Cathedral
Page 27
Explodes.
The woman laughs, a cascade of cracked bells. “Oh Jesus, he’s gone off already!”
Yudl, pale, ambushed, sinks against the lintel, breathing hoarse and fast. “I . . . I . . . I . . . Sorry! Sorry sorry sorry . . . ”
And he runs.
The woman’s voice calls out after him. “Don’t worry, Liebling. No charge!”
The Magical World of the Goyyim. Sodom without cataclysm, without the rain of brimstone of a Vengeful God. In this Wonderful World there are women who show their ankles and whose love can be bought for sixpence. In this Wonderful World one may drink wine until one can drink no more, without even pausing once to bless the cup, to praise the Almighty. In this Wonderful World, the Gentile awakes and opens his eyes without obligation to thank God, he burps and farts his way to the commode without ritual ablution. He goes to his abominable Church when he wills, he offers idolatrous prayers when he wishes, he goes hither and thither as he pleases, eats as he wishes, devouring every kind of filth and uncleanliness, and yet He is the Lord of this World, and we Jews are his shadows.
We, even before opening our eyes in the morning, must offer the correct Benediction. And then get up, wash, urinate and defecate according to the Law. Determine when it is dawn according to the Law. And then scuttle through the half-light to the beth midrash to join our fellow Jews for the recitation of the Amidah, Israel raising its voices to the Lord. And only when we have finished may we the Elect of God begin our day, a day spent as far away as can be from the wide, busy avenues of the Gentiles. For we prefer to cleave to our own, private Mourning. For we have no Homeland. Our Temple is but rubble, and the woes of our thousand year Exile have no end in sight.
Mannekint the Tailor, who had a shop in the Schneidergass and sold silks and made robes and tunics for the Hagenburg Lords, who sewed beautiful gilt patterns on kerchiefs and wimples for the finer city ladies, has lost his shop, lost his livelihood. And alongside Mannekint, many other Jews have been banned from their trades.
It is a new ruse, such as the Gentiles often invent to humiliate and break the Jews. And the new ruse is called “the Guilds.” The Guilds are societies to which, of course, only Gentiles may belong. And laws have been passed saying that the only tailors allowed to work in Hagenburg are those who are members of the Drapers’ Guild of Hagenburg, the only goldsmiths who can trade in Hagenburg must be members of the Guild of Goldsmiths, the only cobblers members of the Hagenburg Guild of Cordwainers, and so on, and so forth, and the end result of this Christian scam is to remove all Jewish craftsmen and artisans from the marketplaces of the city.
But Trade is still allowed the Jews, at least for now. Moneylending, peddling, buying, selling.
Trade.
Emmerich Schäffer enters the office, frowning. Yudl, a refugee from Torah study at the beth midrash, looks up from his corner, where he is reading the account ledgers, the mysterious records of every purchase, every sale, every loan. “What’s wrong, Master Schäffer?” he asks.
Emmerich sits down in his silk-cushioned chair by the shutters, closes them against the breeze. The room darkens. He now also has Uncle Meir’s attention.
“Gerber is talking about a River Trade Union.”
An Angel of Silence passes through the room. The unruly breeze nudges the shutters open again, ruffling the pages of Emmerich’s ledgers. He bangs the books shut.
Uncle Meir chuckles sarcastically. “Right, I see. A Union that, of course, we won’t be allowed to join.”
“Gerber wouldn’t dare. We’re his biggest customer.”—“And his biggest competitor.”—“We’ve made him rich.”—“He’s a merchant, Emmerich, he’d sell his own mother.”—“All right then, then let’s do what we’ve talked about doing.”—“We’ve talked about doing a lot of things.”
Emmerich stands, fastens the shutter wide open. White midday light, the hawkers’ cries. Sharpen any kniiiiiiives?
“Make this company Christian. Call it Schäffer and Associates. Move our office out of the bloody Judengasse and into the Merchant Quarter. Hire fat, blond, sausage-eating apprentices. I marry some merchant’s daughter with big jugs. Make it all in my name on paper. And then let them try and call it a Jewish company. Let them try.”
Yudl senses something. A tension. But Uncle Meir’s voice is calm, even warm. “And I come in by the back door?”
