The Bride of Texas (73 page)

At that moment, behind the exaggerated gestures, the false nose, and the red wig, the sergeant recognized an old friend
.

“Me? No! What woman would want me, when I don’t want a woman?” said his old friend Shake, minus the false nose and with a head as bald as if he’d used Fircut’s potion on it. The Black Crow sat on the bench between them and they could smell in the air the pleasant aroma of the final decade of the century: coal smoke from the Milwaukee railroad station. “Married? No,” said Shake, “I’m a classic example of a man with a broken heart and a guilty conscience.”

“Whose heart did you break and why did you jilt her?” asked Kapsa. “You never admitted to anything like that during the war.”

“During the war I was young and taciturn,” said the veteran. “Now I’m a garrulous old man. I feel the pangs of guilt not because I deflowered a virgin — although Rebecca was a virgin to end all virgins — but because her biblical beauty made me renounce my biblical calling.”

“So they were right? All those rumours about you being a defrocked priest?”

“Rumours? I don’t know about rumours. Paidr spread the word among the Czechs, and not only in the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin. He also wrote to Bublina, the bugler with the Sixteenth, and Bublina blew my history all over the place, until even K Company of the Twenty-second Iowa heard about it, and they were all Czechs, right down to the fourteen-year-old drummer boy, Honzik Sala. Wait a minute.…” Shake rubbed his high forehead. “He was actually with D Company, and he couldn’t have spread the word there because he was the only Czech in the company. But after demobilization the others saw to it, unless of course they’d laid down their lives for the liberation of the slaves. So I was the most infamous ex-theology student in the whole Middle West of Bohemia. As a result, I got invited to Sunday dinner by every free-thinker with a marriageable daughter. Former seminarians have a reputation of being good and mainly hard-working husbands. The trouble was, the only girls who appealed to me were from Catholic families. Maybe they really were prettier, or maybe it was my bad conscience at work. Those were the houses I never got invited to.”

Shake sighed, and it seemed to the sergeant that his old friend was being serious for the first time since they had met
.

“You know, sarge,” said Shake after a while, “I ran away from the only profession I would have been good at — if it hadn’t been for Rebecca. I would have been ideal. I was by far the best preacher in the seminary. Monsignor Kotrly, who taught us rhetoric, used to say that I was going to be a second Savonarola — and when he’d had a few too many, a second Master Jan Hus, and he only hoped I wouldn’t let the Church down like that damned heretic did, gifted by God though he was. And I did, neighbour. On account of a girl — what’s worse, one from the nation that has the Lord Jesus on its conscience. And I let down Monsignor Kotrly. He was such a good preacher that when he was preaching on a Sunday afternoon in the Church of the Templars, the nearby theatre was empty. He used to take the afternoon sermon deliberately, because he was a sworn
enemy of the lascivious Muses. When he served Holy Communion, more wafers were consumed than during anyone else’s service.”

Shake fell silent while the trains, puffing smoke, came and went
.

The sergeant said, “He must have been a good teacher, too.”

“The best. Still, I was weighed and found wanting. But with Rebecca — it was all so biblical. Even though, according to the Bible —”

Dusk was falling. The seminarian in the black robe — slender, good-looking, androgynous — strode the cobblestones of the town square, formulating an exemplum about Rebecca, the obedient one, Isaac’s happy wife, when suddenly she appeared to him. At first he felt that he was being blessed with a holy vision, that he had been chosen — the square with a stone fountain in the middle of it, a damsel with a pitcher on her shoulder, walking towards the fountain, and she was indeed very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her, and she went down to the well, and filled her pitcher and came up
.

The seminarian, however, was unlike Isaac’s servant. According to the Scriptures the servant was moved by the girl’s beauty but, true to his master and his mission, only ran to meet her. The seminarian, on the other hand, was not simply moved by her beauty, he was infatuated with it, with the inexplicable osmosis of feeling touched off by Cupid’s arrow. In his black robes he ran to meet her and he said, “Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water from thy pitcher.”

The girl stopped, thought a moment, and then said in German, “You can speak German if it comes easier to you.”

And the holy vision suddenly became a sturdy Jewish girl. The seminarian looked her over hungrily and the words that came to his mind — though unsuitable for a seminarian — were equally biblical: how fair and how pleasant art thou
.

“Why German?” he asked, stunned
.

“Because your Czech is so odd.”

“I beg your pardon.” He swallowed. “Allow me to introduce myself: Jan Amos Schweik.” Cupid’s arrow had dried his throat and he sounded hoarse
.

“Would you like a drink of water, father? Here!” And she handed him her pitcher
.

Embarrassed, he tipped it up and drank, spilling water over his robe
.

“God bless you,” he said
.

“I’m glad to be of help,” said the girl
.

They were facing each other, both ill at ease — the seminarian in black, the girl in a grey skirt and a grey blouse of rough linen. Under it, like two young roes that are twins —

“I’m not ordained yet,” he said. “I’m only in my third year.”

She looked puzzled
.

“That means I’m not a priest yet.”

“Oh, you’ll get there,” she said, and just then he had a different vision. He tried to drive it away but he couldn’t
.

“I —” the girl said reluctantly, “I’m Rebecca Goldstein. My father is the cantor at the Old-New Synagogue.”

“May I — walk with you?” Then, firmly, “Here, I’ll help you with your pitcher.”

“I can’t,” she said
.

“Why not?”

“People will see us,” she whispered
.

He looked around, glanced down at his robe. She was right. “So come to the park around the corner,” he said softly. “There are benches there in the bushes, so you can’t be seen in the dark.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is,” he said. “No one will see us.”

