The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

  Two new, younger girls in braids, about eight years old, had braved the controversy — or their parents had — and had shown up, appearing only mildly frightened, along with the previous eight. After giving her first German lesson, watching the pupils squirm, their faces distorted in pain and puzzlement as she explained the complications of der, die and das, Guttle let them stand and stretch. Rebecca would be teaching the science class next, but she was treating a critically ill patient and had warned Guttle that she might be late. Five minutes passed, then ten. Guttle decided she had better tell them something about science, from what little she knew, until Rebecca appeared.

  “When we talk about learning science,” she began, as the girls settled into the chairs, “it is different than learning a language, such as German. With a language, we begin with correct answers. Der Dummkopf is correct. Die Dummkopf is not. No one argues about it. Except, perhaps, der Dummkopf.”

  The girls laughed. School could be fun, if the grown-ups stopped fighting about it, stopped making everybody nervous.

  “But in science, we begin with questions, and we look for the answers. We don’t know what they are ahead of time. Sometimes people disagree on the answer.”

  She saw puzzlement in some faces. One girl raised her hand. “So how do we know who is right?

  “A very good question, Katya. We don’t know who or what to believe, until there is proof. Science is about finding proof.”

  They waited, attentive. Guttle could understand their confusion. In the lane everything they were taught was already known, it was either right or wrong and had been for thousands of years. Only at the highest levels of Talmudic argument was there room to disagree. That was why so many viewed her as a nuisance. For the second time — the first had been with Georgi — she had brought serious debate to the kitchen table, and out onto the cobbles.

  “Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about,” she said. “For thousands of years, most people have believed that the sun up in the sky revolves around the earth. Correct? We can see it every day, rising over the eastern wall, passing straight overhead at noon, then, at evening, setting over the western wall.”

  Ruthie Berkov raised her hand and spoke. “That’s not what Galileo said.”

  “Very good, Ruthie. Who was Galileo?”

  “An Italian philosopher.”

  “Yes. Philosopher, or scientist, as they are starting to be called now. How do you know about him?”

  “I heard my Papa and Yussel Kahn discussing him once.”

  “Does anyone else know about Galileo?”

  “He lived a long time ago,” Schönche said. “But I don’t know what he did.”

  “Ruthie, do you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I’ll tell you what he did. It was only a hundred and fifty years ago — well, I guess that is a long time. Galileo proved that the sun does not move around the earth. He proved that, instead, it is the sun that stands still, and the earth that moves around it.”

  Several of the girls giggled. Others murmured in disagreement.

  “I know,” Guttle said, “you think that if that were true, we would all be falling down. Doctor Simcha will tell you more about that during the week. For today, can you accept my word that it is true? Can you do that? Just for a few minutes?”

  The pupils hesitated, then agreed, reluctantly.

  They all turned towards the door as it began to open. For an instant Guttle was frightened; she had neglected to lock it. Then Rebecca entered the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She apologized to the girls for being so busy, and stood off to the side, asking Guttle to continue. In the Doctor’s constricted face Guttle read that she had just lost a patient.

  She turned back to the class. “As scientists — we are all scientists now, right? — we know, because Galileo proved it scientifically, that it is the earth that moves around the sun, and not vice versa. But a problem quickly arose. ‘Wait a minute,’ the Pope said — he’s the head of the Catholic church — ‘that can’t be true.’”

  “‘Why can’t it be true?’ we ask.

  “Because we’re not falling down?” Katya said.

  “That was not the Pope’s concern. The Pope said. ‘This cannot be true, because the Bible says otherwise. King Solomon wrote, “The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down.” Clearly, the sun is moving. Are you saying that King Solomon, in the Bible, lied?’”

  The pupils sat silent, transfixed. Hiding a smile, Guttle looked away from them, toward the window, through which about ten metres away she could see the ghetto wall. She noticed that Rebecca had her eyes closed, as if in pain.

  “So,” Guttle said. “Which should we believe? As scientists, do we concede that Galileo made a mistake, and agree with the Pope that the Bible is always right? Or do we stick to our scientific beliefs, and decide that the great Solomon was wrong?”

  No one responded. Their faces looked even more puzzled than during der die das.

  “I’ll tell you what the Catholic church did when it was faced with this problem,” Guttle said. “It banned Galileo’s writings on the subject. It made him renounce his discovery that the earth moves. Because the Pope found it in conflict with the teachings of the church. If Galileo hadn’t done what they wanted, they would have put him to death.” She paused for a moment, to let the girls ponder the import of that. “But years later, when Galileo was an old man, dying a natural death, do you know what his last words were? At least, what legend has it? I was not there, of course.”

  Too rapt even to acknowledge her little joke, the students waited.

  “According to legend, Galileo’s dying words were: ‘And yet, it moves.’”

  Silence. She looked from one face to another. Several girls who had been holding their breaths now breathed audibly. She saw Ruthie and Schönche, the two eldest, exchanging glances.

