by Noah Gordon
29
TRYAVNA
Gabrovo was a bleak town of makeshift stick buildings. For months Rob had been yearning for a meal he hadn’t cooked himself, a fine meal served to him at the table of a public house. The Jews paused in Gabrovo to visit a merchant, just long enough for Rob to visit one of the three inns. The meal was a terrible disappointment, the meat heavily salted in a vain attempt to hide the fact it was spoiled, and the bread hard and stale, with holes in it from which, no doubt, weevils had been picked. The accommodations were as unsatisfactory as the fare. If the remaining two hostelries were no better, the other members of the caravan faced a hard winter, for every available room was crammed with sleeping pallets and they would slumber cheek by jowl.
It took Meir’s group less than an hour to travel to Tryavna, which proved to be much smaller than Gabrovo. The Jewish quarter—a group of thatch-roofed buildings of weather-silvered boards, huddling together as if for mutual comfort—was separated from the rest of the town by hibernating vineyards and brown fields in which cows cropped the stubs of coldwithered grass. They turned into a dirt courtyard, where boys took charge of their animals. “You’d best wait here,” Meir told Rob.
It wasn’t a long wait. Soon Simon came for him and led him into one of the houses, down a dark corridor that smelled of apples and into a room furnished only with a chair and a table piled with books and manuscripts. In the chair sat an old man with snowy hair and beard. He was roundshouldered and stout, with drooping dewlaps and large brown eyes that were watery with age but managed to peer into Rob’s very core. There were no introductions; it was like coming before a lord.
“The rabbenu has been told you’re traveling to Persia and need the language of that country for business,” Simon said. “He asks whether the joy of scholarship isn’t reason enough to study.”
“Sometimes there is joy in study,” Rob said, speaking directly to the old man. “For me, mostly there is hard work. I’m learning the language of the Persians because I hope it will get me what I want.”
Simon and the rabbenu jabbered.
“He asked if you are generally so honest. I told him you’re sufficiently forthright to tell a dying man he is dying, and he said, ‘That is honest enough.’”
“Tell him I have money and will pay for food and shelter.”
The sage shook his head. “This isn’t an inn. Those who live here must work,” Shlomo ben Eliahu said through Simon. “If the Ineffable One is merciful, we’ll have no need for a barber-surgeon this winter.”
“I don’t have to work as a barber-surgeon. I’m willing to do anything useful.”
The rabbenu’s long fingers rooted and scrabbled in his beard while he considered. Finally he announced his decision.
“Whenever slaughtered beef is declared not to be kasher,” Simon said, “you’ll take the meat and sell it to the Christian butcher in Gabrovo. And during the Sabbath, when Jews may not labor, you’ll tend the fires in the houses.”
Rob hesitated. The elderly Jew looked at him with interest, caught by the gleam in his eyes.
“Something?” Simon murmured.
“If Jews may not labor on your Sabbath, isn’t he damning my soul by arranging for me to do so?”
The rabbenu smiled at the translation.
“He says he trusts you do not yearn to become a Jew, Master Cole?” Rob shook his head.
“Then he is certain you may work without fear on Jews’ Sabbath, and bids you welcome to Tryavna.”
The rabbenu led them to where Rob would bed at the rear of a large cow barn. “There are candles in the study house. But no candles may be lighted for reading here in the barn, because of the dry hay,” the rabbenu said sternly through Simon, and put him to work at once mucking out stalls.
That night he lay on the straw with his cat on guard at his feet like a lion. Mistress Buffington deserted him occasionally to terrorize a mouse but always came back. The barn was a dark, moist palace, warmed to comfort by the great bovine bodies, and as soon as he became accustomed to the eternal lowing and the sweet stench of cow shit he slept contentedly.
