The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  Steam billowed through the cookshop window, carrying its odor of pork and cabbage up into the minister’s study, mingling with the smell of wood burning in the fireplace. Mr. Nussbaum was sitting behind his desk and put down the Daily Mail just as Emilia arrived for her appointment. There was talk of forming a Jewish Lads’ Brigade.

  Zaydeh was with her, dressed like a workman, in an old wool cap and a jacket stuck together in a sweatshop with more soap than thread. He wished to see for himself whether the Reverend Mr. Nussbaum was kosher enough to make his grandson’s wife a Jew.

  “Good morning, Mr. Nussbaum,” Emilia said. “This is my husband’s grandfather, Mr. Karpman. He’s so kind as to keep me company today.”

  “Please sit down, sir,” Mr. Nussbaum said to Zaydeh, pointing to the armchair opposite Emilia’s. There was no humor this morning in Mr. Nussbaum’s mobile face. “I’m so very pleased that you came today, sir. My father used to quote your treatise on the laws concerning malicious speech.”

  “Me? No. It must have been someone else,” Zaydeh said quietly. He sat down, taking a Yiddish newspaper from his jacket pocket, unfolding it and smoothing it down, then engrossing himself in it as if he weren’t listening to every word, weighing and balancing and forming his judgments.

  “Let us review a woman’s mitzvos,” Mr. Nussbaum said. He closed the scrapbook of clippings on his desk. A photograph of bayoneted men slipped out and floated to the floor. “You are not obligated by any of the time-bound commandments like formal prayer.” Zaydeh was nodding. “A woman’s first duty is to her children, though she has many other obligations. Charity, for instance.”

  “Charity she knows,” Zaydeh said over his newspaper. “Doesn’t she get for me the best herring?”

  “I’m sure of that, sir,” Mr. Nussbaum said, his eyebrows working themselves up and down as if to discover the wisdom that must be hidden in Zaydeh’s words. After all, he’d written a treatise.

  “Don’t let me disturb you. Please.” Zaydeh waved his hand.

  “Then let us consider the three commandments that are particular to women. Sabbath candles, the dough offering, and niddah.”

  Emilia grimaced but said only, “Oh.”

  “Then your mother-in-law has explained it to you?” Even through the closed window they could hear the sound of a parade. It was not the parade of a Torah scroll dancing to a new synagogue but pipes and drums and marching men on their way to a ship.

  “Yes, she tells me everything,” Emilia said. Zaydeh lowered his newspaper. “Everything,” she repeated. Hadn’t her mother-in-law told her about niddah before she got married? Surely she must have. Along with salting meat so that there was no blood in it and how many hours to wait until dairy could be served. She answered Zaydeh’s look with a shrug.

  “I’m surprised your mother-in-law spoke of it. These days women among the better classes ignore this virtue, even though reformers say that the children of poor Polish Jews are born healthy because of it. However, in such private matters, one may not know everything. Please go on.”

  “Is this really necessary?” Emilia asked.

  “I’m sorry to embarrass you with a delicate matter, but I have to be sure that you know what a Jewish wife should. Don’t be shy—a rabbi deals with everything.”

  Zaydeh rustled his newspaper and turned the page, even moving his lips to show that he was paying no attention to this. Outside the drums were beating time to “God Save the Queen.”

  “Very well,” Emilia said, keeping her eyes on the collection of ancient oil lamps in the cabinet to the right of the desk. “A husband must not touch his wife during her time of month and for a week afterward or until her cloths are completely clean. Then she goes to the ritual bath and makes herself ready. I hope you’re satisfied now.”

  Emilia’s mother used to say that the laws of niddah were a gift to a woman with a disagreeable husband. Her days of impurity often extended from one month to the next.

  “Very good, Mrs. Zalkind. Let us then repeat the blessing a woman says at that time, for you will say it in the mikva when you are immersed in the water for your conversion. Repeat after me.” Mr. Nussbaum said the Hebrew words, and she repeated them.

  A convert is said to be the daughter of Abraham and Sarah our ancestors, not her own mother and father, and better so. A person with no past is a person unburdened. So why would she notice that she was saying the blessing with the Minsker pronunciation?

  “That isn’t bad,” Mr. Nussbaum said. “Let me just correct you a little. Listen to me and try again.”

