The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

  “Yes.” Rabbi Simcha took a seat beside Izzy. “For a thousand years, since the destruction of the temple by the Romans, and the diaspora that followed, the Jews had been left in peace. Wherever they lived. For the most part. Except for a murder now and then. Until that crusade. But go on, Isidor. I interrupted your story.”

  “It’s not a story, Rabbi. This man says it really happened. In Mainz. That’s just thirty kilometres from here.”

  “Yes.”

  “As these crusaders marched down the Rhine, the Jews in Mainz came together. They agreed they would not become Christians. But they didn’t want to be tortured, and they didn’t want to be killed by the Christians. They would rather die by their own hands.”

  “Yes.”

  “They were prepared to fight. Some of them did. But there were eleven hundred Jews, and twelve thousand crusaders. There was no way they could win. So they gathered together and carried out their plan. The women cut the throats … ”

  He stopped.

  “Yes.”

  “The women cut the throats of their own babies. Of babies at their breasts, he says. The men plunged swords and knives into the bellies, or the hearts, of their wives. And their mothers, even. They killed their own mothers!”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the men killed themselves.”

  “Not only in Mainz,” the Rabbi said. “In Worms, in Speyer, in other towns along the Rhine. But the most dead were in Mainz. Eleven hundred.”

  Izzy began to sniffle as he spoke.

  “Do you know what those crusaders did? They stripped the clothes off all of the dead bodies. They dragged them through the town that way, and threw them into a ditch. The men and women and children all together. They did that just because they were Jews.”

  “When they got to Jerusalem, they mangled quite a few Muslims as well. But that’s another story.”

  Izzy put his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands. Rabbi Simcha stood and moved behind the boy and placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders and rubbed them. Izzy’s muscles were knots. “You’ve taken on a difficult task, Isidor. It won’t get easier. Perhaps you should stop. Wait till you get older.”

  “People need to know things,” the boy said. His words were muffled by his hands. He turned in his chair and looked at the Rabbi, wiping his eyes. “Is it wrong to cry?”

  “No.” The old scar on the Rabbi’s temple was throbbing. Because of Izzy, or the mass suicide at Mainz more than six hundred years before, he could not have said. “How can we hear of such things and not cry?”

  Izzy took several slow, deep breaths. He pulled the papers on the table closer to him. He straightened the pile. He touched a small cloth to his tongue and wiped the ink from the point of his quill. “Then I want to keep on doing this,” he said.

  The Rabbi’s reply was little more than a whisper.

  “Yes.”

  Mournful moans drifted through the halls. The whitewashed walls were sweating. The hospital building itself seemed to be sick. Standing inside the front door, waiting for the Doctor, Dvorah Schlicter could see elderly patients lying on straw in the corridors. She recognized the nearest one, Herr Liebmann. The Doctor’s helpers, all men, bent over them, sleeves rolled above hairy forearms, giving the patients sips of water, wiping their brows. The air she was breathing seemed not so much to smell of sweat as to be sweat. She wondered if Guttle’s idea was a good one.

  But a chance to go to the Fair! How could she pass it up?

  Doctor Berkov loomed in front of her. “Come into my office. I’m busy with patients. I can spare two minutes.” He perched on the edge of his desk. Wooden cabinets took up two side walls. Dvorah remained standing. She felt bad for intruding on the sick.

  “Dvorah Schlicter, is that right? How can I help you?”

  “It’s about the Fair next week. I was wondering if the hospital will have a stall there.”

  “To sell what?”

  He lifted a paper off his desk, a patient’s record sheet, and glanced at it.

  “Not to sell. To help the Jewish merchants. I’ve heard there will be more than a hundred merchants there from the Judengasse. With their helpers, that’s more than two hundred people.”

  “So?” He continued to read as he listened.

  “They’ll be out in the bright sun, which they aren’t used to. If this heat continues, they might need help. They could start fainting, like people here are doing. They might need water, cold compresses. If the hospital had a stall, it could provide those things.”