* * *
Winter came to Tryavna three days after Rob did. Snow began to fall during the night and for the next two days alternated between a winddriven bitter sleet and fat flakes that floated down so big they looked like sweet things to eat. When it ended he was given a great wooden snow shovel and helped remove the drifts from before all the doors, wearing a leather Jew’s hat he found on a peg in the barn. Above him the looming mountains glittered white in the sun and the exertion in the cold air made him optimistic. When the shoveling was done there was no other work and he was free to go to the study house, a frame building into which the cold oozed and was pitifully fought by a token fire so inadequate that it wasn’t unusual for people to forget to feed it. The Jews sat around rough tables and studied hour after hour, quarreling loudly and sometimes bitterly.
They called their language the Tongue. Simon told him it was a mixture of Hebrew and Latin, plus a few idioms from the countries in which they traveled or lived. It was a language designed for disputants; when they studied together they hurled words at one another.
“What are they arguing about?” he asked Meir, amazed.
“Points of the law.”
“Where are their books?”
“They don’t use books. Those who know the laws have memorized them from hearing them from the mouths of their teachers. Those who haven’t yet memorized the laws are learning them by listening. It’s always been thus. There is Written Law, of course, but it is there only to be consulted. Every man who knows Oral Law is a teacher of legal interpretations as his own teacher taught them, and there are a multitude of interpretations because there are so many different teachers. That’s why they argue. Each time they debate, they learn a little bit more about the law.”
From the start in Tryavna they called him Mar Reuven, Hebrew for Master Robert. Mar Reuven the Barber-Surgeon. Being called Mar set him apart from them as much as anything else, for they called each other Reb, an honorific indicating commendable scholarship but ranking below that of someone designated a rabbenu. In Tryavna there was but one rabbenu.
They were a strange people, different from him in appearance as well as custom. “What’s the matter with his hair?” a man named Reb Joel Levski the Herdsman asked Meir. Rob was the only one in the study house without peoth, the ceremonial hair locks that curled beside each ear.
“He knows no better. He’s a goy, an Other,” Meir explained.
“But Simon told me this Other is circumcised. How can that be?” said Reb Pinhas ben Simeon the Dairyman.
Meir shrugged. “An accident,” he said. “I’ve discussed it with him. It has nothing to do with the covenant of Abraham.”
For several days Mar Reuven was stared at. In turn he did some staring of his own, for they seemed more than passing strange to him with their headwear and earlocks and bushy beards and dark clothing and heathenish ways. He was fascinated with their habits during prayer. They were so individualized. Meir donned his prayer shawl modestly and unobtrusively. Reb Pinhas unfolded his tallit and shook it out almost arrogantly, held it in front of him by two corners, and with an upward motion of his arms and a flick of his wrists sent it billowing over his head, to settle over his shoulders as soft as a blessing.
When Reb Pinhas prayed he bobbed back and forth with the urgency of his desire to send his supplication to the Almighty. Meir swayed gently when he recited the prayers. Simon rocked with a tempo somewhere in between, ending each forward motion with a little shudder and a slight shaking of the head.
Rob read and studied his book and the Jews, behaving too much like the rest of them to stay a novelty. For six hours every day—three hours following the morning prayer service, which they called shaharit, and three hours after the evening service, ma’ariv —the study house was jammed, for most of the men studied before and after completing the day’s work by which they earned their living. Between th
ese two periods, however, it was relatively quiet, with only one or two tables occupied by fulltime scholars. Soon he sat among them at ease and unnoticed, oblivious to the Jewish babble as he worked on the Persian Qu’ran, beginning to make real progress at last.
When their Sabbath came he tended the fires. It was his heaviest day of work since the snow shoveling but still so easy he was able to study for part of the afternoon. Two days later he helped Reb Elia the Carpenter put new rungs into wooden chairs. Other than that there was no labor but the study of Persian until, near the end of his second week in Tryavna, the rabbenu’s granddaughter Rohel taught him to milk. She had white skin and long black hair that she wore braided about her heart-shaped face, a small mouth with a womanly swelling of the lower lip, a tiny birthmark on her throat, and large brown eyes that always seemed to be on him.
While they were in the dairy one of the cows, a foolish thing that believed she was a bull, mounted another cow and began to move as if she owned a penis and had entered the other beast.
