by Noah Gordon
They were a strange people, different from him in appearance as well as custom. “What’s the matter with his hair?” a man named Reb Joel Levski the Herdsman asked Meir. Rob was the only one in the study house without peoth, the ceremonial hair locks that curled beside each ear.
“He knows no better. He’s a goy, an Other,” Meir explained.
“But Simon told me this Other is circumcised. How can that be?” said Reb Pinhas ben Simeon the Dairyman.
Meir shrugged. “An accident,” he said. “I’ve discussed it with him. It has nothing to do with the covenant of Abraham.”
For several days Mar Reuven was stared at. In turn he did some staring of his own, for they seemed more than passing strange to him with their headwear and earlocks and bushy beards and dark clothing and heathenish ways. He was fascinated with their habits during prayer. They were so individualized. Meir donned his prayer shawl modestly and unobtrusively. Reb Pinhas unfolded his tallit and shook it out almost arrogantly, held it in front of him by two corners, and with an upward motion of his arms and a flick of his wrists sent it billowing over his head, to settle over his shoulders as soft as a blessing.
When Reb Pinhas prayed he bobbed back and forth with the urgency of his desire to send his supplication to the Almighty. Meir swayed gently when he recited the prayers. Simon rocked with a tempo somewhere in between, ending each forward motion with a little shudder and a slight shaking of the head.
Rob read and studied his book and the Jews, behaving too much like the rest of them to stay a novelty. For six hours every day—three hours following the morning prayer service, which they called shaharit, and three hours after the evening service, ma’ariv —the study house was jammed, for most of the men studied before and after completing the day’s work by which they earned their living. Between these two periods, however, it was relatively quiet, with only one or two tables occupied by fulltime scholars. Soon he sat among them at ease and unnoticed, oblivious to the Jewish babble as he worked on the Persian Qu’ran, beginning to make real progress at last.
When their Sabbath came he tended the fires. It was his heaviest day of work since the snow shoveling but still so easy he was able to study for part of the afternoon. Two days later he helped Reb Elia the Carpenter put new rungs into wooden chairs. Other than that there was no labor but the study of Persian until, near the end of his second week in Tryavna, the rabbenu’s granddaughter Rohel taught him to milk. She had white skin and long black hair that she wore braided about her heart-shaped face, a small mouth with a womanly swelling of the lower lip, a tiny birthmark on her throat, and large brown eyes that always seemed to be on him.
While they were in the dairy one of the cows, a foolish thing that believed she was a bull, mounted another cow and began to move as if she owned a penis and had entered the other beast.
The color mounted from Rohel’s neck into her face, but she smiled and gave a little laugh. She leaned forward on her stool and placed her head against a milch cow’s warm flank, her eyes closed. Skirt tautened, she reached between her spread knees and grasped the thick teats beneath the swollen udders. Her fingers rippled, pressing swiftly in turn. When milk drummed into the bucket Rohel drew a breath and sighed. Her pink tongue crept out to wet her lips and she opened her eyes and looked at Rob.
Rob stood alone in the shadowy gloom of the cow barn, holding a piece of blanket. It smelled strongly of Horse and was only a little larger than a prayer shawl. With a quick movement he sent the blanket over his head to settle about his shoulders as nicely as if it were Reb Pinhas’ tallit. Repetition was giving him a confident motion in donning the prayer shawl. Cattle lowed as he stood and practiced a prayerful swaying, sedate but purposeful. He preferred to emulate Meir in prayer rather than more energetic worshipers like Reb Pinhas.
That was the easy part. Their language, strange-sounding and complex, would take a long time to master, especially while he was exerting such an effort to learn Persian.
They were a people of amulets. On the upper third of the right-hand doorpost of every door in every house was nailed a little wooden tube called a mezuzah. Simon said each tube contained a tiny rolled parchment; inscribed on the front in square Assyrian letters were twenty-two lines from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21, and on the back was the word Shaddai, “Almighty.”
As Rob had observed during the journey, each morning except on the Sabbath each adult male strapped two small leather boxes to his arm and head. These were called tefillin and contained portions of their holy book, the Torah, the box bound to the forehead being close to the mind, the other fastened to the arm, hard by the heart.
