The next evening, as Pearl walked the few peaceful blocks to the ritual bath, the three-quarter-full moon looked melted away, like a sucked-on candy. Pearl had known for a long time there was something wrong with Masha. The girl had been sickly, intense, oddly, unconciously seductive all her life. Now Masha was twenty-one, the perfect age to find a husband. But who would marry a sick girl, a rebellious girl? No parent would allow it.
Pearl slipped off her robe and walked naked down the steps to the mikveh. If Masha didn’t marry by the time she was twenty-four, twenty-five at the most, her chances dwindled, she thought as she submerged herself in the water, feet hovering a few inches from the floor of the tank, her long red hair floating around her, then rising, taking a breath, and going under again. The competition to find a man and start having babies was enormous. The men didn’t start dating till they were twenty-five, as a rule, and then they wanted the young ones. Rising once more, Pearl saw the kindly bath attendant, a tiny old woman in a headscarf, observing her to see she was cleansing herself properly. The woman was nodding with approval. Pearl Edelman was a model mother. She had eleven children, a loving husband, and she knew the depth of happiness family life could bring. Her purpose, the purpose of her children, was to bring good Jews into the world, and teach them the Torah.
I have to get Masha married as quickly as possible, she thought as she went under one more time. That’s what I have to do.
Later that night, when Pearl sat at the edge of her bed combing out her long, wet hair, Mordecai walked in, shutting the door behind him quietly. Pearl’s pale skin was luminous. Her full arms emerged from the puffed sleeves of her prettiest cotton nightgown, legs crossed. Peeking up, nearly shy, she smiled at him. They would make love. It is written in the Shulchan Aruch, the legal code:
Every man must lie with his wife on the night of her immersion.
14
The day my fate was to change, the sky was a seamless vivid blue, the air a frigid claw. I had made my usual tense, skittering way across the courtyard to the latrine clutching a wad of rags, my hands chapped and ruddy from the cold. Inside the stinking privy at the base of the stairwell, my pants down, I felt colder than I had outside. At least the smell of crap—largely Hodel’s, I guessed—was dulled by the freezing air. Sitting on the rough wooden seat, I gazed up at a circle of cobalt sky through a high round window. When I left, I could not bring myself to say the bathroom prayer of thanks for my crevices.
On my way to morning prayer, the wind sliced through my thin trousers, ran up my sleeves like trickles of freezing water. As I prayed in Rabbi Noé’s house, my prayer shawl over my head, I could not keep my thoughts still. I was singing hymns along with the other men, but my mind was on the coming day of lugging my peddler’s box through the glacial streets of Paris, hoping to sell a pair of gloves to a man who already had fifty pairs when my own hands were numb, or perhaps a lace collar to a woman who owned a hundred almost exactly the same as what she was buying from me. I sold useless objects to people who didn’t need what I sold, in order to support a wife I didn’t love, whom I had come to fear in a way. I rocked back and forth, back and forth, and it suddenly occurred to me that I might ask God to help me. I prayed: “Please, Hashem, Great One, please, change my life.” That’s what I said, over and over. I was interrupted by the man to my right. He was whispering my name. At first I wasn’t sure, but then I realized that, yes, he was speaking to me.
“Jacob,” he whispered. “Jacob Cerf.” I looked up and saw the cheery face of Blond Nathan, a man I occasionally bought merchandise from. He must have sidled up to me when I wasn’t looking. Nathan was an affable fellow with a shady reputation. My father would never go near him because some of his merchandise was stolen. I tried as much as I could to avoid fenced items when I bought stock, and for the most part I think I succeeded. Today, however, I was very vulnerable, low, and frankly I was capable of much more serious crimes than buying a knife that had been lifted from some powdered little turd. Nathan gestured for me to come outside after the morning prayer had ended. I did so, and we both stood outside stamping our feet and breathing into our hands.
“I have a wonderful haul of knives, straight from Thiers, in the Auvergne, I just got back to Paris yesterday,” said Nathan urgently. His front teeth were very prominent, and brown at the tips, as if they had been dipped in tannin. His eyes were round and gray. “I’ll give you an excellent price.”
