Beyond the Pale: A Novel (53 page)

“Gutke—,” I was about to say Gurvich and quickly switched to “Greenbaum. Your daughter and Chava came to my home several times.”

“She did? Why?” She regarded me carefully.

“I invited them after lectures, things like that. Mr. Greenbaum and I have no children of our own, so we appreciate when young people honor us with their presence.”

Mrs. Petrovsky smiled faintly. “It seems I took my daughter’s presence for granted.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that,” I said.

“No, you didn’t. I just see that we never know what blessings we have until–.” She started to cry and I reached for her hand. “I don’t want to talk in proverbs,” she said after awhile, wiping her face. “Tell me about my daughter, how she was in your home, at the settlement.”

I didn’t realize how many stories I had to tell Mrs. Petrovsky. Not only about how generous and lively her daughter was, but about Miriam and our old life in Russia. We stayed on that hard bench for hours. Only at sunset did we catch the trolley back to the Lower East Side, holding hands like old friends.

N
OT GUILTY!
Nisht shuldik!
” the newspaper boy in front of the bindery called out. Across the street, another boy yelled,
“Non Colpezole
!” holding up what I took to be an Italian daily.
“Nisht shuldik!
Read all about it. Not guilty! Paper, lady?”

“Give me both the
Forward
and the
Call
,” I said, handing him a dime. Little snowflakes fell on the headlines as he pulled out the papers I wanted. I skimmed the words but they were too hard to believe and I rolled the papers back up, tucking them under my arm. The wind was stronger. I pulled the scarf tight around my throat. If I had been on that jury I would have hung Harris and Blanck. Personally. Didn’t they used to burn people at the stake? I would have lit the fires underneath their feet. I would have stood close to the fires and watched their ugly faces:
Now do you know what you did to those girls?
Only when their hair caught on fire would I have looked away.

My feet packed the light snow down on the pavement. I felt each footstep, furious, deliberate. At the top of the steps to our tenement door I looked back, expecting sulfurous smoke to rise from where I walked, but the print of my overshoes was melting unremarkably into brown December slush.

Bina, Isadore, Leon and Harry were eating dinner. Shmuel had left for a chicken farm in California almost six months ago. Harry started coming regularly on Shabbes after the fire, and some other times during the week when I was at the bindery, to pick up and drop off Bina’s piecework. On the sideboard the Shabbes candles flickered.

“You’re later than usual. Did they keep you overtime?” Isadore asked.

“Overtime?” I left the bindery exactly at 5:30, as always. Where did I go? “No, just walking. Did you hear the news?”

Bina looked at Isadore and then up at me. “Yes. Come, sit, eat. I made kneydlekh.” She got up and spooned out a bowl of soup.

I shook out my coat, hung it up. For her, I sat down. Leon passed me the challah. There was only the clink of spoons in bowls, slow, tense. I couldn’t join in this old music of sigh and slurp. Instead I made marbles out of the soft white challah, the way children do, rolling it under my fingertips.

“I don’t understand,” Isadore finally said.

I guess the strain got to Harry. His father had asked a thousand questions that he never deigned to answer—but this, that wasn’t even a question, he had to jump on.

“Maybe you didn’t follow the trial closely,” he said in English.

“What’s to follow?” Leon asked, then blinked as if he hadn’t meant to get into this.

“Harris and Blanck said they were being singled out for all this publicity because they’re Jews. That’s anti-Semitism,” Harry said.

“Singled out because they’re Jews! Imagine trying to claim that as a defense, as if they were Dreyfus. Who singled out all those Jewish girls to die—were they planted in the factory by anti-Semites?” Isadore let his spoon clang into his dish.

“All right, Pop, but you have to admit it looked like the girls’ testimony was coached—”

“Most of the girls don’t speak any better English than Aunt Bina, no offense,” I said and Bina waved her hand in the air to dismiss any idea of disrespect, “and they were scared, still shocked. What difference does it make if they’re coached to tell the truth?”

Harry put his palms out, bunched his shoulders up. “Chava, I’m only saying it didn’t look so good. Everyone knows there are always girls in factories not as smart or clean as they should be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Isadore stared at his son. “The boss is responsible, that’s that.”

