“What do you do?” I asked her, in Yiddish, holding up a tray of needles and thread.
“I’m a tailor, just like you,” she replied, tentatively offended. “Only I’m called a seamstress.”
“No,” I said. This made her angry.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean, what does one do?”
“What does one do?” She was now perplexed.
“Yes, what does one do?”
“In what circumstance?”
“Here!” I said, pointing to my tools and cloth.
“One sews,” she said, warily.
“But I don’t know how! Teach me what to do, or they’ll fire me.”
She went back to her sewing, and then turned to me. “You escaped from someplace,” she said bravely.
“I did not.”
“You work for a newspaper.”
“No.”
“Why is there ink on your hand?”
“I have been known,” I said, “to touch a pen. But I don’t work for a newspaper.”
“You’re dressed like a lawyer, not a tailor. Why are you here, if you can’t do the work?”
“You,” I said accusingly, “should be on the stage. Why are you here?”
“I have strong ideas about the stage,” was her reply. “The stage is vanity and stupidity, and I hope that I am neither vain nor stupid. At the moment, at least, since I don’t know English, I’m perfectly happy to do this work.”
In less than a minute, we had become enemies. It was horribly frustrating. I studied her from the corner of my eye (which made me seem cross-eyed). She was tall, her arms were long, and her hair was smooth and black—as shiny as the pelt of a seal. Her cheeks were so spacious and her cheekbones so high that when I studied them I thought of mountain snowfields. Her nose was long and straight, her shoulders and breasts finely formed, and her voice was the sort of voice with which the blind fall in love.
“I need a job as a tailor,” I explained. “Not permanently—only for a certificate of employment, so that I can get someone off the Island.”
“Oh,” she said, “I see.”
I thought that she would have nothing further to do with me, but it was not long before we had embarked together in a course on tailoring.
She was a good teacher. First, she made me aware of a lot of unrelated techniques, listing them in a hurry, demonstrating, and calling for imitation. “That’s fine,” she would say, and go on to the next thing. In this way I learned how to sit, how to end a stitch, how to thread needles, how to “lock up” my work, etc., etc. We then tried a system she devised whereby she would do most of the work on a coat and I would struggle along on what she assigned, so that in the end—with me pushing as hard as I could while she labored twice as much and corrected my mistakes—we could finish the work of two. I did my best, but she did most of it. Because of this, I insisted on giving her my pay.
“How will you eat?” she wanted to know.
“I can go without eating for a few days,” I told her. “I’m like a camel. You must take my wages, since you will have done the work.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I won’t take anything. Let’s keep on sewing. If we don’t, we won’t get it done.”
We managed this way during the first afternoon, and did a passable job. For several days, until I got my certificate, it was much the same. She struggled to do double the work that she normally did. I helped her as she helped me.
She was generous without the slightest guile, and I fell in love with her as I had never fallen in love before. As she revealed herself to me, her physical beauty paled in comparison to what she really was. I began to think of Elise only in terms of paying back the debt I owed her for guiding me on the Island, and because I had promised.
And then something happened with this woman (who would not tell me her name, which—I found out from someone else—was Hava). You must understand that we are a nation whose most profound respect is for old men, the Tzaddikim—whether they be rabbis, or tailors, or farmers, or whatever. Perhaps it is because they have had the time to live and to study, and that, embodied in them, is what we revere. I have always seen in them the line of my life both forward and backward; I am deeply solicitous of them; they have a special hold on me—as if they were what I really should be, as if I see in them the holiness that one can see in a child, as if each one were my own father, as if they were unnervingly close to God. I don’t know. All I do know is that they can easily break my heart.
Hava, you see, with her silver needles flying, bent over the rich and heavy cloth, working intently not for herself but for another, drew from me the reverence and the love that I had known only for the Tzaddikim. She became for me, in her justice, a symbol of all that I had loved and all that had ever moved me. Hava, in selflessness, became the recollection of my village, the winters there, the light that came to us suddenly from the clouds when in our frailty we thought only of the dark. Hava became all the beauty of the hart that I had seen, when a little boy, leaping over our house dizzily into the blue. Hava became everything that was good and beautiful. Perhaps one might think this was too much credit for a human soul, and that such splendid attribution could only have led to disillusion. But she was those things, and more, radiant even in qualities of imperfection. With the simplest of actions she elicited from me the deepest emotions. I watched her, with her silver needles flying, working intently—not for herself, but for another.
I did give her my wages. I pressed them into her hand. This turned out not to have been entirely contrary to my self-interest, for although I could not have predicted it, she took me home with her, since I had no place to sleep and nothing to eat.
Almost trembling, we wound our way up the stairs of the tenement in which she lived. My hands were swollen from needle punctures. All I had had to eat (after eating far too much the day before) was a twisted bread that I had taken from the bakers, and five glasses of tea, which might have made me tremble anyway.
