by Alon Hilu
In an instant several thugs hired by my father to guard our estate take hold of me – on Father’s orders – in their sturdy arms, not for purposes of cuddling or lovemaking but to remove me to the far side of the outer wall, into the street, so that I will not sabotage my family’s happiness.
From the moment I am expelled from the house it becomes clear to me that I was never on the verge of dying, it was my many sins that strangled my soul, and now, when the suffering of the Jews has been resolved, my health is slowly restored and my breathing grows regular; still, the impurity does not ebb from my feeble, evil-ridden body.
I can still hear the sounds of merrymaking from the feast as I walk away from it, slightly scratched and bruised, and in my heart there is a buoyant feeling of relief at being expelled, and now that the entire city has been washed clean and its diseases have been exiled and its oppressors have fled for their lives, there is nothing left but this final step, that is, to purify Damascus of all the bitterness and blackened pus in my body, and I am overcome with longing for that wooden statue that was hurled into the water and I wish to follow in its path, and my first, original prayer returns to me and I thank the Messiah of the Christians for his help in saving the good Jews from my evilness, and I desire to fulfil my part of the agreement by cleansing the Jews of my repulsive presence and accepting upon myself the benevolent faith of Jesus the Nazarene, and I approach the gatekeeper in the alley that divides the Jewish and Christian quarters and I leave Kharet Elyahud, but I know not where I am headed nor what I will do.
From there I walk northwards, beyond the city walls, and in spite of the grave danger of being attacked by marauding Bedouins I have no fear at all for my life, and I place my trust in the Messiah, the Jew, that he will show me the right way, and I remove my outer clothing and proceed, half-naked, while a spring breeze carries the pollen of many flowers, and my path becomes clear: I will immerse myself in the good, translucent river and wash away my sins to the last of them.
Here the current of the River Barada is swift and frothing and I remove my shoes and my undergarments and enter the water barefoot, prepared to place myself naked and unencumbered before the celestial court, and I await a sign to show me that I have taken the proper action in seeking divine forgiveness and that the terrible evil will be washed away.
I am emerged to the loins in the roiling water but still firm in my stance when a band of priests passes by on its way into the city, and they take note of this young man immersing himself and they wonder at the late hour and at the act itself, for the lad’s face is bearded and his eyes have known torment, and they rush towards him, agitated, to fathom whether this is their Messiah come to earth, as it is written in the Holy Scriptures, after soaring through the highest turret of the Umayyad Mosque, and bringing with him the kingdom of heaven and the end of evil and stupidity and bestowing his kingship on his flock of faithful.
The priests remove their sandals and enter the water clothed, and they question the tormented youth, asking him to explain himself, and so I tell them that I wish to be baptised there at this very hour of the night in order to remove my grievous sins, and they proffer threefold blessings and place a warm and loving hand on my head and they bend my upper body and immerse my head in the pleasant, night-darkened water three times so that I may enter the Christian faith, and after that they draw me away from there, with loving arms, to one of the city’s monasteries, and I emerge dripping from the water, ready to follow wherever they will lead me.
8
MY HAPPY FRIEND, I have told you of my immersion in the river and my baptism into the faith of Jesus at the hands of the priests, after which I accompanied them to one of the monasteries of Damascus, a proselytising monastery whose few monks were timid and kept to themselves, and they lived together in harmony, tending a pleasant garden of vegetables and red and white roses.
They offered me a bed of snowy linen and placed a soft pillow under my head and instructed me to rest and sleep well, for my wanderings had been many that evening and they were sore afraid that my body had caught a chill from being immersed in the icy river, and they dried my skin and my hair and made pleasant quips about the abundance of fur covering my body, and they asked no further questions, merely wishing me a good night and pleasant dreams.
On the morrow, my happy friend, they placed before me a breakfast of newly picked cucumbers from their garden and homemade yoghurt and fresh baked bread from their oven, and I told them how I had spoken with their Messiah, pleading for relief and deliverance, and that he had come to my assistance and brought about a solution to the nightmarish entanglements of this affair that I had caused to rain down upon the good Jews in my foolishness and vice, and that when my prayers had been answered I had hastened to fulfil my part of the bargain with Jesus the Nazarene and went to immerse myself in the waters of the River Barada and take upon myself his teachings.
The kind monks praised me for this deed, adding that Jesus son of Mary is prepared to shoulder the burden of all the sins in the world and had done so in the past, for his doctrine was none other than that of forgiveness and atonement, and it was he who had removed my onerous guilt, and after my baptism I am pure and cleansed and on my way to a new life, the life of a believer atoning for his villainy.
