The Origin of Sorrow (57 page)

“You go. I have considering to do.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“It wouldn’t let me sleep. Of that I’m sure.”

Meyer moved toward the top of the stairs. “You’ll turn down the lamp?”

“I’ll turn down the lamp.”

As Meyer descended, Guttle exhaled deeply, rested her head on the back of her chair, tried to breathe slowly, deliberately. To the empty room she said, “Now the battle begins.”

Rebecca and Guttle were sitting in the Café after closing time. Brendel had shut the doors, was washing dishes in the kitchen, while her two friends drank tea and talked.

“What Meyer says is true, Guttle. Everything he predicted is likely to happen. Are you sure you want that?”

“Are you saying you won’t help me?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“You know it’s the right thing for us to do.”

“You’re putting me in a difficult position. I’m not alone anymore. This will reflect on my husband. He could even forbid it. How would that look, if I am involved?”

“There’s no place large enough to to do it except your old house, with Melekh sleeping in the attic.”

“What about the community room?”

“They would never allow that. It’s part of the synagogue.”

Rebecca sipped her tea, bit into a macaroon. Guttle was tense as she awaited a response. The shouts of children playing in the lane were distracting. There seemed to be a fight taking place.

“I have an idea,” Rebecca said, sounding uncertain. “But first you need to think this through again. Bitterness could run in the lane like the sewage.”

“Then you’ll help? We can use your house?”

“You have to request the community room.”

“Why? That will require a public meeting. Public approval.”

“So? You might as well see what you’ll be up against.”

“I don’t see . . .”

Rebecca put her hand on Guttle’s. “This question is not about you, or me. It’s about the Chief Rabbi. Trust me.”

Drying her hands on a towel, Brendel entered the Café from the kitchen. “So, what have you two conspirators decided? Are we going to assault the bastions?”

Guttle sighed, closing her eyes wearily, trying to rub pain from her forehead. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Someone must.”

44

13 October

Consider the consequences. Think this through. How could I not?

Three women came to visit last night. Whether I was awake or asleep I cannot say.

We met in the bakery, long after it had closed for the night. Joan of Arc was there — not my imaginary Jennie — and Madame Antoine, is now Queen Marie Antoinette — but not Melka, or Melekh; to my surprise, Mama was there instead. The fires in the stoves had been banked, with embers left glowing for the bakery women to stoke up easily in the dawn. Perhaps that is why Mama came; she no longer works there, but it is one of the few places where she still feels comfortable. The embers cast an orange glow over all of us as Mama pulled her gray robe tight around her, the hem of her white nightgown showing beneath, and sat on the stone bench where so many years ago I used to search for beetles. Madame Antoine made a throne for herself of one of the tables on which by day the flour and eggs and yeast are rolled into braided challah, which, oddly, her pale brown hair seemed got up to resemble, though no challah braids, I think, were ever studded with emeralds. For Joan of Arc no makeshift seat sufficed to contain her. Dressed in men’s clothing, covered shoulder to boot in heavy armor that glinted a fiery orange, she preferred to pace near the entry, as far from the stoves as possible — because of the heat, she said, though the glow of the embers may have been reason enough. I did not recognize her at first, and thought she might be an impostor. The Joan of Arc depicted by all the painters is tall and thin, blue-eyed, fair and pretty; in person or spirit she was none of these; she was short, stocky, brown-eyed and dark, as befit the French peasant girl she was.

“But I had lovely breasts,” she said when I questioned these discrepancies. For a moment I feared she would strip off her clothing to prove this. She did no such thing, modest maid that she was, and it was not long before a certain magnetism emanating from her person dispersed my doubts. “Your artists fit glory into their own notions of beauty,” she said, with benign acceptance. “Lean and weak I could not have done what I did. It was essential that I was a woman, of course, which is why I speak of breasts; a man with my accomplishments would long since have been forgotten. If the artists need make me tall and fair, let them; I would have burned equally well.”

I was startled by her easy manner about the flames; perhaps it was because, though dead, she lives on.

“But my appearance is not why you summoned me here,” she continued. “You are torn about how to proceed in some conflicted matter. Spare me the Jewish details, which I surely would not understand. And those involving learning; I never learned to read — though this proves nothing, except that God chooses whom He will to do His work. My simple message is this: oppose the authorities and there will be consequences, there is never doubt of that. But if your inner voices tell you to fight, then you must fight. How else to remain in a state of grace, not only with your God but with yourself?”

