The Singing Fire by Lilian Nattel Read Free Book Online Page B

voices made hoarse by smoking tobacco and opium. Sometimes they asked her to sing a foreign song, but she would only shake her head and begin with “It’s a cold haily night of rain,” and everyone clapped to the beat as if they were friends in a music hall.
    There were a dozen sailors, so each of the girls had two at a time, for which the Squire could charge triple the price. They ate and drank in the parlor with the girls on their laps, while the mirror turned them into twenty-four men and their drunkenness into forty-eight as the old prostitute brought out bottle after bottle, and Madam’s playing knocked flat the statue of Diana the huntress that stood on top of the piano. The lamps were made of lion glass, each one with a frosted lion reclining after his feed.
    Nehama had the bald sailor and the one with two gold earrings. She fed them bites of sausage, first one, then the other, and in the mirror framed with gilt she was perched on a knee, laughing as well as the other girls. And just as quick as they did, she offered her breasts to a mouth, expecting it to bite and pull as usual, but instead the lips and tongue were soft. And when her sailors put up a bet of three sovereigns, she said, You’re on. Pulling up her gown, she spread her ass for the bald one and licked up the one with earrings right there in the parlor with the velvet sofa. She did it in front of everyone; she saw them watching her. The gold coins sparkled. The statue of Diana the huntress wobbled on top of the piano as Madam played. The one she licked didn’t stink as she thought he would. The surprise of it made her quiver, and as she dug herself deeper into the one behind her, she lost her sense of smell. God took it away and abandoned her to the evil inclination. This was her real ruin, and she knew she could never see her mother again. How was she to understand that it was the strength of her life asserting itself?The difference between hell and earth is that, even in the midst of misery, the body can find some pleasure to keep it alive.
    Her sisters used to tell her that when Grandma Nehama was eighteen, a marriage was arranged for her. Before she left home, she visited her parents’ grave to ask their blessing, and then she traveled by boat with her aunt. At last someone would belong to her—even if it was just a widower with a young child. But on her wedding day, when she met her husband, she was not as taken with him as she expected. He had hair growing in his ears, and the speech he gave for the bride was full of warnings about the shortness of life, as if she didn’t already know it. But the baby daughter, who was nine months old, was something else altogether. She was tiny and dark and sad, and Grandma Nehama fell in love with her.
    There was a wet nurse for the baby, and Grandma Nehama saw with her own eyes that milk without love wasn’t putting enough weight on the baby. And why should it? Didn’t she remember getting thinner while she was mourning, no matter how much the neighbors urged her to eat? So when the baby’s eyes were full of sorrow, Grandma Nehama gave it her own milkless breast to suck, and she did not sing to it “Sleep my child, may heaven guard you,” for this baby had already seen the angel of death. Instead she sang about the wind. It became her particular lullaby, this old song that went “Dark burns the fire in its agony. And the wind, the wind, the raging wind …” She sang from morning till night, and whether it was the sucking or the songs, no one could say, but eventually Grandma Nehama’s breasts ran to milk as thick as cream, and on it the baby grew plump.
    After the night’s work was done, Nehama lay awake in Sally’s bed, the younger girl’s arms around her while she listened to the wind as if it were a song she’d forgotten and might remember if only she listened hard enough.
    MINSK, 1876
    Moskovskaya Street
    Winter came to Minsk, and snow rose in great drifts reflecting streetlamps while