The Origin of Sorrow (14 page)

If Adam had named human families, she would not be a Schnapper. A wolf could have been a schnapper. As could a wild boar. Or a viper. But not her. She was in constant conflict with her name.

She tried to keep a smile from surfacing. She felt a stirring in her breast. Yahweh’s first man, she thought, would have given her a name with some red in it.

13

The Fahrgasse was the widest, busiest street in Frankfurt. Buildings with stone foundations and wooden upper stories rose on both sides. Late morning sun glared off the cobbles as Yussel and Meyer walked along, passing, beyond the slaughterhouse and Ziggy Zigmund’s Z-Z horse stable, a market for salted meats and fish —which the Jews loved but was not to Lutheran taste — more stables, blacksmith stalls, farmers from the countryside selling fruit and vegetables from the backs of wagons, vendors tending small fires despite the heat, on which they were cooking sausages and veal chops. Gentile men and a few women were lining up at these stalls; the noon dinner hour was approaching. Further along, cafés and beer halls were filling with hungry diners. Wide, heavy carts drawn by six or eight horses rumbled by carrying stacks of lumber toward the town market. No doubt the lumber would be used to build the three hundred and fifty stalls for the Fair.

“So, who will be your assistant?” Meyer asked his friend. They were headed toward the Town Hall to obtain their passes.

“Hannah Schlicter.”

“You mean Dvorah. Hannah is the mother.”

“I mean Hannah.”

Meyer looked at his friend as they walked, but said nothing.

“She’s a seamstress. I went to see her work. The dresses are beautiful, she might get lots of orders. So I’m letting her share my stall.”

“Good for you.”

Before Yussel could reply, two boys, perhaps sixteen years old, stepped into their path. “Jud mach mores!” the boys shouted. Jews, pay your dues.

Yussel and Meyer took off their three-cornered hats. They bowed. They stepped aside to let the boys pass. All these things they were required by law when any Gentile uttered those words.

The gloom of repressed anger settled upon them, as it always did when this happened. They were silent as they turned off the Fahrgasse toward the Town Hall. Without thinking, they climbed the few steps to the front entrance of the Gothic building. A guard stepped in front of them. “Jews use the rear door,” he reminded them.

They circled the building to the rear. “How do they always know?” Yussel asked.

“The badge of dishonor.” Meyer patted Yussel’s pallid cheek. “At home, we forget.”

Meyer was the more accustomed to such insults. His coin and antiques business took him out into the city most every day. The cabinet maker left the Judengasse only when he needed to obtain more wood, or glue.

Inside the rear entrance to the Town Hall, an office had been set up to handle the business of the Fair. The two friends waited on a long line and paid the fees for their stalls, and were given two passes each. On one they wrote their own names. On the second pass, Meyer added Guttle’s name, and Yussel added Hannah Schlicter’s. The clerk recorded the names in his book.

The air in the dark corridor was cooler than it was outside. They were perspiring heavily, from walking in the unaccustomed sunlight, and from the debasement by the Gentile boys. They stood for a moment, carefully folding the passes into their pouches. As they turned to leave, they were stopped by a slim young man from the Judengasse. “Herr Rothschild is it? Herr Kahn? Don’t go yet.” He nodded down the corridor. “They’re about to try a Jew. He’s accused of robbery.”

They recognized the man. It was the rag dealer with the new baby. Ephraim Hess.

“Why is that our business?”

“Ah, you’ve never been hauled into court, Herr Cabinet Maker. If you’re a Jew, it’s your business.”

Yussel and Meyer glanced at one another. He had succeeded in making them curious. They followed him to a nearby courtroom. The door had been left open because of the heat, and the three of them slipped into seats in the last row. The benches nearer the front were filled.

The portly judge, cloaked in black, entered. The accused thief was called to the witness box, which was enclosed on three sides by wooden rails. He was a hearty looking fellow, about thirty years old, tanned, beardless except for the stubble of a day or two. The judge looked down from his raised bench, took in the rugged coloring of the defendant, and seemed uncertain. “Your name is Rafe Isaacs. You are a Jew?”

The accused said that he was.

The judge turned to a bailiff. “Bring in the skin.”

