The Midwife of Venice (2 page)

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

The Rabbi’s marital troubles were not a secret from anyone in the ghetto within earshot of their apartment. He and Rivkah had not enjoyed a peaceful moment in their forty years together.

“Gentlemen, this is our midwife, Hannah. May she be blessed above all women.” The Rabbi bowed. “Hannah, this is Conte Paolo di Padovani and his brother Jacopo. May God his rock protect them and grant them long life. The Conte insisted that I bring him to you. He asks for our help.”

Our help? Hannah thought. Did
she
deliver sermons? Did the Rabbi deliver babies?

“But as I have explained to the Conte,” said the Rabbi,
“what he asks is not possible. You are not permitted to assist Christian women in childbirth.”

Only last Sunday in the Piazza San Marco, Fra Bartolome, the Dominican priest, had railed against Christians receiving medical treatment from Jews, or as he phrased it, “from enemies of the Cross.”

The Conte tried to interrupt, but the Rabbi held up a finger. “Papal dispensation, you are going to tell me? Not for a humble midwife like Hannah.”

This time it seemed the Rabbi was on Hannah’s side. They had common cause in refusing the Conte’s request.

The Conte looked to be in his fifties, at least twice Hannah’s age. Fatigue showed in his hollowed cheeks, making him appear as old as the Rabbi. His brother, perhaps ten years younger, was soft and not as well made, with sloping shoulders and narrow chest. The Conte nodded at her and pushed past the Rabbi into the room, ducking his head to avoid scraping it on the slanted ceiling. He was large, in the fashion of Christians, and florid from eating roasted meats. Hannah tried to slow her breathing. There seemed to be not enough air in the room for all of them.

“I am honoured to meet you,” he said, removing his black hat. His voice was deep and pleasant, and he spoke the sibilant Veneziano dialect of the city.

Jacopo, his brother, was immaculate, his chubby cheeks well powdered, not a spot of mud disgracing his breeches. He entered warily, placing one foot ahead of the other as though he expected the creaky floor to give way under him. He made a half bow to Hannah.

The Conte unfastened his cloak and glanced around her
loghetto
, taking in the trestle bed, the stained walls, the pine table, and the menorah. The stub of a beeswax candle in the corner guttered, casting shadows around the small room. Clearly, he had never been inside such a modest dwelling, and judging by his stiff posture and the way he held himself away from the walls, he was not comfortable being in one now.

“What brings you here tonight?” Hannah asked, although she knew full well. The Rabbi should not have led the men to her home. He should have persuaded them to leave. There was nothing she could do for them.

“My wife is in travail,” said the Conte. He stood shifting his weight from one leg to the other. His mouth was drawn, his lips compressed into a thin white line.

The brother, Jacopo, hooked a foot around a stool and scraped it over the floor toward him. He flicked his handkerchief over the surface and then sat, balancing one buttock in the air.

The Conte continued to stand. “You must help her.”

Hannah had always found it difficult to refuse aid to anyone, from a wounded bird to a woman in childbirth. “I feel it is a great wrong to decline, sir.” Hannah glanced at the Rabbi. “If the law permitted, I would gladly assist, but as the Rabbi explained, I cannot.”

The Conte’s eyes were blue, cross-hatched with a network of fine lines, but his shoulders were square and his back erect. How different he appeared from the familiar men of the ghetto, pale and stooped from bending over their second-hand clothing, their gemstones, and their Torah.

“My wife has been labouring for two days and two nights. The sheets are soaked with her blood, yet the child will not be born.” He gave a helpless wave of his hand. “I do not know where else to turn.”

His was the face of a man suffering for his wife’s pain; Hannah felt a stab of compassion. Difficult confinements were familiar to her. The hours of pain. The child that presented shoulder first. The child born dead. The mother dying of milk fever.

“I am so sorry, sir. You must love your wife very much to venture into the ghetto to search me out.”

“Her screams have driven me from my home. I cannot bear to be there any longer. She pleads for God to end her misery.”

“Many labours end well, even after two days,” Hannah said. “God willing, she will be fine and deliver you a healthy son.”

“It is the natural course of events,” the Rabbi said. “Does not the Book of Genesis say, ‘In pain are we brought forth’?” He turned to Hannah. “I already told him you would refuse, but he insisted on hearing it from your own lips.” He opened his mouth to say more, but the Conte motioned for him to be silent. To Hannah’s surprise, the Rabbi obeyed.

