The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

  “He was. I mean … Never mind. Let me in.”

  He stepped aside, closed the door behind her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to tell you a dream I had.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Hersch Liebmann didn’t kill the Schul-Klopper.”

  “He did.”

  She felt cold, pulled her robe tighter around her. Seeing this, he said, “I haven’t lighted a fire yet. Do you want some tea?”

  “No. First sit down and listen.”

  Meyer shrugged, tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, pulled the chair from in front of his desk, sat. “So. What did you dream?”

  “It was horrible. I dreamed I was feeding poison to Sophie Marcus. I woke up frightened. I couldn’t get to sleep again.”

  “I can see that would be upsetting.” He pulled her onto his lap. “But what has that to do with Hersch Liebmann? Was he in the dream?”

  “No. Listen to me.” She squirmed off his lap, paced about. “I would never poison anyone, of course, so the dream had to be about something else. Then it struck me. Our names have the same first letters. Guttle Schnapper. Solomon Gruen. They’re just reversed. Maybe it wasn’t me in the dream. Maybe I represented Solomon Gruen. He’s the one who was poisoning Frau Marcus.”

  “But he’s dead. She’s alive.”

  “But our first letters were reversed, so the whole dream might be reversed. Like in a mirror. It could be Sophie Marcus who was giving the poison.”

  “Therefore?”

  “That’s what really happened. Frau Marcus is the murderer.”

  “Guttle, you’re thinking too much. Twisting things around. You’re nervous about the trial. We all are.”

  “I may be nervous, but I’m not crazy. Sophie Marcus is the crazy one.”

  “That’s true. But Solomon Gruen was her brother. You’re saying she poisoned her brother?”

  “Remember, at the Fair, when you first told me Herr Gruen had been murdered? Immediately I thought, perhaps Viktor did it, for the money he would inherit. So my father would want me to marry him.”

  “Guttle, we talked about that. We agreed the Cantor wouldn’t do such a thing. Even though he’s robust, he’s gentle. He has a good heart.”

  “I know. But we never thought of his mother. Sophie wanted him to marry me, even more than he did, I think. Maybe she even gave him the idea. When I told him I didn’t want to, that night in the cemetery, he went home upset. His mother would have asked him the reason. When she found out, she assumed it was because he had no money. That’s all the Marcuses think about. She figured that if Viktor already had his uncle’s money, my father would say yes.”

  “But it still was her brother!”

  “She’s crazy, Meyer. And she hated him.”

  “How can you say such a thing?”

  “She babbled to people. She told Frau Metzenbaum she wanted her son to get married as soon as he became twenty-five, so he wouldn’t become a sissy, like his uncle Solomon. Bea Metzenbaum told Mama.”

  “Herr Gruen a sissy? Just because he never married?”

  “Frau Marcus thought the whole Judengasse was gossiping about him. Laughing at her, behind her back. It’s one of the things that was making her crazy.”

  “I never heard anyone say a word against Solomon Gruen. Or question his manliness. Just because he was kind … ”

  “The truth doesn’t matter — it’s what Sophie believed. She killed him so Viktor would inherit his money, but also to stop the gossip she imagined. Also for Viktor — so people wouldn’t gossip about him, say he was a sissy like his uncle. Maybe she also wanted grandchildren.”

  “You’re making me nervous, Guttle. And cold.” Meyer stood and went up to his bedroom. He came down wearing slippers and a dark blue robe. “She lives toward the south end. He couldn’t have walked far with the poison in him, Berkov said.”

  “Maybe she met him at the schul. Or near where he died. A friendly gesture, a glass of hot tea in the morning, with honey. And ratbane.”

  “Why are you telling me this now? Hersch goes on trial tomorrow.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you. You have to stop the trial.”

  “I’d be a laughingstock.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “But there’s no evidence against her! Guttle, come up to the kitchen while I light a fire.”

