AHMM, June 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Inquiring into a possible death, I expect.”

  Some of the color drained from her face, as if I had accused her of violating a sacred law of some kind.

  “Who are you?” she asked, squinting up at me.

  Kassy answered for me: “You may not know his face but you certainly know his name, for this man is none other than Rabbi Benyamin Ben-Akiva, special assistant to the new head Rabbi of Poznan, the great Rabbi Loew himself, who saved the Jews of Prague from an army of enraged Christians intent on burning down the ghetto.”

  “Ah! Then it is surely a blessing on this holy day that you happened to be passing by at just this moment,” she said, waving us inside. “Come in, Rabbi Benyamin, come in, Miss Whoever-you-are.”

  “My name is Castava in my native Czech, but the Germans call me Kassandra.”

  “Ach! Who gives a damn what the Germans think?” said the maid with a toughness that's typical of these big city women.

  “I was all alone when I found him—may God protect you from such things!” said the maid, appraising me from head to toe as if I were a sprightly young stallion at the horse market. “A fine, eligible bachelor like yourself, Rabbi Benyamin.”

  I caught a twinkle in Kassy's eyes as she stepped in ahead of me, her skirts twirling around her ankles as her curiosity propelled her forward. I planted my boot on the threshold, kissed the tips of my fingers, and raised them to touch the mezuzah on the doorpost.

  Then my fingers froze. The mezuzah was out of kilter, pointing toward the street. Thinking it might have slipped out of place, I tried to pivot it back toward the house, but it didn't budge. I looked closer. It was nailed into place facing the wrong direction.

  “What kind of fool nailed this up?” I said, louder than I should have.

  “Oh, the master had the houseboy do it,” said the maid, her face cracking. “Oh, my poor master!”

  Kassy drew the woman close, stroking her coarse gray hair and offering words of comfort as the maid clung to her, shaking and dampening Kassy's long cloak with tears.

  I was still stuck on the mezuzah. I guess there were plenty of ignorant Jews in the world. Though to be fair, the ignorant goyim outnumbered us and did a lot more damage.

  When my thoughts returned to the world around me, Kassy was giving me a black look for upsetting this helpless old woman. I stood accused, once again, a coarse blunderer unfit for the world of women. But then she raised an eyebrow and her bright green eyes flitted toward the room above, and I understood her unspoken message.

  As I climbed the creaky stairs, knowing that I was approaching a solemn place of death, I couldn't help feeling relieved that Kassy wasn't really angry with me.

  The master's bedroom was dark, with heavy curtains shutting out all but a sliver of daylight. A cluster of gold and silver semicircles hung low to the ground in the center of the room, catching a bit of the light, and as my eyes got used to the darkness, the remains of a bedside supper for two took shape and form. The luminous rings and curves resolved into silver plates and spoons, a polished wine jug, and what appeared to be solid gold wine cups. But the fire in the hearth had long since died and the room was ice cold.

  So the old man's spirit had been given plenty of time to flee the scene. I threw open the curtains, letting the cool gray light of the early Polish springtime flood the room.

  I approached the master's bed, mindful not to touch anything, since a familiar fluttering in my gut was telling me that something deadly, whether of this world or the World to Come, was present in this room.

  The dead man's half-opened eyes were milky and opaque, fixed on the red velvet canopy above the bed, and his fist clutched a handful of velvet curtain in a death grip. Bits of silvery residue clung to his lips and a trickle of silver-flecked wine, dried to a glittering red stain, had dripped from the corner of his mouth into his graying beard stubble and onto the silk pillowcase.

  “Looks like Reb Schildsberg knew what he was drinking,” said Kassy.

  I turned. Kassy was bent over the table, examining the remains of the unfortunate soul's last meal, her brownish blonde hair hanging loose around her face, just a few inches above the leftover peas on the tainted dinnerware.

  “Take a look at this.” She beckoned to me with a crooked index finger.

  As I drew nearer, I could just make out traces of a powdery silver residue clinging to the rim of one of the gold wine cups.

  The master's cup.

