by Miklós Vámos
“What are you thinking of?”
“A hundred.”
“Monseigneur, they would not work for you anyway.”
“A hundred and fifty.”
“I tell you, no…”
“Two hundred.”
“Please!”
He paid three hundred for the much-worn pack. He had already learned how to put out a Celtic cross, but in the dark tents he had few opportunities to study properly the cards of the various colors. In the first alehouse on the way he ordered himself a jug of Champagne wine and studied the colored pictures of the tarot pack. It consisted of twenty-two cards, of which one was unnumbered: LE MAT-the Fool. Number XIII, on the other hand, bore no name; it showed a skeleton reaping heads, hands, feet in a field of blue flowers.
He studied the cards again and again. He paused at VII: LE CHARIOT. A crowned man with golden hair stands on a cart resembling a pulpit, drawn by two horses, one blue, the other red. On the chariot a coat-of-arms, bearing two letters: M.S. Mendel Stern? The Berda is missing.
Leopold Pohl enlightened him later that the M stood for Mercurius or Mercury, the S for Sulfur. These two elements are of utmost importance in alchemy. “If we ever try to make gold, we shall have need of them.”
Mendel Berda-Stern gave a little “Hmm.” He already had a way of making gold. Though he did not actually say so, in the features of the charioteering king of card VII he detected himself, especially because of the wide, almond-shaped eyes and small but uneven lips. Not surprising if I win on number 7, then. The tarot and the computations of astrology confirm each other. He was troubled only a little: that the fortune-tellers generally regarded number 7 as the picture of the Reaper. (Of course, not in tarot and not Roman seven: VII.)
Eleonora did in fact fall pregnant and her belly began to swell nicely; her husband considered the increase between his two trips to be spectacular. Above them hung the unspoken question: how do they get to Nagyvárad? Apart from his wife, Mendel Berda-Stern discussed the matter with two others. Leopold Pohl was of the opinion that the solution to this problem had to be left to fate; if it had been decided that the child would come into the world in Nagyvárad, then fate would see to it that his parents got there in time. His sister Hami persuaded him of the opposite: “What is the problem in traveling to Nagyvárad? Surely it cannot do any harm. While if you stayed at home and there was some complication… you would never forgive yourselves.”
They had a letter from the Sterns. Mendel Berda-Stern was nowadays even more reluctant to accept money and presents from them since they no longer actually needed it. But he knew if he refused, they would be mortally offended, and that was not a good thing either. He hardly knew the members of the large Stern clan; apart from a few courtesy visits he had almost no contact with them. The last time he visited them it was to introduce them to Eleonora.
They had moved from Hegyhát to Tokay. The Stern & Stern Wine Emporium, as well as the locally resident members of the family, had moved into Tokay after the serious conflagration of this year, 1866, as they had suffered severe damage to their houses and property. Hearing of this, Mendel Berda-Stern wrote them a concerned letter.
A sealed canvas satchel accompanied the reply, brought by a young farm laborer. The lengthy letter was written by Móricz Stern. From his adventures into the past Mendel Berda-Stern knew that Móricz was Rebecca’s eldest. Rebecca’s father, Benjamin, had died early from tuberculosis. His mother, Eszter, was the sister of Éva, the wife of István Stern. Mendel Berda-Stern had seen the Lemberg tragedy any number of times: death by the sword of five-year-old Robert and three-year-old Rudolf. He would gladly have been spared further viewings. But he to whom is given the gift of seeing into the past does not choose what he sees.
Our dear Mendel,
You would not believe how often you are in our thoughts, especially since we moved to Tokay. Many of our beloved things fell victim to the fire, above all in this list stand the copper mortar that melted into an unrecognizable ball, found by Bálint Sternovszky in the clearing where he built his turret-as you will know, since you are of our clan, the first-born son of your honorable father. Those whom He gave the gift of seeing into the past can feel if disaster threatens. It is certain that grave events are about to befall us. For this reason I am sending you, and ask you to look after and protect, a few family relics, above all and especially the first Book of Fathers. Its continuation you already have in your possession. It is possible that I shall be obliged to come forward with further requests in the near future, in the hope that your feelings towards us owe more to the strength of blood ties than to the debilitating power of distance.
