Fantastic Metropolis

Sometimes they gathered in the nearby bathhouse, where Reb David of Vilna, author of the famous almanac, led daily sessions of numerological jousting. Reb David, who under different circumstances might have been a great mathematician, was a numerologist of exceptional ability. It had been a passion with him in his youth and in his maturity it had become an obsession. Gradually it took over his life, until in old age he devoted himself entirely to his calculations. He was rarely seen without a slip of paper and a pencil, and had the permanent skyward gaze of a man totting up numbers in his head.

Each autumn he published a diary of sacred quotations whose numerical total was equivalent to the Jewish year. They might be regarded as either prophecies or curiosities. Meanwhile he was secretly working on a project of far greater significance: the date of the end of the world. Since there were enough relevant verses with enough suggestive totals to place the apocalypse anywhere within the next several thousand millennia, he only succeeded in endorsing what the world knew already; though it is always good to have some confirmation.

At dawn, after a night of sleepless calculation, he would join Reb Zalman the watchman on his rounds of the quarter as he cried: “Rise up, holy people, and serve the Creator, blessed be His Name!” Reb Zalman was a pious scholar and a man of many wives. For the wife of his youth, his first, who had died in childbirth, he retained the greatest affection. Since then he had never been a bachelor for long. To marry was not difficult: it required only a blank contract bought at the local stationer’s. Divorce was more complicated: that required a dispensation from the rabbis. The rabbis did not like Reb Zalman’s frequent divorces, but since he was old and his wives were old, they continued to humour him.

Reb Zalman had strange habits of excessive piety, though perhaps in Jerusalem they did not seem so strange. He would drink his tea boiling as he stood outside the gates of the study house at midnight, muttering quick blessings as it burned his mouth. If he saw a funeral procession he would join it. Sometimes he stood by the steep alley which led from Habad Street to the Armenian Quarter and which was reputed to be the toughest hill in Jerusalem because the martyred bodies of Hannah and her seven sons lay below. He stopped the passersby and insisted on carrying their bundles up the hill, to the gratitude of some and the profound embarrassment of others.

Jerusalem lay sleeping on the ashes of her seventeen destructions. Houses were built upon houses; ruins tottered on a foundation of ruins. Sometimes there were earth-tremors and the ruins collapsed down into each other like an ancient honeycomb. There were strange events: shooting stars, a rain of yellow mud. Each year on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, the lights on the Temple mount would be extinguished. Tears would spring from the stones of the Western Wall.

Jerusalem was a city of many wells. At one time the wells of Jerusalem were left uncovered, which could be very dangerous where the mouth of the well was flush with the ground. In the Hurvah Square at the heart of the Jewish Quarter there were several such wells.

It happened once that a boy from the Tree of Life Yeshivah went missing. They searched and after three days they had not found him.

Then the elders of the yeshivah gathered and decided to draw lots to discover the whereabouts of the boy.

They asked the lots: Is he alive or dead? The answer came back: Dead. They asked: Where is he? Answer: In the well. Which well? Answer: In the Hurvah.

Then the people searched the wells in the Hurvah and they found him in the third well, head downwards, with his lunch in his pocket.

After that the wells in the Hurvah Square were covered, and only Reb Israel the Righteous was permitted to uncover them each day, to draw water for the Tree of Life Yeshivah.

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The Genizah at the House of Shepher by Tamar Yellin will be published in March 2005 by The Toby Press. For further details and ordering information please visit the publisher’s website.