People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  I assured him that Mum was being well taken care of. Once word had got around the neurosurgical meeting, the whole doctor network had sprung into action, the way it does for one of its own. I doubted there was a patient in Boston who was getting more attentive care.

  “Well, Mom would be glad that this tragedy has brought us you, at last.”

  “Yeah, it’s too bad you and your mum didn’t stay in Australia—it would have been nice to have a granny when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, but we did stay there, for a few years. Mom wanted to give me the chance to finish my architecture degree. I was a night student at the Institute of Technology and I worked for the NSW Government Architect during the day. I designed the loos at Taronga Park Zoo. If you ever have occasion to take a piss there…” He grinned. “Well, they’re really nice, as loos go….” He put his glass down and looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not to say something. “You should know. Mom begged Sarah to let us see you, to make you part of the family. But Sarah said no. She insisted that there be no contact.”

  “But you just said your mother didn’t take orders from anyone. Why would she listen to Sarah?”

  “I think it came hard to her. But she knew we were moving back here. I suppose she thought it was unfair to create a big disruption in your life and then vanish. But she found out where you went to pre-school, you know, and would go there and watch for you, in the afternoon, when the housekeeper came to collect you. She worried about you. She said you looked like a sad little kid….”

  “Well, that was pretty perceptive of her,” I said. My voice, much to my embarrassment, was breaking, and I couldn’t keep the tremble from my lip. How bloody cruel. Cruel to Delilah, who must have yearned for her grandchild, all she had left of her son. And cruel to me. I would have been a different person if I’d had this family.

  “But why did Mum keep in touch, then? I mean, why were they together last night?”

  “Estate matters. Aaron’s trust—he willed his copyright to create the Sharansky Foundation.”

  “Of course,” I said. It was one of Mum’s boards. She was in big demand for boards—corporate, charity. She’d take the director’s fees and the prestige, but I’d never got the sense she cared that much about any of them. The Sharansky Foundation had always seemed an odd one for her; its interests weren’t exactly aligned with the Establishment.

  “Aaron wrote a will just before his operation, creating the Foundation. He named Delilah and Sarah as trustees. I guess he thought he’d bind them together that way.”

  Someone else came up then, and Jonah turned to speak to her. I stared at the pictures on the bookshelf. There were just a few, in plain silver frames. There was one of Delilah as a young woman, dressed in a white organza frock with a silver-spangled collar. She had huge dark eyes, all lit with excitement over whatever event it was that she’d dressed up so beautifully for. And there was a picture of Aaron, in his studio, paint-spattered, considering the canvas in front of him as if the photographer wasn’t even there. There were family group shots, bar mitzvahs, I suppose, brises, maybe…. Good-looking people with arms over one another’s shoulders, smiling eyes, body language that said they were glad to be together.

  They were all so warm—plying me with food, hugging me even. I’m not used to being hugged. I was trying to recast myself as someone who belonged in this setting, someone half Russian Jewish. Someone who could have been going through life named Hanna Sharansky.

  The vodka bottle was sitting on the glass table, and I kept gravitating toward it. I lost count of how many I’d had. I kept tossing them down, glad of the numbing buzz. Everyone was telling Delilah stories, Jonah’s wife was telling how, when she first got married, Jonah kept saying her matzoh balls weren’t like his mom’s. “I tried whipping the egg whites separately, combining everything gently by hand, and making these lovely, airy matzoh balls, but no, they were never like Delilah’s. And then one day I got fed up and just threw everything in the blender. They were golf balls. So tough. And what does Jonah say? ‘Just like Delilah’s!’”

  There were other stories in the same vein. Delilah hadn’t been a stereotypical Jewish mother, or grandmother, for that matter. Jonah’s son, a bloke a bit younger than I, talked about the first time his parents had left him alone for a weekend, supposedly staying with his granny Delilah. “She met me at the door and she had two take-out chickens in foil bags. She thrust them at me and said, ‘Now go home and have a nice weekend with your friends. Just don’t get yourself—or me—into any trouble.’ It was an overprotected fourteen-year-old’s dream, I tell you.”

