Even the Ghetto with its daily bustle and chatter grows quiet at night as we sleep behind wooden gates and bricked windows, but there is no silence in this land. Fruit bats, large as cats, hang head down from the trees along the river during the day; when night arrives, they unfold their black wings and swoop away into the approaching darkness. Flitting insects like tiny flying lanterns spangle the shore with darting sparks of pulsing light. I stand on deck, the ship asleep, all human sound put to bed, and I listen to the world come alive. The chirp and clack of insects, the whistle of birds, the croaking choir of frogs, the whoops and chatter of monkeys hidden in the treetops. It is like an orchestra playing from a dozen different scores. What wondrous music God composes.
Sometimes, I admit, all these sounds frighten me. The world is so much larger, so much more populated by beings that I could not have imagined when I waved farewell to you at the dock. Abodes line the river like fragile dollhouses, while a short walk away lies the vast unknown darkness. The Gentiles outside our walls primp and parade, praising the creations of their hand and mind. And among us Israelites there are some who are not shy to proclaim the pinnacles of learning they have reached or recite the wisdom of the Rambam, as if he alone put pen to paper. Yet beneath our silken and plumed finery, I have begun to wonder if we are not more brothers than we care to admit to the half-naked heathens.
Forgive me, but I have sailed beyond Cosmin with my words. Let me return to this port where we first landed and discharged our goods under the gimlet-eyed gaze of the royal customs officials. We had sailed around Cape Negrais, drawn through treacherous shoals by a huge golden structure where these people pray to their god: imagine the Campanile but higher, story upon story like some baker’s confection, a gilded sugar loaf that flashed in the sunlight, a bright beacon from the headland. Its reflected light and the mumbled prayers of the crew brought us safely into the harbor, where we were greeted with much pomp and surprising kindness.
We anchored two hundred yards from shore and were soon greeted by the governor of the city himself. Out he came in a long, thin ship, as narrow at the stern and bow as a gondola but at least one hundred rowers long. He sat in a cabin raised in the middle of this low sliver of a ship, hidden behind shuttered windows painted gaily with red and gold dragons, magical birds and flowers. He was only a governor of this one port, not a king or prince as one would have thought from the glittering appearance of his vessel and the four trumpeters sitting before his cabin urging on the rowers with the rhythm of their bellowing. You should have seen our ship owner play the fawning subject. He, who for these many weeks had ruled our floating world like a despot, whose simple scowl turned both freeman and slave silent, now bowed and stood meekly before a small brown man no taller than a boy just old enough to make a minyan. I took pleasure in how the wheels of divine justice had turned, and I saw in the crew’s eyes and their half-hidden smiles this pleasure shared. The governor welcomed us with baskets brimming with oranges, whose sweetness bathed the brackishness from our mouths, and crates of squawking chickens, whose sacrifice later that night brought full bellies and no tears. After a customs inspection more thorough than a prospective groom’s inquisition, we and our goods were allowed to come ashore. The king of Pegu wants no diamonds, pearls, and fine cloth smuggled into the kingdom, for smuggled goods rob his treasury of duties; and I have quickly learned that the king’s ambitions and follies have left the treasury much diminished. Our goods now travel to Pegu on a larger vessel, while we proceed upriver on smaller boats, close cousin to our gondolas.
Cosmin is a bustling entrepôt where peoples from lands that are only undecorated voids on our maps crowd the markets and storehouses, scurrying back and forth like frightened deer, one hand on their money pouch, the other stroking their chins as they calculate in their mental ledgers the play of profit and worldly advantage. In this land, everything has a value and is fair game for the trader’s eye. Melaka, Sumatra, Arakan, Aceh, Chieng Mai, Java, Siam, Yunnan—these strange lands sound like magical incantations an alchemist might chant, hunched over his vials and flasks. Though I have no desire to travel beyond the needs of our business, I must admit there is fascination in these names and the images they conjure up.
