People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  And so he nodded.

  “Let the record show that the Jew, Reuben Ben Shoushan, has confessed to Judaizing. Now, admit that you have corrupted your wife with these things. An informant says you have been seen praying together.”

  Renato felt a new surge of fear. His wife. His innocent, ignorant wife. Surely he was not to be the cause of her suffering. He shook his head as vigorously as his depleted state allowed.

  “Admit it. You taught her your vile prayers and forced her to pray with you. There was a witness.”

  “No!” Renato rasped, finally finding his voice. “They lie!” He dragged the words from his shredded throat. “We prayed the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. Only those. My wife had no idea I had brought Jewish things into our house.”

  “Did you have these things with you when you contracted the sacrament of marriage?”

  Renato shook his head.

  “How long, then, have you been a Judaizer?”

  He opened his cracked lips and whispered, “Only one month.”

  “You claim you have been a Judaizer for only one month?”

  He nodded.

  “Then who supplied you with these things?”

  Renato winced. He had not foreseen this.

  “Who supplied you? Name the man!”

  Renato felt the room begin to spin and clutched his chair.

  “Name him! I give you one chance more.”

  The priest signaled, and the masked hulk moved toward him. The alguaziles grasped Renato and tugged him from the chair. He held his peace as they dragged him from the room and down the dimly lit stairs. He held his peace as they tied him to the ladder and inverted it over the basin. Dry sobs wracked his body as he heard the well water pouring into the ewers. Still, he held his peace. It was when they picked up the linen and forced open his jaws that he cried out. The pain of the one word seared his throat.

  “Sparrow!”

  When an alguazil made an arrest in the Christian quarters, he took care to do it at dead of night. That way, their victim would be at his lowest ebb, confused, unlikely to put up significant resistance or raise a fuss among neighbors who might complicate the business. But the Holy Office of the Inquisition did not send its own soldiers into the Kahal. It was concerned with the rooting out of heresy among those who pretended to have accepted Christ, not with those who persisted in their old, erroneous faith. The crimes of Jews who meddled with Christians and tempted them from the true religion were a matter for the civil authorities, and they sent their soldiers at any time they chose.

  So it was afternoon, and still light, when a preemptory banging shattered the peace of the Ben Shoushan house. Only David was within; Miriam had gone to the mikvah, and Ruti to the bindery to see if her father might collect the finished work that evening in time to deliver it to his brother, whose return was expected. David had noticed, with annoyance, that she was late returning from the errand, as usual.

  He shuffled to the door, crying out as he went against whatever uncouth caller had the effrontery to pound so on his door. As he flung the bar back and saw who stood there, the imprecations died in his mouth. He took a step backward.

  The men moved into the courtyard. One spat into the well. Another turned, slowly and purposefully, letting the tip of his sword’s scabbard catch on the edge of the bench that held David’s delicate writing implements. Ink bottles tumbled to the ground.

  “Give us Ruth Ben Shoushan,” the tallest of the armed men commanded.

  “Ruti?” said David in a small voice, his eyes widening in surprise. He had been sure the men had come for him. “There must be a mistake. You can’t want Ruti.”

  “Ruth Ben Shoushan. Now!” The man raised a booted foot with an almost languid motion and kicked over David’s scriptionale.

  “She…she is not here!” said David, his scalp prickling with fear. “She went out on an errand for me. But what can you possibly want with little Ruti?”

  In reply, the solider drew back his fist and struck the sofer in the face. David reeled, lost his balance, and fell backward, landing hard on his buttocks. He wanted to howl in pain, but the air had been forced from him, and when he opened his mouth, no sound came.

  The soldier reached down and tore off his head cover, then grasped the knot of silver hair in his fist and pulled him up off the ground.

  “Where did she go?”

  David, wincing, cried out that he didn’t know. “My wife sent her and I—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, the soldier wrenched on his hair, flinging him to the ground. A boot landed hard against the side of his head.

  His ear roared and rang. He felt a burning on the side of his face, then wetness.

  Another kick landed against his jaw. He felt the bones grind against each other.

