Journey of Strangers

by Elizabeth Zelvin

  Mama exclaimed sharply and sucked at her finger. She had stuck herself with the needle.

  Did Mama think that Hutia was about to ask her hand in marriage? Rachel hurried into speech, not trusting what any of them might say.

  “We have all been talking about Hutia's conversion for some time.”

  “Hadn’t Hutia better speak for himself?” Papa said.

  Hutia squared his shoulders.

  “Yes, sir, I will. Don Efraín, Doña Elena, you know that I am far from my home and that my people are dead or dying. Until I met Diego and then Rachel, I had never heard of Adonai. The Taino knew nothing of the One God. We knew only the cemi, our gods of earth and sky, of storms and death. But I have left the cemi behind. Indeed, I believe they too are dead or dying. Does not a god die when all who heard his voice are gone? Is that not why you left Spain, so the voice of Adonai would remain strong?”

  “Something like that,” Papa said. “Go on. I am listening.”

  “A man is made of spirit,” Hutia said, “as well as flesh and bone. He must believe in something, or he will despair. The Spaniards brought a proud man and a weak man to persuade the Taino to follow the Christian way.”

  “Fray Buil and Fray Pane,” Diego said. “I agree. I knew them, and nothing they did or said could have recommended Christianity to either Taino or Jew. Hutia is saying he hungers for a spiritual home, Papa.”

  “I know what he is saying, my son,” Papa said. “What do you wish to do, Hutia?”

  “I wish to become part of your family as a Jew,” Hutia said. “To convert.”

  “We Jews are not like the Christians or the Muslims,” Papa said. “We do not encourage conversion. The rabbis would have to consent, and they will not do so easily.”

  “I understand.”

  “Jews are the People of the Book. You would have to learn to read Hebrew and study Torah and Talmud.”

  “I understand that too,” Hutia said. “I will learn.”

  “He is very quick at languages, Papa,” Diego said.

  “Hutia is good at any task he undertakes,” Rachel said.

  “It is to your credit, Hutia, Papa said, “that my children think so highly of you. But that is not enough. You would have to be circumcised. Do you understand that fully? Are you willing?”

  “I understand, and I am willing.”

  “I have lived more than fifty years,” Papa said, “and I have never met a convert. Not a soul I have known would choose to be a Jew, were he not born to it. But I know your history, and I hear your sincerity. Every man needs a community. No man should have to live alone. You ask to join our family as well as the community. Very well. Let me think about it, and in the meantime, you may begin your studies, if Diego is willing to help you.”

  “I am, Papa,” Diego said.

  “I will help too,” Rachel said.

  She heard Mama draw in a quick breath.

  “Elena? What is your opinion? Please speak.”

  Rachel held her breath.

  “No, no. I agree with you, but Rachel has her household duties to keep her busy. How can any but a Jewish man teach Hutia to be a Jewish man? It is for Diego to provide this assistance.”

  Please, Ha’shem, no more, Rachel prayed. It is enough. Let them leave it for now, with all of us in accord.

  Mama picked up her needle. Diego stood.

  “Then we are all agreed?” Papa said.

  “No, sir,” Hutia said. “That is, yes, I thank you, and I will do all you ask while you consider whether I am worthy. If I am not, you will not speak for me before the rabbis. If I am, I hope you will. But there is more. The quality we Taino value most in a man or woman is matu’m. You would call it generosity. My people loved Rachel and Diego because they are matu’n. They give always with an open hand and a full heart. Since then I have met other Jews in whom I have seen matu’m, those whose joy it is to do what you call mitzvaot. I have also learned to recognize another quality, one that you, Don Efraín, have in full measure: integrity. I must show you that I have equal integrity by waiting no longer to tell you that I love Rachel. I wish to marry her. I know you wish her to wed a Jewish man. I will prove that I am worthy of her by becoming such a man.”

  “Elena, did you know about this?”

  “I told Rachel she must not think of it. I hoped that would be enough.”

