 The year is 1506, and the streets of Lisbon are seething with fear and suspicion when Abraham Zarco is found dead, a naked girl at his side. Abraham was a renowned kabbalist, a practitioner of the arcane mysteries of Jewish mysticism at a time when the Jews of Portugal were forced to convert to Christianity. Berekiah, a talented young manuscript illuminator, investigates his beloved uncle’s murder, and discovers in the kabbalah clues that lead him deep into the labyrinth of secrets in which the Jews of Portugal sought to hide from their persecutors.(...)
Quotes
“Zimler writes with such detail and polarity that the reader feels transported across space and time…a delicious slice of sixteenth-century life and a story well told.” – London Jewish News.
“Explosive, prophetic and unquestionably brave.” – Newsday
“A moody, tightly constructed historical thriller that is both entertaining and instructive.” – The New York Times
“An international bestseller and a riveting literary murder mystery, this novel is also a harrowing picture of the persecution of sixteenth-century Portuguese Jews, and, in passing, an atmospheric introduction to the hermetic Jewish tradition of kabbalah mysticism.”
“Drenched in atmosphere and detail… Zimler conveys the surrealistic nightmare of being a Jew in the age of the Inquisition.” – The Wall Street Journal
“The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon is a gift for all of Mankind” – The Midwest Book Review
Chapter I
When I was eight, in the Christian year of fourteen ninety-four, I read about the sacred ibises who helped Moses cross an Ethiopian swamp riddled with snakes. I drew a scythe-beaked creature in scarlet and black with my Uncle Abraham’s dyes and inks. He held it up for inspection. “Silver eyes?” he questioned.
“Reflecting Moses, how could they be any other color.”
Uncle kissed my brow. “From this day on, you will be my apprentice. I will help you change thorns to roses, and I swear to protect you from the dangers which dance along the way. The pages that are doors will open to our touch.”
How could I have known that I would one day fail him so completely?
Imagine being outside time. That the past and future are revolving around you, and you cannot place yourself properly. That your body, your receptacle, has been numbed free of history. Because I feel this way, I can see clearly when and where the evil started: four days ago, on the twenty-second of Nisan, in our Judiaria Pequena, the Little Jewish Quarter of the Alfama district of Lisbon.
It was a jeweled morning much like any of the opal beads on the necklace of that spring month. The year was fifty-two sixty-six for the New Christians. April the sixteenth of fifteen and six for the accursed Christians of heart.
From the darkness of early Wednesday morning, hiding here in the cellar, I remember the dawn of Friday as if its sunlight heralded the first notes of an insane fugue.
Concealed behind one of these notes of melody, camouflaged in memory, is the face I seek.
The day of our first Passover seder began dim and dry, like all the dawns of late. We hadn’t been blessed with rain in more than eleven weeks. And would have none today.
As for the plague, it had been sending shivers through our bodies and souls since the second week of Heshvan—more than seven months now.
King Manuel’s half-made Christian doctors had resolved that cattle were perfect for soaking up the airborne essences that they blamed for the disease, and so two hundred dazed and overheated cows had been let loose to wander the streets.
Manuel himself had long fled our misery with most of the aristocracy. From Abrantes, three weeks earlier, he’d issued a decree establishing the construction of two new cemeteries outside the city walls for the scores who were taken to God each week.
The souls of the dead were beyond being encouraged by such a gesture, of course. And one could hardly blame the living for regarding the decree as simply one more indication of the King’s ineffectual pragmatism and cowardice. Was it a turning point? Certainly, daily life began to take on an edge of cruel and despairing madness. In the last three days, I’d seen a collapsed donkey blinded with his master’s dagger, his eyes spurting blood, and a girl of no more than five hurled shrieking from the rooftop of a four-story townhouse.
The poor, to dispel their hunger pangs, had taken to eating a mash of linen fibers and water.
I had just turned twenty years old. Proof that I was a little too devout for my own good was my belief that our city had been gifted generously with the stark significance of Torah. To me, there was a terrible, timeless beauty and horror to everything. Even the filthy feet of the recently deceased sticking out from the burlap of their sour-smelling plague carts possessed a sad and reverent grace. For they made our thoughts turn to Man’s mortality and our covenant with God.
Only Uncle Abraham had the confidence to disregard completely the goat-ribbed preachers roaming the streets screeching that God had abandoned Portugal and that the end of the world was but five weeks away (though it could be postponed, they noted, if we were generous with our copper coinage). With an irritated frown, he had told me, “Don’t you think that the Lord would show me a sign if He were about to close the last gate upon the Lower Realms?”
