The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘Perhaps that is better than keeping them and accusing them of crimes,’ I said crisply. ‘But tell me this: why do you think Professor Ralston chose to write directly to the rabbi and put off his answer to you until later?’

  ‘Well, I cannot say for sure, but I can think of several possible reasons. First of all, he had a relation of particular enmity with Rabbi Kahn. He had provoked him into serious open disputes while he was in Paris. Ralston believed him, as chief rabbi, to be the architect of the efforts in favour of Dreyfus. This is not actually the case; I have worked much harder on the case than Rabbi Kahn, and even my role is not comparable to that of Captain Dreyfus’s own brother. However, it is not so strange that Ralston attributed this major role to the leader of our community. Also, I myself never openly quarrelled with Ralston, because it is not my way. He was certainly provocative and aggressive, but I would not rise to the bait, preferring to stay calm and see all sides of the question. And as you may know, before the Dreyfus affair began, I published an analysis of anti-Semitism in which I tried to give a fair presentation of all the different views. This made me less of an ideal enemy for Ralston. That is why it does not seem to me unnatural that Ralston should react instantly to my letter by addressing the rabbi, and accusing him. The rabbi allowed me to take a copy of the letter when I told him that Ralston had been murdered, and that I was going to see the detective in charge of the case. Let me show it to you; you will understand why I told you yesterday that I wondered if Professor Ralston were not becoming slightly mad.’

  He extracted the letter from his folder and handed it over to me.

  So, Rabbi –

  I hear that the BEAST is about to rear up its ugly head again: I refer to your famous little captain (the Jew, not the Corsican). A pity – I had hoped the affair would be settled for good once he had been sent off to his lonely island. But what a piece of luck for you: a new document, so they say, but you probably know exactly what it is and where it comes from, don’t you? Better than anyone else, I should guess. And how useful for you it will be, as under the guise of the noble endeavour of rescuing your fancy boy from his island, you can get back to the kind of work you and your people do best: creeping and penetrating into old, established societies, undermining them, rotting them, and causing them to decay, by dividing their people, sowing enmity and fomenting discord, all in order to grab a little material advantage for yourselves. Just the usual phenomena to be observed wherever the Jews have managed to gain a foothold. Bravo! Don’t be too sure of success this time, though. I will fight you every step of the way, and there are plenty in France who think as I do.

  – G. Ralston

  ‘Goodness gracious!’ I exclaimed, after perusal of this shocking epistle.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I do indeed. Why, he was worse than a fanatic. This does sound nearly insane! But Mr Lazare, listen. Underneath the raving, Professor Ralston really says as clearly as possible that he intends to take up the cudgel against Dreyfus once again, if the case is reopened. Do you think it conceivable that he was murdered in order to prevent him from doing that?’

  He reflected for a moment. ‘It seems difficult to believe that someone would have killed Professor Ralston in order to prevent him publishing new articles against Dreyfus,’ he said finally, ‘given that a large number of such articles were certain to appear very shortly, at least in French newspapers, written by the people in France to whom he refers in the last line of his letter.’

  ‘Well, I agree it is unlikely that a French person would come all the way over here to silence him, when there are already such excellent targets as Barrès or Drumont to hand. But Professor Ralston was in England, and from all I have read, it seems to me that he was one of the chief proponents here of anti-Semitism, and anti-Dreyfusism in particular.’

  ‘Well, perhaps some English person killed him for that reason. I really don’t know,’ he said, politely restraining further expression of his obvious doubt.

  ‘How did the rabbi react to Ralston’s letter?’ I asked.

  ‘Not by coming over to kill him, I think,’ he said.

  ‘No, no. I am not suggesting such a thing. But did he tell anyone about it? Did he have any contacts in Britain to whom he might have mentioned it?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Can we find out?’ I said, as a sense of urgency began to make itself felt within me. ‘Could you ask him? It suddenly occurs to me that this, or something like it, might be the explanation of the fact that an elderly Hassid was visiting Professor Ralston just before his death.’

