The Fifth Servant Read Free

saying in Yiddish: A cat and a mouse will make peace over a carcass.
                And spring is open season on Jews. Holy Week and Eastertide were especially risky, and a gambling man would say that we were long overdue for some old-fashioned Jew-hatred. Every year the Jews got thrown out of somewhere . The lucky ones merely got beaten up, had their property stolen, and escaped with their books and the clothes they happened to be wearing at the time. But one Easter a while back, a mob of enraged Christians had practically burned down the entire Jewish Town, leaving only the blackened stone shul and a few crummy houses that refused to fall over. Three thousand people murdered in one weekend, all because some idiot said that a Jewish boy had thrown a handful of mud at a passing priest.
                Some say it was worse than just mud, but I don’t believe that for a minute. What Jew in his right mind, outnumbered by hostile and well-armed outsiders, would invite such trouble?
                When my ancestors first set foot in the land of Babylonia , they didn’t rush around smashing the idols, they made the place their home and wrote the monumental Babylonian Talmud there.
                The Bohemian capital was as alien as pagan Babylon in many ways, but I knew enough to move closer to the wall and yield to a couple of footmen in red-and-gold livery walking a pair of sleek black dogs. Despite my good faith effort to get out of the way, the dogs’ ears flew back and they lunged for my groin. I stepped back once again and found myself pressed to the wall with nowhere to go, and before I knew what I was doing I had taken a fighting stance, with the big wooden kleperl raised and ready to clobber the first dog that came at me.
                The footmen laughed.
                “Don’t worry, they don’t like Jewish meat. Isn’t that right, girl?”
                The dog snapped at my privates.
                “I don’t know,” said the other one. “She seems to like the smell of kosher salami.”
                Reflex had gotten me into this. What was going to get me out? Think, man, think .
                “Go ahead, Jew. I’d like to see you try.”
                I didn’t understand Czech very well yet, but I got the general idea.
                The dogs strained against their leashes, but the footmen were well mannered enough to hold them back. It sounded like one of them called the dog Miata, but I might have heard wrong.
                I slowly lowered the club, searching for the right combination of words to placate these lackeys.
                Finally, I said, “Forgive me for startling your master’s dogs.”
                My poylishe Yiddish was close enough to the local dialect of German for the footmen to understand me, and they seemed satisfied. They nodded curtly and strolled away, patting the dog and saying “good girl.”
                So that’s how it was. A couple of spoiled livery servants could taunt me like that and I couldn’t respond. I could have broken the two of them in half if they didn’t have those dogs with them. And some rich man’s coat of arms on their sleeves. And every Christian in the kingdom watching their backs.
                I was still considering this when I heard the cry again:
                “Gertaaaaaah—!”
                Closer this time.
                I pounded on the doors and windows of all the houses and shops with mezuzahs on the doorposts, calling “In shul arayn!” and asking if anyone knew anything about the missing girl. Was Gerta a woman or a child? But nobody had any answers for me. Some of the shop doors rattled loosely, their locks clearly worthless.
                I turned into the Würfelgasse. In the middle of the narrow lane, two children four or