The mere sight of the soiled cover of The Book of Fathers so upset Mendel Berda-Stern that he put off opening it until the next day, though he would gladly have rushed off with it to Leopold Pohl, so that the two of them might browse the history of the Sterns, Sternovszkys, and Csillags. But all this is only his business. He spent many a long and lonely night turning the parchment pages. He wrote comments in the margins. He found it difficult to imagine that he could ever return the treasure entrusted to him for safekeeping. When he gave up reading and reverie at dawn, he would extinguish the sooty candle, and in the dazzling darkness he would embrace the thick volume as a mother does her baby.
Summer was over and the branches of the apple trees and quinces were bare in the wind when a messenger boy brought a message from Móricz Stern: “Mr. Stern asks you to come and see him without delay in Tokay. He awaits an answer.”
“I shall be there tomorrow sundown.”
Mendel Berda-Stern packed. Eleonora’s face clouded over when she saw him making preparations. “Mendi, where are you off to this time?”
“They want me in Tokay, urgently.”
“Could I not keep you company?”
“If your condition permits, why not?”
It was still a month and a half till the child was due. Mendel Berda-Stern persuaded Hami to join them. Not counting the coachman they set off in the bigger carriage with a manservant and a chamber maid. They took little in the way of luggage, the heaviest item being the wooden chest that they had piled high with gifts, so that they did not arrive empty-handed. It had in it two complete Kassa hams, three truckles of Homonna cheese the size of small millstones, several bottles of cider made according to a local recipe, and four heavy Pozsony homespuns, ideal for hanging on the wall or as bedspreads.
The Stern family occupied virtually a whole street in the Tokay valley. The seat of the wine emporium loomed tall but unfinished. A little tower resting on Corinthian pillars had been imagined for its top by the Italian architect, which was at present represented by a cylindrical skeleton. An unusual disarray ruled the ground; it seemed that the building works had been abandoned rather than left half-complete. The wooden planks of the foreman builder’s lime pit were turned out of the ground and the white mass had spilled along the area in front of the house. The ladders and climbing frames appeared to have been lashed by storms. Above, the bare girders loomed black as if the roof had already burned down. What had happened here?
Móricz Stern received his visitors in the first-floor salon, with tea and kosher plum brandy. “Thank you for coming, my blood,” he kept repeating, with childish inanity (at least that was what Mendel Berda-Stern thought). Móricz Stern was no more than nine years his senior, yet he looked like an old man, because of his thinness and his unkempt, salt-and-pepper beard.
The afternoon tea seemed never to end: unnoticed it turned into the evening meal, for which the relatives began to arrive at around six o’clock. They came before them one by one, and in their introductory smiles Mendel Berda-Stern seemed to detect the same childish inanity. He was waiting to be informed why he had been told to come. He had brought the two volumes of The Book of Fathers with him, but decided that if they were to ask for the first volume back, he would say he did not have it.
The Sterns pretended that they had gathered purely for a pleasant family meal-the usual
jokes were heard, the usual toasts and good wishes. They tasted the firm’s finest wines, the cheeks of the men quickly turned rosy pink, white collars were unbuttoned. The fire in the hearth increased the perspiration whose penetrating odor could not be blotted out by that of the food, even as the number of courses inexorably increased to eight. When they had drunk the sorbet, the men moved over to the library to smoke cigars. In the room there was no trace of either books or of shelves; the carpenters had still a great deal to do here. The cigars and pipe-lighters had been prepared on the green baize card-table, in front of the seven-branched gold candlestick. For a while only satisfied noises of puffing and gentle wheezing could be heard.
Then Móricz Stern rose to speak. “Now that we are all of us here, every mature and responsible male in the Stern clan, let us consider how we can maintain ourselves and our families intact during the coming disaster.”
“What kind of disaster?” asked Mendel Berda-Stern.
Indulgent smiles all around by way of reply.
Móricz Stern placed his palm on his neck; Mendel Berda-Stern could feel the serious tremor in his fingers. “You cannot yet know. Perhaps up your way, in the north, there is still peace. But here the dam of mindless passions has been breached, since they voted into law our equality of rights.”
