The Oath

  “In a town that is afraid, yesterday’s bonds turn into heartbreak. Fear is absorbed and communicated like poison or leprosy. Once contaminated by fear, you too become a carrier. And you transmit it the way primary experience is transmitted: involuntarily, unwittingly, almost clandestinely; from eye to eye, from mouth to mouth, to the unearthly sound uttered by a mouthless creature covered with eyes, a creature whose eyes signify death. It flaps its wings, and with its every flutter you slide closer to the precipice, where, finally, your fear, clinging to your breath, will founder. And at the bottom of that abyss there lies a town possessed by fear. But it is not a fear of God or even in God. There, fear is God.”

  Berish the Beadle, inconsolable widower, lifted his head toward his daughter Hannah. “I promised your mother on her deathbed that I would watch over you; and I did. I promised her that you would grow up into a good Jewish woman; you have. But I also promised her to make you a happy woman, and that part of my promise, daughter, I am afraid I cannot keep.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Hannah, a tall, bright-eyed girl. “Nothing is certain, you know. This night too will pass; there will be others—happy ones, long nights of celebration.”

  Hannah did not believe her own words. She recited them absent-mindedly to calm her father. That he should be poor and weak, the laughingstock of the town—that she had accepted. But his quiet, contained despair was breaking her heart. He had of late become obsessed by a horrifying unmentionable vision of the rape of his daughter during a pogrom.

  “Your mother would never forgive me. And yet, it is not my fault. I have done everything to protect you, to offer you what a father like me can give a daughter like you. But your mother, of blessed memory, will choose not to understand, you know her. She will put all the blame on me. I didn’t do this, I did that poorly. Everything will have been my fault, you’ll see.”

  Hannah went up to her father and tenderly touched his elbow. “Stop, Father. Stop torturing yourself. If Mother is watching, she knows the truth, and even better than we do. She will not reproach you for anything; nobody will. Besides, nothing will happen, you’ll see.”

  On the verge of tears, the beadle sighed: “I am afraid, Hannah. Not for myself, but for you. You don’t know what they are capable of. You cannot know. An aroused mob respects nothing, pities nobody.”

  “Stop, Father. You are imagining things.”

  “You don’t know what a pogrom is, you cannot know. Insanity unleashed, demons at liberty. The basest instincts, the most vile laughter. Hell’s flames frighten me less; there is no blind cruelty in hell, no gratuitous savagery. There is no desecration in hell. No trampled innocence.”

  “Father, please. Stop. You exaggerate. As always. You love doing that. But now is not the time. Another time, all right? Tomorrow?” She took her father by the hand as if he were a sick man, and with infinite affection and tenderness, led him to his bed, helped him to lie down.

  And then Hannah let herself fall into a chair, her hands clasped in her lap, painfully awake.

  The Rebbe stared at the scribe and shook his head to indicate no. “We were wrong. Wrong to try, wrong to hope. Help cannot come from the other side. A Jew must not expect anything from Christians, man must not expect anything from man. Consolation can and must come only from God.”

  “Yes, we were wrong.”

  The Rebbe had sent the scribe to the other end of town with a note to the Bishop, requesting a meeting: “In the name of that which is holy to you and to us; in the name of the esteem our predecessors manifested for one another, I beseech you to show your humaneness by receiving me at once.”

  Reb Hersh had returned empty-handed; he had rung at the door of the Bishop’s private apartments behind the cloister, but the old servant had refused to open the door. Though she accepted the letter, she pretended she would be unable to hand it to her master before the next day, the Bishop being away on a journey.

  “She was lying,” said the scribe in a rage, which was unlike him. “The Bishop was at home. The servant was not alone, I felt it. My eyes are sharp and so are my ears. I heard noises, suspicious noises, dragging footsteps, whispers. Eyes other than hers were watching me. She was play-acting, that servant. She was a good liar but a bad actress.”