“Pop, I feel as bad about what happened as anyone. But in a factory there are always accidents. The girls get sloppy. We had a fire even in my place last month—”

“In your factory you had a fire?” Bina stared at him, her eyes wide.

“It got put out, Mama. I only lost one rack of pants.”

“You lost a sister, or maybe that doesn’t count as much as pants to you?” Isadore pushed his soup bowl to the center of the table.

“You’re deliberately twisting what I’m saying. All I meant was an owner can’t be everywhere at once, making sure there’s not a single oily rag left in a corner—”

“In your factory you allowed a fire?” Bina said again. She moved slowly to the sewing machine, tore the pair of trousers she was working on out, threw it on the stack, picked up the fifty-pound bundle, finished and unfinished, and dumped it by the door. “You take these out of here. You don’t bring me sewing ever again, do you hear me?”

Harry got up. His face was splotched, red where his anger rose and yellow where his little-boy fear overcame him. “If that’s the way you want it. But you’re making a mistake—”

“You’re the one making a mistake. I hold you responsible for every hair on the head of every girl who ever works for you, you understand, Ephraim? Every hair!”

“Pop—” Harry turned to Isadore.

“Don’t look at me. I back your mother 150 per cent! You want to be an owner, fine, but if you can’t be an owner and a mentsh at the same time, better you should be a pushcart peddler. The boss is responsible for the safety of the workers, and that’s that.” He folded his arms across his chest.

Harry shrugged, got his derby, picked up the bundle and kicked the door open. “I miss Rose as much as you do!” he shouted from the landing. “You don’t have to take this out on me!”

Leon looked at me. I looked away, got up, cleared the plates. Aunt Bina went into her bedroom and slammed the door. We could hear her pacing back and forth. It didn’t take Isadore more than a minute to follow her.

“Guess I’ll go out. They say there’s a new picture show, almost forty-five minutes long, at the theater on Broadway. Want to come?” Leon asked.

I knew he was trying to be polite, but I was shocked by his insensitivity. I said no. Leon hurried out into the night, a lost beetle of a man, still looking for a way to be at home in a country he only pretended to understand.

What was I doing in this place? I listened to Bina’s and Isadore’s voices in the next room, the anguish, anger and grief beating against the walls of the apartment. By now the griefs we suffered should have knocked all the timbers loose, the tenements should have been crumbling under the blows of our losses. I couldn’t stay much longer. I’d been holding Rose’s shadow for nine months, trying to calm her, to be a salve on the wounds of her sudden death. I walked into our room and looked across the bed to the window, out beyond the fire escape. Rose was gone. I lay down listening for her heartbeat, the way I’d heard it filling the world every hour since the fire. Tonight there was only my own heartbeat and the sound of wind blowing snow across the metal grates.

“I don’t know what to say to her, Gutke, you talk to her,” Dovida said.

“It’s too much for a young person.”

“It’s too much for anyone but she can’t fold up forever.”

I could hear their voices from the kitchen. Lately it seemed I heard much better. I could distinguish the sounds of every gear and strap in the folding machine from the sounds of the binder’s engine. I knew which horse was coming down Essex by its hoofbeats and its cough. The chestnut mare of the iceman, for instance, paused for a second before putting its leg down, as if it couldn’t believe the road would still be there. Before it had only been noise to me. Now I heard how silence coiled behind the city, below the noises. I found it first at the fire. Gutke could hear it too, I knew. She told me she’d never had such a bad headache as the day before the fire.

If I could make a way to the silence, I could sometimes hear the dead. The dead were all around us. Cities had to make so much noise to cover them up, so we wouldn’t be distracted from maintaining the engines that drove the machinery of profit. In Kishinev, I realized, we had more room in our ears, in our habits, to live with our ancestors—

Gutke was in front of me, offering me a handkerchief. I’d been crying again, unaware. She sat down on the other side of the sofa. I imagined the beams of an X-ray were like her eyes, the black one, the gold one, only they took pictures of our spirits, not of our bones. What does a spirit look like without its body? I let myself be drawn into her eyes, let her see whatever she wanted. What difference did it make?

