by Robert Mayer
Izzy hurried to him.
“Knock on every door between here and the gate. Tell them not to dump any slops till after the horse is removed. Or else, to carry it below.”
She was placed in a bed on the second floor, the women’s ward. Dvorah pulled a curtain around her, began to unbutton her dress. Meyer paced anxiously outside the curtain. With Guttle naked and still unconscious, Doctor Kirsch examined her closely before covering her with a sheet and blanket. To the dried blood on her temple she applied a wet compress, another to her forehead.
She dreamed of devils, Rabbis, golden hyenas, mermaids who could dance. Barely awake, she tried to think what the strange dream meant. Her head hurt. Trying to understand the dream was making it hurt worse. She was no Joseph, and should not try to be. Dreams were random nonsense, mostly. Or Yahweh being childish, playing with imaginary toys. Or, if there were strange creatures in them, reviewing unworkable ideas He’d had before He was satisfied. When she slept again the nightmare came. A large black bird landed on the cobbles, beside the body of the Schul-Klopper. The dead man woke, raised his hammer, turned to her. The face was not that of Herr Gruen but of Hersch Liebmann. Sneering, with evil eyes, he came toward her, the hammer raised as if he would smash her face. She backed against the wall of the Owl. There was no place to run. She screamed, but could make no sound. Then, at the last instant a man’s hand came down and stayed Hersch’s arm. He was riding a white horse. She could not see who it was.
Fighting up from her nightmare as if from underwater, Guttle realized that the Schul-Klopper had been dead for six months. Only rarely did the name of Solomon Gruen arise in the lane any more. But not a day passed when Guttle did not, closing her eyes, see his black-clad body sprawled on the cobbles, his heavy hammer clasped in his hand. And wonder why, if someone had been attacking him — forcing him to drink rat poison, if that was truly the case — why had he not struck at them with his hammer? He was 59 years old, but he was strong.
She had never raised this question with anyone, not even Meyer. She was just a girl. The Chief Rabbi had not brought in the Frankfurt police to investigate — his friend was dead, nothing would bring him back, why make trouble for everyone in the lane? And in the lane itself, except for the Doctor’s finding of poison, no one admitted knowing anything.
Breathing hard from the nightmare scare, Guttle murmured something unintelligible, and opened her eyes. Doctor Kirsch smiled. Dvorah clapped her hands, once, before remembering where she was. “Was that her?” Meyer asked, and pushed in through the opening in the curtain. When he saw that Guttle’s eyes were open, her pupils moving about, he said, “Thank you, Adonai,” and he knelt and caressed her arm. Guttle looked at him, trying to comprehend. Frau Schnapper, stepping through the curtains, pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
“The white horse is gone,” Guttle whispered.
Meyer looked anxiously at the Doctor. “The horse is black.”
“I know.” She peered closely into Guttle’s eyes, holding up the lids, first one, then the other. “I think we should let her rest,” she said.
The horse in the ditch mesmerized the lane. Children and adults alike stood around it as if waiting for it to levitate, though the weight of a thousand flies might have prevented that. “A shame, such a good-looking animal,” Sophie Marcus said to Bea Metzenbaum. The courier and the Constable stood off to the side as they waited for help. Yussel Kahn took the arm of the widow from Mainz and led her out through the unattended gate, and walked with her to Jewelers Street, from which the afternoon coach to Mainz would be leaving. As she prepared to climb onto the coach, she thanked him for his hospitality. “If you’re ever in Mainz, come visit. I brew a nice pot of tea.”
“I’ll consider that,” Yussel said.
He could not help noticing the shapely curve of her stockinged calf as she climbed onto the coach. As the stage drew away, pulled by two brown horses, Brendel Isaacs looked out the side and waved.
