The Fifth Servant (25 page)

           
“Really?” The young woman approached, her eyes brightening.

           
Kassy studied her more closely. She had long black braids that had been hastily tied back with a kerchief. Her hands were chapped from washing vegetables in cold water, and her apron showed traces of animal blood. Her deferential manner indicated that she was a servant girl, but there was something else about her, a certain headstrong quality that suggested that she wasn’t dependent on a serving maid’s meager wages for her livelihood. She didn’t have a ring on her finger or any other sign that she was another man’s property, but she didn’t seem to care about spoiling her beauty with heavy chores, including, apparently, butchering large animals.

           
“Tell me, how long has your family owned a butcher shop near the Jews?”

           
“You are truly as wise as they say, Miss astava. The Cervenkas have been butchers in the
Staré M
sto
 
for five generations. My name is Anya,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her apron. “And I’m coming to you because I need you to identify these herbs.”

           
She took out a sachet filled with long oval leaves.

           
Kassy took the small pouch and studied the leaves, turning them over in her hands. The specimens were thin and brittle, tapering to a dull point, like bay leaves, with a thick midrib, deep green on top, and gray-green on the underside, where the veins were more prominent. She had never seen their like before, and her eyes shone as she examined this new discovery. Who knows? Maybe
this
was the plant that could cure the little boy’s scarlet fever.

           
“Where did these come from?”

           
“From the New World.”

           
“I’m not surprised to hear that. I meant, where did
you
get them from?”

           
“Oh. From Viktor Janek’s shop, but please don’t tell anyone—”

           
“I won’t tell, I promise. But I do want to know why Janek the apothecary is trafficking in exotic herbs such as these.”

           
“His wife says he’s selling a lot—” She stopped again.

           
“Look, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

           
Anya the butcher’s daughter clenched and unclenched her fists a few times, fiddled with her apron strings, then finally revealed her big secret: “I’m working for the Jews.”

           
“Yes, I heard they were having some trouble over in the Jewish Town. You work as a Sabbath maid?”

           
“Yes, but also as—something else.”

           
“And these herbs are a key to that something else.”

           
“Yes.” Anya nodded rapidly.

           
“Do you know where they come from?”

           
“Like I said, from the New World.”

           
“That covers a lot of territory. Any idea where in the New World?”

           
“Marie Janek said something about the
Viceroyalty of Kee-To
. Am I saying that right? It sounds like it’s somewhere near China.”

           
“If it’s the Viceroyalty of Quito, it’s in the mountains of the southern Americas.”

           
“Oh. What is it, some kind of tobacco?”

           
“No, it’s not tobacco.” Kassy’s pulse quickened at the prospect of uncovering the secret of these mysterious herbs, and their importance to the Jews. Perhaps they would lead her to some of the Jews’ forbidden wisdom.

           
She said, “But if you leave them with me, I’ll see what I can learn from them.”

CHAPTER 14

           
FEW LANGUAGES ARE MORE ELOQUENT than German, especially when it’s shouted. So we paid close attention when a preacher called Brother Volkmar climbed onto an empty beer barrel and harangued the citizenry not to hold the whole Jewish community responsible for this crime against nature. He said that they had to treat the Jews in a friendly manner, for Christ Himself was born a Jew, and such kindness would surely bring many Jews back to the faith of the patriarchs and prophets, and lead them to become real Christians.

           
I wasn’t too sure about that last part, but since a couple of inches of crumbling wood were all that stood between us and the knife-sharpening party outside the gate, I was willing to accept this as a step in the right direction. Rambam counsels us that if we are forced to choose, conversion is preferable to death, since it allows us to live and return someday to our Jewish faith.

           
But when Acosta spotted another group of ragged street boys running up the Geistgasse to join the scavengers tearing up the sooty remains of Federn’s shop, I swear I heard something inside that hotheaded Sephardi go
snap
from three feet away.

           
He started barking orders like an old soldier who still jumps at the sound of the trumpet.

           
“I need eight strong, fleet, trustworthy men to watch the remaining gates,” he said as he went about rounding up volunteers from among the bystanders.

           
“Would you settle for two out of three?” said a toothless old graybeard.

           
“I’ll settle for
one
, old man.”

           
I saw the old man smile.

           
Then Acosta grabbed a
batlen
by the collar and told him to alert the butchers and have them take up their choppers and guard the flimsy wooden barrier on Schächtergasse. A
batlen
is one of those people who hangs around the shul all day in case he’s needed to make up the tenth man in a
minyen
, so I was pretty amazed when he took off as if he were trying to outrace the sun itself.

           
Acosta drafted me to organize a human chain to transfer the stacks of cobblestones from the Zigeunergasse half a block away to the clearing in front of the East Gate, where my comrade planted himself, spittle flying from his lips as he called out the dimensions of our makeshift barricades.

