by Tuvia Fogel
“I beg you, forgive me, madame!” he cried, his voice breaking. “Not one word came from my heart! It was what fury does to me when it takes over, like a demon clawing at the edges of my soul.” He hesitated and then plunged on. “I can’t hide it, madame, I was furiously jealous of Chalabi in there, and when I saw the pearl, I . . . ” He looked at her, unable to continue.
Galatea smiled, immensely relieved by the apology, and chose not to comment on his jealousy. “Remember when Brother Francesco poured out his fury on Brother Elia?” she asked. “You said there was ‘something about him you couldn’t fathom.’ Perhaps at times a demon claws at his soul, too.”
She stretched out a hand to help him back to his feet, and they returned to Nissim’s house.
The next day a certain coolness still hung between them. Of course, the rabbi’s confession that he was jealous had not left her cold, but she willed herself not to dwell on its implications.
Yehezkel couldn’t get a detail of her dream in Limassol out of his head. It was connected to the red heifer, so he decided to glance through the appropriate tractate of the Talmud in a house of study; maybe something would jolt his memory.
Cities with many wooden houses, both in Christendom and Dar al-Islam, are plagued by fires, but al-Kahira in those years was particularly known for fires breaking out somewhere every single day.
Turning a corner in the haret, the three saw a small crowd of Jews pointing and shouting outside the house of study, from whose first-floor window smoke emerged and rose to the sky. They ran toward it, and Yehezkel learned that an old rabbi was still inside and someone had just run in to rescue him. A chain of people passing buckets had already formed, and though no flames were visible from outside, the smoke pouring out of the windows was getting thicker and blacker.
Just as Yehezkel was about to rush in, a man came down the steps of the entrance carrying a minute, bearded figure in his arms. The old rabbi wore an embarrassed smile, as if surprised that his time had not, in fact, come. A shout of joy rose from the Jews in the alley, by now more than had been in the house.
It only took five minutes for the celebration over the rescue of the rabbi to turn into lamentations for the fate of the Sifrei Torah, the Torah scrolls that were in the Holy Ark in the hall.
“That was quick!” thought Yehezkel, “We Jews are such a lachrymose lot!”
He saw a single tongue of fire through an upstairs window and decided there was probably enough time to bring out at least the two or three scrolls in the ark. He turned to Galatea. “I’m going in there to rescue the scrolls. Please, madame, whatever happens, don’t come in! You couldn’t help me if you did. Keep an eye on Aillil, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He decided his blue scarf was too narrow to wrap the scrolls in and borrowed a large, black Bedu shawl that a woman nearby was wearing. He grabbed one of the buckets of water moving from hand to hand, dunked the shawl in it, pulled it out dripping, wrapped it round his head and ran into the burning building.
Galatea had no intention of disobeying him, but the minutes went by, and the dousers’ efforts seemed to have little effect. Flames could now be seen dancing in the windows. Then, to a fearful shout from the crowd, the floor of the upstairs room, which was the ceiling of the main hall, caught fire with a sudden, great roar. Smoke poured out of the entrance, and people began to shout for Yehezkel to come out.
Suddenly, Galatea recognized the signs of a vision taking over. The air became thick, sounds receded, time slowed. A hall full of smoke came into focus before her eyes, its floor covered in scattered books and chairs. The rafter that had held up the ceiling was burning in the middle of the floor, a wrought iron chandelier lying next to it. A foot of Master Ezekiel’s blue scarf poked out from underneath.
For the first time in her life, driven by the urgency, she willed a vision away before it ran its course. The scene slowly vanished, and she saw the entrance again. The ceiling was burning fiercely now, and for a moment she thought it was like looking at hell from underneath. The more she waited, the more dangerous it would become. She lifted the hem of her habit and made to run into the house but suddenly felt someone’s hand pulling her wrist to drag her away. She turned, saw no one there, and understood the vision had not finished with her.
She remembered Master Ezekiel’s folded breath and started breathing it, waiting for something else to happen. When nothing did, she told Aillil not to move and rushed in. She ran down a corridor, dodging bits of burning wood that fell from the ceiling, and came to the hall of her vision not five minutes earlier. The rabbi, scarf still round his neck, stood in the middle of it, contemplating the three scrolls he’d laid in the black shawl on the table.
