The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

It was an old joke. What humor it may once have contained had long since faded. But the handsome young Constable, who was new at his post, turned his face to hide his grin. Perhaps it was for his benefit that Guttle had revived the joke.

  The merchant flicked his whip and the swaybacked horse began to move slowly along the cobbles, accepting without protest the weight of the wagon and the nuisance of the flies, as if it had been pulling this same cart over these same stones for three hundred years. Perhaps it had. The other two women wrapped thick fingers around the wheelbarrow handles and pushed the flour through the gate. It would fill the bellies of the Judengasse for a week.

  Guttle smiled at the clean-shaven guard. “Imagine,” she said. “Free beetles. Perhaps a new day is dawning.”

  The Constable was not accustomed to speaking with Jews. He did not know how to respond. Guttle winked at him. Then she hurried back through the gate, raising her ankle length shift two inches so it would clear the churned-up mud. This new guard certainly seemed nicer than Leutnant Gruber, who wielded his sword as if were a fly swatter and the Jews an irritant buzzing around his head. Was it really possible, a kindhearted guard at the gate?

  Above them, in the third-story front room of the first house inside the gate, Hiram Liebmann, the deaf mute, was noting on a sheet of paper what he had observed: that the flour wagon had arrived eleven minutes late, that the purchase of flour had taken three minutes. Lacking language, he made his notations with small drawings, like entries in an odd ledger: a cart for the horse and wagon, a sack of flour for the sale. When he was through, he would wind his pocket watch, as he did many times each day; it marked his passage though life, as a crutch serves a one-legged man.

  Guttle’s mother was waiting for her a few houses down, in front of the rag dealer’s stall. Used coats, dresses and remnants of cloth hung from nails and were piled on a table. “What are you, meshuganah?” her mother said. “Talking to a guard holding a musket?”

  “He wasn’t holding it.”

  “Don’t get smart with me. I heard what you said. ‘Perhaps a new day is dawning.’ What kind of talk is that? You want another Fettmilch riot? I would smack your face, if I didn’t think finding the Schul-Klopper maybe affected your brain. And ‘free beetles?’ Enough with your jokes. Today is not a day for them.”

  Frau Schnapper led her towards the bakery. Guttle said nothing as they walked down the lane, in which merely breathing the humid, stagnant air was difficult. Dishwater air, the poet laureate of the Judengasse, Nahum Baum, had called it in a poem more than a century earlier. The air had not improved since.

  “Just wait,” Emmie said. “A new day, indeed! We’ll see what your father has to say.”

  The aroma of browning challah and the putrid stink of the ditch battled for the air like warring armies. Half a dozen women in white aprons were baking with flour that remained from the previous week. Guttle went to her Friday work place, already cleared for her. The new sacks of flour were stacked beside a flat stone shelf.

  The air in the bakery was warmer than the morning air outside, although that, too, was unusually mild. This was a time of renewal, the first week of spring, the Chief Rabbi had intoned in his Sabbath sermon, and the congregation had buzzed like a hive. Except for the men who went into the city on business, and passed the city parks, the Jews had few hints of the changing seasons. Not a tree, not a bush, not a flower, not a blade of grass grew in the Judengasse; there wasn’t any room; there wasn’t enough sun. Only in the cemetery did wildflowers bloom, in late summer mostly, and then wilted quickly, imitating the dead.

  With knowing fingers Guttle wound her braids atop her head to keep them clear of the flour and the ovens. Slitting stitches on the top canvas sack, she dumped a pile of coarse brown flour onto the flat stone. The flour was speckled, as always, with red dots. Flour beetles. Sinking to her knees to see them better, she began to pick the beetles out, using a pair of tweezers donated long ago by a Doctor at the hospital. Each insect she removed she dropped into a pot of heated oil that smoked near the edge of the stone. The beetles, living creatures, sizzled as they touched the oil. Then they turned black. The work of cleaning the flour was tedious, was always assigned to one of the younger women, who still had strong knees and strong eyes, knees not yet burning from dozens of years of scrubbing floors, eyes not yet dimmed from reading the Books of Moses by oil lamp or candle light. Even young eyes, however, were not strong enough to spot all the beetle eggs in the flour. This was a secret made harmless by the heat of the ovens, a secret the world of women kept from the world of men. There was a saying every woman knew: in baking bread, you can’t have too many eggs.