  “Also salt.” Doctor Berkov placed the patient’s record back on his desk. He looked at her with new interest. “I don’t know that we’ve ever done that.”

  “Has it ever been this hot before? In September?”

  The Doctor slid from the desk and began to pace in the small office. “It’s a good idea. But I don’t have the staff to do that. We’re short of staff as it is.”

  “I could help. That’s why I’m here. I could operate the stall.”

  The Doctor gazed at her. Sweat ran down her neck. Her head itched. She lifted off her cotton cap and placed it on a chair. Auburn curls tumbled around her face.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Do you work?”

  “I help my mother with sewing. She’s a dressmaker.”

  “Can you roll bandages? Mix ointments to the proper measure?”

  “There’s a week till the Fair. I could learn.”

  The Doctor looked at his pocket watch. “It’s an excellent idea. I should have thought of it myself. Come back in the morning, we’ll try to fit in some training. I’ll arrange for passes to the Fair.”

  He turned to leave his office, lifted her cap from the chair, held it out it to her. “It’s a shame to hide that beautiful hair,” he said. “Until you have to.”

  He was out the door too quickly to see her pale face flush.

  Walking slowly home in the heat, cap in hand, Dvorah thought: I meant to tell him it wasn’t my idea. He didn’t give me the chance.

  No one in the schul was praying more fervently than Yussel Kahn that the extraordinary heat not turn into an epidemic of deaths. The cabinet maker remembered the last epidemic, smallpox, thirteen years before. It had taken both of his parents and both of Meyer Amschel’s, and more than a hundred others, in the space of a few months. He’d been twenty years old, had finished apprenticing and had just opened his shop. Two of the older carpenters had died of the pox. He had worked from sun-up till well past dark almost every day, making nothing but coffins, month after month. Only the Sabbath had saved him from exhaustion. He didn’t want to face that again. Just one death, his own, would make more sense.

  But the truth was, he was feeling somewhat better since Meyer Amschel had begun spending time with the Schnapper girl. He’d thought that when she found a beau he would fall into a pit of despair, perhaps never be able to climb out. Instead, the opposite had occurred. Now he could tell himself she was taken. This wasn’t precisely true, but he believed it soon would be. He could stop berating himself over his own fear of approaching her; she was forbidden now in the real world as well as in his mind, and this decreased the internal pressure. The fact that it was his friend who had made her off limits made it easier, somehow. She might actually come into his life, if only as Meyer’s wife. He could envision pleasant Sabbath dinners together over chicken that Guttle had cooked. They all could grow old together

  But it hadn’t taken long for his mind — or his manhood — to rise to the occasion, to find a replacement fantasy. If anything, this one was even prettier. In the popular plays of Shakespeare, which Yussel had been reading to pass the summer nights, Guttle could portray bright Cordelia, or Rosalind. In a Biblical drama, she would be Ruth, or Rebecca. But the sumptuous Dvorah Schlicter would be Delilah. Or the New Testament’s Salomé, seven veils and all. Which he had begun removing in his mind several nights each week.

  Even as he thought of her, there w
ent the gorgeous Schlicter girl, walking up the lane, her cap in her hand, auburn curls framing her face like cherry. Pained by his pun — he needed to get his mind out of the ditch — he crossed the lane to speak with her. Dvorah’s curves, he was surprised to discover, did not intimidate him the way Guttle’s knowing eyes did.

  He told her who he was — she knew — and that he was seeking an assistant to help at his stall at the Fair. Would she be interested? Selling coffins? she asked. No, not coffins. Selling cabinets, desks, tables. He had made miniature models of his work. He would display them, and take commissions.

  Ten minutes ago she would have loved to, she said. But she had just agreed to run a hospital stall at the Fair. Because of the heat.

  Ten minutes.

  But I know of someone who would, she said. Who would that be? My mother.

  Your mother? He tried to place her. Hannah Schlicter.

  She’s a seamstress, Dvorah said. She makes the most beautiful dresses. But with us five kids she can’t afford to rent a stall at the Fair. Do you have room? Perhaps she could share your stall, and be your assistant as well.

