The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  Tendrils of flame were jumping like tugged marionettes. “You threw Eurico Damas into the fire?!” I demanded.

  “I think you’ll find his teeth if ya look hard!” she grinned. She licked her lips as if tasting a treat. “He had more than his share so I’m sure they’re there somewhere.” She fixed my stare with a bemused look, burst into laughter. “He went to kidnap your uncle, you know.”

  “Did he find him?! What did he…”

  “No, he came back all snarly. Couldn’t locate where Master Abraham was hiding. I heard him say so.”

  So my intuition was wrong; Eurico Damas had not been involved. And Samson was dead. That left Father Carlos and Diego as the only threshers who could have betrayed Uncle; Miguel Ribeiro and Rabbi Losa as those who might have stooped to blackmail.

  “He wanted to pinga your entire group of kabbalists,” the girl continued. “Force ‘em to admit it was all a lie. Lately, he was kind of obsessed with it. Getting old, I guess. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing, ya see.”

  “What sort of thing? I don’t understand.”

  She laughed as if to ridicule me, tugged with showy pride on the ends of her silken vest. “An ever present God, stupid!” As she spoke, a black-haired, weedy teenager with wisps of mustache on his upper lip ran out of the house trailing a bloody sword. His eyes were targeted upon me.

  “It’s all right, José,” she said. “He’s Master Abraham’s nephew.” To me, she whispered. “It was José who killed him. He’s not much good with a sword. But when a man’s as drunk as a pig in a trough of grapes, it don’t take more than one little skewer and…” She thrust her hands down in imitation of a swordsman delivering a deathblow, grinned, then left me to toss a cloak onto the fire. José acknowledged me with the serious nod of an adolescent who has assumed the role of a protector, and in an eerie, reverent silence, we three watched the garments smoke and twist and blacken. The girl’s expression hardened. She touched her cheeks as if blotting stains. She turned to me. “I’ve other marks on my back, you know. For a year, I was his whipping post. Used to flap his ‘bird’ himself while hitting me if ya know what I mean.” She grinned, “I want to erase the very memory of him.” She took my hand. “You can understand, can’t ya?” When I nodded, she looked at me gravely, pointed to her chest. “Do kabbalists really believe God resides in here?”

  “There and everywhere else. And nowhere. God will come to you in a form which you can perceive—clothed as you can see Him. It depends on His grace…and your vision.”

  “Then He won’t come to me as a man—I’ve no need for a male God. I’ve already had one, and I hated him! I’ll kill the next male god that shows his ‘purple head’ to me!”

  “A female emanation then. Or neither sex. Or both more likely.”

  “A woman. Yeah, I’d prefer a woman.” She made a fist, and with gritted teeth, shouted, “I’ll never have another man thrust inside me!” Her look became haughty as she twisted her beret back on. Tucking in her hair, she said, “Grab any of his clothes you want, then go!”

  We stared at each other as if to take in the world’s cruelty. In a trembling voice, she said, “Once upon a time there was a happy girl who swam in the Tagus and who was spied from afar and sold by her parents into slavery.” She closed her eyes and folded her arms about her chest, as if comforting her own despair.

  I replied, “And a young man who lost his uncle and little brother.”

  Her eyes opened in understanding, and we nodded at each other like siblings who must part. The weight of our solidarity held me in place another moment, then I turned and strode away.

  Sunset had washed the sky with rosewater and copper. As I surveyed the massive crowd still assembled in the Rossio from afar, Uncle’s hand held the back of my neck. “If you dye your hands red, no one will bother you,” he whispered. I knew what he meant and pulled off the scab which had formed on my shoulder where the boy’s lance had caught me. The blood sluicing out came warm against my fingertips. I coated my hands and arms with it. “Now descend to the river,” Uncle whispered. “Walk along the bank, and to any one who hails you, tell them you are hunting Marranos!”

  As I knew I would, I made it home without incident. The shit-stained rug over our trap door was still in place. Yet I descended into the cellar as if into imprisonment. I was young and proud, and such a hideaway only provoked shame.

