I hear my “mum” drag herself out of bed while it’s still dark out. Once she lights a candle, I can see her in her room, pulling on black stockings and boots, throwing a coat over her nightgown, grabbing her water basin. I pretend to be asleep as she walks past me on her way out the door. A minute later I hear an outdoor water pump squealing. When she comes back inside, she puts the tea kettle on and goes to her room.
And then it hits me.
It’s morning, and I’m still in the wrong place and the wrong time. Which means…I don’t think this is a dream after all. I think this is really happening. A scream rises up in my chest, and it’s all I can do to shove it back down before it reaches my throat. No wonder everything feels so authentic here. No wonder I can’t will myself to fly or breathe under water or any of those fantastic things they say you can script out in a lucid dream. This is all for real.
My heart hammers in my chest, and it’s a good thing I’m lying down because I’m so dizzy I can’t budge. I’m really in nineteenth-century Whitechapel. I can’t believe it, much less understand it.
Even if I don’t know how it happened, I do know it’s all Zinnia’s fault. Zinnia and her sapphire moon, her big changes, her chocolate jimmies. She probably expects me to save someone’s life while I’m here too. Ha! Sorry, Zinnia, I won’t have time for any of that. I’ll be putting every shred of energy into getting myself out of here. Period.
Unless…
Ugh, what if I can’t escape until I fulfill her prediction? What if I can’t go home until I prevent someone from dying?
The teapot whistles, jarring me fully awake. I get up and walk across the cold floor to take the pot off the stove.
“Did I wake you?” Mum asks when she emerges from her room, her hair up in a bun, her skirt and shawl on. She talks partly in English, partly in Yiddish.
“I-I thought I’d walk you to work,” I say, even though I don’t know where that is. I’ve got to keep myself moving or my head is going to explode. It might as well be a slog through the city.
“Don’t be silly. I walk myself to work every day. This is your one day to sleep in.”
“Too late for that.” I feel protective of her somehow, this woman who’s a stranger but who’s also my mother here. I want to see what kind of sweatshop she toils in, and how far she has to trudge to get there. I’m actually relieved that I don’t already know—it means I’m still Abe, or at least I’m not completely Asher. Yet.
“That’s sweet of you, hon, but—”
“Did you say there’s some supper left?”
“Herring, on the shelf.” She pours two cups of tea. “Give it a smell, make sure it’s still good. There’s pumpernickel in the breadbox.”
So no refrigerator, no indoor plumbing, no heat. This is going to be a long day. I grab a chunk of brown bread and call it a meal.
It’s still twilight when we head out, the damp air reeking of horse droppings and trash. The fog hangs in the doorways and alleys like ghosts. Overhead, bickering voices spill out of an open window. I think of that old Animals song I hear sometimes in the car—something about a dirty city and the sun withholding its shine.
“You really don’t have to do this, Ash.” Mum pulls her woolen shawl tighter around her shoulders. “You should be doing whatever you want on your Sunday off.”
I finally allow myself now what I refused to do last night—I take a good look at her face. Her harsh existence has dug lines around her mouth and drawn circles under her eyes, but she’s still pretty, with hazel eyes, tawny skin, and a way of talking that shows off her teeth.
“I am doing what I want,” I tell her. “And I have the rest of the day to laze about.” Laze about—did I really say that? It’s like this place, this time, is drawing me in, taking me over.
We cross over a road marked Bloomsbury Street and head east, then walk in silence. Mum keeps her head down, probably trying to avoid horse pies, while I watch the city yawn itself awake. Foot traffic picks up as men plod to work, probably to the river docks. Every once in a while, a horse trods by with a cartful of wares. Above it all, the gulls screech in loud, urgent squawks, as if they’re singing along to that same oldie—about needing to get out of here or die trying. I swallow down my panic.
“What will you do with yourself today?” Mum asks. We’re passing by a place called Mitre Square, where hawkers are setting up their market stalls.
“Um…” Crap, what would Asher do on his day off? What could he do around here? “I suppose I’ll, y’know…”
“More hanging around the stables?”
“Maybe.” Apparently, Asher likes horses.
Mum steps over some broken glass. “How I would love to send you to the Veterinary College one day.” So Asher wants to be a vet. Yeah, that seems right. He wants to do dissections and study anatomy and stuff. A real animal lover. “You know that, don’t you, Asher? That I would if I could.”
“I don’t want to go to Veterinary College, Mum,” I tell her. “I just like hanging about the horses sometimes, that’s all.” Hanging about?
She offers me an apologetic smile. “Sweet of you to say, anyway. You are a good boy.”
