On the Sabbath she asked Matron for a pair of candles, so that she might say the blessing over them; and the nurses gathered in her doorway and wiped away tears as she lit them and prayed. Another woman watched with them, a steel-haired lady in a long, dark dress. This, Kreindel had learned, was the headmistress.
“Matron says you’re a healthy young girl,” the headmistress said briskly, once the others had left. She spoke her Yiddish like a German, just as the settlement ladies had. “We’ll keep you for the full week, to make certain. Then you’ll be ready to live in the dormitory.” She watched Kreindel for a moment, as though gauging her, then said, “Matron also tells me that she explained to you how most children arrive here.”
“She said that a parent brings them,” Kreindel said. “And that I’m much older than usual. Since I’m eight.”
The headmistress nodded. “It may feel overwhelming, at first. So let’s find an extracurricular or an interest group for you, something that you enjoy doing, and that might help you to adjust. If you like to sing, for instance, you could join our Glee Club. Or, let’s see—you could learn a musical instrument, or join the badminton squad, or learn Hebrew—”
“You have Hebrew lessons?” Kreindel said, surprised. “For girls, too? Not just boys?”
“We do indeed,” the headmistress replied, smiling.
For the first time since the night of the fire, Kreindel felt something stir inside her, her soul rousing itself from numbness. “I’d like to take Hebrew lessons, please.”
“Then I’ll tell the beginners’ class to expect a new student. Oh—and one more thing.” The woman smiled again, as though to soften whatever came next. “We encourage our new arrivals to adopt new names, to help them fit in more easily. It might feel strange at first, but I promise you’ll grow used to it. Now, what would you like to be called? Claire, perhaps?”
Kreindel stared at her dumbly. A new name? Claire? It was unthinkable—and yet the unthinkable had already happened. Her father was dead, and she was at the Asylum’s mercy. Would the other children make fun of her, with a name like Kreindel? Yes, of course they would.
The governess was waiting patiently, wearing her down with silence. It would be so easy to say yes, here in this place where she knew no one, an orphan, utterly alone—
No. Wait. She wasn’t alone at all. She would never be alone, for she had Yossele. She’d brought him to life, and now he was out there in the night, listening for her command. Her protector, and a sacred gift from her father and the Almighty both. She would prove herself worthy of him.
Her back stiffened. She glared at the headmistress. “My name,” she said, “is Kreindel Altschul.”
And in the waters of the East River, holding fast to a pier piling, Yossele saw what Kreindel saw, felt what Kreindel felt. Tugboats and rail barges plied endlessly back and forth above him, their shadows darkening the water. Currents and wakes pulled at him; engine oil slicked his glass eyes as he watched his master’s thoughts, waiting for her to call him to her side.
They tried, nevertheless, to call her Claire.
When she corrected them, they’d smile and move on, confident she’d accept the change once she was among girls who couldn’t remember being called Rivke instead of Rebecca, or Dvoire instead of Deborah. But when the quarantine ended at last, and she was taken to her new dormitory and saw the footlocker at the end of her cot with the name Altschul, Claire stenciled in black paint, Kreindel grew furious. Show me where it’s written, she demanded, that I must change my name to live here.
But of course there was no such rule. The “modernization” of the children’s names was meant to proceed naturally from the Asylum’s civic values, not from an order on high. She’d backed them into a corner; the matter was quietly dropped. But already her reputation had been cemented. Prickly, recalcitrant. A difficult child.
She fared little better among her peers. At first, a few of the bolder girls ventured to introduce themselves to her, and invited her into their playground circles, to shoot marbles and skip rope. At eight, Kreindel might’ve been glad for the inclusion; at eleven, she thought the games pointless and childish, and soon the others stopped asking. Were she another girl, they would’ve played the usual pranks: items snatched from her footlocker, her cot short-sheeted, her dinner-tray knocked from her hands. But Kreindel, true orphan, was left alone.
Each morning, at the rising bell, she donned her uniform of white blouse and brown skirt—a baggy, horrible thing, the cotton as stiff as canvas—and marched through the halls to a synagogue that had no partition, only an aisle to divide the girls from the boys. Then, the dining hall, where she murmured the proper prayers over her bread and margarine while the rest of her table stared and giggled. The bell, again—and up the hill they marched to P.S. 186, where she was sequestered with an English tutor. She resented the lessons, but learned quickly regardless, and soon was sent to the regular classes with her peers: Arithmetic and Science, History and Literature. Then back down the hill for a dinner of meat and stewed prunes—universally detested for the way they dodged and squirted when poked with a fork, as well as for what Matron called their “healthful effects”—and then, at last, to the class that the headmistress had promised her.
Hebrew study was the sole balm of Kreindel’s days. She was meant to be a beginner, of course, but it wasn’t long before the instructor realized she had a prodigy on her hands. She
