Burning Twilight (12 page)

Women carrying heavy tubs for spring cleaning sloshed soapy water on the steps of their homes and onto the newly laid cobblestones. I had to dodge a butcher’s apprentice holding a big basket of meat on his head and step around the masons chiseling away at the paving stones. Then I nodded to another shammes, who was out collecting “wheat money” so the poor visitors would have matzoh tonight. Two Jews were handing sacks of flour to a couple of Christians to store the forbidden
khumets
for the next eight days.

The big eastern gate rose up in front of me. Penned-in with no place to go, the Jews had built one house on top of another along the narrow streets of the Jewish Town. After a few years away from city life, I’d gotten used to the grassy paths and open pastures outside Slonim, which calmed my spirit and helped me talk to God. How could a man talk to God on a street like this? I mean, besides a cry for help.

“Stop right there!”

The gatekeeper laid a hand on my chest.

“Where’s your Jew badge?”

“My what?”

“Listen, stranger, you’ve got to wear the Jew badge whenever you leave the ghetto. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I hurried back to the house with the stone Lion of Judah over the doorway and persuaded one of the Christian servant girls to take a moment out of her busy morning to sew a bright yellow ring on my cloak.

We don’t have such things in Slonim.

I rushed back to the gatekeeper, who let me through this time, now that I was wearing the
gelber flek
, the yellow stain required by an imperial decree—the
Reichspolizeiordnung
.

The street outside the ghetto was quiet compared to the Schwarzengasse, with only a few whores and drunken soldiers refusing to call it a night, crossing paths with clear-eyed kitchen maids and shopkeepers with pink cheeks as round as apple dumplings. They all looked harmless enough, but I knew very well how the sunniest Christian faces could turn mean in an instant once an accusation is made.

I avoided eye contact as I walked down the Geistgasse, crunching over a thin layer of frost that had settled on the old stones. And I almost jumped out of my boots when a couple of rats scurried around my ankles, joining a slithering mass of rodents swarming over a piece of fallen meat. I’ve seen plenty of field mice in my time, but these city rats were
huge
.

Hoofbeats rang off the pavement, and suddenly the rats scattered as a horse-drawn cart clattered over them and came barreling right toward me. I jumped to the side and the cart thundered past, nearly crushing me beneath its wheels, the driver violently whipping his horses while his big-boned helper held on for dear life. They just missed flattening a tiny Christian servant girl as the heavy cart swung east onto Stockhausgasse and rattled away.

My heart was pounding, and I hoped that no one had seen the panic in my eyes.

Bohemia was relatively safe for the Jews these days, certainly safer than the other parts of the German Empire, where Protestants and Catholics had been furiously fighting for control of the soul of Europe ever since the reformists broke from the Roman Church a few decades back. And for a while it seemed like a good plan to just step back and let them fight each other, but we have a saying in Yiddish: A cat and a mouse will make peace over a carcass.

And spring is open season on Jews. Holy Week and Eastertide were especially risky, and a gambling man would say that we were long overdue for some old-fashioned Jew-hatred. Every year the Jews got thrown out of
somewhere
. The lucky ones merely got beaten up, had their property stolen, and escaped with their books and the clothes they happened to be wearing at the time. But one Easter a while back, a mob of enraged Christians had practically burned down the entire Jewish Town, leaving only the blackened stone shul and a few crummy houses that refused to fall over. Three thousand people murdered in one weekend, all because some idiot said that a Jewish boy had thrown a handful of mud at a passing priest.

Some say it was worse than just mud, but I don’t believe that for a minute. What Jew in his right mind, outnumbered by hostile and well-armed outsiders, would invite such trouble?

When my ancestors first set foot in the land of Babylonia, they didn’t rush around smashing the idols, they made the place their home and wrote the monumental Babylonian Talmud there.

The Bohemian capital was as alien as pagan Babylon in many ways, but I knew enough to move closer to the wall and yield to a couple of footmen in red-and-gold livery walking a pair of sleek black dogs. Despite my good faith effort to get out of the way, the dogs’ ears flew back and they lunged for my groin. I stepped back once again and found myself pressed to the wall with nowhere to go, and before I knew what I was doing I had taken a fighting stance, with the big wooden
kleperl
raised and ready to clobber the first dog that came at me.

The footmen laughed.

“Don’t worry, they don’t like Jewish meat. Isn’t that right, girl?”

The dog snapped at my privates.

“I don’t know,” said the other one. “She seems to like the smell of kosher salami.”

Reflex had gotten me into this. What was going to get me out?
Think, man, think
.

“Go ahead, Jew. I’d like to see you try.”

I didn’t understand Czech very well yet, but I got the general idea.

The dogs strained against their leashes, but the footmen were well mannered enough to hold them back. It sounded like one of them called the dog Miata, but I might have heard wrong.

I slowly lowered the club, searching for the right combination of words to placate these lackeys.

Finally, I said, “Forgive me for startling your master’s dogs.”

My
poylishe
Yiddish was close enough to the local dialect of German for the footmen to understand me, and they seemed satisfied. They nodded curtly and strolled away, patting the dog and saying “good girl.”

So that’s how it was. A couple of spoiled livery servants could taunt me like that and I couldn’t respond. I could have broken the two of them in half if they didn’t have those dogs with them. And some rich man’s coat of arms on their sleeves. And every Christian in the kingdom watching their backs.

