Cathedral

by Ben Hopkins

  Dear Heinrich,

  The matter of the Lenzenbach estates is now in process. I have established that Baron Lanzelin von Rappoltstein will be willing to sell his newly acquired parcels of land near the village of Lenzenbach for the reasonable price, given the revenues that pertain thereto, of a thousand marks. He wishes to sell quickly, as he has substantial gambling debts, as you know.

  As Mistress Gerber, as a woman, may not own landed property by purchase, but only through inheritance or gift of a male relative, the land deeds will be transferred, initially, on Baron Lanzelin’s receipt of the balance of one thousand marks, to my name.

  I remind you of our conversations on this matter, and the benefits that will redound to You for your assistance in this case. Please recommend the transaction to your client.

  Your Friend,

  Emmerich Schäffer

  † † †

  To His Honourable Highness, Count Wolfram von Lichtenberg.

  From Emmerich Schäffer, Secretary to the Bishop of Hagenburg.

  My Honoured Lord,

  It is with gratitude and joy that I write to you, and humbly accept your gracious gift of the revenue of the Rohrbach vineyards. Your House has ever been a great servant to the Diocese, and a courageous defender of its northern Marches, and should you profit from the allocation of the von Moder lands, it is only because of your virtue, and not mine.

  I will do, as I promised, all that I can to promulgate the candidacy of your son Konrad as the noble and worthy successor to our present, remarkable Bishop. When that Sad Day comes, as come it must, I will prove your most loyal servant.

  Yours in Gratitude and Obedience,

  Emmerich Schäffer

  † † †

  Judah Rosheimer,

  Borek Village, The Duchy of Kalisz

  Dearest Yudl,

  It is done. It took great effort, and perseverance, but it is done. I have now, in my sight and in my grasp, the necessary capital to restore our wonderful company, Schäffer and Associates, to its former glory. It will be exactly as you left it. Hagenburg is presently resurgent, trade is buoyant, and there is much that we can do together.

  Therefore I beg of you to return to Hagenburg and take the reins once more. I cannot tell you how much it would gladden my heart to see you once again.

  Please come, Yudl. Together we can repair the wrongs done to you, for which I am so truly sorry.

  Please write and tell me you will do this. I yearn for word from you.

  With affection and hope,

  The Strawhead Goy

  KALISZ

  (ANNO 5030. YUDL BEN YITZHAK ROSHEIMER IX)

  He remembers the Abomination, and in his memories, it is monstrous in size, reaching to the very heavens like Babel. Its walls, its stones and statues are hazy in his sight, aqueous, as if he is seeing them through a veil of drifting rain and river mists, as if the Rhine itself has burst its banks and flooded the great city, as if the Cathedral is a ship adrift on surging, vengeful waters.

  And he remembers the Strawhead Goy walking beside him through the Square, and putting his fatherly hand on his shoulder and bending down to him (for he was not yet fully grown) and saying, Look, Yudl, look there.

  And the statue he showed: a woman, blindfolded, her body slumping in melancholy and despair, the curves of her pleated gown sighing, pulled down by black Melancholy, her one hand weakly clutching a broken spear, the other a book that is slipping from her powerless fingers.

  That, Yudl, he said, is the statue of Synagogue. That is our representation of the Faith of the Jews. Blind, broken . . . and with the tablets of the Law falling from her hand.

  

  When he thinks back on Hagenburg he sees nebulous images sunken in gloom, feels a choking sensation, a rising panic, the echo of nightmare. Sometimes he dreams he is back in the city, lost in a labyrinth of narrow, empty streets. He is always small, frightened, a little Boy, and the Gentiles are giants towering above him, their buildings are monoliths, towers gashing wounds in the Heaven. And a mocking voice sings, from Numbers. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak: and we were as grasshoppers in their sight.

