a couple of footmen in red-and-gold livery walking a pair of sleek black dogs. Despite my good faith effort to get out of the way, the dogs’ ears flew back and they lunged for my groin. I stepped back once again and found myself pressed to the wall with nowhere to go, and before I knew what I was doing I had taken a fighting stance, with the big wooden kleperl raised and ready to clobber the first dog that came at me.
The footmen laughed.
“Don’t worry, they don’t like Jewish meat. Isn’t that right, girl?”
The dog snapped at my privates.
“I don’t know,” said the other one. “She seems to like the smell of kosher salami.”
Reflex had gotten me into this. What was going to get me out? Think, man, think.
“Go ahead, Jew. I’d like to see you try.”
I didn’t understand Czech very well yet, but I got the general idea.
The dogs strained against their leashes, but the footmen were well mannered enough to hold them back. It sounded like one of them called the dog Miata, but I might have heard wrong.
I slowly lowered the club, searching for the right combination of words to placate these lackeys.
Finally, I said, “Forgive me for startling your master’s dogs.”
My poylishe Yiddish was close enough to the local dialect of German for the footmen to understand me, and they seemed satisfied. They nodded curtly and strolled away, patting the dog and saying “good girl.”
So that’s how it was. A couple of spoiled livery servants could taunt me like that and I couldn’t respond. I could have broken the two of them in half if they didn’t have those dogs with them. And some rich man’s coat of arms on their sleeves. And every Christian in the kingdom watching their backs.
I was still considering this when I heard the cry again:
“Gertaaaaaah—!”
Closer this time.
I pounded on the doors and windows of all the houses and shops with mezuzahs on the doorposts, calling “In shul arayn!” and asking if anyone knew anything about the missing girl. Was Gerta a woman or a child? But nobody had any answers for me. Some of the shop doors rattled loosely, their locks clearly worthless.
I turned into the Würfelgasse. In the middle of the narrow lane, two children four or five years old, a boy and a girl, took turns shooting marbles into a chalk circle.
As I called on all the Jews to come and serve the Creator, a pair of women’s voices answered from opposite sides of the street. The children obediently got up from their game and went in to their mothers, the boy through a doorway marked by a mezuzah, the girl through a doorway with a cross nailed squarely in the middle of the upper frame.
So young and compliant, I thought, smiling to myself. They haven’t learned to be difficult yet.
They haven’t learned to think of all human relations in terms of what language you pray in or how much gold your family has to buy friends in high places.
Because you can only buy fair-weather friends.
That’s why Rabbi Shemaiah says, “Love work, hate authority, and don’t get friendly with the ruling powers,” because no matter who’s sitting on the throne, all those petty lords and nobles just use your friendship when it serves their needs, but they do not stand by you in the hour of your need.
Just look at Emperor Rudolf II’s grandfather Ferdinand, who expelled the Jews from Bohemia, even though he gave his word as king that he would never do so.
Back on the lower Geistgasse, a middle-aged Christian woman with a dark blue headkerchief was banging on the door of one of the Jewish shops I’d just called to shul. She looked up at the second-floor window, then went back to rattling the flimsy door. Another woman, who must have been the proprietress, stuck her head out of the upstairs window.
“What can I do for you, paní?”
“Are you open today?”
“Sure, sure. Until noon. I’ll be down in a minute.”
I was halfway back to the East Gate when a bleary-eyed Jew and a pair of Christians beckoned to me.
“Come join us,” said the Jew. He was trying to open his door with a key that was far too large for the narrow lock.
I didn’t budge. “Join you doing what?”
“Is there something wrong with your eyes? Can’t you see that we’re celebrating Purim?”
“Purim was over a month ago.”
“Can I help it if I celebrate Purim a little more often than other Jews?”