Authors: Kenneth Wishnia
No, I can’t
, Anya thought, but she allowed her heart to be cheered by her mistress’s kind words. Her shoes felt heavy and confining as she returned to the kitchen. She checked the bucket of well water. The sediment had settled to the bottom, so she began ladling some of the water into a ceramic basin.
She dropped a handful of turnips into the basin, running her fingers over their smooth white skins to loosen the dirt, and scraping off the clinging specks of earth with her fingernails. The icy water turned her fingers red with cold.
Dolora was chopping up the whitefish and carp and keeping an eye on the pots, so she told Anya to fetch the veal shank from the larder.
Veal shank, hell. More like the biggest side of beef on the block. There was enough on the bone to feed twenty people. Anya couldn’t help letting out an unladylike grunt as she lifted it off the hook and carried it to the kitchen, trying not to get any blood on her apron, even though the meat had been hanging for nearly a day. She set it down on the cutting board, washed her hands in the proper Jewish fashion, and finished washing the turnips. She turned to the pile of cabbages, and began to wash each leaf by hand because the tiniest grub was enough to render the whole dish non-kosher.
She was pining for fresh green vegetables after a long winter of turnips and sauerkraut when her mistress told Katya to take over the washing and sent Anya into the dining room to prepare the main table.
Anya spread the white tablecloth and smoothed out the corners, wondering when Yankev would come back from the study house, since today was a half-holiday. The Jews had a rule against fasting on the day of the Pesach feast, but many of them skipped the midday meal in order to welcome the Seder with a heartier appetite. She was fascinated by how much leeway the Jews had when it came to interpreting their laws.
As she wiped the special set of kosher-for-Pesach dishes with a cloth and set them out, she remembered the day that she was at the cutting board tearing the leftover bits of boiled chicken from a carcass so the cook could make a Sephardic dish of yellow rice and chicken for Rabbi Mendes, when Meisel’s new scholar came into the kitchen, and she asked him, “Tell me, Jew, what is kosher about this meat? How is it different?”
So he told her that it was mainly the method of slaughtering, and draining the blood. Then he told her his name was Yankev, and not “Jew,” and she giggled and apologized and told him her name.
And since that moment, whenever Yankev returned from studying with the rabbi, she would feed him in the kitchen and ask what he had learned about God. A gentle lad with an inquisitive mind, he was so different from the men who hung around Cervenka’s butcher shop making crude comments while she washed the ox blood off her arms. And since they both knew that they would always live in different worlds, they found it easy to speak freely about almost anything while she dried and stacked the dishes. Yankev told her that since any Jew in the congregation could say a blessing over the bread and wine, they had no priestly class that dictated the one correct way of worshiping and behaving.
She liked the idea of eliminating the rigid cadres of men standing between her and God, of having no intermediaries, no infallible rulings, and especially no
extra ecclesiam nulla salus
. Oh, the rabbis could fine you or even banish you from the community in extreme cases, but they couldn’t declare that you weren’t a Jew anymore. Nobody could. Even God couldn’t turn His back on His children forever.
She set out the fancy soup bowls made of heavy cut glass with golden rims. All this for chicken broth and unleavened doughballs?
She peered out the front window. The rain seemed to be letting up, but she didn’t see any sign of Yankev yet.
He had even taught her that the Jews didn’t believe in eternal punishment—that a man named Rabbi Akiva, who lived in the second century, said that the worst sinners only spend twelve months in Hell, which they call
gehenem
, while another rabbi said that the maximum punishment lasts from Pesach to Shvues, which is only
fifty days
.
And according to still another rabbi, Moses ben Something-or-other, evil thoughts pop into our heads for no reason and should not be considered sinful, which was a nice change from the nuns who always told her that the slightest impurity of thought was as bad as the sinful deed itself. (So of course, she was
always
in a sinful state according to them.)
They even said that a Jewish woman didn’t have to live out her days chained to a man who drank, beat her, or screwed around. If she could get her husband to approve the papers, the rabbis let her divorce the bastard.
She looked out the window again. Nothing. Up the block, people were hurrying by on the Breitgasse with more than the usual pre-holiday rush. Something was definitely up.
A flush of panic filled her chest. What if little Katya had been listening behind the door when Yankev told her the Jews believed that the Messiah is merely the messenger of God, not his son? What if the little servant girl had gone running to tell Father Prokop about the heretical ideas Anya was listening to? She told herself not to worry, but she still crept over to the kitchen and peeked around the door. Little Katya was still washing the cabbage, her face placid. Anya breathed easier.
She was laying the embroidered cloth on a silver tray for the three ceremonial matzohs when an iron key scraped the lock and Yankev came in, tracking in water with his boots. Rain dripped down his face, and he was breathing hard. His eyes were tense and humorless.
“Trying to beat the rain?” she asked. But she knew that wasn’t it.
“No. There’s trouble coming, Anya.” He told her all about it, starting with how little Gerta Janek had been found with the blood drained out of her.
