The Ghost of Hannah Mendes

by Naomi Ragen

  “And I wasn’t waiting for him,” Orvieda sniffed. “I went to Israel for a year to study, and then to Paris. I had ten offers of marriage a year.”

  “Oh, yes!” all the women chimed in protectively, nodding their agreement. “She was the most beautiful girl you ever saw!”

  “Men couldn’t take their eyes away from her.”

  “She was so intelligent and educated.”

  “I kept going to school, waiting and waiting for…him!” she accused.

  “And we kept saying to him: When will you settle down, have a family of your own, children of your own? Without that, you may be as rich as King Carlos. What does it matter? Who will you leave it to?”

  “We kept telling him: Orvieda is still waiting for you. But she won’t wait forever.”

  “Finally, thank G-d, he woke up and went to her to beg her to forgive him and to marry him.”

  “Yes,” Serge admitted. “I did. Flew to Paris bearing gifts. Sending a certain persistent Mr. Levi on his way.”

  Orvieda dimpled with pleasure.

  “Yes. Finally, he came to his senses!” Claudina exclaimed, reaching over to touch a few of her grandchildren—a stunning blonde beauty of about ten, a six-year-old redhead with a mass of wonderful curls, and a delicate, sensitive boy of about thirteen, whom Suzanne immediately realized, was the reason for the celebration. His name was Isaac, she remembered, and he was the bar mitzvah boy.

  “Foolish men!” Claudina wagged her finger at the entire male sex. “But our Gabriel is smarter. He doesn’t wait until he is almost forty to begin his family. He understands the true meaning of life is not to make more money and more money.” She turned curtly to Serge. “To open another store and another store. To keep it open even on the Sabbath.”

  “That again, Madre!” he groaned, turning to Suzanne. “Years ago, everyone kept their shops open, and the employees were Christian or Muslim, they wanted Sundays or Fridays off anyway. They didn’t care. But now we have returned to our roots. We keep the store closed Saturdays as well as Sundays. We Sephardim are like reeds,” he said with charming insouciance. “We bow to the wind. When it blows hard, we bend instead of breaking. When it passes, we stand up straight again and go on, until the next wind.”

  There was a short, uncomfortable silence.

  “The Ashkenazi Jews always hold that against us. When they were asked to convert, they killed themselves.”

  “And we pretended and survived! The dead are no use to Him.”

  “Not all pretended,” Claudina chided him. “The Sephardim produced more than their share of apostates, who became our people’s worst enemies. We destroy ourselves through our own hands.” She glanced at Gabriel, who seemed to freeze.

  Suzanne caught the exchange and wondered at its meaning until she was distracted by the maids bringing in beautiful silver dessert trays. Chocolates and sugar biscuits fried in oil, and almond cakes and all kinds of sweet jams.

  “Biscochos,” Claudine explained, pointing to the cookies, and then to the various jellies: “Dulce de naranja—made from orange peels, dulce de rosas—rose petals, dulce de bimbrio—quince.”

  It was eerie. The very same foods mentioned in the manuscript! Suddenly, five hundred years didn’t seem that long ago. Only seven or eight generations. And everything that had happened between the age of Gracia Mendes and Claudina was simply a series of errant blips—the conversions, the intermarriages, the abandonment of religious traditions, the crass modern world—all of it an aberration that had passed, leaving the descendants closer than ever to their roots. The same rituals, the same language, the same values, even the same foods!

  Reeds, bending in the wind.

  Was it inescapable? she wondered.

  And did she really want to escape?

  Saturday morning, a small knock on her door woke her, and a breakfast tray was set upon her night table.

  “Churros con chocolate.” The maid nodded pleasantly.

  Hot chocolate and fried sugar doughnuts, Suzanne discovered on investigation, lifting the clean white napkin that covered the delicate china.

  Although after dinner she’d sworn never to eat again, here she was, ravenous! She finished breakfast off with what she thought was indecent haste, then leaned back with a sigh, licking the sugar from her fingers.

