The Origin of Sorrow (25 page)

“Bitte, do as I say.”

She wriggled her legs, raised her knees under the sheet.

“Danks Gott!”

“Meyer, what is it?”

“The Doctor thought you might be paralyzed.”

They embraced fiercely. “That would have been terrible for you,” Guttle said.

They remained that way, holding each other like lovers long parted, until Meyer said, “I ought to tell the Doctor.” He kissed her nose. “I’ll send Rebecca up. Then I should run home, straighten up a mess I left in the office. Maybe eat something. I’ll be back in awhile.”

“Don’t run too fast,” Guttle said. “Like some people.”

As he left the hospital, his eyes watery with relief, he almost bumped into Sophie Marcus, who was standing idly outside, as she seemed to do much of the time of late, in one awkward place or another. “Yahweh took revenge for the Cantor,” Frau Marcus said. “Is she dead?”

The horse was still in the ditch. Boys were throwing pebbles at it, or small clumps of mud, to watch the covering of flies rise into the air like devil’s lace before descending again onto the horse. The Constable was growing impatient, help had not arrived. He walked outside the gate, so as not to frighten anyone. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining here. He discharged his musket into the air again. A flare of noise seeking aid.

As the shot was fired, a black carriage with a gold coat of arms on the doors was rounding into the square outside the gate, pulled by a prancing bay mare. Spooked by the musket shot, the mare reared; the driver had to struggle to steady her. When no shots followed, he tapped lightly with the reins and walked the bay across the square and through the gate, into the narrow lane, where the carriage just barely fit between the tenements and the trench. He pulled the mare to a stop outside the third house on the left; she reared again, whinnying. The driver leaped from his seat to the cobbles, patted her neck and fed her a carrot from his pocket to settle her. Four elegantly dressed people lowered themselves carefully from the coach on the tenement side — two women of middle age, two young men of about twenty years.

“Josef, what’s upsetting Brunhilde?” Countess Freya von Brunwald asked. She had a long face with a sharp nose and a sharp chin, and was dressed in dark blue. The driver pointed ten metres ahead, to the stallion in the ditch. “Over there, missus.”

“Oh, my, what is that?” the countess asked.

“Looks like a dead horse, half covered with turds,” her son, Paul, replied.

The other woman, who had a round, fleshy face beneath a large straw hat, frowned. “It must be one of those Jewish rituals,” she said. She pulled a beige handkerchief from the sleeve of her beige dress and held it to her nose.

The door to the tenement opened. Hannah Schlicter, the dressmaker, having heard the carriage pull up, anxiously stepped out to welcome them .

“This is my friend, Catharina Goethe,” the countess told her. “This is her son, Wolf. And my son, Paul. The boys will explore the Judengasse while Frau Goethe and I examine your fabrics.”

As Hannah led the women up the stairs to her shop, the young men looked about. Paul was dressed in brown, Wolf in a blue jacket over yellow breeches, and a yellow vest.

“Josef, my good fellow, you’ve got yourself into a fix,” Paul said to the driver. “You’ll never turn the carriage around in this space. Not with that ditch in the middle.”

“Happily, lad, I inquired first. There’s an exit gate at the other end.”

The young men, both wearing the powdered wigs forbidden to Jews, mused about the dead stallion, wondered how it had gotten there. They became aware of the foul stench, the impossibly narrow houses, the incessant movement in the lane as men and women fingered used clothing at a rag dealer’s table or bargained with pawn brokers or carried warm-smelling bread to their homes. The clean-shaven faces of the visitors, their fine city clothing, the powder on their wigs, their superior yet uneasy manner, identified them clearly as strangers — perhaps customers — and each shopkeeper nodded to his goods as the visitors passed.

Outside the stone synagogue, the young men stopped and admired its architecture, its soaring lines. “This place is awful, with the stench and the crowding,” the fellow called Wolf said. “But I suppose it’s admirable that they endure all this for the sake of their beliefs. And they do look human.”

Paul said, “And this temple of theirs — it’s not as tall, but it rises in an arc as fine as St. Bartholomew’s.”