  “Where is your daughter?”

  Even had he wanted to reply, his broken jaw would not open to form words. He tried to raise an arm to protect his fractured skull, but it was as if a lead weight had been tied to it. His left side would not move. He lay there, powerless under the blows, as the blood leaking into his brain spread further, and extinguished the light entirely.

  Rosa del Salvador had not slept properly in days. Her huge belly would not let her find a comfortable position. Her face throbbed from the blows her father, in his rage, had landed on her earlier in the evening. Even when exhaustion dragged at her and she dozed, a terrible dream always came. Tonight the dream had been of an old horse from her childhood, a black gelding with a white star on his forehead. He had been the blindfolded horse who worked the oil press, plodding in patient circles. One day the horse had fallen lame, and her father had sent for the knacker. Rosa remembered how the man had put the iron bolt to her old friend’s head, right on the star, and given the great hammer blow. As a little girl, she had cried for the death of the horse. But in her dream, the horse did not die, but reared, screaming, with the metal bolt embedded in his head and blood flying from his tossing mane.

  Rosa awoke, sweating. She sat up in the dark and listened to the night sounds of her family’s masía. The farmhouse was never really silent. There was always the creaking of the old beams, the ragged snores of her father in his wine-drenched slumber, the scratching of mice among the amphorae where the grain was stored. Usually these sounds soothed her, but not tonight. She rubbed her hands over her belly. These dreams, surely, were curdling the blood that should nurture her child. She feared that the child inside her might be turning monstrous.

  Why had she let herself love a Jew? Her father had warned her. “Don’t trust him. He says he will give up his faith for you, but they never do. In the end, he will blame you, and the bitterness will poison your later years.”

  Well, if only that was all that had happened. A commonplace misery, such as a marriage gone sour in old age. Now it was likely that neither of them would see their old age. Without ransom, which her father refused to pay, her husband faced the stake. She had begged her father to buy her husband’s life, and received blows for it. Her stubborn choice in marriage had put them all at risk, he said. The entire family was now suspected of being secret Jews. Any jealous neighbor who wished for one less competitor in the oil market, any greedy man who eyed their fine groves, could make an accusation against them. It could be some trifling thing: that her mother had choked on a piece of ham, that her father had changed his shirt on a Friday, that she, Rosa, had lit candles too early in the evening. Her father feared it, that was plain. Every evening he tormented himself, running through lists of his competitors, of customers who might have a grievance, of relatives with whom he had not been open-handed enough in their times of need. He would berate her mother for having once, long ago, bought kosher meat because it was selling cheaper at market than the cuts of the Christian butcher. At such times, Rosa tried to be anywhere in the masía that would keep her from falling under his eye. Once, when he beat her, he had cried out that he wished she would miscarry, that her infant, with its Jew-polluted blood, might be born dead.
Rosa’s great guilt was that, as the blows fell, she, too, began to wish for it.

  Agitated, she eased herself up off her pallet and reached for her mantle. Air, that was what she needed. The heavy farmhouse door creaked as she pressed against it. The night was mild; the scent of loamy earth carried the first hint of spring. She threw a blanket around her shoulders but did not take a lamp; her instep knew the path to the grove that she had traversed all her life. She loved the trees, the gnarly strength of them. The way they could be blasted by lightning or charred by a brushfire, and look quite dead, then send forth a new green shoot out of the old wood and keep living, in spite of everything. She would have to be like an olive tree, she decided. She ran her hand over the rough bark.

