“Don’t be so sure. The people of Portugal don’t like Jews or conversos any more than Spaniards do, and it will come out soon enough.”
My body tightens. “Come out? How?”
“You know what happens when people get it in their minds that a Jew has wronged them.”
“And you?” My mouth is suddenly dry. “How do you feel?”
Diogo shrugs. “Abravanel and the others are useful at court. If they’re helpful to me, I can put up with them.” He spears a piece of mutton and chews it once or twice before swallowing hard to force it down his throat. “They are the best educated, that’s for certain. No foolishness about how God wants people to show they trust him by remaining ignorant.”
A bit of sauce wets the side of his mouth, and he wipes it away with his sleeve. “I’ve contracted with a converso to collect taxes on my new lands.” He laughs. “I’ll grow rich, but the people of Esposende will hate him more than me. Now there’s something Jewish blood is good for.”
***
We get along by avoiding each other and speaking little at meals. I go to Queluz only when Diogo is visiting his new lands, but that isn’t enough for him. One evening I mention Simona, and he dents his favorite pewter mug when he throws it against the fireplace.
“I thought I made it clear I didn’t want you to mix with Jews,” he says.
“You told me no such thing,” I say, which only makes him angrier.
“Couldn’t you figure that out for yourself?”
Despite wanting to put on a stony front, I burst into tears. “I have no friends, no family,” I sob. “And I feel more alone when you’re here than when you’re not.”
He ignores my criticism. “Go out and make some Christian friends, why don’t you? Or are only Jews good enough for you?”
I storm from the room, and within a few hours, I am on the road to Queluz, leaving word with Diogo where I am going and saying that I will not be back until he apologizes.
He does not. Two days later, guilt drives me home, and I arrive around dinnertime to find Diogo and a group of his friends enjoying their meal. They are jolly with drink, and no one is happy to see me. I go to my room and bolt the door. I am at my window getting some air to calm myself when I see two boys skirting the edge of the house. Below me, a door opens and they are ushered inside.
***
By summer, I am pregnant again, but I say nothing about the baby aloud, for fear the Evil Eye is close enough to strike. Diogo stays in Lagos when he is not at sea, and I visit Judah and Simona whenever I wish. Their son Isaac is a studious boy with solemn and soulful gray eyes, and at eight, he has lost the blond curls of childhood. I love the way he absentmindedly chews on a ragged strand of hair as he pours over his books, lost in another world.
Judah is away at court more than ever these days, and Isaac, hungry for someone to talk to, explains to me the science of the Muslim doctors Averroes and Avicenna, the philosophy of Aristotle, or whatever he is studying at the time. He reads Portuguese and Hebrew with ease, and I help him with Arabic, which I learned while translating for my father.
Chana was married last summer to a soft-spoken young man from an old Jewish family in Lisbon, and she lives in the aljama, the Jewish quarter there. She is expecting her first child around the same time as mine. Rahel is almost fifteen, and several families with marriageable sons have made inquiries about her.
Judah’s time is taken up with a new business importing textiles from Flanders, a license he was given as a reward for service to the crown. One of the Portuguese princes recently died, and in his will, he repaid a large debt to Judah. Astute as always, Judah saw the regent’s longing eyes and lent most of it back to the crown, using the rest to build a larger house at Queluz.
The chaos, dust, and noise of the workers drive Simona to distraction, as does the increased flow of visitors. Judah is the leading figure among Portugal’s Jews, and though they might look to rabbis for spiritual advice, it’s Judah they come to for everything else. The Abravanel family is among the few Jews exempt by royal decree from having to live in the aljama, so most of his visitors ride out for the day from Lisbon and are back in the city before the curfew for Jews at nightfall.
Like most homes in Portugal and Spain, the new house looks inward to a courtyard that supplies light and air. Though the outer walls are solid with only a few high windows, there will be another wall around the compound, because one never knows when or how quickly life can become unsafe for Jews caught outside the aljama.