  She was too upset to sit as she watched him add kindling and two logs and stoke the ashes smoldering in the woodstove. He put a kettle of water on the stove. “Guttle, Hersch Liebmann is the murderer. He stole from me. He stole from the schul. We know that as fact, we have the evidence. That’s not a dream.”

  “That’s theft. It’s not murder.”

  “It gave him reason to murder — at least in his eyes. As I explained to you.”

  “What about my dream?”

  “You don’t like Frau Marcus, because she harasses you — so in your dream you killed her. It’s that simple.” He put his arm around her shoulder. “Maybe that’s why we sane ones sometimes do terrible things in dreams. So we don’t do them in life.”

  “You also do terrible things in dreams?”

  “Once I ate a pig. A whole pig.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Well, most of it. Worse than that, it was some farm girl’s pet.”

  “You’d never eat even a bratwurst.”

  “In a dream I would. What does that tell us? I have no idea. Except that dreams are even crazier than Sophie Marcus.”

  “I still think she did it.” But her midnight certainty was melting away. She pressed her face into his chest. “You’re making me feel like a child.”

  “Don’t feel that way. It’s just nerves. Tomorrow it will be over.”

  “I’m a fool.”

  “All of us are fools in the dark of night.” He kissed the top of her head, inhaled her scent.

  “I’d better go home,” she said. “People will think I slept here.”

  “Imagine what Frau Marcus would do with that.”

  As he closed the door behind her, he heard the water in the kettle boiling. He went up to the kitchen and made his tea, and sat with it at the table. Waiting for it to cool, he looked up at the ceiling. He cracked his knuckles, and said: “Sophie Marcus? It’s not possible — is it?”

  24

  On the first day of the trial, snow light as pastry sugar sifted into the lane. With white frosting it coated the tops of the walls and the slopes of the ditch and the sills of the tenements. The cobbles became wet but not white as winter boots stirred the snow to slush. Among these were the boots of the twenty-three men of the jury, of the nine council members, of the scores of spectators who wanted to see this astonishing event, their boots turning slush to water as they walked or shuffled or hurried to the lecture hall of the yeshiva, which, except for the synagogue, was the largest room in the lane.

  The oak table of the council had been positioned at one end of the hall. A witness chair stood to one side of it, the defendant’s chair at the other. Forming two rows in front of the council table were the jurors’ seats, and beyond them, two rows of chairs for witnesses. The remainder of the seats, perhaps two hundred, were available to spectators. The chairs had been crafted by the lane’s carpenters thirteen years earlier, just before the smallpox came, for an appearance by the Ba’al Shem Tov; since then they’d been stacked high against the walls and arranged in the room only for special occasions.

  Most of the jurors selected lived in the south end of the lane, where Hersch Liebmann was not so well known. The fire captain had spent two weeks choosing them after Meyer Amschel officially brought the charges. The number of jurors for a criminal trial was specified in the Talmud; at least thirteen of the twenty-three would have to vote “guilty” for the accused to be convicted.

  Meyer felt apprehensive as he took his seat at the council table, to the right of the presiding Chairman, Wolf Schnapper. As he looked out at the witness section
he knew that Guttle was even more nervous than he. Life had been a strain for her lately. The day before, he had overheard her talking to her mythical friend Melka of the South Gate, whom she only invoked in the most difficult of times.

  “Sometimes I wish you hadn’t done this,” she had said to him on several occasions. Each time his reply had been much the same. “How can we let murder go unpunished?” Each time, she knew he was right — if he was right.

  At the appointed hour, all the seats were filled; standing spectators crowded the rear, their boots staking their places with dark puddles; not even the eldest residents could remember a murder trial. Hiram Liebmann sat in the spectator area, Izzy Kracauer beside him to translate the testimony with his hands. Yetta Liebmann had chosen to remain beside her husband’s bed at the hospital.

