The Fifth Servant (34 page)

           
His eyes nearly glazed over as he stared at the picture, and he felt a stirring under the bedclothes, and he was considering what to do about it when Popel burst into the room, half out-of-breath, and said, “We’ve brought in a pair of witches, my lord.”

           
The bishop flipped the pages shut, his unsightly bulge fading to invisibility as he made a show of flapping open the sheets and climbing out of bed.

           
“What do you mean, a pair?” he demanded.

           
“A mother and daughter, my lord. The mother has already undergone a couple of hours of rough questioning.”

           
Those idiots!

           
“I gave them strict orders not to start without me,” he said, as Popel helped him put on his robes of office.

           
“I’m sorry, my lord, but we had no control over this. They were arrested by the local authorities.”

           
“On what charges?”

           
Popel checked the
Blutschreiber
’s report. “It says they cursed a crowd of good Christians, made the sign of the Devil, spun around three times, and uttered more of those blasphemous Hebrew curses.”

           
“What are their names?”

           
Popel ran his finger down the page. “Freyde and Julie Federn.”

           
A pair of Jewish witches, eh? As Popel grabbed a lantern to light their way down the steps to the dungeon, the bishop wondered if the daughter was young enough to be a virgin.

Samstag

Sobota

Saturday

           
Behold, the Guardian of Israel does
neither slumber nor sleep.

           
—PSALMS 121:4

CHAPTER 19

           
I BLINKED AWAKE, AND BREATHED easier as I came to full awareness that the dream was over and the creeping things had vanished. It felt good for a second, but then I remembered where I was, and it took a good long moment for the spirit of God to come flooding back into me. I closed my eyes and thanked the Lord in His mercy for having returned my soul to me.

           
A shadow loomed above me, and I heard Acosta’s voice: “Well, blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who revivest the dead. Now get the heck out of that bed and let me have my spot. I’ve been up all night.”

           
I told him as quickly as I could that I was worried that we might have a deranged messianist in our midst who believed that stirring up Christian hatred would prevent assimilation and thereby preserve our separate Jewish identity. But he dismissed my fears.

           
“Do you really think anyone has to encourage the
goyim
to hate us? Now I’m asking you nicely to get the hell out of my spot.”

           
I got up, washed my hands, and said the
reyshis khokhmah
prayer:
The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God
. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on my old, worn boots, one of the few things I could count on these days to keep out the rain. One of the few things I could count on, period.

           
The Holy Writings tell us that God speaks to us in dreams, and that if we do not pay attention to this subtle form of communication, we will suffer for it. So I went looking for Rabbi Loew, and found him in his study-room, getting ready for the morning prayers with his daughter Feygele and his son-in-law Rabbi Ha-Kohen. Yankev the mystic and young Lipmann were also there, putting on their
tallises
. Rabbi Loew’s daughter barely glanced at me as she stepped out of the room in her best Shabbes clothes.

           
As her steps faded away, I said, “Have any of you recently studied the passage in Brukhes which says that a dream is one-sixtieth of a prophecy?”

           
The others stood there shaking their heads, but Rabbi Loew said, “Why? Did you have a prophetic dream of some kind?”

           
“It certainly felt like it.”

           
“Then you must tell us about it.”

           
After the quiet isolation of Slonim, I had forgotten what it was like to have all but the most intimate acts open to public observers.

           
“What are you waiting for?” said Rabbi Ha-Kohen. “No wisdom will come of this if you keep it to yourself.”

           
“Aye, for an uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter,” said Yankev.

           
So I told them about my unsettling dream, and Rabbi Loew’s face grew serious.

           
“What were you running from?” asked Rabbi Loew.

           
“I don’t know. I just knew that I had to get away.”

           
A feeling that I’d always known.

           
“That would explain the final part of your dream,” said Rabbi Loew. “The part where you saw the
Shmir
.”

           
“The what?”

           
The fringes of Isaac Ha-Kohen’s
tallis
stopped swinging. Even the books on the shelves seemed to straighten up and listen closely.

           
“Ach, my
talmid
, you need to study the
aggadic
literature in greater depth.”

           
“The time will come for that.”

           
He looked me in the eyes and accepted this as a promise to study with him further.

           
“A story,” he began in classic rabbinic style. “In the early days of creation, a mighty reptile was formed. A
tanim hagodl
, a great worm named Shmir, as it is called, that has the power to flood the world with just a swish of its tail. And while we would be virtually powerless to subdue it ourselves, the demon king Ashmedai was able to imprison the creature in a deep pit beneath the waves and seal it with the seal of Ashmedai.”

           
He gripped my forearm and turned it over as if he were looking for traces of the strange seal still written on my body.

