Then to the muddy exercise yard for recess, the younger girls dispersing to their various territories and strongholds: the swing-set, the hopscotch board, the shady corner. Kreindel spent this time walking the perimeter of the yard, as close to the fence as the monitors would allow. She noted the small gate in the fence along 136th, and the path that led to a basement stairwell; and saw that the gate was held shut by a simple padlock, one that might be broken with enough strength.
At supper Kreindel once more prayed and ate, and endured the stares and quiet giggles. Then all went back to their dormitories, to wash and change and stand beside their cots for the nightly inspection. Each smudged face or dirty fingernail was announced by the monitor, and earned the miscreant a pinch or a slap. As Kreindel was fastidious about washing, it took some time for her to realize that most of these infractions were imaginary, merely excuses for the monitors to dole out punishments, and that she herself was immune.
At nine o’clock precisely everyone crawled beneath their thin cotton sheets and their blankets of gray shoddy. A final bell—and the lights went out in unison.
Coughs, sighs; the sounds of small, restless bodies, of lumpy pillows being punched into better shape. A few lonely, muffled sobs. Slowly the noises faded—but not until the entire dormitory had calmed into sleep would Kreindel at last slide out of bed and pad in her nightdress to the hallway door, crack it open bit by bit, and slip through.
The Asylum at night was a place of gigantic, moonlit proportions, where hallways stretched endlessly and ceilings disappeared into darkness. Night by night she learned her surroundings, memorizing the places where the old wooden floorboards groaned beneath her feet, staying alert for the creak of a door, the flush of a toilet. Sometimes she had to scurry for cover as, with a deafening chorus of whispers and shushes, a raiding party from a boys’ dormitory passed by on their way to the kitchen, hunting for slices of bread and cheese. Capture by the monitors was a rite of passage for the boys, who’d bear the beatings and then display their bruises proudly in the morning. Kreindel, long trained in silence, was never caught.
Each night she scouted, considering her options. The dormitory floor was too well traveled, too full of children. The ground floor seemed more likely to contain an unused coat-closet or forgotten niche—but in the end she couldn’t trust that what appeared abandoned at night would remain so during the day. And so, little by little, Kreindel’s search took her down the wide central staircase, and into the basement.
In daylight hours, the north wing of the Asylum’s basement was a place of loud and hectic industry. Clouds of steam billowed from the laundry, where the older residents spent their chore hours operating the gigantic pressers and mangles. Next door was the shoe-shop with its smells of leather and polish, its rows of iron lasts. Beyond that was the vast, naphtha-scented room where the boys of the Marching Band—the Asylum’s pride and joy—kept their feathered hats and braid-covered jackets, their shining white spats.
The basement’s southern wing, however, was seldom traveled: a place of custodial closets and supply rooms, boilers and pipes and valves. And it was here that Kreindel now crept in the darkness, just a little farther every night. The equipment room, the children’s property room, the textbook room: she tried each door but they all were locked, one after another, all down the length of the southern wing. It was well into autumn now, the weather turning colder day by day; on some mornings, lying in her cot, Kreindel could see her breath in the air. But the basement’s southern wing remained persistently warm, and grew more so the farther she traveled, as though she were approaching the building’s beating heart.
In November she reached the final door. She had little hope left; there was no reason to think this one would be different from the others. Was there a prayer for success in opening a locked door? In her desperation she could recall no prayers at all. She thought only, with great fervency: Please.
She grasped the knob—and felt it turn beneath her touch.
An hour later she crept to bed again, shivering with exhaustion. Dust and grime streaked her nightgown; cobwebs laced her hair. But she was elated nonetheless. She closed her eyes, and thought:
You have a new home, Yossele. Come and see.
Later that night, a longshoreman hauling barrels from an East River rail barge suddenly yelped in fright and let go of his barrel, which rolled off the ramp and landed in the river with a splash. When his boss berated him for the loss of cargo, he could only reply that he’d seen a dead man in the water, walking beneath the pier.
Northward Yossele went, fording along the bottom. He moved only at night, in utter blackness, blindly contending with the refuse of the shipping channel: rusted anchors and propeller blades, lengths of rope twined with river-weeds. He spent a day resting beneath a Gas House pier, next to the chain-wrapped remains of a corpse, while the Blackwell’s Island ferry plowed back and forth above him. Algae tried to take root in his body, without success. Bluefish and striped bass approached him, nibbled at him briefly, and then swam away.
The piers thinned, forcing him to walk in open water. The channel narrowed, and the currents strengthened until he had to crawl across the murky bottom, or else risk being pulled off his feet. The water grew colder, and only the friction of his clay muscles kept him warm. Now he must keep moving in day as well as night, or else he’d stiffen entirely.
On and on he crawled—until late one frosty night Kreindel was no longer north of him,
