The Fifth Servant (32 page)

           
A scale model of the city of Prague lay across three tabletops, taking up most of the artist’s studio, including all the hills and valleys and the river running through the middle, with countless houses made of bits of wood and canvas. Thousands of tiny chimneys rose from roofs that Langweil had adorned with rows of orange tile, each one painted on with a brush about the width of an eyelash. Each window was distinct, whether it had four panes or six, an iron grille in front of it or ornate curlicues below the sill. Nothing had escaped his cunning eye. He had glued bits of spruce and other natural objects together to reproduce the bushes and trees in the cemetery, the rocky outcroppings on the shore, and even the ripples in the rushing water. Tiny loads of lumber were stacked by the river’s edge waiting to be shipped out, and he had painstakingly outlined the details of each brick in the Old-New Shul’s distinctive roof columns, as well as the faces of the Old Town Clock.

           
The whole thing stank of horse glue.

           
Yet the model was an absolute marvel. And it allowed me to appreciate how truly vulnerable we were in terms of sheer proportions. Spread out on the table in front of me, the Old Town was easily six or seven times larger than the ghetto. The Little Town and the castle were larger still, and Langweil hadn’t even started on the New Town, which had the big horse and cattle markets and so many neighborhoods it needed its own town hall.

           
The Christians had it all: fortified walls topped with crenellated teeth in the old style, powder towers for storing ammunition, and hotels and castles that laid claim to all the surrounding high ground, while we lay in the flood plain by the river. Did the river offer a refuge? A way out?

           
I looked closer.

           
He had even labeled the streets, but I could barely make out his scribbling, which made the words look like the bending images of tree branches reflected on the surface of a pond. Then I noticed that he had put himself in his model, in the darkened window of the jail on Stockhausgasse. So he had a grim sense of humor, which was probably what kept him alive.

           
He’d made it sound like something he had taken up to pass the time when the steady work dried up, but anyone could see that he had spent years on it. He had spent years in this room, making a model of the city. For what purpose, exactly?

           
Maybe
this
one.

           
In his discussion of the Mishnah, Rambam says that a man may spend many years building a palace without knowing the true purpose of his labors. It may all be to satisfy God’s will that a century later, a pious man shall be saved from the scorching rays of the sun by lying in the shade of one of its walls.

           
“Your model may end up serving a higher purpose by helping us save the ghetto from destruction,” I said, drawing a circle in the air around his miniature representation of the
Yidnshtot
.

           
And from high above, I saw just how easy it would be to destroy it all. All those tiny bits of wood and canvas and horse glue would go up at the merest touch of a flame, the smoke curling up to be reconstituted in the World-to-Come.

           
Of course, we had recovered from such assaults in the past. The sands of time were littered with the remains of the proud empires that had tried to destroy us. But still, it was something to be avoided. A seedling growing from the stump of an oak is not the same as the original tree.

           
I studied the model, getting a feel for the layout of the city that I had been sorely lacking, particularly the area around the ghetto, noting the lines of sight down certain streets and the relationships between the angle of some rooftops and the street corners that made up the presumed itinerary of the butcher’s wagon.

           
I focused on the street that ran south from the river along the eastern edge of the ghetto. It was the shortest route from the dockyards at Johannes Platz to the Geistgasse where Federn’s shop stood (that is, until they torched it this afternoon). The shop was still intact on the model.

           
The wagon drivers must have had a hell of a time turning that big cart around on this narrow street, but if they had kept going straight, they would have ended up in the biggest public square in the city. So they took the trouble to turn around and tore off down Stockhausgasse, which leads to a four-way intersection at Haštal Square, where they had their choice of escape routes. But they probably wouldn’t have turned back, or turned south toward Old Town Square, so that left two possibilities, north on Kozí Street or farther east on Hastalgasse. And then what?

           
Something caught my eye. Langweil’s model included a house with a long row of windows on the second floor overlooking a key stretch of the Geistgasse where the girl’s body had been dropped.

           
“Do you know who occupies these rooms?” I asked.

           
“No one’s ever asked me a question like that before,” he said, leaning over to examine the spot under my finger. “It’s always,
How long did it take you? What did you use to make the bushes?
But why do you want to know something like that? You don’t think that a Jew had something to do with this?”

           
“No, no, of course not. God forbid. I was only thinking that anyone staying in those rooms might have seen something unusual, if they were up early enough.”

           
“Well, let me see…hmm…” He made a clucking sound that for some reason I found extremely irritating at that moment. I told myself that if I would just be patient, all would be revealed.

           
Finally he said, “Ah, yes. The second-floor windows face the Christian street, but the entrance to this building is on the Shammesgasse. That’s where Rabbi Aaron’s study group meets every morning, just before sunrise.”

           
Oy vey
. Fifty rabbis in this town and it just had to be him.

           
Izzy said, “See? That’s a whole classroom full of
yeshiva bokhers
who might have seen something if they weren’t paying attention to the rabbi.”

