The Origin of Sorrow (50 page)

Now I am back to bed, at noon. The Guide of the Perplexed I shall have Fromet send in a separate parcel. Please extend my warmest regards to your loving Meyer, to winsome Brendel, to generous Doctor Kirsch, to anyone else in your bustling lane who remembers me kindly.

As always, your humble servant,

Moses Mendelssohn

As Yussel Kahn turned the corner of Linden Street into the Heldenplatz, in Frankfurt, he stopped suddenly. He had been here hundreds of times before, but now he felt cold sweat break out on his forehead and a thumping begin in his chest, as he saw at an angle across the square a police wagon blocking the street in front of Johannes Gluck, Bookseller. Three more officers sat on horses that were standing impatiently, pawing the muddy cobbles, in front of and behind the wagon. Yussel shrank back against the window of a pawn shop and watched, his view partially blocked by the trunks of several lindens in the square. In two directions the foot traffic seemed almost normal. Bankers in dark coats and knee-breeches and silk hose and powdered wigs crossed the manure-strewn streets, lost in their important conversations; shoppers carried bolts of fabrics, or smaller packages, as they emerged from the stores. An ice wagon stood in front of an ale house while the driver, using large tongs, hauled an opaque block of ice inside. But a few people, he saw, had gathered near the police wagon, curious to see what had brought the Constables there. Yussel’s first impulse was to join the little group and hope he would not be recognized. But that might be suicidal. His next impulse was to leave at once, to hurry back to the lane. But that would be cowardice, and would leave him dangling in ignorance. Rejecting both ideas, he stayed where he was, leaned against the window of the pawn shop like a bystander without any cares, and waited to see what would happen.

So it has come to this, he thought. After sixteen years, they have found out. He wondered how.

He thought painfully of Brendel, of her two boys, to whom he had become like a father. If he were arrested, imprisoned, how could he live apart from her, when she dwelled with loving and sensuous force in his soul? When the Chief Rabbi had approached him far in the past, he had been happy to accept the task, honored and excited. He was alone then, often in despair, his life a salacious daydream of pretty women half his age. This would be a chance to do something meaningful, he had decided, and his decision had felt right; even if he were some day to lose his life, as the Schul-Klopper had, it would be no great loss. But things were different now, with Brendel, with the boys. Now he did not choose to rot in prison, or to hang by his neck until dead.

The procedure had been so simple. The bookseller, who secretly sold Nahum Baum’s poetry along with his Shakespeare and his Milton and his histories and his maps, was still willing. Widely read, he had long been outraged by the treatment of the Jews; as a matter of honor he was willing to continue taking a risk to help. Gluck had been in business for years, not far from the headquarters of the Frankfurt Constabulary, and had good relations with a sympathetic officer of the police or the judiciary — to this day Yussel did not know which; he never had needed to know. Twice each week Yussel had come to the Heldenplatz on business. Sometimes he would enter the book-seller’s to buy glue for his carpentry, sometimes to purchase a book. Other times they just would chat, about public affairs, about an interesting new book that was being published. If he saw through the window that Gluck was busy with a customer, Yussel would just pass by — but only after glancing at the books in the window. In the center of the window was a low table on which there were always three books displayed — a Goethe, a Schiller, translations of Voltaire or Rousseau, the Holy Bible, whatever. What Yussel looked for was books about art. If any of the three books featured on the table was about a painter — Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, it did not matter who — Yussel hurried back to the Judengasse, to the Chief Rabbi’s study, and gave him the warning: the police would be raiding the Judengasse in the next few days. Both Yussel and Gluck believed that the risk of anyone noticing this obscure code was minimal.

So many years had passed without discovery that Yussel no longer thought about danger — until he came upon the police wagon and its two dray horses standing in front of the bookseller’s shop. Had the police somehow discovered the officer among them who was sympathetic to the Jews? Had someone recognized the code? He had no notion of how they might have found out, but apparently they had.

His mind sizzled like oil in a hot iron pan as more people crowded around the police wagon to see what was happening. They were looking toward the shop. Officers must be inside. Did they know that he,Yussel, was the go-between? He did not think Gluck would tell them, Gluck was a gentleman who had become through the years a friend. But the Polizei, he knew, had ways to get information from even the most resisting soul.