  ‘So that story is true? I thought it was just calumny,’ he said.

  ‘No, I think it is true,’ I said quietly. ‘He was observed by the young man who has just been arrested. He insists he is telling the truth.’

  ‘Well, but this is very dangerous. If this man were visiting the professor because Rabbi Kahn asked him to exert some influence, and it becomes known, then it is he who will be arrested, and it will all end up with yet another Jew on trial for murder.’

  ‘But that is already the case. Jonathan Sachs is Jewish, too.’

  He threw up his hands in a gesture of weary despair.

  ‘They may both be innocent. If so, my task is to prove it,’ I said. ‘And if one of them is guilty, well then a trial is not only inevitable, but just. However, I do not believe the rabbi seen by Jonathan Sachs can be the murderer, and I will tell you exactly why. If Jonathan is speaking the truth, then it is absolutely impossible for the rabbi to have been the murderer, on a question of timing. And if Jonathan is lying, that would be more likely to imply his own guilt than someone else’s. And even if he were lying about the timing in order to protect the rabbi, why, it would be much easier to deny ever having seen such a person.’

  ‘You are very logical,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘I am learning,’ I responded. ‘Logic is the keystone of this case. But I need more than logic; I need information. I need to know if there is any connection between your Rabbi Kahn and Jonathan’s rabbi.’

  ‘Well, I will ask him the question,’ he said. ‘I will send him a telegram today before leaving for France, and you may have an answer by tomorrow.’

  I thanked him warmly. I was impressed by his intelligence and kindness, and by the many things I had just learnt from him, and excited over what struck me as an important new idea. Yet as we said goodbye, I could not prevent myself from glancing anxiously at my watch. The coming visit to Baruch Gad was causing me increasing tension and nervousness, and I could not wait another moment before hurrying off to Paddington. On the way there, I tried to prepare myself mentally for the transition from luxurious hotel to prison ward.

  The trip to Exeter, and from thence through Devon to Princetown was rather long, but my time was well occupied, first in inventing ways to express what I wanted to ask in front of the prison guard, and when I had settled that in my mind, in reading the novel by Amy Levy which I had found in the flat and taken along with me. I read it quickly; it was a short book, expressing mingled bitterness and sadness with virtually no lightening moments.

  Following the fortunes of various members of a well-to-do family of bourgeois British Jews, the novel placed each one of them, separately, face-to-face with the fundamental dichotomy of their lives as Englishmen, and their lives as Jews. Reading along, I saw the title character, Reuben Sachs, condemn to oblivion all of his deepest spiritual needs for his milieu, his family, his religion, and the deep, quiet understanding of the beautiful Jewish girl he secretly loves, in order to achieve outward success by being elected to Parliament. More complex and appealing was the personality of his cousin, Leopold Leuniger; a brilliant student and sensitive violinist, to whom every aspect of life showed its face of suffering more easily than its face of joy. At home, the gross materialism, the vulgarity, the worldly values rendered him ashamed, miserable, and sarcastic, whereas at Cambridge, in spite of his brilliance as a student and an artist, and his succ
ess in entering an aristocratic social circle, his religion and his background left him feeling like an eternal outsider. I remembered what Amy had tried to tell me, and the young man’s anguished self-contempt seemed a perfect illustration for it.

  Leo had taken in the slight, brief, yet significant episode in all its bearings, hating himself meanwhile for his own shrewdness, which he considered a mark of latent meanness … ‘Ah, look at us,’ he cried with sudden passion, ‘where else do you see such eagerness to take advantage; such sickening, hideous greed; such cruel, remorseless striving for power and importance; such ever-active, ever-hungry vanity, that must be fed at any cost? Steeped to the lips in sordidness, as we have all been from the cradle, how is it possible that any one among us, by any effort of his own, can wipe off from his soul the hereditary stain?’