I responded by telling them that my sins were black and burdensome, and that a lifetime of purification and atonement and supplication lay ahead but that I could not pursue this path there, nor could I remain a Jew or remain in Kharet Elyahud or in Damascus for that matter, that I must roam to a distant place, and I requested their help in leaving the city, that they might bring me to some faraway monastery, solitary and remote, of their order, and I pressed upon them to hasten with these plans to remove me from Damascus so that I might not come face to face with a member of my family or tribe, whom I would be unable to look in the eye even one more time, and they agreed even without understanding my meaning, and they packed a small bundle for me and placed it in my hands, then they hired a mule driver in the Khan Assad Pasha to lead us away, and we left in the afternoon on several dark and sturdy mules, and I sat among them wearing their clothing, a golden cross glittering on my chest, and when we departed from the city gates we were subjected to a dust storm that blew many grains of sand into our eyes, and I gazed upon that place, that city, and I knew it was the last time I would see Damascus, never to return to it, and I thought about those persons and characters I was leaving behind, and they are now buried in the pages of this book, alive one minute and frozen the next, trapped inside a short description, a fistful of words, their fate bound and sealed until a reader brings them to life, only to be forgotten, after that, by one and all.
Moreover, I know their story has not been told as it should be, my happy and industrious friend, for the evilness of the teller has seeped into the descriptions and into the words by which the characters were created, and all their beauty and innocence has receded, so that it is incumbent upon you, my young foundling, and incumbent upon all who read these pages after you, to rescue the truths from among the lies and injustices committed by the teller in the grip of his story.
My original, impromptu prayer returned to me then and settled in my heart, and I spoke with God and asked His forgiveness for estranging myself from my father and my entire family for the whole of my life, and I condemned my foolhardy blindness in failing to recognise within myself the spirit of love, and now that my mind had settled at last, I was filled with hope of being pardoned and purified, and of realising a long and continuous life of faith.
My happy friend, from that day forth I have indeed devoted my life to the study of Christianity and the priesthood, first in several monasteries in Lebanon as a novice and then later, as a result of my diligence, I was sent to the Vatican in Rome, where I spent seven full years learning the Holy Order until I confessed to my teacher-priests my burning desire to live out the rest of my days in a small monastery where I could pray to our Father in heaven that He might blanch my sins white
as snow and send them tumbling down the banks of the river to be carried off to the sea and swallowed up.
After many hardships I arrived hither, at this desolate, windswept monastery on Mount Lebanon where the seedlings and flower bulbs do not survive and the trees are blighted, and from the summit of this hill I gaze eastward day after day at the city I left behind, and I pray for peace for Damascus and all her inhabitants.
Whenever some Damascus-bound traveller happens upon our monastery I am in the habit of asking if he would be kind enough to make inquiries with regards to my family, and it is in this manner that slivers of rumours of their lives following the time of the affair and in the ensuing years have reached my ears.
Thus I was informed by an itinerant priest who heard it from a benevolent woman that on the day I took leave of my Jewish heritage my parents rent their clothes and mourned me as is customary for seven days, and from that moment forth did not mention my name even once until their deaths; they removed my belongings from the servants’ room and destroyed or conveyed from the house all traces of Aslan in order to render my existence in the world null and void.
Upon learning the news of my conversion to Christianity, the Khaham-Bashi hastened to extract from the Beth Din a writ of divorce which was presented to Markhaba so that she was thus divorced by law, and within several weeks he married her off to one of the poor Torah scholars, a tall young man of weak eyes and white skin who was as thin as a palm branch but who was faithful to her and loved her deeply, and she bore a great number of children to him and presented him with an abundance of descendants, many of whom grew to be Torah scholars themselves who in turn gave birth to more Torah scholars, and I was pleased to know that at last she had found joy.
Other voyagers have informed me about my sister, who migrated to Baghdad to marry a wealthy widower who fancied her, and about the wedding of my younger brother, Meir, and the five children he raised strictly and lovingly according to the laws and precepts of Judaism, and I would recite their names and light votive candles for them and pray to Jesus to keep them safe under his wings, free from any harm.
With trepidation and anxiety I received news of my family’s finances as they progressed from bad to worse, first on account of the ubiquitous Harari family, who had resumed their rough and cruel business practices as before and wore down the Farhis with underhandedness and unfair competition, and later, some thirty years after the Blood Libel, on account of the digging of a deep canal through Egypt designed to accommodate fast ships, and this canal put an end to the livelihoods earned by both families, since the caravans of camels that had transported goods from Damascus to the Indian subcontinent and the Far East and Egypt and Africa were now replaced with ships as fast as fire that passed through the canal and sprinted the distance in a matter of days, and then, to add insult to injury, the mortgage bonds they had loaned to Istanbul were annulled due to the bankruptcy of the Turkish rulers so that the assets of the Farhi and Harari families plummeted.
Late one afternoon while I was perusing the Holy Scriptures, the bitter news of my parents’ deaths was brought to me by an itinerant priest covered in dust on his way back from Damascus, and the angel of death had visited them with speedy stealth, taking first the soul of my mother, who was wrapped up in the finest cloth of the gowns she loved so well, and then the next morning, in a flash, that of my father as he lay slumped upon the lounging pillows in his plundered, decaying mansion, already an old man, his strength long since sapped.
I took it upon myself to fast but I was not overwhelmed with sadness, for our king Jesus had informed me of his second kingdom, in which all of our dead will return to live with us, so that perhaps the next life we live will be wiser than the present, and all humans, with Aslan at their head, will be more loyal, more loving, more forgiving, and I will reunite in perfect faith with all those who cherished or despised me in this life and with my family, from whom I parted and remained distant.
