Elizabeth is in the hallway wearing only a nightdress of silk so thin her nipples and the triangle of dark hair at her groin are visible underneath. Her hair is tangled, as if she had been thrashing about to escape a bad dream. Though the servants are trying to restrain her, they can’t. Some hidden force is powering her delicate body, which seems to be floating just above the floor.
“He’s here,” she says. “He’s come for his revenge.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Alvaro de Luna.” Her hysterical laughter echoes down the hallway. “I had him beheaded. Don’t you hear him laughing at me now?”
***
Eliana and I travel for weeks over the plains and rolling hills between Arévalo and Queluz. Elizabeth ordered a royal guard to accompany us, but Eliana was so fearful about being in the company of soldiers that to keep the men in line, we agreed to have a priest accompany us. He is an overweight man in his late thirties, who tipples with the guards by the campfire and tells bawdy stories as we ride along.
A jolly sort most of the time, he is grim only about the need to save Eliana’s and my souls. He lectures us about the Jews’ apostasy from God, and when that doesn’t work, he oozes honeyed words about the love of Christ. He tries threatening us with the flames of hell, until I point out to him that as Jews, we won’t be going there. Such a fate is reserved for misbehaving Christians, I remind him, arching my eyebrows to suggest that perhaps he should worry about his own fate a little more.
Finally we reach Lisbon, where we send word to Queluz that we have arrived. I dismiss the guard and the priest, and because it is Shabbat, we wait until the following day for Judah and Isaac to escort us the rest of the way.
It is Eliana’s fifteenth birthday—fifteen years to the day since I made that painful ride to Queluz along the same road and gave birth to her in the house to which I am finally returning.
20
QUELUZ 1461
The fragrance of mown hay wafts through the branches of this year’s sukkah as I sit with Simona, watching Eliana and Isaac perform the rituals of Sukkot.
I am getting used to a fifty-year-old Simona with gray hair and a sixty-year-old Judah with a beard gone almost completely white, but their children still astonish me. Isaac is twenty-four, taller than his father but still slender. His beard matches the light brown of his hair, and his dark eyes retain the solemnity of his boyhood. Chana, the oldest of Judah and Simona’s children, is now thirty-two and has grown stout and disheveled, with six children between age one and fifteen to deal with. Rahel, her younger sister, is thirty and as slender as her mother, with two children and several more lost in the womb.
Simona and Judah’s oldest grandchild, Chana’s boy Joseph, is fifteen, like Eliana. When we left Queluz, he was a small child, and I suppose his sparse beard and hoarse, adolescent voice are the same shock to me that Eliana’s womanly body is to others. I am thirty-five, and though I still have only a few gray hairs, the lines around my eyes and the furrows on my brow speak to the passage of a decade of my own life.
Eliana and Isaac are standing in front of us. “Do you remember how Eliana used to offer little gifts to the Ushpizim?” Isaac asks, his eyes crinkling with amusement.
“We decided it would be fun to do it again,” Eliana says to Simona. “Do you still have the box?”
Simona gets up. “I know exactly where it is.”
The covered woven basket is smaller than I remember. So many things in life are when we see them again, especially if once held in a child’s hand. She and Isaac go out of the courtyard, and Simona’s and my eyes follow them. We have the same thought at the same time as we turn to each other. From the day Isaac stood by my bed and touched Eliana’s newborn head, they were meant to be together.
I remember being under the covers with Eliana at Palacio de Mondragon in Ronda.
“Isaac’s not a boy.”
“Well, what is he then?”
“I don’t know!”
I remember wondering then whether it was possible for a six-year-old to be in love. She warmed to Sawwar in time, even had a bit of a crush on him, but seeing Eliana and Isaac go off to find treasures, I know that nobody has meant as much to my daughter as Isaac Abravanel.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Simona asks.
“About our children?”
She nods. “Judah told Isaac he should be getting married soon. He’s almost twenty-five. The Holy One will not let even someone as important as Judah live forever, and Isaac needs to carry on after him.”