“Bought wholesale?” I asked doubtfully.
He nodded, pulling up his lapels to protect his neck from the wind. “I rode all the way to the Auvergne and back in a cart with a load of onions, just to get the best blades. You know those poor French fellows in Thiers who grind the blades, do you know how they do it? They have to lie down all day on their bellies. They look like dybbuks, pale as death—they lie there right over the gorge, on freezing slabs of stone, holding out the blades against the grindstones, with big shaggy dogs curled up on their backs like living blankets, to prevent them from getting pleurisy! I’m not joking! What a way to live, eh? It’s like something you’d expect in Gehenna …”
We were already halfway to Nathan’s rented room. The narrow, muddy street was crowded with men, women, and children, nearly all dressed in black. The women sold firewood, the men sold rags, bagels, teakettles, pots, the boys walked dutifully behind their tutors, going off to study Torah, or, if they were urchins, they scampered about looking for pockets to pick or a hunk of bread to make off with. The occasional shop window boasted paltry items: a couple of salted herring, some seedcakes, a barrel of pickled cucumbers, cuts of meat, candy, all displayed side by side. People talked fast and loud; there was a marketplace atmosphere to the neighborhood, which was, in fact, only a few blocks away from where I lived. I was anxious to get inside again; in spite of the rags I had stuffed down my undershirt, I was shivering from the cold.
Nathan, checking left and right, led me through a door into the courtyard of his building, where two barefoot children, a girl and a boy, were chasing a bedraggled chicken, and up a set of cramped stairs. We plodded, shuffling. Dust swirled in a parabola of light let in by a tiny high window. After a three-flight ascent, Nathan stopped at a heavy oak door. Squinting in the low light, he picked out three keys, and tumbled a trio of corresponding locks.
“Now,” he said. Turning to me and smiling with his tea-dipped overbite, he heaved himself, shoulder-first, into the massive door, which gave way grudgingly. I stepped inside behind him. The only furniture in the murky room was a small desk with a few papers fanned out on it, a high-backed chair, and a double bed. I glanced at the papers and noticed that Nathan had written out his accounts in neat Hebrew. On the floor were three large trunks with flat tops.
Nathan took his key ring out again and unlocked the first trunk, flinging it open. Without much interest, I observed the dull steel of many knives neatly arrayed in rows on velvet. There were clearly several tiers of cutlery in each trunk. Nathan took out each tray and set it onto the bed, then lit a meager fire in the grate. This hint of warmth relaxed me; I was suddenly overcome by sleepiness and wished I could lie down for a few minutes. I did not want to look at knives. Nathan opened the last of the trunks, set all the trays of knives and cutlery onto the bed, sat on the chair by his desk, and lit a small pipe with a bell-shaped bowl he carried in his inside pocket.
“Just knives for me,” I said. “I don’t have room for the full sets in my box.” Nathan nodded and frowned down at his accounts, puffing on his pipe. As I watched him, his fair hair was suddenly rimmed with golden light. The sun must have come out from behind a cloud at that instant, because the room was transformed. A rectangle of light threaded through with white veins trembled on the wall to my right, thrown through the warped glass of the window. The lifeless gray knives on the bed had become smears of blazing silver. The illuminated smoke from Nathan’s pipe rose liquidly through the air like a sinuous dragon. I felt the warmth of the sun on my face and was suffused with a strange, almost ecstatic jo
y. Then, as though a great fist had closed itself over the sun, everything went dark again. My doldrums returned. So sad and bored I could have wept, I approached the first of the trays on the bed and listlessly thumbed a few blades. Pocketknives. I could sell these. The blades were sharp, tapered, shining. They had been hinged into simple bone handles, for the most part. A few of them had a bit more detail on them and could fetch a higher price. Very slowly, as though drugged with valerian, I selected eight knives, placing them on Nathan’s desk. And then, as I shuffled toward the bed again, an extraordinary object caught my eye, tossed in among knives. It was a pistol dagger—a long knife with a little pistol built into the blade. The handle was a finely carved ivory horse’s head. I had never seen a weapon like this before. I picked it up and turned it in my hands. It was as long as my forearm. The blade was very sharp. The barrel of the little gun was burnished steel. The trigger guard of the pistol was shaped like a shell. I took it to the window to examine it more closely. The horse’s head had been carved in great detail; it looked alive, the nostrils flared as if in mid-gallop, the mane flowing.
