The Library Paradox (13 page)

Suddenly I thought of my old friend Inspector Reynolds of Scotland Yard. I have crossed his path more than once in the last few years, and he has always been most kind. I believe he took a particular liking to me once, when I realised that a colleague and rival of his was entirely on the wrong track, and our relations have been of the most cordial since then. Would he be able to help me?

Who else might know? Baruch Gad, of course, and I know well enough where to find
him
. I wonder if it would be possible to visit him in prison. What pretext could I imagine to obtain the right to a visit? Decidedly, I must visit Inspector Reynolds. I wrote this down in my notebook and, consulting the time, hastened my steps towards home.

Jonathan had already arrived when I reached the flat,
and he and Amy were fermenting with excitement about our coming visit to their cousin. They exchanged frequent glances and their nervousness struck me oddly. We must, I thought, be going to a strange place indeed.

Emily was her usual self, tranquil as milk, perfectly well-bred, equally at home in any situation. We started out about an hour before sundown. The city was already grey with shadow.

‘Are we getting out here?’ I asked in surprise, as Amy stopped our cab in a part of London which, although not particularly familiar to me, did not seem to be the heart of the East End.

‘Uh, we thought we would walk the rest of the way,’ mumbled Jonathan.

‘You see,’ Amy said, speaking clearly, ‘religious Jews are not allowed to take cabs on the Sabbath, that is from Friday sundown until Saturday sundown. We do it, of course, but we feel that it wouldn’t be right to appear on a Saturday at Rivka and David’s in a cab, or even to go driving into the East End where they all live. I hope you are not too tired to walk a short distance?’

‘Oh no, it’s quite all right,’ I said hastily, although I had already walked a great deal that day. Still, comfortable shoes go a long way towards making such walks pleasant.

‘I did not know that the Israelites rested on Saturday rather than Sunday,’ I added, observing the quietness in the streets around me, which contrasted sharply with the busy Saturday bustle in the part of London I had just come from.

‘They rest on the seventh day, observing the fourth
commandment, just as Christians do,’ she said dryly. ‘Both traditions come straight from the book of Genesis and the Creation in six days, you know. We Jews just count the days differently. Sunday is the first day of the week for us. If it doesn’t fall on the same seventh day as it does for Christians, why, I don’t know where that comes from; the desire to differentiate themselves, no doubt. Don’t you know anything about it? Does it say anything in your Bible about changing the Sabbath to Sunday?’

I felt a pang of guilt as I became uncomfortably aware that before her last words, I had stupidly and automatically applied the words ‘the desire to differentiate themselves’ to the Jews, imagining momentarily that they had chosen to rest on a different day than the Christians. I tried to imagine a time and place in which Judaism was the norm and to be a Christian was a recent fashion, adopted only by a few. The absolutism of Christian thought and Christian values is more deeply embedded into our unconscious minds than we realise. And oddly enough, we Christians often spontaneously think of Christianity as having been born in Rome rather than in Jerusalem, although Rome is really only the place of its flowering. But it is so convenient; there are no pagans left to reveal the original nature of Christianity as a choice among others. And the observance of Sunday worship seems to us as old as the religion itself … yet …

‘No,’ I admitted, thinking over any possible reference I could remember from the Gospels or the Epistles to Sunday. ‘It was the day of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and it is indeed referred to as the “first” day of the week. But I have
no idea when Christians actually chose to set that day aside for rest and worship.’ I made a mental note to ask Arthur to find out for me. He has many very erudite friends.

My friends led me past Petticoat Lane, which was, they assured me, the very heart of the East End, and down the Whitechapel Road. We left it for Fieldgate Street, passing an old synagogue whose open doors revealed dim lights and a group of men within, crossed over to the other side, and ignoring a dingy little way on the right bearing the euphemistic denomination of Greenfield Road, we turned into narrow little Settles Street. There were not many people about, but those that were there, hurrying along, looked to me like folks from an ancient tale. There were stout, weary women wearing wigs and many ample layers of skirts, bearded men wearing heavy black coats and hats, with long locks of hair dangling quaintly on either side of their faces. The streets were muddy and lined with shabby tenements. The whole place oddly had the air of a rather tumbledown village, except that (in spite of the street names) I have rarely seen anything less reminiscent of fields and greens and gates.

