A young hunter out to prove his prowess to his friends and family, I thought. And I am to be sacrificed for the good of his arrogance. As I waited for him, my feet sought sure footing. He stopped twenty feet away and faced me with a bemused look. I felt strangely at an advantage.
“This is going to be a pleasure,” he observed in a voice of false ease. He braced his feet and arched his whip back, then swung it forward with a shout. Its tip slapped by my feet. Two rooftiles exploded. Moments later, the bitter clacking of their shards below spread a look of satisfaction across his smug face.
A rush like a ghost passed from my toes into my chest and up through my head: the grace of God was ascending. I clung tight to its hold.
“They say if you hit a Jew hard enough you can hear the gold rattling in his rib cage,” he said with a smirk. “I aim to find out!”
It was a legend based on a horrible truth; Jews expelled from Spain in the Christian year of fourteen ninety-two were forbidden from taking valuables. Some of the tens of thousands crossing the border into Portugal dared to eat coinage.
As I spired up to the pinnacle of the roof, a tile came free. I picked it up, held it as a shield in front of my chest. An image of Moses and his tablets entered my mind. The burning sun of the age of Torah seemed to be pulling me toward the sky. My nemesis laughed. He took awkward giant steps, joined me on the apex. We faced each other across a silence of ten feet. His face was twisted with scorn. I began chanting the names of the Unnameable.
“A magical Marrano incantation?” he questioned.
To defend myself, I was tempted to invoke a kabbalistic prayer for his death. Forcing my words silent, I withdrew from thought until there was only a light presence weighing my soul.
“Crazy Jew,” he said. “We’ll kill all of you. Peel open your skin and take out your gold!”
A sudden visceral force pushed me. I charged. He lifted his whip slowly, as if mired in a liquid time. Was he surprised that a Jew would attack without warning? He never tried to dodge me. With my tile as a shield, I plowed up into him like a bull, took the very air from him. He flew to the end of the roof, slid past the ledge and screamed all the way down. A sound like a gloved fist knocking once at a door rose up toward me when he hit the ground.
When I peered below, I saw him lying at a crazy angle on the cobbles, twisted like a discarded marionette.
There was still the roof to cross if I was to get away. Space seemed to recede from me as I jumped, however. Crashing against the wall, I began a free fall, landed hard on a slatted verandah below. My arm was scraped badly and my face stung with blood. The apartment must have belonged to former orthodox Moslems; I was atop the gallery from which their women had surveyed the world below without being seen in the days before their forms of worship were outlawed as well.
I kicked against the blue slats till they gave, then dropped below. Out of the light, I felt strangely distant from myself. I was in a bedroom of pallets and leather mats. As I trudged breathless into a whitewashed hall, voices came through walls. A family was gathered in front of a smoldering hearth. A tall, cinnamon-complexioned man in green robes and a white skullcap faced me. He had broad, powerful shoulders. His light brown eyes were close together and menacing, like an eagle’s. A tuft of dark hair sprouted between his eyebrows, gave him the look of a man of mystery. The thought came: I am too tired to fight. If this man chooses to take my life, I will offer it to him like a prayer.
“You seek sanctuary?” he asked in hesitant Portuguese.
I answered in my Hebrew-accented Arabic: “They’re after me.” We watched blood dripping from my arm onto a leather mat. I cupped it with my hand. “I’m sorry for staining your…”
He called his wife. She rushed to me with a young girl clinging to her robes. Her hair and fingernails were dyed red with henna. After smearing an olive-green ointment on the cut, she bandaged my arm with a linen remnant. Her black, thickly outlined eyes regarded me fearfully till I complimented the grace of her daughter with an Arabic couplet which Farid had written.
My right shoulder had dislocated when I crashed, however, and now, calmer, I realized I could barely move it. It ebbed with pain, then grew numb.
“My name is Attar,” the man said. “I am a potter. I come from Tavira.”
“Berekiah Zarco. I am a fruitseller, and I have always lived in Lisbon.”
