The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  Rivka did not feel any of this. ‘He understood you, I know he did,’ she insisted enthusiastically. ‘If he didn’t speak today, it just means that we have to wait until tomorrow morning. I am not so afraid any more, now that I have seen what you are able to do. I can hardly believe that you managed to speak to the rebbe for so long! What outsider could ever have managed that!’

  ‘It was perfect,’ agreed David as we took the direction of their home. ‘You couldn’t have done it better. Our plan was brilliant. Come along with us now – you shall put your own dress back on and have some more Hummentaschen and some dinner. I suppose you will go to court tomorrow?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I hope that the rabbi will come, I hope so with all my heart. But to be honest, I am maddened by the idea that I have now seen and spoken with the rabbi, yet do not know anything more than what I knew before. There is still a missing piece to this puzzle! Perhaps we shall learn it tomorrow morning, and perhaps not. Yet we hold so many of the threads in our hands already. We ought to be able to understand what happened by ourselves at this point! What is the matter with us? Why can’t we solve this problem?’

  ‘It is true that we still don’t know the most important thing of all: what did the rebbe see and do in the library?’ said David thoughtfully. ‘Yet we cannot say that we know nothing more than we did yesterday. At least now we know why Reb Avrom went there.’

  ‘But do we?’ I said.

  ‘Of course!’ he replied in surprise. ‘It was in that telegram you received this morning.’

  ‘Well then, tell me why he went?’

  ‘Because he received a letter from the chief rabbi of France asking him to. Isn’t that what you told us?’

  ‘Yes, I did, but I don’t consider that it explains much. What did he think he could accomplish? What did he mean to do there? What could he say to Professor Ralston? The rabbi is a man who reflects deeply about what he does. He wouldn’t just dash off and try to convince him to stop being anti-Semitic. It’s perfectly obvious that that would have no chance of working. If anything, it would just enrage the professor even more. What did the rabbi go there to say?’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ admitted David after a moment’s reflection. ‘I’m trying to imagine what he might have thought he could do, and I realise that I have no idea. In fact, now that you mention it, what could anyone possibly say, to try to stop a man like Ralston? There’s no way to silence that kind of person short of killing him – oh! No, I didn’t mean that.’ He stopped, embarrassed. There was a rather long silence.

  ‘We learnt another little fact,’ said Rivka meekly. ‘Maybe this has nothing to do with anything, but we learnt that the rabbi had a daughter who disappeared.’

  ‘Really?’ put in Ephraim, interested by this revelation of something more dramatic than the rest of the day’s fare had been. ‘Disappeared? How? When?’

  Rivka told him about the finding of the photograph and the comments of the rabbi’s other daughter.

  ‘Oh,’ he said with some disappointment. ‘You mean she disappeared a hundred years ago. No point looking for a corpse, then.’

  ‘Not a hundred. More like forty or forty-five,’ I said. ‘I wonder where she is now?’

  ‘Didn’t you say her picture reminded you of someone?’ said Rivka. ‘Perhaps you have actually met her, and you don’t realise it. Who could she be?’

  I ran all the elderly ladies I could think of that had any connection with the case through my mind, unsuccessfully. Mrs Bryant? I had never met her, and besides, she was certainly too young. Mrs Taylor? No, she really did not look at all like the girl in the picture, nor did Mrs Hudson. Had I met anyone else? I could not think of anyone. Yet that face …

  ‘Oh, this is awful,’ I moaned. ‘I ought to know! That makes two different mysteries surrounding the rabbi. What we have to do is find the link between them.’

  London, Friday, March 20th, 1896

  The gavel banged on the magistrate’s desk and the proceedings were opened.

  I, as a member of the public with no official status of any kind, sat upright in my gallery seat, stiff with anxiety, staring at the door, wondering whether the rabbi would come, and trying, unceasingly and desperately, to find the key which would simultaneously solve all the questions which still eluded me.

  I had returned home last night so weary that it was difficult even to concentrate on answering all of Emily’s eager questions, the more so as I clearly perceived that my replies and my continuing ignorance disappointed her. I left her as soon as I could and flung myself into bed, too tense, too overexcited, too deeply troubled to sleep. I had cast my line, but I couldn’t know if it would bring up any fish. There was nothing more I could do now, except hope and wait and think. I was overwhelmed with nerves and unable to settle my mind to any one train of thought. I tossed and turned on the narrow sofa, and the events of the day ran over and over, obsessionally, through my brain. Over dinner, Rivka had told me the story of Chava, Tevye’s daughter, and how she chose to leave her father’s house, abandoning her past in order to marry the Russian boy Fedka who had captured her heart. According to Rivka, the story dealt essentially with Tevye’s heartbreak, and the unbearable pain of being torn between the religion that was his whole life and the daughter who was still, to him, the precious treasure he held, consoled and rocked in his arms as a baby.

  I drifted to sleep, and baby Chava became baby Cecily in my dreams. I felt her presence so close to me that I was warmed by her firm little body. I reached to plant a kiss on her round cheek, and encountered only emptiness. I jumped awake in a shock of dismay and found myself alone in the unfamiliar bed. No tender little girl, just the empty darkness.

