by Noah Gordon
That evening Meir gave Rob a lesson from the Book of Leviticus. These were the animals Jews were allowed to eat of all those on earth: any creature that both chewed its cud and had a split hoof, including sheep, cattle, goats, and deer. Animals that were treif—not kasher—included horses, donkeys, camels, and pigs.
Of birds they were permitted to eat pigeons, chickens, tame doves, tame ducks, and tame geese. Winged creatures which were an abomination included eagles, ostriches, vultures, kites, cuckoos, swans, storks, owls, pelicans, lapwings, and bats.
“Never in my life have I tasted so fine a meat as cygnet lovingly larded, barded in salt pork, and then roasted slowly over the fire.”
Meir looked faintly repulsed. “You won’t get it here,” he said.
The next morning dawned clear and cold. The Study House was nearly empty after shaharit, the early prayer service, for many wandered to the rabbenu’s barnyard to watch shehitah, the ritual butchering. Their breath made small clouds that hung in the still, frosty air.
Rob stood with Simon. There was a small stir when Reb Baruch ben David arrived with the other mashgiah, a bent old man named Reb Samson ben Zanvil, whose face was set and stern.
“He’s older than either Reb Baruch or the rabbenu but is not as learned,” Simon whispered. “And now he fears he’ll be caught between the two if an argument should arise.”
The rabbenu’s four sons led the first animal from the barn, a black bull with a deep back and heavy hindquarters. Lowing, the bull tossed his head and pawed the earth, and they had to enlist help from the bystanders in controlling him with ropes while the inspectors went over every inch of his body.
“The tiniest sore or break in the skin will disqualify an animal for meat,” Simon said.
“Why?”
Simon looked at Rob in annoyance. “Because it is the law,” he said.
Finally satisfied, they led the bull to a feeding trough filled with sweet hay. The rabbenu picked up a long knife. “See the blunt, square end of the knife,” Simon said. “It’s made without a point so there’s less likelihood it will scratch the animal’s skin. But the knife is razor-sharp.”
They all stood in the cold while nothing happened. “What are they waiting for?” Rob whispered.
“The precisely right moment,” Simon said, “for the animal must be motionless at the instant of the death cut, or it is not kasher.”
Even as he spoke, the knife flashed. The single clean stroke severed the gullet and the windpipe and the carotid arteries in the neck. A red stream sprang in its wake, and the bull’s consciousness vanished as the blood supply to the brain was cut off at once. The bovine eyes dimmed and the bull went to its knees, and in a moment was dead.
There was a pleased murmur from those who watched but it was as quickly stilled, for Reb Baruch had taken the knife and was examining it.
Watching, Rob could see a struggle that tightened the fine old features. Baruch turned to his elderly rival.
“Something?” the rabbenu said coldly.
“I fear,” Reb Baruch said. He proceeded to show, midway down the cutting edge of the blade, an imperfection, the tiniest of nicks in the keenly honed steel.
Old and gnarled, his face dismayed, Reb Samson ben Zanvil hung back, certain that as the second mashgiah he would be called upon for a judgment he didn’t want to make.
Reb Daniel, the father of Rohel and the rabbenu’s oldest son, began a blustering argument. “What nonsense is this? Everyone knows of the care with which the rabbenu’s ritual knives are sharpened,” he said, but his father put up his hand for silence.
The rabbenu held the knife up to the light and ran a practiced finger just beneath the razor-sharp edge. He sighed, for the nick was there, a human error that made the meat ritually unfit.
“It’s a blessing that your eyes are sharper than this blade and continue to protect us, my old friend,” he said quietly, and there was a general relaxing, like a releasing of pent-up breath.
Reb Baruch smiled. He reached out and patted the rabbenu’s hand, and the two men looked at one another for a long moment.
Then the rabbenu turned away and called for Mar Reuven the Barber-Surgeon.
Rob and Simon stepped forward and listened attentively. “The rabbenu asks you to deliver this treif bull’s carcass to the Christian butcher of Gabrovo,” Simon said.
He took Horse, for she was in sore need of the exercise, hitching her to their flatbed sleigh onto which a number of willing hands loaded the slaughtered bull. The rabbenu had used an approved knife for the second animal, which was judged to be kasher, and the Jews already were dismembering it when Rob shook the reins and directed Horse away from Tryavna.
He drove to Gabrovo slowly and with great enjoyment. The butcher shop proved to be exactly where it had been described, three houses below the town’s most prominent building, which was an inn. The butcher was large and heavy, an advertisement of his trade. Language did not prove a barrier.
“Tryavna,” Rob said, pointing to the dead bull.
The fat red face became wreathed in smiles. “Ah. Rabbenu,” the butcher said, and nodded vigorously. Uncarting the creature proved to be hard but the butcher went off to a tavern and returned with a pair of helpers, and with rope and effort at length the bull was unloaded.
