The Singing Fire Read Free Page A

she became a teacher. And Shayna-Pearl is so bad-tempered no one could stand her for a week. Thank God that there was enough money for them to go to school. But now, unfortunately—well, when it’s the youngest’s turn there just isn’t much left. You never liked to face reality, but there comes a time when you have no choice.”
    “You could send me to school, Rivka.” It wasn’t fair. Nehama added up the accounts herself. She knew what was going in and going out.
    “And don’t I have my own children to consider? Someone has to tell you how the world works, and I can see it’s up to me. Make yourself into an attractive girl, Nehama, and your dowry will stretch further. I mean attractive in temper, not just in looks. You should eat eggs because they’re good for you and never mind if you like them. That’s what makes a nice girl.”
    “Fine. If I can’t do anything I want here, then I’ll go somewhere else.” Along the river she’d seen the large boats that carried everything a person might dream about. She could be on such a boat, the force of her desires driving the steam engine. A life that she made herself, one that was worth remembering at the end of it. “Maybe I’ll go to London. Girls don’t need dowries there.”
    “I never heard anything so stupid. You don’t know what you want.”
    “How am I supposed to know? Every time I take a step, I have a sister telling me when to lift my foot and when to put it down.”
    “Thank God, or who knows where you’d end up. Just because Mama makes you a dress in the latest fashion, you think you’re a specialsalami. Let me tell you, Nehama, someday you have to find out that you’re just plain beans and you give everyone gas.” Rivka slapped a roll of cotton onto the counter. “You see this? It would make a serviceable dress for everyday. The dirt won’t show on it. If you want I’ll give it to you at cost, Nehameleh, and you can save a couple of yards if you make it up yourself without any fancy-shmancy business. A mother that sees you in this will realize that you know what’s what and she’ll think of giving her son to you.”
    “I don’t like it,” Nehama said. “It looks like an old woman’s.”
    “All right. Insult me. That’s what I should expect. Just remember when you end up depending on handouts for a piece of bread that if you weren’t so stubborn, it could have been avoided.”
    Rivka went back to her bales of fabric in a huff, and Nehama added up the columns of numbers once again, hoping that with God’s help the sums would stay the same.
    On Shobbos they all sat together in the women’s gallery of the synagogue, Nehama, her mother, and all her sisters. It was a modern synagogue with an open balcony, where the women could look straight down at the Holy Torah as it was paraded in its crown of silver and its gown of velvet. Her next older sister, Bronya, was breathing noisily. Seven months pregnant and still she did business every market day, charging a few pennies to weigh goods on the scale she brought to the market square in a wheelbarrow. Her husband was a carpenter, not a bad trade, but he stank of onions. How could Bronya stand him? “Your turn next, Nehama,” she said.
    “Not me. I’m helping Father. He can’t afford to marry me off.”
    “I hear the matchmaker’s been sniffing around.” Hinda shifted her baby from one breast to the other. “I ought to give her some tips about you.”
    “There’s a fine young man on the next street to ours,” Bronya said. “You can smell him coming. Aah—dead animal skins. But a tanner can still be very pious. And just think how you can help him by collecting cow shit for tanning.”
    “Such language! Don’t tease your sister,” Mama said. “You know how sensitive she is to odors.”
    Down below among the men, the Holy Torah, which has no odor, was unrolled all the way to the beginning. The reader chanted: “Andthe earth was chaos and void. On the face of the deep, in the