David awoke in the strange room and was momentarily afraid, then he saw Sammy’s ginger head on the pillow beside him and the fear receded. He lay still, the perineh tucked high beneath his chin, his face exposed to the frigid air, breathing it in, tasting it. He was used to the cold, in Russia it had been much colder than this; crisp and clear, dry and biting. But the chill he felt now was different, moist and muggy, unclean. It was his first experience of a typical winter morning in Manchester, except that the rain had not yet begun to fall. He buried his face in the pillow to escape from it and from the general strangeness of which it was a part.
Last night, he had dreamed about Sammy and the Cossack again. It was three years since the dreadful thing had happened, but when he dreamed about it, it was as if it was happening all over again. Himself and his little brother sitting on the thick, green grass on the river bank throwing pebbles into the water. His own legs crossed, like Mr. Seretsky, the tailor, when he sewed in his shop, and Sammy with one of his tucked under him and the other stretched out. They were a few yards back from the river because their mother had told them never to go there alone and when they went with her she always warned them to stay away from the edge. When the horses began to clip-clop past in front of them they had to stop tossing the pebbles and the one in his hand felt lovely and smooth when he stroked it. Even the flock of white birds overhead was there in the dream and the gleam of the horses’ coats. And silver braid glinting in the sunlight as one of the tall, uniformed riders reached down and snatched Sammy’s yamulke off his head and threw it into the river. Sammy’s cars were real in the dream, too, plopping onto the pile of pebbles as they had that day; he’d known it was a sin for a Jewish boy not to have his head covered, though he was only two. Then the weeping changed to screams of pain as the Cossack turned back and rode the horse over his leg before he cantered away laughing.
The screams and the laughter were the most terrible part, and the guilty feeling because he’d taken Sammy to play by the Dvina, but his parents had said he mustn’t blame himself, that Cossacks could be cruel to Jews anywhere. Later, his mother had warned him that Cossacks weren’t the only ones, that Jewish children should be on their guard all the time, which she hadn’t told him before because she didn’t want to frighten him. He’d promised her he wouldn’t feel guilty, but when he saw his little brother limping he still did.
He felt Sammy cuddle closer to him under the perineh like he used to at home. But now they had no home. He tried not to think about it. The boy whose bed they were sharing was lying on the other side of Sammy, reading a book, his spectacles perched halfway down his nose. Daylight had just begun filtering into the room and David was not surprised the boy needed spectacles; anyone would get eyestrain from reading in this light. He’d been sound asleep when they crawled in beside him last night, but finding them there this morning didn’t seem to bother him. Unless his sight was so bad he hadn’t noticed them yet?
“Good morning,” David ventured. You couldn’t just lie in someone’s bed and not say a word to them. Even if they hadn’t said a word to you.
The boy gave him a vague smile, then continued reading.
Maybe I wouldn’t be too friendly if I woke up and found two strange boys in my bed, David thought seeking an explanation for his indifference. Not if I didn’t know they’d been driven from their own beds. “It isn’t our fault we have to be here,” he said with the words choking in his throat as memories welled over him. “I bet you never had to hide in a barrel, like Sammy and me did.”
“I got my glasses knocked off, though.”
“When?”
“Before we left Vienna. That’s why we left, my father thought it was time to.”
David digested this interesting information. Why had nobody told him that it wasn’t only in Russia such things happened? Sammy woke up and gave him a good-morning kiss. “I hope you don’t mind us sleeping with you,” David said to the boy.
“The only thing I ever mind is being interrupted when I’m reading. You’ll find that out if you know me for long enough.”
“Well thanks anyway.”
“Why’re you thanking him?” a cool little voice inquired. “None of the other boys who’ve slept here did.”
David had wondered what was behind the curtains which divided the room in half. They had just been tweaked apart and he felt himself being appraised by a pair of pale-coloured eyes. The eyes were fringed by thick, black lashes which matched the tumbled locks framing the small white face.
“It’s good manners to say thank you, Miriam,” a voice said primly from behind her.