  But when he awakes, friendly, bright sunshine is pouring through the shutters. And when he opens them, the sky is vast and untrammelled, stretching out over the wide, flat Kaliszian plain. Here in the village of Borek in the Duchy of Kalisz, all is calm, all is in proportion. The sky and the plain seem to stretch out forever. The wind blows, fresh and clear, scented with grass.

  Yudl has been chosen as Rabbi for this small, frontier community. The Jews of three villages, strung out along the River Prosna, south of the town of Kalisz. A small congregation, but growing every spring and summer month as emigrants arrive from the distant German lands.

  That morning, a letter has come to him from Emmerich Schäffer, bearing with it the oppressive memories of his Rhineland home. It has lain, unopened, on Yudl’s desk whilst he has conducted his pastoral business, receiving villagers, answering their questions, calming their concerns.

  And now, finally, he is alone in his study. He takes his knife to break the letter’s seal.

  

  He finds his mother at home. The Rosheimers have built three logwood houses and a stable surrounding a courtyard where chickens peck amongst the cabbages and beans. One house is for Mother, her younger husband and their two children who have come to join Yudl from Prague.

  Mother has finished cooking the soup for the evening meal, and is gathering the embers, forming them into a glowing, amber cone, to smoulder until dusk when it will be time to set the night-time fire.

  “Mother, he writes and tells me he has the money.”—“Then tell him to send it.”—“No, he says he will set up the company again. As it was. Before it was stolen from me.”

  Zipporah turns from the embers, and sits on the bench by the hearth. Her sunken eyes are deep in shadow, her pale cheeks dull silver in the light that seeps through the half-closed shutters. “Then go. If that is what you want.”

  “No,” says Yudl, sitting on the stool facing her. “I have left that life behind. And yet it is a lot of money. If I were to return, disband the company, take the capital? Think of what it could do here. What a synagogue we could build, we could bring teachers and scholars, buy herds of cattle . . . ”

  Zipporah snorts, a gentle reproach. “And the Kalisz peasants? How long before they form a mob and come and hang us for all this newfound Gold? For now they leave us be, for we are as dirt poor as they.”

  Yudl nods mournfully, and rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands. It’s true, the beth midrash here is little more than a stable with roughly plastered and whitewashed walls. When the winter winds blow, the men pray wrapped in blankets, their breaths steaming in the frozen air.

  “Maybe you’re right, Mother.”—“Only you can decide, Yudl. But in our hearts, we gave up that money a long time ago.”

  Yudl looks up at his mother. Her face is still beautiful despite the lines of age and care that spread across her cheeks. He searches for her eyes, set deep in her face, two points of reflected light, crescent moons. “Mother, when I think of him, I think of a kind man. A man who loved me, taught me, who took pleasure in my happiness.”

  Zipporah shrugs. “I do not think of him very much at all.”—“And yet you loved him? Once?”

  His mother flinches, looks down in shame. Listens carefully, as if to make sure that they are alone. Her husband and sons are out at the beth midrash, or grazing the herd. They are alone.

  She whispers. “I loved him. But I was just a little girl.” Gently she rocks on the bench, her hands twist and turn. “He loved me . . . very much. He talked of taking me, and us running away to Italy. Where the sun shines, and you can pluck ripe figs from the trees. But then they . . . your uncle . . . made him go away. And when he came again, after some years . .
. It was as a stranger. He rarely spoke to me. Not until after you were working for him. And all that time I watched him. And I could see, where his heart used to be, there was a purse. A purse full of coin.”

  She stands, smoothes her dress, and takes the soup pot in both hands. “Do not go. His Gold will only bring us trouble.” She walks with the soup pot, and sets it on the table. “Let us never speak of this again.”

  

  His son Eli has made gloves, fashioned from supple kid leather, varnished over with a secret substance that helps keep the leather dry, and inside, stuffed with warm sheep’s wool. At the market in Kalisz, the first twenty pairs he had made were sold out in a single morning. And now he has an atelier here in Borek, where they are making hundreds more.

