Hungry Hearts

by Anzia Yezierska

  He cracked his knuckles and bit his finger-tips, but no words came. “Ach! You yok! Why ain’t you saying something?” He wrestled with his shyness in vain. The tense silence remained unbroken till they reached her house.

  “I’m sorry”—Shenah Pessah colored apologetically—“But I got no place to invite you. My room is hardly big enough for a push-in of one person.”

  “What say you to a bite of eating with me?” he blurted.

  She thought of her scant supper upstairs and would have responded eagerly, but glancing down at her clothes, she hesitated. “Could I go dressed like this in a restaurant?”

  “You look grander plain, like you are, than those twisted up with style. I’ll take you to the swellest restaurant on Grand Street and be proud with you!”

  She flushed with pleasure. “Nu, come on, then. It’s good to have a friend that knows himself on what’s in you and not what’s on you, but still, when I go to a place, I like to be dressed like a person so I can feel like a person.”

  “You’ll yet live to wear diamonds that will shine up the street when you pass!” he cried.

  Through streets growing black with swarming crowds of toil-released workers they made their way. Sam Arkin’s thick hand rested with a lightness new to him upon the little arm tucked under his. The haggling pushcart peddlers, the newsboys screaming, “Tageblatt, Abendblatt, Herold,” the roaring noises of the elevated trains resounded the pæan of joy swelling his heart.

  “America was good to me, but I never guessed how good till now.” The words were out before he knew it. “Tell me only, what pulled you to this country?”

  “What pulls anybody here? The hope for the better. People who got it good in the old world don’t hunger for the new.”

  A mist filled her eyes at memory of her native village. “How I suffered in Savel. I never had enough to eat. I never had shoes on my feet. I had to go barefoot even in the freezing winter. But still I love it. I was born there. I love the houses and the straw roofs, the mud streets, the cows, the chickens and the goats. My heart always hurts me for what is no more.”

  The brilliant lights of Levy’s Café brought her back to Grand Street.

  “Here is it.” He led her in and over to a corner table. “Chopped herring and onions for two,” he ordered with a flourish.

  “Ain’t there some American eating on the card?” interposed Shenah Pessah.

  He laughed indulgently. “If I lived in America for a hundred years I couldn’t get used to the American eating. What can make the mouth so water like the taste and the smell from herring and onions?”

  “There’s something in me—I can’t help—that so quickly takes on to the American taste. It’s as if my outside skin only was Russian; the heart in me is for everything of the new world—even the eating.”

  “Nu, I got nothing to complain against America. I don’t like the American eating, but I like the American dollar. Look only on me!” He expanded his chest. “I came to America a ragged nothing—and—see—” He exhibited a bank-book in four figures, gesticulating grandly, “And I learned in America how to sign my name!”

  “Did it come hard to learn?” she asked under her breath.

  “Hard?” His face purpled with excitement. “It would be easier for me to lift up this whole house on my shoulders than to make one little dot of a letter. When I took my pencil—Oi weh! The sweat would break out on my face! ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ I cried, but something in me jumped up. ‘You can—you yok—you must!’—Six months, night after night, I stuck to it—and I learned to twist around the little black hooks till it means—me—Sam Arkin.”

  He had the rough-hewn features of the common people, but he lifted his head with the pride of a king. “Since I can write out my name, I feel I can do anything. I can sign checks, put money in the bank, or take it out without nobody to help me.”

  As Shenah Pessah listened, unconsciously she compared Sam Arkin, glowing with the frank conceit of the self-made man, his neglected teeth, thick, red lips, with that of the Other One—made ever more beautiful with longings and dreams.

  “But in all these black years, I was always hoping to get to the golden country,” Sam Arkin’s voice went on, but she heard it as from afar. “Before my eyes was always the shine of the high wages and the easy money and I kept pushing myself from one city to another, and saving and saving till I saved up enough for my ship-ticket to the new world. And then when I landed here, I fell into the hands of a cockroach boss.”