  The Chairman asked Meyer Amschel if he was ready to proceed with the prosecution. Meyer, wearing his best coat and waistcoat, his unpowdered gray wig and a white yarmulke, said he was. Rabbi Eleazar was seated on the other side of the Chairman in his tall black hat. To the consternation of virtually everyone, the Chief Rabbi would be the advocate for the defense. By Talmudic tradition, someone on the council needed to fill that role — a man could not be tried without a defense — and Rabbi Eleazar had volunteered at once, as if he relished — almost as if he demanded — the assignment. No one, certainly not Meyer, knew why. Solomon Gruen had been his friend.

  The Rabbi assured Chairman Schnapper that he, too, was ready. Banging his gavel several times, the Chairman called for silence from the gossiping spectators. He asked that Adonai bless the proceedings with justice and truth. Expanding his large chest, his gold watch chain looping across it, his eyes seeking out his daughter in the witness section with a dim foreboding he could not explain, he declared that the trial of Hersch Liebmann, on two charges of grand theft and one charge of murder without a witness, was now underway.

  Hersch had been waiting calmly in an anteroom. When the fire captain opened the door and motioned for him to come out, he strode into the hall with his head held high while the spectators murmured. He would not give them the satisfaction of cowering. All his life he had been poor. For two months he had been a leper, shunned as he passed people, their eyes averted from him, their tongues silent. Very well, let them have their show. He could only wait and see what transpired. Deaf to their smug conceits, he would remain as mute as his brother.

  He sat indifferent as Rothschild told the jury he would explore the thefts first, and then the murder; as he established by questioning Isidor Kracauer that a hundred gulden had disappeared from the synagogue while Hersch was working there, and asserted that another hundred had disappeared from his own wooden chest while Hersch was working for him; how the fire captain had found two pouches of money containing a hundred gulden each in Leo Liebmann’s mattress; how one of these bore the markings of his own shop.

  “He did not even destroy the pouches,” Hersch heard Rothschild tell the jury.

  His defense advocate, the Chief Rabbi, established under cross examination that the office in the synagogue where the money was kept was never locked, nor the chest in which it was kept. The same for Meyer Rothschild’s money. Every person in the lane had easy access to the money, Rabbi Eleazar pointed out. But with the gulden already found in Hersch’s house, and exhibited to the jury, his defense seemed desultory.

  Meyer Rothschild stood again. Hersch’s skin seemed to tighten on him, he became more alert in his chair. Everyone in the hall became more alert. Theft was bad enough, but proof of murder, this all of them — including Hersch Liebmann — wanted to hear.

  Meyer drank from a glass of water. He looked about until he had their attention, until not a sound could be heard. His experience speaking after the hanging at the Fair had given him confidence in his unexpected ability as an orator.

  “Now we come to murder,” he began. “Some of you may wonder why that word alone is not the formal charge, instead of ‘Murder Without a Witness.’ I will tell you why. There is a very important distinction. ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder,’ the Torah says — and it makes very clear that the punishment for murder is death. But … and this is the important part. The Talmud makes an exception. It says that if a person is convicted of a murder to which there were no witnesses, then the punishment is not death. It is incarceration for life. That is the charge here. I want to make it very clear: the defendant, Hersch Liebmann, is not on trial for his life. Even if he is convicted, he will not be put to death. Such a heavy responsibility will not be on your shoulders. That will rest with Elohim, where it belongs.”

  Meyer heard scraping among a few of the juror’s chairs. He hoped he had eased their minds.

  “Let us begin with the murder. On the morning of 29 March of this Christian year 1769, our beloved Schul-Klopper, Solomon Gruen, was found lying in the lane not far from the north gate. I shall direct several questions to Doctor Lev Berkov, who has been the chief Doctor here for more than four years, and is a member of the Judengasse Council.

  “Doctor Berkov, on the morning we are discussing, you were summoned to attend to the person of Solomon Gruen, is that correct?”

  Berkov spoke from his seat at the council table. “Yes.”

  “What did you discover?”

  “Herr Gruen was dead.”

