The Fifth Servant (11 page)

           
The doctor laid out his bloodletting instruments and collection bowl, and gestured for the patient to approach.

           
Bishop Stempfel was a big man who had been eating well. The doctor asked the bishop to describe his symptoms, then said that he needed to examine the patient more closely in order to palpate his abdomen, since fire in a bodily organ was the most likely cause of his ailment.

           
The bishop stripped to the waist, while on the other side of the screen, Popel condemned the casual social proximity of Christians and Jews in Rudolf II’s court and in the well-to-do houses in the ghetto, which resulted in all kinds of opportunities for illicit and unnatural couplings.

           
“Why would they want to invite their own destruction?” asked the bishop, getting gooseflesh as the doctor probed his gut with cold hands.

           
“Jews are more lustful than our people,” Zeman explained.

           
“You’d think they’d keep it in check, considering what we did to the last Jew who took a turn at the grindstone with a Christian maiden,” said Popel.

           
The bishop felt a sickly tugging in the scrotum as he was prodded in sensitive areas. His fingers fidgeted for a moment, then found comfort fondling his special set of rosary beads carved from human bone.

           
The doctor said, “My lord, I need to perform a
complete
examination of the digestive tract.”

           
The bishop stood dumbly for a moment before he realized what this meant. The room was quite cold by Roman standards, but he removed the last layer of linen covering his shameful places. The doctor directed him to bend forward slightly.

           
The probe was a hollow metal tube, with a flat projection at one end with a hole cut in it for viewing the exposed tissue.

           
Popel continued: “My informants tell me that in the
Judenstadt
the Jewish beadles have been in the streets all morning commanding them to burn something, but it’s all in some dreadful Hebrew code. So the Jews live among us, and repay our generosity by conspiring to burn the city to the ground, just as they once did in the Kleinseite district across the river.”

           
“Conspiring? With who—?” The bishop let out a yelp. The probing was much more painful than he thought it would be. The doctor kept turning the lead instrument roughly to view the damaged area.

           
“They have allied themselves with the Turkish menace, my lord.”

           
The bishop gasped for breath. He was sweating, which made his exposed skin turn clammy.

           
“I know, I didn’t want to believe it myself,” said Popel. “But honest mercenaries returning from the Hungarian front speak of a terrifying horde of Jewish cutthroats hiding somewhere to the east, waiting for the chance to descend upon us and feast on our flesh.”

           
The bishop felt as if a hot poker was searing his entrails.

           
“We know the Jews have gained insight into the black arts with their forbidden learning,” said Popel. “And their perfidious Talmud mocks the virtue of celibacy, saying that a man who has no wife cannot be called a man.”

           
The bishop begged, “Please—stop.”

           
“I won’t stop until the Talmud is forbidden once and for all,” said Popel.

           
“I’ll have it placed on the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
as soon as I get back to
Rome
,” said the bishop.

           
“That could take months. You have your secretary and scribe here at hand. You must do it now, my lord.”

           
The clock on the table rang the hour for mid-morning prayer. It was a
memento mori
device, with a jeweled skull that popped out to remind the viewer that the moment of his death could come at any time.

           
“All right! Stuck—”

           
“Yes, my lord?” said the scribe.

           
The doctor removed the probe. The bishop gave a cry of relief, and stayed bent over, breathing heavily.

           
The scribe repeated his query.

           
The bishop said, “Draft a missive—PUFF PUFF—to His Eminence—PUFF PUFF—requesting that he ban the study of the Talmud—PUFF—in manuscript or any printed form.”

           
“Yes, sir.”

           
The doctor explained to Bishop Stempfel that he had a fissure in an embarrassing location.

           
“What’s the cure? Surgery?”

           
“The Jews may practice such quackery, my lord, because they have no recourse to our miracle cures,” said the doctor, reaching into his bag for a bottle of Saint Anthony’s water and a small wooden box.

           
“They’d poison us all if they could,” said Popel, “so thoroughly have they mastered the secret art of killing. And that is why we must avenge the bloodcrime.”

           
“Enough speeches,” said Zeman. “We all know how you feel about the Jews.”

           
Popel glared at him but said nothing more.

           
The doctor opened the box and removed a small object wrapped in faded golden cloth. He gently unraveled the blood-stiffened cloth and held up the withered finger of a long-dead saint. He sprinkled the relic with holy water and touched it to the bishop’s wound, then the ordeal was finally over.

           
Greatly relieved, the bishop pulled his underclothes back on.

           
Zeman said, “My lord, grant me the authority to prosecute the heretical unbelievers in the neighborhood of Bethlehem Chapel.”

           
A Protestant stronghold. Yes, that made sense, thought the bishop.

           
“Consider it done,” he said.

           
“And sites of Christian martyrdom draw pilgrims as well,” said Popel. And pilgrims spend money.

           
The bishop didn’t take much stock in the bloodcrime story since the Laws of Moses forbid the shedding of innocent blood, but he felt obliged to draw up a report.