  Yudl watches Eli from a distance as the young man negotiates with two peasants from a nearby village. It seems they have brought a sack of apples to exchange for gloves, and Eli is explaining that it’s not enough. They stand outside the wooden shack that serves as the atelier, gesticulating and talking, until the peasant reaches reluctantly into his pocket and pulls out a silver coin.

  A cow lows in the nearby barn, the wind shudders the poplar trees, their leaves turning golden brown. The last days of summer have crept away towards the South, far, far over the Carpathian hills.

  Yudl walks on through the village, the logwood one-storey houses and barns, the mud and cow dung, the piles of winter fuel, the saplings and young trees, not yet bearing fruit. In the near distance, the Christian part of the village, with its lines of poplars, its few stone houses, the tiny Church surrounded by apple orchards and, rising above it all, the huge plane tree that shadows the tavern and the village square.

  Yudl smiles to himself, a wry, accepting smile. It seems his son Eli is destined for Trade. Eli’s bride Rahel, a garrulous girl from Prague, had learned Bohemian from the local children there, and although the language they speak in Kalisz is much different, the rudiments are the same. Eli and Rahel have therefore been the first truly to master the local tongue, and travel between the towns and villages far and wide to thresh up customers for Jewish goods. And for study and the Torah, Eli has little, if any, time.

  But so be it. Life here is a struggle, a challenge more to the body than the mind. Felling trees, cutting timbers, building houses, digging wells, planting crops and saplings. The scholars and their books will come when they are needed. All in the Lord’s good time.

  Yudl returns to his study built into the gable roof of his house. The ceiling is so low one has to stoop, but his chair is soft; the finest chair of his old Hagenburg home. And his Father’s library is there, carried with them all the way from the banks of the Rhine.

  Yudl writes:

  Dear Herr Schäffer,

  I thank you for your letter. I have been touched by your assiduous efforts in restoring my family’s fortunes. But at present I have no desire to return to Hagenburg and resume my previous occupation. I have renounced the merchant’s life, and my days are now dedicated to study and to God.

  Please return to Schäffer and Associates its lost reputation and restore its former glory. Give generously to the poor and the needy. Remain a steadfast friend to our people in Hagenburg. More I do not ask of you at present. After due reflection and further meditation, I will decide whether I will ever be able to return to the Rhine.

  Yours in gratitude,

  Judah

  He will give the letter to his son’s hands, and it will be taken to the next market fair in Kalisz, whence, by the routes of Fortune, it will wander westwards over the coming months, borne by Jews who travel from town to town in search of the rewards of Trade, that web of silver thread that spans the world.

  Yudl stands and puts his hand against the gable ceiling, stuffed with straw. Here in his study, he has allowed himself one Luxury, a single pane of glass the width of five hands, and the only glass window outside a church in all the surrounding land.

  Here, from this higher vantage point, he may look out across the endless Kalisz plain. He may watch the stormclouds forming and the sweeping veils of rain. On sunny days, he can see the clothes drying on the lines, twisting and leaping in the gusts of wind. He can watch the cows returning from the grazing, the scurrying flocks of geese, the children playing, the men returning from the beth midrash.

  He stands like this often, and thinks. For he, in his older age, has returned to the questions of his Youth. He has returned to the Slippery Things, the unanswerable questions. When did it all begin, and when will it all end? What is beyond the end of the Universe and what is beyond the end of Time? If there is Imperfection in this World, then how may it have emanated from the Perfect Source of all Perfect Things?

  And he thinks of the story. That the Soul knows everything, but before it is born, an Angel gives the babe a fillip on the nose, and then all is forgotten, lest the child be driven mad by infinite knowledge on this finite, imperfect earth.

  And all we Know, we Knew once before, and we think we Learn it, but it is not so: we merely Remember a part of that Perfect Knowledge that we carry in our soul.

