The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  He had wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth, wishing he was back in Egypt as he stumbled over his words.

  “Yes, yes, Rav Yitzhak. I’m aware that bringing the boy could be seen as dangerous. But you see, Aillil is the only son of a good friend, a Cathar knight currently in Outremer.*3 The boy swore he would starve himself to death if he could not join his father, and the passages from Venice start at Easter. I was coming here anyway, so I promised I would try to put him on a ship.” He paused. “Also, I heard that in the cities of the Italians the mamserbilbul is not as widespread as in the north.” He had looked at the dyers as if hoping for help but then had lowered his eyes and sighed.

  “No, there’s no denying it, Rav Yitzhak . . . you’re right. I acted without forethought, and I ask forgiveness from you and from everyone. The fact is, the boy has grown attached to me over the years. His mother died when he was a baby and . . .”—he’d lowered his voice—“his eyesight and hearing are defective from birth and he is not as . . . quick as other boys, but sometimes I think God endowed him with a strange talent, which. . . .” He realized he was rambling and smiled, throwing up his arms. “What can I say, Rabbi, Aillil is . . . the only family I have!”

  Rav Yitzhak—a vivacious scholar known for his love of polemic—gave him a long look, at once severe and wistful, with a trace of what looked like envy.

  “You know what Qohelet†1 said, my friend, ‘who can straighten what He has made crooked?’”

  The exchange had been in Hebrew, but Aillil knew they were speaking of him. He sat there with a faint smile that could have been thoughtfulness or absence. He was almost thirteen but looked no older than ten, and his beauty imbued anyone who looked at him for more than a moment with a sadness they couldn’t explain. He had blond hair and freckled cheeks, and his big gray eyes were covered by a barely visible milky film and converged slightly toward the center. He still had a child’s skin and smile, but at times his long lashes, not blinking for long spells, gave him a pensive, strangely adult expression.

  Eighteen people sat around the Passover table that night: the dyers’ families, the six rabbis, and the young Christian heretic. Two of the Ben-Porat boys were over thirteen, thus ensuring the presence of ten adult males necessary to pray and read from the Torah scroll, something Rav Eleazar had verified before choosing the house for the meeting.

  Two copper candelabra stood on the embroidered tablecloth. The big logs in the fireplace spat sparks and bathed the table and celebrants in a flickering reddish light. The commemoration of the Exodus went on late, but after women and children went to bed, a subdued atmosphere settled on the room, much like a wake. A phrase from the Talmud, a sudden word of warning from a prophet, or a loud sigh would break spells of placid silence. Well, near silence: a sizzling candle, a shuffling of slippers, a rabbi humming to himself, a child’s moan behind the curtain. Rav Eleazar rocked back and forth, eyes closed, passing his beard through his hands over and over.

  An hour before dawn, Yehezkel went outside for a breath of fresh air. He slipped on a sarbel,*4 barely managed to get his shoulders through the little door, and stepped outside. Right away, the northeasterly wind wrenched the skullcap from his head, and the rabbi galloped off, chasing it in the near darkness. When he got it, he stood catching his breath and looked at the big moon setting.

  “The moon is always full on the night of the seder,” he murmured, “as it was when we walked off into the desert toward the Red Sea.”

  The window of the cottage was the only light to be seen. He started walking and soon reached a small pier on the northern shore of the island. He sniffed deeply, searching in vain for the briny flavor that the Bora—as he’d heard the locals call the northeasterly—blowing down from the mountains didn’t carry.

  Since leaving Egypt, Yehezkel had seized every chance to go to sea. Despite the Jewish theological preference for mountains—and the consequent lack of a seafaring tradition among Jews—he’d fallen in love with boats as a child living near the Nile and still relished sailing with the youngest part of himself. He had become a sailor in the only way there was, by making the right choices on stormy nights when the sea will not forgive the tiniest mistake. Over the years he’d learned to plan for the unlikeliest, unluckiest of circumstances. Then, with time, he’d learned to do so from the first freshening of the breeze. Later, as he delved into the secrets of Kabbalah, he struggled to reconcile a mystic’s blind faith in Divine Providence with cold, calculating precaution, but his love of the sea had somehow enabled him to fuse fatalism and prevention in a seamanship all of his own, in which astronomy and maneuvers on deck coexisted with the biblical exegesis of the state of wind and sea.

