People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  Four weeks passed between the day the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion and the day they finally ordered its proclamation. During that time, they required strict secrecy on the matter, and this encouraged Seneor and Abravanel to hope that their minds were not fixed, that the right persuasions might be effective. Every day during this time, the two men worked to raise more money, to muster more supporters. Finally, Abravanel and Seneor knelt before the king and queen in the throne room of the Alhambra palace. A gentle light, from an alabaster-latticed window behind and above the monarchs, fell on their tired, troubled faces. Each, in turn, argued his case. “Regard us, O King,” said Abravanel. “Use not thy subjects so cruelly. Why do thus to thy servants? Rather exact from us our gold and silver, even all that the house of Israel possesses, if we may remain in this country.” Then Abravanel made his offer: three hundred thousand ducats. Ferdinand and Isabella looked at each other and seemed to waver.

  A hidden door to an anteroom flew open. Torquemada, who had been listening, repelled, to every word praising Jewish loyalty and lauding Jewish contributions to the kingdom, swept into the throne room. The light from the high windows glanced off the gold crucifix he held out before him.

  “Behold the crucified Christ whom Judas Iscariot sold for thirty pieces of silver!” he thundered. “Will Your Majesties sell him again? Here he is, take him.” He placed the crucifix on a table before the two thrones. “Take him, and barter him away.” He turned, in a swirl of black cassock, and strode from the room, not even seeking the monarchs’ leave to go.

  Abravanel glanced at his old friend Rabbi Seneor and saw a look of defeat. Later, out of hearing of the monarchs, he vented his anger. “As the adder closes its ear with dust against the voice of the snake charmer, so the king hardened his heart against us with the filth of the Inquisitor.”

  The bookbinder was the very last of David Ben Shoushan’s close acquaintances to present himself at shivah. He had waited until the nearing hour of Shabbat had driven the other mourners to their homes. He wanted to speak to Miriam as privately as he could.

  His strategy worked. Miriam, who had refused to leave with Don Joseph despite her brother-in-law’s sincere entreaties, was alone save for one servant that Don Joseph had required to stay with her. She was irritated when the servant announced Micha. She needed time to think. How could she leave the Kahal, the only world she had ever known? She had been born there. Her parents had lived and died there. Their bones, and now the body of her husband, were buried in the Jewish graveyard. How could a people leave its dead untended? And among Christians! When the Jews were gone, they would plow the land for gain, disturbing the rest of all the beloved dead. And what of the old, the ill, those who could not travel, the women nearing their time? Her mind skipped to the wife of her condemned son. She, at least, would be safe. Able to give birth in her own home, with family to tend to her. Give birth to the grandchild whom Miriam would never see. Her tears began again, and now here was the fool of a bookbinder, and she must try to compose herself.

  Micha expressed the usual condolences and then approached Miriam more closely than propriety allowed. He put his face to her ear. “Your daughter,” he said, and she stiffened, ready to receive the blow of even more bad news. Swiftly, Micha told of the soldier’s visit. Any other time, Miriam’s shrewd brain would have led her to wonder why Ruti had tarried so long at the bindery, since her sole purpose in being there was to bring her father news of when he might collect the haggadah. She would have demanded to know what business Ruti had in the binder’s storage alcove. But grief and worry had dulled Miriam’s mind, and her entire focus was on what the binder said next.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’? How can a young girl be gone, alone, on the southern road, at night, with Shabbat beginning? What nonsense is this?”

  “Your daughter told me that she knows of a safe hiding place that she could reach before Shabbat. Her intention is to hide there and send you word when she is able to do so. I gave her bread and a skin of water. She said there is food in the hiding place.”

  Micha took his leave then, hurrying home through the narrow streets of the Kahal. Miriam was so lost in her worry—what secret place could Ruti know?—that she had failed to ask Micha for the haggadah.

