by Irene Gallo
I was not foolhardy, for I knew what I was accepting. My soul had been scorched before, when I was seven years old.
* * *
My uncle and Elias tended me faithfully as I convulsed with fever. I vomited, they told me, continuously, until my body could bring up nothing more, and then I shook and refused to choke down even water. They told me later that they did not believe I would ever regain consciousness, and Elias whispered privately that my uncle had sat weeping by my bedside more than once. Perhaps it is a blessing that I could not feel that pain, for I do not remember any of it.
What I remember are the visions, for while my uncle sat by my bedside, I was not with him. I was not there at all. I was among those to come, among my people when they were expelled from Vienna five years hence, when they were driven from Poland in the century to come. I saw our emancipation throughout that century, and I saw its collapse—and then I was among riots, watching parents throughout Bavaria clutch their children as their homes burned, as learned professors and their students tore their possessions apart and worse, an old man impaled with a pitchfork, unable to scream as blood bubbled from his throat. Again and again, I saw the pendulum swing, as my people’s emancipation drew near and then was wrenched away, slicing through the hands that reached out for it.
And I saw worse. The world around me teemed with flickering images, nightmarish visions of stone roads carrying metal beasts, of burning homes, of people pressed like livestock into mechanical carts, children crying, separated from their parents, toddlers heads dashed against walls, of starvation, and of our neighbors turning on us, only too glad to agree to our degradation and murder. The visions persisted no matter where I turned my head, and there was no reprieve, nor any justice, no justice anywhere.
* * *
What is this, I asked the Matronit. What is happening to me?
None of this has happened, as yet, she told me. You see as I see, across not only space, but time. This has not happened, but it will happen. It will all happen.
And Adonai? What of Him? Why has—why will He abandon my people? I wailed silently. Does our devotion mean nothing, nothing at all? What of our covenant? Did Abraham smash his father’s idols for nothing? For nothing at all?
The Matronit chose her words carefully. Hashem—Hashem … is … hungry for power. He always has been. He rides the waves of power and he does not care who is crushed beneath them. He never has.
So He will desert us?
My daughter, he deserted Israel long ago.
If I could have, I would have spat. Then I will desert Him, I told her. Why should I remain devout, why should I—why should any of us—maintain our rituals or keep our covenant?
My daughter, if you did not, who would you be?
* * *
I awoke with no voice, coughing blood. When I saw Uncle Leyb asleep in the chair by my bedside, tears ran from my eyes for his ignorance, and for his hope, and I cried for Hirsch’s baby, and all the children to come. My uncle awoke and wiped my tears as well as my nose. I was able to take his hand and to whisper that I was well again, but this effort exhausted me, and I fell back asleep. I dreamt not at all.
I was not well. I thought I would never be well again.
* * *
As I slowly recovered my strength, I kept faith with the Matronit. I poured out wine and lit incense for her; I baked small cakes in her form and in her honor. I did not tell Elias or Uncle Leyb the reasons for my actions. I myself was still unsure whether or not the Matronit was a demon or the goddess—and how strange it felt to think that word—and if she was the former, I had no wish to lead them astray, for they are good men. But I became convinced she was what she said she was—the diminished goddess of the Jews, she who had intervened on our behalf with Adonai. For how could she speak holy prayers otherwise? Even if Adonai was no longer with my people, the holiness of our prayers could not be denied. So I prayed for her strength to return, every night and day.
* * *
After such a long illness, it was many months before my uncle would allow me to travel. But recover I did, and soon even he could not deny that I was strong, stronger even than I had ever been before. And so we two set off for Dornburg, leaving Elias in Worms to manage the business.
* * *
When we had travelled for two days, my uncle turned to me and told me that he was not a fool. He had heard me talking to the Matronit, he said, and he told me he would not allow me to continue unless I could explain what seemed to him like madness. He would not, he said, abandon a woman touched in the head to a strange town.
