By Fire, By Water

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  The judería, the Jewish quarter of Zaragoza, lay adjacent to its royal palace, not far from Santángel’s home. He almost never ventured there. Enveloped in a dark surcoat, he entered the neighborhood on a chill winter night, scarcely more noticeable than the shadow of a cloud passing under the moon.

  He rapped lightly at the door of Abram Serero’s narrow, decrepit, two-story habitation. After a pause, he knocked again. He heard loose shoes shuffling across the floorboards.

  Dressed in a long nightshirt, holding a candle, the scribe pulled the door open a crack, then all the way. “Chancellor. What an honor.”

  Santángel faced a cramped room with low beams, small windows, a dwindling hearth fire, unvarnished wood floors, and piles of books on a pine table. Serero pulled a coarse, bark-colored curtain to close off the area where his wife and children were sleeping, and led Santángel to his worktable. “What brings so illustrious a visitor to our modest home?” he asked, low.

  “It’s your accounts,” replied the chancellor, mindful not to wake the children. “You owe the king seventeen maravedís. Look here.”

  He produced Serero’s accounting sheet and showed him his own. As he studied them, Serero placed his hand on the table, beside Santángel’s. The chancellor observed the scribe’s hand, ink-stained and raw, and his own beside it, gloved in the finest calfskin.

  Serero looked up. “Is that all?”

  He did not address Santángel by his title. This scribe clearly had a great deal to learn about the standards of hierarchy and proper behavior.

  “Is there anything else?” repeated Serero.

  “Why, yes. You mentioned the Zinillo family.”

  The scribe gestured for him to sit down and took the chair opposite. “What about them?”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “Of course, you’re curious. To be cut off from your history, your family, your roots. Not to know where you come from.” He shook his head.

  “If you please, Señor Serero.”

  “The Zinillos were cloth merchants, lawyers, and moneylenders. Most of them lived not here, but in Valencia. Surely you know that. A respectable enough family, until … until one of them, the most ambitious, some would say—but others would argue, the least courageous—decided that his world, the world of the judería, was too small.”

  “The least courageous?” echoed the chancellor. “Do you not mean, perhaps, the one who cared most about his wife, his children, grandchildren? The least selfish, perhaps? The one with the strength to elevate himself, to flee this … this …” He waved his hand at the pocked, stained old table, the shabby curtains, the disjointed floor planks.

  “If you already know all you need to know, Chancellor, why did you come here?”

  No one, certainly no commoner, dared speak to the chancellor with such effrontery. “Why, indeed?” Santángel crossed the room, stopped short of the door, and turned around. He had not found what he had been seeking. He would leave when he was ready to leave. “One more question.”

  “As many as you’d like.” Serero smiled.

  “Were they devout in their faith?”

  “When a man turns his back on his people, Señor de Santángel, there will always be those who wonder how sincere he ever was.”

  “Perhaps, but before his conversion?”

  Serero finally joined his guest at the threshold. “Before, I’m sure no one thought much about your grandfather’s—my great uncle’s—beliefs.”

  Santángel crossed his arms. He scrutinized the man’s face, looking for a resemblance and finding none. “You claim, then, Señor Serero, that you and I are cousins?”

  “I do not merely claim it. The synagogue in Valencia has records.”

  Santángel could hardly fathom Serero’s recklessness. “Now I understand why they sent you. What do you intend to do about those seventeen maravedís?”

  “I shall do what’s expected of me.”

  “I appreciate that, and so will the king. Good night.”

  “Good night, Chancellor.” Serero opened the door. A cold breeze blew in.

  Holding a candle, Abram Serero climbed the tiny, twisted staircase to his refuge, a work nook on the second floor. He sat at his desk. A collection of rare books, some dating from the time of his great-great-grandfather, clothed the plaster walls around him.

  He resumed copying the words of a Hebrew Bible letter by letter, using the special inks and instruments prescribed in ancient times. His writing tool was a quill. No Hebrew copyist used iron, copper, gold, or silver in this work for fear that someone might later melt such bits of metal into instruments of death.