  The other cup contained a few drops of red wine, but otherwise appeared to be free of metallic adulterants.

  “How could someone slip that much poison into a man's drinking cup without him noticing it?” I wondered.

  “It probably wasn't meant to poison him.”

  “Then what—?”

  Kassy folded her arms across her chest and looked right at me.

  I took in the scene—an intimate dinner for two, with candles and wine and closed curtains, and the victim still dressed in his nightshirt.

  “A love potion?”

  “Either that or something to increase the heat of passion, or else to help a hoary old man achieve—well, you know,” she said, picking up a polished spoon and scraping some of the silvery residue from the golden cup.

  “Using powdered silver? Are you sure?”

  “I'm afraid that a good number of incompetent or simply fraudulent alchemists have poisoned their customers with elixirs containing quicksilver, antimony, and other heavy metals.”

  She held the spoon up to the light and examined the crumbly wine-and-metallic-powder compound.

  “If only I had some of my tools with me,” she said with a sudden onrush of bitterness.

  Kassy had been forced to abandon her practice and flee from her homeland with little more than the clothes she was wearing, a few tattered books, and whatever implements she was able to salvage on the road to Poznan after her apothecary shop in Prague was set upon by enraged zealots who were convinced that she was guilty of the most hateful and egregious crime of witchcraft.

  So she knew what it was like to be the target of mass hysteria. It was one of the things we had in common.

  “What is it?” she said, looking up at me, the light catching the green speckles in her eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something you feel about this situation,” she said. “Something instinctive. Tell me what it is,” she prompted.

  I don't know how she picked up on it, but something had been bothering me from the moment we had set foot in this house.

  “You said his name was Schildsberg?”

  “That's what the maid told me. Why?”

  “It's just—that's not a typical Jewish name.”

  “You're telling me you think he's not a Jew? Just from his name?”

  “There are other signs as well, but there's only one way to find out,” I said, crossing over to the bed. I hesitated out of respect for the dead, and a primordial fear of the particularly harsh consequences of violating a prohibition dating back to the days of Noah.

  So I asked the dead man's spirit to forgive me, then I pulled back the sheets and confirmed my suspicions.

  “He's not Jewish.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “This man is not Jewish.”

  “And here I was thinking all men were the same down there.”

  “He does not bear the mark of the covenant,” I said, covering up the body as best I could. “And even if he did, as Rabbi Yohanan said to Resh Lakish, not all fingers are alike.”

  “And where is that written?”

  “Babylonian Talmud, tractate Niddah, folio 66a.” She always wanted to know the exact sources of my Jewish wisdom.

  “You're telling me I don't know about the male member, Rabbi Benyamin?”

  “You don't have to call me that when we're—”

  “I know, I know. When we're not in public.”

  Our eyes fell upon the dead man, and I tried to imagine the scene that had unfolded here during the nighttime h
ours—the clandestine visitor, the candlelight dinner, the anticipation of carnal pleasures enhanced by herbal concoctions, followed by a dreadful moment of realization that something was very wrong.

  Wasn't ordinary coupling stimulating enough?

  Kassy broke the silence: “I've heard of Jews occasionally trying to pass as Christians when they need to flee in times of danger, but why on earth would a Christian pretend to be a Jew? Unless he's hiding from some trouble with the authorities.”

  “There are better ways to hide from trouble with the authorities than posing as a Jew, I can assure you.”

  My eyes were drawn once more to the glittering trail of spittle running down the man's chin. Some of the particles looked positively crystalline.

  And that second cup of wine.

  I imagined the effects of the wine rippling out, my thoughts skipping across the surface of the rich red liquid like a well-thrown pebble dancing across the waves, divorcing objects from their names and rearranging the frozen tableau before me in the manner taught to us by the eminent mystical scholar Abulafia three centuries ago, before the great expulsion from Spain.

  It was my strongest desire to share what I knew, to explore all those centuries of wisdom with this newcomer to our faith, this Protestant believer who was so full of questions, this wise woman with whom I shared the road of exile, this newcomer to Poznan just like me.