“I was wondering if you would sniff that out,” said Nathan with a smile.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“An old woman in the Auvergne sold off her whole estate. Her husband had died and left her nothing but debts. She had great stuff, I wish I could have bought more.” He puffed on his pipe, looking over at me benignly. I tried to lay the weapon back on the bed and feign a lack of interest, but I couldn’t relinquish it. The initials DV were engraved under the horse’s chin.
“What was the name of the man it belonged to?”
“No idea,” said Nathan.
“Well, what was the widow’s name?”
“We didn’t exactly have a personal relationship. I bought her stuff by the pound. She was desperate to get rid of it.”
“Where are the other things you bought?” I asked.
“Hm?” asked Nathan.
“The other things you bought from the widow.”
“Jacob, I would love to let you browse all day but I have another client who wants to see this stock.” Nathan had grown as serious as a man who can’t cover his front teeth with his upper lip can look.
“How much for the eight pocketknives?”
“Three livres.”
I forced myself to replace the pistol dagger on the tray and pretended to forget about it.
“I’ll give you two livres for the knives,” I said.
“Two livres ten sous,” he countered.
“Two livres five sous.”
“Forty-eight sous. My final offer,” he said, looking down at his accounts.
“You’re robbing me.” I paid out the money.
“And the widow’s weapon? Not interested?” Nathan asked as he wrote me out a receipt for the knives.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “How much do you want for it?”
“Fifty livres.”
“What?”
“It’s a rare piece.”
“You said you bought the stuff by the pound!”
“You’ll sell it for much more than I’m asking.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“Forty-five,” he snapped. I looked down at him. His clear round eyes were glacial pools.
“Is this going to bring me trouble, Nathan?”
“Not unless you fire it.”
I paid him the money, all I had. He threw in a tooled leather sheath, made in Spain, he said. “It’s not the original, of course, but it fits very nicely.”
I rushed home, breathless, as if to a tryst. There was no one at home. Unable to wait another moment, fingers trembling, I unwrapped the dagger from the square of wrinkled linen Blond Nathan had swaddled it in. The weapon gleamed in my hands, the tiny pistol tucked so neatly against the flank of the long blade. The carved ivory horse’s head had been rendered by a master; I tried to imagine the tiny chisel he had used to pick out the flared nostrils, the widened eyes. Gazing at that perfect object balanced on my fingers, I felt an intense longing, something like love, rise up in me.
It occurred to me that it might be nice to offer a bit of gunpowder and a few bullets along with it, as an incentive to buy.
Old Aaron Mayer, who provided armor and munitions for the French soldiers, had his shop a few streets away. Locking the weapon in my peddler’s box and yoking up, I dashed down the street and walked into Mayer’s shop. The room was paneled with dark wood. Glass-fronted cases filled with gleaming muskets and swords lined the walls. Old Aaron, his back badly bent, his gray beard fine as a sprig of baby’s breath, was helping a young aristocrat choose his equipment. The young man stood very straight, chest out, one foot splayed. He wore a powdered wig and was dressed in an exquisite yellow-and-sky-blue-striped coat with matching britches. As was the custom in those days, he was armed with a long, sheathed sword that hung from a fine leather belt around his waist. The young man’s face was powdered very white, and he wore a little black dot above his lip. He watched me enter in the neutral, slightly irritated way one observes a wet dog slinking in through an open door. Aaron turned. Seeing me, he gestured for me to sit down in a corner till he was finished. The young man was holding a musket in clean, tapered fingers.
“There is really no reason to begin with the finest gun you can buy,” Aaron said, taking the gun. “It’s wisest to begin with something solid but economical, like this.” He held up another, seemingly identical musket. The young man stood there for a moment, one long finger on his chin, thinking. Then he pointed at the more expensive of the two muskets. He told Aaron to put it aside for him for a couple of hours, along with the ammunition. He would be back very soon. “Of course,” said Aaron. The young man walked out, leaving me in a cloud of intoxicating perfume.
