Читать книгу Bread Givers - Anzia Yezierska - Страница 6

I had just begun to peel the potatoes for dinner when my oldest sister Bessie came in, her eyes far away and very tired. She dropped on the bench by the sink and turned her head to the wall.

One look at her, and I knew she had not yet found work. I went on peeling the potatoes, but I no more knew what my hands were doing. I felt only the dark hurt of her weary eyes.

I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother. I knew that the landlord came that morning hollering for the rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world.

I already saw all our things kicked out on the sidewalk like a pile of junk. A plate of pennies like a beggar’s hand reaching out of our bunch of rags. Each sigh of pity from the passersby, each penny thrown into the plate was another stab into our burning shame.

Laughter and light footsteps broke in upon my dark thoughts. I heard the door open.

“Give a look only on these roses for my hat,” cried Mashah, running over to the looking glass over the sink. With excited fingers she pinned pink paper roses under the brim. Then, putting on her hat again, she stood herself before the cracked, fly-stained mirror and turned her head first on this side and then on the other side, laughing to herself with the pleasure of how grand her hat was. “Like a lady from Fifth Avenue I look, and for only ten cents, from a pushcart on Hester Street.”

Again the door opened, and with dragging feet my third sister Fania came in. Bessie roused herself from the bench and asked, “Nu? Any luck with you?”

“Half the shops are closed,” replied Fania. “They say the work can’t start till they got a new president. And in one place, in a shirt factory, where they had a sign, ‘Girls Wanted,’ there was such a crowd of us tearing the clothes from our bodies and scratching out each other’s eyes in the mad pushings to get in first, that they had to call two fat policemen with thick clubs to make them stand still on a line for their turn. And after we waited for hours and hours, only two girls were taken.

Mashah looked up from the mirror.

“Didn’t I tell you not to be such a yok and kill yourself pushing on a line a mile long, when the shop itself couldn’t hold those that were already on the doorstep? All the time that you were wasting yourself waiting to get in, I walked myself through the stores, to look for a trimming for my hat.”

“You heartless thing!” cried Bessie. “No wonder Father named you ‘Empty-head.’ Here you go to look for work, and you come back with pink roses for your doll face.”

Undisturbed by the bitter words, Mashah finished the last stitch and then hung up her hat carefully over the door.

“I’m going to hear the free music in the park tonight,” she laughed to herself, with the pleasure before her, “and these pink roses on my hat to match out my pink calico will make me look just like the picture on the magazine cover.”

Bessie rushed over to Mashah’s fancy pink hat as if to tear it to pieces, but instead, she tore her own old hat from her head, flung it on the floor, and kicked it under the stove.

Mashah pushed up her shoulders and turned back to the mirror, taking the hairpins carefully from her long golden hair and fixing it in different ways. “It ain’t my fault if the shops are closed. If I take my lunch money for something pretty that I got to have, it don’t hurt you none.”

Worry or care of any kind could never get itself into Mashah’s empty head. Although she lived in the same dirt and trouble with us, nothing ever bothered her.

Everywhere Mashah went men followed her with melting looks. And these melting looks in men’s eyes were like something to eat and something to drink to her. So that she could go without her lunch money to buy pretty things for herself, and not starve like the rest of us.

She was no more one of us than the painted lady looking down from the calendar on the wall. Father’s preaching and Mother’s cursing no more bothered her than the far-away noise from the outside street.

When Mashah walked in the street in her everyday work dress that was cut from the same goods and bought from the same pushcart like the rest of us, it looked different on her. Her clothes were always so new and fresh, without the least little wrinkle, like the dressed-up doll lady from the show window of the grandest department store. Like from a born queen it shined from her. The pride in her beautiful face, in her golden hair, lifted her head like a diamond crown.

Mashah worked when she had work; but the minute she got home, she was always busy with her beauty, either retrimming her hat, or pressing her white collar, or washing and brushing her golden hair. She lived in the pleasure she got from her beautiful face, as Father lived in his Holy Torah.