  As Serero wrote each word, he pronounced it aloud. Each letter, with all its extensions, was a holy, living being. If a scribe erred, the rabbis taught, an entire world would be destroyed. Precisely what this meant, no one knew.

  When thoughts of his conversation with the chancellor intruded, he pronounced the Hebrew word a second time. This technique, he found, did not dispel the perturbing thoughts. He wiped his quill and closed the inkpot.

  We live in two different worlds, he told himself. One world honors tradition. The other tramples upon it. Serero doubted he or anyone else could build a bridge between them. And yet, the survival of the Jewish community in Zaragoza required that such bridges be built, rebuilt, and maintained.

  Two weeks later, Santángel again visited the Hebrew scribe. He handed Serero the leather pouch Cristóbal Colón had placed in his trunk. “An acquaintance of mine, a ship’s captain—I hardly know him, mind you—but he placed this in my possession. I have no use for it. Nor do I have any idea what it represents. According to this gentleman, its contents are of some value. Especially to a Jew like you, one would imagine.”

  Abram Serero studied the documents, sliding his fingers under certain phrases, sometimes reading them aloud. Finally, he looked up. “Where did you say you obtained these?”

  “A sailor. He placed them in my trunk even though I had no use for them and, indeed, refused them.”

  Serero nodded slowly. “Did he tell you where he acquired them?”

  “He mentioned Lisbon. A mapmaker, I believe. A Jew.”

  The scribe lowered his expert eyes and allowed them once again to wander across the fragments and pamphlets until they stopped on the most aged of them, the stained and ragged parchment.

  The chancellor, leaning over the parchment next to the scribe, scrutinized the characters as if facing natives on a foreign shore. “What is it? What does it say?”

  In a slight shifting of Serero’s eyes, he perceived a tinge of concern, perhaps dread.

  “I would need to spend more time with them,” said the scribe.

  “Do you want to keep them, then?”

  “Some of them, perhaps. Others,” he rolled up the ancient parchment, “no one would want lying around.” He tried to hand it back to Santángel.

  “Please. Consider it yours.”

  “This particular document, I could never consider mine.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s surely safer in your care.”

  Serero relented, placing the parchment back on the table. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” His face eased into a smile.

  “There is one more thing.”

  Serero waited.

  “Señor Serero,” Santángel began again. “Suppose I wished to learn more about … about the faith of my grandparents.”

  “Why?”

  “Not in the interest of conversion, mind you, but so I can understand what it is I’m rejecting.”

  “You’re asking whether I would teach you? I would not,” said Serero.

  “And why not?”

  “You said your objective would be to find fault with the tradition. What teacher would want such a student?”

  “Suppose we were to make a financial arrangement. Not between you and me, but between the kingdom and the Jewish community of Zaragoza. I understand what a burden these war taxes represent. Perhaps we can find a way to off
set them.”

  An ember crackled in the fireplace. Serero knelt and pushed the logs with an iron poker.

  The First Meetings

  WITH ABRAM SERERO, Luis de Santángel explored ideas that had intrigued him all his life. He argued about the nature of truth, God’s role in history, justice, love. He came to feel an intellectual enfranchisement he had never felt before, invigorating and empowering. The freedom to navigate between the great ideas and sentiments of his own faith and that of his grandfather was a rare privilege.

  Late at night, sometimes once a month, sometimes more frequently, the two men entered a concealed, arbored passageway behind the castle and walked to a private entrance that defied surveillance. Santángel let Serero into the apartments where King Fernando carried on his amorous escapades when in town. They sat amidst brocade curtains, oak trestle tables, large, painted crucifixes, canvases by Bartolomé Bermejo abounding in bright color and detail.

  The king and his chancellor jointly owned the dwelling, and the neighboring residences as well. No one would ask what was taking place within these walls. Other than Fernando and Santángel, only the king’s steward possessed keys.