“You and your good manners, Helga!” the little girl giggled. She leapt off the bed and stood shivering in her flannel nightdress for a moment, then drew the curtains back fully exposing her sister to David’s view.
Helga was not as pretty as Miriam, but David liked her sweet smile. He judged her to be about his own age and thought she looked kind.
She thought him and Sammy somewhat scruffy-looking and hoped Carl wouldn’t get nits from having them in his bed. “Come back!” she chided as her little sister went to examine the guests at closer quarters.
“I’m only having a look at them.”
“Well you shouldn’t, it’s very rude.”
“I don’t mind her looking at me,” Sammy laughed.
Miriam touched one of his springy curls. “Your hair reminds me of the carrots my mamma makes the tsimmes with. Do you have tsimmes with your chicken on Friday nights, too?”
“Never mind!” David flashed. “And your hair reminds me of dirty old coal!” Nobody was allowed to pass remarks about his brother, it was enough Sammy had to put up with being lame.
Miriam stared at him in bewilderment, then hurtled back to bed to be comforted by Helga.
To David’s surprise, Sammy crawled over him and went to comfort her, too. “You didn’t mean it, did you, David?” He could not bear to see the little girl unhappy.
David could not bear it, either. “No,” he muttered grudgingly.
“Then why did you say it?” Miriam gulped.
David remained silent, but later, when they were eating breakfast in the kitchen, he apologised for upsetting her.
“You’ve fallen out already?” Sigmund chuckled sipping his coffee. “You’ve only just met!”
“It’s all right, I’ve forgiven him,” Miriam said generously and gave David a hug to prove it.
Not yet six and look at her! Rachel thought as she poured hot chocolate for all the children. Such a madam that one’s going to be.
David’s face had flushed with embarrassment, the little girls he had known in Russia had not been so demonstrative. “I thought your eyes were grey—but they’re green—” he stammered watching them sparkle as she smiled.
“She’s got cats’ eyes like Shmerel, our puss,” Carl grinned and ducked when Miriam threw her buttered bagel at him.
“No she hasn’t,” David retorted. They were the loveliest eyes he’d ever seen.
“Living with landsleit isn’t easy,” Sarah sighed to Abraham at the end of the first week. “Get a job already, then we won’t be beholden anymore.”
“Nobody but you thinks of it like that.”
“Maybe they didn’t have my upbringing,” she replied and the look on his face made her sorry she had said it.
Sarah’s childhood was something they never talked about. Her family had once been comfortably off, by Russian-Jewish standards and her father had owned a sizeable piece of land until the oppressors seized it. Losing his property had not diminished his pride, nor did his new straitened circumstances prevent him from objecting to Sarah marrying a cobbler. Only after his younger daughter’s tragic end, which broke his spirit as well as his heart, did he consent to the union. Abraham’s expression told Sarah he was remembering this, too.
“In some ways you take after your father, the way you’re so proud!” he exclaimed.
There were times when Sarah thought she did, but she would not admit it.
“And maybe you think I sit shpeiling with the cards all day, playing pisha-paysha like the old men in the marketplace at home, that I don’t try. Get a job, she tells me!
His last remark was addressed to the air. The Berkowitzes had gone to visit friends and Sarah and Abraham were minding the children, who had just been put to bed. Malka had been reluctant to allow Sarah to undress and wash her little girls, but had eventually been persuaded. One of Sarah’s present troubles was that Malka never allowed her to do anything at all, but she could not make Abraham understand how uncomfortable this made her feel.
“Maybe we should go to New York, like Chavah and Ezra,” he said tentatively, absorbed in his own problems.
“Another seasick I can do without! And where is the boat money coming from?”
“So we’re not going. But I heard it’s bigger.”
“Bigger with people who can’t find jobs.”
The rebuke in her voice brought a sharp retort from him. “My feet are raw from the walking!”
“I’ll make you a nice glass of tea.”
