knowing as I do what she has experienced?
38
Rabbi Seligman awoke and saw his wife’s face looming over him. He had dozed off while reading in an armchair next to the fire.
“Wake up!” She shook his shoulder. “Wake up. Kusiel is here.”
“Kusiel?”
“Yes, Kusiel. He says it’s urgent.”
The rabbi got up from the chair and shuffled out into the hall, where he found the old caretaker.
“It’s happening again,” said Kusiel. “You must come.”
Seligman signaled that Kusiel should lower his voice. Taking his coat from the hall stand, he called out to his wife, saying that he wouldn’t be long. The two men stepped out into the night and walked the short distance to the synagogue. The Alois Gasse Temple was dark, except for the eternal light that danced in front of the golden edifice of the ark. Kusiel lit a paraffin lamp.
“It’s been terrible. It’s like something’s being tortured up there.”
The old man rolled his eyes.
Seligman listened. All that he could hear was his own pulse hammering in his ears.
“I can’t hear anything.”
“Wait… and you will.”
The silence unfurled like a bolt of cloth, accumulating in suffocating, heavy folds. It was unyielding and contained within its emptiness a foretaste of oblivion.
“Perhaps you have been working too hard,” said Seligman. “You might have fallen asleep and had a dream.”
“There is something here, Rabbi. Something unnatural.”
Kusiel’s expression was resolute.
Time passed, and Seligman allowed himself to feel less anxious. Perhaps the old man really had imagined the noises after all. The hammering in Seligman’s ears slowed. He was just about to say I’m going home when there was a sound that trapped the words in his throat: a deep, loud groaning. The quality of the vocalization suggested not so much torment-as Kusiel’s reference to torture had suggested-but rather rage or anger. There was something brutal about its depth and fury, like the bellow of a taunted bull.
The whites of Kusiel’s rheumy eyes glinted in the darkness.
“It’s upstairs, Rabbi. Come. You must confront it.”
Seligman’s legs were weak with fear. Was it possible? Had some demonic entity found a home in his synagogue? No! He was letting the old caretaker’s credulous talk get to him. There would be a rational explanation. He took the paraffin lamp from Kusiel and climbed the stairs to the balcony.
When they reached their destination, there was a loud thud: the floorboards shook.
“It’s coming from behind there,” said Kusiel, pointing to an old door.
The two men looked at each other, amazement mirrored in both their faces.
“Impossible,” whispered Seligman.
“It hasn’t been opened in years,” said the old man. “Your predecessor lost the key.”
“Was there anything in there?”
“No. It’s just an empty attic space.”
Lumbering steps and another bellow: impatient stamping. The cacophony conjured a picture of something mythic and bovine in the rabbi’s mind. Seligman moved closer to the door. He reached out and clasped the handle, but as he did so, whatever was on the other side crashed against the woodwork. Seligman released his grip as if he had been electrified, and sprang back. He steadied himself by grasping the balcony rail, his legs shaking.
“I am g-going,” he stammered.
“Shouldn’t you do something first?” pleaded Kusiel.
“No,” said Rabbi Seligman. “I’m calling the police!”
39
Liebermann spent the entire morning seeing patients. He was on his way back to his office with a number of case files under his arm when his friend and colleague Stefan Kanner stopped him in the corridor.
“Ah, Maxim, I’d buy you lunch, but I very much doubt you’ll be free to accept my kind offer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s someone waiting for you.”
“Who?”
“A policeman,” said Kanner, adopting a comic expression. “But you can still get away, of course. We can leave by the back entrance, have a leisurely schnitzel in Josefstadt, and be at the Westbahnhof by two. You’ll be in good time for the Munich train, and I’d recommend changing at Paris for London. They’ll never find you!”
Liebermann smiled and walked on.
When he arrived at his office, a constable was waiting outside. The young man looked very conspicuous in the bare hospital corridor.
“Dr. Liebermann?”
“Yes.”
“Constable Mader, sir. I was sent here by Detective Inspector Rheinhardt of the security office.”
Liebermann assumed that the constable was the bringer of bad news.
“Has there been another murder?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Inspector Rheinhardt would like you to join him in Leopoldstadt.”
“But why? What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened, as such…” The constable took off his spiked helmet and brushed his hair back. “More like… something’s been found.”
“What’s been found?”
“Well, it’s…” The constable shrugged, apparently lost for words. “I think you’d better see for yourself, sir.”
Two carriages were already parked outside the Alois Gasse Temple and a policeman was standing by the entrance. A group of onlookers had gathered on the sidewalk close by.
“Make way, please,” Constable Mader called out. “Make way for the doctor.”
“Has someone been hurt?” asked one of the crowd.
“He says someone’s been hurt,” cried another.
“Move back.”
“Let them through.”
“He’s brought a doctor.”
The bodies peeled away, creating a narrow channel. Liebermann felt like Moses parting the Red Sea, an ironic “identification” given his near-constitutional skepticism. He ascended the stone stairs and, passing through a small vestibule, entered the main sanctuary. He stopped for a moment and viewed his surroundings. He was reminded of his childhood, going to the Stadttempel with his father and being bored to tears by the interminable prayers. He looked at the ark-with its gilded, intricate carvings-and experienced the same simmering resentment that he’d known as a child. Barash’s words sounded in his mind, distant but precisely remembered: Perhaps if you had troubled to take a greater interest in your own origins, in the traditions and history of your people, then you would not be wasting your efforts talking to me now. You would have at least some inkling of what these murders might
