The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. A child with a living mother is blessed by God. Are you listening to me? I’ve had enough talking to the walls. I’m tired of it, let me tell you. You think it’s so ay-ay-ay sitting around in this world? Don’t you recognize me? I talked and I talked until I’m blue in the face. Believe me, even eternity can be a long time.

  “Is that you, Grandmother?” Nehama whispered. “Then why are you here?” An answer could come in a dream, a way to save her husband and her daughter.

  Look out for your daughter. That’s what I came to say.

  “That’s it? For this I could stay awake.” Nehama shook her head. “Maybe someone should take Gittel from me. I don’t deserve her. I don’t have what to give her. You remember the story of King Solomon. He knew the real mother, and to her went the baby. She wouldn’t let anything happen to it.”

  My granddaughter. What makes you so sure that it was the woman who bore the living baby that spoke? The other one, she knew what it was to suffer. She held the stillborn child and cried till her eyes were raw. Wouldn’t she be the first to say, “No. Better the baby should live”? You listen to me, Nehameleh. What was done can be undone.

  “Then help me, Grandmother. I pray to you. Intercede for me with the Holy One above.”

  And Nehama believed that her grandmother would. Against all logic, she came into the house in Frying Pan Alley, thinking that even if she was now fully awake, in the front room she would find Nathan whole again.

  When she saw him lying in bed, the wounded arm flung over his face, she cried out, “I have no grandmother. She’s no relation to me at all.”

  And her step-grandmother wondered why God in heaven had chosen the darkest of her grandchildren, the most obstinate, the loneliest to hear her. Even in the next world, it’s possible to have a broken heart.

  Charlotte Street

  The garden was nothing like the one in Minsk—the bushes were rhododendrons not roses, the tree was a plane tree and had no fruit, the wrought-iron fence was not a brick wall, and no ghosts walked in it, for in London vagrants were swept up by the police—but Emilia liked to work at the table by the window on the third floor, looking out on the garden. She stored her inks, brushes, stencils, and paper on shelves to her right, and there she also kept the German Bible from Zaydeh to study the illustrations for inspiration when she was tired of cutting.

  “Emilia, I want your help with something.” Jacob’s desk was behind her in the shadows under the slanted ceiling, lit by a tall lamp with a glass shade.

  “What is it?” She was working on a paper-cut of Samson and Delilah, painting the figures in the center of a delicate frame of flowers and trees.

  “Pictures for my column. I have to choose one.” He had a sheaf of photographs in his hand. His voice was excited, his eyes uncertain.

  “Let me see.” She had to smile at the sight of him in his shirtsleeves, as if writing was too hot an exercise to keep his jacket on, small pieces of paper torn from his notebook stuck in his waistcoat pockets, ready to hand when he needed them, his golden beard freshly trimmed so she could glimpse his chin beneath as he scratched it. “What are you writing about?”

  “The street where I was born. It’s gone now, torn down with the clearances.” Today there was more brown than green in his eyes. He looked at her with a question, but what it was she couldn’t guess as he put the photograph on the table. “It was rather like this one.” Emilia glanced at the bedraggled square with the beigel lady sitting on a crate, a tin pail of zinc embers on the ground warming her feet.

  “Was it?” she asked. The picture wasn’t any worse than something you’d see in the newspaper. But her husband’s hand on it, his ink-stained hand, worried her. He’d taken off his spectacles and put them in his pocket. There was nothing between his eyes and hers.

  “You see this school? That’s where I went.” He put down a picture of the Jews’ Free School rising high on three sides, in the center six double rows of little girls stretching as far as the eye could see. She peered at the faces as if looking for something familiar.

  “You had classes with the girls?”

  “No, but I used to chase them through the girls’ door in Frying Pan Alley. The old headmaster had me in his office more than a few times. He died last year, you know. I’m going to speak at the yahrzeit memorial.” He pushed aside her paint palette, the brush, and the rag to make room for the rest of the pictures. Small boys exercised in knickers and clean collars, front legs bent, arms held out straight as if pushing away the wretched air. Girls in a cookery class, each with a mixing bowl. A smiling costermonger, his donkey baring his teeth, too. Nice pictures, oh, so very nice. But they did not belong in her house, on her table.