He sat me down on a pillow and gave me water. When I mentioned Samir, Farid’s father, a welcoming smile lit his face; they knew each other and had even studied Koran together in Granada when it was still the capital of an Islamic kingdom. “I’ll get you some more water,” he said when I’d finished my cup. He stepped behind me, grabbed me suddenly. Pushed hard. My shoulder popped. Pain broke over me like a tide, then receded. “You’ll feel better now,” he said. “But no more jumping across rooftops for a little while.”
His wife cleaned my face with warm water as I tested my arm. Attar said, “You’re welcome to stay till the trouble passes.”
“I must try to meet a friend, then get back to my family.”
My pants were badly ripped at the inseam. He made me change into a tawny aba fringed at the collar with delicate arabesques in chartreuse thread.
“How will I ever repay you?” I asked.
He waved away my concern. “The possessions of nomads are meant to leave their hands,” he observed. “It is better. What is without wings has a way of dictating our thoughts.” He placed a knitted skullcap on my head.
“Allah be with you,” he said at the door.
I echoed his closing and bowed my thanks. “I’ll return your clothes as soon as I can.”
He lifted the hood of my robe over my head and bowed back.
The street was empty when I slipped outside. Rushing along the cobbles, I tried in vain to fade my footsteps to silence. The acid smell of burning Jewish flesh was everywhere now. I was sure that a plume of smoke was rising just above me, but would not look. I breathed through my mouth, crossed the Moorish Gate under the scornful eyes of two sentinels on horseback. Dressed as I was, however, these representatives of the crown would not dare to touch me; if there was official violence against former Moslems, there might be reciprocal bloodletting against Christians in Turkish lands and North Africa.
As for the mob, all I had was my knife. I prayed I would not have to use it.
Once outside the city walls, I lowered my hood and ran across the fields fronting St. Anne’s convent, then crawled through thickets of broom and tall, scorched grasses as I approached the great oak crowning the coming hillock. Master David was not there, however. A small crowd of worried Old Christians had assembled just beyond the Roman bridge below; they told frenzied stories of how the mob had turned on anyone even remotely connected to Jews. Some cowards, they said, were even using the riot as an excuse for personal vengeance, or a way of freeing themselves from debt.
“It’s the New Christians’ fault—they caused the drought!” a crone in black kept shouting to anyone who would listen.
A group of peasants armed with the hammers and iron rods of a looted blacksmith’s shop suddenly marched out St. Anne’s Gate in search of Marranos, primping themselves with the good humor of hunters scenting blood. I pressed my chest to the ground and waited. The sun had already set, and the sky was pearly with dusk. Crows flapped in the branches of the lone oak above me. I imagined death as an inky pool spreading from my stomach into my hands and feet. For what sin, I began to wonder, was God taking from us the best of Israel? Why was he using these Christians of Lisbon to punish us?
Soon, the voices of the Nazarenes were gone. Fear gripped me again only when I remembered Senhora Rosamonte’s hand in my pouch. Beside her fingers was the note that had slipped out of Diego the printer’s turban, stained now with blood. Reading its words again—Isaac, Madre, the twenty-ninth of Nisan—I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Uncle’s murder. Had his death, in fact, been originally planned by Diego for five days hence, on Friday the twenty
-ninth? Could Isaac have been the name of a killer hired with a handful of coins taken from an ecclesiastical coffer, from the Mother Church, from the Madre?
I realized, of course, that I was weaving a complex story from mere threads of evidence, that such a scenario was but a remote possibility. I felt so alone, however, so free of my family and Lisbon and the love of God that I needed to believe in a tale—however unlikely—which placed the events of this most terrible day in a sensible order.
Such is the power of isolation. And I understood then that freedom, of the kind bequeathed to abandoned orphans and apprentices without masters, could be the most dreadful state of all.
