The Convert

  By sunrise, she has already walked a few kilometres. She hides among a few sheep in a fold to wait for nightfall before moving on.

  In Nájera, the garrison commander knocks on the door of the inn. Yom Tov comes out, and they sit down at the table. Yom Tov pays the thirty denarii he brought with him and then counts out Obadiah’s five.

  Meanwhile, Obadiah is knocking on the door of Hamoutal’s room. No answer. He calls her name, waits a few moments, knocks again. Still no sound.

  He sits and waits. A while later, the garrison commander comes to fetch Obadiah and Hamoutal.

  When there is still no response from the room, they open the door. The old rabbi realises at once what has happened. The commander seizes him by the throat and shouts, You let her escape on purpose! You cheated me! Your head will roll for this, old Jew!

  Obadiah groans with pain and asks the soldier to let go. Yom Tov comes upstairs and tries to placate the commander: She can’t be far, she must be trying to get to Rouen on her own for fear of being condemned to death again. She’s lost her mind, it’s not their fault she ran away. It will be all right: if they start out for San Sebastián as soon as possible, they’re sure to run into her.

  Again, the commander comes round to their point of view, thinking of the reward that awaits him in Rouen. Yom Tov offers to go with him. The two men depart on horseback, leaving Obadiah behind, panting and exhausted.

  The old rabbi spends a few more days in the inn, recovering his strength. Then he begins his journey back to Narbonne to report on the events in Nájera.

  Along the way, he begins to suspect that Hamoutal has fled to Narbonne. The thought gives him courage and the hope that all will end well. He talks to a wagoner who agrees to transport him, along with a few Muslim refugees from the south. They too are headed for Narbonne.

  When he arrives at the home of the Todros family, he learns to his dismay that Hamoutal is not there. After waiting a few more days for her to turn up, they lose hope. The old rabbis sit down together to assess Hamoutal’s chances of survival. Maybe her father will forgive her after all. Maybe they should send a message to the few surviving Jews in the community there, who don’t know she’s coming. They can imagine what has happened: Hamoutal was found by the garrison commander and Yom Tov, the dutiful cousin. She was escorted onto the ship and must be at sea by now, well on her way to Rouen.

  But after a few weeks Yom Tov returns home and tells them they couldn’t find Hamoutal anywhere; he narrowly escaped a lynching himself. With no remaining prospect of good news, Obadiah passes the entire winter in Narbonne. He is too old and fragile to travel home to the mountainous area where Moniou lies; the wind is cold and treacherous there in the heights. In Narbonne, near the sea, the climate is milder, and the company of his distinguished old friend does him good. But the news they hear from passing travellers is distressing. No place is safe from pogroms any more; a hundred years after the Christians’ millennial fears, the great beast seems to have descended to earth after all, plunging everything in its path into blind hatred and fanaticism. Cheerless song still rises from the churches every day; bells toll in the morning twilight; incense spirals in the sunbeams that press through the stained-glass windows. In the dim synagogues, the Shema Yisrael is heard, as dark and ageless as the unfathomable horrors now visited on the Jews. Spanish mosques are burned down; the Reconquista ignites a blaze of everyday cruelty and vengefulness against Muslims; chaos is rife. The old rabbis bend over their Torah scrolls and murmur. The hands of their silver pointers glide over the ancient parchment.