  “Hutia is the finest man I know, Papa,” Diego said. “He has behaved with great honor throughout our difficult travels, and I would rejoice to make him my brother and see Rachel happy.”

  “Don Efraín,” Hutia said, “this is not some bargain I make with Adonai for the sake of winning Rachel. When I become a Jew, Adonai will be my God.”

  “It is not Adonai, but the Seville congregation, that will oppose this match, I fear,” Diego said, “and the conversion, too, if they learn of both at the same time.”

  “Hutia, nanichi, my beloved,” Rachel said, her eyes swimming with tears, “you should not have spoken. Why did you not ask me first? I would have told you to wait.”

  “My darling Rachel,” Hutia said. “I could not wait, for I cannot bear to lose you. Please do not ask me to leave you, for wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

  Mama gasped. Papa’s eyebrows shot up.

  “I did not tell him to say that,” Diego said. “I swear it. He has never read the Book of Ruth.”

  “What?” Hutia said. “What have I said?”

  “It is written,” Diego said, “in the Book of our people, the Book for which we have suffered so much. One of our foremothers said exactly what you did. You uttered Ruth’s very words.”

  As if against her will, Mama said softly, “Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God.” Her eyes met Papa’s. “It is something true lovers say.”

  “Please, Papa!” Rachel, her eyes now streaming with tears, held out her hands to Hutia. “You must see that we are meant to be together.”

  “I believe that God is telling us not to reject Hutia’s suit out of hand,” Papa said. “More than that I cannot promise you.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” Rachel cried. “It will be all right, Hutia, I know it will.”

  She would have embraced Hutia, but he took her hands and clasped them firmly, holding her a little away from him. Papa gave a nod of approval.

  “Do not get ahead of yourself, Rachel,” Papa said. “I make no promises.”

  Chapter 27: Diego

  Months later, I was no closer to finding an occupation that I could believe would engage my mind and heart for a lifetime. Nor had Mama and the matchmakers of the Seville congregation succeeded in finding me a wife. I could not take seriously the prospect of joining my life to that of any of the twelve-year-old nice Jewish girls they trotted out for my inspection. While not as sheltered as they would have been had we all been able to remain in Spain, they were docile and content with the prospect of spending their days managing a household and, eventually, children, going to the mikvah, and looking forward to a new dress for Pesach or a family wedding. Papa and Mama, who had married for love, allowed me to reject these prospects, regardless of what advantages might be obtained by marrying into the family of one girl or another. Everybody else, from Cousin Miriam to Rabbi Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of the congregation, told me with complacency or conviction that love came after marriage. But I could not forget the beauty of the love I had shared with my Taino sweetheart. Having known Tanama and traveled with my sister Rachel, I wanted a marriage of the body, heart, and mind that none of these unfledged girls could provide.

  As to Hutia’s conversion and marriage to Rachel, the battle still raged. Papa and Mama, living under the same roof as the thwarted lovers, could not help but see Hutia’s many virtues and how miserable Rachel would be if forced into an arranged match. They came around t
o a degree of acceptance of the marriage insofar as they refrained from proposing any of the youths of the congregation as a husband. But the rabbis were inalterably opposed to letting Hutia convert, much less dilute the blood of Israel by allowing Rachel to marry him and bear his children.

  Hutia refused to be discouraged. He impressed even my conservative brother-in-law Akiva by learning, with Rachel’s help, to read and write Hebrew characters and puzzle out the meaning of the words they formed. He learned to read and write Latin characters as well, insisting that to be worthy of Rachel, he must be literate in Castilian. I discovered by chance that he could also write the beautiful script of Ottoman Turkish, which I doubted many of our Jewish scholars, if any, had mastered.

  “You are full of surprises, Hutia,” I said when I came upon him practicing the flowing characters one evening. “As the People of the Book, we take such pride in our intellectual brilliance that it astonishes me the rabbis are not begging you to become one of us. Where did you learn to write Turkish?”

