The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

  “Someone really hates us,” Rebecca muttered, shaking her head from side to side.

  “No one would do that!” Guttle stared into the blinding white centers of the flames as she pressed behind a crowd of onlookers. She looked toward the heavens for an answer, her eyes beginning to tear from smoke and grief. She recalled something Meyer had told her the Talmud claimed — that the Torah had been written with black fire on white fire.

  “Do you smell it?” Rebecca said into her ear. “Burning oil.”

  The two women pushed through the crowd to the front. They could hear the fire devouring the inside now, had to shield their eyes against the ash-blown heat.

  “The fire wall is holding,” a familiar man, his face dark with soot, shouted to the fire

  captain, clanking down an empty pail. They realized it was Yussel.

  “So far,” Lamb replied.

  Yelling above the crackling roar, which could devour words as well as wood and paint, Guttle, her eyes shut by thick smoke, asked the captain, “Was it purposely lit?”

  “It appears that way.” He had to shout back, though he stood not a metre away.

  “How could anyone do such a thing?”

  “A splash of oil. A match.”

  “Did anyone see who?”

  “I doubt it, in the dark. With only the cemetery across the way.”

  “You’ll try to find out?”

  “Of course.”

  Turning to to Rebecca, she said, “A short-lived school,” and wiped streams of tears from her cheeks. The two women embraced, held each other, their faces flickering yellow and orange, heat pouring over them, bits of floating ash settling on their shoulders. The throng behind them stood mute as it watched with respect the flames devour the house like a great orange rat devouring cheese; they were tense, waiting to see if the metal fire wall would hold until the end. If it melted, or collapsed, and the next building caught, they would rush back to their homes, awaken all the children, begin hauling their dearest possessions into the lane while praying the flames didn’t leap across the ditch to the other side; if it did, the entire Judengasse could burn to the ground; they would have no place to live.

  Guttle felt that somehow the scene was Biblical. Was this a punishment, a plague? “Was Yahweh opposed to the school?” she wondered aloud. Her tears had stopped. There was no point.

  “It wasn’t Yahweh who splashed the oil,” Rebecca said.

  From within the burning house they heard a heavy beam crashing down. With sudden remembrance, Guttle screamed. “Georgi! Where’s Georgi?”

  Trembling, she scanned the crowd. The fire had turned their faces into pumpkins. She pushed among them, calling “Georgi! Georgi Kremm! Are you out here?”

  A murmur swirled like an eddy of smoke through those who remembered that the Christian boy lived on the third floor. Guttle rushed to the front, grabbed the arm of Joshua Lamb. “Georgi Kremm lives up there! Have you seen him come out?”

  “Not since I arrived,” the captain shouted over the fire’s roar.

  “Mein Gott!, he might still be in there! Can someone go in?” But her soot-filled eyes told her the answer before the captain spoke, and as if in response another large beam exploded onto the floor inside the house, a fireworks of sparks visible through the gaps in the flames.

  “No one can go in,” the captain yelled. “The upper floors will soon collapse, and the roof.”

  “He might be trapped up there!”

  “Then he’d best be praying,” the captain said.

  Sweating men in nightshirts or dark robes still were hauling water across the lane, splashing the adjoining house; its facade glinted wet in the firelight. Some of the men, suddenly too weary to hurl their buckets, set them down and stood to rest their arms. Others were scurrying into the second adjoining house, climbing to its roof, emptying buckets onto the roof of the first. Occasionally a lone woman or child shrieked in fear.

  “We should get things out of the house!” one wife could be heard urging during a momentary lull in the roar.

  “And put them where?” Her husband tried to calm her. “Everyone will lose everything — or no one will. It’s up to Yahweh now.”

  People were coughing, moving further up the smoke-filled lane, away from the fire. Frantic, having trouble breathing, Guttle searched for Rebecca with her arms outstretched, like a blind person, found her, grabbed the sleeve of her blouse. She realized that Rebecca was dressed, must have been at the hospital. “Georgi may be up there,” she said, trying not to clench her teeth around the words, not to clench her mind around the prospect of Georgi’s fate. The Doctor, her face a grim and forlorn mask, said nothing.