  Cinfa ran to me as I reached the bottom of the stairs and said that only a half-hour before men had stood in the kitchen above them, offering clemency for any Marrano who showed himself. “Don’t go out again!” she begged.

  “Judah?” my mother asked breathlessly.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  Farid and the little girl with no thumbnail were sleeping under blankets by our desks. Esther was sitting in silence, her profile that of a limestone sculpture.

  After I’d comforted Cinfa, I lifted up the prayer rug over Uncle, and as I did, his putrid odor stung my nostrils. Dear God, how long until we can get him into the earth? I thought. I painted him again with myrrh, told myself with each brush stroke: Keep looking at his face; you must remember everything in order to take revenge.

  As I chanted to myself, my body, miraculously, began to shed its accumulated frustration, to vibrate and flex with a holy force. Such is the power of Torah—or so advanced were my powers of self-deception, perhaps—that I was growing convinced that it was I who had been chosen to save Israel from Lisbon’s Philistines and that by solving the mystery of Uncle’s murder, I would somehow be turning the key in the door of our salvation. What exactly the connection was between my master’s death and the survival of the Portuguese Jews, I hadn’t a clue at the time.

  As I looked up at the leather blinds drawn down over the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall, I wondered again about the killer’s escape. There must be a hidden exit, I thought, a tunnel—some way out that was known only to the threshers. That was why Uncle never wished me to enter the cellar without his permission. I hadn’t yet been initiated into the secrets of our temple.

  “Did you bring any food?” Cinfa asked me suddenly. “She’s hungry.”

  The little girl with no thumbnail stood by Cinfa, was staring up at me with yearning silence. “I’m sorry, I forgot,” I answered. “I’ll go up now and see what I can find in the store. There must be…”

  “No. You sit!” my mother ordered. Her hands were balled into fists and her eyes were flashing. “We wait now until it’s over for good!”

  Cinfa and the little girl nibbled on the one matzah I had left. It was blood-stained, but it disappeared all-too-quickly. So hunger accompanied us as well.

  Needing something with which to busy my nervous hands, craving to learn the identity of the girl, I took a sheet of paper from our storage cabinet and began to draw her.

  Farid awoke maybe an hour later, after I’d finished her face and was beginning the first lines of her hands. Cinfa tapped me on the shoulder and said he was asking for me.

  I brought him a cup of water and held it to his lips. He gulped greedily. He was sweating profusely, and his fever had gone up. His pants were stained with flecks of blood and shit. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Something is peeling me open from the inside out. And I’m afraid I couldn’t hold back. My pants… I must stink so bad that even Allah is holding his nose.”

  Despite his protests, I cleaned Farid’s behind and thighs, then covered him with his blanket again. We hadn’t any extra pillows, so I buttressed his head with several manuscripts from the genizah. What better purpose for Hebrew writing at this point could there have been?

  As he descended into sleep, I sat by myself against the eastern wall, in the spot where I imagined that the girl had begged for her life. I brought my knees up by my chest into a position of self-sufficiency and solitude; something cold and calculating was drawing me away from my family. Was it my longing for vengeance? They talked in whispers now, but I could not. I needed to run, to shout for
all to hear that I would avenge my uncle. I could live no more enclosed in murmurs, enchained by coded conversations. My master had been right; the lion of kabbalah inside me would not let me live as a secret Jew any longer.

  And so I learned that the spiritual journey for me that Passover would be an unveiling of my own true face.

  I returned to my sketch, and for the rest of the hours of light, disappeared into the contours of first the girl, then Uncle. When darkness came, I found I was unable to say evening prayers. The little girl slept between my legs, using my thigh as a pillow. Cinfa huddled with us under a blanket.

  In my sleep that night, it was my own screams which came to me; I was tied to the fountain in Rossio Square and baptized with a burning palm branch.

