The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon sc-1

by Richard Zimler

  Farid tugged me up, and we ran like madmen toward the river. At the Jews’ Steps, I realized our nemesis was running after us, shouting for help, and would attract a mob if we didn’t silence him. I stopped, caught Farid, signalled to him my plan. He nodded, ran down the steps and cut into the alley past Senhor Benadife’s apothecary.

  Dripping blood onto my left hand, I waited on the top step for my assailant. I kicked off my sandals so my footing would be better on the cobbles. He came to me panting. I could see now that he was younger than I, with a round, farmboy’s face, a mop of wild black hair. Yet for all his ferocity, he had frightened eyes. Dangling from his belt were human ears, and a filigree earring twinkled from a lobe by his hip. In another time and place, I would have depicted him as one of Saul’s terrified sons. So what sense did any of this make? It was as if Lisbon had thrown open its gates to a disease of ever-increasing lunacy. Yet my breathing came easy, from an eerie landscape beyond fear. “Go back to your millet and rye,” I told him.

  “You stole my father’s best acres!” he answered. He crouched as if preparing to spring. “Don’t you move!” he warned. His lance blade bobbed awkwardly; he was unused to carrying such a weapon.

  “I’m a manuscript illuminator and fruitseller. I’ve never stolen anything.”

  Strange how humor can come to you at the worst moments; I thought, Hmmmn, that’s not quite true…a sponge cake once with a friend…

  “Marrano—over here!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. In a voice of bound rage, he added: “Land that was ours for centuries! Your people… You live off of us, bring us plague, drink the blood of our children!”

  “Your grievance is with whoever stole your land!” I told him.

  “You do their bidding. You manage their estates, collect their taxes!”

  Behind him, Farid dropped down from a rooftop like a cat and crept forward on cottony feet. I said to the boy, “Drop your lance and go. You won’t be injured.”

  He lunged suddenly. I ducked away, but a wound burned open on my good shoulder as it was grazed. Watching my blood sluice, I thought: I will never again let an Old Christian hurt me.

  Farid took him from behind. His powerful forearm locked around the boy’s neck, the arching blade of his Moorish dagger cut into his cheek. I grabbed the lance and said, “If you threatened the nobles as you threatened us, then all would be well!”

  Bellowing cries from down the street turned us: “Hold ‘em son! We’re coming!”

  I signalled for Farid to let him go; we had to trade him for our lives. As he was released, the boy spat into my face. “When we catch you, I’m going to slice off your ‘chestnuts’ and hang them on my belt!” he announced.

  I slashed the lance across his thigh. He fell. Blood curtained his leg as if seeking to cover his agonized screams. Farid grabbed me and turned me. We raced down the Jews’ Steps to the river. I tossed the accursed weapon on which my blood had mixed with an Old Christian’s into the silver waters.

  As we ran, I wondered about the violence which seemed to rise up in me so easily. Had I, too, not simply been wearing a mask of piety and gentility all these years? Was there a true Berekiah whom I’d only glimpsed during moments of rage and desperation?

  Dawn rose in tones of pink and rusty gold. We were hidden on a sand bar inside a lagoon of rushes between Lisbon and Santa Iria. I slept without dreams, awoke into Farid’s arms startled, surprised by the return of the sun. As he wiped my brow and sat me up, I was struck by his unadorned beauty, in particular by the dark, youthful stubble bristling on his cheeks and standing out like ornamentation against his olive complexion. Thick ringlets of wild, coal-black hair framed his face like a mane, ribboned over his forehead, cascaded onto his broad shoulders. The look of a schemer, people used to say who feared his silence and the assessments of his light green eyes, who believed in their ignorance that the deaf were evil. But the only schemes Farid ever dreamed up applied to rhymes. A born poet, he was, and more often than not, his eyes were simply focused inward, judging only the curve of a phrase or contour of a rhythm. Now, his lips thinned to a thoughtful slit. He fingered the long lobe of his right ear as he always did when upset. He looked as if he were yearning to speak. But that, of course, was impossible.