Mashah kept part of her clothes in a soapbox under the bed. Everything in it was wrapped around with newspapers to keep the dirt out. She was so smart in keeping her things in perfect order that she could push out her box from under the bed in the middle of the dark night and know exactly where to put her hand to find her thin lace collar, or her handkerchief, or even her little beauty pin for the neck of her shirt-waist.

High up with a hanger, on a nail nearly to the ceiling, so that nobody’s dirty hands should touch it, hung Mashah’s white starched petticoat, and over it her pink calico; and all around them, an old sheet was tacked about with safety pins so she could tell if anybody touched it.

It was like a law in the house that nobody dared touch Mashah’s things, no more than they dared touch Father’s Hebrew books, or Mother’s precious jar of jelly which she always kept ready for company, even in the blackest times, when we ourselves had nothing to eat.

Mashah came home with stories that in rich people’s homes they had silver knives and forks, separate, for each person. And new-ironed tablecloths and napkins every time they ate on them. And rich people had marble bathtubs in their own houses, with running hot and cold water all day and night long so they could take a bath any time they felt like it, instead of having to stand on a line before the public bath-house, as we had to do when we wanted a bath for the holidays. But these millionaire things were so far over our heads that they were like fairy tales.

That time when Mashah had work hemming towels in an uptown house, she came home with another new-rich idea, another money-spending thing, which she said she had to have. She told us that by those Americans, everybody in the family had a toothbrush and a separate towel for himself, “not like by us, where we use one torn piece of a shirt for the whole family, wiping the dirt from one face on to another.”

“Empty-head!” cried Mother. “You don’t own the dirt under their doorstep and you want to play the lady.”

But when the day for the wages came, Mashah quietly went to the Five and Ten Cent Store and bought, not only a toothbrush and a separate towel for herself, but even a separate piece of soap.

Mother tore her hair when she found that Mashah made a leak of thirty cents in wages where every cent had been counted out. But Mashah went on brushing her teeth with her new brush and wiping her face with her new towel. And from that day, the sight of her toothbrush on the shelf and her white, fancy towel by itself on the wall was like a sign to us all, that Mashah had no heart, no feelings, that millionaire things willed themselves in her empty head, while the rest of us were wearing out our brains for only a bite in the mouth.

As Mother opened the door and saw all my sisters home, the market basket fell from her limp arm.

“Still yet no work?” She wrung her hands. “Six hungry mouths to feed and no wages coming in.” She pointed to her empty basket. “They don’t want to trust me anymore. Not the grocer, not the butcher. And the landlady is tearing from me my flesh, hollering for the rent.”

Hopelessly, she threw down her shawl and turned to me. “Did you put the potatoes on to boil?” Then her eyes caught sight of the peelings I had left in the sink.

“Gazlin! Bandit!” her cry broke through the house. She picked up the peelings and shook them before my eyes. “You’d think potatoes grow free in the street. I eat out my heart, running from pushcart to pushcart, only to bargain down a penny on five pounds, and you cut away my flesh like a murderer.”

I felt so guilty for wasting away so much good eating, I had to do something to show Mother how sorry I was. It used to be my work to go out early, every morning, while it was yet dark, and hunt through ash cans for unburned pieces of coal, and search through empty lots for pieces of wood. But that morning, I had refused to do it anymore. It made me feel like a beggar and thief when anybody saw me.

“I’d sooner go to work in a shop,” I cried.

“Who’ll give you work when you’re so thin and small, like a dried-out herring!”

“But I’m not going to let them look down on me like dirt, picking people’s ashes.” And I cried and cried so, that Mother couldn’t make me do it.

But now, I quietly took the pail in my hand and slipped out. I didn’t care if the whole world looked on me. I was going to bring that coal to Mother even if it killed me.

“You’ve got to do it! You’ve got to!” I kept talking to myself as I dug my hand into the ashes. “I’m not a thief. I’m not a thief. It’s only dirt to them. And it’s a fire to us. Let them laugh at me.” And I did not return home till my pail was full of coal.

It was now time for dinner. I was throwing the rags and things from the table to the window, on the bed, over the chairs, or any place where there was room for them. So much junk we had in our house that everybody put everything on the table. It was either to eat on the floor, or for me the job of cleaning off the junk pile three times a day. The school teacher’s rule, “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” was no good for us, because there weren’t enough places.