  But the bookbinder had given the haggadah to Ruti, at her insistence. As he walked toward his house, he wondered if he had done right. He reached his door just as the notes sounded marking the beginning of Shabbat. As he stepped through the door, the thin cry of the ram’s horn joined with the wailing of his infants within, and he pushed the thoughts of the girl, and her troubles, away from him. Surely he had enough problems of his own.

  As Ruti made the familiar approach to her cave, she, too, heard a faint wailing. Ruti was sure-footed in the dark. She had made this illicit night journey many times, creeping from the room in which her parents slept to snatch a few hours of secret study. But the unexpected sound made her stop suddenly on the steep path, and a scatter of smooth stones loosed themselves and clattered off the path and onto the dry rock below.

  The wailing stopped abruptly. “Who is there?” a weak voice called. “For the love of the Savior, help me!”

  Ruti barely recognized Rosa’s voice. Dehydration had swollen her tongue; terror and pain had exhausted her. For twenty hours she had writhed alone, the contractions mounting. Ruti scrambled into the cave, crying out reassurance and fumbling for the hidden lamp and flints she kept there.

  The light flared on a forlorn, bruised figure. Rosa sat with her back to the rock wall, her knees pulled up hard to her chest. Her nightdress was smeared with blood and other fluids. She mouthed the word water through cracked lips, and Ruti quickly held the skin to her mouth. Rosa swallowed too much and a second later was bent over, heaving. In the midst of her vomiting, another contraction seized her.

  Ruti tried to control her own fear. She had only the most vague idea of how infants came into the world. Her mother had been reticent about matters of the body, considering that Ruti did not need to know such things until she was betrothed. The Kahal was crowded, its homes pressed one against another, so she had heard the cries of laboring women and knew it was a painful, sometimes dangerous, business. But she hadn’t conceived of so much blood and excrement.

  She looked around for something to wipe the vomit from Rosa’s face. All she could find were the pungent cloths in which she had wrapped some dry cheeses for her sustenance during the long nights of study. When she brought these near Rosa’s face, the girl heaved again. But this time there was nothing left to vomit.

  The night stretched on. The pains came, in the end, without respite. Rosa screamed until her throat was too raw to utter more than a rasping cry. Ruti could only bathe Rosa’s forehead and cradle her shoulders through the spasms. Would this baby never be born? She was afraid to know what was happening between Rosa’s legs, but as the girl began to scream and flail in a new agony, Ruti reluctantly moved from her position and knelt in front of this woman, whom her brother had loved so much. The thought of him, and the agonies he might very well be undergoing even at the same moment, gave Ruti a kind of courage. Gently, she eased Rosa’s knees apart and gasped with a mix of awe and panic. The baby’s dark crown was forcing its way against taut, straining skin. With Rosa’s next contraction, Ruti overcame her fear and touched the head, trying to position her fingers so that she might grasp the small skull and ease its passage, but Rosa was too weak to push. For minutes, an hour, there was no progress. They were all three of them trapped. The infant in the unyielding birth canal, Rosa in her agony, Ruti in her dread.

  She moved on her hands and knees close to Rosa’s battered face. “I know you are tired. I know you suffer,” she whispered. Rosa groaned. “But there can be only two endings to this night. Either you find the strength to push this baby out or you will die here.”

  Rosa howled and raised a hand in a weak attempt to strike at Ruti. But the words moved her. When the next spasm slammed her, she mustered what little str
ength remained in her body. Ruti saw the crown of the head straining, the flesh tearing. She cupped her hand around the head and eased it out. Then the shoulders. All in a rush, the baby was in her hands.

  He was a boy. But the long struggle to be born had been too much for him. His tiny arms and legs flopped limply in Ruti’s hands, and no cry came from his still face. With distaste, Ruti hacked at the cord with her small knife and wrapped the infant in some cloth she had torn from her own mantle.

  “Is he…is he dead?” whispered Rosa.

  “I think so,” said Ruti somberly.

  “Good,” breathed Rosa.

  Ruti rose up from her knees and carried the baby away to the back of the cave. Her knees stung from the pressure of the stone, but that wasn’t why her eyes filled with tears. How dare a mother rejoice in her own infant’s death?

