each one as crammed as the one above, and the one below, and opposite, and on either side …
They slept sardine-like, side by side on wooden pallets – no room for niceties here; no single-sex wards. On the sixth night, the two of them lay together in the same hot, slumbering room, separated only by a few unwanted bodies, a few feet of space. Neither could have stood it much longer: the proximity and the distance. But Eleana waited, her mind and body restless with longing. She knew he would come to her, and so he did.
Matz clambered over the two sleeping figures between them – Eleana’s young cousin was one, and the other was somebody else. Matz squeezed in beside her. And she regarded him in the semi-darkness. A long time it was they lay like that: a minute or two, or more. And in the beautiful hush, when the noisy world receded, he touched her face – and she touched his, and they saw in each other all that they needed to see, at least for the moment: more than they ever knew it was possible to see in another human being – acceptance, trust, curiosity, desire … Finally, he whispered:
‘You – this moment – no, you, Eleana. This is all I have been able to think of …’
She nodded, curved him a slow, warm smile: ‘I was hoping so,’ she murmured, ‘but my goodness you took your time!’
He laughed – they both did, a whispered laugh – and they made love to each other – they fucked each other – just there and then. Quietly. So quietly. Beside them, the sleeping man – the one who wasn’t the cousin – grunted in his sleep, a half-conscious protest at his small space being disturbed; and shunted up as best he could. But he didn’t wake.
It was a stolen moment: a moment of enchantment and fierce perfection, shared by two people for whom life had only ever offered struggle. It was a moment which amazed them both.
‘Kishefdik!’ Matz whispered. ‘I am a lucky man.’
And she giggled. ‘Kishefdik! Magical. Yes, yes. It was. You are. Let’s do it again.’
He gazed at her, through the tenement gloom. There was a small light shining from the parlour, where a few of them were still at work, attaching mother-of-pearl buttons to a heap of child-sized pantaloons, sixty little buttons an hour, ninety child-sized pantaloons a night, fourteen hours a day. Three dollars more a week. ‘Sheyn maydl, Eleana,’ he whispered, over the hum of the sweatshop sewing machines, the hum which never stopped; over the snores and grunts of his fellow boarders. ‘You’re beautiful … The most beautiful girl I ever saw.’ And she was. He believed she was. Cat’s eyes, green as emeralds, warm as a summer moon; and that soft, smiling mouth, that long slim neck, and those eyes …
‘Your eyes …’ he whispered. ‘All week, all I see are those eyes …’
She didn’t giggle. She looked at him, looking at her, through the tenement gloom. ‘I am not really beautiful,’ she said simply. ‘But you make me feel as though I were.’
That was how it began. And now, three years on, Matz still worked at the Triangle Waist Company factory during the day and, five nights a week, he worked (though it hardly counted as work) at the Hester Street nickelodeon. During the strike, of course, he and Eleana earned nothing from the factory. But thanks to the nickelodeon, they were better off than many. They had moved to another apartment on the same street, no less cramped or dark or crumbling, and even smaller than the last, but without the elevated railway right outside the window, at least, and with fewer roommates. They lived with Eleana’s mother, Batia Kappelman, and Eleana’s pregnant cousin, Sarah Kessler, and Sarah’s brown-eyed baby Tzivia, and (sometimes) with Sarah’s husband Samuel Kessler, who came and went. There was also, temporarily, a greenhorn boarder living with them, a cousin of Sarah’s, fresh from the old country and still finding his feet.
And best of all, of course, there was a daughter, Isha. Two years old – eighteen months older than her cousin Tzivia. The girls were as alike as two peas in a pod, so their grandmother always said. But of course they weren’t. In any case, Matz and Eleana quietly, confidently noted, Isha was not like anyone, not really. She was their golden child. She could walk and talk already, and she had a smile that could melt all the snow on Hester Street, and eyes as wild and green as her mother’s. Her parents wanted nothing less than the world for her: but a different world – one that was kinder and fairer, and which didn’t smell of pickled herring and horse manure and rotting vegetables. And where food was plentiful and the air was clean, and where their baby girl didn’t have to fight for every soot-filled little breath, and wheeze through every airless night, but where she could sleep comfortably, breathe easily, and know that she was safe.
Isha was never strong – not from the first day. But she had bright green eyes, like her mother, and thick dark curly hair, like her father. And laughter that was so easy, so warm, so infectious, it lightened the burden of all and any who were lucky enough to hear it.
So. They were blessed. They had a roof over their heads and enough food on the table – always enough for Isha, and enough, just about, for them. Unlike his fellow strikers, Matz still brought money home from his work at the nickelodeon and there was just enough, after he had given half of it away, to pay the rent. Better than that, in the apartment they shared with only five others, it had been agreed that when the strike was over, and the greenhorn had found his feet, Eleana, Matz and Isha would have a room of their own.
14
Last night, as she had been making her way home from the Greene Street picket line, Eleana had been approached – ambushed, rather – by Mr Blumenkranz, one of the supervisors at Triangle and someone who, when she wasn’t striking, she was forced to deal with on a daily basis. He was a small man, no taller than Eleana, in his late forties, with an unhappy wife at home. Mr Blumenkranz was standing in wait for her, hiding behind a stationary coal cart, because he sensed, quite rightly, that if Eleana had seen him she would have quickly turned and walked the other way. He fell into step as she bustled by, causing her to jump, and offering her no choice but to acknowledge his presence. She glanced about her, unhappy that anyone should spot her fraternizing with the management, and tried to walk on by. But he was quite determined.
‘Eleana!’ he said, panting slightly to keep pace, struggling for a foothold on the ice.
‘Good evening Mr Blumenkranz,’ she replied, cool but polite, not glancing at him, walking faster. Since when, she wondered, had he thought to call her Eleana?
He rarely bothered to learn the machinists’ names – not first names or second names. Most came and went so fast, why would he bother? But there was generally one girl who caught his eye, whose name he always remembered. Eleana was the one. Everybody noticed it. All the girls. And Matz, too. Mr Blumenkranz’s crushes were a long-running joke at Triangle. Sometimes the girl he fixated upon simply left. Couldn’t cope with it. Sometimes, when they wouldn’t submit to his advances, he fired them. Sometimes they accepted his little gifts, his offers of money and stayed for a little while. Until they were fired. Sometimes, rumours circulated about a girl getting herself in trouble. One way or another, nothing good ever seemed to come of his crushes. To their recipients, it was generally deemed, they were less of a blessing than a curse.
But Eleana was clever, in her quiet way. And somehow she had survived Blumenkranz’s cloying attention for longer than the rest, while still keeping him at bay. Her pleasant refusal to engage with him, her ability to slip so innocuously through his fingers, only left him panting for more. Mr Blumenkranz had taken to standing behind her as she bent over her sewing machine, which whirred from the same motor under the same floorboards and at the same speed as the machine beside her, and the machine beside that, and all two hundred machines on the factory’s eighth floor …
‘Ah, Miss Beekman!’ he would sigh, above all the racket of the whirring. ‘A born machinist, if ever there was one!’ As if that were any kind of compliment. And he would turn to the rest of the row, heads bowed, necks and backs twisted over their work: ‘If only all you girls could work as efficiently as the lovely Miss Beekman!’
She corrected him once. ‘It’s Mrs Beekman, Mr