  For a time, prompted by Farid’s beauty, I stared at my own image in the gentle waters around us. In comparison, my form was graceless, and it seemed as if I couldn’t possibly know this reflective twin looking back at me with the hunted look in his eyes, the dirty stubble on his chin, the mean, knotted hair falling to his shoulders. The young scholar who shared his uncle’s probing profile seemed to have been swallowed by a gaunt, wild-faced youth of the forest, a Pan of vengeance. Had I become the half-human creature the Dominicans believed us all to be?

  Farid tapped my shoulder, offered me bread from his pouch. I refused; it was only the third day of Passover and we were still celebrating the Exodus.

  “Your fever broke in the night,” he signalled. “You feel better?”

  My separated shoulder was stiff with that dull, knotted pain which I would forever associate with that Passover of death. The wound on my forearm was tender with crusted blood. My right foot stung; gashes scarred my toes. I gestured to Farid, “We’ve been abandoned by Moses and will have to get to the other shore of the Red Sea by ourselves. We’re all alone.”

  As Farid ate, the reeds around us swayed in unison with the gentle tide. The waters made the lapping sound of fawns drinking. All was calm, as it should be. I began crying as if at the gates of God’s compassion, gestured to my friend, “Which is the real world? This or…?”

  He signalled back, “Heaven and hell are the sea and sky. And you are the horizon.”

  His words meant nothing then. It was the elegant dance of his powerful hands which was too lovely to bear. And when he caressed my face, the sobs knotted in my throat broke. Memories of the pyre cascaded, molten and furious, onto us both. Even so, I was still unable to talk of Uncle. Farid took Senhora Rosamonte’s hand from me. So frightened he was. Trembling. And yet, he touched its fingertips of bloodstained marble to his closed eyelids as he prayed. I noticed then the bruises and welts on his neck. “We will bury her in a lemon grove,” he signalled. “She will always be able to gift us with her fruit.”

  “What happened?” I gestured, pointing to his tender wounds.

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  “Tell me.”

  “In the alley last night—a man tried to stop me. I killed him.”

  It was the first time either of us had signalled the verb “to kill” in the first person. We both realized our language of gestures had to change to keep up with this new, Old Christian century. As if unequal to the task, we walked along the Tagus back to Lisbon without conversing. Distanced from my own emotions, I remembered the young noble I’d pushed from the roof. Where would I find forgiveness for removing from the Lower Realms a being imbued with a spark of God’s love?

  Just outside the Santa Cruz Gate, we came upon docked salt boats. Women with knobby, blistered feet balancing ceramic jugs of the white crystals on their heads smiled at us. Children played, dogs wagged their tails. A merchant in scarlet and green robes tipped his cap to us for no reason I could fathom. Farid purchased sweet rice and grilled sardines from one of the women who sold food down by the river. He gorged himself, but I, of course, could not.

  Coming into the Little Jewish Quarter was like leaving a theater. Suddenly, the image was not born of denial or separation, but as it was, bordered with shit and stinking of violence; etched with the barking of saliva-dripping dogs, centered by folding islands of rats and mice.

  Vacant-eyed survivors swept blood from their doorways, wore tearless masks, shuffled on bare, dispirited feet. Bodies waited for our notice: Saul Ha-Kohen folded over the slats of his bedroom window, an arm, stiff as salted meat, moving back and forth in the wind, tapping an unknown code against a shutter. Raziela Mor gutted, an onion in her mouth being pried out by her daughter, Nafa, c
louds of flies seeking to lay eggs in her womb. Dr. Montesinhos hanging rigid and bloated from the coiled tracery above our schoolhouse door. A nameless baby without a head sitting in a shovel.

  Faced with the unthinkable given physical form, no one dared speak.

  Do you know what it means to look at a headless baby sitting in a shovel? It is as if all the languages in the world have been forgotten, as if all the books ever written have been given up to dust. And that you are glad of it. Because such people as we have no right to speak or write or leave any trace for history.

  The doors to our store were now lying at oblique angles to each other on the cobbles, like entrances to a cockeyed underworld. Muffled moans in Hebrew were coming from across the way in Senhora Faiam’s house. Her dog Belo’s beseeching blue eyes stared out at me over the wall. In his mouth he now carried a gnarled and splintered bone, yellow with age; it appeared that he had once again found something resembling the remains of his recently amputated left front leg, buried this time by Senhora Faiam in the yard behind St. Peter’s Church. His nose was twitching as if he were on the trail of someone to show it to.

