Child of the Light (16 page)

"Have you heard the news?" Friedrich Weisser asked as they entered the cigar store.

"We saw it all," Jacob said.

"Saw it! My word!" Friedrich wiped his hands on his apron, his eyes sparkling with envy. "Is it possible? They say the chauffeur miraculously wasn't hurt by the grenade."

"There were two grenades."

"Two! Nothing about
that
on the radio."

Sol's mother came hurrying across the street, her shawl fluttering. "Jacob! Solomon! I've been so worried!"

"We're fine, Ella. Sol's dazed. But fine."

"We must close the shop," Friedrich Weisser said. "The radio said people are already entering the streets to demonstrate against the murder. There could be looting."

"Yes. Close the shop," Jacob said. "Who is demonstrating?"

"Workers from the factories. They say they'll be marching four deep within the hour--"

"We must join them."

Ella Freund touched her husband's arm. "But there could be danger. They will never miss us if we mourn him here, at home."

"We shall join them nevertheless," Jacob said. "All of us."

His wife turned away. "You men are all the same. If Walther Rathenau, may he rest in peace, had listened to his mother, he would be alive. They say she did everything she could to stop him from becoming Foreign Minister. She knew his life would be in danger."

Sol heard the conversation but could not respond to it. Once in the apartment, he came out of his stupor. He felt strange. Angry. Sad. He knew something had happened, something more than the obvious tragedy, but he did not know what. He was grateful when his mother suggested they do something normal, like wash up and eat lunch, yet he felt guilty that he was hungry.

"It's nearly one," she said. "Who knows when we'll get home?"

Apparently sensing his son's discomfort, Jacob looked across the table at Sol. "Life must go on," he told Solomon. "Eat your soup."

Sol did so, and was washing the bowl when he heard Herr Weisser yelling. Please, no more trouble, he thought, opening the front door. Erich stood in the main foyer, in uniform. He
wants
his papa to get angry, Sol thought, remembering what Erich had said about his father. What he cannot stand is his papa's weakness. Why can't Herr Weisser see that?

"So! Now you're wearing your defiance," Herr Weisser said. "Go to your room and change. I'll give you," Friedrich glanced at his watch, "two minutes."

Erich climbed to the next landing and looked down over the banister. His voice sounded choked with anger, though whether at himself or at his father, Sol could not tell. "I'm not going anywhere. Especially not with you."

Visibly controlling his temper, Friedrich went up the stairs and, bending before his son, straightened the boy's Freikorps tie. "They've shot Herr Rathenau. There's a demonstration. We do business in this city. We cannot afford not to pay our respects...all of us."

Erich pulled away and went up further. He's dead--that's all that matters to me.
Rathenau, old Walther, shall have a timely halter!"
he sang, insolently and off-key, staring at Sol, who had seen the German youth song printed in the
Social Democrat.

Please don't sing the rest, Erich, Sol begged silently, remembering the last lines:
Shoot down Walther Rathenau...The Goddamned swine of a Jewish sow.

"Shoot--" Erich began.

Something's boiling over in him, Sol thought. Something that's been brewing all week.

Face reddening, Friedrich started after the boy, but Frau Weisser gently caught her husband by the wrist and slightly, darkly, shook her head. Sol heard Erich race up the remaining stairs, unlock the apartment, and slam the door behind himself.

"It's not my place to interfere between parents and son, but we're all involved." Jacob climbed a step and reached out a hand to his friends. "We will always be involved with one another. What the boy has done is despicable. You must make him come with us. Can't you see he's crying out for you to be strong?"

"You knew about this uniform he wears?" Herr Weisser asked Solomon, raising his hand.

Sol backed away, sure he was going to be struck. "He told me not to tell."

"You knew, yet said nothing!" Then a look of vapid acceptance came over Friedrich. "You are not to blame, Solomon." He shook his head sadly. "It is that
boy
up there. I keep telling myself--" he was speaking to Jacob now--"it is because of the seizures, but we cannot blame everything on those. I cannot remember when Erich was not rebellious. My papa used to tell me, 'Life is not always cause and effect, despite what your so-called science claims.' I should have listened to his advice. I should have understood." He took his wife's hand. "We go now, Mama. The boy can do as he wishes. He always has."

Without waiting for Erich, the five of them went down the stairs, out the main door and into the June sun, which had broken through the clouds. Before long, they were part of a spontaneous, giant procession snaking silently up Unter den Linden toward the Reichstag. Already, people said, Rathenau was being brought there to lie in state.

Gone were the ladies in expensive hats and the riders who used the grassy sides of the boulevard to exercise themselves and their horses, gone the men in top hats and the children and toy poodles.

The workers owned the boulevard. They marched, faces set and in silence, alongside street-corner hooligans, politicians, and prostitutes. Like an orderly lynch mob, they moved steadily forward, four and then six abreast as people joined from every alley and side street.

Above the crowd, the black-red-gold banners of the Republic waved in the breeze alongside the red banners of socialism. Politics were set aside for the first time in over a decade as Berlin mourned a statesman who had begun to set into motion his personal dream of a better Germany through negotiation.

"He was so much the aristocrat," Friedrich Weisser said, his mouth close to Jacob's ear. In order to talk to his partner, he had to lean over Solomon, who marched between the two men. "I never realized he had such a following among the working class."

"In a year, they will claim he was purely a man of the people." Jacob Freund was staring straight ahead. "They will even conveniently forget he was a Jew."

For the first time in his life, Sol felt his father's bitterness as his own. "In a year," Sol said, "they will blame his murder on the Jews."

"It's been some time since your bar mitzvah, Sol," Beadle Cohen said. "I have missed you. Will you be returning for advanced Judaic studies?"

