The Origin of Sorrow (3 page)

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Guttle carried the oil-soaked beetles, wrapped in cloth, from the bakery to the sewage ditch. Every twenty metres a board lay across the trench so people could cross it without having to jump. She knelt on the nearest board, let go of two corners of the cloth, slid the black mess into the ditch. The viscous sewage was moving slowly downhill, and the clump of dead beetles moved with it. Children in the street had been waiting for her, as they did each Friday, and now they ran alongside the ball of beetles, shouting and making a game of it, throwing small stones in an attempt to shatter the clump, shouting, “Kill the Emperor,” although for years there had been an Empress. The skull of beetles vanished around the curve. Guttle’s shift was wet beneath her arms. She was frightened for the
kinder.
Constables sometimes walked the lane unexpectedly, and children in the Judengasse had been hanged for lesser offenses than shouting angry words. Children had been hanged for stealing a piece of cheese from the Gentile market.

She stood up on the board, but as she stepped onto the uneven cobbles, the words of the youngsters, circling like ravens, made her dizzy. She lost her balance, fell hard on her knees. She didn’t want to move. Who had taught the children such a thing? People in the Judengasse did not curse the Gentiles. Life was life. You lived it as it came. You made the best of it. A dozen different sayings had taught her that. What was, was the will of Yahweh. Seeking to change the immutable was the wisdom of fools.

Still, she could not deny the anger within her. She wanted to see the locks on the gates disappear. She wanted to see the ghetto walls crumble. It was not the Gentiles she hated, it was the walls. She wanted to take an axe and hack at them until they cracked, work her fingers into the cracks and pull away chunks of rock. Stone by stone pull the wall apart until there was a hole that every person in the lane could climb through, to stream out into the city, to promenade in the parks, to smell the flowers and the trees, to play on the grass, to feel the warm sun on their faces. To do all the forbidden things.

It didn’t matter that she was fifteen years old, and a girl. It didn’t matter that no one had made the walls so much as tremble in three hundred years.

Pressing the back of her hands to her eyes, she thought: Yahweh has put up with the walls for all these centuries. Am I superior to Him? If I oppose His will — and me just a girl — am I mad! Not even a hundred men could tear down the walls.

Her eyes began to sting. The oily rag was clenched in her fist. She had the feeling that someone was watching her, perhaps judging her; she’d had this feeling before. Disregarding it, she knelt by the ditch and saw brown turds float by. Soon they would pass beneath the south gate and down the sluice, into the river laced with sailing vessels, where, in the mild current, Jewish waste would mingle with Gentile waste, and drift together towards the Rhine and the distant sea.

At first she had kept her reaction to the dead Schul-Klopper under control. Now, alone in her room, sprawled on the flowered print spread on the bed, she found the memory of his body making her skin itch, her head throb like the pounding of his hammer. When her mother peered into the room, Guttle blurted, “Why did we run out of milk? If we had milk, I wouldn’t have stepped on him!”

“You’re right, Guttle, it’s my fault. Now come with me to the market.”

“I don’t want to go. Everyone keeps looking at me. As if it was me who made the Schul-Klopper die.”

“No one is blaming you. No one is looking at you. What, are you planning to spend the rest of your life in this room?”

“You know something, Mama? There’s not so much exciting happening outside.”

“That again? You want a dead horse, maybe? Come, I need you to help me carry. I’ll tell you what, bubbelah. Next time we run out of milk, I’ll borrow some myself.”

“There won’t be a dead man to trip over!”

“I certainly hope not,” Emmie Schnapper said.

On the third-floor of the first house inside the north gate, Yetta Liebmann, boney and haggard, heard footsteps on the stairs, then a knocking on the door. Emmie Schnapper and her daughter Guttle had returned from marketing, with the food Emmie had offered to bring.

“I got you a nice chicken,” Frau Schnapper said, pulling a wrapped bird from one of two string bags. “And four small potatoes. And a little piece of sweet, for a treat.”

Hiram Liebmann, the younger son, emerged from the front bedroom, holding his pocket watch and a piece of paper marked 1 + 10, which he showed to Frau Schnapper. It had taken her one hour and ten minutes for her to return, from the time he’d seen her leave through the gate.