As I reach the outskirts of Lisbon one August afternoon, I feel the baby fluttering in my womb, annoyed perhaps by the jostling of the road. I remember how still my first baby was in the days before I lost him, and I’m relieved that this one, with several months yet to go, seems so much stronger. “Go to sleep,” I whisper, but I’m glad it doesn’t. Those little kicks are the best company I will have until I am at Queluz again.
The carriage pulls up in front of the house, and my heart sinks when I see Diogo’s lawyer’s horse tied up outside. Perhaps he’s come home, I think, hoping it isn’t so. Alvaro meets me at the door. “Senhor Montes just arrived.” He motions toward the library. “I told him you weren’t here, and he asked to write a note to send to you.”
Montes looks up from his writing at the sound of my shoes on the stone floor. His face is as grave as Alvaro’s. “Donha Marques,” he says. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
***
Time stops—for how long I don’t know—and I find myself alone in my room as the afternoon shadows lengthen over the street. Diogo is dead. On its way home, his boat broke apart during a storm, on a shallow reef not far from Cape Bojador. Some men scrambled to safety but Diogo’s body washed ashore the following day.
The image is horrifying, but calming in its certainty. Most who die at sea simply vanish. I will be spared wondering whether somehow, years from now, he will walk back through the door. I’m a widow, I tell myself. I’m rid of him.
I stand at the window with the door bolted behind me and let my heart go wild. Diogo isn’t coming home. I’m not yet twenty and I’m a widow. Baruch Hashem, this baby will be mine, to raise as I wish.
I swing between silence and sobs that are a mix of horror and joy. I picture the splintering boards, the rush of water in the cold night. I see waves pounding over the rocks. Did Diogo know how the water claimed him, or did it happen too fast?
Free.
He was my husband, despite his faults, and I try to keep my mind on him, but I can’t.
Widowed.
I am sure his last thoughts weren’t of me, but why should they be? He was fighting for his life, and now I can stop feeling as if I am in a battle with him for my own.
***
I am entering my ninth month of pregnancy by the time the leaves start to fall. The carriage ride to Queluz is too difficult for me now, and though I haven’t seen the Abravanel family in more than a month, all I really want is to curl up in my bed and sleep like a bear.
Senhor Montes is handling the estate. Since my husband had no family to speak of, many decisions have been left to me, and the first thing I did was cancel a scheduled new tax in Esposende. None too soon, for I hear from Montes that people in the north have been rioting over just such increases, and collectors have had to be rescued from attacks on their barricaded homes. If unrest spreads here, I may not be seen as a grieving young widow, but a grasping converso who only cancelled the tax out of fear for her own skin and would show her true colors soon enough.
Am I safe in Lisbon? As if worried too, my baby turns in my womb.
The news grows grimmer over the next weeks—Jewish houses torched in one town, the beating of Jews in another, an effigy of a rabbi burned in a third. When Catellina tells me that in a town just across the Tagus River from Lisbon, not only Jews but converso families are barricading themselves in their homes, I have had enough.
I picture myself in the throes of labor as rioters attack my home. I imagine delive
ring my baby by the side of the road as I flee Lisbon. I envision sticks, daggers, fists—anything a mob can do to harm me and my child—and I know I can’t risk staying in this house. Catellina helps me pack a few things, and I heave my huge body into the carriage to make the trip to Queluz.
Night has fallen as I leave the city, and though the driver must go slowly in the dim moonlight, I cry out with every bounce. I spend most of the journey moaning from grinding cramps in my back and from fear of who or what could lie in the road ahead. As we reach the first houses outside Queluz, fluid gushes into my underskirts. My back cramps again, and I realize that the jostling of the carriage has disguised the beginning of my labor.
My knees buckle as I get down from the coach, and Simona helps me into the house. She throws back the covers on her bed. “I gave my birthing chair to my daughter,” she says. “You’ll have to do the best you can.”
She straddles me from behind, holding me under my arms as the pains get closer together. When there is no time between them, Simona lays my head on a pillow and clears the garments from my legs. “I see its head,” she says. “With the next pain, push hard.”