  Jonah and his wife buried their faces in their hands in mock horror. “If we’d known…”

  I said I had to go not long after that. I said I had to look in on Mum, which I didn’t have any intention of doing. But I did have to get out of there. I was reeling, partly from the vodka shots, but only partly. It was going to take me more than one night to catch up with thirty years of missing information. Missing love.

  By the time I got back to the hotel, all the confusing new feelings I’d been having about my mother since her accident had resolved themselves into the familiar little angry knot I’d had with me most of my life. It wasn’t enough to know that she had once been a woman capable of a great love. Yeah, sure, she’d suffered. Lost the love of her life, and carried a gutful of blame over it. And yes, I hadn’t been perfect by any means. Needy and unforgiving and a nightmare adolescent. But it still wasn’t enough. Because in the end, she’d made all the decisions, and I’d paid for them.

  I went into the bathroom and threw up, which is something I hadn’t done—at least from too much drinking—since I was an undergrad. I lay on the bed with a wet washcloth on my face and tried not to notice the room spinning. As the headache started to kick in, I decided that I wouldn’t cancel my Tate talk after all. Let Mum’s fellow docs take care of her. I knew they would. She’d always put her work first….

  And so did he. The voice in my head was her voice. He was the one who really chose work over love. He needn’t have risked his life with a dangerous operation. He had so much. A lover, a family. A child on the way. But none of it was as important to him as his work.

  OK, then, bugger the both of them. Better just get on with it, like they would.

  I had a wicked hangover, which is just what you don’t want on a seven-hour plane trip. At least I was in the pointy end again, courtesy of the bezillionare. I took the piece of seared salmon the flight attendant offered me, thinking of all the poor sods in the back struggling through their cardboard chicken and rubber pasta. But even in first class, airline food is crap. The fish was seared, all right; cooked to perfection, and then left on the griddle for another hour and a half. All I really wanted was water, anyway. While I waited for someone to take the tray, I picked up the little plastic saltshaker, letting a few grains drop into my hand. After Mum’s accident, I hadn’t thought of getting back to Raz’s lab. When I hadn’t shown up, he’d assumed I was still dark with him. He’d done the analysis without me, as a goodwill gesture. He’d left a message, scribbled by hand, at the desk of my hotel. I had it out on the linen-covered tray table in front of me.

  You were right: NaCl. But sea, not rock. Ck. how they made kosher salt in C.15 th ? 16 th ? Maybe not table salt? Maritime adventures? Fits yr known locations, Spain and Venice??? Sorry fr being an oaf last night. Let me know how goes Lon. Your mate,

  Rattus Raz

  I smiled. Typical Raz. Looking for zebras again. And, of course, his shipwreck obsession would lead him to think of maritime mishaps. But I would take his advice and look into it. What made salt kosher, anyway? I had no idea. It was another line of inquiry, another thread to follow. Perhaps the genie in the book would give me a glimpse of something.

  I let the white grains fall from my hand onto a weary, rust-edged lettuce leaf. Thousands of feet below, the salty waves of an unseen ocean heaved and crashed in the dark.

  Saltwater

&n
bsp; Tarragona, 1492

  The word of YHVH is refined

  As silver and gold are refined.

  When these letters came forth, they were all refined,

  Carved precisely, sparkling, flashing.

  All of Israel saw the letters

  Flying through space in every direction,

  Engraving themselves on the tablets of stone.

  —The Zohar

  DAVID BEN SHOUSHAN was not a rude man, it was just that his mind was on higher things. His wife, Miriam, often chastised him for this, for passing within feet of her sister in the marketplace without a nod of acknowledgment, or failing to hear when the mackerel sellers were hawking their fish at half the usual price.

