by Robert Mayer
Dvorah fussed with her cap again. She loved her bright auburn curls. She was going to hate losing them some day. She did not want to go through life wearing a wig, or with her hair always covered, as custom required of married women. It was supposed to keep other men from wanting her. But would some future husband still want her? Eighteen months older than Guttle, Dvorah nonetheless often followed her lead, had painfully taught herself to read German, for instance, after Guttle had learned the language with ease.
“The coffin maker has never even spoken to me,” Guttle said.
“The truth is,” Avra put in, “my sister is already betrothed. To Isidor Kracauer.”
“Avra, Izzy is fourteen. By the time he’s old enough to marry, I’ll be an old maid.”
“If not Izzy, then it’s the Cantor. Everyone knows he’s after you.”
“Who told you such a thing?”
“What you should do,” Dvorah said, “is marry a rich old banker. Then, when he dies, Izzy can take his place.”
“Think what nonsense you’re talking,” Guttle said. “You know that my father will arrange my marriage. Just as yours will arrange yours.” As soon as she spoke she wanted to snatch back the words. Dvorah’s father had died two years before. He’d been stabbed to death when he resisted highwaymen on the road to Wiesbaden.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dvorah said. “You’ve got your father wrapped around your finger like a piece of string. He’ll let you marry whomever you want.”
She wondered where Dvorah got such ideas. Maybe it was from missing — from idealizing — the father she no longer had. “You don’t know my Papa,” she said.
She squeezed Dvorah’s hand. Her friend squeezed back. The slip of the tongue seemed to have been forgiven. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me,” Guttle said, “I came to attend a funeral. And that’s where I’m going.”
“After all, I did find the body,” Avra mimicked, in a flamboyant voice. She tried to imitate her older sister’s walk. The others did not smile. Avra wished she were with her own friends.
Pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders, Guttle stepped closer to the temple. Politely but firmly she threaded her way through the crowd of women. The required space of three feet remained between the first row of women and the last row of men. She could hear the rich voice of the Cantor flowing out over the assemblage like liquid velvet. His robust tones from afar could make her tingle in a way that his presence could not.
Perhaps because of the Sabbath wine she had imbibed at dinner, Guttle edged closer to the men. Her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
When Rabbi Simcha completed the mincha service, his pink scar throbbing, the Chief Rabbi approached the lectern. To those who could see him he presented an intimidating image, with his stern features, his full gray beard, his tall black hat, his thick hands. A thunderous speaker, he let the silence stretch on, looking about, nodding to some of the men he knew well, among them the banker Kaspar Reis and the Court Factor Wolf Schnapper, the butcher Otto Kracauer, the cabinet maker Yussel Kahn seated beside his good friend, that young fellow — the Rabbi couldn’t recall his name — who had started a coin business.
“My dear friends,” Rabbi Eleazar began. “We have come together, as we do each week, to celebrate the joyous Sabbath, a respite from work and from earthly cares. But today we have also come to lay to rest one of our dearest friends, one of this congregation’s most loyal members. Solomon Gruen. Our beloved Schul-Klopper.
“Solomon had a long life” — here the Rabbi stared at Doctor Berkov, as if daring him to disagree — “but I always believed he would be the one who would bury me. He was never sick. He was never late on his rounds. For a Schul-Klopper, there can be no higher praise.
“Some may mourn that our friend left no family here to mourn for him. He chose never to marry, he had no children. ‘The Judengasse is crowded enough,’ he used to say. Whether that was his real reason for abstaining from raising a family of his own I do not know. But perhaps he saw a more accurate picture than the rest of us. Because Solomon Gruen did have a family. A large one. Every one of us living here in the lane was part of it. He could never pass a little boy without patting his head, or a little girl without pinching her cheek. Or a grown-up without a wave and a smile. So we say farewell to him today not merely as the shammus of the synagogue, not merely as the Schul-Klopper, but as a father, a grandfather, a son, a brother, to us all. Look around you — not only here inside the schul but out in the street. I dare say that almost every person in the Judengasse who is not an invalid or an infant has come to bid him shalom.