           
Somewhere behind the dark gray clouds, the sun was getting low. Shabbes would begin in less than half an hour. But half an hour before Shabbes is not yet Shabbes, so I kept working, struggling to keep the line moving by catching the stones from the fellow on my right and passing them to the fellow on my left. The jagged rocks scraped my hands, leaving them chapped with rough white crosshatches.

           
The tumult must have cleared out the nearest Talmud Torah, because a group of students in long black cloaks came scurrying up the street. I was hoping for a spell of relief from them, but when I saw Rabbi Aaron leading the pack with all the signs of righteous anger clearly written in his eyes, I prepared for the worst.

           
“What’s this?” said Rabbi Aaron, his tone confirming my expectations. Then he warned us that if we didn’t stop in a few minutes, we’d be guilty of desecrating the Sabbath.

           
Acosta hadn’t read two pages of Talmud, so I spoke up for him. “But, Rabbi, surely we have learned that it is acceptable to profane the holy Shabbes for the sake of a man like Reb Jacob Federn so that he may keep many Shabbeses,” I said, losing my rhythm and nearly getting whacked in the elbow with a cobblestone.

           
Acosta caught the wayward stone and knelt to align it with the second row of stones.

           
The rabbi said that kind of talk was just what he expected from a circle of radicals like us, then he reminded me—as if I needed reminding—that as a newcomer to the community, I had no right to interfere with its internal affairs.

           
“And unless you honor the Sabbath by praying with us, all your earthly toil will be in vain,” said Rabbi Aaron.

           
Acosta jumped to his feet. “With all due respect, Rabbi, here’s how it’s going to be. You pray, and we’ll defend the ghetto. It’s called division of labor. It’s a modern concept, so you wouldn’t know about it.”

           
“You’re going to regret that comment,” said Rabbi Aaron.

           
Half a block away, I saw Reyzl leaving the print shop and heading home for the Pesach feast.

           
“Yeah, we may end up regretting a lot of things,” I said.

           
“I’d sooner commit
kidesh hashem
and die with God’s Holy Name on my lips than violate Shabbes with a bunch of
fraydenkers
,” said Rabbi Aaron, and several of his hangers-on nodded in unison, their close-cropped hair staying rigidly in place. Then they actually started
removing
the cobblestones from the barricade.

           
Rabbi Hillel says,
In a place where there are no men, try to act like a man
.

           
I faced Rabbi Aaron’s students and said, “In all your years of study, did you people happen to skip over the passages in the Mishnah which tell us that it is permitted to violate Shabbes on a woman’s account in order to deliver a baby, and to openly carry the necessary implements and heat them in a fire?”

           
But they acted like they didn’t hear me. They just kept on removing stones as if I wasn’t even there.

           
I wondered if they went through this at Masada, where the last of the Zealots committed mass suicide rather than surrender to their pagan enemies, or in York, En gland, where the Jews had taken their own lives rather than fall into the hands of their Christian attackers. All we ever get are the grand and glorious speeches about their heroic sacrifices. But I wondered if they bickered among themselves, taking sides and splitting along the fracture lines of old rivalries. Fortunately, all my years of apprenticeship in institutions of higher learning had prepared me for this type of circumstance.

           
Acosta looked like he was ready to split one of the disciples’ heads open with a paving stone. So I said, “Haven’t we learned that Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Nasi saved the Jewish nation after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple by writing down the Oral Law in spite of the prohibition against doing so? Didn’t he break the rules in order to save our very souls?”

           
I said all this while gathering the muddy stones and feeding them back into the rotation, even as the rabbi’s followers undid our work by taking the stones off the pile and tossing them back into the mud.

           
This bit of horse play from a rustic
Purimshpil
went on for a few go-rounds, until Acosta recognized that he would never win a theological debate with the esteemed rabbi and his followers, and limited himself to muttering about how the toil and sweat of men like us had built the gates that allowed the rabbi and his personal band of zealots to pray in peace.

           
But the rabbi’s band of devotees refused to listen, and it was about to turn into a tug-of-war over the muddy stones when Rabbi Aaron called them off.

           
“That’s enough, my boys,” he said. “Although removing the stones is the correct action to take, it is not worth the cost of desecrating the Sabbath.”

           
The rabbi’s students reluctantly dropped what they were doing and murmured in agreement.

           
Luckily, the
batlen
returned at that moment with the message that the butchers were sharpening their cleavers and gathering under the banner of the double-tailed lion.

           
“Good,” said Acosta. “Now run and tell the other guilds to do the same.”

           
“What other guilds?”

           
“The goldsmiths, tailors, and shoemakers.”

           
The
batlen
said, “What are we going to do to our enemies? Throw
shoes
at them?”