Beyond the Pale: A Novel (44 page)

“And you?” she asked after awhile.

“I’m completely satisfied,” I said.

“Completely?” she asked, moving her fingers down to the hair of my vee.

“Completely,” I said, stopping her exploration. All I wanted was to lie there in the calm, feeling the liquid surface of my skin suffused with her body.

“All right, if you say so.”

We played with each other’s fingers for maybe a minute, maybe twenty. Every once in awhile I opened my eyes and saw the firefly blink.

“Would you like to hear a story?” Rose asked after a long silence.

“Yes.” I felt some tender place tear open, an unused room, where the doorway was covered in cobwebs. Someone rediscovered it, clearing the debris, opening the shutters, bringing in the world. This was a welcome change, yet each cobweb was attached to a nerve in my breast bone and ached as it was wrenched away.

“Do you know the story about stone soup?” Rose asked.

“Stone soup?” I moved my hand down her side, stroking and pressing into her sweet fatness. Of course I knew the story. Who didn’t? Mama used to tell us.

“You know, where the beggar comes to town and asks for something to eat—”

“A woman or man beggar?”

“I don’t remember woman beggars at home, but for now we’ll make it a woman, if you like.”

“I like.”

“Fine,” Rose said. “So the beggar got thrown out of the first town she went to. The people threw rocks at her. She picked up one of the rocks and put it a small velvet pouch she had found the week before.”

“Where?”

“In the woods, near where the deer live.”

“Did the deer make it for her?”

“I don’t know, Chava. She found it, that’s all.” Rose poked me in the side. “Anyway, she comes to the next town and this time shows off her magic stone, which, the beggar bragged, you could put into a pot with some water and make the most delicious soup in the world.”

“What town was it?” I asked, remembering Russia.

“Chava, it doesn’t make any difference. Let’s say it was—it was a shtetl, just a little bump of a town like you could see for a minute from the train.”

“Okay, the shtetl of Bump,” I said, tickling her knee.

“You’re impossible,” she said, swatting my hand. “Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“Very much.”

“Then let me tell it,” she said, ruffling my hair. “So in the shtetl of Bump the women all gathered around the beggar woman to see the stone. The beggar held up the velvet bag with a big lump in it. ‘From this bag it must go directly into water,’ the beggar said. ‘Ah, if only I had a kettle of water.’

“Then one of the townswomen ran home for her kettle. ‘But the water must be boiling,’ the beggar said. And so the women built a fire and filled the pot with water from their pumps. When the water was boiling, the beggar woman circled the pot with her velvet pouch, mumbling words in a language the townspeople had never heard before. Then she made a quick gesture and the rock flew into the boiling water.

“‘Did you see that?’ the women said to each other—” “But they hadn’t really seen anything, had they?” I asked. I looked beyond Rose’s breast and could see that now there were two fireflies in the tent, winking at each other in the dark. Something crawled over my toe and I simply flicked it off. Rose nodded and continued.

“‘Ah,’ the beggar said, bending over the pot, ‘this is going to be delicious, if I do say so myself. But—.’ The beggar took a big sniff. ‘What?’ asked a housewife. ‘Well, if we could throw in some carrots, this soup would rival my grandmother’s, of blessed memory.’”

“So the woman found some carrots, right?”

“Of course. And then onions, celery, salt and finally a chicken. One after another, the townspeople ran and got whatever the beggar woman suggested. Finally, the beggar said, ‘One last thing, and the soup will be done.’”

“What else could she need?” I nestled into Rose even more closely and she pressed back. Not a blade of grass would have found a passage between our bodies.

“Bowls and spoons, of course. And there was enough for everyone in the village as well as the beggar to eat their fill. When they were done, the beggar reached into the pot and pulled out her stone, which of course was gleaming from the soup and the chicken fat.”

The fireflies appeared to be dancing for each other, signaling in some code I thought it might be possible to understand. “It was a miracle,” I yawned.

“That’s what the townspeople thought. A miracle that soup so good could be made from just a stone.” Rose paused and ran the back of her hand along my cheek. I nibbled at her fingers with my lips but my eyes were too heavy to keep open.

“Sweet dreams, my darling,” were the last words I heard Rose say.

“How was your adventure, girls?” Aunt Bina looked up from her sewing. In the gaslight I saw how her face was both drawn and a little puffy. A day in the fresh air had changed my perceptions.

“Marvelous!” Rose said in English, and we all laughed.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Leon’s at his study circle, Aaron’s with his girlfriend somewhere, Harry, who knows, and Isadore went to a union meeting. Is that enough accounting for you?”

“A union meeting?” I whistled. “Things must be really looking grim if Uncle Iz is ready to do more than pay his dues.”

“If you’re hungry, there’s some leftover potato kugl,” Bina said, pretending to ignore me.

Rose and I unpacked our bundles, going in and out of our bedroom. Rose pulled something out of her pocket and brought it over to Bina. “Look, Mama, what I found in this rock—little layers, like windows.” She held up a stone about the size of a fifty-cent piece, which shone in the small yellow circle of gaslight.

Bina stopped stitching for a second. “Nice, very interesting, a souvenir from the country.” She sighed before starting to treadle again. “The stench around here is impossible, though the health department says they’ll have the garbage cleared this week. I’m glad you girls got out for a little bit. You never have enough time to have any fun, just working, politics, studying all the time.”

“Us! Oh Mama, I wish you could have been there. You’re the one who really needs a rest.”

“You think this is work? It’s nothing, nothing. I’m here in my own apartment, no bosses like you girls have. If I want a glass of tea, I have a glass of tea. I only hope we can keep the apartment.”

I’d been cutting pieces of cold kugl. “What do you mean, keep the apartment?”

“What are you, an echo? The landlord is raising the rent again.”

