The Jerusalem Parchment
Page 27
His effort to reassure her touched Galatea. She had feared that his reluctance to discuss it came from a Jewish obligation to deny the Truth of Christianity, as Jews had done since Christ’s days. “All he will say,” she thought, “will be, ‘He wasn’t resurrected because he was not the Son of God!’” Yet here he was, telling her that her faith should stay strong.
But the abbess had been taught enough theology to know that Saint Paul was right. If Jesus was not resurrected on Easter Sunday, if the tomb was only empty because some lowly Judean thieves were paid to steal the body, then Christianity really was just a popular, appealing superstition. She wrenched her mind from the devastating thought and went back to Master Ezekiel’s Kabbalah lesson.
“Surely, Rabbi, secrets coming out when wine goes in could not be the jewel you meant to show me.”
“You’re right, of course. The jewel here is the number seventy, which, being the fusion of seven and ten, two numbers of great perfection, represents wisdom and authority.”
“It is no coincidence, then,” she interrupted him, “that the Greek translation of the Torah”—it was the first time she’d used the Hebrew word for the Old Testament—“is called the Septuaginta and overflows with wisdom and authority!”
“Ehm . . . on the Septuaginta’s authority I’ll tell you more,” he paused, “at a more advanced stage of your studies. But your mention of translation is inspired, for the number seventy is linked to language. After the Deluge, men built the Tower of Babel, and the Torah says that God, to punish their arrogance, dispersed them through the world and made of their single tongue seventy different languages.”
“I’ve often dreamed of speaking all tongues,” mused Galatea, “but then in dreams dogs speak Latin and rivers flow upstream.”
“Mmh . . . one can hear you’re a reader of psalms, madame,” said Yehezkel, smiling.
Strangely, Galatea’s thirst for forbidden Jewish knowledge caused her no embarrassment. On the contrary, she felt like the Holy Spirit was descending on her as on the apostles on the first Pentecost.
“If seventy is the number of languages, then the Pentecost is even more relevant! The Acts say that ‘they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues.’ And that’s not all, even wine comes into it! Saint Peter had to deny they were drunk and explained that Joel’s prophecy on the last days was being fulfilled, when the Lord would pour out his Spirit on everyone, including babes.”
Yehezkel’s gut suddenly told him the conversation just took a direction that came from above. “Joel’s prophecy about babes, madame,” he murmured, “was exactly the one I thought of when you pronounced the first word of the Torah in the middle of the square in Torcello.”
Galatea smiled. “I can see how, in your eyes, this nun might be included when Scripture says the Lord ‘hid these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.’”
Yehezkel’s tingling became more intense. “What Scripture are you speaking of, madame? I know the Talmud says, ‘Since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was denied to prophets and given to the crazy and the little children.’ But you cannot possibly know that passage, and there’s nothing else like it in the Torah.”
“That’s because I wasn’t quoting your Scriptures, Rabbi. I was quoting Saint Matthew’s Gospel!”
Yehezkel glimpsed the message from the world above. Teaching Kabbalah to this nun was not against God’s will. If she was drawn to the word shamayim, he would follow her lead. He smiled and said, “Please calculate the value of shamayim, madame.”
“300, plus 40, plus 10 and then another 40 . . . that’s 390!”
“Good; 390 is also the value of Zachar u-Neqevah, male and female, words the Torah uses in the first chapter when it says they were both created in God’s image. Thus gematria confirms that when husband and wife join their bodies they go to heaven, as the phrase ‘becoming one flesh’ also implies,” he said.
The abbess felt she had to point out the different teaching of the church. “Saint Paul and Saint Augustine both think that not marry ing would be better than marrying . . .”
“Ha! Augustine . . . a dangerous teacher if ever I read one! Your ‘doctor’ interprets the Tree of Good and Evil in a way that damns females forever, while for Judaism the Shekhinà, the Holy Spirit itself, is female!”
