The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (36 page)

His business done, he went directly to the tavern of the nearby inn. The dark public house was long and narrow, more like a tunnel than a room, its low ceiling blackened by the smoky fire around which nine or ten men loafed, drinking. Three women sat at a small table nearby and waited watchfully. Rob inspected them while he had a drink—a brown raw whiskey that wasn’t at all to his liking. They were clearly tavern whores. Two were well past their prime, but the third was a young blonde with a wicked-innocent face. She saw the purpose of his glance and smiled at him.

Rob finished his drink and went to their table. “I don’t suppose you have English,” he murmured, and it was a safe guess. One of the older women said something and the other two laughed. But he took out a coin and gave it to the younger one. It was all the communication they needed. She tucked the coin into her pocket, left the table without another word to her companions, and went to where her cloak hung on a peg.

He followed her outside and in the snowy street he met Mary Cullen.

“Hello! Are you and your father having a good winter?”

“We are having a wretched winter,” she said, and he noted that she looked it. Her nose was reddened and there was a cold sore on the tender fullness of her upper lip. “The inn is always freezing and the food is very bad. Are you really living with Jews?”

“Yes.”

“How can you?” she said thinly.

He had forgotten the color of her eyes and their effect on him was disarming, as if he had chanced upon bluebirds in the snow. “I sleep in a warm barn. The food is excellent,” he told her with great satisfaction.

“My father tells me there is a special Jew’s stink called
foetor judaicus.
Because they rubbed Christ’s body with garlic after he died.”

“Sometimes we all smell. But to immerse themselves from head to foot each Friday is the custom of their kind. I trust that they bathe more often than most.”

She colored, and he knew that it must be difficult and rare to obtain bath water in an inn such as there was in Gabrovo.

She regarded the woman who patiently waited for him a short distance
away. “My father says that anyone who will consent to live with Jews never can be a proper man.”

“Your father seemed a nice man. But perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “he is an arse.” They began walking away from one another at the same moment.

He followed the blond woman to a room nearby. It was untidy with the soiled garments of women and he suspected that she shared the room with the two others. He watched her as she undressed. “It’s cruelty to look on you after seeing that other one,” he said, knowing she knew not a word of what he said. “She may not always have a pleasant tongue, but … it’s not beauty, exactly, yet few women can compare to Mary Cullen in appearance.”

The woman smiled at him.

“You’re a young whore but already you look old,” he said to her. The air was cold, and she shucked her clothing and slipped quickly between the filthy fur covers to escape the chill, but not before he saw more than he liked. He was a man who appreciated the musk-lure of women but what rose from her was sour stink, and her body hair had a hard and plastered look as if juices had dried and redried untold times without feeling the plain honest wetness of water. Abstinence had produced such hunger in him that he would have fallen on her, but the brief glimpse of her bluish body had shown him overused, caked flesh he didn’t want to touch.

“God damn that red-haired witch,” he said morosely.

The woman looked up at him in puzzlement.

“It isn’t your fault, dolly,” he told her, reaching into his purse. He gave her more than she would have been worth even if value-giving had been attempted, and she pulled the coins under the furs and clutched them next to her body. He hadn’t begun to take anything off, and he straightened his clothing and nodded to her and went out into fresher air.

As February waned he spent more time than ever in the study house, poring over the Persian Qu’ran. He found himself constantly amazed by the Qu’ran’s unremitting hostility toward Christians and bitter loathing of Jews.

Simon explained it. “Mohammed’s early teachers were Jews and Syriac Christian monks. When first he reported that the Angel Gabriel had visited him, and that God had named him Prophet and instructed him to found a new and perfect religion, he expected these old friends to flock after him with glad cries. But the Christians preferred their own religion and the Jews, startled and threatened, actively joined those who disclaimed Mohammed’s
preachings. For the rest of his life he never forgave them, but spoke and wrote of them with revilement.”

Simon’s insights made the Qu’ran come alive for Rob. He was almost halfway through the book and he labored over it, aware that soon they would travel again. When they reached Constantinople he and Meir’s group would go different ways, not only separating him from his teacher Simon but, more important, depriving him of the book. The Qu’ran gave him intimations of a culture remote from his own, and the Jews of Tryavna gave him a glimpse of still a third way of life. As a boy he had thought that England was the world, but now he saw that there were other peoples; in some traits they were alike, but they differed from one another in important ways.

The encounter at the slaughtering had reconciled the
rabbenu
with Reb Baruch ben David, and their families began at once to plan for the wedding of Rohel to young Reb Meshullum ben Nathan. The Jewish Quarter hummed with excited activity. The two old men walked about in the highest spirits, often together.

The
rabbenu
made Rob a gift of the old leather hat and loaned him, for study, a tiny section of the Talmud. The Hebrew Book of Laws had been translated into Parsi. Though Rob welcomed the opportunity to see the Persian language in another document, the meaning of the segment was beyond him. The fragment dealt with a law called
shaatnez:
although Jews were allowed to wear linen and to wear wool, they weren’t allowed to wear a mixture of linen and wool, and Rob couldn’t understand why.

Anyone he asked either didn’t know or shrugged and said it was the law.

That Friday, naked in the steamy bathhouse, Rob found his courage as the men gathered about their sage.

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

The
rabbenu
paused in soaping his great sloping belly and grinned at the young stranger, and then spoke.

“He says, ‘Ask it, my son,’” Simon said.

“You are forbidden to eat meat with milk. You are forbidden to wear linen with wool. You are forbidden to touch your wives half the time. Why is so much forbidden?”

“To necessitate faith,” the
rabbenu
said.

“Why should God make such strange demands of the Jews?”

