Hungry Hearts
The voices of her neighbors rose from every corner, but Hanneh Hayyeh,
deaf to all, projected herself forward.
"What are you pushing yourself so wild? You ain't going to get your
meat first. Ain't it, Mr. Sopkin, all got to wait their turn?"
Mr. Sopkin glanced up in the midst of cutting apart a quarter of
meat. He wiped his knife on his greasy apron and leaned across the
counter.
"Nu? Hanneh Hayyeh?" his ruddy face beamed. "Have you another
letter from little Aby in France? What good news have you got to tell
us?"
"No--it's not a letter," she retorted, with a gesture of
impatience. "The good news is that I got done with the painting of
my kitchen--and you all got to come and give a look how it shines in my
house like in a palace."
Mr. Sopkin resumed cutting the meat.
"Oi weh!" clamored Hanneh Hayyeh, with feverish breathlessness.
"Stop with your meat already and quick come. The store ain't
going to run away from you! It will take only a minute.
With one step you are upstairs in my house." She flung out
her hands. "And everybody got to come along."
"Do you think I can make a living from looking on the wonders you
turn over in your house?" remonstrated the butcher, with a twinkle in
his eye.
"Making money ain't everything in life. My new-painted kitchen will
light up your heart with joy."
Seeing that Mr. Sopkin still made no move, she began to coax and
wheedle, woman-fashion. "Oi weh! Mr. Sopkin! Don't be so mean. Come
only. Your customers ain't going to run away from you. If they do,
they only got to come back, because you ain't a skinner. You weigh
the meat honest."
How could Mr. Sopkin resist such seductive flattery?
"Hanneh Hayyeh!" he laughed. "You're crazy up in the air, but
nobody can say no to anything you take into your head."
He tossed his knife down on the counter. "Everybody!" he called;
"let us do her the pleasure and give a look on what she got to show
us."
"Oi weh! I ain't got no time," protested one. "I left my baby
alone in the house locked in."
"And I left a pot of eating on the stove boiling. It must be all
burned away by this time."
"But you all got time to stand around here and chatter like a box of
monkeys, for hours," admonished Mr. Sopkin. "This will only take a
minute. You know Hanneh Hayyeh. We can't tear ourselves away from her
till we do what wills itself in her mind."
Protesting and gesticulating, they all followed Mr. Sopkin as Hanneh
Hayyeh led the way. Through the hallway of a dark, ill-smelling
tenement, up two flights of crooked, rickety stairs, they filed. When
Hanneh Hayyeh opened the door there were exclamations of wonder and
joy: "Oi! Oi!" and "Ay! Ay! Takeh! Takeh!"
"Gold is shining from every corner!"
"Like for a holiday!"
"You don't need to light up the gas, so it shines!"
"I wish I could only have it so grand!"
"You ain't got worries on your head, so it lays in your mind to
make it so fancy."
Mr. Sopkin stood with mouth open, stunned with wonder at the
transformation.
Hanneh Hayyeh shook him by the sleeve exultantly. "Nu? Why ain't
you saying something?"
"Grand ain't the word for it! What a whiteness! And what a
cleanliness! It tears out the eyes from the head! Such a tenant the
landlord ought to give out a medal or let down the rent free. I saw
the rooms before and I see them now. What a difference from one house
to another."
"Ain't you coming in?" Hanneh Hayyeh besought her neighbors.
"God from the world! To step with our feet on this new painted
floor?"
"Shah!" said the butcher, taking off his apron and spreading it
on the floor. "You can all give a step on my apron. It's dirty,
anyhow."
They crowded in on the outspread apron and vied with one another in
their words of praise.
"May you live to see your son married from this kitchen, and may we
all be invited to the wedding!"
"May you live to eat here cake and wine on the feasts of your
grandchildren!"
"May you have the luck to get rich and move from here into your own
bought house!"
"Amen!" breathed Hanneh Hayyeh. "May we all forget from our
worries for rent!"
* * * * *
Mrs. Preston followed with keen delight Hanneh Hayyeh's every
movement as she lifted the wash from the basket and spread it on the
bed. Hanneh Hayyeh's rough, toil-worn hands lingered lovingly,
caressingly over each garment. It was as though the fabrics held
something subtly animate in their texture that penetrated to her very
finger-tips.
"Hanneh Hayyeh! You're an artist!" There was reverence in
Mrs. Preston's low voice that pierced the other woman's inmost
being. "You do my laces and batistes as no one else ever has. It's
as if you breathed part of your soul into it."
The hungry-eyed, ghetto woman drank in thirstily the beauty and
goodness that radiated from Mrs. Preston's person. None of the
cultured elegance of her adored friend escaped Hanneh Hayyeh. Her
glance traveled from the exquisite shoes to the flawless hair of the
well-poised head.
"Your things got so much fineness. I'm crazy for the feel from
them. I do them up so light in my hands like it was thin air I was
handling."
Hanneh Hayyeh pantomimed as she spoke and Mrs. Preston, roused from her
habitual reserve, put her fine, white hand affectionately over Hanneh
Hayyeh's gnarled, roughened ones.
"Oi-i-i-i! Mrs. Preston! You always make me feel so grand!" said
Hanneh Hayyeh, a mist of tears in her wistful eyes. "When I go away
from you I could just sit down and cry. I can't give it out in words
what it is. It chokes me so--how good you are to me--You ain't at all
like a rich lady. You're so plain from the heart. You make the lowest
nobody feel he's somebody."
"You are not a 'nobody,' Hanneh Hayyeh. You are an artist--an
artist laundress."