She rose to lift the kettle from the fire, brushing off the thick fur of soot which perpetually coated it, using the activity to calm herself. She was glad her boys were asleep in the parlour, where they could not see their father’s despondent face.
“Tea she’s making for my feet!” he joked half-heartedly. “But cobblers nobody needs.”
Sarah infused the tea in a tall glass, set it in a silver holder which had been her father’s and brought it to the table. Abraham avoided her eye, as if he had something to be ashamed of. She had seen fear in his eyes many times, but never this. She made herself shrug and smile carelessly. “There’s no law you have to be a cobbler.”
“Put in the lemon already!”
She slipped a thin sliver into the glass and watched him place a cube of sugar on his tongue, to sweeten the liquid before he swallowed it down.
“What else do I know?” he asked her.
“Listen to me, Abraham.”
“Don’t I always?”
She stroked his hand. “What did Chaim know when he came? A picture-framer he was in Dvinsk. Now he makes coats. What he can do, you can do. Already they have their own house. For two-and-six a week wouldn’t we be able to rent one, too? So what is two-and-six a week and a few shillings for food, when you know how to get it? A man has to stretch himself, or where is he?”
“Living with landsleit.”
“Which he can’t do forever. Malka’s borscht is already getting thin from the extra water.”
“I tasted.”
“So I don’t have to tell you. All right, you’ll ask Chaim. In the place he works, or somewhere else, maybe they need someone like you.”
He sipped the tea thoughtfully and Sarah saw the light of hope enter his expression. Her own mind was busy with the details of how they would obtain furniture for their home when they acquired one. She had been one step ahead of him all their married life and sometimes wondered if he knew it.
“Caps and gloves they make round here, as well as garments. But getting a job’s another matter,” Chaim replied when Abraham quizzed him.
“You got one didn’t you?” Sarah put in.
“With his uncle,” Abraham reminded her.
Sarah was ironing the clothes she had washed that morning. In Dvinsk she had never had to iron in the evening, but her laundry had to take second place to Malka’s by the fire and had not dried off until suppertime. “I suppose that made things easy for you,” she said to Chaim.
Chaim grinned at Malka, who was mending her parlour curtains because Sarah had offered to do it for her. “To get a job, yes. But in other ways? Don’t ask!”
Malka put down her needle. “It couldn’t have been harder. Staying with us you have a room for your family to yourselves, don’t you?”
“Listen, we’re very grateful,” Sarah hastened to say.
“When we came five years ago, I was grateful to sleep on our Uncle Mottel’s kitchen floor with five other women lying alongside me. At night, Uncle had to put the table out in the back yard to make space for us. On his splintered wood floor. And my Chaim was grateful to share a room smaller than this with their also-grateful husbands.”
“Why d’you think Lakie and Bella weren’t born until we’d been here nearly two years?” Chaim laughed. He leaned forward and pinched his wife’s dimpled cheek. “Until nine months before then, Malka and me never got to sleep together.”
Malka bent over her sewing again to hide her blushes. “You didn’t think it was so funny at the time!” She looked up and gave Sarah a poignant smile. “I thought I’d never get the chance to have any more children. I used to help in the workshop with the buttonholing, but it only kept my hands busy and all I could think of was how we’d lost our darling daughters in that epidemic. You remember, Sarah?”
“How could I forget? I nearly lost my David and I couldn’t look you in the face when we met on the street afterwards, because I’d still got him and your little girls had died.”
“But God’s good. He gave me two more, both together.”
“How could your own uncle treat you that way?” Abraham asked Chaim.
“When it comes to business, you’d be surprised what people can do. So he took advantage of me, if I’d worked for someone else they’ve done the same. At least he taught me the trade. When I’d learned it, he paid me a little better, my five room-mates also, and we could afford to rent our own homes.”
Malka giggled. “The day after we moved out, I walked past Uncle Mottel’s and saw him moving the next lot in.”
“He made a habit of it?” Sarah said incredulously.