“We do it to obey the instructions in Deuteronomy,” Simon said. “‘And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart … And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes.’”
The trouble was Rob couldn’t tell, simply by watching, how the Jews put on the tefillin. Nor could he ask Simon to show him, for it would have been strange for a Christian to want to be taught a rite of Jewish worship. He was able to count that they wrapped ten loops of the leather around their arms, but what they did with the hand was complicated, for the leather strip was wound between the fingers in special ways he couldn’t determine.
Standing in the cold, ripe-smelling barn, he wrapped his left arm with a piece of old rope instead of the leather tefillin strip, but what he did to his hand and fingers with the rope never made any sense.
Still, the Jews were natural teachers and he learned something new every day. In the school of St. Botolph’s Church the priests had taught him that the God of the Old Bible was Jehovah. But when he referred to Jehovah, Meir shook his head.
“Know that for us the Lord our God, Blessed be He, has seven names. This is the most sacred.” With a piece of charcoal from the fireplace he drew on the wooden floor, writing the word in both Persian and in the Tongue: Yahweh. “It is never spoken, for the identity of the Most High is inexpressible. It is mispronounced by Christians, as you’ve done. But the name isn’t Jehovah, do you understand?”
Rob nodded.
At night on his bed of straw he reviewed new words and customs, and before sleep overwhelmed him he remembered a phrase, a fragment of a blessing, a gesture, a pronunciation, an expression of ecstasy on a face during prayer, and he stored these things into his mind against the day when they would be needed.
“You must stay away from the rabbenu’s granddaughter,” Meir told him, frowning.
“I have no interest in her.” Days had passed since they had talked in the dairy, and he hadn’t been near her since.
In truth, he had dreamed of Mary Cullen the night before and had awakened at dawn to lie stunned and hot-eyed, trying to recall details of the dream.
Meir nodded, his face clearing. “Good. One of the women has observed her watching you with too much interest, and told the rabbenu. He asked me to have a talk with you.” Meir placed a forefinger against his nose. “One quiet word to a wise man is better than a year of pleading with a fool.”
Rob was alarmed and disturbed, for he had to stay in Tryavna to observe the ways of the Jews and study Persian. “I don’t want trouble over a woman.”
“Of course not.” Meir sighed. “The problem is the girl, who should be married. She has been betrothed since childhood to Reb Meshullum ben Moses, the grandson of Reb Baruch ben David. You know Reb Baruch? A tall, spare man? Long face? Thin, pointed nose? He sits just beyond the fire in the study house?”
“Ah, that one. An old man with fierce eyes.”
“Fierce eyes because he’s a fierce scholar. If the rabbenu weren’t the rabbenu, Reb Baruch would be the rabbenu. They were always rival scholars and the closest of friends. When their grandchildren were still babies they arranged a match with great joy, to unite their families. Then they had a terrible falling-out that ended their friendship.”
“Why did they quarrel?” asked Rob, who was beginning to feel sufficiently
at home in Tryavna to enjoy a bit of gossip.
“They slaughtered a young bull in partnership. Now, you must understand that our laws of kashruth are ancient and complex, with rules and interpretations about how things must be and how things must not be. A tiny blemish was discovered on the lung of the animal. The rabbenu quoted precedents that said the blemish was insignificant and in no way spoiled the meat. Reb Baruch cited other precedents that indicated the meat was ruined by the blemish and couldn’t be eaten. He insisted he was right and resented the rabbenu for questioning his scholarship.
“They argued until finally the rabbenu lost patience. ‘Cut the animal in half,’ he said. ‘I’ll take my portion, and let Baruch do whatever he pleases with his.’
“When he brought his half of the bull home, he intended to eat it. But after deliberating, he complained, ‘How can I eat the meat of this animal? One half lies on Baruch’s garbage pile, and I should eat the other half?’ So he threw away his half of the beef as well.