  “This new Bishop is not like the other one. He was a fine man, our Bishop, open and good. Our people wept when he died, or so I have been told. They were right. Changes always work against us.” He tossed his head back and mused out loud: “I wonder what people will say about me one day, and about you, Reb Hersh …”

  Perhaps they will say nothing.

  Now it was dark everywhere. In heaven and on earth. The houses were dark. The streets were dark; the lamps had still not been lit. So it was premeditated. Well, anyway, nobody was venturing into the street. Yet, it was mild, as before the first snow.

  A ghost town, the little town no longer cradled, no longer protected by the surrounding mountains. Blind houses, silent hovels—the very shadows were still, stifling all noise at the source.

  The Prefect had stopped drinking. Leah, resigned to not sleeping this night, let her tears trickle into her mouth. Her husband would not be pleased? She couldn’t help that. These tears that were flowing, they were stronger than she. How could she hold them back? Davidov and his sons erected barricades, reinforcing them with beams. Tamar and her mother were already in the cellar. Berish the Beadle fought vainly against his nightmarish visions. Shaike and his comrades, assembled in their headquarters, awaited a signal from their strategically posted lookouts to move into action. The beggars listened to their new leader, Adam the Gravedigger, recalling his adventures in the cemetery. The Rebbe had given up on finding the book whose title he could not remember. He stood leaning against the bookcase, looking like someone trying to decipher a sign only he could see. Toli followed his grandfather into the kingdom of his childhood, but the old man was speaking so low that Toli missed three-quarters of what he said. Moshe in his cell was working on the speech he planned to deliver to the Celestial Tribunal.

  Elsewhere and everywhere, there was a deceptive silence, a false peace. Behind bolted doors and windows people remained huddled in darkness—the darkness of fear, the darkness of death—resenting their hearts for pounding too hard and time for not running fast enough, nor far enough.

  A grave-town, the little town the night watchmen no longer illuminated. Not a glimmer, not a sound. The river had ceased to flow, the mountain to tremble. It was as though even the wind had fled this uninhabited zone where silence and night had replaced nature and freedom.

  “A town that is afraid is a banished town” noted my father in the Book.

  In the windowless cellar where all three of us had taken refuge, he had lit a candle, not to write better—he wrote in the dark—but to be able to read, and make me read.

  Excerpts from the Book of the holy community of Kolvillàg:

  … On the morning of the fifth day of the month Tishri of the year 4973 (1193 C.E.) even while we were doing penitence, as one is wont to do between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the news was brought that the Crusaders were approaching, led by Petros, the warrior-bishop of sinister renown.

  They had already crossed with their swords the holy communities of Srik, Ptur and Rulla, all of them felled during New Year services, their sanctuaries turned into cemeteries, the rare survivors into gravediggers.

  Without wasting a minute, the Rabbi of Virgirsk, the venerable Barukh ben Yehuda, ordered all the Jews to assemble immediately in his house. In less than one hour, all—men, women and children—had followed the call. The Rabbi ascertained that nobody was missing and then he addressed them thus: “It seems that the decree has been sealed and that it is without appeal. May His will be done, Amen. Let us pray, brothers and sisters, let us pray with all our strength. And thus may our departure take place in prayer and purity. Let us pray, brothers and sisters, since death is awaiting us and God is calling.”

  And all began to pray with fervor, s
o much fervor that they did not hear the killers break down the doors, nor did they hear their savage cries, or the sound of the sabers decapitating the first victims.

  The fourteen survivors are unanimous in their deposition: all the Jews of Virgirsk perished without ever seeing their executioners.

  *

  … And this took place on the ninth day of the month Av of the year 5292 (1532 C.E.), a date commemorating countless afflictions. Never do we approach it without anguish and never do we know whether our lamentations bear on the distant past or on the present. This year it bore on the present.

  We learned what happened from a certain Yona ben Shmuel, a butcher and poultry dealer by trade. Admittedly the trials he underwent have affected his reason. While unacceptable to a court, his testimony must nevertheless be acknowledged by history.

