“I told them you were not a cheater.” Jehiel danced along happily at Papa’s side. “I knew you would never do a wrong thing, Papa.”
“Ah, but I did, my son. I am guilty of coin clipping. Furthermore, I allowed my father to go to prison for it. It would be wrong of me to deny my guilt. And useless. For I am to be tried for my crime.”
“But you said ‘full clemency,’” I interrupted heatedly. “And that means you are forgiven, does it not?”
“By the Duke, yes. But he has remanded me to my own people for justice and punishment. I am now bound over to the Wad Kellilah.”
“That is not fair!” I cried. “He gives with one hand and takes away with the other.”
“Stop your ranting,” Papa ordered me severely. “I have done a grievous thing. I deserve to be punished.”
“Just for clipping a little bit of gold off the edge of some coins?” I asked.
“In any other city in Italy I would have lost my head for clipping that little bit of gold. Or at least had both my hands cut off. Here, look at this.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a gold coin. “What do you see?”
“I see a ducat,” I answered stupidly.
“Give it to Jehiel,” he ordered me impatiently. “Maybe he has better vision. What do you see, my son?”
“I see a strange bird, an eagle with two heads and two bodies,” the little boy replied.
“That is the Este double eagle,” Papa explained. “Now turn the coin over and tell me what you see on the other side.”
“I see a picture of the Duke, the one who taught us how to play —” He stopped short before uttering the cursed word.
“So we have the Duke’s emblem and the Duke himself. Now, Madonna Grazia . . .” He turned to me, still stern. “Why do you suppose the Duke’s picture is on the coin?”
“Because he is vain,” I answered, which earned me a smile.
“That picture stands for the Duke himself, who guarantees personally the amount of gold the coin contains. Now reverse the metaphor. When I tamper with the Duke’s currency it is akin to tampering with the man himself.”
This line of reasoning baffled me and I must have shown it, for Papa once again turned irritable. “Sit still, Grazia, and listen carefully. The Emperor himself granted to the Duke’s ancestor the privilege of minting Ferrarese coins. From that time on, the Estes’ lifeblood — their credit — has depended upon the integrity of the coinage. Do you know what that means?”
“It means that the coin is exactly what it pretends to be — no more, no less. Like a man of integrity,” I replied readily.
“That is why I tell you that to clip the Ferrarese ducat is like taking a piece of flesh out of the Duke himself,” Papa explained. “Do you understand now why my crime is so serious?”
I did. But what he called my “lawyer’s mind” began to search for a loophole in his logic. And, to be sure, I found one.
“But Papa, even a stern jurist like Seneca makes it a condition of any crime less than murder that the first offense is to be treated lightly. For, having not committed the crime before, the perpetrator should be given the benefit of the doubt that he did not, the first time, understand the gravity of his offense . . .”
He held up a hand to silence me. “Unfortunately for your case, daughter, this is not my first offense,” he advised me in a much gentler tone.
“You have clipped coins before?” I asked.
“No, daughter. But I have gambled before to excess and, in my passion, caused untold havoc for myself, my family, and for all the Jews in Ferrara. They forgave me then. But to allow the same passion to drive me into crime for a second time — that is not forgivable.”
“What did you do that other time, Papa?” I asked. And when he remained silent, I added, “We must know.”
“Very well.” He nodded. “Since you share my disgrace, it is only just that you should share my secrets. Come.” And he led us up the staircase to my sleeping room, where he settled us on the bed, one on each side. Then he began his confession.
“The events I speak of took place in Ferrara when you, my daughter, were still a babe in swaddling clothes and you” — he drew Jehiel closer to him — “were only a hope in my heart. It was that season when carnevale fever takes hold, those weeks before Lent when even princes give themselves over to feasting and wenching and whatever else satisfies their appetites.
“Now, Duke Ercole d’Este never was a womanizer. Nor a glutton. Nor a brawler. But, as you children have cause to know, he does have one besetting vice . . .”