Father Carlos, a priest and family friend, could not yet be counted among those unfortunates who’d succumbed completely to the insanity gripping the city. But it seemed only a matter of days. “Drought and plague…they are the Devil’s twin birth!” he told me in a conspirator’s whisper as we stood in the archway of St. Peter’s Church.
I had brought my little brother, Judah, to him that morning for religious instruction in the ways of Christianity. The three of us were watching a candlelight procession of flagellants whipping their backs with leather scourges whose ends trailed wax balls laced with filings of tin and splinters of colored glass. Behind them marched friars from Lisbon’s monasteries unfurling blue and yellow pennons sewn with images of the Nazarene crucified. At the rear, proud-postured guildmen in flowing, silken fineries hoisted up litters bearing effigies of saints.
The crowds that had gathered to watch lined both sides of the street, forming two ragged ribbons against the dusty white façades of the townhouses as far as the cathedral. Shouts for water and mercy rang up like antiphonal choruses. All the variety of our town was there: horsemen and peasants, whores and nuns, beggars and black slaves—even blue-eyed sailors from the north.
Waifs and barking dogs suddenly began running past Father Carlos, Judah, and me to the west to keep up with the moving spectacle. The priest closed his eyes, murmured nervous prayers. I inhaled deeply on the chilly perfume of danger in the air. And tonight, I thought, into the unpredictable currents of this sea of madness, we will be launching the forbidden ship of Passover. Yes, our celebrations should have started exactly one week earlier. But most of the secret Jews, including our family, had postponed Passover in the hopes of sailing safely through the tainted waters of Old Christian gossip around us.
A filthy, mop-haired woodcutters standing near us suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs, “For heavenly rain, we must have more blood! Lisbon must be the Venice of blood.”
Judah pressed back against my legs, and I gripped his shoulder. Father Carlos rubbed his hands over his domed forehead, as if in defense. He was a corpulent man, squat, with soft, pale skin, a bulbous nose, and webs of rain veins on both his cheeks from too much drink. Few people took him seriously, but I found him a good friend. His droopy eyes settled on me and he said, “Men like nothing more than profaning the sacred, my boy.”
I was suddenly laden with sadness for our fate. The scent of Indian pepper turned me around, and blood splattered across my pants and Judah’s face. A shrieking initiate had pulled skin loose from his shoulder blade, was spraying spices over himself to capture the sting of God’s love. In my brother’s terrified eyes, I believed I recognized the look of a Hebrew child about to flee across the Red Sea. A fleeing premonition, unusual in its certainty, shook me: We Jews of Lisbon have waited too long to re-enact the Exodus, and Pharaoh has learned of our escape plans.
As I came to myself, Carlos hid his gaze in the wing of his cape and whisper-screamed, “That young initiate’s moans… You can hear the wailing of the Devil’s children in them!”
Judah was looking up at me with stunned, breathless curiosity. When tears caressed his eyes, I picked him up, wiped him, and tousled the locks of his coal-black hair. He hugged his arms around my neck. “Thanks ever so much,” I told Carlos. “Between you and these madmen I think we’ve had all the religious instruction we need for today.”
I lifted the woolen hood of Judah’s mantle over his head and patted him as he sobbed and sniffled. After the last penitent had dragged himself past our former synagogue, Carlos led us across the square. At the corner was our house, a single story of whitewashed stucco whose rectangular perimeter was traced with a rim of deep blue. An affinity between colors lifted my gaze to the gauzy turquoise of the dawn sky, then down to the spine of the roof, an horizon of mottled fawn-colored tile pierced near its center by our chimney, a soot-blackened white cone notched with air-holes. From its point rose the tin silhouette of a troubadour pointing east, toward Jerusalem. Thin scarfs of smoke from our hearth were wafting around him and unravelling into the breeze leading toward the river. “Just as well we cancel our lessons today,” Carlos said as I pulled open the gate of iron tracery that’s served both our home and the house belonging to my beloved friend Farid and his father. “I’ve got some unhappy business I’ve been putting off with your uncle.”
