The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  It occurs to me again that it is no accident that God has given me Farid; He knows that I will need the help of so talented a self-portrait of God. I signal, “But knowing that he could escape through the door, why would the killer turn back for the cellar?”

  “Maybe he heard someone in the bathhouse…more Christians. Or perhaps, yes… perhaps he was too large or awkward to fit through the passageway. In all probability, he had never been that way before. He may have assumed he could fit. But then he discovered…”

  Farid’s hands fall to his sides. He signals weakly that his diarrhea is worsening. Ashamed of my own good health, I lead him to the outhouse. The night air hits us, dry and chill. His face contorts in pain as I wash his raw behind. Fighting dread, I think: not only do I not know how the killer escaped, but now I must battle once again for the life of another. Looking inside myself into Farid’s future, I see the Angel of Death, a shadow of a thousand gaping eyes, standing at my friend’s deathbed. Skeletal hands clutch a sword with a bitter drop suspended at the pointed tip. As Farid sees this hideous being before him, he opens his mouth in terror, sculpts a deaf man’s clucking scream. Quickly, the Angel of Death flings his foul-tasting offering inside.

  And from this drop, Farid dies and discolors and putrefies.

  There will be no escape.

  My friend’s rag-doll body leans on me as we shuffle back inside. “Farid, then where in God’s name did the killer hide when I burst in? The door was locked. There was no one in the cellar. I swear, no one!”

  As he gestures a poetic phrase about the will of Allah, I grab an oil lamp hanging from the central beam and head downstairs. Just as he said, drippings of blood and footprints stain the floor and walls of the tunnel, and there are finger-shadows in groups of five where the killer has felt his way forward. As it becomes necessary to crawl, matted bloodstains revealing a woven imprint of fabric are reflected back to me, must have been made by knees pressed to stonework. At the tightest spot, a slashing stain seems to indicate that a hand had reached desperately ahead. When the tunnel begins to open outward, when I can stand again, there is nothing. No bloody footsteps or finger-shadows.

  The killer turned back. Or disappeared.

  Chapter XI

  Farid places his hand against the wall to secure his fragile steps down the cellar stairs. He comes to me, squats down on his haunches to fight the pain carving through his gut, signals, “Now that you know the killer didn’t leave through the secret door, tell me the sequence of your movements after you discovered Uncle…everything.”

  It is the magic of words gestured to a friend which gifts me with insight; after I’ve recounted all, the solution comes to me freely. It seems as if it were in me all along, hiding, curled like a sleeping cat in an unseen corner: “The genizah!”

  Farid nods as if reading a verse of wisdom. With his hands, he says, “The killer must have hid there as you called through the door for your family. When you burst in, he was lying with the books, hugging the darkness. Later, when you went upstairs to get nails and a hammer, you paused to scare away a robber, to gaze down the street at the mob. You were dizzy and sat for a time. He must have used those moments to escape through your mother’s door to Temple Street.”

  “Oh God…I didn’t look…I mean, it didn’t occur to me to look because I thought at first Old Christians had killed him. They would not have known of the genizah.”

  “We must check,” Farid signals. “We can afford no mistakes.”

  Opening the lid of this hiding place with the key taken from behind the Bleeding Mirror, I lift out our manuscripts and letters—our sack of coins, as well. Inside the now denuded pit, it is then easy to spot the blood stains. They cover the floor like brown shadows of scattered leaves, bear the woven imprint of pressed fabric.

  When I turn to Farid, I signal my interpretation of the stains: “The killer was lying on his right side, with his body folded around the pile of manuscripts. Hence all the stains on the floor from the bloody clothing. His legs were tucked up toward his chest, and the tips of his sandals made the smudges on the eastern base. His left elbow was held back against the northern side and left the petal-sized fabric imprint near the top rim. His right arm, held out, was holding his shohet’s knife. As he was lying here, waiting for me to leave, he sliced the blade against the southern side a few times, gifting the plaster with the faint lines of blood.”

  Farid nods his approval.

  To myself, I whisper, “Diego.”

  My friend reads my lips, signals, “What about him?”

