The Forbidden Book, page 11
The text itself, the meaning of it, was obscure. He wished Shulem-Yontif would have at least glanced at it, with a yeshiva boy’s eye, to give Isser a broad idea of what he was looking at. It was almost like poetry, interrupted by strings of Hebrew letters whose vowels he couldn’t begin to guess at.
There was no clear explanation of what the book did. He wanted to understand what he was doing before he continued. He didn’t like the idea of being led into something unaware, simply trusting that it was the right thing to do. His grudge against the rebbe did not necessarily translate to believing that Kalman Senderovich knew better how to protect the community. The thought that Kalman believed this book meant anything at all was unusual. Kalman wasn’t a superstitious man. There had to be something more to it, something Isser wasn’t seeing.
Shulem-Yontif was the only religious Jew he’d trust with a secret. He couldn’t ask him. He’d already asked him too much, and Shulem-Yontif’s improvised substitution might give Isser away sooner than he’d planned, so he felt even less confident in asking the boy for help.
He sat for a while staring at the pages, biting his nails. Then he got up and took his sewing kit from the cabinet on the wall, moved the chair over, and tugged the packet of pamphlets out from its hiding place in the rafters.
He snipped the binding threads on the Sefer and spread the pages out across the table. Looking through his own printed work, he found one that would pass for the same paper and interleaved them, making a thicker chapbook of half Sefer Dumah and half women’s prayers on a cheap woodblock. He stitched them together with three simple knots and folded the pages again to make them look as if they’d been handled together. Now anyone taking a quick look would mistake the magical text for what Kalman Senderovich would have called “women’s nonsense.”
Isser tucked this new hybrid creation back into his vest, blew out the lamp, and unblocked his door. He had ordinary criminal texts to sell while he thought about what to do with his stolen goods.
* * *
“I THINK WE SHOULD go back to Isser’s room and look for this book,” Adela said.
“But what about the body?” Sorel asked.
“If it’s Kalman’s daughter, it’s nothing to do with Isser. Or anyway I don’t think so.” She thought for a moment, chewing her lip. “But then, he didn’t tell me about Shulem-Yontif, either. Maybe he wouldn’t have told me if he was planning to elope with some rich girl.”
Sorel choked. “Elope? That’s not what happened. And it might not be her anyway. I want to find out for certain.”
“We’ll split up, then. I’ll go look for the book, and you find me once you’re finished hearing the gossip.”
Sorel hesitated to let Adela go alone, and then caught herself. It was Isser’s argument again, trying to keep Adela out of trouble. Well, they were all in trouble already, and Sorel had already searched his apartment without finding anything.
“See you later, then,” she said. “Watch out for—I don’t know. Murderers and thieves and everything.”
“You too,” said Adela, rolling her eyes. “And behave yourself.”
She walked off before Sorel could ask what that meant, taking the alleyway back toward Isser’s neighborhood instead of the synagogue.
Sorel squeezed back past the rain barrel into the courtyard, just in time to see the crowd part for a man on horseback with a neatly trimmed red beard and a velvet cap.
Kalman Senderovich.
She stopped in her tracks, casting about for somewhere to hide without blocking her own view. After a moment she realized trying to hide would only make her more visible. He wasn’t looking in her direction at all.
Behind him, she saw their coach and a flock of Hasidim helping the rebbe get down so he could hobble across the courtyard. People made way for him and her father as if they were kings. With the rebbe was a gentile who must have been an official of some kind, looking impatient at the old man’s pace.
The whispers of the crowd had turned urgent. Kalman being here lent weight to the assertion that it was his daughter who’d been found.
She had to get a look at the body. While everyone was craning their necks to get a look at the rebbe and straining their ears to hear his conversation with the impatient gentile, she turned back to the alley and slipped out of the courtyard. The mikveh complex was in the street behind, with the hekdesh, the home for wanderers, and the mortuary. But she couldn’t just walk in—the women from the chevra kadisha would be there. Unless.