As I absorbed from her own lips the words she’d lived by, my blood stirred like the blood of a warrior. But Madame Antoine, smoothing the shadows of her stunning skirt, did not agree. “There is such a fine thing as compromise,” she said, examining the painted nails of her fingers. “I offer myself as a prime example. The people of France are suffering. Drought has caused a terrible shortage of bread. When I ride along the roads in my chariot I do what I can; I stop and give money to the women, to feed their children; I love children; to see them hungry tugs at my heart. But what of the jewels I wear? The diamonds on one necklace could feed an entire province for a year. No one knows that better than I. But they brought me from Vienna to Versailles to be a Queen; they expect me to act like one, to look like one. A poor symbol of France I would be without rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls, without ivory combs and lapis buttons, without trains of the finest silk, without the rarest feathers in my hair. I give the courtiers the Queen they demand — while quietly I give the poor at least some of the livres they need. In every conflict there is a place for compromise.” She glanced at Joan, who was listening while she paced, her armor crackling at times. “If nothing else,” the Queen said, “it is a way to avoid the fire.”

I saw Joan wince. She started to speak, then changed her mind and turned away, her sword clanking against her metal thigh. As for myself, I felt confused.

“Compromise? I cannot start half a school for girls. They will not burn me if I proceed. But people have been shunned for less. Why should I invite such trouble?”

“Exactly, bubbelah.” It was Mama answering; I had not realized I had spoken that last thought aloud. “Why go looking for trouble? It will find you often enough without you looking for it.” How Mama allowed herself to speak in such company I didn’t know. Perhaps the loosening of her hold on life had loosened her fears, her deference, as well.

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Are you so sure of that?” Mama asked. “Why not listen to the wisdom of the Queen, and compromise? Teach a few girls in your home, as you do already with your own daughters. Don’t call it a school, and people will look the other way. That’s the first thing we learn in the lane — to look the other way. One day some man will start a school for girls, and then perhaps few will object.”

I could feel Joan seething. With anger she thrust her sword hard into a flour sack. The brown flour running out suggested, in the orange darkness, blood from a belly. “Then it will be charity,” she said, and spat. “A woman must do it, to show other women the way. There’s more than milk in a woman’s breasts, there’s courage. You need to find it.”

“And burn in the fire?” the Queen asked.

“There are compensations. They have shown me the future. I shall be called Saint Joan. The church that condemned me shall canonize me.”

“We Jews don’t have saints,” I mused, and smiled at the notion of Saint Guttle. Hardly.

“Surely you have the wise, the valiant, the heroic,” Joan said.

“Mostly we honor tzadiks.”

“What are they?”

“Very righteous men.”

“And the name for very righteous women?”

I had to think a bit. “We don’t have such a word.”

“Maybe no word,” Mama put in,“but there are many honored women in the Torah. Sarai, Rachel . . .”

“Did they oppose the will of men?” Joan asked.

“They bore righteous sons!”

Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette, said nothing,

Mama turned to me with a pleading look. “Guttle, darling, you, too, have borne sons. No doubt you will bear more. You have suckled them at your breasts. Will you be instructed about a woman’s proper function, a breast’s proper use, by a virgin? By a Queen who surely employs wet nurses? You have a righteous man; he will raise your sons righteously. Why must you want more?”

After the disarray of Mama’s mind in recent months, I felt an unaccountable fear at her lucidity. Declining rapidly, she has been regressing into Biblical yesterdays; this morning she called the River Main the Red Sea. The scientific name for this condition is dementia, Rebecca says. But Mama does have her lucid hours. For these midnight arguments, to what distant fount of wisdom had she traveled?

For one final moment before they disappeared, the Queen spoke. “I must tell you this. I never said it. About eating cake. Never. That’s a canard invented by those who want my head. If your enemies will speak ill of you no matter what you do, why not do as you like?”

I had no response. I lay awake most of the night, long after they all had vanished, writhing in search of an answer.

14 October

It was Melekh after all who led me to decide. I recalled the day we found him there in his lead coffin in the attic of the River View — me and Izzy, Yussel and Rebecca. It struck me like a revelation — two men and two women! Given the most sacred secret of the lane! Surely this would not have been so if women were to remain inferior in knowledge, and in Yahweh’s eyes. He had prepared this lesson for me so long ago — right there in Rebecca’s house! — but only now did I interpret the meaning. Unless some deeper part of me understood it, has been responding to it, has been leading me to this, all along.

What was Brendel’s phrase? We will assault the bastions.

Yes!

Having finished work in his counting house, reckoning their net worth, Meyer summoned Guttle to tell her the final tally privately. He spoke without preamble, calmly, but in a voice tinged with excitement. “We have one hundred and fifty thousand gulden.”

“Meyer, that’s wonderful! We must be the richest people in the lane!”

“Oh, far from that. The south end banker, Emil Hecksher, has more than four hundred thousand, I would guess.”

“That much?”

“Still, it’s a good accumulation. We’ve surpassed your father, I think. I would estimate we’re among the ten wealthiest families in the Judengasse. But the amount is our secret. You can’t tell anyone.”

