The Fifth Servant (48 page)

           
“So we’re supposed to keep the peace,” he said, heading for the door. “Which always turns out to mean protecting the damn Jews. But orders are orders.”

           
He drew himself up and sauntered out, but he didn’t slam the door this time.

           
Anya watched him go, trying to think good Christian thoughts about him because she knew that’s what she was supposed to do. Only God was in a position to judge another man’s soul, and even a repellent human being with no visible redeeming qualities had just as much right to life as she did. But in her heart she also knew that no one would ever be safe from such insensitive brutes until their kind were banished from sight or buried six feet under ground.

           
When Anya turned back, little Hanuš was trying to set the straw seat of a chair on fire with a piece of kindling.

           
She tried to stop him: “No! Hanuš, don’t—”

           
But before Anya could intervene, Ivana whirled around and slapped the stick of wood from the boy’s hands, then she drew back and smacked him across the face as hard as she could.

           
And so it went with the Ivana and Josef Kromys of the world. Anya accepted that. What bothered her was that they were passing it on to the next generation.

           
She converted that thought into a useful strategy, and asked Ivana about her other children. Ivana wiped her eyes with a kerchief and said that she hadn’t seen her eldest son Tomáš in a while because all he did was work on the docks all day and drink all night, and he didn’t come around much anymore.

           
Anya said that it must be hard to accept, but Tomáš probably saw his share of filth and corruption working in a place like that, and Ivana cut her off to regale her with the latest dirt on how a secret society of Jewish merchants had figured out a way around the laws against selling new clothes to Christians by making a tiny rip in a brand-new set of apparel, then selling it as “used” clothing, then sewing up the rip in less than two minutes while the customer waited, and how she’d have given anything to see their faces when they were caught with the goods.

           
Once they got on to the topic, Anya learned more than she ever wanted to know about a variety of Jewish plots to annihilate the Christians once and for all. Did she know that a sinister cabal of Jewish alchemists had been stockpiling supplies for a scheme to poison the air with some kind of toxic smoke? Ivana couldn’t explain precisely how this deadly cloud of smoke would be restricted to Christian houses, but she had no doubt that the Jews were clever enough to carry it off. Anya tried to steer the conversation toward Janek’s association with Jacob Federn, but that only led to another tirade.

           
“How can you work for those Jews?” Ivana asked. “They’re not like us.”

           
“Oh, they are so very much like us,” Anya replied.

           
“Except that they perform sorcery with Christian blood.”

           
“No, they don’t.”

           
“Then what do they use—animal blood?”

           
A loud screech pierced the air. The little boy was pulling the cat’s tail. Then he twisted it while the tormented animal tried to seek refuge under the table, and Ivana didn’t lift a finger to stop the incessant caterwauling.

           
Anya left the Kromys’ place in a rush, drawing more than her usual share of glances from shop windows and doorways. She felt their eyes on her back all the way down the block, their vigilance reminding her that some of the law books still punished the crime of sex between Christians and Jews with death by fire.

           
She visited the homes of several other wives of city guards, and from their widely disparate accounts of Janek’s illicit ties to Jacob Federn, put it all together into a story that went something like this: Aside from the usual claims that each one owed the other money, Janek once tried to seduce the Jew’s daughter Julie when she was only eleven or twelve years old, but she pushed him away and told her father, who threatened to expose Janek unless he was duly compensated. The price of Federn’s silence was said to be a percentage of Janek’s lucrative trade in imported herbs and spices, which was illegal since Federn wasn’t a Christian burgher.

           
And with her sack emptied of sausages, she headed for the Old Town Square.

           
Some soldiers languishing on the fringes of Haštal Square tried to have some fun at her expense, but she told them to get out of her way or they’d learn how good she was with a butcher knife, and pushed right past them. They chuckled and complimented her spirit, and a pair of them showed their appreciation by removing their plumed hats and bowing as if a gracious lady were passing by.

           
She kept walking, putting some distance between herself and the watchful eyes of the well-meaning neighbors, until halfway down the block, when a hand came out of a doorway and grabbed her by the shoulder.

           
Anya’s heart jumped and she pictured how far she could run before they caught her and dragged her back by the hair as she waited for the rigid voice of male authority to say,
You must come with me now, Fraulein
.

           
Instead it was a tiny female voice that said, “
Bitte sehr!
I’ve got to have a
Liebestrank
from the Jews. Can you get me one?”

           
Anya turned. “A what?”

           
Janoš Kopecky’s kitchen maid Erika was cowering in the doorway as if she were afraid to be seen talking to her. “A love potion. Everyone knows the Jews have all kinds of recipes for love potions.”

           
“What am I, the expert on all things Jewish?” said Anya.

           
“Well, aren’t you—?”

           
“I don’t really have time for this right now,” said Anya, turning away.

           
The girl was devastated.

           
So Anya said, “Look, it’s very simple. All you have to do is write your beloved’s name on a piece of paper and hold it up to a candle flame until the paper starts to burn, and the person whose name you have written will burn with unquenchable desire for you.”

