This priest would spend whole days at the inn with the peasants, not doing a thing but causing trouble for anyone he could. He would always ask for his tab to be calculated, and yet he would never pay. Eventually, Asher’s old man had had enough, and he cut off the priest’s vodka. But this so enraged the priest that he decided to get revenge.
Asher’s father often illegally purchased wolf pelts from poachers. Among these were some peasants and some petty gentry, along with the occasional brave vagabond. Legally, hunting for forest game was the exclusive privilege of the lord. One night, a hunter from whom Asher’s father sometimes purchased the pelts came and knocked on the door of the family’s house. He told Asher’s father that he had a great specimen, which he took from his cart and deposited on the ground. The old man wanted to take a good look at the dead wolf to appraise its pelt, but it was dark and late, and the poacher was in a hurry, so he just paid him, put the sack aside, and went back to bed.
Not long after this, there was a pounding at the door, and some guards came bursting in. They took an immediate interest in the bag and Asher’s father suspected that he was about to be fined for buying poached animals. But you can imagine his horror when it turned out that the body inside the sack was human.
He was shackled immediately and thrown into a dark cell. A trial got under way at once, with the priest accusing Asher’s father of having murdered the man himself in order to drain his blood and use it to make matzah, as the Jews were so often accused of doing. Despair took hold of everyone, but Asher’s father, a worshipper of sparks of light even in the deepest darkness, did not confess when he was tortured, pleading instead for the hunter to be interrogated. At first the hunter denied everything, but when he was tortured, too, he confessed to having found a drowned man in the water and taken him to the priest to be buried, poor soul. The priest, however, talked him into leaving the body at the Jew’s, which was what the hunter did. For this, the court sentenced him to be whipped. Asher’s father was set free, but the priest received no punishment.
Asher has learned that people have a powerful need to feel superior to others. It doesn’t matter who they are—they have to find someone who’s beneath them. Who is better and who is worse depends on a vast array of random traits. Those with light-colored eyes consider themselves to be above those with dark-colored eyes. The dark-eyed, meanwhile, look down on the light-eyed. Those who live near the forest’s edge feel superior to those living in the open on the ponds, and vice versa. The peasants feel superior to the Jews, and the Jews feel superior to the peasants. Townspeople think they’re better than the inhabitants of villages, and people from villages treat city people as though they were somehow worse.
Isn’t this the very glue that holds the human world together? Isn’t this why we need other people, to give us the pleasure of knowing we are better than they are? Amazingly, even those who seem to be the worst-off take, in their humiliation, a perverse satisfaction in the fact that no one has it worse than they do. Thus they have still, in some sense, won.
Where does this all come from? Asher wonders. Can man not be repaired? If he were a machine, as some now argue, it would suffice to adjust one little lever slightly, or to tighten some small screw, and people would start to take pleasure in treating one another as equals.
Of the Polish princess in Asher Rubin’s house
A child has been born in Asher’s home, and his name is Samuel. In his mind, Asher calls him “my son.”
They cohabit without any kind of marriage. Asher pretends that Gitla is his servant—she has barely left the house, in any case, and when she has, she’s only gone to market. Asher lives and treats his patients on Ruska Street, in the Christian district, but from his windows he can also see the Turei Zahav Synagogue. On Saturday afternoons, as Shabbat is finishing and the Shemoneh Esreh, the eighteen blessings, are being given, the fervent words reach Asher’s ears.
He closes the window. He barely understands that language anymore. He speaks Polish and Italian, and some German. He would like to learn French. When Jewish patients come to him, he speaks to them in Yiddish. He also uses Latin terms.
Lately he’s been noticing a real epidemic of cataracts; one in three patients who come to him has them. People don’t take care of their eyes, they look directly into the light, and that opacifies their eyeballs, congeals them so they’re like the whites of hard-boiled eggs. So Asher has imported from Germany special glasses with tinted lenses, which he himself wears, though they make him look like a blind man.
Gitla, the Polish princess, bustles about in the kitchen. He would rather his patients take her for some relative than a servant, since the servant’s role clearly does not suit her, makes her stomp around and slam the doors. Asher hasn’t so much as touched her, though it’s several months since she gave birth. She cries sometimes in the room he has given her, and rarely does she go out into the yard, even though the sun, like bright thin paper, has now drawn out from every recess all the damp darkness and moldy sadness of wintertime.
When she’s in a good mood, which is rare, Gitla looks over his shoulder when he is reading. Then he can smell on her that signature smell of milk, which renders him helpless. He hopes that someday she will develop feelings for him. He was fine on his own, but here he has these two strange creatures who have inserted themselves into his life, one of them unpredictable and the other totally unknowable. Both sit now on the arm of a chair: one is reading, snapping radishes in half with her teeth, while the other is sucking on her large white breast.
Asher can see the girl is melancholy. Perhaps it’s because of the pregnancy and delivery that her mood fluctuates so much. When she is in a better mood, she takes his books and newspapers and reads for days on end. She reads well in German, less fluently in Polish, and not at all in Latin. She knows a little Hebrew, though Asher can’t tell how much and doesn’t ask. They don’t converse much, anyway. Asher thought at first that he would put her up until the birth, and once she had delivered the child, he would figure out a place to take them. But now he isn’t sure. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go, she says she’s an orphan, that her father and mother were killed in a Cossack pogrom, although they weren’t her real parents anyway. In reality, of course, she is the illegitimate daughter of the Polish king.
“And the child? Whose is that?” Asher finally ventured to inquire.
She shrugged, which gave him some relief; he prefers silence to lies.