  “No, no. I like the way she says it.” Zaydeh put down his newspaper, looking at Emilia pensively. “She reminds me of my wife of blessed memory. A samach and a shin were the same letters to her. She was a Litvack, and she made a blessing like one. Very refined. She made gefilte fish with pepper.”

  The Jews of Minsk spoke the northeastern dialect of Yiddish like the Litvacks.

  “Me—I’m a plain sort of person from a shtetl near Krakow,” Zaydeh said. “I like sweet fish. I’m a simple man. I don’t know any kintzn.” Tricks. Stunts. A kintz-macher was a juggler.

  “I should hardly say that,” Mr. Nussbaum said, his face alight as torches passed the window, darkening again as fog engulfed it. “A scholar is a juggler of words.”

  “That may be. But I’m just a peddler. The streets where a child plays have more influence,” Zaydeh replied. “Here in London, Jews speak Yiddish with a Polish pronunciation. Even when my daughter blesses Sabbath candles, she sounds like a Jew from the middle of Poland, not like me or even her mother, she should rest in peace.”

  “That’s rather interesting.” Mr. Nussbaum uncapped his silver fountain pen and made a note.

  Emilia wished that she could disappear as easily as the ghost of the first wife.

  “And now I see that God is good and sent me a girl for my grandson who says a blessing just like my wife of blessed memory. Where did such an accent come from? Such is the mystery of the Holy One, for the girl is a gentile.”

  “It’s my Russian accent,” Emilia said.

  A person can miss a hundred small things because what he believes makes him blind and deaf. But there they are in his mind just the same, waiting for him to open his eyes. Zaydeh’s eyes were angry. If Samson had a grandfather, he would look just like this as Delilah tried to hide the shorn locks behind her back. An old man’s eyes can have a lot to say.

  “It’s another funny thing,” he continued. “My daughter and son-in-law have two dressing rooms but only one bedroom.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Nussbaum asked gently, for it appeared that the old man’s mind was wandering. A leather blotter protected his mahogany desk from splotches of ink and scratches. Everyone’s life should have a leather blotter.

  “My daughter is like a date palm,” Zaydeh said. “The taste of many good acts is in her house, and whatever she does, she taught my grandson’s wife. Anything else, she doesn’t mention.”

  Emilia was picturing her mother-in-law’s bedroom with its one large canopied bed. A woman who observed the laws of niddah would have two beds, sleeping apart from her husband during her time of separation. Therefore Mrs. Zalkind didn’t practice niddah, so how did Emilia know about it? She met Zaydeh’s smart old eyes with her own smart glance, keeping her hands tightly folded in her lap so that she wouldn’t scratch the fiery rash on her neck.

  Her own mother was an esrog, the fruit of the Tree of Splendor, which had been mashed into jelly and consumed. But not Emilia.

  “What do I know? I’m a willow branch,” she said. A willow has no taste or fragrance, neither learning nor good deeds, but it can take root anywhere, like a weed. The world was full of gardens; there was no end to them. One must only go on and not turn to look at the angels with their flaming swords blocking the way back.

  It was November, just before Guy Fawkes Day, and fog slithered through every crevice.

  ACT III

  With closed eyes

  The sea s
ounds closer

  With feverish fingers

  You feel the jaunty rhyme.

  The golden peacock

  You know from its flight

  And a longing is lovelier

  When she’s from away.

  Tiredness is exhaustion

  At the threshold of home,

  On your knees you feel keener

  The greatness of God.

  The master of all things is great

  Today as then

  Not in the thundering sky

  But when he sobs in the street.

  Favored is the one

  Who can hear the weeping

  And as for you,

  Listening is your fate.

  For when such a tear

  Falls on your soul

  Wounded and wondrous

  It blooms in a song.

  —Itzik Manger

  CHAPTER 8

  Who Can Hear

  NOVEMBER 5, 1899

  Frying Pan Alley

  Here they could meet on a night of fire and fog, the two mothers, the one we remember and the one we forget. Here they could stand, a breath away from each other, for it was a night of masks and tricks. Darkness was falling, and in the darkness the grandmothers would be visible, the alley making space for them as the costermongers left with their donkeys and barrows, jackets and corsets came down from where they hung, oilcloth was rolled away, boys ran off after counting their coppers to see if there was enough for a ticket to the music hall. In the last light, a few people called their wares, voices growing faint.