An old, suppressed image came to mind: the music and gaiety of the Frankfurt Fair, of one particular Fair, of the gallows, of the blacksmith from Mainz. It always had been difficult to accept the connection, that this had been Brendel’s husband, the father of her sons. Was that now to be the fate of the bookseller? Or of himself? He did not deny to himself that suddenly he was afraid. His fear was not so much for himself —the dead felt neither pain nor desire — but what would his arrest, and what might follow, do to Brendel? How could she withstand a second horror? Dear, sweet Brendel. And the boys — what would she tell her sons this time?

He saw a stirring in the crowd near the wagon, heard a murmuring. He inched his way further into the square, seeking a better view. Johannes Gluck, his gray hair thinning, wearing his usual gray apron, was being led out of his shop between two Constables, his hands bound behind him. Yussel watched with agony for his friend, head turned half away from the scene to hide his face, as the bookseller, under prodding by a Constable, climbed into the wagon. Yussel in the time it takes to turn a page in a book imagined what would happen in the next few seconds. Johannes Gluck standing in the wagon on the way to jail would realize what lay ahead: he would be tortured to reveal the names of his contacts — the high official who knew of the planned raids ahead of time, the man from the Judengasse to whom he informed. Johannes would want to endure neither the torture nor the inevitable betrayal; realizing this, he would find the right moment to leap from the wagon, run down the street; the pursuing officers would fire their muskets; blood would erupt like flowers all over his back; he would fall to the cobbles, to a satisfying death, a man with honor to the end. All this the bookseller would do in a moment, Yussel convinced himself.

His heart and breath were hurtling as if he himself were running down the street. But the bookseller was not. The horses slowly began to walk. The wheels of the wagon slowly began to turn, like the earth. Flanked by two officers holding muskets, the bookseller stared straight ahead.

Circling the Heldenplatz — the Place of Heroes, except that there were no statues of heroes, only three squat bases that stood truncated on the grassy center — as if the city had scoured the history of the Holy Roman Empire and found as yet no hero worthy of bronze — the police wagon came directly at Yussel. He turned to the wall, bent over, adjusted his hose, till the wagon with its human cargo had passed. As he bent the blood had rushed to his head, and now Yussel felt trapped in a fog. Were they, even now, looking for him in the lane? Should he hire a horse, flee to Berlin, or even further, to Vienna, and start another life? Should he risk going back, quickly sign over the shop to Georgi, explain the danger to Brendel and the boys, see if they wanted to come with him? Brendel surely would.

One decision came easily. He would not flee from here, without a proper farewell. If the police already were waiting for him … he would have to take that chance.

He started walking home. Shaken with every step, images created by his nerves drifted through his brain in many colors, like a patch of spent oil on the surface of the sewage ditch — slick purples, yellows, blues, greens, floating toward oblivion with the muck.

While Yussel walked home, uncertain of the future, Izzy sat beside Amelia in the Rothschild parlor, to discuss with Guttle and Meyer his own plans for the future. He was not wearing his butcher’s apron. His blonde hair no longer stood up like a wheat field, but lay flat on his head, and had begun to darken. This had happened several years before, literally overnight. One night he had stolen his first kiss from Amelia, and the next morning he had awakened with altered hair, a change that no one could explain. In his years at the butcher shop his chest and arms had thickened, which Amelia liked, and his hands were acquiring a permanent bloody tint, which she didn’t.

Receiving the Guide of the Perplexed from Moses Mendelssohn — the philosopher’s own copy, possibly even handled by the Rambam himself — had had a profound effect, Izzy told them. He had decided he had been put on earth by Yahveh to do Jewish scholarship; that’s how he must spend the rest of his life.

“So I have made plans,” he said firmly, trying to sound like the man of thirty he now was, though he still appeared much younger, and often acted so. Holding the hand of Amelia, who was blushing, and looking at Guttle, he went on, “Because you were responsible for my receiving the book, Guttle, I want you to be the first to know.” He felt pressure on his palm from Amelia. “Well, not exactly the first. Amelia knows.” She squeezed his hand again. “And Meyer knows.” He saw Guttle give Meyer a questioning look, as she wondered what her husband had held back from her. Amelia dug her fingernails into Izzy’s palm. “And my two brothers also know. And my mother, of course. And Rabbi Simcha. But besides them, I want you to be the first.”

“I’m honored,” Guttle said.

