for fresh green vegetables after a long winter of turnips and sauerkraut when her mistress told Katya to take over the washing and sent Anya into the dining room to prepare the main table.
Anya spread the white tablecloth and smoothed out the corners, wondering when Yankev would come back from the study house, since today was a half-holiday. The Jews had a rule against fasting on the day of the Pesach feast, but many of them skipped the midday meal in order to welcome the Seder with a heartier appetite. She was fascinated by how much leeway the Jews had when it came to interpreting their laws.
As she wiped the special set of kosher-for-Pesach dishes with a cloth and set them out, she remembered the day that she was at the cutting board tearing the leftover bits of boiled chicken from a carcass so the cook could make a Sephardic dish of yellow rice and chicken for Rabbi Mendes, when Meisel’s new scholar came into the kitchen, and she asked him, “Tell me, Jew, what is kosher about this meat? How is it different?”
So he told her that it was mainly the method of slaughtering, and draining the blood. Then he told her his name was Yankev, and not “Jew,” and she giggled and apologized and told him her name.
And since that moment, whenever Yankev returned from studying with the rabbi, she would feed him in the kitchen and ask what he had learned about God. A gentle lad with an inquisitive mind, he was so different from the men who hung around Cervenka’s butcher shop making crude comments while she washed the ox blood off her arms. And since they both knew that they would always live in different worlds, they found it easy to speak freely about almost anything while she dried and stacked the dishes. Yankev told her that since any Jew in the congregation could say a blessing over the bread and wine, they had no priestly class that dictated the one correct way of worshiping and behaving.
She liked the idea of eliminating the rigid cadres of men standing between her and God, of having no intermediaries, no infallible rulings, and especially no extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Oh, the rabbis could fine you or even banish you from the community in extreme cases, but they couldn’t declare that you weren’t a Jew anymore. Nobody could. Even God couldn’t turn His back on His children forever.
She set out the fancy soup bowls made of heavy cut glass with golden rims. All this for chicken broth and unleavened doughballs?
She peered out the front window. The rain seemed to be letting up, but she didn’t see any sign of Yankev yet.
He had even taught her that the Jews didn’t believe in eternal punishment—that a man named Rabbi Akiva, who lived in the second century, said that the worst sinners only spend twelve months in Hell, which they call gehenem, while another rabbi said that the maximum punishment lasts from Pesach to Shvues, which is only fifty days.
And according to still another rabbi, Moses ben Something-or-other, evil thoughts pop into our heads for no reason and should not be considered sinful, which was a nice change from the nuns who always told her that the slightest impurity of thought was as bad as the sinful deed itself. (So of course, she was always in a sinful state according to them.)
They even said that a Jewish woman didn’t have to live out her days chained to a man who drank, beat her, or screwed around. If she could get her husband to approve the papers, the rabbis let her divorce the bastard.
She looked out the window again. Nothing. Up the block, people were hurrying by on the Breitgasse with more than the usual pre-holiday rush. Something was definitely up.
A flush of panic filled her chest. What if little Katya had been listening behind the door when Yankev told her the Jews believed that the Messiah is merely the messenger of God, not his son? What if the little servant girl had gone running to tell Father Prokop about the heretical ideas Anya was listening to? She told herself not to worry, but she still crept over to the kitchen and peeked around the door. Little Katya was still washing the cabbage, her face placid. Anya breathed easier.
She was laying the embroidered cloth on a silver tray for the three ceremonial matzohs when an iron key scraped the lock and Yankev came