The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘Is it possible? Could he really have done it? I don’t know him well at all, yet it is hard to believe. Could they not be making a mistake? Have you discovered anything yourself?’ he continued anxiously.

  ‘I have other leads,’ I said feebly, wondering inwardly at the rigid unwritten social rules that made it impossible for me to ask him directly whether his was not, after all, the hand that had held the gun. Yet the eyes that were looking at me were blue and kind, and expressed only a distressed worry.

  ‘Is Mr Lazare one of your leads?’ he asked.

  ‘Not exactly – not as the murderer, I mean – yet I do have some questions to ask him,’ I said.

  ‘I will be pleased to join you tomorrow morning, then,’ he replied, and shaking my hand courteously, he departed before I could ask him anything more, even if I had been able to formulate a question.

  I looked at the time, and seeing that it was nearing five o’clock, I decided to go to David and Rivka’s house immediately. Stepping smartly into the first dingy four-wheeler that passed, I directed him to Settles Street and sat back thoughtfully as we rolled off, trying to plan how best to tell them what had to be told. I wondered hopefully if they might not have learnt it already, by a telegram or a visit earlier in the day, but when Rivka opened the door in answer to my quick knock, I saw at once that she knew nothing. Amy must have had her hands full dealing with her distraught parents.

  ‘I am very sorry to be the one to bring you bad news,’ I said quickly, drawing a chair towards her. ‘It is about Jonathan: last night, after we left you, he was arrested.’

  ‘Arrested!’ she gasped. ‘Jonathan! But why? What have they arrested him for?’

  ‘For the murder, Rivka. Do you remember that I thought I saw a policeman spying on the rabbi last night? Well, he really was a policeman, but in fact he was spying on Jonathan. And others were waiting for us at our flat. They arrested him as soon as we arrived.’

  Rivka sat down; her face turned pale with horror, then chalk white. The baby sank in her weakened arms, and I hastened to bring her a glass of water and gather him up myself as she struggled to regain her composure. I worried that the little fellow might burst into shrieks, but he remained perfectly still, fixing enormous eyes on his mother and reducing the expression of his own little existence to the silent watchfulness that tends to overtake small children in unfamiliar circumstances. I watched her also, and the blank, childish terror in her eyes suddenly made me wonder, as I had the first time I saw her, how old she actually was.

  ‘Jonathan arrested – for murder! No, it’s impossible, impossible. No, this can’t be happening!’ she said in increasingly desperate tones, pressing her hands to her heart.

  ‘It doesn’t mean that he is guilty,’ I said quickly, unable to seriously entertain the possibility aloud in the face of such a reaction. ‘We need to help him by finding the true murderer. I need your help, Rivka, yours and David’s. We need to work together; we need to see the rabbi, Rabbi Avrom. Will David be home soon?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know when he will come. He is in shul,’ she said, her emotion giving way to a kind of exhausted dullness.

  ‘Is it nearby? Could I fetch him? It is an emergency,’ I said, beginning to feel slightly worried. Her face was whiter than ever. I stared at her, and it dawned on me with increasing dismay that what I was seeing was similar to what I had seen in Amy yesterday evening. Like Amy’s, Rivka’s reaction did not appear normal to me. I would have expected indignation, even anger, and a solid declaration of belief in his innocence. Instead what I saw was excessive shock and fear. Was she fending off the unbearable notion that Jonathan might actually be guilty?

  ‘Don’t be so frightened,’ I told her. ‘The rabbi will surely give us the proof that Jonathan is innocent. Rivka, what is the matter?’

  For answer she burst into tears.

  I felt a little at a loss; I could see there was something I should know, but I could not see how to get it out of her; the more she was frightened, the more she sank into incoherence, and the more I reassured her, the more she would be likely to take hold of herself and say nothing of whatever family secret I now began to suspect her of sharing. I hesitated, and at that moment, to my relief, the door was flung open and David himself burst into the room.