  And we look to the heavens, and sometimes in perplexity, and sometimes in despair, we cry out questions to the Lord. But God maintains his silence and carries the Universe. And there is never an answer.

  He folds the letter, holds the sealing wax to the candle’s flame, and thinks of his Father’s words. Gold comes, and Gold goes, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord shall stand for ever.

  ANNO

  1271

  THE SILVERED SOW

  (ANNO 1271. GRETE GERBER VI)

  I remember, back in Lenzenbach, when I was a girl, there was a sow. And the sow had just farrowed. And then she keeled over and died.

  And she lay there in the corner of the yard, and all the village children came to see her lying there, with her farrow, all seven of them, whining and griping and suckling, pushing their tiny pink heads into her teats, squeezing her dry of every last drop of piggy milk.

  And when her teats were dry, the men came and dragged her up onto a trestle and slit her throat, and bled her into buckets. And then they rubbed hot ash and embers over her hide, to burn off the bristles. And then they shaved her with knives. And then they sawed her up and jointed her, and they hung her, in pieces, in the smokehouse, to cure and dry.

  And the farrow? They were too young to sup on grass and meal. They only wanted milk from their mother’s teats, but her udders were now boiling in the offal pot, to make a chewy treat.

  They whined and keened and squeaked as we chased them round the yard. And when we caught a little piggy, our fathers strangled them, one by one.

  A fire was dug and set, and spits were hung across the pit. The seven spitted little piglets crackled in the flames.

  The whole village gathered, drinking and dancing. For when God strikes down a sow and seven piglets, there is no weeping. There is black pudding, there is smoked bacon, there is boiled offal and liver sausage, there is succulent, sweet, suckling piglet meat, pulled steaming from the tiny bones.

  † † †

  Like that poor old sow I lie here on my side, unable to move, and the farrow nestle, sucking me dry.

  “It was all for the good,” says Vergersheim, that snake. “Of course, when Herr Schäffer reappeared in Hagenburg, alive as you or me, it was clear he had a case to reappropriate the assets of Schäffer and Associates, the so-called ‘Rosheimer Fortune’ . . . plus interest and damages. So we came to a quiet arrangement between us. Clerk to Clerk. We Men of the Pen have a good understanding.”

  A Quiet Arrangement.

  A Good Understanding.

  “We protected and preserved your estate, Madam. But considering that your present fortune is substantially founded on moneys expropriated from your brother Herr Schäffer, it does not seem unreasonable that he now should be, jointly with me, Executor of
your Estate.

  “Do not fret!” flutes Vergersheim, smiling like a Devil. “Your son and grandchildren will be amply provided for!”

  Amply provided for. No doubt they will not starve. But the fat and the bacon and the ham and the sausage will be carved up by Secretary Schäffer and Magistrate Vergersheim, and my own farrow will be weaned from my teats with chitterling and tripe.

  Emmerich comes to visit me when I am alone. I got you, little Gretele, he whispers in my ear. I got you.

  † † †

  Since I was struck down, since my heart seized up and clobbered me lame, since my tongue drooled speechless from my dropsied mouth, I have learned what it is to be a silvered sow. My ateliers, sold. My fabrics, my raw goods, auctioned. My river boats consigned to Schäffer and Associates, a name once again on the Hagenburg Register of Trade. My strongbox of coin, still marked with faded Jewish letters, passed back into my brother’s grasping hands.

  House Gerber on Cathedral Square . . . and my lands in Lenzenbach—conveyed in Emmerich Schäffer’s name.

  Manfredle screams, and Manfredle wails, Manfredle weeps and clutches my palsied hand. Mother, they are robbing me! They are fobbing me off with a house on Langer Weg and a pension of forty marks a year!

  But when it comes to feed me soup and mashed-up beet, when it comes to wash my soiled behind, he leaves the work to the serving girls. As if I never spooned mush into his grasping mouth. As if I never wiped up his shitty arse.

  As if I never suckled life into him from these dried-up dugs.

  † † †