The Origin of Sorrow (46 page)

38

—Oh mein Gott! Do you see?

—For shame! For shame!

—Look at that one. And that one.

—And this one here, do you see?

—If you’d get your nose out of the way, I could see.

—How could he draw such things?

—How could she display such things?

—Women will see.

—And children!

—He left off her face. Whom do you think it is?

—I tell you one thing, my wife it’s not.

—Look at her … her you-knows. It’s someone young.

—But not too young.

—He almost shows … oh, mein goodness!

—And he’s deaf, he won’t hear the children cry.

—Why would you think the children will cry when they look?

—They’ll cry when their mamas spank them.

—Here comes the Chief Rabbi, and Simcha. Someone must have sent for them.

Rabbi Eleazar took a quick gander at the drawings, and approached Avra, who was standing in the doorway. “You must put those away. At once.”

“Why?”

“They are a disgrace. They are obscene.”

“They depict the creation of God. Was Adonai a disgrace? Was Adonai obscene?”

The throng around the drawings was growing larger as word spread. People stood on their toes to see over the heads of those in front of them.

“You go too far, young lady. Adam and Eve, though created naked, put on clothes.”

”You know better than I do, Rabbi — they put on clothes because they ate of the forbidden fruit. Because they disobeyed the will of God — and became ashamed of their bodies. It was not Yahweh’s intent that they be ashamed of His work.”

“That was in Paradise. Does the Judengasse look like Paradise to you?”

“All the more reason we need to look at beauty. Why must anyone get upset at these images? Women see them every month, for real, in the mikveh. Men see them every night, in their wives. And touch them.”

“Not children.”

“What house is so large that a boy has not glimpsed his mother washing, or a girl her father?”

“Such drawings undermine the Jewish spirit. The life of the mind.”

“Only if we allow them to.”

“Enough talking. As the Chief Rabbi, I order you to take them down.”

“You have no such authority. Where is it written that you do?”

“It is by common consent.”

“My husband is an artist. Artists work beyond common consent.”

His face darkening beneath his high black hat like a beet from the fields, the Chief Rabbi turned to Rabbi Simcha for help. Simcha, one palm on a pockmarked cheek, said nothing. The Chief Rabbi turned and strode off angrily towards his study. Simcha took a few moments to look at the drawings. Before following his superior, he rolled his eyes at Doctor Kirsch, whom he noticed in the crowd wearing an amused expression. Rebecca, ever curious, left the throng and intercepted Simcha before he had gone ten metres. “What do you think, Rabbi?” she asked him.

“What do I think? I think Moses Mendelssohn has struck again.”

“Mendelssohn?”

“The Mendelssohn Rebellion, I call it. Time was when the women in the lane were content to scrub the floors and cook the chickens and have the babies, and bring the children up to be like their mothers and fathers — the boys as students of the Torah, the girls as, well, as their wives. Then Mendelssohn came here — what, about six months ago? Look what’s happened since. We have a Gentile living in the lane — invited in by the daughter of the Court Jew; she even mounts a coffin and harangues the old men who don’t want him here, who consider his presence an abomination. The Doctor’s wife runs off from her husband and children to marry a Christian — the son of a Count, no less. A Café owned by a woman — a woman more or less living in sin — which most people had been shunning, suddenly begins to prosper after Mendelssohn gives it his blessing. Now some other woman — I hope I never know who, how could I look her in the eye again? — some woman has disrobed to her skin for the artist, and another daughter of the Court Jew flaunts the drawings in public; she disobeys the Chief Rabbi, even argues with him. Nothing like this has happened in the lane in three hundred years.”

“Is that so bad?”

“I didn’t say if it was good or bad. Only that it was new.”

The Doctor ran her fingers through her lustrous black hair. “I never though to link those things. Perhaps because I’ve been close with some of these women, and seen their ambivalence, their pain. Tell me, Rabbi, what you think of this Mendelssohn’s Rebellion, if that’s what it is.”

“What do I think?” He glanced down the lane, where the sturdy black figure of the Chief Rabbi was diminishing in size as he neared the synagogue. “Clearly it’s scandalous. It’s like a wind blowing the yarmulkes right off our heads, as the Chief Rabbi might say.”

