In New York, my father allowed strangers to stay with us; anyone from the Ukraine was welcome to sleep on our floor. At shul he gave to the poor, though I couldn’t imagine who could be poorer than we. He was a good man, but what was goodness in a world where men who were slaving in close quarters fell to tuberculosis and were all but worked to death? I looked upon the long-suffering immigrants with contempt. They were sheep to me, creatures who dared not raise their eyes to the bosses, let alone raise their voices.
On the night our village burned, when my father and I lay together in the grass, with owls swooping above us, our stomachs rumbling with hunger, I was not more than five or six. And yet this was when I began to view him as a coward. Side by side we were, a coward and a coward’s son.
How could we leave my mother behind? Whether she was ash, or grass, or air, in my mind she was in our village still. We abandoned her, and began our new life. I was certain that if I ever loved someone, which seemed impossible to me even then, I would never let her go.
I saw a kindred defiance in Mr. Weiss when he came to me. I have often wondered why I agreed to help him, and maybe this defiance was the reason. Weiss was unwilling to allow his daughter to vanish; he refused to consider her lost, a hail of ashes on the city streets. I had become the sort of man who stood on the edge of things, as my father was, but I liked to think it was my insolence that kept me separate, not any sort of timidity. I was a rat perhaps, but never a mouse.
I should have remained aloof from someone else’s misery as I was on most occasions, yet I was drawn in. Weiss was an older man, dressed in the black clothing of the Orthodox, but he was hardly timid. He had gone to all of the authorities, stationed himself in the corridors of Tammany Hall, where he was ill treated and berated. He had brought his story to reporters at the Yiddish newspaper, the Forward, on East Broadway, as well as to the English-language daily the Sun, but they had failed to look into his daughter’s disappearance. Only when all other efforts had been unsuccessful had he come to me, the finder of what was lost. He believed I had abilities granted by God.
I agreed to do as he asked because he was a man so unlike my father.
And perhaps I did have a gift, as Hochman always said, for I knew how men’s minds worked. When I imagined myself in their circumstances I could think the way they did, no matter how different their lives might be from my own. I became a criminal, a forger, a philanderer. I played out my desires in these various guises, and therefore came up with a map of where I might hide if I were such a person, how I would occupy my time, and on which vices I would spend my money. This turn of my imagination had helped me as a boy in my ability to find men who thought they had escaped detection. But now, in my search for Hannah Weiss, I found myself lacking in skill and soon enough came to an impasse. My usual ability to uncover a person’s innermost self failed me. Even when Hannah’s sister took me to their haunts—Miss Weber’s hat shop on Twenty-second Street; the shul where they worshiped; Madison Square Park, where they fed pigeons on Sundays—I found no clue. Hannah seemed a sweet, pretty girl, hardworking and loyal. But in my background, I had no practice with such people. Good, trustworthy individuals were strangers to me, mysterious in their small desires.
I spoke with several survivors, girls who had known Hannah, in the hope they would help me uncover who she was. I took notes in a small leather-bound book where I kept my appointments jotted down. Her friends spoke with hushed voices when they talked of the fire that had moved through the workroom. It came upon them like a swarm, one survivor told me, red bees bursting through the wall. Many of the girls who had escaped thought Hannah, too, had survived, but it turned out it was Ella they had seen, for the sisters looked so alike it was nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially on that smoky afternoon.
As far as I could tell there was nothing unusual about Hannah—no secrets, no flaws. But perhaps everyone has a secret life, and on the last day of my interviews, I discovered someone who knew more about Hannah than the others. This survivor asked me to refer to her in my notes only as R, the first letter of her name. She didn’t wish to be in the public eye, and feared the fierce determination of the press. The building where her family lived had been circled by reporters after the tragedy. She had been hysterical for over a week, unable to speak or understand what was said to her. Still reporters called out her name from the street when her parents refused to have her interviewed. R was too distraught to be in our world, a place where she had seen her two younger sisters perch like doves upon the ledge of the ninth floor. She had told her sisters to go on without her, and she went back for her new coat, cranberry-colored wool. By then the smoke was everywhere and the elevators were no longer running; she had managed to grab hold of the burning ropes in the elevator shaft by throwing her coat around the sizzling twine so her hands wouldn’t burn as she lowered herself down.