  “Help me!” Rosa cried. “There’s something—” She screamed. “It’s the monster! It’s coming out!”

  Ruti turned. Rosa was squirming, trying to crawl up the wall away from her own afterbirth. Ruti looked at the glistening mass and shuddered. Then she remembered the cat that had birthed her kittens in a corner of the courtyard, and the messy afterbirth that had followed. Stupid, superstitious Christian whore, she thought, giving vent to all the anger and jealously she felt for this woman. She laid the limp bundle down, took a step toward Rosa, and would have struck her, if the bruises on her face, visible even in the dim lamp light, had not called on her pity.

  “You grew up on a farm…. haven’t you seen afterbirth before?”

  Ruti’s anger and grief made further conversation with Rosa impossible. Without speaking, she divided the few supplies in the cave—the cheese, the bread and water she’d had from Micha. Half she set beside Rosa.

  “Since you care so little for your son, then I do not suppose it is any great matter to you if I bury him according to Jewish rites. I will take the body and see it into the ground as soon as Shabbat ends at sunset.”

  Rosa let out a great sigh. “Since he isn’t baptized, it makes no difference.”

  Ruti tied her small bundle of provisions in what remained of her mantle. She slung this over one shoulder. Over the other, she placed a sack that contained a small packet, carefully wrapped in layers of hides and tied up with thonging. Then she reached for the body of the stillborn child. The baby moved in her hands. Ruti looked down and saw the eyes of her brother, warm, kindly, trusting eyes, gazing back at her, blinking. She said nothing to Rosa, who had curled herself up into a ball and was already halfway to exhausted sleep, but passed quickly out of the cave. As soon as she was on the path, she descended as fast as was safe with her burdens, fearful lest the child should cry and give away the secret that he lived.

  On Sunday, just after the noon bell, all across Spain, royal heralds sounded a fanfare, and citizens gathered in town squares to hear a proclamation from the king of Aragon and the queen of Castile.

  Ruti, dressed in the manner of a Christian woman, in ill-fitting clothes she had pilfered from the box in Rosa’s bedroom, made her way through the gathering crowd in the fishing village’s main square until she was close enough to hear the herald. It was a lengthy text, setting out the perfidies of the Jews and the insufficiency of measures so far taken to stop their corruption of Christian belief.

  “Therefore we command…all Jews and Jewesses, of whatever age they may be, that live, reside, and dwell in our said kingdoms and dominions…by the end of the month of July next, of the present year 1492, they depart from our said kingdoms…and that they not presume to return to, or reside therein, or they shall incur the penalty of death.” Jews were not to leave with gold or silver or gems; they had to pay all outstanding debts but were not in a position to collect any monies owed to them. Ruti stood there, as the hot spring sunshine beat on her unaccustomed head covering, and felt as if the world had cracked wide open. All around her, people were cheering, praising the names of Ferdinand and Isabella. She had never felt more alone.

  There were no Jews in the village, which was why Ruti had chosen to walk there after taking what she could from the Salvador masía. She had not considered it theft, as the things she took were for the support of the Salvadores’ grandchild. In the village, she had sought out a wet nurse, concocting an implausible story about her sister having been lost at sea. Fortunately, the woman was ignorant and dull, and did not question Ruti’s account, or why a woman just delivered of a newborn should have been at sea at all.

  As the crowd dispersed, singing and crying out slanders against the Jews, Ruti stumbled across the square toward a fountain, and sat down heavily on its stones. Every path before her was a road into the dark. To go home to her mother was to put herself in the hands of the Inquisitors. To carry on the tenuous pretense of being a Christian was impossible. She had fooled a dull peasant woman, but when she had to find lodging or buy food, the flimsy nature of her story would almost certainly be exposed. To become a Christian—to convert, as the monarchs urged all Jews to do—was unthinkable.

