The Fifth Servant (65 page)

           
When the bishop made no reply, Rabbi Loew continued: “And as to the charges that we use blood to perform magical spells, Your Grace knows very well that the Laws of God strictly forbid the use of blood for any such purposes. Moreover, I defy any of you to come forward and swear on the Bible that you have witnessed a single Jew committing one of the crimes for which we stand accused. For it is written,
He who suspects the innocent suffers in his body
.”

           
The bishop nearly jumped out of his seat.

           
“Where is that written?” he demanded.

           
“It is in the Tractate Yoma, Your Grace.”

           
The bishop sat back and carefully rearranged his robes, and in the spirit of the moment, he proposed a compromise. The Talmud would not be seized and burned, but instead all copies would be submitted to the Inquisitional authorities for redaction and censorship of the most distasteful parts, continuing the policy established by the late Archbishop Brus of Prague. The people seemed generally satisfied with this solution.

           
However, in order to limit the instances of contact between the faithful and the Jews, Christians were henceforth prohibited from entering synagogues on festive occasions, from eating and dancing with the Jews in mixed company, and from working in Jewish homes as servants. Nor would any Christian parents be permitted to send their sons and daughters to study the liberal arts or any other type of arts under a Jewish instructor.

           
The terms seemed reasonable to all, including Rabbi Loew, and everyone was about to begin the closing prayers when a wild-eyed man who somebody called Federn burst into the church as if the hounds of hell were at his heels and declared:

           
“All right! I did it! Take me! I stabbed her with a knife and burned her flesh with red-hot pincers! I strangled the girl and danced on her grave!”

           
Rabbi Loew clapped his hand to his forehead, as if to obscure his own eyes from this dreadful apparition, and uttered the word
Gewalt
!

           
The man called Federn said, “All I ask is that you take me and spare the other Jews from your wrath.”

           
And the chaos seemed to follow him like a whirlwind, as all those present beheld that out in the street, the Ship of Fools had run aground and all hell was breaking loose.

CHAPTER 34

           
TOMÁŠ SAW THE FLAMES CHEWING up the timbers, and the son of a bitch just laughed in my face, knowing that I couldn’t turn him over to the Christian authorities in the middle of a siege. And I could just see myself trying to convince the Rabbinical Council to take charge of a Christian prisoner until Monday morning when things
might
be quieter. So I had no choice but to saw through his ropes with his own scaling knife and let him go, even though he had tried to kill me for a handful of dalers.

           
He rubbed his wrists and showed me a mouth full of crooked teeth, laughing as he ran away, until he plunged into a cloud of smoke and disappeared.

           
And I stood for a moment and watched the flames threatening to consume the ghetto, and I recalled how Rabbi Isaac, the Ari of Safed, reasoned that in order to make room for creation, God had to withdraw into Himself and leave a place that was empty of His presence. I had never fully understood how that was possible, but for the first time in my life I knew that I was standing in a place where God was
not
present.

           
The Destroyer had been set loose, the slaughterer who makes no distinction between the righteous and the wicked.

           
Some of the Jews were returning safely from the forced march, only to face the ordeal of getting “baptized” in the icy waters by Bohemians who called it the Vltava River and Germans who called it the Moldau. Such linguistic trivialities made no difference to the Jews.

           
“Let’s do the whole fokken lot of them,” said one of the water-soaked ruffians, fingering the blade of his weapon.

           
Nobody stopped me as I ran through the nearest gate and crossed over into a scene from a Flemish painting of an army of madmen plundering their way to the mouth of Hell.

           
The ghetto was largely empty of Jews and undefended, and any Jews discovered among the ruins were being forced back into the flaming doorways they had just escaped. And that German preacher they call Brother Volkmar was standing on the wreckage of a vegetable cart and stirring up his followers: “Take all you want! It’s not theft to take back what the Jews have stolen from us through their obscene and onerous usury.”

           
Usury?
Not that old war horse again. I had seen the list of debtors with my own eyes, and I knew that only the richest burghers had significant debts with Jewish moneylenders. It always amazes me how easy it is for a silver-tongued orator to take something that affects only the rich and get the masses of people to believe that it affects them as well.

           
He went on, aggressive German consonants exploding from his lips like hot lead pellets from an arquebus: “It is our bad luck to harbor this group of outsiders within our borders like some sort of a malignant disease.”

           
We’d been in this part of Germany for
seven hundred years
, but we were still considered outsiders.

           
“And it is our duty to cast out these aliens who
still
refuse to convert to the one true faith, or face the judgment of God Himself for allowing their blasphemy to go unpunished.”

           
Brother Volkmar then proposed his radical solution to the problem, which came straight from a fifty-year-old pamphlet called
On the Jews and Their Lies
, which is a really crappy title if you ask me (it gives away the ending). First, he said, the faithful should burn the Jews’ synagogues, then level the ruins and cover the ground with dirt so that not a stone remained; then the Jews’ valuables should be confiscated and their homes burnt, their travel privileges taken away, and they should all be made to live in a great big stable, like gypsies; their prayer-books and Talmuds should likewise be burned and their rabbis forbidden from teaching on pain of death; and finally, they should be given the flail and be sent into enforced labor to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows instead of living off the blood of innocent Christians.

