At the entrance to the Hôtel de Ville district, a people’s militia, a Hashomer, feverishly fortified the barricades in the event they should have to be defended.
Yet no attack was being planned.
In the ruddy, speckled house on Rue Pavée, the old, hunchbacked shammes walked up softly to the door, on tiptoe, and put his ear to it.
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi hadn’t left his room for three days and hadn’t been taking any food; he had only been praying and speaking to God. The shammes heard his monotonous, wavering voice. Rabbi Eliezer sat over his open, grease-splattered book, and his arched, transparent body swayed like sugarcane blown by the breath of God. For the first time, doubt entered Eliezer ben Zvi’s mind.
And how could he not doubt? He had taken the whole burden upon his shoulders, and it had exceeded a single man’s strength. He had invoked the pekuach nefesh from the book of divine wrath, and since then the Jews had not sat shiva over their dead, and Jewish corpses had been going to death’s womb without ritual being observed. All for nothing.
Black, grotesque letters shuffled before Rabbi Eliezer’s searching gaze, like travelers waving handkerchiefs from the window of a leaving train.
“But the Lord will make a distinction between the livestock of Israel and the livestock of the Egyptians, so that nothing shall die of all that belongs to the Israelites…”
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi swayed lower, pendulating over the book. He had proceeded as the Lord had commanded, he had isolated the flocks of Israel with an impenetrable wall, and here the plague was spreading among them just as before, and there was no cure for it.
The black letters, like drops of a martyr’s blood, trickled onto the book from the grimacing mouth of Rabbi Eliezer:
“Throughout all the land of Egypt the hail struck down all that were in the open, both man and beast; the hail also struck down all the grasses of the field and shattered all the trees of the field. Only in the land of Goshen, where the Israelites were, was there no hail.”
Rabbi Eliezer doubted. He had taken the whole terrible responsibility upon his shoulders; he had surrounded the Jewish town with a wall, depriving it of even its own cemetery, and the Jewish corpses had begun to rot in their chambers.
Rabbi Eliezer had revealed a pekuach nefesh unknown in the history of Jewry: as corpses could not be buried in the earth, they were to be consigned to the flames.
And the plague remained within the walls of the Jewish town.
Yet the Lord said:
“They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they are to eat the lamb.
“And the blood on the houses where you are staying shall be a sign for you: when I see the blood I will pass over you, so that no plague will destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi had doubts for the first time in his life. He bent under their weight like a branch that holds a bird. His parchment lips mumbled:
“Lord, why have you burdened me thus? I am old, and frail is my back.”
The old, grease-stained book, like a sieve filled with valuable liquid, fell upon the parched sand of Rabbi Eliezer’s soul in a rain of black letters:
“And the Lord continued, ‘I have surely seen the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters; yes, I am mindful of their sufferings. I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey… Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt.’
“But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?’
“But Moses said to the Lord, ‘Please, O Lord, I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Who gives man speech?… Now go, and I will be with you as you speak and will instruct you what to say.’ But he said, ‘Please, O Lord, make someone else Your agent.’ The Lord became angry with Moses…
“This Moses and Aaron did; as the Lord commanded them, so they did. Moses was eighty years old and Aaron eighty-three, when they made their demands to Pharaoh.”
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi made no protest. He knew God’s verdicts were inscrutable. He at whom God points the finger seeks to avoid his fate in vain. No, Rabbi Eliezer would not whinge, like Moses: “Please, O Lord, make someone else Your agent.” He was too used to being heard. He closed the book with a sure hand. He rose. He straightened his back. He called the shammes.
The frightened shammes understood: something important, something imperative had occurred. The rabbi’s narrow, waxen face blossomed from the coils of his gray beard, like the white plumes of sacrificial smoke. His eyes shone with an inner glow. They stared without seeing.
Rabbi Eliezer ordered that the elders be sent for.
Down the narrow, darkening streets, where the shadows of streetlamps swayed in prayer like enormous algae, ran the old shammes in his flowing robes. He climbed winding stairs and passed his whispered bulletin through a door, opened just a crack: a message from Rabbi Eliezer.
“Hello! Grand Hotel? Please put me through to Mr. David Lingslay. Hello! Hello-o-o! Is that Mr. David Lingslay? This is the presiding secretary of the Commissioner’s Council of the Anglo-American Territory. The presidium kindly requests that you attend a closed council session at eleven a.m. That’s right, in one hour. Can we count on your presence?…”
David Lingslay rolled over. The light slicing through the gap between the curtains hit him square in the eyes, making him squint, and he was forced to roll back over. He would have slept so sweetly had it not been for that diabolical telephone. In an hour he had to be at American Express. Time to think about getting up.
David Lingslay stretched out once more in his comfortable, king-size bed. He suddenly jerked up and sat on the edge. Tossing off the blanket, he scrupulously fingered his stomach through his silk pajamas, and then, raising his arms one at a time – his armpit glands. After a thorough examination he stretched back out again.
He rose every day with an instinctive terror of the moment his healthy muscular body would feel the animal fear of being woken with a gnawing pain in the pit of his stomach. By day, David Lingslay tried his best not to consider the sorry fact that an elementary calculation set his odds at ninety-nine to one. He safeguarded that wretched formulation of hope, that one percent chance of salvation, somewhere deep inside him, like a nestling coddled in his bosom.
Each morning, however, when his sleepy body still hovered in that irreal void, in the sudden transition from sleep to waking, before the slackened gears of his will could mesh their teeth once more – the fear pressed in his throat like a coiled spring, and he could only punch it back into its cell, where it would lie in wait until the morning.
In those brief moments, David Lingslay would remember that in the nightstand – only an arm’s reach away – lay a small steel object anxiously awaiting that one particular morning. Curled up and invisible, it waited, counting the inaudible pulse of the cracked pocket watch lying on the tabletop, which somewhere, deep inside, in the trembling finger that marked the minutes, concealed the fatal hour, known to itself alone. It had counted out precisely such-and-such a number of revolutions and performed them daily, cloaking its headlong rush with a feigned indifference.
At such moments David Lingslay felt such a burning hatred toward the whole world of objects that only his inborn self-control and even temper kept the morning cleaning maid from coming in to find a demolished suite.