The Fifth Servant (41 page)

           
Rabbi Loew made this wretched place a little bit holier by chanting a verse from the Psalms:
“Ki mikol tsoroh hitsiloni uve’oyvay ro’asoh eyni.”
For from all trouble He has rescued me, and upon my enemies my eye has fallen.

           
I wondered why he chose that passage until he said, “There is your Seder. And your matzoh as well.”

           
Then I realized that the rabbi had chosen a verse with three successive words beginning with the letters
mem
,
tsadek
, and
hey
, which form the word
, or
matzoh
, and thus contain the essence of the Seder in a few short words.

           
We couldn’t light the candles, so we just said the Shabbes blessing.

           
Federn’s lips trembled as he said the
brukhes
over the bread and wine. He took a bite of matzoh, a sip of wine, and when this little ceremony was finished, he hungrily gobbled up the fish. Between bites he asked me to pour some wine into the tin cup.

           
“There’s still some water in here,” I said.

           
“It’s left over from the prisoner before me,” he said, his mouth full of fish.

           
That explained why he hadn’t touched it. It was extremely dangerous to drink from another man’s cup, especially in a filthy place like this. If the other man had contracted a fever or some other illness, the harmful spirit of that illness could have slipped out of his mouth and into the water.

           
I dumped out the remaining water and filled the cup with wine.

           
What wonders a crust of bread and a cup of wine can do to cheer a man’s heart! I waited till Federn was sipping his second cup of wine and nibbling on his second matzoh before opening up the subject of our visit.

           
“Reb Federn
is so formal,” I said. “Is it all right if I call you Jacob?”

           
“Why shouldn’t it be all right?”

           
“Listen to me, Jacob,” I went on. “If you want to get out of here, you’ve got to be cleared of all charges. And in order to do that, we need to hear what happened in your own words.”

           
“You were there. You saw everything. What else is there to say?”

           
“No, I didn’t see everything,” I said. “For example, I didn’t see what happened there three days ago.”

           
“What do you mean, three days ago?”

           
“I mean that what happened in your shop started at least three days ago, if not long before that.”

           
I pressed on before Federn could respond: “By the way, we found a piece of silver thread on the floor of your shop. Do you have any idea how it could have gotten there?”

           
“How should I know?”

           
“Did any of your recent customers wear silver thread?”

           
“How do you expect me to remember that?”

           
“So it could have been anyone.”

           
“
Vey iz mir
, I’m freezing to death up here and he’s talking in riddles.”

           
“Are you acquainted with Viktor Janek, the father of the victim?”

           
“Uh…only slightly.”

           
“But well enough to get into an argument with him?”

           
“What are you talking about? I don’t remember any argument.”

           
“You don’t remember talking with him?”

           
“Do you remember every conversation you’ve ever had?”

           
“You were seen arguing with Viktor Janek in front of your shop. That was three days ago. Surely you can remember that far back?”

           
“Why are you speaking as if I were the guilty one?”

           
“I don’t know. Why are you
reacting
as if you were the guilty one?”

           
“Everyone’s guilty of something,” he said defensively.

           
“Don’t I know it,” I said. But something in the room had shifted, and I had to shift with it.

           
“It must be hard to run a Jewish shop outside the gates, with all those
goyim
staring at you as if you’ve got horns growing under your hat, your wife carping at you for not putting aside more money, your daughter getting ready for the matchmaker—do you have any idea what a decent wedding costs these days?” I asked my companions. They clucked their tongues and condemned the latest trend among rich merchants for increasingly lavish wedding parties.

           
I went on: “And the municipal guards always chiseling away at you in return for their ‘protection.’ Oh, you don’t have to tell me, I saw enough of that Kromy fellow to get the idea. And, well, a man gets desperate, doesn’t he? Anybody can understand that.”

           
Federn stared at me. In the dusty light, he looked like a man who had a lot of secret compartments tucked away deep inside himself, under lock and key. And he was trying to decide which compartment to open.

           
After a while, Rabbi Loew said, “You realize that you are telling us something even when you
don’t
answer.”

           
I said, “I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth.”

           
Federn finally turned the key on one of those tiny compartments. “We were arguing about money.”

           
“We already know that,” I said, as if it were common knowledge in every corner of the city.

           
Rabbi Loew squinted at me skeptically, but he held back and let me press on. “Between
kesef
and
mammon
, money takes all kinds of forms. What was the
specific
problem about money?”