Galatea looked at the rafter above his head, already in flames at both ends, and shrieked,
“Yehezkel!!”
He looked up in shock. No woman had called him by name in over fifteen years. For a moment, he thought she’d ignored his instructions again, but his outburst of the previous day still weighed on his soul. He relished her slip of the tongue and thanked the danger that had caused it. “What’s going on, Galatea? Why did you come in?”
He realized he had to shout to overcome the roar of the fire raging on both floors of the house.
She looked unaware of having used his name. “I just had a vision out there. The rafter above your head, the one with the chandelier, was on the floor, burning! You must come away from there this instant! Please, take the scrolls and leave this place, before we both burn to death!”
Yehezkel knew better than to underestimate her visions, yet for a few seconds he stood there, debating what would be worse for a holy text between the touch of gentile hands and burning to a cinder. Then he called himself an idiot and said, “We don’t have much time, madame. I selected five codices, but I couldn’t have carried them and three scrolls. Now that you’re here, we can save them all!”
As they bundled books and scrolls in the shawl, Yehezkel’s scarf slid off his back. When they reached the door and turned at the sound of the rafter crashing down, they saw Galatea’s vision turned into reality, with the blue scarf under the beam. And just as in the vision, Galatea felt someone pull her wrist, dragging her out of there. Now she knew it was her teacher, who would be lying dead, crushed under the rafter, had it not been for his pupil’s divine gift.
For a kabbalist—explained Yehezkel later that day, as they made arrangements to ride back to Fustat—her saving him from fire after he’d saved her from water symbolized the special relationship between their souls, as implied in the prophecy of the woman and the Jew. She could not but agree.
He also told her, in admiring tones, that contrary to her dreams of Bereshit or the Temple, this time she hadn’t been the passive recipient of a cryptic revelation but had at once understood its import and acted to change what might have been.
“A kabbalist can only dream of achieving what you did after decades of study and practice,” he said.
Those words soothed the abbess more than any Egyptian balm. The crisis of the day before wasn’t forgotten but assumed the traits of the trial that precedes a breakthrough in the growth of an apprentice.
In the three weeks they spent in Fustat before returning to Maître Chalabi’s shop, they felt more like a couple than ever. Criticism was open while affection was hidden, as in a true friendship.
“I don’t need to sing troubadour ballads to her,” he thought one day. “I may not recite teary verses, but she knows that I love her. She is neither stupid nor selfish, just . . . a little crazy, no more than is needed to make life tolerable.”
For her part, Galatea used terms like “perfect confidence” and “secret understanding” to describe their relationship and often argued with herself over the role their feelings for each other had in the hermit’s prophecy and in solving the enigma in Jerusalem.
“We are blind instruments of an irresistible destiny . . . No, Galatea!” said Mother Elisabetta in her head, “that is exactly how
men and women attribute to fate what is in fact the fruit of their sinful passions!”
In Torcello she’d once heard of a tradition on the Apocalypse that said that the Antichrist would be born in Babylon from a nun seduced by Satan. Autumn in Fustat was as delightful as any part of their journey so far, but one day the abbess reflected on that tradition and reached a dismaying conclusion. “I’m a nun, and Yehezkel was born in Fustat, the site of a fortress the Romans called Babylonia. In the sultan’s camp I understood that Francesco is my divine husband. Does it mean that if I commit adultery with a Jew, the result will be the birth of the Antichrist? Am I destined, should I surrender to temptation, to bear the son of the Devil?” She looked at the pyramids in the distance, her breath short.
“Madre Santissima!” she moaned. “Why couldn’t I just stay in my convent and eat sardines in vinegar?”
CHAPTER 25
KOL REMES
And Everything That Creeps on the Ground
AL-KAHIRA, 7TH NOVEMBER 1219
The first time, Aillil only saw her eyes.