  “With his size, he might not fit in the crawlspace leading from the cellar to the bathhouse.”

  “True. But even Father Carlos might have trouble.”

  “Maybe. But look, Diego said he’d be back tonight with a man who wanted to sell Uncle a Hebrew manuscript. What if he told me that only to buy himself some time? I have to find him. Maybe he’s trying to escape even now. And I promise to look for your father. I’ll go to his secret mosque after Diego’s apartment.”

  As I lift the books and letters back into the genizah, Farid shuffles to me, takes my arm. “You shouldn’t go near the Rossio.”

  “I’ll descend to the Moorish Quarter from the Graça neighborhood. It’ll be fine.”

  “Speak only Portuguese.” When I nod, his fingers say, “And take my best dagger. The one from Baghdad which can split even a Sufi’s thinnest thought in two. Get it from my bedroom.”

  “What will you use?” I gesture.

  “One of my father’s. The long one from Safed. He would want…”

  I nod as Farid’s gestures tumble toward grief-stricken silence. We face each other across the distance of the dying. We both know that after a time, my hands will not be able to reach him. He will free-fall just like Mordecai and my father into the black-flame hands of Dumah, the soul-keeper of the world beyond. Farid quivers his hand by his gut, our signal for terror, then punches a weak fist against his chest; he is saying that his spiritual dikes are failing and he cannot continue alone.

  When we hug, he has the sick-soft petal feel of Mordecai. His ribs, hard and cold, ripple outward as if seeking to emerge. I hear my uncle warn me: Berekiah, do not abandon the living for the dead! I signal, “I’m going to go for a doctor. The hunt for Diego will have to wait. If you should…”

  “No doctors!” Farid interrupts. “All the Christians know is bloodletting.”

  “I’ll find an Islamic one.”

  “Where?” he gestures skeptically.

  “Somewhere…I’ll go wherever I have to.”

  We argue for a time. But it is only a show; we both know that Dr. Montesinhos was one of the last who faithfully practiced the wisdom of Avicenna and Galen. Who could I find now who would risk illness to visit a poor and deaf weaver of rugs? He waves away my words with flapping motions. He moans as I wash his arms and legs with water. His skin is free of sores. It is not plague, not the sweating sickness. He is being sucked dry of life. Suddenly, he pushes me away. “Go find Diego!” he gestures angrily. “You’re only wasting time with me.”

  “Farid, will you do what I say?” I ask with my hands.

  He stills my request with a descending wave of gestures: “You have no oil of life that can be poured into my lamps.”

  “Your poetry is of no interest right now,” I signal back. When he continues to protest, I raise my hand to feign a threat of violence. He smiles at the absurdity.

  With a descent linked to the inevitable, I think: This is the last time I will see him happy.

  I lock the genizah and place its key back in the eel bladder. “Upstairs,” I tell Farid.

  “What do you have in mind?” he signals.

  “Patience.”

  In the kitchen, I boil an egg, pour salt on it and force him to down it with boxwood and verbena tea. Together, we suffer an hour of automatic chewing and agonized heaving. I feed him charcoal ash, more liquid till his belly is distended. On my instructions, he hugs his legs to his chest, an
d I give him a strong enema of linseed decocted in barley water, another of barley water and a single drop of arsenic. Once he’s clean, Cinfa brings us from the cellar a special incense of poppy and camphor intended to induce drowsiness. Farid wheezes as he inhales. I talk him to sleep with the fables of Kalila and Dimna told me by Esther in my childhood.

  After I grab the dagger from Baghdad from under his mattress, I climb through the cool air of the sixth night of Passover into the upper streets of the Alfama to find Diego. Just before I reach his townhouse, however, I spot a man of towering stature looming in the darkness across the street. He is leaning back against the flaking wall of the cobbler’s workshop, wears a wide-brimmed hat and a dark cloak which curtains his body down to his booted feet. He is at least a hand’s length taller than I am, well over six feet, a height almost never seen amongst the Portuguese. Straight hair falls to his shoulders. His right hand grips a rawhide riding whip.

  He can only be the Northerner about whom I was warned.