  The boy, no longer a boy, would in three days no longer be a Christian. Georgi Kremm was twenty-six years old; in three days he would complete his year of Jewish studies with Rabbi Simcha and would be circumcised; his name would become Georgi ben Avram. As he lay in bed that night on the third floor of the River View, he was deeply content. In the lane he had become far more comfortable with life than he ever had been on the farm with his mother and the “uncles” who came and went like flies in August and were just as welcome. He was glad that now when he was troubled he could talk directly to God, instead of seeking out a priest, which he had never done. He was not eager to be circumcised, the thought of it made him wince, he did not understand why the God of the Jews demanded this, but if Abraham had withstood the pain at the age of ninety-nine and become father to a nation, then he, Georgi, would drink a lot of schnapps, put a piece of spruce molding between his teeth, and survive. When his skin had healed he would be able to ask for the hand of Misha Marcus. To endure both the pain of study and the pain of the knife to become a Jew — surely her father would accept him then.

  He had drifted off to sleep on a vision of Misha’s lovely hands. Now, hours later, waking, he felt too warm — from his lustful dream, he thought — and threw off his blanket. But he grew even warmer, and then he heard crackling sounds and getting out of bed saw the image of flames on the ghetto wall across from his third-floor window, and knew that something was burning. From the window he could not see what it was — he could see nothing but the wall flickering orange in the night. He turned toward the closed door; smoke had begun to seep under it; he began to cough, at the same time realizing that the school itself was on fire.

  He threw open the window to see if he should jump. The drop was high, he might break his legs. He leaned out to breathe fresh air, and looking down saw a mass of flames rising toward him, as if the ground below were a pool of burning oil. He dared not jump into that.

  The smoke from under the door was thickening, clouding the room. Grabbing the blanket from his bed he wrapped it over his nightshirt and pulled open the door. A beaded curtain of flame hung in his path. Through it he glimpsed the staircase smoldering but not yet gone. Holding the blanket around him with one hand he threw his other arm across his eyes and hurled himself into the fire. He smelled a foul smell that was his own hair being singed. The floor boards of the landing were beginning to burn, flames licking at his feet through the gaps. He reached the top of the stairs and started down. The heat was intense. The banister was crumbling charcoal, he could not hold on. At the first landing he batted at flames as if they were swarms of hornets and continued down, and stepped into vacant air where the steps were gone and fell to the smoldering floor among burning chairs. The fire danced all around him; three of the four walls were blazing. He lay still for a moment, rubbed a throbbing ankle, twisted his torso in each direction, seeking a way out. A roar like crackling thunder rumbled above and a huge object crashed to the ground, seemed to break apart as it landed, one side falling off, a white form spilling onto the floor as the fallen object settled on its side, reflecting flames. Struggling to his feet, bending low, Georgi edged closer and saw what looked like a metal coffin among the smoking boards, and beside it a Torah scroll, its crown of gold flashing white in the flames like a cry for help. He tried to grasp this miracle, a Tor
ah falling from Heaven — I need to rescue it, he thought, it is the sacred word of Yahweh, it saved me from … so much. But his body was jolted with pain as his blanket caught fire. Throwing it off, he rushed headlong through the flames, head tucked into his chest, neck seared now by a falling ember, and saw a gap where the front door had been. He rushed through it and burst out into the lane, where he stumbled, fell to the cobbles, gasping, realizing he had been holding his breath inside against the thickening smoke till his chest felt ready to explode out through his nose, his mouth, his throat, even his eyes. On his hands and knees, he inhaled the air like a dog lapping water.

  “Mein Gott! It’s him!” Seeing this apparition expel itself from the burning school like a cannon ball Guttle ran to him, too close to the fire, wanted to hug him, was afraid she’d touch a place where he was burned and cause him agony. He smelled only of smoke, not of man. Seeing a bucket of water left by one of the men she dipped her hands in it, scooped up what her palms would hold, offered him drink. He shook his head, pushed himself up, gulping smokier air. She saw that his hair had been singed, that part of his nightshirt had burned away. He bent and gripped his right ankle, pressed it tenderly. Guttle felt faint when she saw a piece of bone sticking through the blistered skin.

