any idea what a decent wedding costs these days?” I asked my companions. They clucked their tongues and condemned the latest trend among rich merchants for increasingly lavish wedding parties.
I went on: “And the municipal guards always chiseling away at you in return for their ‘protection.’ Oh, you don’t have to tell me, I saw enough of that Kromy fellow to get the idea. And, well, a man gets desperate, doesn’t he? Anybody can understand that.”
Federn stared at me. In the dusty light, he looked like a man who had a lot of secret compartments tucked away deep inside himself, under lock and key. And he was trying to decide which compartment to open.
After a while, Rabbi Loew said, “You realize that you are telling us something even when you don’t answer.”
I said, “I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth.”
Federn finally turned the key on one of those tiny compartments. “We were arguing about money.”
“We already know that,” I said, as if it were common knowledge in every corner of the city.
Rabbi Loew squinted at me skeptically, but he held back and let me press on. “Between kesef and mammon, money takes all kinds of forms. What was the specific problem about money?”
“We were arguing because he owed me money.”
“Wait a minute.” I leaned closer so he couldn’t look away as easily. “You’re saying he owed you money?
“Well, to hear him tell it, I owed him money. And that’s what we were arguing about.”
“How much money?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I see. So it must have been a trivial amount. Then why would you bother arguing about it?”
“You think a Christian merchant needs an excuse to argue?”
“Why did he owe you money? For what?”
“You want to know what he owed me money for?”
“That’s the question I asked.”
He was just killing time.
Somewhere outside his cell, high above the clouds, the sun was hurtling past the midpoint of the heavens toward another distant twilight. It took every drop of patience in me to sit there as if I had all the time in the world to wait for him to decide what he was going to say.
Eventually I said, “Let thy yea be yea and thy nay be nay,” I warned, quoting the Bava Metzia tractate. The Council of Elders says that going back on your word is one of the seven deadly sins that provokes God’s fiercest wrath, and I was pretty sure that Federn knew it.
Rabbi Loew spoke so softly that it almost felt as if his voice were coming from inside my own head: “Sometimes when we pray for certain things, the gates of prayer may be open or they may be closed. But when we truly repent our misdeeds and pray for forgiveness, the gates are always open.”
A scouting party of red-eyed rodents came creeping up through the hole in the middle of the floor. They must have smelled the fresh food.
I said, “You know, it’s really hard to keep those little creatures from biting you, especially when you can’t maneuver to defend yourself. And it only takes a couple of days for the sores to fester. That alone can kill you.”
“God works in strange ways,” said Rabbi Gans.
“You shouldn’t have put yourselves out for me,” Federn confessed. “I’m not worthy.”
“One man is equal to the whole of creation,” Rabbi Loew said, but the words also came from the mouth of Rabbi Nathan, gone these many centuries, for we are taught that whenever we quote a teaching in the name of the one who composed it, the lips of the teacher still whisper from the grave.
A low moan floated up through the hole in the floor, but I didn’t have time to think about who it was.
“Look, we all bend the rules every now and then,” I said. “It’s the only way to survive in a repressive society like this, am I right?”
“That’s right,” Rabbi Gans agreed.
“And we all make mistakes. With all the laws the Christians impose on us, it’s impossible to remember them all. We’re always violating some edict or other, and nobody in the community would hold it against you if you did. The only thing they care about is whether you’re going to admit your mistakes and do something about making restitution for them. And for it to mean anything, you have to do it now, while we still have a chance to fix the situation.”
Federn laughed bitterly. “You think you can fix the situation? I thought you rationalists didn’t believe in miracles.”