The Boatmaker (29 page)

She is surprised to feel herself drawn to the odd man from Small Island. To his bald spot, the crisscrossing scar
on his nose, the rough, knowing hands. She pulls herself back mentally, startled at how out of place her response is. Perhaps, she thinks, it is because the suit is the vintage of her father's, hanging in his dressing room upstairs, in the place it was the day he died. The suit is touched by no one other than his daughter, who takes it out occasionally to brush it, shake it out and bury her face in it when no one is there to see her.

“And are you a Jew?” asks the rabbi from across the narrow table.

The boatmaker is as startled by this question as if the room had changed into a different room, with different people in it. But he gives no sign.

“No.”

“You are from Small Island?”

“Yes.”

“And where on the Mainland are your people from?” The rabbi is fluent in the language of the Mainland, but he speaks with a slight accent, as if he came from the lands down to the south and east, in Europe.

The boatmaker names a region a long way from the capital, near the narrow neck of land that connects the Mainland to Europe. This narrow land bridge has been fought over repeatedly, belonging to three different nations over the course of its history. Now it is firmly in the
possession of the Mainland, the border overseen by a toll collector in a booth guarded by one sleepy young conscript.

“What you say may be true,” says the rabbi, removing the linen napkin he tucked into his collar when the soup was served. In spite of this precaution, there are dots of beige and brown on his lapel and shirtfront, corresponding to the soup and each of the three subsequent courses. “But there is the matter of the name.”

The boatmaker feels himself tense. He has remained silent about the question of his name whenever it has come up on the Mainland. He has no wish to discuss it here. But he feels an obligation to be a respectful guest. While he is wrestling with his feelings, the rabbi stuns him again.

“Then again, you may be one of
the Secret Jews
,” Goldman says, wiping his mouth with the big napkin, dark eyes sharp and bright. “Stranger things have happened. Baruch Ha-Shem.”

“
Secret Jews
?” The boatmaker cannot believe what he is hearing. He wants to clean his ears out with his fingers. But he sits unmoving.

“Yes, the Secret Jews. There are twelve of them, hidden from the prying eyes of the world. Ha-Shem in his wisdom understood that mankind is weak, unable to keep the Covenant on its own, despite all its piety and good intentions. So he built a foundation.”

“What?”

“A foundation. You are a carpenter, yes?”

The boatmaker's silence passes for assent.

“So you understand the importance of a good foundation. It is invisible—and yet essential. To last, a house must be built on a solid foundation. Even if the house burns down, it can be rebuilt on the same foundation. A single foundation can serve many houses, over generations. Not so?”

The boatmaker's relief that the conversation has veered away from his name has turned to disbelief. Many strange things have happened to him on the Mainland. What happened on the New Land was, in the end, shocking. But at the very least all of it happened within a Christian framework, the framework that holds the entire kingdom together, from the capital to the outer islands. The idea that someone thinks he is a Jew, secret or not, is incomprehensible.

The rabbi rumbles on, giving no sign that he is aware of the boatmaker's distress.

“In his foresight, Ha-Shem provided a foundation for mankind, who are as frail as the frailest wooden dwelling on our Mainland. This foundation consists of twelve men in each generation. These men are to all outward appearance ordinary men, simple, humble people. And yet
they support the world. Who knows? Perhaps you are one of them. Baruch Ha-Shem.”

The rabbi wipes his mouth, eyes twinkling.

The boatmaker has no idea whether the rabbi's speech is deadly serious or merely a fantastic joke played in this room every night on another unsuspecting guest. Perhaps he has been invited only to be the butt of this joke. The foreman told him Jacob Lippsted had an unusual sense of humor, that he was capable of anything.
A Secret Jew
. Nonsense! He is no Secret Jew. Any more than he was Father Robert's Number IV. He wants to get up and leave, but the eyes of Rachel Lippsted are on him, and he cannot rise.

The rabbi continues as if everything is fine.

“The final irony is that none of these twelve know who they are. And they cannot know. The virtue they need most to fulfill their task is humility. And what man, knowing he is one of the righteous twelve—pillars of Ha-Shem's creation—could possibly remain humble? No one! That is not human nature! They would tear off their rags and clothe themselves in jewels and furs. And the people, in their benighted state, would bow down and worship them.”

The rabbi wets his throat with a little of the deep red wine in his glass, which is still more than half full. A servant enters, offering a carafe of the same wine. All except Jacob Lippsted reach out and cover their glasses.

“You see why this lack of self-knowledge is so important. Others may try to guess who they are. A foolish impostor may claim to be one of them. But in almost all cases they live out their lives unknown and unrecognized, to be discovered only later, after they have fulfilled their purpose and been replaced. Because there must be twelve in the world at all times. If one dies, a new one is born that very day, somewhere in the world. Only Ha-Shem knows where. It may be in the farthest, humblest corner of the world—even on your Small Island.”

“There are no Jews on Small Island.”

“Yes,” the rabbi says, laughing and dabbing at his mouth with a corner of his napkin. “That is just what one of the twelve would say. And who is to know? None of us! All we know is that the humor of Ha-Shem is at work at all times and in all places. And He rarely makes our road straight.”

The strange dinner concludes without further discussion of the Secret Jews, but the boatmaker is left wondering, new questions added to the ones he has been accumulating since he landed on the Mainland. No closer to answers, he resumes his routine, going back to long hours in the storeroom before and after his other tasks.

In the back of the storeroom, the thing he is making is filling out. He has recognized it. When he started,
he didn't want to see an image of the finished piece; he wanted it to come into being on its own. Now he can see what it will be. He puts the image out of his mind, concentrates on details. He knows that finishing this piece will interrupt his progress from apprentice to master in the House of Lippsted. But he does not know where his path will take him after that.

