Heretics

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Heretics Page 64

by Leonardo Padura


  Two days later, after the morning Shabbat prayers, Rabbi Samuel asked me if we could talk for a while and we went to a small square in the city in the middle of which there is a great stone cross. We sat down on some steps and his initial phrase caused me some surprise logically: “Would you let me see the painting by your Maestro again?” Without imagining the meaning of that demand, I took out the ark and unrolled the linen to hand it to him. “I have been thinking a lot about what you told me regarding your dream of becoming a painter,” he said to me, after looking at the linen for a moment. “And what have you been thinking?” I wanted to know. “I have been thinking about how many things we sons of Israel should change to achieve a happier life in our transit on earth … If my rabbi colleagues in Nemirov heard me say this, they would think I am crazy or that I have become a heretic. But I myself think like this: we men cannot live condemning one another merely because some think one way and others, a different way. There are inviolable Commandments relating to good and evil, but there is also a lot of space in life that should be only a question of the individual. And it would be worth it for man to manage it freely, according to his will, just as it is: a question between him and God…” he said and devoted several minutes to contemplating the painting until he spoke again: “I do not know much about this art. I have never heard of your Maestro. From what I see, I understand that he is a famous man, that kings and rich men pay for his work … And now I also understand why you want to make him the repository of your thoughts and experiences of these terrible days … Ever since you showed me this painting, you insist that it is nothing but the image of your Jewish head. But, as I contemplate it again, I have discovered that it is much more, because before it one becomes full of strange feelings. Yes, this could be the image that your Maestro has in mind of the person who, to him, was the Messiah. Since I think differently than he does, I see something else and that is what attracts me to this image … There is something intimate and mysterious, an unsettling layer below the surface that comes from that face and from that gaze. It is a combination of humanity and transcendence. It is obvious, your Maestro has a power. He achieved so much with so little that I have no doubt that behind his hand there must lie the will of the Creator. It is not strange to me that you would have wanted to imitate him. The attraction that the human being feels before the infinite beauty of the sacred must be unbearable. Because this is the sacred,” the rabbi concluded, and caressed the linen.

  Dear Maestro: this wise man confirmed for me at that moment the answer that I have sought for years. For him, seeing your work, there was something that was obvious: art is power. Only that, or especially that: power. Not to control countries and change societies, to cause revolutions or oppress others. It is the power to touch the souls of men and, incidentally, place there the seeds of their improvement and happiness … Because of that, ever since I heard Rabbi Samuel speak of your work, I was convinced that there cannot be a better man in the world to take this letter out of Zamość. I have asked him that, with it, he remit to you the painting that belongs to you. With my poor works, which I will also hand over to him, I have told him that he can do what he feels best, to which he responded: “Keep them until we see each other again. In this world or the next, if in fact we are called…”

  Yesterday, Rabbi Samuel said goodbye to the sons of Israel who remain in Zamość with a prayer in the synagogue of the high city. He urged all of us to escape from the city and it appears that many will follow his advice. The events that we have received news of in recent days warn with too much clarity that remaining in these lands constitutes a suicide act, because just a few days ago, as we recently learned, it fell upon the holy community of Polanów to be tortured, where about twelve thousand Jews, along with two thousand men of the Polish princes, decided to resist the attack of the Cossack and Tartar forces. They trusted in the double line of walls and the water moats that, they said, made the city impregnable. But the prince’s serfs, of the Orthodox religion, facilitated the entry to the besiegers. They say that ten thousand Jews died in one day alone …

  When they learned of Polanów’s fate and the defeat that the Polish Army immediately suffered, the Jews living in the nearby town of Zaslav decided to flee. The majority of them went to Ostrog, the stronghold and metropolis of Little Russia, and others ended up in Zamość, bearing this discouraging news and a new one, which reaffirms the messianic and apocalyptic warnings: the outbreak of a plague epidemic, blooming in the unburied human flesh and now latching onto live flesh.

