Free The Origin of Sorrow by Robert Mayer

waiting.”
    “The lamps,” Guttle managed to blurt. “The candles. We don’t know whether to light the Sabbath lamps, because of the funeral. We don’t want to insult the dead.”
    The Rabbi stepped beside her into the street, looked in both directions, saw no Sabbath lights. He fell into his Socratic teaching method.
    “What do you think should be done? Guttle, is it?”
    She did not hesitate. “I think we should light the lamps.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “Because the Schul-Klopper — Herr Gruen — would have wanted us to.”
    “Why would he have wanted us to?”
    “People die all the time. But the Sabbath must live forever — or else the Jews will die.”
    The Rabbi leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead. His broad beard tickled her nose. The Rabbi thought: Lev Berkov would be a fool not to grab this one. What he said was, “That’s precisely the right answer, young lady.”
    He leaned into the hallway of his house and called out, “Gilda, light the Sabbath lamps now. So everyone will know.”
    He stepped farther out into the lane, Guttle with him. In a second-floor window they saw the Rabbi’s wife spread the curtains apart. They could see the star-shaped metal lamp that hung just below the ceiling. A lamp much like it hung in every apartment. The Rabbi’s wife lowered the lamp. As she lighted the oil in each of the five points of the star, the window brightened like a sunrise. When all five points were burning, she said a brief prayer, and lit two Sabbath candles from a point of the star. She set the candles in the window, and passed her hands over her eyes.
    Almost at once, candles flared in a window directly across from the Rabbi’s house. Then in the house next door to the Rabbi’s, as if the family had seen the lights go on across the lane.
    “Go home now,” the Rabbi said to Guttle. “Don’t keep your family waiting.”
    Flustered, Guttle thanked him. She wanted to ask him if the Shul-Klopper had been murdered, but it was such an absurd thought that she didn’t have the nerve. The deep gray of twilight was filling the narrow lane quickly from the bottom up, like water filling a tub. She began to run home along the cobbles. As she ran it seemed to her that lighted candles were appearing in the windows of every house just as she passed by. As if she were an angel lighting up the stars.
    In the house abutting the Owl on the left, Otto Kracauer was scrubbing blood from his hands. Standing in the bedroom in his dark breeches and gray undershirt he poured water from a clay pitcher into a mismatched wash basin. Lathering his thick hands with soap, he scrubbed at the dried blood on his knuckles and wrists, at blood that had splattered on his hairy arms as far as his elbows. In the kitchen, his wife, Ida, waited for him to finish so she could light the Sabbath lamps. The three boys, Isidor, Aaron and Eli, hungrily eyed the food their mother had prepared.
    The washing off of blood was a nightly chore for Otto, but on Fridays he always found himself more splattered than usual. He was the kosher slaughterer for the Judengasse, and while some families ate chicken several times a week, even most of the poorest, with the aid of charity funds, managed to buy a fresh-killed bird for the Sabbath.
    The slaughterhouse, along with a stable and a herring shop the only Jewish-owned businesses outside the walls, was just to the west of the north gate, a noisy sprawling chicken coop of half an acre filled with squawking birds, floating feathers, smelly droppings, plus a cow or two. Once it had been inside the walls, but for many years now there had been no room in the lane. The neighbors had not been sorry to see it go when the banker Emil Hecksher, said to be the richest man in the Judengasse, bought the business and obtained permission from the city fathers to move it just outside the walls. How much this had cost him in bribes the people could only guess. Otto Kracauer had been the