“Who voted?”
“Parliament! Where have you been living, young man? Since December 17th last, the inhabitants of Hungary of the Israelite faith have been declared entitled to exercise the same civic and political rights as the Christians. But this has not pleased all.”
Mendel Berda-Stern seemed to recall having heard something about this, but had immediately forgotten whatever it was. His life was spent in casinos, by card-tables: the intervening days were to him as other people’s nighttime rest. Suddenly he was seized by the same excitement as the others. Intimations of a negative kind had troubled him sometimes, but as he could not understand why, he took them to refer to himself and his betting. Now he learned how individual members of the Stern family had been attacked by riff-raff in various towns. Again and again the frightening word from the past came to people’s lips: “pogrom.” The image of smashed-up shops was painted in bright colors. The emporium in Tokay, too, had suffered such an attack a week earlier. Fortunately, neither here nor elsewhere had the members of the family suffered physically. “For the time being!” said Móricz Stern with a meaningful intonation.
The council of the heads of families decided that something must be done in the interests of their safety. This is what they wanted to think through today, this is why he, too, had been invited. “You, my dear boy, are undoubtedly one of us!” Móricz Stern added.
Mendel Berda-Stern was sweating profusely. He did not have the courage to say that he was a gambler, not a Jew. The Pohl family did not adhere to the traditions of the Israelites, as the practicing Jews were now called, and he did not live with Eleonora in a Jewish manner. Nonetheless he felt at home in this unpretentious room, where everything was reassuringly familiar, from the clouds of smoke to the hoarseness of the voices.
“It is a privilege of our first-born to know our history, looking back into the past, and sometimes into the future,” Móricz Stern continued. “We are members of one family. Let us join together into a common asset, without keeping anything back, what we each of us own separately!” and he looked at Mendel Berda-Stern.
There was silence, only the crackling of the burning logs of wood could be heard in the fireplace of uncarved stone, and the sound of breathing, and the little sucking noises on the cigars. Minutes passed before Mendel Berda-Stern realized that all eyes were on him. That was why he had been invited, to make public what he knew. He cleared his throat: “With your permission, it is difficult…” and he fell silent. He would have to review what he had seen or thought he had seen, and what conclusion was to be drawn from the various images. He remembered his computations based on the position of the stars and the signs obtained from the reading of the tarot, and the prophecies of the king of the prophets.
“Speak, even if what you have to say is of the most terrifying kind,” said Móricz Stern.
Mendel Berda-Stern blew his nose. “This is too great a burden for me. But I know, for example, that on the fourteenth day of November a boy will be born to us, to whom we shall give the name Sigmund, though he will prefer to call himself Sándor. This young child will, moreover, be born in Nagyvárad, though we have never been there and have no other business there…”
Móricz Stern was seized by visible excitement when he heard these words. “Nagyvárad?” he repeated with emphasis.
It became clear that Móricz Stern was contemplating whether it would be sensible for the family to collect all its valuables and emigrate, to a region where the Jews would be undisturbed. It was unclear though where such a region might be. Opposed to his view was that of the highly respected Lipót Stern. Lipót Stern, son of Mihály Stern, had become a famous Rabbi. Over on the far side of the country at Beremend he had been appointed deputy Rabbi and preacher of the community which, in view of his youthful age and limited experience, was regarded as a great honor. His first act had been to propose the building of a new school, whose syllabus he had himself devised, which was later accepted as a model by the Jewish communities of many nearby areas.
Lipót Stern’s view was that it was no use fleeing. The problem was that one section of the Jews of Hungary was alienated from its traditions, another part shrouded itself in them. These extreme modes of behavior give rise to justified negative feelings. “Let us rather approach with a pure heart the spirit of the homeland, and accept the threefold tendency: we are human beings, Hungarians, and Jews all in one. I quote the words of Rabbi Löw: ‘Emancipation and reform are intimately linked, those who want the first cannot reject the second.’ We must accept as our own the national ideals. Let us speak Hungarian in the synagogue, so that everyone can understand our words. If they can see what our intentions are, tempers will no longer flare.”