We stepped into the secret landscape of our courtyard. Enclosed by white façades and walls, paved with gray slate, it was centered by a venerable lemon tree circled by oleander bushes. Farid was standing on his stoop in his long underwear, barefoot, coming his hands back through the black locks falling to his shoulders. To me, he had always seemed gifted with all the attributes of a warrior poet of the Arabian desert—a slim, muscular build, sharp green, hawklike eyes, soft olive skin and an agile, unpredictable intelligence. The stubble he always left on his cheeks made him look sleepy but seductive, and men and women alike were often captivated by his dark beauty. Now, he signalled good morning to me with a twist to the forceful hands he’d developed as a weaver of rugs. Though deaf and mute from birth, he’d never had the least difficulty making himself understood to me in this way; as toddlers, we’d developed a language of gestured signs, undoubtedly because we were born just two days apart and grew up holding hands.
Returning my friend’s greeting, I led Father Carlos to the kitchen door, an ogival threshold exuberantly marked with a rim of green and rust mosaic stars. IN a doubtful voice, he said, “Might as well get it over with.”
Can a house possess a body, a soul? Ours was bent and fatigued from centuries of rain and sun, but fiercely protective of its residents.
As manuscript illuminators, Uncle Abraham and I had often modelled biblical dwellings on our home. For its walls we applied a milky ceruse, and to approximate the low and sagging chestnut wood ceilings that creaked alarmingly during the rains of Av and Tishri, we applied the rich brown made from vinegar, silver filings, honey, and alum. The sandy floor tiles that scratched one’s feet were given a moderated vermilion obtained from a marriage of quicksilver and sulfur.
Cracked foundations sloped the floors toward Mother’s tidy bedroom at the sunset side of the house, little more than a corridor but with the advantage of an entrance to Temple Street for her sewing clients. Facing sunrise was my aunt and uncle’s cozy, light-filled chamber. Between the two were the kitchen, centered by a great oaken table around which our lives passed, and the bedroom I shared with Judah and my little sister, Cinfa. Our fruit store, added on two centuries ago judging from the masonry, jutted out from this room toward Temple Street.
As Carlos and I stepped inside, he grimaced at the sour scent of fresh whitewash on the walls. While he and my little brother checked the cellar for Uncle, I went to my room to peer through its inner window into our store. Down the center aisle, beyond baskets of figs and dates, raisins and sultanas, bitter oranges, filberts and walnuts—all manner of fruit and nut then to be found in Portugal—were Cinfa and my mother, Mira, spooning olives from wooden barrels into ceramic bowls fro display. I leaned in and called out, “Blessed be He who has illuminated our Lisbon morning!”
Cinfa showed me a quick smile. A gangly, wild sort of girl, with a voice forever seemingly squeaked between knuckles jammed into her mouth, she’d been gifted with grace of late. Almost twelve she was, and an adult beauty was awakening in the secretive fullness of her lips, her high cheekbones and postures of reserve. The girl who had spent hours chasing hares and capturing tadpoles was giving way to one more interested in puzzling over the modest, hazel-eyed twin in the looking glass.
As Cinfa and I kissed, my mother offered me a dull, antagonist look. A small, puffy woman of lowered eye and bent shoulder, her contours were concealed as always inside a loose-fitting olive tunic and black apron. Her deep-brown hair, streaked a brittle gray at the front, was crowned by a toque of gray lace and clasped into a bun at the back of her head. The bun was tied with a black velveteen ribbon from Jerusalem given her years ago by her elder brother, my uncle Abraham. Its stringent hold seemed to draw the color from her face, which, over the last few years, had swollen into an expression of wan defiance against any possibility of happiness; she would forever be grieving her long-buried husband and first-born son, my elder brother Mordecai. To all who knew the playful young mother she’d been, her wasted state was a reminder that life saved its sharpest arrows for women, the bearers—and mourners—of departed children.
“Either of you seen Uncle?” I asked.
Cinfa shrugged. Mother licked her cracked lips as if displeased by my interruption, then shook her head.
Father Carlos and Judah met me in the kitchen. “No sign of him,” the priest said.
We sat together at the table to wait. Aunt Esther appeared suddenly at the courtyard door, dressed a high-collared black jupe that seemed to light her tawny face. Her dramatic, darkly outlined almond eyes opened in horror. “What are those stains?!” she demanded, pointing to my pants. “Has Judah been crying?” She clamped her jaw into an expression of judgment, glared at me while tucking wisps of henna-tinted hair under her crimson headscarf. Slender and tall, possessed of a deeply lined and shadowed beauty, she could dominate a room with a single glance down the length of her elegant nose.