  “Subsequent to that, what else did you discover?”

  “When I examined his corpse in the hospital, I found a suspicious white powder on the back of his tongue, and in his throat. On the Monday following, I took scrapings of this powder to a reliable chemist in town, to find out what it was. He assayed several tests, and told me the powder was arsenic.”

  Arsenic — the word swept in whispers through the spectators, as the snow, falling in thicker flakes, was sweeping against the stained-glass windows.

  “What did you conclude from this?”

  “That Solomon Gruen had died from arsenic poisoning — either by suicide or by murder.”

  “What did you do with this finding?”

  “I told the Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Eleazar.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He assured me in strong terms that he had known Herr Gruen very well, that Herr Gruen had not been upset or brooding, that it was not in his character to kill himself.”

  “What did you conclude from that?”

  “That Herr Gruen most likely been given arsenic to drink by someone else. That he had been murdered.”

  “Why was that fact not made public?”

  “Neither the Rabbi nor I could imagine who might want to kill the Schul-Klopper. Or why. The Rabbi decided there was no point in upsetting the lane, until or unless further evidence emerged.”

  “Did you do anything else in this matter?”

  “I spoke with the neighbors at the north end of the lane, asking if anyone had seen anything unusual that morning. I did not tell them the death was suspicious. Without lying, I implied that I wanted to know what might have caused him to have a heart attack. Such as if he’d had an argument with someone. None of them had seen or heard anything unusual.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone else that Solomon Gruen had been murdered?”

  “Not for several months. But increasingly it weighed on me that a murderer was going unpunished. One night, after having drunk several glasses of wine, I told two friends whom I trusted to keep the secret — just to unburden myself. That would be Yussel Kahn, and yourself, Meyer Rothschild.”

  “Thank you Doctor Berkov. I have no more questions.”

  As Meyer sat, the Chief Rabbi cleared his throat in preparation for cross-examination; this system had been mandated by the Talmud a thousand years before defense advocates were required most anywhere else. Hersch Liebmann leaned forward in his chair.

  “Tell me, Doctor. If a person wanted to purchase arsenic, where might he do so?”

  “At a chemist’s shop in town.”

  “At any chemist’s shop?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “If this
person did not want to purchase it, is it not true that arsenic is the principle ingredient of ratbane?”

  “That is correct.”

  “What you found in Herr Gruen’s throat might have been ratbane, which would test positively for arsenic. Is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Isn’t it true that ratbane is found in virtually every house in the Judengasse?”

  “I’ve never looked,” the Doctor said.

  A few in the audience laughed, but the laughter died quickly.

  “Would you say that is general knowledge?”

  “I’ve heard that. I will concede it is reasonable.”

  “So, to sum up: anyone with a few kreuzer could walk into any chemist shop and have no trouble purchasing arsenic. Anyone seeking ratbane could find it in almost every home in the lane. Not just in the home of the defendant — if, in fact, it can be found there. Is that a fair statement?”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Meyer sipped again from his glass of water, and stood. “Very well,” he said to the jury, “what have we established? We have established that Solomon Gruen was murdered; that the weapon was arsenic or ratbane, easily accessible to most anyone — including, I would point out, the defendant; and that, as far as we know, no one witnessed this murder. But the murder did occur — there can be no doubt of that. So the question is — what person or persons perpetrated it, and why.”

  Meyer walked around the table to get closer to the jurors in their two rows of chairs. The hall was quiet as a roomful of cobbles.

  “I freely admit, there being no witnesses, that the charge against Hersch Liebmann rests on circumstances. I ask you to pay close attention to these circumstances. They are critical to this case.

  “First of all, we have shown that a pouch containing a hundred gulden, belonging to the synagogue, was stolen from there while Solomon Gruen was the shammus — and while Hersch Liebmann was his assistant. Those two men had the easiest access to the money. Herr Gruen is dead — and the money was found in the home of Herr Liebmann.