  There was another knock on the door.

  It was Gabriel.

  He sat by her bedside, brushing the sugar crystals from her lips with his long, elegant fingers. She leaned toward him, and he drew her closer, slipping the straps of her gown down over her shoulders, burrowing his head into her bare, smooth neck.

  “Gabriel,” she whispered, pulling him down. But he resisted her gently.

  “How I wish!” he groaned, taking her head between his hands and kissing her lips with the perfect mixture of passion and tenderness she so loved in him.

  “This is torture!” she moaned.

  “You have to be at the synagogue in half an hour. I’m leaving now with the men. The women always come later, but you don’t want to miss Isaac being called up to read the Torah.”

  “I don’t?” she said skeptically.

  He was silent. “They’d be most distressed and insulted if you did, Suzanne.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want to do that.” She shrugged, feeling a sudden resentment she couldn’t really justify.

  “Thanks. I’ll see you later? And Suzanne,” he hesitated, “the women dress fairly conservatively when they go to synagogue.”

  The powerful morning sun pierced through the grillwork, throwing strange patterns of light over his hair and features. He seemed different: older, more severe.

  A shiver ran through all her limbs. He was suddenly a mystery, almost a stranger to her.

  How much more of this was she going to have to endure? she thought, nodding obediently.

  And then he was gone.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back, envisioning getting into the car and driving to the beach. Then she rose reluctantly and put on a long blue skirt with a matching sweater, the most dowdy and presentable outfit she owned. She surveyed the results in the mirror, unsatisfied. It needed a scarf, some jewelry.

  She rummaged through her bag and found a little package wrapped in tissue paper.

  Renaldo’s bracelet. She had taken it off the night she’d run away with Gabriel. She wiped it off gently. It looked neglected, she thought, the bright, intricate design gathering dark tarnish here and there. But it was still quite beautiful. She snapped it around her wrist, feeling guilty and somewhat defiant.

  Arm in arm, she walked with Claudina through the lively streets, stopping every two steps for Claudina to receive and bestow kisses on an endless stream of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Their progress was excruciatingly slow.

  When they finally arrived at the synagogue, they walked through a small courtyard bordered with trees. The women’s gallery was a flight up, overlooking the men’s.

  It was breathtaking.

  A carved frieze of intricate pattern ran the whole length of the room. Silver candelabrum, modernized with electric lights, hung from the ceiling. The wooden pews had been polished by the backs of many generations. Each seat bore a brass name plate: Esther Abecasiss, Miriam Abergel, Esther Benzaquen, Rivka Abuelo, Claudina Benador….

  “Why are so many named Esther?” Suzanne asked in a whisper.

  “Because she is the heroine of the conversos. She was forced to marry the King of Persia and ‘did not reveal her family or her people.’ She was the first secret Jew. Her silence led to salvation. She foiled the plot to eradicate the Jews of Persia by intervening with her husband, the King. It is an honor to name our daughters Esther.”

  Suzanne looked around. The place, as old and beautiful as one of those architectural treasures the British were so keen to turn into lifeless museums, vibrated with life. It was packed with families, reverberating with the chanting of communal prayers.

  She stared down at the graying men and their mid
dle-aged sons; the rows of lively teenagers and children barely out of diapers traipsing up and down the aisles with irreverent familiarity. There was nothing artificial, nothing staged. It was as natural and comfortable to the participants as being at a party at the house of a good friend.

  The women’s section was emptier, but it, too, filled eventually. Like their men, the women were all ages, and singularly friendly. As each entered, they kissed the others, beginning a buzz of whispers that never really subsided.

  Suzanne found this annoying. She was surprisingly anxious to hear and see everything that was going on.

  It was so different from the service she remembered from the Reform Temple in Manhattan: those slow, orchestrated, wordy parodies of prayer, led by some fair-haired singer-entertainer trying to keep the bored participants from dozing off. Here, the entire congregation chanted the prayers together with the exotic tunes of cultures far from New York City’s assimilated Sephardic remnant.

