Melting the Snow on Hester Street Page 22

  With his bandaged hands, he was attempting to pour them both a cup of gin. She took the bottle from him and finished the task for him, slugged hers back and poured another.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said suddenly, looking down at his bowed head. ‘I didn’t say it. But thank you. I would have died.’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘How are the hands?’

  Again, he didn’t answer. ‘… Aren’t you wondering why I was at the factory?’ he asked instead.

  ‘No. Actually. No …’ she smiled. ‘It hadn’t crossed my mind. But now you mention it …’

  ‘Because the police were following me.’

  ‘Oh, well then.’ She refilled his cup, not interested, not really listening.

  ‘Perhaps, after this, it will be forgotten. It will be lost in the … But Eleana,’ he leaned towards her, ‘Eleana, I don’t think it will be forgotten …’

  ‘Sarah might have made it, Matz,’ she said. ‘It’s possible, you know, Matz. It is. She is always so fast on her feet. She might have made it.’

  ‘Eleana, I think I have killed someone …’

  ‘No, darling. You didn’t kill anyone.’ She smiled at him. ‘You saved them, Matz. You tried to save more but you couldn’t save them all.’ Gently, she took his bandaged hands. ‘I saw you, carrying the girls in your arms. I saw you. You could have run – like some of the men. You could have knocked the women aside and put yourself first. But you didn’t do that. You went back and you went back again … And Matz, you saved me, too.’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘Why won’t you listen to me? I mean before. Something terrible happened. I’ve done something terrible. It’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

  She sighed, dropping his hands, sitting down beside him. ‘Not today. Please. Tell me what it is, but tomorrow. Let me hear it tomorrow, when we are both stronger.’

  He glanced at the door to their room, where the children lay asleep, and then at the door to the outside landing. He dropped his hoarse voice to a low whisper. ‘I was trying to get away from him. I didn’t know he was so close, and then when I turned back and I threw the brick—’

  ‘A brick? What are you saying, Matz?’

  ‘There was a meeting. I was speaking.’

  ‘Oh god. Please. Not now …’

  ‘And of course they came with their boots and clubs. And of course they broke it up. And of course I was arrested …’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They were taking me to Mercer Street – and I saw an opportunity, and I fled. One of them came after me. I threw the brick … And it hit him.’

  ‘You hit a policeman? Is he all right? What happened? Did you hurt him?’

  Matz held a bandaged hand to the side of his head. ‘Right here, Eleanor … you understand? Right here …’ He leaned towards her and, with his bare fingertips, he touched her temple. The softness of her skin – the ghost of his touch – sent a jolt of awareness through them both; gratitude and tenderness: a physical reminder that they were still alive. Still together. Eleana fought the urge to weep. If she started, she knew she would never stop. ‘Right here, where the skull is soft,’ he whispered to her. ‘There was no resistance, Eleana. The brick seemed to give beneath his flesh. It seemed to sink into him – does it make sense?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. It makes no sense,’ she said.

  ‘Eleana, listen to me!’ he whispered urgently. ‘He is not all right. No. I am certain that I killed him.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said, voice rising in panic. ‘Of course you didn’t!’ she said again. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You saved us – it’s what you did. You saved as many as you could, and there are plenty who can vouch for you … All the people you saved today. They will vouch for you. You were at Triangle … You were at the factory all afternoon.’

  ‘I killed a man, Eleanor – and I will never forgive myself for it. I killed a policeman, and they will never forgive me for that. No matter what else has happened today … They know my name. They know where I live. They are sure to come after me.’

  As he said the words, the door from the hallway burst open, and both leapt to their feet, terrified.

  But it was only Samuel. Tzivia’s father, Sarah’s husband. Putting in one of his rare appearances at home. Pie-eyed, he was, and swaying. He glanced at them, unable to focus. His eyes, loose in their sockets, swivelled lazily around the tiny room. No Batia, no children. No Sarah. ‘Where is she?’ he slurred. ‘Where is Sarah?’