The Conte said, “Women speak of many things among themselves. My wife, Lucia, tells me that although you are young, you are the best midwife in Venice—Christian or Jew. They say you have a way of coaxing stubborn babies out of their mothers’ bellies.”

“Do not believe everything you hear,” Hannah said. “Even a blind chicken finds a few grains of corn now and again.” She looked at his large hands, nervously clasping each other to keep from trembling. “There are Christian midwives just as skilled.”

But he was right. There was no
levatrice
in Venice who was as gifted as she. The babies emerged quickly and the mothers recovered more speedily when Hannah attended their
accouchements
. Only the Rabbi understood the reason, and he could be trusted to keep silent, knowing that if anyone discovered her secret she would be branded as a witch and subjected to torture.

“Now from her own lips you have heard,” said the Rabbi. “Let us depart. She cannot help you.” He gave a brief nod to Hannah and turned to leave. “I am sorry to have disturbed you. Go back to sleep.”

Jacopo clapped his hands together as though they were covered with dirt, rose from the stool, and started toward the door. “Let us go,
mio fratello.”

But the Conte remained. “I would bear Lucia’s pain myself if it were possible. I would give my blood to replace hers, which as we waste time talking is pooling on the floor of her bedchamber.”

Hannah’s eyes were level with the buttons of his cloak. As he spoke, he swayed from fatigue. She took a step back, afraid he would topple on her.

She lowered her voice and said to the Rabbi in Yiddish, “Is it unthinkable that I go? Although Jewish physicians are forbidden to attend Christian patients, they often do.
Christians needing to be purged or bled turn a blind eye to the Pope’s edict. Many Jewish doctors are summoned under the darkness of night and slip past sleeping porters. They say even the Doge himself has a Jewish physician …”

“Such tolerance would never extend to a woman,” the Rabbi replied. “If a Christian baby was, God forbid, to die at birth, and a Jewish midwife was attending, she would be blamed. And along with her, the entire ghetto.” The Rabbi turned to the Conte and said, speaking again in Veneziano, “There are many Christian midwives in Venice. Any one of them would be honoured to help.”

Paolo di Padovani looked pale in the dim light of the room. “You are my last hope,” he said in a soft voice. “They say you have magic in your hands.” He picked up Hannah’s hands and clasped them. His own hands felt cold, the palms soft as kid leather. Hers were rough from lye soap and hard well water. “Is that true?”

Embarrassed and shocked, she pulled her hands away.

The Rabbi leaned toward her and said in Yiddish, “Is this what you want, Hannahlah?” He used her childhood nickname. “Your body tipped from a barge some night into that part of the lagoon where no fishing is allowed and where no one may draw drinking water?”

A prudent woman would not reply. But Hannah could not hold her tongue. “Is the suffering of a Christian woman different from the suffering of a Jewish one?”

“Tell this illustrious Conte that you cannot help him. Let his wife’s death be laid at the door of someone other than a Jew.”

The Rabbi was ignorant of what it meant to be female: to bear stillbirths, to suffer puerperal fever, to hear the rustle of the wings of the Angel of Death over cradles and birthing stools. Hannah took a deep breath and said, “I have a talent, Rabbi. Surely God wants me to use it.”

“I curse the day you brought your, your …”—he floundered in search of the right word—“your device to me and asked me to make a
brokhe
, a blessing, over it.”

Hannah regretted it too. If only she had kept her creation a secret.

“He is rich,” the Rabbi continued. “A merchant and a Christian. Every man, woman, and child in the ghetto will pay the price if this child dies under your care.”

The Conte said to the Rabbi, “I can protect her if, God forbid, there is trouble. I am a member of the Council of Ten and I have friends in the Courts of Inquisition.” He made an effort to encourage her. “Ready yourself, Hannah, and come with me under cover of darkness, in my gondola. No one outside my household will know of your attendance.”

The Rabbi muttered in Yiddish, “Hannah, you do not know the world as I do. This will not turn out well. Yes, he wants you now. Yes, he will protect you now. He and his lofty Council of Ten. But do you think for one moment that he will give a fig about you if his wife dies?”