Walking back alone, Yussel thought of Guttle — felled by the horse, but, he was confident, not badly hurt; Yahweh would not be that cruel, three days after her betrothal. Yussel had conquered his infatuation with her months before, and was pleased she would marry Meyer. He thought of Dvorah. That fantasy had not lasted long; he was mildly amused that Lev Berkov had taken her on; they seemed such opposites, scientific mind meeting voluptuous body; he wondered how long before there would be trouble. And he thought of Rebecca Kirsch. Since the new Doctor arrived, Yussel had been more content than at any time since before Lainie’s death. Quickly they had discovered common interests. He exulted in news of the outside world — in science, in medicine, in philosophy. Rebecca had brought such news from the university; she loaned him journals from her collection; new ones kept arriving by post. Several evenings each week, both being alone, they shared a simple supper and discussed these unforeseen new turns that human knowledge was taking. She clearly had no interest in a physical relationship; seeing this, Yussel discarded, before they could rise, any such inclinations he might have had; what she gave him was equally stimulating. The world was on the brink of startling changes, and Rebecca seemed the only one in the lane who knew it. This was a slight exaggeration, he conceded; Lev Berkov kept up with medical advances, Meyer Amschel with trade and finance; a few others no doubt did the same; but Rebecca, much like himself, wanted to know everything.
Passing through the gate, Yussel found his old uneasiness returning. Brendel Isaacs was pretty, brash and enticing. She had made her interest clear. He could picture himself riding to Mainz once or twice each week for a sportive romp in the straw, while still spending other evenings discoursing with Doctor Kirsch. Some men would have found such twin blessings a kind of perfection. But depression was settling over the cabinet maker. Already, he had cast himself in a moral predicament. Such a tempting arrangement, he felt, would be a betrayal — but he was not sure of whom, or of what. Of Rebecca? Of the widow? Of his long-dead wife? Of the poor dead blacksmith lying in pieces among the Beckers? Or would it be something else — a betrayal of the centuries-old Jewish suspicion of excessive happiness? He ought to go to one of the Rabbis to discuss his dilemma, he told himself. He knew he would not. Instead, he would do what he always did. He would ruminate.
While Guttle slept, Meyer walked down the hospital stairs, stumbling as the ground floor came up to meet his legs unexpectedly, the phrase “she might be paralyzed” blocking all sense of time and space. Doctor Berkov and Frau Liebmann were emerging from a room at the far end. Out of remembered courtesy, he asked how Leo was doing.
“Not good,” Yetta said. “My Leo can’t move his arm, his leg. He talks meshuganah. ‘Rabbits … money … rabbits … money.’ That’s all the words that come out, over and over. Then he’s exhausted again.”
“I’m sorry.”
She might be paralyzed.
“Frau Liebmann has an interesting theory,” the Doctor said.
“When Leo was a boy, he had a bed of straw in back of his house, where he raised rabbits. He’d sell them outside the gate, and give the money to his Mama and Papa. That’s all I can think.”
“Let’s hope Leo recovers quickly,” Meyer said. “Then he can tell you.”
“From your lips to Gott’s ear,” Yetta said.
Unable to go home, needing to be near her, Meyer went back up the stairs to Guttle’s bedside. She still was asleep. He sat in the wooden chair, gazing at her tender face, her down-curved lips at rest, the patch on her temple in his desperate view serving to highlight the perfection of the whole. Lowering his head into his hands, elbows on his knees, he closed his eyes. She will not be paralyzed! His tormented mind drifted from thought to prayer to promise to benediction; even when lucid he could not have said what it was:
Dear Yahweh, You permitted me to cry after the burial of the Schul-Klopper, to cry for the first time at the graves of my mother and my father. I do not know why my tears fell then, but those tears and sobs like eons of saltwater waves seemed to wash
away a wall around my heart. No sooner was there a breach unto that wall, a wall made, I suspect, of the heavy stones of a child’s anger, a child’s abandonment, then You did let her, or cause her, or invite her, to rush into the temple, rush into the enclave of men, to hug her friend, and I saw in the tender face of this girl, this not yet molded woman, in that sweet innocent face, both terror and defiance. In that one instant she breached the broken wall and entered my heart. There, I soon learned, she belongs, as a Torah belongs in its embroidered covering, as the last piece of a puzzle completes the whole. Thank You Adonai for this gift, but please now let her be well. I shall always look after her, well or ill. I shall always obey Your commandments, be she well or ill. But let her be well and they shall be as a sacred covenant to me, as sacred as Your covenants with Abraham, with Moses. Have mercy, Elohim, Almighty God of Israel . . .