The color mounted from Rohel’s neck into her face, but she smiled and gave a little laugh. She leaned forward on her stool and placed her head against a milch cow’s warm flank, her eyes closed. Skirt tautened, she reached between her spread knees and grasped the thick teats beneath the swollen udders. Her fingers rippled, pressing swiftly in turn. When milk drummed into the bucket Rohel drew a breath and sighed. Her pink tongue crept out to wet her lips and she opened her eyes and looked at Rob.
Rob stood alone in the shadowy gloom of the cow barn, holding a piece of blanket. It smelled strongly of Horse and was only a little larger than a prayer shawl. With a quick movement he sent the blanket over his head to settle about his shoulders as nicely as if it were Reb Pinhas’ tallit. Repetition was giving him a confident motion in donning the prayer shawl. Cattle lowed as he stood and practiced a prayerful swaying, sedate but purposeful. He preferred to emulate Meir in prayer rather than more energetic worshipers like Reb Pinhas.
That was the easy part. Their language, strange-sounding and complex, would take a long time to master, especially while he was exerting such an effort to learn Persian.
They were a people of amulets. On the upper third of the right-hand doorpost of every door in every house was nailed a little wooden tube called a mezuzah. Simon said each tube contained a tiny rolled parchment; inscribed on the front in square Assyrian letters were twenty-two lines from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21, and on the back was the word Shaddai, “Almighty.”
As Rob had observed during the journey, each morning except on the Sabbath each adult male strapped two small leather boxes to his arm and head. These were called tefillin and contained portions of their holy book, the Torah, the box bound to the forehead being close to the mind, the other fastened to the arm, hard by the heart.
“We do it to obey the instructions in Deuteronomy,” Simon said. “‘And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart … And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes.’”
The trouble was Rob couldn’t tell, simply by watching, how the Jews put on the tefillin. Nor could he ask Simon to show him, for it would have been strange for a Christian to want to be taught a rite of Jewish worship. He was able to count that they wrapped ten loops of the leather around their arms, but what they did with the hand was complicated, for the leather strip was wound between the fingers in special ways he couldn’t determine.
Standing in the cold, ripe-smelling barn, he wrapped his left arm with a piece of old rope instead of the leather tefillin strip, but what he did to his hand and fingers with the rope never made any sense.
Still, the Jews were natural teachers and he learned something new every day. In the school of St. Botolph’s Church the priests had taught him that the God of the Old Bible was Jehovah. But when he referred to Jehovah, Meir shook his head.
“Know that for us the Lord our God, Blessed be He, has seven names. This is the most sacred.” With a piece of charcoal from the fireplace he drew on the wooden floor, writing the word in both Persian and in the Tongue: Yahweh. “It is never spoken, for the identity of the Most High is inexpressible. It is mispronounced by Christians, as you’ve done. But the name isn’t Jehovah, do you understand?”
Rob nodded.
At night on his bed of straw he reviewed new words and customs, and before sleep overwhelmed him he remembered a phrase, a fragment of a blessing, a gesture, a pronunciation, an expression of ecstasy on a face during prayer, and he stored these things into his mind against the day when they would be needed.
“You must stay away from the rabbenu’s granddaughter,” Meir told him, frowning.
“I have no interest in her.” Days had passed since they had talked in the dairy, and he hadn’t been near her since.
In truth, he had dreamed of Mary Cullen the night before and had awakened at dawn to lie stunned and hot-eyed, trying to recall details of the dream.
Meir nodded, his face clearing. “Good. One of the women has observed her watching you with too much interest, and told the rabbenu. He asked me to have a talk with you.” Meir placed a forefinger against his nose. “One quiet word to a wise man is better than a year of pleading with a fool.”
Rob was alarmed and disturbed, for he had to stay in Tryavna to observe the ways of the Jews and study Persian. “I don’t want trouble over a woman.”