Suddenly, in the near darkness beside the tareta, Yehezkel noticed that a part of the line dividing the sea from the sky was curved and . . . and it was moving! He jumped to his feet and grabbed Galatea’s hand, his other hand pointing to the horizon, “Look! Over there . . . it’s a whale! Now it will shoot its spray.”
Some three hundred feet from the tareta, the squirt climbed vertically into the air. They heard the whoosh, but the noise didn’t wake anyone up. Galatea froze, peering into the dark, trying to make out the huge back of the monster, terrified by the thought that it might come closer.
“Oh please, God . . . we were already shipwrecked once,” she said in a tiny voice that touched him.
“Have no fear, madame. They are not afraid of ships and don’t normally attack them. I’ve come to think they have the same joyous character of dolphins.”
Instead, the monster came closer before their very eyes, until the panicked voice of the sailor on watch shouted the alarm and frenzied maneuvers were undertaken to sail away from the leviathan.
Yehezkel knew that on summer nights, when the sea is warm, things moving through the water leave a sparkling, silvery-green trail behind them. He’d noticed it with oars, or when fish jumped out of the water, and even when urinating in the sea. But nothing had ever prepared him for the majestic splendor of the whale’s dive a mere hundred feet from the tareta.
Amid the women’s screams and the sailors’ curses, the monster swung its tail and smashed it into the sea, raising masses of water to the height of a cathedral, and then dove into the depths. Suddenly, the surface turned into a vision as bright as the crystal under God’s feet. The water literally boiled, filled with strange blue, green, and gold lights. From the center of the turbulence, long trails of luminous bubbles shot out in all directions. Other big bubbles exploded on coming to the surface. The light was pure magic, as there was neither sun nor moon for it to be coming from. The rabbi and the abbess, when the sea had slowly calmed and darkened, started breathing again in unison, taking in great gulps of air.
“Madre mia,” Galatea managed to whisper after a few moments.
“I never saw anything like that in my life,” murmured Yehezkel. “We’re privileged to have witnessed the glory of God manifesting itself in his gigantic creature. I saw whales before, but never from this close!”
A few moments later the whale resurfaced, now some distance from the tareta, and expelled a last, leave-taking puff of water from its back.
Galatea was thoroughly enjoying herself and expected gematria to yield more miraculous revelations. The last watch of the night, the one that would greet the dawn, had already begun, but she begged him to show one last jewel.
“So be it then; hear this. Rehem is the root of every word that has to do with mercy. In Hebrew, mercy is rahamim, a word so holy to Mohammedans that in the Qu’ran the adjective rah’man, merciful, is used to describe Allah more than any other word.”
“Is rehem written with a caf or with a chet?” she asked, already calculating the value of the word.
“With a chet,” he answered, impressed.
Galatea added up the letters in an instant. “It is worth 248!”
“Correct. So it won’t surprise you that 248 is also the gematria of Abraham, our forefather, for no man was more merciful. But what is missing is, of course, the meaning of rehem. What word do you imagine could be the root of mercy in the Holy Tongue?”
“I don’t know . . . the Latin misericordia comes from the Greek kardia, which is heart, but perhaps . . .”
Yehezkel interrupted, “No, in Hebrew mercy doesn’t come from the heart. Rehem, madame, means womb.”
Yehezkel said, “No, little sister, shed no tears. You know, with the same three letters and the same gematria one writes mahar, which means tomorrow!”
The thought that the fate of women would change one day but she would not live to see it filled her with blind fury. She grabbed the knife they’d been writing with and stabbed the deck with all the force she possessed. The dagger oscillated, stuck in the wood.
Yehezkel jumped back in shock. She raised her eyes, sniffling apologetically, and he looked at her with melancholy tenderness. “When one wants to scream and doesn’t, that’s when one really screams.”
Galatea’s mood improved again as the night wore on. He showed her other jewels, and a little before dawn her muffled laugh delighted him again. After another serene silence, she smiled in the dark and said, “Rabbi, I want you to know that after fifteen years in a convent, conversing with you gives me the sensation that a little bird must feel when someone opens its cage.”
Yehezkel laughed. “I’m flattered to be granted such a poetic role. I would gladly go around all day opening cages for little birds to fly out!”
