by Noah Gordon
“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.
That evening Meir gave Rob a lesson from the Book of Leviticus. These were the animals Jews were allowed to eat of all those on earth: any creature that both chewed its cud and had a split hoof, including sheep, cattle, goats, and deer. Animals that were treif—not kasher—included horses, donkeys, camels, and pigs.
Of birds they were permitted to eat pigeons, chickens, tame doves, tame ducks, and tame geese. Winged creatures which were an abomination included eagles, ostriches, vultures, kites, cuckoos, swans, storks, owls, pelicans, lapwings, and bats.
“Never in my life have I tasted so fine a meat as cygnet lovingly larded, barded in salt pork, and then roasted slowly over the fire.”
Meir looked faintly repulsed. “You won’t get it here,” he said.
The next morning dawned clear and cold. The Study House was nearly empty after shaharit, the early prayer service, for many wandered to the rabbenu’s barnyard to watch shehitah, the ritual butchering. Their breath made small clouds that hung in the still, frosty air.
Rob stood with Simon. There was a small stir when Reb Baruch ben David arrived with the other mashgiah, a bent old man named Reb Samson ben Zanvil, whose face was set and stern.
“He’s older than either Reb Baruch or the rabbenu but is not as learned,” Simon whispered. “And no
w he fears he’ll be caught between the two if an argument should arise.”
The rabbenu’s four sons led the first animal from the barn, a black bull with a deep back and heavy hindquarters. Lowing, the bull tossed his head and pawed the earth, and they had to enlist help from the bystanders in controlling him with ropes while the inspectors went over every inch of his body.
“The tiniest sore or break in the skin will disqualify an animal for meat,” Simon said.
“Why?”
Simon looked at Rob in annoyance. “Because it is the law,” he said.
Finally satisfied, they led the bull to a feeding trough filled with sweet hay. The rabbenu picked up a long knife. “See the blunt, square end of the knife,” Simon said. “It’s made without a point so there’s less likelihood it will scratch the animal’s skin. But the knife is razor-sharp.”
They all stood in the cold while nothing happened. “What are they waiting for?” Rob whispered.
“The precisely right moment,” Simon said, “for the animal must be motionless at the instant of the death cut, or it is not kasher.”
Even as he spoke, the knife flashed. The single clean stroke severed the gullet and the windpipe and the carotid arteries in the neck. A red stream sprang in its wake, and the bull’s consciousness vanished as the blood supply to the brain was cut off at once. The bovine eyes dimmed and the bull went to its knees, and in a moment was dead.
There was a pleased murmur from those who watched but it was as quickly stilled, for Reb Baruch had taken the knife and was examining it.
Watching, Rob could see a struggle that tightened the fine old features. Baruch turned to his elderly rival.
“Something?” the rabbenu said coldly.
“I fear,” Reb Baruch said. He proceeded to show, midway down the cutting edge of the blade, an imperfection, the tiniest of nicks in the keenly honed steel.
Old and gnarled, his face dismayed, Reb Samson ben Zanvil hung back, certain that as the second mashgiah he would be called upon for a judgment he didn’t want to make.
Reb Daniel, the father of Rohel and the rabbenu’s oldest son, began a blustering argument. “What nonsense is this? Everyone knows of the care with which the rabbenu’s ritual knives are sharpened,” he said, but his father put up his hand for silence.
The rabbenu held the knife up to the light and ran a practiced finger just beneath the razor-sharp edge. He sighed, for the nick was there, a human error that made the meat ritually unfit.
“It’s a blessing that your eyes are sharper than this blade and continue to protect us, my old friend,” he said quietly, and there was a general relaxing, like a releasing of pent-up breath.
Reb Baruch smiled. He reached out and patted the rabbenu’s hand, and the two men looked at one another for a long moment.
Then the rabbenu turned away and called for Mar Reuven the Barber-Surgeon.
Rob and Simon stepped forward and listened attentively. “The rabbenu asks you to deliver this treif bull’s carcass to the Christian butcher of Gabrovo,” Simon said.
He took Horse, for she was in sore need of the exercise, hitching her to their flatbed sleigh onto which a number of willing hands loaded the slaughtered bull. The rabbenu had used an approved knife for the second animal, which was judged to be kasher, and the Jews already were dismembering it when Rob shook the reins and directed Horse away from Tryavna.
He drove to Gabrovo slowly and with great enjoyment. The butcher shop proved to be exactly where it had been described, three houses below the town’s most prominent building, which was an inn. The butcher was large and heavy, an advertisement of his trade. Language did not prove a barrier.
“Tryavna,” Rob said, pointing to the dead bull.
The fat red face became wreathed in smiles. “Ah. Rabbenu,” the butcher said, and nodded vigorously. Uncarting the creature proved to be hard but the butcher went off to a tavern and returned with a pair of helpers, and with rope and effort at length the bull was unloaded.
