the streetcars striped green and red or blue and orange. There was no fog today. The sky was clear and cool. So why was she sweating while the bell foundry tolled its bells?

  “You can help Gittel with her homework,” Nehama said as they stepped up into the streetcar. “God only knows that she needs someone to watch her. Her report wasn’t so good. I want her to be a pupil-teacher, Nathan. That’s a life for someone. She has a head on her shoulders, but she won’t use it right unless someones makes her do it. Believe me, I know how it is. I was just the same.”

  Nathan was looking out the window, his eyes raised not to the hills from where God’s help would come, according to some, but to the chimneys and the factory smoke thickening across the sky. “If I died, at least you’d have a payout from the Friendly Society.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Nehama said.

  “I’m only telling you the truth.” Nathan’s hand rested on his knee, trembling as he jiggled his leg up and down. “When is it time for another shot? The medicine is wearing off.”

  It had been his light step that kept her safe. It had been his eyes on her thigh, making something beautiful of a scar. Now the moon was rising, cutting into the darkness that was enveloping her, a dark scythe cutting the dark sky. And she herself was the moon.

  CHAPTER 6

  Today as Then

  1899

  Charlotte Street

  It was the end of the fin de siècle, the last year of the yellow decade. People said that not to be new in these days was to be nothing. Shops for women had sprung up, and in them electric lights beamed. There were bicycles with pneumatic tires that women could ride on their own, even miles into the countryside, where rest houses catered to them. There was The Yellow Book with its new fiction of slums and syphilis and women who had affairs and some who had babies without the benefit of marriage. Everyone spoke of bourgeois decadence, intellectual bankruptcy, and the abyss of freedom. Despair was fashionable; so were ghost stories and detective fiction, but a living had to be made just as in the days of old, and Jacob Zalkind’s books sold well. Emilia often shopped at Liberty’s. When she wasn’t shopping, cooking, at the ladies’ club, or doing good works, she made paper-cuts. They hung in her friends’ homes; a few of them had even been sold. The ghost of the first wife was just a childhood memory, and Emilia didn’t think of her, not even when the garden was planted behind the house.

  She was dressing for the theater in an off-the-shoulder gown cut low enough to distract the eye from her waist. She wasn’t sure when to tell Jacob her news. Harriet Abraham said that the best time was before dinner so one wouldn’t eat with a knotted stomach. But Emilia’s father had thrown the soup, so the story went.

  Jacob was concentrating on his tie, his head above Emilia’s in the small mirror they shared. “Mr. Edwards wants me to rewrite the new book. He says it doesn’t come alive. Well, it’s just words, isn’t it? He gives me an advance of five shillings a page, and if there’s three hundred words on a page, that comes to a fifth of a penny per word. I don’t think he ought to expect me to create living beings at that rate.”

  “You’re not God.” Emilia gathered her hair and twisted it at the nape of her neck, but she couldn’t hold the pins. They kept dropping, pins all over the dressing table, around the jewelry case, and on top of the silver hairbrush. Outside their window the organ-grinder was playing “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay.”

  “How can I concentrate on my work with that?” Jacob asked. Oh, all he cared about was his book and here her pins were driving her mad. She could just cry. “The noise is worse upstairs,” he said. Now that Albert was
in Harley Street, Jacob had his study on the third floor.

  There. Emilia dropped her hair. Let it hang loose. “We could put you somewhere else, I suppose.”

  “And do what with my study?” Jacob asked.

  “It could be a nursery. What do you think of that?” Her earrings wouldn’t go into the holes in her ears. The posts were suddenly too thick. Oh, she had to tell him or she’d never finish dressing. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  He pulled a chair next to hers and sat down heavily. “Dear God in heaven. Really?” At least there was no soup to throw. “I didn’t think we ever would. It was all right, you understand me, Emilia. But now … This changes everything.” He took her hands in his. “How are you feeling?”

  “Well enough.” A little faintness didn’t signify.

  His face was serious, more serious than at any friend’s where he argued about politics or even at dinner with his mother when he argued about religion. “Do you think—will it be a girl or a boy?”