"What mean you an artist?"
"An artist is so filled with love for the beautiful that he has
to express it in some way. You express it in your washing just as a
painter paints it in a picture."
"Paint?" exclaimed Hanneh Hayyeh. "If you could only give a look
how I painted up my kitchen! It lights up the whole tenement house for
blocks around. The grocer and the butcher and all the neighbors were
jumping in the air from wonder and joy when they seen how I shined up
my house."
"And all in honor of Aby's home-coming?" Mrs. Preston smiled,
her thoughts for a moment on her own son, the youngest captain in his
regiment whose home-coming had been delayed from week to week.
"Everything I do is done for my Aby," breathed Hanneh Hayyeh,
her hands clasping her bosom as if feeling again the throb of his
babyhood at her heart. "But this painting was already dreaming itself
in my head for years. You remember the time the hot iron fell on my
foot and you came to see me and brought me a red flower-pot wrapped
around with green crepe paper? That flower-pot opened up the sky in
my kitchen." The words surged from the seething soul of her. "Right
away I saw before my eyes how I could shine up my kitchen like a parlor
by painting the walls and sewing up new curtains for the window. It was
like seeing before me your face every time I looked on your flowers. I
used to talk to it like it could hear and feel and see. And I said to
it: 'I'll show you what's in me. I'll show you that I know what
beautiful is.'"
Her face was aglow with an enthusiasm that made it seem young, like a
young girl's face.
"I begged myself by the landlord to paint up my kitchen, but he
wouldn't listen to me. So I seen that if I ever hoped to fix up my
house, I'd have to spend out my own money. And I began to save a
penny to a penny to have for the paint. And when I seen the painters,
I always stopped them to ask where and how to buy it so that it
should come out the cheapest. By day and by night it burned in me the
picture--my kitchen shining all white like yours, till I couldn't
rest till I done it."
With all her breeding, with all the restraint of her Anglo-Saxon
forbears, Mrs. Preston was strangely shaken by Hanneh Hayyeh's
consuming passion for beauty. She looked deep into the eyes of the
Russian Jewess as if drinking in the secret of their hidden glow.
"I am eager to see that wonderful kitchen of yours," she said, as
Hanneh Hayyeh bade her good-bye.
Hanneh Hayyeh walked home, her thoughts in a whirl with the glad
anticipation of Mrs. Preston's promised visit. She wondered how she
might share the joy of Mrs. Preston's presence with the butcher and
all the neighbors. "I'll bake up a shtrudel cake," she thought to
herself. "They will all want to come to get a taste of the cake and
then they'll give a look on Mrs. Preston."
Thus smiling and talking to herself she went about her work. As she
bent over the wash-tub rubbing the clothes, she visualized the hot,
steaming shtrudel just out of the oven and the exclamations of pleasure
as Mrs. Preston and the neighbors tasted it. All at once there was a
knock at the door. Wiping her soapy hands on the corner of her apron,
she hastened to open it.
"Oi! Mr. Landlord! Come only inside," she urged. "I got the
rent for you, but I want you to give a look around how I shined up my
flat."
The Prince Albert that bound the protruding stomach of Mr. Benjamin
Rosenblatt was no tighter than the skin that encased the smooth-shaven
face. His mouth was tight. Even the small, popping eyes held a tight
gleam.
"I got no time. The minutes is money," he said, extending a
claw-like hand for the rent.
"But I only want you for a half a minute." And Hanneh Hayyeh
dragged the owner of her palace across the threshold. "Nu? Ain't
I a good painter? And all this I done while other people were sleeping
themselves, after I'd come home from my day's work."
"Very nice," condescended Mr. Benjamin Rosenblatt, with a hasty
glance around the room. "You certainly done a good job. But I got
to go. Here's your receipt." And the fingers that seized Hanneh
Hayyeh's rent-money seemed like pincers for grasping molars.
Two weeks later Jake Safransky and his wife Hanneh Hayyeh sat eating
their dinner, when the janitor came in with a note.
"From the landlord," he said, handing it to Hanneh Hayyeh, and
walked out.
"The landlord?" she cried, excitedly. "What for can it be?"
With trembling fingers she tore open the note. The slip dropped from
her hand. Her face grew livid, her eyes bulged with terror. "Oi
weh!" she exclaimed, as she fell back against the wall.
"Gewalt!" cried her husband, seizing her limp hand, "you look
like struck dead."
"Oi-i-i! The murderer! He raised me the rent five dollars a month."
"Good for you! I told you to listen to me. Maybe he thinks we got
money laying in the bank when you got so many dollars to give out on
paint."
She turned savagely on her husband. "What are you tearing yet my
flesh? Such a money-grabber! How could I imagine for myself that so he
would thank me for laying in my money to painting up his house?"
She seized her shawl, threw it over her head, and rushed to the
landlord's office.
"Oi weh! Mr. Landlord! Where is your heart? How could you raise me
my rent when you know my son is yet in France? And even with the extra
washing I take in I don't get enough when the eating is so dear?"
"The flat is worth five dollars more," answered Mr. Rosenblatt,
impatiently. "I can get another tenant any minute."
"Have pity on me! I beg you! From where I can squeeze out the five
dollars more for you?"
"That don't concern me. If you can't pay, somebody else will. I
got to look out for myself. In America everybody looks out for
himself."
"Is it nothing by you how I painted up your house with my own
blood-money?"
"You didn't do it for me. You done it for yourself," he
sneered. "It's nothing to me how the house looks, so long as I