           
“We were arguing because he owed me money.”

           
“Wait a minute.” I leaned closer so he couldn’t look away as easily. “You’re saying he owed
you
money?

           
“Well, to hear him tell it, I owed
him
money. And that’s what we were arguing about.”

           
“How much money?”

           
“It doesn’t matter.”

           
“I see. So it must have been a trivial amount. Then why would you bother arguing about it?”

           
“You think a Christian merchant needs an excuse to argue?”

           
“Why did he owe you money? For what?”

           
“You want to know what he owed me money for?”

           
“That’s the question I asked.”

           
He was just killing time.

           
Somewhere outside his cell, high above the clouds, the sun was hurtling past the midpoint of the heavens toward another distant twilight. It took every drop of patience in me to sit there as if I had all the time in the world to wait for him to decide what he was going to say.

           
Eventually I said, “
Let thy yea be yea and thy nay be nay,
” I warned, quoting the Bava Metzia tractate. The Council of Elders says that going back on your word is one of the seven deadly sins that provokes God’s fiercest wrath, and I was pretty sure that Federn knew it.

           
Rabbi Loew spoke so softly that it almost felt as if his voice were coming from inside my own head: “Sometimes when we pray for certain things, the gates of prayer may be open or they may be closed. But when we truly repent our misdeeds and pray for forgiveness, the gates are always open.”

           
A scouting party of red-eyed rodents came creeping up through the hole in the middle of the floor. They must have smelled the fresh food.

           
I said, “You know, it’s really hard to keep those little creatures from biting you, especially when you can’t maneuver to defend yourself. And it only takes a couple of days for the sores to fester. That alone can kill you.”

           
“God works in strange ways,” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“You shouldn’t have put yourselves out for me,” Federn confessed. “I’m not worthy.”

           
“One man is equal to the whole of creation,” Rabbi Loew said, but the words also came from the mouth of Rabbi Nathan, gone these many centuries, for we are taught that whenever we quote a teaching in the name of the one who composed it, the lips of the teacher still whisper from the grave.

           
A low moan floated up through the hole in the floor, but I didn’t have time to think about who it was.

           
“Look, we all bend the rules every now and then,” I said. “It’s the only way to survive in a repressive society like this, am I right?”

           
“That’s right,” Rabbi Gans agreed.

           
“And we all make mistakes. With all the laws the Christians impose on us, it’s impossible to remember them all. We’re always violating some edict or other, and nobody in the community would hold it against you if you did. The only thing they care about is whether you’re going to admit your mistakes and do something about making restitution for them. And for it to mean anything, you have to do it
now
, while we still have a chance to fix the situation.”

           
Federn laughed bitterly. “You think you can fix the situation? I thought you rationalists didn’t believe in miracles.”

           
I did some more pretending that I had all day for this.

           
“The longer you make us wait, the worse we have to assume your actions were,” said Rabbi Gans, playing up his part nicely.

           
“Listen Jacob, I know what you’re going through,” I said. “I’ve been in some pretty tight spots myself. I’m sure you didn’t want it to turn out this way. You only wanted to provide for your family the best way you knew how. You just didn’t get a chance to put things right before all this happened.”

           
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” said Federn.

           
“So tell me about it.”

           
Federn’s eyes flitted from me to the rabbis.

           
“Don’t look at them, look at me,” I said.

           
But Rabbi Loew said, “When the Israelites came to the wilderness of Sin between Elim and Sinai, the Holy One, Blessed is He, sent us the manna from heaven. And on the sixth day, He sent us a double portion for Shabbes. Do you know what this means, Jacob? It means that even when a man has no money for
challah
and wine, he must prepare for Shabbes as best he can, and have faith that God will provide for him.”

           
Federn said nothing.

           
I gave him one more
noodge
. “Look, it’s going to come out anyway. But if you talk to us now, maybe we can keep everyone from hearing the news from the wrong people. Isn’t that what you want?”

           
Maybe it was the redemptive qualities of the bread of affliction—the dry, unleavened bread that he could barely swallow—or the fact that Pesach is also called the Festival of Freedom, that fragile ideal that he was particularly receptive to at the moment, but Jacob Federn finally started talking.

           
“We started out by clipping dalers,” he said.

           
I tried not to show any reaction.

           
“Janek knew a couple of metalworkers who would melt down the shavings and mold them into coins,” he said.