A man dressed in black, wearing a black hat, emerged from the synagogue. He would have been good looking except for small pock marks that marred his face and a pink scar crossing his temple. The man nodded pleasantly to them, said “Shalom,” and continued on his way.

“Prick them and they do bleed,” Goethe murmured.

Gazing about, taking in every detail with his poet’s eye, he saw a small hospital across the street, a bath house, a shoemaker’s shop, several pawn brokers. Their carriage had rolled across the city in brilliant sunlight but here all was cloaked in a suffocating gray, as if a huge shroud had been strung from roof to roof.

“This,” Goethe said, “is the physical embodiment of the Twenty-third Psalm.”

“The valley of the shadow of death?”

“You can feel the rot in your bones.”

“And yet, they live,” Paul said. “But you’re right. Look at their beards, their hats, their shining eyes. They seem to dwell mostly in the house of their Lord.”

Reaching the south end, they looked down at the busy docks, at the boats in the river, sails flashing in the sun of a different world. A young Constable did not challenge them as they stepped beyond the gate. “Tell me, my good man,” Paul said to the guard, “do you know why the Jews are kept under lock and key?”

“It’s not my doing, sir.”

“I understand that. But why, do you suppose?”

“I’m told they don’t think like the rest of us.”

“Who is it that tells you to guard this gate?”

“My Kapitän, sir.”

“And who tells him?”

“The Polizei Kommandant.”

“And he is told by?”

“I believe that would be the Frankfurt Council, sir.”

“And the council listens to … ?”

“The Empress Maria Teresa. The city belongs, of course, to the Holy Roman Empire.”

“Can anyone tell the Empress what to do?”

“There’s only the Pope can do that.”

“So. Do you think the same the way the Pope does?”

“Jesus, no! I’m a churchgoing Lutheran, myself.”

“Yet here you are, outside the gate.”

“Yet here I am.”

“And doing a fine job of it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“We can’t allow those wrongful Jewish thoughts to get out and pollute the river, can we?”

“Actually, sir, if you follow your nose, the river already is … Oh, I see, you’re having a bit of sport with me.”

“Just a bit.”

The visitors withdrew inside the gate, crossed the cobbles to the cemetery, and began to walk back. “You sounded sympathetic to the Jews,” Goethe said.

Paul replied, “Just a bit.”

As they passed the communal bath, and neared the hospital, they saw three young women walking a few paces up and a few paces back. They were struck by the image — one had red hair, one brown, one black. “I’ll give them this,” Wolf said. “Their girls are very pretty.”

“Shall we speak with them?” Paul asked.

“Why not? You’re in fine form today.”

Coming closer, they saw that the girls — or women — on either side were partially supporting the one in the middle, who was wearing a robe over a hospital gown. The women moved aside as the men approached.

“Good afternoon,” Paul said, pleasantly. “Shalom.”

“I can’t help noticing your plaster,” Wolf said to the one in the middle. “I hope you weren’t riding that poor horse back there.”

She smiled wanly, but did not reply.

“She wasn’t riding it, she stopped it with her head,” the red-haired girl said.

The men raised their eyebrows. “I’d like to have seen that,” Paul offered. “Is that a special talent of Jewish girls?”

“Guttle will be teaching the rest of us.”

Guttle smiled weakly again.

“Excuse me, we did not introduce ourselves. I am Paul von Brunwald. This is my friend, Wolf Goethe. Our dear mothers have business with a dressmaker here, so we rode along.”

“Your mother is the Countess?”

“That is she.”

“My mother, that is she. The dressmaker, I mean. I am Dvorah Schlicter. This is Guttle Schnapper, and this is Doctor Kirsch.”

”I hope you’re not badly hurt,” Wolf said.

“She just needs rest, and some fresh air.”

The men inhaled the stench. Paul thought: perhaps we could take them out walking in a park . . .

“A female Doctor,” Wolf said. “And Jewish. You cannot attend to Christians, I assume.”

“That is the law.”

“Yet one Jewish Doctor at all times is permitted to live outside the Judengasse. Do you know why? It’s because the nobles and the Princes prefer a Jewish Doctor.”

“Your words, not mine,” Rebecca said.