  They returned to their seats without answering.

  ‘So, it is all true … But you two are here. Did she come home with you?’

  ‘Mama is outside the factory. You should go down there yourself. There will be news, soon. Perhaps they have found her.’

  He made a noise, guttural and dismissive, and staggered slightly where he stood. For an instant it looked as if his large body might simply crumple, but he recovered well enough to make the two steps across the parlour. He stumbled past them to his family’s bedroom. They heard the floorboards groan as he laid his weight onto the mattress – and then, nothing. Silence.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Matz whispered. ‘Now Samuel has seen me …’

  ‘Samuel has seen nothing,’ Eleana replied. ‘I should think he has already passed out.’

  As they listened for his breathing, she felt suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to sleep herself, as if she might collapse from exhaustion right there where she sat. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Nothing will happen tonight. It’s impossible. The city is turned upside down with this. Let’s go to bed. And in the morning we will think of something. Tomorrow we will be able to think more clearly.’

  50

  Matz and Eleana were still awake at two in the morning, their small daughter and her cousin entwined across the bottom of the mattress at their feet. They lay side by side, dry eyes wide to the dark ceiling, skin touching, feeling each other’s breath. They heard Eleana’s mother returning. She tapped gently on their door and pushed it open. In the threshold, her outline stood out against the lights of apartments opposite, up and down the street, where other families sat waiting for news. Batia’s figure stood stooped.

  ‘She is dead,’ she said bluntly.

  ‘Shhh!’ Eleana ordered. She sat up. ‘Tzivia …’

  ‘I have seen her.’

  ‘Hush! Tzivia is here with us.’ Eleana clambered up from the mattress, ushered her mother back into the parlour. She closed the door, and sat down with her mother at the table.

  ‘There are rows and rows of them, Eleana. Hundreds … So many coffins. They have their heads and shoulders showing, and if the clothes aren’t burned, the bodies lie uncovered. It’s to help people recognize … But there are so many! And they are so burned! One body, and then the next … Her hair was burned away. She was burned – her skin entirely scorched. Oh! The smell! The smell in that place is too dreadful. It is dreadful …’ Her hands shook and she spilled gin onto the tablecloth as poured herself a cup. It looked odd. Eleana had never seen her drink before.

  ‘Are you sure, Mama? Are you certain it was Sarah?’

  Batia hesitated – as if perhaps there might yet be some hope; as if Eleana’s doubt offered some new shred. She shook her head. ‘I am certain, yes. There was a scrap of her shirtwaist sleeve peeping out from the cover, and I thought I knew it … With the small embroidered flowers … You know the one. She was wearing it this morning.’

  Eleana knew it well. She and Sarah had chosen it together.

  ‘And then there were notes beside each coffin. And there was her little locket bracelet with …’ She bent her head, wiped her face with a sleeve. Matz crept in to join them. He sat down at the table.

  ‘Sarah,’ Eleana said. ‘She found Sarah …’

  ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘Of course,’ Batia nodded. ‘We are all sorry.’

  They sat for a while, not saying anything. Eleana tried to think of Sarah, of the walk they had enjoyed this morn
ing. It seemed like a memory from another life: something she might have watched on that crooked screen at the nickelodeon.

  Matz broke the silence. ‘What did you do, Batia?’ he asked her suddenly. ‘Did you make a report?’

  ‘They are trying to make a list, yes,’ she answered. ‘But it’s going to be too difficult. Some of the bodies are so terribly …’ She stopped, the images swimming before her eyes. ‘There is almost nothing left of them. Some of the boxes have no bodies at all – just a leg and an arm …’ She raised the cup to her mouth, inhaled, felt a wave of nausea and quickly put the cup back down again. ‘And of course,’ she added, ‘what do they know, anyway? Nobody really knows exactly who was in there, what their names were. Nothing.’ She turned to Matz. ‘You never explained why you were there yourself.’

