“Is there something special about this Sabbath, Rebbe?” Julie asked, smiling.
“All are special, Officer Drahuta.” Rabbi Yaakov smiled back.
Shit, Julie thought. His smile was as good as a red flag. “So special that you have groups of children hunting down by the stream and looking along the road? You haven’t lost something, have you?”
Rabbi Yaakov looked away from Julie for a moment.
“Or someone?” Julie continued. “Are you missing a Messiah, perhaps?”
Fire blazed for a brief moment in the elderly rabbi’s eyes. “Julie, this is time for joke?”
“Purim is over, Rabbi Yaakov, so I am not joking. I don’t smile when I am joking.”
“Officer Drahuta…this is a difficult problem.”
“Why didn’t you come to me? Have we not worked well together? Have we not solved problems together? Have I not introduced you to the other men of God in Grantville? Have there been problems with the consecration of the new place of worship in Grantville? Have the Sephardim not been accepted? Non-Jews gathered money and helped Rabbi Fonseca to move here. Why do I have to learn of your problems from an eight-year-old girl?”
“Yes, and I thank you, Julie, but this is difficult. Yes, you have been very helpful. We have tried to be helpful in turn. For your help we have thanked God, Julie Drahuta.”
“You wouldn’t teach me Hebrew,” Jacqueline interrupted. Like her brother, Jackie saw rules as something less “rule-like.” The girl was, in this case, standing on the edge of the doorframe of the patrol car so, technically, she was still “in” the car.
“Jackie! Zip it!” Julie turned back to Rabbi Yaakov. She noted a loose ring of Jewish residents of Deborah standing just within earshot. “Jacqueline here had a little conversation with a young boy. I can have her describe him to you. She speaks Greek quite well. She and the boy had a short little talk. The boy seems to think he is Sabbatai Sebi and that name appears in a book or two in the public library.”
Rabbi Yaakov closed his eyes for a moment.
“He’s from Smyrna. That’s in Turkey…or, well, Ottoman Turkey…or whatever. Doesn’t that make him Sephardic? Am I missing something here? Are the boy’s parents here or in Grantville? Your place of worship is Ashkenazi, I think, correct? Why would the boy be living here? You are looking for him, right?”
“Shabbethai Sebi’s father and Rabbi Fonseca did not come to agreement on what was to be done about the boy. The father and elder brother are looking for him now,” Rabbi Yaakov stated. “The boy was told not to go to Grantville, so the father and older brother look for the boy here.”
“Ah. So the boy Jackie saw wasn’t this Sabbatai person. Good, I will be going…”
“Julie Drahuta, please. This is a difficult matter,” the man almost whispered. “God does not have a son. We must, first, be clear on this.”
“So, while the adults argue, an eight-year-old boy wanders into Grantville and finds out he’s the son of God all by himself?” Julie asked quietly, aware of the audience.
“God can not have a son! That is…” Rabbi Yaakov calmed himself. “…that is…that is not right, Julie Drahuta. Do you understand?”
“I understand, Rabbi Yaakov.” Julie smiled. “I understand that Jews do not believe God may have children. Christians may not be so quick to deny God’s paternity though. If I had known of our guest from Smyrna, I could have at least smoothed over any problems. Now he’s running around in Grantville and you are spending time here in Deborah looking for him instead of thinking about the Sabbath because you told the son of God that he may not go to Grantville. I see.”
“It is the reason we hoped to handle this matter among ourselves,” Rabbi Yaakov sighed. “And I would like this very much if you do not call him the son…in my presence.”
“That I can do, Rabbi Yaakov,” Julie said.
“The Torah is very clear on who God is, Julie. This matter that you have brought with you from the future is one to be discussed carefully and completely. It is a matter of religion, not…the protection of children. The boy is safe…do you think? That is the important thing now. Right now. He is very smart. He is very smart, but he is a boy.”
“I am pretty sure nothing has happened to him,” Julie said.
“How to understand this matter of Messiah is a matter for men of God to determine,” Rabbi Yaakov begged. “This should not be made into a joke.”
“Yes. Theology is easy. Have faith and believe in God,” Julie said carefully. “I have a Christian library aide thinking the son of God was in her library reference section. She calls a Christian dispatcher and now we have people in Grantville who are wondering if the son of God is wandering about Grantville. The chief is a bit upset. He feels someone should have at least discussed the appearance of such a boy, if for no other reason than crowd control. He wants to know what I was doing to allow this to happen. The people of Grantville wish to meet this boy who is not the son of, well, Him. This has become a problem of sociology and mob psychology and trust me on this one, sociology is much more complicated, Rabbi Yaakov. You can have faith in God, Rabbi, but to have faith in humans requires something like insanity.”
“Will harm come to the boy?”
“Worse, the crowd may believe him.” Julie shook her head and almost, almost, laughed. “And then what the Torah says or does not say about God and if He may have children or not will become a moot point. One of the little secrets of Christianity is that Jesus was a Jew. I learned early that to say that brought most religious arguments to an end. Sometimes the argument became centered on me, but I’m not eight, Rabbi. Next time, please, talk to me. Now I have to tell my chief that the Messiah is wandering around Grantville. He doesn’t like his Friday afternoons to vary from the regular round of drunks and brawls.”
Rabbi Yaakov closed his eyes and if he prayed then it must have been a very, very serious prayer, indeed.
“So, Chief…” Julie grabbed up the microphone and began, “about this ‘Messiah’ thing; you’re gonna laugh so you might as well get it out of your system now…”
Somewhere in Grantville, 24th of Av, 5394
(T minus 2 hours 10 minutes)
“Shut up, everybody! It’s the phone!” the boy named Joseph Drahuta shouted over the growing argument. “Hello? Mom? Yeah, we’re all here. Kubiaks, too. Blaise came over, too. No, Mom, Blaise is fine. Where are you? Oh. Sure. Yes, Mom. I was making a snack. No, we won’t make a mess. No. Sure. See you when you get home. Sibylla’s right here. You wanna talk to her?”
There had been a time when Shabbethai would have been very curious about a “phone” but after the library and now the boy who could translate Greek into English, all he wanted to do was hide.
“Sibylla, Mom wants to talk to you,” Joe shouted and Blaise translated. Shabbethai wanted very much to tell the boy to stop translating everything but Blaise wasn’t Jewish so he remained silent.
“Yes, Mother?” the older girl, named Sibylla, said.
It took a certain kind of faith to believe that there was a real person talking back. Shabbethai hunched under the drone of Blaise’s idle translation of almost everything being said in the room. It had been a rough and tumble game of stick ball. The smooth feel of the ball, made out of something called rubber and called a Pinkie, had almost meant that he had not thrown it in time for an out.
English was a curious language.
Shabbethai was curious about how the phone worked. He was curious about why the Jews of Deborah looked at him funny. He was curious about whether the French boy could understand Greek. Look where that curiosity had left him.
The boy named Gabriel, the one with the smile Shabbethai didn’t want to see, asked if he was Jewish and Shabbethai said yes because lying never solved a problem and Blaise had translated his answer and now…
“Joseph, Mom wants me to make dinner,” Sibylla stated very firmly to everyone present. “Mom won’t be home until late and she put me in charge.”
Sibylla placed the phone down on its cradle. Shabbethai looked sadly at the phone then glared at that boy, Blaise. What sort of name was Blaise? He sort of looked like that girl in the library who had translated that English book into Greek and destroyed his life.
“Did you tell your mom you have a Jew in your house?” Gabriel Kubiak asked, looking at Shabbethai, not smiling.
Blaise kept translating and Shabbethai kept wondering about the game of stick ball and how he was ever