  “You’re hurt, but thank God you’re alive,” she said. “We thought you were … I should have run in but. . .”

  Georgi leaned on her, wincing when weight came down on his right foot. “Water,” he rasped, pointing to the bucket.

  Guttle knelt and cupped her hands in it again and let him lap it from between her palms.

  “Your robe,” he said. The hoarse sound of his voice was painful. “Take off your robe.”

  “Why? I have only a nightshirt on.”

  What was she thinking? He must be cold! She opened her robe and slipped out of it, handed it to him, crossed her arms over her breasts. Georgi rolled the robe into a ball and pushed it deep into the bucket of water, and held it there, then pulled it out, dripping, and stretched it over his shoulders. Of course, she thought, he was burning, not cold.

  “Hand me the bucket,” he said.

  Others were trying to crowd around. The fire captain was shoving them back. “Give him room,” he was saying. “Let him breathe. He almost died in there.”

  Rebecca pushed through to see if she could help. After a quick look she said, “We need to get him to the hospital. On a board. He can’t walk on that leg.”

  “The bucket,” Georgi said again.

  Guttle shrugged and picked up the bucket. Half the water was gone.

  “Pour it over my head.”

  Guttle looked at Rebecca. The Doctor nodded. She overturned the bucket above his head, watched it soak his blackened hair, his face, drip onto her soaking robe. He took a step toward the burning house, a grimace visible in his flickering face, then another step.

  “Wait!” Guttle shouted into the fire’s rushing wind. “This way!” She reached out a hand to him; she feared stepping closer, burning planks from the front wall were falling beside him. He ignored her proffered hand.

  “He’s disoriented,” Rebecca said. “The heat, the smoke.”

  “No,” Georgi yelled. “I have to go back in.”

  “What?” Guttle and Rebecca cried the word at once.

  “There’s a Torah in there. I have to rescue it.”

  He was waving smoke from in front of his face.

  Melekh!

  The fire captain had come near to pull them back. “Get him away from there.”

  With a crash a burning plank fell in front of the captain, just missing him as he leaned back. It blazed between Guttle and Georgi, flames from the board obscuring Georgi’s legs.

  “We’ve got lots of Torahs!” Guttle screamed. “You can’t go back in.”

  “It’s the sacred word of Yahweh!”

  “Melka!” a woman in the crowd wailed. “Melka is burning! What will we do now?”

  “Georgi!” Rebecca shouted, but he was not listening any more. Turning away from them, pulling Guttle’s wet robe over his head, he pushed into the the mass of flames where for centuries the door to the River View had been, and disappeared.

  “Stop him!” Guttle cried, her face in the face of the fire captain, her eyes wild with fear, but she knew it was too late, that nothing could be done.

  The captain took her hand. “Frau Rothschild, Yahweh saved the lad a moment ago. Maybe He will save him again. There’s none of us humans can.”