As the kitchen was packed with furniture, so the front room was packed with Father’s books. They were on the shelf, on the table, on the window sill, and in soapboxes lined up against the wall.

When we came to America, instead of taking along feather beds, and the samovar, and the brass pots and pans, like other people, Father made us carry his books. When Mother begged only to take along her pot for gefülte fish, and the two feather beds that were handed down to her from her grandmother for her wedding presents, Father wouldn’t let her.

“Woman!” Father said, laughing into her eyes. “What for will you need old feather beds? Don’t you know it’s always summer in America? And in the new golden country, where milk and honey flows free in the streets, you’ll have new golden dishes to cook in, and not weigh yourself down with your old pots and pans. But my books, my holy books always were, and always will be, the light of the world. You’ll see yet how all America will come to my feet to learn.”

No one was allowed to put their things in Father’s room, any more than they were allowed to use Mashah’s hanger.

Of course, we all knew that if God had given Mother a son, Father would have permitted a man child to share with him his best room in the house. A boy could say prayers after his father’s death— that kept the father’s soul alive for ever. Always Father was throwing up to Mother that she had borne him no son to be an honor to his days and to say prayers for him when he died.

The prayers of his daughters didn’t count because God didn’t listen to women. Heaven and the next world were only for men. Women could get into Heaven because they were wives and daughters of men. Women had no brains for the study of God’s Torah, but they could be the servants of men who studied the Torah. Only if they cooked for the men, and washed for the men, and didn’t nag or curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into Heaven with the men, to wait on them there.

And so, since men were the only people who counted with God, Father not only had the best room for himself, for his study and prayers, but also the best eating of the house. The fat from the soup and the top from the milk went always to him.

Mother had just put the soup pot and plates for dinner on the table, when Father came in.

At the first look on Mother’s face he saw how she was boiling, ready to burst, so instead of waiting for her to begin her hollering, he started:

“Woman! when will you stop darkening the house with your worries?”

“When I’ll have a man who does the worrying. Does it ever enter your head that the rent was not paid the second month? That today we’re eating the last loaf of bread that the grocer trusted me?” Mother tried to squeeze the hard, stale loaf that nobody would buy for cash. “You’re so busy working for Heaven that I have to suffer here such bitter hell.”

We sat down to the table. With watering mouths and glistening eyes we watched Mother skimming off every bit of fat from the top soup into Father’s big plate, leaving for us only the thin, watery part. We watched Father bite into the sour pickle which was special for him only; and waited, trembling with hunger, for our portion.

Father made his prayer, thanking God for the food. Then he said to Mother:

“What is there to worry about, as long as we have enough to keep the breath in our bodies? But the real food is God’s Holy Torah.” He shook her gently by the shoulder, and smiled down at her.

At Father’s touch Mother’s sad face turned into smiles. His kind look was like the sun shining on her.

“Shenah!” he called her by her first name, to show her he was feeling good. “I’ll tell you a story that will cure you of all your worldly cares.”

All faces turned to Father. Eyes widened, necks stretched, ears strained not to miss a word. The meal was forgotten as he began:

“Rabbi Chanina Ben Dosa was a starving, poor man who had to live on next to nothing. Once, his wife complained: ‘We’re so good, so pious, you give up nights and days in the study of the Holy Torah. Then why don’t God provide for you at least enough to eat?’ . . . ‘Riches you want?’ said Rabbi Chanina Ben Dosa. ‘All right, woman. You shall have your wish.’ . . . That very evening he went out into the fields to pray. Soon the heavens opened, and a Hand reached down to him and gave him a big chunk of gold. He brought it to his wife, and said: ‘Go buy with this all the luxuries of the earth.’ . . . She was so happy, as she began planning all she would buy next day. Then she fell asleep. And in her dream, she saw herself and her husband sitting with all the saints in Heaven. Each couple had a golden table between themselves. When the Good Angel put down for them their wine, their table shook so that half of it was spilled. Then she noticed that their table had a leg missing, and that is why it was so shaky. And the Good Angel explained to her that the chunk of gold that her husband had given her the night before was the missing leg of their table. As soon as she woke up, she begged her husband to pray to God to take back the gold he had given them. . . . ‘I’ll be happy and thankful to live in poverty, as long as I know that our reward will be complete in Heaven.’”

