The Convert

  VI

  The Crossing

  1

  The survivors pass the months after the pogrom in a state of collective shock. They pick and press olives in deathly silence, doing without the old songs. The winter is near, and they have lost all their provisions; their fields have been trampled and ruined; felled trees lie scattered over the landscape; life seems to lack all meaning and direction. In some houses, the groans of dying villagers with infected wounds go on for weeks. Hamoutal can’t leave yet; the nights are bitterly cold. So she starves her way through December with the rest of them. On Christmas Eve, she hears the fervent prayers in the streets. The half-ruined synagogue remains sunk in icy silence. Hamoutal has had David buried simply, without any ceremony, in the Jewish graveyard. Later she’ll have a stone cut and his name carved into it. For now, hardly anyone can get anything done. Wood is gathered in the hills. The villagers hunt quail, rabbits and pheasants. They sleep by their smouldering fires. They keep breathing, so they do not die.

  Her father-in-law in Narbonne has not been sitting idle. After the death of his son, he pondered how he might have the body brought home for embalming; the cold put off the moment when the remains would start decomposing. He soon realised his plan was impossible; the traffic on the roads made it too risky. From Narbonne, he sends word to several Jewish communities along the route to Jerusalem, asking for news of his kidnapped grandchildren.

  Where is Hamoutal to go? In his letter, Obadiah mentions her extreme distress. In her sorrow, she clings to childhood memories. Nostalgia carries her through her darkest moments. She considers sneaking away to her in-laws in Narbonne. She considers joining a convent. She considers returning to Rouen and praying for forgiveness. She is only too aware that if she returns, she can expect to be burned at the stake or tortured to death. She doesn’t know that at almost the same time, in her home town of Rouen, there was another pogrom, just as gruesome: nearly the entire Jewish community was driven into a church by a band of crusaders. Anyone who refused to convert was slain then and there – young and old, men and women alike. In Rouen, too, the synagogue was set on fire.

  She is living with Obadiah and his wife again, as she did for her first few weeks in the village. She goes through the motions of caring for her nursing child; she hardly has the strength to take care of herself, and the shock has dried up her milk. The child is left for whole days in a small alcove, which is cold and clammy. Hamoutal has searched for her helper, Agatha from Alexandria, but found no trace of her. She has gone all the way to the top of the rocky slope to search and spent a difficult hour there crying and praying, tugged by the temptation to hurl herself into the depths. She stood at the edge, dizzied, the wind in her face. Then she let herself fall backwards into the bushes. She returned to the village below and took up her household tasks, saying nothing.

  The villagers eat what they can find. The whole wounded and distressed community struggles back to its feet. Winter can be fickle at these heights; temperatures can plummet far below freezing in the early morning and then climb to around 18º Celsius by noon, giving you the chance to warm yourself for a couple of hours, out of the wind behind a sheltering wall. On days of hard frost, the smoke from the oak fires curls out of the old chimneys as if in a dream. In January and February, the cold is biting. When snow falls, the village is hard to reach; it blankets the roads and the mountain passes. Impenetrable fog sometimes covers the highlands, lingering day after day. For weeks, hardly anything moves. Peasants sleep side by side with sheep or calves for warmth, but few of those animals are left alive. A couple of shepherds were wandering the highlands on the day of the catastrophe and came back down the slopes with their sheep soon afterwards. Their animals are offered up one by one to supply the whole village with meagre rations. The last small stocks of dried fruits, nuts and truffles are brought down from the attics. Turnips, carrots and swedes are dug up. Herbs and the leftover grain are harvested and ground; infusions are brewed of sage and thyme. The few remaining goats and sheep are milked, and cheese is made. All this in small portions for the scarred community. The children catch small winter birds with their lime twigs. They pluck them, throw them in hot ash and gnaw off the meat but can never fill their stomachs. Around the ruins of the houses and the synagogue, the stench of fire and carrion persists for weeks.

  In the first flush of spring, the villagers catch trout from the fast-running Nesque. Now and then someone has the good luck to bring down a roebuck or hind with a small wooden spear or a large stone. Then he drags his prey back to the village, where he receives a hero’s welcome. On the other side of the river, they can see the wolves prowling the grasslands near the rocky slope. Sometimes they howl all night, especially when a cutting wind races through the valley from the north-east. From over the hills, a few merchants arrive with a cartload of figs and melons preserved in sour wine. The villagers scrape some coins together, get drunk by the fire that evening, and say nothing. In the Jewish cemetery below, along the road to the gorge, a few flat stones lie in a jumble. The stonecutters haven’t yet had the time to carve names on them. The corpses, treated with herbal oil, lie wrapped in crude linen shrouds in their shallow graves and are slow to decay in the dry cold. That spring, nettles and cleavers run riot over the arid field.

  A thousand years later a few primitive chisels remain, almost rusted away. Amateur archaeologists on holiday in the area are surprised to find this type of tool just lying around in the underbrush. In 1979, the American scholar Norman Golb writes that he has heard a few villagers in Monieux mention a Jewish cemetery, but no one can tell him the exact location.

