He, She and It (50 page)

Today I visited her grave. It was overcast, and I went out without a sec skin, in order to feel the rain on my skin, on my face. At my age I can take a few chances. I wanted to stand under the rain again as I put down a bunch of chrysanthemums, bronze and golden, the flower of warriors, on her grave. I don’t know where Shira is, and today I said kaddish: in which we
pray for the dead without ever mentioning death. We pray for life.

Gale-force winds, small-craft warnings tonight. Over the Net, news of a seaweed harvesting ship gone down. I can hear the surf slamming on the artificial rocks of drowned buildings and walls. I remember rain in Prague, in the spring and the fall almost daily rain; rain tapping the red-tiled roof of the bedroom where I lay with Meier, whose eyes were the darkest brown short of black, whose hair was black and tightly curled as fleece, whose body was slender as a boy’s still at thirty-seven, which seemed to me then middle age. His apartment was in Kostechna Street, near a school where we could hear the children at recess, or church bells at night as we made love, feverishly, for the nights were pale with our desire and always too short. I ran from class to him and off to meetings, crisscrossing what had been the old ghetto before it was torn down, past the Altneushul, past Maisl’s family synagogue, past the artificial hills of the cemetery. Love played me like a flute. Sleep seemed an unnecessary vice. I slept as little as you and Joseph, my dear.

Joseph intercepts two men sneaking into the ghetto carrying the stiff pale body of a young boy, perhaps seven, who looks as if he might have been run over by a cart. His chest is crushed, but time is running out for a corpse to be planted that can then be discovered and blamed on the Jews. Blood for the matzoh, the poppycock tale for which people die every spring. As the dead boy lies crumpled on the pavement, dropped like a calf’s carcass, Joseph fights the men. This time he does not kill them but binds them unconscious in a rope with the dead boy and carries them to the gentile magistrates.

He encounters two wandering drunks, a pimp beating a prostitute, and one unconscious man on the street who has apparently been robbed: dealing with them makes up his night’s work. At dawn, as Joseph is returning to the rabbi’s narrow house in the courtyard, he meets Chava, coming along the street with her birthing bag.

“Why didn’t you send for me to escort you?”

“Joseph, haven’t you enough to worry about right now? I had the father to take me there, and now it’s morning and the scavengers of the night go back into their holes to sleep.” She sighs, shoving a lock that has escaped back under her wig. “Tell me why two thirds of all babies are born at night?”

“Are they? Birth is mysterious and violent.”

“It’s my business. This was a hard one. I thought I was going
to lose her. The baby came fast enough, which is usually good, but she bled and bled. I had to use all of my herbs to stop the hemorrhaging. I tried dragonwort and loosestrife, and still the blood came. Then woundwort. I was getting frantic. Finally shepherd’s-purse worked. Our red blood runs much thinner than your dark blood, my friend.”

Joseph feels a deep embarrassment, a sort of nakedness before her. “I heal quickly,” he mumbles.

“My friend, we both know you are not born of woman. Birth is mysterious to you because you have never undergone it. You were made, not born.”

“What are you saying to me?” He experiences himself as slow, dim-witted beside her. Did she worm the secret from her father?

“I know the texts, Joseph. Don’t fear my tongue. I have said nothing to Father or Grandfather, and I won’t. I’ve spoken to no one.”

“Except me. But I’m no one, you think.”

She rests her hand on his arm. “You know I don’t think that, so don’t fuss with me. Let us just talk friend to friend. We are all in danger here. I’m a little light-headed from lack of sleep.” She lets his arm take some of her weight as they walk.

Everyone is sleeping in the house of Rabbi Loew. In the kitchen, Chava builds a fire under the kettle always kept there. Out of the cupboard she takes matzoh and salt fish. “I’m hungry. Maybe some broth.” She puts herbs and a bit of jerky, cuts some carrots and onions, into a small pot she hangs on a hook over the fire. She dips water from the big kettle into the small. “I’m so tired, I almost started to look for the kasha or the gruel—me forgetting it’s Pesach week. Are you hungry too?”

Joseph nods. “But as you know, I can eat a brick and get nourishment.”

“Then you’d make an ideal husband for a poor woman.” Chava smiles.

He draws a low stool up to the fire and extends his hands to warm them. “Who is your new suitor? I saw him coming and going all week.”

