Hungry Hearts
get my rent in time. You wanted to have a swell house, so you painted
it. That's all."
With a wave of his hand he dismissed her.
"I beg by your conscience! Think on God!" Hanneh Hayyeh wrung her
hands. "Ain't your house worth more to you to have a tenant clean
it out and paint it out so beautiful like I done?"
"Certainly," snarled the landlord. "Because the flat is painted
new, I can get more money for it. I got no more time for you."
He turned to his stenographer and resumed the dictation of his letters.
Dazedly Hanneh Hayyeh left the office. A choking dryness contracted her
throat as she staggered blindly, gesticulating and talking to herself.
"Oi weh! The sweat, the money I laid into my flat and it should
all go to the devil. And I should be turned out and leave all my
beautifulness. And from where will I get the money for moving? When
I begin to break myself up to move, I got to pay out money for the
moving man, money for putting up new lines, money for new shelves
and new hooks besides money for the rent. I got to remain where
I am. But from where can I get together the five dollars for the
robber? Should I go to Moisheh Itzek, the pawnbroker, or should I maybe
ask Mrs. Preston? No--She shouldn't think I got her for a friend only
to help me. Oi weh! Where should I turn with my bitter heart?"
Mechanically she halted at the butcher-shop. Throwing herself on the
vacant bench, she buried her face in her shawl and burst out in a loud,
heart-piercing wail: "Woe is me! Bitter is me!"
"Hanneh Hayyeh! What to you happened?" cried Mr. Sopkin in alarm.
His sympathy unlocked the bottom depths of her misery.
"Oi-i-i! Black is my luck! Dark is for my eyes!"
The butcher and the neighbors pressed close in upon her.
"Gewalt! What is it? Bad news from Aby in France?"
"Oi-i-i! The murderer! The thief! His gall should burst as mine is
bursting! His heart should break as mine is breaking! It remains for
me nothing but to be thrown out in the gutter. The landlord raised me
five dollars a month rent. And he ripped yet my wounds by telling me he
raised me the rent because my painted-up flat is so much more worth."
"The dogs! The blood-sucking landlords! They are the new czars from
America!"
"What are you going to do?"
"What should I do? Aby is coming from France any day, and he's got
to have a home to come to. I will have to take out from my eating the
meat and the milk to save together the extra five dollars. People! Give
me an advice! What else can I do? If a wild wolf falls on you in the
black night, will crying help you?"
With a gesture of abject despair, she fell prone upon the
bench. "Gottuniu! If there is any justice and mercy on this earth,
then may the landlord be tortured like he is torturing me! May the
fires burn him and the waters drown him! May his flesh be torn from him
in pieces and his bones be ground in the teeth of wild dogs!"
Two months later, a wasted, haggard Hanneh Hayyeh stood in the kitchen,
folding Mrs. Preston's wash in her basket, when the janitor--the
servant of her oppressor--handed her another note.
"From the landlord," he said in his toneless voice.
Hanneh Hayyeh paled. She could tell from his smirking sneer that it was
a second notice of increased rental.
It grew black before her eyes. She was too stunned to think. Her first
instinct was to run to her husband; but she needed sympathy--not
nagging. And then in her darkness she saw a light--the face of her
friend, Mrs. Preston. She hurried to her.
"Oi--friend! The landlord raised me my rent again," she gasped,
dashing into the room like a thing hounded by wild beasts.
Mrs. Preston was shocked by Hanneh Hayyeh's distraught appearance.
For the first time she noticed the ravages of worry and
hunger.
"Hanneh Hayyeh! Try to calm yourself. It is really quite inexcusable
the way the landlords are taking advantage of the situation. There must
be a way out. We'll fix it up somehow."
"How fix it up?" Hanneh Hayyeh flared.
"We'll see that you get the rent you need." There was reassurance
and confidence in Mrs. Preston's tone.
Hanneh Hayyeh's eyes flamed. Too choked for utterance, her breath
ceased for a moment.
"I want no charity! You think maybe I came to beg? No--I want
justice!"
She shrank in upon herself, as though to ward off the raised whip of
her persecutor. "You know how I feel?" Her voice came from the
terrified depths of her. "It's as if the landlord pushed me in a
corner and said to me: 'I want money, or I'll squeeze from you your
life!' I have no money, so he takes my life.
"Last time, when he raised me my rent, I done without meat and
without milk. What more can I do without?"
The piercing cry stirred Mrs. Preston as no mere words had done.
"Sometimes I get so weak for a piece of meat, I could tear the world
to pieces. Hunger and bitterness are making a wild animal out of me. I
ain't no more the same Hanneh Hayyeh I used to be."
The shudder that shook Hanneh Hayyeh communicated itself to
Mrs. Preston. "I know the prices are hard to bear," she stammered,
appalled.
"There used to be a time when poor people could eat cheap things,"
the toneless voice went on. "But now there ain't no more cheap
things. Potatoes--rice--fish--even dry bread is dear. Look on my
shoes! And I who used to be so neat with myself. I can't no more have
my torn shoes fixed up. A pair of shoes or a little patch is only for
millionaires."
"Something must be done," broke in Mrs. Preston, distraught for the
first time in her life. "But in the meantime, Hanneh Hayyeh, you must
accept this to tide you over." She spoke with finality as she handed
her a bill.
Hanneh Hayyeh thrust back the money. "Ain't I hurt enough without
you having to hurt me yet with charity? You want to give me hush money
to swallow down an unrightness that burns my flesh? I want justice."
