The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  “Please, Mother. You’re to sit there beside Jacob,” Emilia said, pointing to the place card and seating herself on Jacob’s other side. She took a deep breath and resumed smiling. The maid was serving soup.

  “Have you thought of a name for the baby?” Albert asked.

  “A good British name. Not something from the heim,” Mrs. Zalkind said. The table had been expanded with two leaves to accommodate Jacob’s family. Even the linen had been monogrammed by Mrs. Zalkind. Emilia was hemmed in by the last letter of the alphabet. Z, Z, everywhere Z, as if the world snored.

  “If I had a son, I’d name him after Albert,” Judith said. Emilia had placed her behind the centerpiece, an iridescent blue vase filled with flowers. Judith stretched her neck to peer over them. “That’s the tradition among Spanish Jews.”

  “God forbid. And bring down the evil eye?” Mrs. Zalkind asked.

  “You have to think of the sound of a name.” Jacob tapped the table with his spoon. “Jacob—one, two. There’s a hesitation in it. A strong name has one syllable. John. James. Paul.” He tapped the table: one; one; one.

  Only Zaydeh didn’t have an opinion. At his end of the table, he was saying the blessing over the bread he’d taken from the silver basket. On the wall behind his head were framed photographs of Zalkinds and their relatives.

  “You must have another servant,” Mrs. Zalkind said. “Beating carpets in your condition, it’s outrageous. Don’t think I haven’t been talking to Annie. I know everything. Now listen to me. The orphanage in Norwood has excellent girls, trained for domestic service.”

  Emilia flinched. “I don’t want another servant. I manage fine.” Her daughter would be twelve now, old enough to go into service.

  “But it’s a mitzvah to bring a Jewish girl into a Jewish home. God knows what would happen to her otherwise, a maid among the yoks?”

  In the orphanage there’d be a twelve-year-old girl who didn’t know that her mother lived in Charlotte Street. Such a girl could have any name and any face; who would recognize her? “I don’t want a stranger in my house. Not now,” Emilia said. It was hard to swallow, her stomach begged to be filled with something.

  “Who’s talking about a stranger? Only another servant. There’s nothing better than a young girl you can train yourself. She’ll do for you very well.”

  “I shall do much better if you stop meddling, Mother Zalkind.” Her mother-in-law’s face reddened and Jacob’s eyes flashed, but she had to eat something or she’d faint. The smell of cooked meat made her too warm. She wanted a sweet taste, and a woman in her condition shouldn’t have to wait for the pudding. “Excuse me,” she muttered as she rose from the table. “I have to see to dinner.”

  There was a large window in the kitchen, and a door into the garden, but the pantry was a small room off the kitchen with no windows, just shelves of dishes and jams and pickles and scented sugar, flour, bread, a sink, a stool. The pudding for meat meals was on the right side, for dairy meals on the left. The jubilee cake was on the right, made with cherry jelly and claret, decorated with confectioners’ sugar sifted over a doily, adapted for a meat meal by using a dozen egg whites instead of butter.

  Emilia made do with the pound cake on the dairy side of the pantry. A pound of flour, a pound of butter, a pound of raisins, and each slice was worth a pound of flesh on one’s hips. It would require ever so many pounds for her to withstand the onslaught of Zalkinds.

  “I have something for you,” Zaydeh said, peeking into the pantry.

  Emilia quickly pushed her plate onto a shelf. “I didn’t have any meat,” she said defensively. “I can have dairy cake.”

  “Is it good?” He took something from his pocket, wrapped in thin paper. “Here, for you.”

  “What is it, Zaydeh?” Emilia asked, standing up so that he could sit on the stool.

  “The stem of the esrog. You see the withered blossom still attached to it. Smell it—just like the fruit, it smells. A funny thing, I’m telling you. The esrog is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. For a taste of it, Eve was punished with the pain of childbirth. But that was then and this is now. Everything changes in life. You put that under your pillow when it’s time. For a safe delivery. An easy one.”