Simon had told him the price was fixed and there would be no haggling. When the butcher handed Rob the few paltry coins it became clear why the man smiled with joy, for he had practically stolen a whole excellent beef, simply because there had been a nick in the slaughtering blade! Rob would never be able to understand people who, for no valid reason, could treat good cowflesh as if it were trash. The stupidity of it made him angry and filled him with a kind of shame; he wanted to explain to the butcher that he was a Christian and not one of those who behaved so foolishly. But he could only accept the coins in the name of the Hebrews and place them in his purse pocket for safekeeping.
His business done, he went directly to the tavern of the nearby inn. The dark public house was long and narrow, more like a tunnel than a room, its low ceiling blackened by the smoky fire around which nine or ten men loafed, drinking. Three women sat at a small table nearby and waited watchfully. Rob inspected them while he had a drink—a brown raw whiskey that wasn’t at all to his liking. They were clearly tavern whores. Two were well past their prime, but the third was a young blonde with a wicked-innocent face. She saw the purpose of his glance and smiled at him.
Rob finished his drink and went to their table. “I don’t suppose you have English,” he murmured, and it was a safe guess. One of the older women said something and the other two laughed. But he took out a coin and gave it to the younger one. It was all the communication they needed. She tucked the coin into her pocket, left the table without another word to her companions, and went to where her cloak hung on a peg.
He followed her outside and in the snowy street he met Mary Cullen.
“Hello! Are you and your father having a good winter?”
“We are having a wretched winter,” she said, and he noted that she looked it. Her nose was reddened and there was a cold sore on the tender fullness of her upper lip. “The inn is always freezing and the food is very bad. Are you really living with Jews?”
“Yes.”
“How can you?” she said thinly.
He had forgotten the color of her eyes and their effect on him was disarming, as if he had chanced upon bluebirds in the snow. “I sleep in a warm barn. The food is excellent,” he told her with great satisfaction.
“My father tells me there is a special Jew’s stink called foetor judaicus. Because they rubbed Christ’s body with garlic after he died.”
“Sometimes we all smell. But to immerse themselves from head to foot each Friday is the custom of their kind. I trust that they bathe more often than most.”
She colored, and he knew that it must be difficult and rare to obtain bath water in an inn such as there was in Gabrovo.
She regarded the woman who patiently waited for him a short distance away. “My father says that anyone who will consent to live with Jews never can be a proper man.”
“Your father seemed a nice man. But perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “he is an arse.” They began walking away from one another at the same moment.
He followed the blond woman to a room nearby. It was untidy with the soiled garments of women and he suspected that she shared the room with the two others. He watched her as she undressed. “It’s cruelty to look on you after seeing that other one,” he said, knowing she knew not a word of what he said. “She may not always have a pleasant tongue, but … it’s not beauty, exactly, yet few women can compare to Mary Cullen in appearance.”
The woman smiled at him.
“You’re a young whore but already you look old,” he said to her. The air was cold, and she shucked her clothing and slipped quickly between the filthy fur covers to escape the chill, but not before he saw more than he liked. He was a man who appreciated the musk-lure of women but what rose from her was sour stink, and her body hair had a hard and plastered look as if juices had dried and redried untold times without feeling the plain honest wetness of water. Abstinence had produced such hunger in him that he would have fallen on her, but the brief glimpse of her bluish body had shown him overused,
caked flesh he didn’t want to touch.
“God damn that red-haired witch,” he said morosely.
The woman looked up at him in puzzlement.
“It isn’t your fault, dolly,” he told her, reaching into his purse. He gave her more than she would have been worth even if value-giving had been attempted, and she pulled the coins under the furs and clutched them next to her body. He hadn’t begun to take anything off, and he straightened his clothing and nodded to her and went out into fresher air.
As February waned he spent more time than ever in the study house, poring over the Persian Qu’ran. He found himself constantly amazed by the Qu’ran’s unremitting hostility toward Christians and bitter loathing of Jews.
Simon explained it. “Mohammed’s early teachers were Jews and Syriac Christian monks. When first he reported that the Angel Gabriel had visited him, and that God had named him Prophet and instructed him to found a new and perfect religion, he expected these old friends to flock after him with glad cries. But the Christians preferred their own religion and the Jews, startled and threatened, actively joined those who disclaimed Mohammed’s preachings. For the rest of his life he never forgave them, but spoke and wrote of them with revilement.”
Simon’s insights made the Qu’ran come alive for Rob. He was almost halfway through the book and he labored over it, aware that soon they would travel again. When they reached Constantinople he and Meir’s group would go different ways, not only separating him from his teacher Simon but, more important, depriving him of the book. The Qu’ran gave him intimations of a culture remote from his own, and the Jews of Tryavna gave him a glimpse of still a third way of life. As a boy he had thought that England was the world, but now he saw that there were other peoples; in some traits they were alike, but they differed from one another in important ways.
The encounter at the slaughtering had reconciled the rabbenu with Reb Baruch ben David, and their families began at once to plan for the wedding of Rohel to young Reb Meshullum ben Nathan. The Jewish Quarter hummed with excited activity. The two old men walked about in the highest spirits, often together.
