Burning Twilight (8 page)

Kassy broke the silence: “I’ve heard of Jews occasionally trying to pass as Christians when they need to flee in times of danger, but why on earth would a Christian pretend to be a Jew? Unless he’s hiding from some trouble with the authorities.”

“There are better ways to hide from trouble with the authorities than posing as a Jew, I can assure you.”

My eyes were drawn once more to the glittering trail of spittle running down the man’s chin. Some of the particles looked positively crystalline.

And that second cup of wine.

I imagined the effects of the wine rippling out, my thoughts skipping across the surface of the rich red liquid like a well-thrown pebble dancing across the waves, divorcing objects from their names and rearranging the frozen tableau before me in the manner taught to us by the eminent mystical scholar Abulafia three centuries ago, before the great expulsion from Spain.

It was my strongest desire to share what I knew, to explore all those centuries of wisdom with this newcomer to our ways, this Protestant believer who was so full of questions, this wise woman with whom I shared the road of exile, this newcomer to Poznan just like me.

All this in search of a solution to the riddle, Who was this man, and what had he done that made pretending to be a Jew seem like the safe course of action?

“There are many outsiders,” I began, “who believe that the Jews possess otherworldly knowledge that can be redirected toward profitable enterprises. Perhaps they have heard of our skills at manipulating the letters of the Torah in order to find new meanings hidden in the holy text, and they imagine that we are just as skilled at manipulating the four metals—”

“Gold, silver, copper, and lead. Yes, what else?”

“That we know the secret recipe for invisibility—”

“Just one? There are a quite a few, you know.”

Her face, with its broad Slavonic features, suddenly seemed distant, as if the air between us had solidified.

“Of course none of them work,” she said, the side of her mouth crinkling up into a wry smile. The unseen barrier between us evaporated, and for a split second all was right with the world.

“Same as with all the love potions,” she added.

“Right. But that doesn’t stop snake juice peddlers and other charlatans from preying on people’s weaknesses. Pretending to be a master of the Kabbalistic arts could keep an unscrupulous man clothed and fed for many years.”

“You think this was a failed experiment in Kabbalistic fakery?”

The other wine cup, again.

“The only question is whether it was by mistake or by design. And the best way to answer that is to find out who this mysterious nighttime visitor was.”

“Oh, I doubt that she was all that mysterious.”

“She appears to have taken considerable pains to keep her identity a secret,” I said.

“Nothing can be kept secret in a house full of servants. The maids know everything. They can practically hear through the walls.”

I snapped out of my theoretical reverie.
What if someone had been listening to us?
My overly casual conversation with a Christian woman could easily be turned against me by unsympathetic listeners.

But Kassy was already out in the hall.

“Time to speak to the servants,” she called out to me, before rushing down the stairs.

By the time I caught up with her, she was questioning the laundress just outside the kitchen.

“Oh, no, Miss Kassy. I’ve never listened at the keyhole,” said the laundress. “That would be like eavesdropping on a priest hearing confession.”

“I see,” said Kassy, her eyebrows knitting together in thought.

“Can I go now? I’ve got to hang up the laundry.”

“Yes, you can go.”

“Danke schön.”

The laundress curtsied quickly, then raised the basket of wet linen she’d been balancing on her hip and hefted it out the back door, nearly tripping over a young boy who was polishing a pair of boots on the stairs. They seemed to be in an awful hurry to clean up the place, which is understandable when visitors are expected, but it wouldn’t have been my first priority under the circumstances.

I followed Kassy into the kitchen, where the old housemaid, whose name was Mrs. Gromatsky, was washing dishes while the cook mixed some batter in an earthenware bowl.

“Do you have a butter pan?” said Kassy.

“What size?” said the cook, stirring cheese filling into the bowl that nearly matched the pallor of her skin. She had dark sorrowful eyes and wore her plain brown hair wrapped in a tight bun.

“The smallest one you’ve got.”

“In there,” she said, pointing at a cupboard with her chin while she poured some of the golden yellow batter into a frying pan.

Kassy fished around in the cupboard until she came out with a heavy iron skillet no bigger than her hand.

“And we’d better send for the authorities,” said Mrs. Gromatsky.

“No, wait,” I said.

That got me a suspicious look from the house servants.

“The Christian authorities can be rather, um, single-minded in their pursuit of justice,” I explained, choosing my words carefully.

“You cannot delay such a matter,” Mrs. Gromatsky insisted, as the cook expertly flipped a couple of pancakes.

“Very well.”

And so the houseboy was dispatched to fetch the authorities. Not too quickly, I hoped.

“The authorities are more reasonable here than in Germany,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “Well, some of them are. The parliament is a complete mess, of course, but that’s another matter. You can buy any man’s vote with a pot of vodka and a pinch of salt in that awful place.”

Kassy slipped in between Mrs. Gromatsky and the cook, and placed the tiny butter pan on a back burner. Then she took the residue-caked spoon and tapped it against the iron rim of the skillet a few times until the silvery paste slid into the pan.

“We need to ask you about the woman who visited your master’s room last night,” she said.

“I never saw her,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “The master ordered me to bed, and he opened the door for her himself.”

“Was that unusual?” I asked.

“Do you have any idea what she might have wanted?” said Kassy.

“What they all want,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “Love potions, or else they want their fortunes told.”

“Reb Schildsberg claimed he could tell their fortunes using the Kabbalah?” I asked.

Mrs. Gromatsky was too busy scrubbing a copper pot to answer me. The cook spooned some cheese filling onto three flat pancakes, then folded up the blintzes, pinched the flaps together, and laid them in the pan.