As the words drifted in his mind like a rudderless boat, he crossed the border into choppy sleep. He was startled awake when she said his name. He lifted his head too quickly, for a moment the floor dropped. He did not know how long he had slept in the chair. She was sitting up in the bed, holding the sheet under her neck, reaching out to him with her other arm. He rose from the chair and sat on the bed and slipped within her offered arm and enfolded her with his. Their cheeks pressed together. “I love you,” he whispered, unable to find his voice. “With all my soul.”
Her other arm went around him. The sheet she had been holding slid to her waist. Their close embrace found heat.
Clarity returned to him then, the rudderless boat finding shore. “You’re sitting up!”
As he pulled away to look at her she lifted the fallen sheet. “Is that bad?”
“Move your legs. Raise your legs.”
“Meyer, this is a hospital.”
“Bitte, do as I say.”
She wriggled her legs, raised her knees under the sheet.
“Danks Gott!”
“Meyer, what is it?”
“The Doctor thought you might be paralyzed.”
They embraced fiercely. “That would have been terrible for you,” Guttle said.
They remained that way, holding each other like lovers long parted, until Meyer said, “I ought to tell the Doctor.” He kissed her nose. “I’ll send Rebecca up. Then I should run home, straighten up a mess I left in the office. Maybe eat something. I’ll be back in awhile.”
“Don’t run too fast,” Guttle said. “Like some people.”
As he left the hospital, his eyes watery with relief, he almost bumped into Sophie Marcus, who was standing idly outside, as she seemed to do much of the time of late, in one awkward place or another. “Yahweh took revenge for the Cantor,” Frau Marcus said. “Is she dead?”
The horse was still in the ditch. Boys were throwing pebbles at it, or small clumps of mud, to watch the covering of flies rise into the air like devil’s lace before descending again onto the horse. The Constable was growing impatient, help had not arrived. He walked outside the gate, so as not to frighten anyone. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining here. He discharged his musket into the air again. A flare of noise seeking aid.
As the shot was fired, a black carriage with a gold coat of arms on the doors was rounding into the square outside the gate, pulled by a prancing bay mare. Spooked by the musket shot, the mare reared; the driver had to struggle to steady her. When no shots followed, he tapped lightly with the reins and walked the bay across the square and through the gate, into the narrow lane, where the carriage just barely fit between the tenements and the trench. He pulled the mare to a stop outside the third house on the left; she reared again, whinnying. The driver leaped from his seat to the cobbles, patted her neck and fed her a carrot from his pocket to settle her. Four elegantly dressed people lowered themselves carefully from the coach on the tenement side — two women of middle age, two young men of about twenty years.
“Josef, what’s upsetting Brunhilde?” Countess Freya von Brunwald asked. She had a long face with a sharp nose and a sharp chin, and was dressed in dark blue. The driver pointed ten metres ahead, to the stallion in the ditch. “Over there, missus.”
“Oh, my, what is that?” the countess asked.
“Looks like a dead horse, half covered with turds,” her son, Paul, replied.
The other woman, who had a round, fleshy face beneath a large straw hat, frowned. “It must be one of those Jewish rituals,” she said. She pulled a beige handkerchief from the sleeve of her beige dress and held it to her nose.
The door to the tenement opened. Hannah Schlicter, the dressmaker, having heard the carriage pull up, anxiously stepped out to welcome them .
“This is my friend, Catharina Goethe,” the countess told her. “This is her son, Wolf. And my son, Paul. The boys will explore the Judengasse while Frau Goethe and I examine your fabrics.”
As Hannah led the women up the stairs to her shop, the young men looked about. Paul was dressed in brown, Wolf in a blue jacket over yellow breeches, and a yellow vest.
“Josef, my good fellow, you’ve got yourself into a fix,” Paul said to the driver. “You’ll never turn the carriage around in this space. Not with that ditch in the middle.”