  Ruti sat there as the afternoon waned. Anyone who looked closely at the dumpling girl would have seen that she was rocking gently, back and forth, as she prayed to God for guidance. But Ruti had never been the kind of girl that people noticed.

  Finally, as the slanting light turned the white stones orange, she arose from her place. She pulled off the head cover of a Christian woman and discarded it by the fountain. From the sack beside her she drew out her own scarf and her surcoat, marked with the distinctive yellow button of a Jew. For once, she did not lower her eyes as she walked through the square, past the staring Christians, but held their gaze and returned it with one of anger and resolve. And so she made her way to the dockside shanty where the wet nurse waited with the baby.

  When the sun had set and darkness sheltered her from the eyes of the curious, Ruth Ben Shoushan walked into the sea, the nameless infant tight against her breast, until she stood waist-deep. She unwrapped him, throwing the swaddling cloth over her head. His brown eyes blinked at her, and his small fists, free of constriction, punched at the air. “Sorry, my little one,” she said gently, and then thrust him under the dark surface.

  The water closed around him, touching every inch of his flesh. She had a firm grip around his upper arm. She let go. The water had to take him.

  She looked down at the small, struggling form, her face determined, even as she sobbed. The swell rose and slapped against her. The tug of the receding wave was about to pull the infant away. Ruti reached out and grasped him firmly in her two hands. As she lifted him from the sea, water sluiced off his bare, shining skin in a shower of brightness. She held him up to the stars. The roar in her head was louder now than the surf. She cried out, into the wind, speaking the words for the infant in her hands. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.”

  Then she drew the cloth from her head and wrapped the baby. All over Aragon that night, Jews were being forced to the baptismal font, driven to conversion by fear of exile. Ruti, exultant, defiant, had made a Gentile into a Jew. Because his mother was not Jewish, a ritual immersion had been necessary. And now it was done. Even as the emotion of the moment brimmed within her, Ruti was counting up the days. She did not have very long. By the eighth day, she would need to find someone to perform his brit. If all went well, this would be in their new land. And on that day, she would give the child his name.

  She turned back toward the beach, hugging the baby tightly to her breast. She remembered she had the book, wrapped in hide, slung in a shoulder sack. She pulled on the straps to raise it out of the reach of the waves. But a few drops of saltwater found their way inside her careful wrappings. When the water dried on the page, there would be a stain, and a residue of crystals, that would last five hundred years.

  In the morning, Ruti would begin to look for a ship. She would pay the passage for herself and the baby with the silver medallion that she had pried off the leather binding, and where they made landfall—if they made landfall—would rest i
n the hand of God.

  But tonight she would go to her father’s grave. She would say the Kaddish and introduce him to his Jewish grandson, who would carry his name across the seas and into whatever future God saw fit to grant them.

  Hanna

  London, Spring 1996

  I LOVE THE TATE. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit. I went straight, of course, to the Sharansky. I had a compulsion to look up all his works. I knew the Tate had something by him, and I knew I must’ve seen it, but I couldn’t remember the painting. When I finally found it, I knew why. It’s not very memorable. Small, early, hardly hinting at the power of the other things that were coming. Typical Tate, I thought. Get the Aussies on the cheap. Still, it was his. I stood there, thinking: My father made it.

  Why hadn’t she told me? At least I would have grown up with this, which is not nothing: the ability to look at the beauty he left behind. To feel pride in my father, rather than the undertow of shame that had always pulled at my thoughts about him. As I gazed at the picture, I wiped at my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater, but it was no good. Big tears just kept welling up. Standing there, with a class of English schoolkids dressed in kilts and blazers swarming around me, I lost it. I started to sob. First time in my life it had happened to me. It freaked me out. I started to panic, and that had made it worse. Great big embarrassing, overwhelming sobs. I backed up against the wall and tried to brace myself against it while I struggled for self-control. It didn’t work. I felt myself sliding slowly down until I was a puddle on the floor. I crouched there, my shoulders shaking. The Brits gave me a wide berth, as if I were radioactive.