  “At the palace,” he said. “Through Hasan, I have become acquainted with all sorts of interesting people: imams and janissaries, dervishes and poets.”

  “I never dreamed your visits to the palace had any purpose but to watch cereed with Hasan.”

  The very day after my first meeting with the young prince, I had brought Hutia to meet him and watch a game of the remarkable sport. Hutia had enjoyed it immensely, as I had known he would. Since then, I had not returned, since I could not neglect my obligations to the Jewish community. Papa had started to invest in trading ventures between Istanbul and other lands, both westward to Venice and Ancona and eastward along the silk route. While importing and exporting luxury goods such as spices, perfumes, dyes, and the finest textiles did not strike me as the vocation I sought, I gave him whatever help I could. In the meantime, Hutia had gone his own way.

  “Hasan’s tutor,” he said, “who has Sufi leanings, is encouraging me to learn Persian as well, so that I can read the poet Rumi in the original.”

  “Who is Rumi?”

  “He was the greatest of the Sufi poets, who lived almost three hundred years ago.”

  “Can you recite any of his work,” I asked, “in a language that I understand?”

  Hutia pondered for a moment, then grinned and declaimed:

  Leap up, my heart, place wine in the hand of the soul

  for such a time has befallen, it is time to be roistering,

  to go hand in hand with the garden nightingale,

  to fall into sugar with the spiritual parrot.

  “You have surprised me yet again,” I said. “I thought Muslims did not drink wine.”

  “It is not meant to be taken literally,” Hutia said. “The Sufi are mystics. He is talking about spiritual ecstasy.”

  “Have you recited this stuff to Rachel?”

  Hutia laughed aloud.

  “Rumi wrote many love poems as well,” he said. “Do you wish me to astonish you further?”

  “Please do,” I said. “More poetry? Or have you gained access to the harem? It would be perfectly safe, as you have no interest in any woman other than Rachel.”

  “Do not make jokes like that in front of any Muslim,” Hutia said, “not even Hasan. The only males admitted to the sultan’s harem are eunuchs. No, this is something completely different: I am learning to ride a horse.”

  “Away, demon!” I said. “What have you done with my friend Hutia? Very well, I am truly astonished.”

  “They are marvelous creatures,” Hutia said, “and since I do not wish to live in the past, I decided I must lose my fear of them. The cereed players have said they will allow me to play if I can attain the necessary level of horsemanship. Do you not think it a worthy goal to strive for?”

  “An ambitious one,” I said, “but I have never seen you fail to meet a challenge. Let me know when you have succeeded. I must be there to cheer you on when you first play cereed.”

  “The players of cereed are skillful,” he said, “but the sipahis, the cavalry, do something even more remarkable. I have seen troops of mounted archers loosing their arrows at a moving target while galloping full tilt. It is an extraordinary sight.”

  “I would back your skill at archery against even the best trained Turk,” I said. “Shooting from horseback—as in cereed, you would not have a hand free for the rein. I would give much to see you do it.”

  “The archers’ practice is a purely military exercise,” Hutia said. “It is one thing to join a cereed team for a game, another to participate in training for the Sultan’s wars or even to bend a bow within the palace. But some day I would like to try it.”

  It occurred to me that by performing so many astounding intellectual and physical feats, Hutia might be trying to balance out his lack of power to bring about his marriage with Rachel. I wished that I could make the rabbis change their minds, but I could not. I could only offer him my friendship and my considerable admiration for his resilience.

  At home, the family was in a high state of excitement over two impending events that all could celebrate without ambivalence. Elvira’s child would soon be born, and Susanna was betrothed and soon to be married. It was hard on Rachel to be drawn daily into the collective frenzy of wedding plans and preparations for the coming baby. As a woman of the household, she had no choice, and since she loved her sisters, she tried to do so with a willing heart. But I could see her struggling to maintain her cheerfulness. My freedom and Hutia’s to go where we pleased must also be difficult to bear. On the rare occasions when we had a moment alone, I would hug her, praise her forbearance in a difficult situation, and encourage her not to lose heart. It was not enough, but since the rest of the household, indeed, the whole neighborhood, had no inkling that she was not delighted without reservation to participate in these joyful family events, I hoped my understanding eased her burden at least a little.