  “Harriet says a boy. She hung a needle from a thread and dangled it over me.”

  Jacob stood up again, looking into the mirror. “If it’s a boy, there’s a bit of a thing, you see.” He pulled on the tie. There was ink on his fingers. He was particular about his clothes but never minded the ink.

  “What thing?” Emilia gazed at her part of the mirror as if there were nothing more engrossing than her earrings. Everything was golden, Jacob’s short beard, her hair, the earrings.

  “A father expects his son to look like him. Of course we are English, we are all English now.” He glanced down at her and away. “My son will be English. But, well. It’s like this, Emilia. Do you know what a bris is?”

  “Is it another sort of brisket, Jacob? Or a calf’s-foot jelly?”

  “No. It’s not anything to do with food,” he said as if he hadn’t heard the sarcasm in her voice.

  “Oh, I see. A custom then.”

  “Yes. Well. You know I don’t look exactly the same as other Englishmen. That are not Jewish, I mean. For example, I wouldn’t look like your father did. Gentile men are different. Of course you wouldn’t ever have seen … Well, I—in certain parts. It’s the covenant…”

  “Yes, Jacob?”

  “A man’s private … Never mind. My mother will tell you everything.”

  “Jacob.” She shook her head. “You must be very nervous to forget. I’ve been to a bris before. Indeed, with you standing beside me looking rather pale.” All men paled when the baby’s tiny foreskin was removed. The girls looked on curiously. The mother of the baby cried in the next room. “Why think of it now? Wait till there’s a baby.”

  He didn’t smile. His tie was dangling on either side of his high collar, his hands in his pockets searching out something to occupy them. “It is absolutely necessary if I have a son.”

  “All right, Jacob.” She stared into the mirror, meeting only her own eyes. If she looked at him, he might see too much.

  “Thank you, Emilia. You are a jewel among wives. Then I shall ask Mother to send a letter of introduction to the rabbi.”

  “What are you talking about?” She picked up her gloves and her fan.

  “You’ll have to convert, naturally.”

  “Convert to what?” Her cloak was draped over a stool. It had a high ruffled collar, copied from the cover of La Nouvelle Mode.

  “Judaism. I’m sure it’s not terribly hard for a woman. You wouldn’t have to pray or anything.”

  “Jacob! I’m not doing anything of the sort. Whatever can you be on about?”

  “But my son can’t have a bris unless you are Jewish. It goes through the mother’s line. If you aren’t Jewish, then he isn’t.”

  “Your feelings for me have changed.” That was a man for you. He’d been happy enough with her as a gentile.

  “No, Emilia. Don’t say that. I love you more than ever. But my son…”

  “And this is my child. Don’t you ever forget it’s mine.” Now she was expected to turn around and become a Jew again.

  “Then I’ll ask you,” he said, taking her hands. “If you love me, then love my son for being like me.”

  “I’m not saying no, Jacob. But to come out with this after all these years …” And just being a Jew wasn’t good enough either—her husband wanted a converted Jew, a gentile made kosher, a bit of bacon with ritual water sprinkled on it.

  “No woman could be as sympathetic to her husband as you, Emilia.” He kissed her, and his kisses, at least, hadn’t changed at all, so she opened her mouth softly for another.

  There was a story her mother used to tell about Samson and Delilah. Remember, she’d say: Delilah tried to find out the secret of his strength many times. First, she asked him how he could be tied up and made helpless. He replied that if he was bound with seven fresh tendons, he would be as weak as an ordinary man. So she tied him up and called out, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” Then the Philistines rushed out from her room, where they were hiding, and Samson pulled the tendons apart. After that Delilah accused him of lying to her, so he said that if he was bound with new ropes he’d be as weak as anyone. At the next opportunity, she tied him up with new ropes and called out, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” The Philistines rushed out from her room, where they were hiding, and Samson tore off the ropes like thread. She accused him of lying again and begged for his secret. This time, the third time, he told her that he could be tied up if his hair was woven into a loom and pegged there. He was getting closer to the truth, but when she called out, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” he was as strong as ever. Yet she didn’t give up. Every day she asked him about the secret of his strength until his soul was ready for death and he admitted that if his hair was cut, his strength would leave him and he would be like an ordinary man.