“Isaac Horowitz. Yes, he’s decided I should marry him. Me, I have a different opinion.”

“Who is he?” Joseph feels the cold weight of fear all through him.

Chava perches on a bench, yawning. “He’s a great scholar and a brilliant thinker. We have two of his books upstairs.”

“Then you will marry him.” Joseph tries to sound resigned.

“Why, Joseph? I am a pretty good scholar myself. I was married, you know that. I bore the Bachrach family a son. I have put in my time as a wife.”

“You didn’t like marriage?”

Chava sighs, staring into the fire. Then she shakes her head. “To you I say this and sometimes to another woman. I say it to my mother. I say it to my bubeh, Perl. But I never say it to a man. They get upset.”

“And I am not a man.”

“No, Joseph, and that’s part of why I like you. You’re strange too. So am I. I can read and write, not just one language but seven languages, Joseph. Are there twenty women in all of Europe with whom I could converse about the matters that interest me? I like midwifery. I like to try my hand now and then at cooking and making nice. But my real life is going back and forth between women’s business of birthing and what men have made their business, the life of the mind, my studies.”

“Then you’ll marry Isaac Horowitz. To him you can talk about what matters to you.”

“If I can play on a spinet, should I marry somebody else who plays spinet? Besides, I tell you truthfully, Joseph, nobody but us being up in the house: a man may want to marry you because you’re a brilliant scholar, but what he wants is a wife. So it was with Samuel Bachrach.”

“Did you love this Samuel?”

“I did, oh, how I did, Joseph!” Chava shakes her head. Her hands rise slowly as if of their own volition, cross each to the other shoulder, till she is clutching herself. “With passion. I thought it a miracle. To be loved by such a man, a man with whom I could share my feelings, my body, my intellect. But I was no different from other women. They see how it is with women and men, but they think, For us it will be different.”

“Did this Samuel love you?”

“Very much. We had a good marriage, as good as my parents’, as Judah and Perl’s. But we had a short time. Four years, three months and eleven days. That was my married life.” A deep sigh shakes her, and she looks as if she may weep. She scrubs at her nose with her fist and draws rapid breaths.

The hands of Joseph clench and unclench. He wants to comfort but does not know how. What he touches usually breaks.

“For those four years, my life was what will we eat, is his shirt clean, feelings of the bed, pregnancy, then my son, Aaron, colic, dirt, feeding, seeing him grow and unfold. The flesh closed over me, and I drowned.”

“I don’t understand.” Joseph feels as if he is stretching far, far up to something beyond his grasp. It hurts to stretch, but it will hurt more to fail to comprehend her, when she is talking intimately to him. “You say you are glad to be free, and yet you look as if you may burst into tears.”

“When Samuel died, I was stricken with grief. I tore my hair and wailed. I felt alone, wrenched open. But, Joseph, I tell you truthfully, when the grief subsided a little, I began to remember who I had been, before I had loved, before I was a wife and mother. My old dreams came back.”

“I don’t sleep, I don’t dream.”

“Not night dreams, Joseph. The dreams that drive us. What we most want.” She leans toward the fire. Her wig is pushed back on her hair, and the flames make the locks of brown hair that slip out lighter, as if the edges were bleached. “Dreams are the fire in us.”

“I don’t have those dreams either. I wish I could want something. Sometimes I almost can.”

“The Bachrachs would have kept me in Worms. They expected me to live out my life with them. They’re a huge and warm family. I did something other women will never understand, so I seldom tell anyone I had a son. I let the Bachrach clan keep Aaron, as they wanted, and I journeyed here to my grandfather to act as his secretary.”

“Why, Chava?”

She adjusts the little pot so that it will cook more slowly, moving it to a hook not directly over the fire. Then she breaks off another piece of matzoh, chews and swallows before answering. “I knew my father had outgrown being the Maharal’s assistant. His own matters absorb all his energy. He continued out of respect. I thought this was a good way to apprentice myself to a great scholar and a great thinker, to come back to life intellectually. And so it has been.”

“But how is it better? First you worked for your husband. Now you work for your grandfather. He controls all our fates.”