“Chava, it’s almost a year—”

“Eleven months and nine days by the Christian calendar.”

She nodded. “There is a proscription for the length of mourning.”

I was the rabbi’s daughter—she thought I didn’t know? You said kadish for eleven months to help the departed enter heaven, then no more, except on the anniversary of the death, because you didn’t want people to think the dead person was so unrighteous they’d need a full year of kadish said for them. Rose, Mama, Papa—how long before our prayers helped clear their way to heaven? None of them could have needed more than a week. Heaven—

“Something is perplexing you?” Gutke asked.

“If there is no God, where do the dead go?”

“No God! Child,” she opened her mouth, closed it again. “All right, we don’t have to argue about this now. But don’t you see how much comfort you could have, if you believed?”

“Comfort? Comfort!” Suddenly I was on my feet, pacing. “Comfort in God? God gives and God takes away, blessed are the mysteries of God? That God? Or the God who strikes down the enemies of Israel—where is He? God, if God has any feeling, how could He, how could—” I stopped. I saw my mama lying over my papa’s body in the marketplace. I heard the sound of the wagons where they piled the bodies, those old creaky wheels. I stood there, listening. Then I heard Gutke take a deep breath.

“These things are not what God did, but what men do, out of neglect, fear and something horrible inside them we can’t understand.”

“But once they’ve shown how terrible they are, why are they allowed to go on? No one punished the men who killed my parents, and Harris and Blanck are back in business. No one cares about the girls who work for them.”

“But you do,” Gutke said.

“What?”

“You care about the girls and you care about justice. Justice, not vengeance. When we dedicate ourselves to justice, we honor not only the past but the future. When we become obsessed with vengeance, we get caught in the traps of those who do evil. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Not exactly.” I sat back down beside her, feeling very weary.

Gutke folded her hands in front of her face for a minute, looking beyond me. “These men—Harris, Blanck, the Kishinev murderers and all the others—you don’t want to spend the rest of your life living with them, do you?”

I motioned her to go on.

“You shouldn’t forget them or forgive them—”

“Forgive them?” My hands curled involuntarily, my nails pressing hard into my palms.

“I just said, didn’t I, you
shouldn’t
forgive them. They are responsible for what they do and there is no forgiveness possible for such brutality. But if you are to go on living, you want to live with the people you loved, not their destroyers, am I right?” Gutke said, taking one of my hands and softly prying it open.

“The people I loved are dead.”

“Yes, but you feel them, don’t you?”

“All the time. More and more.” Her palm was creased and soft.

“I thought that. All right, that’s good. If they are with you, what is it they want from you now?”

“I—.” I looked away from Gutke. Rose wavered in the air in front of me, and behind her Mama, Papa stroking his beard, Bobe Malka who, I realized, when I saw her there, must be dead too, though Esther didn’t mention it in her last letter. The faces of the dead became clearer. Rose put her hand out towards me. She didn’t open her mouth but I heard her whisper, “I need you, Chava. I need you still.” And then they all disappeared. I turned to Gutke.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“Only some shadows by you.”

“She said she still needs me.”

“Do you understand what she means?” Gutke asked.

“No.”

“May I tell you what I think?”

I nodded.

“You’ve been living in yourself as if you were dead, too. As if everything you needed died with Rose in that fire.”

“That’s the way I feel most of the time.” I pulled my hand away and started picking at a loose string on the sofa’s arm cover.

“You understand that when Rose says she needs you, she doesn’t mean for you to come to her by taking the gas?”

“No, she doesn’t mean that.” Rose would never have wanted me to kill myself, I realized.

“Good. That’s good. So you have half of it.” Gutke pressed her hands together with a clap.

“Half of what?”

“They need you to live, not to live ‘for’ them, exactly, but to live with them, to hold them in your living, to do what you would have done with them if they had been able to stay with you.”

“But—”

“Sha.” Gutke appeared to be listening to something herself. I couldn’t hear anything except Dovida pacing in her study, the noise of traffic in the street. She cleared her throat, snapped her head around. “Your aunt. What is she going to do now?”