“YUDL!” An angry voice from the street. Uncle Meir’s eyes flinch, reflex of guilt, and then flash in Yudl’s direction. “You told me your lessons had finished!” he hisses, going to the window. “Yes, he’s in here, Yitzhak.”—“Send him down now!”
Uncle Meir turns, shaking his head. His finger rises in the air, points harshly at his nephew, a lightning bolt. “Don’t do this again, Yudl,” he hisses, emphatic. “Decide. Trade or Torah. You can’t do both. Get out.”
Outside in the milling street, his Father grabs his arm. His black eyes are serrated, sharp. “The Rabbi is expounding on the Book of Job, and you’re not there? YOU’RE NOT THERE?”
Yudl looks down. “I know the Book of Job, Father.”
His Father’s hands grab his lapels, nearly knocking him from his feet. “You KNOW the Book of Job? It contains multitudes, layers and layers and layers. Even if you studied it seven years you would not KNOW it.”
“But Father . . . The River Trade Union . . . I just wanted to . . . ”
Yitzhak looks at his son, incomprehending. Anger and disappointment struggle in his eyes. “Yudl, don’t be foolish. Gold comes and goes. But there is Nothing. Nothing. Greater than the Word of the Lord. Come.”
Fifty paces and they are there, back in the world of the beth midrash. The lecterns, sides worn from the grip of a thousand hands. Parchment, vellum, curled and yellowed, blotched and filigreed with black, traces of a thousand scribes, men and boys like Yudl, bent over books with quill and ink. The smell of male sweat, dried on linen shirts in the summer heat. The buzz and hum of prayer, the sway and dance of recitation. The gaze of Gabbai and Rabbi, the unpeeling onion layers of text, commentary, interpretation, all circling the eternal mystery: the Lord Adonai.
Yudl bends to the book before him. Job’s words buzz in his head like wasps.
And the words fade away into silence. And he thinks. He thinks of Uncle Meir’s business ledgers. Written there, like some strange, mysterious Alphabet, rows upon rows of numbers, sums and reckonings, subtractions and additions, a complex and ever-spreading network of figures, every bit as absorbing and mysterious as the Words of the Lord.
I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my bread with weeping. For Thou has taken me up and cast me away.
Three weeks! My turn to read the Torah portion delayed! Three weeks. They are running out of excuses. A bridegroom, an honoured visitor from Mayenz, Michen whose wife gave birth to a son. What new excuse will they find next week? Let us see.
They are conspiring against me, the Whisperers, the Impious. Rabbi Menahem cannot look me in the eye. He now prefers the company of that fool Aberle and his absurd pilpul, his pedantic glosses on the Torah. I am losing everything, my wife, my standing, my son.
My son?
In the village of Rosheim, there are just enough Jews to form a minyan, hold prayers in their tiny schul, maintain a teacher and a mikve, pay the ritual butcher. Yudl’s father’s family came from here. They’re leather traders, tanners, cattle sellers, but as soon as a boy is born here who has a gift for the Torah, he gets carted away to Hagenburg to study under a proper Rabbi. And that happened to his side of the family three generations ago, and so all that’s left in Rosheim are cousins and cousins of cousins.
Yudl has no wish to be here, but it is the month of Tammuz and the time has come to harvest oak apples from the forests that grow around Rosheim, the little gourds that swell from the old oaks in high sum
mer, ripe and bitter with black gall. Oak apple gall, copperas and gum; the ingredients for the perfect ink, the only Ink used for the Holy Script, for the Word of God.
They are sitting on stools in the courtyard between the leather workshop, the tanning shed and the shokhet’s slaughtering house. A smell of cowdung, fatliquor and blood. Father’s critical eyes fix on the mezuzah on the door post. “The mezuzah looks rotten.”—“It’s the winter rain, it comes straight in from the hills, blows right in under the roof.”—“Do you want me to check it?”—“If you like, Yitzhak.”—“If the writing is damaged, it’s a sin.”—“God forbid.”
Father stands to open the little mezuzah box on the doorpost, pulls out the tiny scroll from inside. Goes into the sunlight to examine the writing. “Some of it’s faded. I’ll touch it up for you.”—“God bless you, Yitzhak.”