Guttle raised her hand to her head.

“It still hurts?”

Guttle nodded, closing her eyes with weariness. She wondered how these Christian dandies with their powdered wigs had gotten into her white horse dream.

“We’d better get you back to bed. You still need rest.”

“It was good to meet you gentlemen,” Dvorah said. “I hope your mothers are pleased with their new dresses.”

Paul reached into the pocket of his vest. “My card,” he said, handing it to Dvorah. “If I can ever be of service.”

The women displayed small smiles and turned to go. When they were inside, the young men walked on. “Who would have thought it?” Paul said. “The Three Graces live in the Judengasse.”

For a moment Wolf felt dizzy, as if the tenements that seemed to lean together at their height were about to fall in on him. How could people exist like this? He found the half-light at mid-afternoon maddening. “Angels dwelling in hell,” he murmured.

“You have to admit,” Paul said, “that this place is filled with your kind of girl.”

“What kind of girl is that?”

“Unavailable.”

“You know how it is with me, my friend. I laugh at my own heart — and do what it wishes. But it wasn’t me who just left a calling card.”

They reached the fly-ridden horse. A Polizei Kapitäin was beside the Constable; he appeared to be giving instructions to another officer. The men paused to watch, to see if the officers would try to pull it out.

“Have you noticed something?” Goethe asked. “There is not one bit of nature in this place. Nothing natural at all. Not a tree. Not a flower. Not a blade of grass. You can barely see the sky. Look at that horse. A handsome stallion, the apex of nature. He should be galloping across green meadows in the dewy dawn, as he was born to do, and mounting lusty mares. Instead they rode him in here, and he’s dead in a ditch of shit. A symbol, perhaps, of the absence of nature in the Jews.”

Paul knew enough to keep his mouth shut when his friend took off on a flight of philosophy.

“Imagine, a state of total divorce from the natural world,” Wolf went on. “How does one survive that? Unless … ”

Paul waited. “Unless what?”

“Unless faith in the Creator is the internal equivalent of nature. Belief as a fertile field.”

“Meaning this is a Garden of Eden?” Paul looked about him, sniffing at the air.

“Hardly. But what if the mind is a garden? What if the brain is not a machine in the service of reason, as the French philosophers would have it. Perhaps, in the believing mind, the Garden of Eden still resides. And blossoms with art, with literature.”

“Why just in the believing mind?”

Goethe nodded appreciatively. “Good question. One I will have to think about.”

“To my mind, that redhead Dvorah is built for more than inner faith. I could show her some lovely country gardens.”

“There you go, bringing the discourse down to earthy essentials.”

“I don’t have poetry to warm my bed.”

The dead horse apparently was going nowhere. The officers remained idle, waiting.

“I’ve heard of a race of horses,” Wolf said, “who, when they’re injured, bite into a vein, so they can breathe more freely — and thus gain eternal freedom. Much more noble than a musket ball between the eyes.”

“Not every horse can be noble,” Paul replied. “It’s a lot to expect.”

Wolf saw his mother waiting near the carriage up ahead, and hurried to her. Her handkerchief once more covered her nose. “Are we late? Where’s the countess, Mother?”

“Up the stairs, paying a deposit.”

“And you? Didn’t you order a dress?”

“The seamstress is good,” Frau Goethe said. “Her clothes are quite beautiful. But put a dress on my body that a Jewess has touched so intimately?” She closed her eyes, and shuddered. “I couldn’t do that.”

“Then why did you come?”

“To keep the Countess company, of course. In case of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

His mother roamed her eyes over the entire Judengasse, and said, “You know.”

The Chief Rabbi came to see Guttle after obtaining permission from Doctor Kirsch. When he stepped through the curtain she was startled at first by a bulky shape in black coming at her out of the white. Standing beside her bed, he expressed his concern. He inquired how the collision with the horse had occurred.

“Yahweh was punishing me. I was having bad thoughts.”

“That’s not correct Talmud, Guttle. Yahweh may punish us for our deeds, but not for our thoughts. He knows we cannot control our thoughts. He made us that way. In fact, what happened to you could be looked at very differently. It could be that He was protecting you, not punishing you.”