The Library Paradox (31 page)

‘And were they really not to hear it, all the pleasure would be gone,’ I laughed.

Upon this one day, it seemed as though all the weariness and misery, the grey mud, the dirty tenements and their penniless and ragged denizens had completely disappeared, to be replaced by gaiety and music and even, astonishingly, pale rays of sunshine.

‘Purim is our happiest festival,’ observed Rivka. ‘Even as children, we loved it best of any. I expect I shouldn’t say this, but it contains less prayer than most of the other festivals.’

‘Nem a Hummentaschen,’
said a woman near us, wearing a flour-bedaubed apron and holding out a large tray loaded with the same little triangular pastries that had so charmed Samuel and Eliel. I took one and bit into it, smiling my thanks from under my gold-tinted veil. It was
stuffed with poppy seeds. The lady smiled back, and for the first time, a little feeling of rightness and belonging crept over me, and I stopped cringing inwardly like a usurper about to be discovered and deposed.

‘They’re called
Hummentaschen,
Haman’s pockets,’ said Rivka. ‘But they’re supposed to be shaped like his hat.’

‘What is that man doing?’ I asked curiously, as we moved on. He was giving a remarkable performance of tumbling, with rapid series of somersaults and cartwheels, and stopping between them to entertain the usual motley group of eager children with bursts of speech.

‘He’s telling some story or other,’ said David, stopping to listen for a moment. ‘Obviously this one is not about Esther. Anything goes on a day like this.’ He glanced at me significantly. ‘That’s why I think our plan may work.’

We came, eventually, to the rabbi’s home on Brick Lane, just around the corner from the little
shul
outside which we had waited for him three days ago. Like most of the others up and down the street, the door was flung wide and people were running in and out. Besides the tight, severe group of black-clad, earlock-wearing disciples, who were massed inside the room, I perceived several other guests, many of which were children in gales of laughter over some skit played by a couple of actors. Through the door, I was able to perceive the rabbi himself, enthroned in a large armchair, listening to the actors with benevolence, although without laughing.

David stepped inside, and then beckoned to us. ‘The women are in there,’ he said softly, gesturing towards the
far end of the room, where a curtain divided off a portion of the large room from the rest. Ephraim joined the other children immediately. David stationed himself near the wall, among a group of other listeners, and Rivka and I slipped across the room and entered the women’s section. It was here that the women of the household and their many visitors congregated to enjoy the festival. The segregation was not complete; groups of young people in disguise moved in and out; whole groups disguised as the characters in the story circulated together, singing or chanting and playing instruments. The younger boys and girls dashed about freely in all parts of the room.

After some time during which we watched the mummers in the main part of the room through gaps in the curtain, Rivka led me away from the curtain towards the farther wall, where there was a large table upon which lay several tattered Esther scrolls and prayer books written in Hebrew for the use of the women visitors, who were taking them up and putting them down constantly, as they entered the room or left it to go into the inner portions of the house or capture a stray child.

‘There are players all the time,’ she said, fingering the books absently. ‘How will you get a chance to intervene?’

‘I’ll wait. There will be a gap at some point, surely,’ I said. ‘I think we are too early. People must begin going home at a certain point.’ Seeing that some of the women were watching us, I picked up a prayer book as well.

‘That is a beautiful one,’ said Rivka, taking the well-worn little volume of blue leather embossed with gold
letters from me. ‘I wish I had one like it. You can see that it has lived.’ She riffled through it gently, but her gesture caught the eye of a lady who had been in the room the entire time, checking on an impressive brood of noisy little ones, dragging them back from the front part of the room when they became too rowdy, giving them cakes when they whined, and otherwise taking on the responsibility of keeping the festival cheerful and lively. She seemed to be of the household, and this idea was confirmed as I saw her turn towards Rivka and reach out to take the prayer book from her, not rudely, but with a few quiet words. Stammering an apology, Rivka reacted too quickly, letting go of the book before the other woman had grasped it, so that it fell to the floor. Unexpectedly, an old photograph slipped from between the pages and lay face up on the ground, where the three of us stood staring down at it in surprise.