  From outside, the sound of a horse neighing, an unusual voice in the lane, shattered the quiet. Guttle went to a window and looked out, giving the girls time to think, to absorb the story. A carriage driver who had brought an elderly banker to his home was having trouble getting his gray roan to maneuver out the south gate alongside the ditch; the horse seemed to fear losing his footing near the trench, and wouldn’t move. Horses, like Christians, rarely were at ease in the Judengasse. Finally the driver got down from the carriage and led the roan out by walking in front of him with the reins.

  Her mind distracted, Guttle was taken back to the time she had been kicked by the stallion as it careened into the ditch. Rushing down the alley, the children playing — had she really noticed the children there, so long ago, those blurred colored shapes in the corner of her eye? She still could not be sure.

  Uncertain if minutes had passed or only a few seconds, she turned to the class. Her daughter was raising her hand.

  “Yes, Schönche?”

  “I think I would believe Galileo rather than the Catholic church. But what if the Chief Rabbi said King Solomon was right? Who should we believe then?”

  “That’s right,” Ruthie Berkov added. “The chief Rabbi wouldn’t lie. That would be a sin.”

  Guttle bit her lip. What had she done? How could she not have seen this coming? She looked to Rebecca for help. The Doctor merely shook her head. The older girls smiled; they knew the Chief Rabbi was Rebecca’s husband.

  Guttle felt trapped — even a bit afraid, though she could not put a name to the fear. “I’m going to stop for today,” she said. “You have a lot to think about. The truth is, I, too, have a lot to think about. That’s what science does. It makes you think.” She felt cold sweat break out on her brow. “Tomorrow, perhaps Doctor Simcha will tell you how Galileo proved what he did. About what is called the scientific method. We’ll also learn some more German words.”

  She moved to the door and pulled it open. The girls donned their coats and filed out into the lane, inured, like everyone, to the stench. Rebecca approached Guttle with a shake of her head. “You had to start with th
at? By contradicting Solomon? By dark it will be everywhere.”

  “I was only marking time for you. The lesson didn’t go as I’d planned.”

  “With smart students it never will.”

  “My own daughter! I wanted to slap her face. I also wanted to kiss her.” Guttle slipped into her coat. “Still, we might as well get all the fighting behind us now. Establish our freedom to teach the truth, right at the beginning.”

  “You’re more of a troublemaker than I thought.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Rebecca kissed Guttle’s cheek. “I didn’t say it was bad.”

  Guttle put her arms around the Doctor; in Meyer’s absence she longed for human touch. “Did you see their faces?” she asked. “The glow in their eyes? They just got their first little glimpse over the walls.”

  Walking home, putting Schönche’s question from her mind, Guttle felt exhilarated. A confusion that had undermined her understanding of herself for as far back as she could remember seemed to have been resolved through her defiance in starting the school. She had often wondered which was the essence of her, the true Guttle: her fantasies and dreams, her conversations with Melka and Jennie Aron and Madame Antoine, her whimsical inner opera — or the things she did each day in the lane: making a home for Meyer, raising the children, cooking, cleaning. But the school itself had begun as one of her fantasies — which after ten years she and Rebecca had made real. She saw now that the opposing parts of her were of equal significance — were not even opposing. She would not be Guttle Schnapper Rothschild without escaping into her fantasies when desired — and emptying life’s chamber pots when necessary. She would not be whole without the interplay of the physical universe and her imagined one — just as the world would not be the world without the earth, but it also would not be the world without the heavens. Perhaps this is the burden and the challenge of human life: the task of choosing, every instant, between infinite dualities. Perhaps she would not end up insane after all

  That evening, with the children in bed, she sat again in Meyer’s chair, wearing a white sleeping gown and her pale blue robe, and turned to a passage in Numbers that she had been trying to read the night before. Something in it was calling to her, something related to the sadness she had seen in so many of the faces of the girls at the school. They were eager and excited, but when their faces were at rest they acquired a faraway burden beyond reckoning. She saw in them the same sadness that had lived within her when she was their age, a sadness beyond words or understanding, a perpetual sorrow that dwelled even now in a pocket of her heart.

  She read again where Moses and Aaron sought water for their people in the desert:

  And Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying:

  Take the staff

  and assemble the community, you and Aaron your brother;

  you are to speak to the boulder before their eyes

  so that it gives forth water,

  thus you are to bring out for them water from the boulder,

  that you may give drink to the assembly and their cattle.

  So Moses took the staff from before the presence of Yahweh,

  as he had commanded him.

  And Moses and Aaron assembled the assembly facing the boulder.

  He said to them:

  Now hear, you rebels,

  from this boulder must we bring out water?

  And Moses raised his hand

  and struck the boulder with his staff, twice,

  so that abundant water came out;

  and the community and their cattle drank.

  Now Yahweh said to Moses and to Aaron:

  Because you did not have trust in me

  To treat me as holy before the eyes of the children of Israel,

  therefore:

  You shall not bring this assembly into the land that I am giving them.

  Guttle paused. She read the passage again. She pondered Yahveh’s stern words, wondered at them, and grew disturbed. She knew that Moses had not been allowed to enter the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, with his followers; he had died in sight of it. She had always heard he was being punished for some terrible sin. But no, this was the place in the Torah where Yahweh had decided to keep him out! Exactly here!

