The Library Paradox (36 page)

‘Are we ready to proceed to cross-examination?’ enquired the magistrate of Sir Morris.

Sir Morris wiped his forehead and sighed.

‘Yes,’ he said wearily.

‘Are you acquainted with the accused?’ said Mr Andrews aggressively, pointing a crooked finger at the dock.

‘No. I have never met him.’

‘I put it to you that you are acquainted with him, or at least with relatives or friends of his, and that they organised your appearance here today in order for your testimony to exonerate him. I put it to you that you were never at Professor Ralston’s library.’

‘That is false,’ said the rabbi.

‘I put it to you that you are an accomplice of the accused and your purpose here today is to give him an alibi.’

‘That is false,’ he said again.

‘Then tell us how you come to be here today?’

‘I heard about the arrest of a young man for the murder of Professor Ralston, and learnt that the murder had occurred just after I was with him. I did not know exactly
how my testimony could be useful, but I felt it a duty to present it here. I meant to arrive at the beginning of the proceedings, but I had some difficulty in finding my way here. I do not go about much in London.’

‘Yes, but
who told you
? Who told you about it? Who told you it was here? Who told you to come?’ persisted Mr Andrews.

‘A young woman unknown to me,’ replied the rabbi.

‘A young woman unknown to you,’ repeated Mr Andrews sarcastically. ‘Can you tell us what she looked like?’

‘She was veiled,’ he replied.

‘A mysterious veiled young woman! Well, well. And under oath, you swear that you do not know who she was.’

‘Yes. I did not know her at all. I do not know who she was, nor how she was able to guess that I was the rabbi seen coming out of the library. This is as mysterious to me as it is to you.’

‘Fishy, rather than mysterious, I would call it,’ said Mr Andrews. ‘I put it to you that you were nowhere near the library on March 6th, and had never heard anything about it, and that the young woman, some friend of the accused in the dock here, came to persuade or bribe you to say that you were, in order to get him out of trouble.’

‘That is false.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘The young woman spoke to me in front of a large number of witnesses, in front of a room full of people, in fact, who can describe to you exactly what she said.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She told the story of the murder, the rabbi seen coming out of the library by the young man going in, the young man discovering the body and then being himself arrested. She told me that the case was to come before the court on this day, at this time, in this place. All of this was said in public.’

Mr Andrews turned suddenly and sharply towards Jonathan.

‘Who was she?’ he barked.

Almost involuntarily, Jonathan glanced up towards me. Mr Andrews looked up, following his gaze. I stood up.

‘It was I,’ I said.

‘And who are you?’

‘Wait, wait,’ said the magistrate. ‘If this young woman is a relevant witness, we must have her called and sworn in.’

An usher came to fetch me and led me downstairs and along corridors to enter the courtroom by the door used for witnesses. The rabbi was sent to sit on the witness bench, and I was sworn in. The Torah, which was lying on the clerk’s desk next to his hand, was mistakenly offered to me for use instead of the Bible. I said nothing and swore by it quietly.

Under Mr Andrews’ sharp questioning, I explained that I was a private detective who had been called in to investigate the murder. I said I had been employed by Professor Taylor and Professor Hudson, omitting any mention of my personal acquaintance and friendship with Jonathan. I then proceeded to explain how, with the aid of
‘friends in the East End’, we had traced back the telling of the Peretz tale in order to discover the rabbi. I took care to avoid any allusion to the relationship between Rivka and Baruch Gad and Jonathan, for I knew that if this fact came out, my own testimony would become highly suspect. But my apparently objective involvement spoke for me. The magistrate appeared to accept my testimony as truth, which more or less obliged Mr Andrews to reluctantly do the same. Disgruntled, he sent me to sit down upon the witness bench, and called up the rabbi once again.

‘There is another question I would like to ask you,’ he said. ‘I want to know exactly what arguments you presented to the professor to induce him to cease those anti-Semitic activities of his that you disapproved of so highly. You say that he was angry at what you told him. What did you say to make him angry? Why did he not simply dismiss your arguments with a laugh?’

The rabbi did not say anything.

‘Answer the question,’ said the magistrate.

