The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

  The Origin of Sorrow

  by

  Robert Mayer

  Copyright 2011 by Robert Mayer. (www.robertmayerauthor.com) All rights reserved.

  Published by Combustoica (www.Combustoica.com), a prose project of About Comics, Camarillo, California.

  Cover created by Rhonda Ward

  Books by Robert Mayer

  Fiction

  Superfolks

  The Execution

  Midge and Decker

  The Grace of Shortstops

  Sweet Salt

  The Search

  I, JFK

  The Origin of Sorrow

  The Ferret’s Tale

  Danse Macabre

  Non-Fiction

  The Dreams of Ada

  Notes of a Baseball Dreamer

  (First published as Baseball And Men’s Lives)

  Praise for the Books of Robert Mayer

  “Fascinating.” — John Grisham

  “Gripping.” — Janet Malcolm, The New York Times

  “He writes like an angel.” — Newsday

  “Exemplary.” — Village Voice

  “Pure, undiluted magic.” — Washington Post

  “Quiet brilliance.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Strangely moving.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Genuinely compelling storytelling.” — Chicago Tribune

  “Wonderfully human.” — Dallas News

  “The poet’s touch.” — Detroit News

  “A blend of the funny and the poignant.” — St. Louis Post Dispatch

  “Absorbing.” — Sunday Oklahoman

  “Heart-stopping” — Albuquerque Journal

  “Ranks with the best.” — Santa Fe Reporter

  “Topnotch.” — People Magazine

  “Compelling.” — Booklist

  “Excellent.” — Library Journal

  “Wonderful, moving.” — Publisher’s Weekly

  Ann Kelley

  Kristin Reidy

  Mary Bonney

  Karen Chavez

  And to the people of the Judengasse

  Can you crawl out of asking the origin of sorrow … ?

  —Dana Levin,

  Hive

  Contents

  Book One: Guttle

  Book Two: Jesters and Hangmen

  Book Three: A Flame of God

  Book Four: Wind in the Walls

  Book Five: The Killing

  Epilogue: A Birthday — 1848

  Book One: Guttle

  The confinement, the dirt, the swarm of people, the accents of an unpleasant tongue, all made a disagreeable impression, even when one only looked in when passing outside the gate. It took a long time before I ventured in alone … And yet, they were also human beings, energetic, agreeable, and even their obstinacy in sticking to their own customs, one could not deny it respect. Moreover, their girls were pretty.

  — Goethe,

  Poetry and Truth

  1

  In the beginning were the walls. Stone walls ten metres high. Erected on both sides of a dirt lane in Frankfurt-am-Main, in the Christian year 1458, after the Holy Father ordered the Emperor to confine all Jews in the city. Three hundred years later, the walls and their iron gates still were standing. The Jews had begat in number from 110 to 3,000. They now occupied every metre of the lane. They still were locked inside.

  On the last Friday in March, in the Christian year 1769, Guttle Schnapper, a dark-haired girl with eyes black as olives — fifteen and a half years pretty she was — bare of foot that morning and wearing a blue cotton shift, came out from a neighbor’s house at the northern end of the lane. She carried a small pitcher of milk. Her mind was in turmoil over an unwelcome marriage proposal she had received the night before from Viktor the Cantor, an overweight young man whose operatic voice had a teardrop in it, as the voices of all good cantors must. In the darkness of a cloud-ridden dawn she tripped upon the leg of a dead man. Milk flew from the pitcher, soaked the side of the man’s face, his wisp of beard. Guttle stumbled, caught herself. Frightened, she nonetheless peered closer, to see if she knew the man. Her eyes took in his outstretched arm, his wooden hammer, which was clutched in his hand even in death.

  “It’s the Schul-Klopper!” she cried out.

