The Library Paradox Read online

  The rebbe leaves; the Litvak follows.

  On his way out the rebbe goes in to the kitchen, stoops, removes an axe from under a bed, thrusts it into his belt, and leaves the house.

  The Litvak trembles, but he doesn’t falter.

  A quiet autumnal sense of awe hovers over the dark streets. Often a cry can be heard from one of the prayer groups reciting the penitential prayers, or a sickly groan through a window … The rebbe keeps to the edges of the street, in the shadow of the houses … He glides from one house to the next with the Litvak behind him …

  And the Litvak hears his own heartbeats mingle with the heavy footsteps of the rebbe: but he continues nevertheless, and together with the rebbe he arrives outside of the town.

  Beyond the town there is a wood.

  The rebbe, G–d bless him, enters the wood. He walks thirty or forty paces and stops beside a young tree. And the Litvak is amazed to see the rebbe take the axe from his belt and begin to hack at the tree.

  He watches the rebbe chop and hears the tree groan and snap. And the tree falls, and the rebbe splits it into logs and the logs into chunks of wood; and he makes a bundle of these chunks and ties it with the rope in his pocket. He throws the bundle over his shoulder, sticks the axe back in his belt, and walks out of the wood and back to town.

  In a back street he stops before a half-collapsed house and knocks at a window.

  ‘Who is it?’ a startled voice calls from within. The Litvak recognises a woman’s voice; the voice of a very sick woman.

  ‘Me!’ the rebbe answers in peasant dialect.

  ‘Who “me”?’ the voice from inside asks again.

  And the rebbe answers again in Ukrainian: ‘Vasil!’

  ‘Vasil who? And what do you want, Vasil?’

  ‘Wood,’ says the supposed Vasil; ‘I have firewood for sale. Very cheap. I’m practically giving it away!’

  And without waiting for an answer, he walks into the house.

  The Litvak steals in behind him and by the grey light of dawn he sees a bare room with rickety furniture … A sick woman lies in bed, covered with rags, and she says bitterly, ‘Buy wood? With what should I buy it? I’m a poor widow, what money do I have?’

  ‘You can have it on credit!’ answers the supposed Vasil. ‘It comes to sixpence altogether.’

  ‘How will I ever pay that?’ groans the poor woman.

  ‘Foolish woman,’ the rebbe lectures her, ‘here you are, a poor sick woman, and I trust you for this bit of wood; I have faith that you’ll pay me. And you have such a great and powerful G–d, and you don’t trust Him, and you don’t have faith in Him even for a silly sixpence-worth of wood!’

  ‘But who will lay the fire for me?’ the widow groans. ‘Do I have the strength to get out of bed? My son had to stay away at his work.’

  ‘I’ll lay the fire for you, too,’ says the rebbe.

  And having placed the wood in the oven, the rebbe, with a groan, recited the first verse of the penitential prayers.

  And when he had lit the fire and it was burning merrily, he recited the second verse, somewhat more cheerfully …

  And he recited the third verse when the fire had subsided into a steady glow and he closed the oven door …

  The Litvak who saw it all stayed and became a Nemirover Hassid.

  And later, whenever a Hassid said that the Nemirover gets up every morning during the Days of Awe and flies up to Heaven, the Litvak would not laugh at all, but would add quietly,

  ‘If not still higher!’

  I emerged from the pages with a start, and looked around me quickly, getting my bearings. Amazingly, within the few minutes it had taken me to read the story, I had completely forgotten where I was, forgotten about the existence of such a place as London altogether, forgotten about the grey sky and the March drizzle, feeling myself, instead, wandering half-lost in distant streets, between dark tumbledown houses.

  ‘This might well mean something, yes it might,’ I said to myself, folding away the pages and slipping them into my notebook. ‘We shall see, if only little Ephraim can discover something.’