‘He cannot answer it,’ said Mr Andrews. ‘There is no answer. It’s all a put-up job. This man ought to be arrested as an accomplice.’

‘Will you answer the question?’ said the magistrate again, a little more sharply.

‘I cannot,’ he said.

He would not speak of his daughter!

Yet there was someone else here who knew the truth. I stared anxiously at the man I took to be Professor Ralston’s father. He, of all people,
must
know what the rabbi had
come to tell his son – must he not? Why did he not speak? To my surprise, his face was blank and weary and showed no sign of recognition nor of understanding. What was happening? Was this some other man, not the professor’s father? Or was my idea that the rabbi’s daughter was the professor’s mother entirely wrong? Or could it be that he simply did not recognise his wife’s father? Why, of course! They had probably never met! The rabbi would not have frequented the home of the Christian man who had stolen his daughter, either before or after their marriage. He would never have wanted to see him. The rabbi was almost certainly unaware that he stood facing that very man at this moment, only a few yards away. And Professor Ralston’s father was equally unaware that he was vaguely staring at his own father-in-law. Of course he knew that he had married a Jewish girl, but he probably did not imagine that anyone else could know of it.

‘This man should be arrested!’ said Mr Andrews again.

I felt that I
must
intervene. Only the full truth could elucidate what had really happened! Because of his refusal ever to mention his errant daughter, the rabbi would not explain what he had said to the professor, and what had passed between them.

The magistrate was becoming impatient. Turning rather coldly to the rabbi, he said, ‘Your silence is most suspicious, and your story is subject to doubt.’

‘They are accomplices. Do not allow them to go free by swearing to a story in which each of them provides an alibi to the other!’ said Mr Andrews shrilly.

The rabbi’s stubbornness was too much for me. He may not have fully realised his own danger, but I did. At this rate, he was certain to be arrested the moment he left the courtroom. I rose to my feet.

‘I can tell you what he told Professor Ralston!’ I cried loudly.

Everyone in the courtroom gasped. The magistrate banged his gavel out of pure reflex, then looked at me.

‘Put this woman back on the stand,’ he said.

I joined the rabbi on the stand.

‘The rabbi told Professor Ralston that he was his grandfather. His daughter was the professor’s mother,’ I said concisely, trying to remain poised and hoping that I was not making a gigantic mistake based on a dream and a vague photographic similarity. My words caused the greatest commotion in the public gallery that had been heard yet.

‘How can that be?’ said the magistrate, looking at me as though I must be insane. But the elderly gentleman next to Mr Upp was slowly rising from the bench.

‘I am Gerard Ralston’s father,’ he said. ‘I have something to say.’

‘Call this witness to the stand,’ said the magistrate with annoyance. ‘I wish to have all these witnesses confronted.’

I sat down, and the professor was sworn in.

‘I call Professor Ralston senior, father of the deceased,’ said Mr Andrews, ‘in order to confront his statement with that of the witnesses previously heard. Is this rabbi your father-in-law?’

‘I never met my wife’s father,’ said the grey-haired professor, scrutinising the rabbi. ‘But his name was Moses Abraham, and he lived in the Polish village of Dembitsa. Are you he?’

‘I am he,’ replied the rabbi. The two men stared at each other, each with the memory of ineradicable suffering.

‘Surely Moses Abraham is not the name you gave when I asked for your identity,’ said Mr Andrews angrily, and turning to the stenographer, he added, ‘Please read out the witness’s declaration of identity.’

‘What is your name? Moyshe Avrom,’ read out the stenographer.

‘It is the same name, spoken with the Ashkenazi accent in Yiddish,’ said the professor. ‘I did not recognise it.’

‘So this man is the father of your wife, the grandfather of your son, the deceased Professor Gerard Ralston?’ said the magistrate, not troubling to conceal his intense surprise. And indeed, the contrast between father-in-law and son-in-law was such as could easily astonish.

‘It seems so,’ was the simple reply. ‘But my son was never aware of his mother’s origins. She died when he was only six.’ Whispers and murmurs were to be heard, as the public became aware that the notorious anti-Semite Gerard Ralston was, without knowing it, the grandson of a Hassidic rabbi.

