Birthright

by Alan Gold

  “Why will I be going to all these places?”

  Softly, Anastasia answered, “We have an enduring problem with our agents in faraway places. When they’re training, surrounded by the symbols of their country, they understand the bigger picture. But holding on to that when they’re operatives abroad is not so easy. This you know yourself, Judit. Agents in a foreign land sometimes become too integrated. You, my dear Judit, are too important for that. We have to ensure that you’re not blinkered by the relationships you form in Israel. Not blinkered by your Jewish friends.”

  As though on cue, Vered began to whimper in the pram.

  “Are you saying I’m blinkered by the love of my daughter and my husband?”

  “No, of course you must love Vered and Shalman. But you must love your mother more. Not the poor woman who gave birth to you but failed to protect you from a drunken father. I’m talking about your real mother, Judita, the mother who loves you more than life itself, Mother Russia.”

  It had been two days since the reception in the palaces of the Kremlin. Judit had never seen such opulence and ceremony, and her former life in Moscow as well as her current life in Palestine both seemed alien that night. She had been made a Heroine of the State by Comrade Beria, and for the briefest of moments General Secretary Stalin had shaken her hand. In that moment, Judit felt more tiny yet more powerful than she had felt in her whole life. As the great leader’s hand slid away from hers, she knew who she was, what she was—what her purpose was—without doubt or hesitation.

  But it had been two days since the reception, and the power she had felt was receding. She was also, for the first time since arriving in Moscow, alone. Anastasia had left her to attend meetings, and Judit had time to walk the streets of the city she once called home.

  As she pushed Vered in her pram along Vysheslavtsev Street, within sight of the synagogue, Judit’s heart beat faster. These streets were so familiar yet so strange. Her life was now in Jerusalem. Her home, the roads where she walked, had their names in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The Cyrillic Russian letters that she could read perfectly now looked strangely foreign. These potholed and filthy streets from another era seemed to belong to another person’s life.

  Then she looked at the men and women in the street. Post-war years of privation and austerity had been cruel to most of them. Their hollow-eyed and gaunt faces studied her as a stranger, a potential threat. Had she changed so much? Or maybe it was because she was well fed, tanned, and walking with upright square shoulders, while they were gaunt, dour, and bent in stature.

  Judit walked without any conscious direction or decision about where she wanted to go, but her feet seemed to carry her until she found herself standing on the street of her old family home.

  The building where she had been born was a house divided into seven apartments, each of one or two rooms where upward of four or five members of the same family eked out existence. Judit was struck by the irony: Moscow was ten times bigger than Jerusalem—Russia was a thousand times bigger than Palestine—yet here, everybody was squeezed into a living space the size of a cupboard.

  Judit stood in front of the building, Vered cooing softly and wide-eyed from the pram, and looked up at the building and all its memories. She had no idea how long she stood there, but the trance was broken by a face. Judit did not remember the woman appearing and wondered in that moment if she had been standing in front of her all along.

  “Judita.”

  Judit blinked at the sound of her name. The woman stepped forward.

  “Judita.”

  Closer still she came, age and incredulity worn into her face.

  “Judita?” No longer a name but a question.

  Judit’s mother, Ekaterina, stumbled as she walked toward her daughter, and Judit instinctively threw out her strong arms to catch her. The woman’s body was bony and light as a feather. Ekaterina looked up at her daughter and said her name again with disbelief in her eyes. “Judita . . .”

  • • •

  A short time later Judit found herself seated at the tiny living room table of the cramped apartment with her mother standing before her. Judit couldn’t help but remember her child self hiding under that very table all those years ago.

  Her mother wept. Ekaterina knew, as did the whole community, that Judita had been taken away by the NKVD—taken from school when she was only fourteen—and never seen again until now. No one ever would have expected to see her again, so to her mother, Judit was a walking ghost, bringing as much fear as joy.

  Judit expected to be asked where she had been, what had happened, but her mother managed no such words between sobs, so Judit instead asked after her siblings.