  For a Jew to remain cloistered within his own racial group, or at least in a sufficiently middle-class and well-protected part of it, is to remain a prisoner, but has the advantage of dulling the consciousness of the opprobrium of the outside world. For him to strike out and emerge into the wider society, on the other hand, while bringing all the joys of discovery and giving the momentary illusion of belonging, cannot but lead in the end to an exacerbated sensitivity to that opprobrium, encountered in every social contact, with varying degrees of subtlety. Leopold, who had left the comfortable nest of the family circle and the family business to study at Cambridge, could not meet a new person without immediately feeling the secret stab of knowing that the other thought of him as a Jew, even if he gave no visible sign of it. Dreyfus, who had also left the reassuring circle of the family business to join the army in which he believed he could express his soul as a Frenchman, had encountered the very worst manifestation of prejudice against his race that could be imagined. I thought fleetingly that the real story was far more like a novel than the fictional one. The whole complex question of this contrast between belonging and exclusion reminded me sharply of Professor Ralston’s paradox; I began to understand how he might have come to invent it. I thought of Jonathan, and his carefree, smiling ways; he had struck me as more easy-going, less anguished than his sister, for instance. But did he not harbour the same fundamental contradiction within himself? He had been hiding so much from me, and all of it was sheer pain; his uncle’s fate, his visits to the prison, his obsessive researches into anti-Semitism.

  What else might he not be hiding?

  Could I hope that my visit to his uncle would shed any light on the question?

  I arrived in Princetown somewhat later than I had intended, but thanks to the foresight which had made me telegraph for some conveyance from the local inn before leaving London, a small and nondescript vehicle was awaiting me outside the station. The driver looked at me pityingly, no doubt taking me for a distraught wife or sister exercising her rare visiting rights. I would very much have liked to chat with him during the ride, and ask him if he frequently brought visitors to the prison, but felt it would appear impertinent and unseemly. It seemed clear enough that he went regularly to the prison, for he clucked and the horse trotted along calmly as though he knew the way only too well.

  The prison is farther than the edge of the town, near no other building, but already out upon the vast expanses of the moor. The cab left me at the main gate, an imposing angular stone archway. ‘Here is where the visitors enter,’ he informed me casually. ‘Prisoners go in through another door.’

  I was accosted immediately by an official of some kind, and upon introducing myself and showing him the telegram which the prison governor had sent Inspector Reynolds confirming my visit, I was led inside and escorted into the said governor’s office, not without first being subjected to a rapid search in a little cubicle by a dour lady whose unique task in life was to ensure that female visitors bore no weapons with which to launch a sudden attack upon Authority.

  My interview with the governor was short and to the point. He looked at me with surprise and disfavour as my presence was announced.

  ‘You are V. Weatherburn, Private Investigator?’ he said, looking me up and down.

  ‘Yes,’ I responded shortly, rather disliking his tone of frank contempt.

  ‘I was expecting a man,’ he said with annoyance.

  Well, that shows a certain prejudice upon your part, I thought, but restrained myself from speaking the words aloud. I was not surprised that Inspector Reynolds had chosen to frame his telegram ambiguously. This man would probably have refused me access to his prison if he had known I was a woman. He looked both annoyed and disgusted, but said nothing, contenting himself with ringing a bell and barking to the prison guard who promptly appeared, ‘Bring this person to room 10. Have the prisoner Gad brought there and remain present for the fifteen minutes’ duration of the visit.’

  It struck me as I followed the guard that, although in the course of the last few years I have visited quite a number of prisoners, I have never yet seen a single one who was actually condemned. All of my visits have been to people who were accused and awaiting judgement, and most of them have not taken place in real prisons, but in police cells, which is quite different. I remember feeling long ago that it was like visiting a nether world; I had lost that impression with habit, but it came back to me strongly now. A prison, a true prison, a high-security prison for murderers and dangerous criminals condemned to many years of confinement, is another matter altogether from the chaos of the cells where accused people may be held for a night or two, pending appearance before a magistrate, and where, at least according to the humour of the police officer on duty, the prisoner is not always treated like a criminal.

