The Origin of Sorrow (64 page)

48

On Sunday, the second day of classes at the Moses Mendelssohn Academy for Girls, Guttle’s antagonists sputtered remarks as she passed, but there were only half as many as on the first day; none of the leaders had returned. Guttle was pleased — but an ominous feeling settled in her gut. Why had they surrendered so easily? It was not like them.

Two new, younger girls in braids, about eight years old, had braved the controversy — or their parents had — and had shown up, appearing only mildly frightened, along with the previous eight. After giving her first German lesson, watching the pupils squirm, their faces distorted in pain and puzzlement as she explained the complications of
der, die
and
das,
Guttle let them stand and stretch. Rebecca would be teaching the science class next, but she was treating a critically ill patient and had warned Guttle that she might be late. Five minutes passed, then ten. Guttle decided she had better tell them something about science, from what little she knew, until Rebecca appeared.

“When we talk about learning science,” she began, as the girls settled into the chairs, “it is different than learning a language, such as German. With a language, we begin with correct answers. Der Dummkopf is correct. Die Dummkopf is not. No one argues about it. Except, perhaps, der Dummkopf.”

The girls laughed. School could be fun, if the grown-ups stopped fighting about it, stopped making everybody nervous.

“But in science, we begin with questions, and we look for the answers. We don’t know what they are ahead of time. Sometimes people disagree on the answer.”

She saw puzzlement in some faces. One girl raised her hand. “So how do we know who is right?

“A very good question, Katya. We don’t know who or what to believe, until there is proof. Science is about finding proof.”

They waited, attentive. Guttle could understand their confusion. In the lane everything they were taught was already known, it was either right or wrong and had been for thousands of years. Only at the highest levels of Talmudic argument was there room to disagree. That was why so many viewed her as a nuisance. For the second time — the first had been with Georgi — she had brought serious debate to the kitchen table, and out onto the cobbles.

“Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about,” she said. “For thousands of years, most people have believed that the sun up in the sky revolves around the earth. Correct? We can see it every day, rising over the eastern wall, passing straight overhead at noon, then, at evening, setting over the western wall.”

Ruthie Berkov raised her hand and spoke. “That’s not what Galileo said.”

“Very good, Ruthie. Who was Galileo?”

“An Italian philosopher.”

“Yes. Philosopher, or scientist, as they are starting to be called now. How do you know about him?”

“I heard my Papa and Yussel Kahn discussing him once.”

“Does anyone else know about Galileo?”

“He lived a long time ago,” Schönche said. “But I don’t know what he did.”

“Ruthie, do you?”

“Not exactly.”

“I’ll tell you what he did. It was only a hundred and fifty years ago — well, I guess that is a long time. Galileo proved that the sun does not move around the earth. He proved that, instead, it is the sun that stands still, and the earth that moves around it.”

Several of the girls giggled. Others murmured in disagreement.

“I know,” Guttle said, “you think that if that were true, we would all be falling down. Doctor Simcha will tell you more about that during the week. For today, can you accept my word that it is true? Can you do that? Just for a few minutes?”

The pupils hesitated, then agreed, reluctantly.

They all turned towards the door as it began to open. For an instant Guttle was frightened; she had neglected to lock it. Then Rebecca entered the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She apologized to the girls for being so busy, and stood off to the side, asking Guttle to continue. In the Doctor’s constricted face Guttle read that she had just lost a patient.

She turned back to the class. “As scientists — we are all scientists now, right? — we know, because Galileo proved it scientifically, that it is the earth that moves around the sun, and not vice versa. But a problem quickly arose. ‘Wait a minute,’ the Pope said — he’s the head of the Catholic church — ‘that can’t be true.’”

“‘Why can’t it be true?’ we ask.

“Because we’re not falling down?” Katya said.

“That was not the Pope’s concern. The Pope said. ‘This cannot be true, because the Bible says otherwise. King Solomon wrote, “The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down.” Clearly, the sun is moving. Are you saying that King Solomon, in the Bible, lied?’”

The pupils sat silent, transfixed. Hiding a smile, Guttle looked away from them, toward the window, through which about ten metres away she could see the ghetto wall. She noticed that Rebecca had her eyes closed, as if in pain.

“So,” Guttle said. “Which should we believe? As scientists, do we concede that Galileo made a mistake, and agree with the Pope that the Bible is always right? Or do we stick to our scientific beliefs, and decide that the great Solomon was wrong?”

No one responded. Their faces looked even more puzzled than during der die das.

“I’ll tell you what the Catholic church did when it was faced with this problem,” Guttle said. “It banned Galileo’s writings on the subject. It made him renounce his discovery that the earth moves. Because the Pope found it in conflict with the teachings of the church. If Galileo hadn’t done what they wanted, they would have put him to death.” She paused for a moment, to let the girls ponder the import of that. “But years later, when Galileo was an old man, dying a natural death, do you know what his last words were? At least, what legend has it? I was not there, of course.”

Too rapt even to acknowledge her little joke, the students waited.

“According to legend, Galileo’s dying words were: ‘And yet, it moves.’”

Silence. She looked from one face to another. Several girls who had been holding their breaths now breathed audibly. She saw Ruthie and Schönche, the two eldest, exchanging glances.

From outside, the sound of a horse neighing, an unusual voice in the lane, shattered the quiet. Guttle went to a window and looked out, giving the girls time to think, to absorb the story. A carriage driver who had brought an elderly banker to his home was having trouble getting his gray roan to maneuver out the south gate alongside the ditch; the horse seemed to fear losing his footing near the trench, and wouldn’t move. Horses, like Christians, rarely were at ease in the Judengasse. Finally the driver got down from the carriage and led the roan out by walking in front of him with the reins.

