by Tuvia Fogel
The village of Kaliviani was a little paradise on earth: two dozen houses surrounded by a green belt of oranges and lemons that stood out against a gray, olive-covered hillside. The sea was an intense cobalt blue teeming with white and red sails. The morning light was sharp as crystal, and the fresh air was touched with lemons.
The pilgrims were guests at weddings with singing, dancing, and great roasting of goats. They witnessed disputes that turned into brawls and at times showed the promise of becoming feuds. This was, Yehezkel explained smiling, because despite being small, the village hosted three of the four Mediterranean faiths: Latin Christians, Greek Christians, and Saracens, but lacked the soothing presence of Jews, whom all three could otherwise have blamed for their troubles.
One day, Galatea was talking with Yehezkel about the Holy City and what would be revealed there. The widow, who’d been waiting for the opportunity, fell on her knees embracing Galatea’s thighs.
“I beg you, signora, take me with you! My life on this island without my Vidal has lost all meaning! He was a saintly man, an evil word never passed his lips. I am . . . I feel so useless without him!”
Albacara burst into tears. Galatea raised her up and put her arms around her. The widow went on, “I know what I must do: go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem! My poor Vidal built this house with his own hands, but I shall gift it to the monks and go from one tomb to the other in Jerusalem on my knees!”
Yehezkel turned away, moved by that sudden baring of a whole life in a few moments. He realized the abbess wouldn’t consent to the widow’s request without his approval. He was the shepherd of their mangy flock. “The important thing, after all,” he said to himself, “is that we will be seven souls instead of six.”
He turned around. Galatea’s violet eyes were fixed on him, as he’d expected. He smiled a consent. Albacara followed the wordless dialogue, astonished that the Jew had the last word over the abbess of a Venetian convent. Still, she thanked the rabbi profusely for “accepting her in the company” and then slipped into the sublime transformation that pilgrims go through once their decision is made.
The noble word “company” the widow used struck Yehezkel as a far better term to describe the little group than the flock he had considered them so far. What turned them from sheep to humans wasn’t the presence of the widow, but the power of the number seven.
Despite declared gratitude for having been accepted into the company, Albacara showed an ill-disguised mistrust of the Jew. Once, when she was alone with Galatea, she confided her worry about the influence the rabbi seemed to have on her. “You can’t imagine, dear mother, how much the men of that sensual race are experts at winning the confidence of Christian women. . . .”
Galatea reassured her. She’d known this Jew for a month and owed her life to him twice over. She’d felt the same misgivings at first but now understood they were unfounded fears based on calumnies. The widow seemed convinced and smiled broadly. For an instant, Galatea saw the young girl who, years earlier, had embarked for the great adventure with the settler she’d just married, cheeks scarlet with sun and love, full of dreams and trust in the doge’s promises.
A strange thing happened in the days before their second trip to Heraklion, connected to the blue of Galatea’s visions. One morning, Yehezkel, transgressing his vow to no longer sail for pleasure, joined a local fishing boat. A crewman promised to show him some secret magic. From the animal in a brown-streaked shell as big as a child’s fist, he squeezed a yellowish juice and soiled his shirt with it. Then he pompously announced that an ancient magical formula from the desert of Cappadocia would turn the yellow stain into the blue of the sky.
At the words “blue of the sky,” Yehezkel started paying attention to the fisherman’s ravings. When the boat was a mile from shore, before they lowered their nets—either through magic or, as Yehezkel rather thought, from the effect of the sun on the juice—the stains on the man’s shirt turned a brilliant blue, the very blue of Yehezkel’s talisman: saphir. The rabbi couldn’t contain his excitement: he had just rediscovered t’chelet.*29
Back at the house, he feverishly told Galatea and Rav Shlomo of his discovery, citing the verse in Numbers in which the Lord commands Israel, “Make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel.” Then he explained to Galatea that tassels had been white since the Saracens’ takeover of the Holy Land, because in the confusion of those decades the source of the blue dye had been lost.
