By Night Under the Stone Bridge Page 3

  George Kapliř stopped, and wiped the sweat from his brow. Then he came into the garden, nodded to Zaruba and leaned heavily on the table.

  “Have you been waiting for me?” he said. “I’m grateful to have someone I can talk to, Peter. I’ve had a terrible time with the people up there, I didn’t get a penny out of them.”

  “What happened?” Peter Zaruba asked with a slight yawn.

  George Kapliř collapsed into a chair with a groan.

  “I had a row with Osterstock. He said he couldn’t pay me anything, because he didn’t have it. He read me a long lecture about the Castle’s money troubles, and he said I should be patient with him because of our close relationship and come another time.”

  “Is he such a close relative of yours, then?” Zaruba asked, drowsily.

  “Relative?” Kapliř exclaimed indignantly. “Relative? His grandfather’s cock may have crowed once in my grandmother’s chicken run, that’s the extent of our relationship. And then he took me to the First Secretary, and the argument began all over again. They insisted that they had no money, and had nowhere to turn to get it. The First Secretary showed me for my benefit how overwhelmed the Emperor was with demands for money from all quarters, he showed me a whole file full of appeals and complaints - heavens, what a state they’re in. Yes, Peter, where does the Emperor’s money go? Herr von Kollonitsch, the commander-in-chief in Hungary, needs money to repair the frontier posts. The commandant of the fortress at Raab complains about shortage of supplies and has to be satisfied. The Pro-Cathedral of Linz needs money for maintenance of the imperial buildings, and has been told to wait. The three tigers that arrived from Florence last year for the Emperor’s zoo haven’t been paid for. Count Wolf von Degenfeld has applied for a grace-and-favour payment in recompense for years of loyal service, and has been told to wait. The imperial bodyguard at the Castle haven’t been getting their pay and are beginning to get restive ...”

  “But,” a man at the next table interrupted, “they say that three days ago the Bishop of Olmutz advanced eight hundred ducats for the imperial table, all of it can’t have been used up yet.”

  “They say. They say,” Kapliř mimicked him, for he disliked strangers intervening in conversations between him and his friends. “I take no interest in what they say. They say a deaf man heard a dumb man talking about a blind man who saw a cripple walking the tightrope.”

  He glanced contemptuously at the man at the next table, turned to Zaruba and went on:

  “As I kept telling them, no cash, no lard, and, as they wouldn’t give me a date for settlement of my account, the First Secretary asked me if on this occasion I would be satisfied with twenty gulden, and he wrote me out a chit to take to. . .

  He stopped, shook his head, drew his hand across his brow, and said:

  “What a farce life is.”

  “And where are you supposed to take the chit?” Zaruba asked.

  “Now hold tight, Peter, or you’ll fall off your chair,” Kapliř said. “They said I was to take it to the jew Meisl at his house on the Dreibrunnenplatz, and he would pay me the money. I, George Kapliř of Sulavice, am to take it to a Jew in the Jewish quarter. Would you believe it?”

  He took the chit from his pocket, read it through, folded it, and put it back in his pocket.

  “In the end,” he went on, “Johann Osterstock took me to the officers’ table, but I had no appetite left, I did little credit to the occasion. I took a few spoonfuls of the soup, it was game soup ...”

  Peter Zaruba interrupted him.

  “I had game soup too,” he said. “And then there were omelettes and chicken en gelée, and then another hors d’oeuvre. . .”

  “Really?” said Kapliř incredulously. “So that’s what you had, was it? And what else did you have?”

  “Stuffed fish, and heaven knows what else,” said Zaruba, struggling to stifle a yawn. “Twelve courses, it was too much.”

  “Was there a ragout of pheasant?” Kapliř wanted to know, “and quails on toast?”

  “Yes,” said Zaruba. “How do you know?”

  “And you ended with marzipan cakes, grapes and Hungarian cheese?”

  “Yes, how do you know?”

  Kapliř leant back in his chair and summoned the landlord.

  “How does it come about,” he asked, “that today you offered your guests the same menu that I was offered up at the Castle?”