           
The girl gave a tiny shiver of delight, but an instant later her worried look returned.

           
“But who will I get to write his name?”

           
Anya looked up and down the street, then stepped into the vestibule and took out a stubby pencil and a slip of paper. She tore off a tiny piece of paper and stood with the marvelous implement hovering in mid-air, poised to write.

           
“What’s his name?”

           
“Janoš.”

           
Anya stopped just short of making the first stroke of the
J
. It was a common enough name, but all the same she was about to ask the girl if she was sure she wanted to go ahead with this. The young maid sorely needed to have a heart-to-heart with someone.

           
But Anya had too many other things on her mind, so she wrote the name out carefully, letter by letter, folded the paper twice and handed it over.

           
The girl scurried away as if she were the fair damsel in a romance saga running off to join her gallant lover for a secret tryst.

           
Anya finally slipped unobserved into the crowd at Old Town Square, hiding beneath the streams of bright fabric hanging from the branches that were giving form to the wind and painting the air with flickering tongues of yellow and orange. The Church of Our Lady of Týn stood by impassively, her severe black spires sticking up like knife blades in the featureless sky. Merchants decorated their booths with parti-colored Easter eggs while the festive pageant wagons rolled through the middle of the crowd like ships borne aloft on a sea of upturned faces.

           
But Anya was not distracted by all the color and commotion, looking neither to the left nor to the right as she steered a course through the waves of people to that place where earlier in the day, one of the women in the pillory had called out something that sounded vaguely like her name. It had been too muffled for her to be certain, but she couldn’t live with that doubt and she had to find out for sure.

           
She knew it as soon as their eyes met. Despite the mask, she recognized the brownish-green eyes, reddened with fatigue though they were. It was Kassy the wise woman who had called to her, and now she was a prisoner of the municipal authorities. The masked woman came forward as far as her restraints allowed, and kneeled as Anya approached the platform. Anya could barely make out what Kassy was saying because they had clamped a bit over her tongue, but she was able to slip her the pencil and paper to scribble down the essentials before the city guards stepped between them and shoved Kassy back with the butt-end of a pike.

           
Anya hurried away before they could question her and plunged back into the crowd, clutching the scrap of paper to her chest. When she had scrambled far enough away, she read the note and realized that Kassy had discovered the secret of the strange herbs, and that she had to deliver this message to the Jews right away. But she had one more thing to take care of first.

           
The nearest confessional was in the Church of the Holy Spirit.

           
She was hurrying up the steps to the church when a decrepit beggar rattled his cup at her.

           
She was about to rush past him without a second glance when the beggar said, “Going to confess now, aren’t you?”

           
She stopped and looked him over with a critical eye, since so many of these beggars were charlatans skilled in the arts of painted scars and feigned injuries. But one of his legs was clearly stunted and shrunken from an old wound, and his outstretched hand looked like it had weathered nearly eighty winters or more.

           
“How did you—?”

           
“Late afternoon, last Mass before Easter, and a pretty young lady in a hurry,” he said. “It always means a confession.”

           
“And what if it does?”

           
“Maybe nothing. But if I were you, I’d watch what I said to the bastards.”

           
Anya was shocked by the beggar’s words. But then she saw the indelible mark, half-hidden under the worn sleeve on his right arm, of a single word spelled out in faded red letters:
Fryheit.

           
The German word for
freedom
.

           
Which meant that he must have been a veteran of the great revolt, when thousands of armed peasants stood up to the nobles and paid for it with their blood.

           
Anya couldn’t think of a reply. All she could do was reach into her apron and drop a coin into his cup with a helpless
plink
.

           
The church was cool and dark inside, and steeped in the age-old scent of sanctity, which embraced her like a lover and filled the whole of her being. The comforting smell enveloped her as the yellow chunks of incense gave themselves to the smoldering fires, and in doing so released the smoke that rose heavenward from the swinging censers and began the slow transformation to ashes.

           
The priest was droning on and on in a low voice, but she could barely follow what he was saying. Her eyes were fixed on the dark, narrow entrance to the confessional while the priest’s Latin phrases paraded by like disembodied dancers in a strange carnival of emotions, their sounds elongated and stretched beyond meaning.

           
She had always been among the faithful who got swept up in the pageantry of the Church, and celebrated the act of prayer as the gift of joyous meditation that it was supposed to be, not as a dose of medicine to be gulped down with a shudder, a bitter pill to be endured.

           
But the beggar’s words haunted her.

           
She sat there going over it all from the beginning as one Christian soul stepped out of the confessional booth and another took his place.

           
She heard the invocations, but except for the occasional
ora pro nobis
, which meant
pray for us
, the priest’s words held as much meaning as the sound of pebbles dropping into a fast-moving river, and she wished that she could simply open the Good Book and read the passages aloud for herself and for others. But even if they let her come forward and sully its illuminated pages with her dish maid’s hands, she would find that it was written in that same archaic and inaccessible cipher as always.

           
Anya watched the fragrant wisps of smoke curling lazily around the pedestal supporting the closed book, and she thought back to the gentle way that Yankev had instructed her in the ways of the Bible.