“Those of you inside can see resting on his coffin the beautiful hammer that he wielded so diligently for all those years, until this very morning. Why, you might ask, do we not put the hammer in his casket, and bury it clasped in his hand, where it fit so perfectly? I will tell you why. The Lord told Moses, when He gave him the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, that we shall not worship golden idols. That we shall worship no other god before Him. To place the hammer in Solomon’s coffin would be to make of it a golden idol. Naked we came into this world, the Torah says, and naked shall we leave it. The carpenter must leave his tools behind, the butcher his knife, the teacher his books. But there is another reason we leave his hammer outside the coffin. Because his sacred task must not go unfilled, not for a single day. Because we must pass the hammer along at once to the next Schul-Klopper.
“This I shall not do now — not before Solomon is laid to rest — that would be an insult to his memory — but afterward, when we return here for the Sabbath service. It will not be the very same hammer, because the new Schul-Klopper must have an identity of his own. This afternoon I asked our fine cabinet maker, Yussel Kahn, to carve a new hammer. He did a beautiful job.” The Rabbi held up the new hammer, which had been out of sight on the shelf of his lectern. “You will all get to admire it soon enough, when the new Schul-Klopper awakens you. You may even want to hit him with it.”
Some men in the congregation laughed. Others fought to stifle smiles.
“It’s all right to laugh,” the Rabbi said. “No one in the Judengasse loved a good joke better than Solomon Gruen.
“But now the difficult time has come, before the sun sets over the cemetery, to lay him to rest. I have asked to serve as head pallbearer Hersch Liebmann, in whom Solomon put so much faith when he made him the shammus’s assistant, and who responded so well. The others whom Rabbi Simcha has spoken with can approach the platform now. The rest of you please wait outside. In just a moment we shall carry the coffin out to lead the way.
“To Solomon Gruen, here in the schul he loved so well, I say one final shalom aleichem. Peace be upon him.”
Slowly the men began to file into the street, first those standing at the rear, then those who had been seated. One among them, moving within the muted shuffle, was conscious of a disturbing feeling. He could not recall ever seeing Solomon Gruen pat the head of a little boy, or pinch the cheek of a little girl. Doctor Lev Berkov had the sensation that the Chief Rabbi, for reasons of his own, was making the deceased more beloved than he was.
In the street, with Sabbath lights from the windows gilding the cobblestones, Guttle watched most of the women and older girls drift toward their homes with young children in tow. It was time to put them to bed; they didn’t need to see the burial. Some of the men did the same. There would not be enough room for everyone at the cemetery; they would take a short break before returning to the temple for the evening service. Others remained in their seats, choosing to study their prayer books until the cortege returned.
The procession was led by the six pallbearers carrying the coffin braced against their shoulders. Behind the coffin walked all eight Rabbis of the Judengasse. After them came the dozen men who belonged to the Hevra Kadisha, the Holy Brotherhood. Isidor, watching them pass, could not imagine why anyone would want to be a member. What they did was take care of men who were close to death (women had their own sisterhood) and then prepar
e the bodies for burial — washing the body, dressing it in a burial shroud; no doubt they had done so that very afternoon with the body in the coffin. Izzy shuddered as they passed. Membership was considered a high honor — so much so that often it was inherited, passed on from father to son among the wealthy. For the first time in his life, Izzy was glad his father was only a butcher.
Those men who wanted to walk to the cemetery came next. A few women, including Guttle, trailed behind. She felt an obligation, having discovered the body. As she walked, she was aware of a gurgling sound emanating from the sewer ditch, accompanying the funeral cortege. Those women who had gone home were hurrying to empty wash basins, dishwater tubs and chamber pots before the Sabbath began.
A loud wailing from the front of the knot of walking women pierced the night air. Guttle saw that the woman keening was Sophie Marcus, the Cantor’s mother, the Schul-Klopper’s sister. She was surprised; she’d heard that Frau Marcus had not gotten along with her brother, that they rarely spoke. As two women rushed to support the bereaved by her elbows, Guttle thought: perhaps she’s the kind of woman who needs attention. And then she thought: her brother is dead, I’m being unkind.
