The strike of a bell jolted her: the chime of the clock marking the half hour. More minutes ticked past. In a corner toward the back of the store, near a bolted back door, she found a stack of volumes with torn covers resting on a table next to pots of glue, brushes, and sheets of pulp paper.

At last, next to the table, on a low bookshelf, Batya recognized the small burgundy spine. Blood pulsated in her temples as she grabbed the book and quickly leafed through its pages to verify that it was what she thought it was. It was! She tucked it in the pocket of her skirt and rushed out, her heart singing.

Just before rounding the corner, she heard the siren of a police carriage entering the street from its far end. She broke into a run.

Back home she discovered that Moskowitz, for the first time other than for the Passover Seder, had emptied the house of its clients. One of his colleagues, formerly a chazzan, a cantor who’d found a new calling as the pimp of his wife and sister-in-law, began to conduct the Shabbat services right there in the pavilion.

The sisters gathered in the courtyard, peering at the backs of the men inside. Their eyes were bright; for once they were permitted to hear God’s holy words.

Batya squeezed through the sisters. Walking slowly to avoid attracting attention, she climbed the stairs to the second floor. She sat on her bed and pressed her book to her chest, then kissed it, happiness filling her. Even without the prayer shawl men used, she could wrap herself in solitude with God, commune with Him. No matter what happened to her body, from now on she could keep her soul pure.

From below came the voices of the men repeating some sentences after the chazzan. Moskowitz didn’t get the honor of an aliyah today. Batya smiled with satisfaction. The one thing Yitzik the Pitzik craved remained out of his reach: respectability among the upstanding Jews.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In Flores Cemetery, they weren’t allowed in the Jewish section. No prostitute—alive or dead—was to contaminate the Jews buried there. The few sisters from the house Freda had permitted to participate in the sacred act of accompanying Nettie to her last resting place congregated outside the fenced-off section.

Batya covered her head with the lace scarf she’d brought. A few meters away stood a one-room structure. Since the Chevra Kadisha, the official Jewish burial society, shunned the tme’ot, the two elderly women who formed the prostitutes’ burial sisterhood had retrieved Nettie’s body from the hospital and brought it here to wash and purify. Now Batya and Rochel volunteered to carry out the stretcher on which she lay, wrapped in white shrouds. Her body seemed so small that Batya couldn’t reconcile it with the full-bodied friend she had first met.