The horseman did not wish to become entangled in the frenzied bloodletting; that would not do. He reined his horse and waited. “Plague,” he whispered to himself. “How convenient.”
In the midst of the mayhem, he saw the man he was expecting, a man also on horseback who wore the colors of a nobleman. Approaching near, the man said, “Yes, Bishop?”
“Tomasz Wodowicz, see to it that what you do is in the best interests of the people of Poznan. There must be no misunderstanding.”
Fevered sweat dripped from Wodowicz as he dipped his head in submission, “Yes, your Eminence.”
Turning the black stallion away from the chaos, Bishop Tirasewicz slowly made his way back to his palace, his inspection completed, the objective accomplished. His thin lips curled to a rare smile.
Chapter II
1378
Standing as still as a church statue, Irina tried to take it all in, slowly comprehending that the noise and anger of the people on ulica Zydowska—tradesmen, craftsmen, and common laborers—centered on the Joselewicz house. Her house. The wooden gates having been smashed open, the rioters surged upon the unprepared family defenders, dispensing whatever violence they could. She kept to her place in the alleyway, and in the torchlight, saw several men on horseback, men with swords, men with authority and purpose.
Irina steadied herself, one foot in a puddle of urine tossed from a chamber pot up above. She ignored the smell’s assault to concentrate on what she could see ahead. She knew fear had stolen the joy of her news, and gone was her courage. Her desire to be with her new family, urgent hours ago, now vanished with the threat to her and her unborn child.
People were attacking with a ferocity she had never seen. They screamed, grunted, swung whatever tools, clubs, and implements they had. After a few moments, she identified some of the other Joselewicz servants, people with whom she worked every day. There was Malmus, who worked with the animals in the undercroft. There was Josefina, a large woman who dressed the slaughtered animals for meals and feasts. There was Stanislaus, the stable boy, and one or two others. Some were Jews, some were not. It did not seem to matter. The people of the town bludgeoned them all in fevered vengeance.
She was able to pick out one of the men when the firelight caught the metal of his sword. It was her beloved Berek shouting encouragement to the household members in their pathetic defense of the family and townhouse. At his side, spitting and biting, was Yip, ever protective of his new master. Irina supposed Janus, Eva, and Esther to be inside, already in their hiding place, along with their treasures.
Maybe courage fails only when you think about it. “Berek! Berek!” she shouted. Irina doubted he could hear her, but she wanted him to know she was there. She wanted him to know their news. She wanted him to fight all the harder so they could be together, happy in the knowledge of a new world they would give their child.
Irina watched her beloved, her lover, her knight fight with courage, his sword glinting in the light, his long dark hair lustrous from the heat of combat. He refused to succumb, even with so many of his pitiful army already felled by axes and clubs.
Just then, she saw what appeared to be a man wearing a stonemason’s apron strike Berek’s shoulder with a hammer. He screamed in pain as he was shoved to the ground to collect the killing blow.
Yip leapt upon the stonemason, biting him on the neck. A big man with yellow hair threw the dog off and kicked him hard in the ribs. Yip could only yelp as he flew against the wall. Irina took a step toward her man but dared not take another.
Then she saw something she had never expected. One of the men leading the carnage of ulica Zydowska was from Duke Zygmunt’s household. She had seen him dealing with Janus Joselewicz many times, always arranging matters for the castle. It was the man common people called Tomasz the Terrible. Now she knew why. But why would the duke’s man be doing this?
Thick in body and face, Tomasz never smiled. Instead, he was given to a smirk that revealed the odd, useless short tooth at the front of his mouth. She remembered his heavy brows were often hidden by matted hair the color of a donkey’s hide, and his eyes were like dark coals, cold and soulless.
Tomasz wedged his horse between Berek and his attacker, and for a moment, it seemed as if Tomasz would rescue him. “Don’t kill this one—we want him!”
One furtive step at a time, Irina crept up the street and placed herself in an opening between the houses across from the Joselewicz gate. From there, she could look directly into the courtyard where men were stacking wood in two circles.