  All this in search of a solution to the riddle, Who was this man, and what had he done that made pretending to be a Jew seem like the “safe” course of action?

  “There are many outsiders,” I began, “who believe that the Jews possess otherworldly knowledge that can be redirected toward profitable enterprises. Perhaps they have heard of our skills at manipulating the letters of the Torah in order to find new meanings hidden in the holy text, and they imagine that we are just as skilled at manipulating the four metals—”

  “Gold, silver, copper, and lead. Yes, what else?”

  “That we know the secret recipe for invisibility—”

  “Just one? There are a quite a few, you know.”

  Her face, with its broad Slavonic features, suddenly seemed distant, as if the air between us had solidified.

  “Of course none of them work,” she said, the side of her mouth crinkling up into a wry smile. The unseen barrier between us evaporated, and for a split second all was right with the world. “Same as with all the love potions,” she added.

  “Right. But that doesn't stop snake juice peddlers and other charlatans from preying on people's weaknesses. Pretending to be a master of the Kabbalistic arts could keep an unscrupulous man clothed and fed for many years.”

  “You think this was a failed experiment in Kabbalistic fakery?”

  The other wine cup, again.

  “The only question is whether it was by mistake or by design. And the best way to answer that is to find out who this mysterious nighttime visitor was.”

  “Oh, I doubt that she was all that mysterious.”

  “She appears to have taken considerable pains to keep her identity a secret,” I said.

  “Nothing can be kept secret in a house full of servants. The maids know everything. They can practically hear through the walls.”

  I snapped out of my theoretical reverie. What if someone had been listening to us? My overly casual conversation with a Christian woman could easily be turned against me by unsympathetic listeners.

  But Kassy was already out in the hall.

  “Time to speak to the servants,” she called out to me, before rushing down the stairs.

  By the time I caught up with her, she was questioning the laundress just outside the kitchen.

  “Oh, no, Miss Kassy. I've never listened at the keyhole,” said the laundress. “That would be like eavesdropping on a priest hearing confession.”

  “I see,” said Kassy, her eyebrows knitting together in thought.

  “Can I go now? I've got to hang up the laundry.”

  “Yes, you can go.”

  “Danke schoen.”

  The laundress curtseyed quickly, then raised the basket of wet linen she'd been balancing on her hip and hefted it out the back door, nearly tripping over a young boy who was polishing a pair of boots on the stairs. They seemed to be in an awful hurry to clean up the place, which is understandable when visitors are expected, but it wouldn't be my first priority under the circumstances.

  I followed Kassy into the kitchen, where the old housemaid, whose name was Mrs. Gromatsky, was washing dishes, while the cook was mixing up some batter in an earthenware bowl.

  “Do you have a butter pan?” said Kassy.

  “What size?” said the cook, stirring a bowl of cheese filling that nearly matched the pallor of her skin. She had dark sorrowful eyes, and wore her plain brown hair wrapped in a tight bun.

  “The smallest one you've got.”

  “In there,” said the cook, pointing at a cupboard with her chin while she poured some golden yellow batter into a frying pan.

  Kassy fished around in the cupboard until she came out with a heavy iron skillet no bigger than her hand.

  “And we'd better send for the authorities,” said Mrs. Gromatsky.

  “No, wait.”

  That got me a suspicious look from the house servants.

  “The Christian authorities can be rather, um, single-minded in their pursuit of justice,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

  “You cannot delay such a matter,” Mrs. Gromatsky insisted, as the cook expertly flipped a couple of pancakes.

  “Very well.”

  And so the houseboy was dispatched to fetch the authorities. Not too quickly, I hoped.

  “The authorities are more reasonable here than in Germany,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “Well, some of them are. The parliament is a complete mess, of course, but that's another matter. You can buy any man's vote with a pot of vodka and a pinch of salt in that awful place.”

  Kassy slipped in between Mrs. Gromatsky and the cook, and placed the tiny butter pan on a back burner. Then she took the residue-caked spoon and tapped it against the iron rim of the skillet a few times until the silvery paste slid into the pan.

