[28] The poorly trained soul

When I walk, where doesn’t Paul see me go? I can make the hundred metres to the tram stop without stopping to rest. Then the tram takes me across the river down the Grand Artery to grandfather’s shop on the Isle of Jews. Yesterday afternoon Johnny and I spent the day there, on a crooked lane off a side street in his rooms behind his shop. Nothing much to those but a screened bed and a table and three chairs and the shelves where he keeps his books and the trunks where he keeps his papers. And through the little window across the little yard, Ostara’s stable and the cabbage bins. I can’t read the Hebrew books, but I can the French and Russian ones besides German. If he had any books in Czech, Paul and I could read them together.

And after his wife died ten years ago, he taught himself Latin and Italian both, though he’s warned me not to look at his papers in those tongues. He had to learn them so that he could read one hundred years of Cività Catholica, the Vatican newspaper, and now he’s working backward in time from there. He’s told me what’s in them, though. He wants to write a history of the blood libel. It has a history, he says. Humans invented it, God never would have. History is something people make, a responsibility we share with all the strangers on earth. You think the story has always been around, but no, it’s the Catholics that started it, in the Papal States, two hundred years ago when the popes were looking for excuses to keep the Jews in their ghettoes. Then it seeped across Europe from there. Documents about that he keeps in the stable, in a wooden crate in the harness room. He knows he won’t have time to finish his work, but he’s cataloguing what he’s finding, and he’s going to leave the papers to his friends on the Isle, hoping that someone else will continue. (Paul, a Catholic? Celebrant, no less? At our cottage he is. I found a hard guy for grandfather to trust. He’s never told me how hard it must have been, but really … it worked out.)

It’s dark at his kitchen table, which looks onto a crooked lane, so you need a lantern even in the day, but every kind of light has its own warmth and a horse blanket and soft cushion makes it warmer still. That room is the only place where he wears a yarmulke, though he says it’s only to stay warm and to succor some of his customers when they come in the front. When outside bell rings, I recognize the voices of his customers, and some of them recognize me with a cooing grin, show the baby. Sometimes a cart of cabbage backs into the yard, and he drives a deal with whoever and they unload it together into an empty bin. Then at one o’clock grandfather joins me for cabbage soup with caraway and paprika and dense black bread and mugs of black, black tea. I feel enclosed here, but not by anything cruel. I don’t often just visit like this, so why does it feel so normal? Why does feeling loved feel so normal? It isn’t as if I was ever a child here, yet here I am, feeling safe the way every child likes to be, and when I hold Johnny, he’s safe in my arms the way I’m safe in this room. Sometimes lately I feel overwhelmed by the desire to protect them both – the lad and his grandfather. It’s frightening how little else I want to do except that, even when I remember and miss how much larger my own world used to be.