The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (35 page)

“Shi-ailah, Rabbenu, shi-ailah!”
A question, a question!

Shlomo ben Eliahu’s answer to each problem was deliberate and thoughtful, full of scholarly precedents and citations, sometimes translated for Rob in far too much detail by Simon or Meir.

“Rabbenu,
is it truly written in the Book of Guidance that every man must dedicate his oldest son to seven years of advanced study?”

The naked
rabbenu
explored his navel reflectively, tugged at an ear, scrabbled in his full white beard with long pale fingers. “It is
not
so written, my children. On the one hand”—he poked upward with his right forefinger—“Reb Hananel ben Ashi of Leipzig
was
of this opinion. On the other hand”—up went his left forefinger—“according to the
rabbenu
Joseph ben Eliakim of Jaffa, this applies only to the first sons of priests and Levites. But”—he pushed the air at them with both palms—“both of these sages
lived hundreds of years ago. Today we are modern men. We understand that learning is not just for a firstborn, with all other sons to be treated as if they were mere women. Today we are accustomed to every youth spending his fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth year in the advanced study of Talmud, twelve to fifteen hours a day. After that, those few who are called may devote their lives to scholarship, while the others may go into business and study only six hours a day thereafter.”

Well. Most of the questions that were translated for the visiting Other were not the sort that would start his heart to hammering or even, in truth, maintain his constant attention. Nevertheless, Rob enjoyed Friday afternoons in the bathhouse; never had he felt so at home in the company of unclothed men. Perhaps it had something to do with his bobbed prick. If he had been among his own kind, by now his organ would have been the subject of rude stares, snickering, questions, lewd speculation. An exotic flower growing by itself is one thing, but it is quite another when it is surrounded by an entire field of other flowers of similar configuration.

In the bathhouse the Jews were lavish in feeding wood to the fire and he liked the combination of wood smoke and steamy dampness, the sting of the strong yellow soap whose manufacture was supervised by the
rabbenu
’s daughter, the careful mixing of boiling water with cold spring water to create a lovely warmth for bathing.

He never went into the
mikva,
understanding that it was forbidden. He was content to loll in the vaporous bathhouse, watching the Jews steel themselves to enter the tank. Muttering the blessing that accompanied the act or singing it loudly, according to their personalities, they walked down the six dank stone steps into the water, which was deep. As it covered their faces they blew vigorously or held their breath, for the act of purification made it necessary to immerse oneself so totally that every hair of the body was wet.

Even if invited, nothing could have convinced Rob to enter the chill dark mystery of the water, a place of their religion.

If the God called Yahweh truly existed, then perhaps He was aware that Rob Cole was planning to pass himself off as one of His children.

He felt that if he entered the inscrutable waters something would pull him into the world beyond, where all the sins of his nefarious plan were known and Hebrew serpents would gnaw his flesh, and perhaps he would be personally chastised by Jesus.

30

WINTER IN THE STUDY HOUSE

That Christmas was the strangest in his twenty-one years. Barber hadn’t raised him to be a true believer, but the goose and the pudding, the nibbling of the headcheese called brawn, the singing, the toasting, the holiday slap on the back—these were a part of him, and this year he felt a yawning loneliness. The Jews didn’t ignore him on that day from meanness; Jesus was simply not in their world. Doubtless Rob could have found his way to a church, but he didn’t. Strangely, the fact that no one wished him a joyous Christ’s Day made him more of a Christian in his own mind than ever he had been.

A week later, at dawn of Our Lord’s new year of 1032, he lay on his bed of straw and wondered at what he had become, and where it would take him. When he wandered the British isle he had thought himself the very devil of a traveler, but already he had traveled a far greater distance than was encompassed by his home island, and an endless unknown world still lay before him.

The Jews celebrated that day, but because it was a new moon, not because it was a new year! He learned to his befuddlement that by their heathen calendar it was mid-annum of the year 4792.

It was a country for snow. He welcomed each snowfall and soon it was an accepted fact that after each storm the big Christian with his great wooden shovel would do the work of several ordinary shovelers. It was his only physical activity; when he wasn’t shoveling snow he was learning Parsi. He was sufficiently advanced to be able to think slowly in the Persian language now. A number of the Jews of Tryavna had been to Persia and he spoke Parsi with anyone he could trap. “The accent, Simon. How is my accent?” he asked, irritating his tutor.

“Any Persian who wishes to laugh will do so,” Simon snapped, “because to Persians you’ll be a
foreigner.
Do you expect miracles?” The Jews
in the study house exchanged smiles at the foolishness of the giant young
goy.

Let them smile, he thought; he found them a more interesting study than they found him. For example, he quickly learned that Meir and his group weren’t the only strangers in Tryavna. Many of the other males in the study house were travelers waiting out the rigors of the Balkan winter. To Rob’s surprise, Meir told him that none of them paid as much as a single coin in return for more than three months’ food and shelter.

Meir explained. “It is this system that allows my people to trade among the nations. You’ve seen how difficult and dangerous it is to travel the world, yet every Jewish community sends merchants abroad. And in any Jewish village in any land, Christian or Muslim, a Jewish traveler is taken in by Jews and given food and wine, a place in the synagogue, a stable for his horse. Each community has men in foreign parts sustained by someone else. And next year, the host will be the guest.”

The strangers quickly fit into the life of the community, even to relishing the local babble. Thus it was that one afternoon in the study house, while Rob was conversing in the Persian tongue with an Anatolian Jew named Ezra the Farrier—gossip in Parsi!—he learned that a dramatic confrontation would take place the next day. The
rabbenu
served as
shohet,
the community slaughterer of meat animals. Next morning he would slaughter two beasts of his own, young beeves. A small group of the community’s most prestigious sages served as
mashgiot,
ritual inspectors who saw to it that the complicated law, down to the finest detail, was observed during the butchering. And scheduled to preside as a
mashgiah
during the
rabbenu
’s slaughtering was his onetime friend and latter-day bitter antagonist, Reb Baruch ben David.