  She was there, in the groves, when the alguazil and the bailiff came on horseback up the path that led from the town. She watched, hidden in the tree shadows, as the lamps flared in the house. She heard her mother’s cries of fear, her father’s shouts of protest, as the bailiff took note of the contents of the farmhouse. Everything they owned would be forfeit to the crown if the charges against them were proved. She shrank to the ground, pulling the dun-colored blanket tight to hide the whiteness of her bed gown, covering herself in earth and leaf litter, afraid lest the torches move toward the groves. But her father must have told some lie about her whereabouts to the alguazil, for he did not even make a cursory search. She watched, helpless, as her parents were led away. And then she ran, with her strange, slow, pregnant gait, through the groves, across the neighbor’s fields. She could not go to them for help; she could not know if they were the Inquisition’s informants. Beyond the neighbor’s fields, the land rose abruptly toward Esplugües. She could hide there, in the cave where she and Renato had met in secret courtship. Why had she gone to him? Why had she brought this misery upon their heads? The bulk of the baby compressed her lungs so that she could barely breathe as she climbed. The sharp stone scraped her bare feet. She was cold. But fear drove her on.

  When she reached the mouth of the cave, she collapsed, gasping. When she felt the first pain, she thought it was a stitch. But then it came again, not harsh, but unmistakable; a pressure like a girdle drawn too tight. She cried out, not because the contraction hurt her, but because her child, whom she did not want, this baby, who might have turned into a monster, was about to be born, and she was all alone and very much afraid.

  Ruti and Micha were together in the storeroom when they heard the door to the bindery open. The binder cursed. “Stay in here and be silent, for pity’s sake.” He closed the heavy door to the storeroom and stepped out, tugging at his leather apron, trying in vain to hide the bulge beneath. Stifling his annoyance, he arranged his face to greet the client.

  His expression changed when he saw that it was a soldier, and no client, who had entered his workshop. The haggadah, complete, splendid, with its gleaming clasps and burnished medallion, sat on the counter, where he and Ruti had been admiring it until their desire had overtaken them. Micha, offering a polite greeting, moved between the soldier and the bench, deftly pushing the book under a pile of parchments.

  But the soldier did not care for books and barely noticed his surroundings. He had picked up a thick needle from the workbench and was working it under his nails, sloughing greasy matter in a little cascade of motes that fell, Micha noted with dismay, onto a sheet of prepared parchment.

  “Ruth Ben Shoushan,” the soldier said, without preamble.

  Micha swallowed hard and made no answer. His inner panic expressed itself in a blank expression that the soldier took for witlessness.

  “Speak, dullard! Your neighbor, the wine seller, reports that she came in here.”

  No point denying it. “The daughter of the sofer, you mean? Ah yes, now that you mention it. She did come, indeed, on an errand for her father. But she left with…ah…a silversmith…I think from Perello. Her family had business with him, it seems.”

  “Perello? She has gone there, then?”

  The bookbinder wavered. He did not want to betray Ruti, but he was not a brave man. If he gave false information to the authorities, and was discovered…But then, if Ruti was found in his store cupboard, that was already enough to indict him.

  “Sh…she did not confide her plans to me. You must know, sir, that unmarried Jewish women do not speak with men outside their families, except briefly, on necessary matters of business.”

  “How would I know what your Jewess whores do?” said the soldier, but he turned for the doorway.

  “May I ask…that is, might your lordship tell me, why so important an officer would concern himself with the humble daughter of the sofer?”

  The young man, like most bullies, couldn’t resist a chance to instill fear. He turned back into the shop with an unpleasant laugh. “Humble, maybe, but not the daughter of the sofer anymore. He’s already on his way to hell with the rest of your damned race, and she’ll be joining him soon. Her brother’s for the stake, and she’s to go with him. He confessed that she tempted him to Judaize.”

  Miriam returned from the mikvah, ready to greet her husband as a bride. There had been signs, the past year, that told her there could not be many more months in which the purification ritual would be required of her. She knew she would miss it: the restraint of abstinence, the anticipation of renewed union.

  For the previous ten days, since the start of her period, David and Miriam had not even touched hands, according to the ancient laws of family purity. Tonight they would make love. As much as their personalities had grated one against the other, their physical union had always been a mutual pleasure, and no less as their bodies aged.

  Miriam was spared from finding her husband dead in his blood on the stones of her courtyard. The whole alley had heard the rough, raised voices, and known all too well what they meant. As soon as the armed men were gone from the Kahal, they had come to do what was necessary and right for their neighbor.