Jonathan and Amy stopped in front of one of the tenement houses, entered the main door, which stood ajar, and knocked loudly at the door of a flat on the ground floor. We heard shuffling and children’s voices, the door opened suddenly, and a young woman greeted Jonathan and Amy warmly, joyfully, beckoning us all inside. I was surprised and greatly struck by her appearance and manner.

Rivka Mendel is the most astonishing example I have
ever seen of a woman living at the crossroads between two separate worlds. In the dim light of the hall, she seemed extremely young to me – no older than Emily, I should have said. But as we stepped into the firelit front room, I saw lines of weariness on her face that suddenly seemed to age her. Whether the round shape under her voluminous dress indicated that she was expecting a baby or had had one quite recently, or both, I could not be sure, but the room was soon invaded by a tiny boy hardly bigger than Cedric – I reached for him spontaneously – and a baby of some seven or eight months who crawled in upon hands and knees. Ignoring the guests, these arrivals climbed simultaneously upon their mother and proceeded to vociferate demands. Rivka sat down, somewhat heavily, and gathering them to her, indicated to us that we should take off our wraps and sit down. She did not excuse herself for the children, nor remove them to some distant region of the flat, nor even seem to see anything amiss in their noisy presence, as I realised that I often did with Cedric and Cecily when guests appeared and I thought they might be put out by the noisily joyful disorder and racket.

‘Dovidl will be home any moment,’ said Rivka with a voice whose slight echo of weariness did not cover a lilting note of happiness. ‘It will be time for Havdalah, and then we’ll have dinner. I am so happy to meet you,’ she added, turning to Emily and to me. ‘Look Samuel, look Eliel,’ she added to the swarming boys, ‘the lady is making shadow animals on the wall! Look – a wolf! A rabbit? Oh, that is pretty! You must show me how you do it!’

‘Woof, woof,’ said the intelligent tot, climbing off his mother and toddling over to the wall to touch the shadows I was making with my folded hands. It is an art that I have developed to some perfection in the nursery, and it never fails to fascinate children of all ages.

‘Woof-woof DOG,’ I informed him educationally.

‘He doesn’t speak much yet, though he is nearly two,’ Rivka told me. ‘It’s probably because he is growing up in a mix of languages. I speak English with him, of course, but I am the only person who does so. His father and the rest of his family speak to him in Yiddish.’

‘She doesn’t know what Yiddish is,’ said Amy. ‘It’s the language spoken by Jews from the East, from Poland and Germany and thereabouts. It’s a kind of ancient hybrid German dialect full of Hebrew words, which is actually written out in the Hebrew letters, for those who can read them. But a person who knows German can understand at least something of spoken Yiddish.’

‘And have you learnt to speak it?’ I asked Rivka.

‘I have learnt a lot,’ she smiled, ‘since I have been living here. I understand it reasonably well and can make myself understood. I’m not sure that the reading will ever come really easily to me, though.’

At this moment the front door banged to and a cheerful and eminently British voice shouted, ‘Here I am, Rivkele! Time for the blessings!’

And a perfectly wonderful young man pushed aside the curtain, which hung in front of the door, and made his appearance with a smile of sheer delight on his face.

David Mendel’s entrance into the low, crowded room was like a breath of fresh air. It provided an immediate and incontrovertible solution to the puzzle of the choice of this lovely girl, who had renounced a life of relatively carefree liberty (certainly, girls suffer a thousand restrictions in our decorous society, yet modern girls with character, such as Amy and Emily, are not absolutely prevented from carving out their lives much as they will) for a life of crowded poverty, straitened means and innumerable children, in a world foreign to her yet out of which she might virtually never step again. I suddenly remembered Shakespeare’s odd words
and eke most lovely Jew
– I had always wondered what he meant. Anyone, I thought, might easily fall in love with this young man, in whom remarkable beauty, especially about the ardent black eyes, was conjugated with a radiant aura of tenderness, spirituality and inspiration. It is something which can be found only in deeply religious people. Seeing him made it clear to me at once that the traditional Christian discourse on the subject of Israelites and their religion much maligns them. I reminded myself anxiously that this handsome young man with the shining eyes, who swung his little boy up into his arms and laid his hand lovingly on his wife’s shoulder, did not believe that Jesus Christ is our Saviour and Messiah, and the Son of God. But the thought had lost its usual power of provoking a feeling of shocked awe within me. Instead, I had a sudden, fleeting vision of the Heavenly Host laughing at our foolish enmities and rigid convictions. I smiled.