Simon had told him the price was fixed and there would be no haggling. When the butcher handed Rob the few paltry coins it became clear why the man smiled with joy, for he had practically stolen a whole excellent beef, simply because there had been a nick in the slaughtering blade! Rob would never be able to understand people who, for no valid reason, could treat good cowflesh as if it were trash. The stupidity of it made him angry and filled him with a kind of shame; he wanted to explain to the butcher that he was a Christian and not one of those who behaved so foolishly. But he could only accept the coins in the name of the Hebrews and place them in his purse pocket for safekeeping.
His business done, he went directly to the tavern of the nearby inn. The dark public house was long and narrow, more like a tunnel than a room, its low ceiling blackened by the smoky fire around which nine or ten men loafed, drinking. Three women sat at a small table nearby and waited watchfully. Rob inspected them while he had a drink—a brown raw whiskey that wasn’t at all to his liking. They were clearly tavern whores. Two were well past their prime, but the third was a young blonde with a wicked-innocent face. She saw the purpose of his glance and smiled at him.
Rob finished his drink and went to their table. “I don’t suppose you have English,” he murmured, and it was a safe guess. One of the older women said something and the other two laughed. But he took out a coin and gave it to the younger one. It was all the communication they needed. She tucked the coin into her pocket, left the table without another word to her companions, and went to where her cloak hung on a peg.
He followed her outside and in the snowy street he met Mary Cullen.
“Hello! Are you and your father having a good winter?”
“We are having a wretched winter,” she said, and he noted that she looked it. Her nose was reddened and there was a cold sore on the tender fullness of her upper lip. “The inn is always freezing and the food is very bad. Are you really living with Jews?”
“Yes.”
“How can you?” she said thinly.
He had forgotten the color of her eyes and their effect on him was disarming, as if he had chanced upon bluebirds in the snow. “I sleep in a warm barn. The food is excellent,” he told her with great satisfaction.
“My father tells me there is a special Jew’s stink called foetor judaicus. Because they rubbed Christ’s body with garlic after he died.”
“Sometimes we all smell. But to immerse themselves from head to foot each Friday is the custom of their kind. I trust that they bathe more often than most.”
She colored, and he knew that it must be difficult and rare to obtain bath water in an inn such as there was in Gabrovo.
She regarded the woman wh
o patiently waited for him a short distance away. “My father says that anyone who will consent to live with Jews never can be a proper man.”
“Your father seemed a nice man. But perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “he is an arse.” They began walking away from one another at the same moment.
He followed the blond woman to a room nearby. It was untidy with the soiled garments of women and he suspected that she shared the room with the two others. He watched her as she undressed. “It’s cruelty to look on you after seeing that other one,” he said, knowing she knew not a word of what he said. “She may not always have a pleasant tongue, but … it’s not beauty, exactly, yet few women can compare to Mary Cullen in appearance.”
The woman smiled at him.
“You’re a young whore but already you look old,” he said to her. The air was cold, and she shucked her clothing and slipped quickly between the filthy fur covers to escape the chill, but not before he saw more than he liked. He was a man who appreciated the musk-lure of women but what rose from her was sour stink, and her body hair had a hard and plastered look as if juices had dried and redried untold times without feeling the plain honest wetness of water. Abstinence had produced such hunger in him that he would have fallen on her, but the brief glimpse of her bluish body had shown him overused, caked flesh he didn’t want to touch.
“God damn that red-haired witch,” he said morosely.
The woman looked up at him in puzzlement.
“It isn’t your fault, dolly,” he told her, reaching into his purse. He gave her more than she would have been worth even if value-giving had been attempted, and she pulled the coins under the furs and clutched them next to her body. He hadn’t begun to take anything off, and he straightened his clothing and nodded to her and went out into fresher air.
As February waned he spent more time than ever in the study house, poring over the Persian Qu’ran. He found himself constantly amazed by the Qu’ran’s unremitting hostility toward Christians and bitter loathing of Jews.
Simon explained it. “Mohammed’s early teachers were Jews and Syriac Christian monks. When first he reported that the Angel Gabriel had visited him, and that God had named him Prophet and instructed him to found a new and perfect religion, he expected these old friends to flock after him with glad cries. But the Christians preferred their own religion and the Jews, startled and threatened, actively joined those who disclaimed Mohammed’s preachings. For the rest of his life he never forgave them, but spoke and wrote of them with revilement.”
Simon’s insights made the Qu’ran come alive for Rob. He was almost halfway through the book and he labored over it, aware that soon they would travel again. When they reached Constantinople he and Meir’s group would go different ways, not only separating him from his teacher Simon but, more important, depriving him of the book. The Qu’ran gave him intimations of a culture remote from his own, and the Jews of Tryavna gave him a glimpse of still a third way of life. As a boy he had thought that England was the world, but now he saw that there were other peoples; in some traits they were alike, but they differed from one another in important ways.
The encounter at the slaughtering had reconciled the rabbenu with Reb Baruch ben David, and their families began at once to plan for the wedding of Rohel to young Reb Meshullum ben Nathan. The Jewish Quarter hummed with excited activity. The two old men walked about in the highest spirits, often together.