“Just a little blood,” I began to explain to her. “The flagellants were…”
She thrust out her hand and sucked in on her cheeks so that she looked like a Moorish dancer. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it. Dear God, can’t you even clean yourselves? And whatever you do, don’t let your mother see Judah like that. We’ll never hear the end of it!”
“Yes, go wash,” Father Carlos agreed with a dismissing twist to his hand. He turned to Aunt Esther and added, “I told him it’s the first thing he should do when we got back.”
I shot the priest a dirty look. He curled his lips into a wry smile and lifted his eyebrows as if we were rivals for my aunt’s affection. To her, he said, ªNow, about my little problem…”
I took Judah with me to our bedroom and slipped off his clothes, then my own. As I cleaned him with the vinegar and water solution that my mother always insisted upon, his body went limp in my hands. A compact five-year-old, already muscular and possessed of seductive gray-blue eyes, he seemed destined to grow into a milk-skinned Samson.
Never one for bathing, he dashed back to the kitchen the moment I’d finished dressing him. When I entered the room, he was clinging to the fringe of Aunt Esther’s jupe while fingering his wooden top. She was preparing her beloved coffee with almond milk and honey the way she’d learned in her native Persia.
From outside the sour rumbling and creaking of refuse carts was suddenly drowned out by a woman’s shrieks. Opening the shutters to listen, I spotted a familiar vermilion carriage careening down the street. As always, the horses were caparisoned in blue-fringed silver cloth. The usual driver, an Old Christian with pockmarks cratering his cheeks, had been replaced, however, by a fair-haired Goliath in a wide-brimmed amethyst-colored hat. “Guess who’s coming,” I said.
Aunt Esther nudged me partially aside and peered out. “Oh dear, Dona Meneses. More work for Mira,” she grumbled. She squeezed my hand. “You shouldn’t stand here staring out at her.”
I rolled my eyes, turned away. The carriage pounded to a stop and the door squealed open. Dona Meneses’ pattering footsteps trailed toward the Temple Street entrance to my mother’s room. As she entered the house, she began to describe the qualities of the fabric she’d brought in false, lyric tones. Her voice trailed away to a soft murmur as my mother’s door was closed.
Aunt Esther leaned toward us as if to disclose a secret and said, “It’ll be a miracle if Mira can turn that hideous puce velvet she brought with her into anything presentable!” Marching to the hearth, she carried our matzah to the table with a linen mitten.
“It pays our debts,” I said.
“True. And with the drought…”
“It’s the Devil,” Father Carlos exclaimed suddenly in a voice of warning.
“I grant you that Dona menses isn’t lovely, but she’s hardly from the Other Side,” I replied.
The priest squinted his eyes and glared at me. His tongue darted between his thick, soft lips. “Not her, you fool! It’s the Devil who’s behind the plague and drought!”
“You’re an absolute lunatic,” Aunt Esther told him in Hebrew, with that frown of hers that could freeze bathwater. “And keep your voice down—we don’t want to scare her away.”
The bells of St Peter’s began tolling tierce. Father Carlos mumbled to himself as if succumbing to the religious call, said a quick grace and picked on a piece of warm matzah with his chubby fingers. In a tone of disgust, he continued in the Holy language, so that Judah wouldn’t understand, “You mean to say, Esther dear, that the Devil doesn’t exist?”
“I mean to say that if you scare my little nephew one more time with your nonsense…” And here, Aunt Esther lifted her iron poker from the fire and aimed its red-glowing tip toward the priest’s nose, “…I’ll see to it that you meet your Christian savior sooner than you intended! Find someone else to scare!”
“Your aunt has always had a way with threats,” Carlos whispered to me with a lecherous smile. “Remember her the day they dragged you out to be baptized in the cathedral? She cursed them in seven different languages…Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese…”
“We remember,” I interrupted, holding up my hand in a gesture of disapproval so that we could all avoid the memory. Too late; Esther’s eyes, dimmed by isolation, were focused on an interior landscape. She had slipped her hand below her crimson scarf, was tracing the outline of the cruciform scar given her on the accursed morning of our forced baptism. Then, she had fought hardest of all against the bailiffs sent by the King to drag the Jews to the cathedral. As an example, a guard had thrown her to the ground, pinned her legs and arms to the cobbles on the Rua de São Pedro. A Dominican friar had pressed a red-glowing iron cross vertically to her forehead. He’d shouted, so all could hear, “I hereby gift you with the sign of our Lord!”
