The Origin of Sorrow (10 page)

9

The Cantor, Viktor Marcus, is pacing on the bemah in a vast, dimly lit synagogue. His ivory-colored talis, with black trim, is draped on his broad shoulders. He takes hold of the lectern, a hand on each side, as if to deliver a sermon. All of the seats are empty. Guttle, unseen, is standing in the shadows. The Cantor sings an aria.

Now I rise in dudgeon high, and fury,

To air my rage before this absent jury,

For how am I to honor and condone

What Guttle fair, deserving of a throne

Ere fracturing the sanctity this night

Of Torah, of the Talmud, and of right,

Hath done, perhaps with meditated rancor,

To stab the heart of such a loving Cantor?

It’s wound enough to make a wooer swoon,

For morrow, on the upright stroke of noon

I’d planned with silent gait and hidden carriage

To hear my father seek her hand in marriage.

Instead, to trump my hand, she bolted in

Where woman does not enter without sin,

And ere a single hand could reach to stop her

Did hug the boyish flesh of the Schul-Klopper,

Compounding with her lips upon his skin

Dark trespass into bright vermillion sin.

Then, fleeing from the sanctity of schul,

Where God forgives the rashness of a fool,

As if to prove she’s made of darker meat,

Rashly to the south gate did retreat ,

And earned the leers of goyim without number

By spreading legs in unprotected slumber,

Till guard, with stiffened sword and words of hate,

Did send her reeling home, but much too late

To stop the gossip and its careless pain

From poisoning opinion in the lane

Enough so that a prudent Cantor waits,

And cancels nuptial dreams, and hesitates,

For who can wed a teaser — fairest Guttle —

Who needs a whipping, firm and hard and brutal?

Still do I long to thrust myself upon her,

But cannot do so now and keep my honor;

I wonder at the days that I must live

Before I dare to wed her, and forgive.

Condemn, but then relent — is that the way?

I must now to my bed, and let it lay.

Footsteps are heard from a corner of the schul. The girl pushes open the outer door and hurries home, limping on her turned ankle.

She was trying to read the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, a new German edition her father had bought for her. She could not concentrate. Still upset by the confrontation with the Kapitäin, her mind kept returning to the only time she had gone outside the gates by herself. It happened late one afternoon when she was five years old. Her mother had sent her next door to play with Izzy, which she often did. Instead, curious as always, Guttle that day went the other way, a short distance to the open gate. The guard had left his post for a moment. Guttle wandered through. She strolled to the slaughterhouse and went inside, and ran happily towards the rear, to look at the live chickens; when she came here with her mother, the chickens always made her laugh, the way they strutted and clucked; she understood less than they their approaching fate. Emerging, she saw the guard back at the gate, and became frightened. What if he told her mother? Her mother had forbidden her to go outside the gate by herself. She would get a beating for sure.

There must be another way in, she reasoned in her precocious manner, the lane was very long. She scooted behind the slaughterhouse, making herself invisible to the guard, and came to the outside of the stone wall. Slowly she walked along it, in search of an opening, a door, an unlocked gate. As she walked and walked without finding one, a fear beyond her father’s hand came over her. The sky was growing dark, she was alone, who knew what the Gentiles might do if they found her? She might be snatched up and put in a cage by a witch, like Hansel and Graetel, a witch who baked children in her oven.

The darkness descended rapidly. There were no lamps in the deserted fields outside the wall. Strange shapes stalked the arriving night. She heard faint scurrying in the weeds, either witches or rats. Terror took hold, she began to cry, began to claw at the wall as if to create a gate of her own. “Let me in,” she cried, and then, braving the thought of a beating, “Mama, Mama, I’m sorry, let me in.” She ran back and forth along the wall, tugging at a stone with both hands when she found a loose one, clawing, clawing, but it would not come out. “Mama, Mama, come get me,” she cried, but no one heard through the wall.