  “Thank you,” Emilia said. She must have been looking unwell, for Zaydeh was pushing her onto the stool, putting a cup of cold tea into her hands. The real odor of the esrog wasn’t strong enough to cover the remembered odor of childbirth, which she could forget as long as she was busy ordering wallpaper or cooking for twelve or choosing just the right earrings for her gown or even eating pound cake.

  “I want to name my child myself,” she said. But how could he realize that there was another child, and she didn’t know its name?

  “All right, all right. Who else?” he asked, for how can a mother not know her child’s name? “But today you need to shake the lulav.”

  “I—what?”

  “It’s a mitzvah.” A virtue, a commandment, a religious obligation. “For a woman, too. It’s Sukkoth, the season of our joy.”

  “Sukkoth,” she repeated.

  “You see? You say it just like my wife, alleva sholom. Come with me and I’ll show you how to shake the lulav. You hear what I’m saying? It’s Hoshana Rabbah. There’s still a chance. The Court of Heaven is ready to make a different decree.” He was picking up the esrog and the branches of the lulav.

  “Thank you, Zaydeh, but the family is waiting for me. Another time.”

  “Next year, who knows if I’ll be alive to teach you. You do it like this. The branches are people. You hold them together, all the different kinds with the esrog. This one, the date palm, it has no smell, but so what? It brings forth fruit and the taste means learning. This is the kind of person that learns but doesn’t do good acts. Like me when I was a young man studying in my father-in-law’s house while he did business. You smell the myrtle? A beautiful smell, but taste? Nothing. A person that performs good acts but has no learning. Like my daughter, may God bless her always. And the esrog”—he held up the citron fruit—“is fragrant and edible. My wife, alleva sholom, made a wonderful jelly from it. A person who has learning and also acts.”

  “The willow has no fragrance and it doesn’t produce fruit,” Emilia said.

  “Very good. You’re learning already—a willow you’re not. For the willow is a person who doesn’t learn and doesn’t do good. But even such a person isn’t abandoned. You hold all the branches with the esrog and shake them in the six directions, like this …”

  “But, Zaydeh, what does it mean?”

  “Just shake the lulav. It’s a mitzvah.” Below his fur shtrimel, his eyebrows were white, but his eyes were Jacob’s eyes, the same greenish brown, the color of a turtle’s shell. “Come. Do it with me. You think because this is just one thing it doesn’t count? It’s not so. Listen to me. What you do here is also done there. You know what I mean. In the other world. A spark here is a fire there, like the fire that spoke to our teacher Moses. Such a fire sang the Tree of Life into being, my good girl. Take the branches from me.”

  As she reached for them, in the garden in Minsk the ghost of the first wife climbed high in the apple tree and higher still into the clouds to see the gate where the heavens were opening for a last plea, a final meeting with God.

  Frying Pan Alley

  All through the Lane, there was the sound of hammers as men took down the boards and branches that made up the decorated shelters of joy. The festival of Sukkoth was ended, the season of yellow fog beginning. Gittel was turning a rope by herself and jumping while she waited for Libby. She was humming as she jumped, her voice part of the music of the street, the hammers and the streetcar, the organ-grinder and the smoked-fish vendor rolling his barrels to the corner. Libby was tying her braids together with a yellow ribbon. It was a spelling prize, and she tied it slowly so everyone would see.

  “Aren’t you finished yet?” Clara asked, holding her doll as she always did. There were five girls and they needed a
nother to make two even sides. They were going to play Please I’ve Come to Work a Trade.

  “Just about.”

  The sky burned orange as the sun lowered itself into a bath of smoke and fog, spreading dusk from house to house. “What’s your trade?” Libby and her side chanted.

  “P.H.,” Gittel answered, pretending to pick hops.

  “Picking hops!” Libby shouted and chased the girls down the alley toward the school yard till they saw the sparks from the forge in Bell Lane where horses were shod. The girls shrieked and ran fast between the barrels of smoked fish and behind the toffee stand, but Libby ran faster and, with a wallop on their backs, said, “You guess now!”

  Libby’s side huddled against the railing of an “aree,” the little square by the basement door where the rats had a conference and someone was finding a bit of privacy; sounds of moaning drifted upward.