  “Jacob! Look at what you’re doing to my paper-cut.” A drop of paint splashed onto Delilah, a bit of yellow in the eye like a sty. Emilia put it all away on a shelf. “How can you just come here and throw aside what I’m doing?”

  “It’s just a paper-cut. I’m talking to you about my work.”

  “Fine. We shall talk about it.” Now there were just the photographs on her table, pictures of the East End taken with a large-format box camera, every detail clear. But only this child was hers, the one making the flutter like a brush of wings under her hand. “Your mother will be embarrassed by this. She won’t like her friends to see it.”

  “My mother is always embarrassed by me. Thank God in heaven she has a physician for a son in Harley Street. Which of the photographs do you think I should use?”

  “I’m not a publisher. What do I know?” She pushed the pictures away in a rough pile, making room for her brush and her palette again, noisily searching through the tray of scissors and knives for just the one to make an adjustment to her paper-cut.

  Jacob was looking at her quizzically, like Samson suspecting that Delilah has an unhealthy interest in the secret of his strength. “When are you going to see the rabbi?”

  “I’ve an appointment with him after Sukkoth,” Emilia said, but she couldn’t make herself smile. It was a frightening thing, the obstinacy of her mouth, as if she wasn’t the gitteh yokhelta at all. Just because there was a burning in her chest and she was thinking that it was too early in her pregnancy to have heartburn, something she shouldn’t know at all. Not when to expect the itchy nipples, the kicking, the pressing of a crown. “Why this sudden preoccupation with your history?” she asked. “You used to say it wasn’t worth remembering.”

  “Now I think it is.”

  “Well, it’s old. The Jewish question is old and tired.” In the fin de siècle there was nothing worse than something old.

  “Honesty is a great virtue, Emilia. I appreciate it.” He returned to his desk. There he stood, bending a little under the slanted ceiling as he picked up his notebook and shoved it into a folder with the photographs. “I’ll work at the Gazette office. You might think about calling in your dressmaker. That dress is too tight,” he said. “You’re getting fat.” His steps were quick on the stairs, the same haste she used to hear on the steps of the shop in Regent Street.

  Samson had a penchant for gentile girls. His parents asked him, Can’t you find a girl among your own people that you have to go and take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines? He said, I like the Philistine girl. Get her for me. This wasn’t Delilah but his first wife. Her father’s wedding guests threatened to set fire to her and her father’s household if she didn’t help them win a bet that Samson had put them up to. Later the Philistines set fire to her anyway after Samson, being angry about something, destroyed their grain, vineyards, and olive trees. Maybe when Delilah was offered a bribe to find out the secret of Samson’s strength, she remembered the fate of the first wife and took matters into her own hands.

  Frying Pan Alley

  “Get my medicine,” Nathan called out. He was lying on his back, eyes closed.

  “You can’t have it,” Nehama said as she showed Berman’s boy where to pile the pieces of cut cloth in the back room. He held
out his hand for a penny and she gave it to him, or else the next order might be accidentally dropped in the mud. Then she took a dark bottle from the dresser and poured the contents out the window. If a man doesn’t look at what his wife is doing, why should he have a choice in the matter?

  “I want it now, Nehama. My hand is killing me.”

  “There isn’t any. I just spilled it into the gutter.”

  She took Nathan’s shirt off the hook and sat on a stool next to the table, attacking the stitches on the sewed-up sleeve. If she couldn’t undo the accident, then at least she could rip out stitches and sew something else.

  “Are you crazy? I need my medicine.” The sun was struggling through the dusty window, making faint shadows on the wall.

  “The doctor said you had all that’s good for you. Get out of bed.”

  Nathan rolled over to face her. “I’m not well. I need sleep.”

  “You’ve had enough sleep to last the rest of your life. What about the newspaper? God alone knows how many horses have won since you looked at a racing page.”

  “What do I care?”