“Happily, lad, I inquired first. There’s an exit gate at the other end.”
The young men, both wearing the powdered wigs forbidden to Jews, mused about the dead stallion, wondered how it had gotten there. They became aware of the foul stench, the impossibly narrow houses, the incessant movement in the lane as men and women fingered used clothing at a rag dealer’s table or bargained with pawn brokers or carried warm-smelling bread to their homes. The clean-shaven faces of the visitors, their fine city clothing, the powder on their wigs, their superior yet uneasy manner, identified them clearly as strangers — perhaps customers — and each shopkeeper nodded to his goods as the visitors passed.
Outside the stone synagogue, the young men stopped and admired its architecture, its soaring lines. “This place is awful, with the stench and the crowding,” the fellow called Wolf said. “But I suppose it’s admirable that they endure all this for the sake of their beliefs. And they do look human.”
Paul said, “And this temple of theirs — it’s not as tall, but it rises in an arc as fine as St. Bartholomew’s.”
A man dressed in black, wearing a black hat, emerged from the synagogue. He would have been good looking except for small pock marks that marred his face and a pink scar crossing his temple. The man nodded pleasantly to them, said “Shalom,” and continued on his way.
“Prick them and they do bleed,” Goethe murmured.
Gazing about, taking in every detail with his poet’s eye, he saw a small hospital across the street, a bath house, a shoemaker’s shop, several pawn brokers. Their carriage had rolled across the city in brilliant sunlight but here all was cloaked in a suffocating gray, as if a huge shroud had been strung from roof to roof.
“This,” Goethe said, “is the physical embodiment of the Twenty-third Psalm.”
“The valley of the shadow of death?”
“You can feel the rot in your bones.”
“And yet, they live,” Paul said. “But you’re right. Look at their beards, their hats, their shining eyes. They seem to dwell mostly in the house of their Lord.”
Reaching the south end, they looked down at the busy docks, at the boats in the river, sails flashing in the sun of a different world. A young Constable did not challenge them as they stepped beyond the gate. “Tell me, my good man,” Paul said to the guard, “do you know why the Jews are kept under lock and key?”
“It’s not my doing, sir.”
“I understand that. But why, do you suppose?”
“I’m told they don’t think like the rest of us.”
“Who is it that tells you to guard this gate?”
“My Kapitän, sir.”
“And who tells him?”
“The Polizei Kommandant.”
“And he is told by?”
“I believe that would be
the Frankfurt Council, sir.”
“And the council listens to … ?”
“The Empress Maria Teresa. The city belongs, of course, to the Holy Roman Empire.”
“Can anyone tell the Empress what to do?”
“There’s only the Pope can do that.”
“So. Do you think the same the way the Pope does?”
“Jesus, no! I’m a churchgoing Lutheran, myself.”
“Yet here you are, outside the gate.”
“Yet here I am.”
“And doing a fine job of it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“We can’t allow those wrongful Jewish thoughts to get out and pollute the river, can we?”
“Actually, sir, if you follow your nose, the river already is … Oh, I see, you’re having a bit of sport with me.”
“Just a bit.”
The visitors withdrew inside the gate, crossed the cobbles to the cemetery, and began to walk back. “You sounded sympathetic to the Jews,” Goethe said.
Paul replied, “Just a bit.”
As they passed the communal bath, and neared the hospital, they saw three young women walking a few paces up and a few paces back. They were struck by the image — one had red hair, one brown, one black. “I’ll give them this,” Wolf said. “Their girls are very pretty.”
“Shall we speak with them?” Paul asked.
“Why not? You’re in fine form today.”
Coming closer, they saw that the girls — or women — on either side were partially supporting the one in the middle, who was wearing a robe over a hospital gown. The women moved aside as the men approached.
“Good afternoon,” Paul said, pleasantly. “Shalom.”
“I can’t help noticing your plaster,” Wolf said to the one in the middle. “I hope you weren’t riding that poor horse back there.”
She smiled wanly, but did not reply.
“She wasn’t riding it, she stopped it with her head,” the red-haired girl said.