  He could say he didn’t have room. But with just his miniatures . . .

  Tell her I’ll come by in an hour to look at her dresses. Across from the Owl, right?

  That would be wonderful, the girl said.

  As she walked off, recollection of her mother appeared in his mind. Her chubby arms. Short, squat, hair not quite as red as her daughter’s. She probably outweighed him. And five children — though Dvorah was hardly a child.

  Idiot! he thought as he crossed the cobbles to his shop. I’m not marrying the woman. I’m only doing a favor. For how could he tell her that her dresses were not good enough?

  Yet, oddly, he was aware of a settling of his blood, of clear, cold water diluting the heat of his absurd ardors. As if, somewhere in Heaven, Lainie approved.

  —Did you hear what happened to Meyer Rothschild?

  —Something happened to Rothschild? I was going to ask if you heard about Hersch Liebmann.

  —The shammus? What about him?

  —He works for Rothschild. But Meyer won’t take him to the Fair.

  —I heard. It’s terrible.

  —The one chance of his life, and Rothschild said no. He’s taking the Schnapper girl.

  —She gets anything she wants, that one.

  —Doesn’t care whose feeling she hurts. Offended the Cantor, of all people, after leading him on. You should hear Sophie Marcus talk about her.

  —A real Guttle die Schrect, like people say.

  — So what happened to Rothschild? An accident?

  —What you said.

  —What I said? What did I say?

  —Guttle the Bad. She’s got her hooks into Rothschild. Very deep, they say.

  —He let that happen? I thought he was smarter than that.

  —He’s twenty-five years old, I guess he’s human.

  —This would be the first sign of it.

  — I say Mazel tov to both of them. It’s his funeral.

  —Not a bad way to go — if you get my meaning.

  Guttle sat on her bed, fashioning a kerchief from a piece of fabric her mother had found at the rag dealer’s. The cloth was yellow, with a pattern of red flowers, her favorite color. Sometimes it made her sad that there were more flowers on the kerchiefs of the women in the Judengasse than had ever bloomed within the walls. Only once that she remembered had real flowers graced their table — a bouquet of red roses. On the day he was named Court Jew, her father had brought them home to celebrate. Her mother had put them in water in a kettle on the kitchen table. Nine years old at the time, Guttle had never seen anything so beautiful. She asked if she could give one of the roses to Izzy. Her mother said that would be nice. Guttle recalled her disappointment when, only three days later, the roses had wilted, and died.

  What Guttle did not know was that the rose she had given to Izzy six years earlier, though dead, still lived. In the attic room he shared with his two brothers, their straw mattresses side by side by side, with no room for space between, the rose still lay on a shelf, beside his hammer. It was a deep purple now, almost black, not the bright red it once had been, and it was covered with dust; Izzy did not want to touch it, to brush off the dust, fearing it might fall apart.

  As she hemmed the kerchief, the image of the rose bouquet reminded Guttle of Baby R. The child had been born a year later — three years after Avra, three years before Amelia. Her parents had first liked Rifka for the new baby’s name, then Rachel, but finally decided on Rose. She was a snuggly little thing, Baby R, perfectly formed. But one morning when Rose was only a week old, Guttle had looked into her crib and seen that something was wrong. The baby had twisted herself into an awkward position, and did not seem to be breathing. Guttle ran to the kitchen and pulled at her mother to come and see. Emmie had let out a desperate wail and scooped up the infant and run down the stairs and through the lane to the hospital, Guttle running behind her. In the examining room the Doctor unwrapped the baby’s blanket and spanked her to get her breathing, and pushed on her tiny chest, and breathed into her mouth. Nothing worked. They did not notice Guttle watching from the doorway as the Doctor unwrapped the baby further, and inspected her body, and said that she was dead.

  “You picked a bad name,” Guttle remembered shouting at her distraught mother. “Roses die too soon.”