  “A cockroach boss?” she questioned absently and reproached herself for her inattention.

  “A black year on him! He was a landsman, that’s how he fooled me in. He used to come to the ship with a smiling face of welcome to all the greenhorns what had nobody to go to. And then he’d put them to work in his sweatshop and sweat them into their grave.”

  “Don’t I know it?” she cried with quickened understanding. “Just like my uncle, Moisheh Rifkin.”

  “The blood-sucker!” he gasped. “When I think how I slaved for him sixteen hours a day—for what? Nothing!”

  She gently stroked his hand as one might a child in pain. He looked up and smiled gratefully.

  “I want to forget what’s already over. I got enough money now to start for myself—maybe a tailor-shop—and soon—I—I want to marry myself—but none of those crazy chickens for me.” And he seemed to draw her unto himself by the intensity of his gaze.

  Growing bolder, he exclaimed: “I got a grand idea. It’s Monday and the bank is open yet till nine o’clock. I’ll write over my bank-book on your name? Yes?”

  “My name?” She fell back, dumbstruck.

  “Yes—you—everything I only got—you—” he mumbled. “I’ll give you dove’s milk to drink—silks and diamonds to wear—you’ll hold all my money.”

  She was shaken by this supreme proof of his devotion.

  “But I—I can’t—I got to work myself up for a person. I got a head. I got ideas. I can catch on to the Americans quicker’n lightning.”

  “My money can buy you everything. I’ll buy you teachers. I’ll buy you a piano. I’ll make you for a lady. Right away you can stop from work.” He leaned toward her, his eyes welling with tears of earnestness.

  “Take your hard-earned money? Could I be such a beggerin?”

  “God from the world! You are dearer to me than the eyes from my head! I’d give the blood from under my nails for you! I want only to work for you—to live for you—to die for you—” He was spent with the surge of his emotion.

  Ach! To be loved as Sam Arkin loved! She covered her eyes, but it only pressed upon her the more. Home, husband, babies, a bread-giver for life!

  And the Other—a dream—a madness that burns you up alive. “You might as well want to marry yourself to the President of America as to want him. But I can’t help it. Him and him only I want.”

  She looked up again. “No—no!” she cried, cruel in the self-absorption of youth and ambition. “You can’t make me for a person. It’s not only that I got to go up higher, but I got to push myself up by myself, by my own strength—”

  “Nu, nu,” he sobbed. “I’ll not bother you with me—only give you my everything. My bank-book is more than my flesh and blood—only take it, to do what you want with it.”

  Her eyes deepened with humility. “I know your goodness—but there’s something like a wall around me—him in my heart.”

  “Him?” The word hurled itself at him like a bomb-shell. He went white with pain. And even she, immersed in her own thoughts, lowered her head before the dumb suffering on his face. She felt she owed it to him to tell him.

  “I wanted to talk myself out to you about him yet before.—He ain’t just a man. He is all that I want to be and am not yet. He is the hunger of me for the life that ain’t just eating and sleeping and slaving for bread.”

  She pushed back her chair and rose abruptly. “I can’t be inside walls when I talk of him. I need the earth, the whole free sky to breathe when I
think of him. Come out in the air.”

  They walked for a time before either spoke. Sam Arkin followed where she led through the crooked labyrinth of streets. The sight of the young mothers with their nursing infants pressed to their bared bosoms stabbed anew his hurt.

  Shenah Pessah, blind to all but the vision that obsessed her, talked on. “All that my mother and father and my mother’s mother and father ever wanted to be is in him. This fire in me, it’s not just the hunger of a woman for a man—it’s the hunger of all my people back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!”

  A veil of silence fell between them. She felt almost as if it were a sacrilege to have spoken of that which was so deeply centered within her.

  Sam Arkin’s face became lifeless as clay. Bowed like an old man, he dragged his leaden feet after him. The world was dead—cold—meaningless. Bank-book, money—of what use were they now? All his years of saving couldn’t win her. He was suffocated in emptiness.