  Libby’s side left the aree. “We have come to work a trade.”

  Nearby, the boys were playing hide-and-seek. One of them leaned against a lamppost and counted while his friends hid. “Ready or not,” Herman shouted, making a dash for it, only to slip on some rotten cabbage leaf. The girls laughed as he got to his feet, hitching up his trousers. “Laugh at this,” he said, pushing Libby into the muck.

  “Who do you think you are, then?” She shoved him back.

  At one end of the alley, men were coming back from praying at the Dutch synagogue in Sandys Row. At the other end they were coming from the Plotsker Congregation. “Clear off home,” one of the Dutch Jews said.

  “Piss up your leg and play with the steam,” Herman answered. “Hi! Hi! A dolly!” He grabbed Clara’s doll, tossing it end over end, its bare bottom showing. The dress flew up, a bit of pink peeking out of the muck in the gutter. Clara was crying as she picked it up.

  “Your mother’s got a bloke,” Gittel said, giving Herman the look that made adults blow away the evil eye. But Herman was a London child. He stood his ground.

  “She don’t. You’re a liar. A liar with a cripple for a dad.”

  “I’ll call him. See if I don’t.”

  “Too good, you are. You wouldn’t dare to fetch a stone from Dorset Street.”

  “Maybe I would,” Gittel said.

  “Let’s see you.” Herman put his hands in his trousers and took out a shining half crown. “Give you this if you do.”

  “Where’d you nick that from, Herman?” Libby asked.

  Everyone was looking at the silver coin. “I wouldn’t go to Dorset Street on a bet,” Clara said. “My mother would kill me.” All their mothers would kill them. Dorset Street was the exemplar of evil, the birthplace of ogres, the darkest mystery that children could imagine. They talked about it all the time.

  “She could go,” Herman said. “Her real mother’s an abbess in Dorset Street, isn’t she?”

  Clara put her arm through Gittel’s. She shouted something at Herman, and Libby shouted, and even Sheindel shouted, though she didn’t understand a word of English.

  “You’re a double liar,” Gittel cried. “My father will tear your arm off if you don’t leave me alone!” But Herman was running off with the other boys and she knew that her father wasn’t going to do anything.

  Night was falling on the street as mothers called from windows and doorways, “Come in. I mean it. This minute or I’ll give you what for.” One by one they went in, Clara, Sheindel, even Libby. But Gittel stayed outside, jumping rope. Above her head was the needle of night, beneath her feet cobblestones and the fog creeping over her boots. She could jump to one hundred without breathing hard. Then to two hundred. But at two hundred and ten, the rope burned her hands and the sweat was pouring off her and Mama was in the alley, as real as anything, taking her by the arm and hauling her inside, away from the darkness.

  The Other Charlotte Street

  It is common in London for a street to change its name several times along its length, and any number of entirely different streets can have the same name. A letter to someone living in a street, for example, like Frying Pan Alley would bear the address: Frying Pan Alley, Sandys Row, Whitechapel Road, London—to ensure that it was going to the right alley and not another one with the same name in a different snake’s nest of twisting, crooked lanes. It was said that only criminals and the drivers of hansom cabs truly knew the streets of London.

  Just a few minutes west of Emilia’s house, there was another Charlotte Street, one block from Great Portland, where the synagogue was situated. Great Portland was a yellow street, as yellow as the sun. Naturally the minister of the synagogue had a house in the same street, one that would not cause him to be ashamed to greet prominent members of the Jewish community who came to the synagogue on important occasions like the consecration of twenty-five columns of Italian marble. But his assistant could not afford a house in Great Portland. He lived on the next street over, a red street, among the shopkeepers and clerks of the other Charlotte Street.

  Emilia ought to have been calm as she stepped out of the cab, realizing that life was not going to change with this appointment. It was, like her pregnancy, merely making her more. The good yokhelta. Jacob would thank her all of her days for presenting him with a Jewish son. Keeping kosher was nothing compared with it. So there was no reason for her itchy neck, none at all. And if she scratched until there was blood under her nails, it was only an old habit and everyone knows how tenacious such habits are.