Smiling slightly, she thought: so they have overcome their fears at last. Loving each other for so long — since they were children and Amelia used to follow Izzy’s Pied Piper of a Schul-Klopper through the lane — each as they grew older silently becoming terrified of joining together as man and wife — each making profound excuses behind which to hide. How many times have I wanted to tell them they were merely afraid, that they should look within themselves, that they should confess their concerns to each other? How many times have I held back, my mouth tightly shut, deciding they must face and accept and subdue their trepidations on their own, without my interference — when they were ready to, and not before. Perhaps, now, they are ready.

“Here are my plans,” Izzy was saying. “You know that when my father died he left the slaughterhouse in three equal shares, to me, Eli and Aaron, even though I am running it. And he left their feather business in three shares as well. I have agreed to trade my share of the slaughterhouse, which makes good money, to my brothers, in return for their two shares of the feather business, which is going bankrupt, now that nearly everyone in the lane has feather beds.”

“It wasn’t Meyer who gave you this business advice, of that I’m sure,” Guttle said.

“As a matter of fact, Meyer worked it out for us. He has agreed to buy the feather business from me.”

Again Guttle looked at Meyer, furrowing her brow. A dying feather business? Had he lost his senses? Her husband’s features betrayed only slight amusement at her puzzled look.

“Meyer plans to close the feather shop and use the space for his office,” Izzy continued. “He needs more room, now that he’ll be taking Amschel into the business. Also, he will have more storage space for imports.”

Guttle had not taken her eyes off Meyer. “Again I’m honored that I’m the first to know.”

She had been aware of Meyer’s hopes, of course — but not of this sudden reality.

“With the money from Meyer,” Izzy said, “and with whatever dowry your father sees fit to provide, Amelia and I will be married. She will remain here in the lane while I go away for a year to a rabbinical school — one that Rabbi Simcha will suggest. To be taken seriously as a scholar, I need to be a Rabbi.”

Guttle looked at each of their faces. “It’s amazing what can go on in the lane right under one’s nose. In a single day.”

“Everyone always asks your advice,” Izzy said. “We decided it was time we made decisions on our own.”

Adjusting her skirt more comfortably on the love seat, Amelia said, “This was after we couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I was at the cemetery with Mama,” she said. “Little Benjy would have been eighteen today.” She reached into her skirt pocket for her handkerchief, but did not withdraw it, merely grasped it. “Mama wouldn’t leave. For a time she didn’t know where she was. We could hear the river running. She thought we were on a boat. She thought that if we left the cemetery we would drown.” Hidden in her pocket, her fist was squeezing the handkerchief with force, squeezing away the tears she refused to let form in her eyes. “But back to your news. You’re telling me all this now, because?”

“We’re asking your approval,” Amelia said.

“You don’t need my approval for any of it. For marriage, you need Papa’s approval.”

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Izzy said. “Your father also knows.”

Guttle felt her tears welling up, despair for her mother — today had been the worst episode by far — overwhelmed by joy for her sister. She sat on the love seat beside Amelia, forcing Izzy to move to the edge, and hugged her close. “I’m so happy for you,” she said. And to Izzy, “You don’t deserve her — making her wait this long.”

“I didn’t make her wait. She made … “

Meyer stood and shook Izzy’s hand. “The Schnapper girls have a strange sense of humor. You’ll get used to it.’”

“Get used to it? I’ve been suffering barbs from Guttle since we were kids. I never get used to it.” He turned to his betrothed. “But no more waiting. Let’s go to Simcha and choose a school for Rabbis.”

“And a wedding date.” To Guttle she said, “Papa is leaving the date up to us.”

“He’s growing soft, it appears.” Because of Mama, she knew; the little rules didn’t matter any more.

“It’s thanks to you, Guttle. He said to us last night, ‘Guttle made a good match with Meyer. Soon he’ll be richer than I am. That’s why Avra could have her starving artist. That’s why you can have your starving scholar. When you need money, you’ll be able to turn to Rothschild, instead of your poor old Papa.’”

Guttle grinned and said, “He was joking.”

“I’m not so sure,” Meyer said drily.

When her sister and Izzy had gone, Guttle led Meyer to the loveseat, and they sat together, Meyer’s arm around her shoulder. “Did you see how happy they are?” she said.

“She’ll make a beautiful rebbetzin.”

“Thank you for helping them. It’s a mitzvah.”

“You think so? A feather-business in my cap?”

“For that, you owe me a kiss.”

“Maybe two,” Meyer said.

“It all happened so fast. My head is buzzing like a fly.”