Our time in Cosmin was only two nights, but it seems these heathens love their gods more than money. You cannot walk a hundred yards without coming across a temple—or what they call a pagoda—with gilded images of their god in all sizes and poses. There is no solemnity in these places. Beggars crowd the steps, women crouch on their haunches selling trinkets and spitting red gobs of betel juice on the ground, and monkeys scamper everywhere. You may claim that some of our brothers act the monkey at synagogue; but we can count them on one hand, and if they keep their tongues, they are hard to discover. Here dozens clamber everywhere, running wildly among idols and idolaters, who feed and care for them as if they were orphans beloved by their god. Yellow-robed monks walk the streets in silence, leather pads about their necks and begging bowls in their hands. They take the pad from their neck and sit cross-legged upon it when begging for food or coin—a wise custom on ground strewn with spit and rotting fruit. While these monks show in this practice some wisdom, most heathens, like children, wallow in superstition before their gods. Walking the streets with a Portuguese trader in pepper and nutmeg, who has traveled several times to these lands over the last decade, I remarked on the fearsome naturalness of two large wooden tigers standing guard before the high steps leading to a grand pagoda. From the craftsman’s fine touch, you almost expected a frightening roar to shake the ground. He said that a native trader told him with convincing earnestness that he had seen one of these guardians raise its lethal claws and swipe dead with one blow a blustering official from the customs house, who claimed loudly that no one’s prayers could save the king from his follies. The Holy One, blessed be He, works in mysterious ways, but not through the paws of some heathen idol.
Each bend in the twisting river we now travel brings sights strange and mystifying. The Ghetto’s face does not change from day to day, while on the river, when you think you have seen all the pages in the book of life, another opens before your eyes. In the late afternoon we had just passed a floating village of fishermen—hundreds of barks with straw houses straddling them from bow to stern. The families living there sold fresh and salted fish. The stench was fierce, and black clouds of flies hovered over fish drying on straw mats. The village disappeared in the curve of the river, and soon a swirling cloud of black flies floated toward us. My first thought was that a small boat had come back to join its neighbors. Our jabbering boatman and laughing crew fell silent, as if under a choirmaster’s command. What I saw later than they was a small raft of coconut palms lashed together, and tied atop it, feast for the flies, the bloated body of a woman. I had to cover my nose and mouth, the smell was so overpowering. I wish I had covered my eyes so that the vision did not bore itself into my memory: a grimace of black teeth exposed by skin drawn taut from starvation and the sun, her tattered sarong bunched around her waist. Death spared her no shame. The boatman steered the boat toward the opposite shore, as far as we could get from the raft without running aground among the fallen trees tangled in the shallows. Two crewmen, as if on silent cue, spat in the direction of the stinking body and in mumbled singsong chanted this unbidden omen downstream toward the sea. I was told that it is the custom in this land for an adulteress to be set adrift to die far from the shame she has brought family and village. We shun our adulteresses too but do not set them afloat in the canal or exile them to die alone on some islet in the Lagoon. I have not been among these Peguans long enough to know what they believe or how they think, but it is hard to imagine these people, so small and childlike in appearance, so cruel and inhuman to their own. There was only one Eden, and it is long past.
Oh, this land has loosened my tongue. I best sleep and awake my old self—quiet, observing from the safety of the corner, while you and your friends twirl and dance in the middle of the floo
r.
Your cousin,
Abraham
Bugs skitter across the surface of the water. The paddy field is alive with tiny creatures no bigger than a speck of dust. I hold my hand over the water, careful to scare them away with my shadow before I plant a seedling. The rice spirit wouldn’t be pleased if her children lived because innocent creatures died. I listen and she speaks to me. She directs my hand beneath the water. My seedlings find a good home, and they take root.
If my mother were alive, I would sing to her, and she would send me back a song, skimming across the water. But I work alone and sing only to myself.
My mother was a handmaid to my father. When he speaks her name, his eyes redden, his voice trembles. I grow small as a sparrow, until I disappear altogether into his sadness. No matter what I do, I am not her. I am not the sons taken from him when they were young. My life is a reminder of theirs not lived.
