The Singing Fire Read Free

but Father didn’t as he added, “Your home is your home. Nothing else is the same.”
    The back door was open to the courtyard surrounded by small houses that were old and run-down. In them lived Nehama’s married sisters. She was always surrounded by sisters. She couldn’t open her mouth to sneeze without one of them saying, Bless you. Where’s your handkerchief? Why aren’t you wearing woolens? Where’s your head? The other sisters were all fair, like Father. Only she and Mama were dark. She’d been named for her grandmother because she was born just after Grandma Nehama died. Nehama means “consolation,” but her mother had been inconsolable. She was depressed for a year, ignoring all her fair-haired children, who pinched and slapped the baby when no one was looking. It was their duty to curb the yetzer-hara , the evil inclination, because she was the youngest and Mother let her get away with murder. They should have pinched harder. Nehama still had a strong yetzer-hara .
    “If I was young, I’d go to London in a minute,” Mama said. The shop was small, the back door propped open with a stone. In the courtyard the sisters’ laundry hung like angels in the smoke from the nearby feather factory.
    “Then you’d let me go?” Nehama asked.
    “Who’s talking about going? I only meant in theory,” Mama said. Her hair was still dark, her hands scrubbed raw after baking so she wouldn’t stain the fine cloth when she came to sew.
    “But in theory a boat ticket costs less than a dowry,” Nehama said.
    “Don’t be silly. Sending away a child, that’s for desperate people.” Mama shook her head. While she sewed she sighed, as if it was hard to breathe in the smoky air that blew in from the feather factory.
    “But I’d send for you. I’d send for everybody!”
    “You and who else?” Hinda called from the other room. She was the prettiest of the sisters. “You’d better keep the price of the ticket for your dowry. You’ll need it because no one’s marrying you for your beauty.”
    “So who needs beauty if you know business?” Rivka said. She was the oldest sister and had a business importing cotton. “I can’t keep the store closed more than an hour to take inventory. What are you waiting for, Nehama?”
    “Go, go. I’ll finish here,” Mama said.
    Nehama crossed the courtyard with her oldest sister to the small house where the store took up the front room. Rivka planned to have a real shop soon, with two stories and heavy shutters that locked out thieves and rioters.
    “Do you think I’m ugly?” Nehama asked, seating herself at the table to write up the accounts.
    “Ugly? I wouldn’t say that. Your hair is too curly, but it matters more that it’s dark.” Rivka lifted a bale of fabric onto the counter, unrolling it and checking for holes. She wore a kerchief over her hair but wasn’t too pious not to let a few golden strands fall across her forehead. “Too bad you don’t have our coloring. I mean mine and Father’s. Jewish boys go crazy for fair hair. But your eyes are nice. Very blue. And you wouldn’t be so dark if you ate eggs.”
    “I hate eggs.” Nehama erased a sum with a rubber. She added every column twice, and each time it came to something different.
    “You hate everything good for you.”
    “Not everything. I’d like a shop. I could run it.”
    “There’s no money for you to have a shop. You have to be practical about what you can do.”
    Nehama kept a list of things she might do. Page one: businesses. Importing cotton, wheat, eggs, oranges. Selling corsets, rope, kerosene, wooden barrels. Page two: occupations. There wouldn’t be so many for a woman, but never mind. She wrote them in large letters to fill up the page, all her pent-up energy making the penciled letters as dark as black ink. “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? I could be a teacher like Leah and Shayna-Pearl.”
    “You want to talk ugly? Leah’s scarred from the smallpox. It’s a mercy from God