  As she stared, stunned, at the body, she was further upset by the sound of laughter. Three Gentile boys were peering through the bars of the north gate, making fun of the dead man. Guttle ran at them, shouting that they should show respect. The boys pranced away, still laughing. When she spun her head around, her braids tied with white ribbons whipping off her neck, she saw down the lane the men and boys walking towards the synagogue for the morning service, to which the Schul-Klopper’s hammer only moments ago had summoned them. She knelt beside him. His face was pale as parchment. Pale not because he had just fallen dead, but because in all his fifty-nine years, may he rest in peace, the sun had rarely touched his forehead, his long nose, his cheeks that peeked soft as a baby’s tush above the whiskers. The faces of everyone in the lane were pale; the sun, when it passed overhead precisely at noon each day, allowed its rays to warm the cobbles for four minutes, perhaps five. Then, as if in a rush to escape this stinking place, the rays climbed the walls of the gray houses and disappeared, leaving the Judengasse, as it was called — the Jews Lane — in the deeper gray of twilight, till the twilight itself disappeared into black of night.

  The Schul-Klopper’s brown eyes were open. He was staring as if in disbelief that he was dead. Guttle could hardly accept it, either. Only a few minutes before, she had heard his hammer pound on their door. She had heard him knocking on doors morning and evening every day of her consciousness. He was the most familiar figure in the lane, more familiar even than the Chief Rabbi. Now his face was twisted by pain he no longer felt. Guttle knew she needed to find help, even as she knew that Solomon Gruen was beyond all help but God’s.

  The pitcher still in her hand, she ran to fetch her mother, bare toes flinching like frightened kittens on the cold morning cobbles. Before she reached her house a neighbor boy, Isidor Kracauer, emerged from the adjoining door and grabbed her arm, spilling more of the milk. He was a year younger than she. His short blond hair stood up in front of his dark blue yarmulke like winter wheat.

  “Why are you running?” he asked.

  “It’s the Schul-Klopper!”

  “I know, I heard him knock, I’ll hurry.”

  “Not schul! He’s over there. He’s dead.”

  She set the empty pitcher on the ground, took his hand, led him to the body. Isidor blushed at her touch, as only a fair-skinned boy of fourteen can blush. They’d been raised like cousins; Guttle had yet to notice the stress her curving body had begun to induce in him.

  The Schul-Klopper, though wearing his usual long black coat, frayed at the wrists, was repellant in his twisted silence. Neither wanted to touch him. They’d seen dead bodies before, there was plenty of death in the lane, but usually in a bed, under covers. Isidor quickly invented an excuse to keep away; it was for good reason the boys at the yeshiva called him Izzy the Wise. “Don’t touch him, he might have disease,” the boy warned. “I’m going for the Doctor.” He leaped across the sewage ditch, nearly a metre wide, which bisected the lane like a stinking brown snake, and stumbled off to the hospital.

  “It’s not the Doctor he needs,” Guttle murmured, looking again at the Schul-Klopper. With his hand still clutching his curved hammer, he seemed to be knocking with patience on the door of Heaven.

  Guttle hurried to the synagogue, half way down the lane. When she returned with the Chief Rabbi, the Doctor, Lev Berkov, was kneeling beside the body, holding Herr Gruen’s wrist, touching fingers to Herr Gruen’s throat.
Izzy in his wisdom watched from several feet away, then ran off towards the schul. The Doctor glanced up at the Rabbi, and murmured, “He’s dead.”

  Tears formed in Guttle’s eyes. She did not know why — she already knew he was dead.

  Rabbi Avram Eleazar folded her slim hand into his stubby one, and lifted her chin with a finger. “It’s all right to cry, child,” he said. “But also remember, death is the will of Elohim. Perhaps Solomon died so that another might live.”

  Hungry for comfort, Guttle asked, “He died so that who might live?”

  The handsome young Doctor hid a smile with his fist. Lifting his eyebrows at the question, the Chief Rabbi shrugged, rotated the palms of his stubby hands skyward. Quickly he turned from her, so she would not see his own eyes watering at the passing of his dearest friend.

  As she walked home carrying the empty pitcher, a darkness crossed Guttle’s face, like the shadow of a large bird — but there were no birds in the Judengasse. The death of the Schul-Klopper, the shadow seemed to warn, would one day cast a dark mark on her own life. She shuddered. That was nonsense, just her unruly imagination, for which she was not yet known.