  My mother and Cinfa met me in the courtyard. They had been picking up broken pieces of slate. Cinfa ran shouting my name and clawed at me as if afraid to fall. Mother dropped to her knees and wailed. Two vellum talismans dangled from her neck. When I lifted her up, she gripped me with white-knuckled desperation. She sobbed as if she were vomiting. When she had her breath, she said, “Judah’s missing. I don’t know what…”

  Mother gripped me so tight that her heartbeat seemed to pound from inside my chest. Dizzy with her presence, I said, “I’ll find him.”

  She dragged her disbelieving hand through my hair, over my chest. Cinfa hugged herself into Farid.

  “You’re unhurt?” my mother asked. “Nothing happened that you won’t…”

  “Yes, I’m fine. What about Esther and Reza?”

  “Esther’s bruised but alive. Reza, we don’t know.” Mother turned toward Farid. Although she’d never fully approved of my friendship with him and was terrified of his silence, she looked at him now with anxious concern, raised her hand and approximated our gesture for greeting. “O Farid estábem,are you all right?” she mouthed.

  He smiled gently and bowed his head in thanks.

  “He’s fine, too,” I said. “Where were you all last night? I came back but the house was empty.”

  “We were here! I was hiding in the store with Cinfa. It was siesta when the Christians first came. We were spending it with Didi and his mother. Rushed back home only to find that…”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” I interrupted.

  Mother held up hands blotched purple. “I surrounded Cinfa and myself with barrels of beans, then covered us with basketfuls of overripe figs. We stayed that way for as long as we could stand it, couldn’t hear much.”

  Stained with violet skin and smelling of fermented sugar, she and Cinfa suddenly seemed possessed of a holy beauty; they glistened with survival. I was laughing with an absurd relief. I kissed her forehead. “Clever girl!” I said, as if I were my father.

  “Old Christian men pinned Esther’s arms to the cobbles in front of St. Stevens Church,” she whispered conspiratorially. “And then…”

  As I nodded my understanding, she lowered her eyes.

  “Mother, have you seen any of the threshers? Father Carlos, Diego, Samson…”

  “No one.”

  After searching his rooms, Farid signalled that Samir had not returned. We entered my house. Esther was seated in the kitchen with her hand wedged between her legs, her bare feet in a puddle of water. I kissed her forehead. She was cold. She would not talk. I covered her with a blanket from Cinfa and Judah’s bed.

  I whispered fearfully to Mother, “Then…then you have not seen Uncle?”

  “No. I thought he might be in the cellar. But the trap door, its nailed shut. He must have sealed it. And the curtains on the window eyelets are drawn. We can’t look in. We’ve knocked and screamed for him a dozen times. No answer. I’m afraid to break through. He may have had a reason why he wanted it shut, to protect the books, or something more…more occult. I hope he’s all right. He probably went out looking for us, then couldn’t make it back home.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

  “After lunch on Sunday. Not long before…before they came. He went to the cellar to chant. And Cinfa and I went out to…”

  “Mother, I nailed it shut,” I said dryly.

  “You? Why?”

  “When I came back, I went downstairs and… Wait.” I went to the courtyard, took the hammer from our shed, smashed at the trap door. The last slat of wood dropped free with a cracking sound which seemed to imply a terrible finality, as if we would never again find safety in our house.

  “Don’t come down yet,” I said to my mother as I stepped onto the stairs. “Let me take a look.”

  It was insane, but I wanted to see Uncle first because in those days I put very little beyond the range of a kabbalah master’s powers. Might he not have swallowed a piece of paper bearing a special prayer formula before his throat was slit, a secret name of God which would effect his revival?

  “Why…what is…?” Mother grabbed my arm. “What do you know? Is he down there?!”

  “All right, come,” I said, and in the quivering of my own voice, I heard the simple truth of his disappearance forever from the Lower Realms. “But I must warn you, Uncle is with us no longer.”