  Here, the very corridors held an atmosphere of frightful repression; the tones, the gestures of the guards bespoke a state of permanent tension and enmity. I thought about Baruch Gad spending ten years within the silence of these walls. My conviction of his innocence, which had begun as the faintest echo of a doubt on the first day I read of the trial, and which had increased with each of my successive discoveries, was now as solid as a rock. Baruch Gad was no grisly murderer, but a victim of anti-Semitism and the machinations of maniacs like Professor Ralston. He was the only prisoner I was to see, yet as I walked along the corridors, I felt, like an alchemical mixture, the tension of mingled evil, fear, and power which dominated the entire closed-off prison society.

  I do not know about the other visiting rooms, but number 10 turned out to be not a room, but a cage. With walls and ceiling of wire mesh, it sat within a larger room; the interior of the cage was divided into three sections by two parallel walls of mesh forming a corridor running down the middle. Each section contained one chair. The guard introduced me into one section through a little door which he locked behind me. He himself then entered the little corridor which divided the two sections, pushed the chair there to one end of it, and sat down with a carefully cultivated lack of expression on his face. I waited, and he waited. Nothing happened for several minutes, and I felt uncomfortable, exposed, and somehow deeply ashamed for myself, for the prison, and for humanity in general that such cages should exist. I cringed secretly, while remaining outwardly composed, and sat motionlessly without a sign of impatience. Time passed, but I refused stubbornly to look at my watch. It struck me that the guard had a dreadfully boring job. We both waited.

  After what seemed like an endless time, I heard sounds and saw the slight figure of a man being led towards the opposite side of the cage between two guards. He was handcuffed and they pushed him along with an inhuman rudeness and lack of ceremony which disgusted me. I tried to tell myself that like the screaming crowds who mocked Dreyfus, the guards believed him guilty, guilty of the murder of a little child, and that were I personally to encounter the murderer of a child, I would not be tempted to treat him with any particular delicacy.

  The door of the cage was opened, and the prisoner was introduced inside and locked in. His two guards moved off a very short way. The situation was awful. There was at least a yard’s distance between us, the width of t
he corridor where the guard was sitting stolidly, and every word we spoke would be overheard by at least three people. I felt awkward and tongue-tied for a moment. Then the prisoner crossed his part of the cage to the barrier which divided us and, leaning against it, he looked directly across at me, fixed me, in fact, with a look so direct and so intense that my inhibitions dropped suddenly away. Two paths crossed in my mind, and I seemed to be standing in front of the prisoner Dreyfus on his desert island, pleading, shouting his innocence to the four winds, standing alone on the rocks as a symbol of injustice and persecution. The man in front of me was a broken man, his shoulders bent, his face drawn, the spark of life dimmed yet not extinct. Kept alive, perhaps, I thought suddenly, by nothing other than his terrible grievance. I felt a little shudder run through me. Rising, I went to stand directly across from him and looked back at him, meeting his eyes. Erasing the very consciousness of the guard from my mind, I spoke the words I had carefully prepared.

  ‘Mr Gad,’ I said, looking at him, ‘I must inform you of something which will mean a great deal to you. The black dog is dead.’

  He looked up suddenly, stared at me in amazement, but said nothing.

  ‘Yoni went to see the dog on the day he died,’ I continued. ‘He says he never did see the dog, but others say he did.’

  ‘Yoni – Yoni is accused of killing the dog?’ articulated the prisoner suddenly, in the hoarse voice of someone unused to speech. It was obvious that he had caught on to my meaning instantly; the code was working. I responded with a brief nod, wishing that I could tell him to avoid the word killing. I did not want anything of the kind to remain in the memory of the guards.

  ‘He claims he didn’t see the dog,’ I went on. ‘I want to help him; I wish I knew if it were true, or if in fact he did see the dog – maybe because … someone asked him to.’