“I can’t,” I moan. “I don’t have the strength.”
“Of course you do!” I bear down so hard I think I will rip in two as the baby’s head strains the entrance to my body.
“One more,” Simona says, and with everything I have, I deliver my daughter into the world.
I hear a loud, healthy wail. Simona holds up the tiny body for me to see, and then lays her down while she cuts the cord and delivers the afterbirth. Finally, slick with sweat and dressed with little more than a mane of matted hair, I hold my most cherished dream in my arms.
Simona covers me up and opens the door to the bedroom. Isaac and Rahel are standing wide-eyed outside.
Isaac gets to the bed first. “Would you like to see the baby?” I turn her so he can see her face.
“What’s her name?” Isaac moves closer.
I feel a wave of love for this sweet boy, and I pull him to me with my free arm. “I can’t say yet. I don’t want the Evil Eye to know she’s here.” Isaac nods, patting the baby on the head as if to reassure her it’s all right not to have a name quite yet.
But she does. The Holy One sent her to me when I was lost. I started this day full of doubts about myself, about my past decisions, about my future, but it’s as if his hand scooped me up in Lisbon and set me down here, as if he were saying I wasn’t listening well enough, that I hadn’t yet figured out what he has in mind for me.
Eliana. In Hebrew, it means “my God has answered,” and I know he has. We were both delivered today. He brought me to the Abravanels to have my child in a Jewish home, where we both belong.
I lie back and shut my eyes. It’s settled then, I think. No matter what comes, Eliana and I will face it all—joy, hope, pain, sorrow—reunited with our people.
I feel my parents’ and grandparents’ spirits hovering near me. “Our exile is over,” I whisper. “I’ve brought us home.”
11
VALENCIA 1492
I take the vial of poison I bought from a woman in an alley before we came to Valencia, and I pour it out the window, letting it run down the wall so it doesn’t touch anyone in the street. I haven’t come all this way to give up on life. I shut my eyes and thank the Holy One for the memory of Eliana’s birth and for the many reminders that he always answers, even if sometimes we can’t hear.
The room is full of ghosts of the Mallorcan family I never knew—of Abraham Cresques, who created the atlas with my grandfather, of the wives, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. “I was wrong about bringing my baby home,” I whisper to them. “Our exile will be over in God’s time, not mine.”
I know now that the Evil Eye can wait for years, and it is just now exacting the price for my arrogant belief that I could choose Eliana’s destiny and my own.
The air in the room shifts, as if the spirits have stepped back in surprise. “You’re in exile in Spain now,” they tell me.
“Here?” My incredulous tone echoes off the bare walls. “Spain is my home!”
I picture my people wandering through the desert, weeping by the rivers of Babylon, expelled from England, France, Aragon. “Anywhere you can be a Jew is home,” they remind me. “And exile is anywhere you cannot.”
“But—” I want to know what I should do today, whether I should sail from here with my family or stay and defy any mortal—even a king and queen—to keep me from being who I am. Whether I die in exile, at the stake, or alone in my bed, the one thing I am sure of is that I will die as a Jew, because I will not forsake myself or my people again.
QUELUZ 1450
Eliana lets out a sigh so long and slow she must be wondering if it’s possible to deflate completely and disappear. She rocks her body back and forth as if every minute were an eternity. “Isaac promised,” she whines. “No one keeps their word to me.”
Growing up as part of the Abravanel family, Eliana has seen nothing of the sort, and I say a silent prayer she may be so fortunate her whole life. Of course, I think with a smile, it’s not possible for a four-year-old girl to understand what the men huddled over the Zohar could possibly find more important and exciting than what she wants to do.
Newly a man under Jewish law, Isaac is studying outside with Judah and his guests, and I hear his husky thirteen-year-old voice drift in from the courtyard. “When you sit in the sukkah, the shade of faithfulness, the Shekinah spreads her wings over you,” he reads. “Abraham, five other righteous ones, and King David make their dwelling with you.”