  To their first session, Serero brought a small bag containing the seventeen maravedis his community owed the king. Santángel placed the pouch on the table. Late the next morning, realizing he had left the coin bag behind, he went back to retrieve it. The pouch was no longer there. To ask the king’s steward about it would be to raise uncomfortable questions. The seventeen maravedis were lost. Santángel cursed himself for his lack of vigilance and replaced them with coins from his own purse.

  Jorge Bargos-Saucedo, steward of the royal palace of Zaragoza, wore his gray-streaked hair short, his moustache and beard full. During his ten years in King Fernando’s service, his belly had ripened like a melon. He balanced himself by throwing his head back and walking with his nose pointing upward, a hand behind his back, black robes hanging to his ankles. Thus he toured the palace and adjacent properties every morning, checking that chairs and books had not strayed from their places, that mice had not chewed into larders, that no brigand had violated the king’s privacy.

  On a bright summer morning, in the great room of the Bermejo suite, Jorge discovered a small leather pouch. He loosened the cords of its mouth and poured silver pieces into his hand.

  The door and its jamb were intact. Jorge knew that only two other men possessed the key. The king was away. The pouch must belong to Luis de Santángel.

  Jorge found his way to the tiny office of Felipe de Almazón, the chancellor’s aide, who sat stiffly at his desk, writing with his left hand in a careful, deliberate manner. Usually left-handedness was a sign of deviousness. Felipe’s left-handedness, the steward knew, was different. His aristocratic family had raised him to fight on the battlefield, but an accident had injured his back and right arm, his javelin arm. The king, eager to strengthen the allegiance of Felipe’s father, had offered the young man a position in the chancellery.

  “Good day, Señor de Almazón. Is your back acting up?”

  The chancellor’s aide turned his head, as if unable to adjust his body. “It’s bearable. What brings you here, Jorge?”

  “A small matter. I believe this belongs to Señor de Santángel.” Jorge held out the pouch.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In the Bermejo suite.”

  While Felipe de Almazón counted the coins, the king’s steward contemplated the wooden creatures that jostled for space on the walls. Haloed countenances of lions, oxen, eagles, and men, some with six wings, some with fewer. Some with multiple eyes. Some painted in gold leaf, lapis blue, yellow, red, or silver. Others, bare walnut, ebony, or gall wood.

  “Thank you,” said Felipe.

  The steward bowed.

  “Please pull the door closed as you leave.”

  Felipe spilled the coins into their sac. Seventeen maravedis. A familiar number. A note he had jotted two or three weeks earlier. He leafed back through his ledger books, hoping to refresh his memory.

  Luis de Santángel sat at his desk, reading correspondence. His aide requested permission to enter. “Yes, yes. Come in, Felipe.”

  Felipe closed the door and sat down. The chancellor turned from his work to see his aide staring at the ground, hands clasped in his lap.

  “What is it?”

  “May I speak honestly?”

  “I wouldn’t ask less of you.”

  “I know of your meetings.”

  “What meetings?”

  Felipe raised his eyes. “Your meetings with the Jew.”

  Santángel regarded him blankly. He had always thought Felipe worthy of trust. His aide had long ago mastered the twin arts of discretion and respect for authority, requirements for any position in the chancellery.

  “No one else knows,” he reassured Santángel.

  “What, precisely, did you wish to discuss, Felipe?”

  “I want to attend them with you. The meetings.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think they’d be working so hard to suppress it—Torquemada, Pedro de Arbués—if it didn’t hold some truth. Some power.”

  The chancellor forced himself to smile. “I’m afraid these meetings aren’t what you think. They’re nothing but philosophical discussions. If you’re looking for religious instruction, you’ll have to search elsewhere, although I would not recommend it.”

  “Whatever they are, Chancellor, I’d like to participate.”

  Santángel saw determination in Felipe’s clenched jaw. For the first time, his aide was challenging him.