  ‘Matz saved so many people, Mama,’ Eleana said quickly, before he had a chance to reply. ‘He carried them – piled them into the elevators and went back for more, and then more again. Matz saved me, Mama. I would not be alive now. But he carried me …’

  ‘Good.’ She smiled at him, more kindly than usual. ‘It’s what a husband should do. Where is Samuel? Is he here?’

  ‘Samuel is asleep in his room,’ Matz said. ‘It will take the ceiling to fall on his head to wake him. Tell me, Batia,’ he asked her, ‘when you gave them Sarah’s name, did they seem to question you? Or did they simply write it down – the name beside the number?’

  ‘Yes – they put her name down. And they thanked me. I think. Why? What does it matter?’

  ‘If Samuel had not seen us,’ he muttered. He was talking to himself. Thinking aloud. ‘And even if he had, would anyone believe him? Would he even believe it himself? … Tell me, Batia – what is it like down there? Is it madness? How many boxes, would you say? How many bodies … Are there men, too? Of course there are men. Batia – I have to ask you, would you go back there, one more time?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘If our lives depended on it. I mean to say – my life. If my life were to depend on it?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Eleana whispered.

  Batia considered his words. She looked at him hard. ‘What have you done, Matz?’

  He didn’t answer. He said, ‘Tell me, Batia. Describe to me exactly what it is like …’

  51

  By the following morning, word of the fire had spread far beyond the tenements of the Lower East Side, to the front pages of every newspaper in America. The country awoke to photographs of young immigrant bodies heaped and crushed on the sidewalk. It was a national tragedy – and a national scandal: the locked doors, the broken standpipe, the feeble fire escape. The factory owners and city regulators were already tossing the blame between them. And, amid the clamour, 136 young bodies already lay in their boxes. Crowds gathered at the pier by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.

  But the city did not stop. A policeman had been murdered that afternoon, and the killer’s identity was known.

  Early the next morning, while Matz and Eleana hid away in their room, two policemen came to the door. Batia was out. She had taken the girls to fetch bread. But through the thin partition that separated their rooms, they could hear Samuel breathing as he lay abed. There came an impatient bang at the hallway door, and then another.

  ‘Police. Open the door!’

  Matz, wide awake, as he had been all night, sat bolt upright, glanced at Eleana, put a finger to his lips. There was nowhere to go. No window in the room. The only possible exit was the garbage chute at the back of the parlour, but to reach it they needed to pass by Samuel’s door, and they could hear him shifting, grunting – rudely awoken by the knocks. If they tried to reach the garbage shoot now, they would perhaps collide with him – and all would be lost.

  ‘Open the door!’ Outside, one of the police gave the door a hefty kick. The flimsy wood split noisily.

  Matz and Eleana climbed silently off the mattress. In that tiny, crowded room there was a single place to hide: the chest beside the bed. Together, they threw its contents onto the mattress and clambered in, one on top of the other. It was hopeless. Worse than hopeless. The police would only need to open the chest to find them. They waited.

  They heard Samuel grunting again, shuffling out of his room towards the front door. ‘Take it easy!’ he muttered, opening the door. ‘Look what you’ve done to my door,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Matz Beekman?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We’re looking for Matz Beekman. Is he here?’

  ‘You want Matz …?’ Samuel repeated stupidly. ‘What do you want Matz for? What’s he done?’

  ‘Is Matz Beekman here?’

  He stopped, scratched himself. Scratch, scratch. They could hear it, from inside the chest. ‘Not enough to keep you busy this morning?’ he said at last.

  ‘Step aside.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll step aside,’ Samuel said. ‘But you’re wasting your time. He’s not here. Prob’ly down at the morgue looking for his wife … If he’s not dead himself, already.’

  One of them said: ‘Why would he be dead already?’ The voice sounded taken aback.

  ‘He was in there, getting the girls out … That’s what I heard.’

  One of the police officers had a brother who worked at Triangle. A manager, not a worker. They found his body in the lift shaft.

  ‘Is that what you heard?’ the officer asked. After all, the murdered policeman had been struck only a few blocks from the factory. It wasn’t impossible.