Later, at dinner, he takes over all the blessings, studies the kitchen knives for nicks in the blade, checks the division of the bowls for milk and meat. He looks like has hasn’t slept for days. His eyes shine with edgy fervour as he fingers cousin Aaron’s tabard. “Where did you get this?”—“This? From a peddler.”—“From a peddler?”—“It was good and cheap. Why?”—“It’s shatnez.”—“What?”—“It’s a mix of linen and wool . . . Take it off.”—“What?”—“You can’t wear it, Aaron, it’s forbidden. You should buy nothing from the Gentile.”—“That’s easy for you to say.”—“Come to Hagenburg for your cloth and buy from Mannekint; it will be a mitzvah, he has lost all his Gentile clients. Take the Law seriously, Aaron. Don’t wear shatnez.”
Aaron takes off his shirt, stands stupid and bare-chested in the courtyard, ashamed.
They walk through the Forest, carrying the ladder, his Father in front. The sun is high and bright, filtering through the trees, a shifting tapestry of gold and green. Despite the lustre and brightness, his Father is nervous, always looking about him as if expecting the trees to bend down and strike him.
His wild eyes narrow, focus. “Here are some,” he says, pointing to the high branch of an oak. “Up you go.”
They lean the ladder against the twisted trunk, and Yudl climbs up into the canopy, slides along the branch. “Don’t worry, it will hold your weight.”—“That’s easy for you to say.”—“If you fall, I’ll catch you.”
Yudl looks down at his Father, standing small and anxious below him, holding out his hands, absurdly ready to try and catch his fall. Yudl takes his little knife and cuts the gourds from the tree. Swellings from the oak twigs and branches, the size of acorns, rough and gnarled to the touch. He tosses them down to his Father, who puts them in the basket. “Good. Now come down.”
Yudl swings onto the branch, clutches on for a moment and then lets go, plummeting heavily to the forest floor. The jolt takes the wind out of him.
His Father shakes his head. “I said ‘come down,’ not ‘jump down.’”—“Jumping down is easier than climbing down.”—“All right, but be careful. I nearly died of shock.”—“How many more do we have to collect?”—“A lot more.”
Yudl walks on in glum silence. Today they are opening the new office of “Schäffer and Associates” in the Ehlestrasse, and he wants to be there, to see the new sausage-eating apprentices, the crucifix hanging over the lintel, the idol of Saint Christopher above the desk, the new, Christian face of Uncle Meir’s Money. The biggest business in Christian Hagenburg.
Instead he’s here in a forest, carrying a ladder, looking for stupid gourds and swellings.
“Yudl!”—“What?”—“You just walked straight past an oak full of them.”—“I didn’t see anything.”—“Look up there!”—“All right, Father . . . ”—“Keep your eyes open, boy!”—“But it’s boring!”—“Boring?” Yudl throws the ladder down on the ground. “You’re just teaching me this so you don’t have to do it yourself!”—“And so? Why do you think my father taught me how to do this? And his father before him? It’s the way of the world, Yudl, from father to son. And you’ll teach your own son the same.”—“No I won’t. I’ll teach him to make money and send a servant to buy ink from a shop. Why make our own ink when you can buy it?”—“Because this is the Way, Yudl. The Way We Do Things.”—“For what? For what? So we can sit in the beth midrash our whole lives, sit in the Judengasse and read and read and read and do nothing until the words come out of our bloody ears?”
Silence between Father and Son. Five heartbeats, seven, nine.
Suddenly his Father’s hands are grabbing at Yudl, beating at him, slapping his face, pushing him to the ground. Yudl curls into a ball in the mulch of leaves. His Father’s eyes are bulging with blood, veined with rage. “GET UP THAT TREE! DO AS I SAY!”
“NO.”
His Father’s hand curls, writhes. Then it rises in the air and comes down hard.
Sundown in Rosheim, the Cousins have been tenderising hides, the courtyard is awash with stinking, yellowish fluid. “What happened to the Boy?”—“Oh, what a bruise!”—“What happened, Yudl?”—“I fell off the tree and hit my head.”—“You should be more careful.”—“I know, my Father says the same thing, don’t you, Father?”
Yudl and his Father have to share a narrow bed in the reeking house, pushed up against each other. Neither of them can sleep. Yudl thinks the eye that mocks a father will be plucked out by ravens, but what if your Father is not your Father? What if your Father is an impersonator, a monster?
What if your real Father cannot claim you as his own?