  “It was funny,” said Yona son of Shmuel. “There was this big fellow of a warrior, resplendent in his armor, irascible, authoritarian. If, by misfortune, there exists an angel or a god of war, he resembles him. Handsome, noble features, gentle bright eyes. I imagined his hands to be long, thin, nervous. I should have liked to see them and compare them to mine, which are ugly and rough—but he was wearing gloves.

  “The soldiers, one after the other, showed him the victims before cutting them down. He did nothing but nod his head, as though to salute death.

  “But when they presented Esther, the delicate and virtuous spouse of our benefactor Ephraim, he raised his arm. And the soldiers retreated as the woman moved forward.

  “And she stood before him straight and proud, clasping the child to her breast. She looked at him wordlessly, steadily; she must have thought him capable of pity.

  “It was funny because he held out both his hands and waited serenely. And Esther, whose face lit up with a mysterious smile, entrusted him with the child. And all those present who are still alive agree that her gesture had the grace of an offering.

  “The child was not crying. Nor was the mother. It all took place in silence. Not one word was exchanged, not one cry was heard. Confident against all odds, the woman gazed at the god of death who did not wear a mask; and suddenly she understood that she had been betrayed. The god of death conceals from us his hands, his hands and not his face. A glint of terror tore through Esther’s eyes. She wondered what to do with her discovery. She covered her mouth so as not to scream, and her eyes so as not to see, not to see her child splattering the muddy cobblestones and the god of death with its blood. The noble warrior seemed surprised, disappointed. And somewhat sad. And I, Yona, thought it funny.”

  A footnote by the chronicler Asher son of Jacob:

  We have stressed that Yona is no longer quite sane. But history accepts testimony even from those who have lost their sanity. Let us add, for the sake of truth, that Esther, spared, did not confirm the former butcher and poultry dealer’s deposition. Nor did she deny it. Besides, it is said that she has lost the power of speech.

  *

  … And this is what a gentle and devout young girl did to save the life and honor of her community (1523? 1553? The date is blurred.).

  Her name was Brakha—benediction. And that is what she was. For her parents and also for her friends. To see her was to smile, if only to receive her smile in return.

  Widowed and of modest means, her father never complained. On the contrary, he never ceased to express his gratitude to God for having given him Brakha.

  She was the dream of his dreams, the joy of his awakenings.

  Came the ill-fated day when the oldest son of the squire, proprietor of seven hamlets and twelve estates, saw Brakha near the stream and desired her. So ardent was his desire that he offered her father a thousand ducats for one night with her. When he was refused, his passion became so violent that he declared himself ready to wed the young girl before God and the church. His distressed parents surrounded him with wealthy and coveted young girls, one more attractive than the next, but he rejected them all, rather rudely it must be said. He yearned only for Brakha, which was understandable, for she was truly beautiful and truly perfect. Eventually he foundered into the blackest of melancholies, refusing food and sleep; he had lost his taste for life. He grew thinner and thinner, and no longer left his rooms. And the healers summoned from far and wide confessed their inability to cure his ailment.

  And then his father the squire followed advice tendered by sworn enemies of Israel. He resorted to a threat. If Brakha continued to refuse herself to his son, members of her family and her friends and all the Jewish families would pay with their lives. That was the message he had delivered to the young girl and her prostrate father, allowing them twenty-four hours of deliberation.

  Brakha asked to be taken to the dean of the rabbinical court, and this is what she told him: My beauty comes from God and from the people He places on my path; my life is mine but in some measure it is also theirs. That is why I wish to defer to the community; let it decide in my stead.

  And the truth must be recorded even if it rends our hearts. To our great shame, as soon as the news spread, there were those who thought of nothing but their own interests. It grieves me to admit it, but they resorted to the most transparent of arguments, to the most abject of means to persuade Brakha to follow the example of Queen Esther, long ago, and marry the lovesick young lord. But, and this too must be noted, there were also those, more numerous, who insisted on their inability to take a stand; the decision properly was the poor young girl’s, and hers alone. And they made her understand that they would not judge her, that they would admire and love her even if her answer would result in the death of their children.