Mother licked up Father’s every little word, like honey. Her eyes followed his shining eyes as he talked.

“Nu, Shenah?” He wagged his head. “Do you want gold on earth, or wine of Heaven?”

“I’m only a sinful woman,” Mother breathed, gazing up at him. Her fingers stole a touch of his hand, as if he were the king of the world. “God be praised for the little we have. I’m willing to give up all my earthly needs for the wine of Heaven with you. But, Moisheh”—she nudged him by the sleeve—“God gave us children. They have a life to live yet, here, on earth. Girls have to get married. People point their fingers on me—a daughter, twenty-five years already, and not married yet. And no dowry to help her get married.”

“Woman! Stay in your place! “His strong hand pushed her away from him. “You’re smart enough to bargain with the fish-peddler. But I’m the head of this family. I give my daughters brains enough to marry when their time comes, without the worries of a ’dowry.”

“Nu, you’re the head of the family.” Mother’s voice rose in anger. “But what will you do if your books are thrown in the street?”

At the mention of his books, Father looked up quickly.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Take your things out from the front room to the kitchen, so I could rent your room to boarders. If we don’t pay up the rent very soon, we’ll all be in the street.”

“I have to have a room for my books. Where will I put them?”

“I’ll push my things out from under the bed. And you can pile up your books in the window to the top, because nothing but darkness comes through that window, anyway. I’ll do anything, work the nails off my fingers, only to be free from the worry for rent.”

“But where will I have quiet for my studies in this crowded kitchen? I have to be alone in a room to think with God.”

“Only millionaires can be alone in America. By Zalmon the fish-peddler, they’re squeezed together, twelve people, in one kitchen. The bedroom and the front room his wife rents out to boarders. If I could cook their suppers for them, I could even earn yet a few cents from their eating.”

“Woman! Have your way. Take in your boarders, only to have peace in the house.”

The next day, Mother and I moved Father’s table and his chair with a back, and a cushion to sit on, into the kitchen.

We scrubbed the front room as for a holiday. Even the windows were washed. We pasted down the floppy wall paper, and on the worst part of the wall, where the plaster was cracked and full of holes, we hung up calendars and pictures from the Sunday newspapers.

Mother sent me to Muhmenkeh, the herring woman on the corner, for the loan of a feather bed. She came along to help me carry it.

“Long years on you!” cried Mother, as she took the feather bed from Muhmenkeh’s arm.

“Long years and good luck on us all!” Muhmenkeh answered.

Muhmenkeh worked as hard for the pennies as anybody on the block. But her heart was big with giving all the time from the little she had. She didn’t have the scared, worried look that pinched and squeezed the blood out of the faces of the poor. It breathed from her the feeling of plenty, as if she had Rockefeller’s millions to give away.

“You could charge your boarders twice as much for the sleeping, if you give them a bed with springs, instead of putting the feather bed on the floor,” said Muhmenkeh.

“Don’t I know that a bed with a spring is a good thing? But you have to have money for it.”

“I got an old spring in the basement. I’ll give it to you.”

“But the spring needs a bed with feet.”

“Do as I done. Put the spring over four empty herring pails and you’ll have a bed fit for the president. Now put a board over the potato barrel, and a clean newspaper over that, and you’ll have a table. All you need yet is a soapbox for a chair, and you’ll have a furnished room complete.”

Muhmenkeh’s bent old body tottered around on her lame foot, as she helped us. Even Mother forgot for a while her worries, so like a healing medicine was Muhmenkeh’s sunshine.

“Ach!” sighed Mother, looking about the furnished room complete, “God should only send a man for Bessie, to marry herself in good luck.”

“Here’s your chance to get a man for her without the worry for a dowry. If God is good, he might yet send you a rich boarder——”

From the kitchen came Father’s voice chanting:

“When the poor seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I, the Lord, will hear them. I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.”