  She read the passage yet another time, with mounting trepidation. God had told Moses to speak to the boulder so that it would give water; instead, Moses had hit it with his staff. In this small manner he had disobeyed God. But was that so terrible an offense, in the context of his life? Moses, who upon Yahweh’s instruction had led the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt? Who had stopped them from worshipping idols? Who had been entrusted with the Ten Commandments by Yahweh Himself? Moses, who would guide his people across the desert for forty years? The supreme leader of the Jews! Yet in the eyes of God — in one angry instant — Moses was found not worthy of the Promised Land, the land that flowed with milk and honey. Because just this once — in this one small action — he had disobeyed.

  Guttle found her lower lip trembling, pressed her fingers to it, felt an avalanche of insight about to crash down upon her. If Moses was not good enough in the eyes of Yahweh, how could any of us hope to be? What are we, compared to the great Prophet? To surpass Moses we would have to be perfect. But God Himself had made us flawed! We can never hope to please Him entirely.

  This unexpected understanding watered her eyes, as if they were a garden in need. The walls enclosing the lane, the locked gates, were unjust, obscene, hateful, the cause of infinite sadness stoically borne. Some day they must be torn down; she and Meyer must pledge themselves anew to that goal, must work to lead their people, one bright day, out of the Judengasse. But the walls, she now understood, were not the true cause of unutterable regret. In this one unfair passage in the Torah lay the reason for Melka and Jennie Aron and her other fantasies. This one passage was why Pincus Cohen played his mournful fiddle tunes, why Hiram Liebmann drew his dark pictures, why Viktor Marcus sang sad arias alone in the cemetery, perhaps even why the Gentile Goethe wrote his unforgiving books. Because, like herself, deep in their souls they knew they were not good enough. They knew that no Promised Land awaited them.

  In this one dire passage in Numbers, it appeared, lay the origin of sorrow.

  Only her husband, she thought, seemed to be an exception. Of all the people she knew, only Meyer Amschel had never evinced a reason to doubt himself.

  “Mama!”

  It was Nathan again, frightening himself with a dream. She set down the book and hurried, barefoot, up the stairs to him, her toughest child by day, the most in need at night. She kissed his forehead and sat beside him while he drifted off again into his nocturnal caves. She wished she knew how to light a lamp in them.

  Returning to the chair, exhausted from the emotions and confrontations of the past few days, Guttle herself fell asleep, the sacred book open in her lap.

  She was awakened by the most dread word in the Judengasse. At first she thought it was part of a nightmare, the kind that made her clutch Meyer’s arm for comfort, in the hope that he would turn to her in his sleep and embrace and distract and protect her. But Meyer was not there, and when she heard the terrible word a second time she knew she was awake.

  “Fire!” someone was shouting down below. “There’s a fire in the lane!”

  Could this be true? A whimper of panic sliced through her grogginess like a sharp knife through brisket. She rose from her chair too quickly, grabbed her belly as she felt the baby move. A moment later she was climbing the stairs, looking in on the children. Both of the bedrooms were dark, no sign of flames. “Baruch atau Adonai,” she murmured. Blessed art Thou, O Lord. In the kitchen she made sure the woodstove was properly damped, then hurried down to the bedroom where she put on her slippers with growing apprehension; fire had destroyed large sections of the Judengasse three times in the century. Pulling her robe tighter around her, she stepped out into the lane. At first all looked normal. Then she saw the glow of lamps starting to illuminate many apartme
nt windows, realized that people were scurrying over the cobbles. They were running from the north, as if fleeing a fire’s heat, but in that direction she saw no flames. Following the crowd as it flowed with unspoken fear around the scimitar curve of the lane, she saw the illusion of flames shadow-dancing on the last house before the cemetery — but not the terrible brightness of unconfined fire. She began to walk quickly; were it not for the baby in her she would have run.

  A hand gripped her shoulder. It was Rebecca. “Do you think?” the Doctor shouted over the noise in the lane. Guttle didn’t answer. When they curled around the bend they could see it for themselves, and smell its appetite. The last house on the east side — the River View — the two-day-old Moses Mendelssohn Academy for Girls — was clothed in orange and yellow flames. A breeze off the river was carrying to them the smell of smoke, and something more sinister.

  “This can’t be!” Guttle cried out, weakly, wanting to vomit, and she began to run in spite of her swollen belly, the Doctor running behind her, passing silhouettes of men, women and some children hurrying along the cobbles. As they got closer they saw the flames reflected like an undulating line in the sewage ditch, heard the voice of Joshua Lamb, the fire captain, shouting, “More water! Every man get a pail and carry water!” Men already were scurrying behind the last house near the cemetery, where there was a pump and buckets, and hauling filled buckets across the lane. When Guttle and Rebecca were within ten metres of the school they saw that the filled buckets were not being emptied onto the flames, but were were being splashed on the wood facade of the adjoining house. It was clear that the River View, with flames already licking at the third floor, could not be saved; the men were trying to prevent the fire from grabbing hold of the adjoining house, and moving up the lane like a ravenous beast.