The Singing Fire (30 page)

They spent Passover in the hospital. Mama pushed two chairs together for Gittel to sleep on, which wasn’t any worse than how many a lodger or cousin slept. Aunt Minnie and Uncle Lazar brought food. No one could eat, but the point was not to eat, only to have it so that they were reminded of the existence of food. They talked fast, as if any pause would be a door for death to enter, but Gittel heard them only
now and again. Something about Uncle Lazar’s play, he’d write another act, it would be about this or that, you see that Nathan’s color is better, a little rest, that’s all. Aunt Minnie was taking things out of a basket, finding a place for them on the small bedside table, on the plate that she pushed into Mama’s hand, on the cloth she put over Gittel’s lap.

Uncle Lazar had lost his hat, the bowler hat that made him somebody. It fell off when he was lifting Papa into the nuns’ cart so they could take him to the hospital. He hoped that Papa would appreciate what he’d sacrificed. Only for such a friend, a brother, would he give up that hat. Look at this odd wool thing he had on his head. Could you call it a hat? It belonged on an old man, an
alter-kacker
, never mind.

So they went on, the talk hurting Gittel’s ears until she thought she would bleed if anyone said another word. But at last they were ready to leave. Aunt Minnie swept up the crumbs and wrapped the uneaten food in newspaper. Uncle Lazar put his hand on Nathan’s head, murmured a blessing, then turned away, embarrassed.

“Let me take Gittel home,” Aunt Minnie said. “She shouldn’t get sick. Look at her eyes, she’s so tired she’s ready to fall.”

“I’m staying here,” Gittel said. There was mud on her dress and a spot of dried blood where she’d cut her knee, throwing herself on the ground over her father.

“Come with me. A child needs sleep.” Aunt Minnie was pinning her hat to her hair, the hatpin as long as a sword in the moonlight.

“You should go,” Mama murmured, her eyes far away. She was touching the gold chain that Papa had given her to wear for Passover. There ought to be something hanging from the chain, a locket, a jewel set in gold, but Mama said she liked the chain just the way it was.

Gittel folded her hands in her lap as if she were in school. “I’m staying,” she said. A person had to sit still with her hands folded. That was the rule.

“It’s all right. Go on,” Mama told the others.

The ward was bright with moonlight while men moaned in their dreams. Some of the moans were in Yiddish, some in English, one was in Chinese, and several in no language at all. There were two rows of beds, each with a small nightstand. Beside one was the wicker frame used to hold the canvas that wrapped a patient for hot air treatments.

“What happens after someone dies, Mama?” Gittel asked quietly. She had to be quiet. When someone cries, people run away. It was her crying over her
tatteh
that had driven him into unconsciousness.

“People sit
shivah
. They mourn and then they get up.” Her mother’s voice was quiet, too. The night nurse was walking between the rows of beds. Her white habit made her look like a ghost, but her shoes clump-clumped on the linoleum. It was the day nurse who washed the floor with carbolic acid.

“I mean the person that’s dead. If his body is in the ground, how does he turn the pages of the Torah when he’s studying in heaven?”

“Do I care?” Mama asked. “That’s God’s problem. Me, I want my family to use their hands to make a living and clap when there’s a good show at the theater.”

“What if there’s nothing, Mama?” The biggest boy in her class said that after you die, worms eat the body and that’s all. Papa was lying in the bed, a thin line under the sheet on his way to nothing. His face was without expression, the crease in his forehead made by the bandage. If only it was worry about finishing an order or concentration on the last line of a joke. “Do you think there’s nothing after a person dies?”

Her mother looked from the bed to Gittel, pushing her chair closer to Gittel’s before saying in a confidential tone, “I’m telling you, what you hear now, you’ll hear then.”

“I hear Papa breathing,” Gittel said. His breathing was slow and shallow though there wasn’t anything wrong with his lungs or his heart, the physician had said. “But, Mama, I smell something.”

“What—is it blood?” Mama stood up as if to pull back the sheet, looking around for the nurse, who had gone back to her station.

“No. It smells like trees.”

With a sigh, her mother sat down again, taking Gittel’s hand in hers. “What kind of tree?”

“A linden tree when it buds.” Mama’s fingers were long and elegant. If they weren’t rough, they could be a lady’s. But a lady wouldn’t touch a dead body, and Mama would wash Papa if it came to that.