I dreaded the ordeal of family scrutiny. The one time that I had been taken as the prospective husband in an arranged marriage (the bride didn’t know me; I didn’t know her; I had no choice; I was only sixteen), the girl’s father picked up a chair and tried to smash it over my head. What could I have done to offend him so? To this day, I am in ignorance. All I know is that I was dressed very carefully, my hair was slicked down, and I was wearing my uncle’s .25-carat-diamond stickpin. The bride turned out to have been a sweet blond girl as skinny as a violin string, but her father went into a rage, screaming, “Another fat boy! Yet another fat boy! I’ll show him!” (I was almost as slender as his daughter.) As my cousin the very incompetent matchmaker and I ran from his front garden, he appeared at the window and fired a dueling pistol at us. But that is another story.
Hava had no family: she lived alone, and had dared to take me in. Just before she opened the door, she told me that her parents were still in Russia, and her sister and her brother-in-law, with whom she had come to America, were in Milwaukee. For an entire hour, we talked nervously about Milwaukee, although neither of us knew a single thing about it.
Then she heated some boiled beef with carrots and celery, and she served not only bread and horseradish but wine. Across the airshaft was a music school in which a student quartet was sawing out lovely Viennese quazerkas. Even though these students were to real musicians as a chicken is to a nightingale—I thought at first that they were Chinese trying to learn Western scales—the wine that we drank turned them all into Joseph Joachims. I could not have been happier. Everything was going perfectly. Two days in America, I thought, and I am a Drake (I think I meant Duke). It is true that we were in a single cold room in a tenement, but the food was excellent; I had a job (in a way); and there was this woman, Hava, who was searingly, painfully beautiful. As the wine and I told her, she was “a veritable merry-go-round of dizzying attractiveness, numbingly tantalizing, perfectly and smoothly alluring.” I was practicing English, and, like ever
y immigrant, I had been hypnotized by polysyllabic Latinates. Nonetheless, she blushed like an adolescent and stared at her plate. After all, she didn’t know English.
As she washed the dishes, I swayed back and forth, fodder for the violins. When she finished, she dried her hands and put on some sort of lotion that smelled like roses. Most women let down their hair when they go to bed. Hava did the opposite, and her arms at work became terribly visible, as did the flowing concave arches of her shoulders and neck. The symmetry of this viscous telegraphy, as smooth as silken ribbons, took from me my remaining will and self-possession. I was in the primum mobile. Then she pointed at the ceiling.
I wanted to please her, so I too pointed at the ceiling. What did I know. I had read that, in America, the Eskimos rubbed noses.
“Up there,” she said.
“Up there,” I repeated like an idiot.
“That’s where you’ll sleep.”
I looked up. “On the ceiling?”
For an instant, I imagined that she could, by a single prayer, make me as light as a balloon, so that I would tuck comfortably against the ceiling, there to dream all night of the bed below and its occupant—as inviting as an Alpine meadow in bloom (without the bees).
“No, not on the ceiling, my dear man,” she said, with such affection that I would have been willing thereafter to sleep in Hell for her had she desired it. “On the roof, where you will find a tent and a cot. Any”—her Yiddish pronunciation of Annie—“a consumptive who lived across the hall, used it for taking the air.”
“Tell me something, Hava. What happened to Any?”
“Poor Any died.”
Once again, I cast my eyes to the ceiling. “What about the germs?”
“What are germs?” she asked innocently.
It was a joy to sit on the edge of her bed, close to her, holding her hand in mine, explaining the theory of bacteria and germs—a theory with which, I might add, she was really quite taken. Still, at the end of my dissertation, she pointed to the ceiling.
I stayed on the roof for two hours. It was actually several degrees below zero, and Annie had left only two blankets (no wonder she died). I eventually got so cold that I climbed down the fire escape and knocked on Hava’s window. She got up from her bed and turned on the lamp; she was wearing a snow-colored gown.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I could see through the glass that she was delightfully warm. Her skin was rosy, a color that the Russians call “blood and milk.”
I was too cold to answer, so she opened the window and I fell in, crashing onto the floor like a block of ice. Then Hava’s true humanity surfaced as she helped me into bed, drew the covers over us, and to banish the chill, embraced me with legs and arms and everything she had. “We have to get up early,” she whispered, “so sleep now.” I awoke in the morning with Hava in my arms. Snow had blown in through the open window, and a snowdrift slept at the foot of our bed, just like a white cat.
We soon discovered that splitting the rent in two makes life much easier. And since I was able to shop in the morning, she no longer had to settle for wilted and damaged vegetables, and meat that would have been passed over even by its mother. As a reward for leaving, I received a certificate of employment from Barvaz, who had found a real tailor—an old man of great skill—to sit next to Hava.
When my hands—infected from the needle punctures—healed, I picked up my pen. Within a week, I had written an eloquent plea for the oppressed Jews of Turkestan, and I was paid a great sum (all right, not a great sum but a good sum) by the Jewish Daily Forward, which published it under a banner headline. There was a box in the middle of the article, which the editor used to solicit contributions for the Turkestan Emergency Fund. He wrote, “To give to another without reward is the only way to compensate for our mortality, and perhaps the binding principle of this world.” At the time, I still was not quite sure of what he meant.