I see Eliana’s downcast look and put down my quill. “I’ll do it with you.” Only the first two days of the fall harvest festival, Sukkot, require rest from all labor, but it’s not in the spirit of it to spend as much time as I have at Judah’s desk.
We walk into the dappled sunlight of the courtyard, the front half of which is taken up with our sukkah. It’s a temporary house with roof and walls made of leafy branches, where during the week of Sukkot we take our meals, spend our leisure time, and sleep if we wish. We build a sukkah every year not just in gratitude for the harvest, but to remind ourselves of both our displaced ancestors and those who live now without our comforts and security.
I call it our sukkah even though Eliana and I don’t live with the Abravanels. After Diogo’s death, I sold the houses in Lisbon and Lagos, never wanting to set foot in either again. I used the proceeds to buy my own home in Queluz and turned the rest of the money over to Judah to invest in his textile business. He says I am becoming quite the wealthy widow, but I don’t care, other than to be sure I have a good dowry for Eliana.
Judah doesn’t like that my house sits outside the walls of his new compound. In the years of Pedro’s regency, laws limiting Jewish rights and activities were not strictly enforced, and by the time Afonso became king two years ago, the people were angry enough to revolt. Last year, riots broke out in Lisbon, and a mob attacked the Jewish quarter, intending to burn it down. Afonso cracked down hard, claiming the Jews of Portugal as his personal property and saying he would show little mercy to anyone who damaged anything that belonged to him.
Remembering those frightening days still makes my heart race. Someone came from the compound to tell me to hurry to safety there. I carried the atlas in one hand and clutched Eliana’s hand with the other, for in my haste I could think of nothing else that mattered. We stayed together inside the compound for several days, and Eliana and I came home to find our house untouched, except for a shattered clay mug knocked to the floor by a cat that had gotten in through a window. Queluz, praise to the Holy One, is still a sanctuary.
Sukkot is too pleasant a time to dwell on bad memories, I remind myself, as I look around the courtyard. Some of the furniture has been moved outside, and Simona sits in her favorite chair, bouncing Chana’s eight-month-old baby on her knee. Chana stands over a flower bed watching her four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter giggle as they
pick blasted flowers from wilted stalks and poke them in each other’s hair. Rahel, married last year, sits next to Simona, looking miserable in the final weeks of her first pregnancy.
“Grandmother,” Eliana says, “where did you put my basket?” Simona produces a small covered box woven from rushes and hands it to my daughter. She pulls her close and buries her face in Eliana’s brown curls, kissing her on the top of her head until they both are grinning ear to ear.
Eliana and I go to the place of honor in the sukkah, a chair covered with the finest Flemish cloth from Judah’s inventory, on which his most treasured religious texts are placed. The chair shows we are ready for the arrival of seven biblical guests, the Ushpizim, whose presence casts an aura of holiness over the sukkah. Eliana already knows their names and the attributes they represent. “Abraham for love and kindness,” she says, swinging my hand, “Isaac for serenity and strength, and Jacob for…” She scrunches up her face as she tries to remember. I make the sound of the first letter and her face lights up. “Beauty and truth!” she says, continuing through Moses, Aaron, and Joseph without faltering.
“And David, for the kingdom of heaven on earth,” Isaac says with her, having left the men to come over to us. He crouches beside Eliana. “I’m sorry I made you wait so long.” Eliana gives him a shy, pleased look, and I am amazed that my daughter already seems to know more about flirting than I’ve learned in twenty-four years.
“Let’s see what you have today,” Isaac says, opening the lid. I look inside as well, wondering what treasures Eliana will want to offer Jacob, the visiting spirit of honor today. There’s a small, pink pebble rubbed to a glow and a huge tuft of goose down. Of course there’s always a biscocho de huevo, a Sukkot cookie Simona bakes just for her.
I suspect she has kept to her ritual so diligently because she’s gotten so much attention from Isaac for it. I remember his wide eyes as he stood in the doorway the day Eliana was born, and I feel a rush of tenderness for him as I watch the two of them looking through her box.
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