We walk on, along proper English-sounding roads like Aldgate and Whitechapel High Street, passing the Petticoat Lane Marketplace and sidestepping trash. It’s a regular morning on a regular street, I guess—and a long walk for a job that probably pays peanuts. She will never, ever be able to send her son to college. She’ll always be dirt poor, just like she is now. That’s the rotten truth. And the reason I care about her is that this is real. I really am her son, at least in this crazy version of the world.
“Mrs. Bidwell took in a street cat, did I tell you?” Mum asks.
“I don’t think so.”
“It has no tail, but it has extra toes, that’s what she says.”
“Huh.” Mrs. Bidwell must live in the building. Well, if her new pet is any kind of mouser, I hope she lets it loose on the staircase.
“She says she’ll pay you to feed it when she goes to visit her sister, how’s that?”
I’m about to answer, but something distracts me. What’s this? Just ahead, by that brick wall fronting a row of buildings. There are two cops standing there, and another man, and they’re looking at something on the wall. At handwriting. Mum, with her head still down, doesn’t notice, but I do. The chalk graffiti says:
The Juwes are
The men that
Will not be blamed
For nothing
The Juwes? Is that supposed to say…Jews? And what does that mean, will not be blamed for nothing? I want to get within earshot of the cops, but I don’t want to worry Mum. If I could think straight, if I were in the right place and time, I might be able to break it down, but I can’t.
“Did you hear what I said?” Mum asks.
“Hmm? Oh, right.” I force my eyes off the graffiti. I’ll just have to wait until my return trip to check it out. “Yes, I’ll feed the cat.”
“Good. I already let her know you would.” She checks her hair bun. “For free.”
Yup, that sounds about right.
We leave the chalk graffiti behind and walk past a church bell workshop, a shuttered-up mill, a railway station. Finally, Mum stops in front of the Bryant & May Matchstick Company. It’s a mammoth building with women and girls pouring in and out, the sharp tang of phosphorus piercing the air. Mum is just another one of those women, just another matchstick girl, another brick in the wall.
“Thank you for the lovely company.” She offers me a tired smile. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Tonight?” It’s barely morning now. How long is her shift, anyway?
She kisses me on the cheek. “Around seven, I expect. Oh, bring Mr. Kraskov our copy of Di Nayes, would you? I forgot to bring it by yesterday.”
Di Nayes means The News in Yiddish. It must be a local paper. “Mr. Kraskov?”
“Our upstairs neighbor. I’ve told you about him.” She pulls my vest closed. “The butcher, remember? Number 38.”
“Oh, right.”
“Go on now, go have yourself a day off.”
I give her arm a squeeze. “See you later.”
As I walk away, I can feel her eyes on me, watching me as far as she can. Right before I take the first turn in the road, I wave, and she raises her hand to me, and then we turn in our opposite directions—she to make matchsticks, me to do I don’t know what. Clearly, we’re both going to have a long, rotten day.
I pick up my pace now, passing a corner bookshop, a church, and a place called a “haberdasher”—men’s clothes by the looks of it. And now I see the brick wall again. This time, I want to eavesdrop on the cops, or at least get a closer look at the graffiti.
Wait, where is it? Where’s The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing? I could swear it was right here on this stretch of wall, but there’s no sign of it now. I step closer. Nothing but dusty bricks. I look up and down the street for the cops, but there are no uniforms, just tradesmen and marketers.
Maybe I’m on the wrong street. Maybe I’m just tired. Or maybe Zinnia sent me to a place that isn’t even internally consistent. Yeah, thanks a load, Zinnia.
“Coming through, coming through!” shouts a voice from behind.
It’s a man barreling down the road on a bike, the old-fashioned kind with the jumbo front wheel. He’s huffing and puffing and red in the face, like he’s late for a wedding or something. I step aside to let him pass, then turn my gaze back to the wall. The graffiti is still gone. Or maybe it was never here, I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore, including and especially how to get out of here. I shove my fists into my pockets and schlep the rest of the way back to the tenement.
The flat smells a little like my school locker, stuffy and stale, so I open the small window over my bed and lie down, thinking I might actually fall back to sleep—anything to avoid thinking about what’s happening to me. No such luck, though. I’m wide awake, as if I’d just chugged a couple of cans of Red Bull. Wide awake but with no ideas. No idea how Zinnia got me here, no idea how to save someone from dying, no ideas whatsoever.
The window above me lets in the din of the street—peddlers shouting out their wares, cart wheels creaking against cobblestone, kids laughing, mothers scolding. After a while I notice another, closer noise. It’s a scraping sound, like wood against wood, as if someone upstairs is struggling to open their window.