  Mother reached for her mouth to stifle a scream. I reached for her hands but she drew them away as if I were tainted.

  She crept downstairs with one hand forming an awning over her eyes, the other gripping the talismans dangling from her neck. But she did not cry. A moan when she saw him. A rasping inhale. As if she were choking for breath. That was all.

  As she knelt to put Uncle’s fingertips to her cheek, she began to pull her hair. Her face peeled open to sobs. I turned away; it was a moment which could bear no witness.

  Chapter V

  Time is like a seal certifying existence. And like a seal, it is artificial. As Uncle used to say, past, present and future are really just verses of the same poem. Our goal is to trace its rhyme scheme back to God.

  And yet it was already Monday afternoon, a day since Uncle’s death.

  The fourth evening of Passover would be descending soon.

  My mother had just left the cellar, had told me that she’d never seen the girl before. “You’re sure?” I’d asked her.

  “Never,” she’d whispered shamefully, and I could see her thinking: It was carnal sin which drew death to him.

  I was now standing above the bodies, my aunt by my side. She wasn’t howling or crying, had simply picked up a shard of pottery and was scarring her fingers with its razor edge.

  “Esther, stop that!” I said. “Esther…”

  Her transfixed stare, remote and childlike, showed she had severed herself from the finality of Uncle’s death seeking to penetrate our hearts. A groan rising from her belly splintered suddenly into gagging. She looked between him and the girl, leaned forward as if tugged downward by his grip, began slashing at her index finger—the finger graced with her wedding band. I ran to her, ripped the ceramic piece away. Blood sluiced burning over my hands.

  Farid rushed from the stairs and folded his arm protectively around Esther’s waist. As he steered her away, she turned, stared at me over her shoulder as if to say goodbye before a long voyage. With Farid following closely behind her, she carried herself up the stairs with a ghostly grace.

  Although its exact route is hidden to us, the pathway between sadness and insight must be paved carefully by God; I suddenly realized that the killer, who had been intimately familiar with the contents of our storage cabinet, would also probably have known of our genizah!

  Taking a key from inside the eel bladder hanging behind the Bleeding Mirror, I lifted the rim of our prayer mat skirting the north wall and peeled away a p
iece of slate to reveal a lock. Half a circle to the right I turned. At the sound of a click, I lifted a wooden lid flanking the wall, three feet by four, camouflaged with slate. Our genizah opened with a groan of protest.

  I’d been right; smudges of blood stained the top two manuscripts: the “Fox Fables” which I was illustrating and the Book of Esther which my aunt was lettering. Below, for the most part clean, but still tainted here and there with the red finger-shadows of the killer, were family Torahs, Haggadahs and prayer books; a map of the Mediterranean by Judah Abenzara; religious commentaries by Uncle’s friend Abraham Sabah; poetic works by Farid ud-din Attar; and two mystical guidebooks by Abraham Abulafia—our spiritual father—which my master had not yet summoned the courage to entrust to his secret smugglers. Below these, seemingly untouched, there rested a Torah illuminated with magical beasts bequeathed to my master by his late friend, Isaac Bracarense; a Koran from Persia; three piles of my master’s personal correspondence; our woolen sack of coinage, still heavy with copper and silver; and finally, the marriage contract between my aunt and uncle, scripted by one and illustrated by the other.

  I locked everything below the genizah door.

  It seemed clear to me that the killer had stopped his search before reaching the lower manuscripts; they were unstained. And if he had continued that far, surely he would have taken our money.

  The only work missing opened the petals of a new mystery: it was the Haggadah Uncle had been completing just before his death. For all the daring of its knotted patterns and bird-headed letters, it was worth nothing in comparison to the Abulafia manuscripts, portions of which were centuries old and in the master’s own hand.

  So my uncle’s Haggadah must have possessed a hidden value to the killer.

  That certainty gifted me with another, and I turned around so that I could face our desks: the killer had found the key to the genizah in the eel bladder hidden behind the Bleeding Mirror. This was confirmation that a member of the threshing group was involved. But why had the genizah been re-locked? Out of a simple desire for order?