Jupiter the Stupider - Brian Prousky

Jupiter the Stupider by Brian Prousky

Book excerpt

The Legend of Gideon Marx

Once upon a time there was a Jewish physician, named Pavel Marx. He was the most talented doctor in the Ukraine and Russia, perhaps the world, and travelled between shtetls treating people who were very sick. When another doctor was unable to cure a patient, Pavel was summoned for a second opinion. More often than not he found a cure. Some patients he treated were so close to death their families had already built caskets and dug holes in the ground. Pavel saw things other doctors didn’t, symptoms that were almost invisible. Unlike them, he examined every inch of every patient he saw. It wasn’t unusual to find Pavel examining the toes of a patient suffering from head pain. And he asked many questions. If the patient could still speak, he questioned the patient and those who cared for him about things seemingly unrelated to the patient’s aliment. And if the patient couldn’t speak, he questioned only those who cared for him. The people in the shtetls thought Pavel was a sorcerer, a man with unexplained magical powers. But he wasn’t gifted that way. Pavel’s gift was that he could quickly take in dozens of pieces of information and put them together in his mind to solve a problem—a problem other doctors thought was an unsolvable mystery. In truth, he was a gifted problem-solver. Today he would be known as a gifted diagnostician.

One day the daughter of a wealthy man in St. Petersburg, a cousin of the Czar, became very sick. So sick she couldn’t eat or drink or lift her head off her pillow. The wealthy man summoned his family doctor who came to examine her. The doctor spent an hour with her, doing all the regular things doctors do, but afterward told the wealthy man he had no idea what was making her sick. The wealthy man summoned another doctor who reexamined the girl. He also said he was puzzled by her symptoms and had no idea how to treat her. The wealthy man summoned three more doctors. All of them admitted they too were stumped. Meanwhile the girl was getting worse. Her skin was turning grey. Her lips were turning blue. Her breathing was shallow and weak. The wealthy man was becoming desperate. He summoned all the doctors in St. Petersburg, including the five who had already seen his daughter. There were eleven of them. He sent them into her room to examine her together. Every hypothesis one of them came up with, another discredited. After eight hours they told the wealthy man they were no closer to discovering what was wrong with his daughter than they were when they first laid eyes on her. The wealthy man was angry and distraught. As the doctors prepared to leave his house, he wondered aloud about their abilities and qualifications. He didn’t care if his words were insulting. He wanted them to feel his pain. One of them, the youngest and bravest, lingered for a moment after his colleagues had left. He approached the wealthy man and said, “There’s another doctor you might try. A fish salesman told me about him. Though I haven’t actually met him. He’s a Jew who lives in a shtetl called Derazhnia. He has a wife and young son. Apparently he’s so talented he can cure a patient who already has his foot in a grave.”

With no time to waste, the wealthy man sent two soldiers in a carriage to fetch this miracle worker. It was normally a six-day return trip, but they travelled at incredible speed from the moment the sun rose to the moment it set, exhausting the horses, which twice they had to trade for rested ones. They reached the shtetl and fetched Pavel and brought him to St. Petersburg in only three days.

The wealthy man was waiting in the doorway when they arrived. Without introducing himself, he rushed Pavel upstairs to the girl’s bedroom. She had the appearance of a skeleton. Pavel bent over her and put his ear to her mouth to listen to her breathe. He put his hand on her chest. Just as he was about to tell the wealthy man there was nothing he could do to save her because her illness was incurable, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she stopped breathing. Pavel straightened up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She had cancer. In her lungs.” He expected to see inconsolable grief in the wealthy man’s eyes. Instead, he saw them fill with rage.

“You put your hand on my daughter and a second later she’s dead!” The wealthy man shouted. “I suppose you only cure Jews and kill everyone else!”

Because of his work, Pavel had met men who expressed their grief in anger. Though it was God, not him, they’d expressed it at. He wanted to defend himself but couldn’t think of the right words—words that in his mind wouldn’t further enrage the wealthy man.

“You have nothing to say for yourself? Has the angel of death lost his tongue?”

“I know how—”

“You know how to kill people! That’s what you know!”

The wealthy man picked up a marble statue of a ballerina from the dresser and smashed it against Pavel’s head, knocking him to the floor. A second later Pavel felt a heavy weight on his stomach and hands around his neck. They were the last things he felt.

Now one might assume the wealthy man was worried about getting arrested by the police. But back then relatives of the Czar didn’t get arrested. And they especially didn’t get arrested for killing Jews. The police would have been happy to accept any story the wealthy man told them, for example that Pavel accidentally slipped and banged his head.

Now one might also assume that that was the end of the wealthy man’s anger. After all, he’d just killed a man with his bare hands. But in his mind he still wasn’t even. Pavel had taken the life of his child. In return, he was going to take the life of Pavel’s child.

The next day he sent two soldiers—the same ones who’d originally fetched the doctor—back to the shtetl. Though this time with very different orders—to break into the doctor’s home at nightfall and murder his only child, Gideon, who had just turned two.

Those orders, of course, were never carried out. If they were, there would be no legend to speak of. Gideon’s story would have ended before it began.

Gideon and his mother, whose name was Sofia, were fortunate in one regard—many people felt deeply indebted to the doctor. One of those people happened to be the wealthy man’s groundskeeper. He was half-Jewish and had a nephew living in Kiev who was cured by Pavel of a near-fatal skin disease. After learning of the wealthy man’s plan for vengeance, the groundskeeper risked his own life and stole a horse and set out for Derazhnia. It was dark and the paths were hard to see but he travelled all night and got a head start on the soldiers. When he arrived at the shtetl he told Sofia and all the townspeople what had happened to Pavel and what was going to happen to Gideon if the wealthy man had his way. Waves of overwhelming grief washed over Sofia. Her knees buckled under her, and she fell to the ground sobbing. The townspeople, most of whom knew someone who was cured by the doctor, hid her and Gideon in a covered wagon and transported them in the middle of the night to a neighboring shtetl, where the townspeople also knew and revered the doctor. They too hid the pair in a covered wagon and transported them to the next westernmost shtetl. And the two kept moving like this, from shtetl to shtetl, until they were in Poland. But still Sofia feared the wealthy man’s quest for vengeance. It was possible he’d put a bounty on Gideon’s head. And it was possible he had friends and business associates in all the countries of Europe who would happily take the child’s life not just for the bounty but also to win favor with the wealthy man, which, if you were a trader or importer and exporter, could prove quite lucrative.