Burning Twilight (7 page)

Rabbi Loew was given to such pessimistic comments, so I just said, “It’s time to go, Rabbi. Let’s get out of this town.”

“Not before we say the
mayrev
prayer.”

Kassy the Bohemian stood by in silence as we chanted the verses, from
Blessed art thou, Lord our God, Who causes day to pass and brings night
to the counting of the Omer.

When we were done, we invited her to come to Poznan with us.

“There’s plenty of work for a wise woman there,” I promised. And she agreed to leave her native land behind and wander the world with us. So we set out on the dark road toward the distant dawn.

The mystics say that the Messiah will not arrive until the Age of the Four Kingdoms comes to an end, and that the first three kingdoms of Babylonia, Greece, and Rome have already been buried by the sands of time. No one knows the true identity of the Fourth Kingdom, but Rabbi Loew believes that we are currently living under the Fourth Kingdom, meaning the whole era of Christian rule over the lands of the West. And if that’s the case, we may have a heck of a long wait.

Fortunately, there is a Midrash which says, “One empire comes and another passes away, but Israel abides forever.”

Lord Strekov offered to pay us for our troubles and grant us safe harbor for the night under his roof, but we asked him to pay us nothing and grant us safe passage out of town. His Lordship agreed, with somewhat mixed feelings.

I thought of his role in creating the monster that had terrorized this remote village, and I prayed that we would not see his kind again any time soon.

W
hen the Angel of Death darkens your doorway with his icy shadow, you must take great care to cover all the mirrors with heavy cloth or turn them to the wall, or else the dead man’s spirit might mistake one of the mirrors for a window and end up lost in an endless hall of mirrors and wander it forever, trapped in a left-handed world of everlasting confusion where it will be easy prey for the spiteful demons of Gehenem. Or so I am told.

And because the
malekhamoves
marks off a man’s last moments on earth by letting a drop of bitter gall fall from the point of his sword into the dying man’s mouth, you must also make sure to empty out all the pitchers and basins with any water left in them, because a wayward drop of the deadly gall might have fallen into the water.

And that’s the origin of the expression, “To kick the bucket.”

So it was a very serious matter indeed when a careless housemaid tossed a washbasin full of dirty water out a second-floor window and nearly soaked us with God knows what foul and offensive liquid.

Kassy jumped back, raising the hem of her cloak just in time to keep it from being ruined. My boots weren’t as lucky.

I was accompanying my partner-in-exile down the
ulica Zydowska
, the Jewish Street—or in common speech, Jew Street—to her rooms near the tannery on Kleine Gerberstrasse, a fetid alley nearby that was all she could afford at the moment. We had just come from the services for Shvues, and she was bombarding me with her usual array of questions about our beliefs and customs, especially the untranslated portions of the mystical Zohar, and why it compares the seven weeks from Pesach to Shvues to the seven days that a menstruating woman must wait before she can purify herself in a ritual bath. Not an easy subject to talk about with a foreign woman in the divided Polish-German city of Poznan. So I told her that the Shvues services she had just witnessed form the annual celebration of the Giving of the Torah, when the
shul
is filled with early spring flowers and, like a young wife preparing herself for her husband’s embrace, we celebrate our immersion in the cleansing “waters of Torah.”

“So why do you read from the Book of Ruth on this day?”

“For the same reason.”

My master and teacher, Rabbi Judah Loew, would probably say that the seven-week period marked the beginning of our exodus from slavery just as Ruth made a spiritual exodus from idolatry to monotheism as she crossed the wilderness from her native land of Moab to her future home—and her future husband—in Judea.

But before I could answer more fully, my boots got soaked with what I sincerely hoped was merely the refuse from someone’s piss pot.

The maid disappeared from the window. But we could hear a company of servants running from room to room, slamming doors, gathering crockery, and clomping up and down the stairs. This time I stepped back as the front door flew open and the housemaid flung a bucket of filthy water into the gutter running down the middle of the street.

I stopped the door with my arm before she could slam it in my face.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. A life of hard labor had carved deep lines in her face, which was flushed red with exertion.

“Inquiring into a possible death, I expect.”

Some of the color drained from her face, as if I had accused her of violating a sacred law of some kind.

“Who are you?” she asked, squinting up at me.

Kassy answered for me: “You may not know his face but you certainly know his name, for this man is none other than Rabbi Benyamin Ben-Akiva, special assistant to the new head Rabbi of Poznan, the great Rabbi Loew himself, who saved the Jews of Prague from an army of enraged Christians intent on burning down the ghetto.”

“Ah! Then it is surely a blessing on this holy day that you happened to be passing by at just this moment,” she said, waving us inside. “Come in, Rabbi Benyamin, come in, Miss Whoever-you-are.”

“My name is Castava in my native Czech, but the Germans call me Kassandra.”

“Ach! Who gives a damn what the Germans think?” said the maid with a toughness that’s typical of these big city women.

“I was all alone when I found him—may God protect you from such things!” said the maid, appraising me from head to toe as if I were a sprightly young stallion at the horse market. “A fine, eligible bachelor like yourself, Rabbi Benyamin.”

I caught a twinkle in Kassy’s eyes as she stepped in ahead of me, her skirts twirling around her ankles as her curiosity propelled her forward. I planted my boot on the threshold, kissed the tips of my fingers and raised them to touch the
mezuzah
on the doorpost.

Then my fingers froze. The
mezuzah
was out of kilter, pointing toward the street. Thinking it might have slipped out of place, I tried to pivot it back toward the house, but it didn’t budge. I looked closer. It was nailed into place facing the wrong direction.