My aunt says I look like her. I was four when she died. I struggle to remember her face. What I do remember is her hand holding mine when we walked to and from the field. My hand fit into hers, like two pieces of wood cut and smoothed to lock one into the other. When you are a child, an older person grabs your hand and squeezes it tightly or just lets it hang limp. You are expected to do all the work—you clutch three fingers and try to keep up with their long strides. They forget you are there, trailing along like the tail of a kite. But my mother and I walked side by side, her hand a nest for mine.
I remember coming back from the field, my hand in hers. The trees trembled, alive with spirits. When we got to the village gate, we would say together, as she had taught me, “Outside! Outside!” and she would turn and spit on the ground to keep the ghosts from following us into the village. I thought it was a game and tried to spit but could only offer a whoosh of air and a dribble of saliva. That always made my mother laugh. Even now, though I am no longer a child, I sometimes lie at the edge of the stream and look into the water. I smile, and my mother smiles back at me. I say my name, and I hear my mother’s voice, “Mya, Mya.” A breeze ripples the surface of the water, and my mother comforts me.
It is a great city, very plain and flat, and four square, walled round about, and with ditches that compass the walls about with water, in which ditches are many crocodiles; it hath no drawbridges, yet it hath twenty gates, five for every square on the walls; there are many places made for sentinels to watch, made of wood and covered or gilt with gold; the streets thereof are the fairest I have seen, they are straight as a line from one gate to another…and they are as broad as ten or twelve men may ride abreast in them…these streets…are planted at the doors of the houses with nut trees of India, which make a very commodious shadow; the houses be made of wood, and covered with a kind of tiles in the form of cups…the king’s palace is in the middle of the city, made in form of a walled castle, with ditches full of water round about it, the lodgings within are made of wood all over gilded, with fine pinnacles and very costly work, covered with plates of gold.
CESARE FREDERICI, 1581
15 October 1598
Dear Joseph,
My first letter from Pegu, my home for the next year. I write from a table that does not shake with the waves, and sleep on a thick mat that does not swing in the breeze. I apologize for not writing sooner, but this city tests my habits. The activities of the day and walking freely in this spacious city send me early and tired to bed—but this is a freedom I will never complain of.
The eight royal brokers assigned to the foreign merchants stood on the shore to greet our boat with its half dozen traders, I alone from Italy. A more reckless breed, these Gentiles leapt the gap between ship and shore, but I had not come this far to fall in these foul waters. I would not venture farther until they had found a plank long enough to provide a narrow but solid path to land. I did not want to fall and risk losing to the murky water the blessed Talmud and my beloved Dante, carried in the leather pouch I hugged close to my chest.
My broker, a small bald fellow whose name is Maung Win, found me. His parents named him well, or perhaps he grew to be the name they had given him. His name means “Brother Bright” and he appears to wear a permanent smile and see only the sunlight in this world and not its shadows. Though he seemed genuinely saddened, when in answer to his barrage of questions he learned that Ruth of blessed memory had died long ago, leaving me without wife or son—a condition he believes no man should suffer. We would make a fine pair for the commedia dell’arte: he squat and smiling and myself tall and serious. Yes, Joseph, serious, not dour. To my surprise and pleasure he speaks a rudimentary Italian—childlike in its vocabulary and comical in its grammar but passable. The last four years he served a Genoese trader who lived in the house I now occupy and who died suddenly a few months ago. This Genoese seems to have been well liked; when people learn I am living in his former home, his name is met with a nod and a broad smile. I noticed that the columns on the house’s verandah are streaked with red, where many visitors must have wiped their betel-stained fingers.
Win’s Italian will make my life easier. I would not want to depend on Portuguese, Spanish, or even Italian traders to speak on my behalf. I would not want to share with them knowledge of our affairs. On the ship from India there were Peguans from whom I learned the rudiments of their language—enough to praise a sunset and ask questions about the marvels of this new world—and hopefully by year’s end I will speak with some facility. For the moment, Win and I converse in a humorous stew of Italian and Peguan. Maybe I shall teach him some Hebrew to make me feel closer to home—I have not heard our tongue since I left the Israelites of Cochin.