  While Guttle searched for beetles and dropped them in the oil, other women added water and yeast to the already cleaned flour, molded it into braided loaves, and gossiped. The subject this day, of course, was the death of the Schul-Klopper.

  “Who can replace him?” one of them asked. “It’s hard to imagine anyone else knocking.”

  They agreed that at least Solomon Gruen had led a full life. A learned man, a Greek scholar, with all those shelves of books he loved. They wondered why he never had married — well, maybe his life had not been so full. But he’d been a good shammus — a good sexton — at the schul, they agreed, making sure everything was in good repair, that there was always enough oil for the lamps, helping the Rabbis teach the young boys the Talmud in the three heders. And he’d been a good influence, they agreed, on that wild Hersch Liebmann, a boy from the poorest family in the Judengasse, whom he’d given a job as janitor at the schul so he could take home a few kreuzer each week to his elderly parents. Life was unpredictable, the women agreed; who wanted to die in the street instead of in bed? But at least the Schul-Klopper had died doing what he most enjoyed: summoning the pious to services. And death had been quick, with little suffering. His heart, no doubt.

  The chatter of the women stopped as the whining sound of a saw biting into board sliced through the air from the shop of the coffin maker across the lane. Yussel Kahn called himself a cabinet maker, which he was, but only the wealthiest in the Judengasse thought of him that way. To the rest he was the coffin maker. The women paused in their work, maintaining a respectful silence. They could guess what the coffin maker was doing. He was fashioning the plain spruce box in which Solomon Gruen would be buried before sundown. And when, a short time later, they heard him hammering nails they knew they were right. When he was making furniture, Yussel Kahn, who took pride in his craft, used only glue and dowels.

  Except for the painful screaming of the saw, an unusual quiet had settled over the lane. News of the death of the Schul-Klopper had passed from house to house as if through the ether, even before it was passed by word of mouth. Saddened families kept noisy children indoors out of respect. Rag pickers and moneylenders did not cry out to passersby; there were none. But now it was noon, the body of Solomon Gruen was resting in the hospital under a sheet, where it would remain until the funeral that evening, and Guttle could hear the Judengasse returning to life. The boys in the heders were out and about for their midday exercise. Young children innocent of death darted through the lane shouting as they played made up games, watched over by older sisters — the girls did not go to heder — or by no one at all. Groups of women, talking quietly, moved past the bakery toward the north gate, where they would pass the new Constable, then walk two by two in the direction of the market. The women could go to the stalls to buy fresh fruits and vegetables only after noon, after the Gentile women had taken their pick. Unlike the Gentiles, they were not allowed to touch the produce.

  Guttle picked beetles out of the last pile of flour and dropped them into the oil. She packed the cleaned flour in ceramic canisters with tight-fitting lids. With a slatted spoon she lifted clumps of the dead beetles from the surface of the oil onto a rag. By the time the oil was clean — the same oil was used week after week — a knob of crisp beetles sat dripping on the cloth, waiting, like the body of Solomon Gruen, to be carried to its fin
al resting place.

  Perched on the edge of the stone, closing her tired eyes, Guttle found herself burrowing past the morning’s sadness to the previous evening’s absurdity. Viktor the Cantor proposing marriage to her, instead of first asking her father! Outrageous! He’d been shocked when she put him off, saying she was too young to marry. But he said he might ask her father tonight. Now she relived his proposal — in the cemetery! — as melodrama, as opera, which was Viktor’s favorite subject; he’d studied it while away at school, talked about it incessantly. Beneath her breath, amid the baking bread, with the other women chattering outside, she softly sang an aria, which she invented as she sang. A creative person was Guttle Schnapper, and in the Judengasse this could be a curse, because what could you do with it? Guttle often painted dark moods into song .