“Made a habit of it is right!” Chaim told her. “And plenty of others did, as well. It was how they kept their little pots of gold on the boil. Only an unskilled worker would let it be done to him. Once he became an expert machiner, or whatever, he was off to where he’d earn a bit more. I’m the only one of the six of us who shared that room who’s still with my uncle, and I wouldn’t be there, either, if he hadn’t given me another raise and made me his right-hand man.”
“That a Jew could be like that with his own brethren is hard to believe,” Abraham said in a shocked voice.
“Oy, what babes in arms these Sandbergs are, Malka!” Chaim guffawed. “They know from nothing. Believe me, Abie, it wasn’t uncommon for a man who owned a little sweatshop to go to the railway station and offer room and board to immigrants getting off the trains, so the poor greeners would work for him for next to nothing. These days they can get their cheap labour without providing free bread and herring and a mattress thrown down in a stinking-dirty room. So many people’re fleeing here from Russia just now, they’re lining up to be underpaid. Did you think because we’re all Jews there aren’t some among us who’ll grasp at the chance to exploit the rest? My Uncle Mottel goes to shul and says his prayers just like you and me, Abie, and maybe that means he’s a good Jew, but it doesn’t mean he’s a good man.”
“My head’s going round from all the terrible things he’s telling me,” Abraham muttered to Sarah.
Sarah took the iron out of its tin casing and put it on the glowing embers to reheat. “Chaim’s talking about how things used to be.”
“You didn’t hear the last bit?”
“I’m pretending I didn’t and you’d better do the same,” she said with a firm smile. “Because it doesn’t matter how many people’re lining up to find work, you’ve still got to get a job, haven’t you?”
“I only told you for your own good, Abie, so you won’t have to find everything out the hard way, like I did.” Chaim got up to fetch a pitcher of milk from the dresser and filled the cat’s saucer. He watched the big, black creature leap from a stool by the fire and begin to lap thirstily. “You know I’m getting quite fond of Nicholas, Malka. Even though we only got him to catch the mice.”
“Only my Chaim would name the cat after the Tsar!”
“What’s wrong with calling one killer after another?” Chaim replied. “It looked as if there’d been a massacre when I went in the scullery before you were up this morning.”
“Uggh!”
“It’s the same every morning, he didn’t get that name for nothing. Do you hear any scurrying about in the parlour when you’re lying there in the dark?” Chaim asked Sarah and Abraham. “If so, we’ll put Nicholas in with you for a night or two.”
“We don’t hear a thing,” Sarah lied before her husband had time to open his mouth. She was scared of mice, but the thought of Nicholas’ baleful stare riveting her from the end of the perineh was too much for her.
“Tomorrow you’ll leave with me when I go to work and I’ll show you where the factories are, Abie,” Chaim said. “You can rise at five, like I do, and watch me shovel up the corpses!” he added rumbustiously.
Sarah thought most of Chaim’s jests were in bad taste and this one especially, but she was a guest in his house and forced herself to laugh. Abraham did not even try to. She watched their host give him an encouraging slap on the back which almost catapulted him out of his chair.
“Tomorrow you’ll start your rounds, all right, Abie? Listen, you might get lucky.”
Sarah could not fall asleep that night and the scampering of the mice seemed noisier than usual. She wanted a drink of water, but was afraid of going into the scullery and finding the cat at its nocturnal butchery. When she did doze off, she awoke with a start, convinced there was a mouse inside the perineh with them, but it was only Abraham’s hand wandering on her thigh.
“Is it five-o’clock yet? Or have I got time for another little nap?” he mumbled against her cheek.
Sarah got up and put a match to the candle she kept on the mantelpiece. They never used the gaslight because the Berkowitzes were paying for it. She took Abraham’s watch from his vest pocket and held it near to the flame. “It’s a-quarter-to.” She rubbed her arms and shivered. Getting out of bed in a freezing-cold room she’d never get used to!
Abraham reached out and tugged at the hem of her nightdress. She bent down to kiss him and laughed when he tried to pull her down into his arms. “I know what you haven’t got time for!”