“Today,” he shouted, jumping up and down on the spot to Rav Shlomo’s amusement, “I discovered that what had been lost was the knowledge that dyed materials have to be left in the sun for the yellow to turn into blue! Do you understand, madame? Jews now have t’chelet again!”
Galatea, literally under the spell of that color since childhood, was nodding slowly.
The rabbis were as excited as two knights who had just found the Holy Grail. They couldn’t wait to find a synagogue to announce the discovery to the Jewish world, so sure were they that finding the source of t’chelet was a sign of Israel’s imminent redemption.
To celebrate the historic occasion Galatea wove a linen scarf for Yehezkel on the sturdy little loom Vidal Cordier constructed for his wife. Then she bought fifty shells from the fishermen and used the juice from the disgusting animals to dye the scarf as she had seen the Ben-Porats do in Torcello. When it had lain in the sun for an hour, the scarf filled the abbess with perfect joy by becoming the exact same blue as the mantle of Christ Triumphant in the Last Judgment of the cathedral in Torcello.
The company spent days of near-perfect serenity in Kaliviani, the kind that later shine in memory. Yehezkel and Galatea took to sitting outside the house at sunset, watching the fiery display in the western sky. The song of crickets bounced off every rock, endlessly repeating the same phrase, like a liturgy stuck on the first two notes of a hymn. One evening Yehezkel said dryly, “Healthy children shout together like these Cretan crickets, a habit adults find bothersome. I wonder what makes them so happy . . . or maybe something prevents grown-ups from letting themselves go to such noisy celebrations. Maybe bigger animals are just more solemn.”
Galatea smiled and then stood up and went inside. She set the table, served supper, and sat there, watching him eat. Meanwhile, the widow was lighting candles all through the house, as she always did when she heard the unburied dead scream in the wind.
IN THE PREACHER’S HOUSE ON THE UNIVERSITY’S PREMISES IN PARIS, 25TH MAY 1219
The same evening in late May, Domingo of Guzman was dining with a friend, Bertrand of Garrigue. “Dining” is perhaps too strong a word, since before the friars were only some black rye bread, a hard piece of cheese from the Pyrenees, and a big radish. Domingo said a blessing, and they dug into their banquet.
The Spaniard was exhausted but, as usual, didn’t show it. He looked older even than when he’d met Bois-Guilbert in Prouilhe just a month earlier, the frantic pace taking its toll ever more visibly. He now wore a reddish beard, which, together with his blue eyes, was ample evidence of his Visigoth ancestry.
After despatching thirty friars to establish new houses in Orléans, Reims, Metz, Poitiers, and Limoges, he was preparing to return to Bologna. He knew he didn’t have long to live and was in a race against time to ensure that the work of a lifetime became irreversible. But through it all, the danger the confession posed to the church was foremost in his mind. He often told himself he must build houses of preachers as if there were no confession and look for the confession as if there was no Order of Preachers.
“Only two days to the Pentecost,” remarked Bertrand. “As usual, you did the right thing when you wrote to Francesco of Assisi, saying you would not be back in Italy in time for the chapter of his order.”
Domingo smiled. “I have a confession to make, Bertrand,” he said. “I only met Francesco once, at the council, four years ago, and don’t doubt his good faith for an instant, but I found him strongly influenced by the Cathars’ misguided talk of lo
ve . . . most of all, I think he doesn’t believe in studying and educating priests. He quoted Jesus’s words on the lilies in the field and kept saying that where there is love there is no ignorance. But I had the feeling that holy, mystical ignorance is what he is actually about.”
Bertrand smiled. “So you’re not sorry you’ll miss the Pentecost chapter of his ‘mendicants’?”
“No, I’m not. It would only have resulted in misunderstandings and a spirit of competition between our friars, if not between him and me.” Domingo stood up and started pacing the room. Bertrand knew better than to interrupt the founder’s reflections.
Domingo had recently begun to ask himself if the confession really existed, if it wasn’t just a plot by the Jews of Jesus’s time, a false document redacted to counter the claim of Resurrection. After all, no pope, from the Honorius at Troyes ninety years before to this one, had ever actually seen it.
