“Rebecca or Shayna. Teacher or domestic servant. For me, what matters is that you Jewish meidelach all bring in good money for me”
Becca pulls a large, colorful shawl over her shoulders. Should she? Shouldn’t she?
Is it better to go out as a Western woman, dressed in her own clothes? Or better to pull a shawl over her shoulders, her head?
She pulls one corner of the shawl over her hair. A tassel dangles down the middle of her forehead. Turkish princess. She stands in front of the window; the shadows of the alleyway are quite effective at turning it into a mirror.
She squints at herself, then throws off the shawl.
She has asked Fortuna for a mirror, but the request had clearly struck her hostess as outlandish in the extreme. Besides, it looks like Fortuna has no need for a mirror. Her complexion, slightly dark, is always perfect. No unsightly bumps or pimples or blotches. Her eyes are wide, and she rings them with black kohl each morning. How she does that without a looking glass, who knows.
She peers at herself, but sees only the stone wall opposite the house. Oh, to be so confident in your beauty. Not too large and too small, without ear lobes that hang too low or a nose that is slightly too wide, or a chin that shows when you guzzle too many sweetmeats.
She will go as she is. Becca. With no chaperone. This waiting and begging for both Fortuna and Nissim to be available, begging them to walk her through the streets, wait for her, return her home, it feels so wrong. Demeaning.
She thinks about leaving a note to Fortuna to tell her where she has gone, but she still has not worked out whether the woman can read.
Outside, she walks quickly through the narrow lanes. The noise grows as she nears the souk, and she marvels at her newfound competence with the city streets. The alleyways are starting to become less labyrinthine, more distinct.
A loud wailing sound comes from the second house on the left. Becca hesitates, then raps smartly on the door. Inside, a baby cries. Another rap. A Muslim woman opens. A relief. She was afraid that it would be a man, and then she would have to negotiate from the doorstep, for her own safety. The woman has one crying baby in her arms. Another lays on the floor on a colorful rug. Twins. How, well, not really, very charming.
“Passport.” Becca says, loudly and slowly. “Passport.”
The woman crinkles her eyebrows, says something unintelligible, and then places the baby in Becca’s arms, before scooping up the baby on the floor.
As long as the baby’s tears do not stain her dress.
The woman looks Becca up and down, then she reaches down to her skirt — the baby still crying on her shoulder — and rubs the fabric between her fingers. Her face lights up. “De plus?” she says.
“As in, do I have more fabric to sell?” She shakes her head. “Désolé.”
The woman looks at her, clicks her tongue, and walks out. Becca is left with a crying baby.
Becca shifts the baby from one arm to the other. Where has she gone?
Two minutes. To the bathroom maybe?
Five minutes. She has not gone to nurse that baby, has she?
The baby in her arms is still wailing. Now, though, she — or is it he? — gives little hiccups. Hungry? Soiled? Hot? Cold?
“Hello!” she calls.
The woman does not appear. Becca takes a few steps forward, through the kitchen areas and into a hallway with a domed ceiling. Surely the mother will hear her baby and come back?
A moment later, the woman appears again. Again, she touches Becca’s skirt. In response, Becca takes out her money. “Passport,” she says. “Passport.”
The woman bats away the money with her hands and instead points at the skirt.
“You want my dress?”
The woman nods her head.
“But what are you going to do with a gown?” she asks. The woman wears traditional dress. A Paris gown?
The woman doesn’t answer. She reaches for the baby, who throws himself into her arms. She walks around Becca, examining the fabric. It is a navy brocade. Utterly impractical for Turkey. But still, Becca likes it. It is conservative enough to give the impression of a competent schoolteacher, but the design features acorns and there was an oak tree in the shtetl, near the cheder.
But she loves freedom more. “For passport, gown?”
How the woman understands, Becca does not know.
“Yes. Agreed.”
She stuffs the notes back in her sleeve.
The woman gives her a beatific smile, revealing a row of pearly white teeth. She beckons for Becca to follow her.
The woman’s husband—Abu Khamir, sits at a desk. Spotless. “Which passport would you like?” He doesn’t look up at her. “Or is it immigration papers?”
“Passport. Bohemia.”
He wrinkles his nose. “Bohemia is a problem. Prussia? France?”
She hesitates. Not Prussia. Everyone in Bohemia looks down on the Prussians. Prussians are slow and backward and bow to authority as if that’s all they were created for. France, on the other hand, has some pride.
“France. I shall be a Frenchwoman.”
It didn’t really make a difference. It is just a traveling document, after all, to be checked on the ship by some ignoramus who couldn’t get a better job. But still, something in her is excited to say that she is French, the crown of civilization.
The man reaches into his drawer and takes out a paper, embossed with the coat of arms of the French Republic.
For the first time, he looks up at her. “Are you not a Jew?”
“I am.”
“And so do you not want a Turkish immigration document? The Great Ottoman Empire will be in the palm of your hand.”
“I do not want to immigrate. I have a visa to be here to teach.”
“Teach?” His mouth opens into a sneer. “That’s a good one. Teach.”
She shakes her head, and suddenly wishes she had a baby to clutch close, even if it wails.
He dips a pen into an inkwell and shakes off the excess drops. “And don’t tell me, your name is Rayzel.”
She shakes her head.
“Frumet.”
She shakes her head again.
“Freidel. Shayna. Fayga. Soro. Baila.”
“My name is Rebecca.”
“Write it for me.”
She takes a pen and obliges.
He looks puzzled for a moment, then shrugs his shoulder. “Rebecca or Shayna. Teacher or domestic servant. For me, what matters is that you Jewish meidelach” he gives a belly laugh, “I said it right, didn’t I? — all you sweet meidelach bring in good money for me.”