And I learned that I was not alone in awaiting the kingdom of heaven, that the Khaham-Bashi Rabbi Yaacov Antebi – who had not lost faith in spite of having been disappointed in the decision of the Messiah King not to bring about his reign in the year five thousand, six hundred – stood ready for his arrival as well, and chose to live out his remaining days in the holy city of Jerusalem, quitting Damascus just two years after the conclusion of the Blood Libel and moving there on his own, his many daughters and their husbands and children left behind, and the Jews in Jerusalem bestowed considerable honour upon him for they knew of the martyrdom he had endured in the Saraya prison and of his firm stance in the face of the devil’s temptations.
The Khaham-Bashi met his demise only a few years after the affair and his bones were interred on the Mount of Olives overlooking the walled-up Gate of Mercy, through which, according to their tradition, the Jewish Messiah will re-enter Jerusalem and magically raise up all those sleeping beneath their ancient headstones on that holy hill, and when I learned of his death I shed copious tears for I recalled his light-hearted humour and the way he would rumple my hair, and of all the men of Damascus he was the kindliest, tickling the palms of the children with his ginger beard and making them giggle.
One other character doomed to depart Damascus never to return was the powder-cheeked French consul, the Count de Ratti-Menton, who was called back urgently to the Foreign Office in Paris and dispatched on to new postings in faraway countries and I never again heard of him, or, for that matter, of my old friend the barber, Suleiman alkhalaq, all trace of whom seems to have vanished.
*
Many days have passed since that affair, my happy friend, and when I come to speak with you of Mahmoud Altali my heart still fills with emotion, for that man was the only one to have touched my soul, and in my memory he mixes and blends with another, the woman I loved, and there are times, on spring evenings, when a bewitching scent of blossoms thickens the air and the moon is at its fullest and all the creatures that buzz and slither and float overflow with life and come together in acts of desire and love, and I am flooded anew with longing for her, and her image is true and clear in my nostrils, and I offer many prayers of thanksgiving to our God in heaven for making our paths cross and for His generosity in granting me that taste of the goodness of her love, for numerous are those who live their long lives in boredom and vapidity without ever sampling the juiciness of that apple, while I, thanks to the benevolence of our God and our saviour, did just that.
Countless and contradictory rumours have reached my ears concerning Mahmoud Altali, some of them heinous, causing me no end of worry, some of them soothing and consoling, and there are those who claim Mahmoud Altali succeeded in escaping to Egypt, where he entertained the men of Alexandria with his prodigious talents, while others swear he was captured by Turkish and English soldiers and hanged in an abandoned field on a dark night, his body left as prey for the jackals and foxes, and I vacillate between the conflicting tales about my beloved of yore, and in my long conversations with my friend Jesus I add a special request that, whatever Mahmoud Altali’s fate is or was, I plead before the Creator of the World to spare the essence and the honour and the person of that revered and righteous woman Umm-Jihan, for what sin was it of hers to have found herself inside the body of Mahmoud Altali? She was a woman whose every path was of peace and whose cheeks blossomed in roses and whose voice was pure and clean and lucid as the soul itself, so what possible reason and purpose could God have for destroying and smiting with His own hands so exemplary a specimen that He Himself had created and brought into this world?
As for that woman who made her home in my intestines and chided and cursed me without mercy, well, her shrieks and moans gave way to good counsel that she would dribble into my ears, and she always took good care from her perch between my ribs to look after my health, catching sight and informing me of any growth or illness about to wreak havoc upon my innards, and instructing me on which medicines to consume, and even now, in her great old age, she is ever wise, her skin fur
rowed with wrinkles, her advice still advantageous.
And as for me, my happy friend, through all these many winters I have aged considerably, and I am no longer a lad prone to tears cringing behind his mother’s skirts, for the fifty years that have passed have taken quite a toll on me, as you can see by the belly that sags before me and the wrinkles spattered across my face, and when the doctor-priest arrives once every few months to check my health I see clearly in his expression that the remainder of my life may be counted in months, even weeks, for many diseases are gnawing away at my body, the first of which is this illness in my privates that makes passing water so terribly painful since it passes devoid of might or strength; still, these torments I accept with love, for they are but the tiniest taste of the punishment I deserve for my wicked deeds, and indeed, their offspring and descendants – the tortures and clubs and whips and scorpions – will all come to afflict me in the eternal hell that awaits me after my death.
At times, my happy friend, as I lie upon my bed in this small monastery in which we tarry, or when I gaze upon the image of the Holy Mother Mary etched in the coloured stained-glass windows here, I am pestered and plagued by questions: to what purpose was that Blood Libel, and what did its perpetrators have in mind, and why was it that I laboured in such wickedness – so generously, so diligently – to ensure it would come to what it did, and what could possibly have been my justification for hurling such muck at my father and father-in-law, and I think of the lives that were cut short because of me and the tortures endured because of my actions, and all this in a year which should have seen, according to the calculations of the Khaham-Bashi, the arrival of their Messiah.