  Do you realize, Emilia’s mother used to ask, that Samson was awake when he was tied up the first three times? Why did he let her do it? And then he went to sleep just like that after telling his secret. You have to wonder whether he just wished to give up his burden. A man with such strength has a cannon on his back and when he’s piqued, he brings the house down on top of himself. After Samson is captured, there’s no more mention of Delilah. But if you ask me, the money she received from the Philistines allowed her to buy a little house with a vineyard and settle down quietly far from the cannons.

  Petticoat Lane

  The new year began with the ram’s horn announcing the Jewish year of 5650. It was early September, the weather mild as the busy season approached for everyone but Nathan. After the accident, he’d tried to use the sewing machine with his left hand and not only botched the jacket but nearly injured his hand. He frightened himself as much as Nehama, and never tried it again. Often he forgot what he was saying in the middle of a sentence. He didn’t play cards, and he wouldn’t go to the theater. Sometimes he slept for days; sometimes he couldn’t sleep and lay on his back all night, moaning from the pain of his missing hand. The only jokes he told were so bitter that no one laughed. When his sick benefits from the Friendly Society were used up, Nehama was able to get some sewing here and there, but she had to sell the gold chain, and the stash of coins under her bed was slowly shrinking to make up rent. One day there would be nothing, and what then? So as the ram’s horn sounded the new year, she decided that something had to change. While neighbor was asking forgiveness of neighbor, she made Nathan as presentable as she could and dragged him to the office of the Jewish Board of Guardians.

  She waited with other newcomers sitting on the benches, reading the racing pages and eating apples. Babies cried, mothers nursed as they discussed The Slaughterer, the new play in the Yiddish theater. It was about a girl forced into marrying a rich man who made her live in the same house as his mistress and her two children. The script was supposedly adapted from a Yiddish play written in New York, but that couldn’t be true. They all knew who was meant by the slaughterer, and Mr. Berman was threatening to sue. Nathan leaned against the wall, too
restless to sit. He wore the dark blue jacket with the sewed-up sleeve. Double-breasted it was, with brass buttons. His beard was neat; Nehama had trimmed it herself that morning. Then she’d rolled his cigarettes and put them in his pocket.

  “Mr. Katzellen,” the secretary called.

  Nehama took Nathan’s arm and walked him to the interview chairs. He sat down like an old man, his back curved, his mouth slack as if he’d had a stroke, not lost a hand. Where was he, her Nathan? That was what she wanted to know. This person beside her was someone else, an embarrassment. “Good morning, sir,” she said to Mr. Zalkind, sitting behind his shining desk piled with overflowing files. His secretary was pouring tea from the Wedgwood teapot. Through the window she could see the warehouse that had been going up before Nathan’s accident last year. Trucks stood in front of it, men with rolled-up sleeves unloading the goods. All the best things in the world came from the river and were stored in the East End until they could be transported to places that deserved them.

  “Both Mr. and Mrs. Katzellen. To what do I owe this honor?” Mr. Zalkind smiled under his gray mustache.

  “Sholom aleichem,” Nathan said vaguely. His eyes wandered to the portrait of the queen on the wall behind Mr. Zalkind’s desk, then to the window, with its view of secondhand stalls and trucks.

  “We come about a loan, sir.” Nehama ignored her husband as she unfolded the paper on which she’d written the figures.

  “What is the purpose of the loan?” Mr. Zalkind asked, looking not at her but at Nathan, who was taking out a cigarette and lighting the match with one hand.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Zalkind,” she said. He turned his attention to her. She’d copied the figures so carefully onto a sheet of new paper. “You see it all laid out here. We’re to have a shop. Here’s how much is wanted for stock, how much for rent. This is what we has, and here’s the loan we want.”

  Mr. Zalkind nodded. “Yes, it’s all quite clear.” But even so, he wouldn’t speak to her, who knew what was what, turning again to Nathan. “Mr. Katzellen, do you have any experience in shopkeeping?”