For some reason, little birds and poetry reminded Galatea of troubadors. Here, finally, was a trustworthy teacher who could solve the quandary she was in about the minstrels and their songs. “Tell me, Rabbi, did you ever meet any troubadors in Provence?” she asked gingerly.
“Many. Not long after I arrived from Egypt, at the court of the counts of Foix, I was lucky enough to witness song and rhyme contests between troubadors. Those were memorable nights!”
“And tell me, do you think the rhymes about their ‘ladies,’ their . . . ‘love’ is pure or lascivious?”
“Mmhh . . . you raise an old problem, madame. Starting with the Song of Songs, that decision has been difficult to make. The Sufis, Mohammedan mystics, openly declare they are God’s lovers. In my opinion—but mind you, this not Kabbalah, it is just my opinion—all love and all poetry come from God.”
“I couldn’t agree more! Some of the verses I read as a girl rent my heart to shreds!”
The sky was just starting to whiten in the east when Yehezkel, in a husky but melodious voice, sang a song to her that he’d learned from the troubadour Raimbaut de Vacqueyras. He sang it in the Langue d’Oc, but Galatea understood every word.
Keep yourself, dear keeper of the tower,
Against the jealous one, your lord, wretched,
More bothersome than the dawn,
Since down here we discourse of love.
But we are afraid
Of the dawn,
The dawn, alas, the dawn!
CHAPTER 15
LE-HA’IR AL HA-ARETZ
To Give Light upon the Earth
BETWEEN ANTALYA AND CYPRUS, 19TH JUNE 1219
The reassuring sight of Antalya’s lighthouse had disappeared behind them three hours earlier; the tareta was sailing southeast toward Cyprus. The atmosphere on board was quiet but tense, as these were the waters where a pirate attack was most likely.
Spiro sat on a bench on the aft castle, scratching his belly and surveying crew and passengers glumly, thinking of the Jew’s rubies. Yehezkel knew that André’s presence would provide the company with much needed security against Spiridione’s schemes, but he couldn’t have imagined how much the sight of a red cross would unsettle the old bandit. For the last four days, his mind had throbbed with memories of glory days and humiliations on Cyprus thirty years earlier. Spiro had been a rising star among the officers of the unforgettable Margaritone of Brindisi, and the cursed Templars put an end to it all.
For ten of those thirty years, Spiridione saw enough Latin brutality to put him off the pursuit of power, and the worst of it came from crazed Frankish youths, their eyes devoid of any grip on reality, draped in the white cloak with the red cross—looking, in fact, exactly like André de Rosson.
Spiro was still lost in thought when he heard the Jew’s voice call out from the deck. Visibly proud of his sharp eyesight, Yehezkel pointed out a minute black sail on the southern horizon.
They had finally found their Saracen pirates.
For someone who’d spent so much time talking to sailors, Yehezkel knew surprisingly little of pirates. He knew of their predilection for capturing Jews, and since they’d discovered that rabbis were worth more silver than ordinary Jews, he knew that his black sarbel would signal the presence on the tareta of juicy prey. From Rav Shlomo and other ransomed prisoners he’d met, he heard that not a few pirates were Christians. There were Normans and galley convicts for whom joining the pirates was a lucky escape from their previous fate. Some were merchants ruined by a storm taking revenge on other peoples’ goods. Then there were the renegades, Christians who “raised their finger,” the Mohammedan gesture proclaiming God’s Unity having become synonymous with embracing Islam.
To the kabbalist, the sighting was confirmation that his mission was closely followed by the powers above. He was not surprised at what would otherwise have seemed an extraordinary run of bad luck; he considered that at stake was the possible proof, as the nun put it, that “Christian faith was useless.”
Spiridione climbed on the aft castle and came down again several times and then gave the orders Yehezkel would have given. He chose to keep sailing as close to the wind as the tareta could manage, while manning all six oars in the hope of fleeing east faster than the pirates’ dhow.*37 Yehezkel ran below deck and grabbed an oar with more enthusiasm than the Greeks themselves.