  “Everything in this establishment is respectable and above board, sir, and there is no secret about how I conduct my business,” the landlord replied. “A great deal of boiling and roasting takes place in the imperial kitchen, but not much is eaten, and the waiters sell the leftovers to the innkeepers of the neighbourhood, and I get my share. But only on weekdays, because my Sunday customers are less well off, and are unwilling to pay three Bohemian groschen for a meal.”

  Peter Zaruba blanched and his torpor had vanished. “George,” he exclaimed. “I’ve eaten at the Emperor’s table.” “So you have,” said Kapliř laughing. “So what? Isn’t life a farce?”

  But Peter Zaruba felt as if a millstone lay on his chest.

  “I’ve eaten at the Emperor’s table,” he muttered. “What will become of Protestant liberty? What will become of my beloved Bohemia?”

  I was told this story of Peter Zaruba and the Emperor’s table by Jakob Meisl, in his room in the Zigeunergasse when I was fifteen and he was a medical student and my tutor. “When Peter Zaruba walked into the inn garden, he thought it wouldn’t cost him his head, but that is exactly what it did cost him,” Jakob Meisl explained, “for after the Battle of the White Mountain he, with twenty-four other Bohemian noblemen, was executed on the Altstädter Ringplatz. And that is yet another example that shows the ignorance of school history teachers and the writers of school history books. They’ll tell you, and prove in precise detail, that the Bohemian rebels lost the Battle of the White Mountain because Tilly was the commander on the other side and their general, Count von Mansfeld, stayed behind at Pilsen, or because their artillery was not positioned correctly and their Hungarian auxiliaries left them in the lurch. But that’s just rubbish. The Bohemian rebels lost the Battle of the White Mountain because that time in the inn garden Peter Zaruba didn’t have the sense to say to the landlord: ‘How can you provide twelve such courses for three Bohemian groschen? It’s an economic impossibility, my good man.’ And so Bohemia lost its independence and became Austrian, and we now have the imperial and royal tobacco monopoly, and the imperial and royal military swimming school, and the Emperor Franz Joseph and the high treason trials, all because Peter Zaruba was tired of his landlady’s cooking, it wasn’t good enough for him, and so he ate at the Emperor’s table.”

  DOG LANGUAGE

  On a sabbath day in the winter of 1609 the Jew Berl Landfahrer was taken from his room in a house in the Ufergässlein in the Prague ghetto to the Old Town prison, which the Prague Jews called Pithom or Raamses, in memory of the bondage in Egypt. Next morning he was to be promoted from life to death by being hanged on the Schindanger between two stray dogs.

  This Berl Landfahrer had been unlucky all his life. Everything he had tried his hand at since boyhood had ended in failure and, for all his efforts and exertions, he was still so hard up that he had to wear his weekday jacket on the sabbath, though others had a different jacket for every half-holiday. Recently he had started going round the neighbouring villages buying up the skins of slaughtered animals left over for him by Christian butchers, but this was just at the time when the peasants had taken it into their heads to ask twelve kreuzers for a skin that wasn’t worth eight. His neighbours said that if Berl Landfahrer started dealing in candles the sun would stop setting, and that if it rained ducats he would be indoors, and if it rained stones he’d be out in the street. There wasn’t a stick over which he didn’t stumble, and if he had bread he wouldn’t have a knife, and if he had both bread and a knife he wouldn’t be able to find the salt.

  His being arrested and taken away on the jo
yous day of the holy sabbath was typical of his bad luck. At the same time it couldn’t be said that he was completely guiltless in the matter, for real misfortune does not come from God. He had bought from a soldier at an unusually cheap price, as he himself admitted, a sable-trimmed cloak and a silk robe with hanging sleeves, not knowing that two days before, Colonel Strassoldo, the commander of the imperial troops stationed in the Old Town, who, because of the unsettled times, had been given full powers by the Emperor, had issued orders forbidding anyone to buy anything from a soldier unless the latter could produce written authority signed by his company commander. The penalty for infringing this order was death on the gallows. For a number of burglaries had been carried out in the Old Town by unknown soldiers, and valuable materials, curtains and clothes had been stolen from aristocratic homes. In accordance with custom, the proclamation had been read out in all the houses of God in the ghetto, but just that day Berl Landfahrer had stayed at home in his room, so deeply immersed in the secret teachings of the book Raya Mehemma, or “The True Shepherd”, that he missed going to synagogue. True, as soon as he discovered that he had been handling stolen property he had handed over the sable cloak and the silk robe to the head of the Jewish community. But it was too late. The commander of the troops in the Old Town was furious at his proclamation having been ignored, and he remained implacable. So Berl Landfahrer was to be hanged on the gallows between two dogs next morning as an example and a warning to others.