“Of course not.” Meir sighed. “The problem is the girl, who should be married. She has been betrothed since childhood to Reb Meshullum ben Moses, the grandson of Reb Baruch ben David. You know Reb Baruch? A tall, spare man? Long face? Thin, pointed nose? He sits just beyond the fire in the study house?”
“Ah, that one. An old man with fierce eyes.”
“Fierce eyes because he’s a fierce scholar. If the rabbenu weren’t the rabbenu, Reb Baruch would be the rabbenu. They were always rival scholars and the closest of friends. When their grandchildren were still babies they arranged a match with great joy, to unite their families. Then they had a terrible falling-out that ended their friendship.”
“Why did they quarrel?” asked Rob, who was beginning to feel sufficiently at home in Tryavna to enjoy a bit of gossip.
“They slaughtered a young bull in partnership. Now, you must understand that our laws of kashruth are ancient and complex, with rules and interpretations about how things must be and how things must not be. A tiny blemish was discovered on the lung of the animal. The rabbenu quoted precedents that said the blemish was insignificant and in no way spoiled the meat. Reb Baruch cited other precedents that indicated the meat was ruined by the blemish and couldn’t be eaten. He insisted he was right and resented the rabbenu for questioning his scholarship.
“They argued until finally the rabbenu lost patience. ‘Cut the animal in half,’ he said. ‘I’ll take my portion, and let Baruch do whatever he pleases with his.’
“When he brought his half of the bull home, he intended to eat it. But after deliberating, he complained, ‘How can I eat the meat of this animal? One half lies on Baruch’s garbage pile, and I should eat the other half?’ So he threw away his half of the beef as well.
“After that, they seemed to oppose each other all the time. If Reb Baruch said white, the rabbenu said black, if the rabbenu said meat, Reb Baruch said milk. When Rohel was twelve and a half years old, the age when her elders should have begun talking seriously about a wedding, the families did nothing because they knew that any meetings would end in quarreling between the two old men. Then young Reb Meshullum, the prospective bridegroom, went on his first foreign business trip with his father and other men of his family. They traveled to Marseilles with a stock of copper kettles and stayed almost a year, trading and making a fine profit. Counting the time of traveling they were gone two years before they returned last summer, bringing a caravan shipment of well-made French garments. And still the two families, held apart by the grandfathers, do not arrange for the marriage to take place!
“By now,” Meir said, “it’s common knowledge that the unfortunate Rohel might as well be considered an agunah, a deserted wife. She has breasts but suckles no babies, she’s a woman grown but she has no husband, and it has become a major scandal.”
They agreed that it would be best for Rob to avoid the dairy during the hours of milking.
* * *
It was well that Meir had spoken to him, for who knew what might have happened if he had not been made to see clearly that their winter’s hospitality didn’t include the use of their women. At night he had tortured voluptuous visions of long, full thighs, red hair, and pale young breasts with tips like berries. He felt certain the Jews would have a prayer asking forgiveness for spilled seed—they had a prayer for everything—but he had none and he hid the evidence of his dreams under fresh straw and tried to lose himself in his work.
It was hard. All around him was a humming sexuality encouraged by their religion—they believed it a special blessing to make love on the eve of the Sabbath, for instance, perhaps explaining why they so dearly loved the end of the week! The young men talked freely of such matters, groaning to one another if a wife was untouchable; Jewish married couples were forbidden to copulate for twelve days after the flow of menses began, or seven days after it ceased, whichever period was longer. Their abstinence wasn’t over until the wife marked its end by purifying herself through immersion in the ritual pool, called the mikva.
This was a brick-lined tank in a bathhouse built over a spring. Simon told Rob that to be ritually fit, the mikva water had to come from a natural spring or a river. The mikva was for symbolic purification, not cleanliness. The Jews bathed at home, but each week just before the Sabbath, Rob joined the males in the bathhouse, which contained only the pool and a great roaring fire in a round hearth over which hung cauldrons of boiling water. Bathing stripped to the skin in the steamy warmth, they vied for the privilege of pouring water over the rabbenu while they questioned him at length.