  Ashore, his movements often overshot their intended reach, as if he’d never quite learned to govern his bulk, but the minute he boarded a vessel, be it a Nile jalabah*5 or a Catalan sardinal, he suddenly acquired an uncanny agility, as everyone who watched him in his element readily admitted.

  The wind tore the spray from the crests of the wavelets and slung it in his face.

  Yehezkel closed his eyes and imagined himself on a ship’s quarterdeck.

  He thought he’d heard something, but the wind put back to northeast, so all he could hear now was its erratic whoosh in the nearby reeds. He concentrated, turning his head slightly from side to side, waiting for another more northerly gust.

  There! This time he heard it distinctly. It was a woman’s scream.

  Galatea degli Ardengheschi was listless.

  The Compline bell had rung hours ago, but the candle in the room over the refectory of San Maffìo’s convent still burned. Sitting on a wooden stool, the abbess raised her eyes from the Psalter and stretched like a cat, so voluptuously that she found herself standing.

  That she was the most fetching nun in the lagoon was the one thing men in Torcello could agree on. Even in the shapeless smock she’d taken to calling her “insomniashirt,” her figure was striking: tall and graceful, but with shoulders nearly as broad as a man’s. She had violet eyes, and right there, some claimed, one could stop looking for the origin of her undeniable charm. But her white complexion was translucent like alabaster, too, so that her lips, a tiny mole next to them, looked bright in comparison.

  Long neck, strikingly slender wrists and ankles—in short, a noblewoman. Even kneeling in prayer, the daughter of Orlando d’Ardenga—who had died a hero’s death at the Siege of Acre a month before her birth—knelt differently from other nuns. Not just more composed, but with dignity, like someone who considers it a humiliating but necessary imposition.

  She went to the window and gazed at the windswept trees. She watched the Bora shake them fiercely, their silvery foliage twisting and dancing in and out of the moonlight, as if trying to send signals to her. For some time now the stretch of lagoon framed by that window, with its big sky and flat horizon, had weighed on her soul the way a cage stifles the song of a little bird.

  That dawn, two doves cooing on the windowsill—an early sign of spring that would normally have put her in a chirpy mood for the whole day—hadn’t even scratched this torpor, as nothing seemed capable of doing in the last few weeks. From the taste of food to Sister Erminia’s bitchiness, it was all indifferent. At times she felt as if the very salvation of her soul—Madre Santissima!—had become an indifferent issue.

  “It is a failure of your will!” she told herself for the hundredth time. “This is not melancholy; it is sloth masquerading as a nobler ailment. That’s what Mother Elisabetta would say, and you know it!”

  Galatea paced the room like the lioness she had been. “And were you a simple nun, you could accept it as a punishment from Heaven, but you’re the abbess of San Maffìo, and if you don’t snap out of this soon, the whole convent will go to hell in a basket!”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she wondered gloomily if her detractors, Bishop Ranolfo at their head, were not right to argue that the nuns of San Maffìo should never have chosen a thirty-year-old Tuscan no
blewoman—and a widow, to boot!—to be their abbess.

  She closed her eyes, letting Mother Elisabetta’s familiar smile easily float up before them. A pang of nostalgia, tinged with hopelessness, struck at the thought of her departed teacher. On her deathbed two years before, Elisabetta had advised the nuns to choose Galatea as her successor, because only Galatea could stand up to Bishop Ranolfo to save their community. Ever since the hermit’s prophecy on the Island of the Two Vines, ten years earlier, Mother Elisabetta had taken Galatea under her wing and had spent much of the last eight years training the young countess in the fickle politics of the lagoon.