  He wants to marry me

  Though I am just fifteen;

  He wants to carry me

  Where I have never been;

  His voice, though very large,

  Does not exceed his paunch;

  I might be crushed to death

  Before we ever launch

  The dozen babes he seeks

  (“Just six of each!”)

  Without a loving breeze

  The eager Cantor can’t

  Prepare to sail my boat

  However high his C’s.

  When Viktor seeks my hand,

  Perhaps this very night,

  Papa I beg of you:

  My troth don’t plight!

  Now love’s bare plot’s afloat,

  The naked scene is set;

  How will fair Guttle fare?

  I don’t know yet!

  She rubbed her eyes with her fists. She didn’t know whether, in the half light of the lane, the libretto of her life would be comedy or tragedy.

  Soon after the women returned to check the ovens, their talking broke off. There was an intaking of breath, several women at once began to say, “Shalom, shalom Doctor.” Guttle turned to look. Doctor Lev Berkov, the tall, lean director of the hospital, had entered the bakery. To many of the women, Doctor Berkov was the catch of the Judengasse. Though he’d grown up in a poor family, he had managed to leave the Judengasse to go to medical school. Then he’d come back. He was thirty years old, and not yet married. And so nice, so dedicated. He had a full head of brown hair, and the way he wore his beard, trimmed very short in a dark triangle, the bakery women found (in their matronly euphemism) scintillating.

  Doctor Berkov greeted the women with smiles and friendly nods even as he looked about. Spotting Guttle in the far corner, he approached her, asked if she would step outside for a moment. The whispers began as soon as she followed him into the lane: Was that his choice? Would Guttle Schnapper wed the handsome Doctor? But what would that do to poor Viktor Marcus, with whom she’d been seen keeping company? It was not the Doctor’s place to choose, of course, nor the Cantor’s. Guttle’s father would arrange her marriage. But if the good Doctor hinted that he was interested, would any father say no? Guttle would be sixteen in the autumn, it was time she was spoken for.

  Thus did the women speculate as the Doctor led her out of earshot. He asked her how she was feeling since finding the Schul-Klopper. She’d been shaky at first, she admitted, but felt fine now. She told him she was grateful he’d come to ask.

  The Doctor replied that there was also something else he wanted to know. It was she who had spilled the milk on the deceased, was that correct?

  “I didn’t mean to … I stumbled over him.”

  “Where did you get the milk?”

  “I borrowed it from Frau Metzenbaum. We had none left for my baby brother.”

  “And was Herr Gruen — the Schul-Klopper — already dead when this happened? As far as you could tell.”

  Guttle began to feel uneasy. She did not understand the point of the questions. “He was lying on muddy cobbles, that’s why I stumbled. He wasn’t making a sound. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. I was afraid to touch him. That’s why, when Isidor ran to get you at the hospital, I knew it was too late. I ran for the Rabbi instead.”

  “Was his mouth open at the time?”

  “It was closed.”

  “When you left Herr Gruen lying there, was anyone else in the lane?”

  “Nobody. The men were already off to schul.” Her irritation grew. “Why are you asking these questions? Did we do something wrong?”

  She began to feel nervous in her stomach. The Doctor saw her agitation, placed his hand on her shoulder. “That’s all the questions. You and Izzy didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly the right thing, getting help. It’s just that, when someone dies, we doctors are supposed to find out the cause.”

  Guttle looked at the Doctor’s face. His searching eyes flicked away. There was, she knew, something he was not telling her.

  A few minutes later, as the sun reached its apex, clean light sharp as a butcher’s knife fell into the lane from overhead, brightening the cobbles. Guttle and the other women of the bakery — indeed, hundreds of women the length of the Judengasse — and some men, too — poured out into the lane, as they did at this time each sunny day, and turned their faces skyward, to feel the warm rays on their pale cheeks, their foreheads, the soft lids of their eyes. Motionless and silent, they stood that way, faces toward the blue sliver of sky, absorbing the sun’s warmth like so many hungry flowers. Until, in four minutes, maybe five, the golden light climbed the east-side walls and disappeared, and the lane was in shadow again.