           
He finished dressing, and ordered the two priests to begin a campaign of general intimidation to ferret out and round up the leaders of the heretical sects. He was sure he’d find some witches among them.

CHAPTER 8

           
THE WIND SHIFTED, BLOWING DUST into my eyes and making me feel that I was fighting the wind no matter which way I was going. It didn’t help that most of the Jewish Town was laid out in a labyrinth of dark and unfamiliar streets.

           
Rabbi Loew steadied himself, and we trudged toward the main street.

           
“Do we have a moment so I can go see my wife?” I asked.

           
“No, we need to prepare our case for the
kehileh
.”

           
“What do you mean, ‘our case’? We’re making a simple request to remand a prisoner to the emperor’s custody.”

           
Rabbi Loew stopped and fixed one of his eagle eyes on me, his long cloak flapping in the breeze. “Tell me, Ben-Akiva, what happened to the Israelites after they crossed the
Sea
of
Reeds
into the wilderness?”

           
“They came to a place called Marah where the water was too bitter to drink.”

           
“And—?”

           
“And they thought they were all going to die of thirst.”

           
“But God said—?”

           
I searched my memory for the correct verse of Torah:
Vayoymer…lekoyl Adinoy…veha’azantoh lemitsvoysov veshomartoh kol khukoysovkol hamakhaloh asher samti…

           
“He said, ‘Study Torah and you will live.'”

           
“Before He actually gave them the Torah.”

           
True. The Lord had told them to keep His commandments before He gave them the list of commandments.

           
“How is that possible?” asked the rabbi.

           
I focused on the deep furrows in my teacher’s brow, with his white hair blowing around like wild wheat along the edge of a lovingly plowed field that had yielded harvest after harvest of wisdom.

           
I said, “Because the seven laws of Noah are so basic that they even apply to the other nations that have not received the Torah, like the prohibitions against incest, robbery, and murder.”

           
“A good, straightforward answer, and ethically valid,” said the rabbi. “But only on one level. What is the deeper
d’rashic
meaning?”

           
Right. There was always a deeper meaning.

           
The narrow street was full of people who, despite their physical separation and sparring elbows, shared a common thread stitching their lives together. It was good to be among Jews, but I was not a part of their world yet—the world of the Jews of Prague. I needed allies, contacts, connections. Hell, I’d welcome an old enemy just to see a familiar face.

           
I floundered for a moment until the holy spirit of the
sh’khineh
came to me and revealed the words I needed to fill the silence:
Eyn mukdem u-me’ukher batoyreh.
There is no before and after in the Torah. “The Lord told them to follow the Torah before they possessed the written text because the true Torah has no beginning or end.”

           
Rabbi Loew smiled the way other men do when a bet pays off. But there was more. “You say that the Noahide laws are so basic that even idolators should follow them.”

           
“Well, except for the laws against idolatry.”

           
“Don’t joke with me.”

           
“I wasn’t joking—”

           
“And yet there are people who break God’s most basic commandments every day of the week. So what makes you think they will follow our little man-made rules?”

           
A group of street boys ran past us toward the Fleyshbanksgasse, where the butchers were making a show of giving away their weight in meat to the poor.

           
I was getting used to the rabbi’s humorless manner and elliptical logic, so I waited for the lesson to circle around to the point where it would reveal its relevance.

           
After a moment, the rabbi said, “The Sages warned us many times about the dangers of official corruption, but from what I have seen here, I would take their argument further and say that anyone who takes a rabbinical post in order to profit materially from it might as well be committing adultery.”

           
His disillusion over petty corruption sounded awfully familiar, I’m afraid.

           
And I realized that I had allowed myself to nurture the hope that the magical city of
Prague
would somehow be different from other places.

           
But I recovered quickly. “That’s probably why the Sages say that if all
Israel
were to observe two Sabbaths properly, we would immediately be redeemed.”

           
“Amen to that,” said Rabbi Loew. And he proceeded to fill me in on the local politics, telling me how the wealthy burghers get elected to public office because of their high standing in the community. But their standing is largely determined by their wealth, so the evil twins of money and power feed off each other in an endless cycle, while everybody else gets left out in the cold.

           
“I didn’t know things had gotten that bad.”

           
Rabbi Loew’s eyes glowed with satisfaction, as if I had made the most remarkable statement. “I see that you are like the great Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba, who was never ashamed to admit when he had not learned something from his teachers. I think we are going to work very well together, Ben-Akiva.”

           
This was my first taste of meaningful praise from Rabbi Loew, and my eyes dropped to the pavement. It was still cold out, but the temperature had climbed past freezing and the frost had long since melted with the passing of so many feet. I studied the wet footprints on the paving stones.

           
“What is it, my shammes?” asked the rabbi, following my gaze.

           
A faded mental picture was forming. “There were footprints in the frost outside of Federn’s shop. When I first got there, before the crowds came.”