  “Maxim works at the factory. He works so hard . . . Your sister, Galina . . .” Ekaterina didn’t finish the sentence, and Judit wondered if her sister had been forced to sell herself to support the family, like the women in the hotel where she and Anastasia were staying. Judit left the question hanging and scanned the room for signs of her father.

  Why had she returned? Was it to show her vicious, violent papa that, despite the fear she had lived through, she had grown powerful and strong? Was it to show her mother that there was a better way than weakness and appeasement? Was she here to prove something?

  Ekaterina reached into the cradle to lift out the softly stirring Vered, and her tears ran anew.

  “Her name is Vered,” said Judit. “In Hebrew, it means ‘rose.’ When she was born, the roses were in bloom, and the air smelled like perfume.”

  “And her father?” asked Ekaterina in an apprehensive voice.

  “Shalman,” she answered, then added, “He’s a good man,” as if to allay her mother’s unspoken fears. “Training to be an academic. A good Jew.”

  Ekaterina held the child close and sobbed. Judit found she had nothing to say. What did she hope to accomplish by coming here? Judit’s mind was flung back to the day in the park when Anastasia had handed her a rifle and given her an order. The choice had been hers and she had made it.

  Without thought or intention, Judit asked another question. “Where’s Father?”

  Ekaterina lifted her head from baby Vered’s and stared with a great weight of sadness at her daughter. When she spoke, it was in broken sentences. “He is sick. These past years. Since you were taken away. Can no longer walk. He dribbles and can barely speak. In the hospital. The drink and the stroke . . .” She paused and swallowed. “He will die soon.”

  And the anger toward her father, her desire to confront him for the beast he’d been when she was a child, the very essence that had filled her mind and body in her adult life, and which had grown and grown and become the epicenter of Judit’s persona, suddenly drained away.

  Castle of Henri Guillaume

  Duke of Champagne, Meaux, and Blois

  1095

  “DEUS VULT? THIS was the pope’s decree! A Crusade and Deus Vult? God wills it! And this milk-livered pribbling hedgepig of a priest wants us to believe that he knows the mind of God!”

  Henri Guillaume, duke of Champagne and count palatin of Meaux and Blois, bellowed as his servant dressed him in clothes for hunting. The duke wasn’t angry, but he was aroused, and his barrel chest was more than capable of filling a cathedral with sound.

  Nimrod took bombast in stride. The Jew was dressed in a fine doublet of blue and scarlet cloth embroidered with red and yellow stones to emulate precious jewels. On his head was his scholar’s cap of wisdom, which failed to hide his plume of white hair, and he stood in the middle of the baronial hall holding the proclamation from the pope, his eyes scanning the text as he half quoted, half paraphrased, the text.

  “His Holiness says that God spoke to him and told him to raise a pilgrimage, which he is calling a Holy Crusade. And that all men of Christian lands should gather and ride across the land east through Germany, then south to the Middle Sea, and then on to the Eastern Empire. There they will free Constantinople from the Seljuk and continue on to Jerusalem, where they will ri
d the holy city of the Muslim. He calls on all men to join him in this Crusade.”

  Nimrod looked up from the parchment and added from his memory of that day in the field: “A commandment from God demanding the cleansing of His house in Jerusalem. This is the pope’s edict, my lord.”

  “And what do you make of this? What would a Hebrew make of such proclamations?”

  “We’re a naturally skeptical people. We’ve had many prophets but we tended to ignore them . . . or stone them . . . or banish them to the desert . . .” said Nimrod dryly.

  The duke was not a man of intellect, but he was no fool, and smart enough to have kept the services of Nimrod and Jacob in his employ for many years, one as doctor, philosopher, and adviser, the other as treasurer, tax collector, and receiver of estate revenues.

  Nimrod advised the duke on many matters but had learned to be succinct. This edict from the pope troubled him, and he found himself in the rare position of being unsure how to advise his master without lengthy debate.

