The Fifth Servant (51 page)

           
“Enough of this,” Acosta said to me. “There is a time to lay down the glove and take up the sword.”

           
“Only trouble is they have a lot more swords than we do.”

           
“Better a noble death than a wretched life.”

           
“That’s a mighty fine sentiment, but are you sure you’re ready for this?”

           
“One hundred percent ready. How about you?”

           
“One can never be one hundred percent ready for anything like this. It’s not possible.”

           
“All right, I’m ninety-eight percent ready. You?”

           
“I’m the other two percent. Let’s go.”

           
Acosta gave a tight smile. “I promise to put in a good word for you with God the next time I see Him.”

           
The two of us led the children forth into the crowd, which grudgingly parted, standing like a wall on either side of us. And as we marched into their midst, I finally spotted Sister Marushka waiting for us at the other end of the gauntlet.

           
Our enemies watched the children closely, as if they were counting heads of cattle. Suddenly a shout went up.

           
“Hey!”

           
“Hold on there—!”

           
One of the
Judenschläger
elbowed past the guards and laid his hand on a lump of fabric crawling along amid the cluster of children. He grabbed on with both hands and effortlessly hauled a grown man to his feet. Yankev ben Khayim popped into view looking pale and petrified, his knees barely holding him up.

           
“What the hell is this?”

           
“Please don’t—”

           
“See how they repay our kindness us with deception and trickery!” said a town official, who must have gotten it straight from one of those anti-Jewish pamphlets, because I couldn't believe that anybody really talks like that.

           
The
Judenschläger
descended on Yankev ben Khayim, others made for Rabbi Loew. We had no time to think. Acosta plunged into the crowd, trying to save Yankev. To their everlasting credit, the city guards closed in to protect the children and deliver them into the arms of Sister Marushka, while I waded into the sea of bodies, beating a path to Rabbi Loew.

           
A couple of Christian
bulvans
were setting a pair of dogs on him. I charged into the men, knocking them to the mud, then drew back and smacked one of the dogs as hard as I could with the club and sent him off with a swift kick in the rear. The other dog growled and leapt at me. I held out my left forearm for it to latch onto but all it got was a mouthful of gaberdine, and as the damned thing tried to sink its teeth into my flesh, I grabbed its front paw with my free hand and yanked up sharply until I heard a pop. The dog yelped and dropped to the ground. I shook my club at him, and he showed more sense than some people I know and limped away.

           
The two men came back at me. I lunged at them with the
kleperl
, jabbing one in the stomach with the sharp end of the stick and kneeing him in the face when he doubled over. As the other man closed in on me, I faked a jab at his face, and when he held up his arms to block me, I spun the shaft around and hooked him by the ankle and yanked him off his feet.

           
I threw my arm around Rabbi Loew and half-carried him through the small door to safety. Then something clubbed me from behind and I went down in the mud, pain shooting through my shoulder.

           
The mob tried to push through the small door, but Acosta’s crew fought them off.

           
I groped around in the mud until a hand reached down to help me. Waves of pain spiraled through my shoulder. I slowly raised my hand, my quivering fingers drawing upward at the promise of a friendly encounter, when that other hand inexplicably closed in mid-air, without my fingers in it, and my arm sank back into the mire. The face of the bystander with the close-cropped hair loomed over me.

           
“I’d be happy to help you
tomorrow
,” he said. “But never on Shabbes. On Shabbes, we need not seek protection, for Shabbes itself protects us.”

           
The face drifted away and silence filled its place.

           
I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t help feeling that if by some miracle I managed to survive this day, I was going to remember precisely which members of the community had turned their backs on me when I needed them the most, or promised to help me but never did.

           
I twisted around and looked up the block for any sign of reinforcements, but the street was deserted, except for a couple of terrified observers peeking around the corner at Joachimstrasse. They looked like servants from the Rozanskys’ house, but I couldn’t really tell from where I was lying.

           
I sat up, rubbing my shoulder, and slowly got to my feet.

           
Outside the gate, the municipal authorities were leading Yankev away under heavy guard, which undoubtedly saved his life, or at least prolonged it by a day or two. And it looked like Sister Marushka was being allowed to guide the children to safety.