  Blistered segment of skin sizzles on his scalp. He staggers under the soaked blanket, heavy as the past. Finds the black hole of a fiery door, pushes through, ankle cutting like a butcher’s knife, eyes stinging in the smoke, peers this way, that, all ways burning, smoke thick as morning fog, smelly as musket spit — coughs, coughs again, mouth dry as autumn hay — sees the gleaming crown between the flames — that way! — ember ashes hot beneath his feet, booming sounds above like artillery. Peering up into ash falling like snow he sees flames wrestling beams, his ankle twists, scalds on a blackened pan. He falls to a knee, hot handle poking his groin, drops to his other knee, sweat coating his body like grease, his uncle’s hand pushing him down, stinking like rotted cheese or chicken shit, doesn’t the bastard ever wash? Twisting from the hot metal — palm stings as he pushes down on hot ash — turn away will you I’ll shove a musket up your ass, squeeze the trigger I will. Heat or suck making him dizzy. He turns — where is the Torah, the coffin? Lashes out with a punch to his uncle’s groin, uncle screaming as he falls or is that him screaming from a burning board bouncing off his back? Eyes tearing from smoke and flame and shame — run, hide, say you ran from the recruiters, no one need know the truth. Flames like angel wings point, he sees the gleam of the coffin, stumbles toward it, trips over the fallen lid, the soaked blanket catches on a post as on a restraining hand, twists away, pulls itself half off, he is exposed. There is the Torah. Flames surround it. He cannot breathe he must get out the pain is too much he must get both of them out. Hurls himself through a storm of fire to a clearing of white ash, falls to his knees, ankle like a smith’s hot iron in his leg. Lifts the Torah still wearing its crown of gold, scroll heavy as lead itself, have to get it out — works blistering hands beneath the scroll, it budges off the ground, he strains to pull it higher, cradles it to his chest, tries to stand, to drag his shattered leg through the ember glow, ignoring the pain, stooped by the weight, but moving. When like a tree falling unseen a roof beam falling knocks him prone, his body covering the Torah like a lover. Has to get up but the beam won’t lift. No feeling in his hands. His back is broken. Cries for help but only croaks — no matter, no one can rush in now. Cradles the Torah beneath him, the warm parchment, the soft sweet cheek of God, as the roof collapses, crashes down, a burning wooden tent covers him, pain ascendant like a shofar’s wail till in the highest octave of scream it calls down upon itself a cooling light. His blistered forehead falls into the melting Torah crown. One leg twitches, stops. His face is white as a Jew.

  Late that afternoon, as Meyer returned from his journey, the horse reacted first, rearing up, refusing to enter the stable, before Meyer smelled the residual smoke. Zig Zigmund grabbed the reins, somehow calmed the horse and led him in, told Meyer about the fire. His mind still stuck in the castle killing, Meyer could barely comprehend. “Burned to the ground?” After all of Guttle’s work … “I don’t believe it.” But in the wind rushing up from the river like a teller of tales he smelled the truth of it. “In the night? Then it was empty, no one was hurt.”

  “Just the Christian fellow.”

  “Georgi lives there! Not badly?”

  “He’s gone. Rushed into the burning house like a Dummkopf, and the roof collapsed.”

  “Georgi was no dummy!”

  “Maybe Adonai doesn’t want converts.”

  The story did not make sense. Meyer told Zig he would settle his bill later, and he hurried into the lane, carrying the case of clothing he had taken to Hesse-Kassel. He saw Guttle’s f
ather standing in front of the Owl, looking toward a faint spiral of smoke still rising at the south end.

  “Guttle — how is Guttle?” Meyer asked.

  “Papa! Papa’s home!” Nathan shrieked as he ran out of the Owl doorway and leaped into Meyer’s arms. Meyer pulled the boy’s head to his chest, knelt and covered his face with kisses.

  “There was a fire, Papa! Georgi went to heaven, because he tried to save the Torah.”

  “Yes, I heard,” Meyer said. To Wolf Schnapper he added, “Where is Guttle?”

  “Sleeping,” Nathan answered. “She told us not to bother her.”

  Meyer stood and rubbed the boy’s red hair and looked at Schnapper. “I can’t believe it. And what’s this about a Torah?” The court Jew told him what details were known, and about the funeral for Georgi Kremm that would begin in an hour.

  “They poured oil and lit a match?” Meyer was incredulous.

  Schnapper shrugged, as if to say, What is there to say?

  Meyer told Nathan to stay with his grandpa, that he wanted to speak with Guttle alone, Walking down the lane, he left his case in front of the Green Shield, continued toward the south end. He realized what was strange about the lane. No one was visible. It was as if the fire had sucked out all the air and driven the people inside.

  As he neared the south gate the smell of smoke and the sickening sight assaulted his nose, his eyes, like acid. There was no more River View, no Mendelssohn Academy, just this wide sore pocked with ash and rubble, spits of smoke rising here and there, the ash blackened by water so the fire would not flare. A woodstove still stood, its bent pipe leaning into the air like unfinished business. Twisted metal poked from the ash, the remains of lamps, of pots from the kitchen. The lead coffin lay on its side, the lid in the rubble not far away. The metal fire wall was charred in places, had buckled in other places, but gleamed in the afternoon light. “Thank you, Adonai, at least for that,” Meyer murmured, but bit his lip in memory of the boy whom Guttle had saved.