“Gambling,” I whispered.
Papa nodded his confirmation and continued: “How else does such a man choose to indulge himself during carnevale but in an orgy of gambling? And what better place for it than on his golden bucentaur, where the guests can be sequestered from the eyes of the curious?
“We gambled for three days and three nights. As the gilded boat wound its way slowly up the Po, the stakes gradually mounted,” Papa continued. “On the final day hundreds of ducats were being wagered on each throw of the dice. By the time the ship sailed into port one man, a merchant named Ambrogio, had been ruined. And a young Jew ‘with golden hands’ had won three thousand gold ducats.”
Papa paused to allow us to digest the magnitude of the numbers. Then he continued.
“The following day, Ambrogio’s son, crazed by the overnight disappearance of his inheritance, ‘stolen’ (as he believed) by a cheating Jew, made his way to the banco owned by the Jew’s family. He stormed into the place waving an unsheathed dagger, and before anyone knew what was happening, he fell upon the first young Jew he encountered and stabbed him to death.”
Instinctively, I covered my eyes with my hands as if to block out the terrible picture. But Papa gently reached over and took away my blindfold, as if to say, “You wanted the truth. Now you must face up to it.” And there was more to come.
“The worst of it was,” he continued, “that in his rage for vengeance the young Christian had mistaken his victim. The Jew he killed was not the dealer with golden hands. The Jew who went down was his innocent brother. In case you have not already guessed,” he went on in a low voice, “I am the Jew with the golden hands. The boy who went down in my place was my brother, Davide, the true dei Rossi firstborn.”
The revelation struck me dumb. I looked at Jehiel. He too was speechless. But Papa had one more thing to tell, and he gathered himself together to give us the coda of his tale.
“In time the tempers of the citizens cooled. But not the bitterness of the slain son’s family toward his slayer, the gambling son with the golden hands. The daily sight of those cursed hands served only to remind them of the dead firstborn on whom all their hopes had centered. With each day that passed their loathing of the living son mounted. His very presence in the room raised a stink in their nostrils. Driven by rage and grief, they decided to cut him off from the family, as a surgeon amputates a gangrenous limb so that it will not infect the healthy part of the body. The gambler was exiled from Ferrara, sent off to a distant branch of the family bank in Mantova with his wife and his infant daughter. Before he left in disgrace, he took a solemn vow never to gamble again in this life.”
But he had gambled again. With terrible consequences. And now “the Jew with the golden hands” — my father — was about to be judged by the Wad Kellilah. What punishment they might choose to inflict, we dared not wonder.
11
Within a day of my grandfather’s release from the Duke’s dungeon, the Wad Kellilah assembled in the dei Rossi private synagogue to judge my father. As they shuffled through the courtyard, I recognized many of them as the same people who had come a few months before to plead for Papa’s help in the matter of the Jewish badges, and later, when he had performed so excellently on their behalf, had returned bearing sweetmeats and trinkets. Now, they stared through him as if he were a p
ane of Venetian glass. Where was their gratitude? I berated Jehiel, having nowhere else to vent my spleen.
“It seems, sister,” he replied in his grave little way, “that gratitude is like the butterfly. It bursts out of its chrysalis, flutters, and dies within a day.” (That child knew his Pliny.)
Lest I slander the members of the council, I should point out how ill prepared they were to deal with my father’s case. Their true function was to arbitrate the civil disputes that plagued the Jewish community — mainly to allocate liability for the tax burden imposed by the Estes on the community. On the criminal side, their jurisdiction held sway over paternity suits, divorce settlements, and such domestic matters deemed sufficiently minor by the Christian authorities to leave to the Jews to settle among themselves. To stage the trial of a serious crime — and to arrive at their judgment with all Ferrara watching to see what constituted Jewish justice — must have weighed heavily on those reluctant Solomons. Certainly they hardly appeared to look forward to their task as they filed past us in the cortile.