“Here?”

Rose gave me a look. “Where else would he raise the rent? On the moon?”

“You know the girls at the camp were talking about organizing a rent strike this fall. Maybe we should start right here.”

“You want me to tell Mr. Abrams, I’m sorry, but we’re on strike? He’ll throw us out on the street in a minute,” Bina said.

“Not if all the tenants do it together.”

“Chava, it’s one thing to talk theory, another to put us all in danger of being on the street. I don’t even have a job.” Rose looked frightened. Every day we passed people whose entire lives were open for public display to all their neighbors, sitting on their broken chairs, with a hat on an old milk crate for donations. Where did these people end up? With savings, we might find another place to rent but we’d have the same problems. And I planned to send most of what I’d saved to Sarah next week. Dovida had told me I should get my money out of the bank soon. Not a rush, she said, but soon.

I gave Rose her kugl, trying to tell her with my eyebrows that I would never allow her to be humiliated. We were too busy with our private interchange to notice that Bina’s hands had stopped still in her lap. She was staring at something inside the wall.

“Rosele, it might not be such a bad idea, this rent strike of Chava’s.”

Rose turned to her mother in surprise. “First, it’s not Chava’s idea. It belongs to that socialist Pauline Newman—”

“Socialist, Republican, a good idea is a good idea,” Bina said.

“Mama, you can’t mean it.”

“We wouldn’t do anything foolish, I promise you, my heart. But we can talk. It can’t hurt to talk to our neighbors. That new family who moved onto the third floor last week—”

“The Dropkins, I think that’s their name,” I said.

“Yes. I’ve never even introduced myself to her. What kind of world is that, where we don’t talk to our neighbors? Sometimes I think I can hear this old building breathe. Not knowing each other chokes us.”

Rose plopped into a chair in disbelief. Love for Aunt Bina filled me. I could feel my muscles twitching, curving up around my mouth and eyes.

“What about Uncle Iz?” I asked.

She waved the thought aside as if it were a fly. “I’m the one who deals with the landlord and makes sure we have enough to pay the rent every month. If he doesn’t agree, I know how to insist. You never know, he may think it’s a good idea himself.”

“But what will you say to the other tenants, Mama?” Rose was almost whining. She saw me watching her, and looked down, frustrated.

“I might be able to think of something. You think all your arguments have passed through me, that I’m some kind of sieve? No one likes to pay more rent, and this increase is simply unfair. To think of raising rents when so many are out of work, it’s inhuman. Who, in this building, wouldn’t agree? We’ll put together some kind of paper—”

“A petition,” I said, “everyone has to sign it for the strike to work.”

“You girls, you’ll help. Chava, you’ll write the petition up, and as long as you don’t have work, Rose, you’ll go with me to the neighbors. Maybe you’ll bake some rugelakh.” Aunt Bina went to her basket and removed two pieces of paper. She handed one to me and used the other to start a list.

“It’s too hot to bake anything, Mama,” Rose said, a sign she’d given in on everything else.

“All right, so maybe you won’t bake. But you’ll put a ribbon in your hair and you’ll come, nu?”

Rose took a bite of her dinner. “I’ll go with you, Mama. But don’t blame me if you’re the only one who thinks this is a good idea.”

“She won’t be the only one, Rose—that’s just it. That’s what Pauline and the girls were saying. We need to get our mothers and the housewives involved. We have to work for a better life on every level.”

Bina finished with the list, put the pencil down and started running her sewing through the machine again. “And am I one of your levels?”

“No, I just meant—”

“I know what you meant, darling. You think of everything as a cause, you can’t help it. And sometimes,” she winked at me, “only sometimes, mind you, you’re right.”

No one believed, when we started, that the rent strike would be a success. Even Bina, whose enthusiasm was a bright, cool wind in the hot days of September and early October, didn’t think so many women would join. Pauline was thrilled. More than a year younger than me, she acted like a general in an army, sending her troops to every street, setting up housewives’ committees for every block. Bina was chairman on our block of Essex Street. Many of the girls from the Palisades camp talked to their mothers, their friends, the people they boarded with—and the housewives enlisted more housewives.

We heard that Jewish housewives had held a successful meat strike shortly before we arrived in New York, when they forced the kosher butchers to lower prices. The women of the Lower East Side had tremendous energy—most of it leached out in doing piecework and haggling over every penny. Unorganized energy, that now seemed worth harnessing. They were angry. They worked hard and had no saloons or social clubs to go to in the evening like the men. The dance halls were for us, their daughters and sons. Was everything only for the children? Had their hopes for an American life been reduced to a few comic lines mumbled by a sentimental yente on the stage of the Yiddish theater, and even that glimpse only allowed them if everyone in the household was working for once and the boarder paying his rent on time?

Under the city streets there was a constant thrum of new electricity. Everywhere people studied for their naturalization exams—except the wives, who would become citizens automatically if their husbands did, and weren’t going to be allowed to vote anyway. On almost every corner there was a man, sometimes a girl or lady, giving a speech. Most of the time Aunt Bina had to hurry by: the sewing, the cooking, the laundry, the shopping, the family waiting. But once in awhile she stopped for a few minutes to listen. Socialists, anarchists, suffragists, unionists—everyone had something to say.

And Aunt Bina, what did she have to say?

You asked me, I’ll tell you.

The day I started talking rent strike

to the neighbors

was the best day of my New York life.

In Odessa we were progressive people,

maskilim. My husband had the idea

progressive Jews

didn’t bury themselves in Torah,

made their own way,

while their wives stayed home.

It was the honor of a new age,

a mark of culture

not to live in the marketplace

where our grandmothers did,

prosperity measured

by how desperate you were

to sell an egg.

In Odessa I thought I was always busy but