Yiddish. Polish. Hebrew. Aramaic. He had them all. No one who knew Yiddish didn’t also know German. A man who spoke Polish could, at need, make a stab at Czech or Ruthenian or Russian. All the Yehudim in Wawolnice were scholars, even if they didn’t always think of themselves so.
Back to sharpening his own knives. It had the feel of another slow day. Few days here were anything else. The ones that were, commonly weren’t good days.
After a while, the front door creaked open again. Jakub jumped to his feet in surprise and respect. "Reb Eliezer!" he exclaimed. "What can I do for you today?" Rabbis, after all, had knives and scissors that needed sharpening just like other men’s.
But Eliezer said, "We were talking about serpents the other day." He had a long, pale, somber face, with rusty curls sticking out from under his hat brim, a wispy copper beard streaked with gray, and cat-green eyes.
"Oh, yes. Of course." Jakub nodded. They had been speaking of serpents, and all sorts of other Talmudic pilpul, in the village’s bet ha-midrash attached to the little shul. The smell of the books in the tall case there, the aging leather of their bindings, the paper on which they were printed, even the dust that shrouded the seldom-used volumes, were part and parcel of life in Wawolnice.
So . . . No business--no moneymaking business--now. Bertha would not be pleased to see this. She would loudly not be pleased to see it, as a matter of fact. But she would also be secretly proud because the rabbi chose her husband, a grinder of no particular prominence, with whom to split doctrinal hairs.
"Obviously," Reb Eliezer said in portentous tones, "the serpent is unclean for Jews to eat or to handle after it is dead. It falls under the ban of Leviticus 11:29, 11:30, and 11:42."
"Well, that may be so, but I’m not so sure," Jakub answered, pausing to light a stubby, twisted cigar. He offered one to Reb Eliezer, who accepted with a murmur of thanks. After blowing out harsh smoke, the grinder went on, "I don’t think those verses are talking about serpents at all."
Eliezer’s gingery eyebrows leaped. "How can you say such a thing?" he demanded, wagging a forefinger under Jakub’s beaky nose. "Verse 42 says, ‘Whatsoever goeth upon the belly, and whatsoever goeth upon all four, or whatsoever hath more feet among all creeping things that creep upon the earth, them ye shall not eat; for they are an abomination.’" Like Jakub, he could go from Yiddish to Biblical Hebrew while hardly seeming to notice he was switching languages.
Jakub shrugged a stolid shrug. "I don’t hear anything there that talks about serpents. Things that go on all fours, things with lots of legs. I don’t want to eat a what-do-you-call-it--a centipede, I mean. Who would? Even a goy wouldn’t want to eat a centipede . . . I don’t think." He shrugged again, as if to say no Jew counted on anything that had to do with goyim.
"‘Whatsoever goeth upon the belly . . . among all the creeping things that creep upon the earth,’" Reb Eliezer repeated. "And this same phrase also appears in the twenty-ninth verse, which says, ‘These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth;--’"
"‘ --the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.’" Jakub took up the quotation, and went on into the next verse: "‘ And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.’ I don’t see a word in there about serpents." He blew out another stream of smoke, not quite at the rabbi.
Eliezer affected not to notice. "Since when is a serpent not a creeping thing that goeth upon its belly? Will you tell me it doesn’t?"
"It doesn’t now," Jakub admitted.
"It did maybe yesterday?" Eliezer suggested sarcastically.
"Not yesterday. Not the day before yesterday, either," Jakub said. "But when the Lord, blessed be His name, made the serpent, He made it to speak and to walk on its hind legs like a man. What else does that? Maybe He made it in His own image."
"But God told the serpent, ‘Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast in the field: upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.’"
"So He changed it a little. So what?" Jakub said. Reb Eliezer’s eyebrow jumped again at a little, but he held his peace. The grinder went on, "Besides, the serpent is to blame for mankind’s fall. Shouldn’t we pay him back by cooking him in a stew?"
"Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t. But that argument isn’t Scriptural," the rabbi said stiffly.
"Well, what if it isn’t? How about this . . . ?" Jakub went off on another tangent from the Torah.
They fenced with ideas and quotations through another cigar apiece. At last, Reb Eliezer threw his pale hands in the air and exclaimed, "In spite of the plain words of Leviticus, you come up with a hundred reasons why the accursed serpent ought to be as kosher as a cow!"
"Oh, not a hundred reasons. Maybe a dozen." Jakub was a precise man, as befitted a trade where a slip could cost a finger. But he also had his own kind of pride: "Give me enough time, and I suppose I could come up with a hundred."
A sort of a smile lifted one corner of Reb Eliezer’s mouth. "Then perhaps now you begin to see why Rabbi Jokhanan of Palestine, of blessed memory, said hundreds of years ago that no man who could not do what you are doing had the skill he needed to open a capital case."
As it so often did, seemingly preposterous Talmudic pilpul came back to the way Jews were supposed to live their lives. "I should hope so," Jakub answered. "You have to begin a capital case with the reasons for acquitting whoever is on trial. If you can’t find those reasons, someone else had better handle the case."
"I agree with you." The rabbi wagged his forefinger at Jakub once more. "You won’t hear me tell you that very often."
"Gevalt! I should hope not!" Jakub said in mock horror.
Reb Eliezer’s eyes twinkled. "And so I had better go," he continued, as if the grinder hadn’t spoken. "The Lord bless you and keep you."
"And you, Reb," Jakub replied. Eliezer dipped his head. He walked out of the shop and down the street. A man came in wanting liniment for a horse. Jakub compounded some. It made his business smell of camphor and turpentine the rest of the day. It also put a couple of more zlotych in his pocket. Bertha would be . . . less displeased.
Shadows stretched across Wawolnice. Light began leaking out of the sky. The rain had held off, anyhow. People headed home from their work. Jakub was rarely one of the first to call it a day. Before long, though, the light coming in through the dusty front windows got too dim to use. Time to quit, all right.
He closed up and locked the door. He’d done some tinkering with the lock. He didn’t think anybody not a locksmith could quietly pick it. Enough brute force, on the other hand . . . Jews in Poland understood all they needed to about brute force, and about who had enough of it. Jakub Shlayfer’s mobile mouth twisted. Polish Jews didn’t, never had, and never would.
He walked home through the gathering gloom. "Stinking Yid!" The shrei in Polish pursued him. His shoulders wanted to sag under its weight, and the weight of a million more like it. He didn’t, he wouldn’t, let them. If the mamzrim saw they’d hurt you, they won. As long as a rock didn’t follow, he was all right. And if one did, he could duck or dodge. He hoped.
No rocks tonight. Candles and kerosene lamps sent dim but warm glows out into the darkness. If you looked at the papers, electricity would come to the village soon. Then again, if you looked at the papers and believed everything you read in them, you were too dumb to live.