  Names. She’d been intrigued as a child how Adam, the first man, himself newly created, had come up with so many names — and how every one of them had been just right. A cow, with its fat flanks and drooping udders, could only be called a cow, nothing else. A chicken, with its skinny neck and yellow feet, obviously was a chicken; try a different name and it didn’t work. With pin-sized heads and long, spidery legs, how could spiders be anything but? They surely weren’t horses, or dogs, or trout.

  If Adam had named human families, she would not be a Schnapper. A wolf could have been a schnapper. As could a wild boar. Or a viper. But not her. She was in constant conflict with her name.

  She tried to keep a smile from surfacing. She felt a stirring in her breast. Yahweh’s first man, she thought, would have given her a name with some red in it.

  13

  The Fahrgasse was the widest, busiest street in Frankfurt. Buildings with stone foundations and wooden upper stories rose on both sides. Late morning sun glared off the cobbles as Yussel and Meyer walked along, passing, beyond the slaughterhouse and Ziggy Zigmund’s Z-Z horse stable, a market for salted meats and fish —which the Jews loved but was not to Lutheran taste — more stables, blacksmith stalls, farmers from the countryside selling fruit and vegetables from the backs of wagons, vendors tending small fires despite the heat, on which they were cooking sausages and veal chops. Gentile men and a few women were lining up at these stalls; the noon dinner hour was approaching. Further along, cafés and beer halls were filling with hungry diners. Wide, heavy carts drawn by six or eight horses rumbled by carrying stacks of lumber toward the town market. No doubt the lumber would be used to build the three hundred and fifty stalls for the Fair.

  “So, who will be your assistant?” Meyer asked his friend. They were headed toward the Town Hall to obtain their passes.

  “Hannah Schlicter.”

  “You mean Dvorah. Hannah is the mother.”

  “I mean Hannah.”

  Meyer looked at his friend as they walked, but said nothing.

  “She’s a seamstress. I went to see her work. The dresses are beautiful, she might get lots of orders. So I’m letting her share my stall.”

  “Good for you.”

  Before Yussel could reply, two boys, perhaps sixteen years old, stepped into their path. “Jud mach mores!” the boys shouted. Jews, pay your dues.

  Yussel and Meyer took off their three-cornered hats. They bowed. They stepped aside to let the boys pass. All these things they were required by law when any Gentile uttered those words.

  The gloom of repressed anger settl
ed upon them, as it always did when this happened. They were silent as they turned off the Fahrgasse toward the Town Hall. Without thinking, they climbed the few steps to the front entrance of the Gothic building. A guard stepped in front of them. “Jews use the rear door,” he reminded them.

  They circled the building to the rear. “How do they always know?” Yussel asked.

  “The badge of dishonor.” Meyer patted Yussel’s pallid cheek. “At home, we forget.”

  Meyer was the more accustomed to such insults. His coin and antiques business took him out into the city most every day. The cabinet maker left the Judengasse only when he needed to obtain more wood, or glue.

  Inside the rear entrance to the Town Hall, an office had been set up to handle the business of the Fair. The two friends waited on a long line and paid the fees for their stalls, and were given two passes each. On one they wrote their own names. On the second pass, Meyer added Guttle’s name, and Yussel added Hannah Schlicter’s. The clerk recorded the names in his book.

  The air in the dark corridor was cooler than it was outside. They were perspiring heavily, from walking in the unaccustomed sunlight, and from the debasement by the Gentile boys. They stood for a moment, carefully folding the passes into their pouches. As they turned to leave, they were stopped by a slim young man from the Judengasse. “Herr Rothschild is it? Herr Kahn? Don’t go yet.” He nodded down the corridor. “They’re about to try a Jew. He’s accused of robbery.”

  They recognized the man. It was the rag dealer with the new baby. Ephraim Hess.

  “Why is that our business?”

  “Ah, you’ve never been hauled into court, Herr Cabinet Maker. If you’re a Jew, it’s your business.”

  Yussel and Meyer glanced at one another. He had succeeded in making them curious. They followed him to a nearby courtroom. The door had been left open because of the heat, and the three of them slipped into seats in the last row. The benches nearer the front were filled.