  It is late March 1099 when Obadiah begins his journey home, which he guesses will take him at least a week and a half. He travels by horse over the Via Domitia, first to Arles and then north-east to Apt, where he spends a few days. The weather has changed; a sudden cold snap has brought late flurries of snow, making noon seem like night, and mist wafts from the dark woods of the Luberon massif. He waits until one morning the sun bursts through the clouds. Wisps of haze rise over the hillsides. The first, fresh warmth of spring is in the air; the old rabbi takes heart. He will first cross the plain to Roussillon and then take the road over the heights of Saint-Saturnin, along the clefts and fissures of the waking countryside. The blackthorn is already in bloom; hares leap over the dark rocks, the first irises are budding in the valleys, and the last berries still hang, inky, from bare branches. At some point he ducks into a cave to wait out a shower. His horse is nervous and skittish; he ties it to a tree some distance away. The rain patters across the landscape like a curtain swept aside. Too late, he notices he’s sitting near a she-wolf ’s litter. The cubs whimper with hunger and pad towards him on shaky legs. The wolf comes closer, growling and showing her teeth, prepared to defend her young; the old man slowly, carefully lies down and holds still. The wolf waits for a long time before relaxing and coming over to sniff at him. Then she lies down beside her whelps. The old man falls asleep next to the nursing she-wolf. When he wakes, she is gone. A weak sun shines over the hills, the branches are dripping, wherever he looks water glistens. He stands, cautiously, and goes to his horse. As he rounds the corner, he sees the eyes of the she-wolf, tracking him.

  His heart is with the proselyte; all day long he thinks about her. In fact, he mourns her, certain she’ll be put to death. He feels he hasn’t done enough for her. By evening he has reached the heights of Saint-Saturnin. His back is in agony from the long ride; he is stiff and exhausted.

  Yet he yearns to be home as soon as possible. He catches a few hours’ sleep in a thatched lean-to, far from any house, by a fire he stokes now and then to keep away the wolves. Several times that night, the horse snorts in fear.

  The next morning he feels the warmth of the dew.

  As soon as the sun is up, he mounts the horse, rides past Lioux and the place called Le Château de Javon in our day – which was then nothing more than a low farmhouse with a few sheep and goats and a nervous sheepdog barking. Finally, he descends from Saint-Jean and passes close to the dry riverbed at La Croc, where the Roman arches curve over the valley, on the north-east side of the high plateau of Moniou.

  Seeing his solitary old village again in the distance stings him with pain; holding back tears, he presses his heel into the horse’s side. He rides across the valley and up the slope towards the village, beginning to hear the faint everyday movements around the walls, the clucking chickens, a yapping dog. The sun shines on the tower and the chapel above it. Men are at work expanding and reinforcing the ramparts.

  He is moved by the smells and colours of his old village. His heart is spent. The first bees buzz in the vines, the first spring blossoms overwhelm him with fragrance, the small, rain-wet wild roses on the village’s outskirts smell like spring water. Obadiah hitches his horse at the gate. The villagers are surprised to see him back; tears in his eyes, he stumbles home; the climb is harder than he remembered.

  He’s been away for more than six months; here, time seems to have stood still.

  He rests for a few hours and then, in the late afternoon, makes the rounds of the village, shaking hands.

  And then sees, next to the half-rebuilt Portail Meunier, a woman sitting on a stone.

  It is Hamoutal.

  He hurries over to throw his arms around her in joy.

  She gives him a blank look.

  Hamoutal, he says, how did you get here?

  The woman shakes her head no and stares at her feet.

  Hamoutal … ?

  The woman tips her head, as if to shift something in her mind, but nothing comes.

  She looks up, no recognition in her gaze. Her pale blue eyes are terribly crossed.

  Her hands are covered with scratches and dirt.

  Her swollen left foot has a bite mark and is badly out of joint.

  Her left hand is missing the little finger; pus runs from the crusted wound.

  A man comes up and takes the dumbstruck rabbi by the shoulder.

  Forget her, she won’t talk to anyone these days.<
br />
  The man tells him she arrived on foot, before the winter, ailing and broken, and that she likes to sit among the remains of the synagogue, at the edge of the mikveh. Sometimes she climbs down into the empty bath. She is thought to live in that old hole, covering it at night with leaves and branches. She begs a little; some villagers bring her food now and then. She accepts it all, gobbles it up, but won’t say a word.

  And where is her child?

  The man shrugs.

  A child? We never saw it here. There was no child with her when she arrived.

  Obadiah tries again: Hamoutal.

  He lays his hand on her shoulder.

  Sarah Hamoutal?

  The woman doesn’t seem to hear him. She wrings her hands in her lap and stares into space.

  Obadiah stumbles back into his house.

  The next day, he writes a letter to the Jewish community in Fustat, to explain her disappearance and report that the Egyptian child, Shmuel’s son Avram, has been lost.