  “Buy any sandbag? Buy a window bag?”

  “Wild rabbits! Kosher rabbits if you like!”

  In the afternoon of Guy Fawkes Day, Nathan was working in the back room. It had taken him a month to learn to use the sewing machine again, a month of thumps, curses, rattling and ripping sounds coming from the workshop while he made himself over. Now wool flowed slow and dark from his sewing machine, like cows climbing down the steps to the dairy in Black Lion Yard. Nehama was in her place across from him at the sewing machine, working on a dress ruffled with scraps at neckline and hem. Lazar was pressing the last jackets while Minnie turned over the rough edges of seams to sew them flat, from time to time banging Nehama with her elbow as she turned over a jacket. The wind rattled the windowpane and the gas jets flickered.

  “Is it ready, Mama—is it?” Gittel called as she came in, throwing her schoolbooks on the small table in the front room.

  “Almost,” Nehama said. It was a dress for Gittel’s guy that she’d made out of straw, using a turnip for the head.

  Nathan was yawning. All night he sold coffee to nightwalkers, a tray strapped to his chest. When he came home, he’d lift the loose board and, holding it up with his foot, put the night’s earnings away. He’d sleep for a couple of hours, then slowly, slowly work the sewing machine, doing the plainest work. And between the dark of the morning and the dark of the afternoon, there would be fog and rain.

  “Where are you going tonight?” Nehama asked him. Through the door to the other room, she could see Gittel buttering a slice of bread.

  “The usual places,” Nathan said.

  “He means Dorset Street again.” Nehama turned her head toward Minnie. “Do you believe it?” Her life had become a tale of two streets, the good one and the bad one, here and there, and God must be laughing, such a joke.

  “It’s close by,” Nathan said, “and I have to go where people are awake.” His walk had changed again. When he strapped the tray to his chest and went into the alley calling, “Coffee hot! Hardly any chicory,” his pace was brisk, and he made jokes about giving change with the missing hand, risking himself night after night to make a life possible for his family when all she could think was that time was going backward.

  “So who says you have to sell coffee at night?” she asked. “Show me where it’s written.” The needle of her sewing machine bit into the dress. It was made from scraps of three different fabrics: green, red, yellow.

  “A man has to work for his family. Am I right?” Nathan appealed to Lazar, who was sweating as he pressed the hot iron, steam hissing. “Nehama’s going to have a shop.”

  “Do I need it if I’m a widow?” God’s joke was that she hadn’t been able to save Nathan; instead he’d done it himself, believing that he was saving her hopes, feeling himself to be a man again in the very place that was her torment. Every night she dreamed about Dorset Street, waking up and wondering where she was. “You don’t know what kind of people you’re dealing with,” she said.

  “Of course I know. I see them every day. Unless you think I’m blind as well as crippled, Nehameleh.”

  “Argue with a wall,” she said, frilling the fabric that made the ruffle as she stitched it over the neckline. The dress she’d worn in Dorset Street had been made of a cheap, stiff fabric like this. The longer she wore it, the stiffer it got. When she used to take it off, there would be a red mark across her chest.

  “That’s it for me.” Minnie put away her needle and thread. “I’m going upstairs to prepare supper. When Nathan goes out, I can use the machine. All right?”

  “That’s fine,” Nehama said. She could feel exactly where the mark was. An irritation, a scratch.

  Nathan went into the front room, and she followed while he poured himself a cup of cold tea. “Here’s the dress. It’s all finished,” she said, hardly looking at her daughter as she put a hand on Nathan’s good arm. “Promise me you won’t go there.” She was sore in places that shouldn’t be sore in a middle-aged married woman whose husband was gentle and slow with her.

  “How can I promise? We need the money. Unless you found a way to grow some. Give me a pot of mud and I’ll put a penny in it. Then tonight I’ll dig up a sovereign.” He winked at Gittel.

  “The dress doesn’t fit.” Gittel was kneeling over the guy, trying to put it on him.