  The thickly accented Hebrew, almost indistinguishable from Spanish or Arabic, filled the vast halls with a vital energy.

  Claudina handed Suzanne a prayer book, opening the page to the correct spot. But it was hopeless: Hebrew on one side and Ladino on the other. She held it out of courtesy, but barely glanced at it, her attention captivated by the happenings on the raised platform before the carved wooden doors holding the sacred Torah scrolls.

  It was almost a stage, she thought, feeling as if she had good seats to a particularly unique performance.

  She saw the little bar mitzvah boy rise and walk to the front of the room, climbing the steps to the tevah. He was soon followed by his father, grandfather, and uncles. A smaller child of about five or six, whose red hair gave him away as a member of Gabriel’s clan, pulled back the velvet curtain. The rabbi opened the ark and handed the Torah scroll in its large, exquisitely painted wooden box to the oldest man present. He in turn passed it to his son, and so on until it reached Serge.

  He turned to his son Isaac, chanting a blessing. Then he held out the heavy parchment scroll to the boy.

  For a moment, the child hesitated. Suzanne held her breath, watching him brace his thin body. Finally, he held out his thin arms to receive it.

  “What if he drops it!” she whispered.

  Claudina turned to face her, shocked. “Hashem Yishmor,” she murmured, whispering an incantation. “It would be a curse on the whole congregation. But don’t worry. He won’t.”

  He was so young, so small, and the scroll so old and so heavy! Yet she saw his thin arms enfold it, displaying a confident strength that seemed to Suzanne as strangely wonderful as it was improbable.

  The box was laid flat on the reading table and opened. The boy, surrounded by relatives, the rabbi, and others, stood on his toes and began to read. His voice, a sweet childish soprano, took up the strange melody with an ease that startled her.

  It was a chant that had in it the sound of the synagogue, the Muslim muezzin, and the Spanish cancionero. Sung in his young voice, it took on a wonderful freshness.

  He didn’t look unhappy, Suzanne had to admit. Simply dwarfed by the weightiness of symbols and the insistent presence of the older men who hovered over him in anxious, prideful silence.

  Something must have happened, she thought, as Claudina gave out that high-pitched, vibrating scream with which women of the East have for centuries marked joyous occasions. The other women joined in immediately, and the whole congregation suddenly transformed into some huge ululating tribe, centuries melting, Western veneers dissolving. Small candies were rained down about the child’s head, landing in the collars of the men’s white prayer shawls, scooped up from the floors by active little boys who descended upon the loot like locusts.

  A clapping began, and the shrill, birdlike warble of the hellulah continued, as the bar mitzvah boy stepped down to shake the hands of the men in the congregation. To her amazement, Suzanne sensed a little swagger in his stride, as if he had pressed some claim and been victorious. And unless he did something unforgivable, that claim would always be valid, reserving him a place among his people.

  No, this place would not be a museum. Let the millennium come and go. There were enough children here who would claim their place, who would fill the empty spots created by death and unexpected desertions.

  And what of her section, the women’s gallery? She glanced around the room. Young matrons with babies, young girls in their bright dresses, matriarchs in exquisitely tailored suits, their faces happy and satisfied, as after a job well done. They, too, knew the joy of place, of fitting into a world made for them, and preserved by them.

  Suzanne felt an unwilling surge of joy that she couldn’t explain. In its own terms, it was a real accomplishment. And yet, by the same token, she found something about it simply appalling: the iron-fisted parental control, the boring sameness of the rigid steps that led the child to emulate the parent. The predictability and perhaps, too, the narrow-mindedness that allowed for such consistent and unwavering steps forward in the same direction as those who had come before.

  And where had it led? To this last small outpost of an empire in which they had almost entirely disappeared. For five hundred years since the Expulsion, Sephardic Jews had wandered to North Africa, South America, Bulgaria, England, America, Salonika, and places too numerous to mention. And what had been the result: Eighty-nine percent of Ladino-speaking Jews in the world had died at Hitler’s hands, many of them in Auschwitz.