  On they walked till they reached a deserted spot in the park. So spent was he by his sorrow that he lost the sense of time or place or that she was near.

  Leaning against a tree, he stood, dumb, motionless, unutterable bewilderment in his sunken eyes.

  “I lived over the hunger for bread—but this—” He clutched at his aching bosom. “Highest One, help me!” With his face to the ground he sank, prostrate.

  “Sam Arkin!” She bent over him tenderly. “I feel the emptiness of words—but I got to get it out. All that you suffer I have suffered, and must yet go on suffering. I see no end. But only—there is a something—a hope—a help out—it lifts me on top of my hungry body—the hunger to make from myself a person that can’t be crushed by nothing nor nobody—the life higher!”

  Slowly, he rose to his feet, drawn from his weakness by the spell of her. “With one hand you throw me down and with the other you lift me up to life again. Say to me only again, your words,” he pleaded, helplessly.

  “Sam Arkin! Give yourself your own strength!” She shook him roughly. “I got no pity on you, no more than I got pity on me.”

  He saw her eyes fill with light as though she were seeing something far beyond them both. “This,” she breathed, “is only the beginning of the hunger that will make from you a person who’ll yet ring in America.”

  THE LOST “BEAUTIFULNESS”

  “Oi weh! How it shines the beautifulness!” exulted Hanneh Hayyeh over her newly painted kitchen. She cast a glance full of worship and adoration at the picture of her son in uniform; eyes like her own, shining with eagerness, with joy of life, looked back at her.

  “Aby will not have to shame himself to come back to his old home,” she rejoiced, clapping her hands—hands blistered from the paintbrush and calloused from rough toil. “Now he’ll be able to invite all the grandest friends he made in the army.”

  The smell of the paint was suffocating, but she inhaled in it huge draughts of hidden beauty. For weeks she had dreamed of it and felt in each tin of paint she was able to buy, in each stroke of the brush, the ecstasy of loving service for the son she idolized.

  Ever since she first began to wash the fine silks and linens for Mrs. Preston, years ago, it had been Hanneh Hayyeh’s ambition to have a white-painted kitchen exactly like that in the old Stuyvesant Square mansion. Now her own kitchen was a dream come true.

  Hanneh Hayyeh ran in to her husband, a stoop-shouldered, care-crushed man who was leaning against the bed, his swollen feet outstretched, counting the pennies that totaled his day’s earnings.

  “Jake Safransky!” she cried excitedly, “you got to come in and give a look on my painting before you go to sleep.”

  “Oi, let me alone. Give me only a rest.”

  Too intoxicated with the joy of achievement to take no for an answer, she dragged him into the doorway. “Nu? How do you like it? Do I know what beautiful is?”

  “But how much money did you spend out on that paint?”

  “It was my own money,” she said, wiping the perspiration off her face with a corner of her apron. “Every penny I earned myself from the extra washing.”

  “But you had ought save it up for the bad times. What’ll you do when the cold weather starts in and the pushcart will not wheel itself out?”

  “I save and pinch enough for myself. This I done in honor for my son. I want my Aby to lift up his head in the world. I want him to be able to invite even the President from America to his home and shame himself.”

  “You’d pull the bananas off a blind man’s pushcart to bring to your Aby. You know nothing from holding tight to a dollar and saving a penny to a penny like poor people should.”

  “What do I got from living if I can’t have a little beautifulness in my life? I don’t allow for myself the ten cents to go to a moving picture that I’m crazy to see. I never yet treated myself to an ice-cream soda even for a holiday. Shining up the house for Aby is my only pleasure.”

  “Yah, but it ain’t your house. It’s the landlord’s.”

  “Don’t I live in it? I soak in pleasure from every inch of my kitchen. Why, I could kiss the grand white color on the walls. It lights up my eyes like sunshine in the room.”

  Her glance traveled from the newly painted walls to the geranium on the window-sill, and back to her husband’s face.

  “Jake!” she cried, shaking him, “ain’t you got eyes? How can you look on the way it dances the beautifulness from every corner and not jump in the air from happiness?”