  She taught how the ways of the female mind could make running a nunnery more complicated than negotiating with the Saracens. Before long, Galatea found the courage to confide her secret to the Mother Superior. She’d told Elisabetta about the visions, dreams, and premonitions she’d had since childhood. The abbess believed her every word and had commended her on the choice to enter a convent rather than run the risk of such visions being declared as being from the devil. For the first time in her life, Galatea found someone who didn’t frown on her dangerous gift and embraced the older woman’s friendship like an orphan finding a home.

  The bond between them grew deeper than that between teacher and disciple; the two had often talked late into the night about why God tolerated the injustices women suffered everywhere. Popes and clerics said it was Eve’s curse, under which every woman would suffer until Christ’s return, but both had come to believe that men’s words were dictated more by convenience than divine inspiration. No doubt the strength needed to defy priests on the spiritual worth of women came to them from the writings of the Sybil of the Rhine, as people had called Hildegard of Bingen even before she’d died forty years earlier and especially from an idea that Hildegard had called “trust in the soul of woman.”

  Galatea first heard of the prophetess from a German nun on a pilgrimage to Rome who had actually known her. Then, five years after moving to Torcello, her mother sent a costly copy of Hildegard’s Scivias, or Book of the Twenty-Six Visions, lovingly illustrated by the monks of Monte Amiata. Mother Elisabetta and Sister Galatea had meditated on each vision and on Hildegard’s commentaries, coming to trust her spiritual guidance more than that of any male confessor they had ever known. How they had loved Hildegard’s answer to why the devil decided to tempt Eve rather than Adam! “He knew that it would be easier to prevail over the sensitivity of woman than over the rigidity of man.”

  Galatea felt a strong complicity with Hildegard. “She must have been a strange woman, one not many people understood . . . like me,” she thought. The Sybil had her visions with eyes wide open and listening with her “inner ear,” just like Galatea, who often wondered if her own visions were a prelude to a complete illumination that would come when she was ready. After all, Hildegard had only had hers when she’d been forty-two. “Yes, but she told her sisters everything about those visions. Were I to do the same in the Venetian lagoon, it would cost me what little liberty I still enjoy . . . if not my life!”

  She thought back to the winter, when a fisherman’s wife on the island of Costanziaca had a vision of the Virgin on a desert shoal in midlagoon. Right away, pilgrimages to the site began, despite the season: sad processions of gondolas and roscone bearing the sick. Then the bishop interrogated the woman and determined that the origins of that vision were satanic. The wretch was summoned by the newly established Rialto chapter of the Preaching Friars, and no more was heard of her. The husband, deranged with grief, joined the colonists sailing off to settle the island of Crete.

  No, there was no question of telling anyone else about these dreams.

  Then there was the Sybil’s music. Since becoming abbess, Galatea was entitled to commission books and manuscripts for the convent; among the first things she’d sought out were sheets of music by the prophetess, written in that new French notation, with a four-line staff and squares for the notes. Those soaring, celestial melodies changed her life.

  More or less since the time her mood had soured, she’d started having a recurrent dream. Six virgins sung a hymn to Hildegard’s music. She didn’t understand a word the white-clad girls sung, but the music was her favorite of the hymns by Hildegard. She started humming the melody. A month before the dream started, she attempted to replace the music the nuns sung at morning Lauds with that very hymn, causing a scandal on the island. The Cistercian obsession with sobriety is well known: no silver or gold in their churches, only wooden crosses and iron candelabra. Their rule prescribed “the most simple and sombre plainchant,” and at San Tomà, the mixed Cistercian house where the nuns lived before San Maffìo, the hooded monks would follow the horizontal line of the melody in a low, dogged bellow so insufferable that Mother Elisabetta had called it a “cilice for the ears.”

  Naturally, Galatea’s idea of singing Hildegard’s music at Lauds had met first with Sister Erminia’s outrage and then with the bishop’s censure. Just as when Mother Elisabetta lost the battle with San Tomà’s abbot to keep her nuns in the big house on the canal between Torcello and Boreano, Galatea had to bow to the men on the island on a dozen small but humiliating issues.