“After that, they seemed to oppose each other all the time. If Reb Baruch said white, the rabbenu said black, if the rabbenu said meat, Reb Baruch said milk. When Rohel was twelve and a half years old, the age when her elders should have begun talking seriously about a wedding, the families did nothing because they knew that any meetings would end in quarreling between the two old men. Then young Reb Meshullum, the prospective bridegroom, went on his first foreign business trip with his father and other men of his family. They traveled to Marseilles with a stock of copper kettles and stayed almost a year, trading and making a fine profit. Counting the time of traveling they were gone two years before they returned last summer, bringing a caravan shipment of well-made French garments. And still the two families, held apart by the grandfathers, do not arrange for the marriage to take place!
“By now,” Meir said, “it’s common knowledge that the unfortunate Rohel might as well be considered an agunah, a deserted wife. She has breasts but suckles no babies, she’s a woman grown but she has no husband, and it has become a major scandal.”
They agreed that it would be best for Rob to avoid the dairy during the hours of milking.
* * *
It was well that Meir had spoken to him, for who knew what might have happened if he had not been made to see clearly that their winter’s hospitality didn’t include the use of their women. At night he had tortured voluptuous visions of long, full thighs, red hair, and pale young breasts with tips like berries. He felt certain the Jews would have a prayer asking forgiveness for spilled seed—they had a prayer for everything—but he had none and he hid the evidence of his dreams under fresh straw and tried to lose himself in his work.
It was hard. All around him was a humming sexuality encouraged by their religion—they believed it a special blessing to make love on the eve of the Sabbath, for instance, perhaps explaining why they so dearly loved the end of the week! The young men talked freely of such matters, groaning to one another if a wife was untouchable; Jewish married couples were forbidden to copulate for twelve days after the flow of menses began, or seven days after it ceased, whichever period was longer. Their abstinence wasn’t over until the wife marked its end by purifying herself through immersion in the ritual pool, called the mikva.
This was a brick-lined tank in a bathhouse built over a spring. Simon told Rob that to be ritually fit, the mikva water had to come from a natural spring or a river. The mikva was for symbolic purification, not cleanliness. The Jews bathed at home, but each week just before the Sabbath, Rob joined the males in the bathhouse, which contained only the pool and a great roaring fire in a round hearth over which hung cauldrons of boiling water. Bathing stripped to the skin in the steamy warmth, they vied for the privilege of pouring water over the rabbenu while they questioned him at length.
“Shi-ailah, Rabbenu, shi-ailah!” A question, a question!
Shlomo ben Eliahu’s answer to each problem was deliberate and thoughtful, full of scholarly precedents and citations, sometimes translated for Rob in far too much detail by Simon or Meir.
“Rabbenu, is it truly written in the Book of Guidance that every man must dedicate his oldest son to seven years of advanced study?”
The naked rabbenu explored his navel reflectively, tugged at an ear, scrabbled in his full white beard with long pale fingers. “It is not so written, my children. On the one hand”—he poked upward with his right forefinger—“Reb Hananel ben Ashi of Leipzig was of this opinion. On the other hand”—up went his left forefinger—“according to the rabbenu Joseph ben Eliakim of Jaffa, this applies only to the first sons of priests and Levites. But”—he pushed the air at them with both palms—“both of these sages lived hundreds of years ago. Today we are modern men. We understand that learning is not just for a firstborn, with all other sons to be treated as if they were mere women. Today we are accustomed to every youth spending his fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth year in the advanced study of Talmud, twelve to fifteen hours a day. After that, those few who are called may devote their lives to scholarship, while the others may go into business and study only six hours a day thereafter.”
Well. Most of the questions that were translated for the visiting Other were not the sort that would start his heart to hammering or even, in truth, maintain his constant attention. Nevertheless, Rob enjoyed Friday afternoons in the bathhouse; never had he felt so at home in the company of unclothed men. Perhaps it had something to do with his bobbed prick. If he had been among his own kind, by now his organ would have been the subject of rude stares, snickering, questions, lewd speculation. An exotic flower growing by itself is one thing, but it is quite another when it is surrounded by an entire field of other flowers of similar configuration.