Chapter IV
It was late Sunday, the third holy evening of Passover. Long after midnight. Master David had not met me, was either dead or in hiding. St. Anne’s Gate had become ever more clogged with Christian rabble. Not so the Monks’ Gate to the east. Past a few sleepy peasants slurping soup from wooden bowls, I strode across the fortified Visigothic bridge there back into Lisbon, my hand gripping my knife inside my pouch. A crescent moon was skimming over the stream below like a heavenly boat. Pricks of sound prompted me on like ivory needles. I realized with a bitter dread that I was fighting a fever. Yet had I ever been more alive? Every nerve in my body was craning into the present for the touch of sensation.
Was the city safe yet? The answer didn’t seem to matter; a dreadful longing in my chest as powerful as Uncle’s chanting of Torah was pushing me home.
Beyond the gate, a dim music of contrapuntal horns seemed to dance like shadows along the high Moorish walls surrounding the oldest part of the city. As I climbed, the Alcáçova Palace rose above me, its garlic-bulb towers beaming with an orange light that slid into the darkness as a mist. Hundreds of feet below me, seeming to protest against my movement, slept central Lisbon and our largest Jewish quarter, Little Jerusalem—twenty thousand moonlit homes reclining across the hillsides and valleys and nestling into a bend of the Tagus. As I prayed for my family, the downy gray moonlight behind my eyelids separated and coalesced as angels.
I descended through the steeply falling labyrinth of ancient stairs and alleys. By the Church of São Martinho, the smell of smoke chilled me. I slowed, crept along whitewashed walls. Loios Square opened to me. In front of the brittle arcades of the convent, a raging bonfire was sending jagged butterflies of light and darkness across a crowd. At the center, a group of New Christians from our Little Jewish Quarter had their arms and legs bound with nautical rope. They stood in a ragged line, their clothing tattered, their heads hanging from exhaustion. No one spoke. Wan, hopeless expressions showed they’d been paraded around the city like this for hours.
Rugged men with swords and halberds fixed them in place. I crept back and hid around the flaking wall of the corner tavern.
“I beg you not to do this!”
“Kill me if you want, but save my children!”
A hundred supplications pounded me as I searched the caustic orange torchlight for the faces of my family. Blessed be His name, none of them was there. I recognized all of the linked prisoners, however, including Solomon Eli the surgeon, and I imprinted their faces in my Torah memory.
A monk with a beaked nose was swinging a smoking silver censer and cursing the Jews in Latin.
How many had already been dragged from our neighborhood and rendered ash? Little Didi Molcho, whom we all believed would grow up to be a great poet? Had his future been pried from his mother’s hands and…? Or Murça Benjamin, who gave me my first look at a girl’s dark place out behind St. Vincent’s? Was it her glorious body, within the crown of flames, that was beginning to…? Please, I chanted, let no one be burned tonight. Yet into the breathing spaces of my prayer burst the question: why has He allowed any of His self-portraits to be so desecrated?
Samuel Bispo the blacksmith was tied to the monumental stone cross that centers the square and was about to be whipped. I drew away into the darkness without looking back. Empty streets returned my hollow heartbeats. What a coward of Biblical proportions I was to have abandoned him and the rest of our prisoners!
My chest and injured shoulder were aching with a revolving, knotted pain, and I was shamed by my terror. I squatted to catch my breath, prayed for deliverance. A sweet scent stung my nostrils. Reaching my hand up, I discovered my nose was bleeding. Men following? Jumping to my feet and pressing into a slatted doorway, I listened. The plunk of dripping water reached me. When a bat sliced through the air and dove into an open window across the street, fear like violent Moorish drumming struck at me. I set off again. Paupers in rags were sleeping amongst sheep in Praça do Limoeiro, Lemon Tree Square. One was awake, watched me with idiot-curious eyes.
Cutting in front of our old neighborhood inn and hostelry, I descended the steps past the accursed house where Isaac Ibn Zachin murdered himself and his children after the conversion. I cut into the alley behind the Church of São Miguel. As if landing from a tumbling fall, I found myself trudging along the Rua de São Pedro. A thousand onions and garlic heads were scattered by my feet; a cart had been overturned. A tumbling island of black rats was forming over the opened gut of a headless man without clothes. I rushed toward home. Since I had last been here, half a day earlier, our neighborhood had been defiled. Shit had been smeared against all the walls, stores looted, doors and shutters smashed. At the entrance to our former schoolhouse hung a body: Dr. Montesinhos. A cross of blood was finger-painted on his chest. A gold sovereign peeked from his mouth; a daring Jew must have put it there to pay for his ferry ride across the River Jordan. One of his sandals had come free. A sprig of oleander peered over the lip of its heel. I took it.