  I fell asleep again, and Chava returned to my dreams, no longer as little Cecily, but now inextricably identified with the young girl in the picture at the rabbi’s house. I seemed to see her living in her village, going out of her house, perhaps, to draw water or tend geese or run errands, meeting a young man from a place so near and yet so far, falling in love, and turning away forever; yet looking back at her father, perhaps, like Chava, with tragedy in her eyes.

  Then it seemed to me that she died, but it was not really death; her living body turned into a photograph, she became the photograph. I stared at her features, stared at them; the rest of the picture, the people grouped around her, became blurred, and only her face stood out. The features shifted slightly, and her face became another face: Professor Ralston, also dead, looking out of another photograph, also surrounded by a group of indistinct people.

  Again and again, through the course of the night, I dreamt the same thing. The young girl’s face in the photograph melted away and became that of Professor Ralston. I was exhausted by the time I awoke, and relieved to see that it was already light outside. My bed had become a place of torment and I desired only to leave it. A glimpse of my dream came back to me briefly, but I chased it away like a cobweb. It made me shiver; it felt strangely abnormal, like the delusions of fever.

  I washed and dressed quickly. Emily was already up and preparing tea.

  ‘Of course I’m coming with you,’ she said quickly, as soon as she saw me. Why was she coming, I wondered. What did she feel? Was it curiosity? Friendship? Was it something more? But I was too preoccupied to probe, and merely nodded.

  We were silent as we made our way through the streets towards Covent Garden in the morning freshness. My mind was on the events of yesterday and those to come this morning, and I tried to force myself to concentrate, feeling that this was my final chance to fit the scattered pieces together into a coherent whole. Yet my eyes could not help straying to my surroundings, and noticing the tiny leaves beginning to bud on the bare branches of the trees. I felt something like that inside my own head: exactly such a little, budding thought seemed to be trying to push its way up through the confusion in my brain, with the stunning tenacity of a little green shoot trying to break the surface of the hardened ground. I speeded up my steps nervously, dragging
Emily along pitilessly, and wishing that I could stop asking myself a thousand times whether the rabbi would or would not come.

  I would not have thought that the case was sufficiently interesting to attract much of an audience – after all, one comes before the magistrate merely to determine whether or not there is enough evidence to send one to trial – but a medium-sized cluster of people had already gathered at the door and was beginning to edge its way inside. I suppose there are always spectators available for this kind of thing.

  Emily and I took places in the public gallery. We soon saw Jonathan, entering with his solicitor, a distinguished gentleman quite unknown to me, probably an expensive expert hired by his parents, whom I took to be the handsome and well-dressed couple I saw flanking Amy, sitting some distance away. I observed their faces with great interest. None of them noticed me in the least; all three were staring intently at the scene below.

  The magistrate looked distant and pained. The prosecutor was a personage so pointed, so severe, so glaring and so inimical as to cause my spine to prickle: no leniency, no tolerant broad-mindedness was to be expected here. Repressing my distaste, I leant over to a lady sitting near me and asked her if she knew who he was.

  ‘That’s Mr Andrews, a Scotsman,’ she replied with the knowledgeable air of a familiar of the place. ‘And it’s Sir Morris Hirsch for the defence! Well, he would defend this case, wouldn’t he?’ She sat back, laughing unpleasantly.

  I turned away from her, and set to observing the witnesses for the prosecution, grouped together below. To my surprise, I recognised Mr Upp. Sitting next to him was a bony gentleman with a domed forehead, greying hair and unhappy eyes. I guessed that this must be Professor Ralston’s father, finally arrived from overseas, and felt acutely sorry for what he must be going through. The rabbi was nowhere to be seen, although I searched for him anxiously and ceaselessly until the gavel banged, and proceedings commenced.

  The prosecution began by calling as a witness the doctor who had attended the corpse. He described the exact nature of the victim’s death, following instantaneously from a gunshot wound to the heart. Mr Andrews then called the police inspector who had been summoned to the scene, who gave a complete description of the state of the room at the time, which corresponded in every way to what I had myself observed. The magistrate was interested above all in the position of the murder weapon.

  ‘The weapon was undoubtedly Professor Ralston’s property?’ he asked, even though this piece of information had only just been stated as fact.

  ‘It was, my Lord, and I will presently have a witness who will attest to the fact,’ replied Mr Andrews.

  ‘And it was found lying, you say, near the doorway of the professor’s study?’

  ‘Yes, my Lord,’ replied Mr Andrews. ‘Just about a yard inside of the door. The desk, tipped over, stood about two yards from the door and the professor’s body had fallen behind it.’

  ‘So you assume that the criminal, standing on the other side of the desk from the professor, snatched the professor’s gun from him and shot him—’

  ‘—at close range, my Lord—’

  ‘—at close range, then turned to flee, dropping the gun.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the magistrate. ‘Let us have the next witness.’