  The rabbi’s house was next to a cookshop, and the smell of fried pork sausages followed Emilia up the stairs. He was not called Rabbi Nussbaum, as the English Jews did not like the word rabbi.

  “The Reverend Mr. Nussbaum will see you now,” the maid said as she opened the door to the study.

  Mr. Nussbaum was an average man in every respect, height, weight, features, everything except his mouth. It was wide and mobile and lived three lives for every word it spoke. He wore no spectacles, though they would have improved his appearance, at least giving him a scholarly air and hiding the flicker of annoyance in his dark eyes. A minister’s assistant has many tiresome duties.

  Like a gentleman, he took Emilia’s hand. A rabbi in the heim would never touch a strange woman. Nor did he look like a rabbi, with his frock coat and his study furnished like a sitting room with armchairs and a Persian rug. His desk was piled with correspondence, not yellowing volumes of religious commentary. And on the wall there was a portrait, not of Moses but of the Zionist Theodor Herzl. It was not even a painting but a cheap print, the kind that came with New Year’s cards. A real rabbi would not have the painting of a person at all; it was tantamount to a graven image.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Zalkind.” He directed her to a comfortable armchair with a crocheted doily on it to protect it from hair oils. A gentleman, yes, but one that couldn’t quite afford to be fashionable. His frock coat, with an outside pocket on the left breast, was three years out of date. His wife no doubt still wore puffed sleeves. Emilia’s sleeves were tight from shoulder to wrist. She wore a blouse and bolero and a skirt that flared around her ankles; her hat was so covered with feathers that the brim was indiscernible. But Mr. Nussbaum did not even glance at the hat; a man of no taste. Neither a real rabbi nor a real gentleman.

  “Let me tell you something, Mrs. Zalkind,” he said without any of the small courtesies that grease social intercourse. “In ancient Rome there were millions of converts to Judaism, but the first Christian emperor made conversion to Judaism a capital crime. Very wise. You can be certain that your converts are quite sincere when their heads might be cut off for it. Now you take Spain—”

  “I am not interested in Spain,” Emilia said.

  Mr. Nussbaum took no notice. He did not even have a beard. Was there a real rabbi without a beard? “Hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews were forced to become Christians, but one might question the religious fervor of someone who converts to save his neck. To this day, their descendants are called New Christians and are considered … trayf, we shall say. They are not kosher. They simp
ly cannot be trusted. I should like to trust you, Mrs. Zalkind. Tell me. Why do you wish to convert to Judaism?”

  “I’m going to have a child.”

  “So? There are many gentiles that have children without ever converting.” She did not like his smile. It was too full of humor.

  “It is a known fact that gentiles do not have Jewish children, and my husband wishes to have a Jewish child.”

  “Well, in that case he should have a Jewish wife. Who will my sister marry if all the Jewish men take yokheltas to wed? Intermarriage is the greatest problem of our time, Mrs. Zalkind. Should I encourage it?”

  “It is a fait accompli, sir, and I have a duty to my husband.” She nodded at the maid, who was discreetly placing a tea tray on the low table next to Emilia.

  “Keeping a Jewish home is far too much trouble. Ask my wife. She’ll tell you. For a lady—well, you might have to hire another servant. Religion doesn’t come cheaply. Perhaps your husband ought to reconsider. Two sets of dishes for milk, meat, then another two sets for Passover.” Mr. Nussbaum cleared his throat. “And there’s the fifth set—if your husband should fancy a pork sausage, so as not to mess up the nice arrangement, you understand.”

  “I have kept kosher since my marriage,” Emilia said coldly. The special frying pan and the blue plate used for Jacob’s bacon and eggs were kept in a bread box in the pantry. “My mother-in-law showed me everything.”

  He leaned toward her. “Did she tell you that you may not ride in a carriage to call on your friend on Saturday?” he asked. “So inconvenient. And in the summer, when the days are long, you would not go to the theater on a Saturday evening, for the Sabbath ends at sundown. It would be very dull, don’t you think?”