“Is he spoken for?” I brace myself for the answer.
“No,” Simona says. “Isaac told his father he didn’t think any of the young women he knew were right for what he wants to accomplish.”
“And what is that?”
Several of Simona’s grandchildren come up, arguing over a game they were playing. She tends to them for a moment, then returns to our conversation.
“Isaac wants to carry on our family’s leadership among the Jews, but he also wants to write—commentaries on the Talmud, the Zohar, all the things he loves to study. And it seems there’s always a problem somewhere with the way Jews are being treated. He’s been traveling all over Portugal with Judah, but it won’t be long until he has to continue on his own.”
She thinks for a moment. “He needs a woman who won’t complain about his studies or his long absences. Someone with a good head and talents of her own. Someone who can be as strong as he is, whatever comes.”
“It’s a big burden for anyone to marry a man with such dreams,” I tell her. “But look at how well you’ve handled it. We all grow into what life brings, don’t you think?”
“True, but it’s best to start with the coffers full. And I think I know the young woman he is looking for.”
It’s true. Eliana’s coffers are full indeed. She speaks Portuguese, Castilian, Arabic, and Hebrew. She knows the Bible and the Talmud as well as many men her age. She never wavers in our practices for the sake of convenience. We arrived in Queluz with our clothes hanging on our bones because we had left Arévalo too hastily to prepare for a kosher journey. Many days, we had eaten next to nothing because she refused to break Jewish law and shamed me into a standard I might not have followed so strictly if she weren’t there.
“All this time, they’ve being growing up for each other,” I say to Simona. “Do you think they know it?”
“Let them discover for themselves,” Simona says. “We are in for the great joy of watching young love grow.”
***
Since Eliana has no father, within a few months, Judah approaches me. There’s none of the usual maneuvering, just an immediate meeting of minds between old friends. Isaac has told his father he has found the woman he wants to marry, and Eliana has been so lovestruck I don’t need to ask how she wants me to reply when Judah asks if I will permit them to wed.
Judah has taken the unusual step of visiting me alone in my home, and we sit by the fire on a cold February morning. “It’s been almost twenty-three years since I made my first trip to Queluz,” I say. “I’m thirty-six now, and it doesn’t seem possible I’ve lived almost twice as long since that day.”
Judah smiles. “You’ll be surprised at how quickly life speeds up now. Then I was about the age you are now—do you realize that?”
I laugh. “It’s strange how when you’re young everyone seems old, but now that you put it that way, I don’t feel nearly as old as I thought you were at the time.” I grin to let him know I am teasing.
He laughs. “And Eliana is already two years older than you were when you went riding here for Shabbat without asking anyone’s permission. Children always seem older to themselves than they do to us.”
“But still, fifteen is too young. She’s barely a woman.”
Judah’s dark eyes catch the firelight. “I felt the same way about Chana and Rahel. How would these girls who had turned into women overnight be all the things my wife is? But they’ve done very well. And Simona was just a year older tha
n Eliana when she married me.”
“She’s growing up and leaving me,” I murmur into the firelight, as if the flickering embers can clarify what to think of something so momentous. Tears make the fire a golden blur. “I can’t bear the thought, but I am so happy for her and overjoyed it’s Isaac she will marry.”
“And we will be one family,” Judah adds. “By blood, I mean, with their children. I have always thought of you as part of us, since that day you first rode here from Sintra.”
I know this so deeply I don’t even nod. “I’d rather they wait until she’s sixteen,” I say. “I’d like Eliana to settle in here first. And I’d like her to get used to being—” I don’t know how to put delicately that I would like her to feel comfortable with her womanhood before it will be used as marriage entails.
“I think it would be fine to wait,” Judah reassures me. “The Holy One willing, they have many years ahead to make up for the little time we ask them to wait.”
“They may have other ideas though.” I get up to add a log to the fire. “Do you think they know why you came here today?”
