Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 36 of a new online serial novel, Nine A.M., by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
On the bulletin board in the main dining room:
For a nominal fee, you can have your clothes laundered in the factory’s washing machine. Anyone interested should please contact Elky Kush.
“Elky?” Rochel Cohen put the big ladle down on the counter when she saw her daughter approaching, and came out from behind the counter. “How are you?”
“Baruch Hashem, everything is fine.”
“What’s the sign I saw this morning all about?”
“Oh, nothing major. Peri, who is in charge of laundry at the factory, told me that the new machine is faster and has a bigger drum, so the factory workers’ overalls and aprons get laundered faster. So now the old machine is standing empty.”
“And the office decided to give people a chance to enjoy it?”
“Yes…sort of.”
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“The office staff is not going to be busy with this. They have more important things on their minds.”
“So what is going on here?”
“They gave me permission to use the washing machine for this. I pay them a bit for these hours, and customers will pay me.” There was a sparkle in her eye, a look that Rochel did not recognize.
“And how do you have laundry detergent?” Rochel asked her daughter.
“I buy it.”
“But after all your expenses for the detergent and the fee to the office, how much will you have left?”
“I’ll have.” Elky clearly didn’t want to talk too much.
“But who will want to waste vouchers for this when everyone has a simple, good laundry basin and soap at home? Who needs a machine?”
“I do,” someone said from behind, and mother and daughter both turned around. One of the younger workers from the sewing workshop was standing there. “I’m sorry for eavesdropping,” she said with a gleam of interest in her eyes, “but I’m very short on time, and I have to get back to work soon.”
“Me, too,” Rochel said hurriedly and turned back to her abandoned ladle. She returned to her post behind the counter and began to serve the younger woman, who was Herzlich’s oldest daughter, her food.
“I hardly have a chance to wash all the clothes at home myself,” the Herzlich daughter confided as Rochel put two chicken balls on her plate and doled out a mound of rice next to them.
“You work hard,” Rochel said understandingly.
“Yes.” She shrugged and carried her full plate to the tables.
“The young ones today have more clothes than we do,” said Olga to her right as she placed a stack of clean plates on the counter. “When did you last visit the grocery, Rochel? Go see how many shirts there are for sale there, along with new rolls of fabric.”
“And usually, those fabrics are the types that are hard to wash by hand,” Elky said, appearing suddenly near the counter to take her own lunch portion. “So there are those who are grateful for this offer.”
“But why are you taking more work on yourself, Elky?” Her mother was perplexed. “Are you lacking for anything?”
“No, but you can never know.” A small smile crossed her face. “Mama, tell me, if someone doesn’t come eat their lunch, does it get factored into their salary?”
“You’re supposed to know the answers to these kinds of questions better than me, don’t you think? You work in the office where the monthly vouchers are distributed.”
Her daughter chuckled. “It’s true, but I don’t feel comfortable asking.”
“But what difference does it make anyway? Are there angels here who can forego food?”
“Not forego, but they can just bring something from home. Why do we have to eat specifically what they prepare here?”
Her mother gave her a look. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to offend me and hint that the food is not tasty enough or that it’s not clean enough here.”
“No, of course not!”
“And you surely trust the kashrus of the food,” Olga added from the side, with a wink. “You know what my father says—at the beginning of the war, when he was working in the labor camps under the Hungarians, yemach shemam, it wasn’t easy for a yerei Shamayim to keep kashrus. The Reformers would mock whoever didn’t eat the same food as everyone else… Baruch Hashem the kitchens here are in our hands and not theirs. Otherwise, we would have a serious problem with the food.”
“Right.” Elky nodded, but her mother wasn’t sure she’d even heard everything Olga had said. “I trust the kashrus, I trust it all. I just want to know—does someone who doesn’t eat the cooked meal get a higher paycheck at the end of the month?”
“I don’t think so. The workers are registered in different kitchens, and we’ve never been asked to keep track of who does or doesn’t eat their meal.”
“Oh.” Elky looked disappointed but didn’t say anything more on the subject. She murmured a polite thank you and took her food. Her mother glanced at her from afar as Elky sat down next to the Herzlich girl and got into an animated discussion with her about something. When Olga passed them by and picked up their empty plates, they fell silent, only continuing when she walked away.
“Ruchele?” Rechel Schvirtz was virtually the last one to come get her food, as usual. “You look preoccupied. Is everything okay?”