  “That is all,” concluded Felipe. He rose, bowed, and turned to leave.

  Santángel stopped him. “How did you learn?”

  Felipe reached into his pocket and produced Abram Serero’s coin bag. “This was found in the Bermejo suite.”

  He handed the pouch to Santángel, who looked inside. Seventeen maravedis.

  “Who else knows?”

  “Jorge found it, but he knows nothing about the Jew.”

  “Thank you.” Santángel waved his apprentice out and tried to return to work, but preoccupations hindered him.

  He had either to end his meetings with the scribe or invite Felipe to participate. To continue holding the meetings without including him would be to invite disloyalty. His aide would feel shunned, perhaps resentful. Such sentiments made spies even of close associates.

  After several days of deliberation, Santángel stepped into Felipe’s office. “Those meetings you referred to. If they ever took place in the king’s apartments, they will cease.”

  Felipe’s lips tightened. A small crease formed above his chin.

  Remaining in his aide’s office, the chancellor closed the door. He fished in a pocket and lowered his voice. “This is a key to the back door of my house. Come by tomorrow evening if I can’t persuade you otherwise. Just after Compline. Climb the stairs to my private study, the first door on the left.”

  The crease above Felipe’s chin vanished as he broke into a grin. “Thank you. Not just for inviting me. For having the courage.”

  “Courage? There’s nothing wrong with these meetings,” said the chancellor. “They’re entirely legal. We’re permitted to discuss ideas, even with Jews. It’s the New Inquisition that is illegal, here in Aragon.”

  “Unfortunately, Tomás de Torquemada doesn’t agree.”

  “Let him confront us, then, in our cortes. I would welcome the opportunity.” Santángel handed Felipe the key.

  The Sixth Meeting

  FELIPE DE ALMAZÓN PROVED AS EAGER in the ad hoc classroom as he was in King Fernando’s treasury. “Father Serero,” he began on more than one occasion.

  “Please don’t call me ‘Father.’ I’m not a rabbi. And even if I were, I wouldn’t be your father.”

  “Forgive me, Señor Serero.”

  “What is it you wanted to know?”

  “Angels.”

  “Why?”

  “Ni
ne years ago,” said Felipe, “I was thrown from a horse. They say I appeared dead, but they didn’t bury me. I was breathing. It lasted three days. Then I woke.”

  “Did you dream of angels?” asked Santángel.

  “I felt a presence. In my cousin’s castle, near Tarazona. In my very room.”

  “A presence?” asked Serero. “A warmth? A breath? Voices?”

  “I just know it was there. And it still is there. Here. In this room. As we speak.”

  “Do you believe angels saved you?”

  “I don’t know if angels saved me. But I do think they’re guiding me. Not just me. All of us. I’ve done some reading.”

  “What have you read?”

  “St. Dionysius, the Areopagite.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” said Serero. “But I find it strange that a Christian saint would have the name of a pagan god.”

  “It’s just a name,” said Felipe.

  “A man’s name,” said Serero, “is important. Take for example our chancellor. Santángel. Holy angel.”

  Santángel smiled.

  “Much of Dionysius’s thought derives, or so he says, from the Hebrew Bible,” said Felipe.

  “Tell us, then, what you’ve gleaned from this pagan Christian expert on Judaism.”

  “He describes the celestial choir,” said Felipe. “Nine species of angels. Seraphim, cherubim, seven others. Some have six wings, some have four, some two. Some have eyes all over their wings. Some have the faces of oxen, lions, or eagles. Some burn as they sing. He goes into great detail.”

  “The sculptures in your office,” remarked Luis de Santángel.

  “Yes, Chancellor. For me, carving angels is like praying.”

  Santángel thought of those busts and faces. Some looked menacing. Others, scheming or mocking. Grim prayers, he reflected.

  “Regarding angels,” said Serero, “There are many traditions. The Torah tradition, the prophetic tradition, the Talmudic tradition, the Kabalistic tradition. They don’t necessarily agree.”