  2

  According to Obadiah’s letter, there was no one in Moniou who could care for Hamoutal. With no funds, he adds – which must mean that the silver coins that David had received from his father in Narbonne had been stolen in the pogrom. Or had David hidden the silver in the synagogue, and did Obadiah bring it to safety? That can’t be, because then he would have returned it to David’s widow soon after the pogrom. Broken and desperate, ‘in thirst and nakedness’ – under those circumstances, how do you decide which way to run?

  Hamoutal, worn with uncertainty about her children’s fate, decides to go in search of them. She has thought long and hard and sees only one possibility: the knights have dragged her children off to Jerusalem. So she must go after them, even if that means putting her own life in danger. The rabbi and his wife try to persuade her that this would be folly, a pointless path to nothing but death. But she seems determined and barely listens to their arguments. The next day, the rabbi hands her his letter of recommendation, addressed to any Jewish community in the world, entreating them to care for her. He pleads with her to be careful and not rush into anything. That night she tosses and turns, consumed by worry. She decides to run away while everyone else is sleeping. Goaded onward by despair, she steals off in the early morning with pain in her heart, leaving the high valley that has grown so dear to her. She has Obadiah’s letter, along with David’s tefillin, tucked into a pouch she wears around her waist. She goes without saying farewell to the two survivors who have taken care of her.

  On her own, with her sole remaining child on her arm, Hamoutal crosses the valley towards Saint-Jean-de-Sault. It is 5 April 1097, and the weather is fine. She plans to trek south and reach Marseilles in a week. The landscape consists, at first, of gently rolling hills; as she passes through it, she turns for one last look at the greening valley of the Nesque as it sinks away behind her in the sprawling freshness of the spring day. She passes through the Fôret de Javon and over a hilltop where wild olive trees are turning a light grey. The child at her breast sleeps in the warm wind. It’s still too early for jasmine; the first wild flowers sway, small and colourful, in the grass. She is at the mercy of chance, space, landscape, and could meet with misfortune anywhere. To survive some nights, she will have to go without sleep. She is numb to everything around her. She finds the path over the high crags, sometimes creeps behind a stone when she hea
rs animals, and lives like a wild creature. At night she can’t stop rocking back and forth, reciting Jewish and Christian prayers combined. She sings a lullaby to the baby, cries herself to sleep and is roused by the morning sun.

  She chooses the heights – the fastest route, with views. After Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, she reaches lower, open terrain, and from there she makes quick progress. Though weak and underfed, she trudges on till her feet are bleeding and then slumps to the ground wherever she is. Begs for food. Lies down, now and then, to catch an hour’s sleep under a holm oak. After crossing the plain near Villars, she heads south till she is near the gates of Apt. Two humble peasants take pity on her and offer her a bed; she stays with them for a couple of days. She doesn’t tell them she’s a Jewish convert; for the second time, she has the uneasy feeling she’s abandoned her new religion, but she has no real choice.

  Her baby is still weak; she’s glad the peasants have goat’s milk for him. For weeks, she’s been almost unable to breastfeed under the weight of her grief, and because her own diet is too poor and meagre. She sleeps on straw in a little stable, next to the animals quietly shuffling their feet. In and around her, everything is dark; she feels the child’s small breath against her chest. Her husband’s mutilated head sometimes lunges out, monstrous, in her dreams; then she feels like howling. She sobs herself through difficult patches and falls asleep again.

  The third morning, the concerned couple give her a few days’ provisions. She leaves early, crosses the large smooth stones of the Via Domitia and recalls her last flight, when her husband was still with her. Her heart races; the dark woods of the Luberon rise ahead, looking like an insurmountable wall she must pass over. High in the sky, crows gather. There are not many easy routes even in our time – she must pass Bonnieux and head towards Lourmarin, where today Camus’s readers lay stones on his simple grave. She has to move fast, crossing straight through desolate woods and valleys; around Cadenet she finds herself on more level terrain. She wades across the Durance, wide but shallow in spring. The ice-cold water takes her breath away. At some point, she loses her balance and falls flat into the current. Soaked and shivering, rubbing her crying child to warm him up, she reaches the vast reed fields on the other side – which a century later will inspire Cistercian monks to name one of France’s most famous abbeys Silvacane, from silva cana, the forest of reeds.

  What did she do when she ran into clergymen? Did she seek refuge in Romanesque churches along the way? How hard was it for her to keep changing her religion and identity to fit in? Rognes, Éguilles, Cabriès, Vallon de la Femme Morte. She walks like a woman possessed, through the rising heat on the salt flats, more than thirty kilometres a day. Somewhere near L’Estaque, she spends the night in a women’s house and tends to her walk-wounded feet. In the morning, she prays in the small chapel, asking the Christian God to forgive her for now belonging to the Jewish God. Yet some part of her knows that she’s always calling out to the same God: that quiet, desperate voice deep inside her. The next day, she enters Marseilles, salt air on her chapped lips, her child sucking his thumb in a shawl on her back.