  His head raises up suddenly, and he stands upright; he has spotted me. We share a look in which I sense that he knows who I am. Neither of us make a move, however. Questions seem to root my feet to the cobbles: is he here to kill Diego or merely waiting to collect the payment he was promised by this thresher for the murder of Uncle?

  What must he be wondering about me?

  I don’t stay to learn the answers; they must come from Diego himself, and clearly, he is not in his apartment or this Northerner would not be waiting so diligently outside. I back away and rush toward the Moorish Quarter, checking over my shoulder now and again to make sure I’m not being followed.

  In the nighttime streets of Lisbon, harsh orange lights spray from the windows of taverns and brothels. Every time I hear a sound, my heartbeat leaps as if toward a secret refuge; it is that time of night when all noises and objects seem to have turned into oracles foreseeing death.

  The secret mosque which Samir frequents is in the second floor of a blacksmith’s workshop near the old Moorish bazaar. The great wooden door, carved with knotted patterns and centered by a horseshoe knocker, is locked. A dead goldfinch, of all things, lies on the cobbles below, a tear of blood near its beak. After a second tap with the knocker, a candlelight blossoms in the window above. “Who is it?” comes a woman’s hissing whisper.

  “Pedro Zarco. I’m looking for Master Samir.”

  The shutters bang closed. After a few seconds, a man in long underwear, with the wiry frame and squinting eyes of a Sufi ascetic, appears in a doubtful crack of doorway. Lit by a fluttering candle flame, his cheeks show hollow under the crescent moons of his cheekbones.

  “I’m looking for Master Samir,” I begin. “He comes here…”

  “Who are you?” he asks in Portuguese. His voice is deep, sonorous, as if cut from granite.

  “A friend. Pedro Zarco. We live on opposite ends of the same courtyard. If he’s with you, tell him I’m…”

  “He’s not here.” He speaks gruffly, as if being seen with me is a risk.

  “Do you know where he’s gone?”

  “When the pyre started, we scattered. He ran home for Farid. Wait.” He closes the door and bolts it. Footsteps trail off, then return in a rush. When the doorway squeals open, dangling sandals are offered to me. “Samir ran off so fast that he left these,” he explains.

  The knowledge that Farid’s father, too, must be dead, prompts me to run to Senhora Tamara’s bookstore and home in Little Jerusalem—to find out about the ‘storybook from Egypt’ which was offered to her.

  There comes no answer to my knocks at her door, however. My feet turn me toward home. My body has the emptiness of a cavern, and the night air resonates inside my chest as if inside a leaden bell. I must eat something and pray for nezah, the lasting endurance which emanates at every moment from God into the Lower Realms.

  At home, I wash my face, eat some stale matzah and two apples, then sit in front of the hearth and chant.

  Beyond my prayers, solitude and slumber descend, catch me in their net.

  Suddenly before me are Uncle’s hands, gesturing wildly at the back of the hearth in a language I cannot fathom. Sweat beads on my forehead. A face suddenly leans toward me. Distended with dancing shadows, it burns with an orange light. My heartbeat leaps. I rear back, jump to my feet.

  “Berekiah, I’ve brought the man I told you about.” It is Diego, lit by the hearth. He unfurls his hand. “This is Isaac of Ronda.”

  I take deep breaths to calm myself, see that Diego’s bodyguard stands with his back to us at the kitchen door. Isaac himself has the gaunt, dim face shared by so many of the New Christian merchants. Draped in scarlet robes, his shoulder-length straight hair is topped by a crested purple cap from which a long dark plume is arching back. When we shake hands, he stares boldly into my eyes as if trying to convince me of his strength or beckon me to share his bed. Peasants sometimes behave in such a way, and I realize that he may have only recently come into money.

  My sudden descent from the dreams of half-sleep has left me heavy in body. I light two more oil lamps above our table to give me time to recover my strength. “Have you seen my mother or Esther?” I ask Diego, confused about the time and place into which I have awoken.

  “Undoubtedly, they are asleep,” he says. “Dawn will be with us in a few hours. I thought it was safer to come now, however. I suspected you’d still be up.”