I crept toward home, slipped through our gate. Two hens loosed from neighbors’ coops scuttled and cackled around the courtyard. Our lemon tree had been felled by an ax. In my mind, I chanted our religious injunction from Deuteronomy against the felling of a fruit tree even during a siege: You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Out loud, I whispered: “Cinfa, Judah, Esther…”
I almost called Uncle’s name, but an image of him lying stiff and white pressed my lips toward silence. As I gripped the handle of our door, Roseta hopped gray and ghostly onto the low wall next to me. The cherries were gone from around her neck. “Wait,” I whispered to her. But she leapt inside as the door opened.
“Mother…Esther…” I called in a low voice.
The darkness of night held its breath.
The hearth in our kitchen was cold. I felt along the tile floor. It was wet. Blood? I lifted my fingertips to my mouth. Only water. I cut my hand on the tip of a fallen knife, cursed, then blessed He who gives power to iron. I held it in front of me as I groped my way to the bedroom which I shared with Judah and Cinfa. Caressing the cold, barren mattress where they slept, I whispered a prayer for their safety. I balanced on tottering feet to my mother’s room, whispered for her, felt the taut emptiness of her bed in my fingertips. I swirled her blanket over my shoulders to end my shivers.
Where could they all have gone?
Robbers had rifled through my chest again, but had still left behind most of the frayed hand-me-downs I’d inherited. Discarding the blanket from my shoulders and slipping out of Attar’s cumbersome aba, I put on a pair of my father’s linen pants and one of my elder brother’s shirts. In Uncles chest, I found his ancient woolen cape. Was I alone now, the inheritor of all his clothing, the narrator of his story?
Crossing the courtyard to Farid’s house, I whispered for his father, Samir. Heavy footfalls from outside made me duck. I peered out the window. Two men carried swords. They were swiveling their heads to survey the courtyard.
The soles of my feet suddenly recorded three taps on the tile floor. One more. Then four. It was Farid, signalling pi from back in his house. I crept through his front room to the kitchen. A sweaty hand reached out for my arm. We kissed, and I held Farid until his silent sobs seemed to leach across my skin into my heart. I couldn’t allow him to peel me open to emotion and pul
led away. “I can’t find anyone,” I indicated against the palm of his hand in our language of signs. I considered telling him about Uncle, but guarded the knowledge of his death as if it might not be true. Was my master a powerful enough kabbalist to cast such an illusion?
Farid started to signal in wild, frenzied movements. I was unused to reading his words inside my hands. “Slowly,” I begged.
“When the Christians came, I tried to escape the Little Jewish Quarter,” he indicated. “But there were too many. It was like a cloud of locusts. I came back and hid. I saw Judah for a moment. Only him. Father Carlos was running with him down the Rua de São Pedro. They disappeared into his church. I tried to call, but my voice…”
So Carlos was alive! Perhaps he was indeed in hiding when I knocked at his door! But what then of Judah?
Farid’s palm flattened and pressed against mine. His pulse raced. Space and time dropped away until there were only two presences meeting at a warm border.
I signalled, “I tapped pi for you once, this afternoon, an hour or two after nones, but there was no reply.”
“I was looking for Samir.”
“Any luck?”
He shook his head. “He was at one of the secret mosques in the Moorish Quarter when they came. I couldn’t make it there. I don’t know.”
“Two peasants with swords have breached the sanctity of our courtyard,” I indicated. “Let’s sneak out and get to St. Peter’s, look for Judah and Carlos.”
Farid stood, guided me through squares of light and darkness toward their back door. As we stepped outside, a long-haired man with a lance surprised us. His blade swept at me. I dove to the cobbles. My right forearm burned. A gash near my elbow dripped blood.
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