  Susanna’s betrothed, Nahum, and her future father-in-law were printers. Their status in the congregation was high, since they had recently undertaken to print the siddur, the prayer book of which so many copies had been lost, and the Haggadah, which was essential to the Seder on Passover. By doing this, they earned the whole congregation’s gratitude. It was comical to see how Susanna and Elvira squabbled over whether a printer’s wife or a rabbi’s merited more esteem. In truth, most of the congregation’s enthusiastic interest in my sisters’ welfare was based on delight that both of them would soon be producing Jewish babies. The only shadow over the community’s festive mood was the recent arrival of several more families from Seville by way of Portugal. Their children, like the others we had heard of, had been “sent to the lizards,” and the daily reciting of Kaddish was made both more heartfelt and more depressing by their presence.

  I liked to go down to the Bosphorus and spend time around the harbor, which bustled with shipping. Not only did the sultan encourage trade and seek to expand his empire, but he was also engaged in building up a navy that could challenge Venetian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. Not all the building of ships for the imperial fleet took place where any casual observer could see. The sultan, naturally, did not want his enemies to know how big the fleet was and with what munitions each ship was furnished. But his admiral, Kemal Reis, had a recently built flagship that was the buzz of the waterfront. The Göke was a magnificent four-masted galley big enough, it was said, to carry seven hundred soldiers. I had the luck to see her coming into port one day, bright red banks of oars flashing in perfect unison and pennons snapping in the wind. There were plenty of other galleys to see, the hulls of many of them painted in the Turkish blue-green that Europeans called turquoise, a beautiful color like that of the waters off Hispaniola. I also saw trim galliots, galleys rigged for sail as well, and numerous smaller fishing boats. Slender caïques only three feet wide, built to be rowed in either direction, were everywhere, as they were the chief means by which those who had business on the Asian shore crossed the strait.

  I made the a
cquaintance of a Jewish tax farmer whose revenues came from dock and wharfage fees. He told me that the sultan commissioned naval vessels by the hundreds and fielded armies of sixty or seventy thousand who might be transported by sea to wherever they needed to fight. Considering how proud I had been of having helped to outfit Admiral Columbus’s fleet of seventeen ships for the second voyage, I was impressed. Papa warned me against growing too complacent about the sultan’s benevolence toward the Jews. But I could not help a comfortable feeling that in coming to Istanbul, we had backed a winner.

  One day I was watching a fishing boat unload its catch when I heard someone call my name. Whirling, I saw Amir grinning at me. I remembered guiltily that I had promised to seek him out if I ever came to Istanbul. But not thinking at the time that I would ever find myself there, I had not troubled to remember where his home was located.

  “Diego Mendoza! Asalamu alaykum.”

  “Alaykum asalaam,” I responded.

  The Moor laughed in delight at hearing me return his greeting.

  “So you have come to Istanbul, Diego Mendoza. It is fate that brings us together once again. I am on my way to the hammam. Nothing clings like the stink of fish. I do not want to bring it home with me. Would you care to accompany me?”

  “I would be honored,” I said. I had not yet been inside a hammam, the bathhouses that Turkish men frequented not only for cleanliness but as a congenial setting for much of their social life. “Have you become a fisherman, then?”

  Amir laughed.

  “I have a fleet of fishing boats. I own the fish you were gazing on with such fascination. In addition, I do favors for the navy now and then.”

  “Every time I see you,” I said, “you have risen further in the world. What is your ultimate ambition? To be grand vizier? Admiral of the fleet?”

  “Neither. Viziers are taken from the devşirme. Admirals can be Muslim born, but I like my independence too much to dream of bearing responsibility for such a bureaucracy as the Royal Navy. Come, let us go. In the hammam, you will tell me how you have fared since we last met, and I have much to relate as well.”