“I know what the Chief Rabbi would say. I just heard him. What about Emil Simcha?”

He glanced toward the synagogue, then back at Rebecca. Lowering his voice, he said, “Just between us, Doctor, it’s making life interesting. There are worse things than scandalous.” He touched the top of his head, making sure his yarmulke was still on. With a small, rueful smile that softened his scarred face, he added, “Not that it wasn’t interesting before. The compression from the walls makes sure of that.”

Together they began to walk down the lane, the Doctor towards the hospital, the Rabbi towards his study. “At least I became a Doctor long before Mendelssohn spoke,” Rebecca said. “I’d hate to be a crowd follower.”

“That was in Berlin, am I right?”

“Correct.”

“Your father encouraged you?”

“Pretty much.”

“Isn’t your father an acquaintance of Mendelssohn?”

Taken by surprise, Rebecca inclined her head, smiling gamely in defeat, her dark eyes merry. As they reached the hospital, she said, “You’ve really thought this through.”

Simcha shrugged modestly. “That’s what we Rabbis do. That’s what we’re for.”

Up the lane, in front of Hiram’s drawings, some art lovers had left, others had come to look, and the old men, with nothing better to do, continued to speculate.

—The question remains, who is it?

—It’s not skinny Avra.

—It could be her sister, Guttle Rothschild.

—Except Guttle is pregnant out to here.

—You know what I think? A lot of wives will get pregnant tonight.

—From looking at pictures you don’t get pregnant.

—You’d be surprised.

—I know who! There’s only one woman who would drop her drawers in front of the deaf mute.

—Who is that?

—The shiksa whore. The Doctor’s former wife.

—She left the lane months ago.

—Maybe he drew her months ago.

—Then why not show them before?

—He waited till she wasn’t Jewish.

—What, something changes then?

—You know what? Looking at these is making my mouth go dry.

—I know what you mean. You want to go to the Café?

—My thought precisely. We’ll have Brendel fix us a nice glass of tea.

Guttle lay awake in the dark. She and Meyer had not said a word to one another since their fight. In the morning it would be two days. Nothing like this had ever happened before. She was frightened for her marriage. He was due at Hesse-Hanau at eleven in the morning — if he was going. He would have to leave early. He lay beside her, his broad back turned. She did not know if he was awake or asleep. She did not want to find out. Her body was stiff, tense. Not, she assumed, like the naked torso in the drawings in the lane. She had heard about them from Avra, who had come to see how she was feeling. Avra who had faced down the Chief Rabbi — the Chief Rabbi! — with chutzpah. Or had it been true courage? Guttle was not sure about the prerogatives of art. All she knew was that just now her own body was not a thing of beauty. She felt heavier than when she had borne the other children; her arms and legs were thicker, her every movement was sluggish. She felt more like a cow in a barn than a wife in bed. Why did she have to become pregnant every time Meyer sneezed? It was not his fault, a man had to sneeze, Yahweh had made him that way. She loved her three children, like Meyer she wanted more, and yet … She felt a pain wrack through her womb and her back, as if it would cut her spine in half.

When she had fallen asleep she had dreamed of the trench running red with her menstrual blood. She’d been awakened by pain and sat upright, near to tears, from the pain or the nightmare, she was not certain which. Something was wrong with the baby inside her; she could tell. Something was different this time. That was why she could not get warm, why her entire body ached, why she was so tired. She had tried talking to Melka, but Melka was Melekh, a King, a Torah, a man, and didn’t want to hear of such things. She tried talking to Jennie Aron, but Jennie was a virgin, knew nothing of giving birth — burned to death, a far worse pain And the Archduchess, Marie Antoinette, ridiculed for being childless after six years of marriage. Guttle wondered which was worse, the pain of ridicule or the pain of labor, of giving birth, the punishment visited by Yahweh on Eve. “I am not Eve!” she cried aloud. Beside her Meyer stirred, but when she became silent again he did not turn to her.