She stopped, thinking. Could she pass for a maidservant? Pretend she was her own nanny come to look at the girl from the river, to see if it were really Sorel Kalmans? She’d need to be quick. While the men were still talking.
She cast her eyes around at the strings of laundry. There—an old-fashioned peasant’s dress, certainly too big for her, and not fine enough quality to really meet Kalman’s approval, but the city women might not know that. She tucked her coat and satchel behind the rain barrel and pulled the damp dress over her head. She grabbed a scarf from another line to wrap her hair as she hurried through the alley and turned toward the hekdesh. When she looked at herself in a grimy shop window she looked passable and certainly panicked enough to be a maidservant looking for her dead mistress.
There was a male bathhouse attendant standing outside, smoking a cigarette. Sorel ran up to him and fluttered her hands, trying to distract him from looking at her too closely.
“Is this the hekdesh? Is this where they brought that poor drowned girl, God forbid?” She tried to imitate the tone of the sort of person her father referred to scornfully as poor village Jews, even though most of the people he’d turned the epithet on lived in the city.
“That’s right,” said the attendant, looking at her askance. “Why?”
“I’ve just come with Kalman Senderovich from his estate! They said it was his daughter, drowned, may it not be so! He and the rebbe, may he live, are at the synagogue, but he sent me ahead to see the—to see her! May it not be so!”
She wrung her hands, for dramatic effect. The attendant looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’m not supposed to let just anyone in, you understand? There are liars and gossips in this town. How do I know you’re really from Kalman’s estate, huh?”
Sorel wished she’d thought to have a coin in her hand to bribe him with. The stocking with her money in it was tucked into her trouser pocket, and she couldn’t very well hike up her skirts to get at it now. She wracked her brain.
“Kalman’s daughter,” she said. “Can I tell you what Kalman’s daughter looks like? And if it isn’t her then you don’t have to let me in at all! Did you see the body?”
“No,” he said, “but I can ask Penina, if you describe her.”
He jerked his head toward the doorway, indicating that Penina was inside.
“All right.” Sorel glanced around, expecting her father to come around the corner at any moment and ruin her charade. “All right. Kalman’s daughter is a maiden, about seventeen years old, tall. Not so well built. Skinny, if you forgive me for saying. A redhead, with brown eyes. She’s taller than you! That’s not so usual for a girl, don’t you think?”
She hoped he wouldn’t think too hard about the fact that, had she not been hunching her shoulders and occasionally lifting her hands to her face to hide imaginary tears, she too would have been taller than he was. He didn’t seem to notice, thankfully, stubbing out his cigarette on the brick wall and tucking it behind his ear before he went inside.
Sorel waited, heart pounding, for what felt like half an hour before he came back.
“All right,” he said. “You can go in and take a look.” Then, belatedly, “May her memory be a blessing.”
Sorel had thought he’d come back and tell her there was no need to see the body at all, that it was clearly someone else. She stared at him for a moment in astonishment.
“Penina says come in and take a look,” said the attendant. “It’s what you came for, isn’t it?”
“Yes! Yes, thank you, thank you.” She hurried past him and slammed the door behind her. What the hell?
There was lamplight coming from a door on the right of the entryway. She followed it to a room where two women were sitting at a card table, knitting and looking not particularly bothered by the third presence in the room, a figure stretched out under a blanket on another table.
One of the women rose to her feet when she saw Sorel. “You’re Kalman’s maidservant?”
“That’s right.” Her voice was genuinely shaking now. She hadn’t thought this through. She’d never seen a body! What was she thinking? It couldn’t possibly be hers, so what use was knowing whose it was?
But Penina was already leading her gently by the elbow to the side of the table.
“She hadn’t been in the water long, poor thing,” she said, drawing back the blanket. “Is it her?”
Sorel didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
It was her.