           
“And you will continue to wear the invisible bonds of slavery until you summon the will to confront the forces within you that are driving your actions.”

           
It was too early in the morning to absorb all of this. How was I supposed to go around knocking on doors and calling people to shul while trying to fathom how close I came to waking the sleeping dragon that is guarded by the king of the demons?

           
“A bad dream can sting worse than thirty lashes,” said Rabbi Loew, trying to reassure me. “But you must believe that God would not build the moral foundation of the world on such shaky and unstable ground as human reason alone. It is precisely
because
the world appears to have no order or justice that the Holy One, blessed is He, created us with His commandments imprinted on our souls. But we will have to talk about this later, my
talmid
. It’s time for you to call the faithful to shul.”

           
THE STREETS OUTSIDE THE GHETTO were empty of Jews, who had either gone into hiding or melted into the countryside. So the rabbis added a couple of streets to my rounds, which turned out to be a maze of alleys north of Hampasgasse that dead-ended near the riverfront. And I had to pound on all those doors with my fist, since we’re not supposed to use the
kleperl
on Shabbes.

           
I could smell the dankness in the rotting wood.

           
I heard noises coming from inside, foul and unpleasant noises, and a black mood gripped me by the shoulders.

           
The hand swoops down and knocks me to the floor. The clenched teeth open wide and snap at me. I press against the floor with my eyes squeezed shut, until the angry whirlwind rushes over me and leaves me shivering in its wake.

           
I did my best to shake it off.

           
Rabbi Akiva says that God foresees all, but still gives us permission to act freely, which suggests that the Almighty is willing to permit a fair amount of random cruelty in the world.

           
I must have been lost in those kinds of thoughts for a while, because I suddenly found myself up against the iron fence, looking across the cemetery at the stragglers scurrying into the Klaus Shul for the
shakhres
services. And I had to squeeze through a break in the fence and cut across the cemetery or else I’d be late—again.

           
The
beys khayim
was filled with tombstones. Well, what did I expect to find crossing through the cemetery? But these marble stones were positively
crammed
together, some of them leaning on each other for support, others, the old ones, nearly falling over. And the Bohemian Jews had decorated their brand-new tombstones in the latest fashion, which meant that instead of austere monuments bearing silent witness with the eternal Hebrew letters, I was surrounded by living symbols of who the inhabitants were in life. Everywhere I looked, the carvings depicted animals that represented the family names of the deceased—a fox for the Fuchs family, a deer for the Hirsches, a rooster for the Hahns, a crouching lion for anybody named Judah or Ariyeh—or symbols of their professions, like a pair of shears for the tailor, its blades tilting menacingly toward me, or a water-jug for the Levite, which looked like it was about to spill over into the apothecary’s mortar and pestle.

           
I had to get out of there before the spirits of the dead closed in on me, but my path was blocked by the sudden appearance of a gravestone carved with the hand of God breaking a blossoming branch from a tree that spread over a female figure, which must have meant that it was the grave of a young, unmarried woman. And the text confirmed this: “She had trouble all her days and did not have years.”

           
I felt a deep sadness for her, whoever she was.

           
But the dead would have to wait. I barely had time for the living, and the sun was already running its course.

           
Rabbi Gans told me that Mordecai Meisel built the Klaus Shul about twenty years ago, several steps below street level, for two reasons. One sacred: because the Psalm says, “Out of the depths I have called unto thee, O Lord,” and one profane: in order not to provoke the Christians by building a shul as splendid as one of their churches. (Although he had apparently grown bolder in recent years, employing his favorite Italian architects Fodera and Tannuzzo to build the Meisel Shul, which was on its way to becoming the biggest and most lavish building in the ghetto.)

           
The benches in the Klaus Shul were only half-full, since the shul was located on a bad street and presided over by a strict reformist whose views were unpopular with the rich families. But in the rear of the shul, behind a rope separating them from the rest of the worshipers, a group of women of the night huddled together on a low bench, following along as the
zogerke
translated the Siddur into Yiddish for them.

           
I washed my hands again and joined the service just as the first
balkoyre
was called up to read from the Torah. On the first day of Pesach we always read the part where Moses tells the Israelites to smear the blood of a lamb on their doors to keep the Angel of Death away. You might think that such divine protection allowed them to sleep easily. And yet they remained awake and vigilant all through the night, listening to the howling wind as the Destroyer walked the streets.

           
I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep through that, either.

           
The second reading was the passage from
Bamidbor
that commands us to do no manner of servile work on the fifteenth day of Nisan, just in case I had forgotten what a bad job I was doing of keeping His commandments.