She called out to God and cupped her hand to her mouth. Nothing human could have done such a thing.
He told her no, it was clearly knife wounds. No doubt about the perpetrator’s humanity.
She said that it didn’t make sense to blame it on the Jews.
“That may be true,” he said, “but I still have to leave the city to night.”
“To night? Why so soon?”
“You know that I’m not much of a fighter, Anya.”
“But you said the Jews have three days to flush out the killer. And from what you’ve told me, I’m sure he got a lot of blood on his clothes.”
“What difference does it make? A sharp mind is no match for a sharp sword.”
“That’s not what you’ve been telling me for the past six months, Yankele. Where will you go?”
“I hear the Turkish kingdom is pretty safe for Jews these days. Maybe I’ll go all the way to Safed to study with Rabbi Vital.”
“But how will you get past the gates?”
“All it takes is money, Anya, and Reb Meisel will give me what ever I need for such a purpose.”
“But who will teach me—?”
“I’ve told you before that every Jew is a student of the Law.”
But every Jew wasn’t Yankev ben Khayim.
“Well, you can’t leave, at least not until I show you—”
“Show me what?”
She took him by the hand and led him into the pantry. He must have really been distracted by all the troubles because he forgot to remind her that such contact was prohibited. She gave him a conspiratorial smile as she lifted the checked cloth from her basket, picked out two spongy white pastries, and held one out to him.
“Just wait till you taste my Easter buns. I just baked them this morning.”
This delicacy was supposed to wait until Easter, since the recipe called for lots of eggs and sugar. Not exactly lean Good Friday fare. But she told herself it was all right because if Yankev left to night she wouldn’t be seeing him on Sunday. Or ever again. The thought made her unexpectedly sad.
“No, I can’t,” he said.
“It’s still early, isn’t it? I thought the prohibition didn’t start till sundown.”
“The law forbids eating
khumets
after midmorning on the day before Pesach.”
“Just like the law forbids any contact between Christians and Jews of opposite sexes?” She had him there.
She still had so many questions, but someone was pounding on the front door. She heard Lívia scurrying by to see who it was, then heard two men asking to see Mordecai Meisel. There was urgency in their voices.
“Sounds like Rabbi Loew and that newcomer,” Yankev said, turning away from her.
“Don’t leave me like this.”
It just came out. She was as surprised as he was by it.
He stared at her.
She tried to explain. “I mean—everyone comes to Prague. The problem is that they don’t want to leave. Every jerk that marches through here tries to claim it as his own. And—and—well, the Jews don’t. They don’t want to conquer us, they just want to live here and not be bothered. So why should I hate them more than the preachers who say my Church is corrupt or the rich burghers who try to run our lives?”
One of her braids was coming undone, loose hair spilling out of her headkerchief. She had to let her hair down, re-braid it, and tie it back up again.
Yankev watched her strong, quick, movements as her hands shaped her long black hair, which was full of static charge. She caught him looking at her, but he didn’t turn away. He stayed where he was, looking into her dark eyes. And he kept looking as if he had never seen a woman’s eyes up close. They weren’t Christian eyes or Jewish eyes, they were
her
eyes, sparkling like the stars on a dark winter night.
She felt her face grow warm as her hot young blood flowed to the surface of her skin, and she blushed. She had a feeling his hot young blood was flowing, too.
“Tell me, Yankele, how many more years do you have to study until you become a rabbi?”
“There’s no set number of years. You become a rabbi when a community hires you to be a rabbi, or as soon as people start coming up to you asking,
Rabbi, is this pot still kosher
? That could happen to me at any time.”
“And rabbis don’t have to be celibate, like priests?”
“With all due respect, the priests have it all wrong. Celibacy goes against God’s wishes.”
“How can you say that?"
“Because the very first commandment in the Torah is to be fruitful and multiply. God tells Adam and Eve to enjoy each other’s bodies without shame. There’s none of that sex-is-inherently-evil nonsense.”
“It’s supposed to be about purity.”
“Who told you that sex is impure? Love between a married couple is not impure, it’s holy. Even the most pious scholar who studies the Torah every day of the week commits a sin if he doesn’t give his wife joy on the Sabbath.”
Her belly tingled as she thought of the delights of being a married woman.
“And a man does not sin if he loves his wife too much?”
He chuckled at the thought. “Only if it keeps him from fulfilling the other commandments.”
She wondered what it would be like to forget everything else and touch him—no, strike that—to hug him with all her might.
The aroma of stuffed fish drifted in from the kitchen, which meant that Dolora must have already put them in the steamer. Time was running short.
“Why do all the old laws forbid close relations between Jews and the other races?”
“You know why,” he said.
“No, I mean since the days of Solomon, as told in the Book of…uh…”
“It is written in the Book of Kings,” he said. “Because in those days it was a sin to have such relations with idol-worshipers. But in our time, Rabbi Menakhem Ha-Meiri,
a likhtigen gan-eydn zol er hobn
, says that the old prohibition doesn’t apply to modern Christians, because they worship the same God that we do.”