The picture showed a vigorous couple in the prime of life, of which the man was clearly recognisable to me as the rabbi himself, although he was much younger, probably in his middle thirties. Between them stood a group of four children. The tallest one was a girl of about sixteen; a medium-sized boy was on her left and a smaller one on her right, and she held a little girl of about three in her arms. With her pale colouring and fair hair, her strangely slender, dreamy face, she stood out in the photograph almost like a being of another world. It was difficult to concentrate on any face but hers. I stared at her, fascinated. It seemed to me that she reminded me strongly of someone; another
face I had seen somewhere, that had that slender line, that strange fixed gaze.

The woman who had spoken to Rivka, a heavy, dark and somewhat worn-out looking creature between forty and fifty years of age, looked more surprised than any of us; bending down, she retrieved the picture and held it to her face, inspecting it closely.

‘That is the rabbi,’ I said in English, identifying him with a forefinger, and hoping she would not take the gesture as offensive prying. She nodded in answer.

‘Die kleyne bin ich,
’ she added, planting her own finger on the littlest child, who wore her hair in a dark cask framing her heart-shaped face.

‘She says that the little one is herself,’ Rivka translated. ‘The prayer book is her mother’s. We shouldn’t have touched it. No one uses it but her mother. We ought to put it back,’ she added, picking it up from where it lay at her feet.

‘These are your brothers and sisters?’ I asked the lady, reluctant to interrupt what appeared to be a moment of discovery.

‘Yes,’ she answered in hesitant, broken English. ‘Two brothers; here.’ She pointed vaguely towards the outer room, then, turning towards Rivka, she suddenly burst into a short speech in Yiddish, as though she wished to disburden herself of an anxiety which was exerting some irresistible inner pressure upon her. Several times I caught the word
schwester,
like the German word for sister, and I waited impatiently for Rivka to provide me with a translation.

Suddenly she started and stopped speaking. Rivka also looked up guiltily.

‘The
rebbetzin
!’ she said.

The shadow of the elderly rabbi’s wife fell upon us as she approached. At the sight of the book and the picture, a look of fear came over her features. Snatching both with a word of anxious reproach, she thrust the picture out of sight and hurried out of the room, looking badly upset. Her daughter followed her hastily.

‘What was she telling you?’ I asked Rivka quickly.

‘She said she had never seen a picture of her eldest sister before, that she hardly remembers her; she has only a few memories of her up till the time she was about five years old. Then her sister seems to have disappeared. She told me that if it were not for the fact that her two older brothers have much more precise memories than hers, she would hardly be convinced that the beautiful princess she remembers admiring really existed elsewhere than in her dreams. The parents never, ever mentioned the girl after her disappearance; not even one single time, and this lady never dared ask them. She did talk about it with her brothers, but more and more rarely; it seems to have ended up turning into some kind of dread family secret. She seemed deeply moved that her mother had kept a picture of the lost daughter for all these years, even though she never spoke of her.’

‘Perhaps the girl died suddenly, and the parents could not bear to think about it,’ I said.

‘That is impossible. There are burial and mourning
ceremonies and prayers for a dead child. And it is a
mitzvah
, a good deed, to recall her memory lovingly.’

‘But then what could possibly have happened, to make parents behave that way?’ I mused.

She hesitated. ‘It’s not easy to imagine what a girl can have done to deserve such treatment. But … there is something like that in a book I read, a novel in Yiddish which is much loved by the people here,’ she said. ‘It is a story by Sholem Aleykhem, and it tells about a poor milkman with many daughters, and each of them gets married, one by one.’

‘A Yiddish version of
Pride and Prejudice,’
I observed.

‘In a way,’ she responded, smiling. ‘But so different! Every marriage contains a heartbreak. And the father ends up treating one of his daughters exactly like the rebbe and his wife. He says: once and for all, she doesn’t exist any longer.’