“What kind of fool nailed this up?” I said, louder than I should have.

“Oh, the master had the houseboy do it,” said the maid, her face cracking. “Oh, my poor master!”

Kassy drew the woman close, stroking her coarse gray hair and offering words of comfort as the maid clung to her, shaking and dampening Kassy’s long cloak with tears.

I was still stuck on the
mezuzah
. I guess there were plenty of ignorant Jews in the world. Though to be fair, the ignorant goyim outnumbered us and did a lot more damage.

When my thoughts returned to the world around me, Kassy was giving me a black look for upsetting this helpless old woman. I stood accused, once again, a coarse blunderer unfit for the world of women. But then she raised an eyebrow and her bright green eyes flitted toward the room above, and I understood her unspoken message.

As I climbed the creaky stairs, knowing I was approaching a solemn place of death, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that Kassy wasn’t really angry with me.

The master’s bedroom was dark, with heavy curtains shutting out all but a sliver of daylight. A cluster of gold and silver semicircles hung low to the ground in the center of the room, catching a bit of the light, and as my eyes got used to the darkness, the remains of a bedside supper for two took shape and form. The luminous rings and curves resolved into silver plates and spoons, a polished wine jug, and what appeared to be solid gold wine cups. But the fire in the hearth had long since died and the room was ice cold.

So the old man’s spirit had been given plenty of time to flee the scene. I threw open the curtains, letting the cool gray light of the early Polish springtime flood the room.

I approached the master’s bed, mindful not to touch anything, since a familiar fluttering in my gut was telling me that something deadly, whether of this world or the World-to-Come, was present in this room.

The dead man’s half-opened eyes were milky and opaque, fixed on the red velvet canopy above the bed, and his fist clutched a handful of velvet curtain in a death grip. Bits of silvery residue clung to his lips, and a trickle of silver-flecked wine, dried to a glittering red stain, had dripped from the corner of his mouth into his graying beard stubble and onto the silk pillowcase.

“Looks like Reb Schildsberg knew what he was drinking,” said Kassy.

I turned. Kassy was bent over the table, examining the remains of the unfortunate soul’s last meal, her brownish blond hair hanging loose around her face, just a few inches above the leftover peas on the tainted dinnerware.

“Take a look at this.” She beckoned to me with a crooked index finger.

As I drew nearer, I could just make out traces of a powdery silver residue clinging to the rim of one of the gold wine cups.

The master’s cup.

The other cup contained a few drops of red wine, but otherwise appeared to be free of metallic adulterants.

“How could someone slip that much poison into a man’s drinking cup without him noticing it?” I wondered aloud.

“It probably wasn’t meant to poison him.”

“Then what . . . ?”

Kassy folded her arms across her chest and looked right at me.

I took in the scene—an intimate dinner for two, with candles and wine and closed curtains, and the victim still dressed in his nightshirt.

“A love potion?”

“Either that or something to increase the heat of passion,” Kassy said, “or else to help a hoary old man achieve—well you know.” She picked up a polished spoon and scraped some of the silvery residue from the golden cup.

“Using powdered silver? Are you sure . . . ?”

“I’m afraid that a good number of incompetent or simply fraudulent alchemists have poisoned their customers with elixirs containing quicksilver, antimony, and other heavy metals.”

She held the spoon up to the light and examined the crumbly wine-and-metallic-powder compound.

“If only I had some of my tools with me,” she said with a sudden onrush of bitterness.

Kassy had been forced to abandon her experiments with magnetism and flee her homeland after her apothecary shop was set upon by enraged zealots who were convinced that she was guilty of the most hateful and egregious crime of witchcraft.

So she knew what it was like to be the target of mass hysteria. It was one of the things we had in common.

“What is it?” she said, looking up at me, the light catching the green speckles in her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“Something you feel about this situation,” she said. “Something instinctive. Tell me what it is,” she prompted me.

I don’t know how she picked up on it, but something
had
been bothering me from the moment we set foot in the house.

“You said his name was Schildsberg?”

“That’s what the maid told me. Why?”

“It’s just—that’s not a typical Jewish name,” I said.

“You’re telling me you think he’s not a Jew? Just from his name?”

“There are other signs as well, but there’s only one way to find out,” I said, crossing over to the bed. I hesitated out of respect for the dead, and a primordial fear of the particularly harsh consequences of violating a prohibition dating back to the days of Noah.

So I asked the dead man’s spirit to forgive me, then pulled back the sheets and confirmed my suspicions.

“He’s not Jewish.”

“Are you serious?”

“This man is not Jewish.”

“And here I was thinking all men were the same down there.”

“He does not bear the mark of the covenant,” I said, covering up the body as best I could. “And even if he did, as Rabbi Yohanan said to Resh Lakish, ‘not all fingers are alike.’ ”

“And where is
that
written?”

“Babylonian Talmud, tractate Niddah, folio 66a.” She always wanted to know the exact sources of my Jewish wisdom.

“You’re telling me I don’t know about the male member, Rabbi Benyamin?”

“You don’t have to call me that when we’re—”

“I know, I know. When we’re not in public.”

Our eyes fell upon the dead man, and I tried to imagine the scene that had unfolded here during the nighttime hours—the clandestine visitor, the candlelight dinner, the anticipation of carnal pleasures enhanced by herbal concoctions, followed by a dreadful moment of realization that something was very wrong.

Wasn’t ordinary coupling stimulating enough?