As for me, I was covered with pig blood and sawdust by Christian children on my way home from the baptism ceremony. But they never learned of the gift they gave me; my burning humiliation summoned the grace of God to me, and I had the first ever of my visions.
This preternatural occurrence began when Farid saw me in the courtyard. Out of shame, I ran from him. As I reached the kitchen door, however, a presentiment of eyes watching over me forced me to stop. When I turned, a white light appeared to me in the sky, far away, above the Moor’s castle. As it drew closer, wings sprouted, and I saw that the luminescence had been but a supernal egg. A radiant heron of ruby red, black and white took form, and as it flew over the Little Jewish Quarter, wind from its flapping blew fiercely against me. When I looked down at myself, the blood and sawdust were gone.
Uncle told me that God had shown me my continued purity and had revealed the Christian stain to be simply an illusion. I answered, “It wasn’t God; it was just a bird.”
“But Berekiah,” he said, “God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze.”
Indeed he was right; at my darkest moments, the Lord has always appeared to me as a kind of bird, perhaps because I most easily see the beauty of creation in those creates gifted with flight.
Recalling other words of Uncle’s wisdom, I said now to Aunt Esther, “The Devil is just a metaphor. It’s religious language. You can’t expect all words to have everyday meanings.”
“As God is my witness, it’s too early for kabbalistic philosophy!” she answered.
Aunt Esther’s harsh tone of voice moved Judah to climb up next to me on the bench. His lips were pressed together into that slit of forced silence which Mother’s shrieks and slaps had taught him. Of late, he’d learned to do everything he could to avoid being her last, impossible burden—to tiptoe, not run, through childhood.
The trap door to our cellar, located at the southwest corner of the kitchen, suddenly opened. Uncle Abraham, my spiritual master, rose from the staircase, his forehead bathed in sweat and his hair waving off in a hundred different directions, as if he’d been caught in a spiritual storm. A small finchlike man of darting movements, his pointy face was centered by a long, angular nose that gave him an amusing look to strangers, but which connoted a probing intelligence to all those who knew him. His smooth dark skin, the color of cinnamon, seemed to highly his wild crest of silver hair and tufted eyebrows. Graying stubble softened his cheeks, and where they looped inward, added a shadowing of sagely age to his face. Always, but particularly after prayers, his eyes burned with that secret green light, that piercing strangeness, that distinguished him at once as a powerful kabbalist. “Who’s that?” he asked squinting. “Ah, it’s our friendly priest!”
“Where’d you come from?” demanded Carlos, still unused to my uncle appearing out of nowhere. “We looked in the cellar not five minutes ago. Sometimes I think you’re a lez.”
“What’s a lez?” Judah asked.
“A ghost that comes back to play tricks—a spirit jester,” I answered.
Uncle grinned appreciatively and wiggled his right hand in the air to show his five fingers; in Jewish lore, lezim were reputed to only have four. “My movements parallel life’s mysteries,” he said with a dismissive wave. Raising his eyebrows, he nodded inquisitively toward the muffled voices coming from the back of the house.
“Dona Meneses,” I explained. “She’s brought fabric for another dress. Purple, this time.”
He took coffee and, after a quick blessing, wolfed down a hard-boiled egg. We’d already finished shaharit, morning prayers, together, but he again wished me a good morning with a kiss on the lips. Lifting Judah onto his lap, he assaulted him with little popping kisses and growling noises. Not usually demonstrative, the coming of the Passover made Uncle giddy with affection.
“I just came to tell you that I decided not to sell the sapphire,” Carlos said with a sight that seemed to request forgiveness.
My master’s lips suddenly curled in that way that made him look menacing. He said, “I think you should reconsider.”
“You’re buying gemstones?” I asked. I looked to my aunt for her protest. But she was busy tracing her glance over a Book of Psalms she’d recently copied for an Old Christian nobleman, proofreading carefully. Turning back to Uncle, I added, “If we had that kind of money, we could close the store and leave this desert for a few weeks.”
My master gave me a challenging look. “A sapphire cut during the time of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol,” he said. He spoke in Hebrew except for the word safira in Portuguese.
Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a master Jewish poet of the eleventh century from Málaga. “I’m afraid I’ve lost the trail of your thoughts,” I said.
Petah et atsmehah shetifateh delet. Knock upon yourself as upon a door,” Uncle replied.
That was his condescending way of saying I was to keep quiet and look inside myself for an answer. “Way too early for your mystical advice,” I countered.