Mother put her hand over Muhmenkeh’s mouth to stop her talking Silent, breathless, we peeked in through the open crack in the door. The black satin skullcap tipped on the side of his head set off his red hair and his long red beard. And his ragged satin coat from Europe made him look as if he just stepped out of the Bible. His eyes were raised to God. His two white hands on either side of the book, his whole body swaying with his song:

“And I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known; I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them and not forsake them.”

Mother’s face lost all earthly worries. Forgotten were beds, mattresses, boarders, and dowries. Father’s holiness filled her eyes with light.

“Is there any music on earth like this?” Mother whispered to Muhmenkeh.

“Who would ever dream that in America, where everything is only business and business, in such a lost corner as Hester Street lives such a fine, such a pure, silken soul as Reb Smolinsky?”

“If he was only so fit for this world, like he is fit for Heaven, then I wouldn’t have to dry out the marrow from my head worrying for the rent.”

His voice flowed into us deeper and deeper. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were singing with him:

“Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains; for the Lord hath comforted his peoples.”

Suddenly, it grew dark before our eyes. The collector lady from the landlord! We did not hear her till she banged open the door. Her hard eyes glared at Father.

“My rent!” she cried, waving her thick diamond fingers before Father’s face. But he didn’t see her or hear her. He went on chanting:

“Awake! Awake! Put on strength, O arm of the Lord: Awake, as in ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not he that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?”

“Schnorrer!” shrieked the landlady, her fat face red with rage. “My rent!”

Father blinked his eyes and stared at the woman with a far-off look. “What is it? What do you want?”

“Don’t you know me? Haven’t I come often enough? My rent! My rent! My rent I want!”

“Oh-oh, your rent?” Father met her angry glare with an innocent smile of surprise. “Your rent? As soon as the girls get work, we’ll pay you out, little by little.”

“Pay me out, little by little! The cheek of those dirty immigrants! A fool I was, giving them a chance another month.”

“But we haven’t the money.” His voice was kind and gentle, as hers was rough and loud.

“Why haven’t you the money for rent?” she shouted.

“The girls have been out of work.” Father’s innocent look was not of this earth.

“Hear him only! The dirty do-nothing! Go to work yourself! Stop singing prayers. Then you’ll have money for rent!” She took one step towards him and shut his book with such anger that it fell at her feet.

Little red threads burned out of Father’s eyes. He rose slowly, but quicker than lightning flashed his hand.

A scream broke through the air. Before we had breath enough to stop him, Father slapped the landlady on one cheek, then on the other, till the blood rushed from her nose.

“You painted piece of flesh!” cried Father. “I’ll teach you respect for the Holy Torah!”

Screaming, the landlady rushed out, her face dripping blood as she ran. Before we knew what or where, she came back with two policemen. In front of our dumb eyes we saw Father handcuffed, like a thief, and taken away to the station house.

Bessie and Fania came home still without work. When they heard that Father was arrested it was as though their heads were knocked off.

Into this thick sadness, Mashah came, beautiful and smiling, like a doll from a show window. She hung up her hat with its pink roses on her nail on the wall, and before she had time to give a look at her things in the box, to see that nobody had touched them, she rushed over to the mirror, and with her smile of pleasure in herself, she said:

“A man in the place where I was looking for work asked to take me home. And when I wouldn’t let him, still he followed me. The freshness of these men! I can’t walk the street without a million eyes after me.”

Silence and gloom were her only answer.

Mashah stopped talking; turning from the mirror, for the first time gave a look at us.

“What happened? It’s like a funeral in the house.”

“The landlord’s collector lady was here—and——”

“Well? What of it?”

“She was hollering for the rent.”

“Then why didn’t they pay her the rent?” asked the innocent doll face. “Don’t everybody pay rent?”

Mother began to scream and knock her head with her fists. “A stone! An empty-headed, brainless stone I had for a child. My own daughter, living in the same house with us, asking, ‘Why did the landlady come? Why don’t they pay her the rent?’”