The banco was closed that day. No lessons were given. Jehiel and I hung about the chamber as silent as two shadows, waiting for the verdict of the council. Only when the council members finally emerged at dusk did we give vent to our feelings, rushing forward to throw ourselves into Papa’s arms, weeping and hugging him with abandon. We knew such displays to be odious in that household but we were beyond caring.
Papa kept countenance through it all. With solemn dignity he gathered us into his arms and gently conducted us into a small side room that we might speak together privately.
“What I have to tell you children is not something you will wish to hear,” he began. “Nor do I wish to tell it.” Then he took a moment to wipe away my tears before he told us the verdict. “I am to be put under a cherem. Do you know what that means?” We did not.
“It is an excommunication from the faith — the community — the family,” he explained.
“Is it like a niddui, Papa?” I asked. Once in Mantova the silk merchant Mordecai had been placed under a niddui for forging a receipt, and I remembered the poor man clad in black from head to toe and ignored by everyone for an entire month.
“No, my daughter,” Papa replied. “The cherem is a longer punishment and more severe. By its terms, I am banished from all concourse with the synagogue, even denied a place in consecrated ground should I die. And you along with me, unless you agree to renounce me.”
“Renounce you?” I placed my hand on my heart, à la Dido. “Never!”
Jehiel did not even dignify the idea with a response. To him, our refusal of the offer was a foregone conclusion. “What will happen to us under this cherem, Papa?” he asked.
“You will be banished from Ferrara along with me. Like me, you will be prohibited from entering the sacred precincts of any synagogue for any purpose. And, like me, you will suffer the contempt of your fellow Jews. If you cleave to me.”
“Of course we cleave to you,” Jehiel answered with just a trace of impatience in his high, boy’s voice. “Who else would we cleave to? Poor old Uncle Joseph or Grandmother or —”
“All right, all right,” Papa cut him off. “You are decided then not to renounce me?”
We nodded solemnly.
“In that case, I must explain to you what will happen tomorrow. Since I cannot keep you from it, I had best prepare you . . .” Yet he did not speak.
In that moment of silence, the question that had been bedeviling me rose to my tongue. “Why did you do it, Papa?” I found myself asking.
“Why indeed?” he asked of the air.
“We wonder why you had to steal gold from the edges of the coins when there is so much of it in the strongboxes of the banco,” Jehiel explained.
“I’ve wondered about that too, my son,” Papa replied. “Why did I choose to rob the Duke rather than my parents?” He paused, bemused by his own question, then continued in a much brisker tone. “What I do know is that I was a double-damned fool to make such a choice. The Duke forgave me,” he added.
“I knew he was a good man when I played Zara with him,” Jehiel announced. Then, realizing that he had trodden on forbidden territory, he quickly added, “I never speak of it, Papa. Never.”
“Good,” Papa commended him. “Keep your silence. And stay away from dice. If I were you, I would prefer calcio — kicking the ball is better for your muscles and your purse.”
“Very well, Papa,” Jehiel agreed. “But who am I to play calcio with? Grazia is the only person who can kick hard enough. Asher dribbles the ball like pee-pee. And —”
“Enough!” Papa held up his hand. “Let me speak of tomorrow while I still have the heart for it. What you will see may seem cruel to you. But remember, the civil punishment for the crime of coin clipping is death by dismemberment. Do you know what quartering is?”
We were not certain that we did.
“When a man is quartered, his body is chopped into four pieces by the executioner.” Jehiel buried his face in my shoulder when he heard this. But Papa would not stop. “After his body has been divided by the axe, the head is mounted on a pike and displayed for all the world to see atop the town walls. That might have happened to me, had not the Duke forgiven me, as you put it. That is the fate I escaped. Whatever you see and hear in the community’s synagogue tomorrow, remember that I deserve it all — and more.”
We both agreed to remember. But, of course, with no clear idea of what we were about to witness.
