Beyond the Pale: A Novel by Elana Dykewomon Page B

After I figured out that only prostitutes came on Mondays, I wondered how the other women knew to stay away. Sometimes I thought there was a secret meeting place where girls were told all the things women needed to know, or maybe the rabbi’s wife explained these matters to her pupils when they were old enough and I had missed that lesson. Pesah insisted that both Feygele and I should work some other place than the bathhouse on Mondays. I would peek around the side of the building at the women who came, but they didn’t seem so dangerous. They just wore brighter cloaks and more rouge.
    The new factories were beginning to hire, and working girls started coming to the baths too, fourteen, fifteen years old. They were from the poorest families, the ones who had to let their daughters go out to work where they might be with men and goyim all day, and although nearly every kopeck went to their families, still, they had a little money of their own for the first time.
    “The factories might be good for the baths, but they’re bad for Jews,” Pesah told her friend Sadie.
    “Isn’t what’s good for you good for a Jew?” Sadie asked, poking Pesah in her ribs.
    “You know very well what I mean,” Pesah answered, turning away, playing at being annoyed. But I didn’t know what Pesah meant. Like so many of the bits of conversation I recall, the meanings hidden in childhood only become clear now that I write them down. Most were just small lessons, people trying to prove their virtue to each other, but because I wasn’t supposed to be listening, I made things out to be more important than they were. Maybe that’s why our childhoods seem so big, so resonant, while our adult years slip by like fish in the river Byk.
    Pesah discussed all the changes in her clientele with Sadie, and I watched my mother listening, trying to understand. It seemed to me my mother cleaved stubbornly to the innocence she had the day before she was raped. Nothing she saw in the bathhouse left a mark on her. She could listen to women and men arguing all day about socialism and nihilism and have no opinion. Well, she did have an opinion: “Someone will always be rich, someone will always be poor. Do you think the Narodniki will give the government to washerwomen?”
    She was happy to see me growing and delighted to get good reports from Milcah. While Pesah thought of her as a little sister, Feygele never for a moment thought of Pesah as anything more than our kind benefactor. From a benefactor, goodwill must always be bought. I was much freer. In fact, my mother bought my freedom, day after day, chore after chore. Something I only now see. Not all understanding comes in visions!
    So I was twelve, and Pesah let me help in the evenings. I would be tired but the steam in the bathhouse was invigorating, and the women who came at night were more interesting than the married women who shleped along their babies during the day. There was a group of unmarried women, “old maids” in their twenties, who would come on Wednesdays and take the four private rooms, with their own little bathtubs, twenty kopecks for each room extra. Yetta, Rayzl, Naomi, Golde—I remember their names still.
    After a few months I was particularly aware of Golde. She was maybe twenty-two, one of the first women in Kishinev to have her own Singer sewing machine. She had opened a little tailoring business—beautiful work, everyone said. Golde was very much in demand as a seamstress, and three girls worked for her in the front room of her house. (The women in the bath always gossiped about each other, especially the old maids, so it was easy to learn whatever I cared to know.) Her mama died when Golde was still young. She was the only daughter, her father a traveling merchant. She kept the house for her papa when he was home, and ran her shop. She had seven brothers, if you can imagine, and they had all married and gone.
    Golde had eyes so dark they made the new moon seem like an oil