  ‘It’s what I heard,’ Samuel said again. ‘The guy’s a hero. That’s what they’re saying … Even if he didn’t get to my wife,’ he added. ‘Nobody did. Didn’t get to save her.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’s a tragedy, what happened down there.’

  ‘Well, come in if you want,’ Samuel said. ‘Go ahead …’

  Matz and Eleana heard him pulling back the broken door, and the officers stepping inside, but more politely now.

  ‘Have a look around.’ Samuel chuckled. ‘I can tell you, there’s not too many places he could be hiding, not in this dump. But if you want to go see for yourself …’

  ‘Is that his room, right there?’

  ‘Take a look! … What’d’he do this time?’ Samuel asked again, padding behind them. ‘Must be pretty serious. To get you out here, on a day like this … Can I get you something to drink?’

  From inside the chest they heard their bedroom door open, a voice saying, ‘That’s good of you. But thank you – no. We should get on …’ And the door closed to again.

  Samuel saw them out with a level of civility neither Matz nor Eleana had ever observed in him before. And there it was – they were gone.

  They stayed where they were, not daring to speak or move. They waited for Samuel to shuffle back to his room. Instead, the bedroom door opened again. He said, ‘Don’t know what the hell you done, my friend. Not sure I want to know either. But they’re after you … And they’ll be back. Take my advice. Get outta town while you can. While it’s still so crazy round here. I’m telling you, they’ll be back again tomorrow.’

  He didn’t linger for a response, nor even to watch them emerging from the chest. He just closed the door again and returned to his mattress. They didn’t go after him. They stayed in their room, too shaken to talk. By the time Batia and the girls returned, Samuel was gone – no one knew where, or why – without pausing to speak with his daughter.

  52

  Eleana’s mother would not go back to the morgue alone. She brought Eleana with her, leaving Matz to look out for the girls. Mother and daughter walked from Allen Street to Misery Lane with hair covered and heads lowered. They joined the back of a line that snaked the full length of the pier and waited silently for their turn to be allowed in.

  It was a simple, gruesome plan. A crazy plan, Batia argued, and a wicked one, too. ‘How is it wicked?’ Matz asked her. ‘They are dead, and I am alive. Ther
e will be plenty of bodies nobody can identify … And workers who died but who nobody knows, and who nobody will miss. Tell me what is so wicked about it, Batia?’

  ‘Because, if we claim someone’s remains as our own, their family will have nothing to bury.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Matz acknowleged. ‘But they are already dead. Nothing will bring them back – and that is the tragedy. The rest … the rest is sentiment. If a family has a few charred remains to bury, it doesn’t change the ending. Does it? Whereas, it would change ours …’

  It was not ideal, but it made sense. Set against what was at stake for her own son-in-law, she could not refuse.

  ‘You will have to leave the city. You will have to start a new life,’ she said wretchedly.

  But the truth hovered unspoken between them: in that crowded flat, where death seemed to be everywhere, and poverty, and injustice, and filth … for a moment the three of them almost laughed. It wasn’t such a dreadful proposition after all.

  ‘I have no real work here, in any case,’ Matz said.

  Eleana added: ‘Nor I.’

  ‘What will you do for money?’ her mother asked.

  Matz smiled at her: ‘You think I’m feckless, Batia, because I concern myself with politics.’

  ‘I think you are feckless because you throw bricks into the skulls of policeman,’ she snapped. ‘You know I have nothing against your politics.’

  He paused, nodded. ‘What I meant to say …’ he corrected himself. ‘I have a little money saved. Enough to last for all of us, until I find some work – and then you can bring Isha and can come to live with us. As soon as we have found a place.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Eleana. ‘Couldn’t Isha and I come with you?’

  ‘But I didn’t mean …’ He stopped. She had misunderstood. ‘Won’t you come with me?’ he asked her. ‘If you come with me, we will save money twice as fast. Isha is safer here with her grandmother.’