           
“I can’t imagine Rabbi Aaron having much tolerance for inattention.”

           
“They’re probably still there,” said Langweil. “They usually stay up pretty late burning the midnight oil. If you hurry, maybe you can catch them.”

           
“This is your lucky day, my friend,” said Izzy.

           
“Right. I figured if I stayed in one place long enough, some luck was bound to stick to me.”

           
THE S HAMMESGASSE BARELY COUNTED as a street, even in this part of the ghetto. It was a dead end, ankle deep in murky water from today’s rainstorms, and barely wide enough for two men to pass each other without scraping their elbows on the peeling plaster. The crumbling houses leaned on each other for support like a group of penniless old beggars who had turned their faces to the outer streets and gave their humble backs to this alleyway.

           
A wooden sign swaying in the wind marked the house we were looking for. The faded lettering was barely legible:

           
A verse from the Book of Job, offering hospitality to all newcomers:
No stranger ever passed the night in the street, my door was always open to any guest.
The text was in Hebrew only, however. Rabbi Aaron may have been openly welcoming strangers, but he wasn’t crazy. Any strangers who wanted a bed for the night had better know how to read Biblical Hebrew.

           
All that mystical talk with Langweil must have gotten inside my skull, because as I crossed the threshold, I felt a prickling under my skin as if I were leaping over a chasm, sensing for the briefest moment what the Kabbalists call the presence of God’s absolute Being between the gaps in our experience of the world.

           
I was breathing hard, but somehow I made it up to the second floor without upsetting the balance of the universe. I listened outside the door while waiting for my heart to slow down. They must have been discussing the tractate Niddah, because they were talking about how a new bride who notices some spotting after performing her marital duty may be declared ritually clean, because the blood did not issue from “the source,” a polite term for the uterus. One of the students raised a difficult question about a
married
woman who still bleeds from “that place” during intercourse.

           
Rabbi Aaron answered in classic Talmudic fashion, by posing another question. “Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel ruled that the blood of a wound that issues from the source is unclean. On the other hand, Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi and our Masters declared that such blood is clean. Why the discrepancy?”

           
Before today I would have nodded in approval, but now the high-level debate of such a fine legal point seemed almost alien to me. We needed to act, and swiftly, or else I could practically guarantee that pretty soon we’d all be seeing plenty of blood, and that nobody would have the time to debate whether it was clean or unclean.

           
Rabbi Aaron wasn’t pleased with the interruption, but if I learned anything in the old school it was how to kiss up to people I can’t stand, so I bowed humbly and wished him a
gutn Shabbes
and did my best to avoid the charges of “working” on the Sabbath by confessing that I was here because I was lacking a crucial bit of knowledge that only he and his students could provide for me.

           
An intellectual problem to solve? Nothing could interest them more. They rose from their benches and formed a loose semicircle around me, asking for details. They all had the same closely cropped hair, like some splinter sect of reverse-Nazirites, as if every applicant had to chop off his hair to join their little study group.

           
I told them I needed to know if anyone had seen a butcher’s cart pass by that morning, just before sunrise, heading south toward Federn’s shop, or if they remembered seeing anything else out of the ordinary, no matter how insignificant it might seem. I reminded them that the Holy One, Blessed is He, did not create a single thing that is useless (Tractate Shabbes), and that even a snake, a scorpion, a frog, or a gnat may carry out His mission (
Breyshis Raboh
).

           
They nodded vigorously and told me that they had seen a number of omens that day, bombarding me with stories of how this one felt his foot or his palm itch, or that one saw a pot of milk boil over and spill on the fire, or broke a shoelace, or heard the maid singing before breakfast. All bad signs, apparently.

           
A young student named Bloch, with short blond hair and bright blue eyes, told me in all seriousness that he had heard thunder, and that thunder on a Friday means the Angel of Death is walking the streets of the ghetto searching for victims.

           
Then a skinny fellow with big ears and deep-set eyes named Schmerz claimed to have seen it all unfolding, from the swarm of bloody rats to the mob of angry Christians torching Federn’s shop. He described the men in the cart that nearly ran me down as a big man with a wrestler’s body and a driver whose face was half-hidden by a black mustache and beard. He said he had seen them before. But as I pressed him for details, he got that possessed look that I’ve seen in newly minted converts as he explained that these events were harbingers of the final split between the Chosen People and the
goyim
, and that God was punishing us because we had become too much like the Christians, but that all the horrors to be visited upon us were necessary, since they would hasten the coming of the Messiah and bring an end to the Jewish Exile forever.

           
And the thought came over me, creeping in from the edges of my awareness like a malodorous breeze drifting through the window, that such devotees of messianism were capable of anything, and that some wild-eyed fanatic could very well have committed this crime in the hopes of precipitating a crisis that would somehow “purify” the Jews and speed their return to the Land of Israel. So it was possible that a Jew could have done it.