Behind him appeared his older brother, Hersch, who scowled when he saw the food on the table. “What’s all this?” he asked.

“Frau Schnapper brought it from the market,” his mother said. “Wasn’t that nice?”

“Give it back. We don’t want charity.”

“Oh, it’s not charity,” Frau Schnapper said. “You can pay for it when you have money.”

“When do you think that will be? I don’t get paid much for sweeping the schul.”

“Don’t you and your brother have a grave to dig?” his mother asked. “When you get paid for that, we’ll have enough. Till then, your father could use a good meal. He’s in there under the covers, he’s always so cold.”

Hersch said no more, but motioned to Hiram and led the way down the stairs. Watching them go, Guttle knew the brothers had seen her as a child, acting as if she were not there.

“I’m sorry,” Yetta said to Emmie. “He’s angry a lot these days. I don’t know what dybbuk has gotten into him.”

“This time of year, the spring air warming up, is worst on the young ones,” Frau Schnapper said. “Guttle is the same. Sometimes I think their bodies have ancient memories, of trees and fields, of lakes in which to swim — and it makes them a little crazy. They haven’t learned yet how to accept the walls.”

“It’s a hard thing to learn,” Yetta said. “Sometimes I think my Hiram is the lucky one. He doesn’t expect so much.”

The women indulged themselves in a mutual sigh. Frau Schnapper left soon after, carrying her own purchases, to begin preparing the Sabbath meal. Guttle followed silently, feeling invisible.

Mentioning the grave her sons needed to dig had given Yetta an inspiration. She entered the small bedroom, where Leo peered from beneath covers pulled to his neck. “I have to go out,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

She walked down the two flights of stairs slowly, holding tight to the rickety banister. In the lane she stayed close to the houses, ready to grab hold in case an uneven cobble twisted her ankle, or broke her shoe. Soon she reached her destination — the Judengasse hospital. It was a three-story building with examining rooms at street level and space for eight beds upstairs, twelve in an emergency. A Doctor’s helper, seated at a table looking bored, asked what she needed. Yetta said she wanted to see the Doctor. When the assistant asked what the trouble was, Yetta told him it was a private matter.

In his office down the hall, Doctor Berkov stood from behind his writing table and helped her to a straight-backed chair. He, too, asked what the trouble was.

“There’s no trouble,” she replied. “I’ve come about the coat.”

“What coat?”

“The Schul-Klopper’s coat. When you bury him, you won’t be needing his coat.”

“You have a use for it?”

“My husband. You’ve seen him. He’s cold all the time. For him I would like the coat.”

The Doctor pondered. The deceased had not been diseased, he was fairly certain of that. “I don’t see why not,” he said, finally. “It’s probably a good idea.”

He went to another room, and returned with the worn black coat and handed it to her. At once she noticed a white stain near the collar.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing.

“Spilled milk.”

“That I can wash out.”

She thanked him, and with the coat folded under her arm she walked home, past the bakery with its warm smells of challah, past a pawn shop and a moneylender, past the rag picker’s stall, till she climbed the steep stairs in her house. She found Leo sitting at the table in the kitchen, hoping she would fix a glass of tea.

“Better than tea, look what I got for you. A new coat!”

“A new coat? From where did you get a new coat?”

“It was the Schul-Klopper’s. He won’t be needing it.”

Leo was a small man and seemed of late to be melting into nothing. He looked at the coat, stood, carefully put his arms through the sleeves, shrugged the collar onto his neck. The hem of the coat reached below his ankles. “Look, it fits,” he said.

Yetta smiled, or at least one could say the corners of her mouth pulled back out of memory. She had done well. She moved to the kitchen, poured water from an earthen jar into the kettle for tea. She lit a few pieces of kindling in the stove.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m making you tea.”

“I don’t want tea. I’m going for a walk in my new coat.”

With no further words Leo was out the door in his brown slippers, shuffling down the stairs, both feet touching each step, the way small children
do. Yetta let the water boil for herself. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone out.

