The Fifth Servant (22 page)

           
I wound my way back toward Zigeuner Street, hunger slowly sapping the clarity from my brain. It was a bad day to go without eating. I needed all my strength to get through this.

           
The Rozanskys’ print shop was just around the corner from the East Gate, but the masons had stopped work for the day, leaving stacks of paving stones in the middle of Zigeuner Street. And even though we’d been married for four years, my chest was tightening like a teenage groom’s on the morning of an arranged marriage.

           
I held the door for two men delivering reams of broadside paper, and entered the shop. An apprentice rushed past with a tray of spare type, while the master and his assistants rolled the sticky-wet ink on the finished frames and pulled pages from the press with such rapidity it seemed as if the letters were about to take flight.

           
Reyzl was standing at a steeply tilted table, setting type and leading like she was born to it. I drank in the sight of her, this industrious female with her fingers covered with ink, smears going halfway up her arms, and a smudge over her right eye where she must have tried to brush away a bit of loose dark hair that the sweat had plastered to her forehead. I watched her slender hands fly from the upper case to the frame, composing the last lines on the final page of the book, backward, from left to right: “Arranged and finished by the typesetter Reyzl, daughter of Zalman, of the Rozansky family of Prague.”

           
“Nice-looking typeface,” I said.

           
“It should be,” she said without looking up. “Jacob Bak himself designed it before he left for Venice.”

           
I maneuvered around her, and peered at the handwritten text she was working from.

           
“What is it?”

           
“It’s a book of customs for women—and for men who might as well be women,” she said, finally looking up at me. Her eyes showed no fire, no flash, no blazing love or hatred. It was a look she might use on a traveling peddler selling secondhand lice combs.

           
I dredged up what was left of the speech I had prepared: “Look, I know I’ve disappointed you—”

           
“Don’t underestimate yourself,” she said. “You’ve disappointed my whole family.”

           
“Your father always liked me.”

           
“Sure, once upon a time.”

           
My eyes fell on the backward letters in the type frame.

           
“So how does this story end?”

           
“It ended a long time ago, Benyamin.”

           
My father-in-law’s voice cut through the noise: “Reyzl! We’re out of
tsadeks
. Be a good girl and—”

           
He saw me and stopped. Zalman Rozansky was short and stocky, his wiry beard as black as a Gypsy’s.

           
“Oh, it’s you. Is he bothering you, Reyzele?”

           
“No, it’s all right,
tateleh
. I’m fine.”

           
He told me, “There are sixty-eight other printers in Prague. Go bother one of them and quit wasting my daughter’s time.”

           
“I’m not wasting time—”

           
“Like I said, we’re out of
tsadeks
, and Katz and Loeb are sitting on trays of them.”

           
“And you want me to go over and borrow some,” said Reyzl.

           
“Get some
reyshes
too, if you can.” He turned back to me. “You know how hard it is to get materials without a royal
privilegeum
for printing in Hebrew type? And guess who’s got the only one. Solomon Kohen.”

           
Back in the 1580s, one of the Kohen brothers had shown quite an interest in young Reyzl Rozansky. The inference was clear.

           
“We’re already pushing it past legal hours, Mr.
Slonimer
, and I don’t want you slowing her down or following her through the streets, is that clear?”

           
“Yes, sir.”

           
“Good.”

           
Rozansky went back to check the latest page proofs, grumbling about his worthless son-in-law, until his words were lost in the clanking of the huge letterpress.

           
“So, you finally found me,” she said, pulling off her apron and tossing it on a shelf.

           
“Finding you was the easy part.”

           
“Then why didn’t you drop everything and come right after me?”

           
“I couldn’t just abandon all our obligations. I had to fill the orders, close the accounts, and wait until they found a replacement for me at the
kheyder
.”

           
“And that took two months?”

           
“It takes a while to get things done in a small town.”

           
“You can say that again,” she said, stretching and arching her back until it cracked. I remembered how I used to massage her neck and shoulders after a long day waiting on the customers. She had always appreciated that.

           
I said, “You had one of the biggest dry goods stores in Slonim.”

           
“I had to do
something
with myself or I would have gone out of my mind with boredom in that place. Believe me, the
cemeteries
in Prague are livelier than the central marketplace in Slonim.”

           
“We could move to another part of Poland.”

           
“And make a living doing what? Collecting taxes for the big landowners?
There’s
a popular profession.”

           
“It’s a center of Jewish learning, and there’s a lot of trade in the big cities.”

           
“What
big cities?”

           
“Kraków, Lvov, Poznan—”

           
“Every one of them full of Jew haters.”

           
“It’s worse in Germany.”

