The Origin of Sorrow (65 page)

This unexpected understanding watered her eyes, as if they were a garden in need. The walls enclosing the lane, the locked gates, were unjust, obscene, hateful, the cause of infinite sadness stoically borne. Some day they must be torn down; she and Meyer must pledge themselves anew to that goal, must work to lead their people, one bright day, out of the Judengasse. But the walls, she now understood, were not the true cause of unutterable regret. In this one unfair passage in the Torah lay the reason for Melka and Jennie Aron and her other fantasies. This one passage was why Pincus Cohen played his mournful fiddle tunes, why Hiram Liebmann drew his dark pictures, why Viktor Marcus sang sad arias alone in the cemetery, perhaps even why the Gentile Goethe wrote his unforgiving books. Because, like herself, deep in their souls they knew they were not good enough. They knew that no Promised Land awaited them.

In this one dire passage in Numbers, it appeared, lay the origin of sorrow.

Only her husband, she thought, seemed to be an exception. Of all the people she knew, only Meyer Amschel had never evinced a reason to doubt himself.

“Mama!”

It was Nathan again, frightening himself with a dream. She set down the book and hurried, barefoot, up the stairs to him, her toughest child by day, the most in need at night. She kissed his forehead and sat beside him while he drifted off again into his nocturnal caves. She wished she knew how to light a lamp in them.

Returning to the chair, exhausted from the emotions and confrontations of the past few days, Guttle herself fell asleep, the sacred book open in her lap.

She was awakened by the most dread word in the Judengasse. At first she thought it was part of a nightmare, the kind that made her clutch Meyer’s arm for comfort, in the hope that he would turn to her in his sleep and embrace and distract and protect her. But Meyer was not there, and when she heard the terrible word a second time she knew she was awake.

“Fire!” someone was shouting down below. “There’s a fire in the lane!”

Could this be true? A whimper of panic sliced through her grogginess like a sharp knife through brisket. She rose from her chair too quickly, grabbed her belly as she felt the baby move. A moment later she was climbing the stairs, looking in on the children. Both of the bedrooms were dark, no sign of flames. “Baruch atau Adonai,” she murmured. Blessed art Thou, O Lord. In the kitchen she made sure the woodstove was properly damped, then hurried down to the bedroom where she put on her slippers with growing apprehension; fire had destroyed large sections of the Judengasse three times in the century. Pulling her robe tighter around her, she stepped out into the lane. At first all looked normal. Then she saw the glow of lamps starting to illuminate many apartment windows, realized that people were scurrying over the cobbles. They were running from the north, as if fleeing a fire’s heat, but in that direction she saw no flames. Following the crowd as it flowed with unspoken fear around the scimitar curve of the lane, she saw the illusion of flames shadow-dancing on the last house before the cemetery — but not the terrible brightness of unconfined fire. She began to walk quickly; were it not for the baby in her she would have run.

A hand gripped her shoulder. It was Rebecca. “Do you think?” the Doctor shouted over the noise in the lane. Guttle didn’t answer. When they curled around the bend they could see it for themselves, and smell its appetite. The last house on the east side — the River View — the two-day-old Moses Mendelssohn Academy for Girls — was clothed in orange and yellow flames. A breeze off the river was carrying to them the smell of smoke, and something more sinister.

“This can’t be!” Guttle cried out, weakly, wanting to vomit, and she began to run in spite of her swollen belly, the Doctor running behind her, passing silhouettes of men, women and some children hurrying along the cobbles. As they got closer they saw the flames reflected like an undulating line in the sewage ditch, heard the voice of Joshua Lamb, the fire captain, shouting, “More water! Every man get a pail and carry water!” Men already were scurrying behind the last house near the cemetery, where there was a pump and buckets, and hauling filled buckets across the lane. When Guttle and Rebecca were within ten metres of the school they saw that the filled buckets were not being emptied onto the flames, but were were being splashed on the wood facade of the adjoining house. It was clear that the River View, with flames already licking at the third floor, could not be saved; the men were trying to prevent the fire from grabbing hold of the adjoining house, and moving up the lane like a ravenous beast.

“Someone really hates us,” Rebecca muttered, shaking her head from side to side.

“No one would do that!” Guttle stared into the blinding white centers of the flames as she pressed behind a crowd of onlookers. She looked toward the heavens for an answer, her eyes beginning to tear from smoke and grief. She recalled something Meyer had told her the Talmud claimed — that the Torah had been written with black fire on white fire.