  She remembered a passage that Boris Pasternak had written in Dr. Zhivago about Jewish leaders: “Why have they not—even if at the risk of bursting like boilers with the pressure of their duty—disbanded this army which keeps on fighting and being massacred, nobody knows for what? Why don’t they say to them: ‘Come to your senses. Stop. Don’t hold on to your identity. Don’t stick together. Disperse. Be with all the rest.’”

  Lemmings or survivors? she wondered.

  Or simply, very simply, a family.

  She wiped away an honest tear drawn up from a well of ties long ignored or forgotten. A tear of bitterness and compassion, of rage and unwilling pride.

  28

  Fax

  TO: CATHERINE DA COSTA

  FROM: FRANCESCA ABRAHAM

  Dear Gran,

  We reached Cáceres just as the afternoon light was fading. It was like being transported back in time. The houses, the churches, the old synagogue, all left exactly the way they must have been five hundred years ago. Marius says it is a well-known tourist spot for that reason. I don’t think that many tourists find their way here very often, though.

  The streets are a rough, hard cobblestone that would make any jogger’s teeth bang together like castanets. I swear I could almost hear the echoing clack of hooves. In general, the place seems riddled with ghosts. They peek out at you from the dark, gray granite houses, hiding behind the immense, metal-studded wooden gates and shutters. Despite the intense Spanish sun, the streets are quite dark, leaning over you and whispering conspiratorially behind your back.

  From the hilltop, you can see the snow-capped Sierra de Gredos shining in the distance, touching the thick, low clouds. Looking down at the clustered houses, you can still see the smoke rising from chimneys and the ivy overlapping green moss on garden walls. Up in the church spires, I saw a nesting stork, and below I glimpsed this strange hidden garden with an old stone sculpture of an open book.

  The former synagogue (for hundreds of years a church, it is unnecessary to add, since there hasn’t been a Jew in Cáceres since the Inquisition) has hardly been touched. There are no crosses on the original building, or any carved images. You can see where the women’s section was, and where the Ark must have stood. How strange it must have been for the new converts, especially the unwilling ones, to suddenly find themselves in their old house of worship, everything so familiar, yet so utterly changed: monstrances instead of Torah scrolls, altars and crucifixes instead of the tevah and Star of David.

  We arrived full of expectations, bu
t have so far been sorely disappointed. The person who has been selling off the manuscript is a local boy named Juan Martinez Ortega. He had a job working in the church archives—a favor the priest did for his widowed mother. Apparently, he has been stealing for some time to pay his gambling debts. He brought a page from the manuscript to a rare-book dealer almost two years ago, but the dealer wasn’t interested. Then when the international rare-book grapevine starting throbbing with the news that such a manuscript was worth big bucks to some crazy Americans, the dealer remembered the boy and contacted him. That’s where the pages we got in England came from. The boy, either because he was afraid of being caught or was getting wise to the worth of his merchandise, decided to check out its value with dealers in Toledo and Córdoba. Again, he sold only part of it and disappeared with the rest—at least that’s what the dealer in Córdoba says, although he admits it’s just a hunch. There’s no way to know how much of the manuscript was actually available to him in the first place, and how many pages—if any—he’s got left.

  How the manuscript made its way to the archives of the Church of San Mateo in Cáceres is anybody’s guess. Local folklore says it was in a suitcase left by a refugee at a border crossing at the base of the Pyrenees. A truckdriver on his way to Cáceres to deliver meat picked it up and was very disappointed to find it full of old books and yellowing papers. He just left it behind him at the inn before starting back to Madrid.

  It was the innkeeper who turned it over to the local priest, an educated and very righteous person with an extensive library. Until the priest’s death five years ago, no one had access to his collection. The new priest, also a very decent fellow, has been trying to catalogue the vast collection.