“Why? What does that mean?” said Kassy, spreading the silvery paste around the butter pan as casually if she were heating oil to fry blintzes.

“No true Kabbalist would ever claim to be able to predict the future,” I said. “It is not for us to know. The Mishnah teaches that whoever reflects upon such things would be better off if he had never been born.”

“Keynehore
,” said Mrs. Gromatsky, spitting on the floor between my boots. Well, most of it went between my boots.

“Damn it, this isn’t working.” Kassy grabbed a cloth and removed the pan from the fire. “Don’t you have anything smaller?”

“Well, there’s these . . . ” Mrs. Gromatsky removed a tiny key from the folds of her apron and unlocked a drawer that was practically hidden beneath the countertop. It was full of precision metalworking tools: long, thin files, delicate clippers and tongs, and a couple of three-inch-wide smelting pans.

“My my,” said Kassy. Her eyes met mine.

“Will that do?”

“Yes, this will do nicely,” said Kassy, removing one of the smelting pans from the drawer as the cook placed a couple of perfectly formed blintzes on a plate and sprinkled them with powdered sugar.

Kassy concentrated on transferring the half-melted paste to the special pan, while Mrs. Gromatsky set out a couple of plates of blintzes with sour cream for us.

Kassy questioned me with her eyes.

I told her that it is our custom to eat dairy foods on Shvues, even in a house of mourning, because when God first called to Moses in the wilderness of Midian, He said He would lead our people out of Egypt to “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

She took the smelting pan off the fire and studied its contents, which had separated. Part of it had burned to a crust, the rest was thin and watery.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s certainly not silver,” she said.

Mrs. Gromatsky and the cook nudged me aside to gawk at the strange half-burnt lumps, and I chose that moment to step out of the cramped kitchen and help myself to a foretaste of the Promised Land.

So I had a mouthful of cheese blintz when a heavy pounding shook the front door. For a brief, terrifying moment I thought they had come for me. My hand found the hilt of my short-bladed knife, but before I could unsheath it and get into more trouble than I could handle, Mrs. Gromatsky had unlocked the door to let in the houseboy. Instead, a captain of the guard stood framed in the archway with four armed pikemen.

“We’ve been looking for a woman who fits her description,” the captain announced, pointing at Kassy, then charging her with possession of illegal counterfeiting tools. Before I knew what was happening, the pikemen barreled in to seize her, knocking over the stack of pots in their haste and sending a few earthenware dishes crashing to the floor, even though Kassy offered no physical resistance. But she did use her tongue, castigating them for arresting her on such flimsy circumstantial evidence, while Mrs. Gromatsky yelled at them for ruining her dishes.

I swallowed hard and struggled to be heard over the noise, until finally I had to shout,
“Kapitan!”

The captain turned to face me, the curse on his lips evaporating when he noted the authority of my manner and decided that I might have powerful connections. He had steely gray eyes, a square Teutonic face, and blond hair that hung nearly to his shoulders, brushing the carved eagle claw ornaments on his dress plate armor, while the foot soldiers’ armor was made of plain tanned leather. I appealed to him in the name of King Sigismund, and when that didn’t work I tried to reason, cajole, and even beg them to set Kassy free, insisting that Rabbi Loew would vouch for her good name.

“Then I suggest that you send for him,” said the captain, and they carted her off to the stockade.

And here I was thinking that Kassy might be safe from persecution in the somewhat more tolerant Kingdom of Poland. Now I felt like a man wearing his best Shabbes clothes who suddenly needs to sift through a pile of manure in search of a lost penny. But it finally gave me somewhere to start.

I gave the houseboy my last German
kreuzer
and told him to seek out Rabbi Loew as fast as he could and alert him to Kassy the Bohemian’s arrest. It was nearly ten
groschen
in Polish currency, and I wasn’t on the public payroll yet. But who thinks about money at a time like this?

Then I cornered Mrs. Gromatsky as she was sweeping up the broken dishes.

“Where can I find some thieves in this town?”

“Try the City Hall.”

“I mean some real
ganefs
—cutpurses, whoremongers, coin-clippers—”

“Those
paskudnyaks
? All I can tell you is that the big crooks used to gather down by the Water Gate, but now most of them work on Wall Street.”

I grabbed my soft hat and set off for the
ulica Muma
, or Wall Street, so named because its back end lay in the shadows of the fortifications that formed a ring around the old city.

“Be careful,” Mrs. Gromatsky warned. “If one of those varlets kisses you, you better count your teeth.”

T
he man who went by the name of Reb Schildsberg had lived in a large town house near the corner of Zydowska and Kramarska Streets, the informal borderline between the Jewish and Christian quarters, only a few steps from the main square. But the sun was low in the sky and the fog was already rolling in, and the thought of what they might do to Kassy after nightfall made me quicken my pace toward the southwestern part of the old city.

And nobody tried to stop me and ask what I was doing.

Despite the urgency of my mission, it was still a relief to leave Germany behind and be able to move about freely without having to wear that cursed Jew badge on my chest like a bright yellow target. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to breathe the air of freedom.

Or at least partial freedom. Because life in Poznan was no paradise for the dark-eyed People of the Book. For the past seven decades the city fathers had issued one anti-Jewish decree after another, imposing strict limits on commercial and residential expansion in order to control the size of the city’s Jewish population. And while there was no wall around the ghetto, as there was in other places, that just made it easier for the Christian mobs to attack us, prompting a number of royal proclamations that made the city council directly responsible for our safety, which did help a bit, God save King Sigismund III.