‘I wish to ask Rabbi Abraham once again what he went to tell Professor Ralston on March 6th,’ said Mr Andrews. ‘I ask him, specifically, if he informed him of the fact that his mother was Jewish.’

‘I did,’ replied the rabbi simply.

‘And he was previously unaware of the fact?’

‘He knew nothing of it,’ confirmed the elderly professor.

‘And he had no idea that his grandfather had arrived in London? You had no contact with him, your own grandson?’

‘When my daughter left our home in Poland to marry a Christian, she died for me,’ said the rabbi with a look of rigid bitterness that seemed to have remained undimmed over the forty-odd years that had elapsed since. ‘I knew nothing of her life, of her husband, of her child, not even their names. I did not know when they left Poland to live in England. My wife, however, remained in contact with my daughter until her death. I did not know it; we never spoke of her. I forbade the family to speak of her. I have not mentioned her for more than forty years. I was not aware that she had had a son. Nearly three weeks ago I received a letter from Rabbi Kahn of France, in which he spoke to me of this Gerard Ralston and of his anti-Semitic writings. He asked me if there was anything I could do to influence him to stop leading the fight against Dreyfus in England. I talked to my wife about the letter from Rabbi Kahn. And that is when my wife told me that Gerard Ralston was the name of our daughter’s child. She confessed to me that she had never obeyed my command to forget our daughter, that she had continued to see her daughter after her marriage, and to write to her after she came to live in England, until she died. I knew nothing until that day of the existence of my daughter’s son. And now that I know, what can I say? Such a son was a punishment for her sin.’

The Jews are perhaps the most uncompromising of people. If they were not, their race and their religion would have slipped into oblivion long ago.
Then must the Jew be merciful,
Portia said. Then, perhaps, would the Jew no longer exist.

‘So you think he deserved to die?’ interjected Mr Andrews quickly.

‘It is the Lord and not men who must decide such questions,’ replied the rabbi.

‘And you still claim that you do not know how the professor met his death?’

‘I do not
know
. No.’

But is it not obvious by now?
I wanted to scream. I longed to speak. My anxious gestures finally succeeded in catching the eye of Sir Morris Hirsch. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded quickly and urgently, and he called me once again to the stand. The rabbi and the professor sat down.

‘The manner in which the professor met his death is now clear,’ I said.

The magistrate looked up at me in surprise. ‘Well then, will you condescend to explain it to the court?’ he said.

‘Yes. It is very simple if one separates the two strands which appeared inextricably intertwined around the professor. On the one hand, the professor was a particularly fanatical anti-Semite who used all of the power and influence he held as a professor of repute in a distinguished university to attack the Jewish community. It is important to realise that his actions were not limited merely to generic activities such as publishing articles. He was personally responsible for
sending at least one innocent Jew to the gallows and another to Dartmoor, and he had contributed with all the means in his power to the movement which sent Captain Dreyfus to Devil’s Island and is keeping him there. He was probably the author of any number of other acts of this kind.

‘On the other hand, unbeknown to himself, the professor’s mother was Jewish, which in fact by the tenets of the Jewish religion meant that he himself was also a Jew. Confronting these two facts makes it easy to imagine that the rabbi’s information must have been a severe shock to the professor, the destruction of the very meaning he had chosen to give to his life. It now seems clear that he took his gun and shot himself.’

‘Shot himself? But the witnesses heard the sounds of a fight going on in the room. They heard shouting and the crashing of furniture before the shot.’

‘As the rabbi left, he heard Professor Ralston shouting violently after him. The desk in front of him, with its articles and letters lying on it, would mock him as a symbol of his life’s work, and it is easy to understand that in a gesture of violent rage, he heaved it over, and it fell onto the chair standing on the other side of it. He then picked up his own chair and flung it against the wall, where it crashed into an engraving. The idea of the gun in his desk drawer probably came to him at this point, and he snatched it out with sweating, slipping hands, smudging the traces of his own fingerprints. It is quite possible that he actually caught up the gun with some idea of running after the rabbi, but of course it was too late. So he turned it against himself.’