Berek and the few servants, wounded but still alive, were dragged into the courtyard and made to stand in the center of one of the circles. Their captors then tied their upper arms firmly behind them, one person to another. A heavy silence fell. Irina gasped, her mouth dry in terror.
Tomasz focused his attention on Teofil, the elderly footman, bent with pain and caking blood. He dragged him toward the stairway leading to the second story, where the living quarters were, and all but ran up the stone steps with his elderly baggage. Teofil could not keep his balance, and it angered his captor. The man who had always had a reassuring smile for Irina and for the young people who visited had no composure left to him. There were only the whimperings of an old man loyal to a generous master, preparing to meet the Master of all.
Teofil stumbled again and again, but Tomasz’s only reaction was to curse him as a tool of the Jews, a fool who would pay the price for service to the hated ones. Yanking an arm away from the old man’s body, Tomasz gave no mercy.
From what Irina could see, Tomasz had taken the old man into the family’s rooms where they remained for several minutes. Irina heard shouting, then cringed as an agonized cry filled the air—Teofil’s cry. In the courtyard, the others cheered. Reappearing, the barely conscious Teofil grasped his wrist to stanch the blood from the stump where his hand had been.
Right behind them, two of Tomasz’s underlings pulled the elder Joselewiczes and their beautiful daughter—Little Esterka to Teofil—down the stairs and into the courtyard. Leaving the household with his men, Tomasz the Terrible climbed back on his horse and, eyeing his prisoners with disgust, spat out the words Irina knew she would hear in nightmares for the rest of her life: “Burn them! Burn them all.”
Into the second circle, just a few paces away from the first, his henchmen tied them all together, back-to-back, Mother Eva to Esther and Janus, the hands of one clasping the hands of the others. Teofil, now oblivious to the world, they threw into the circle at their feet.
Janus Joselewicz begged, “Let our son die tied to us. Prosze—please!”
Tomasz glared at the elder Joselewicz, as a man might consider an animal. “‘Prosze,’ says the old Jew. Hah! There’s more gold than the few pieces you gave me, you filthy bastard. You can see your son in hell!”
To one of his men, he said, as if buying a loaf of bread, “Don’t burn the house—someone else will enjoy it.”
In quiet, tearful whispers, Janus, Eva, and Esther expressed their love for each other, and called out their love to Berek. Then, they quieted, and bowed their heads.
With glee, the men set torches to wood and straw, but in the damp night, it took a minute for the fire to find its way. Eager townspeople stood around the circles, the growing flames illuminating their eyes, aroused with delight, and their faces, etched with hate.
Yanking the reins of his horse, Tomasz turned the animal and cantered from the courtyard. With him and another armed horseman were two others on foot pulling a small cart filled to overflowing with rugs, silver pieces, cutlery, wood carvings, and other treasure found in the house.
When she was sure they weren’t coming back, Irina crept across the street toward the opening in the wall where once-firm wooden gates had kept out nighttime intruders. Now the gates lay in a death of their own. Leaning in shadow against the damp stone, she peered intently at the scene before her
as the air thickened. After an agony of long seconds, Berek’s eyes met hers through the smoke and flames. Neither cried out.
They held each other’s gaze, but for only a moment. Irina wanted to tell him of her love. She wanted to tell him of her news, their news. Thinking quickly, she spread the fingers of each hand, and placed them, splayed, on her belly, as if she were carrying a small melon. With her hands in place, she looked into Berek’s eyes and amidst her own tears, gave him a smile of love, of fulfillment, of secret, shared treasure. When he lowered his eyes to her belly, she saw his sudden recognition. Clenched in pain, he did his best to give her a smile in return.
The pyres creaked in fury. At first, the onlookers taunted and cursed their captives. Then they, too grew silent as the shapes within the circles seemed to shrink away before them.