“You’re sure?”
Sarah smiled and blew out the candle and he wasn’t certain whether she had done so because they never made love in the light, even when their children weren’t sharing their room, or was taking off her nightdress to put on her clothes. He had never seen her naked and did not expect to. Sometimes he wondered if Chaim had ever seen Malka that way, but it wasn’t the kind of thing Jewish men talked about, not even when they’d had a few drinks at a wedding. When Inspector Ivanovitch the policeman had sat waiting for a rush job to be done on his wife’s slippers one day he’d talked about nothing else.
When Sarah relit the candle she was tucking her dark wool blouse into her skirt.
Abraham admired her tiny waist for a moment and let his eyes wander lustfully to her small breasts and the neat curve of her hips which did not look as if she had borne three children. A man was only human. “So what can you do?” he sighed watching her brush her hair to remove the night time tangles. “I don’t work for Mr. Chernik the cobbler anymore who didn’t mind if I sometimes got to the shop late in the mornings. Did I ever tell you when you stand in the candlelight your skin looks like silk and your hair like satin?”
“Sure, but I don’t mind hearing it again,” she laughed pinning up her long tresses. “Meanwhile you don’t work for anyone anymore and you never will if you don’t get up and start looking.”
“I’ve never been a lazy man, Sarah.”
“Don’t I know it?”
“But it’s like going out into a wilderness.”
Sarah kept her tone light. “With all those two-storey trains and the rest of the busy traffic?”
“I mean what I’ve got to do. Be something I’m not and first find someone who’ll give me the chance to be it.”
“You’ll find the someone and you’ll be what you have to be. I know you. You’ll do it.”
They heard Malka and Chaim clatter downstairs.
“Get up already!” Sarah glanced at her sleeping children and removed Esther’s thumb from her mouth, then she dropped another kiss on Abraham’s head. “I’m going to the kitchen now.”
“But not to the scullery!” he joked as she was leaving the room.
“I wouldn’t put a foot in there to wash my hands and face until Chaim’s been in with the shovel first!”
Abraham and Chaim left the house at 5:30. Nicholas was encouraged by Malka’s foot to leave with them and went to join a group of feline friends in the middle of the street. People in Strangeways kept their cats in at night to serve their functional purpose and put them out during the day to get them from under their feet.
Some of Chaim’s neighbours were also leaving for work. “Good morning, Shmuel!” he called. “How’s by you today, Nocham? Your head cold’s better, Mendy?”
“Tell me what’s good about it.”
“How can a person be when they have to leave their warm bed and go out in weather like this?”
“My head cold is permanent in such a climate.”
Chaim watched them hurry away and laughed. “Those three miseries say the same every morning, it never varies.”
Abraham glanced at the sullen sky and tucked his muffler into his coat to protect it from the drizzle. “Neither has the weather since I’ve been here. A person can get fed up with it.”
“In Russia we got fed up with the snow, didn’t we? Remember how we had to dig our way out of the house sometimes? It isn’t that long since you were doing it. And when were we ever without chilblains? The reek of that stuff everyone put on them used to knock me over.”
“Nobody suffers from chilblains in England?”
“All right, so they do. But you can get a block of something nice and scented from the chemist, to rub on them.”
“Last night he tells me the brutal truth and this morning he’s kidding to me!” Abraham snapped as they trudged along. “What is it with you?”
“Listen, there’s a time for the truth and another when people need cheering up, so this morning I’m cheering you up. Shoot me!”
When they reached the street corner, Bury New Road was seething with hurrying men in flat caps and long, floppy coats, darting between the trams and carts before disappearing into the side streets like ants on their way to the ant hill. Abraham had not ventured out this early before and the scene had a depressing greyness which chilled his heart. “There must be a lot of factories, to make work for so many people,” he said to Chaim while they were crossing the road.
“Sure, but you’d be surprised how many workers will fit into one small room. You’ll walk with me to Uncle Mottel’s. We don’t need any extra help right now, I wish we did, but there’re plenty more places near there.”