  The Jewish elders and the Jewish council did everything in their power to save him, they went here, there and everywhere, they prayed, they promised, but all in vain. The powers of destiny seemed to be conspiring against Berl Landfahrer. An audience with the Emperor through the mediation of his stove attendant was unobtainable, for the Emperor was in bed with a fever and nine monks in the Capuchin monastery on the Hradschin were praying night and day for his recovery. The wife of Herr Czernin of Chudenitz was Colonel Strassoldo’s sister-in-law, but she was on her estate at Neudeck, which was three days’ journey from Prague. The prior of the Knights of the Cross monastery, who was well-disposed towards the Jews and had often intervened on their behalf, was on the way to Rome. And the Great Rabbi, the head and shining light of the diaspora, to whose words Christians too had listened, had long been in the next world.

  The two stray dogs were not guilty of any crime. It was only to increase the Jew’s disgrace that they were to suffer death by his side. They had no one to speak for them.

  One of them was already in the prison cell when the warder opened the door and let Berl Landfahrer in. It was a big, wretched, half-starved, emaciated peasant’s dog with bristly, reddish-brown fur and big, handsome eyes. It had probably lost or run away from its master, because for several days it had been wandering hungrily about the Old Town. Now it was gnawing a bone the warder had thrown it. When the warder came in with Berl Landfahrer it raised its head and growled at them.

  Berl Landfahrer contemplated the companion who was to share his fate with considerable alarm. He didn’t trust big dogs, which were his worst enemies on the peasants’ farms and invariably grudged him the animal skins he took away.

  “Does it bite?” he asked.

  “No,” replied the warder. “If you don’t do anything to it, it won’t do anything to you. You may as well make friends, because tomorrow the two of you will be going together to the Valley of Hinnom.”

  And he left Berl alone with the dog, and locked the door behind him.

  The Valley of Hinnom is the Jewish term for hell. The warder was familiar with Jewish expressions, having had many Jews in his care.

  “To the Valley of Hinnom,” Berl Landfahrer muttered with a shudder. “What does he know about where I’m going? He said that out of sheer spite, if he looks into the water, it’s enough to kill the fish. To the Valley of Hinnom. Eternal and righteous God - not that I’m criticising You, You know and You have seen that I have lived a life of prayer, fasting and study and honestly earned my crust of bread.”

  He sighed, and looked up at the sky through the barred window.

  “I see three stars,” he said, “so the sabbath is over. At home Simon Brandeis, the tapster, and his wife Gittel are now sitting in the room next to mine. He has said the Havdala, the prayer of discernment, and now he’s singing the blessing for the week to come, wishing himself and his wife happiness and health, for that alone is wealth, and, as on every sabbath evening, she chips in with her ‘Amen, amen, and what we most desire, the year of the Messiah’. And now, while they light the fire and put the evening soup on the table, perhaps they’re talking about me, calling me that poor Berl Landfahrer, or maybe that good Berl Landfahrer, because only yesterday I again gave Gittel oil for the sabbath lamp and wine for Kiddush, because she had no money to buy what was needed. Today people will be talking about me as that poor Berl Landfahrer or, perhaps, that good Berl Landfahrer, and tomorrow I’ll be Berl Landfahrer of blessed memory, or Berl Landfahrer, peace be with him. Today I’m Berl Landfahrer, living at the house ‘At the sign of the Cockerel’ in the Ufergasse, and tomorrow they’ll be calling me Berl Landfahrer who is living in Truth. Yesterday I didn’t realise how well off I was in the world: I ate what I pleased, I read the Scriptures, and in the evening I went to bed. Today the hand of the Enemy is over me. Whom am I to blame? I can only blame the stones in the earth. What’s the good of that? Praised be the Lord, the eternal and righteous Judge. I must accept what He has decided for me. You are the God of truth, Whose actions are without fault.”

  And, as it was dark by now, he turned his face to the east and spoke the evening prayer. Then he curled up on the ground in a corner of the cell in such a way that he could keep an eye on the dog, who growled again.