He answered by filling my cup with water. “Keep drinking and you won’t get angry. The fluids will carry the white bile from your system.”
“Any more liquid and I’ll drown,” I replied.
“You’ll drown you when disappear in God’s ocean.” Lifting a finger to his lips, he requested silence. Turning back to Carlos, he said in a grave tone. “The safira could be lost, you know.”
“My responsibility.”
My master lifted Judah from his lap and sat him on one of our Persian pillows. “Off you go,” he said. To Father Carlos, he added, “Lost forever, I mean. Your position puts you in danger.”
As he spoke, I realized that we weren’t talking about a gemstone at all. Safira was code for Sefer, Hebrew for book. He was undoubtedly negotiating to purchase a work of Rabbi Solomon Gabirol’s and smuggle it out of Portugal. But why talk in code inside our house, where we were safe from the spying eyes and ears of Old Christians?
Father Carlos nodded with a gesture of excuse and stood up to take his leave.
“One warning—I’m going to keep trying to convince you,” my master said with fierce determination in his voice.
The priest crossed himself with a trembling hand. Trying to mollify Uncle Abraham, he offered a misguided effort at humor and replied, “Your kabbalistic sorcery doesn’t scare…”
My master jumped up from the table, glaring at Carlos. Motion in the room seemed suspended by his rage. “I never practice magic,” he said, using the Hebrew term, kabbalah ma’asit, practical kabbalah, to designate this forbidden activity. “You should know that well, my friend.”
He was referring to the time Father Carlos had requested an amulet to kill a slanderer spreading rumors about the priest’s continued allegiance to the faith of Moses. Uncle had refused, of course, although he had personally appealed to Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, the King’s astronomer, to see that the evildoer was silenced. Now, he walked to the hearth and stared at the backs of his fingernails in the light of the fire. His topaz signet ring etched with the form of an ibis, symbol of the divine scribe, glowed with an inner sunset. “When Adam and Eve were born in Eden, they were covered with nail from head to toe as armor,” he said. Turning back to Carlos, he added, “And now, our fingernails are all that remain from this primal protection. A tiny border, don’t you think? Not much against he weapons of the Church.”
The priest shrugged off the implication and lowered his eyes.
“It won’t be enough to save you if they find out about the sapphire.”
“I need it,” Father Carlos said, a note of sadness in his voice. “Surely you should understand. It’s the last…” His words trailed away. He added dryly, “I should be going now. I’ve a Mass to prepare.”
“You bastard!” Uncle shouted. “Holding back a safira our children will need, that God will need!” When he turned the wall of his back to Carlos, the priest bowed his head as if to request forgiveness from the rest of us and left.
“You could be more understanding,” I said to my uncle. When he waved away my criticism, I added, “So why were you speaking in code with Carlos? There’s no chance Dona Meneses can hear us way back there. Besides, she must know we still practice Judaism. If it bothered her, she’d have reported us to the authorities by now.”
“The priest trusts no one. ‘Even the dead wear masks,’ he says. And the more I learn, the more I think he is right.” He scratched his scalp and frowned. “I’m going to pay my respects to Dona Meneses.” He shot me a commanding look and marched out.
“How quickly people forget,” Aunt Esther sighed.
“What do you mean?”
She dabbed some rosewater on her neck, then tied a linen kerchief around it. “The plague. It disappears for a couple years and people think it’s something now the Devil’s conjured up.” She brushed a trembling hand over her forehead, reconsidered her words. “Maybe it’s a kind of grace that we can forget. Imagine if…”
“Not a word, not a gesture, not a single lesion do I forget!”
Aunt Esther grimaced; she knew I was referring to my father and elder brother, Mordecai. During the winter of fifty-two sixty-three, a little more than three years ago, the knife of plague had peeled them open to the moist northern winds of Kislev. My father, lost under running black sores and pustules, shivered to death on the sixth day of Hanukkah. A month later, the living skeleton that had been Mordecai was dead in my arms.
My aunt and I sat in silence. After a few minutes, Dona Meneses left our house with the large basket of fruit that she always took away from her visits. Esther said, “I’ll go see if Cinfa needs help in the store,” then trudged out of the room with that stiff, forward-tilting walk of hers. I watched Judah playing in the doorway with his top until Uncle returned to me and said, “I need your help in the cellar.”