* * *
SHE HAD EXPECTED something fresh from the river—a rusalka with weeds tangled in her hair, smelling of mud. But, of course, the women of the chevra kadisha had washed her. Sorel imagined them whispering prayers as they gently combed the knots from her hair. They might not have finished the taharah, since they didn’t have a name for the body. She certainly wasn’t dressed for burial. But someone had loosely braided her damp hair, without tying it off at the end, and laid it over her shoulder, as if she were sleeping.
It was her own face. She’d seen it in the mirror, she’d seen it in her dreams with Isser wearing it. When she touched the girl’s cheek, it was cool and waxy, like a doll’s face. It couldn’t be real. How could it be?
“It’s her, isn’t it,” said the woman at her shoulder. Penina, presumably. “May her memory be a blessing.”
“It’s Soreh bat Batsheva,” Sorel said, her voice faraway in her ears. How had they not looked at her when she came in and instantly seen that it was the same face? Except neither of the women were really looking at her at all. Penina was looking at the body, and the other was looking at her knitting, squinting in the candlelight.
“I have to—” Sorel burst out, in a real sob. “I have to—”
Penina stepped back, giving her space, and she ran for the door. Only there was the sound of talking outside, men’s voices, loud in the street. She couldn’t go that way; she’d walk straight into her father’s arms, and that was the last place she wanted to be when she was in a panic.
She dashed down the hall in the other direction. There would be a back door, to bring the coal in for the fires. She told herself so firmly, as if the words could make it true. And sure enough, she found a door that opened to a set of steps leading into a cellar that was stifling with trapped heat from the boiler in one corner. Here she tore off the stolen headscarf and dress, and kicked them behind a pile of kindling. Her hands were shaking so badly she almost couldn’t get the door to the alley unlatched. Finally, it swung open and she was running full-tilt away from the bathhouse complex.
She only caught herself at the sound of a dog barking up ahead, a deep booming bark that froze her in her tracks. It sounded like the same dog—the damn werewolf, or whatever it was Yoshke had called it. She pressed herself against a wall, waiting, but no dog appeared, and the bark was not repeated. When she got herself under control, she remembered that she’d left her satchel by the Great Synagogue, under the rain barrel. She’d have to go back and get it.
Go and get the bag and coat, then find Adela. She took a deep breath and looked around, finding her bearings. She needed to be practical. One foot in front of the next.
She had to have imagined the face under the sheet. Her eyes were playing tricks. She hadn’t slept enough, she’d hit her head maybe, falling from the window at Pavlikov’s club. She was going mad, and the corpse from the river was part of it but so was Isser; she’d imagined him entirely and she’d have to tell Adela so when she saw her again, and—
She stopped again, squeezed her eyes shut, and took another breath. No, it was just bad light and a girl who looked a bit like her and her own fear. She hadn’t even really looked, had she? She’d had half her mind on listening for her father and the rebbe to come in and ruin her scheme.
The courtyard of the Great Synagogue was emptying out when she got there. People had gotten bored of waiting or her father had told them to go away or they had more important business. She didn’t see Shulem-Yontif anywhere.
Her things were just where she’d left them. She pulled the coat on and checked the pockets for the reassuring weight of the knife, though she had no immediate use for it. No one was chasing her, not even the dog. If the dog actually existed.
The dog has to exist, she told herself. Because if it doesn’t, I tore those men apart with my teeth.
She would remember doing that.
Probably.
* * *
AFTER SEVERAL WRONG TURNS, Sorel realized the problem with telling Adela to meet at Isser’s apartment. She didn’t remember the way, and all the streets looked the same, houses leaning like crooked teeth and alleys full of scrap wood and garbage. The gnawing hunger had returned as her panic drained away, so she finally gave up on trying to regain her bearings and sat in front of a kosher tavern like the one Sam had taken her to days before.