When the procession turned right, through the cemetery gate, a last streak of yellow sky was visible above the wall. It left in deep shade the inscribed faces of the chipped and weathered stones, the oldest of which dated to the Christian year 1234. In the Jewish cemetery in Mainz, thirty kilometres away, Guttle had heard from her father, there were stones from the year 1000.
The procession wended its way along the narrow dirt paths amid clusters of stones, to the place among the deceased Beckers where Hersch and Hiram Liebmann had dug the grave not long before. The pallbearers lowered the coffin onto two leather straps. Holding the ends of these, they lowered the coffin further, into the grave.
The concluding prayers, led by the Chief Rabbi, did not take long. When he was through, he took a handful of earth from the pile beside the grave and tossed it onto the coffin. To those watching, the dull thud as the earth struck the wooden lid resounded with a forbidding finality.
As the mourners filed back to the lane in the quick-falling dark, the brothers Liebmann hefted their spades and began to fill in the grave. Hersch worked slowly. His arms felt heavy, as if his prayer shawl were made of lead. Perhaps his muscles had tightened from the effort of digging the grave. Or perhaps he was in no hurry to learn the identity of the new Schul-Klopper. Pausing, looking up at the darkening sky, he took a deep breath. The air was brisk and clean. He realized, for the first time, an oddity: the center of the cemetery was the one place in the Judengasse to escape from human stench.
In contrast, his brother worked quickly, dumping one heavy spade load after another into the grave. His prayer shawl didn’t hamper him at all. Was he hurrying because darkness, and thus the Sabbath, was approaching rapidly? Or was he in a rush to get back to the temple, expecting to see if not hear himself offered the sacred hammer — as if some teasing messenger had whispered into his useless ear that it would be so? Hersch dared not ask.
When the grave was full they patted it level with the back of the spades, then left the tools inside the cemetery gate. As they walked up the lane, Hersch was conscious of a dread to which he was not accustomed, while his brother, who usually lumbered through the lane slowly, with no destination outside his own imagining, kept moving two or three steps ahead, turning and waiting for Hersch to catch up, then moving ahead again. When they reached the synagogue, Hersch would have kept on going, would have walked straight home. But Hiram quickly crossed the trench toward the temple doors. Hersch knew he had no choice but to follow.
The last to leave the cemetery was Meyer Amschel Rothschild. When the burial service was done he walked alone in the stone-pocked darkness to the plot where his father and then his mother had been buried when he was barely twelve years old. Every funeral he had attended since had drawn him there with a pull on his leaden soul. He had not cried for his father. He had not cried for his mother. He had not known why, then. He did not know why now.
They had sent him away to school in Furth that year, in Bavaria, instead of to the yeshiva. It was almost as if they had foreseen what was coming. He was in mathematics class, he remembered, hunched over his desk working on a problem, when the Rabbi who headed the school summoned him from class. Seated in his office, the Rabbi said, “Sit down, Meyer Amschel. I have received today a letter from your mother. It is bad news, I’m afraid.” The Rabbi had hesitated, then continued. “Smallpox has appeared in the Frankfurt Judengasse. Your father was one of those stricken. It appears that he has passed away.”
Meyer felt stunned for a moment, then stood up. “I have to go back.”
“Sit, son, sit. It takes at least three days for the post to reach here from Frankfurt. Your father passed away on Thursday evening. The funeral would have been Friday. There’s nothing you can do now.”
“I have to be with my mother. And visit his grave. How can this be, Rabbi? My father went to schul every day. When I was little he would take my hand, and I would walk with him, alongside the Schul-Klopper, Herr Gruen. Yahweh wouldn’t do this to him. I have to go see.”
“The journey takes three days,” the Rabbi said. “More important, let me read from your mother’s letter. ‘Please tell Meyer Amschel I shall be writing to him directly as soon as I am able. Under no circumstances should you allow him to come home. I know that will be his desire, but the lane is rife with smallpox, and it would not be safe for him. I am praying that this plague will pass before the school year ends.’” The Rabbi put the letter on his desk. “You see now why I cannot let you go back?”