  The illumination from the lamps has given our shadows more restful, human proportions. I beckon my guests to sit. “Some brandy, perhaps?”

  My offer is accepted. Isaac clamps his lips onto his cup, jerks his head back and downs his drink as if it were water. “Toothache,” he says. “Dulls the pain.”

  “We have some oil of cloves if you’d prefer,” I say.

  “Thank you. But I’ve got some myself.” He reaches in his pouch, takes out a vial and rubs the liquid across his gums. His hands are thin, elegant, his nails immaculately pared. As of yet, it seems, only his hands have had time to adapt to riches. Soon, his lips will learn to caress the wine from his cup, and when he shakes hands, his will descend like a peacock feather in a soft breeze.

  “Diego, where have you been?” I ask. “I went looking for you.”

  “With a friend. I thought it was safer than going home.”

  “It was. That Northerner…I saw him outside your townhouse.”

  “A Northerner?” Isaac asks in a voice of surprise.

  “Blond, tall, with a rawhide riding whip of the kind made in Castile,” I reply.

  Diego shrugs. “I shall not go home. Perhaps he will grow weary of waiting for me and simply leave.”

  “What do you suppose he wants?” Isaac asks.

  Diego brings his hands up over his face and shudders, stares me straight in the eyes with a look of dread. “We suspect that he wants to kill me. Some enemy whom we, the friends of Master Abraham, have made without being aware of it.”

  Isaac fiddles nervously with the hair falling over his ears. “I was sorry to hear of your Uncle Abraham’s death,” he says. His Andalusian accent is thick, his voice deep, slow and graveled like many of his kinsmen.

  I say, “I have heard that you have a safira to sell that was cut by Judah Ha-Levi.”

  He paraphrases one of the poet’s most famous verses: “‘I shall not rest until the blood of the prophet Zechariah finds peace.’” He gives me a probing look which seems to seek understanding of my own motives.

  “My uncle was interested?” I question, wondering how to categorize this Isaac of Ronda.

  “Very,” Diego says.

  Isaac adds, “He said he would raise enough money to pay me for it over the next few days. But now I…”

  “How did you get the safira into Portugal?” I question.

  “It was always here. I bought it from a friend in Porto. He was about to burn it. I couldn’t let that happen. I’m sure you understand.”

  “If you don’t buy it, Berekiah, I’m afraid another person may get it wh
o doesn’t have your understanding of its importance,” Diego observes.

  “So you’re no longer considering it at all?” Isaac asks Diego.

  “I was really only interested in order to help Master Abraham until he raised enough money. I prefer Latin manuscripts, myself. Far safer. So I must defer to Berekiah.”

  “Was anyone else interested in the book?” I ask.

  “I have made several contacts,” Isaac replies. “But no one seems ready to make an offer.”

  “Not even Senhora Tamara, the bookseller in Little Jerusalem?” I enquire.

  “She wanted nothing to do with it. Isn’t buying anything in Hebrew at present—not even translations from Hebrew. After what happened, you understand.”

  Diego says, “Simon, among others, seemed to believe it could fetch a large price elsewhere. In Genoa or Constantinople or Ragusa. Even in Morocco.”

  “Simon Eanes, the fabric importer?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Diego replies.

  My heartbeat sways me from side to side. Were they in competition over books? Was that it?

  A perverse desire twists in my gut and rises through my mouth as a devilish prayer that the murderer not be Simon—that I may be granted the privilege of revenge.

  Diego pats my shoulder and continues in a wistful tone, “Hard to believe so much effort for manuscripts that we once could take out from our libraries. Our heritage seems to be falling into private hands. One day, all our writings will belong to Christian nobles and be locked away in golden chests and glass display cases.”

  “I’m willing to sell it cheap,” Isaac says. The pitch of his voice jumps in order to tempt me. “Or to make a trade even. A silver candelabrum at this point would be enough. I want no more delay in getting back to Ronda.”

  “You understand that I can’t fulfill any verbal agreement my uncle may have made,” I explain. “We’ll need all our savings just to eat. But tell me this—did he say who was helping him buy his manuscripts and smuggle them from Portugal?”