The girl was hiding behind a hanging fold in the tent of the Bedu sheikh they’d come to meet. Only her eyes showed through the gap in her niqab, but they were too far for Aillil’s weak sight when he sat with Yehezkel and Galatea in the middle of the tent. But when he stood up to relieve himself outside, he walked past one of the two posts holding up the tent and saw the big brown eyes, hiding behind veil after veil, staring at him so hard that he knew at once those eyes would rule his life forever.
When he reentered the tent, the hungry brown eyes were still there. He took a step toward the girl, wanting to see her face, but Yasmine nimbly retreated into the depths of the tent. Aillil wasn’t too upset. They were riding to Syria with this clan, so he knew he would see her again. He wondered how he would communicate, and his first thought was to enlist Rav Yehezkel.
“Or maybe Mother Galatea would be better,” he thought. “She’s a woman; she could vouch for my noble intent . . . but wait, she doesn’t speak the girl’s tongue, either! No, it has to be Rav Yehezkel.”
Still shaken by the willful intensity of the girl’s gaze, Aillil went back to sit by the rabbi. As Yehezkel translated niceties between sheikh Twalia and the abbess, the boy thought dreamily that he needed to see those eyes again more than he’d ever really needed anything else.
Aillil never felt strongly about any of the things his peers got excited about, not heresy or saving souls, not holy war and killing infidels, not even the knightly code of chivalry, which in the last years he pretended, even to himself, was his ideal. No, apart from finding his father, the only thing in the world he really wanted was to see that girl again, and to remove the veil over her face and hair!
Yasmine was the oldest daughter of Twalia ibn Salem, the sheikh of a clan of the Muzziena Bedouin tribe that Chalabi approached to take the three to Syria. The reason the Copt told Yehezkel it was the perfect clan for them had been revealed on meeting Twalia in Chalabi’s shop a week earlier. After the trader’s introductions, the sheikh addressed Yehezkel in pure, ancient Arabic.
“My clan is honored to have been chosen to escort to Syria a disciple and close friend of Musa ibn Maimun, may his memory live forever, after bringing the master himself to his final resting place!”
Yehezkel’s jaw dropped. “You took my teacher’s remains to Eretz Israel?”
Twalia ibn Salem nodded with a proud, nearly toothless smile. “Your teacher saved my father’s life twice and refused to be paid. Your community knew of his wish to be buried next to his father in Tiberias, so after watching over his body for ten years, they asked our clan to bring the casket safely to the shores of the lake, to be buried where the great man wished.”
Yehezkel was moved to the bottom of his soul. “May the Lord reward you and your clan for the holy duty you absolved!” he exclaimed to approving nods from Mâitre Chalabi.
As Chalabi expected, Yehezkel felt they could not be safer on a journey across Sinai than in a Muzziena caravan. Before the meeting, the rabbi warned himself to keep jealousy in check lest he harm their chances of making a deal, but on hearing what the Copt arranged he’d been so grateful that Chalabi’s verbose attentions toward the abbess hadn’t bothered him in the slightest.
But the cheerful atmosphere of the gathering was soured when Chalabi glumly reported the news that Damietta had fallen two days earlier. It seemed that three thousand people were found alive inside the walls that two years ago sheltered some sixty thousand Egyptians. Hunger and pestilence turned the once thriving city into an open-air cemetery.
“They say al-Kamil has written to the caliph in Baghdad that if he won’t send forces to help Egypt, the whole ummah will face catastrophe,” Chalabi reported. “But the caliph, as everyone knows, has other problems. Some of the savages from the East are already camping on the banks of the Tigris.”
Yehezkel’s first thought was that if the sultan was forced to give Jerusalem to the Christians, the only thing he could count on for any search in the Holy City would be Pedro’s laissez-passer. Still, he was pleased to see Galatea not at all uplifted by news of a Christian victory—after all, her side in the war Brother Francesco called a “useless massacre.”
“The caravan will depart in three weeks,” said Twalia, noting he was still waiting for part of the goods he would transport to Syria, so they decided that the next week the passengers would visit the clan’s camp to acquaint themselves with both people and camels.
A week later, they mounted their donkeys and rode to the edge of the desert, just north of al-Kahira, where the clan pitched their camp—and where Aillil saw Yasmine for the first time.