           
I reached down and picked up a heavy wooden support post ripped from somebody’s staircase, while Brother Volkmar told anyone within listening range that the Jews had been torturing and persecuting the Christians for centuries, poisoning wells, stealing children and slitting them open in order to cool their own savage humors with Christian blood. And I stood there hefting the baluster and imagining the damage I could do to Brother Volkmar with it.

           
But Brother Volkmar was only one man, and the reality in the streets of the
Yidnshtot
was that there were more slaughterers than chickens, as we say in Yiddish.

           
My only chance was to try to reach the house on Hampasgasse and hope that our man-made golem was ready. I shoved my way through the crowd and raced off down the Schilesgasse.

           
Come on, God
, I prayed. I’m down to my last pfennig here, and I need at least a daler to buy a break. You’re my last chance. If You’re ever planning on helping me, now’s the time. Send help. Send Elijah. Do
something
. At least send me strength if nothing else.

           
Rabbi Joshua says,
One who walks in a place of danger prays a short prayer
, but I chose a whole Psalm, the one that begins,
Yosheyv b’seyser elyon, b’tseyl Shaddai yislonon
, He who dwells in the shelter of the Supreme One, under the protection of Shaddai he will abide, because that Psalm is supposed to protect against weapons (especially daggers). But soon I had to switch to Latin,
Qui habitat in adjutorio Altissimi, in protectione Dei coeli commorabitur
, which wasn’t the same at all, and the looters
still
looked at me askance as I ran past them mouthing the strange words.

           
I rounded the corner, and came upon a spectacle that must have spilled from the feverish brain of a madman. Three Christian boys were gleefully gathered around a sack dangling from a hook. They were taking turns beating it with sticks. Something was inside the sack that might have been alive. It might have been shaped like a baby.

           
I struck the boys about the face and neck and quickly drove them off. Then I lifted the sack off the hook, took a breath to steady myself, and peered inside. It was an orange cat, bloodied beyond recognition.

           
The sick taste of that abominable sausage climbed up the back of my throat. I swallowed hard, and stifled the urge to retch. I was miserable enough as it was.

           
A narrow shaft of light marked the path of the rising sun along the street. We are told that the sun has only stood still for three people—Moses, Joshua, and a folk hero named Nakdimon ben Gorion—each of whom needed more time to complete their divinely inspired tasks.

           
And it struck me that for the past three days, I’d been begging for more time, and now I couldn’t wait for the day to end.
Bring on the blackness, O Lord, let the earth swallow me whole.

           
For it is written that
He orders the sun—and it does not shine
.

           
How I longed for such a thing to come to pass.

           
But they also say that a man must not lose hope, even when the sword is laid upon his neck.

           
THE FOOT PATROLS HAD CLEARED out every dwelling on the street but one. Somehow they had bypassed the bawdy house on Hampasgasse.

           
Maybe
that
was the miracle I’d been asking for.

           
I found my co-conspirators in the back room. They had blocked the passage with empty crates, making the short hallway look like a storage area.

           
“Where the hell have you been?” said Trine. “You said you’d be back in a couple of hours.”

           
“And what happened to all your hair?” said Zinger.

           
“Sorry,” I said. “If I could control the world—”

           
“There’d be fewer Hamans and more Purims,” said Trine. “Now, let’s get you out of those damp clothes. Come on, don’t be shy. You think you’ve got something I’ve never seen before? That’s better. Here you go.”

           
She handed me a set of clothes that a Christian water-carrier might wear.

           
“Don’t you have any Jewish clothes?” I asked.

           
“Jews don’t get drunk, pass out, and leave pieces of their clothing behind,” said Trine.

           
I had to agree with that.

           
“So where
are
your clothes, big boy?” asked Trine.

           
“I left them at Rabbi Loew’s house.”

           
She eyed me curiously, but I was cold and wet, and didn’t offer much in the way of interest.

           
When I was ready, they took me next door to Yosele’s room. There was a mound of fresh earth on the bed that turned out to be a living, breathing human being. Trine patted his face and said it was time to get up. Yosele’s face and arms were smeared with mud, and his matted hair was stiff with dirt. He truly looked like a creature made from the clay of the graveyard, and when he put on the elevated boots that Zinger had fashioned for him, he stood more than seven feet tall. And the floor shook so much when he took his first lumbering steps that dust fell from the rafters.

           
“You remember Reb Benyamin, don’t you?” Trine asked.

           
“
Yes
,” said Yosele, in that stiff way of his.

           
“You’re going to go with him and do what he says, all right?”

           
“
Yes
.”

           
Yosele grabbed my left hand and nearly crushed it with an awkward handshake.

           
“Be nice, Yosele,” said Trine.

           
“
Yo-se-le
,” he responded, repeating what she said.

           
He had the strength of ten men, but he was still as clumsy as a three-year-old child.

           
All the same, I tried to explain what we were about to do.