  ‘I couldn’t stay in shul, Rivka,’ he cried, rushing towards her. ‘I felt so uneasy – I felt something was wrong! I left suddenly and came running home. Oh, what is it, what is it?’ and he knelt next to her and took her in his arms.

  ‘Jonathan has been arrested,’ she said in a voice muffled by the shoulder against which her face was buried.

  ‘Jonathan! For our murder? That’s – why, that’s crazy!’ He turned to look up at me. ‘How can it be? I didn’t know anybody suspected him.’

  ‘Nobody did, I think, until yesterday,’ I said, and recounted yet again the story of the newspaper article and the paradox.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ he said. ‘But he didn’t do it, of course. He shouldn’t be in much danger. We will have to confront Reb Avrom, come what may. We will find some way to tell him what’s going on. If he knows it’s a question of life or death, the rebbe will listen!’ He turned back to his wife with a look of tender concern. She was sobbing harder than ever.

  ‘Rivkele, what’s the matter? It will be all right, you’ll see. We’ll get Jonathan out of there. The police have made a mistake, that’s all. What’s wrong?’ he added, in a strange tone, suddenly perceiving, as I had, that something deeper was upsetting her. I moved a little farther back, holding the baby – the older boy was nowhere to be seen – and made myself as inconspicuous as possible, for I thought that David had a better chance than myself of persuading her to express what was in her heart.

  ‘Arrested for murder,’ she wailed incoherently. ‘Oh, I should never have married you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he said, amazed. ‘Just because your cousin has been arrested by mistake? Rivkele, that’s nonsense. Of course you should have married me. I need you – aren’t you the one who draws water for me from the well? From the source of life?’ He put his arms around her shoulders more closely. I paused in my thoughts, struck by what he had just said. Was he referring to something from the Bible?

  ‘We must see what we can do to help your aunt and uncle,’ David continued. ‘I suppose they know of it already?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Amy went to them immediately after it happened, last night. I have not heard from her since.’

  ‘Poor Aunt Judith,’ said Rivka, making an effort to speak more normally. ‘She will be desperate. But Uncle Simon will take control. Perhaps they can visit Jonathan.’

  Everything came together in my mind at once. It was Rebecca with her pitcher who drew water from the well – Rebecca!

  And Uncle Simon, and Aunt Judith – Simon and Judith! I remembered the marriage certificate I had seen in Somerset House: Judith Gad and Simon Sachs, married in the Synagogue, in 1871. And I had not made the connection, because I had never heard the name of Uncle Simon, and Sachs was said to be a typical Jewish name.

  ‘Rivka’ – nothing but the Hebrew form of Rebecca. Rebecca, Judith Gad’s niece – Rebecca, Menachem Gad’s daughter! I have been scouring London for this girl, while seeing her every day.

  My God, I have been so blind! I turned to her, and the baby transferred his startled gaze from her face to mine.

  ‘You are Rebecca Gad, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I have just realised it – I should have known it before. You are Menachem Gad’s daughter. Now I understand why you and Amy are so frightened about Jonathan. You think he killed the professor because he had a good reason to do it. Is that what it is?’

  ‘No!’ she cried loudly, and sank half-fainting into her husband’s arms. ‘No, it isn’t that! Innocent, guilty, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s too late, too late. Arrested – put on trial – condemned!’ And she uttered a choked cry and closed her eyes, pressing her hands to them as though to shut o
ut the vision. And I understood what it was that she feared. It was that which she had already lived through once.

  ‘What does this mean? Who is Menachem Gad? What are you talking about? What about your father?’ said David urgently, staring back and forth between the two of us. ‘Rivka, what is this all about?’

  There was a silence while Rivka struggled with herself.

  ‘It would be better for you to tell your husband,’ I advised her softly. ‘If your father was innocent, then there is no dishonour in his death.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she said. ‘Then you are the only person I have ever heard say so. Dishonour – I don’t know, but there is pain. Too much pain,’ she continued, her face still buried in her hands. ‘Pain and terrible memories. I can’t bear to talk about it, after so many years of silence.’

