The Jewel Trader of Pegu

by Jeffrey Hantover

  Win is gentle with his words but finds fault with me when I speak of my trials. I have wandered far from his faith’s teachings.—Ab…ra…ham, you speak as if your god has chosen you and only you to suffer. You love your passing, impermanent self so much you believe suffering is your burden alone. My dear Abraham, life is suffering. That is what the Buddha teaches. Suffering is to us as water is to the fishes of the sea. It surrounds us, it is inescapable, we live within it, and it lives within us. Where there is life there is suffering. I am not a wise man. Even if I spoke your language better or you understood mine, I still wouldn’t be a wise man. I stumble and struggle to remember the sutras (Joseph, these are his prayers), and I have not lived so well in my past lives as to have been reborn a monk in this one. All I know is what the Buddha teaches—we live, we suffer, we die, and we are reborn. All of us. Not you or me alone. All of us.

  You know, dear cousin, I am not one who laughs easily like Leon or Jacob. I don’t walk around with a smile shining on the world, but Win’s world painted in tears seems too dark even for me. This somber presence, who sits in the corner while you and others swirl by to the music, takes on Win, not to be disputatious like a scholar, but because even I do not want to live in a world so full of suffering, so empty of meaning.

  —Is that all, Win? Are we not born to love, to do duty to our family, to our ancestors, to our faith? Loving fine cloth more than man or hoarding jewels rather than wisdom, that is not what the Holy One, blessed be He, commands. How can our desire to hold dear those we love be anything but a good?

  —Desire is the waterwheel that churns suffering into the fields of our lives, Win said.—We desire what we don’t have. We desire more of what we already have. We cling to what we have like a crab to a stone at high tide. Afraid we will lose what we have or restless to get more, we suffer. Desire—snuff out the flame of desire, Ab…ra…ham, and suffering will disappear like a wisp of black smoke from the candle’s wick.

  —Is a man a crab to want to shelter a child from the hurt that lurks in the shadows of the world, to want to grow old surrounded by a wife and children and their children?

  Win’s face was dim in the flickering light, and he seemed pained by the words he had to speak.—Hurt is the world, he said, looking at me as if I were a wayward son.

  —I will pray to the Holy One, blessed be He, to save you and all your family from hurt.

  A slight smile crossed his face. —Ab…ra…ham, only I can save myself. I know Massimo was not of your faith. He gave me a carved piece of wood with a sad man on it with nails in his hands and feet. I asked what this poor man had done to his king to be punished so harshly. He said he had done nothing bad—that he was the son of his god and died to save all those who believed in him. It all sounded so strange, like a tale told to calm a child frightened by thunder and lightning. But I did not say that—I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I only spoke the same words I speak to you. It is hard, my dear friend, but no dead man, no god, not even yours, can save you. He can tell you, “Abraham, go here, do this,” but it is you who must choose the way.

  We and the night grew quiet. Win and I were both sleepy, and we parted down our separate paths, like friends who wave good-bye but know they will meet again. Don’t worry, Joseph, I will not return dressed in a yellow robe, but I will continue to speak with Win of these things. He never stands above me, wrapped in holiness, making me feel, as even some men among our own do, that only they speak to the Holy One, blessed be He, and only they are cut from sacred cloth. For Win and his kind, we are all humbler cloth, strazzaria, each with our flaws.

  I came home to find Mya awake, waiting for my return. She doesn’t go to sleep until I have said my prayers and am ready for bed. It is strange. Before she came, I felt I lived alone, even though Khaing slept under the same roof. Now when I lie on my mat at night, I can feel the young woman’s presence. I no longer feel alone.

  Your cousin,

  Abraham

  12 March 1599

  Dear Joseph,

  You would think my adventures would bring me greater wisdom. Yet the opposite seems to be happening. Axioms turn to questions, certainties turn to doubts, straight roads to twisting paths. Wind ripples the water, and when I look down, my reflection is broken and shifting in the fractured surface.