“One last thing,” Papa went on. Would there be no end? “I have inflicted grievous shame on my parents by my folly, and not for the first time in my life. For this, I must also pay a penalty, and this time, the penalty falls upon you two as well.”
Dio mio, I thought, we are all going to be beaten together in La Nonna’s sala di giustizia.
“What are they going to do to us, Papa?” asked Jehiel.
“Banishment is their judgment, my son,” he replied. “It is at their request that the Kellilah has banished us from Ferrara.”
“Where will we go, Papa? Who will take us in?” Jehiel bit his lip to keep from crying.
“We will go to Bologna,” Papa answered. “I have been offered a post there. As a clerk in the banco.”
“A clerk?” I could not imagine it. Clerks were inferior beings, only a jot above servants.
“A clerk,” Papa repeated forcefully. “But a clerk with two hands and two feet and two beautiful children. I call that a gambler’s luck.”
Of course he was right about everything — the seriousness of his crime, the extent of his folly, and the magnitude of his good fortune. Nonetheless, the next day when they led him forward in the synagogue, hooded like a blind leper, I froze with dread. And when they pulled off the hood and revealed his head completely shaven, I could not stifle a scream.
After that he was paraded up and down the aisles barefoot and shirtless while the congregation cursed him and slapped at him and spat upon him. Yes, Danilo, they spat upon my father. And I sat up in the gallery and watched the wads of spittle thicken on his bare chest.
After two full rounds of this, some of the meaner ones began to aim higher . . . at his cheeks . . . his eyes. He could do nothing to cleanse his face for his hands were bound behind his back.
When they were done spitting and cursing they sat him down to listen to the terms of the cherem. Words upon words washed over him. But no one of all those believers made a move to wash away the clots of yellow phlegm that covered his face.
After what seemed like hours the time came for the actual ritual of excommunication. A funeral bier was brought in. Then the cantor came down the aisle and laid upon the bier a dead cock, which continued to drip blood down the front of the casket as the ceremony progressed.
Next, a fringed tallis was laid upon the bier. With a gasp, I recognized it as Papa’s prayer shawl, the one my mother
had embroidered for him with her own hands. With slow deliberation the shammash lit four white tapers and placed them at the four corners of the bier as is done at funerals. Then suddenly a weird cacophony broke out — a din of chanting and dancing around my father while the rabbi and his minions tossed burnt ashes over his head and rubbed them into his cheeks, all this accompanied by the cantor blowing the great ram’s horn over and over, each time louder and wilder than the last.
When the adults had worn themselves out, the children got their turn to dance around Papa, chanting curses and forcing bursts of noise into his ears from inflated bladders.
At last, the lust for spectacle having been satisfied, Papa was led to a seat below the ark. And there, the recentor, standing over him with the scroll of the law in his hand, pronounced the prayer for the dead:
Yisgadal v’yiskadash, Shmay rabo.
Byolmo dee v’hir usay . . .
As the rabbi repeated the ancient words, Papa was led out followed by his bier, the dead cock dripping blood on the feet of the pallbearers.
As far as the Jews were concerned, my father was now dead.
12
Foul weather, double-dealing barge captains, rapacious innkeepers, treacherous waterways — these are but a few of the conditions of the journey from Ferrara to Bologna that have been known to reduce strong men to tears. They say there is not a captain on the Reno canal who will budge from his moorings until every cubit of deck space is covered by the behind of a paying customer. I had heard tales of travelers forced to sit out days in the foul inns of Malalbergo (well named) until their vessel was full up. Not to mention the wicked currents of the Reno canal and the treacherous mud flats of the Ferrarese marshes into which whole boatloads of passengers have been known to sink without a trace. Yet to us those treacherous marshes presented their most benign aspect that day, a thick greenish-gold carpet of undulating reeds as far as the eye could see, crisscrossed by narrow waterways that seemed to be incised on the marsh like graffiti patterns.
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi Page 12