           
But Acosta was surrounded. He was keeping a ring of twenty men at bay by jabbing and slicing at the air between them, spinning around to threaten the ones creeping up behind him, and cursing them all in the harshest Judeo-Spanish idiom. You didn’t have to know a word of Ladino to get the gist of it. They had vastly superior numbers and a plentiful supply of weapons, but rather than get in close, they decided to pelt him with stones. And before I could get enough feeling back in my shoulder to hold a weapon effectively, sharp stones clipped him in the ear and over the eyebrow. The wound over his eyebrow started to bleed profusely, then time slowed down as he took one in the neck—his neck bone jerked aside, and all of a sudden he turned into a limp sack of human skin, stumbling forward, already beginning the awful transition from a vibrant human being to a wet hunk of meat, fat, and bone.

           
He went down, and the mob fell on him, poking, kicking, and stabbing, while others stood off to the side and did nothing. And never before had I understood so strongly how there are times when doing nothing can be a deadly sin.

           
The rest of the mob turned on us. A few more Jews had turned out to help, but only five of us were armed—with inferior weapons—and my right arm was still tingling, so we couldn’t hold them off for long, and they soon overran us and the looters poured into the ghetto. Some of them began prying the mezuzahs from the doorposts, either for the silver and brass or for the magical properties that some Christians ascribe to them. Others smashed shop windows and grabbed what they could. They shattered mugs, glasses, and other vessels as they plundered the shops searching for the gold that they
knew
the Jews were hoarding.

           
There just
had
to be more gold in the ghetto.

           
The Jews were sitting on a mountain of gold.

           
Oh, they’re clever, all right, the cheap bastards. They’ve got it hidden somewhere.

           
A shop keeper stood by watching the invaders destroy his livelihood. He did not try to interfere as they shredded his ledger and tossed it into the gutter.

           
He calmly addressed one of the looters: “So, Václav, I guess you don’t owe me four-and-a-half dalers anymore.”

           
The man could only stare back for a moment before continuing the rampage.

           
They also ransacked a print shop. Unable to find gold, they turned their wrath on the books, tearing the covers off and sending loose pages flying out the window into the mud. The galleys for Rivka bas Meyer’s
Meynekes Rivka
were scattered like a deck of playing cards, her guide for house wives on baby and child care fluttering down together with a set of pages depicting two angels supporting a shield embossed with a pair of hands giving the priestly blessing. The largest word on the page was just beneath the angels, and even upside down from twenty feet away I could tell that it said
.
In the beginning
.

           
Proof of the
Zohar
’s observation that if there is quarreling among men, even God’s anger does not frighten them.

           
Then one of the raiders came across a large book full of magical symbols and markings in thick black letters an inch high that looked like this:
.
Slaves
. He tore out a fistful of pages, till he got to a page showing a group of men in European clothing chopping up infants and filling a tub with their blood so that a queen could bathe in it.

           
It was an ordinary set of woodcuts illustrating the place in the Haggadah where the Egyptians butcher and drown the male children of Israel in the Nile. But to the Christian illiterates, it must have looked like a bunch of men in modern dress slaughtering babies and collecting their blood, and they saw this fanciful image as indisputable proof that the Jews practice ritual murder.

           
They screamed like madmen and held up the offending book to the crowd, whose demands quickly became a chant:
Burn the book! Burn it!

           
Their outrage knew no bounds. They broke apart the store’s shelving and tore up the floorboards in order to start a bonfire in the middle of the street with books and anything else that would burn.

           
The Christians ignored us in their frenzy. No one bothered us as we stood around, helplessly watching the flames grow hotter, since it was suicide to step in against fifty men, at odds of eight-to-one against.

           
At least the cool, wet mud would keep the fire from spreading to the nearby houses, for the moment.

           
But they had already taken the life of a man whose like is not to be found the whole world over, and unless they allowed us to retrieve his body, there would be no one to wail over his coffin.

           
One of the Christians spotted a trickle of silver flowing from the bonfire, a sure sign that someone had missed a bauble and thrown it into the fire with the rest of the trash.

           
And the Lord heard our voice, and remembered His covenant with Abraham
.

           
I felt them before I heard them, as a vibration under the soles of my feet like the pulse of a beating heart.

           
All eighteen members of the butcher’s guild and their apprentices came streaming down the street with a force six men wide and four rows deep brandishing meat cleavers, bone saws, and flaming torches. Every butcher in the
Yidnshtot
was marching shoulder-to-shoulder behind the emblem of their guild, a massive heavy metal key topped by the figure of a lion wielding a sharp ax, and there was no space between them.