  2

  Guttle carried the oil-soaked beetles, wrapped in cloth, from the bakery to the sewage ditch. Every twenty metres a board lay across the trench so people could cross it without having to jump. She knelt on the nearest board, let go of two corners of the cloth, slid the black mess into the ditch. The viscous sewage was moving slowly downhill, and the clump of dead beetles moved with it. Children in the street had been waiting for her, as they did each Friday, and now they ran alongside the ball of beetles, shouting and making a game of it, throwing small stones in an attempt to shatter the clump, shouting, “Kill the Emperor,” although for years there had been an Empress. The skull of beetles vanished around the curve. Guttle’s shift was wet beneath her arms. She was frightened for the kinder. Constables sometimes walked the lane unexpectedly, and children in the Judengasse had been hanged for lesser offenses than shouting angry words. Children had been hanged for stealing a piece of cheese from the Gentile market.

  She stood up on the board, but as she stepped onto the uneven cobbles, the words of the youngsters, circling like ravens, made her dizzy. She lost her balance, fell hard on her knees. She didn’t want to move. Who had taught the children such a thing? People in the Judengasse did not curse the Gentiles. Life was life. You lived it as it came. You made the best of it. A dozen different sayings had taught her that. What was, was the will of Yahweh. Seeking to change the immutable was the wisdom of fools.

  Still, she could not deny the anger within her. She wanted to see the locks on the gates disappear. She wanted to see the ghetto walls crumble. It was not the Gentiles she hated, it was the walls. She wanted to take an axe and hack at them until they cracked, work her fingers into the cracks and pull away chunks of rock. Stone by stone pull the wall apart until there was a hole that every person in the lane could climb through, to stream out into the city, to promenade in the parks, to smell the flowers and the trees, to play on the grass, to feel the warm sun on their faces. To do all the forbidden things.

  It didn’t matter that she was fifteen years old, and a girl. It didn’t matter that no one had made the walls so much as tremble in three hundred years.

  Pressing the back of her hands to her eyes, she thought: Yahweh has put up with the walls for all these centuries. Am I superior to Him? If I oppose His will — and me just a girl — am I mad! Not even a hundred men could tear down the walls.

  Her eyes began to sting. The oily rag was clenched in her fist. She had the feeling that someone was watchi
ng her, perhaps judging her; she’d had this feeling before. Disregarding it, she knelt by the ditch and saw brown turds float by. Soon they would pass beneath the south gate and down the sluice, into the river laced with sailing vessels, where, in the mild current, Jewish waste would mingle with Gentile waste, and drift together towards the Rhine and the distant sea.

  At first she had kept her reaction to the dead Schul-Klopper under control. Now, alone in her room, sprawled on the flowered print spread on the bed, she found the memory of his body making her skin itch, her head throb like the pounding of his hammer. When her mother peered into the room, Guttle blurted, “Why did we run out of milk? If we had milk, I wouldn’t have stepped on him!”

  “You’re right, Guttle, it’s my fault. Now come with me to the market.”

  “I don’t want to go. Everyone keeps looking at me. As if it was me who made the Schul-Klopper die.”

  “No one is blaming you. No one is looking at you. What, are you planning to spend the rest of your life in this room?”

  “You know something, Mama? There’s not so much exciting happening outside.”

  “That again? You want a dead horse, maybe? Come, I need you to help me carry. I’ll tell you what, bubbelah. Next time we run out of milk, I’ll borrow some myself.”

  “There won’t be a dead man to trip over!”

  “I certainly hope not,” Emmie Schnapper said.

  On the third-floor of the first house inside the north gate, Yetta Liebmann, boney and haggard, heard footsteps on the stairs, then a knocking on the door. Emmie Schnapper and her daughter Guttle had returned from marketing, with the food Emmie had offered to bring.