“She told my father that the swine would pay him to take me as his ‘wife.’ Ha! What a joke! Everyone in the village had seen the man before. I was the third such ‘wife’ this matchmaker found for him. My father knew it when he brought two witnesses and without a rabbi gave me a worthless shtile chuppah. He took the money and was on his way to the tavern even before I left with my new ‘groom.’”

Your father couldn’t have imagined that your fate would be so bad, Batya wanted to say. Her father, too, had accepted Moskowitz’s money, but he had been awed by the worldly man who would pull her out of their persecuted life. Even her no-nonsense mother had believed Batya would have a great future in America. And Batya would have, had it not been for Grabovsky.

Nettie broke into a whistle, and Batya looked at her puckered lips. She’d heard only shaygetzs, non-Jewish scoundrels, whistling, never a maiden. Nettie grinned and pointed at her teeth. They were white and square, with a gap between the two front ones. “This is how I do it.” She kept whistling, seemingly unperturbed by her memories, and Batya thought of Shayna’s tragic orphanhood. She’d be careful not to ask Rochel about her past.

The girls turned their attention to their underarms and were soon squealing at the pain, laughing as they pulled off each other’s hair.

At their shrieks, a window opened on the second floor of the house next door, and a woman shouted in that high-pitched clucking language. Before Batya knew what was happening, the woman had emptied a bucket of dirty water on them. Batya was hit in the face, and Nettie, with her back to that house, had her hair drenched. In the altercation that ensued, Batya guessed that the woman was complaining about the prostitutes. The houses were close to each other, and from her spot above, the woman must have been able to witness the goings-on in the patio and hear the activities in the bedrooms through the windows kept open in the summer heat.

A part of Batya’s brain hung back, still numb and confused, as she rinsed and watched the girls hose themselves down. A few minutes later, their chatter and hilarity resumed. These girls were so different from the ones in Nina’s training house. No shadow of her own self-loathing seemed to hang over them; no great suffering was embedded in their eyes or in a hunching of shoulders. No one seemed to prefer death.

When one of the girls turned to a new task—waxing off the Armenian’s moustache and sideburns—Nettie produced a pair of tweezers. “Your eyebrows,” she said to Batya.

“You’re going to take off my eyebrows?” Batya asked.

“Just some areas. They are wild and unfashionable.” Nettie smiled. “Wait till you see yourself after I’m done.”