“They’re probably driving my wife wild with their fidgeting. Perhaps we should go end it.” He goes to the window. “We should hurry. It looks like rain.”
We go out into the gray winter afternoon without feeling the cold at all.
***
Six months later, on a warm August afternoon, almost one year after our return to Queluz and shortly before my daughter’s sixteenth birthday, she and I stand in front of the huppah in the synagogue in Lisbon to carry out the ancient ceremony that will make her Isaac’s wife.
Earlier that day, I took her to the mikveh and marveled over the beauty of her young body. I suppose it’s true what they say about a daughter’s marriage being a passage for the mother as well, but even though my breasts have begun to sag and there are new dimples and folds in my skin, I am proud of my body, proud of its strength, proud of the fact that it bore her.
For all that strength, I am weak in the knees as Eliana steps under the huppah, a symbol of the new home they will create, made from Isaac’s prayer shawl suspended overhead by four decorated poles. Wearing a kittel, a white robe denoting the fresh start of married life, Isaac does not look at her but instead stands bobbing at the waist, murmuring psalms as she circles him the traditional seven times. When she is finished, she stands with Isaac as the hazzan chants from the Song of Songs.
“When I found him whom my soul loves,
I held him and would not let him go.
Until I had brought him into my mother’s house,
And into the chamber of her that conceived me.”
Isaac places a simple gold band on Eliana’s finger. “Behold, you are sanctified to me with this ring, according to the Law of Moses and Israel,” he says, his voice breaking with emotion.
The rabbi recites the traditional seven blessings, after which Eliana and Isaac drink wine from a gold-rimmed glass. When they have emptied it, Isaac crushes it under his heel. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” he declares, “let my right hand forget its cunning.” And then, because God wants us to be joyful, our voices break out in cheers of “Mazal tov!” as Isaac and Eliana beam.
We leave the synagogue and go to Judah and Simona’s Lisbon house for the celebration. I hold my wonderful daughter in my arms and whisper a blessing in her ear before we shut the door of the cheder yichud, the room of privacy that newlyweds share for a few minutes before the wedding banquet. It’s the first time Eliana and Isaac have been alone since they were betrothed, and before joining the celebration, they will feel what it is like to kiss and hold each other within the sanctity of marriage and talk for a while about their dreams for their new life.
The dancing and singing lasts well into the night, and when my eyelids are growing heavy, I ask Eliana and Isaac if I can have a moment alone with them in the study.
I have left a large object there, wrapped in several layers of cloth. “This is your wedding present,” I tell them. Eliana’s eyes widen, realizing what it is. She unties the cord, and the wrapping falls away to reveal the atlas. “I wasn’t expecting this,” she says. “I thought you would keep it until you—” She doesn’t complete the thought.
“I gave you life,” I say, “and I gave you as much experience of the world as I could. I want you to take this with my blessing and pass it along to your children.”
Isaac has seen the atlas before, but he is as dazzled as a child. He sits down, and Eliana hesitates only for a moment before remembering she now can sit beside him. They exclaim over this and that as they go through the pages. I take in the aura of grace and beauty that surrounds them, and too softly for them to notice, I steal away.
21
VALENCIA 1492
Judah was right about how quickly time would speed up. How can it be that I can say in great detail what happened when I was eight or twelve, but now shake my head in bewilderment when I try to remember year by year what has happened since? Decades of my life are swallowed whole, and it doesn’t seem possible that I have filled each day with one thing or another.
Perhaps it’s because we stop centering on ourselves once we have other lives to think about. First our children, and then our grandchildren, and then, if we live to be as old as I have, our great-grandchildren come along to clarify that we are not so important after all.
And perhaps it’s because I spent two decades, from the time I was thirty-five until I was fifty-six, living quietly at Queluz. Years soften into one when they are spent in the same way: the first golden leaves and a nip in the air around the High Holy Days, the blossoms of Passover, the setting of fruit at Shavuot, to autumn again and the repeating of the cycle.