  When Miriam saw her house already prepared for shivah, she thought at once of Reuben. They had sat shivah for Reuben for seven days after his baptism as a Christian, to signify that he was dead to them. But now it fell into her heart that her son was truly dead. His father had relented and decided to accord him Jewish rites. She grasped the doorpost.

  The neighbors supported her, brought her inside, and gradually made her understand the truth. David’s body had been washed and clad in white. Now the neighbors wrapped the body in a linen sheet and carried it to the burial ground. Shabbat was approaching, and Jewish law required burial without delay.

  As soon as her husband was buried, Miriam lit the yahrzeit candle. She wanted to give herself up to grief. Her husband dead, her son convicted and sentenced to death in the Casa Santa, her daughter…where was she? The soldiers, in their callousness, had invaded the graveside, crudely interrogating the mourners as to the whereabouts of the deceased’s daughter. Miriam struggled to think clearly. For the first of her tragedies, David’s death, she could do nothing but grieve. For the second, her incarcerated son, she could do little but pray. But the third, Ruti, was another matter. There, it might not be too late. If the girl could be found, warned, hidden or spirited out of the city…

  Just as she was thinking these things, the neighbors parted, jostling to make room as Joseph Ben Shoushan, still wearing his travel clothes, crossed to his sister-in-law to offer his condolences. His eyes were red from road weariness and grief.

  “The servants told me the news as I arrived at my house. I came directly here. Sorrow heaps upon sorrow. David! My brother…if only I had ransomed your son as he asked me, this might not—” His voice broke.

  Miriam spoke with a harsh urgency that startled the grieving man. “You did not, and what is done is done and God will judge you. But now you must save our Ruti—”

  “Sister,” Joseph interrupted. “Come with me now to my house. I am taking you under my protection.”

  Miriam, her eyes blank and uncomprehending, could not focus on his words. She could not leave her ho
use during shivah, surely he knew that. And poor as she was, she did not intend to walk away from her own home to become a charity case in her brother-in-law’s. How could he think she would abandon her little house and all its memories? Miriam’s querulous voice sounded almost normal as she started to list her objections to her brother-in-law.

  “Sister,” he said quietly, “soon, very soon, we shall all be forced to leave our homes and our memories, and we all of us shall be charity cases. I wish I could offer you a place in my home. All I am able to offer you is a place at my side on the uncertain road that now faces us.”

  Slowly, painfully, Joseph explained to the crowded room the events of the preceding weeks. Husbands and wives, who usually would not touch each other in public, fell upon each other, weeping. Anyone passing by the little house and hearing the lamentation would have thought, Indeed, David Ben Shoushan was a good and pious man, but who would have known his death would provoke such an outpouring?

  Joseph did not tell Miriam’s neighbors, simple people like the fishmonger and the wool comber, all the arguments and stratagems that had been tried in the monthlong struggle for the heart and soul of the monarchs. He told them, simply, that their leaders had done their best. Pressing the case for the Jews had been Rabbi Abraham Seneor, eighty years old, the queen’s friend, who had helped negotiate her secret marriage to Ferdinand. He had served as treasurer of her own hermandad police force and as tax collector for Castile. Seneor was such a wealthy and important man that when he traveled, it took thirty mules to accommodate his retinue. With him was Isaac Abravanel, renowned Torah sage and the court’s financial adviser. He had won his post in 1483, the very same year that the queen’s confessor, Tomàs de Torquemada, had been named Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Inquisition Against Depraved Heresy.

  It was Torquemada who pushed the case for the Jews’ expulsion. He had been unable to act on his hatreds during the Reconquest, when the monarchs relied on Jewish money and tax collecting to fund the war against the Moors; Jewish merchants to supply the troops over miles of difficult, mountainous terrain; Jewish translators, fluent in Arabic, to facilitate negotiations between Christian and Muslim kingdoms. But with the conquest of Granada, the war was over; there were no more Arab rulers to deal with; and sufficient Jewish skills, such as translation and scientific knowledge, craftsmanship and medicine, could be found among the conversos.