I was still considering this when I heard the cry again:

“Gertaaaaaah—!”

Closer this time.

I pounded on the doors and windows of all the houses and shops with mezuzahs on the doorposts, calling
“In shul arayn!”
and asking if anyone knew anything about the missing girl. Was Gerta a woman or a child? But nobody had any answers for me. Some of the shop doors rattled loosely, their locks clearly worthless.

I turned into the Würfelgasse. In the middle of the narrow lane, two children four or five years old, a boy and a girl, took turns shooting marbles into a chalk circle.

As I called on all the Jews to come and serve the Creator, a pair of women’s voices answered from opposite sides of the street. The children obediently got up from their game and went in to their mothers, the boy through a doorway marked by a mezuzah, the girl through a doorway with a cross nailed squarely in the middle of the upper frame.

So young and compliant, I thought, smiling to myself. They haven’t learned to be difficult yet.

They haven’t learned to think of all human relations in terms of what language you pray in or how much gold your family has to buy friends in high places.

Because you can only buy fair-weather friends.

That’s why Rabbi Shemaiah says, “Love work, hate authority, and don’t get friendly with the ruling powers,” because no matter who’s sitting on the throne, all those petty lords and nobles just use your friendship when it serves their needs, but they do not stand by you in the hour of your need.

Just look at Emperor Rudolf II’s grandfather Ferdinand, who expelled the Jews from Bohemia, even though he
gave his word as king
that he would never do so.

Back on the lower Geistgasse, a middle-aged Christian woman with a dark blue headkerchief was banging on the door of one of the Jewish shops I’d just called to shul. She looked up at the second-floor window, then went back to rattling the flimsy door. Another woman, who must have been the proprietress, stuck her head out of the upstairs window.

“What can I do for you,
paní
?”

“Are you open today?”

“Sure, sure. Until noon. I’ll be down in a minute.”

I was halfway back to the East Gate when a bleary-eyed Jew and a pair of Christians beckoned to me.

“Come join us,” said the Jew. He was trying to open his door with a key that was far too large for the narrow lock.

I didn’t budge. “Join you doing what?”

“Is there something wrong with your eyes? Can’t you see that we’re celebrating Purim?”

“Purim was over a month ago.”

“Can I help it if I celebrate Purim a little more often than other Jews?”

I turned to go, but the Jew spread his cape wide and blocked my path.

“We, sir, are entertainers to the lords and burghers, and only a gawking newcomer from the provinces would fail to recognize the great Shlomo Zinger and his associates. Professional merrymakers,
a su servicio
.”

“We also do weddings,” said one of the Christians.

“And when we see a man looking troubled”—Zinger patted my cheek with sloppy familiarity—“it is our sworn duty to cheer him up.”

“Taanis, folio twenty-two A,” I said, reflexively citing the Talmudic passage in which Elijah the Prophet announces that two humble jesters will have a share in the World-to-Come because they are helping people to forget their troubles.

“Ah yes, I heard you were a scholar,” said Zinger.

“You did?”

“The
Yidnshtot
is big, my friend, but word gets around just like in a small town. A promising disciple of the great Isserles and some other Polish rabbi, who tossed it all to come after a woman. That’s the stuff of romantic ballads, mate.”

“No, it isn’t. She hasn’t spoken to me yet.”

“Don’t worry, she will.” He leaned in closer. “We also heard that one time you fought off six men at once. Six big, drunken Cossacks.”

The other Christian said, “Is that true?”

“Well, no,” I said. Actually, I had
talked
my way out of that one, but as a newcomer to this town, I figured I could use the reputation.

“It was only
five
Cossacks. And two of them were kind of scrawny.”

The two Christians looked genuinely disappointed.

“Listen,” I said. “Do you know anything about—”

Zinger nudged me as a young woman with long black tresses and broad Slavonic features walked up to the East Gate carrying a basket.

“That’s the little mouse’s
Shabbes goye
.”

“The who—?”

“Mordecai Meisel’s sabbath maid. The big
makher
who built the hospital, the orphanage, the
mikveh
. He paved the streets. Pretty much owns your ass, too, Mr. Benyamin from Slonim.”

“Oh. Listen—”

“You want to come in and see our costumes for Sunday’s feast at the Rozˇmberks?”

“No, I need to get back in time for the
Amidah
prayer—”

And just at the moment when I should have been somewhere else, a woman’s scream pierced the morning air.

CHAPTER 2

A
nya hated killing pigs, especially when it took a couple of tries to hit the main artery. Cows and sheep were finished in a moment, if you did it right. But pigs
knew
. They knew you were trying to slit their throats and they didn’t understand what they’d done wrong, or why they deserved it. She felt their animal incomprehension when they struggled to get away from the glistening knife, and heard it in their plaintive squeals. Sometimes she swore she could even see it in their faces.

She hated it even more when her father asked her to help do it when it was still dark outside.

“Let me finish doing my braids first,” she said.

“No time now. Do it after.”

So she tied her hair back with a kerchief and ran downstairs. The pig was tied up in the courtyard, and her father Benesh was sharpening the long knife. She pushed up her sleeves, and tied a butcher’s apron around her waist.

When he was ready, she gently wrapped her arms around the animal’s shoulders, took hold of its front legs and hugged it tightly, bracing herself.

“Why so early?” she asked.

“The cart came through early.”