The Library Paradox
Page 30
The Jews are perhaps the most uncompromising of people. If they were not, their race and their religion would have slipped into oblivion long ago. Then must the Jew be merciful, Portia said. Then, perhaps, would the Jew no longer exist.
‘So you think he deserved to die?’ interjected Mr Andrews quickly.
‘It is the Lord and not men who must decide such questions,’ replied the rabbi.
‘And you still claim that you do not know how the professor met his death?’
‘I do not know. No.’
But is it not obvious by now? I wanted to scream. I longed to speak. My anxious gestures finally succeeded in catching the eye of Sir Morris Hirsch. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded quickly and urgently, and he called me once again to the stand. The rabbi and the professor sat down.
‘The manner in which the professor met his death is now clear,’ I said.
The magistrate looked up at me in surprise. ‘Well then, will you condescend to explain it to the court?’ he said.
‘Yes. It is very simple if one separates the two strands which appeared inextricably intertwined around the professor. On the one hand, the professor was a particularly fanatical anti-Semite who used all of the power and influence he held as a professor of repute in a distinguished university to attack the Jewish community. It is important to realise that his actions were not limited merely to generic activities such as publishing articles. He was personally responsible for sending at least one innocent Jew to the gallows and another to Dartmoor, and he had contributed with all the means in his power to the movement which sent Captain Dreyfus to Devil’s Island and is keeping him there. He was probably the author of any number of other acts of this kind.
‘On the other hand, unbeknown to himself, the professor’s mother was Jewish, which in fact by the tenets of the Jewish religion meant that he himself was also a Jew. Confronting these two facts makes it easy to imagine that the rabbi’s information must have been a severe shock to the professor, the destruction of the very meaning he had chosen to give to his life. It now seems clear that he took his gun and shot himself.’
‘Shot himself? But the witnesses heard the sounds of a fight going on in the room. They heard shouting and the crashing of furniture before the shot.’
‘As the rabbi left, he heard Professor Ralston shouting violently after him. The desk in front of him, with its articles and letters lying on it, would mock him as a symbol of his life’s work, and it is easy to understand that in a gesture of violent rage, he heaved it over, and it fell onto the chair standing on the other side of it. He then picked up his own chair and flung it against the wall, where it crashed into an engraving. The idea of the gun in his desk drawer probably came to him at this point, and he snatched it out with sweating, slipping hands, smudging the traces of his own fingerprints. It is quite possible that he actually caught up the gun with some idea of running after the rabbi, but of course it was too late. So he turned it against himself.’
‘But the gun was found near the door,’ the magistrate continued to argue.
‘The professor was standing behind his desk, which had fallen and was lying obliquely supported on a chair. The gun fell onto it and glanced off, projected a yard or two in the direction of the door. Have you ever dropped something onto a slanted surface? It will glance off at the reflection of the angle from which it fell. There was a fresh dent in his desk, actually. I didn’t realise until now how it must have been made.’ I regretted my words instantly, fearing that I would be asked how I had managed to be inside the professor’s sealed study, but fortunately nobody raised this delicate point. The magistrate was considering my words.
‘You have no proof of all this,’ he said finally.
‘What I am giving you is a proof by logic. It is the only possibility. We saw that neither Jonathan Sachs nor Rabbi Abraham can be guilty, because each of their testimonies exonerates the other.’
‘Unless they are accomplices and both lying!’ insisted Mr Andrews tenaciously.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if that were the case, then it seems to me that the whole point of their plan would have been for each of them to make a statement exonerating the other from the start. But the rabbi did nothing of the kind. He remained at home and let Jonathan be arrested. In fact, he was serenely ignorant of everything that took place after he left the professor’s study.’
‘But he came here today.’
‘Because I asked him to.’
‘You don’t know that he did not mean to come anyway, or perhaps to present himself to the police with his statement in his own good time.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense! Obviously, the longer the rabbi waited to give his evidence, the more suspicious it would look. Even today you find it suspicious, and cannot resist wondering if he has not been somehow bribed or persuaded to invent his role. The natural thing for him to do, if this were a conspiracy, would be to “find out” about the professor’s death from the next day’s newspaper and present himself spontaneously to the police with his story, in a context having no relation to Jonathan Sachs at all.’
The old gentleman, Professor Ralston’s father, suddenly stood up from the bench, and turned towards the magistrate. His face was grey and drawn.
‘I should like to say something, if I may,’ he said. There was a kind of deathly despair in his voice.
‘Certainly,’ said the magistrate courteously.
Stepping up to the stand, the professor leant his hands on the bar wearily. He looked down painfully for some time, collecting himself, before speaking.
