same hours. He kept only what he needed to survive, and divided the rest between the Party, the Union, and the little boys on the Lower East Side who roamed the streets just as he had, whose fathers never came to meet them at the dock, whose mothers died of consumption by a small window in a filthy street, in a crowded tenement a world away from home.
That was Matz.
By comparison, Eleana had enjoyed an easy life. Who hadn’t? She was born a few crowded streets away, on Orchard Street, five years after her parents arrived off the ship. By the time she was born, her parents were fully Americanized, and took care to speak to Eleana, almost always, in English. Her sister, two years her elder, died of tuberculosis when Eleana was one. Her father, Jethro, shared a lease on a six-by-four feet pickled food store, in the hallway of a neighbouring tenement block. He died of pneumonia, aged thirty-nine, in the winter of 1905, a year or so before she and Matz met. But Eleana often remembered her father: learned, affectionate and kind, always with the smell of pickled herring hanging over him, and – like everyone she knew – always working.
After he died, life grew much tougher. The shop, such that it was, was quickly appropriated by the other lessee, leaving Jethro’s widow and daughter to fend for themselves: Eleana abandoned her education and set to work making up the family income. Easier than Matz’s life, perhaps. But never easy. Before Jethro died, their tiny apartment had been shared only with one uncle and two cousins. Afterwards, innumerable more were crammed in. The apartment, like so many of their neighbours’, became home and sweatshop both, and a flop house for an ever-changing roster of boarders and fellow workers. They sewed buttons onto feathers, or feathers onto ribbons or ribbons onto hats … Whatever piecework was going, they took it in, and sewed – too tired to talk – and sewed – too poorly paid to stop – and sewed, and only paused to sleep.
It was how Matz first encountered her. Old for her years, and with the roster of boarders always passing through, no longer quite the untarnished maiden of good romantic fiction, a toughened daughter of the Lower East Side, but with a bloom that nothing and no one could dim.
There was a heat between them from the moment they met. No doubt about it. She was fifteen. He was eighteen. Maybe. He came back from the Triangle factory that first night. He sat down at the small kitchen table, where the boarders had to eat in shifts. Her mother passed Eleana a plate of schmaltz – chicken fat – and cornbread, which Eleana set before him without a word. He looked up at her – she looked back at him. If it wasn’t love, it was desire at first sight: hot, thick, rich. They gazed at each other, and felt a rush of something wonderful flow through them. They gazed at each other, in no hurry to look away; allowed their eyes to roam each other’s faces as if they were quite alone in the room, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. After a minute, when the current between them seemed to stifle everything else – and there seemed to be no question where it would lead, Eleana’s mother leaned across from the stove and smacked her soup ladle against Matz’s bowl. That was all. She said nothing. Nobody said anything. And, for the instant at least, the spell was partially broken.
There were eight bodies sleeping in that small and crumbling ‘old law’ Allen Street apartment then. Lower East Side was still filled with them – tenements with conditions so foul, with so little light and space, that they were no longer legal. Slowly, they were being replaced. But too slowly. In this small apartment, there lived five family members, loosely connected – not everyone could say quite how – and three boarders, connected only by the fact of the rent. At the end of each day, ten dog-tired bodies returned from their workplaces to be fed by their landlady: pickled herring and cornbread, pickled herring or cornbread, schmaltz, potatoes … mostly potatoes … Eleven bodies squeezed into the four small rooms: a parlour, a windowless kitchen, two windowless bedrooms. Directly outside ran the track for the Second Avenue elevated railroad, which meant a constant thunder and rumble of passing trains, and cinders from the engines floating through the only window, coating the parlour and everything inside it with dust. There was a water faucet in the hallway and a couple of toilets, which serviced all six floors, all seventeen apartments, 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.