  I walked past the Auythia Gate today not knowing what horror lay there. A prince long loyal to the king had refused to march with his retainers on an expedition he thought foolhardy. The king had the prince, close as a brother, slain. His body, pierced with wounds, was thrown naked on the ground under the gate, a bloody reminder to all who passed of the price of disloyalty. The prince’s son came that very evening to mourn his father, and he too was slain as he bent in prayer over his father’s mutilated body. Tragedy begat tragedy—the next morning a family servant, loyal in death as well as life, came to cover the two bodies from the pecking of jackdaws and the prodding sticks of wild children. He too was slain on the spot by royal guards. The three bodies had lain under the gate another two days before I passed by. As I write I still see in my mind the crows feasting on their rotting bodies, smell the stench of their flesh, and feel sadness in my heart. Not all kings are cruel, though power can easily exile a man from his heart. Does Nandabayin’s cruelty flow from his heathen blood, from the blood of his line, from the power that is his, or is his soul a twisted labyrinth our minds cannot comprehend? And if it is his heathen blood, then what of the servant’s blood that impelled him, like an angel, to cover his masters from shame?

  I can’t so easily place the peoples I have met on my travels upon some moral ladder. I am no longer so certain who to allow and who to exclude from God’s embrace. I confess I have been too quick to pass judgment on those whose tongues and customs are different, and too slow to see the Rambam’s wisdom that all of us are half innocent and half guilty. Peguans, Portuguese, even some Israelites, one day dance with the devil, and the next sing with the angels.

  I thought when I first arrived that Peguans accumulated gold and jewels and fine cloth out of an excessive love of display, like children entranced by the sparkle of colored glass; but I have come to see that like us Israelites their lives are precarious, subject to forces outside their control. They fear that they too will be exiled, cast out from home and hearth and forced to flee into the forest from those who would kill or enslave them. They can carry jewels with them and bury their fine cloth in the hope that when the tides of fortune change, they will be able to return home.

  Win and his brethren grow in my eyes. The Gentiles, with their gates and ghettos and cages hung halfway up the Campanile to shame their wayward priests, travel round the world but seem no better for the sea, air, and sun. The Gentiles have no place in their hearts for us, and the Peguans fare not much better. But at least the Peguans can be forgiven, for they are in the Gentiles’ eyes ignorant of the holy word and their hands are not stained with the blood of Jesus. A Dutchman, who is not a bad fellow, was railing the other day against a Chinese trader from Malacca.—These Chinamen can’t be trusted. They’re worse than the Jews. He for a moment had forgotten I was there or perhaps who I was, but caught himself.—Not you, Abraham, you’re not like the others. You’re a good man. Even a gentle fellow, who seems a cut above his brethren, has the poison in his blood.

  The Jesuit, who I finally met but will now try to avoid, is like the Franciscans who so bedevil us with hate at home. Though young, with peach fuzz for a beard, his deep-sunk eyes and hollow cheeks make him look like an old man. His thin neck pokes out from his cassock like a willow reed. He speaks as if he had lived forever and knows without doubt the mysteries of the world. He had passed me by several times without a word but couldn’t avoid me two days ago. Win and another Peguan broker were trying to convince him to visit a pagoda, a few miles outside the city, that believers in the Buddha hold especially sacred. He had not stepped inside a pagoda and had no intention of traveling to see their false gods, he said, especially one so lazy as to be lyin
g down. He bent over Win, his arms folded.—If you abandon your false gods, you will be born again.

  I could see the smile bubbling behind Win’s impassive face.—That will not be necessary, he said slowly.

  Joseph, you know I am not a rude person by nature, especially to a Gentile and even more so to a priest. But I am not good at hiding my feelings. The priest read my faint smile at his ignorance. His face reddened.—Jew, why do you mock me? Before I could feign my innocence, his words spewed forth.—You people strut about haughty and ungrateful. Do you think because you’re far from the Holy Church, you’re free to look down your nose at me like some highborn nobleman? Maybe here you think yourself free, but let me tell you something—Christians are the true free men in Jesus Christ and God. You and your people are only tolerated to bear witness to our faith. And how do you repay our kindness? With arrogance. Until you people accept the light of the one true faith, you will bear the perpetual servitude you deserve, the servitude you have earned by your guilt. Oxen and mules are created for the service of man; you people live for the service of Christians. Even if he had taken a breath, I would have stayed silent. What good would it have done to speak? Red faced, he sputtered on.—You struck our Lord on the Via Dolorosa. You people are cursed to wander till the Second Coming. He waved his hand as if to brush away a bothersome fly, turned like a soldier on parade, and walked away.