  Pulling her hands away, he captured them in his, bending towards her with an expression on his face that reminded me of a half-forgotten moment in my own experience.

  I lay on my bed, the midwife near me; the birth pangs had been upon me for many hours already, and I was exhausted. Each one was followed by a little oasis of calm, but these oases were becoming shorter, and I did not know how I should find the courage and the strength to continue enduring the ever-increasing pain. I saw the door of my bedroom open suddenly, and Arthur, entering and crossing the room with a firm step in spite of the midwife’s annoyed exclamations of ‘Mr Weatherburn, sir! You must not come in here now!’ came up to me. Taking my hand in his, he bent close to me and said … some of those words which the normal course of daily life gives so few occasions to hear. They filled me with joy, they heartened and encouraged me, and I turned to him with a smile to tell him so, when I was suddenly submerged in a wave of pain stronger than ever. His face changed as he saw, and he looked at me with exactly the expression I saw on David’s features now, as he held his wife’s hands in his and looked into her eyes.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said softly.

  ‘My father was hanged, he was hanged for murder, for the horrible murder of a child,’ she cried, suddenly breaking down, ‘but he was innocent, David, he was innocent, I swear it. My father would never have killed a soul! He was a victim, no less than the little boy he was accused of murdering. They said – at the trial, David, they said – they said that he had done it for me, so that I should eat the matzah with … with the blood in it!’

  She stopped, overcome. David stared at her.

  ‘It was because of things such as these that we left the old country,’ he said.

  ‘They can happen everywhere, David,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it before, but I know it now.’

  We jumped, all three of us, at the sound of a sharp knock on the door. Nobody moved, and after a moment it was pushed open from outside. Amy entered, and stopped short at the sight of us.

  ‘Oh, I came to tell you myself,’ she began.

  ‘Vanessa told us,’ said Rivka. ‘Amy, she knows all about my father.’

  Amy stared at me, dismay filling her features.

  ‘How did you find out?’ she stammered.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I countered.

  ‘Why should we tell you?’ she said, almost angrily. ‘So that you could become the first to believe that Jonathan murdered that monster? That’s what you think now, isn’t it? Anyone would.’

  ‘Do you?’ I said quickly.

  Her eyelids lowered suddenly. ‘Of course not!’ she said.

  ‘Yet you are frightened, very frightened.’

  ‘Vanessa – do you have no imagination? Can’t you understand that my family has already been through this? It will destroy my mother, it will destroy us all. It’s obvious that the case against Jonathan is serious, horribly serious. They say he had the opportunity, and now they will say that he had a motive, too. We realised right away, he and I, that anyone could say he must have been lying. But as long as no one knew that he had any connection with that horrible professor, we thought he would be safe from suspicion. We’ve just been waiting and worrying … and hoping that you would find the true murderer before anyone found out about this.’

  ‘You’ve known all this the whole time and never said a word,’ I marvelled, not knowing whether to be angry with her or with myself. ‘And when I asked you if you knew anything about James Wilson – you said nothing!’

  ‘You gave us the shock of our lives!’ she exclaimed. ‘We thought no one would ever find out, and you discovered the connection in less than one day! You really frightened us. We had been so keen on your coming, because we hoped you would find the true murderer before anyone noticed that Jonathan could be accused if his statement were considered untrue. Instead of that, you started to find out just what we didn’t want you to know. It was horrible! You mustn’t be angry with us, Vanessa. We were silly to think we could fool you, but you must understand why we tried.’

  ‘You did fool me,’ I said, but her words comforted me a little. They had tried, and succeeded for a certain time, but in the end, I had discovered the truth by myself. Yet something troubled me in her words. What did she mean, when she spoke of Jonathan’s ‘connection with that horrible professor’? What could that connection be – unless they were aware of Professor Ralston’s role in the trial of her uncles? If Jonathan knew that, then he had a motive indeed.