  So he was never quite able to explain why it was that he noticed the youth. Unlike the other beggars and peddlers, this one did not cry out, but just sat, silent, his eyes searching the faces of the passing crowd. Maybe it was his very stillness that caught Ben Shoushan’s attention. In all the clamor and bustle, he was the one quiet, centered thing. But perhaps that was not it at all. Perhaps it was merely a beam of thin winter sunlight, glinting on gold.

  The youth had claimed a small patch of ground at the edge of the market, hemmed in by the city wall. It was a damp, windy spot at this time of year; a poor place to attract customers, which was why the local merchants left it for the itinerant peddlers or the ragtag of war-fleeing Andalusians who drifted through the city. The wars in the south had set so many adrift. By the time they reached this far, what little they’d had of value was already sold. Most of the refugees who found places on the market’s edges were attempting to sell worthless things; threadbare cales and surcoats or a few worn-out household goods. But the youth had a piece of leather unrolled in front of him, and on it, bright and arresting, was a collection of small painted parchments.

  Ben Shoushan stopped and fought his way through the press to get a better look. He squatted, pressing his fingers into the chill mud for balance. It was as he thought; and the pictures were dazzling. Ben Shoushan had seen illuminations in the Christians’ prayer books, but never anything like this. He stooped and peered, unable to believe his eyes. Someone well acquainted with the Midrash had done these, or at least directed the artist. An idea occurred to Ben Shoushan, an idea that pleased him immensely.

  “Who made these?” he asked. The youth stared at him, the bright brown eyes blank with incomprehension. Assuming he did not understand the local dialect, Ben Shoushan switched to Arabic, then Hebrew. But the blank stare did not change.

  “He’s deaf-mute,” said a one-armed peasant, hawking a much-mended dough trough and a pair of wooden spoons. “I met up with him and his black slave on the road.” Ben Shoushan looked at the youth more closely. His clothes, though travel stained, were very fine.

  “Who is he?”

  The man shrugged. “The slave told some wild tale—claimed he’s the son of a physician who served the last emir. But you know how it is with slaves, they like to make up tales, eh?”

  “Is the boy a Jew?”

  “He’s circumcised, so he’s not Christian, and he doesn’t look like a Moor.”

  “Where is this slave? I’d like to know more about these pictures.”

  “Slipped off one night not long after we reached the coast at Alicante. Trying to get home to Ifriqiya, no doubt. My wife’s taken a liking to the youth; he’s a willing soul and he surely doesn’t give her any backchat. But when we got here, I made him understand that he’d have to sell something to pay his way. The pictures are all he had with him. That’s real gold on them, you know. You want one?”

  “I want all of them,” said Ben Shoushan.

  Miriam slapped the meat onto the quadrae so hard that David’s slice broke, letting a trickle of juice dribble onto the table.

  “Now look what you’ve done, you filthy man!”

  “Miriam…” He knew that the source of her anger was not the broken piece of bread. His daughter, Ruti, had leaped to her feet and was already wiping up the spill. David saw the girl’s shoulders drooping as his wife continued her scolding. Ruti hated raised voices. Sparrow, David called her, for she reminded him of a nervous little bird. Like a sparrow, she was a dull brown thing, with dun-colored eyes and a muddy complexion, who often smelled bad from tending the kettles where he boiled the gallnuts, resins, and copper vitriol that made his inks. Poor Sparrow, he thought. Gentle, willing to work, at fifteen she could have been married to some kindly young man and out of reach of her mother’s bitter tongue. But Ruti lacked both fortune and a fair face. And from the observant Torah families, who did not set such store in those things, she was excluded by the taint of her brother’s conduct.

  Miriam, tough as an old saddle, had no patience with the girl’s timidity. She shoved her daughter roughly and snatched the clout from her hand, rubbing at the table with exaggerated vigor. “You know better than me how few commissions you have, and yet you go and spend two months’ income on pictures! And Rachela says you didn’t even bargain with the boy.”