  I rose, and putting on my wraps, I went outside and made my way through the miserable, misty rain to Professor Ralston’s library. I felt a wish to examine his papers again, and in particular, his professional writings. Indeed, I went through his personal papers with some care on my previous visit, in the company of Professor Taylor; I saw what there was to be seen there – only there was not much to get hold of! I did not realise then what is now becoming clear to me, namely that it was through his articles that the professor had made the most enemies, and that I was wrong to neglect them.

  It being Sunday, no one was about, and the Adelphi Street gate was locked. I let myself in, relocking it behind me, and entered the library and then the study discreetly. Once settled in, I began opening the drawers of the left-hand cabinet one by one. I took out each of the heavy files and looked through their contents methodically. One article made me smile, as I remembered the annoyance its thesis had caused Professor Taylor as he tsk-tsked about it on the floor under the window.

  For more than two hours, I worked my way through the papers to the echo of drops beating against the large window, sometimes harder, sometimes almost ceasing. I scanned each one, wondering about its significance, yet none of them appeared to me to contain a possible cause of murder. That is, until I came to the folder devoted to the Dreyfus affair.

  It contained nothing handwritten, nothing personal, only a large sheaf of press cuttings, many in French. Before examining them, I went back to the other cabinet, containing the personal correspondence, and extracted the file containing the two letters from the journalist Bernard Lazare, and sat down to remind myself of their contents.

  In the first letter, dated March 1895, Mr Lazare reproached Professor Ralston, courteously and without undue bitterness, for an article he had recently published in The Times. The letter contained a concise but striking analysis of the negative effects of anti-Semitism, and a gentle but firm explanation that monsieur le professeur had not understood the true facts of the Dreyfus affair, which was a grave judicial error. Mr Lazare invited Professor Ralston to visit him and his friends in Paris at his convenience, in order to study the elements of the Dreyfus dossier. He was certain that monsieur le professeur would be influenced by what he read. The letter was written in elegant and rather difficult French, with no effort at simplification. The journalist seemed to take it for granted – or else he was aware – that Professor Ralston’s French was very good. But it would be, I remembered. Hadn’t someone told me that his mother was French? It was Mr Upp, or maybe Professor Taylor. I remember hearing something about Ralston’s father: the mother was a foreigner that he met and married on his travels to France and Poland … Catherine de Medici …

  The second letter by Bernard Lazare was dated September 1895, and took a very different tone. Clearly Professor Ralston had been to Paris in the meantime and the visit had not gone well, in addition to which he had continued to publish inflammatory articles in the British press, and established a friendship with the notorious anti-Semitic writer and newspaper director Edouard Drumont. All of these things were brought up in the letter, which accused the professor explicitly of using his position as a savant, a renowned scholar, to wield undue influence on a subject upon which he had not taken the trouble to reach an objective conclusion, and furthermore – this must have piqued the professor – of basing all of his research and scholarly work on a personal feud or animosity so bitter that it could not but have its roots in some subjective psychological experience. There was no record of Professor Ralston’s answer, if any. I really wish I could meet this Bernard Lazare.

  There were no letters from Lazare but these two and the one that had been on the desk at the time of the murder, and there seemed to be no reason to suppose that there had been others. I wondered yet again what the empty file marked ‘B.L.’ could have contained; a wealth of material, to judge by the thickness of t
he used binding. Putting away the letters, I took up the dossier on the Dreyfus affair.

  It contained cuttings of a great many newspaper articles, some signed, some unsigned; some in French, others in English. They covered a period of more than a year; the earliest dated from December 1894. Many of them were signed by the same Drumont that Lazare had referred to so bitterly; he wrote exclusively for a newspaper called La Libre Parole, of which he was also the editor, and his articles invariably expressed a fever of generic anti-Semitism. I skipped quickly over descriptions of ‘typical racial characteristics’ of both physical and psychological types, searching for explicit references to the Dreyfus case. There were several of these but, somewhat to my surprise, I found them to be extremely unconvincing; it seemed strange to me that someone should attempt to persuade an entire populace of a person’s guilt based on such vague, raving indications as I was now reading. Given that Dreyfus’s guilt was now questioned or disputed by people as eminent as Bernard Lazare or Professor Taylor, I expected Drumont to give specific arguments supporting his conviction, but he did nothing of the kind, contenting himself with the type of railing that usually convinces only the already fully convinced. He was particularly enraged that the poor captain should ever have been allowed to make a career in the Army at all, the Army being, after all, the very seat of a country’s honour.