“If it’s a linden, then it’s the tree in the courtyard of my mother’s house, may she rest in peace. Is there anything else?”

“Roses. I smell roses,” Gittel said without any wonder that she might smell spring in Poland or summer in Russia, for when this world
comes close to the other, it seems stranger that they’re separated than that they can touch.

“We didn’t have any. But my father’s customers did. They all had rosebushes in their gardens.”

There was a sound from the bed. Papa was smacking his lips as if they were dry. Mama poured water from the pitcher on his nightstand and held the cup to his lips. He drank like a man so old he could be in the museum. “How will we wake
Tatteh
?”

“We just have to wait,” Mama said. The man in the next bed groaned as he turned over. “Is there another choice?”

“You could tell me a joke,” Gittel said, looking away from Mama’s mournful face.

“I’m no good at telling jokes. But it’s all right. God laughs plenty.”

“Please, Mama. Just one.” The smell of carbolic acid mixed with roses and lindens and something else—yes, it was the smell of a stream filled with trout. The ward was a night garden, and if her
tatteh
only knew it he would realize that this world wasn’t such a bad place to return to.

“All right. Just one,” Mama said, kissing Gittel’s forehead. “And then you go to sleep. I don’t want a sick child on top of everything else.”

So Mama told one joke and then another. Every single joke of Papa’s, all the bad jokes, the terrible puns, the stories about the angel of death and the priests and the converts and the two brothers, one rich and one poor, all of them she told while Papa was unconscious. Before dawn, in the darkness between the moon and the sun, when you couldn’t even see the gold chain on Mama’s neck but just touch it as you leaned against her, she was hoarse and she was still telling jokes. She said, “And then the convert sprinkled a little water on the boiling beef and he said, Holy, Holy, Holy, now you are a fish.” She said, “You mean you’re not Moisheh from Minsk?” She met Gittel’s eyes with a promise, and she said, “You without me is like a door without a handle.”

So the first sound that came from Papa was a faint laugh. Gittel jumped up to embrace her father, and Papa laughed again before he looked down and discovered the bandage on his arm where his right hand should have been.

Frying Pan Alley

The front room was just as Nehama had left it. The iron stove was shining. It had taken her a day to get it ready for Passover. The curtain hung in front of the bed, sewn in a patchwork of remnants so that when she lay with Nathan her eyes fell on pieces of their life together. The loose board under the bed was still loose, and under it were the handkerchiefs knotted around silver and copper coins. The Passover dishes were piled on the dresser, the blue glass vase was on the mantel and beside it the program from a children’s evening at the school with Gittel’s name in the chorus. Nathan’s newspaper was still on the table, Gittel’s homework, Nehama’s book from the library:
The Woman Who Did
.

“Minnie! Come down!” she shouted.

There was a clatter on the stairs, the door flung open. “My God, Nehama. What is it?”

“Did you move a sewing machine?”

Gittel was in school, Nehama had just come from the hospital. It was Hol Hamoed, the middle four days of Passover, when work is permitted. In the street someone was calling,
“Motzos!
If you didn’t get enough on Chametz Battel Night, now’s your chance! Half price, slightly burnt!” The barrow rattled over cobblestones, the voice grew fainter.

“What are you talking?” Minnie asked. “Why would I do such a thing? Is there a reason to
shlep
sewing machines here and there?”

“Then it’s gone, Minnie. There’s only one in the workshop.”

“That’s impossible. Let me have a look.”

“You think I’m blind all of a sudden?”

“Maybe just a little crazy. It happens. With Nathan in the hospital …” While she was talking, Minnie walked into the back room, Nehama following, the book still in her hand. It was easy to see the workshop with a single sweep of the eyes. The mantel for the gaslight, the pressing table, the soot on the window and the paper over the crack, the rough table where in the busy season four people worked, and now only one sewing machine. “Joe’s bag is missing, too.” Minnie pointed to the bench. A black-and-red-striped bag should have been under it. The bag belonged to Joe, the lodger, who’d been training on
the sewing machine and sleeping on a bench in the workshop for the last month. He was a
landsmann
from Plotsk. He knew Nehama’s next older sister or at least her husband, the one that smelled like onions, or so he’d said.

“You think he stole it—I don’t believe it.” Nehama dropped her book on the table and sat down, her hands over her eyes.