“Do you smell it?” Rebecca said into her ear. “Burning oil.”

The two women pushed through the crowd to the front. They could hear the fire devouring the inside now, had to shield their eyes against the ash-blown heat.

“The fire wall is holding,” a familiar man, his face dark with soot, shouted to the fire

captain, clanking down an empty pail. They realized it was Yussel.

“So far,” Lamb replied.

Yelling above the crackling roar, which could devour words as well as wood and paint, Guttle, her eyes shut by thick smoke, asked the captain, “Was it purposely lit?”

“It appears that way.” He had to shout back, though he stood not a metre away.

“How could anyone do such a thing?”

“A splash of oil. A match.”

“Did anyone see who?”

“I doubt it, in the dark. With only the cemetery across the way.”

“You’ll try to find out?”

“Of course.”

Turning to to Rebecca, she said, “A short-lived school,” and wiped streams of tears from her cheeks. The two women embraced, held each other, their faces flickering yellow and orange, heat pouring over them, bits of floating ash settling on their shoulders. The throng behind them stood mute as it watched with respect the flames devour the house like a great orange rat devouring cheese; they were tense, waiting to see if the metal fire wall would hold until the end. If it melted, or collapsed, and the next building caught, they would rush back to their homes, awaken all the children, begin hauling their dearest possessions into the lane while praying the flames didn’t leap across the ditch to the other side; if it did, the entire Judengasse could burn to the ground; they would have no place to live.

Guttle felt that somehow the scene was Biblical. Was this a punishment, a plague? “Was Yahweh opposed to the school?” she wondered aloud. Her tears had stopped. There was no point.

“It wasn’t Yahweh who splashed the oil,” Rebecca said.

From within the burning house they heard a heavy beam crashing down. With sudden remembrance, Guttle screamed. “Georgi! Where’s Georgi?”

Trembling, she scanned the crowd. The fire had turned their faces into pumpkins. She pushed among them, calling “Georgi! Georgi Kremm! Are you out here?”

A murmur swirled like an eddy of smoke through those who remembered that the Christian boy lived on the third floor. Guttle rushed to the front, grabbed the arm of Joshua Lamb. “Georgi Kremm lives up there! Have you seen him come out?”

“Not since I arrived,” the captain shouted over the fire’s roar.

“Mein Gott!, he might still be in there! Can someone go in?” But her soot-filled eyes told her the answer before the captain spoke, and as if in response another large beam exploded onto the floor inside the house, a fireworks of sparks visible through the gaps in the flames.

“No one can go in,” the captain yelled. “The upper floors will soon collapse, and the roof.”

“He might be trapped up there!”

“Then he’d best be praying,” the captain said.

Sweating men in nightshirts or dark robes still were hauling water across the lane, splashing the adjoining house; its facade glinted wet in the firelight. Some of the men, suddenly too weary to hurl their buckets, set them down and stood to rest their arms. Others were scurrying into the second adjoining house, climbing to its roof, emptying buckets onto the roof of the first. Occasionally a lone woman or child shrieked in fear.

“We should get things out of the house!” one wife could be heard urging during a momentary lull in the roar.

“And put them where?” Her husband tried to calm her. “Everyone will lose everything — or no one will. It’s up to Yahweh now.”

People were coughing, moving further up the smoke-filled lane, away from the fire. Frantic, having trouble breathing, Guttle searched for Rebecca with her arms outstretched, like a blind person, found her, grabbed the sleeve of her blouse. She realized that Rebecca was dressed, must have been at the hospital. “Georgi may be up there,” she said, trying not to clench her teeth around the words, not to clench her mind around the prospect of Georgi’s fate. The Doctor, her face a grim and forlorn mask, said nothing.

The boy, no longer a boy, would in three days no longer be a Christian. Georgi Kremm was twenty-six years old; in three days he would complete his year of Jewish studies with Rabbi Simcha and would be circumcised; his name would become Georgi ben Avram. As he lay in bed that night on the third floor of the River View, he was deeply content. In the lane he had become far more comfortable with life than he ever had been on the farm with his mother and the “uncles” who came and went like flies in August and were just as welcome. He was glad that now when he was troubled he could talk directly to God, instead of seeking out a priest, which he had never done. He was not eager to be circumcised, the thought of it made him wince, he did not understand why the God of the Jews demanded this, but if Abraham had withstood the pain at the age of ninety-nine and become father to a nation, then he, Georgi, would drink a lot of schnapps, put a piece of spruce molding between his teeth, and survive. When his skin had healed he would be able to ask for the hand of Misha Marcus. To endure both the pain of study and the pain of the knife to become a Jew — surely her father would accept him then.