Hannah tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry. The Conte had ventured into the canals at night, courted disaster from roving bands of ruffians, bribed Vicente to unlock the gates, and roused the Rabbi from his bed. Few
husbands would take such trouble. She glanced at the Rabbi, whose black eyes, below wiry eyebrows winging up toward his bald head, fixed her with a scowl. He was blocking the door, standing in front of her with the air of a man who would not step aside for God Himself.

When Hannah’s sister, Jessica, converted to Christianity in order to marry a gentile, who later abandoned her, the Rabbi had, in accordance with Jewish law, ordered the family to sit
shiva
, the traditional mourning ritual for the dead, and to never utter her name again. “Jessica, may her name be obliterated and the teeth rot in her head,” he had said as Hannah wept and her father covered the family’s only looking-glass. The Rabbi had forbidden anyone in the ghetto to have contact with Jessica from that moment on.

Her sister lived only a few canals away. Hurrying to the Rialto market at dawn, Hannah had often crossed paths with Jessica as she made her way home from a party or fancy dress ball, attired in a gown of rich silk, sequins, and a mask. Each time, obedient to the Rabbi’s injunction, Hannah would duck her head and take another route.

A year later, a midwife’s apprentice arrived at the gates of the ghetto, out of breath from running, to summon Hannah to Jessica’s confinement. The Rabbi barred Hannah from accompanying the apprentice and chased her away.

The Rabbi addressed the Conte now. “With all due respect, the authorities cannot always protect the Jews when the priests foment trouble. You and I would not have to ponder the matter long to think of examples—during
outbreaks of the plague, when the infidel pirates seize Venetian ships …”

If he heard the Rabbi, the Conte gave no sign, shrugging off his cloak and laying it on the only space available, the bed. A look crossed his face, and for a moment Hannah thought he would wrap her up in his cloak, sling her over his shoulder, and carry her out into the night.

“Conte,” said Hannah, “I do not perform miracles, nor is there magic in my hands.”

“You must try,” he replied.

Jacopo tugged at the Conte’s arm. “Come. Let us go. We were fools to think a Jew would help. Holy Mother of God, Paolo, I will leave without you if I have to.” He held his handkerchief to his nose. “The smell of this room is making me quite nauseous. Paolo, conclude this matter. Offer her money. This is the only thing Jews understand.”

Hannah should have been accustomed to such remarks—she heard them often enough. But she whirled on him, ready to say the first thing that came into her head, to curse him as the whore son of a pig. Instead, she cleared her throat and addressed his brother.

“Conte, pay me two hundred ducats and I will go to your wife.”

Jacopo let out a snort of laughter.

Hannah kept her eyes fixed on the Conte, who was not laughing. His eyebrows knit together as he pondered the demand. It was a shocking sum. Two hundred ducats was sufficient to buy a hundred bolts of printed silk, a cargo of timber, or Isaac’s life. No one, not even a nobleman,
would pay such an amount for her services. A few silver coins was her usual fee.

This would end the discussion and send the Conte back to his palazzo. The Rabbi was right. If Hannah failed to save the Contessa, the Inquisition would force her to submit to the
strappado
. Her hands would be bound behind her back and she would be dropped from a great height.

Hannah said, “My husband is being held as a slave in Malta by the Knights of Jerusalem. They demand this sum for his ransom. I will try to save your wife’s life if you will save my husband’s.”

The Rabbi was angry now, his voice slow and deliberate. “Hannah, as I have told you, the Society for the Release of Captives will fund Isaac’s release. It is only a matter of time.”

“Time is running out,” Hannah said.

The Rabbi shook a stiff, blue-veined fist in her face. “Your first obligation is to do nothing to endanger the ghetto. Isaac is only one Jew; the ghetto is three thousand.” He was so close Hannah could feel the heat of his breath on her face. “I am your Rabbi and I forbid you. That is the end of the matter.”

These were the hands that had blessed her many times, had circumcised her brothers, and had held the silver
kiddush
cup to her lips at Seder dinners.

“Rabbi, I did not stand under the wedding canopy with three thousand Jews. I stood under the
huppah
with one man—Isaac.” Her husband, she wanted to add, who had married her without a dowry, and had continued to love her in spite of her barrenness. In the synagogue, she had
overheard the Rabbi assuring Isaac that the law would release him from a childless marriage. The Rabbi had urged him to divorce her and find a wife who would bear him a son. Isaac had pulled his prayer shawl more tightly around his shoulders and shaken his head. Most husbands would not have shown such patience—for is not a child the
takhlit
, the purpose of all women?