Below the trap door, we descended five coarse granite steps, one for each book of the Torah, to a small landing centered by a menorah in green and yellow mosaic. Passing through the next entranceway, we started down another stairway of twelve thinner limestone steps—one for each of the books of the Prophets. Since the forced closure of our synagogue in the Old Christian year of fourteen ninety-seven, this had become our temple. As we descended, I picked a blue cylindrical skullcap from a shelf and placed it atop my head. Uncle reached back to his shoulders and lifted his prayer shawl over his head, giving it the form of a hood. Together, we chanted, “In the greatness of thy benevolence will I enter thy house.”
The cellar was low-ceilinged, five paces wide, double that in length, floored with the same rough slate as the courtyard. It had witnessed at least a thousand years of chant, and its cool, musty air, guarded hermetically by walls shimmering with knotted patterns of blue and yellow tile, seemed scented with ancient memory. Window eyelets at the top of the northern wall—at the level of our courtyard paving stones—let in only a soft, dim light. From the bottom of the staircase, which flanked the western wall of the room, spread our circle of prayer mat. Around its circumference were seven verdant bushes in ceramic pots, one for each day of creation. Three were myrtle, three lavender, and one, symbolizing the Sabbath, was an intermingling of both plants. The half of the room beyond the mat, facing sunset, was our realm of earthly work, where Aunt Esther lettered manuscripts and where Uncle and I illuminated them. Our three desks of the finest polished chestnut faced the north wall and were spaced only a foot apart so we could view one another’s work. Each had its own high-backed chair. Opposite, against the south wall, were two granite bathtubs sunken into the floor. In between was our hulking storage cabinet of coarse-grained oak. It had lion’s-paw feet and possessed eight rows of ten drawers, each of them thin and long, like the receptacles for type in a printer’s studio. A last row, the lowest, had only two drawers. We kept our gold leaf and lapis lazuli in these.
The most unusual item in the room was undoubtedly the circular, platter-sized mirror on the wall above the middle desk belonging to Uncle. Inside a wooden frame, the looking glass’ silver surface was concave, and hence reflected squashed and distorted images. We started into it oftentimes at the start of meditation as a way of loosening the mind from its accustomed landscape, particularly from its familiarity with the body. The mirror was somewhat famous locally because on the sixth of June of thirteen ninety-one of the Christian era, it was said to have seeped blood at the death of tens of thousands of Jews killed in the riots then raging across Iberia. In fact, great-grandfather Abraham held that it shed an infinitesimal amount of blood—invisible to the naked eye—whenever even a single Jew died. He believed that the blood had become visible at the time of the anti-Jewish riots only because so very many of us had been murdered. From this time forward, therefore, it had been known as O Espelho a Sangrar, the Bleeding Mirror.
We all hoped it would never reveal its talents to us again.
As Uncle motioned me toward the sunken bathtubs, he said, “I need you to pee.”
“Now?” I asked.
From the rim of a tub, he picked up a jug. “In here. It’s spring. I need a virgin’s pee.”
Each year, just prior to Passover, my master made new dyes and colors for our manuscript illuminations. The acid in the urine ate at certain elements to create varying hues, particularly a fine rose when mixed with Brazil wood, alum and ceruse, and a brilliant carmine when mixed with the ashes of vine branches and quicklime.
“I’m no longer a virgin,” I said, picturing Helena as she had been in the hills overlooking the vast monastery being built just west of Lisbon. I’d waited so long for her decision. Until it seemed as if sex and life would not happen to me as they did to other people. And then, when all was lost, when the ship set to take her to Corfu was already anchored in Lisbon, her arms opened to me like the gates of God’s grace.
“A whore at the Miadenhead Inn?” Uncle asked, awakening me from daydream. He had often recommended a certain house of ill repute outside the city walls.
When I answered, “Helena,” he raised his eyebrows like a rogue and said, “In any event, you’re the closest thing to virgin I can get without revealing that we’re still illuminating Hebrew books. Judah’s too young and I’m too old, and women’s pee is too strong—especially your aunt’s. I tried it years ago when we were married. Turns everything black as Asmodeus’ soul.”
We shared a silly grin. “Now I know why you loaded me with fluids,” I said.
As my water cascaded hot and musty into Uncle’s jars, he shuffled to our desks with the modest, duck-like walk he adopted in synagogues and began to dust them.
After I’d peed in six different ceramic jugs and closed their lids securely, we placed them in the sunken bathtubs. Uncle washed his hands and brushed them through the Sabbath bush of myrtle and lavender. With a puzzled frown, he said, “Diego the printer is so late—I don’t understand.”
