Asher tries to picture how the illness passes from one person into another; it must be that it takes the form of some dense, vague fog, a fug, or a virulent vapor. These miasmas, getting into the bloodstream from inhaled air, infect and inflame it. Which is why Asher, summoned today to a certain bourgeois household where the lady of the house had fallen ill, positioned himself next to a window through which air was entering, while the sick woman lay whence the air was exiting. The family tried to insist that he let her blood, but Asher is against this procedure—some people it greatly weakens, particularly women, even if it does reduce the virulence of the plague in the bloodstream.
Asher has also heard of infectious germs, something along the lines of little insects that cling to materials like fur, hemp, silk, wool, and feathers, scattering off them at the slightest movement, getting into the blood through the lungs and poisoning it. Their strength is dependent upon air—when it is clean, they collapse and perish. As to how long a germ can last, medical opinion is that in things kept in a cellar or a dungeon, it can survive up to fifteen years; in ventilated spaces, thirty days at most. The same is true when it is in a human being—it can’t last longer than thirty days. Yet in the main, people blame the pestilence on God’s wrath over the sins of man. And that applies to everyone—Jews, Christians, and Turks. Divine vexation. Solomon Wolff, the doctor from Berlin with whom Asher corresponds, says that pestilence is never endemically European, but is always imported from other parts of the world; its cradle is Egypt, from where it tends to make its way to Stamboul, and from there to spread through Europe. Thus those Wallachian Jews must have brought the plague to Lwów when they came here to be baptized. At least that’s what people have been saying.
Now they’re all counting on winter to save them, since freezing is the antithesis of rot, and therefore serious illness should vanish or at least weaken tremendously throughout the winter months.
Asher does not allow Gitla to go out of the house, saying she is to sit with Samuel by the windows with the curtains drawn.
One evening, two men show up at Asher’s—one old and one young. The older one is dressed in a long black coat and a cap. His beard unfurls majestically over his ample belly. He has a sad and open face and piercing blue eyes that fix on Asher. The younger one, who seems to be here out of respect for the other man, is tall and heavyset. His eyelashes and eyebrows are almost transparent, and against his pale complexion, his brown eyes look like glass beads. Standing in the doorway, the older man gives a sigh full of meaning.
“The esteemed doctor,” he begins in Yiddish, “is in possession of a particular thing that does not belong to him.”
“How interesting,” answers Asher, “since I have absolutely no recollection of ever appropriating anything at all.”
“I am Pinkas ben Zelik of Kozowa, a rabbi. And this is my nephew, Yankiel. We have come for Gitla, my daughter.”
Stunned, Asher says nothing. Only after a moment does he regain his senses and his voice.
“You’re saying she is the thing to which you were referring? She’s a living being—not a thing.”
“Yes, yes, that’s just the way people talk,” says Pinkas good-naturedly. He peers over Asher’s shoulder into his home. “Perhaps we could come in for a word.”
Asher reluctantly lets them come inside.
“When you are a doctor, all you see is human suffering,” says Pinkas, his father-in-law, let us call him, when on the following day Asher Rubin is once more at the hospital among the victims of the plague. “But life is a great force; we stand on the side of life. What has happened cannot unhappen.”
Pinkas pretends he’s wound up here by accident. The lower half of his face is covered by a piece of white cloth, which will supposedly protect him from effluvia. The stench here is terrible; the hospital has become less a place of healing than a place to die, and the sick are being laid out on the floor now, since the hospital is small.
Asher doesn’t say a word.
Pinkas says, over his head, as though not even addressing him, “The Vienna kahal needs a doctor, and in particular, an expert on eyes. They’re starting a Jewish hospital. Asher Rubin could take his wife and”—here he falls silent for a moment, then goes on—“children and get out of here. Everything bad that has happened would pass into oblivion. A wedding would take place; all would be repaired.”
After another pause, he adds in a tone of encouragement to conversation:
“This is all because of those unfaithful dogs.”
When he says, “unfaithful dogs,” his voice grows hoarse, and Asher looks up at him in spite of himself.
“Go away from here, both of you. We’ll return to this subject. Do not touch anything. I need to see a patient now.”
This kind of death is quick and merciful. First your head hurts, then nausea and stomachaches, followed by diarrhea that never lets up. The body dries out, the person fades from view, loses strength and, finally, consciousness. It takes two or three days for death to come. First a child died, and then that child’s siblings, then the mother, and finally the father—Asher watched it all. That’s how it started. From that family the plague spread to the rest.
The man of the household he is visiting right now has dropsy. Godfearing Jews, these people give him a knowing look as they ask about the situation in town, as though proud that all they have is dropsy. A woman in a slanted bonnet raises her eyebrows significantly: it’s the curse, she says, it’s that powerful herem cast upon the renegades. It works. God punishes traitors who befoul their own nest, those heretics, those fiends.
“His good luck was bound to give out, it’s all devil’s work—hence that money, those carriages with all those horses, those ermines. Now God has made an example out of him. His renegades are dying of the plague, one after the other. That’s their punishment,” she murmurs.
Asher turns his head away from her and directs his gaze at the curtains by the window, faded and coated in dust, so that their pattern is barely visible—they’re just the color of dust, that’s all. He thinks of Pinkas, his sort-of father-in-law, and he wonders what would happen if hate could transform into a plague. Is that how herem works? Asher often sees how a cursed person quickly becomes defenseless, weak, ill, and when the curse is taken off him, he gets well.