The Fifth Servant (31 page)

           
What a waste of a truly gifted mind
, I thought.

           
A passkey slid into the lock and turned with a
click
. The door opened and there stood the hostess with a couple of the girls and Izzy the Ratcatcher.

           
“What’s going on in here?” the hostess wanted to know.

           
“I’m looking for the way out of the
Yidnshtot
,” I said.

           
“Not looking like that, you aren’t. You wouldn’t get ten feet with that shaggy beard and that yellow bull’s eye on your chest,” said the hostess.

           
The other girls giggled at my predicament.

           
“Also, there’s nothing happening over there at this time of night on Good Friday,” said Izzy. “It’s dead.”

           
“I bet it is,” I said.

           
“Besides,” he said, “there’s someone I want you to meet.”

CHAPTER 17

           
THE MAN HUNCHED OVER the railing at the top of the stairs smiled at us, displaying a crooked line of yellowing teeth. He brushed a cloud of orange dust from his shirtsleeves, and invited us into his studio overlooking the courtyard on the Rotegasse. The room had no stove or fireplace, so it was cold enough for us to see our breath.

           
At first I thought that Izzy was taking me to meet a locksmith, but he told me that this man had a much more useful skill to share with me.

           
“So
you’re
the lowly
unter
-shammes who’s single-handedly trying to save us all from this false bloodcrime charge,” said the man, shaking my hand.

           
“Not by choice. I’ll take any help you can offer.”

           
His name was Franz Langweil. He had dark eyes, pale skin, and shoulder blades that must have fused to his spine years ago because he was bent into a permanent crouch. He offered us some tea, but his mugs were so dusty that I declined. Every available surface was crowded with odd containers spilling over with minerals and powders of every conceivable color. Langweil told me he scraped out a living mixing dry pigments for the Christian artists decorating the new churches near the emperor’s castle.

           
“A few years ago, a Jewish paint er could work side-by-side with the Christians and nobody gave a damn.
Then there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph
,” he said, pilfering a quote from the Book of
Shmoys
, “and now I’m barred from working on Christian themes. My
goyishe
friends still toss me some business now and then. Not much, but it’s a living,” he said. Then he coughed, and some orange particles went flying into the air. The wind carried the sounds of the city in through the broken windowpanes.

           
Izzy must have read my mind, because he gestured for me to be patient.

           
“You appreciate the finer points of the female form, I presume. Tell me, what do you think of this?” Langweil asked, lifting an oil-stained cloth, revealing a painting of a young woman. She was totally nude, facing away from us, her body floating on a sea of blue satin, her smooth, round behind in the very center of the frame. Kneeling in front of a dusky red curtain, a winged cherub whose dark hair matched the woman’s held up a mirror that reflected her face, which was dimly shadowed and indistinct compared to the soft flesh that was the brightest element of this scene.

           
I swallowed.

           
Like a male animal with no control over his instincts—I swallowed.

           
“Notice how dark the painting is?” said Langweil.

           
“Sure, that’s the first thing I noticed,” I said, hoping it sounded natural.

           
“See how the blue satin turns black at the painting’s edges? See how well this artist observed the relationship between light and color, simultaneously revealing and concealing the mystery of her beauty? Just look at the attention to detail,” he said, handing me a glass magnifier.

           
I obliged him, leaning close and pretending to study the subtle shift in shading under the woman’s right elbow.

           
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said, straightening up. “She’s—fantastic.”

           
“Before your palms get all sweaty and you drop my lens, I better tell you that the man who painted this nubile young lady died a hundred-and-fifty years ago.”

           
The warm glow in my chest drained away. This vibrant young woman appeared to be so full of life, and her warm, tender places were posed so naturally, that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the paint still wet to the touch. Now, I realized that she had probably died at least a hundred years ago. I hoped that she’d had a good long life, full of warmth and happiness, and that she hadn’t died of a purulent fever a few months after she posed for this painting, which was pretty common among artists’ models.

           
“It’s called
The Venus of Colucci
. I think that was the original patron’s name,” said Langweil.

           
The iron clapper of the town bell rang three times, announcing the curfew in the Christian sections of the city, and the rhythm of the night was punctuated by the tramping of heavy boots as the municipal guards came around, barking orders and pounding on doors as they searched the ghetto for hidden treasures—which were so well hidden that not even the Jews knew where to find them.

           
I reluctantly bid goodbye to the ageless beauty of this unknown woman as Langweil covered her again with the oily cloth. I knew that Izzy had brought me here for a reason, but before I could ask him what it was, a window shattered in the courtyard below, and the sergeant of the guards stormed around issuing scatological curses at his henchmen.

           
Langweil turned to me, his dark eyes glistening as if they were made of glass. “What do you think of all this, Mr. Shammes? Some Polish stargazer can shift the center of the universe from the earth to the sun, but even in this strange new world the Jews are still hated and persecuted as heretics.”