  The recently arrived say that the Jews of Zaslav fled in a stampede. Those who could left by horse and wagon, the poorest ones by foot, with their wives and children. As is already occurring in Zamość, they left in the city many of their belongings, everything they had amassed in their lives of work and observance of the Law. And as they fled, the most irrational panic spread when someone said that their executioners were coming behind them. Desperate to advance more quickly, they threw to the fields golden cups, silver adornments, clothing, without any of the Jews coming behind them stopping to pick anything up … But, no matter how quickly they ran, the moment came in which they felt on the verge of being reached by the Cossacks and to save themselves they stampeded through the woods, leaving behind even their wives and children, since they could only think about not falling into the hands of their pursuers. Except that the fetid breath of the most horrible of deaths felt at the backs of their heads ended up being just a part of what these Jews today consider divine punishment: because it had all been the product of a wave of panic, and the much-feared enemies in reality were not coming behind them. Yet.

  Maestro, as soon as I finish this narration to which I have devoted myself for the last two days, I will hand it to Rabbi Samuel, along with your painting and some of the others I brought with me. I have made a leather case to better preserve them. I trust that this holy and wise man will save his life and, with it, the treasures I have handed to him. As far as I’m concerned, after today, I do not know what my luck holds for me. I hope that the Holiest, blessed may He be, allows me to cross the masses of barbarism and arrive at my destination. Knowing that my finances are agonizing in the midst of a stay in this country that has been prolonged over what was foreseen, Rabbi Samuel has given me a significant amount of money so that I can maintain myself and even purchase a passage on one of the ships traveling toward the country of the Ottoman Turks, from where I hope to take the path to meet up with the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, over in Palestine. May God will that I can traverse the inferno and set foot on the land promised by the Creator to the sons of Israel, to there join the troops of the Messiah and announce the renewal of the world with him. In this adventure, I know that my faith accompanies me, never diminished, and the will and ambition to reach the goals that I was taught to have by my unforgettable grandfather Benjamin, from whom I also learned that God more joyously helps the fighter than the inert … What my regrettable personal pettiness still will not allow me is to stop thinking about what could have been of my life, perhaps even what should have been, if after having the luck of seeing the light in what my brothers in faith considered to be Makom, the good place, I had also found there my space for freedom. If I had been able to place my life on the path there that the best of my soul demanded. Was what I asked for so terrible? I only trust, in the notions my mind is given to as I listen to the laments of those who flee, that my personal destiny was written long ago. Also, the announcement of the coming of the end of the world that the Anointed will bring will at least serve to make men more tolerant with the desires of other men and their freedom of choice, as long as they do not hurt their fellow man, which should be the foremost principle of the human race. And if none of my desires come true, at least I will feel consolation, as I write to you, that perhaps these words will reach your hands, and the beings of today and tomorrow will be able to have a first-person testimony of the suffering of some men and of the extremes reached by the cruelty of other men. If that kno
wledge arrives by some path, I will feel rewarded and know that my life has had meaning, very different from the one I thought it would have when I dreamt of paintbrushes and oils. A necessary and useful meaning, perhaps, for revealing the depths of the human condition that I’ve had to witness …

  Maestro, this very day I leave for the South in search of the Messiah. I pray for the Blessed one to be with you, young Titus, and the pleasant Hendrickje, that you may always enjoy the happiness and health you deserve, as I have requested so many times in my prayers, since you are part of the dearest memories I treasure from a life that was mine and from which I now feel separated from not only by the sea …

  Eternally indebted to you,

  E.A.

  His heart cringing and a feeling of unease running through his body, Conde maintained his vision fixed on those two letters finishing off the missive: E.A. The initials of a name. A name that identified a man, he thought. A man who had gone down to the inferno and, from there, sent his message of alarm.

  The former policeman had to give himself a few minutes to continue reading that letter, which included such an extraordinary tale.