  I had foolishly thought that the priest had avoided me because he had heard of my service for the brides—perhaps he was jealous. Now I know it was just the same old venom, the same old hate. “Tolerated.” What is worse, to be a slave, a defeated foe of the Peguans, forced to live far from home and kin, or to be banished behind thick gates and bricked-up windows, tolerated by Gentiles? The Peguans may laugh at me, at my white teeth like a growling dog’s, my hairy arms and my gawky body, but there is no animus in their laughter. Children grow quiet at my approach. When I pass, they point and burst into singsong jabbering and giggling, but I am just a queer animal to them. I live where the Peguans tell me to live, but all foreigners have their own neighborhoods marked by the nations from which they come, not by the faiths they embrace. The Peguans want to keep track of us, want to make their trade with us go more smoothly. We have a definite place in their cosmic order. We are necessary—not “tolerated,” not shunned like some contagion, some agent of the plague.

  We stand on the edge of a new century—new worlds await us, men of science at Padua chart the seas and inlets of the body, while adventurers chart lands unknown to our grandfathers. Joseph, we climb ever upward, and yet on this path of progress, we are burdened with unbounded hatred and blood libels.

  I don’t think Win understood all that the Jesuit said, but he could hear the hate in his voice and see the anger in his eyes.—That is no priest. Poor man, he will be reborn a ghost with a mouth burning like a furnace.

  I couldn’t wait to return home, pour buckets of cold water over my head and shoulders to wash the stench of the Jesuit from my body. I couldn’t wait to sit quietly sipping tea that Mya would bring without my asking. I have stopped asking Win what luck he has had in finding her a permanent place. She costs me little and is no bother. In fact, I must admit that her presence pleases me. Khaing cooks well enough, but her wrinkled face, lips stained red from years of betel chewing, not to mention her sagging breasts, are not the easiest sights to bear, especially in the bright light of morning. Mya hides the grief she must feel beneath a smile. She and Khaing fill the house with chatter and laughter, like mother and daughter, as they sweep the floor and earth in front of the verandah or sit around the hearth pounding spices. Mya is always up before the sun and has taken to sleeping on a mat outside the curtained entrance to my room in case I wake early and need a bucket of warm water.

  I wonder why after all these years of absence I have thought again, and even dreamed, of Ruth. I see her and a man who looks like me and I think him a stranger—a man buried with her those many years ago. In the first years after her death, did I, like you, look up from my prayers to catch sight of young women behind the wooden screen at the synagogue? I don’t remember. Did I ever in those early years, like you, mark the young girls who sat silent at the end of the Passover table as ones who, with time, might blossom into women worthy of attention? I don’t remember. What I remember is that there came a time when whatever interest I might have had disappeared, and whatever interest parents and anxious aunts had in me disappeared also. Even the Rieti twins, whose mother must have gazed at the time of their conception at a painting of the frogs God visited on the Egyptians, stopped cornering me at parties with their idle prattle. Though I spoke of finding another bride, they knew—they could smell the musty odor of someone who had given up.

  Tonight, like other nights, I hear the soft shush of Mya’s breath outside my door. Her perfume fills the house. Her slight smile, even with blackened teeth, sweetens my day and makes me smile, a rare expression when you last saw me. She has been here barely a month, but it is hard to remember my days in this house without her.

  Your cousin,

  Abraham

  In the mornings, Khaing and I go to the market. I carry the full basket home on my head, and she carries a stick to shoo away the crows. I help her cook his food and wash his clothes. I sweep the floor and ground in front of his house. I tend the garden—village girls are good at spotting weeds and making things bloom. Except for sharing his mat, Khaing jokes, we are his wives.

  He is like a house whose door and windows are shut. When Uncle Win is not here, he nods more than he speaks. He doesn’t talk to himself or hum or sing a song. You can feel the silence, thick and heavy as afternoon air before the rain. Maybe his people were punished for speaking. Maybe his family spirits commanded him to be silent—his silence like offerings to keep them content. Win says he speaks many languages, even ours, but he says few words. He speaks a strange language that only his god understands. Who can know what a man thinks, especially a stranger?