I weighed my options.
“I have a maggid, Uncle,” I said at last. “My soul is hosting a righteous spirit who is leading my steps. Please trust in it as I do.”
My uncle looked strangely relieved. “I am glad to know it, Itte,” he said. “I will feel better knowing that you are not on your own. Tell me the name of this spirit, so that I may honor her as well.”
I paused for a moment, wondering if I should invoke the name of some learned Rebbe, but I could think of none. “The Matronit,” I said. “It is the Matronit-Shekhina.”
My uncle said nothing. I hoped that he would remember her in his prayers, and that his prayers would add to her strength.
* * *
He left me five miles from Dornburg. I know my uncle did not like to turn back to Worms alone; I know he worried. He tried to disguise it, but I was less easily fooled than I had been ten years previous. And despite my maggid, after I had walked for two hours and found myself standing alone outside the walls of Dornburg, staring at the gibbet where my father’s body had rotted a decade ago, I found myself gripped by terror. I looked for the rocks my uncle told me he had placed atop my father’s grave, but without much hope. It would have been strange indeed if they had not been moved in ten years. Finally, I placed the stone I had brought from our garden in Hoechst at the foot of a birch tree.
Then I paid my toll to the guard at the gate and entered the town.
* * *
It was morning when I entered Dornburg. My uncle was right; it was not even as large as Hoechst, and after having been in Worms for a week, it seemed even smaller than I would have thought it only a month previous. A cluster of women was gathered around a well, and a group of children were tearing around after each other, screaming with laughter. As I walked slowly, they caromed into me. One went sprawling and the others ground to a halt, looking embarrassed.
I tried to smile kindly, and I began to speak, but my throat was suddenly dry. In the pause, the boy who had fallen spoke.
“I’m sorry, Fraulein. I didn’t see you—we were playing, and I wasn’t looking where I was going, and then you were there—”
I lifted him up and helped him brush the dirt off his clothing and hands. “It’s no matter, liebchen. I too knocked into my share of grown folk when I was little. They move so slowly, you know?”
We shared a conspiratorial grin.
“Were you playing a game I know, kinde? Tag? Or—” I said, noticing some crude musical instruments in the children’s hands. “War? Are you piping brave songs to hearten the soldiers?”
“Neither,” laughed the child. “Dance-the-Jew! I’m the Jew, and when the others catch me, they must make me dance ’til I drop!”
I recoiled involuntarily. “I—I don’t know that game, child. Is it … new?”
“Dunno,” said the boy. “We all play it.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to not to shake. “Well. Run along, then. Run along and enjoy yourselves.”
The children took off again, shrieking in delight.
“They will know,” I whispered to the Matronit. “They will know and they will hang me as they did my father, and then children will laugh for years afterward!”
They will not know, she said. They will not know, because they do not see your true form. I have glamored you, my daughter. They do not see your true face, and they do not hear your accent. Be calm in your heart.
> Slowly I made my way to the well at the center of town, past a tavern called The Dancing Jew. There, I found three or four women talking amongst themselves, but instead of happy, boisterous, gossiping, they were speaking in low tones of worry and sorrow.
“Well, it’s not the first time one so small has been lost, and it won’t be the last, either,” said an older matron briskly, but with tears in her eyes.
“But for such a great man,” said a younger woman. “The loss is doubly sorrowful.”
“Guten morgen, Frauen,” I began. “I wonder if there is work in this town for one who is willing.”
“You have chosen a sorrowful day to come to Dornburg,” said the youngest woman. “For one of our finest bürgers has lost his wife in childbed just two days ago, and will soon lose his baby girl as well. And he is a fine man, who helps anybody in our town in need.”
“Is the babe sick?” I inquired.
“She will take neither cows’ milk nor goats’ milk, but she screams and turns away from any who try to nurse her. She will not last much longer.”
I felt the Matronit move in my body, and a sudden heaviness in my breasts, almost painful.