  ‘Amy,’ I said, ‘even if the police learn that Jonathan is related to the Gad brothers, what motive would they attribute to him for the murder of Professor Ralston?’

  She hesitated, looking at me, then glancing down again. ‘The anti-Semitism …’ she began.

  ‘No, Amy,’ Rivka intervened suddenly. ‘No, tell her. It’s no use hiding it any more. If anyone can help us, she will. I’ll tell you myself,’ she added, turning to me. ‘Our Uncle Baruch went to prison ten years ago, and Jonathan is the only person in the family to have visited him during all that time. Since Jonathan turned sixteen, he has been to Dartmoor Prison every three months. He was always especially close to Uncle Baruch as a child, and Aunt Judith and Uncle Simon decided to allow him to go when he would be old enough. They never wanted Amy to go, though, because of her being a girl. As for me, my mother and I had moved away from London. After my father – died—’ she winced at these words, ‘my mother and I went to live in Brighton, far from everything we knew. She took her own name of Rubinstein back and found employment in a hotel, but her health became worse and worse until she could barely do her work. She used to take me to the synagogue often; she became more and more devout with the years. She died when I was seventeen, and I didn’t know what to do, so I wrote to Aunt Judith. After all, she was my father’s sister and my only near relation. And I went to live with her and Uncle Simon. They were wonderfully kind to me. Because I had become more religious than they were, they allowed me to attend a different synagogue than theirs, and that’s how I met David, almost right away.’

  ‘You were married under the name of Rebecca Rubinstein?’ I asked.

  ‘Rivka Rubinstein,’ she replied. ‘My mother changed my name with hers when we moved to Brighton. But that is not what I meant to tell you. I wanted to say that I was just a child when it all happened, and even though I thought of Uncle Baruch sometimes, I never dared mention him to my mother, and she never spoke of him. So I knew nothing until I arrived at Aunt Judith’s, and then I learnt from Amy and Jonathan that Jonathan had been visiting him for years, and – this is the important thing – that Uncle Baruch had made him swear to try to find out who the anonymous witness at the trial was; the one whose false testimony caused the jury to bring in a verdict of guilty. And Jonathan had promised.’

  ‘He made him swear it at Jonathan’s very first visit to the prison,’ said Amy. ‘Jonathan was just sixteen, and I was twenty-one. He told me about it as soon as he came home. We got all fired up and felt noble. He wanted to search for the mysterious witness right away, and I wanted to help him. But we had no idea how to go about it. We didn’t find out anything for ages. We did try; we tried to see the j
udge, but he had died, and we tried to find out who had been on the jury, but no one could tell us. I didn’t see what else we could do; I was ready to give up. Jonathan didn’t want to give up, but he didn’t know what to do either. He ended up deciding to start frequenting anti-Semitic circles, in the hopes of hearing something. He took to reading their newspapers, and going to their lectures and meetings. He would come home furious, lock himself in his room for hours; I’ve seen him cry, Vanessa. You have no idea what it’s like to be one of us! Each and every one of us has a battle to fight, no matter what circle of society we live in. It’s easy to see what can happen to people like my uncles – foreigners, penniless immigrants, only good enough for the rope. My mother thought she was escaping all that when she managed to marry into a wealthy, established bourgeois family. But our class has its own problems. We’re educated, and although Jews finally obtained the right to take degrees at Oxford and Cambridge – not thirty years ago, mind – we’re still shunned there in a hundred ways you couldn’t possibly understand. We learn to love refinement and nobility, yet we see ourselves reflected in the eyes of gentry like vermin. We want to welcome our persecuted co-religionists from Eastern countries, but it is no easy task, when their miserable masses cause the people among whom we live to turn against all Jews with a hatred that overflows even onto those who belong to the same set as themselves. When you’ve been given as many cold shoulders, and seen as many turned-away faces, when you’ve heard as many sniggers and snide remarks as we have, you start wondering and doubting – about yourself and yours. No one knows those feelings as we do. If you want to understand our story, you have to understand this. Have you ever heard of Amy Levy?’