  “I’m fixing your shirt. Next I’ll do the jacket. It was a mistake sewing up the sleeve. You have an arm if not a hand there.” She threw the shirt on the bed. “And with your legs, there’s nothing wrong. Don’t wave your stump at me. There’s more stumps in the next world than I know what to do with already. Them as is Rothschilds may lie in bed. Get your bleeding arse up. The boy brought an order from Berman.”

  “I don’t want slop here.” He glanced back at the workshop, but from where he lay on the bed he couldn’t see anything.

  “So what about me? Rent has to be paid and I want your help.”

  “What are you talking—can I do something now?”

  “You can read to me, Nathan.” Her breath came quickly; this was a man she didn’t know, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, but he was sitting up, and in his eyes she saw something of the old Nathan that she’d missed like her own heart.

  “A book doesn’t pay rent,” he said.

  “You read and I’ll forget that I’m making slop for half what everyone else gets.”

  “You shouldn’t speak to Berman. You know what he’s like.” He put the shirt on over his long underwear with the hole near the collarbone, leaving it open because he couldn’t manage the buttons with one hand and she wasn’t moving an inch to help.

  “Next time you talk to him, then,” Nehama said. “Come on.”

  He followed her into the back room, his voice angry. “Well, maybe I should.”

  “Maybes I don’t want to hear. Do it or don’t bang me on the head with complaints.” She put the library book on the worktable in front of him. Our Mutual Friend.

  “I don’t read English so good,” he said.

  “Good enough for me.” Before she put her foot to the treadle of the sewing machine, she stood for a minute next to the table, looking at Nathan. “It’s too hot,” she said, hiking up her skirt and rolling down her stockings ever so slowly. She did it to wake him up, though only God in heaven knew what kind of husband she had now. It was ridiculous, a middle-aged woman doing this, but she couldn’t stop, her hands belonged to someone else, pushing down her stockings just so, for the good inclination is a harsher master than the wiliest yetzer-hara, and Nathan’s gaze was alert.

  “My old scar is fading,” she said matter-of-factly, sitting beside him on the bench, her bare foot on the treadle of the sewing machine.

  “I can still see it,” he said, and whether it was the old Nathan that was speaking or the new Nathan, she wasn’t sure.

  “Start here.” She pointed to the page where she’d left off on Shobbos, and he began reading in a halting voice.

  “Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? T’other world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Nathan looked at her uncertainly.

  “Go on,” she said. Later she would hire Lazar for pressing and Minnie to do the plain sewing, but now there were just the two of them, herself and Nathan, her back to the pressing table, her eyes on her husband’s as dark as charcoal. “Don’t stop.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Master of All

  1899

  Charlotte Street

  A person might wish to live in Bloomsbury, Mrs. Zalkind said at every opportunity, though why someone might is a mystery one must accept, as God offers many mysteries in life and an ordinary person cannot comprehend them. Nonetheless, if a person wishes to live in Bloomsbury, then there are many good streets. She had made a list of them and inspected the houses. In fact, following her advice, Mr. Abraham, the renowned Jewish artist, had moved his family next to the house of a famous dead poetess. Well, not exactly beside it, for the street of the poetess had decayed as had all the streets where the literary luminaries of twenty-five years ago lived; one must keep abreast of change, and the Abrahams, on Mrs. Zalkind’s advice, had found a house in the square next to the dead poetess. But Mrs. Zalkind’s own children were deaf to her.

  A woman in her fifties ought to be shepping naches, reaping pride from her descendants. But Mrs. Zalkind couldn’t hold her head up in the ladies’ gallery of the synagogue. Not when her firstborn son lived in a pink street! As secretary of the Society for the Protection of Hebrew Girls, she had a duty to study the color code of Booth’s London Street Map. One must trouble oneself with the unfortunate, and there were many gradations of poverty: the dark blue streets of the starving poor, the light blue of the merely hungry poor, the pink of bricklayers and carpenters, even to the red of struggling shopkeepers, but there was only one color for the better classes. Yellow. One must live in a yellow street. Mrs. Zalkind’s only consolation had been her son’s proximity to the playwright Mr. Shaw, but he had left his home in Fitzroy Square last year.