“Not even Papa?”

“Not even him. Something three people know is no more a secret.”

She placed her hands on the back of his neck to rub away the knots she could feel. “Whatever you say, Herr Genius.”

He wriggled his shoulders gratefully. “It doesn’t take genius. Just concentration.”

“But what about that?” She was peering over his shoulder at a ledger that lay open on the slanting table. “The ledger says sixty thousand.”

“That’s for the tax assessors. About the rest they don’t have to know.”

“You’ve done that before?”

“There wasn’t so much cash before.” He looked at her. “Does that bother you?”

“The way they treat us, they don’t deserve a kreuzer.”

“My feeling exactly.”

A rapping on the door, by small knuckles, interrupted them. Guttle opened it and found Nathan there, in trousers she had made for him after the fashion of the sailors on the docks, and scuffed shoes, and a hand-me-down shirt from Salomon, and an oversized yarmulke — the eager boy unable to be still, standing first on one foot, then hopping to the other. “There’s a messenger here for Papa. From the Crown Prince!”

He said the last words with awe and admiration. Puzzled, Meyer raised an eyebrow as he eased his way past Guttle into the vestibule. At the arched doorway he accepted a small brown envelope from the courier, checked that the wax seal was unbroken, and from his pocket withdrew a coin and gave it to the man for his trouble. Peering at the seal as Guttle joined him in the bright vestibule, Meyer said, “It’s not from Wilhelm, it’s from the treasury office. That means Buderus.” He broke the seal, and with mounting anticipation — for he suddenly had an inkling of what it might contain — he pulled out a single piece of note paper. He scanned it quickly, then read it to her.

“Wilhelm’s father, the Landgrave Friedrich, is dead. The funeral is Wednesday. Wilhelm will be crowned on Thursday. You might want to be there. Buderus.”

Both remained silent as they absorbed the news. Meyer was not completely surprised, he had heard rumors of an illness.

“That means in Hesse-Kassel,” Guttle said. “That’s a long way.”

“One hundred and fifty kilometres. A two-day trip each way. I should leave tomorrow to be in time for the funeral. After the coronation, I would have to stay over, so as not to ride on Shabbas. That’s all right, I can make good contacts there. I would be back in a week.”

“You’ve never stayed away overnight before. Not even once. The children will be upset.”

“I’ll talk to them. Guttle, do you realize what this means? As Crown Prince, Wilhelm has a fortune. As Landgrave, he’ll inherit twenty times as much. Beyond counting, almost. When I get his investments — and I will — I’ll have something real to work with. Then maybe you’ll see a genius.”

“But you haven’t had his investments for ten years. Not since you discounted the British bills for his soldiers. He’s acted as if you lost his money, instead of doubling it.”

“I know. I don’t know why. Neither does Buderus. But Buderus is still there. Look what he wrote, ‘You might want to be there.’ It’s easy enough to finish the sentence. ‘ … if you know what’s good for you.’ To Buderus, I still have opportunity.”

“I don’t want you to go. It’s too dangerous. Besides, you’re clinging to an old hope. Wilhelm clearly isn’t interested.”

“Then I have to make him interested. All my life Yahweh has told me to work hard and take risks and get rich. I can’t tell you why, there’s no place to spend in the lane. Still . . .”

She had never forgotten Amelia’s view of Meyer years ago: that the money he accumulates represents his lost mother’s love. She dared not say that to him. Instead she asked, “Yahweh speaks with you?” He had never said such a thing before.

“Not with a voice, like your Jennie Aron.”

“You’ve heard me speak to her as well?”

“Only in the night. She heard heavenly voices, and look what happened to her. Some God that was. I don’t hear Adonai’s voice, it’s just a feeling I have. Ever since my parents died. To collect coins, to make money. It seems important — for what purpose, I’m not sure.”

“But it’s been ten years!”

“Buderus says it will be worth my while. Maybe Yahweh speaks to Buderus.”

“He’s Jewish?”

“No. But Adonai may be open-minded.”

“I’ve never met this Buderus. Does he even exist?”

“He just sent a messenger with this note, no? I have to go. I can’t disobey my feelings.”

“What about my feelings? Seven days? It frightens me. There are highwaymen. I don’t want to be left a widow.”

“And my feelings about you starting a school? That frightens me. You have to follow your heart, you told me. You’d better make your heart strong for the meeting tonight, I doubt it will be pleasant. But I have to follow my feelings as well. I have to go to Kassel.” Meyer took her arms in his hands. “I’ll be safe. Adonai will look after me.”

“Everyone thinks that.” She turned away from him. “Go then, if you must. I will miss you.”

“And I, you.” He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, lightly kissed the back of her neck, imbibed his favorite scent.

“You’d better hurry.”