  Henri Guillaume, duke of Champagne, who hated priests more than he hated the king’s tax collectors, shuffled on his stool beside the roaring fire and looked up in bemusement at his adviser as his servants struggled to put on the nobleman’s left boot. Seeing the man in difficulty, the duke’s liegeman pushed him roughly aside, picked up the boot, and slid it on his leg. The duke nodded his appreciation of his liegeman’s skill as a dresser.

  He turned to his Jewish philosopher. “I cannot refuse the order of the pope, or the king will have my bollocks for his dinner. But as a Jew outside the grace of our Lord, how would you counsel me, Nimrod? Should I gather my soldiers, draw my peasants from the field, and march on Jerusalem?”

  Nimrod considered the words. Deep down he wanted to yell that the Crusade was folly, an absurd distraction that would reap destruction on so many. But this would never do. He needed a more delicate response that might steer the duke away from war.

  “It will be expensive.” Nimrod hoped this simple answer would speak to the material rather than the spiritual in his master.

  “That cannot be a consideration when I’m commanded by the pope.”

  In truth, Nimrod was terrible with money. He was a seeker after wisdom, not a treasurer. He kept the duke’s political alliances intact and treated him with mercury for venereal diseases acquired from the countless whores who shared the duke’s bed. It was Jacob who handled the duke’s finances and who had, through his consummate skill, made Henri Guillaume very rich indeed. Jacob, however, was old, and at times Nimrod wondered what might happen when the old man passed away.

  “Jacob will give you a full account, but it is fair to say that this Crusade will be exceedingly costly. You’ll have to equip your army, pay their wages, and feed them while they’re away, and that could be for several years. And of course you’ll have to employ itinerants to work the land while they’re in the Holy Land. You must weigh the benefits against that cost.”

  “And there will be the benefit of plunder, but spiritual benefit is what is promised by the pope, is it not?” asked the duke as he pulled on his gloves.

  “It is, my lord. The absolution of all sin for those who take up the Crusade. For what that’s worth.”

  “It is worth a great deal!” bellowed the duke. “With all the whoring and sinning I’ve done, it’s worth an eternity of sunshine!”

  Feeling the comfort of the ancient seal, an heirloom passed down in his family from generation to generation, Nimrod gained sufficient strength to continue making his concerns apparent. He hoped that the duke was well humored before his Christmas hunt, so much that the philosopher risked a comment on the papacy. It was one thing for the duke to excoriate the pope but quite another for a Jew. “My lord, any Christian who obeys the dictate of a pope may find himself following the Holy Father through the gates of hell. Do you have to be reminded of the evil of previous popes to know that those whose arses warm the seat of St. Peter are members of a reprobate and execrable concatenation who follow in a line of mendacious, perfidious, and deceitful thieves and murderers, simonists, and miscreants. I need only mention the names of previous popes who have shat on the throne of Peter for you to understand how evil the papacy has become.”

  Without a pause, Nimrod continued, “John XII, who turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel and raped women pilgrims in St. Peters; or what about Pope Sergius III, who murdered Pope Leo V and the anti-pope Christopher and fathered a future pope? And let us never forget Pope Benedict IX, who actually sold the papacy itself. So if you’re a true Christian, you would refuse to obey the dictates of this or any pope.”

  “Of course I’m a true Christian. And while there have been many Satanic arses and warty pricks who’ve followed the blessed St. Peter, this pope seems to be a good man, and he’s probably quite correct. I’ll certainly roast in the eternal fires of hell for the life I’ve led because of my whoring and hunting. Apart from those sins, I’ve lived a good life. I invite Bishop Fulk here every Easter and Christmas to enjoy my table. And I’ve extended my beneficence to you, a Jew.”

  “True,” said Nimrod, “but look at the benefits that my presence has brought you. Scholars from across France and Italy and Germany come here to debate and discuss matters of the greatest import. Would they have come to the castle of Duke Henri Guillaume, even if he has the best wine in the world, without me being here? Think what my presence has brought to you, my lord. Gloria in Excelcis.”