Meyer had nodded dumbly, and left the Rabbi’s office and went back to class, where the numbers no longer had meaning. That night he slipped out of the dormitory with all his spending money and one change of clothes in a sack, and walked two miles to the stable, and hid amid new-cut hay, till he could board the morning coach. He slept two nights on ragged beds arranged by the coach driver in cheap way stations. In Frankfurt the driver left him not at the town square but one street away from the north gate. His mother hugged him and kissed him and cried tears into his hair, and was frightened. It was not safe for him to be here, she said.
He visited his father’s freshly turned grave with her. He did not cry. He wanted to be strong. Four days he stayed before making the long journey back to school.
When he next returned to the lane, six months later, it was because his mother, too, had succumbed to the pox. He was too late for her funeral as well. His small consolation was that he had come to see her when his father died. Again, he forced himself to be strong. He did not cry. Perhaps he had been too angry at Yahweh to cry.
As he stood by their graves now, Meyer unexpectedly felt tears welling. They seemed to be rushing up from his chest to his eyes like water from an underground spring. This had never happened in his many visits to their graves through the years. He did not know why it was happening now. Perhaps the death of Herr Gruen, his father’s good friend, had stirred old memories. Or perhaps because he had just become old enough to marry, and realized his parents never would meet his bride. Under the dark sky pocked with stars he sobbed for them. He sobbed until there were no more tears within him. He felt as if the tears had cracked a wall of stones in his chest. He could feel the stones crumbling. He could hear them.
Reaching for his handkerchief, he discovered his pocket was empty; he had forgotten to bring one. He wiped the last of his tears on his prayer shawl, and found his way among the stones to the lane, and back to the schul, to his own seat, which long ago had been his father’s.
The synagogue was almost full, as it always was on a Friday night, but not nearly as crowded as before. Moving past a knot of standing women, Hersch was surprised to see his mother among them, wearing her best hat and her one good coat. She was holding the arm of their young neighbor, Guttle Schnapper. The dread in his chest reached deeper, like a small tree extending its roots. H
e should never have told her about Hiram’s stupid hope. He slumped onto the nearest bench. Hiram sat beside him, his shoulders thrust back, looking around eagerly.
The Sabbath service was led by Rabbi Simcha. It lasted, Hiram guessed in his silence, about half an hour, though he did not take out his watch to check; that, he’d decided, would not be proper in schul. Upon its conclusion, the Chief Rabbi once again approached the lectern. He held up his hands for quiet. In one of them Hiram saw the new carved hammer with its sleek, sensual curve. Just by looking he could imagine touching it.
Hersch peered at his brother. For a moment he himself wanted to be not only deaf but blind. He did not want to see or hear what happened next. He covered his eyes with his hand. He didn’t dare to cover his ears. Where had Hiram gotten such an absurd idea as becoming a deaf and dumb replacement for Herr Gruen?
“Now, it is my happy task to name the new Schul-Klopper,” the Chief Rabbi intoned. “I will not be presenting this fine hammer to him tonight, because as you know, the hammer is a tool, and no tool can be used on the Sabbath. Tomorrow morning and tomorrow afternoon he will knock on your doors with his fist. But tomorrow evening, in the community room, at the conclusion of the Sabbath, we will drink wine and toast the health of the new Schul-Klopper, and present him with his hammer.”
The Rabbi sipped water from a cup on the lectern. His eyes seemed to take in every face in the temple as he turned about to include them all.
“We were all shocked to learn this morning of the death of Solomon Gruen, our dear friend, whom we have just laid to rest. But soon after, my thoughts turned of necessity to the selecting of his replacement. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I must tell you, it was not an easy task. By tradition, a new Schul-Klopper is a young man, who can walk the lane with ease. We have many fine young men in this community; it made me proud to contemplate upon them. But which one to select? I was making little progress in coming to a decision — until this afternoon, the Lord, blessed be His name, delivered the answer into my hands. Rabbi Simcha brought into my study a young man from the yeshiva, who had approached him with an interesting notion. I will not dwell on what we talked about, except to say I thought the idea was extraordinary for a boy his age.”