She drank a mug of strong scalding tea and ate bagels with herring. The gossips all around her were talking about how Kalman Senderovich’s daughter had been pulled from the river, which meant that the wedding was cursed, which meant that the rebbe was cursed, which meant that Esrog was cursed.
She even heard the story about the three-eyed goat again. There was some disagreement on where the third eye had been located. Sorel leaned her chin in her hand and picked apart her second bagel.
“Of course everyone knows he’s a miracle worker,” a man was saying at the table next to her. “They say when he was young, he stopped a drought that had gone on so long that even the tsar himself sent a purse to the rebbe in thanks.”
“He healed my cousin’s sister-in-law’s fever,” said another man. “He gave her some holy names, and it just went away. She would have died otherwise.”
“He stops the river from flooding the lower city every single year,” someone else added.
“Then if someone’s put the evil eye on him, should we look out for rain?”
Everyone, Sorel included, glanced up at the sky. It did look rather gloomy, but Sorel felt foolish for checking. She’d never believed in the rebbe’s miracles, largely because her father, despite his lack of superstition, was so careful never to discount them. He didn’t like the Hasidim, he found them unruly. But he liked having his own personal Baal-Shem.
“We should worry who’s got the kind of sorcery that can put the evil eye on a tzadik like that to begin with,” said the man whose relative had been healed of her fever.
“Someone didn’t like the thought of there being one united Esroger Jewish community,” said another, lowering his voice conspiratorially and glancing around. “If the Hasidim and the kahal agree with each other, there’s more of us than there are of the goyim. Don’t you think Kalman Senderovich knows that? A Jew doesn’t get rich by being stupid. When the Hasidim first came the kahal wanted to be rid of them. Once it was clear they’re not leaving, he changed his tune.”
“I don’t think it speaks well of the rebbe,” said one of the men, irritable. “Making nice with a man like that.”
“A tzadik is always forgiving! Of course he would make nice with Kalman. It’s the right thing—for the Jews, for all of us.”
Sorel chewed her bagel slowly, no longer because she was hungry, but so she had an excuse to keep listening. She’d never liked the rebbe because he was her prospective father-in-law. She’d always vaguely assumed his followers were ignorant, superstitious village Jews—which she now realized was her father talking. These men believed in the rebbe, even though they weren’t dressed as Hasidim, and judging by the neighboring shops, these men were city artisans. They liked the rebbe more than they liked her father, in fact they hated her father. This didn’t surprise her. Kalman wasn’t easy to like, and he oversaw the collection of taxes for the Jewish community. No one liked that, even if most of the money went to fixing synagogues and supporting orphans and whatnot. The rebbe, as far as she knew, did nothing but perform miracles.
It had never occurred to her that the rebbe might be working with her father out of something more complicated than the friendship between two old men who each ruled his own kingdom. Her father talked of the rebbe behind his back in ways that weren’t always glowing, but she’d assumed, somehow, that the simple miracle worker wouldn’t have an ulterior motive.
“Alter!” A voice interrupted her thoughts, and she looked around, annoyed at the interruption, to see Sam waving cheerfully from down the street. He jogged over and sat across from her without being invited. “I’m glad I found you. I worried you and Adela had been swallowed up, God forbid, by demons.”
“No,” said Sorel. “And you? Did you get swallowed up by demons?”
“No. I ran when some wild maniac goy pulled a gun, and then I spent the night at the Gravediggers’ Synagogue because I left my things there.” He shrugged a shoulder to indicate his peddler’s pack. “Have you heard?”
“That they really did pull Kalman Senderovich’s daughter from the river?” she said. “The whole city’s heard.”
“They’ll be burying her as soon as the goyim are done with their city inquest,” said Sam quite cheerfully, taking a piece of bagel off Sorel’s plate. He whispered the blessing for bread and popped it into his mouth. “It was the talk of the Gravediggers’ minyan, as you can imagine. Taking her back to Kalman’s estate, I think.”