  Duke Henri laughed. “You know, there are times, Jew, when I truly believe that you should be burned at the stake. Yes, I think I’ll have you roasted tomorrow, along with the pig I slaughter.” The duke laughed again.

  It wasn’t the first time Henri Guillaume had made such statements, and Nimrod felt the license to counter. “Roast me if that is your wish, but not with a pig, I beg you. Think of the tenets of my faith!”

  “But if I burn you, you’ll be a light unto other nations.” The duke laughed. He enjoyed making biblical jokes.

  “And when I’m fully burned, my lord, my flame will wither and you’ll be cast into the same darkness which surrounded you before I arrived.”

  Henri laughed again. “Enough of this banter, Nimrod. I’m off to the hunt. Walk with me to the bailey and help me mount my horse. And while we’re walking, you can explain some things to me. Your people come from Jerusalem; tell me about them. If I am to take the city from Muslims and Jews then I should know something of them, should I not?”

  “Indeed,” answered Nimrod.

  “And perhaps you can explain why you Jews don’t hunt or ride horses or take part in tournaments. Why do you just study scrolls and manuscripts and books all day long? Why don’t you ever seem to enjoy yourselves? You’re a miserable lot. You know that?”

  It was in such moments that the duke revealed traces of an intellectual curiosity that defied his gruff demeanor. As they walked out of the baronial dining hall toward the castle courtyard, Nimrod took some relief that the decision to go on the Crusade would leave behind him and Jacob to manage the estates. It would be a sign of trust and Nimrod found himself silently pleased at the prospect.

  Nimrod spoke even as he quickened his pace to keep up with the long strides of the duke. “My family is reputed to have come from Jerusalem, in the ancient times of King David. It is said that my ancestry can be traced back to the time of King Solomon the Wise. My name in Hebrew is Nimrod, son of Isaac the Cohen. The significance of the term ‘Cohen’ means that the ancestors of my family were originally derived from the family of Zadok the Priest, who himself was descended from Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the brother of Moses. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt my ancestry, then my forebears would have been priests in the holy temple built in Jerusalem by King Solomon of blessed memory. And that would have been two thousand years ago.”

  Nimrod absently touched the medallion under his shirt. It was an ancient piece of metal that had come down to him from his father and his father’s father before him. It was said to have be
en cast by the stonemason of King Solomon. But how much of that was myth and how much truth, it was impossible to say. Yet the words on the seal around Nimrod’s neck spoke volumes. An ancient Israelite named Matanyahu had cast a seal, which later had been copied. God only knew where Matanyahu’s original seal was today.

  Duke Henri looked at the Jew with skepticism. “Two thousand years? You can trace your lineage back two thousand years? God’s blood, I can’t trace my family back beyond my great-grandfather, winemakers who planted vines! As far as I know, they could have been peasants in the fields. Certainly, the bishop thinks I’m a peasant, the way he treats me.”

  “I’ve studied your family line, and I can assure you that what you think of your forebears is not so, my lord. When Hugh Capet was crowned as the king of France a century ago in the cathedral at Reims, your ancestors were already famous as vignerons and wealthy property owners. Soon after the Capet monarch visited, your family was ennobled. In this blessed region, they had been known for centuries by their trade as champenois. And though the line is indistinct, I have traced some of your family back to the time of the Romans, for it was they who planted these vineyards. So you have a long and proud ancestry.”

  And turning his head away from his employer, Nimrod whispered to himself, “Nearly half as old as mine.”

  “I heard that!” bellowed Duke Henri. Nimrod smiled to himself, but his mirth was snatched away as the thin and wiry shadow of Chevalier Michel Roux fell between him and the duke.

  Roux’s hair was copper-red, framing a ruddy complexion, pockmarked and deeply etched in lines. He was a bitter man, and his diminutive stature did nothing to dilute the cold menace in his eyes. Michel Roux was chevalier commander of the field to the duke and, in the coming Crusade, would no doubt lead Henri Guillaume’s troops.

  Roux looked Nimrod the Jew up and down as if appraising cattle for slaughter. Nimrod quickly looked down at his feet.