           
“Is it? Take a look around you. Rudolf’s the best king we’ve had in
ages
. The last expulsion was thirty-five years ago.”

           
I followed her over to the washbasin, where she lathered up her hands with coarse, gritty soap.

           
“You have no idea what I gave up for you,” she said. “And you never showed any willingness to do the same for me.”

           
Ink darkened the water in the basin.

           
“How can you say that when I quit my position to come here and be with you?”

           
“Well, you can go ask for it back.”

           
“No, I can’t. I’m working for Rabbi Loew now. He’s hired me to investigate a conspiracy against the Jewish community—” I said, reaching inside my cloak and showing her the new contract, but she waved it away.

           
“Marrying an outsider cost me all my rights to citizenship in Prague.” She checked her dripping hands. The ink had faded slightly. She used more of the gritty soap. “And I want my rights back.”

           
“There’s still time for us to start over. We’re still young enough.”

           
“No, we’re not.”

           
“All right, maybe I’m not. But you are,” I said. The pressure was building like a fist behind my eyeballs, and I needed to select my words with great care.

           
She kept scrubbing her hands.

           
She said, “You could have gotten a rabbinical post in Kolín or Roudnice, built up your reputation, and come to Prague as a respected member of the town council, but you settled for being a
shrayber
in that far-flung
shtetl
just because you were one of the three people within fifty miles of the place who could read and write.”

           
“When Rabbi Lindermeyer left me without a letter of referral, I was lucky to get a post as assistant to the
Slonimer Rebbe
.”

           
“Some luck. Exiled to a place where your spit freezes before it hits the ground.”

           
That wasn’t the only thing that froze, but I didn’t particularly mind the cold in that small, northern town. At least it was predictable. And there was something peaceful about the way the snow blanketed the land for miles around.

           
Reyzl examined her hands. Traces of ink still remained etched deep in the lines of her palms and under her fingernails. She kept scrubbing.

           
They say that even your worst enemy contains a spark of the divine, but it’s a lot easier to see it in a pretty young woman.

           
I said, “I wish that our spirits could float above all this, to the places of God’s miracles, and mingle with every other soul in creation.”

           
“That’s because you’ve been studying with that mystical rabbi who thinks that rearranging numbers can unlock the secrets of the universe. Well, I arrange numbers every day—it’s called double-entry accounting—and they haven’t unlocked any secrets other than the fact that if you spend more than you take in, you starve.”

           
“Nobody starves in our community.”

           
“Oh, right, I forgot. We can always get a bowl of watery oatmeal in the poor house.”

           
There was shouting in the street, but I didn’t really notice it.

           
“How much time do we get here?” I said. “How many years do we have together? Can’t we at least find happiness in the short time that we’re here?”

           
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

           
“I mean together.”

           
Piles of gray paving stones sat outside the window, unmoved by my plight.

           
I said, “All this other stuff around us comes and goes with the seasons, but your love is a bridge to the next world. Union with you is like a foretaste of heaven—”

           
“Don’t talk about that in here,” she said, stepping away and examining her face in a broken piece of mirror nailed to the wall. She moistened a rag with soap and wiped at the smudge over her eye.

           
“Rabbi Horowitz says that there is no holiness like the union of man and wife.”

           
“Except when the woman’s womb is not strong enough to bring healthy children to term. That changes everything. Then the rabbis say that a childless man is like a dead man, which means that not having kids is practically the same as murder. So there—you can divorce me on those grounds.”

           
My breath caught halfway down my throat. She had actually used the word for divorce—a
get
, such a short, sharp word in Yiddish—like a punch in the gut, and I had to be careful not to take the bait. I had to remain logical about this.

           
I said, “You’ve got to wait six more years before that will hold up in the
beys din
.”

           
“All right, then have me declared a rebellious woman who refuses to have sex with her husband. You can even deduct the money from the
ksubeh
.”

           
“I don’t want to deduct money from the
ksibeh
, I want
you
.”

           
“Then I’ll tell them you’re not providing for me, that you’re unfaithful, and that you beat me.”

           
“You wouldn’t do that.”

           
“I will if it’s the only way I’m going to be free to remarry.”

           
People were running by the front of the shop with panic in their eyes.

           
“Reyzl—” I said. This was as hard as parting the Red Sea. “Our marriage was foretold in heaven. Forty days before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs, a heavenly voice decreed, ‘The daughter of Zalman Rozansky will marry the son of Akiva ben Areleh.’”

           
“So maybe they made a mistake. Some heavenly office clerk—made a mistake. I’m sure it happens.”

           
“But…I will have no son to say
Kaddish
for me when I’m gone.”

           
She tossed the towel next to the basin.

           
“So get a shammes to do it. Better still, get two. They’re cheap enough.”