  She snorted, got up from the bed, and went over to her chest. No nun would normally be allowed to keep in her cell such a family heirloom, bearing the Ardenga coat of arms and her initials. But the huge trunk of solid oak, with two locks on its iron flaps and endless drawers and secret compartments inside, had been given to the convent by her family for safekeeping in exchange for yet one more donation, thus circumventing the young countess’ vow of poverty.

  She unlocked it with a key hanging around her neck, looking for the table she’d copied from her latest acquisition for the scriptorium, Hildegard’s Causae et Curae. She hummed the dream’s melody, as if that sudden curiosity were a sign of a recovery, until she found the fragrant, undulated parchment.

  AIR FIRE EARTH WATER

  Spring Summer Autumn Winter

  Morning Noon Evening Midnight

  Hot Dry Cold Humid

  Childhood Adolescence Maturity Old Age

  Lymph Black Bile Yellow Bile Blood

  East South West North

  Lymphatic Sanguine Choleric Melancholic

  That last column ending in the melancholic humor seemed to her a summation of her condition. “But I’m not old!” she exclaimed, a little peeved, throwing the parchment back into the chest.

  She decided to react; she would take a walk under the moon. She got up, took a woolen cloak from its peg, and slung it over her shoulders. Unlike the cloaks of the nuns, its inside was lined with soft rabbit fur. An owl in the oak on the bank let out a long hoot. She snuffed out the candle on the desk.

  “No one will know,” she whispered to herself with a flash of the old roguery.

  Going down to the small cloister, peering into the kitchen, she heard the regular breathing of the two young scullery girls, curled up by the fireplace. She passed the hospital from which a loud snoring of pilgrims emerged. She took out the key to the door that let out into the kitchen garden and turned it in the hole, trying to make no sound. The moment she stepped out, the Bora filled her cloak. She pulled it to her chest, both fists under her chin. She crossed the garden, raised the pole that barred the wooden palisade, and in an instant was outside the convent.

  She was on the northern tip of the island—in her microcosm, the “North” in Hildegard’s table. She started walking down to the convent’s pier. The moon, still high, splashed whitish light on rocks and puddles on the path. Soon Galatea was calling herself a fool for not wearing proper shoes instead of stupid clogs, more slippery with mud with every step.

  The abbess could never say exactly how she slipped into the lagoon. She remembered the low whistle of the wind as she stared at the black water, breaking wavelets slapping the bank. Maybe a gust of wind, maybe a sudden dizziness or a misstep, suddenly she found herself in freezing water up to her neck, the soft slime on the bottom squeezing u
p between her toes.

  She laughed at her own clumsiness and briefly worried that people might find out. But just as in a dream one strives to grasp something as it slips away again and again, so did her efforts to reach the bank only suffice to keep her three feet from it. When her strength started to wane, the shore receded! Only then did Galatea abandon any hope of hiding the incident and begin to fear for her life.

  She started shouting under the stars, her white insomniashirt floating around her like an exotic flower. The Bora broke up her screams and slowly dragged her out toward the open lagoon.

  The sailor rabbi contemplated the possible scenarios:

  If he wasted any time looking for help, the woman would drown.

  If he tried to row by himself, standing on the skiff, the wind would capsize him.

  The only way to row against that wind was to sit in the stern and use a short paddle.

  With God’s help, there would be a senseless body in the boat on his way back.

  All this went through his mind in a few seconds. Yehezkel started to breathe in the deep, ventral way he learned from his master, a technique kabbalists used to accumulate the energy required to correctly pronounce the secret Names of God.

  He stuck his skullcap in his pocket and ran to the pier. He grabbed an oar from inside the dyers’ skiff, leaned it against the oak, and jumped on its midpoint with all his weight, snapping it three feet from the blade. He hopped into the skiff with the makeshift paddle, as nimble as a mountain goat.

  Crouching on the bottom to dodge the wind, he raised his thumb and lined up the oak with the belltower of the Cathedral behind it, an alignment to help find the landing again. Then he untied the skiff’s mooring, sat in the stern and started paddling. With the Bora on a broad reach, the small boat fairly flew on the smooth lagoon, the spray in Yehezkel’s face exciting him like a rider’s yells spur on his steed.