Later that day, they met Hussein the camel puller, the only member of the clan outside the sheikh’s family they were introduced to. Everything about Hussein was like a miniature: a short man with a short beard and short, muscled legs. The only large thing about him were his eyes, black and shiny like fat olives.
Galatea later discovered that Hussein tried to feel up every female he got close to, from little girls to old hags, and often carried the bruises that were the price of his reprehensible habit. Fortunately, from the day he set eyes on her, something about the abbess made him repress such beastly instincts.
The reason Hussein’s habit didn’t get him chased out of the clan was that good camel pullers were hard to come by. They had to be experts on camels because, as Twalia put it, “there is no good doctor for a camel when he is sick, so a camel puller must learn how to keep it well.”
And Hussein loved his camels. Later that day, he introduced the three passengers to them, assigning each one to an animal, rather than the other way round. In big caravans, with several eighteen-camel files of heavily loaded beasts, passengers would alternate between riding on top of a load and walking. Luckily, Twalia’s clan only possessed one file of camels, and each passenger had a nearly load-free animal to ride. Also, to Yehezkel’s relief, Twalia said the caravan would cover no more than ten leagues in a day.
As she gazed at the munching female that would be her mount for a month or so, Galatea suddenly felt herself grabbed above the hips and lifted off the ground. Two iron arms were holding her in midair, proffering her like some sort of sacrifice before an altar.
“You could have warned me you were going to help me onto the saddle, Rabbi!” she exclaimed, scandalized by the affront to her dignity. Galatea had ridden horses and donkeys in her life—and now had sailor’s legs, too—so the problem as the animal rose on its legs wasn’t keeping her balance in the ample stool-shaped saddle; the problem was that she hadn’t expected to be lifted quite so high. The moment she saw the camp from almost ten feet in the air, vertigo raised its ugly head. The abbess closed her eyes and gripped the saddle’s big horn with all the strength in her body.
Hussein sensed something wasn’t right and refrained from calling to the camel to start walking.
Galatea, eyes still closed but head no longer spinning, said to herself that she had no cho
ice: she couldn’t walk to Jerusalem. A moment later, she opened her eyes and said, “I’ll be all right, Hussein.”
Hussein walked her camel in a circle, and Galatea experienced firsthand why the beasts were called “desert ships.” Hussein laughed at the awkward positions she assumed on the saddle, in much the same way Galatea might have laughed at his spelling—but for the time being, she thought, it was not her turn.
Her overfed, undisciplined camel was a real princess, curling its lips in disdain. Hussein, with Yehezkel’s translation, instructed Galatea to keep talking to the animal to get it used to her voice. Then, in painstaking stages, he taught her the commands to make her camel bend its forelegs, sit down, rise again, trot, and stop. When Galatea climbed down, quite spent, Hussein whispered the last command in her ear, the one to make the camel break into a gallop. She must pray to Allah, translated Yehezkel, that she would never have to shout that last command.
With the help of Yehezkel’s translation, Hussein then held a lesson on camels for Galatea and Aillil that belied his reputation as a dirty little man best forced to live with his beasts. He showed them the large leathery pads that are a camel’s toes—“able to grip any surface that Allah invented”—and how it can keep sandstorms out by sealing hermetically its nostrils and double eyelashes. He explained that camels don’t store water in their hump, as Westerners seem to think, but fat, and that if the hump shrinks, the camel is sick.
They were fascinated—even Yehezkel was impressed by the exposition—and Galatea was happy to regain some respect, after her initial diffidence, for an animal she’d have to get along with, like it or not. As Hussein concluded their lesson, Galatea felt someone’s eyes on her back and turned to see a young Bedu in a dirty djellaba sprawled on the sand, his back leaning on the side of his seated camel. He was chewing on a long blade of grass, his lower lip sticking out, and staring at her with an air of lewd bravado. She was so amazed by the resemblance between animal and owner that she nudged Yehezkel to point it out to him. At first he didn’t grasp what she meant, and then she whispered “The lips . . .” and he burst out laughing.