“It has to be the lodger,” Minnie said.

“Tell me, Minnie. Just one thing. How could I forget? A person claims to be a
landsmann
. You offer your trust and then … Now you see what happens. You see it with your own eyes.”

Minnie was sitting on the bench beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not a watch he put in his pocket. A sewing machine? The whole street would be looking.”

“A cholera on him.” Nehama put her fist against her mouth. How easily a life could come undone in just a few days. If only she’d sleep. Maybe then she’d wake up to everything as it was before Passover.

“He had to go somewhere with it,” Minnie said. “A new lodger with a sewing machine won’t be hard to find. I want to see a man with such
chutzpah
in his face and then I’m going to scratch it out.”

“All right,” Nehama said. Of course the missing sewing machine was the better one. Nathan had bought it after she had the miscarriage. “You go, Minnie. You tell me if you find out something.”

“By myself? Don’t be foolish. Come on. Let’s go now. Everything can be fixed.”

“I can’t do it, Minnie. Not again. How many times do you think a person can start from nothing? From less than nothing, from beneath the grave.”

“You’re smarter now.” Minnie was taking her by the hand and leading her to the other room. “Here, put on your shawl. It’s raining again. If only I was a fish, I’d be ecstatic. When you have your shop—”

“What are you talking? Without the sewing machine, we’re going to be lucky if we don’t starve to death.”

“Cakes and blouses, am I right?” Minnie asked.

“Books,” Nehama muttered. But she was shrugging into her coat, the shawl over her head. “Books and blouses.”

“Who wants books? A good cake, a honey cake or a butter cake—that’s something I can make. Should we be partners, Nehama? I’ll want
a striped blouse. A shopkeeper should have a striped blouse. Do you think pink or blue?”

Nehama shook her head, but she couldn’t help smiling a little. Minnie was arguing with her about the sign over the shop and the color of the awning, and before she could look around, they were out in the street among the barrows and stalls dripping with rain.

They went around the alley and to all the small streets that made up the Lane; the rain was gray and the houses leaned over them as they went from door to door. No one saw anything. It was Passover; on the last two evenings everyone had been inside at the
seder
while the moon was full and the streets as bright as by day. Did you see something? No, No, No, and then Yes. Mrs. Flacks’s youngest child, when she opened the door for Elijah the prophet to come in and drink his drop of wine, she’d seen something. What did she see? they asked, everyone excited. It was Elijah, she told them. Did he have a sewing machine? That was too funny—Elijah wasn’t a tailor, he was a prophet with a long white beard and sweets for children and maybe Mrs. Katzellen had a farthing for her to buy a peppermint as she’d seen the holy Elijah.

Pious Pearl was holding an umbrella over her beigels at the corner of Sandys Row and Frying Pan Alley outside a shop that sold uniforms from the Crimean War and weapons from the wars of Napoleon, everything rusty and moth-eaten. The owner of the shop, twice as wide as her doorway, was standing outside looking for customers in the drizzle. Beside her was the hot-chestnut seller who, ten years ago, had seen a man fleeing on the night of the murders. It was a corner for seeing things. It was a corner for listening.

“Chestnuts, all ’ot!”

“Knives and sitthers to grind!”

“Special edition, ’orrible railway accident!”

“Did you maybe see our lodger?” Nehama asked Pious Pearl. Her voice didn’t belong to her. How could it sound so calm when she was strangling?

“Joe with the striped bag?” Pious Pearl asked. She didn’t have to think for a minute. “I saw him on the first night of Pesach.” She’d been a bit tipsy from her four glasses of wine and the vodka both before and after, but it was no one else. They’d had a little conversation. The lodger said that Nehama had asked him, as a favor, to pawn the sewing
machine for her rent while Nathan was in hospital. “It’s not true?” she asked Nehama.

“Not a word.”

“Maybe he took it to Shmolnik’s. Have a dozen beigels, Nehama. No, I don’t want a penny. Take it or I’ll curse you till you’re sorry you ever saw me. Here.”

“Keep it,” Nehama said. “Curses I have plenty.”

Minnie took her arm as they turned down toward the high road. The rain was soaking through her shawl, and she needed a drink. She wished she was Pious Pearl. She needed to be the kind of person who could drink and not throw it up before she got drunk.