‘I feel as intimately persuaded as a man can, that what this young lady is saying is the truth. It gives me great pain to say this, but I know that I am deeply to blame for what my son became, and for everything that has happened. I allowed my son to remain totally unaware of his mother’s Jewish origins. It never occurred to me when he was a child; she converted to Christianity, and we were a Christian family. But she never ceased to suffer terribly over her father’s severity and rejection. Her pain and resentment at this treatment grew as she saw even her mother’s kindness tempered by feelings of guilt and fear of discovery. She spoke bitterly of the Jews, and complained often and passionately of their harshness, yet without ever explaining the full and true circumstances to our child. I believe that without fully realising it, my son came to blame the Jewish people for her suffering and her early death. They became the focal point of the resentment caused by the loss of his mother. I feel largely to blame for letting this happen. I never told him the full truth, nor helped him to overcome his sadness at his mother’s death. I felt incapable of it. I thought that in order to become a man, he should bear her loss in silence, just as I myself was doing. At least, that is what I told myself. But I realise now that bearing the loss in silence was the easier way, for me, than talking about it would have been.
‘Later, when my son became an adult and began specialising in the study of the Spanish Inquisition and other historical iniquities, I wondered if I should speak to him. But I put it off for too long; also, I did not generally read his scholarly publications, and did not realise to what point he had become engaged in the direction of ferocious anti-Semitism. We were … we were not close. Yet one day after a colleague drew my attention to a particularly virulent article by him in a well-known intellectual journal, I decided that I must broach the subject. I went to see him, and in attempting to introduce the topic gently, I found that his prejudice was so severe that he could not even hear the word Judaism without flying into a kind of rage. I had barely begun, by delicately allowing that the contribution of Jews to our society may not be all negative, and this alone brought a storm of what I can only call hysteria upon my head. I tried to induce a state of imagination in my son by such phrases as “Imagine that you yourself were Jewish”. He answered – I will never forget this phrase – “If I were a Jew I would commit suicide.” It was then that I decided there was no point in ever telling him the truth. I had left it too late.’
Needless to say, the magistrate discharged Jonathan without a stain on his character. He seized my hand and shook it gratefully as he was leaving, surrounded by his loving family. I thought he was going to stay and talk for a while about the meaning of it all, but no.
‘Where is Emily?’ were his only words.
EPILOGUE
Cambridge, Sunday, April 12th, 1896
Nearly a month has passed since I last wrote in my journal. March, with its crop of daffodils and crocuses, has gone, leaving only the long green blades behind. April has come, filling my little garden with its own personal selection of flowers; purple pansies, blue muscarii, violets and pink bells bloom in lost corners, while the carefully planned beds produce groups of fat-petalled and civilised hyacinths and tulips. The old garden walls are dripping with wisteria, whose dry stalks are already heavily loaded with enormous, promising buds. Arthur is sitting near me – he has quite forgiven me for making him desperately anxious by my sudden disappearance. Upon receiving no letters from me during his absence, he became worried and sent three increasingly urgent telegrams before it suddenly occurred to him to try at Dora’s, whence he received full reassurances, at least concerning the children.
‘But I’ll never feel secure when you are investigating a case of murder,’ he said, brushing a little moss off the stone bench, and drawing near to me.
‘It wasn’t really one, after all,’ I said consolingly, picking a flower and tucking it into his buttonhole.
The two most precious flowers of all the garden frolic about like happy lambs. Here in the midst of all this, my own Eden, I am absorbing the last rays of late afternoon sunshine, and preparing to dot the i’s of the story recounted in these pages by writing down an account of the visit I received earlier this afternoon.
It was an unexpected one, yet expected and unexpected are all the same to me; whoever comes, planned or unplanned, finds the same odd mixture of peaceful tranquillity and permanent chaos, and a cup of tea is always available. There is no time here; time, and urgency, exist for me only when I am investigating. At home, each day is just a poem; some speak of rainfall, others of sunshine, and all of them contain the same echo of tenderness.
When guests join us, the children gambol around them, deeply interested yet keeping a suspicious distance unless mollified by particularly tactful personal communication. If a guest is particularly loud or overexcited, they cling very tightly to their parents.
Jonathan did not cause them to cling; he sat, long-legged and relaxed, upon a garden chair, smiling valiantly. He was up in Cambridge for mathematical reasons, he explained, and could not resist the impulse to drop by.
‘To think I haven’t seen you at all since that last moment in the courtroom!’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘The moment I walked out of there, I had nothing else in my mind but taking the first train down to Kent to recover my babies. I can’t think how I managed to spend so many days away from them. They’re very addictive,’ I added, clutching little Cedric, who presented himself at that precise moment holding a large and impressive pink blossom which he had torn from its stem.
‘No no no, mustn’t pick flowers,’ I told him. There was not much authority in my tone. The pink tulips are not at all my favourites, anyway. He paid but little attention to my words and, inserting the end of a petal delicately into his mouth, he sampled it with concentration. I kissed the top of his soft head.
‘You seem to have survived the separation well enough,’ said Jonathan agreeably. ‘And how did you find the children? Were they upset at your long disappearance?’
‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘To tell you the truth, when I arrived at the house where my sister and her husband live – it is the house I grew up in – I found the babies in a state of perfect delight, as their father was there, devoting himself to them adoringly, while my sister and the nurse had gone off on a well-deserved outing. I did feel guilty when I saw him! He was supposed to be doing mathematics in France.’
‘And what was he doing instead – taking a secret holiday?’