The woman's words were like bullets that shot through the static
security of Mrs. Preston's life. She realized with a guilty pang that
while strawberries and cream were being served at her table in January,
Hanneh Hayyeh had doubtless gone without a square meal in months.
"We can't change the order of things overnight," faltered
Mrs. Preston, baffled and bewildered by Hanneh Hayyeh's defiance of
her proffered aid.
"Change things? There's got to be a change!" cried Hanneh Hayyeh
with renewed intensity. "The world as it is is not to live in any
longer. If only my Aby would get back quick. But until he comes,
I'll fight till all America will have to stop and listen to me. You
was always telling me that the lowest nobody got something to give to
America. And that's what I got to give to America--the last breath in
my body for justice. I'll wake up America from its sleep. I'll go
myself to the President with my Aby's soldier picture and ask him was
all this war to let loose a bunch of blood-suckers to suck the marrow
out from the people?"
"Hanneh Hayyeh," said Mrs. Preston, with feeling, "these laws are
far from just, but they are all we have so far. Give us time. We are
young. We are still learning. We're doing our best."
Numb with suffering the woman of the ghetto looked straight into the
eyes of Mrs. Preston. "And you too--you too hold by the landlord's
side?--Oi--I see! Perhaps you too got property out by agents."
A sigh that had in it the resignation of utter hopelessness escaped
from her. "Nothing can hurt me no more--And you always stood out to
me in my dreams as the angel from love and beautifulness. You always
made-believe to me that you're only for democracy."
Tears came to Mrs. Preston's eyes. But she made no move to defend
herself or reply and Hanneh Hayyeh walked out in silence.
A few days later the whole block was astir with the news that Hanneh
Hayyeh had gone to court to answer her dispossess summons.
From the windows, the stoop, from the hallway, and the doorway of the
butcher-shop the neighbors were talking and gesticulating while waiting
for Hanneh Hayyeh's return.
Hopeless and dead, Hanneh Hayyeh dragged herself to the
butcher-shop. All made way for her to sit on the bench. She collapsed
in a heap, not uttering a single sound, nor making a single move.
The butcher produced a bottle of brandy and, hastily filling a small
glass, brought it to Hanneh Hayyeh.
"Quick, take it to your lips," he commanded. Weak from lack of food
and exhausted by the ordeal of the court-room, Hanneh Hayyeh obeyed
like a child.
Soon one neighbor came in with a cup of hot coffee; another brought
bread and herring with onion over it.
Tense, breathless, with suppressed curiosity quivering on their lips,
they waited till Hanneh Hayyeh swallowed the coffee and ate enough to
regain a little strength.
"Nu? What became in the court?"
"What said the judge?"
"Did they let you talk yourself out like you said you would?"
"Was the murderer there to say something?"
Hanneh Hayyeh wagged her head and began talking to herself in a low,
toneless voice as if continuing her inward thought. "The judge said
the same as Mrs. Preston said: the landlord has the right to raise our
rent or put us out."
"Oi weh! If Hanneh Hayyeh with her fire in her mouth couldn't get
her rights, then where are we?"
"To whom should we go? Who more will talk for us now?"
"Our life lays in their hands."
"They can choke us so much as they like!"
"Nobody cares. Nobody hears our cry!"
Out of this babel of voices there flashed across Hanneh Hayyeh's
deadened senses the chimera that to her was the one reality of her
aspiring soul--"Oi-i-i-i! My beautiful kitchen!" she sighed as in
a dream.
The butcher's face grew red with wrath. His eyes gleamed like sharp,
darting steel. "I wouldn't give that robber the satisfaction
to leave your grand painted house," he said, turning to Hanneh
Hayyeh. "I'd smash down everything for spite. You got nothing to
lose. Such a murderer! I would learn him a lesson! 'An eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.'"
Hanneh Hayyeh, hair disheveled, clothes awry, the nails of her
fingers dug in her scalp, stared with the glazed, impotent stare of a
madwoman. With unseeing eyes she rose and blindly made her way to her
house.
As she entered her kitchen she encountered her husband hurrying in.
"Oi weh! Oi weh!" he whined. "I was always telling you your bad
end. Everybody is already pointing their fingers on me! and all because
you, a meshugeneh yideneh, a starved beggerin, talked it into your
head that you got to have for yourself a white-painted kitchen alike
to Mrs. Preston. Now you'll remember to listen to your husband. Now,
when you'll be laying in the street to shame and to laughter for the
whole world."
"Out! Out from my sight! Out from my house!" shrieked Hanneh
Hayyeh. In her rage she seized a flat-iron and Jake heard her hurl it
at the slammed door as he fled downstairs.
It was the last night before the eviction. Hanneh Hayyeh gazed about
her kitchen with tear-glazed eyes. "Some one who got nothing but
only money will come in here and get the pleasure from all this
beautifulness that cost me the blood from my heart. Is this already
America? What for was my Aby fighting? Was it then only a dream--all
these millions people from all lands and from all times, wishing and
hoping and praying that America is? Did I wake myself from my dreaming
to see myself back in the black times of Russia under the czar?"
Her eager, beauty-loving face became distorted with hate. "No--the
landlord ain't going to get the best from me! I'll learn him a
lesson. 'An eye for an eye'--"
With savage fury, she seized the chopping-axe and began to scratch
down the paint, breaking the plaster on the walls. She tore up the
floor-boards. She unscrewed the gas-jets, turned on the gas full force