  This man is interested in making money like all the sons of Shem. You could shoot him by mistake, after having slapped his face with his own epaulettes – and it wouldn’t be enough to put into his mind the ideas of honour, of duty, of patriotism that he cannot possibly have, because they are the legacy transmitted through innumerable generations, and cannot be improvised.

  It could not have been more obvious that Dreyfus was here being tried and convicted for no crime other than his race and religion.

  A number of articles signed Maurice Barrès, which I read with increasing disgust, were more underhanded in their insinuations, twisting as they did the unjustified assumption of guilt into a pretended presumption of blamelessness:

  I don’t need to be told why Dreyfus chose to become a traitor. Can one even speak of treason? Dreyfus doesn’t belong to the Nation. He is but an uprooted plant, ill at ease in our old French garden. He is the representative of a different species. How could we expect this child of Shem to possess the beautiful traits of our Indo-European race? He is not permeable to all the excitement caused within us by our land, our ancestors, our flag, the word ‘honour’.

  Professor Ralston appeared to have been inspired by this style in his own writings, but being British, he did not allow himself to fill pages with swollen declamations of national superiority. His analyses were sharp and to the point and his adjectives were few; his theme was not so much the guilt of the traitor Dreyfus as the signification of this guilt in terms of the Jewish influence on the economy, and thereby on the culture and development, of an entire nation. Like Drumont and Barrès, he considered this influence to be pernicious, undermining the solidity of ancient roots based in the land and the cohesion of our people and our valiant Army. Had it not been for the streak of bitter irony, which permeated every line – If not for the necessity of judging him according to French morality and the French system of justice, the Dreyfus affair would really be a case study for a Department of Comparative Ethnology – I would have found his writings more convincing than those of the French. And yet, perhaps because I am a woman, I felt disturbed, not merely by the description of the Jewish threat to the national identity, but by the professor’s analysis of this national identity itself. I am English to the core, yes I am, indeed. I love my country deeply and passionately: I love its nature, its spirit, its language, its countryside, its traditions, its rich history, its defiant island soul, its little field creatures, and its wandering lanes and hedgerows – This precious stone, set in the silver sea …this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, beloved of John of Gaunt – I love it with a feeling as elemental and beyond analysis as the love of a mother for her child. Yet I object to being expected to bend in worship to the British Army as a symbol. Am I truly expected to believe that every individual in the Army is a model of personal honour, and that to accuse any one of them of any crime whatsoever is a stain on the body as a whole? Is not the Army, after all, guilty of an infinite number of bloody horrors? Of course, in my humble ignorance, I am happy that our Army exists, and that it is there to defend me and mine from attack, but I am unspeakably wary of extending this feeling to a dangerous absolutism, and deeply resentful that this should be presented as a condition sine qua non for being truly English. All in all, Professor Ralston struck me as a fanatic with a dangerous obsession. Leaving the library and locking the door behind me, I found myself wondering what could possibly have made him become the way he was.

  I returned home, damp and very muddy about the hem, just in time to find Emily charmingly dressed, with her prettiest hat in her hand, and hopping with impatience over my absence. I looked at her in surprise.

  ‘I am coming to Professor Taylor’s dinner party with you,’ she said. ‘Did I forget to tell you? He sent me an invitation because, ah, because I have friends who will also be there. Do hurry and dress! Shall I help you?’

  ‘No, no,’ I laughed, seeing her impatience. ‘I shan’t be long. I don’t have anything so very complicated to prepare myself with, you know.’ And removing the much-reduced day’s wear, I arrayed myself rapidly in the dove-grey silk evening gown that Arthur particularly likes, and a single string of pearls.

