I watch them every market day. I know what her mother is saying because I know that girl—not her name or where she lives, but I know her all the same. She’s a secret Jew. She is drawn, as I was, to where she knows she belongs. Do she and her mother buy pork sausages and throw them away? Do they light Shabbat candles in their cellar? I see a crucifix dangling around the little girl’s neck, and I wonder whether her mother adjusts it when they leave the house, as my own mother did, to make sure it is always visible.
Nailed to the door of a church across the street is a sheet of paper, printed on one of those new presses invented in Germany. I’ve seen the same notice all over town. The bottom end has torn away from the nail, and the paper has curled up, but no one needs to read it because we all know what it says.
The notice from Tomás de Torquemada gives those engaging in practices condemned by the Church forty days to confess. Anyone who can incriminate another is required to give evidence as well, to save the souls of those who do not comply. The Inquisition has come to Toledo.
Across the city, printed leaflets identify thirty-seven ways to detect secret Jews. Do they refrain from cooking on Saturdays? Is the family clean and well-dressed by Friday sundown? Do they keep Jewish fasts? Are they never observed eating pork? Such suspicions are enough to send the people in Toledo to the chambers of the Inquisition, to give confidential testimony against their neighbors.
In the first two weeks of the grace period, not a single person—Jew or Christian—came forward, so great is the antipathy toward these outsiders strutting in and announcing they will decide the fate of Toledo’s people. A converso plot to assassinate the inquisitors and their chief supporters was discovered the evening before it was to be carried out. Apparently the inquisitors are so confident they see with the eyes of God that they didn’t hold trials until after the bodies of the accused, stinking with decay, were finally cut down.
The conversos have been debating what to do. Should they ignore the call to confess because they believe their practices are well hidden? Should they come forward on the suspicion that they have already been secretly denounced? Many have already fled Toledo, but I wonder where in Spain they will find any lasting safety.
I’ve watched the street every morning with an uncomfortable flutter in my heart, wondering if the girl and her mother will reappear. Tomorrow, all chance for mercy will vanish, and the arrests will begin.
In the aljama, feelings are high. Some say conversos should expect punishment for abandoning our covenant with God. At the moment, it seems that those who remained Jews have proved the wiser, for the Inquisition has power only over Christians, although we all know that whenever conversos are targeted, Jews won’t be far behind. I say nothing, because no one other than Eliana and Isaac—even the younger generations of my own family—realize that I am one of those the Inquisition is looking for.
The following morning, black-robed Dominican monks take down the tattered notices, ending clemency in Toledo. I watch for the girl and her mother on market day, but they do not appear. “What happens to the children?” I ask Isaac one evening. “Are they burned at the stake too?”
Isaac has heard that one ninety-five-year-old woman was burned somewhere in Spain, but he suspects that leaving children orphaned and impoverished will be seen as punishment enough for their parents’ sins. For the next few weeks, I lie sleepless with worry about that little girl, knowing how easily, in another time and place, she could have been me.
***
The Inquisition concludes its first trials a month later. Torquemada expects the whole town to turn out for the auto-da-fé, but I intend to spend the time in the synagogue saying the Mourners’ Kaddish for the victims. As I go down into the aljama with my twelve-year-old grandson Samuel, who attends yeshiva next door to the synagogue, armed guards sweep down. “All Jews are to come with us,” the priest with them shrieks into the street. “Come see what damage the dead faith of Moses has wrought.”
A guard puts his hand on the sword tucked in the scabbard at his waist to show he won’t tolerate any excuses or delay as we are herded through the narrow and winding streets to the Plaza de Zocodover. Workers are unloading wood from carts in the clear, cold air of a winter afternoon, piling it around seven stakes erected near a platform holding gilded chairs with red velvet upholstery.
At first, the sound of drums is faint, but it grows louder as the procession makes its way from the cathedral. The crowd, to this point waiting in quiet agitation, erupts in a roar as a group of Dominican monks comes into view, holding aloft the banner of the Inquisition, with its olive branch on one side and sword on the other. I read the Latin embroidered there. “Exsurge, Domine, et Judica Causam Tuam,” it says. “Rise Up, Master, and Pursue Your Cause.”
God’s cause? I begin murmuring the words of a psalm that lodges in my mind.
“Pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.”
Samuel adds his voice to mine.
“From their callous hearts comes iniquity,
the evil conceits of their minds know no limits.
They scoff, and speak with malice;
in their arrogance they threaten oppression.
Their mouths lay claim to heaven,
and their tongues take possession of the earth.”
By now, the local magistrates are passing by. I see sugared piety on some faces and bloodlust on others, and both disgust me equally. Behind them march six men and one woman in yellow robes, wearing nooses around their necks and carrying candles. Samuel and I continue the psalm louder now, in hope it will comfort them. One of the men turns to us, his terrified eyes flickering as he recognizes the Hebrew.
“My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.”
The woman must understand Hebrew too, for she lifts her eyes to look at us. My heart lurches. It is the mother I watched in the street. Acid rises in my throat, and I fight down the urge to vomit. My eyes scan the procession for her little girl, and in a group of people following the procession, I see her being carried by a man. She is rigid rather than clinging to him for comfort, and I think perhaps a stranger picked her up when she lagged behind, calling for her mother.
Samuel and I fall in with the families of the victims, and we all huddle together in the square as the condemned mount the platform. A tall and extraordinarily pale man with a bald pate rises from his chair and holds his bible aloft. “Scorn of our Lord Jesus Christ has made this Inquisition necessary. It is a painful burden to see these unrepentant souls before us and to think of God’s eternal judgment on their souls.”
After a long rant of which I hear nothing, Tomás de Torquemada drops the hand carrying his Bible to his side and slumps his shoulders, as if he has done all he can. “It is the Word of the Lord that condemns them, not us.” He turns to a magistrate. “Describe the crimes and pronounce the sentences.” He gives the prisoners a dismissive wave before going to his chair.
Eating meat on Good Friday, refusing to eat soup made with a ham bone, not cooking on Saturday—the magistrate drones on and on. The knees of one man buckle. A guard helps him to his feet, but he cannot stand without help. Has he been tortured, I wonder, or is it pure terror that has taken away his strength? “I—I wish to confess,” he says.
Torquemada gets to his feet. “Confess what?” he asks, leaning his head forward as he skulks toward him like a wolf sizing up prey.
“I—I kept the fast on Yom Kippur,” he says. “I wore a torn shirt when my wife died.”
The man next to him moans. “Mordechai, you are dead anyway. Be strong.”
“I can’t,” the man says, looking again at the piles of wood around the stakes. A dark, wet circle forms at his groin on the front of his yellow robe.
“Take him,” Torquemada says, and a guard leads him away, tying him to the nearest stake. