The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘No,’ I admitted, thinking over any possible reference I could remember from the Gospels or the Epistles to Sunday. ‘It was the day of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and it is indeed referred to as the “first” day of the week. But I have no idea when Christians actually chose to set that day aside for rest and worship.’ I made a mental note to ask Arthur to find out for me. He has many very erudite friends.

  My friends led me past Petticoat Lane, which was, they assured me, the very heart of the East End, and down the Whitechapel Road. We left it for Fieldgate Street, passing an old synagogue whose open doors revealed dim lights and a group of men within, crossed over to the other side, and ignoring a dingy little way on the right bearing the euphemistic denomination of Greenfield Road, we turned into narrow little Settles Street. There were not many people about, but those that were there, hurrying along, looked to me like folks from an ancient tale. There were stout, weary women wearing wigs and many ample layers of skirts, bearded men wearing heavy black coats and hats, with long locks of hair dangling quaintly on either side of their faces. The streets were muddy and lined with shabby tenements. The whole place oddly had the air of a rather tumbledown village, except that (in spite of the street names) I have rarely seen anything less reminiscent of fields and greens and gates.

  Jonathan and Amy stopped in front of one of the tenement houses, entered the main door, which stood ajar, and knocked loudly at the door of a flat on the ground floor. We heard shuffling and children’s voices, the door opened suddenly, and a young woman greeted Jonathan and Amy warmly, joyfully, beckoning us all inside. I was surprised and greatly struck by her appearance and manner.

  Rivka Mendel is the most astonishing example I have ever seen of a woman living at the crossroads between two separate worlds. In the dim light of the hall, she seemed extremely young to me – no older than Emily, I should have said. But as we stepped into the firelit front room, I saw lines of weariness on her face that suddenly seemed to age her. Whether the round shape under her voluminous dress indicated that she was expecting a baby or had had one quite recently, or both, I could not be sure, but the room was soon invaded by a tiny boy hardly bigger than Cedric – I reached for him spontaneously – and a baby of some seven or eight months who crawled in upon hands and knees. Ignoring the guests, these arrivals climbed simultaneously upon their mother and proceeded to vociferate demands. Rivka sat down, somewhat heavily, and gathering them to her, indicated to us that we should take off our wraps and sit down. She did not excuse herself for the children, nor remove them to some distant region of the flat, nor even seem to see anything amiss in their noisy presence, as I realised that I often did with Cedric and Cecily when guests appeared and I thought they might be put out by the noisily joyful disorder and racket.

  ‘Dovidl will be home any moment,’ said Rivka with a voice whose slight echo of weariness did not cover a lilting note of happiness. ‘It will be time for Havdalah, and then we’ll have dinner. I am so happy to meet you,’ she added, turning to Emily and to me. ‘Look Samuel, look Eliel,’ she added to the swarming boys, ‘the lady is making shadow animals on the wall! Look – a wolf! A rabbit? Oh, that is pretty! You must show me how you do it!’

  ‘Woof, woof,’ said the intelligent tot, climbing off his mother and toddling over to the wall to touch the shadows I was making with my folded hands. It is an art that I have developed to some perfection in the nursery, and it never fails to fascinate children of all ages.

  ‘Woof-woof DOG,’ I informed him educationally.

  ‘He doesn’t speak much yet, though he is nearly two,’ Rivka told me. ‘It’s probably because he is growing up in a mix of languages. I speak English with him, of course, but I am the only person who does so. His father and the rest of his family speak to him in Yiddish.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what Yiddish is,’ said Amy. ‘It’s the language spoken by Jews from the East, from Poland and Germany and thereabouts. It’s a kind of ancient hybrid German dialect full of Hebrew words, which is actually written out in the Hebrew letters, for those who can read them. But a person who knows German can understand at least something of spoken Yiddish.’

  ‘And have you learnt to speak it?’ I asked Rivka.

  ‘I have learnt a lot,’ she smiled, ‘since I have been living here. I understand it reasonably well and can make myself understood. I’m not sure that the reading will ever come really easily to me, though.’

  At this moment the front door banged to and a cheerful and eminently British voice shouted, ‘Here I am, Rivkele! Time for the blessings!’

  And a perfectly wonderful young man pushed aside the curtain, which hung in front of the door, and made his appearance with a smile of sheer delight on his face.

  David Mendel’s entrance into the low, crowded room was like a breath of fresh air. It provided an immediate and incontrovertible solution to the puzzle of the choice of this lovely girl, who had renounced a life of relatively carefree liberty (certainly, girls suffer a thousand restrictions in our decorous society, yet modern girls with character, such as Amy and Emily, are not absolutely prevented from carving out their lives much as they will) for a life of crowded poverty, straitened means and innumerable children, in a world foreign to her yet out of which she might virtually never step again. I suddenly remembered Shakespeare’s odd words and eke most lovely Jew – I had always wondered what he meant. Anyone, I thought, might easily fall in love with this young man, in whom remarkable beauty, especially about the ardent black eyes, was conjugated with a radiant aura of tenderness, spirituality and inspiration. It is something which can be found only in deeply religious people. Seeing him made it clear to me at once that the traditional Christian discourse on the subject of Israelites and their religion much maligns them. I reminded myself anxiously that this handsome young man with the shining eyes, who swung his little boy up into his arms and laid his hand lovingly on his wife’s shoulder, did not believe that Jesus Christ is our Saviour and Messiah, and the Son of God. But the thought had lost its usual power of provoking a feeling of shocked awe within me. Instead, I had a sudden, fleeting vision of the Heavenly Host laughing at our foolish enmities and rigid convictions. I smiled.

  Wine and spices had been laid out on a white cloth, together with a lit braided candle, on the small dining table in a corner of the room. We stood in a group around this table, Emily and I stealing awkward and respectful glances at the others to see how they behaved, while David pronounced a series of Hebrew blessings over these objects, touching the glass of wine, smelling the spices and holding his hand to the candlelight and then to the firelight as he chanted. The procedure was utterly foreign to me, and yet it did not seem strange, for he performed it with the same air of infinite familiarity that I feel when chanting ‘Sing a song of sixpence’ or ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ for the twins.

  Coming to an end, he extinguished the candle by pouring a little red wine over it, and turned to me.

  ‘Havdalah means separation,’ he said. ‘These prayers separate our holy day from the mundane remainder of the week. Now that we have become mundane once again, let us proceed to have dinner. Shall you get it, Rivkele? I’ll hold the baby.’ Rivka disappeared into the kitchen, whither Amy followed her, not before a short whispered conversation with her brother whose words I could not catch. While the young women prepared the meal, we played with the two tiny boys who swarmed cheerfully over our knees and under our chairs, and tried to play successively with the fire tongs, the lamp and the bread knife. As sitting and dining room together, the place was filled with that type of appurtenance which is of essential use to adults and of great danger to children, so that I was continually on the qui vive, although their father seemed perfectly at ease letting them do exactly as they liked, contenting himself with removing from their little hands any object which appeared too pointed or sharp for comfort, and consoling the indignant cries which invariably followed this act with a sudden medley of songs and dances.

  �
��Perhaps we could move into the nursery,’ I finally said, after Samuel had brought a tin cup down energetically on little Eliel’s head. ‘Would not the babies be safer and more comfortable there?’

  ‘There is no nursery here. Apart from this room, there is only the bedroom. Our home is very small, and we cannot yet afford anything better,’ replied David in a relaxed tone of voice indicating neither surprise nor offence at my awkward miscalculation of the situation. Rising, he opened the door leading out of the modest sitting room and showed me a bedroom whose tiny proportions caused me a pang of mingled discomfort and guilt. The children’s two little cribs were pushed into a corner, separated from the rest of the room only by a thick dark blue curtain looped onto a string nailed to the ceiling, which now hung open. A few, very few scattered toys lay on the floor around these little cribs. For the rest, the room contained only a larger bed, a row of clothes hung on nails and a rickety little dressing table with a crooked mirror. A door led into a tiny bathroom with a tin bath in the middle of it, and another led out into a small, dirty stone courtyard.

  The boys scrambled into their familiar little space the moment the door was opened, but we could not follow them, as the bedroom was far too exiguous to contain us all. David pulled his chair near to the bedroom door to keep an eye on them, and we continued to talk cheerfully about children and sundry other subjects. Suddenly we heard a tremendous crash in the kitchen, followed by a cry of dismay.

  We all jumped up, but before we reached the kitchen door, it opened from inside, and Amy, thrusting her head through the crack, said quickly and nervously, ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing. Rivka dropped the serving platter. She says can you get her the silver tureen instead.’

  I saw Jonathan throw the briefest of glances in her direction, and their eyes met instantaneously. I thought she gave a minuscule nod, but it annoyed me to find myself unable to penetrate their singular mode of communication further.

  Unaware of their little exchange, and seeing nothing more than a household accident where I suspected some sudden emotion, David reached up to the top shelf of a dresser which held a number of cheerfully mismatched dishes and glasses in its various recesses.

  ‘Ah, I shall eat out of this with pleasure!’ he said, lifting down an item certainly astonishing to behold in the modest, dark little apartment: a splendid, heavy soup tureen of silver, with handles richly decorated with entwined bunches of silver grapes and leaves.

  ‘What a noble tureen you have there,’ I remarked.

  ‘It was our wedding gift from Jonathan and Amy’s parents,’ he smiled, handing it into the kitchen where it was received with eager hands. ‘It is so impressive that we do not use it as often as we might. It certainly is Aunt Judith all over, isn’t it,’ he added, turning to Jonathan.

  ‘You mean ostentatious and bourgeois?’ said Jonathan, with a hint of coldness.

  ‘Maybe a little taste of that, but above all something solidly worthy, no cheating with appearances, and actually rather regal,’ answered David, whose good humour was truly invincible.

  Emerging from the kitchen, Amy and Rivka now cleared away the objects of the Havdalah ceremony from the table and, pulling it a little away from the wall, they redecked it with a gay embroidered cloth and set the tureen in the centre of it. David helped them lay the table with chipped and bent oddments from the dresser whose modesty made the table resemble a crowd of beggars besieging the Queen’s carriage, and we settled around it, Rivka holding her older son upon her lap, while the baby crawled about at our feet with a crust of bread tightly clutched in his little fist.

  Uncovered, the tureen revealed a meal of lentils, upon which swam a few lonely pieces of mutton. It was, however, comfortably warm and fragrant, and as hunger is the best sauce, we were soon regaling ourselves in communal pleasure. I knew that Amy was longing to introduce the subject which had brought us to her cousin’s home, but she waited patiently until the meal had been consumed, the dishes carried away and a dense almond cake had appeared, accompanied by a pot of tea.

  ‘Let us tell them now, shall we?’ she said, when everyone was sitting around the table in a state of replete peacefulness. ‘David, Rivka, now is the time to discuss the details of why we want to ask for your help. We hope that when you know exactly what is going on, you will feel as we do about what must be done.’

  She described Professor Ralston and his murder in a few strong sentences, laying emphasis on the factual murder, and on the strange contradictory evidence about the timing, and stressing the anti-Semitic activities of the man, and the important role played by the mysterious rabbi. Rivka and David listened intently. Rivka made no comment, but pressed her lips together nervously and glanced at her husband. David, however, was extremely surprised by our tale.

  ‘You don’t think the man you saw was a rebbe from here?’ he said, turning to Jonathan.

  ‘I think it almost certain,’ was the reply. ‘From where else could he be? We absolutely need to find him.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said David slowly. ‘Are you sure it wouldn’t be best to leave the whole thing alone? What could a rebbe from here have to do with a murder? Why bring trouble on him?’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Amy, Jonathan and I all spoke simultaneously.

  ‘I for one am duty bound to look for him as best I can, with or without help,’ I said. ‘It is my job.’

  ‘The police are looking for him too,’ said Jonathan. ‘We need to find him first!’

  ‘No, but David – don’t you see?’ burst out Amy. ‘If he is being hunted for by detectives and by police, he will be found, sooner or later, and then he will certainly be arrested, and if he cannot tell the police who the real murderer is and convince them that he has nothing to do with it, he will be accused and brought to trial himself!’

  ‘That mustn’t happen!’ cried Rivka, with a sudden look of pain.

  ‘Vanessa has to do her best to find out what really happened,’ said Jonathan, more calmly. ‘And I think we must help her to go as far as possible while avoiding the police. Surely you do not want them invading the East End, searching houses, questioning people and making arrests, as is certain to happen soon enough if no progress is made – if it is not already beginning, without our knowing it?’

  David threw himself back in his chair. Clouds passed in front of the sunshine.

  ‘Even if you are right,’ he said reluctantly, ‘what do you think I could do? There are dozens, if not hundreds of rebbes in this part of town.’

  ‘What we were thinking, though,’ said Amy gently, ‘is that most of the rebbes from here, the real Hassidim, I mean, are not likely to leave and go into town very often, are they? They scarcely ever do leave their homes or their shul – they could hardly do it without being noticed, could they?’

  David writhed in his chair and grew a little hot, as the idea of actually participating in an investigation to locate an errant rabbi gathered reality.

  ‘What is shul?’ I asked, in order to distract him.

  ‘It is our study house,’ he answered me. ‘It isn’t exactly like a synagogue, which would be closer, I suppose, to your church. Synagogue is where the Shabbat and festival services take place. The shul is often in the synagogue, or next to it if there are two rooms, but it is the place where we students congregate to study Talmud and Mishnah, the texts and the commentaries on the Torah – the Law.’

  ‘You are a student there? I thought you worked in the City,’ I said in surprise.

  ‘I do work in the City. But every Jew is a student,’ he answered. ‘I go to shul every free moment I have, though it is little compared to those who are fortunate enough to be able to study all day.’

  ‘It must leave little time for your home and family,’ I observed.

  ‘David’s home is always here, waiting for him. It is not going anywhere,’ said Rivka. Her eyes met those of her husband lovingly, and her fingertips brushed his.

  ‘I suppose it is not so very different from what my husband does,�
�� I mused. ‘After all, though he generally returns home after his day of work, often enough he goes racing out again if some idea for his mathematical research comes upon him. I suppose there are many ways of spending one’s life in study.’

  ‘Let us return to the rebbe,’ said Amy with her usual single-mindedness. ‘Listen, David. Suppose that your own rebbe suddenly upped and went off to transact some private business in the City? Wouldn’t you hear something about it? I’ll bet the students here gossip plenty, and discuss every little detail concerning their teachers, just like students everywhere else.’

  ‘They do gossip,’ said Rivka honestly. ‘Gossip in this community is more than you can imagine. And the strange thing is, that there is so very little to gossip about. The people live the most regular lives, and almost everybody has far too much work to get into any kind of trouble. Yet the least little dispute in the marketplace gives rise to infinite discussion and analysis! Perhaps the most serious of the young men try to avoid engaging in gossip, in order to respect the Hassidic prescription against Loshen hara – “the evil tongue”, meaning speaking ill of people. But everybody I know gossips anyway! I myself learn everything that goes on from your brothers, Dovidl,’ she added, smiling.

  ‘You have brothers?’ I asked.

  ‘I have two brothers, Yakov and Ephraim,’ he said. ‘They are fifteen and eleven; they are just schoolboys. My mother works very hard as a hand in a tailor’s shop, and my father has a stand in the Sunday market and also spends much time in the shul, so the boys visit here very often. They love to come after school and play with their little nephews.’

  ‘Your little brothers probably know just about everything that goes on around here,’ said Amy firmly. ‘If any rebbe disappeared for an afternoon, you could find out about it, or they could. You must imagine it,’ she added, turning to me. ‘A Hassidic rebbe is hardly a private person: he is entirely given over to his disciples and students, and his time belongs to them. Even his wife is lucky to spend any time alone with him. He is solicited all the time, by people asking learned questions, or needing help, or wanting his judgement on some problem. And when nobody is soliciting him, he is likely to be surrounded by eager students drinking the words of wisdom from his lips.’ Turning to David, she added, ‘Have you yourself heard nothing at all about an unusual absence?’