“Only by that time our houses and shops will have been destroyed, and it is by no means certain we shall survive the assaults of the people on the street!” countered Móricz Stern.
“We can in no way avoid our fate.”
“And if something happens to us, who will bring up our children?”
“Who will bring up the lilies of the field and the trees of the forests?”
The debate became more and more heated, and to Lipót Stern’s Talmudic arguments Móricz Stern gave practical answers, which made the Rabbi increasingly angry. His voice sharpened into shrillness, his elongated skull began to tremble violently. Foam came to his lips, his words halted, and he fell in a fit on the floor. Dr. Márton Stern, the surgeon, threw himself onto his body, forced his jaw open with the blade of a knife, pulled out his tongue, and through the space between the teeth poured in some medication from a flat little flask. This scared only Mendel Berda-Stern; the family had often witnessed such a scene. In a few minutes the Rabbi was back to his old self, his eyes clear, the lines on his face smoothed out, and the fit had no aftereffects of any kind. “Where was I?” he asked calmly.
“The parable of wine and honey,” said Dr. Márton Stern.
“Ah, yes. So you are all thoroughly conversant with my view. The Jews of Hungary must join together, whether they be of the orthodox or the neologue persuasion. We must go to the conference in Nagyvárad, where the formation of a national organization of Israelites must be the main item on the agenda.”
There was silence again, and Mendel Berda-Stern was once again the object of every pair of eyes. He blew his nose again-he must have caught a chill on his way here-and then said very quietly: “I shall say something that I have been pondering for a long time, in the hope that perhaps your intellects can divine its essence, which has remained a mystery to me. The great Nostradamus, the king of prophets, wrote a prophecy that will not let me rest. This is how it goes:
Whence we await starvation,
Thence welcome
we repletion:
The sea with the greedy dog’s eyes
With oil and corn shall us surprise.
“Once more, if you don’t mind,” said Lipót Stern.
He repeated the doggerel.
There was a lengthy pause in the conversation. Leopold Stern removed his pince-nez and wiped it on the edge of his smoking jacket. “This is a tough nut for me to crack,” he muttered.
For me too, thought Mendel Berda-Stern. We are not living in a barbarous age when people put others to the sword for no reason and raze people’s property to the ground. Now a lawful order reigns in society and if a bandit should upset it, the authorities will take the necessary steps.
The Rabbi went over to the window, his hands folded behind his back, and stared out for a while, then solemnly declared: “Within minutes it will be Shabbos. We must postpone our deliberations for twenty-four hours.”
The candles were left to burn all night in every house, since extinguishing them counted as work, as was their lighting. Food was brought in by Slovak servant girls. For the duration of Shabbos Móricz Stern thought it best not even to emerge from his bedroom, thinking it was most appropriate if the day He designated for rest was spent by man in sleep. No wonder that his belly had swollen into a watermelon and was testing his trouser belt to its limits.
Mendel Berda-Stern, Eleonora, and Hami were allocated two rooms on the ground floor of Móricz Stern’s residence. Their staff were lodged in the servants’ quarters. Mendel Berda-Stern gave an account of the discussion only to Hami, desiring to spare his expectant wife such unnecessary excitements. Hami did not understand: “Mendi, my dear, does that mean we should now be afraid?”
“Ach, stuff and nonsense. Every county has its handful of youngsters who have a drop or two too many and go on the rampage a bit. There’s no point in getting too worked up about that. Don’t you worry at all, my sweet.”
He himself, however, was not at all convinced that the fears of the Stern family were entirely without foundation. That night he set about completing his own computations on the basis of Morin de Villefranche’s methods, focused on a given geographical location and a specified period of time, on the basis of the ephemerides. When taken together with his own horoscope, the results had in the past often helped him to considerable winnings in the casinos. He knew that in this wise he could glean some indication of the direction of the future, only he was never certain whether it referred to the week, month, or year to come. Whether this way or that, the position of the stars boded no good. In the twelve houses the eight astrological bodies were rather unpropitiously arrayed: the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Especially Saturn, which formed a horrific quincunx with Mars, and all this in the twelfth house… O woe! If he were now on one of his money-raising trips, he would give the gambling dens a wide berth.