  Because Elias Kaminsky then began his announced digressions and conclusions: as far as he could read, he wrote, this E.A. had been a Sephardic Jew who, fleeing Amsterdam, had ended up in Polish territories in 1648, just when it was being devastated by Cossacks and Tartars and, as he confirmed, was determined to continue his journey to the South to join the hordes of followers of that Sabbatai Zevi who, shortly after, would reveal the imposture of a mentally unstable fraud when, to save his neck, he would end up converting to Islam after having tried to overthrow the sultan of Turkey. The sultan, the story went, after imprisoning him, had known how to most easily resolve the enigma of whether Sabbatai was or was not the Messiah when he offered him two choices: “Muslim or the gallows?” To which Zevi immediately responded: “Muslim.”

  But the questions that the notebook had prompted among historians and art historians of Dutch painting were infinite, as one could presume. The first of these referred to the identity of that E.A., in whom converged the difficult conditions of being a Sephardic Jew and a painter, when art was anathema for the Jews. The second, of course, had to do with the origins and later fate of that tafelet turned junk sold at a flea market. The question followed of why only a fragment of the letter survived, addressed without any doubt to Rembrandt, as the mention of his son Titus and his then lover, Hendrickje, Hendrickje Stoffels, confirmed. And, amid many other question marks, the one that beat most loudly was the group of sketched faces in the notebook, so similar to the head of a Jew that had served as a model for Rembrandt for his studies of the heads of Christ. Studies and pieces that, just around then (coincidence or cosmic plan?), were for the first time in history being displayed together, thanks to an exhibit organized by the Louvre … From which the piece held in London and under litigation was missing.

  Ever since Conde began to read Elias Kaminsky’s missive, and more intensely after going over E.A.’s letter, the feeling of an important mystery had begun to take him over, growing as he read the last part of the text and immediately taking root in his spirit inquisitively, forcing him to read Elias Kaminsky’s words over and over again, destined to show an enigmatic panorama for which, he already sensed it, it would be impossible to establish a definitive map. The image that Conde had in his head of that street market of worthless junk, open alongside a canal in Amsterdam as the city enjoyed the privilege of its spring, pushed an unforeseen desire in the man to wander around that magical place where one could find, just like that, in the middle of the street, traces of remote mysteries, no matter if they were solvable or unsolvable.

  In the last part of his letter, Elias Kaminsky (perhaps pulling at his ponytail, Conde thought) fully entered speculation based on what was known and what was possible. The most striking thing for him was proof of the real existence of the Dutch Sephardic Jew E.A., who wandered around Poland in the time of the massacre of Jews, and had a relationship with painting. How many Dutch Sephardic Jews who were painting aficionados could have been in Poland at that time? Almost without a doubt, Elias stated, E.A. had been, he had to have been, the enigmatic character who gave three paintings and some letters to the rabbi infected with the plague and dead in Kraków, in the arms of his ancestor Moshe Kaminsky. If E.A. was that man and his “Maestro” had been Rembrandt, then that explained the fact that E.A. was in possession of the head of Christ or the portrait of a young Jew (seemingly, E.A. himself), painted and signed by Rembrandt, one of the oil paintings that Dr. Kaminsky received from the hands of the dying rabbi.

  Knowing that story didn’t prove anything that could help in the painting’s possible recovery, Elias Kaminsky noted. But, at the same time, it proved everything and the New York lawyers would take advantage of it. And if at the end of the day it did not serve to help him recover the Rembrandt painting, it gave the ponytailed behemoth the certainty of its origins and authenticity, and ratified that the family story was true about the bizarre way that the painting had come to be the property of the Kaminskys of Kraków, three and a half centuries ago.

  The other outstanding question was the existence and tribulations, nearly impossible to trace, of the tafelet capable of causing all of those unexpected revelations. Where had it come from, where had that notebook in which the flea market vendor had acquired with a lot of old objects left by the heirs of an old woman without the slightest interest in keeping some dusty ruins? Elias Kaminsky had a tempting response: it could have come from the boxes of Rembrandt’s objects auctioned at the end of 1657, when the artist had declared bankruptcy and lost his house and almost all of his material goods. The rest of the many possible questions (who was E.A.? What had been his final fate? Why did his notebook end up, as it appeared, in Rembrandt’s seized files?) would perhaps never have an answer.

