The Fifth Servant (59 page)

           
“Want me to toss him out?” said the landlady.

           
“No, it’s all right, Mrs. Leibstein. Thank you.”

           
Mrs. Leibstein gave me a look that a less rational being would have taken as a curse, then she hobbled slowly toward the stairs so she wouldn’t miss a word.

           
“What have you done to yourself?” Reyzl asked.

           
It was cold in the hallway, but Reyzl just stood there in her thick woolen nightgown, glaring at my hairless face.

           
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” she said, crossing her arms.

           
“Uh…No.”

           
“It figures.” She dropped her arms, turned her back to me, and stepped into her room.

           
I followed.

           
The bed sheets were rumpled, but I hadn’t roused her from bed. She had been going through her things. There was a pile of clothes and other items next to a small trunk on a table by the window.

           
“Make it quick,” she said, selecting a long black skirt from the pile.

           
“What are you doing?”

           
“What does it
look
like I’m doing?” she said, shaking out the skirt. “I’m going to stay with some friends in the Christian quarter until it’s safe to come back.”

           
She carefully folded the skirt and packed it in the trunk.

           
“If you’re going to run away, why not come back to Slonim with me?” I asked.

           
“I am
not
running away! It’s just for a few days till—oh, forget it. I don’t have time for this now,” she said, stuffing cosmetics into her blue purse with the gold tassels.

           
“You don’t have time for
me
?”

           
“What are you going to do, start breaking furniture?”

           
“I’ve learned not to do such things since you left,” I said. “I try not to react like that so much anymore.”

           
“Not
so much
anymore? How about not reacting that way at all?”

           
“Believe me, I’m working on it.”

           
“A couple of years too late, Benyamin.”

           
She shoved a pair of silk slippers into the trunk.

           
“I’m trying to do better—”

           
“And where on earth are the Imperial protectors? Weren’t you supposed to talk them into providing us with some protection? Any sign of
keyser
Rudolf’s troops out there?” she said, waving her hand toward the window.

           
Her gesture made the candle flicker wildly.

           
“How are you going to get past the
Judenschläger
?” I said. “Where are you going to hide? Unless I can punch a hole in their defenses, you won’t get twenty paces past the gates.”

           
“Won’t I?” she said, yet I sensed a wavering in her manner.

           
But she was still winning the war of words. How was I supposed to summon the strength to fight off hordes of Jew-bashers when I couldn’t even convince a headstrong woman to listen to me for five minutes? And suddenly I felt extremely tired. I sat on the edge of the bed before my whole world collapsed like a house of cards.

           
The Guardian of Israel does not sleep
. But I was no Guardian of Israel.

           
The candle kept flickering by the window, burning through its fleeting life and sending up a thin plume of smoke that would soon be the only sign that it had ever existed.

           
“Don’t send me away like this,” I said. “The ReMo says not to turn away a poor man without giving him
something
, even a dried fig.”

           
Reyzl stood there, trying to decide between a white blouse and a red blouse, holding them up and examining them in the light as if trying to weigh their beauty against their usefulness over the next few days. Finally, she gave up and laid them both on the trunk.

           
Then she came over and sat next to me on the bed.

           
“Rough day, huh?” she said, patting me on the back with some of her old familiarity.

           
“Rough week,” I answered.
Rough year. Rough life
.

           
“I can tell. You didn’t used to give up so easily.”

           
I let that one ping off me.

           
“You’re just overtired,” she said, rubbing my shoulders.

           
“I could do this if I just had some help. I can’t do it all alone.”

           
“The problem is that you’re too tired and cranky to approach this logically.”

           
“I’m not—”

           
“You’re a good man, Benyamin. And when I first met you, you were the smartest boy on the block—”

           
“But it was an awfully small block.”

           
“Listen to me. You’re not thinking clearly. You need to rest so you can restore your energy and think clearly.”

           
“I don’t have
time
for that—”

           
“What do you mean? Didn’t you always tell me that whenever a man eats and sleeps to keep up his strength so that he can carry out God’s commands, those activities become holy and sacred as well?”