  The drizzle had turned into a downpour, and we were lucky to catch a four-wheeler trundling grumpily down Tavistock Street, as it passed in front of the house. We emerged in front of the professor’s house just off Russell Square, and dashed to the door as quickly as we could, avoiding the puddles, umbrellas raised.

  I was surprised to perceive quite an astonishing number of people assembled in the elegant drawing room into which we entered. I had expected a small gathering of professors of history, but Professor Taylor, coming forward immediately to welcome us, told us that he had also invited professors from the mathematics department, as well as some distinguished foreign visitors. Many of these gentlemen were with their wives, and there were even some young people, so that the atmosphere was altogether sociable and friendly. Professor Hudson was present; he greeted us kindly and gestured his family forward to be introduced.

  ‘My wife,’ he said proudly, ‘my son Roland, my daughters Phoebe and Hilda.’

  Roland was an exceptionally handsome youth of about twenty. Seeing Emily blush pink as she shook hands with him, I felt suddenly enlightened as to her earlier excitement.

  ‘Hello,’ he said to her gaily. ‘How are you getting on at King’s? Does my dad’s teaching still hold together?’

  She laughed, a tiny bit more than necessary.

  ‘Your father is the best teacher I’ve ever had,’ she said contentedly. ‘It’s nothing for you; you’ve had him all your life. But I feel so lucky to be here! Roland is up at Cambridge now,’ she added, turning to me. ‘It’s a funny thing. He grew up here, and I there, and now we’ve switched places.’

  ‘Do you also study mathematics?’ I asked him.

  ‘Why, yes! Can one study anything else?’ he said with amused surprise. ‘No, I’m only joking. I can see you don’t know our family, though. My mother read mathematics at Newnham twenty years ago, and all three of us children drank it with our milk, as you might say. Whenever she was too busy, Dad took over. My sister Phoebe will be going up to Cambridge next year for sure. As for little Hilda – why, Dad claims she’s the cleverest of us all!’ He smiled warmly in the direction of a snub-nosed and freckled young thing of fourteen or so, who although by far the youngest person present, was not in the least bit intimidated, but chatted cheerfully with the mathematics professors as though she had grown up among them, which indeed she apparently had.

  Professor Taylor, who had moved away to greet some new arrivals, made his way back to me
with some difficulty.

  ‘Talk, talk to everyone,’ he encouraged me. ‘Everyone here has something or other to tell you about old Ralston. He’ll come up naturally soon enough, I’ll see to that. All the mathematicians here have had some contact with him over logic. We told you that he was a bit of a maniac about that, didn’t we? He took the advanced courses, and tried to argue with the people working on the new theories. Here is someone you must meet. This is Bertrand Russell, a fellow of Trinity. Your husband is at Trinity, isn’t he?’

  A presentable, almost foppish young man in his early twenties looked me up and down, and enquired who my husband was, politely enough, yet a little haughtily, as I thought.

  ‘His name is Arthur Weatherburn,’ I said. ‘You are probably acquainted with him, although I do not believe that I have yet had the pleasure of meeting you.’

  ‘Oh, Professor Weatherburn! I knew him, of course. I never took any of his courses, though. I’m not too interested in those matrix theories. I work in philosophy and logic. I don’t actually live in Cambridge any longer.’

  His tone subtly implied that there was no possible comparison in importance between philosophy and mere ‘matrix theories’. I asked myself why Professor Taylor had insisted on my being introduced to this person, and concluded that he must have known Professor Ralston. I wondered briefly how I could lead the subject of conversation in that direction before the young man decided that I was not worth his notice.

  ‘And here is Dr Burali-Forti,’ Professor Taylor continued, drawing forward a rather tall and strong gentleman of a rustic, Mediterranean appearance, who had just approached our group. ‘He is visiting our department from Italy, and Russell has come down here to work with him.’