‘But why? Why?’

‘Because she marries a Gentile.’

Shylock’s cry of despair –
O my daughter! Fled with a Christian!

‘And in the story,’ Rivka went on, ‘he never mentions her again, and forbids his wife and children to mention her, and never goes to see her even though she lives very nearby.’

‘That seems heartless,’ I said.

‘No – it is terrible for him – like a wound every time he thinks of her, like a death for which one cannot mourn because it is always fresh and never finished. But he cannot bear the marriage. His religion, his faith, his God, his whole life would lose their meaning, and all the suffering, all the
persecutions and misery and poverty and injustice that he and all the Jews have had to bear just for
being
Jews. If you no longer care about preserving it, then where is the meaning of it all? Even modern Jews like Amy’s parents would suffer if she were to marry a Gentile. As for a rebbe like this one – I think it would be death to him.’

‘You really think the girl in the picture married a Gentile?’

‘No, I don’t think anything, I am just imagining and guessing. But you know, it could be. It is not so terribly unlikely; it does happen. And it is difficult to imagine any other reason for such a reaction.’

‘Suppose she had a … an illicit love of some kind?’

‘With a Jewish man? If he were not already married, the whole community would force them to marry. But then the father would not cut her off. All marriages are arranged within this community; such a marriage would not be worse than any other. If the man was already married, the daughter would probably be shut up at home until a new marriage could be arranged, probably with some horrible old widower who wouldn’t care. Those are grave sins, but they are not unforgivable; they are part of the human condition.’

‘Suppose she converted to Christianity?’ I asked.

‘Then the father would probably react the way he did! But what Jewish girl would convert to Christianity for any reason other than love?’

‘Does the girl in the picture remind you of anyone?’ I asked her suddenly, feeling a little spurt of suspicion that
there might be some connection between the rabbi’s family and the Rubinstein or Gad families. Britta Rubinstein? No, the mother of a young girl like Rivka would not be old enough to be the girl in the picture, who, if she were still alive, would have to be nearly sixty.

‘Not particularly. Does she remind
you
of someone?’ she countered. I looked at her sharply, but her natural expression of surprised interest was convincing.

‘Yes, she does,’ I answered honestly, ‘but I can’t remember who it is. I have become sensitive to such resemblances. I feel that I saw a face like hers recently somewhere; very recently. If only I could think who it might be! You are sure that her face recalls nothing to you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘It is a shame. It would have been exciting to be able to help you.’

‘But you have been helping me a great deal,’ I replied. She didn’t answer, and in the brief moment of silence, I noticed that no more sound was coming from the other side of the curtain, and hastened back to it.

‘The play is over,’ I said, peering through a gap. There were still several men milling about, but most of them seemed to be the rabbi’s disciples, easily recognisable by their black garb, and their hats and fringes and long side-curls. David and a few other guests stood out in their more ordinary clothing, the more so as the disciples did not mingle with them at all.

One of them began a song, and the others soon picked it up. It grew and swelled into a loud, tuneful and rhythmic chant, containing only one word, repeated over and over.

‘What are they saying?’ I asked Rivka.

‘Rebbenu,’
she answered smiling. ‘It means “our rebbe”.’

‘Rebbenu, rebbenu, oy rebbenu-u-u-u-u-u,’
sang and chanted the group of disciples, more and more loudly, and they surrounded the rabbi, still sitting tranquilly in his armchair, and danced around him in increasingly wild circles as they sang, swaying and flinging their arms about.

I watched in fascination as they became more and more uncontrolled; many were dancing with their eyes closed, their faces upturned towards Heaven. Several of the women and girls on our side of the curtain took up the chant, albeit more softly, but they too lost themselves in the joy of it and swayed back and forth freely as they sang. The melody was an easy one and before long, to my own surprise, I found myself singing along, abandoning myself to its invincible attraction. The wildness of it swirled through the room, snatching up the guests one after the other; it seemed that no one could escape it.