Not listening to Mother’s cursing and screaming, Mashah looked about for something to eat. The stove was cold. No food was on the table.

“Why ain’t there something to eat? I’m starved.”

Then Mashah caught sight of two quarters on the table that Muhmenkeh had left when she came to comfort us.

“What should I buy for supper?” Mashah asked, reaching for the money.

Before she could get to the quarters, I leaped to the table and seized one of them.

“Mammeh!” I begged. “Let me only go out to peddle with something. I got to bring in money if nobody is working.”

“Woe is me!” Mother cried. “How can I stand it? An empty-head on one side and a craziness on the other side.”

“Nobody is working and we got to eat,” I kept begging. “If I could only peddle with something I could bring in money.”

“Let me alone. Crazy-head. No wonder your father named you ‘Blut-und-Eisen.’ When she begins to want a thing, there is no rest, no let-up till she gets it. It wills itself in you to play peddler and waste away the last few cents we got.”

“As long as we’re not working,” said Bessie, “whatever Sara will earn will be something. Even only a few cents will buy a loaf of bread.”

Without waiting for Mother to say yes, I ran out with the quarter in my hand. I saw Mashah go to a pushcart of frankfurters. But I, with my quarter, ran straight to Muhmenkeh.

“I got to do something,” I yelled like a fire engine. “Nobody is working by us. Nobody! Nobody! What should I buy to sell quick to earn money?”

Muhmenkeh thought for a minute, then said, “I got some old herring left in the bottom of this barrel. They’re a little bit squashed, but they ain’t spoiled yet, and you’ll be able to sell them cheap because I’ll give them to you for nothing.”

“No—no! I’m no beggar!” I cried. “I want to go into business like a person. I must buy what I got to sell.” And I held up the same quarter that Muhmenkeh had given Mother.

“Good luck on you, little heart!” Muhmenkeh’s old eyes smiled into mine. “Go, make yourself for a person. Pick yourself out twenty-five herring at a penny apiece. You can easy sell them at two cents, and maybe the ones that ain’t squeezed for three cents.”

On the corner of the most crowded part of Hester Street I stood myself with my pail of herring.

“Herring! Herring! A bargain in the world! Pick them out yourself. Two cents apiece.”

My voice was like dynamite. Louder than all the pushcart peddlers, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling, I cried out my herring with all the burning fire of my ten old years.

So loud was my yelling, for my little size, that people stopped to look at me. And more came to see what the others were looking at.

“Give only a look on the saleslady,” laughed a big fat woman with a full basket.

“Also a person,” laughed another, “also fighting already for the bite in the mouth.”

“How old are you, little skinny bones? Ain’t your father working?”

I didn’t hear. I couldn’t listen to their smartness. I was burning up inside me with my herring to sell. Nothing was before me but the hunger in our house, and no bread for the next meal if I didn’t sell the herring. No longer like a fire engine, but like a houseful of hungry mouths my heart cried, “Herring—herring! Two cents apiece!”

First one woman bought. And then another and another. Some women didn’t even stop to pick out the herring, but let me wrap it up for them in the newspaper, without even a look if it was squashed or not. And before the day was over my last herring was sold.

I counted my greasy fifty pennies. Twenty-five cents profit. Richer than Rockefeller, I felt.

I was always saying to myself, if I ever had a quarter or a half dollar in my hand, I’d run away from home and never look on our dirty house again. But now I was so happy with my money, I didn’t think of running away, I only wanted to show them what I could do and give it away to them.

It began singing in my heart, the music of the whole Hester Street. The pushcart peddlers yelling their goods, the noisy playing of children in the gutter, the women pushing and shoving each other with their market baskets—all that was only hollering noise before melted over me like a new beautiful song.

It began dancing before my eyes, the twenty-five herring that earned me my twenty-five cents. It lifted me in the air, my happiness. I couldn’t help it. It began dancing under my feet. And I couldn’t stop myself. I danced into our kitchen. And throwing the fifty pennies, like a shower of gold, into my mother’s lap, I cried, “Now, will you yet call me crazy-head? Give only a look what ‘Blood-and-iron’ has done.”