  I sit down in the sun, which shines brightly on this plateau for more than 250 days a year. I pore over hiking maps and gamble on Hamoutal having reached Marseilles in less than two weeks. Two fighter jets tear through the sky with a deafening roar; disoriented birds flutter around in circles like confetti for a moment before flying onward. As I sit musing, my neighbour Andy comes down the narrow street and knocks on our small terrace door. Come on, he says, follow me, I want to show you something. I know where to find the base of that huge wooden shaft that connected the village to the tower above in the Middle Ages, like a big fire escape. We spend the rest of the morning scratching our hands and legs on juniper bushes, rocks and stiff palm leaves. Like panting schoolboys, we stare at the stone base, huge and rough, on top of the ruined rampart, near the rocky slope, where snakes roam free on the sun-warmed limestone and in the caves, and we watch where we step in our light shoes. In my mind’s eye, I see the old rabbi on the night of the pogrom, collapsing beside the blocked stairway.

  3

  On the same day Hamoutal leaves Moniou, 5 April 1097, Robert of Flanders and Stephen of Blois arrive in Brindisi, where they will set sail for the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It is a day of sunbursts, wind and spectacular clouds. At the same time, the Provençals led by Raymond of Toulouse are toiling their way towards south-western Slavonia, where they plan to push on to the Dalmatian coast and there to continue by sea, perhaps from Zadar. This plan will not succeed, either this time or in later crusades. A century afterwards, in the Fourth Crusade, Christian knights will vent their fury on the proud Croatian port, plundering and torching it. The northern armies will not join up with the armies from Provence until more than a hundred kilometres beyond Lake Ohrid – past Macedonia. For now, in northern Croatia, they lose their way again and again, stray into mountainous enemy territory, meet with delays, and have trouble resupplying.

  Raymond of Aguilers, the embedded journalist of his day, describes their dreadful journey, through weeks of cold and mist, through thick woods and mountains, plagued by uncertainty and growing unease, attacked more and more often by locals warned of earlier atrocities committed by the unruly rearguard. The attacks targeted that vulnerable horde of plunderers, although Raymond of Aguilers portrays them as innocent victims. The vagrants who followed the knights and foot soldiers often didn’t know which way to go, sometimes went days without seeing a single bird or animal, had almost nothing to eat, cut shoes out of birch bark, and hunted snipes and small game to survive. The locals refused them any form of support, providing food only under duress – in other words, after being assaulted and brutalised – and retaliated in the night, taking the worn-out mob by surprise as they tried to sleep on damp moss. By the time the crusaders arrived in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), many had been weakened by overexhaustion, infections, broken bones, lacerations, intestinal complaints, undernourishment, pneumonia, hunger and stress. Raymond of Toulouse had learned his lesson by then and offered the local king all sorts of gifts in return for fresh supplies and logistical support. But Raymond of Aguilers complains that this had little effect; the crusaders were subject to constant attacks from the rear. They had an especially hard time in narrow gorges and along rough mountain paths – landscapes unlike anything they had encountered before.

  The fate of little Yaakov and Justa can hardly have been anything but tragic. They were Jewish children, even if the girl had inherited her mother’s blonde hair. They were too young to take care of themselves, and far too young to escape on their own. If they survived at all, they may well have been sold as slaves in northern Italy. But it’s no less conceivable that they couldn’t keep up and were left behind to wander the land like so many other children, starving to death or falling prey to infections or wild animals. Is it also possible one of the knights helped them out? Now she almost hopes that someone knows of her distinguished Christian background and will make sure the children are sent to her parents in Rouen. But she has never told the children anything about them – if only she had. Such thoughts torment Hamoutal. Day and night, the image of her Jewish husband’s horrific murder vies for attention with her maddening worries about the children. When she conjures up a vivid image of Yaakov and Justa in the arms of the parents she’ll never see again, she sobs for hours in misery.

  Then one night she dreams of the snake that lay in the gravel next to Yaakov when he was born. She sees it creeping closer and tries to pull the blood-soaked newborn between her legs away to safety, but the child is stuck, attached to the ground by repulsive white roots. She pulls and tugs in desperation as the snake slithers closer, closer, looking as if he wants to creep inside her. She squeezes her legs shut and jolts awake with a shriek. She feels her heart on the brink of giving out. On the lonesome plain, she hears the monotonous rush of the wind through the pines. The stars look like pinholes in an impenetrable black sheet spread over the wo
rld. She dreams of the divine light beyond it and prays. She prays, but without words, a timeless murmuring to stems, stars and stones.

  I drive up from Monieux towards Saint-Trinit and see the valley sink away behind me. I reach the lonely Plateau d’Albion, site of the mysterious avens, pits in the calcareous rock so unfathomable that if you toss in a stone you’ll never hear it land. Sometimes you see birds fluttering through the dark depths in search of blind insects. An icy draught rises out of the complex of underground passageways; somewhere beyond reach, there must be an opening to the other side. These enormous limbos, lying precipitously on the arid plateau, draw you in; your head reels as you near the edge, the archetype of the entrance to the underworld. Some are surrounded by rusty barbed wire, knocked down by the rare adventurers who visit these hidden places. There are stories of collaborators hurled into the pits after the war, gangsters who pushed their rivals into them. A lean black dog approaches, swaying its vicious head back and forth. I get back in the car.