  “I’m only thinking on the money you spent out on the landlord’s house. Look only on me! I’m black from worry, but no care lays on your head. It only dreams itself in you how to make yourself for an American and lay in every penny you got on fixing out the house like the rich.”

  “I’m sick of living like a pig with my nose to the earth, all the time only pinching and scraping for bread and rent. So long my Aby is with America, I want to make myself for an American. I could tear the stars out from heaven for my Aby’s wish.”

  Her sunken cheeks were flushed and her eyes glowed with light as she gazed about her.

  “When I see myself around the house how I fixed it up with my own hands, I forget I’m only a nobody. It makes me feel I’m also a person like Mrs. Preston. It lifts me with high thoughts.”

  “Why didn’t you marry yourself to a millionaire? You always want to make yourself like Mrs. Preston who got millions laying in the bank.”

  “But Mrs. Preston does make me feel that I’m alike with her,” returned Hanneh Hayyeh, proudly. “Don’t she talk herself out to me like I was her friend? Mrs. Preston says this war is to give everybody a chance to lift up his head like a person. It is to bring together the people on top who got everything and the people on the bottom who got nothing. She’s been telling me about a new word—democracy. It got me on fire. Democracy means that everybody in America is going to be with everybody alike.”

  “Och! Stop your dreaming out of your head. Close up your mouth from your foolishness. Women got long hair and small brains,” he finished, muttering as he went to bed.

  At the busy gossiping hour of the following morning when the butcher-shop was crowded with women in dressing-sacks and wrappers covered over with shawls, Hanneh Hayyeh elbowed her way into the clamorous babel of her neighbors.

  “What are you so burning? What are you so flaming?”

  “She’s always on fire with the wonders of her son.”

  “The whole world must stop still to listen to what news her son writes to her.”

  “She thinks her son is the only one soldier by the American army.”

  “My Benny is also one great wonder from smartness, but I ain’t such a crazy mother like she.”

  The voices of her neighbors rose from every corner, but Hanneh Hayyeh, deaf to all, projected herself forward.

  “What are you pushing yourself so wild? You ain’t going to get your meat first. Ain’t it, Mr. Sopkin, all got to wait their turn?”

  Mr. Sopkin glanced up in the mid
st of cutting apart a quarter of meat. He wiped his knife on his greasy apron and leaned across the counter.

  “Nu? Hanneh Hayyeh?” his ruddy face beamed. “Have you another letter from little Aby in France? What good news have you got to tell us?”

  “No—it’s not a letter,” she retorted, with a gesture of impatience. “The good news is that I got done with the painting of my kitchen—and you all got to come and give a look how it shines in my house like in a palace.”

  Mr. Sopkin resumed cutting the meat.

  “Oi weh!” clamored Hanneh Hayyeh, with feverish breathlessness. “Stop with your meat already and quick come. The store ain’t going to run away from you! It will take only a minute. With one step you are upstairs in my house.” She flung out her hands. “And everybody got to come along.”

  “Do you think I can make a living from looking on the wonders you turn over in your house?” remonstrated the butcher, with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Making money ain’t everything in life. My new-painted kitchen will light up your heart with joy.”

  Seeing that Mr. Sopkin still made no move, she began to coax and wheedle, woman-fashion. “Oi weh! Mr. Sopkin! Don’t be so mean. Come only. Your customers ain’t going to run away from you. If they do, they only got to come back, because you ain’t a skinner. You weigh the meat honest.”

  How could Mr. Sopkin resist such seductive flattery?

  “Hanneh Hayyeh!” he laughed. “You’re crazy up in the air, but nobody can say no to anything you take into your head.”

  He tossed his knife down on the counter. “Everybody!” he called; “let us do her the pleasure and give a look on what she got to show us.”

  “Oi weh! I ain’t got no time,” protested one. “I left my baby alone in the house locked in.”

  “And I left a pot of eating on the stove boiling. It must be all burned away by this time.”