‘Well, he had discovered that I was gone, and that the children were at my sister’s, so he went there to be with them. He meant to come up to London to look me out, but the babies having once got hold of him would not brook the idea of letting him go, so he stayed and waited to see how much time I would take before putting in an appearance.’
‘And how long was it?’
‘Oh, I came the next day. I did feel like a terrible mother when I saw them!’
‘Nonsense. It was probably good for them – teach them to appreciate their luck,’ said Jonathan, tickling Cecily with a long blade of grass, as she stood staring unwinkingly at him, planted on a pair of solidly parallel little legs.
‘Well, in any case, I have made up for it since,’ I said. ‘I spend all my time with them, and Cecily has learnt to say “mamma is back” as I have repeated it so frequently.’
‘Mamma back,’ said that small person obligingly. Jonathan smiled.
‘It is interesting, this learning to speak,’ he observed. ‘I must have done it myself at that age, yet I occasionally have the unfortunate impression that I did not do it quite right. I wish I could express myself better.’
‘What would you express, if you could?’ I said, sensing some deeper meaning behind his words.
‘I would convince Emily to marry me,’ he said. ‘She would, if she saw inside me.’
‘She doesn’t want to?’ I said. It was very sad, but I was not completely surprised. Emily was as fond of Jonathan as could be, perhaps fonder even than she realised. But there was someone else who made her cheeks flush and her eyes sparkle.
‘I think she is in love with young Hudson,’ said Jonathan gloomily, as though reading my thoughts. ‘And what can I say?’ he added after a short pause. ‘He’s brilliant, attractive, a nice fellow altogether … and not Jewish.’
‘I’m sure that has nothing to do with it!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘We Gentiles are not all like Professor Ralston, you know!’
‘Oh, him – he wasn’t a Gentile,’ he responded bitterly. ‘He was one of us. Now that I know it, I almost wonder how I never saw it before. That single-minded fanatical rigidity of his was really a twisted version of something uncompromising and even obsessional in us, that I recognise … only too well.’
‘That is what Darwin would call the survival instinct,’ I said. ‘In a situation where survival is not threatened, it becomes a danger. Jonathan, the world is full of beautiful things – why, here you are in this garden, free as air! Just think that you might have been in prison at this very moment. You have been inside Dartmoor. You know what it is like.’
‘I know, I do know. I often think that very thought,’ he said. ‘I’ll be forever grateful for what you did. It’s incredible, though, that none of us understood sooner what actually happened. There was obviously only one possible answer.’
‘Ye-es,’ I said. ‘And yet, I find myself wondering just a tiny bit about it. Would the professor really have shot himself just because he found out his mother was a convert from Judaism? I know he told his father that he would commit suicide if he were a Jew, but I can hardly believe that he really meant it. His father took it seriously because it was his own son, and because he felt guilty. But it’s probably just as well that it never came to trial. I wonder if a jury would have accepted that as a motive for suicide.’
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Actually, we talked with Reb Abraham afterwards much more. He told us all about his interview with the professor. He feels responsible for what happened. He has sent all of his disciples away to study with other rebbes. You see, he – he actually said more to Professor Ralston than we thought. He told him that he had to entirely cease all of his
anti-Semitic activities instantly, or else he would make the information public – tell everybody that Ralston himself was Jewish. A lot of people deeply disliked Ralston. They would have made mincemeat of him, professionally.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And I am not completely surprised. It was almost a kind of blackmail. That raises an extremely difficult moral question. Did the rabbi do right, or wrong?’
‘I think he did right, and I told him so,’ he said. ‘Ralston was himself a murderer, don’t forget that!’
‘I know why you say that, and you are right,’ I said softly. ‘That reminds me that your uncle must have come out of prison by now. Tell me about him.’
‘He was released less than a week ago,’ he replied. ‘He has gone to live with my parents now, while looking for a little place of his own. It’s strange; freedom is … not as easy as you might think. Prisoners think of nothing else, and yet, when they emerge, they are like lost souls. But that is what a family is for. His story has cost us all so much in indignation and fury and worry and fear that we are spent, and now only wish to welcome him and make sure that he finds a little quiet contentedness, a little tranquillity.’
‘How – how did he react to Professor Ralston’s death?’ I asked, a little timidly. ‘It seems strange to think that he said he meant to kill him.’
‘I wonder what he would have done, in fact,’ mused Jonathan. ‘It is easy to think of killing someone in the heat of despair, or from the depths of a prison. It is surely not so easy to do it when push comes to shove. He did not say what he would have done had none of this happened, but he did tell me that when he learnt that I had been arrested and realised that I was in danger because of that letter he wrote, he suddenly knew that he would have chosen to do none of it rather than have me risk what he has undergone. It seems silly now; hard to believe there was any real danger. Yet there was, I think. At least, I was terrified enough! Believe me, I saw those prison walls closing around me. The old rebbe was the only arrow in my quiver, and I was afraid that he would not come, or would deny everything, or worse, that he would be arrested as well. It never occurred to me that he could have had the power to say something to Ralston that would have such an effect on him. I admit that I saw no way out of it; I almost wondered if I hadn’t committed the murder myself unconsciously, somehow.’