Burning Twilight Read Free Page B

with her hands tied behind her back and a gag stuffed in her mouth.
    I raced along the riverbank, pulling off my cloak, and splashed into the icy waters, razors of ice nipping at my ankles and knees as I waded deeper. I was almost halfway across when I slipped and was swallowed by the maelstrom. The current pummeled me, throwing me against the rocks. It felt like someone was smacking me in the face with an ice axe, but I regained my footing and finally reached the woman. I pried her away from the rock and gathered her in my arms, but her body was completely limp, her waterlogged clothes dragging us down. The other bank was closer at this point, so I fought the current and carried her to the river’s edge, and laid her on the grass.
    I climbed out, pulled a short knife from my belt, and cut the ropes binding her wrists. She was still unresponsive, so I propped her against a rock, pried her mouth open and put my fingers down her throat. She had swallowed the gag, but I was able to get a piece of it. And the bastards must have used an oily rag, because when I pulled it out of her, the evil thing was black and blue and slippery. Then she vomited up all the water she had swallowed and started gasping for air, and shivering with cold.
    By now Rabbi Loew had crossed the narrow bridge and was coming toward us, holding my cloak and a small bundle that presumably belonged to our new acquaintance. I seized my cloak from him and wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders, rubbing her arms to get the circulation going while the rabbi rustled about gathering driftwood for a fire.
    She babbled a bit about how “they” were coming for her, so I put my hand on her shoulder to steady her and said, “I think we’re on the Polish side of the border now. So you’re safe.”
    “S-S-Safe from what?” she said, her teeth chattering.
    “Safe from the Germans.”
    Rabbi Yaakov of Toledo says that delivering a person from the Eretz Gezerah, the Land of Calamity, his term for the German Empire, is the same as saving their life.
    She saw the faded circles on our cloaks where we had recently worn our yellow badges.
    “You’re Jews?” she said, suddenly quite lucid.
    Her green eyes sharpened and I waited for the inevitable curses, but they never came.
    Good. That would make it easier for us. The Sages say that the value of a single human being is so great that all but three of the 613 Commandments may be suspended for the sake of one life. So we built a fire to warm ourselves, even though Shabbes would arrive shortly with the setting sun and we didn’t have much time to spare. It was already the twelfth of Iyar of the year 5352 (April 24, 1592, on the Christian calendar), in the fourth year of the reign of King Sigismund III of Poland, Protector of Jews, and we only had a couple of weeks to get to Poznan, where Rabbi Loew was set to rejoin his family and become chief rabbi.
    Rabbi Loew rested his bones on a jagged rock and lent me his cloak. The strange woman thanked him for returning her bundle, and after some clumsy handling and averting of the eyes, the two of us sat around the fire watching the steam rise from our drying clothes. The Maharil— the renowned Talmudist Jacob ha-Levi—advises us to dress in tattered clothing while traveling, to avoid attracting robbers, but I only had one set of clothes, which were already quite tattered, so it was a moot point with me.
    As the dirty blond hair clinging to the woman’s broad forehead dried and the color came back to her face, she told us her name was Castava, or Kassy for short.
    “So you are a Bohemian,” Rabbi Loew observed. “Your name harks back to the warring maidens of pagan times.”
    “Right. And I’ve just been kicked out of my homeland.” She drew my cloak tightly around her shoulders and inched closer to the fire.
    “Really? It looked more like you were thrown out,” I said.
    “You have a strange sense of humor, Jew.”
    “The Germans thought so too,” I said, since our