“To keep us separate from you,” the
rabbenu
said, but his eyes twinkled and there was no malice in the words, and Rob gasped as Simon poured water over his head.

* * *

Everyone participated when Rohel, the granddaughter of the
rabbenu,
was married to Reb Baruch’s grandson, Meshullum, on the second Friday of the month of Adar.

Early that morning everyone assembled outside the house of Daniel ben Shlomo, the bride’s father. Inside, Meshullum paid a handsome bride price of fifteen gold pieces. The
ketubah,
or wedding contract, was signed and Reb Daniel presented a handsome dowry, returning the bride price to the couple and adding an additional fifteen gold pieces, a wagon, and a span of horses. Nathan, the groom’s father, gave the fortunate couple a pair of milch cows. When they left the house, a radiant Rohel walked past Rob as if he were invisible.

The entire community escorted the pair to the synagogue, where they recited seven blessings under a canopy. Meshullum stamped on a fragile glass to illustrate that happiness is transient and Jews must not forget the destruction of the Temple. And then they were man and wife, and a day-long celebration was under way. A flutist, a fifer, and a drummer provided music and the Jews sang lustily,
My beloved is gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies,
which Simon told Rob was from the Scriptures. The two grandfathers spread their arms in joy, snapped their fingers, closed their eyes, threw back their heads and danced. The wedding celebration lasted until the early hours of the morning and Rob ate too heavily of meat and rich puddings and had too much to drink.

That night he brooded as he lay on his straw in the warm blackness of the barn, his cat at his feet. He remembered the blond woman in Gabrovo with less and less disgust and willed himself not to think of Mary Cullen. He thought resentfully of skinny young Meshullum, lying at that moment with Rohel, and hoped the boy’s prodigious scholarship would enable him to appreciate his good fortune.

He woke well before dawn and felt rather than heard the changes in his world. By the time he had slept again and awakened and risen from his bed, the sounds were clearly audible: a dripping, a tinkling, a rushing, a roar that grew in volume as more and more ice and snow gave way and joined the waters of the unlocked earth, sweeping down the mountainsides and signifying the coming of spring.

31

THE WHEAT FIELD

When her mother died, Mary Cullen’s father had told her he would mourn Jura Cullen for the rest of his life. She had willingly joined him in wearing black and avoiding public pleasures, but when a full year of mourning ended on the eighteenth of March, she told her father it was time for them to return to the routines of ordinary living.

“I continue to wear black,” James Cullen said.

“I shall not,” she said, and he nodded.

She had carried all the way from home a bolt of light woollen stuff woven from their own fleece, and she inquired carefully until she found a fine seamstress in Gabrovo. The woman nodded when she conveyed what she wanted, but indicated that the cloth, of a nondescript natural color, had best be dyed before cutting. The roots of the madder plant could give red shades, but with her hair that would make her stand out like a beacon. The center wood of oak would give gray, but after her steady diet of black, gray was too subdued. Maple or sumac bark would give yellow or orange, frivolous colors. It would have to be brown.

“I’ve gone all my life wearing nut-husk brown,” she grumbled to her father.

Next day he brought her a small pot of a yellowish paste, like slightly turned butter. “It is dye, and fiercely expensive.”

“Not a color I admire,” she said carefully.

James Cullen smiled. “It’s called India blue. It dissolves in water and you must be careful not to get it on your hands. When the wet cloth is taken from the yellow water it changes color in the air and thereafter the dye is fast.”

It produced a rich, deep blue cloth such as she had never seen, and the seamstress cut and sewed a dress and a cloak. She was pleased with the garments but folded them and put them away until the morning of the tenth
of April, when hunters brought the news to Gabrovo that the way through the mountains was open at last.

By early afternoon, people who had been awaiting the thaw throughout the countryside had begun to hasten into Gabrovo, the departure town for the great pass known as the Balkan Gate. Provisioners set up their wares, and milling mobs began to shout for the right to buy supplies.

Mary had to make the innkeeper’s wife a gift of money to persuade her to heat water over the fire at such a frenzied time and carry it upstairs to the women’s sleeping chambers. First Mary knelt over the wooden tub and washed her hair, now long and thick as a winter pelt, then she squatted in the tub and scrubbed herself until she glowed.

She dressed in the newly made garments and went to sit outside. Drawing a wooden comb through her hair as it dried sweet in the sun, she saw that the principal street of Gabrovo was crowded with horses and wagons. Presently a large pack of men, wildly drunk, galloped their horses through the town, uncaring about the havoc caused by the pounding hooves of their mounts. A wagon was overturned as horses bucked and shied, their eyes rolling in fright. While men cursed and fought to hold the reins and horses whickered and screamed, Mary ran inside before her hair was fully dried.

She had their belongings packed and ready by the time her father appeared with his manservant, Seredy.

“Who were the men who stormed through the town?” she asked.

“They call themselves Christian knights,” her father said coldly. “There are almost eighty of them, Frenchmen from Normandy on pilgrimage to Palestine.”

“They are very dangerous, lady,” Seredy said. “They wear mail vests but they travel with wagons laden with full armor. They stay drunk and …” He averted his eyes. “They ill-treat women of all sorts. You must stay close to us, lady.”

She thanked him gravely, but the thought of having to depend upon Seredy and her father to protect her from eighty drunken and brutal knights would have been amusing were it not grim.

Mutual protection was the best reason for traveling in a large caravan, and they lost no time in loading the pack animals and leading them to a large field on the eastern edge of the town, where the caravan was assembling. When they rode past Kerl Fritta’s wagon, Mary saw that he had already set up a table and was doing a brisk business in recruiting.