  I awoke into darkness with the smell of smoke, thick with memory, permeating my clothes—an impossibility, I know, for the pants and shirt I was wearing had not borne witness to the pyre in the Rossio. From the viewpoint of kabbalah, however, illusions like this are not so easily dismissed, and later I understood the odor as an indication that some part of me had not advanced past Sunday. Now, however, I simply undressed and doused my clothes with fennel water from our storage cabinet. But the odor, stubborn as an engorged tick, clung tight.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. In the darkness, moonglow shapes of yellow and violet started folding around my family and me in icy sheets. Yet their touch was comforting. It was as if we were enveloped in a blanket that sealed our fates together. (How dearly I would have liked to have said, a blanket bequeathed by God, but such poetry was lost to me by then.)

  And so, the world reached the early hours of Wednesday morning, the morning before the sixth evening of Passover.

  Worry brought me back to Farid. His breathing rose against my fingertips, regular but shallow. I recalled how when we were children, he would cry at the scent of spring rain against the oleander bushes in the courtyard; the sweet smell, to him, was overwhelming.

  Yes, he has always been more sensitive than me.

  And I remembered then how when Judah was born, he and I had danced our prayers by the river.

  Judah… Farid… Uncle Abraham…

  Names… Are they arbitrary signs or something more meaningful?

  When I was despondent over my forced name change from Berekiah to Pedro, Uncle covered my head with his prayer shawl. “God has many names,” he whispered. “So we who are made in His image should have many as well. And what is beyond your name will always be the same.”

  My master told me many times that we were all God’s self-portraits.

  Would that even include his killer?

  Now that I’d seen a pyre of Jewish flame curling high above the steps of the Dominican Church, you’d think that one life—Uncle’s life—wouldn’t matter so much. Perhaps horror must be localized in a single soul, a diamond of pain.

  As my thoughts reached a sudden impasse, I looked up to see dawn light beginning to filter through the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall. I took a sip of water from the jug on the storage cabinet, nodded good morning toward my mother who had just woken. Cinfa was lying asleep against her thigh. My mother’s hands were caressing her hair absently. Esther was sleeping on her chair, her head fallen to her right shoulder, her arms hanging limply. Farid, too, was still asleep. His forehead was burning. I wiped it with water, but he did not wake.

  Lifting the prayer rug from the girl, I kneeled by her face and made some final adjustments to my drawing of her; the mouth which I had given her was too wide, too melodramatic.

  A sketch of a person is a powerful thing; as I stared at it, her image took on the contours of a talisman bearing her unfulfilled hopes.

  A few minutes later, while still engaged in correcting her lips, I heard Reza and her husband, José, calling to us from the courtyard. Mother sat up, and her mouth dropped open. Yet she did not get to her feet. It was as if she could not trust her ears. I ran to them. Cinfa followed.

  Reza was opening the trap door when I reached the top of the stairs. I motioned for her to let me climb out. “I looked all over for you!” I said, hugging her. It was good to feel her compact, feminine solidity. And I needed the light and air.

  Even so, Reza looked as if she’d been hunted. Her great gray eyes, normally so aristocratic—even distant, some said—were lit with burning anxiety. José hadn’t been to a barber in several days, looked ill, bloated with a kind of restrained terror. His eyes were rimmed by deep, dark circles and his thick red lips were badly chapped.

  “You’re okay, Beri?” Reza asked hesitantly.

  “Fine, fine. But where have you two been? I went to your house, but there was…”

  “We tried to get here, but the way was blocked,” José said, taking my shoulders. “So we left the city for Sobral. Stayed there. Each time we tried to get back till now, the gates…” He shook his head. “We couldn’t risk it.”

  Reza removed the toque from her head, asked in an urgent voice, “Is…is everyone here safe?”

  “I can’t find Judah,” I replied. My heart throbbed against my chest as if to seek an escape as I added, “And your father, Reza…he’s left his body and returned to God.”

  The toque dropped from her fingers. Her eyes opened wide to seek understanding. I moved to take her hands, but she pulled away. I whispered, “What once gave home to your father is lying in the cellar.”