“And off he goes to borrow money from Loeb Hildesheim, and so the trouble begins,” Aaron said in Yiddish, shaking his old head. “Not one of them lives within his means. When they go into the army, they all need to buy the fanciest gear. And so they borrow from us, and then their parents get furious at us for lending.” Aaron shrugged. “I’m not complaining. So, Jacob, what can I do for you?”
“I need some bullets and gunpowder. For a pistol dagger I want to sell, but I have never sold such a thing, and I thought it would be nice to have the accoutrements.”
“Listen to your accent! You sound almost French.”
“We all have to try, a bit,” I said.
“Of course. Now. You’re not wearing the weapon, of course.”
“Are you mad? It’s in the box.” Jews in Paris were not allowed to bear arms of any kind on our persons; swords, guns, even hunting knives, were forbidden to us.
“Well, I better show you how it functions. So you can demonstrate for the customer. Always a good idea to know how your merchandise works.”
Tenderly, I removed the wrapped weapon from the bottom drawer of my peddler’s box, laid it on a table, and revealed it. Aaron looked at it somberly for a long moment. “Where did you get this, Jacob?” he asked me quietly.
“I bought it along with a load of other knives from Thiers,” I answered casually. Aaron lifted it, examining the carved handle.
“You must have paid a great deal for it,” he said.
“It was a part of an estate. A widow. I did think it was particularly nice,” I said fatuously.
“It’s signed,” Aaron said, passing his thumb over a tiny scrawl embedded in the bottom of the handle. “Le Page. You see? Pierre Le Page is commissioned by the finest families in France. You’ll need to be careful how you sell this. I can’t believe … Who sold it to you?” Sensing my hesitation, he looked up at me from under his wiry gray brows. “All right. Well, first you put a measure of gunpowder down the barrel like this.” He took what looked like a silver hip flask in his crooked fingers, removed a pointed silver measure affixed to its top, then unscrewed its cap. Carefully, he tipped a measure of gunpowder into the pointed silver cap, then emptied the powder in
to the barrel of the gun.
“Here’s a bullet. You wrap it in a little piece of rag, like this.” He enfolded a round lead bullet neatly into a square of cloth, then stuffed it into the barrel. He snapped a little metal rod from a clip under the barrel of the gun. “Use it to push the bullet all the way to the bottom of the gun, like this.” I nodded, absorbed in the demonstration.
“Now,” he said. “When they are ready to fire, they should simply tip a tiny amount of gunpowder into the pan here, cock the gun like this, and pull the trigger. The flint ignites the bit of powder in the pan, then the spark travels through the little hole, and—boom—there’s an explosion behind the bullet, and it flies out. But you can’t fire from too far away with this pistol. A few feet at most. This is for close range. Better to just stab them, really,” said Aaron with a wry smile. “Then shoot them for good measure.”
“How much for the powder flask?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll give you that as a wedding present. Just pay me for the bullets. Ten sous for a dozen, and a bit of powder. You don’t need to give more than that with a pistol dagger like this. They’re very popular with my set these days,” he said, gesturing toward the young man who had returned with funds for his musket.
“Ah—monsieur, back so soon!” exclaimed the old man. I nodded to Aaron and left.
That night I had a dream. Hodel was sleeping with her nightgown bunched up around her breasts. I could see her naked belly, the red hair of her sex. Her skin was very pale. An eerie, animal growling was coming from somewhere in the room. It veered into a high whine. It was coming from her gut. The skin of her belly began to ripple and undulate; something sinuous was writhing under her skin. The whining got higher, louder. I became frightened. In the dream, Hodel sat up suddenly, her eyes wide, her red hair a mass of serpentine curls around her head. She opened her mouth as if to vomit. I saw with horror that she had no teeth. Her mouth was a shiny pit. Something was moving around inside her throat. I couldn’t stop myself from leaning in to see what it was. A black eel with round yellow eyes lunged out of her mouth and clamped its needle teeth onto my forehead, undulating as it injected poison into my brain. I woke in a state of terror.
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