  Jacob’s family came for dinner during Sukkoth, the festival of the autumn harvest. All over the East End, small huts were made of boards and roofed with green branches, open to the sky in memory of the dwellings that the Israelites put up and took down in their wanderings through the desert. The sukkah was decorated with fruit, paper chains, leaves, lanterns, and chestnuts, and there the Jews of the East End ate cake and drank schnapps. Weren’t they commanded to rejoice? Each night they invited their ancestors into the sukkah, newcomers like themselves. Abraham. Joseph. Moses.

  Special prayers were recited in the synagogue, and on the seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, the grandmothers came. Living women were not permitted to stand among the men, but the dead came to add their prayers. A person’s fate, sealed on the Day of Atonement, was yet subject to one last appeal on this day. Seven times the men circled the synagogue, shaking the branches and the fragrant esrog, the fruit of the tree of splendor. Save us, save us. They beat the ground with willows and when three stars were visible in the sky, the grandmothers looked up to the Court of Heaven. What was written was then sealed and the books closed.

  On Hoshana Rabbah, while the heavens were still open, Jacob’s family came for dinner. Zaydeh wore his holiday clothes, a satin caftan and fur hat, like a figure of ancient days, mortifying his English daughter and son-in-law. Holidays exist, however, so that mortification, insult, and loneliness may have their moment, and the house in Charlotte Street was ready with wine, meat, and cake.

  “Come in, Zaydeh,” Emilia said, ever the good yokhelta. He held a lulav and esrog.

  “Would you take it to the kitchen?” he asked Emilia. “A lulav shouldn’t dry out, God forbid. The steam from cooking will keep the branches moist.” Emilia motioned to the maid, who took it from Zaydeh.

  They were all standing about the parlor, furnished with everything that would be most fashionable in a year or so, the long and lean lamps casting deep shadows, the leaded window painted with oak leaves, a collection of cloudy glass bubbled and streaked as if it came from ancient Rome, the wallpaper with its overgrown thistles, the posters for this season at the Royal Adelphi, which happe
ned to be a season of dramas like The Drink and Two Little Vagabonds.

  It was fashionable, and that was all. But the autumnal light and the painting of the empty road overtook Mr. Zalkind, who hugged his son like a Jew on the holiday of rejoicing, forgetting that an Englishman ought to shake a hand or offer a cigarette. He quickly retired to the fireplace—there was still a fireplace and most fortunately a mantelpiece to lean one’s elbow on—and he fumbled for his pipe. There he could stand back as usual, thinking of his business and the Board of Guardians and the sad people he saw every Sunday. He wore a lounge coat with slits in the side seams; it was the latest style. His mustache was not gray but silver.

  Albert’s young wife was a Spanish Jew, her family distinguished. “My dear sister,” she said, taking Emilia’s hands in hers. Judith was dressed modestly. Of course, if you knew clothes, you would immediately see that the gown was, in fact, very dear. “Your poor nails. I don’t care what anyone says, a woman in a certain condition has nerves and ought to take care of them. Are you feeling quite well, Emilia?”

  “Just a little tired. If you’ll excuse me, I might check on dinner.” But there was no escaping to the kitchen, for Mrs. Zalkind was taking her arm.

  “It’s most confusing,” she said to Emilia, walking with her to the dining room. “Everyone knows how showy the Spanish Jews are,” she whispered, “but look at that gown of Judith’s. It is absolutely plain. I hope that you are not insulted, my dear. She ought to have worn something a little nicer. I don’t entirely trust her. A person ought to be what she is; then one knows what to think of her. It’s most disturbing, though naturally I shall love her as a daughter. Something smells appetizing. Did you try that new recipe for brisket?” Mrs. Zalkind sailed into the dining room; Emilia followed like a dinghy behind a battleship. “Ah, you have one of those Art Nouveau things with the droopy flowers. I don’t feel it necessary to be current with every small decoration myself, but everyone to his own. After you are converted, Emilia, you will be even more my daughter. Though it’s such an awful word. One converts rubles to pounds. I prefer guineas. The better shops price everything in guineas.”