After the dinner, Sven Eriksson comes to the storeroom more frequently. The foreman says little, but he seems troubled. Even though he himself gave permission for it, he has always been disturbed by what the boatmaker is doing in the storeroom. Now that the man from Small Island has been up the stairs to dinner, what is going on in the storeroom seems like an even more troubling disruption of the accepted way of doing things. There is an explosive energy around the boatmaker and what he is building. Perhaps it is because no such work has ever been undertaken inside these walls, with or without permission.

His mind troubled, the foreman mutters that his time has passed. He's lived too long, he tells himself. He's an old man in his dotage, the way his father was for three or four years before he died. Eriksson knows none of this is true. It would be easier if it were. He walks the wall four times, five times.

All around him the smells of the city rise in full power—from layers of manure, fruit in vendors' carts, raw meat behind windows inscribed with letters of gold. The foreman flaps and puffs like a waterbird, trying to put out of his mind the volatile energy he feels around the wordless Small Islander. He badly wants to know what things were like upstairs in the apartment of Herr Jacob Lippsted and his sister Rachel, but he will never ask.

A few days after the dinner the boatmaker tries to return the dinner suit, but the landlady won't accept it. “You might be asked to dinner again,” she says. “Then you'd just have to come down and get it. Keep it in your room. I'll come up and brush it.”

He hangs it in the wardrobe in his room, which until now has been empty. The landlady is sad to part with the suit, but pleased that it may be worn again at an elegant dinner table. It was not so old when her husband died, the last in a line of dinner suits he ordered from a tailor patronized by many of the elegantly dressed men of the capital. She is moved to think that it might have a new life in the present, reduced as that present might be for her, with its odd boarders, Kierkegaard and alcohol and cigarettes.

While for some reason the landlady is sure the boatmaker will be invited back, he is equally sure he will not. The invitation was a mistake, he thinks, or an elaborate
prank. And if he is, by some remote chance, invited back, he will decline immediately. He has no need to be harangued about being a Secret Jew. He is no Jew, has never been one.

But he humors his landlady, appreciating her kindness. He hangs the suit in the wardrobe and returns to his round of working, walking, smoking and attempting to puzzle out Crow's notebook. One night while he is looking through Crow's black scratches for the twentieth time without approaching any closer to the mystery of
R
and the third stream of Crow's income, there is a knock on his door, something that is unusual at any hour, unheard of this late.

He gets up and opens the door to find the landlady, Kierkegaard and cigarette in hand, sans cats. “You have a visitor,” she says. Her voice is even, not too different from usual, but the boatmaker can feel her excitement. He thinks Father Robert has finally found him. In a corner of his mind he has been expecting the priest, Neck and a few other brothers to enter, wrestle him to the floor and take him to the New Land, bound and gagged. He should have run long before. He was an idiot to return to this house.

“A visitor?”

“I think you should go down.” She turns and disappears down the stairs. The boatmaker pulls the straps of
his overalls over his longjohns, picks up his candle and follows her down between the ancestors until he reaches the bottom and the family's founding knight, dating from only a few centuries after the time of Vashad.

The front door is standing open. In the doorway is a man dressed in the uniform of the House of Lippsted. Behind him at the curb the boatmaker sees a familiar two-wheeled carriage with matched black horses shaking their heads and snorting under stiff plumes. The shades are drawn over the windows.

“Miss Rachel Lippsted to see you, sir,” says the servant, his throat clenching around the hateful words.

“Rachel Lippsted?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well . . . send her in,” the boatmaker says, trying to recover and speak words appropriate for a gentleman receiving a lady, absurd as such words might seem, spoken by an unshaven man in overalls and stocking feet at the door of a house that has come down many rungs in the world.

The servant retreats to the curb, opens the door of the carriage and extends a gloved hand. Rachel Lippsted steps out, wearing a dress of emerald green with a short cape. She is unveiled, but there is no one on the street to witness her sail across the curb and up the stone steps to
the landing, where the boatmaker is standing still as the house, candle flame flapping.

“I apologize for coming unannounced. I know it's not civilized. I hope I'm not intruding.”

“No.”

“Good. You may go, Karl. Return for me in two hours.”

“Very good, miss,” the servant says, choking on his outrage. He returns to the carriage, takes his whip and abuses the horses through the deserted streets, their hooves loud on the cobblestones, black plumes bobbing.

The boatmaker leads the way up between the landlady's ancestors to his room, holding his candle high. Castor and Pollux escape from the landlady's open door. She rushes out to shoo them back before they can follow the boatmaker and his guest.

Rachel sees the portraits and is struck by the contrast between the shabbiness of the boardinghouse and the nobility of the lineage. Unlike the boatmaker, she knows exactly who the landlady's family is. As she climbs the stairs, feeling each step give and then spring back, Rachel has a moment of fear, wanting to turn back. But it is too late. It was too late the moment she stepped from her carriage to the curb. Perhaps the moment she gave the address to her driver and saw him attempt to
conceal his surprise at her poor judgment. Possibly even before that.

She follows the boatmaker to the top of the stairs, turns left down the hall and into the small room with its window overlooking the alley. He offers her his only seat: a simple oak chair from a country kitchen. She removes her dove-gray gloves and drops them into her emerald-green lap. The boatmaker pulls the bedsheets into a semblance of civilized respect, pushes Crow's account book under the pillow and sits on his bed.

“I hope you can forgive the rabbi for his talk about the Secret Jews.”

“Where I come from, there aren't any Jews.”