“You’re a priest.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, almost.”

At that moment he understood the story of Faust, which he had always found hard to believe. Faust had traded eternity for wisdom. He would have traded it too, though not just for wisdom
.

He cleared his throat. “Please don’t think ill of me, Miss Rebecca. I only —” He realized how awkward it sounded, but he couldn’t think of anything more intelligent. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“I can’t.” She looked around nervously. “I don’t know.” Then she said, “If you were a rabbi —”

“Come!”

“I have to go home.” She picked up the pitcher and put it on her shoulder, turned, and set out resolutely towards the lights of the houses down the street that looked like Mephisto winking at him
.

“Come! I’ll wait for you there!” he called to her softly
.

It was the time of May masses and he could get out in the evening. He skipped mass, but she didn’t show up
.

A few days later, though, when he managed to slip away from the seminary again, there she was, drawing water at the well
.

“Come with me!”

“I don’t know.”

“What if I were a rabbi?”

She didn’t answer. For quite a while. Then she said, “I won’t meet you there because people can see. I went to look. People can see from both sides.”

He became Faust; the agreement was signed and sealed. He went to see an old schoolmate, a prosperous farmer’s son who owned a bachelor’s apartment on the Lesser Town Square
.

“I need to borrow —” He hesitated
.

“Well, well!” smiled his schoolmate. “They even gamble in the seminary, do they? Of course, Reverend Father, for you I’ll do anything. How much do you need? A hundred? Two hundred? Any more than that will be a problem. Lady Luck hasn’t been very good to me either these days.”

“No. I need to borrow your apartment. Just for an hour or two —”

His buddy gave a whistle. “Well, what do you know!” But he gave him the key. “I’m going away tomorrow for a week. The place is yours. It’s right around the corner from the Church of St. Kliment. Confession there, as I recall, is from five to seven.”

Rebecca also sold her soul. And they were one
.

He left the seminary. Monsignor Kotrly wept. “Oh, lad, you’ve disappointed me! Really disappointed me.”

“But Reverend Father, it’s just that I — I —”

“I know, I know.” The monsignor wiped away a tear with a fleshy thumb. “You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. But you’ve still disappointed me. Well, what’s to be done? Go with God. But remember, even as a layman you’re still a Catholic, and that binds you.”

He kissed the old priest’s hand. “I swear to you, by the Mother of God —”

“Better not swear. Pray. Like every seminarian, you’ve surely read Saint Paul. As long as you don’t end up burning in hell, Amos, my lad!”

He didn’t burn in hell, but he didn’t follow Saint Paul’s advice to marry either — nor could he have, because in the end Rebecca did what her biblical namesake did
.

Cantor Goldstein was a stone wall. It wasn’t because the former seminarian was now working as a clerk in a textile warehouse, and a Jewish-owned one at that — a job his classmate the rich farmer’s son had obtained for him through friends. Even the fact that he had quit the seminary might not have mattered if — but Papa Goldstein was a stone wall. Rebecca was an only child. There was no one else. And like the vision in the First Book of Moses, she was an obedient daughter. Sinful, but obedient. The loss of her virginity was a secret she carried with her into her marriage with Isaac Karpeles, a shy, decent, and equally obedient young partner in the
ironmongers’ firm of Abraham Karpeles und Sohn in Olomouc. The secret remained a secret
.

“You’re not of our faith, young man.”

“I could —” Schweik, the Gentile, tried to say, but he turned red when he looked into the deep-set eyes of the righteous old man. He couldn’t even say the words to the old man’s face. So the pact with Mephisto was never ratified. And that was that. He left for America
.

“Oh yes, Rebecca has children. Six of them,” said Shake, “each one prettier than the last. They all have her eyes.”

“How do you know?” asked the sergeant
.

“Well, I was there, you know. After the war.”

It wasn’t difficult to find Karpeles’s shop in Olomouc. Besides, Rebecca had just leaned out of a third-storey window. Either she hadn’t changed, or he was being revisited by the vision from the stone fountain on the square
.

She opened the door and saw a man whipped by the wild winds of war who removed his foreign-looking hat and said, “It’s me, Rebi. Remember?”

She was still sturdy but she almost fainted
.

She too was a sinner — not in deeds anymore, only in words — for she introduced Shake to Isaac Karpeles as the cousin of the husband of her distant cousin Rachel, the one whose marriage had caused such a stir. Isaac couldn’t recall any stir or any distant cousin, but even at forty he was a gullible nebbish. He invited Shake to stay for supper
.

There he saw Rebecca’s four sons and twin black-eyed daughters. When Isaac said the prayers, Shake almost forgot himself and made the sign of the cross; then he folded his hands on the table in front of him
.

Isaac even suggested he stay the night. The house was roomy, with a small guest chamber upstairs, but that was impossible. The pact might not have been ratified but he still felt desire for her. The
vision remained. It was there at the table with the flickering candles, with the children smacking their lips over the gefilte fish. A vision come to life. He suddenly wished for it to remain with him, just as it was, for ever. He thanked them for the offer, told them he was staying with friends in Olomouc, then returned to the inn and carried the vision back to America
.

Just the vision. Not so much as a photograph of her and her six children
.

“Is that why you never married?” asked the sergeant. “After all, it’s water under the bridge.”

“Old love never fades,” said Shake. “Besides, I still have a bad conscience. On account of the Holy Church, but mainly because of Monsignor Kotrly, may he rest in peace.”