“I think I can help,” I said.
* * *
He has three gifts, the Matronit told me as I was being taken to Herr Geiger’s house. He has the fiddle that compels all to dance when it plays. He has a blowpipe that hits whatever it is aimed at. These two objects are on display, so that he may have the pleasure of telling of his triumph over the wicked Jew. The third is not tangible, but it is the most valuable of the three. No mortal can resist his requests.
“No—but then, if he asks me of my background—”
I will strengthen you. That and your appearance I can do right now. And you will meet his will with your own.
My fear subsided and I thought clearly again. “So he could have requested that he be set free, and gone on his way without consigning my father to the gallows, then?”
Yes.
“But he preferred to torture my father and take all he had and see him hanged?”
Yes.
* * *
Herr Geiger made only the most cursory inquiries into my background. I was a widow, I told him, and had lost my man last month in an accident in Hoechst. After my husband’s death, I said, his family had refused to take in me and my baby due to bad blood between them and my late parents. I had set out for Worms looking for work, but had lost the baby to a fever only days ago on the road, and could not go on. It was a very sad tale.
Herr Geiger took my hand in his and wept with me over the loss of my child. He asked me its name.
“Jakob,” I said.
* * *
I did not worry that he would connect this lost baby’s name with the Jewish peddler he had murdered a decade ago. I do not believe Herr Geiger ever knew my father’s name. I am not entirely certain that he ever realized that my father had a name.
* * *
When I first saw Eva, she had hair like the sun, yellower than my mother’s. My mother was fair, her hair pale blonde, but Eva’s was true gold. Her eyes, though, were dark and brooding, the kind of stormy blue that, in a baby, will soon change to brown. She lay in her cradle, too weak to do more than mew sadly as she turned her head this way and that, searching for her mother’s breast.
When I lifted her to mine, she gripped my braids with more strength than I thought she had left in her entire body and seized my nipple in her mouth. I closed my eyes and for a terrible moment thought nothing would come, but surely I knew that if the Matronit was any kind of goddess at all, she would be well-versed in the powers of the female body, and soon Eva shut her eyes in long-awaited bliss, and her suck changed from frantic to strong and steady, an infant settling in for a long time.
I shut my eyes as well, exhausted by my journey and my anxieties. When I opened them, Eva was asleep in my arms, and we were alone in the room.
* * *
Herr Geiger thanked me the next morning. He had tears in his eyes and his breath smelled of schnapps.
* * *
I nursed Eva carefully. As carefully, I lit incense and poured out libations to the Matronit. And as Eva got stronger, so did my maggid.
* * *
Eva stared up at me with her storm-night eyes as she nursed. When she was sated, she would push her head away and sigh contentedly. Sometimes, I thought I saw my reflection in her eyes, the reflection of my true face, but I knew I must have been fooling myself.
Her hair began to curl, like my mother’s.
I spent my days caring for her. I sang to her when she wept. Her first laugh came when I set her down on the floor and stepped out of the room to retrieve a blanket. As soon as I got out of her sight, I popped my head back in the room and said, “Boo, baby girl!” She laughed and laughed. We did it ten times in a row before her giggles calmed.
She is a jolly baby with an open heart.
Her first word was Jutta, the name I had chosen for myself when I translated my own name to its Christian equivalent. When I kissed her, she beamed up at me and tried to kiss me back, but was not quite clear on how. She opened her mouth and bit my nose instead. I laughed so hard she did it over and over again, and we rolled around together laughing and kissing each other.
I had not been so happy since I had flown through the air, swung around and around by my papa.
* * *
One night, after Eva was asleep, Herr Geiger called for me, and I found him in his study, fondling a violin.
“Are you fond of music, liebchen?” He was well in his cups.
“As fond as anybody, I believe.”
He lifted his bow.
“But not, I think, now, Herr Geiger.”
