LITMIR.BIZ

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swept floors, cut cloth. The pay was meager at best. He began to pilfer for survival, and then to steal outright. Soon he was stealing even when there was no need. In one village he worked at a mill, filling the flour sacks and taking them into town to be sold. The local baker had a daughter with bright green eyes and a shapely figure, and she liked to linger while he unloaded the sacks of flour in her father’s storeroom. One day he dared to brush his fingers across her shoulder. She said nothing, only smiled at him. The next time, emboldened and inflamed, he beckoned her into a corner and grabbed clumsily at her. She laughed at him, and he ran from the storeroom. But the time after that, she did not laugh. They copulated atop the shifting sacks, their mouths thick with flour dust. When it was over, he climbed off her, neatened himself with shaking hands, called her a whore, and walked away. At the next delivery she did not respond to his advances, and he slapped her across the face. When he returned to the mill, her father was waiting for him, along with the police.

      For the crimes of rape and molestation, Yehudah Schaalman was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Two years had passed since his dream; he was now twenty-one years old.

      And so the third phase of his education began. In prison, Schaalman hardened and turned clever. He learned to be always on his guard, and to size up each man in a room as a possible opponent. The last traces of his old gentleness vanished, but he couldn’t disguise his intellect. The other inmates thought him a laughingstock—a skinny book-learned Jew, locked up with murderers! They called him “Rabbi,” at first jeeringly; but soon they were asking him to settle disputes. He accepted, and handed down pronouncements that married Talmudic precision with the strict moral code of the prison yard. The inmates respected his judgments, and eventually even the wardens were deferring to him.

      Still he kept to himself, holding himself apart from the hierarchy of the prison and its gangs. He had no toadies, kept no corrupt guard in his pocket. The others thought him squeamish, afraid to dirty his hands, but he could see who held the real power, and it was himself. He was the definitive arbiter of justice, fairer than the courts. The inmates hated him for it, but they left him alone. In this manner Schaalman survived for fifteen long years, unharmed and untouched, nursing his bitterness and anger while the prison seethed around him.

      At thirty-five he finally emerged and discovered that he would’ve been safer if he’d stayed behind bars. The countryside was aflame. Tired of the theft of their lands and their culture, the Poles of the duchy had risen up against their Prussian occupiers, only to be drawn into a military battle they had no hope of winning. Prussian soldiers roamed from village to village, stamping out the last of the resistance, looting the synagogues and Catholic churches. It was impossible to travel unnoticed. A group of Prussian soldiers came upon Schaalman on the road and beat him for sport; and then, even before his wounds had closed, a gang of Polish conscripts did the same. He tried to find work in the villages, but he bore the invisible mark of the prison now, in his hard features and his calculating eye, and no one would have him. He stole food from storehouses and stable feed-buckets, slept in fields, and tried to stay out of sight.

      And so it was that one night, in a filthy camp at the edge of a field, starving and nearly mad with fear of death, Schaalman awoke from a gray dreamless sleep to see a strange light on the horizon, a pulsing, red-orange glow that grew as he watched. Still in that realm between sleep and waking, Schaalman stood and, taking no notice of his few belongings on the ground, began to walk toward it.

      A furrow had been plowed down the middle of the field, making a highway that pointed straight at the light. He stumbled over clods of earth, barely conscious and dizzy with hunger. It was a warm, windy night, and the grain rippled in the breeze, a million small voices whispering his secrets.

      The glow brightened, and stretched higher into the sky. Above the whispering of the field he heard voices: men shouting to one another, women crying out in anguish. The scent of woodsmoke reached his nose.

      The field fell away behind him, and the ground began to slope upward. The glow now stretched across his vision. The smoke had turned acrid, the screams louder. The slope steepened until Schaalman was on his hands and knees, dragging himself upward, at the edge of his strength and beyond the boundaries of reason. His eyes were shut against the effort, but the red-orange light still floated before him, compelling him to keep moving. After what seemed an unutterable distance, the hill began to level, until Schaalman, sobbing with exhaustion, perceived that he had reached the crest. With no strength left even to lift his head, he collapsed into a fugue deeper than sleep.

      He woke to a clear sky, a gentle breeze, and a strange clarity of mind. His hunger was extreme, but he felt it at a remove, as though someone else were starving and he merely observed. He sat up and looked around. He was in the middle of a clearing. There was no sign of the hill; the ground was flat in every direction. There was nothing to tell him which direction he had come, or how to return.

      Before him lay the charred ruins of a synagogue.

      The grass around the structure had singed along with it, carving a black circle into the ground. The fire had burnt the walls down to the foundation, leaving the sanctuary open to the elements. Inside, fallen beams jutted from twin columns of blackened pews.

      Carefully he stood and crossed into the burnt circle of grass. He paused at the place where the door would have been, then stepped across the threshold. It was the first time in seventeen years that he’d entered a house of worship.

      Not a living thing stirred inside. An eerie quiet hung over all, as though even the sounds of the outside world, the rustlings of bird and grass and insect, had been muffled. In the aisle, Schaalman picked up a handful of woody ash and sifted it between his fingers—and realized that the synagogue couldn’t have burned only the night before, for these ashes were as cold as stone. Had it all been a dream? Then what had led him here?

      Carefully he walked the rest of the way up the aisle. A few spars from the ceiling blocked his path. He put his hands to them, and they crumbled to splinters.

      The lectern was singed but still whole. There was no sign of the ark or its scroll; presumably they had been either saved or destroyed. The remains of prayer books lay scattered near the dais. He lifted from the ground a browned half-page, and read a fragment of the Kaddish.

      Behind the dais was a space that had once been a small room, likely the rabbi’s study. He stepped over the half-wall that remained. Burnt papers littered the floor in drifts. The rabbi’s desk was a seared oblong hulk of wood in the middle of the room. A drawer was set into its front. Schaalman grasped the handle, and the fitting came away in his hand, lock and all. He wormed his fingernails into the crack that lay between the drawer and the desk, and broke the face to smithereens. He reached inside the exposed drawer, and withdrew the remains of a book.

      Carefully he placed it atop the desk. The book’s spine had peeled away from the body, so that it could not properly be said to be a book any longer, but rather a sheaf of singed papers. Scraps of leather clung to the cover. He lifted the cover away, and placed it aside.

      The book had darkened from the edges inward, leaving only an island of undamaged writing on each page. The paper itself was as thick as rag, and the writing was of a spidery hand that held forth in an old-fashioned, declamatory Yiddish. With growing wonder he lifted each page, his fingers cold and trembling. Broken snippets of text ran together before his eyes:

      … a sure charm against fever is the recitation of the formula discovered by Galen and augmented by …

      … should be repeated forty-one times for highest efficacy …

      … aid in good health after a fast, collect nine branches from a nut-tree, each branch bearing nine leaves …

      … to make one’s voice sweet to others, direct this exhortation to the Angel of …

      … increase of virility, mix these six herbs and eat at midnight, while reciting the following Name of God …

      … speak this Psalm to ward away demonic influence …

      … of a golem is permissible only in times of deepest danger, and care must be taken to ensure …

      … repeat the demon’s name, removing one

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