  “It’s as cold as if heaven and earth were trying to freeze together,” he said. “The dog won’t keep quiet either, it keeps growling and baring its teeth. Suppose it knew what’s going to happen to it. But what has an animal like that got to lose? Man loses his ruach, his spiritual nature, and we Jews, when we lose our life, lose more than others, for what do they know of the sweet bliss we gain when we immerse ourselves in the Book of Gleanings, The Book of the Four Rows, or The Book of Light?

  He shut his eyes and took off in thought to the heights and depths of the Secret Teaching, of which it is said that there are ten stages, up to that of God’s angels. He did this because it is written: Busy thyself with the secrets of wisdom and knowledge, thus thou shalt overcome the fear of the morrow in thee. And the fear of the morrow in him was great and almost not to be borne.

  In his mind he explored the whole world of divine powers known to the initiated as Apiryon, that is, the Wedding Litter, in which the Eternally Shining Ones, who are also known as the Bringers of Insight, live - they are the supports and pillars of this world. He meditated on the motive forces that conceal in themselves the four-letter name of God, and on the Mysterious One who controls them and is called the Most Hidden of the Hidden, “He Who is Completely Unknowable”. He let the letters of the alphabet, whose meaning is intelligible only to the Knowing, pass before his mind’s eye, and when he came to the letter caf which, when it comes at the end of a word, is God’s smile, the door was unlocked and opened and the warder let in the second dog.

  It was a white poodle with matted hair and a black spot under its right eye and another over its left ear. Berl Landfahrer knew it, in fact the whole Prague ghetto knew it, because for years it had lived in the house of the wealthy Mordechai Meisl, who had died a poor man. Since Meisl’s death it had wandered about the Old Town and the ghetto, getting its food where it could. It was on good terms with everyone, but refused to accept a new master.

  “The poodle of Meisl of blessed memory,” muttered Berl Landfahrer, who was deeply affected. “So they want him dead too. What would the blessed Meisl have said if he had known that the day would come when his poodle was to be hanged on the gallows?”

  He watched the two dogs greeting each other in doggish fashion, scrapping and
yapping. Soon, however, he began to find the noise intolerable, for the dogs wouldn’t stop chasing each other round and round the cell, growling and yapping at the same time. Soon the dogs of the whole neighbourhood joined in, barking and howling from near and far.

  “Quiet!” Berl Landfahrer shouted angrily. “Must you keep snarling and yapping? Can’t you keep quiet? It’s late, and people want to sleep.”

  But it was like talking into the wind, the dogs took no notice and went on scrapping noisily. Berl Landfahrer waited for a while, thinking the dogs would tire and lie down and go to sleep. He had no thought of trying to go to sleep himself, for he knew he wouldn’t manage it. He wanted to spend the whole night immersed in sacred matters, but the dogs wouldn’t let him.

  But the Secret Teaching, the Kabbala, gives those who have penetrated to its deepest depths, plumbed its abysses and climbed its heights, great powers of a special kind. He could not use them to save his own life, for that would have meant infringing on the divine prerogative. But he could use them to control these two dogs that refused to obey him.

  It was said of the Great Rabbi that he addressed the Melochim, the angels, as if they were his servants. But Berl Landfahrer had never in his life used the revealed secrets and their magic powers, for he was timid by nature and knew that the fiery flame of the Secret Teaching burnt and consumed everything that was not fire like itself. But now, trembling and in great anguish, he decided to try with the aid of the secret formula and magic spell to become master of these troublesome dogs that on his last night were refusing to allow him peace of mind and closeness to God.

  He waited until the moon appeared from behind the clouds and then wrote the letter vav with his finger in the dust that covered the cell walls. Every conjuration has to begin with this sign, for in vav heaven is united with the foundations of the universe.

  Below it he wrote the sign of the bull, for all the creatures that live among mankind in the world are included under that sign. Next to it he wrote in the dust the sign of the divine throne vehicle, and under it, in the prescribed sequence, seven of the Ten Names of God: the first that he wrote was Ehieh, ‘the Always’, for it is by the power of this name that the bull is guided and led. And under Ehieh he wrote the letter of the alphabet which conceals strength and power within itself.