Yudl closes his eyes, feeling his soul swell with hatred. Gall and bitterness swill in his guts, and he sees the Temple of Jerusalem, and King Solomon before it, calling for a sword. And tugging at Yudl’s hands, pulling him apart, his so-called father Yitzhak and the man his Mother truly loves, the Strawhead Goy.
Yudl turns in the bed for the thirteenth time. He cannot hold it back. “Where does my fair hair come from, Father?”
A bitter silence fills the darkness. The smell of tanning fluid, horsehair and polish seems to rot, ripen, grow. Yudl opens his eyes, but the air is like pitch. His Father has frozen. He doesn’t move.
“From your Mother, Yudl.” His voice seems to come from the distance. It trembles. “But her hair is dark.”—“She has fair cousins.”—“Where?”—“They live far away. In Prague.”—“Have you seen them?”
“No.”
Father and Son’s breaths shudder in the perfect blackness. It is so dark that all things are as one, confused and fumbled together, indistinct. Truth, Lies, Half-Truths, Fears, Speculations, Desires . . . all lie together in the same stinking, narrow darkness, crowding the invisible spaces between Father and Son.
THE NEW REGIME
(RETTICH SCHÄFFER VIII. ANNO 1245)
The New Regime spreads out its cold hands, reaches into every cubbyhole and cranny, every hidden corner of Hagenburg life. It crawls along the rillets of sewerage that seep through the stinking alleys, spreads like a shadow from the Rheintorgässel shacks to the whitewashed walls of the central streets.
After a dull day’s work carving the cornices of the Rood Screen, Rettich wanders, dawdles, drinks. He dreads the idea of going home to Ällin’s cold, turned shoulder, his children’s questioning stares. On Holidays he makes melancholy pilgrimage to Avenheim Monastery in the Vogesen foothills, to Achim’s lonely grave beyond the convent walls.
Hagenburg is fat, overstuffed, bursting. Every Spring brings new hopeful faces, stumbling through the City Gates from the rain-flayed hills, feet wrapped in muddy rags, asking directions from the first citizen they meet, “Sir, can you tell me the way to Metzger Street?” There they will sleep in the corner of their cousin’s tiny rented shack, rise at dawn to wait with the restless crowds on Brandplatz and Barfüsserallee, beg for work at tuppence a day.
A slow, muddy flood of humanity swills around Rettich, searching for coin. And from Bishop von Stahlem’s butcher’s fingers, a bright rill
of papal silver flows.
Pope Innocent has fled from the chaos of Rome to Lyon. From Lyon he has declared Emperor Friedrich’s son Konrad dethroned, and Heinrich Raspe of Thuringia the new King of the Germans. Holy Gold flows to German Lands from the Florentine banks, buying support for this newly declared monarch, the Pfaffenkönig, the Pope’s choice of King. And Bishop von Stahlem holds out his cassock’s apron and gathers the Pope’s golden augustales like a Rhineland milkmaid gathers plums.
Von Stahlem gilds his liegemen’s nests, ensilvers his coterie of Lords, Canons and Clerics. His enfeoffed nobles ride proud through the city gates from their country estates, their stallions’ hooves shed purple Vogesen mud on the Hagenburg cobbles. They canter to the Cathedral to hang their standards from the Triforium arches that Rettich once carved.
The von Zaberns, von Kronthals, von Rappoltsteins, old Alsatian Gentry, watch on darkly. Supporters of Friedrich and the Staufen dynasty since the times of Barbarossa, they cleave to Konrad, son of the Emperor. And so there are now two Kings of Germany, King and Anti-King, Staufen and Raspe, Konrad and Heinrich. There are two Overlords; Pope and Emperor. There are two masters in Hagenburg, two hearts in the breast of the Rhineland, beating in fractured, bellicose time.
But Rettich wants no argument with anyone. When the talk turns to politics, to Pope and Emperor, he withdraws to the corner, whittles with his knife as if he were back in the fields of Lenzenbach, watching his Lambs.
Rettich’s closest friend and companion is Wine, golden Rhenish Wine. And his Friend and Companion has painted Rettich’s nose and cheeks a broken crimson, age has scratched lines around his eyes. His hands are calloused, rasp to the touch like pumice stone. His gait is stooped from a thousand shouldered loads. But his hair is still yellow and unruly as harvest straw, and in evening sunlight, it shines.