He lowered the bow. “I take it you have heard of my conquest of the Jewish rascal whose ill-gotten gains gave me my start in life?”
I lowered my eyes modestly.
“Indeed, how could you not? Dornburg has made its fortune on that tale. I have always been a generous man—am I not so to you?”
“But of course, Herr Geiger. I am very grateful to you after so many difficulties.”
Herr Geiger waved off my thanks and offered me a glass of schnapps. I accepted warily.
“After my first job, for a man so miserly he might as well have been a Jew, I set out to seek my fortune. I had not walked ten miles before I saw a poor old woman begging by the side of the road, and I gave her three talers, all the money I had in the world. What do you know but she was a fairy in disguise, and in recompense for my kind heart, she gave me one wish for each taler. I asked her for a blowpipe that would hit anything I aimed at and a fiddle that would compel all who heard its music to dance, and one more wish that is my secret, my dear!” He paused and waited for me to attempt to wheedle the secret of the third wish out of him.
I remained silent.
“Well,” he said awkwardly. “I kept on with my journey, and not two days later, what did I find but a nasty Jewish swindler by the side of the road, muttering some sort of hex. I didn’t quite understand all he was saying, but to be sure he was up to no good, with his eyes fixed on a brightly colored bird in a tree. Quick as anything, I used my blowpipe to bring down the bird. Then, all politeness, I asked the wicked old fiend to fetch me my kill. I waited until he was just crawling through a thornbush and then—out with my fiddle and on with the dance!”
Herr Geiger laughed at the memory and poured us both more schnapps.
“Such fine dancing you’ve never seen, my dear! With the blood running and his clothing in tatters, still he had to keep on dancing! He begged me to stop, and I did, on one condition—that he hand over all his sacks of money! And he did—there was less there than I had hoped, but plenty still, so on I went with my journey, having made a good beginning.
“But oh, that vengeful, petty Jew—of course he couldn’t let me have my triumph, of course not—they are a vindictive race, my dear, grasping and vindictive. He followed me straight to Dornburg and had me arres
ted with some trumped-up story about how I attacked him on the road! I would’ve hanged, my dear, if you can believe it, had I not pulled out my fiddle again, and this time I didn’t leave off playing until the Jew had confessed to all his crimes. He hanged before the day was out, and I was rewarded with all he had—for of course, you know Jews, he’d kept back some money from me at our first bargain. And that’s how I got the capital I needed to set myself up well, here, and they honor me as one of their first citizens! You can see how well I’ve done for myself.”
“I can, indeed, Herr Geiger.” I kept my face turned to the ground, not out of modesty, but so as not to show my feelings. I say again, my father never stole, and was never petty. He ever had open hands and an open heart, and never turned away a request for help. I remember him, I do.
“All I lacked was a companion to share my happiness with. I thought I’d found my heart’s desire in dear Konstanze; we were so happy together. I never thought in my youth that I’d wish to give up bachelorhood, but as a man ages, my dear, his thoughts turn to the comforts of hearth and home. Poor Konstanze. She was always delicate, and childbirth was too much for her.”
Herr Geiger lapsed into silence while I considered the lot of the late Konstanze.
“But Jutta, a man cannot live forever alone. It’s not right. It’s not healthy. It’s not Christian. And Jutta, I know what a good mother you will be. Are you not already a mother to my child?”
Now I did look up, startled. “Herr Geiger—you know not what you are saying—you know so little about me—you are still headspun with grief—”
He leaned forward and took my hands in his. I tried not to lean back. “Jutta, my darling, let me hope. Give me a kiss.”
I felt the force of his request coursing through my body, the pressure to bend toward him and part my lips. This was different than just a request for information, to which, after all, I at least had pretended to accede. I felt the Matronit’s strength behind my own, and I redoubled my resolve. Never. Never. Not even to lull him into complacency.
I think that if I had not been able to resist, I would have strangled him right then and there.