He shuffled only as far as the rag dealer’s shop, thinking: the coat of a dead man she wants me to wear! He shrugged off the coat, handed it to the skinny proprietor, Ephraim Hess. With a minimum of haggling they struck a deal. The rag dealer handed Leo a few kreuzer. He was still standing there, placing the coins in his pocket, one by one, when the rag dealer’s waif of a wife, Eva, came out from inside the shop, carrying in a small blanket a newborn child. Handing the baby to her husband, she inspected the coat quickly. Just as quickly she pulled a faded dress from a nail at the front of the stall , and hung the coat there, the spot most visible to passersby.

“Eva, you can’t put it out so fast,” her young husband told her. “That’s the Schul-Klopper’s coat. He hasn’t even been buried yet.”

“All the better,” his wife said. “Someone can dress nice for the funeral.”

The infant started to squall. Eva took the baby, opened her blouse, gave the child a lovely breast on which to suck.

“That’s a fine-looking child,” Leo said. “What name do you call her?”

“It’s a boy,” the rag dealer said, the pride of a new father in his voice. “Our first child. Only eight hours old. We named him Solomon, after Israel’s greatest king.”

“After Israel’s greatest poet,” the wife said.

Leo offered a nod of understanding. “One Solomon dies, another Solomon is born. It’s the way of the world.”

He left them looking love into one another’s eyes, and shuffled home with a new rhythm in his steps, humming to the music of the coins clinking in his pocket. He was not so old he could not remember young love. When he entered the apartment after a slow climb up the stairs, Yetta, appraising him as if she were a dealer in old men, said, “What did you do with your new coat? You didn’t lose it already!”

“I didn’t lose it. I sold it to the rag dealer.” He jingled his pocket, and shook his elbows as if he were about to dance.

“You sold it? It was supposed to keep you warm.”

“Now we have money to buy wood. To keep you warm, too, bubbelah. And to cook the chicken.” He eased himself onto a chair. Both the chair and his knees creaked.

“We already have wood to cook the chicken,” Yetta said.

“Then it’s to buy wood for next week’s chicken.”

“Wood for next week’s chicken? We don’t have chicken for next week’s chicken. Besides, the coffin maker gives us wood. He gives the boys his odds and ends, pieces too small to use. He doesn’t charge for that.”

“There you go. In case he starts to charge, we’ll have money for wood.”

Yetta shook her head, closing her eyes as she did, as she had been doing for thirty-five years. She approached her husband and pressed her lips to the top of his flaking head. He was bald except for a gray fringe that circled the back from ear to ear. “I don’t know what to do, Leo. I tried to do something nice for you.”

“What you can do nice for me?” He took her wrinkled hand and gently pulled her onto his boney knees, which had almost worn through his breeches. “What you can do nice for me, Yetta darling, is live with me until I die.”

“All the way till then?” She tugged lightly at his chin. “That’s a lot to ask, you know. That young Doctor has a
schön
tush.”

He pushed her off of his lap. “In that case, make me a glass of tea before you run away with him.”

Yetta kissed the whorls of his ear, from which small white hairs were growing, and made him a glass of tea. He chopped with a knife at a bowl of honey, and when a small piece broke off placed it between his lips. As he sipped the tea through the crystal honey, Yetta sat across from him and watched, saying nothing.

And if, as he drank his tea, he was thinking what lovely breasts the rag dealer’s young wife has, what harm was being done?

Doctor Lev Berkov, wearing the brown breeches, loose-fitting white shirt and leather vest that was the fashion for younger men, caught up with the Chief Rabbi just as he was locking his study, and asked to speak with him. Rabbi Eleazar said he had no time just then, but when the Doctor said his problem was related to the forthcoming funeral, the Rabbi gave him a questioning, annoyed look, then reluctantly unlocked the door and motioned him inside. The Rabbi seated himself behind his desk, but did not put a match to the lamp; the only light in the room filtered in through the single curtained window that faced the lane. The Rabbi was dressed, as always, in black. The Doctor at first had difficulty seeing him.

“It’s about Solomon Gruen,” Berkov said, seating himself on a wooden chair. He removed his three-cornered hat, making sure with his right hand that the yarmulke he wore underneath had remained in place.