He had drifted off to sleep on a vision of Misha’s lovely hands. Now, hours later, waking, he felt too warm — from his lustful dream, he thought — and threw off his blanket. But he grew even warmer, and then he heard crackling sounds and getting out of bed saw the image of flames on the ghetto wall across from his third-floor window, and knew that something was burning. From the window he could not see what it was — he could see nothing but the wall flickering orange in the night. He turned toward the closed door; smoke had begun to seep under it; he began to cough, at the same time realizing that the school itself was on fire.

He threw open the window to see if he should jump. The drop was high, he might break his legs. He leaned out to breathe fresh air, and looking down saw a mass of flames rising toward him, as if the ground below were a pool of burning oil. He dared not jump into that.

The smoke from under the door was thickening, clouding the room. Grabbing the blanket from his bed he wrapped it over his nightshirt and pulled open the door. A beaded curtain of flame hung in his path. Through it he glimpsed the staircase smoldering but not yet gone. Holding the blanket around him with one hand he threw his other arm across his eyes and hurled himself into the fire. He smelled a foul smell that was his own hair being singed. The floor boards of the landing were beginning to burn, flames licking at his feet through the gaps. He reached the top of the stairs and started down. The heat was intense. The banister was crumbling charcoal, he could not hold on. At the first landing he batted at flames as if they were swarms of hornets and continued down, and stepped into vacant air where the steps were gone and fell to the smoldering floor among burning chairs. The fire danced all around him; three of the four walls were blazing. He lay still for a moment, rubbed a throbbing ankle, twisted his torso in each direction, seeking a way out. A roar like crackling thunder rumbled above and a huge object crashed to the ground, seemed to break apart as it landed, one side falling off, a white form spilling onto the floor as the fallen object settled on its side, reflecting flames. Struggling to his feet, bending low, Georgi edged closer and saw what looked like a metal coffin among the smoking boards, and beside it a Torah scroll, its crown of gold flashing white in the flames like a cry for help. He tried to grasp this miracle, a Torah falling from Heaven — I need to rescue it, he thought, it is the sacred word of Yahweh, it saved me from … so much. But his body was jolted with pain as his blanket caught fire. Throwing it off, he rushed headlong through the flames, head tucked into his chest, neck seared now by a falling ember, and saw a gap where the front door had been. He rushed through it and burst out into the lane, where he stumbled, fell to the cobbles, gasping, realizing he had been holding his breath inside against the thickening smoke till his chest felt ready to explode out through his nose, his mouth, his throat, even his eyes. On his hands and knees, he inhaled the air like a dog lapping water.

“Mein Gott! It’s him!” Seeing this apparition expel itself from the burning school like a cannon ball Guttle ran to him, too close to the fire, wanted to hug him, was afraid she’d touch a place where he was burned and cause him agony. He smelled only of smoke, not of man. Seeing a bucket of water left by one of the men she dipped her hands in it, scooped up what her palms would hold, offered him drink. He shook his head, pushed himself up, gulping smokier air. She saw that his hair had been singed, that part of his nightshirt had burned away. He bent and gripped his right ankle, pressed it tenderly. Guttle felt faint when she saw a piece of bone sticking through the blistered skin.

“You’re hurt, but thank God you’re alive,” she said. “We thought you were … I should have run in but. . .”

Georgi leaned on her, wincing when weight came down on his right foot. “Water,” he rasped, pointing to the bucket.

Guttle knelt and cupped her hands in it again and let him lap it from between her palms.

“Your robe,” he said. The hoarse sound of his voice was painful. “Take off your robe.”

“Why? I have only a nightshirt on.”

What was she thinking? He must be cold! She opened her robe and slipped out of it, handed it to him, crossed her arms over her breasts. Georgi rolled the robe into a ball and pushed it deep into the bucket of water, and held it there, then pulled it out, dripping, and stretched it over his shoulders. Of course, she thought, he was burning, not cold.