Then I hear a voice, drifting in from directly above. A girl’s voice. “Finally,” she says, her voice muffled by the breeze. “Fresh air at last.”
I sit up. Blink. Rub my eyes. Could it be?
“Beam me up, Scotty,” the voice pleads. Then softer, sadder, with an edge of desperation. “Please, just beam me up.”
I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to jump up and down. I get on my knees, eye level to the window. “Mitzy?”
Silence.
“Mitzy, is that you?” Please, please let me not be hallucinating.
“I—I know you.” She hesitates. “Who—?”
“It’s me,” I practically shout. “Abe Pearlman.”
“Abe? Abe! Where are you? What happened to us?”
“I don’t know.” I crane my head, squinting up through the laundry lines cluttered with petticoats and bedsheets. I still can’t see her. “I mean, I sort of know. I went to this, this fortune teller, and she told me—”
“What a freak.”
“What?”
“Not you,” she says. “Her. Zinnia.”
“Wait, you know her?”
“As of yesterday I do,” she tells me. “I went to, y’know, have her look into her crystal ball and tell me everything’s going to be okay. Instead I got this. I got the worst.”
“It’s not the worst.” Which might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.
“You don’t know the half of it, Abe. Just you wait and see.”
“I’ll be right up.” I jump out of the bed. “What apartment are you in?”
“No idea.”
“No problem.” I stick my feet into my boots. “You’re directly over my apartment, right? I can figure it out. Do you know the name?”
“Um, wait, I got this.” She makes a low hum. “It’s Krakov—no, Kraskov.”
“Kraskov, perfect.” I grab the copy of Di Nayes off the kitchen table and head out the door, wondering if I’m a bad person because I’m glad Mitzy is here with me, glad she’s stuck in this time warp, this tenement, this disaster.
Climbing the dingy stairs to the top floor, my mind strays back to last school year, around Halloween time. Mitzy wasn’t in class one day. Or the next day. Or the rest of that week. I heard she was on a leave of absence, unexplained. It didn’t take long for the rumor mill to start filling in the blanks. She ran away, she got thrown into juvie, stuff like that. Yup, everyone always figured Mitzy was Trouble, or at least Troubled, just because she’s the kind of person who keeps to herself. I was waiting for them to say she robbed a bank or joined the circus, but then one day she was back. She looked the same as ever, except her hair was blue. It’s been blue ever since.
I never heard the real reason she was out of school, and I didn’t really care, as long as she was back. But now I have to wonder if she was on one of these space-time trips. Like, maybe this isn’t her first time through the wormhole. Not that it matters. Well, maybe it does, but I don’t have time to work that out right now.
One flight up, I knock on the door with the mezuzah. It feels like an hour until she answers it. I can’t wait to see someone from the twenty-first century, someone who can tell me I haven’t gone crazy, that I’m not alone in it. But most of all, I can’t wait to see her, to see Mitzy. As the door finally starts to open, I break into my first smile since I blew into this joint.
But it’s not Mitzy. It’s a man. Short, stocky, dark eyes, balding. And most definitely not smiling.
“Mr. Kraskov?” I guess.
“Ver zayt ir?” he asks in Yiddish—who are you?
I hand him the newspaper. “Nat aykh—here you go. From my mother.” I don’t know how I pull that line out. I’m used to listening to my grandma talk in Yiddish, but I hardly ever speak it. It’s this place, this time, sucking me in.
He’s already shutting the door in my face when a voice from inside calls, “Duvid, ver iz do—who’s there?” A small brown-haired woman appears in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. She looks around the same age as my mother—I mean, my here-mother, my mum. She’s younger than my real mother, my there-mother.
“Good morning,” I say. “I mean, gut-morgn.”
“It is all right,” the woman says with a Russian accent. “I have English, some. I am Bina Kraskov. And you, you are?”
“Abe—I mean, Asher, ma’am.”
Mr. Kraskov plants a scowl on me while he talks to the woman in Yiddish. “This boy, his mother usually brings me the paper. Not him.”
“I am pleased to meet you,” she says. “You will come in please, yes?”
Mr. Kraskov groans at this, but he steps aside to let me into his hovel. A pot is boiling on the coal stove, and the room smells like meat, like maybe calf’s liver. Otherwise, it’s exactly like my flat.
Bina Kraskov smooths her apron. “I move in with Duvid few days ago. He is my—how you say—he is mishpuchah. He is my, I am his—oy.”
A voice calls in from the back room, “He’s Mama’s brother-in-law.” Not just any voice. Mitzy’s. “And he’s my uncle.” Then she’s in the room with us.