“This is a factory?” Abraham said when Chaim halted outside a small, terraced house. “It’s got curtains at the windows, what kind of workplace is that?”
“The same as many others round here, also a home. My uncle and aunt live downstairs. Upstairs has got sewing machines. You want to see for yourself? Come, I’ll show you, Uncle won’t mind.”
Abraham followed Chaim into the dismal little place. They had to squeeze past some bales of dun-coloured fabric and almost tripped over a couple of underfed cats as they climbed the stairs.
“Uncle keeps two since the mice started nibbling the cloth,” Chaim explained.
He opened a door in the middle of the landing and Abraham caught his breath at the foetid atmosphere which came at him in a sickening wave. At first he thought the room was windowless. Harsh gaslight hollowed the workers’ faces as they bent over sewing machines crammed into every inch of the limited space. The noise of the treadles was deafening and he was sure he could never learn to move his feet as fast as these people were doing.
Women were employed here, too, and a lad who could not have been more than twelve was crouched in a corner with a heap of coats beside him, sewing on buttons. The workers were talking to each other, shouting above the clatter and wiping beads of sweat off their brows with the backs of their hands without pausing in their work, as if it was a mechanical gesture and they were not aware they were doing it.
Chaim had taken off his coat and cap and was straightening his yamulke on his wiry dark hair. “So what do you think of it, Abie?”
Abraham thought of the cobbler’s shop in Dvinsk, where he had worked with just one other person beside a window overlooking the marketplace which had trees in it, leafy in summer, glittering with frost in winter. This room was not windowless he saw now, but the grime-blackened glass was like a shutter between the people who toiled here and the sky, denying the existence of any other world but this. He looked at Chaim and shrugged wordlessly.
“Listen, you’ll get used to it, like I did. You should only be lucky enough to find a job.”
Uncle Mottel was standing at the cutting bench snipping away with his shears. Cutters had to be paid more than machiners, which was why he had never employed one. “You’ve got time for social callers?” he rasped to his nephew without removing the cigar clamped between his yellow teeth. “And also you’re late. So who’s your friend?”
“You don’t remember Abie Sandberg from home, Uncle? Like I told you, he’s staying with me.”
Uncle Mottle’s codfish eyes surveyed Abraham. “Now I remember him. It’s ten years since I left the old country, but how many redhaired Jews do you meet? I wish you luck, Abie, but I’m not short of staff. Come back next week and who knows? You’re a trained machiner?”
Abraham shook his head.
“In that case don’t bother. You’re going to stand there all day, Chaim? Plenty of people would like to be promoted to my righthand man.”
“Go to it!” Chaim said encouragingly as Abraham opened the door to leave and clapped him on the back to help him on his way.
Abraham hurried down the narrow staircase and stumbled outside, gulping in air greedily. Even the smell of smoke and horse dung was a pleasure after Uncle Mottel’s workroom. He eyed the other houses uncertainly. How was he to tell which of them were also factories? The only way was to knock and find out. He tried a house across the street.
A young woman in a rusty-looking black dress opened the door, dabbing at her swollen eyes. “The funeral’s not till this afternoon,” she sobbed. “But you can come in if you like, all my brother’s friends who aren’t working are here already.”
Abraham was momentarily tongue-tied. What did you say when you’d intruded on someone’s grief? “You’ve lost your brother?” he stammered. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You’d like me to lose him also? His friends are here to comfort him, but Job’s comforters we can do without.”
He walked away with the sound of the slamming door echoing in his ears. It was not easy for him to knock on another one, but he made himself do so.
“I’ll pay what I owe next week and if you don’t like it you can take the china cabinet, or the sofa, or whatever it is you’re too mean to wait for the money for, back to the store!” an irate female voice told him through a crack in the door. “Lousy debt-collectors!”
He ran down the street to escape from the voice.
“Where’s the fire?” a familiar voice called to him. Shloime Lipkin was standing on the corner watching him run.
