The Fifth Servant (18 page)

           
“I guess we’re just not as efficient at expulsion as you Germans are,” said Masaryk.

           
“And
der Kaiser
always lets them come back, anyway,” said Kopecky.

           
“Perhaps I should remind you that it is not proper to criticize one’s rulers when we are at war with infidels,” said Tausendmark.

           
Johnson was still curious. “With all their wealth, is there no Jewish gold left for you?”

           
“Each Jewish house hold pays the city fifty gulden a year to provide for their protection, but we don’t see a lousy pfennig of it,” said Hrbeck.

           
“Maybe you should be raising the protection fee to sixty gulden a year.”

           
“We tried that. The extra ten gulden went straight into the imperial coffers.”

           
Masaryk said, “We tax them every time they pass through the gates of the city or cross the border into
Moravia
. We tax them for crossing the stone bridge, for buying a loaf of bread, or for selling a second hand shirt in the
tandlmarkt
on
Havelská Street
. We tax them for taking a bath, getting married, and protecting the cemetery from vandals. What else is there?”

           
“You charge them for protecting the cemetery?” said Johnson. “Are you taxing each burial, as well?”

           
It struck them like a bolt from the heavens. Kopecky looked around the table. The others were equally thunderstruck.

           
“A tax on each death and burial,” said Masaryk. “How come we never thought of that?”

           
“Got any more where that came from?” said Kunkel.

           
Johnson said, “Well, I understand that King Philip of
France
was making the Jews pay a yearly fee for the privilege of wearing the yellow badges.”

           
“He
charged
them for the Jew badges?”

           
“Oh! Nice idea,” said Švec.

           
“That’ll teach them to undersell us,” said Hrbeck.

           
“Provided we can get the Rožmberks to support the idea,” said Kopecky.

           
“Count Vilém may have a soft spot for the
Zhids
, but all that flies out the window when there’s money to be made.”

           
“If the Jews are taxed so heavily, how are they managing to undersell you?” asked Johnson.

           
Hrbeck explained: “They’re not allowed to join the Christian guilds, so the sons of bitches are able to set their own prices.”

           
“Even their wine is cheaper,” said Švec. “And I can tell you that many a Christian lad fritters away his time drinking in some dive in the
Židovské M
sto
 
with a couple of Jewish no-goodniks.”

           
Masaryk had the servant girl bring in some
ko
ak
 
so he could propose a toast to their guest.

           
While everyone talked excitedly about the potential for exploiting these new sources of income, Kopecky took the Englishman aside.

           
“So how come you know so much about Jews?” Kopecky asked.

           
“Well, as you know, we don’t have any Jews in En gland. So I’ve become quite curious about them.”

           
“Fair enough. You’ve certainly got some fresh ideas about how to deal with them, my friend.”

           
Johnson shrugged it off modestly.

           
“Now, what’s your business with me?”

           
The Englishman’s face changed, becoming quietly intense. “I’m after pearls.”

           
Kopecky glanced at the tiny pearls sewn into the fabric of Johnson’s vest.

           
“That’s not really my specialty. You should talk to Granovsky about Oriental trade.”

           
“Not that kind of pearl. I’m talking about
exotic
pearls.”

           
The burgher still didn’t get it.

           
“You know. Perls. Or Rachels. Or Hannahs. Maybe a Deborah or two.”

           
The words dropped like water into a clear pond, and ripples of meaning spread out between the two men.

           
“I’ve heard that the Jewish women are, shall we say, somewhat warmer than the females in the northern climates.”

           
Kopecky stroked his chin, and said, “Give me a little while to see how this plays out, then I’ll see what I can do for you, my friend.”

CHAPTER 11

           
“WHERE IS THAT GIRL?” D OLORA shouted from the kitchen.

           
“She’s coming,” said Lívia the upstairs maid as she elbowed the front door open and stepped outside. She had to empty the chamber pots into the gutter so the filth would wash downstream with the rainwater. You didn’t just toss it out the second-floor window on Meisel Street, not when rich folks like the Hürwitzes might be strolling by.

           
The girl came in, dripping wet and staggering under the weight of a bucketful of brackish well water.

           
“Don’t spill it,” Lívia commanded.

           
The girl carried the heavy bucket into the kitchen, and dropped it on the tiles.