  3

  The night is so unfathomably black and silent on the far side of the valley that she sometimes thinks this must be the end of the world. That whoever leaves the village will fall into an endless black pit, the unknown that surrounds the world and starts here, within walking distance. She hears the owl’s cry and some shard of her youth flashes through her addled brain. Another time, on an evening of wind and downpours, she watches the snails crawl over the paving stones to mate, a translucent, entwining tangle. She feels queasy. There are no stars any more, only countless pinholes in the blackness, too tiny for light to shine through. She descends into the dry mikveh, sometimes spending half the night there babbling nonsense. In the morning she shivers like a trapped animal, lying on dry ferns. She says names and mutters inaudible prayers. She gathers herbs and fruit in the first light. She caresses shrubs and bursts into tirades against the clouds. A wild boar slams into her right knee, and for a few weeks she walks with a limp. She drags her left foot like a clog. This pitiless landscape is her delirium; she stays clear of people and their ways. Through the long hot summer she sleeps by the banks of the Nesque, in the gorge, where it’s cool and safe. In the autumn she gathers nuts, picks apples, wanders. She’s doesn’t see how time is slipping past. She is thin as a lath, tough as a wild animal. She has almost forgotten how to talk. The onset of winter menaces her with the silence of icy death. She creeps into stalls to lie beside the animals. No one pays any attention to her, except the old rabbi, who these days can hardly walk. He begs her to come inside, at least at night. She can’t understand his words, or pretends not to. She doesn’t want to live and cannot die. Names, echoes of names in her head, she no longer knows which. In her imagination, she sometimes spends day after day in Rouen, in the courtyard, playing with her brothers. Arvid, she says with a toothless smile, Arvid my love. At other times, a glow spreads through her hips, a man is on top of her, his weight bearing down on her, making her laugh and gasp till she falls asleep. She knows the rats and snakes; sometimes they creep into the warmth of her dirty skirts, but they leave her be. Frost comes, then snow, then thaw in swift succession one late afternoon under low-hanging clouds; meltwater runs all around, the steep paths turn to streamlets. She sleeps in the dry mikveh, under branches and old fox skins. There she’s heard shouting, laughing, shrieking and praying. She digs up truffles with her dirty nails, the Devil’s hooves. She laughs hoarsely and talks to herself.

  In the heights, where the ruins of the village of Flaoussiers now lie, a few houses without memory in a sheltered side valley, she settles into an old borie for the snowy season. In the morning she walks to the ravines of the Nesque to watch the birds fly back and forth in the depths below. She dreams she’s floating high above the world. She hears the rush of the river; she watches the swift white clouds. In the morning she sees the sun rising fast against the great cliff, the Rocher du Cire, its orange glow reflected onto the cold blue stones where she lies shivering. The hard frost sends chunks of rock bursting out of the cliff face and rolling down into the valley; she can hear them clattering and tumbling down deep. She longs for death.

  She will have what she longs for. It comes unexpectedly, one day in December. She has eaten poisonous toadstools; she vomits herself through the horror in her thrashing, dying body. Gagging, she stumbles to the edge of the ravine, somewhere more or less opposite the stony mass of the Rocher du Cire. The ice-cold sun breaks through and does not warm the rocks. The plants are eternal and soulless; the heights rustle with snakes where the wind tugs at the crooked elms. She looks around for one last moment at the world, a thing she no longer understands. Vigdis, bright sweet sister, she says, I am black Hamoutal. The sour laugh shoots like a knife through her body. Then she stiffens, her heart thumping like mad. Her pale eyes bulge. Her tongue swells out of her mouth, dripping black saliva. She feels the chill rising in her body like a great wave from her feet, slow and gradual, as if she herself is as large as this cold, impervious world. For an instant, her eyes open wide and stare straight ahead. She feels herself filling slowly with this new feeling, this cooling and sailing away into an endless dark depth in her own body.

  A few days later, the year 1100 begins.

  The inhospitable place where she lies is hidden from passers-by.