Leaving through a rear door, the bailiff returned a moment later dragging the heavy, hairy skin of a large pig. The head and the tail were still attached. The men in the front seats murmured to one another and stretched their necks to see. The bailiff moved the suspect aside and placed the pig skin on the floor of the witness box. “Stand on that,” he ordered.

The accused hesitated for a moment, looked around the courtroom as if in protest. Then he did as he’d been told.

“You are accused of being a highwayman,” the judge intoned. “You are charged with robbing a Gentile merchant, who was driving alone in a carriage, of the sum of five gulden, by threatening to crack his head with an iron bar. How do you say, guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty.”

“Very well. Before you are questioned you must take the Jews’ oath. Place your right hand upon the Books of Moses in front of you, and repeat after me.”

The judge moved a piece of paper on his lectern. As the accused repeated the judge’s words, his tremulous voice seemed to clash with his powerful physique.

“Regarding such property of which the man accuses me, I know nothing of it, nor do I have it. I never had it in my possession, nor do I have it in any of my chests, I have not buried it in the earth, nor locked it with locks, so help me God who created heaven and earth, valley and hill, woods, trees, and grass. And so help me the Five Books of Moses, that if I dissemble I may nevermore enjoy a bite without soiling myself all over as did the King of Babylon.

“And may that sulphur and pitch flow down upon my neck that flowed over Sodom and Gomorra, and the same pitch that flowed over Babylon flow over me, but two hundred times more, and may the earth envelop and swallow me up.

“And may my dust never join other dust, and my earth never join other earth in the bosom of Master Abraham, if what I say is not true and right.

“If not, may a bleeding and a flowing come forth from me and never cease, as my people wished upon themselves when they condemned God, Jesus Christ, among themselves, and tortured Him and said, ‘His blood be upon us and our children.’

“It is true, so help me God who appeared to Moses in a burning bush which yet remained unconsumed. It is true by the soul which I bring on the Day of Judgment before the court of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is true, so help me God.”

All the time that the suspect was saying these words, he winced with pain, as the bailiff drew back and forth between his bare legs a rose branch covered with thorns.

“Very well, the accused Jew has sworn the oath,” the judge said. “The city attorney may call his first witness.”

In the back row, Meyer Rothschild leaned close to Yussel Kahn. “I’ve had enough of this,” he whispered. Quietly he slipped from his seat and out into the corridor. Yussel followed. The rag dealer Ephraim Hess remained in his seat.

On the Fahrgasse, the cries of vendors, the smells of the stables and the beer halls, the rumbling of huge wagons carrying barrels of goods from the docks, the loading of other wagons in front of warehouses, all went unnoticed by the two men. Neither spoke until they were back in the Judengasse. The deprivations with which they had grown up they could accept; the unexpected cut deep.

They stopped outside the Pfann, where the alley led back to Meyer’s apartment in the Hinterpfann. “I knew there was a special oath for Jews,” Yussel said. “I never imagined anything like that.”

They were ready to go their separate ways. But neither wanted to be alone. They perched on the warm cobbles, leaned their backs against the wall. They did not feel like working; Yussel did not trust the steadiness of his hands; Meyer, at the moment, had no interest in coins. The bustle of the lane swirled around them. Would things ever change? Thinking that way lay madness. Unless you had the power to make them change.

“The oath was bad enough,” Meyer said. “And the pig. What was the need for ripping him with thorns?”

“I imagine that’s their ironic joke. A crown of thorns upon his head. A branch of thorns between his legs.”

“Highly comical.”

Yussel wanted to alter the discussion, but hardly succeeded. “Are there many highwaymen on the roads?”

“So they say. I’ve never encountered one. I didn’t know any were Jews.”

Yussel closed his eyes, pressed his shoulder blades against the wall, recited a line of poetry — a line that resonated within his soul. “Desperation ignores no race, no faith, but gallops in on twin black steeds, swords flashing.”

“Your beloved Shakespeare?” Meyer asked.

“Our beloved Nahum Baum. 1614.”

“Before or after the Fettmilch attack?”

“During, if you believe the stories. Baum unable to go down and fight because of his withered leg. Watching from his window, writing poetry.”

“The yeshiva teaches only Torah and Talmud. Where do you find your Shakespeare? Your Baum, for that matter?”