The air was cooling rapidly, and in her thin cotton dress with its short sleeves she felt cold. She was desperate now to get home, but she had run back and forth so many times that she was not sure which way she had come. Choosing a direction, she walked, uncertainly, tears staining her face while she wiped her sniffling nose with dirty hands and then dried her hands on her dress — it was pale blue, freshly washed, her mother would be angry about that as well. At last she heard the dim sound of chickens squawking, and knew she was getting closer. Coming to the end of the wall, she peered around it, and saw by the guard’s lantern that the gate was open despite the dark, saw the night guard talking with her mother. “Mama, Mama,” she yelled, and went running and stumbling across the cobbles. Her mother scooped her up and kissed her head and carried her into the lane, as the guard locked the gate behind them.

“You were supposed to be at Izzy’s,” her mother said. “Why did you go out of the lane? Why didn’t you come right back?”

She sniffled and wiped her nose. “The walls kept me out. I don’t like them.”

“You’re not supposed to like them. You won’t like your tush, either, when your father is done paddling it.”

Shakespeare still in her lap, Guttle smiled ruefully. What a little adventuress she had been! She was grateful that although the memory was vivid, the pain of the beating was not. It was the only time her father had used a stinging birch.

Because Izzy for his new project asked them, the elder Liebmanns recalled a time when the Judengasse was a happier place. When the houses were three times as large, and each belonged to only one family, and were spaced far apart. When there was room within the ghetto walls for chicken coops, for flower gardens, for large vegetable plots, for pens holding goats. When children had grassy yards in which to play. Though it is not quite accurate to say they recalled it; they remembered being told of it by their grandparents or great grandparents — who had been told of it by their grandparents.

Seated at their kitchen table, Izzy was learning things about the early days of the Judengasse that he had never heard before. Guttle had suggested he might begin his research by speaking with them; surely they would cooperate, he had taken on their son as assistant Schul-Klopper. Indeed, the Liebmanns had felt honored to talk with him. While Hersch and Hiram played chess in their room, Izzy made notes with a new graphite pencil he’d borrowed from the yeshiva.

Leo and Yetta regaled him with tales. In the old days, they told him, long before they were born, before there was even a ghetto, Jews had to wear special clothing. They had to wear black cloaks and broad white collars, which made it look as if their heads were sitting on a platter. They had to wear wide, round, bright yellow “Jew hats,” with a distinctive point about three inches high rising from the top. The men had to wear on their cloaks a badge of two concentric yellow circles. The women had to wear veils with yellow stripes. Groups of Gentiles sometimes set upon them and beat them, for no other reason than they were Jews. In the thirteen hundreds, mobs had killed three quarters of the Jews in Frankfurt. Seventy-five people had been left dead in the streets. When the city fathers put up the stone walls, and forced the Jews to move in, they said, with some truth, that it was for the Jews’ own protection. They charged the ghetto for that protection, twenty-two thousand gulden each year, a tax that was still in effect.

Izzy asked, “If it was so nice and spacious back then, with chickens and goats and gardens, what happened?”

Leo put his hands through his suspenders, which were stark black against his threadbare white shirt. Yetta was amazed at how talkative he was being; she hadn’t heard him go on like this in years, not since he was a teacher at the heder. Before his mind started wandering.

“What happened was the begats,” Leo said. He sipped from a glass of tea that Yetta had set before him. The tea had grown cold while he talked. “At first there were eleven families, I think it was. But those families begat more families. And they begat more. Not much of a surprise. So more and more houses had to be built.”

He told of the changes happening outside the Judengasse as well. How the town was growing. Frankfurt was becoming a commercial center, for importing and exporting. Jews for hundreds of miles heard about this, and decided that Frankfurt was the place to come to do business. Because that was all that they could do. The laws against Jews being farmers, or members of craft guilds, or owning shops, were the same all over. So they came to Frankfurt to make money to feed their families — and they had to live in the Judengasse. Not only live there, they had to own property there. But no houses were for sale. No one was moving out. So they bought a chicken coop, or a vegetable garden, and built a house on the land.