Wine and spices had been laid out on a white cloth, together with a lit braided candle, on the small dining table in a corner of the room. We stood in a group around this table, Emily and I stealing awkward and respectful glances at the others to see how they behaved, while David pronounced a series of Hebrew blessings over these objects, touching the glass of wine, smelling the spices and holding his hand to the candlelight and then to the firelight as he chanted. The procedure was utterly foreign to me, and yet it did not seem strange, for he performed it with the same air of infinite familiarity that I feel when chanting ‘Sing a song of sixpence’ or ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ for the twins.

Coming to an end, he extinguished the candle by pouring a little red wine over it, and turned to me.

‘Havdalah means separation,’ he said. ‘These prayers separate our holy day from the mundane remainder of the week. Now that we have become mundane once again, let us proceed to have dinner. Shall you get it, Rivkele? I’ll hold the baby.’ Rivka disappeared into the kitchen, whither Amy followed her, not before a short whispered conversation with her brother whose words I could not catch. While the young women prepared the meal, we played with the two tiny boys who swarmed cheerfully over our knees and under our chairs, and tried to play successively with the fire tongs, the lamp and the bread knife. As sitting and dining room together, the place was filled with that type of appurtenance which is of essential use to adults and of great danger to children, so that I was continually on the
qui vive
, although their father seemed perfectly at ease letting them do exactly
as they liked, contenting himself with removing from their little hands any object which appeared too pointed or sharp for comfort, and consoling the indignant cries which invariably followed this act with a sudden medley of songs and dances.

‘Perhaps we could move into the nursery,’ I finally said, after Samuel had brought a tin cup down energetically on little Eliel’s head. ‘Would not the babies be safer and more comfortable there?’

‘There is no nursery here. Apart from this room, there is only the bedroom. Our home is very small, and we cannot yet afford anything better,’ replied David in a relaxed tone of voice indicating neither surprise nor offence at my awkward miscalculation of the situation. Rising, he opened the door leading out of the modest sitting room and showed me a bedroom whose tiny proportions caused me a pang of mingled discomfort and guilt. The children’s two little cribs were pushed into a corner, separated from the rest of the room only by a thick dark blue curtain looped onto a string nailed to the ceiling, which now hung open. A few, very few scattered toys lay on the floor around these little cribs. For the rest, the room contained only a larger bed, a row of clothes hung on nails and a rickety little dressing table with a crooked mirror. A door led into a tiny bathroom with a tin bath in the middle of it, and another led out into a small, dirty stone courtyard.

The boys scrambled into their familiar little space the moment the door was opened, but we could not follow them, as the bedroom was far too exiguous to contain us
all. David pulled his chair near to the bedroom door to keep an eye on them, and we continued to talk cheerfully about children and sundry other subjects. Suddenly we heard a tremendous crash in the kitchen, followed by a cry of dismay.

We all jumped up, but before we reached the kitchen door, it opened from inside, and Amy, thrusting her head through the crack, said quickly and nervously, ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing. Rivka dropped the serving platter. She says can you get her the silver tureen instead.’

I saw Jonathan throw the briefest of glances in her direction, and their eyes met instantaneously. I thought she gave a minuscule nod, but it annoyed me to find myself unable to penetrate their singular mode of communication further.

Unaware of their little exchange, and seeing nothing more than a household accident where I suspected some sudden emotion, David reached up to the top shelf of a dresser which held a number of cheerfully mismatched dishes and glasses in its various recesses.