  The Judengasse curved like a limp sausage for half a kilometre, sliding in a gentle slope toward the river Main. At each end of the lane were the gates of iron. Men were permitted to leave only for business, and were to be back inside each day by five on the clock. Women could only go to the nearby market. At night, and on Sundays, the gates were locked to everyone.

  Why had the Jews put up with this for three hundred years? Because the Constables outside the gates had pistols. And muskets. And swords. And cold, hard eyes.

  Along both sides of the lane, narrow houses of gray wood stood quietly, shoulder touching shoulder, like skinny men whispering Kaddish. Behind the front houses a second row had been wedged against the outer walls down through the centuries, to house the expanding number of families. The Schnapper home fronted the lane, in sight of the north gate.

  “Where’s the baby’s milk?”

  Her mother’s question stung Guttle like a slap as she entered the kitchen and set down the empty pitcher. “I send you across the lane for milk, you let Bea Metzenbaum talk your ear off, you forget what you went for. You would forget your head if it wasn’t attached.”

  “Mama, listen! The Schul-Klopper is dead.”

  She recited what had happened in the lane.

  “You never watch where you’re going!” her mother said. “You’re always too busy thinking!” Then Emmie Schnapper dropped herself onto a chair like a load of wash. “The Schul-Klopper? That’s terrible.” She looked at Guttle, took her hand, rubbed it. “Are you all right, bubbelah?”

  “I’m fine,” Guttle said, though she had begun to tremble.

  “Avra, watch little Benjy. I’m going to Ida’s next door to borrow milk.”

  Emmie’s heavy footsteps faded down the stairs. Avra, who was thirteen, two years younger than Guttle, thin as a spatula, said, “Was it disgusting? Were his insides hanging out? I’ll bet you’ll have nightmares tonight.”

  Guttle accommodated her, if that is the proper word. “His insides were bleeding onto the cobbles. His throat was slashed. His fingernails were long as claws. He said he’d come get me in my sleep tonight, and klop my head to pieces with his hammer. He forced me to tell him my name. I said I was Avra Schnapper.”

  “You didn’t! I’m telling Mama you’re scaring me!” She bolted down the stairs before Guttle could remind her she was supposed to be watching the baby. “I’m so awful, Benjy,” Guttle said. “How could I say such things?”

  “What things?” Benjy, still in his white nightshirt, was looking up at her with a sleepy face and slept-on hair. He was not yet three years old.

  “Nothing, Benj. I’m just upset.”

  “At me?”

  “Not you, sweetie.” She sat on a chair by the kitchen table, pulled her only living brother onto her lap. “I’m mad at Herr Gruen for being dead.”

  “What’s dead?”

  She ignored his question. “And I’m angry at Viktor Marcus for wanting to marry me.”

  “What’s marry?”

  She tousled his silky hair. “Married is the same as dead, only you’re not alone.”

  She set her brother down and dropped tea leaves into a glass and poured hot water over them from a kettle on the woodstove. Holding the glass with one hand and Benjy’s fingers with the other, she led him upstairs to the small front bedroom she and Avra shared, and she set her tea on the windowsill. She needed to rid herself of the dead Schul-Klopper’s image, needed to purge herself of her stupid joke. How do you apologize to the dead?

  From her father’s chair in the sitting room she fetched the newspaper he’d brought home the evening before, the Sachsen-Meiningen Zeitung. With editions of this newspaper, with her father’s help, she had taught herself to read and write Hochdeutch, in addition to her Hebrew and the Judendeutch that was the language of the lane. Benjy climbed beside her onto the bed as she looked at the newspaper. Hardly a week went by when her father’s name did not appear in it. Almost always it was the same sentence. “The profits of the Prince will be invested, to replenish the municipal treasury, by the Court Jew, Wolf Salomon Schnapper.”