           
I closed my eyes and thought of God. After all, they say it’s better to talk to a woman and think of God then to talk to God and think of a woman.

           
“At least you’re trying to change things for the better. I can see that,” she said. “And I believe that if anyone can save us, you can. But you can’t do it if you’re too tired to think straight. You need to relax and rest so you can get an early start tomorrow.”

           
“Relax? How can I relax at a time like this? I shouldn’t even have come here—”

           
“No, you did the right thing by coming here,” she said, reaching behind her head.

           
She unpinned her long, dark hair, and shook it loose.

           
O, taste and see that the Lord is good
.

           
It had been such a long time that her body was just like new to me. Her breasts were as sweet as two ripe apples, young and erect, like the very first time.

           
I breathed in as if I wanted to take in the moment and hold it inside me forever.

           
Then it hit me. I had to tell her.

           
“Wait. I’m not clean.”

           
“Neither am I,” she said, indicating that her period had ended but she hadn’t taken her ritual bath yet. But by that point, I wouldn’t have stopped for all the money in the world.

           
Two opposites converged, forming a divine circle, the very essence of life, and yet something beyond life, a union of souls for a brief instant. But even one hour in Paradise is good.

           
Her hands caressed my newly shorn head, and she couldn’t help giggling.

           
“Good Lord, it feels like I’m making love to a Christian.”

           
And her lips unfolded like a rose opening toward the sun.

Sonntag

Ned
le

Sunday

           
Pay attention that you not ruin or destroy
My world, for if you ruin it, there will be
no one after you to repair it.

           
—GOD
Koheles Raboh

CHAPTER 31

           
A BLAST OF COLD AIR woke me, and my head felt strangely exposed. I put my hand to my cheek, felt its sandy nakedness, and wondered what world I was in. Then I remembered I had changed myself into a Christian.

           
Reyzl stood by the window, fully dressed, wrapping a hand mirror in a woolen shawl, and stuffing it into her trunk.

           
The icy draft had brought a strange man in with it, a hunched fellow clutching a bag full of papers and other scribal implements. His crabby hand stayed on the doorknob, as if he feared that he might have strayed into the wrong room.

           
“Come in, Reb Avreml,” said Reyzl. “You’re letting in the cold.”

           
“Where’s the second witness?” said Reb Avreml, pointing his long nose at me, which in the pale shadow of a tallow candle looked as shriveled as a pickle that had been steeped too long in brine.

           
“Isn’t Reb Leibstein with you?”

           
“Coming, Miss Reyzl,” said a boxy man with an unkempt beard, who at least had the decency to look uncomfortable with his assigned role in this affair. But the landlady trotted in with all the bubbly anticipation of a food vendor at a bullfight.
God damn it
, she was actually enjoying this.

           
I pulled the blankets around me and reached for my clothes, but the foreign garments piled on the chair weren’t mine.

           
Oh, right
. They were now.

           
How long had I been asleep?

           
It was still dark out, but a faint glimmer of the dawn’s first light outlined the chimney tops outside the window.

           
Suddenly I was wide awake. How much time had I lost? And what did they need witnesses for? Some strange Bohemian fertility rite to mark our reconciliation? Were they going to shower us with seeds and tell us to be fruitful and multiply? Somehow, I didn’t think so.

           
The scribe laid his tools on the night table and unfolded a document that consisted of long passages of unadorned Aramaic laid out in uncompromising rows of plain black letters, and instead of taking up the iron pen of the court scribe, he took up the kosher quill that a rabbinical scribe uses to create a Torah, a mezuzah, an amulet fulfilling the commandment to
bind them as a sign upon your hand
, or a bill of divorce.

           
“Husband’s name?” he asked.

           
“Benyamin Ben-Akiva from Slonim,” Reyzl answered, shutting the lid of the trunk.

           
The quill traveled from inkpot to parchment and scratched in my name.

           
“What do you think you’re doing?” I said. “You can’t write a
get
at the wife’s bidding.”