Her mind distracted, Guttle was taken back to the time she had been kicked by the stallion as it careened into the ditch. Rushing down the alley, the children playing — had she really noticed the children there, so long ago, those blurred colored shapes in the corner of her eye? She still could not be sure.

Uncertain if minutes had passed or only a few seconds, she turned to the class. Her daughter was raising her hand.

“Yes, Schönche?”

“I think I would believe Galileo rather than the Catholic church. But what if the Chief Rabbi said King Solomon was right? Who should we believe then?”

“That’s right,” Ruthie Berkov added. “The chief Rabbi wouldn’t lie. That would be a sin.”

Guttle bit her lip. What had she done? How could she not have seen this coming? She looked to Rebecca for help. The Doctor merely shook her head. The older girls smiled; they knew the Chief Rabbi was Rebecca’s husband.

Guttle felt trapped — even a bit afraid, though she could not put a name to the fear. “I’m going to stop for today,” she said. “You have a lot to think about. The truth is, I, too, have a lot to think about. That’s what science does. It makes you think.” She felt cold sweat break out on her brow. “Tomorrow, perhaps Doctor Simcha will tell you how Galileo proved what he did. About what is called the scientific method. We’ll also learn some more German words.”

She moved to the door and pulled it open. The girls donned their coats and filed out into the lane, inured, like everyone, to the stench. Rebecca approached Guttle with a shake of her head. “You had to start with that? By contradicting Solomon? By dark it will be everywhere.”

“I was only marking time for you. The lesson didn’t go as I’d planned.”

“With smart students it never will.”

“My own daughter! I wanted to slap her face. I also wanted to kiss her.” Guttle slipped into her coat. “Still, we might as well get all the fighting behind us now. Establish our freedom to teach the truth, right at the beginning.”

“You’re more of a troublemaker than I thought.”

“Is that bad?”

Rebecca kissed Guttle’s cheek. “I didn’t say it was bad.”

Guttle put her arms around the Doctor; in Meyer’s absence she longed for human touch. “Did you see their faces?” she asked. “The glow in their eyes? They just got their first little glimpse over the walls.”

Walking home, putting Schönche’s question from her mind, Guttle felt exhilarated. A confusion that had undermined her understanding of herself for as far back as she could remember seemed to have been resolved through her defiance in starting the school. She had often wondered which was the essence of her, the true Guttle: her fantasies and dreams, her conversations with Melka and Jennie Aron and Madame Antoine, her whimsical inner opera — or the things she did each day in the lane: making a home for Meyer, raising the children, cooking, cleaning. But the school itself had begun as one of her fantasies — which after ten years she and Rebecca had made real. She saw now that the opposing parts of her were of equal significance — were not even opposing. She would not be Guttle Schnapper Rothschild without escaping into her fantasies when desired — and emptying life’s chamber pots when necessary. She would not be whole without the interplay of the physical universe and her imagined one — just as the world would not be the world without the earth, but it also would not be the world without the heavens. Perhaps this is the burden and the challenge of human life: the task of choosing, every instant, between infinite dualities. Perhaps she would not end up insane after all

That evening, with the children in bed, she sat again in Meyer’s chair, wearing a white sleeping gown and her pale blue robe, and turned to a passage in Numbers that she had been trying to read the night before. Something in it was calling to her, something related to the sadness she had seen in so many of the faces of the girls at the school. They were eager and excited, but when their faces were at rest they acquired a faraway burden beyond reckoning. She saw in them the same sadness that had lived within her when she was their age, a sadness beyond words or understanding, a perpetual sorrow that dwelled even now in a pocket of her heart.

She read again where Moses and Aaron sought water for their people in the desert:

And Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying:

Take the staff

and assemble the community, you and Aaron your brother;

you are to speak to the boulder before their eyes

so that it gives forth water,

thus you are to bring out for them water from the boulder,

that you may give drink to the assembly and their cattle.

So Moses took the staff from before the presence of Yahweh,

as he had commanded him.

And Moses and Aaron assembled the assembly facing the boulder.

He said to them:

Now hear, you rebels,

from this boulder must we bring out water?

And Moses raised his hand

and struck the boulder with his staff, twice,

so that abundant water came out;

and the community and their cattle drank.

Now Yahweh said to Moses and to Aaron:

Because you did not have trust in me

To treat me as holy before the eyes of the children of Israel,

therefore:

You shall not bring this assembly into the land that I am giving them.

Guttle paused. She read the passage again. She pondered Yahveh’s stern words, wondered at them, and grew disturbed. She knew that Moses had not been allowed to enter the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, with his followers; he had died in sight of it. She had always heard he was being punished for some terrible sin. But no, this was the place in the Torah where Yahweh had decided to keep him out! Exactly here!

She read the passage yet another time, with mounting trepidation. God had told Moses to speak to the boulder so that it would give water; instead, Moses had hit it with his staff. In this small manner he had disobeyed God. But was that so terrible an offense, in the context of his life? Moses, who upon Yahweh’s instruction had led the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt? Who had stopped them from worshipping idols? Who had been entrusted with the Ten Commandments by Yahweh Himself? Moses, who would guide his people across the desert for forty years? The supreme leader of the Jews! Yet in the eyes of God — in one angry instant — Moses was found not worthy of the Promised Land, the land that flowed with milk and honey. Because just this once — in this one small action — he had disobeyed.

Guttle found her lower lip trembling, pressed her fingers to it, felt an avalanche of insight about to crash down upon her. If Moses was not good enough in the eyes of Yahweh, how could any of us hope to be? What are we, compared to the great Prophet? To surpass Moses we would have to be perfect. But God Himself had made us flawed! We can never hope to please Him entirely.