‘Did Spinoza not know your true sex?’
‘Yes, eventually, but I was a paradox he could not accept.’
‘For me you can be both Ruth and Felix: a woman who leads and a man who can surrender.’
He pulls her towards him, banging their noses together in the dark. Laughing, she searches out his mouth again, this time sweetness overriding passion. But afterwards, as he lies there, Detlef feels a foreboding. He knows this stolen time will never be enough, that he cannot put away this desire, contain it as he did with Birgit, for he has already begun to feel as if Ruth is a part of himself, privy to his most private ambitions, secret terrors, unspeakable desires.
‘Ruth, we must talk. We must face what is before us and not succumb to the pleasures of the moment.’
‘But why? You know this love cannot be. Not with who we are, what we are,’ she answers, not allowing herself hope, her fears warning her to surrender nothing despite the warmth of his arms.
‘I will not lose you.’ His words sound out like a vow. ‘Against all nature I will not lose you.’
Tuvia’s throat is dry. He has been sitting for six hours in the back of the wagon, hands gripping the sides to stop himself being bounced around like a herring in a fishing net. At his feet is a bag containing his prayer shawl, his Tefillah and the tools of circumcision. The journey was successful, despite the arduous route they had to take to avoid the plague-ridden villages beyond the border. The household Tuvia visited was orthodox, like the one he envisages for Ruth and himself: a happy home with a modest wife, an adoring husband, bread on the table and salted beef hanging in the parlour, a sanctuary from a hostile world. The brith was executed well: the baby was robust and the young father ecstatic to have his first-born a male. But just after the circumcision a vision came to Tuvia, the Tetragrammaton in the form of fiery letters dancing over the crib. Tuvia, not unaccustomed to the call of the unknown, had attempted to read the future of the new-born boy in the leaping flames, as is the custom, but the scarlet-blue colour did not bode well. Lying, he told the father the child had a great life ahead, perhaps as a statesman for his people. But the experience frightened the mohel, tainting the excitement he felt about returning to Deutz.
Exhausted, he sinks back against the cart, mesmerised by the swinging flanks of the huge draughthorses in front. He closes his eyes, lulled by the rocking. The cry of a startled pheasant flying out from a low holly bush jolts him awake. He recognises the small wooden bridge ahead and immediately the thrill of seeing Ruth sets him trembling despite his immense weariness.
The sound of the horses’ hooves turns to a hollow clamour as they cross the small stream. When the cottage comes into full view Tuvia sinks down low. He wants to surprise her. He wants to see the dream he has of her running towards him with delight made real. In his travelling sack is a stomacher embroidered with gold he bought from a seamstress in Maastricht. It is of a deep maroon velvet which he chose to set off her raven hair. She will wear it for him, of this he is as sure as the knowledge that the sun rises in the morning.
It is then that he spies the intruder, the German he saw in the town the morning of his departure. The tall man steps out of the back door of the cottage then moves back into the shadows as if he wishes to hide. But it is too late. Tuvia immediately recognises the uncovered head and the distinctive gait despite the old cloak and the worn workman’s breeches. Detlef von Tennen, the canon from the cathedral. The last time Tuvia saw him was with the soldiers who came to make the arrests: then the man had gleamed arrogantly with power and beauty, sitting high on his bay horse with aristocratic superiority. Now he is a furtive stranger at the door of the woman Tuvia loves. But why? For a moment the young man is paralysed by the fear of what might have happened to Ruth. Then, as he watches in horror, the midwife appears behind the Christian cleric. Wrapping her arms around him she pulls him back into the doorway. Tuvia, now quivering with nausea, vomits over the side of the cart into the gutter.
Rosa, standing at the window, cries out when she sees the young rabbi, his face flaming red, stumble off the cart clutching his bags. Running out of the house, parsnip peelings scattering from her long apron, the nursemaid barely catches the thin young man as he collapses.
‘Tuvia, Tuvia, what is it? You are burning with fever! Mein Gott!’
‘What I have seen would make any man blaze! It is unforgivable! She must burn! She must burn!’
Rosa glances around fearfully then claps her hand over his mouth. She hoists Tuvia’s skinny arm across her sturdy shoulder.
‘Hush with these blasphemies, Master Tuvia! A dybbuk has got your tongue.’
She marches him inside and after leaving him resting on a low day bed, runs to the front door and bolts it securely.
Elazar walks painfully from the yeshiva across the road to his house. The lecture he gave the eager-faced young boys—a sermon on the story of Esther who forfeited her life for her people, his favourite metaphor of self-sacrifice—echoes in his mind. Having noticed some restlessness amongst his pupils, a motley group of sharp-witted boys ranging from five to twelve, he wonders whether he is losing his oratorial skills. There was a time when he could keep a class spellbound with his stories, Biblical parables ornamented with homespun proverbs and little illustrations incorporating local folklore. Thus Joseph became Jupp and the bulrushes an inlet on the Rhine, with Elazar using humour to describe the character of each religious pedant in rabbinical debates about the points of the Torah. But recently the rabbi has become painfully aware of his shortness of breath and the glazed looks from his pupils which tell him he has just repeated the very same allegory without realising.
He must teach Tuvia some of his tricks. Tuvia will make a good teacher, if a little fanatical. I will have to be firm, Tuvia must not use the classroom to promulgate his zealot notions, the old man thinks as he avoids a goat which has stubbornly planted itself in the centre of the narrow road.
The rabbi arrives at his house only to find that the door is bolted from within. He knocks at the window with his stick. No answer. Irritated that he will have to make his old legs walk further to enter from the back lane he kicks impatiently at a stone.
‘Rosa! Rosa!’ he shouts, finally standing in the empty kitchen. On the table is a half-chopped onion and a bowl of whey covered with a muslin cloth. Elazar listens to the rest of the house, his grey head cocked like an ancient bird. It is then that he notices Tuvia’s travelling sack in the corner of the room, the prayer shawl spilling out. Dread falls across the elder like a sudden chill.
Tuvia lies on the pallet, his breath a jagged rhythm. His face above his thin beard is the colour of a grey mushroom. Incongruously he is clutching an ornately embroidered maroon stomacher against his chest. A jug of cold water and mint leaves sits on the floor beside him. Rosa, her heavy body melted in an exhausted sprawl, snores in a chair in the corner.
As Elazar leans over him, Tuvia begins muttering in a feverish voice, his tone so vicious that for a moment the old rabbi wonders if the young man is possessed. ‘He was with her, my love, my love…they have lain together, she and the German…the one from the cathedral. I shall kill him! Kill him!’
As he tosses about, the nightshirt rides up above his chest and Elazar sees the ugly rings of red sores which have begun to blossom. He has seen these marks only once before but they are unmistakable. Cautiously he lifts a lock of Tuvia’s curly black hair to reveal a hideous bulbous pustule swelling below his ear.
‘He has a fever,’ Rosa says, startling the old man. Now fully awake she stretches herself wearily. ‘And is talking nonsense…dangerous nonsense.’
Elazar pulls down Tuvia’s gown before Rosa has a chance to see the lesions. ‘It will not be the nonsense that kills him.’
The rabbi’s sharp tone makes Rosa sit up; she has never heard him sound so stern.
‘Close the shutters and send a boy for Isaac Schlam and for my daughter immediately!’
‘But Elazar, she has done nothing wrong. Tuvia is just voicing his fears—’
‘It is not what he is saying that I am frightened of, but what he is dying from.’