  Her face was suddenly white, her eyes glassy. She descended to him as if straining at a yoke.

  Downstairs, my mother, Cinfa, José and I stood back as she kneeled to touch hesitant fingers over his form; if death is to be accepted, then it must be met alone for a time.

  When she sagged like a child to the floor, I rested my hand atop her hair. I felt her silent tears enter me as if through a whisper. She turned for Esther. “How did it happen, Mother?”

  My aunt wouldn’t respond, was still in hiding within herself.

  “Do you know if King Manuel has retaken the city?” I asked José.

  “Not yet. They say that he is afraid to return. The people are now clamoring for his death.”

  Reza prayed over Uncle. When she turned away, Esther rose like a ghost, glided to his body and covered his face again with the prayer rug. She sat back down and returned to stone.

  A wall crumbled inside the little girl with no thumbnail when Reza picked her up. She wailed as if her insides were being torn.

  “You know her?” I questioned.

  “Aviboa. The daughter of my neighbor, Graça. Is she…?”

  I shrugged. “The girl was the only one there.”

  It was a sin, I know, but as I replied I was thinking: Why could I not have found Judah instead?

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter IX

  It is near noon on Wednesday—seven hours from the sacred descent of the sixth evening of Passover—and I have done all the drawings I will need.

  Reza has assured us that the city has quieted, and so she, José, Cinfa, Aviboa, Mother and I creep upstairs in a line, unsure of our footing, as if returning from a long sojourn abroad. To cool Farid, I walk him to my mother’s room and wash his face with brandy. I hold a compress to his forehead. His eyes cannot resist closing, but he remains awake; fingertips cross my arm over and over again asking for Samir.

  Esther has remained below to commune alone with the gloom of the cellar.

  We are preparing my master and the girl for burial. We chant our prayers as we wash. Seven times I clean Uncle’s face with cold water, three with warm. And as it is written, we cleanse first his stomach, then his shoulders, arms, neck, genitals, toes, fingers, eyes and nostrils.

  A warm tide of sadness and joy sweeps over me as I hold the marble hands of Uncle’s old armor; he has escaped to God. Then I am alone again with a murdered man. Insight comes in flashes, says the Zohar. And so it is.

  The slit which splits his neck has turned black. The blood has clotted to a ceramic crust.

  Four times I wash his fingers, and yet they are stil
l dyed with ink. Just as it should be for an artist meeting God.

  Aunt Esther takes a scissors to her hair and places her hennaed locks upon his chest.

  Which Hebrew poet was it who said that a widow’s clipped hair consists of tears of blood drawn into filaments?

  When my master is dressed in his white robes, Mother sprinkles the symbolic dust of Jerusalem over his eyes and private parts.

  I hold Cinfa’s hand as she says goodbye. “We’ll never see him again,” she nods to me. Her weary, bloodshot eyes are wide open and curious, not sad or frightened.

  “Not like this,” I agree. “When you next see Uncle, it will be when he holds out his hands to you and welcomes you to God.”

  My confident words belie a stiff terror which forces my eyelids closed; I have forgotten the feel of my master’s embrace.

  We lay him upon his prayer shawl, then cover him with the linen shroud Reza and Mother have sewn.

  When his face disappears from me for the last time, my eyes close to capture him in their darkness. He is only a violet shadow now; I cannot summon his glow. Will he fade until I can no longer even summon his voice?

  We wash the girl with no less care. Reza helps now; she has sent Aviboa to play with Roseta in the courtyard.

  Brites, our laundress, appears suddenly at the kitchen door. Gifted with an optimistic nature, she generally has a bright sweet face. Today, however, she is glum and hoarse-voiced. In her cart is our last load of laundry, cleaned and pressed. She has brought us a salted hide of codfish the length of a man’s arm.

  We kiss, and there is no need to talk. The silence of our solidarity sits in my chest like a heavy stone. “I called for you in the night,” she finally whispers.