The rabbenu made Rob a gift of the old leather hat and loaned him, for study, a tiny section of the Talmud. The Hebrew Book of Laws had been translated into Parsi. Though Rob welcomed the opportunity to see the Persian language in another document, the meaning of the segment was beyond him. The fragment dealt with a law called shaatnez: although Jews were allowed to wear linen and to wear wool, they weren’t allowed to wear a mixture of linen and wool, and Rob couldn’t understand why.
Anyone he asked either didn’t know or shrugged and said it was the law.
That Friday, naked in the steamy bathhouse, Rob found his courage as the men gathered about their sage.
“Shi-ailah, Rabbenu, shi-ailah!” he cried. A question, a question!
The rabbenu paused in soaping his great sloping belly and grinned at the young stranger, and then spoke.
“He says, ‘Ask it, my son,’” Simon said.
“You are forbidden to eat meat with milk. You are forbidden to wear linen with wool. You are forbidden to touch your wives half the time. Why is so much forbidden?”
“To necessitate faith,” the rabbenu said.
“Why should God make such strange demands of the Jews?”
“To keep us separate from you,” the rabbenu said, but his eyes twinkled and there was no malice in the words, and Rob gasped as Simon poured water over his head.
* * *
Everyone participated when Rohel, the granddaughter of the rabbenu, was married to Reb Baruch’s grandson, Meshullum, on the second Friday of the month of Adar.
Early that morning everyone assembled outside the house of Daniel ben Shlomo, the bride’s father. Inside, Meshullum paid a handsome bride price of fifteen gold pieces. The ketubah, or wedding contract, was signed and Reb Daniel presented a handsome dowry, returning the bride price to the couple and adding an additional fifteen gold pieces, a wagon, and a span of horses. Nathan, the groom’s father, gave the fortunate couple a pair of milch cows. When they left the house, a radiant Rohel walked past Rob as if he were invisible.
The entire community escorted the pair to the synagogue, where they recited seven blessings under a canopy. Meshullum stamped on a fragile glass to illustrate that happiness is transient and Jews must not forget the destruction of the Temple. And then they were man and wife, and a day-long celebration was under way. A flutist, a fifer, and a drummer provided music and the Jews sang lustily, My beloved is gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies, which Simon told Rob was from the Scriptures. The two grandfathers spread their arms in joy, snapped their fingers, closed their eyes, threw back their heads and danced. The wedding celebration lasted until the early hours of the morning and Rob ate too heavily of meat and rich puddings and had too much to drink.
That night he brooded as he lay on his straw in the warm blackness of the barn, his cat at his feet. He remembered the blond woman in Gabrovo with less and less disgust and willed himself not to think of Mary Cullen. He thought resentfully of skinny young Meshullum, lying at that moment with Rohel, and hoped the boy’s prodigious scholarship would enable him to appreciate his good fortune.
He woke well before dawn and felt rather than heard the changes in his world. By the time he had slept again and awakened and risen from his bed, the sounds were clearly audible: a dripping, a tinkling, a rushing, a roar that grew in volume as more and more ice and snow gave way and joined the waters of the unlocked earth, sweeping down the mountainsides and signifying the coming of spring.
31
THE WHEAT FIELD
When her mother died, Mary Cullen’s father had told her he would mourn Jura Cullen for the rest of his life. She had willingly joined him in wearing black and avoiding public pleasures, but when a full year of mourning ended on the eighteenth of March, she told her father it was time for them to return to the routines of ordinary living.
“I continue to wear black,” James Cullen said.
“I shall not,” she said, and he nodded.
She had carried all the way from home a bolt of light woollen stuff woven from their own fleece, and she inquired carefully until she found a fine seamstress in Gabrovo. The woman nodded when she conveyed what she wanted, but indicated that the cloth, of a nondescript natural color, had best be dyed before cutting. The roots of the madder plant could give red shades, but with her hair that would make her stand out like a beacon. The center wood of oak would give gray, but after her steady diet of black, gray was too subdued. Maple or sumac bark would give yellow or orange, frivolous colors. It would have to be brown.
; “I’ve gone all my life wearing nut-husk brown,” she grumbled to her father.
Next day he brought her a small pot of a yellowish paste, like slightly turned butter. “It is dye, and fiercely expensive.”
“Not a color I admire,” she said carefully.
James Cullen smiled. “It’s called India blue. It dissolves in water and you must be careful not to get it on your hands. When the wet cloth is taken from the yellow water it changes color in the air and thereafter the dye is fast.”
It produced a rich, deep blue cloth such as she had never seen, and the seamstress cut and sewed a dress and a cloak. She was pleased with the garments but folded them and put them away until the morning of the tenth of April, when hunters brought the news to Gabrovo that the way through the mountains was open at last.
By early afternoon, people who had been awaiting the thaw throughout the countryside had begun to hasten into Gabrovo, the departure town for the great pass known as the Balkan Gate. Provisioners set up their wares, and milling mobs began to shout for the right to buy supplies.
Mary had to make the innkeeper’s wife a gift of money to persuade her to heat water over the fire at such a frenzied time and carry it upstairs to the women’s sleeping chambers. First Mary knelt over the wooden tub and washed her hair, now long and thick as a winter pelt, then she squatted in the tub and scrubbed herself until she glowed.