My soul is divided, she thought. I am twenty-three years old and I am still a child, talking to girls who are imaginary, or distant, or dead — yet I am becoming a mother to my sisters, and to their friends; they come to me for advice, as if I had the wisdom of someone twice my years. Is that because I am Meyer’s wife? Because I am my father’s daughter? “Let’s see what Guttle thinks,” they say. But why? Is this wisdom, that I believe in Torah and Talmud and all the traditions of my people, yet I stand upon a coffin and scold the elders? Is this wisdom, that I cut myself off from the friend I love the most, and then pine for her smile, her touch, the very color of her hair? Is this wisdom, that the man I married is a tireless worker who wants to make us rich, and I meddle in the business he knows so well?

But how can I not speak the truth — at least the truth as it seems to me? If I don’t, then I cease to exist. The ‘me’ in me disappears. I become just a tiny part of a pointless untruthful beast called the Judengasse. Or called humanity. Surely that can’t be what Yahweh wanted when He created us in His image. If I do not speak the truth, and my children don’t, and their children don’t, then what is the purpose of bearing children at all? Then humans are only an endless procession of lies. That can’t be what Yahweh intended.

Another spasm in her womb. Something bad was happening — not just the child kicking, she could feel that, but something else. Another spasm. If she did not know she had two months yet, she would think she had started labor. But she felt as if the child inside her had a mind of its own. A sharp contraction ripped through her like an animal with claws. Is the child doing this, or is my mind doing this to my body, out of anger at Meyer Amschel? To punish him — for what? It cannot be. Just ask anyone, they will tell you, I would not do such a thing. I am the perfect one. Not as selfish as Dvorah, not as flirtatious as Brendel, not as brilliant as Rebecca, not as sharp-tongued as Avra, not as skinny as some or as heavy as others, clever but not clownish, born to be, if not everyone’s mother, then everyone’s big sister — not just Avra’s and Amelia’s and Mira’s and Benjy’s but also Izzy’s, and Dvorah’s — who is older than me — and Georgi — my own doing, but why did I do it? — and now even big sister to Mama, who is disappearing into a vapor of fear as her children get older. “Let’s see what Guttle thinks.” I am tired of living up to my name. Guttle. The Good.

Yet that is not entirely true. Bringing Georgi into the lane, haranguing the elders from a coffin, even, when I was younger, intruding on the men in the synagogue. Plenty of men in the lane, and women, too, must whisper of Guttle the Bad. Even to Meyer I must be a curse when I speak of the blood on Wilhelm’s wealth.

Already I hear the Chief Rabbi rebutting my thoughts: You have read the Torah, Guttle. Yahweh did not create you in His image. He created man in His image. He created woman from Adam’s rib, to serve. To multiply. Not to criticize. Not to harangue. Not to intrude.

Yes, I have read the Torah, but why do I have a mind, if not to think? If I do not think, I do not exist, except as a slave — and that I cannot accept. Yet women all around me accept. My mother. Dvorah’s mother. The rebbetzin. Almost every woman in the lane accepts. Only my sisters and my friends do not. Is there something wrong with us?

I used to joke, to tease, in order to ease the pressure of the walls. That has become more difficult to do. The stakes increase in sorrow. How does one joke about Georgi? Or Dvorah? Or money stained with blood? To tease and joke and sing arias through the sorrow of life, with honor and honesty — that would be a worthy goal. But is it possible?

For twenty-three years I have lived. I have borne three children. How old, dear Yahweh, how fecund must I be before I understand?

Enough, my twisting brain. I’m tired. So tired …

“Mein Gott!” Half asleep, Guttle woke and winced at yet another strong contraction. And then another. “It’s too early!” she yelled at the ceiling, arching her back.

This time Meyer turned, groped for her hand. “What is it?”

“Run and get the midwife.” She gasped at another wave of pain. “The baby’s coming!”

“Not for two months.”

“It’s coming now!” she screamed. “Just go!”

Jumping out of bed, stumbling in a moment of dizziness, Meyer quickly donned a robe and slippers, unlocked the door and hurried into the lane, ran in the darkness, his slippers flapping, past the hospital and the baths to Celia Levine’s wig shop, began to pound on the door. He pounded until Celia sleepily came to the front, a robe over her shift, wearing slippers. She lighted a lantern, saw through the window who it was, opened the door.

“You’ve got to come! Guttle is having her baby!”

“Guttle? It’s too soon!”