“No, Joseph, no! Can he halt the violence gathering against us? I prefer being an intellectual servant to being a physical servant. I get more out of it. There is no son. I am the son. I am taken care of. I go into the kitchen only when I choose. I’m spoiled here, and I appreciate that, because I know exactly how much work it takes to make things go in a house.”

“Dreams … I have none, Chava. Give me one.”

“I will. My dream is to go finally to Eretz Israel, to make my aliyah. It is my dream to travel there.”

“A long, long journey. I have seen David Gans’s room, with all the maps. The world is enormous, and Eretz Israel is far. You must cross Christian lands and Muslim lands, land and sea. I hear the men praying for it always. At the end of both Seders, we all said, ‘In Jerusalem next year.’ But even the Maharal has never gone.”

“But I’ll go. I want to talk to the scholars in Safed who work so excitingly with the kabbalah. Luria has ideas about the Shekinah that make my mind dance. I want to pray in Jerusalem. I want to walk where Abraham and Sarah walked.… You want a dream? Come with me. Travel with me to our land.”

Joseph leaps off his stool. He seizes her hands and then lets them go for fear he might injure her. “I will go with you! Yes. That will be my dream too.”

“It even makes sense, Joseph. You would be a perfect traveling companion for me. No woman could ask for gentler company, and no woman could ask for better protection than you offer. And you’d be far away from here.”

“Do you think the Maharal will let me go?”

“I don’t think he’ll let either of us go. But, Joseph, he’s very old. My duty is to prepare his books for the press. I’m young still, and you are too. It is sad to say this, but we will outlive him.”

Joseph seats himself on the stool again. “Unless you marry Isaac Horowitz or somebody.”

“Joseph, my grandfather gives me room and time for my papers, my books. I support myself with midwifery. Between my breasts I carry a knife in a little sheath for protection. If I’m set on by a group of men, as I was the night you saved me, then I can be raped and killed, but so can every other woman. Marriage doesn’t make that less so.” The water in the kettle is boiling hard. Chava picks up her midwife’s bag, motioning to Joseph.

Joseph hauls the kettle of boiling water to the bench for her. There she washes out her tools and her cloths. A thick unpleasant smell of blood clings to everything. In cooler water she washes her face, her arms, her hair.

Joseph peers into the bag in curiosity. “What’s this?”

“An amulet. Leave it be, Joseph.”

“An amulet?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “And you a scholar! I’ve heard the Maharal fifty times decrying the use of magic amulets and stones to protect children and houses and travelers and horses.”

“Now, are you going to stand there, Joseph, and tell me you don’t believe in magic?” She flings back her head and laughs.

Joseph sits, confused. “Do you believe in amulets, then? Do you believe if you call on the right angel and use the forty-second hidden name of the holy one that you will be able to save a woman’s life?”

“I think that people believe amulets help, and therefore amulets help. A woman clutches a birthing stone, and yes, it’s just a field stone worn smooth with a hole in the middle, but hundreds of other women have clutched it, and most of them survived and bore healthy children, so why shouldn’t she have something to hold, too? It has a power, Joseph. When I reach in the dark into my birthing bag, I can always feel it. My hand closes on it.” She finishes her cleansing, and he empties the water in the yard for her, refills the kettle at the pump in the street and puts it back on the fire.

But he does not sit again on his low stool. Instead he kneels in front of her where she sits gazing into the fire. Her hair hangs loose and wet on her shoulders, like willow leaves, he thinks, although she tries to keep it decently covered with the towel as her wig dries. Fire glints off her dark eyes. “Chava, if I were a man and I could marry you, I would never ask you to be my wife but my teacher. I would cherish you for your company.” He takes her hands in his own very carefully, lightly. Hers are warm and still damp.

Gently she withdraws her hands from his clutch. “Joseph, I don’t want to marry anyone—not even an angel or a golem. Be my friend. I will be a true friend to you.”

The house is beginning to stir. Outside in the street, the first cart clatters by. The odor of soup fills the kitchen. “I will be your friend. I would die for you, if I can die. It is said a thing of clay cannot love, but I know that I love you.”

“Love is many things, Joseph. You can travel farther than Eretz Israel and still know only a little of love.” She smiles into his eyes, and he knows she is not offended or laughing at him, but tender. She is his friend. “Now the day begins when we find out whether we live or whether our blood runs again on the stones of the street.”