Irina could not watch as her Berek disappeared quietly in the whitehot air. The stench of human flesh, crackling and roasting, assaulted her nostrils. She turned to the darkened street outside the courtyard wall, gagged and then retched, wrenching her insides. In dumb-struck fear, she could not speak. Her heart beat so fast and so hard, she could not catch air to breathe.
She had come to be with Berek, with the only other people who loved her. Janus, the good, gracious father. Eva, her new, most gentle mother. Esther, who reminded her of her own littlest sister, Zuzanna. And now they were gone in smoke rising to the heavens on a starless, cruel night.
Where are you, O God of us all?! Why? She knew the answer. Her parents had taught her. They were Jews.
In the gutter, vomit dripping from her mouth, she spat her vow. “This will never happen to me or my child.”
…
Shaken, Irina retreated into the darkness several cart lengths away from the Joselewicz gate. There, she crouched down in the gutter, the day’s vegetable peelings and other refuse her bed. Pulling her blue woolen cloak around her, she slid even further into the night shadows.
In her mind, she put aside what she had just seen for fear she wouldn’t be able to control herself. She thought of St. Michael, where, unless trading caravans stopped on the main road nearby, visitors and news were rare. There, it was natural to put Berek out of her mind, to let him remain beyond the edge of the village, where, as always, it was as if time was never-ending and as if nothing existed outside of it.
That Berek and his family were Jews had, somehow, never mattered to her. In her circle of life, nearly all Poles knew little or nothing about the Jews except what they heard in church or on market day. What they had heard all their lives, they did not like much. Jews were thought to be greedy and distrustful, an alien race to be despised—at least, that’s what they heard from pulpit to parent, from father to family.
They knew not why their beloved Kazmierz Wielki—Casimir the Great—wanted the reviled ones in their midst, and in so many ways, it seemed, the common people were powerless to change the lives they had to live. Unknowingly, Irina realized, Poznan was the real world she had been fated to join. For ordinary people, she knew, ignorance was a way of life. While they might know their king, the noble who owned their lands could change every generation,
To Irina, there was nothing unusual about her and Berek, except that she was a Catholic and he, a Jew. Everyone knew how things were. With a studied blindness, the church readily absolved young men, boys really, who bedded with girls their age before marriage. If no pregnancy occurred, the couple chose their marrying time when the boy was released from his family responsibilities and found a trade. If a child was expected, the boy and girl hastily wed with the approval of family and church. They produced as many children as nature permitted them, because so often, many did not survive more than a few years. This cycle, Irina had come to understand, repeated itself unendingly.
Irina was not one of the lucky young lovers of her age, her pregnancy being an almost immediate consequence of their physical love. Yet she felt lucky that her lover was young Berek Joselewicz. She knew he would want to marry her. His family was wealthy, indeed, with a large house in Poznan, and many doors to open for anyone tied to them by blood or water. Or so she had hoped—until the evening of the Lord’s Day, when God himself seemed to be somewhere other than on Jewish Street.
It began to drizzle. Unfazed, she clutched the cloak tightly about her and stared into the darkness.
Her greatest fear had centered on what her parents foretold, that despite her hopes and dreams, Berek would spurn her as peasant garbage. That notion had so played itself in her mind, that she found herself wondering how she would deal with the total rejection. How she would raise a child disowned by its father. She had thought that would be the worst consequence, but the cruel and violent death of Berek and his family was beyond anything she could have imagined.
For what seemed like hours, she sat, soaking in the steady, light rain, letting her emotions run in all directions. One minute her spirits floated above the pillage around her, lifted as they were by Berek’s love for her. Overwhelmingly, however, she felt herself slipping into a vast chasm of loss, into a place where the future did not seem to matter after all.
With a sudden growl of thunder, a lightning bolt reached from the black sky to strike the gates of another estate just up the street. Its crash sent sparks and wood splinters in all directions. For Irina, the shock was enough to shake her dark reveries. She repeated her vow to the heavens: “This will never happen to me or my child!”
Then came a deep, steady rumble from the sky, the likes of which shook the stone wall against which she cowered. It was as if God had been there all along and was just now sounding his displeasure with the people he made. Will You come to my side?