She thinks of Raizel and Freidl. Somewhere in Istanbul, surely, there is a man supplying them with Turkish immigration documents, forged by some artist.
Something in Becca recoils and the woman suddenly appears behind her, all black eyes that seem to have swallowed the night.
As Becca backs out of the door, he calls after her. “Come next week. It will be ready then. And in place of money, bring my wife your pretty dress.”
*****
First morning at work. Felix has dressed casually, not quite like a student, but without the top hat that would be expected. Just to show that this may be work, but it is not what he considers to be his vocation. He is still a student, perhaps.
Paschele is stooped over his precious typewriter, and when Felix enters, he looks puzzled, as if wondering what he is doing there.
This morning, Felix had adjusted his cravat, swept his hair to one side, deliberated about his top hat. And his new employer had forgotten that he was coming. Alexander Pope’s words come to mind: Man, “created half to rise, half to fall.”
Felix clears his throat. “I have my first scoop for the paper.”
Wolf Paschele pushes up his wire spectacles. “The paper? I did not take you on as a journalist. Here.” He hands him a stack of typed pages and a notebook with blue sloping writing. “Congratulations. Your first job.”
The stack is heavy in Felix’s hands. He looks at the title page.
Felix looks around for a chair. He sits down without being asked, the large pile of papers resting on his lap. “But—”
“My grandfather, the original Wolf Paschele, was the first one to print this calendar. It is quite a moneymaker. Can’t save a calendar from year to year, now, can you?” He laughs, revealing two rows of perfect teeth. “Now, go through it, page by page, line by line. Make sure that the days are in order. The months. One page follows on from the other. A game, such as those that you students enjoy. Spot the mistake.
“It shouldn’t take you longer than around three days. But work during the day, lest your eyes grow weak, like mine.”
“But—”
Paschele sits back down behind his typewriter. “No discussions now, please. No disturbances the day before the newspaper prints.”
Felix pulls his hand through his beard. “But that’s what I want to talk to you about. I have a story for you. A scoop. My father arrived at the concert hall and found a copy of Wagner’s anti-Semitic treatise on his chair.”
Paschele clucks his tongue. “Rising anti-Semitism, eh? It seems to be everywhere these days. Ah, well. Times get bad and times get better again. Not worth losing any sleep over.”
“But don’t you think that this is newsworthy?”
All the way over to the printer’s shops, he was composing his opening sentence to his first article. Informative but compelling. Filled with information, but not clunky. Elegance. Elegance, he had thought to himself, must be the first of the ten writing commandments. He doesn’t know the rest, but is pretty sure that this would be top of the decalogue: Write with Elegance.
He shrugs. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. As it is, the paper is well-nigh full, we’re just waiting for a few advertisements.” He looks up suddenly, hopeful. “Perhaps—”
Felix shakes his head. “No. Advertising, no.”
Paschele gives a sigh. “Young people today. They want all the interesting jobs, without the obligations that go with it.”
“I’m prepared to work hard. I’ll get you good stories for the paper.” Felix looks down at the stack on his lap. He hopes that it is not a dull book. The words of Heinrich Heine come to him: “I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading one, so I awoke from sheer boredom.” That will be his anti-motto, if he gets a chance here.
“I am a talented writer. My professors say so.”
Paschele laughs so hard that he clutches his middle. “Professors, indeed. That’s not the kind of writing that people actually read, my boy.”
He looks at Felix for a moment, considering. Then, as if some wordless decision has been made, continues. “When people pick up a paper, they want to be led through it. Think of a little boy who puts his hand in his mother’s as they walk to the market. And as they walk, the mother points out all the amusing things that he will appreciate — the horse chewing on the flowers in the window box of the police station, the busker playing his violin upside down — so that the child doesn’t once look up to his mother and say, I want to go home, I’m bored, I’m tired. Before they know it, the little boy is at the marketplace, just where his mother wanted to go.
“Or, the reader has finished the piece. He has been amused, perhaps stimulated to think a little but that comes in a roundabout way, such that he doesn’t even realize he’s made an effort. This writing is not Gemara, where you puzzle out each word. It’s not even a philosophy dissertation, with a carefully constructed argument. We want to get people to the marketplace, yes, but we don’t want them to realize that they have to walk all the way there.”
Felix gives a half nod. Writing as spoiling. Writing as infantilization. Writing as manipulation. Perhaps he is better off with the calendar.
“You really want to prove your writing skills?”
He does. If only to prove Paschele wrong. That there is a writing that moves the soul. That readers can be trusted. That words can bridge the endless gap between one mind and the other.
He nods.
Paschele picks up a pen and chews. A blotch of black ink blooms on his lower lip.
“Well, I have been thinking of a children’s supplement to the newspaper. When their husbands sit down to read the paper, it will make the women happy if they can give something to the children to read. Papa-in-training and all that. A little bit of information. A story. Say, four small pages. We’ll place it in the center of the paper, so we can prove to our advertisers that people are seeing their ads, even if they are not in the front pages.
“A children’s magazine?”
“Well, not a magazine. A pullout, we call it. Four pages. I think you could probably do that. A sweet little project. I would do it myself but—” he waves his hand in the air, as if to take in all his surroundings: the newspapers piled up, the books, the calendar, the printing press, the typewriter.
Felix looks around. A little empire, indeed. He is suddenly, curiously jealous.
A children’s magazine.
Well, as his new boss has told him, everyone must start somewhere.
"Thank you for your efforts, surely you are a brave and courageous reporter and I admire your values. But these subjects do not belong in our newspaper”