“Could Saint Bernard have been taken in by the Templars and sold the pope a fictitious end-of-times danger? And what if it’s all just a Templar ploy? No, no, I must proceed as if the thing exists,” he smiled bitterly. “They say Innocent dreamed that Francesco was saving the soul of the church. That may be so, but if I don’t find and destroy the confession, there will be no church for Francesco to save!”
Part Two
Second and Third Day
CHAPTER 11
OSE PRI LE-MINO
Bearing fruit after their kind
KALIVIANI, 27TH MAY 1219
Pilgrims set off with a devotional purpose. Absolving a vow, expiating a sin, saving their souls are the focus of their thoughts. All this for a hundred or two hundred leagues, maybe three hundred in the more pious ones. Then something in their heads shifts, like the light on a landscape, and the important thing for them becomes walking. One foot in front of the other, one step after another. A leaf, a lizard, a forest, a river ford, a hostel, a walled city, a desert, a mountain range. Walking forever, beyond the end of the world and down another path, no longer remembering the destination and with no more need of a purpose.
Rav Shlomo of Toledo had become such a pilgrim and was trying to explain it to Galatea. “A pilgrim’s real journey, señora, is inside himself. Man’s mind is a landscape, and walking is a way of crossing it. Pilgrims know it . . . oh, do they know it! When they cross each other, there’s a certain smile in their greeting; they are secret adepts of the religio of never stopping again.”
“Yes, I always suspected something of the sort,” smiled Galatea. “I could see it in their eyes.”
“Of course,” said Yehezkel, “should a luckless pilgrim set off on a donkey like the one you rode, madame, he could go in circles in a field near his home until the end of time.”
Galatea threw her head back and laughed, the sight of her long white neck making both rabbis fear for their integrity.
“Oh, since we are talking of circles, Shlomo . . . did you ever, in your wanderings, hear talk of an ancient ‘Parchment of Circles,’ apparently a relic of the Cathar heretics?”
“Parchment of Circles? Yes, let me think, where have I heard that name before? Of course! It was Makarios who mentioned it! Two years ago, in Famagusta, I was discussing Coptic traditions with a very erudite priest of theirs. His name is Father Makarios, and both Latins and Greeks call him a heretic. He said that a big trove of parchments was found near Jericho some four hundred years ago, and the one that caused the greatest sensation was the Parchment of Circles you speak of.”
“That’s all? Your Father Makarios didn’t know what the parchment was?”
“No, but then he was only repeating what he’d heard from other Copts in Egypt . . . but why do you want to know about that parchment?”
“Don’t laugh, Shlomo, but do you remember Mother Galatea’s dream I told you of, the choir singing the first verse of Bereshit in Hebrew? And do you remember the page of Ezekiel that the other said Rav Hanina had hidden? Well, I suspect—nay, I have the strange certainty—that both things are connected to this Parchment of Circles, and that all three are somehow part of a single, arcane scheme.”
Galatea smiled. “Perhaps the role kabbalists attribute to names that Master Ezekiel told me of is justified. After all, you, sir, are called Shlomo and possess the wise moderation of King Solomon, while your friend here rants and raves just like the prophet whose name he bears.”
Rav Shlomo laughed, charmed by her wit, and asked, “Has Rav Yehezkel tried writing your name in Hebrew letters, señora, to tell you what can be glimpsed in it?”
“Wait, wait, what did you just say? Write my name in Hebrew letters?”
“Of course, señora. It is the sacred language of Scripture! No mystical secrets are accessible to anyone using a different language,” answered Rav Shlomo, as if stating the obvious.
Yehezkel snorted. “I’ll do it, sooner or later. I’m beginning to think that this won’t be a short journey. We left Venice a month ago, and we’re still riding donkeys back and forth on a Greek island.”
Galatea blurted out, “You’re an ingrate, Master Ezekiel! Thirty-two people . . . no, thirty-three with Don Sancio, died in the beaching of the Falcus, and all you can think of is the time you lost!”