For a while it wasn’t clear whether the black sail was closing in on them, and a tense silence descended on the tareta. Galatea watched the dot in the distance, struck by how tenaciously fate seemed to pick on their journey. For the first time since leaving the lagoon she wished she were in the little room of her own at San Maffìo, where her biggest source of anguish had been Sister Erminia’s meanness.
“After all,” she told herself, “what is a Cistercian abbess doing on a Greek adventurer’s ship? Anyway, is it not a mortal sin of pride to have decided that we are the chosen ones who will find the hiding place of the Holy Grail in Jerusalem?”
But Spiridione was only pretending to flee the dhow. In his mind he had decided all the way back in Heraklion, that if—or rather, when—pirates attacked, he would keep the nun for himself and give the Jew and pilgrims to the Saracens in exchange for his freedom and that of his crew—as well as their tareta. And all that after grabbing the rest of the rubies, of course.
By badly trimming his mainsail—something Yehezkel couldn’t notice as he pulled on an oar below—and giving secret signals to his crew not to pull too much on their oars, Spiridione ensured that the tareta lost speed, until it became clear that the dhow would catch them. André de Rosson excitedly watched the black sail grow bigger. It would be his first combat at sea, and every infidel he would get close to was a dead man. As for himself, he didn’t care if he survived or won martyrdom.
The tareta made little headway; Yehezkel hadn’t caught on to Spiro’s tricks and resigned himself to using the precious gift from Rav Isaiah of Trani.
When Rav Eleazar had announced that Yehezkel would sail to Eretz Israel, the little rabbi from Apulia, a land with centuries of Greek traditions plagued by pirate raids for half of every year, took him aside and gave him three projectiles of the famous “Greek fire,” carefully instructing him on their use.
The secret of the Byzantines’ fearsome weapon—a sticky black goo that, once set alight, didn’t go out even if thrown in the sea—had been lost to the West for over forty years
. Since then, the formula of the mixture—naphtha and a dozen other ingredients—had become a prize sought by adventurers from all kingdoms. The fact that Saracens were throwing Greek fire at that very moment on the Christian knights besieging Damietta was one of the reasons the armies of the cross were losing heart. In Acre or in the camp outside Damietta, one could hear people say, “Only fools insist on fighting the infidels, since clearly Jesus Christ is not opposed to them. The proof is that they took Jerusalem, and have Greek fire, and keep on winning.”
The three greasy balls of incendiary destruction survived the beaching hidden in Galatea’s chest. The rabbi came on deck. The dhow was twice as big on the horizon as when he’d gone below. Immediately, he made for the trunk and discreetly extracted a linen wrapping from a sealed bottom drawer.
Rav Isaiah was adamant that he must distance himself from all goyim before using the substance. Yehezkel thought the chubby Italian rabbi was being naively superstitious, but the habit of respecting one’s teachers was ingrained in him, so he set out to obey Rav Isaiah’s injunction. “Everyone move to the stern! I am about to fight these pirates with an ancient Jewish magic spell, and the proximity of Christians could render it ineffective!”
Now in those years, Greeks and Saracens knew Jews much better than Latin Christians did and were far less in awe of their wizardly powers. Spiridione challenged him, a sneer on his lips, “And what kind of enchantment do you intend to use against them, Jew?”
“If they’re Christian, their dhow will catch fire,” said Yehezkel. “If they are Mohammedans, though, I’m not sure, because they also believe in the one and only God, so the spell may not work on them.”
For Spiridione’s sons, cousins, and nephews the explanation was good enough, but Spiridione, a man of the world, guessed that the rabbi was somehow making fools of them all. “You have a nerve, Jew, amusing yourself with magic when your . . . I mean our life, is in danger!”
That was when Yehezkel twigged. “I’m the naive one, not Rav Isaiah!” he said to himself. “I thought he was being superstitious, when in fact everyone must be kept at a distance to prevent them interfering with the throwing of the projectiles . . . in case they are in cahoots with the pirates!”