Sol rubbed his temples, hoping to ease his headache. Bar mitzvah boys went two ways: some swore they would never read another word of Hebrew or Judaica in their lives; others, suddenly filled with sentiment, expressed the intention of becoming rabbis or Hebrew scholars and never doing anything else. Unsure of how he felt, he had devoted what little time he had--when not studying or working for Papa--to reading and rereading his growing library of books on Jewish mysticism.

He had come to no conclusions, except to decide that, for the time being, he fell somewhere between the cracks.

As a bar mitzvah gift, the beadle, already responsible for the library of mystical books in Sol's room, had given him the
Book of Formation
and the first book of the Lurianic Kabbalah. Both were inscribed with his usual message: "When you are ready, you will understand."

Thus far, all Sol understood was that Luria believed Jews were born with a consciousness of their heritage--a sort of untapped well of accumulated experience and knowledge.

"Beadle Cohen, I need your guidance. I know I want to continue learning," he said, "but I don't really want to be part of a set traditional program."

As always, the beadle got straight to the point. "You don't look well. Is there something I can do to help you?"

Sol paced around the beadle's study--wondering where and how to begin--suppressing the urge to shout, scream, throw something across the room. He was moody and depressed most of the time, struggling with unaccountable angers, convinced he was being haunted by the soul of the woman who had practically died in his arms, and fighting blinding headaches. The voices came more and more, repeating words and phrases that made no sense.

"I have nightmares," he said slowly. "I see Erich hanging from the grating. I hear...sounds. Strange, ugly laughter that is Erich's, but isn't human."

Except for the bar mitzvah, which Erich had attended despite the pressure of his Freikorps-Youth friends, Sol had seen little of his friend since Rathenau's death. He knew that the Weissers had finally given Erich permission to belong to the group, and he had watched Erich's uniformed comings and goings, but they had not done anything together. They had not even gone to the hideout, which was just as well. He was still trying to escape his memories of the assassination and of Erich's ugly behavior that day.

"I keep thinking Rathenau's assassins are after me...."

"Tillessen, von Salomon, and the Techow brothers are in prison," the beadle said.

Sol knew that. And Kern and Fischer, the ringleaders of what had proven to be a conspiracy, had been tracked down, too. One was shot to death; the other committed suicide. Yet in his nightly imaginings, they came to his window, holding knives and grenades, looking for the boy-witness.

"I get headaches," he said. "I hear voices...one woman cries out
'Oh God, let me die. I did not know...I did not know.'
Another talks of
sweetbreads
to someone called Margabrook who speaks to her of lice and the dreams of dead men."

Haltingly he told the beadle about the sounds in the sewer, and about the feeling that something had entered him, taken possession of him as he had looked into the eyes of the dying woman.

The beadle listened without interruption. "Ever see flashes of light?" he asked when Sol fell silent.

Sol nodded. "Right before the headaches come. The doctor says it's part of them."

"That is one possibility. There are others. You have read
The Book of Formation?"

Again Sol nodded. Terrified, searching for answers, he had read and reread it. The more he came to understand, the more afraid he became.

"Solomon ben Luria was a mystic and a prophet," the beadle said. "He knew the past and had visions of the future. They were always presaged by brilliant flashes of light."

"I see nothing. I just hear voices, over and over--"

"Give it time, Sol."

"Are you saying--"

"God has the answers. The only help I can offer is to suggest possibilities."

"For example?"

"Are you sure you want to hear this, Solomon?" The beadle looked extremely serious. When Sol nodded, the beadle sighed in resignation and said, "All right, then. I'll tell you what I think. I have known you for a long time, Sol, and I do not say this lightly. I believe it is entirely possible that, like Ben Luria, you are a visionary. I also believe you have a dybbuk in you, and that it is muddying your abilities. When...if...the dybbuk leaves you, everything will become clear."

"I don't what any...any
thing
in me," Sol said, then mentally backed away, embarrassed even to countenance such an outrageous possibility. Like most Jewish boys, he had heard of dybbuks--vaguely--some kind of soul that was unable to transmigrate to a higher world because the person had sinned against humanity.

"I just think I'm going crazy," he said. "Am I? Tell me...
please!

"Sometimes," the beadle said, "dybbuks seek refuge in the bodies of living persons, causing instability, speaking foreign words through their mouths."

"You're saying that
that's
what is wrong with me?" Sol asked, dazed.

"Perhaps."

"Well, get rid of it! It's affecting my schoolwork. It's affecting my whole life! My parents are worried--and I don't blame them. I can't talk to them about something like... How could I possibly tell them!" Exasperated, he put his head in his hands.

The beadle waited for Sol to calm down. "Sometimes a rabbi can exorcise a dybbuk," he said at last. "But that is not always the right answer. You are strong, Solomon. For those who are strong, a dybbuk can open doors into worlds that other men cannot enter. Eventually it will depart as it came--unbidden--and then you will understand its message. Go home and think about it."

Leaving the question of his studies unanswered, Sol went home. That night, lying in bed, he wished he had opened himself up to the beadle sooner. He had almost forgotten how much he treasured their discussions. The man was the only person he knew who was not afraid to acknowledge the difference between rhetoric and original thought. He really listened, debated each point, gave of his knowledge, yet left the conclusions open so that Sol never felt like a young know-nothing fool when he expressed his views.

It was amazing, Sol thought, how quickly life could change. Bedtime had once been the best part of his day. In bed, it had no longer mattered that when he took off his glasses he could not see things in sharp focus. He had liked the way his lace curtains clothed the night sky in crisscross patterns and the way the moon looked dressed in lace. He had even made up stories about moon men and about beautiful princesses held captive in lunar craters.