Diego was a family friend whom Uncle was initiating into his threshing circle, his group of mystics that met in secret to discuss kabbalah. Although a robust man with the graying beard and commanding brown eyes of a patriarch, he’d had his heart reduced to ash in the Inquisitional flames of Seville that had claimed his wife and daughter four years earlier and from which he’d barely managed to escape. Often, Uncle and I sought ways to renew his spirit, and we had convinced him to go for a walk today through Sintra forest so that we might sketch the great white cranes before their migrations north.
“Perhaps Senhora Belmira’s family has kept him behind,” I said. A neighbor and friend of Diego’s, she’d been beaten to death in Xabregas, one of the city’s eastern districts, two months before. Diego had been spending a lot of time with her loved ones of late.
Uncle shrugged and cupped his hands around my nose. “Refresh yourself,” he said, and as I sniffed at his myrtle-scented fingers, he added, “If he isn’t here soon, we’ll go to his place and check. Oh, and when we go out, I’ll need to pass by New Merchant’s Street. I promised Esther I’d deliver the Book of Psalms she’s just finished.”
My master had a way of turning business transactions into disputations on the sex lives of angels and other esoteric matters. “You have precisely the time it takes Diego and me to down a cup of wine at the Attic Inn.” It was a tumbledown garret, but it served kosher wine on the sly.
His lips sculpted a dismayed but amused frown. “Look who’s giving orders!” he observed.
I met his challenge with the bored expression I used to practice to irritate my father when he spoke of Talmud classes. Uncle nodded his agreement. “All right, no more than a half hour.” He motioned for me to bend so he could bless his hand over me. Then, as I picked colors from the storage cabinet, he unlocked the genizah, the traditional hiding place for old books in a synagogue. Ours was a pit—three feet wide by four feet long—sunken into the floor at the western perimeter of our prayer mat. Its contents were constantly changing; books smuggled out of Portugal were soon replaced with others my master discovered and either bought or begged.
Uncle stepped one foot down into the genizah to retrieve our work. By the time he’d climbed back out, I was at my desk, arranging my brushes and dyes. Placing my manuscript neatly on the slightly inclined surface before me, he circled his hand around the back of my neck and advised me with a parable on the coloration for my most recent illumination, one of the tales from the famous collection of “Fox Fables.” As I began to offer an analysis of his words, his lips began to tremble and his hand grew cold against my skin. “What is it, Uncle?” I asked.
He rubbed his eyes with both his hands, like a child, took a long inhale of breath as if to ready himself for a challenge. “You’re so grown up,” he said gently. “Already my equal in so much. And yet in other matters…” He shook his head, smiled wistfully. “There is so much I’d like to tell you… Beri, God may soon demand that we take separate paths.” He reached into his pouch and took out a scroll of velum. Handing it to me, he said, “Be so kind as to accept this little gift.”
The scroll unfolded into a vellum ribbon on which were scripted both our Hebrew names in elegant golden lettering. “Esther made it for me,” he continued. He gripped the back of my neck and, in an urgent voice, added, “If ever you should need me, wherever you are, no matter how far or how desperate the circumstances, send this ribbon to me and I will come for you.” He placed his other hand atop my head, stared pressingly into my eyes. “And if, for any reason, you find me beyond your earthly reach, pray over it and I will make every effort to appear before you.”
So touched was I by his grace, by my master’s generosity, that my throat parched with a kind of desperate yearning. Tears clouded the room. I had to swallow several times just to whisper, “But we will never be separated. I will always…”
Uncle told me, “Youth is meant to be separated from age for a time. You will go your way as it should be, then return. But no demon, however powerful, shall stand in my way if you are in trouble!” He took his hand from atop my head and caressed my cheek. “Now come, let’s work together.”
“But is there nothing that I can…?”
He held up his hand and pointed to my manuscript. “Woe betide the kabbalah master who answers every question posed by his apprentice! Now get to work.”
A few minutes later, as I was highlighting the powerful legs of a young dog in my illumination with minute strokes of black, a shriek like shattered glass cut the air.
“Go!” my master yelled.
I bounded up the stairs. The kitchen was empty. Harsh voices from outside pounded against the walls. I climbed through my bedroom window into the store, dashed out onto Temple Street. As I removed my skullcap, I spotted Aunt Esther kneeling over Diego the printer. He was moaning. Blood was spilling from a gash on his bearded chin into her hands.
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