  The next witness was Mrs Forbes, housekeeper of the murdered man. She spoke very little, asserting that she knew nothing, nothing at all. Yes, the gun was the professor’s, he kept it with him, usually in the same room, at all times, and occasionally, although not always, took it out with him. Yes, the professor thought he had a lot of enemies, and by the look of it, he was not wrong. No, she did not see how it could be something to do with his personal life. As far as she knew, his personal life was of the simplest. No, he kept neither letters nor papers in his house; everything was kept in his study below, which needed no more cleaning than an occasional sweeping and dusting. The door leading from his study upstairs to his rooms locked automatically when it closed. The professor opened it with his key when he wanted to go upstairs. He did not mind the automatic locking, quite the contrary. He disliked the idea that if he were out of his study for a minute and someone entered, they could slip upstairs to his rooms. The professor thought it possible that this might happen; he had enemies, remember. No, she did not see how the murderer could have slipped upstairs to the professor’s rooms, since so far as she knew, there was only the one key that the professor had, which was found in his pocket. And anyway, the police had searched upstairs directly upon their arrival. No, she herself did not have a key to the rooms. The professor let her in when she arrived. If he was already down in his study, he let her in, and if he was upstairs, she knocked and he came down to open the door for her. No, she always came after the library was already opened. It was opened every day punctually at nine o’clock by the professor himself.

  Sir Morris Hirsch raised a new point during his cross-examination. Could someone have been in the professor’s lodgings upstairs before the shooting, slipped down and killed him, blocking the door open with some object, and then gone quickly back upstairs when the witnesses ran in? Yes, it would have been possible, except that how would the murderer have ever got away? Could he have been sitting on the roof the whole time? But he could hardly escape up the chimney, and the windows didn’t open. How did one air the rooms? Well, the windows had tiny sections at the top which one lowered with a stick. But no, they were no higher than a hand’s breadth. No, certainly no one could pass through them. He could not have got onto the roof.

  Mr Andrews then called the detective inspector from Scotland Yard who was in charge of the case. I recognised him as the man who had arrested Jonathan. Quietly avoiding any mention of Bertrand Russell, journalists or newspaper articles, he explained how he had himself discovered the logical flaw in the perfect paradox with which the case had at first seemed to confront him.

  ‘To begin with, you had not thought that the witness Mr Sachs was lying?’

  ‘I had no particular reason to think so. In principle, when we begin work on cases, we assume that the witnesses are speaking the truth and try to confirm their statements. However, when confronted with an obvious contradiction, we are in the habit of making the hypothesis that any one of them may be lying. In this case, we delayed working on that assumption because the witness claimed to have a witness to his own statements, namely the Orthodox Jew he met on his way out. If we could have located and identified that individual, and if their stories agreed, it would have diminished or possibly even excluded the probability of the witness’s statement being a lie. So we allowed ourselves a waiting period while searching for that person.’

  ‘But you were unable to find him.’

  ‘He had, seemingly, vanished into thin air. Or rather, not into the air, but back into that part of town where Jews come cheaper by the doz—where there are a great many foreign Jews and many people do not speak English, and even when they do they are most reluctant to aid the police in any way. The search began to appear hopeless, and I came to the decision that the possibility of the witness being a liar must be confronted. That was when we proceeded to an arrest. At that point, the Ralston family lawyer came to see me with a threatening letter directed against the murdered man, and I was able to discover almost immediately that the author of the threats was closely related to the man I had arrested.’

  This information caused a stir in the public gallery, and a terrific stir in myself. So the police knew about Jonathan’s relationship to the Gad family! Yes, of course they must. It was easy enough to establish a relationship once one had the idea that it might exist. I remembered my own search in the birth records for Rebecca Gad. I had started searching in her parents’ marriage year of 1874. But if I had been more thorough – if I had taken the time to search for every child born to the married couples in my entire list of Gad spouses, I would soon have found Amy and Jonathan, born just a few years earlier, and realised the connection myself much soo
ner than I did. Of course, I had acted logically enough, but I had lacked the thoroughness that the police automatically bring to their research. It was a bad thing for Jonathan. They could easily construe a motive out of it. More distraught than ever, I looked around for the rabbi.

  Ignoring the rustle of interest in his statement, Mr Andrews proceeded to call the next witnesses, who were successively Mr Mason, Mr Chapman, and the college caretaker who had accompanied them to the gate on the evening of the murder. All three told the same story; it was simple and straightforward and matched what we already knew in every particular. Before turning over Mr Mason for cross-examination, Mr Andrews said that there was one point which he greatly wished to elucidate.

  ‘As you came running around the house and reached and turned the front corner, you saw the accused and called out to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Mr Mason soberly.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, “Someone’s been shot!” and ran on inside.’

  ‘Did you pay attention to whether the person you saw on the path came running after you?’

  ‘Not at all. I didn’t look back. However, I certainly assumed that he was following us, and he came rushing in barely a few moments later.’

  ‘Now, Mr Mason, I wish you to answer the following question very carefully. When you saw the accused, what exactly was he doing?’

  ‘Walking up the path,’ said Mr Mason in surprise.

  ‘You are sure of that?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘He could not, for example, have been walking down the path, away from the house, and have just turned around?’

  Now he hesitated a little.

  ‘I don’t know. My impression was very certainly that he was walking up the path when I saw him. It never occurred to me that he might have been doing anything else.’