  After a day and a night of solitary meditation, Brakha put the house in order, kissed her father, made him promise to take care of himself and also not to prolong mourning beyond the required period and went her way with a light and graceful step.

  She went in the direction of the forest. There, with a knife she had concealed on her person, she mutilated her face and breasts. Her beauty chastised, she went to the castle but was refused admittance by the watchmen, for she was disfigured and her wounds were repulsive. “Tell the young lord that I came and left, and describe to him how I looked,” she told the watchmen.

  Her body was found the next day, at the bottom of a well. It is said that there were those who sighed with relief, but they were few and did so only in secret. The others, and they were the majority, tore their clothes as a token of mourning.

  People still speak of Brakha’s beauty, more even than of her death. That is strange and that is the reason why mention of it is made here.

  *

  … And this is how death came to a man both just and courageous, though misunderstood in his own day.

  Zemakh fulfilled the duties of beadle at the Rabbinate of Klausberg. He cleaned the place, fed the hearth in winter, called the faithful to Selihot services, showed visitors to the rabbi’s study, helped the clerk in charge of baths on Friday, carried messages, packages, never accepting payment. He was one of those persons who cannot say no.

  As bad luck would have it, he was noticed by Lupu, nobody knows under what circumstances. It was a Tuesday, the twenty-first day of the month Tamuz, of the year 5563 (1803 C.E.). Never before had Lupu left his tower on Tuesday. It was morning and never before had Lupu ever gone out before noon. And when he appeared on horseback at the foot of the mountain, the Jews ran for shelter, so dreaded was he. Thus one fails to understand how Lupu and Zemakh could have met, nor why Zemakh considered it necessary, subsequently, to defy the most cruel of lords.

  This Lupu was a monster, figuratively and literally. His body was twisted. His torso was that of a child. One eye, no forehead, crooked nose over a gaping mouth. He was so ugly that pregnant women exorcised him from their thoughts, and so bloodthirsty that his own brothers and sisters chose exile over him.

  Why, O God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, why did he have to happen on poor Zemakh that morning? You who arrange encounters, why did You not prevent that one?
r />   Zemakh had gone to run an errand for the rabbi. The place where he was noticed by Lupu was not even on his way. Why did he make a detour? Why did he not take flight like everybody else? Did You bring the two men face to face? To bring sainthood to Zemakh and defeat to his murderer?

  For that is what occurred. Before our eyes. In the marketplace, in full view of a large crowd. Yes, such had been Lupu’s orders: a mustering of the population on the main square. Used to his whims and fearing his wrath, Jews and Christians obeyed.

  Lupu waited for the square to fill before he dismounted. Planted on his ridiculously frail little legs, he was more frightening than in the saddle. One felt that demoniacal forces had chosen his body as symbol and instrument. People tried to look at him without seeing him. They feared, woe unto them, to be unable to resist laughter.

  Meanwhile Lupu was tottering toward Zemakh, who, to everyone’s amazement, did not step back.

  The petrified crowd anticipated the worst.

  Lupu halted in front of Zemakh. Midget and giant confronted one another for a moment in silence. Then Lupu grimaced and screamed: “I should beat you, disfigure you, decapitate you, reduce you to my size, and I shall, unless your God helps you to persuade me of the uselessness of all this. I don’t want to be changed; I only want your eyes to change. I want you to look at me and tell me that you see a man endowed with many talents, indescribable virtues, big and strong and handsome, the idol of maidens, the arch-foe of husbands, the envy of princes and the peer of sages. Go ahead, begin and you shall have your life.”

  And Zemakh, obstinate for the first time in his life, refused. “No,” said he, “you are none of these things. You inspire fear and revulsion. You want my pity? I refuse it to you. Whoever feels compassion for a man without pity, will in the end be ruthless with a man of compassion, says the Talmud. I shall not lie to please you.”

  Lupu, prancing around Zemakh, bellowed like a small evil beast: “You will repeat what I have just said, you will sing my praises! To please me, yes! To please me!”