Irina let the rain strike her face as she regained a sense of her surroundings. She forced herself to think of the future, of the human seed within her that she must safeguard and nurture, now more than ever.
In the blackness, crouched in the puddling water, she drew her knees tight under her chin. The rain fell heavily, blotting out what little light had remained from the fires. She heard nothing but the rain. No other being moved about at this end of ulica Zydowska now. The killers had left with the downpour—on to other victims or, spent of their vicious energy, to bed with their nightmares.
Irina knew she could not stay where she was, but in truth, she had no idea where to go. The Joselewicz family was gone. Her heart hurt as if a sword had cut it in two when she began to grasp the finality of that fact. In all likelihood, she reasoned, all or nearly all the Jews with whom she’d become acquainted in Poznan through the Joselewiczes were now dead or running into the darkness. In her work as a family servant, she knew almost no one in the city who was not a Jew. Except for a few others just like her, who had similarly come from somewhere else in the city or the countryside, there was no one. The butcher, the poulterer, the greensman, the bakers, they were all Jews, and now dead or gone. She was alone.
Quietly, she struggled upright, ready to move further away from the horror just inside the courtyard. I must not stay here. She stopped herself. Or could I?
…
His grace, Antony Tirasewicz, Bishop of Poznan, was a tall, spare man who enjoyed the pleasures of his position. One of them was not rising at dawn when cocks crowed throughout the city. It was just as well when he’d been up late the night before.
With candlelight dancing on the ledger books, the bishop sat in his study, staring into the warming fire not far from his feet. Leaning on his elbows, his index fingers touching at the point of his chin, he rocked back and forth using his fingers as a fulcrum. It was the kind of respite he particularly enjoyed—reflecting upon his good fortune.
He had missed first sleep and now mused patiently awaiting his regular time for second sleep. Old habits were hard to break. Like most people around him, he went to bed at nightfall so as not to waste candles. Yet no one, not even the farmers, could sleep the whole night through. So, somewhere around the tenth or eleventh
hour after noon, one could see and hear light and movement all over the city. People talked, visited neighbors, and, he laughed to himself, procreated the next family member for them and Holy Mother Church. In his case, he worked on his account books until sometime after midnight, when he and the rest of the world, it seemed, slept until their rising. He rarely saw a dawn. Sunrise was for his staff to enjoy.
Appointed by Pope Gregory XI at Avignon in 1372, sponsored by a Cardinal and a noble, Tirasewicz had reigned over his See with aplomb and comfort. The nobleman to whom he owed fealty was Zygmunt Sokorski, Duke of Poznan, and were it not for the duke’s power and means, the bishop’s existence would have been meager. Considering his benefactor more fully, he perceived the duke to be neither a smart nor thoughtful man, but honored him, in his presence, at least. Surely, the duke knew Jews had nothing to do with the plague. Had the man but a silver penny’s worth of cleverness in him, he would never permit an ogre like Tomasz to be his face in the city, and neither would he let the man be thought to act on the duke’s beliefs—as he saw him do tonight. No, it was just not done. Yet, the bishop thought, just as the duke was useful to him in one way, Tomasz was useful to him in others.
Another point of pride for his grace was that Poznan had once been the Capital of Wielko Polska—Greater Poland—and that very fact endowed him with a palace worthy of a church prince. In Poland’s largest royal city, the bishop was pleased to preside over its cathedral, Saints Peter and Paul, a Romanesque structure in existence for nearly three hundred years and where Poland’s first rulers were entombed.
Casimir the Great—Kazimierz Wielki—had once reigned in the city, but he had one great flaw. He loved the Jews too much! Indeed, the people called him “the King of the Serfs and the Jews.” His tolerance for the accursed tribe had been infamous and long-standing, and, for certain, Jews had been a welcomed people in Poland for more than a hundred years. In Poznan, the large Jewish community even had its own synagogue. Allowing them to have their own place of worship was too much, the bishop fumed on a regular basis.
Irina Page 5