Unlike our city with its narrow twisting streets and its dark maze of alleys that start, stop, and disappear under names new and confounding, Pegu is a grand city of wide streets ordered with a carpenter’s measuring rod. Coconut palms, taller than a half dozen men one atop another, fan over street corners and shade the walls of houses. The streets glow and glitter with gilded spires. Win tells me that the city is an earthly miniature of the cosmic order, with the king’s palace and royal residences at the center and the number of surrounding blocks of this ordered grid a reflection of their many gods. I do not understand all this convoluted talk of cosmic order—I soon lose my way in these infidels’ phantasma. All I know is that I can stand in the middle of a wide road and look down its long, shaded expanse and not see the road’s end before it narrows into the horizon.
I walk these streets a free man. When I left Venice I put away the yellow hat that marks us, but I still feel strange walking without it. I am an object of bemused curiosity, especially in these dark clothes that I must shed lest I drown in my sweat, but I am just a barbarian, lumped with all the other barbarians. I am not feared, kept at a distance like a diseased animal. I do not feel the Gentiles’ gaze or even the eyes of other Jews ready to report my words and acts to the Assembly, ever watchful of behavior they fear will inflame Christian hostility. A solitary traveler, I have come to realize how tired I was of living under the constant gaze of others. Though I stand a head above most of these people, I feel I am invisible to them. Here only the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, keep watch over me.
I am not used to getting up in the morning with the city free before me. I can go where my feet take me and do not have to wait for the Marangona chimes to open the Ghetto gates. I do not have to flee for home before the gates close at sunset. I do not have to worry that if I lose track of the hour I will be stuck for the night in the Ghetto Nuovo across the bridge, forced to sleep in another’s bed. You will be amazed to hear that old Abraham of the Antechamber, who never made the morning’s first prayers and had to wait until others drowsy with sleep straggled in, now arises with the cock’s crow. Without waiting for the bell’s command, I watch the market come to life or simply wander where whim takes me. Even if I were free to do so, I have had little cause to go out of the Ghetto after sunset or early in the morning. But that I cannot is a constant reminder that we Israelites live in V
enice at the toleration of the Gentiles—it is like a pebble in my shoe that I cannot remove.
The last two days I have taken walks at sunset, when the palms come alive with the sound of birds, high and shrill like the chatter of Peguan women in the market. Without plan I ended by the river sparkling in starlight. I had no destination. The simple act of walking drew me through the quiet streets in the growing darkness. No guarded gates kept me close to home. I embraced the freedom of walking. I felt for the first time freedom as a presence, as something real that exists in the world. Not just an ideal. Not just a prayer at Passover.
The streets are dense with shops and stalls the closer you get to the trading houses and the royal storehouse, or what is called in this land a godown. A cat could leap from roof to roof without touching the ground; and if it fell, it could scramble from umbrella to umbrella, shoulder to shoulder and never dirty its paws. What a Babel of tongues, what a mosaic of bodies and colors—bare brown skin, bright-colored cottons and silks, turbans and robes, polished staffs and jeweled daggers, umbrellas bobbing up and down in the bright sunlight. It is as if the world were tipped on its side, and merchants from every heathen land funneled into these market streets: Bengalis, Chinese, Malays, Turks, Arabs, Siamese, Gujaratis, dark-skinned Indians from Coromandel and Calicut, and even dusky Abyssinians. Win tells me merchants from these lands set up stalls for six months or more to sell their cloth and thread, earthenware jars, seed pearls, iron and copper pans, spices, and anything else the Peguans have come to desire. You can tell a man of means—even if he is a heathen—from his fine dress and the ease with which he carries himself. Seamen and petty traders, rougher in dress and appearance, sell their wares themselves, or sometimes Peguan women, whom they call their wives, carry on their business. But these men have pledged themselves to women who can speak the local tongue only to turn a profit.
The Jewel Trader of Pegu Page 2