Since I was paid by the word, I had been very careful to make my survey of the conditions in Turkestan not only dramatic but complete. This necessitated not a few interpolations, estimates, and inventions. I was immediately attacked by a lot of sanctimonious literalists whom I led rather easily into a dizzying thicket within the paying pages of the Forward, which made them regret that (and wonder if) there was ever such a thing as Turkestan. I had been accused before, even in Russia, of insulting the truth. Some had gone so far as to call me a devious liar. How ridiculous! Truth is not anchored to the ground by driven piles. It can float and take to the air; it is light and lovely and delicate. It is feminine as well as masculine. It is often gentle, and, sometimes, it can even make a fool of itself—but when it does it calls down God (who protects weak creatures), and suddenly its foolishness becomes a blazing, piercing light.
I was soon able to earn a decent living writing for the Forward. I bought a vest in which to carry my fountain pen, and a watch chain—although I did not have a watch. I began to study English very hard, and Hava was soon able to work less: from eight until four. When she came home, we would have tea and biscuits and then go to the Jewish turnverein to exercise—she danced and swung Indian clubs, and I took up no-contact boxing. After the turnverein, we would go to the baths, and after that we would go home to read or play chess. At the end of February, we were married in a synagogue on Chrystie Street.
Living together as we had was rather unorthodox. But it had not troubled us, because America never seemed entirely real. For me, America was always very much like a dream. And when New York ties you up in its net, how can you know for sure what is real and what is not?
I suppose I could have gone on that way forever, and left the past to take care of itself. But one morning, in March, I awoke in intense sadness. I had been so busy and so content that I had forgotten Elise. Perhaps it was because I was afraid to return to the Island, fearing that the clouds would once more descend and I would wake up having just come off the boat, with the night class, the palace, and Hava only dreams.
I didn’t want that, but I dressed and shaved, tucked the employment certificate and my fountain pen (the badge of my real profession) in my vest pocket, and set out for Ellis Island, apprehensive that I might never return. In anticipation of being trapped there once again, I ached for Hava. It was a risk that had to be taken. Mainly for Hava’s sake, I wanted to be a man who kept his promises—and there is only one way to do that.
The waters of the harbor were translucent and aquamarine; they ran thick with shards of ice and white islands as big as polar bears. Ellis Island lay in the distance, its Byzantine domes and blood-red roofs glowing in the morning sunshine. The sloop in which I sailed was loaded with inspectors, officials, and sacks of mail destined for ships not allowed into port. Having passed through already, I knew the power of the Island and feared that I would be possessed. It is a lair of the deepest emotions, where hope has died and flourished, where those who love one another have been separated forever, where anything that can happen to a soul has happened, all in full view of the Battery. It is like a sinking ship just offshore, watched by those who have landed; a court of the world; a purgatory; the turning place of dreams.
Once I had set foot again on Ellis Island, I knew that I had come to one of God’s places, and that those of us who had been there were tied to it forever. I passed through warm kitchens, and halls decorated with signal flags. I went into the great room, and saw the same people still winding through, silently walking up the long stairs, their eyes glistening in gray light. But this time there was no underlying surflike noise. It was totally silent, and I thought I was deaf. They climbed the stairs without a sound; there were no voices; everything was light and cloudy in tones of gray and brown. In that unearthly place, people spoke and nothing came from their mouths.
By the time I reached the hall in front of the Commissioner’s office, I felt as if I had never left the Island, and the silence held me deep within its saddened chambers. What a shock, then, when I knocked at the glass and it rattled lo
udly in my ears.
“Don’t knock so loud,” said a bluecoat, who had jumped up to get the door. I was awake now, but only half out of the dream. “What do you want?”
He knew that I was not subject to the laws there. I had a pass in my pocket, but I never showed it to anyone, coming or going, since they could tell from your eyes whether or not you were bound to the Island. I asked him about Elise, and if he remembered us.
“How can I remember anyone?” he said with irritation. “Everyone’s the same here.” But he did take me in to the Commissioner, who—no longer a giant—sat behind his desk just like any other high-level bureaucrat. He received me politely, but I could see that he wanted to be busy. I asked if he remembered the time that we had gone with Elise into the tower to see Manhattan rising over the clouds.
“Of course I do,” he said. “She died.”
I was struck as if by the blast of a gun at close range, and only through the severest discipline did I manage to press him for the details.
“Not long after you left the Island,” he said, “a ship small enough to dock in the launch slip came in out of the fog. It had sailed from Constantinople, under the flag of a well-known shipping house. But something about it struck our inspectors as out of the ordinary—there were only a third as many people on board as usual, and yet these were poor people who normally would have been packed like rice into the steerage. They were bothered as well by the faces of the passengers as they filed off the gangway and headed for the reception hall. Only when all were inside, waiting on the benches, and several collapsed onto the floor—in itself a common occurrence—did the inspectors make the connection with what they had observed beforehand.
“These fellows are smart, you know. They have to pass a rigorous exam. When they figured it out, they acted immediately. Several of them raced to the hospital, and the rest went on board the little steamer. They found exactly what they had expected, but even then it shocked them. Corpses were lying all over the place, next to the barely living bodies of men, women, children, and the sailors themselves—more than five hundred dead and dying. Typhus. The boys at St. George must have been asleep: for, somehow, the ship had passed the quarantine.