  He seems a good man, who wants to please his god. He prays to his god every morning and every night before he goes to bed. At least, I think he is praying—his eyes are closed, and he rocks gently back and forth. You can’t see his god—there are no statues of him in the house, no altar to offer him food and flowers. There is an amulet, nailed to the door frame, he kisses with his fingertips when he enters the house; but inside, the house is empty. He carries his god inside him all the time. I think this god is always telling him what to do, and that is why he is so somber, listening hard to everything his god says. Before and after he eats anything, he bows his head and talks to his god. I want to tell him not to be afraid—I would never poison his rice.

  I know he can smile. I have seen him smile at Win. Uncle Win could make a dark cloud smile. At night I sit outside his room and watch him smile as he reads back to himself the words he has written. I know he isn’t writing his wife; Khaing, who asked Win, has told me he isn’t married. He must be writing someone he loves. Not a woman, though—how could he travel so far and stay away so long if he loved her enough to write her almost every day? Maybe it is his father who has sent him on this long journey or a brother whom he has seen every day of his life.

  If I knew how to write and if my dog knew how to read, I would write her letters too. I miss her. She followed me like a shadow. No snake ever bit me in the fields, because she was my protector. She listened to everything I said, and never turned away, never barked for me to stop. If she has not gained enough merit to be reborn a human, I hope that, like the Buddha, she can be reborn a white elephant, honored, and well treated.

  The days pass. I am not unhappy. I have a dry mat to sleep on. I have enough rice to eat. I have a master who doesn’t raise his voice or hand to me. Sometimes there are even moments when he looks at me with the comforting eyes of my bridal night. I think I see in his eyes the memory of his body in mine; but then I stop myself—I’m just a foolish girl lost in my dreams.

  What will happen to me when, his fortune mad
e, he leaves? Or takes a temporary wife, like other foreign traders do? I see the old nuns, stooped and lame, begging for coins in the market. Where do they sleep at night? I tremble with shame that someday I might be one of them.

  Today I went to the pagoda near the Prome Gate. Clumps of boys stood at the entrance selling caged birds. They were doing well, and only a few birds were left by the time I arrived. With most of the extra coins that my master had given me, I bought a sparrow and brought it home. I took the bird into the garden and let it go. It flew up into the palms and then away over the wall. May the Buddha notice this act of generosity, and may the merit I gain erase the bad karma that has cursed me a young widow far from home.

  25 March 1599

  Dear Joseph,

  It is Sunday, and if I were there with you, we would spend our day in idleness, forced to obey the Gentiles’ Sabbath commandments. I did a bit of work with Win, examining again the stones we have bought, looking to see if any stones bought early in my stay should be sold so we can upgrade our stock. It was not a pressing task, but the freedom to work when I choose is like sweet nectar to the bee, and I couldn’t resist.

  As I walked home after a morning of holding stones up to the light, imagining them cut, polished, and set, I couldn’t help but think of Uncle and his daily rounds. He claims his good health comes from the power of the precious stones he handles, that they protect him from the lurking harm of pestilent vapors. I think rather it is our doctors—one of the few things that bloom luxuriant in the Ghetto—that keep his bodily humors in balance. I marvel how every morning he rises, clear minded, ready for the day. With steady hands, he puts on his right shoe, then his left shoe, then ties the left and the right to bring him good fortune, strides off to be one of the first at morning prayers, then sets off for the Rialto to barter in gossip and rumor. If gossip were gold, our uncle would be rich as Croesus. I would be his silent shadow as he moved through the stalls and storerooms of the Rialto like a chicken pecking the ground for spare kernels, listening to the talk of merchants, goldsmiths, and the agents of noblemen from Florence to Augsburg, even from the palaces of the Ottomans and the pope in Rome. His favorite goldsmiths whisper to him of betrothals still in negotiation, merchants flush with profits even before their ships from the East drop anchor, and unfaithful husbands anxious to appease angry wives with pearls and precious stones. The buyer matters not to Uncle—Holy See, sultan, or princely merchant—he finds the best stones and the best Christian hands to work them. I think he will be pleased with the goods Win and I have secured.