Yetta placed her hand on her husband’s arm. “Don’t talk so fast,” she said. “He has to write it down.”

Izzy had been making notes as quickly as he could, writing only the important words. He was learning he could not write quickly enough to keep up with people talking. He would reconstruct the details when he went home.

“So write, write,” Leo said. And he went on with his story.

After many years, he said, people were still begatting. What else should they do? Soon there were no gardens left. No chicken coops. No goat pens. All the space was taken up by houses. People moving to the Judengasse began to buy half a house. Or a quarter of a house. To meet the requirement of ownership. Two families would live in the same house. Sometimes three families. Or four.

“Let me tell this part,’’ Yetta said. “After a long time passed — a hundred, two hundred years — even that was not enough. What the people decided to do — the houses were nice and large, twenty-four feet wide back then — they began to tear down each house, and put up three in its place. Each new house maybe three metres wide. But three or four floors high. Those are the houses we have today. The city fathers didn’t mind. They got more taxes from three small houses than from one big one.”

“And the special clothing?” Izzy asked.

“The yellow hats, the special collars, that ended before we were born. But not the yellow circles, not the striped veils. We had to wear them as children, right Leo? As grown-ups, too. They only stopped that maybe thirty years ago.”

For more than an hour they had been reciting. Izzy’s hand, still bruised from his door-knocking misadventure, was aching. He put the graphite down; he could barely hold it anymore. He asked if perhaps he could come back another time. They agreed that was a good idea.

“Just one more question,” Izzy said. “Why did the Gentiles make us do all this?”

Leo looked at Yetta before answering. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because the sky is blue. That’s why.”

Izzy closed his writing book. He set the graphite on top of it. “I’ve heard people say that. Is the sky really blue?”

A wry smile rearranged the wrinkles on Yetta’s face. But her smile disappeared at once. He was a child of the lane; she could not be certain he was joking.

As he pushed his chair back to leave, it scraped harshly along the floor. Hersch came out of the front room, followed by Hiram. “The boss is leaving,” Hersch said, with a grin. He looked at his brother, then at Izzy. “Hiram says you shouldn’t sleep late tomorrow.”

Izzy, too, grinned, his blue eyes twinkled. “Tell him if I didn’t sleep late, I wouldn’t need an assistant.”

Hersch made rapid motions. Hiram, looking at Izzy, placed his palms together beside his cheek, and tilted his head., nodding. He was granting permission. Izzy the Wise could sleep as late as he wished.

Doctor Berkov once again was in the office of the Chief Rabbi. He was not made to feel welcome. He was not offered a seat. On the contrary, the Rabbi himself stood and went to his window and pulled apart the curtains and looked out, his back to the Doctor. The street was alive as it had not been since the death of the Schul-Klopper three days before. Men and women were strolling up and down the lane. Shopkeepers were calling out their wares — used clothing, bolts of cloth, used furniture, antiques, homemade candy, jellies and jams, money at a low interest rate. Children too young for heder were running about noisily, sometimes crashing into the legs of passersby.

“I’ve been to the chemist this morning,” the Doctor said.

The Rabbi did not turn around. He kept his eyes on the street. “Not enough sick people to keep you busy?”

“Nothing my helpers couldn’t handle.”

He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “Would you like to see his report?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’m afraid it confirms my suspicion. The residue in the throat of Solomon Gruen was arsenic. Which means he almost certainly was poisoned.”

The Rabbi stiffened. In the street a group of sightseers was walking past. The Judengasse was notorious, not only through Frankfurt but through all of Europe, for its overcrowding, its narrowness, its stench. It was the ultimate ghetto. Gentiles who had heard of its degradations walked through occasionally to see it for themselves — perhaps to describe it to their friends at home, perhaps to challenge their fears. Children were surrounding them, pulling at their breeches or coats, asking for coins. The Rabbi wished they wouldn’t.

“What do you expect me to do with this information?” he said. “Go to the Polizei? Give them an invitation to come in and torture a few people? Maybe hang a few people?”