At the counter of the I.G.K.P. she finds Mr. Katzenelson and Mr. Pollak, two former theater critics in exile, still arguing over the premiere of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées forty years ago. But nothing from them. Only shrugs. They care like cats care, which is to say they don’t. It’s Thursday, so maybe check that Milkhiger restaurant on Rivington Street. She finds one of Feter’s cronies, the socialist writer Mr. Garfinkel, known for his story from thirty years ago, Hurrah for Schmeul the Waiter!—still available by mail as a pamphlet through the Yiddish Publishing Company. He sits with his dairy noodles, proudly wearing his I.W.W. union button pinned to his collar, but is of no help.
Nor are there any clues forthcoming from the place on Broome Street that serves milk from a ladle and has the sink installed outside the toilet for Hasidic customers. Mr. Rubinstein is a Zionist who’s never put a foot in the Promised Land but who keeps a white-and-blue tin for donations to Israel on the table with his black coffee. Also no help. “Sorry to disappoint, Kallehniu,” he tells her and gives the tin a tap, so that costs her a dime for the Promised Land.
She walks. It’s only a block away, but she saves it for last, because really why would she want to go back to such a place if she doesn’t have to? She has managed for five years not to take a step back inside. Now, against her own desire, she confronts a sooty, terra-cotta brick tenement house on Orchard Street. One among many around Seward Park, where shabby canyons of flat-faced brick and wooden rental barracks stand. Jews have lived here for decades, filling up the cramped apartments and spilling out onto the stoops and into the streets and markets. More since the war’s end, but not from the shtetlakh this time. Instead of all those little villages dotting Eastern Europe, this time the deluge has come from the displaced persons camps.
Rachel stands on the sidewalk facing the building’s wood-frame entrance with its peeling varnish. Above, a latticed ironwork of fire escapes zigzags down the facade. A couple of teenaged girls burst from the door and come clattering down the steps in saddle shoes, gabbling in a language from the old country. A Baltic dialect maybe. They ignore Rachel. Ascending into the tenement’s upper floors, where the light of the stairwell thickens to soup, she hears a radio blaring Yiddish from somewhere and the yap of a dog. Mounting the stairs, she notes that the tattered step runners she remembers have been replaced by rubberized treads. The ancient smells linger, however. They’re in the woodwork, the sweat and cook pots of generations of poor immigrant Jews, boiling kraut and pickling beets, breaking their backs for a few American coins to jangle in their pockets.
On the third floor, she stops in front of the door of a flat. She wonders… If she presses an ear against it, would she hear the echo of her own voice, that skinny D.P. girl who once lived there? She had spent her days then waiting on her uncle like a servant. Preparing the food as best she could, washing clothes, sweeping the floor. She thought it was her duty to tend to her elder, and he did not disabuse her of that idea. He could still pretend that he was the master of the house.
She didn’t care. What else was there for her to do? She had no friends and no desire for them. She was content with her ghosts, who understood her pain. Understood her guilt. At night, while Feter snored to high heaven, she would lie on a lumpy mattress plopped on the floor and try to sleep—though night was when the muscularity of her fear and shame threatened to strangle her. This was her life back then, until she met Aaron. Barely a life at all.
A tarnished tin mezuzah is tacked onto the doorframe. And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thy house, and upon thy gates. So says the Mishneh Torah. The mezuzah had been left behind by the previous tenant who died of pneumonia in a hospital bed, may his name be a blessing, whatever it was. How many times had she touched it and brought the touch to her lips? Shema Yisrael. The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. She had been teetering then on the cusp of changing from Rokhl to Rachel. She takes a half step forward as if to touch the mezuzah now, as if she is stepping into the fringe of a dream, but a sharp crack of the floorboard under her feet wakes her up. Reminds her she is not here for memories; she is here for her answers. How could Feter have possibly raised the money? He begs her one day for charity, then the next yanks such cash from his pockets that he drops fifty dollars on the pawnshop counter in a blink? How? What pile of straw had he spun into gold?
Rachel presses the buzzer. “Feter?” she calls urgently. “Feter Fritz? Will you open the door?” she asks him in Yiddish.
Nothing, until a voice that isn’t her uncle’s surprises her. She turns, gripping her shoulder bag as if she might need to repel an attacker. A squat old lady is slowly descending from the upper floors. “You’ll have no luck finding that one at home,” she tells Rachel. “I know, I’ve been knocking all morning.” The lady’s hair has gone gray like steel wool fashioned into a bun. Her high cheekbones are swollen now and her eyes pouched darkly. Yes, the lady has aged since Rachel saw her on the day she moved out to marry Aaron. As she descends the steps, Rachel notes that the woman’s hobble appears to have worsened. The lady stops, gripping the stair rail, huffing lightly over the exertion of living life. “Up and down these steps, it’s torture, you know, for an old widow.”
“Mrs. Appelbaum,” Rachel says.
“That’s me,” the lady answers, peering more closely through the thick lenses of her eyeglasses. “But who are you, little treasure?”
“I’m Rachel Perlman, Mrs. Appelbaum. Though when you knew me, my name was Morgenstern. I used to live here.”
The lady frowns, but maybe she can recall. “Ohh.” She nods, peering. “I might remember a certain girl. A skinny little thing with big calf eyes. Was that you?”
“That was me. But I’m married now. My husband and I live in Chelsea,” she says as if it is an accomplishment. “On West Twenty-Second Street.”
“Ah, well. Mazel tov,” the lady wishes her.
“Thank you. B’karov etzlech.”
“It’s a wonderful thing to be happily married.”
“Yes,” Rachel says and nods.
“For forty-six years, I was happily married to Mr. Appelbaum, may his name be a blessing.”
“That’s a long time.”
A shrug. “Time passes. But I’ll tell you what my problem is now, child. Your poppa, is he?” she asks, pointing at the door.
“Meyn feter,” Rachel corrects.
“Ah. Your uncle then,” the lady confirms. “He’s got a bad memory. He forgets to pay for his rent.”
Rachel feels a sting of embarrassment. “How much does he owe?”
“Two months. Two months and not a penny offered. I’ve told him: ‘Mr. Landau,’ I said, ‘I’m only the concierge, but I have a legal responsibility to the landlord.’ I told him if I don’t see some rent soon, I’ll have to call for the authorities.”
Appearing behind Mrs. Appelbaum, Rachel’s eema has commentary to offer. Ah, Fritzl, she laments. He could always make his money. That he had the gift for. But to keep it?
Rachel is already digging into her purse. “How much?”
“How much?” says Mrs. Appelbaum. She frowns in her accounting, eyebrows raised as she observes Rachel’s billfold. “For two months? Twenty-four dollars,” the lady answers. “Twenty-four dollars and forty cents.”