She had only once spent her hard-earned money on a secret wish. She had hoped to be miraculously carried back to Russia, to the shtetl, to her parents’ arms, to the sour scent of dairy products on her father’s beard. Even if they would all live in a hut whose rat-infested walls were covered with mildew and soot, whose thatched roof crawled with insects, and whose stove sputtered and smoked, they would be together. She had been disappointed when the magic words accomplished nothing, even though the soothsayer who had sold them explained that the key to their success was persistence: more secret words would bring about the magic. Batya refused to part with more money.

Batya had been toying with the idea of praying in the Sephardi synagogue where Ovad worshipped, and where there was no chance she’d encounter Zwi Migdal pimps who’d come from Eastern Europe. She entered San Telmo with its dilapidated, soot-covered tenements, sarcastically called conventillos, small convents. The hordes of poor immigrants living there—Jews and goyim alike—were no better off than they had been in Europe. The buildings with sagging staircases and walls swarming with rats and vermin were so crowded that families not only shared beds, but fifty families shared two lavatories. Unlike the good food Batya ate—though every morsel was deducted from her pay—these people lived on potatoes and hardtack.

Batya quickened her pace, careful to protect her good shoes from the open channel of sewage running along the street. She chased away a pack of children with filthy faces and heads speckled with lice eggs, begging her for pennies. There was nothing here to indicate it was Shabbat, she thought. Through the window of one of the conventillos, she glimpsed men smoking opium through bamboo pipes. She breathed in the wafting sweet smell, so different from the bitter tincture she had been given during her surgery and recovery. She wished she could buy some to float her down that river of dreams and forgetfulness, but it cost its weight in real silver, an indulgence she wouldn’t allow. Opium, she had learned, made its users lose all their money in pursuit of it.

She hurried on, ignoring the prostitutes who leaned against doorways or bent out of second-floor windows. In this overcrowded neighborhood, most operated out of rooms rented in families’ small flats or ran brothels on roofs, with only straw partitions separating each woman and her groaning, panting client from the next. Despite the squalid conditions, many of these sisters were independent, not subjugated as she was, though rumor had it that Zwi Migdal extorted protection fees from these women, too.