“A bookbinder and bookseller near the university, where I buy special glue for my wood. Shakespeare he displays in the window. The Baum he hides under the floor.”

“And they sell?”

“I’m told ‘The Merchant of Venice’ does very well.”

“A play about a merchant? That one you’ll have to lend me, when I have the time. Maybe I’ll learn something.”

“That one you wouldn’t like. Of course, the scribblings of Luther outsell them all.”

“The devil in monk’s clothing.” Meyer spat on the cobbles.

Across the lane he saw Leo and Yetta Liebmann walking slowly toward their house near the gate. Leo was leaning on his wife’s arm, apparently recovered from fainting spells that had sent him to the hospital. Meyer waved to them. Neither waved back. He could not tell if they had not seen him, preoccupied as they were with each uneven step on the cobbles, or if they, too, were angry because he wasn’t taking their son Hersch to the Fair.

“That fellow in the court,” Yussel said. “Do you think he’s guilty?”

“His darkened, outdoor face could convict him.”

“He could live in Mainz. In Mannheim. Anywhere there’s sun in the Jewish quarter.”

They envisioned the accused again. A sturdy, rugged man. He’d looked as if he could wrestle down a bull.

“One thing about highwaymen,” Meyer said. “Whether they exist or not — I assume they do — I aim to make money off them.”

“How can you do that?”

A woman emerged from the house next door to empty a chamber pot into the ditch. Both men turned away to diminish the smell. Etiquette said you shouldn’t turn your nose, because everyone had chamber pots to empty. It was one rule of manners rarely obeyed.

“Merchants and Princes from all over will be coming to the Fair,” Meyer said. “They’ll want to buy jewelry, silks, antiques. But they don’t like to carry gold or silver with them. Or a great deal of money. The metals are heavy to haul around. And there’s a risk, because of these highwaymen. It could get stolen.”

“How does that help you?”

“I’ve written to many of the richest merchants and Princes, offering them letters of credit.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve told these wealthy men they can come here without any gold or silver, without much money. So they don’t risk being robbed. For anything they want to buy at the Fair, I‘ll give them a letter of credit. They can use it just like gold. I will pay for their purchases. When they return home, they can send the money to me, safely. With interest, of course. Which is where I make a profit.”

“Where will you get the money to lend them?”

“From the coins, the antiques. I’ve been saving cash exactly for this. There’s money to be made in buying and selling all kinds of goods. There’s more money to be made in banking. But there’s a fortune to be made in combining both. Commerce can give you a stream of gold. With banking, you can turn the stream into a river.“

Meyer loved to talk about business. Yussel was a willing listener.

“Look at the ships in the harbor,” Meyer said. “Importing is growing fast — and it can’t exist without loans, without credit. Importers have to pay for their goods first, and make their profits later. So they need to borrow money. Lending isn’t new, most of the rich men in the lane are bankers. That doesn’t make them brilliant . . .”

Yussel interrupted. “Don’t tell that to them.”

“I won’t, believe me. But they did make the most of a sort of mercantile Judengasse. Some Pope or other decided way back that charging interest is unclean. The church forbid Catholics from doing it. That left the field to the Jews.”

“Usury,” Yussel said.

“Which is a stupid notion, unless the charge is excessive. The interest is because your money is locked up in the loan. You can’t use it for anything else.”

“It’s hard to love the person you owe money to.”

“Exactly. That’s one reason the goyim hate us. But the idea of giving credit on a large scale isn’t appealing to most bankers. A pawnbroker will give you a small amount, against your pawned item. Lending a lot of money, with nothing to back it up, no collateral — that’s a gamble. Most Gentile bankers don’t want to take the risk. Especially with fancy-living Princes they don’t trust. Jews can’t afford to be so choosy.”

“Where’d those Gentile bankers come from?”

“Protestants don’t listen to the Pope.”

Yussel smiled, lifted his hat momentarily and ran his hand through his prematurely thinning ginger hair. “These letters of credit — when others see them, won’t they offer the same thing?”

“Some of the braver ones will. But I’ll charge lower interest.”

“Then you’ll make less money.”

“Not if I get most of the business. Also, the merchants and Princes I give credit to now, because I trust them, will come to me in the future, when they need bigger loans.”

“You were born to do business, Meyer Amschel. How do you think of such things?”