  She tried to read, couldn’t concentrate. But a small notice near the bottom caught her attention. It was headed, “Madame Antoine to Marry.” It said: “According to a dispatch from Vienna, Empress Maria Teresa has authorized negotiations to marry her youngest daughter, Archduchess Antoine, to the Dauphin of France. Such a match would create a rare alliance between the two leading powers of Europe. The lovely Madame Antoine is thirteen and one-half years of age, the French Dauphin is fifteen. He is heir to the throne of his grandfather, King Louis XV. The report caused much joy in Vienna, although no formal announcement has been made.”

  Guttle sipped her tea while Benjy babbled, pretending to read. Madame Antoine might be going off to live in a grand palace, she mused, but they still had something in common, she and the Princess: neither one could choose whom they would marry. Although, she admitted to herself, marrying a Prince might not be altogether bad.

  Her father had been looking at her in a new way of late, and Guttle knew why. He was measuring her for a husband. It would not be a boy, like the Dauphin, it would be a man of twenty-five years at least; that was the law shackled on Jewish men by the Frankfurt Council, who wanted to reduce the number of Jewish babies. Her marriage would not be for a political merger, like Madame Antoine’s, but for a financial one; her father would decide whose family was wealthy enough, with enough useful acquaintances, to suit him.

  In the street below, her mother and sister were arguing. The sister with the sharp nose and the sharper tongue. Avra was not so ugly, but the slight extra grinding of her nose, the thinness of her lips, a tightness to the skin of her face, a narrowness between the eyes — as if there had been a shortage of Schnapper flesh when she’d been born — gave her a sour appearance. No surprise that she was developing a personality to match.

  Guttle carried Benjy down to the kitchen. “Ida already knew about Herr Gruen,” her mother, Emmie, said as she climbed the last step ahead of Avra.

  “Where’s the milk?”

  Her mother looked at her empty hands. “Oy, I got so caught up in talk. Guttle Schnapper, don’t you say a word!”

  “I’m not saying a thing, Mama.” She tried to swallow a smile. Like a raw egg, it wouldn’t go down.

  “Avra, go borrow milk,” Emmie said. “Try Frau Schlicter. She doesn’t talk so much.”

  “And Avra,” Guttle said.

  “What? I’m not talking to you!”

  “Don’t spill it.”

  Avra stuck her tongue out at Guttle before stomping down the stairs.

  “Do you feel all right from the Schul-Klopper?” Emmie asked.

  Guttle wanted to curl up in bed and weep in her pillow. Tripping over a dead man should happen only in one of Viktor’s operas, on a dimly lighted sta
ge, while the audience gasped.

  “You look upset. Maybe you shouldn’t go to the bakery.”

  “I need to go,” Guttle said. “At least there I can focus on the beetles.”

  A few minutes later she was at the north gate, waiting impatiently with her mother and two other bakery women; it was their turn to meet the flour wagon. Avra was home with the little ones; almost everywhere in the Judengasse there were little ones. Guttle heard the slow clopping of hoofs on the cobbles before the gray head of the old horse came into view around the ghetto wall. As the wooden wagon came closer, an escort of flies announced its approach, dipping and circling. The flour merchant pulled the horse to a stop. The small wagon could have been driven through the open gate and transported the flour sacks to the bakery, but the tradesman, tall, thin, emaciated, had made clear long ago that, like most Gentiles, he would never enter the Judengasse. As if the Jews carried germs. Instead, the women had to lift heavy sacks from the cart and place them in the two wheelbarrows they’d brought along.

  To the left of the gate a young Constable stood erect as a pole in gray breeches and a dark blue coat with silver buttons. His musket was propped against the wall. He seemed uninterested in the flour transaction — though his gaze did flick to Guttle from time to time — as Frau Schnapper, the bakery treasurer, pulled a purse from the pocket of her apron. “The usual price?” she asked.

  “The usual,” the merchant said, brushing a fly from his drooping gray mustache.

  Frau Schnapper reached up and handed him several coins. He examined them closely, as if counterfeiting might be a burgeoning art in the Judengasse, before shoving them into his trouser pocket. Guttle pulled her dark braids prettily around her chin. “And how much for the beetles?”

  The merchant did not smile. Reaching for his tattered whip, he said, “For you, Mädchen, the beetles are free.”