“Baruch Hashem.” Rochel had no desire to discuss Elky’s issues with just anyone. Not that Rechel Schvirtz was “just anyone”—she was a good friend—but still.
“How is your Naomi managing with parnassah?” Rochel asked.
“She’s okay. What could there be already…the preschool teacher. They get by. A bit frugally, but baruch Hashem they aren’t hungry for bread during the week.”
“And you invite them for Shabbos to you.”
“Yes, of course. And Elky?”
“She’s very tired when it gets to the weekends. I try time and again to invite them, but they come only very rarely. And she asks me if instead of them coming to us…oh, it’s not important.”
Rechel’s eyes registered surprise, but she hurried to say politely, “Running a house really takes getting used to. It’s not so easy for the young ones.”
“True. By the way, how is your Binyamin?”
“Baruch Hashem, recovering.” Rechel was understanding about the change of subject and didn’t pry any further. She parted from Rochel and joined the long table of the other seamstresses.
The rush at the counter had eased; everyone who was coming for lunch today seemed to have already gotten their portion. Rochel took a plate for herself and sat down to eat, but a moment later, she stood up again as Elky passed by the counter on her way out.
“Elky?” she called. Something inside was pushing her to try again, not to give up.
Her daughter turned around. “Yes, Mama?”
“It’s Thursday. What’s with Shabbos this week? You haven’t come to us in a long time.”
“Oh,” Elky replied, and then, predictably, she offered her regular response, which repeated itself each week in some form. “Thanks so much, Mama, but we’re so tired at the end of the week… I really appreciate that you want to help me. Maybe instead of us coming to you, you can give me the amount you planned to spend on our food for Shabbos, and I’ll buy everything we need, okay?”
***
Bluma Hanter didn’t come to the family’s factory very often, but when she did, the office workers appreciated it. She was friendly, smiled at everyone, and generously brought refreshments for them all. No one knew how influential she really was in the actual management of the factory.
“Dena will work here,” she said in the administrative office, in the back, after refusing an offer to sit down. “I think it will be good for her. She doesn’t speak the language well, and every other workplace will make it very difficult for her. Do you hear, Bentzy? We’ll set up a job for her here, twice a week, as a secretary, and see how it goes.”
“I don’t know, Ma… When I mentioned the idea to her a while back, she wasn’t excited at all.”
“Excited or not excited, a woman needs to have what to do, Bentzy. She needs to feel fulfilled, you understand?”
“But we don’t need another secretary,” her son said, from his big executive chair that stood next to his father’s.
“So we’ll make sure to need one,” Bluma declared. “Do you think I don’t know how it works in these offices? That I don’t see the piles of stuff on the desks? Let Dena come twice or three times a week; she can file and organize the files in the drawers, and after two or three weeks like that, you’ll want her to come every day, trust me.”
“Gladly,” her husband said in his deep voice.
Bentzy nodded. “Do you want a drink, Mommy?”
“No thanks. I had some tea outside, with the secretaries, while I was waiting for you to finish your phone calls. And I thought about something else, Bentzy. Something that will make your wife happy and show her that we appreciate her input.”
“Her input in what?” he asked, sounding almost resigned.
“You’re not supposed to sound so appalled,” she chided. “Your wife has come all the way here, with such dedication, right? To make us happy and to help out. We need to show her how much we appreciate it. That we appreciate her, the house she comes from, the chinuch she received…”
“We certainly do appreciate our mechutanim,” Moshe Hanter confirmed.
“I thought of something small that will show her that,” Bluma said as she took a colored memo paper from the table. She grabbed a pen and jotted down a few words.
“What do you think about this?” she asked, pushing the yellow square toward her husband and son. “In my opinion, this is perfect. It will be in small English letters on the bottom of the package. Something that someone who doesn’t know what we mean, won’t even see. It won’t negatively affect our name in any way, trust me. But it will make Dena happy and give us extra zechusim.”
When Dena came to her new job at the beginning of the following week, for the first time, she found a rectangular chrome-paper sheet on her desk, in shades of orange and green. “The boss asked if you can check if this is okay,” said Suri, the other secretary in the room. “Remember we talked about this color combination when you once came to visit?”
“Yes, sure,” Dena said. She wasn’t quite sure what her new job was all about, but she sat down tentatively on the upholstered chair and took the paper in her hand. Her eyes scanned the lines. She didn’t understand the German, but she knew the English.
She raised her eyes to the closed door of the conference room across from her and then lowered them back to the chrome paper, as a small smile played on her lips.
thenextpage-israelbookshop.com 