  “A straw man fits into any dress.” Nehama pushed some straw in here and out there, tying up the dress behind. “There. Done.” The kettle was boiling. Nehama stood up and took it off the stove. She put milk in the cup, poured the water through a sieve of tea, added two spoons of sugar. She needed a very sweet tea. The guy and the dress would burn on the bonfire. May all such dresses be burned to ash.

  “I want more bread,” Nathan said.

  “Bread you want?” She buttered a thick slice for him, the good dark rye from Grodzinski’s bakery, and slapped the plate on the table. “God forbid a wife denies her husband anything. Should I stop you walking in the streets at night? A widow with two sewing machines has plenty of suitors.”

  “And a dowry under the bed, too. Listen to me.” He smiled his old smile and for a minute she could imagine that nothing had changed. “If there’s trouble in the street, I go inside and have a pint. Mrs. Dawes from next door likes to drink at the Horn and Plenty, and I have a little talk with her.”

  “But she doesn’t have a choice. Her granddaughter sings for her supper and the old woman keeps an eye on her.” Nehama picked up the broom to sweep the floor, remembering how else a broomstick might be used.

  “How much does she get singing?” Gittel asked.

  The twigs of the broom went scritch-scratch across the floor. “Are you still here? You’re supposed to be out the door already.” Her daughter, in a plain dark school dress, braids looped with a ribbon, was tying a rope to the crate. “Take an apple. You shouldn’t be hungry.” She slipped it into her daughter’s pocket, and Gittel waved as she left, pulling the crate behind her.

  “I saw a good location for the shop,” Nathan said. “Lazar came with me. Am I right?”

  “Beautiful!” Lazar called from the back room. “A jewel of a shop.”

  “It’s right on the high road and already divided in two sections. One for you and the other for me, Nehameleh. You can preside like a queen over the women. But I was thinking to have a coffee house like Shmolnik’s.”

  “For gambling?” She would let him sell coffee one more nigh
t. Then tomorrow she would break his tray.

  “A workingmen’s club.”

  “In part of a shop?” She could tell him that she accidentally stepped on it. And she accidentally cut the straps that bound it to his chest. “The Board of Guardians has such a nice place for their workingmen’s club. Who’s going to come to us?”

  “You need to ask, Nehameleh? I’m surprised. In my club men can play cards and have a pint. Then they’ll enjoy reading a newspaper, maybe even a few books in the mama-loshen. Not to sell, just to read there.”

  He held the bread in his good hand, forgotten while he went on about tables and chairs as if in half a shop you could have the furnishings of a mansion. What could she do? She made herself nod because her husband’s eyes were full of life. “You see what a trade I’m making out of selling coffee,” he said. “May God in heaven bless the nightwalkers in Dorset Street and make them very thirsty.”

  “Amen,” she said, lighting candles as the room darkened. Gaslight was only for the workshop. In here she watched the candle flames like torchlights at the foot of a stage. If it were Shobbos, she would be reading Esther Waters, forgetting herself in the drama of the book. But as it was a weekday in the busy season, she would go upstairs to see Minnie and then she would sew cheap jackets until midnight, imagining every shadow that is cast in a street of riotous despair.

  Charlotte Street

  In the West End, too, kindling was laid for the bonfires and floats were given the final touches for the parade. An erudite symposium on the Guy Fawkes conspiracy was being hosted by the university, and there was to be a masked ball in the museum. But though it was late in the day, Emilia was still sitting in bed, wearing her silk dressing gown while the ghost of the first wife sat beside her among the magazines and newspapers. The latest issue of Ladies had articles on winter colors, a charity tea held by the Duchess of York, crystallized party decorations, the women’s suffrage calendar, the annual report of the Women’s Trade Union Association, and a recipe for German chocolate cake. Emilia thought that Zaydeh would enjoy it if he was ever willing to eat with her again, now that he knew she was not the good gentile but the bad Jewess. On her bed tray there was a letter from the shop in Regent Street regarding the sale of a paper-cut, a bill from Liberty’s, a catalog, and a postcard from Minsk. Beside the bed, a tea trolley was laden with cakes and sandwiches for, as the physician had noted, her condition hadn’t affected her appetite, thank God. He said she was suffering from irritability due to neurasthenia, a weakening of the nervous system brought about by pregnancy, and she was to be humored.