In the bathhouse the Jews were lavish in feeding wood to the fire and he liked the combination of wood smoke and steamy dampness, the sting of the strong yellow soap whose manufacture was supervised by the rabbenu’s daughter, the careful mixing of boiling water with cold spring water to create a lovely warmth for bathing.
He never went into the mikva, understanding that it was forbidden. He was content to loll in the vaporous bathhouse, watching the Jews steel themselves to enter the tank. Muttering the blessing that accompanied the act or singing it loudly, according to their personalities, they walked down the six dank stone steps into the water, which was deep. As it covered their faces they blew vigorously or held their breath, for the act of purification made it necessary to immerse oneself so totally that every hair of the body was wet.
Even if invited, nothing could have convinced Rob to enter the chill dark mystery of the water, a place of their religion.
If the God called Yahweh truly existed, then perhaps He was aware that Rob Cole was planning to pass himself off as one of His children.
He felt that if he entered the inscrutable waters something would pull him into the world beyond, where all the sins of his nefarious plan were known and Hebrew serpents would gnaw his flesh, and perhaps he would be personally chastised by Jesus.
30
WINTER IN THE STUDY HOUSE
That Christmas was the strangest in his twenty-one years. Barber hadn’t raised him to be a true believer, but the goose and the pudding, the nibbling of the headcheese called brawn, the singing, the toasting, the holiday slap on the back—these were a part of him, and this year he felt a yawning loneliness. The Jews didn’t ignore him on that day from meanness; Jesus was simply not in their world. Doubtless Rob could have found his way to a church, but he didn’t. Strangely, the fact that no one wished him a joyous Christ’s Day made him more of a Christian in his own mind than ever he had been.
A week later, at dawn of Our Lord’s new year of 1032, he lay on his bed of straw and wondered at what he had become, and where it would take him. When he wandered the British isle he had thought himself the very devil of a traveler, but already he had traveled a far greater distance than was encompassed by his home island, and an endless unknown world still lay before him.
The Jews celebrated that day, but because it was a new moon, not because it was a new year! He learned to his befuddlement that by their heathen calendar it was mid-annum of the year 4792.
It was a country for snow. He welcomed each snowfall and soon it was an accepted fact that after each storm the big Christian with his great wooden shovel would do the work of several ordinary shovelers. It was his only physical activity; when he wasn’t shoveling snow he was learning Parsi. He was sufficiently advanced to be able to think slowly in the Persian language now. A number of the Jews of Tryavna had been to Persia and he spoke Parsi with anyone he could trap. “The accent, Simon. How is my accent?” he asked, irritating his tutor.
“Any Persian who wishes to laugh will do so,” Simon snapped, “because to Persians you’ll be a foreigner. Do you expect miracles?” The Jews in the study house exchanged smiles at the foolishness of the giant young goy.
Let them smile, he thought; he found them a more interesting study than they found him. For example, he quickly learned that Meir and his group weren’t the only strangers in Tryavna. Many of the other males in the study house were travelers waiting out the rigors of the Balkan winter. To Rob’s surprise, Meir told him that none of them paid as much as a single coin in return for more than three months’ food and shelter.
Meir explained. “It is this system that allows my people to trade among the nations. You’ve seen how difficult and dangerous it is to travel the world, yet every Jewish community sends merchants abroad. And in any Jewish village in any land, Christian or Muslim, a Jewish traveler is taken in by Jews and given food and wine, a place in the synagogue, a stable for his horse. Each community has men in foreign parts sustained by someone else. And next year, the host will be the guest.”
The strangers quickly fit into the life of the community, even to relishing the local babble. Thus it was that one afternoon in the study house, while Rob was conversing in the Persian tongue with an Anatolian Jew named Ezra the Farrier—gossip in Parsi!—he learned that a dramatic confrontation would take place the next day. The rabbenu served as shohet, the community slaughterer of meat animals. Next morning he would slaughter two beasts of his own, young beeves. A small group of the community’s most prestigious sages served as mashgiot, ritual inspectors who saw to it that the complicated law, down to the finest detail, was observed during the butchering. And scheduled to preside as a mashgiah during the rabbenu’s slaughtering was his onetime friend and latter-day bitter antagonist, Reb Baruch ben David.