           
“Careful, Katya! You’d have to scrub the floors for a month to pay for a couple of those tiles, unless the master decides otherwise,” Dolora warned the girl. “And you’ve stirred up the muck. Now we’ve got to wait for it to settle.”

           
The Pinkas Shul shammes passed by the window, calling out, “Burn your
khumets
!”

           
“Muj Bože
! We haven’t even washed the turnips yet!” said the cook.

           
“That’s enough shouting, Dolora. It won’t make the day go any faster,” said the mistress of the house, Frumet Meisel, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Anya, come bring the whisk broom.”

           
“Yes,
paní Meislová
,” Anya said, putting down the paring knife and wiping her hands on her apron. She followed her mistress down the corridor, tucking a few loose strands of hair under her headkerchief.

           
The servant girls had spent the morning scouring the Meisels’ town house from basement to garret, leaving only a symbolic pile of crumbs in the corner of the front room.

           
The group of boys and girls from the orphanage had already finished their half-day of
kheyder
studies, and they had nothing to do but play games until the Seder started just after sundown, several hours from now. They formed two teams: boys against girls, of course. The leader closed his eyes and opened a printed copy of the five Books of Moses at random—the children called it a
khumesh
—then they started counting the number of times the Hebrew letters
samekh
and
pey
appeared, the boys rooting for each
samekh
, the girls screeching for each
pey
.

           
Even the children in the Jewish Town know how to read
, Anya marveled. She remembered being their age, sitting in the drafty church staring at the imposing book with the mysterious squiggles on its pages, and dreading all the do’s and don’ts prescribed in its impenetrable code. As the years went by, intimidation turned into admiration for the priests, who were the only ones given access to the knowledge needed to translate the secret language of God and share it with her, and her soul had filled with gratitude for this gift of divine wisdom. Imagine having God’s word written in a book
and not being able to understand it
. And she thanked God for the priests.

           
Then about six months ago, a young man turned up at the Meisels’ door, taking up their offer to sponsor his studies with the great Rabbi Loew. (Mordecai Meisel had to quit school when he was still a boy to support his mother by working in the iron trade, so he was always very generous with poor children and scholars.) The young student’s name was Yankev ben Khayim, and the first thing that struck her was his sense of humor. He actually made her laugh with his plays on Yiddish and Czech words, which weren’t always so chaste and pure. Most of the Jewish men were always so deadly serious around her, if they acknowledged her at all. The second thing she noticed was how thin and delicate his fingers were. Anyone in her family of butchers could have cracked his frail bones with one hand. But he had one thing they didn’t have: a thousand-year tradition of public education, and when he spied Anya flipping surreptitiously through the children’s books, he said to her:

           
“A hungry mind should be fed no matter what, for it is written, ‘There shall be one Law for the citizen and the native who dwells among you.’”

           
“What does that mean?” she asked.

           
“It means that I should teach you to read the Bible in your own language.”

           
The young man began teaching her letters and numbers so that she could begin to navigate the forbidding pages of the Christian Bible. She brought this new knowledge home to the family, and of course her parents worried at first. But soon they were demanding that the wholesale meat suppliers provide written receipts so that Anya could look them over and catch any omissions or excessive charges, which she always did, to their delight, however slowly and clumsily she might read.

           
Her wealthy employers also taught her the importance of separating the clean from the unclean, since any bits of food left lying around would attract invisible spirits who would bring sickness and poverty to the house. And it seemed to work. She noticed fewer babies dying of childbed fever in the Jewish Town than in the Christian homes, although the priests thoroughly condemned it as a sign of Jewish magic.

           
Frumet Meisel now took a candle from the mantel while Anya stood by with a dustpan and whisk broom. The children abandoned their game and gathered around
froy
Meisel, who lit a candle and made a show of searching for the last traces of
khumets
in the corner of the room. As her mistress renounced ownership of any crumbs they might have missed, Anya swept the last crumbs into the dustpan and threw them into the fire, declaring, “Any kind of leaven shall be regarded as non-existent.”

           
Frumet Meisel patted her on the cheek and said,
“Di shikseh baym rov ken oykh paskenen a shayleh.”

           
“What’s a
shayleh
?”

           
“It means the rabbi’s servant girl can also answer a difficult legal question.”