“Sorry, I won’t speak another word,” mumbled Yehezkel.
“If that were to happen, I would think there was a saint among us,” said Galatea drily, “because only they perform miracles!”
The next day she asked about the things he promised to teach her when they would be at sea.
“The Hebrew alphabet, for a start. But Manichean theology, too, and your—what is it called—Kabbalah?”
Yehezkel shilly-shallied, without explaining. To overcome his reluctance, she said, “I promise, Master Ezekiel, I’ll never reveal to anyone who taught me to read and write Hebrew!”
“Madame, I’ve never been jealous of my knowledge . . . but Jewish tradition frowns on the excessive instruction of women.”
“Aah, is that so?” said Galatea. “I should have imagined it; Jews don’t consider women capable of leaving ignorance behind them. You’re no different from Christian men, after all.”
Yehezkel’s face reddened under his beard. He found the accusation intolerable. “No, no, it’s not the way you think! The Talmud says women are less likely than men to surrender to base instincts, the opposite of what your Saint Augustine held!” He floundered, bringing ten arguments at a time. Galatea noticed his breathless good faith and smiled.
In the late afternoon of the next day, Yehezkel abandoned all scruples and scratched the twenty-two letters of the aleph-bet on a wax tablet. Then, under a fig tree in a remote corner of a Mediterranean island, far from the prying eyes of priests or rabbis, he taught his Christian pupil the appearance, pronunciation, and numerical value of the first five letters.
Galatea was a fast learner. Something in the sound and shape of Hebrew letters resonated inside her like a memory. At times, after dawn, Yehezkel heard her practicing pronunciation by singing the first verse of the Bible in Hebrew to herself as she walked around the house, like that dawn in the lagoon.
One day, the rabbi overheard the women commenting on the saltiness of the meat the widow just cooked. He rushed to the fireplace where the stewpot was hanging.
“Don’t eat it!” he exclaimed. “Listen to a medicus. The excess salt was rubbed into it to hide the taste of rotten meat. It is probably poisonous!”
They all followed his advice except Garietto, who thought that throwing out fine Greek goat stew was an offense to God and men. In the evening, the young Venetian looked like a man possessed by demons, writhing with spasms terrifying to watch, froth drooling from his mouth. Yehezkel immediately dragged him out in the garden to make him throw up and picked some chamomile flowers—luckily in bloom.
In the following days Garietto recovered, lovingly cared for by Gudrun. The feeling between the two eighteen-year-olds had been evident on board the Falcus, but the abbess had been in no condition to notice temptation sneaking up
on her ward. But the German girl being a Cistercian nun, in Kaliviani the story took on the characteristics of the impossible romances sung in every court of Provence.
They were a fetching couple. She hovered over him, blonde tresses swaying, sunburned freckles, and worried blue eyes. Garietto, all muscles and hair, was normally a picture of vigor, and watching the pangs of pain on his sweat-soaked face moved something in Gudrun’s deepest spiritual recesses. Garietto, on the other hand, when she bent over him, which was all the time, had before his eyes her irrepressible breasts, which had already caused one villager to have a jug smashed over his head by the virago.
In those lazy Cretan days, as he watched Garietto unabashedly flirting with the girl, Yehezkel mused that the two nuns in the company couldn’t have been more different. Gudrun, like all chubby girls, was always rushing somewhere, flushed and panting, in stark contrast to Galatea’s poise, as well as her figure. He admitted he couldn’t begin to fathom the strange way in which the abbess and her younger sister alternated tender gestures with bouts of sulking.
The abbess continued Aillil’s musical education. Yehezkel would hear them singing Hildegard’s hymns as they wandered in the low shrubs outside the house. Aillil smiled every time Galatea approached, and for some reason, the boy’s weakness for the abbess bothered Yehezkel more than it should have.
Some days before they left the village to see Spiridione again, a meeting neither looked forward to, Galatea mentioned she’d not forgotten the voice he used in the slave market, nor her threat to give him no rest until he taught her how to summon it.