That evening Meir gave Rob a lesson from the Book of Leviticus. These were the animals Jews were allowed to eat of all those on earth: any creature that both chewed its cud and had a split hoof, including sheep, cattle, goats, and deer. Animals that were
treif
—not
kasher
—included horses, donkeys, camels, and pigs.

Of birds they were permitted to eat pigeons, chickens, tame doves, tame ducks, and tame geese. Winged creatures which were an abomination included eagles, ostriches, vultures, kites, cuckoos, swans, storks, owls, pelicans, lapwings, and bats.

“Never in my life have I tasted so fine a meat as cygnet lovingly larded, barded in salt pork, and then roasted slowly over the fire.”

Meir looked faintly repulsed. “You won’t get it here,” he said.

The next morning dawned clear and cold. The Study House was nearly empty after
shaharit,
the early prayer service, for many wandered to the
rabbenu
’s barnyard to watch
shehitah,
the ritual butchering. Their breath made small clouds that hung in the still, frosty air.

Rob stood with Simon. There was a small stir when Reb Baruch ben David arrived with the other
mashgiah,
a bent old man named Reb Samson ben Zanvil, whose face was set and stern.

“He’s older than either Reb Baruch or the
rabbenu
but is not as learned,” Simon whispered. “And now he fears he’ll be caught between the two if an argument should arise.”

The
rabbenu’s
four sons led the first animal from the barn, a black bull with a deep back and heavy hindquarters. Lowing, the bull tossed his head and pawed the earth, and they had to enlist help from the bystanders in controlling him with ropes while the inspectors went over every inch of his body.

“The tiniest sore or break in the skin will disqualify an animal for meat,” Simon said.

“Why?”

Simon looked at Rob in annoyance. “Because it is the law,” he said.

Finally satisfied, they led the bull to a feeding trough filled with sweet hay. The
rabbenu
picked up a long knife. “See the blunt, square end of the knife,” Simon said. “It’s made without a point so there’s less likelihood it will scratch the animal’s skin. But the knife is razor-sharp.”

They all stood in the cold while nothing happened. “What are they waiting for?” Rob whispered.

“The precisely right moment,” Simon said, “for the animal must be motionless at the instant of the death cut, or it is not
kasher.”

Even as he spoke, the knife flashed. The single clean stroke severed the gullet and the windpipe and the carotid arteries in the neck. A red stream sprang in its wake, and the bull’s consciousness vanished as the blood supply to the brain was cut off at once. The bovine eyes dimmed and the bull went to its knees, and in a moment was dead.

There was a pleased murmur from those who watched but it was as quickly stilled, for Reb Baruch had taken the knife and was examining it.

Watching, Rob could see a struggle that tightened the fine old features. Baruch turned to his elderly rival.

“Something?” the
rabbenu
said coldly.

“I fear,” Reb Baruch said. He proceeded to show, midway down the cutting edge of the blade, an imperfection, the tiniest of nicks in the keenly honed steel.

Old and gnarled, his face dismayed, Reb Samson ben Zanvil hung back, certain that as the second
mashgiah
he would be called upon for a judgment he didn’t want to make.

Reb Daniel, the father of Rohel and the
rabbenu
’s oldest son, began a blustering argument. “What nonsense is this? Everyone knows of the care with which the
rabbenu
’s ritual knives are sharpened,” he said, but his father put up his hand for silence.

The
rabbenu
held the knife up to the light and ran a practiced finger just beneath the razor-sharp edge. He sighed, for the nick was there, a human error that made the meat ritually unfit.

“It’s a blessing that your eyes are sharper than this blade and continue to protect us, my old friend,” he said quietly, and there was a general relaxing, like a releasing of pent-up breath.

Reb Baruch smiled. He reached out and patted the
rabbenu
’s hand, and the two men looked at one another for a long moment.

Then the
rabbenu
turned away and called for Mar Reuven the Barber-Surgeon.

Rob and Simon stepped forward and listened attentively. “The
rabbenu
asks you to deliver this
treif
bull’s carcass to the Christian butcher of Gabrovo,” Simon said.

He took Horse, for she was in sore need of the exercise, hitching her to their flatbed sleigh onto which a number of willing hands loaded the slaughtered bull. The
rabbenu
had used an approved knife for the second animal, which was judged to be
kasher,
and the Jews already were dismembering it when Rob shook the reins and directed Horse away from Tryavna.

He drove to Gabrovo slowly and with great enjoyment. The butcher shop proved to be exactly where it had been described, three houses below the town’s most prominent building, which was an inn. The butcher was large and heavy, an advertisement of his trade. Language did not prove a barrier.

“Tryavna,” Rob said, pointing to the dead bull.

The fat red face became wreathed in smiles. “Ah.
Rabbenu,
” the butcher said, and nodded vigorously. Uncarting the creature proved to be hard but the butcher went off to a tavern and returned with a pair of helpers, and with rope and effort at length the bull was unloaded.

Simon had told him the price was fixed and there would be no haggling. When the butcher handed Rob the few paltry coins it became clear why the man smiled with joy, for he had practically stolen a whole excellent beef, simply because there had been a nick in the slaughtering blade! Rob would
never be able to understand people who, for no valid reason, could treat good cowflesh as if it were trash. The stupidity of it made him angry and filled him with a kind of shame; he wanted to explain to the butcher that he was a Christian and not one of those who behaved so foolishly. But he could only accept the coins in the name of the Hebrews and place them in his purse pocket for safekeeping.