  Nonetheless, Elias Kaminsky had already given his answer to some of those questions: the young Jew too similar to the image of the Christian Jesus had to be E.A., he insisted, and in that way, his face, always nameless, had been the one to accompany the members of his lineage for three hundred years. Because of that, he promised, or Elias Kaminsky promised himself, he would do everything possible to recover that image, since it was the moral and blood right of his family … But, when the probable recovery would occur (a decision that could be influenced by Conde’s discovery concerning the identity of María José Rodríguez, who had placed the painting for sale, and her relationship as the great-niece of Román Mejías), Elias would hand over the piece to a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. He simply could not and did not want to do anything else, he said, because if Ricardo Kaminsky didn’t want anything to do with money coming from a possible sale, neither did he. That painting, in reality, had never served his family at all, and, just when it could have had a concrete use, it turned into the motive for a tragedy that marked the lives of his uncle Joseph and his father Daniel. “Do you think I’m a real moron for having made this decision?” Elias asked him in the final lines of his letter, to then give a quick answer: “Perhaps I am. But I am sure that, in my shoes, you would do the same, Conde. I owe it to that painting and to its real owner, E.A., dead perhaps in the lands of Poland during one of history’s many anti-Semitic rages…” And he signed off, promising new letters, new news, and, of course, a sure return to Havana in the nearby future.

  Only when he finished reading the letter for the second time did Conde return the papers to the yellow envelope. He served himself a new cup of coffee, lit another cigarette, and watched Garbage II, who had entered the house as he read, sleep peacefully. When he finished the cigarette, he stood up and went to the bookcase in the living room and took out the Rembrandt volume published several years before by Ediciones Nauta. He flipped through the pages of the book until he reached the section of illustrations and stopped on the one he was looking for. There it was, with a red shirt, brown hair close to his head, the curly beard, and the gaze fixed on the
infinite, a real man portrayed by Rembrandt. For several minutes, he looked at the reproduction of the work, a close relative of the one he’d seen in the picture of Daniel Kaminsky and his mother Esther, taken in the house in Kraków before the beginning of the misadventures of that family exterminated by a hate crueler than that of the Cossacks and Tartars. As he contemplated the face of the young Jew who could now, at least, be identified by some initials and some twists in his life history, Conde felt surrounded by the greatness and the invincible influence of a creator and by the atmosphere of a mysticism that men, since the beginning of time, had needed to live. And he perceived that the miracle of that fascination capable of flying across centuries was in the eyes of that character, fixed for eternity by the invincible power of art. Yes, everything is in the eyes, he thought. Or perhaps in the unfathomable that lies behind the eyes?

  The man dragged that question to the rooftop of his house. Like every night that season, the warm and aggressive Lenten winds marking Cuban spring had abated, as if withdrawing, in order to regain strength and pick up their exasperating battle with the arrival of the following dawn. The city, more dismal than it was tempting, extended itself toward a sea made invisible by distance and night. Behind Mario Conde’s eyes, in his mind, he was seeing through the eyes of the young Jew E.A., a painter’s apprentice, who died three and a half centuries before, possibly following, like so many men in so many places throughout the centuries, the trail of another self-proclaimed Messiah and Savior, capable of promising everything, only to end up revealing himself as a fraud, sick with the thirst for power, with the overwhelming passion to control other men and their minds. That story sounded too close and familiar to Conde. And he thought that perhaps, in her libertarian searches, at some point Judy Torres had been closer than many people to a devastating truth: there is no longer anything in which to believe, no Messiah to follow. It is only worth being a part of the tribe that you yourself have freely chosen. Because if there is a possibility that, had he existed, even God was dead, and the certainty that so many messiahs had ended up turning into manipulators, the only thing you have left, the only thing that really belongs to you, is your freedom of choice. To sell a painting or donate it to museum. To belong or stop belonging. To believe or not believe. Even to live or to die.

 

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