  “We need to ask you about the woman who visited your master's room last night,” said Kassy.

  “I never saw her. The master ordered me to bed, and he opened the door for her himself.”

  “Was that unusual?” I asked.

  “Do you have any idea what she might have wanted?” said Kassy.

  “What they all want,” said Mrs. Gromatsky. “Love potions, or else they want their fortunes told.”

  “Reb Schildsberg claimed he could tell their fortunes using the Kabbalah?” I asked.

  Mrs. Gromatsky was too busy scrubbing a copper pot to answer me. The cook spooned some cheese filling onto three flat pancakes, then folded up the blintzes, pinched the flaps together, and laid them in the pan.

  “Why? What does that mean?” said Kassy, spreading the silvery paste around the butter pan as casually as if she were heating oil to fry blintzes.

  “No true Kabbalist would ever claim to be able to predict the future,” I said. “It is not for us to know. The Mishnah teaches that whoever reflects upon such things would be better off if he had never been born.”

  “Keynehore,” said Mrs. Gromatsky, spitting on the floor between my boots. Well, most of it went between my boots.

  “Damn it, this isn't working.” Kassy grabbed a cloth and removed the pan from the fire. “Don't you have anything smaller?”

  “Well, there's these—” Mrs. Gromatsky removed a tiny key from the folds of her apron and unlocked a drawer that was practically hidden beneath the countertop. It was full of precision metalworking tools: long, thin files, delicate clippers and tongs, and a couple of three-inch wide smelting pans.

  “My, my,” said Kassy. Her eyes met mine.

  “Will that do?”

  “Yes, this will do nicely,” said Kassy, removing one of the smelting pans from the drawer, as the coo
k placed a couple of perfectly formed blintzes on a plate and sprinkled them with powdered sugar.

  Kassy concentrated on transferring the half-melted paste to the special pan, while Mrs. Gromatsky set out a couple of plates of blintzes with sour cream for us.

  Kassy questioned me with her eyes.

  I told her that it is our custom to eat dairy foods on Shvues, even in a house of mourning, because when God first called to Moses in the wilderness of Midian, He said He would lead our people out of Egypt to “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

  She took the smelting pan off the fire and studied its contents, which had separated. Part of it had burned to a crust, the rest was thin and watery.

  “I don't know what it is, but it's certainly not silver,” she said.

  Mrs. Gromatsky and the cook nudged me aside to gawk at the strange half-burnt lumps, so I chose that moment to step out of the cramped kitchen and help myself to a foretaste of the Promised Land.

  So I had a mouthful of cheese blintz when a heavy pounding shook the front door. For a brief terrifying moment, I thought they had come for me. My hand found the hilt of my short-bladed knife, but before I could unsheath it and get into more trouble than I could handle, Mrs. Gromatsky had unlocked the door to let in the houseboy, and framed in the archway stood a captain of the guard with four armed pikemen.

  “We've been looking for a woman who fits her description,” the captain announced, pointing at Kassy, and charging her with possession of illegal counterfeiting tools. And before I knew what was happening, the pikemen barreled in to seize her, knocking over the stack of pots in their haste and sending a few earthenware dishes crashing to the floor, even though Kassy offered no physical resistance. But she did use her tongue, castigating them for arresting her on such flimsy circumstantial evidence, while Mrs. Gromatsky yelled at them for ruining her dishes.

  I swallowed hard and struggled to be heard over the noise, until finally I had to shout, “Kapitan!”

  The captain turned to face me, the curse on his lips evaporating when he noted the authority of my manner and decided that I might have powerful connections. He had steely gray eyes, a square Teutonic face, and blond hair that hung nearly to his shoulders, brushing the carved eagle claw ornaments on his dress plate armor, while the foot soldiers’ armor was made of plain tanned leather. I appealed to him in the name of King Sigismund, and when that didn't work I tried to reason, cajole, and even beg them to set Kassy free, insisting that Rabbi Loew would vouch for her good name.