Eliana and Isaac had their first child, a boy named Judah after his grandfather, a year after they were married. Four more children—two girls and two boys—followed. Chana’s son Joseph married and made Judah and Simona great-grandparents somewhere in all that pool of time. Almost every year brought me another grandchild and then great-grandchild to love. Now Eliana’s Judah is thirty, and she is a grandmother herself.
Time passed for others as well, and as in all families, fortune and misfortune were not shared equally. Alfonso of Castile, Isabella’s little brother, died at sixteen. Civil war raged over whether the daughter Queen Juana bore was the legitimate heir to the kingdom. Enrique claimed the child as his own, but the princess was better known as “La Beltraneja,” after Beltrán de la Cueva, the lover presumed to have fathered her. Rumors abounded that Enrique deformed the little girl’s face to make her look more like him.
A year later, while Isabella was still Crown Princess of Castile, she married Ferdinand of Aragon, a marriage brokered by the court rabbi, Abraham Seneor. Five years after the wedding, Isabella became Queen of Castile, and they joined their two lands. Now they have Granada too, and the conquest is complete. I suppose we should have predicted our expulsion then, but no one did, not even Isaac, who as a courtier to Ferdinand and Isabella was in the best position to know.
I cannot understand what is threatening about Jews. How much more of an advantage do Christians need?
We belong here as much as anyone. I don’t know when the Cresques family first came to Mallorca, but the Abravanels know they have been in Castile and Andalusia for centuries. Where do we go now? Will the Abravanel name open doors for us? Isaac has good friends in Pisa and Naples, and I suppose we will find refuge somewhere.
We? Where did that thought come from?
I still haven’t decided whether to stay or go. Two weeks ago, we reached the coast after traveling on foot from the middle of Spain. There, as I waded into the sea, I felt the land of my birth disappearing under my feet. I’ve been floating between life and death, between here and an uncertain there, ever since.
I brush the cover of the atlas in my lap. My daughter does not know I still have it. The family library was sold for a tenth of what it was worth and the money put into the account Ferdinand and Isabella will a
llow Isaac to take abroad as a special privilege for his service. I rescued the book without anyone seeing and hid it in my trunk.
It will comfort me if I stay in Spain, reminding me that the shape of the world, like the fullness of time, has been decreed by the Holy One. He alone will judge their Catholic Majesties just as he will judge the rest of us. In the meantime, Jews suffer, and though I no longer think he cares, I still worship him for the power he wields over all of us.
LISBON 1471
The bedroom is humid from exertion and from the water steaming in a pot hanging over the small log fire in the house in Lisbon. Eliana’s face is purple with the strain of bearing down as she sits on the birthing chair. Rahel is kneeling on one side, offering encouragement, while the midwife touches her fingers between Eliana’s legs to check the baby’s progress. “It won’t be long now,” she says.
I dangle a silver hamsa near Eliana’s head to keep the Evil Eye away. “I will lift up my eyes unto the mountains,” I say. “From whence shall my help come?”
Eliana groans and bears down again. “I feel its head,” the midwife says, as I continue the psalm.
“Behold, he that keepeth Israel doth neither slumber nor sleep.”
She gulps air as the contraction subsides. I come up behind her and put my hand on her shoulder. “You’re doing well,” I say. She nods her head frantically as another pain wracks her body.
“The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night—”
Eliana lets out a loud, unearthly scream and grunts with all her might.
“Hold her,” the midwife says. “The baby’s coming.”
“The Lord shall guard thy going out and thy coming in,” I say, as she bears down again. “From this time forth and forever.” With these words, Eliana’s baby, my fourth grandchild, is delivered into this world.
“It’s a boy,” the midwife says, holding it up, its white and twisted umbilical cord still attached. It wails and turns crimson in the reflected firelight as the midwife cuts the cord and hands the baby to me. His hair is wet and streaked with blood, and his skin is slippery and coated with oily, gray paste. His testicles are two huge purple sacs, and his tiny penis points up at me as it delivers its first water onto my cheek.
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