  The wolves sniff at her body. The snakes slither past it. The toads hop up against it. Fluids soak into black soil. The world. The earth. The crows and jays circle above her. In the depths of the ravine, under the place where she lies decomposing, a young monk has arrived at St Michael’s Chapel in the cliff. The hermit prays to God and is moved by his own devotion. The bears sleep in the caves. The fish leap against the current in the rising, ice-cold water that courses from the heights of the Plateau d’Albion to the depths of the gorge. The last butterflies die under winter oaks, in dry leaves that rustle in the morning breeze. The cocooning insects bide their time in the shadows. The sun is weak, something like a faded dream. In the distance, a snow devil spins its way over the rocks. In the thorn bushes, juniper berries glitter like drops of darkness. No one comes to pick them.

  In time, her soiled clothes disintegrate.

  Her hair grows in the grass.

  After a year and a half, small scavengers have eaten away everything; the well-known worms of song and story do the rest. Her bones whiten; not a soul discovers her remains.

  The crusaders have captured Jerusalem at last.

  Soon it is February 1106. An enormous comet, like an apparition shooting through the membrane of a dream, rips through the night sky, terrifying the whole Western world. Preachers with rattles return to the streets; wolves and dogs howl to wake the dead. It streaks over the valley of Moniou, like a divine visitation, something defying all reason. Rabbi Obadiah looks up and asks God what is to become of humanity. The silence up there, where that apparition races, is overpowering. In the weeks that follow, several ewes have stillbirths; the faces look human, but twisted like devils. Their throats are slit there and then, and they’re tossed in a well. A mass is said for forgiveness of unconfessed sins. A few kilometres away, at the lower end of the village, the body of David Todros has already rotted in the Jewish graveyard. Hamoutal’s bones are likewise turning to dust, which looks like a handful of yellowish soil and can no longer be separated from the timeless motion. She lies untouched and is absorbed into the earth.

  No grave, no trace of the fact that she ever existed.

  All that remains is to tell the story of her life – described in the moth-eaten documents from Cairo. After a while, the rabbi also threw the second letter from Obadiah, passed on to him by Shmuel, into the genizah. He had to climb the small staircase to the gallery before he could reach the back wall. There, a metre and a half up from the floor, was the opening to the storage space, glimmering with darkness. The second document, too, contained the name of Yahweh. So Yahweh had to take it back; no human may destroy God’s word. The letter flutters down onto the others, somewhere between rubbish and dust.

  Years
passed; the tempestuous history of Fustat, the once-proud city founded by Amr ibn al-As near the ancient gate of Babylon, came to an unexpected and tragic end. Less than seventy years after Hamoutal’s death, the Kurds, led by the legendary Shirkuh, mounted an unstoppable advance on the city and brought the golden age of the Fatimids to an end. In 1168 the grand vizier of Egypt, unable to stand the thought of his city being sacked, decided to put it to the torch himself. He hoped this would prevent the crusaders, who were taking advantage of the Kurdish invasion to snatch territory from the Arabs, from using the city as a base of operations. This act of self-destruction was one of the many disasters that befell the cultures and societies of the Near East around that time. The city burned for more than two months. The fire devoured a whole world; every trace of the colourful multicultural society it had been was reduced to ashes and scorched earth. Scholars wailed; panicking masses fled the inferno; rats and snakes, cats and dogs tried to escape the sea of flames; children were buried under falling debris; hardly a stone was left atop another. For twenty kilometres around, the black smoke clouds were visible week after week, drifting over the waters of the Nile like a sign of doom and downfall. At night, millions of sparks leapt and whirled over the orange glow; the elders wept and beat their chests, watching from tents on the banks of the Nile, certain the end of the world was approaching. The fall of Fustat was a catastrophe on the same scale as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria: the end of an age, the ruthless gates of oblivion slamming shut. There is no telling how much knowledge was lost to us then. Astonishingly, the district containing the Ben Ezra Synagogue was spared. The genizah reposed in its dark depths, cherishing its secrets, only tens of metres away from the last, undefeated remnant of the great city wall, right next to the Well of Moses.