           
I said, “Actually, the Church’s official position is that Judaism is a perfidious deviation from the eternal faith of Christianity, but not a true heresy.”

           
“So we’re in a class by ourselves?”

           
“I guess so.”

           
“Lucky us,” said Izzy.

           
Langweil asked, “Do you follow the Zoharic Kabbalah or do you prefer the Lurianic system?”

           
“I didn’t come here to talk about this.”

           
“Oh, but you did.”

           
Ah, the famous mystical reasoning: Nothing is what it seems to be. Absence is presence. There are hidden meanings everywhere. He sounded like a follower of Rabbi Luria.

           
His manner of questioning me brought back the feeling of when I was a kid in the small-town
kheyder
where the teachers smacked your knuckles with a wooden rod if you took too long to answer a difficult question. Naturally, I thought that the World-to-Come was run like that
kheyder
, and that we would have to pass some kind of test before we got in. But in the troubled world of my daydreams, my brain would get all slow and fuzzy and I never had enough time to answer. So while other people have nightmares about drowning or being chased by demons, I have nightmares about not being able to think my way out of a simple problem.

           
I looked at Izzy, who directed my gaze back to Langweil, like an assistant reminding a distracted student to pay attention to the master.

           
I said, “I believe that as long as we live and breathe, we will never know the Creator in His true form, because in order to protect us from being engulfed by His endlessness, He had to build a barrier around us, and that same barrier also keeps us from being aware of the infinite energy that lies beyond it.”

           
“Not all the time. There is a wise woman in the Old Town who knows how to prepare philtres that will temporarily dissolve the barrier and reveal the hidden glory of the Divine that pulsates in everything.”

           
“Really? I must meet her, after all this blows over.”

           
If I’m still alive by then
.

           
“But that’s quite a paradox you’ve identified,” he said. “What would the great rationalists say in response to that?”

           
My right leg was getting numb. I shifted my weight and rubbed my thigh to get some feeling back into it.

           
“You know, I would be perfectly happy to have this discussion
on Tuesday
. But right now—”

           
Izzy nudged me.

           
I resumed my part of the dialogue. “Rambam would probably argue that the universe contains many accidents, such as time, which he describes as a side effect produced by the motion of the material objects of creation.”

           
“We all know that the pure energy of God’s emanations devolved into time-bound material reality,” Langweil chided me. “The question is, how do we reverse the process and convert a material object back into God’s original energy?”

           
“If I knew that I’d be making a living transmuting base metals into gold.”

           
Izzy’s face brightened, but Langweil remained serious, apparently waiting for my answer.

           
So I told him, “The
Seyfer Yetsireh
says that God created the world through some combination of the ten emanations and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. But the Sages say that God created the entire world by unlocking the hidden energy in the single letter
hey
in the short form of His name.”

           
“The universe is made from the energy contained in a single letter
H
? It’s a good thing we’re Jewish, or the Inquisition would be screaming for our heads on a platter for even thinking such a thing—”

           
“Before you go on, does this have anything to do with finding out who owed Federn money?”

           
“Yes,” Langweil insisted. “Because they probably burned his ledger. Am I right?”

           
I didn’t drop my jaw and say
My God! How did you know that?
But I came pretty close.

           
“Ah, the Hidden Science teaches us many things,” he said. “We can neither create or destroy any part of God’s creation. All we can do is alter its form. And so it just might be possible to reconstruct the contents of the ledger through a series of mystical processes that will briefly unite our souls with God’s eminence.”

           
“You’re saying the words and numbers in that ledger still exist in the form of dissipated smoke?”

           
“Exactly.”

           
“I see. Any chance of us being able to reconstruct the shape of evaporated footprints by examining their vapor?” I asked.

           
“Let’s not get too far-fetched here, shall we? It’s just that many times, what appears to be destruction is really an opportunity for us to begin healing God’s creation.”

           
Another mystical absence-is-presence type argument.

           
“You doubt me,” he said.

           
I didn’t deny it.

           
“For more than a hundred years, we have plowed our ashes back into the soil to bring renewal to this city,” he said. “When the Jewish Town Hall was damaged by flames, Mayor Meisel rebuilt it with the alabaster ceiling that soars above our heads today. When the great fire tore through the Little Town and reached the roof of St. Vitus’s Cathedral on the hill, they replaced the old roof trusses with brand-new copper ones, and laid the foundations for all the town houses you see rising up in a grander style than ever before.”

           
“I haven’t visited those neighborhoods yet.”

           
“You don’t have to. I’ve made a living record of it. Every disaster, every act of demolition, every laborious rebirth. Let me tell you, it’s better than hanging myself with the rope from a sack of sugar so I’ll have a sweet death. Come, I’ll show you,” he said, beckoning us to follow him around the dusty table.

           
He parted the ragged curtains and easily cleared the low roof beams thanks to his permanently stooped shoulders.

           
I had to duck under the angled beams and keep low as I entered his private wonderland.