Abraham halted beside him and laughed. “It’s good to see you, Mr. Lipkin.”
Shloime took off his wet cap, wrung it out and put it on again. “Oy, if only some of the factories I’ve called at since I got here would say that! You found anyone who needs a cobbler yet?”
“Who needs a cobbler? Today I’m trying the garment places.”
“I’ve got competition! So we’ll keep each other company, Mr. Sandberg, we’ll look together, why not?”
They plodded along the road and turned into another side street. Shloime made straight for a door which was ajar.
“How do we know it’s a workplace? Walking in like this, without knocking, we could get hit on the head with a frying pan,” Abraham said as they entered. “Two experiences I just had I wouldn’t want to repeat.”
“When it’s a factory as well, they always leave the door open,” Shloime informed him. “To save the boss’s wife from letting in callers all day.”
Some dejected-looking men were coming downstairs.
“Why’re we bothering to go up, Mr. Lipkin?” Abraham said scanning their faces. “It’s a waste of time.”
“Your friend’s right,” one of the men said to Shloime. “I’m an experienced machiner, I was a tailor’s assistant in Kiev, but here nobody wants to know.” He rubbed his bloodshot eyes wearily. “If I wasn’t living with landsleit I’d go home and put my head under the covers, the way I feel, but you can’t do that in someone else’s house.” He thrust his hands into his coat pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet for a moment. “So what can you do?” he sighed as he left.
“There’s always the Benevolent Fund and the Board of Guardians,” another man called after him.
“What’re they?” Shloime inquired.
“People who’ve been here long enough to save a bit give what they can spare to them, to help folk like us.”
“Charity?” Abraham said in a shocked voice.
“The rabbi at our shul told me about it. I didn’t say I was going to ask them for anything, did I?” the man snapped. He took a soggy packet from his pocket and bit off some of the black bread which was protruding from it, then walked away.
“So I’m wasting my time, but I promised Gittel I’d try,” Shloime shrugged.
“Didn’t I promise my wife the same?” Abraham followed him upstairs.
They spent the rest of the morning trudging around Strangeways, trailing up rickety staircases and down them again after men in shirtsleeves, or bulky cardigans, who reminded Abraham of Uncle Mottel, had shaken their heads and turned their backs on them.
“Why don’t we try a real factory?” he said to Shloime desperately.
“My landsleit Judah Mishnik said I shouldn’t bother. They pay better, so they get the pick of the workers. We don’t stand a chance,” Shloime led the way through yet another doorway. “Here, they make waterproofs, I can tell by the stink. It makes me want to throw up.”
Abraham was trying not to breathe in. “Me also.”
“It’s the varnish they glue the hems down with,” Shloime told him when they reached the workroom.
“Judah’s a shmearer, that’s what they call those who do that job.”
Abraham got a glimpse of the shmearers’ fingers swooping birdlike into cans of the malodorous substance, then flying lightning fast along the edges of garments amid the same clatter and confusion he had found everywhere.
“I wouldn’t do that job for a fortune!” he declared when they were back on the street again.
“For that job they don’t pay no fortune.”
“Whatever they pay I wouldn’t do it.”
“Me, I’d do anything,” Shloime said flatly. “Anything is better than nothing.”
By now, they were soaked to the skin and calling each other by their first names. They sheltered in the doorway of a baker’s shop on the main road for a moment and stared in the window at the mouth-watering array.
“What d’you fancy, Abie? An onion bun, maybe? A hot poppyseed roll, smothered in butter? Or just a nice piece of strudel?” Shloime drooled.
“Let’s move away from here, Shloime. It’s giving me an appetite. You’re going home for a bite?”
“It’s enough my landsleit have to feed me breakfast and supper.”
“I feel the same. Malka wanted to give me a sandwich to bring, but I said I don’t get hungry.”
“That’s what I told Becky Mishnik. A pair of liars we are,” Shloime said wryly. “But a little break would do us good. Come, I’ll take you where I always go at this time of day and we’ll get a glass of tea there with the rest of the boys.”