  David tried to quash his unneighborly thoughts about Rachela, who always seemed to know the business of the entire Kahal in its most minute particulars.

  “Miriam…”

  “As if we haven’t enough expense coming up, with your nephew’s wedding!”

  “Miriam,” said David, raising his own voice in a way that was highly unusual for him. “The pictures are for the wedding. You know I am making a haggadah shel Pesach for Joseph’s boy and his bride. Don’t you see? I can have the quires with these pictures bound into the book, and then we will be able to give a gift of substance.”

  Miriam pursed her lips. She tucked a curl of hair into her linen headdress. “Oh, well, in that case…” Miriam would rather suck a gall than back down in an argument, but this information brought with it the ease of removing an ill-fitting boot. She had been troubled about this wedding gift. One could hardly come with a trifle to the wedding of Don Joseph’s eldest son and the daughter of the Sanz family. She had worried that a plain haggadah from David’s own hand would seem a paltry gift to those great families. But these pictures, with their gold and lapis and malachite, these, she had to admit, had quality.

  David Ben Shoushan cared nothing for money and less for position; that he was the poorest man in the entire Ben Shoushan family bothered him not at all. But he did care for the peace of his household. Seeing that he had pleased his refractory wife was a relief to him. The idea of the thing satisfied him, too. A decade ago, he might have hesitated at the propriety of images, even religious ones such as these. But his brother was a courtier: he held banquets and enjoyed music and was—though David would never say it to his face—barely distinguishable from a Gentile. Why should his son not have a book to rival the finest Christian psalter? The great Rabbi Duran, after all, had insisted on teaching his students only from beautiful books. These, the rabbi said, strengthened the soul. “It has been one of the virtues of our nation that the rich and important in every generation have tried to produce beautiful manuscripts,” the rabbi had said.

  Well, he was neither rich nor important, but by the help of the Almighty, these fine paintings had been put into his hands—hands that had already been gifted with the skill to produce harmonious script. He intended that the book he made would be a glory. Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer—a scribe of God’s holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him.

  He was at work in the first gray light of morning, waving away Miriam when she came to offer breakfast. Their house, like most in the Kahal, was a tiny tilted thing, just two rooms perched one above the other, so Ben Shoushan had to work outdoors, even in the chill of winter. It was barely ten paces from the street door to the house, and the space was crammed with vats of skins soaking in lime, and others stretched on frames waiting for the few pale b
eams of sunlight that would slowly dry them. There were skins still thick with their fat and blood vessels, awaiting the careful parings of his rounded blade. But he had a small pile of scraped skins, and these he sorted carefully, looking for those of mountain sheep, that matched the parchments of the illuminations. When he had selected the perfect skins, he set Ruti to work, rubbing them smooth with pumice and chalk. He washed his hands in the chill water of the courtyard fountain, and sat down heavily at his scriptionale, carefully ruling up the readied pages with his bone stylus. His letters would hang from these faint lines. When the ruling was done, he passed his cold hands over his face.

  “Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach,” he whispered. Then he took up the turkey quill and dipped it in the ink.

  Ha Lachma an’ya…. This is the bread of affliction….

  The fiery letters seemed to burn into the parchment.

  …which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him enter and eat…

  Ben Shoushan’s stomach growled, protesting his missed breakfast.

  Whomever is in need, let him enter and celebrate.

  There were many in need this year, thanks to the taxes imposed by the king and queen for their interminable wars in the south. Ben Shoushan tried to rein in his racing thoughts. A sofer must fill his mind with only the holy letters. He could not be distracted by daily things. “Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach,” he whispered to himself again, trying to quiet his mind. His hand formed the letter shin— the letter of reason. What reason could there be in this constant fighting with the Moors? Had not the Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared these lands in contentment—in convivencia—for hundreds of years? What was the saying? Christians raise the armies, Muslims raise the buildings, Jews raise the money.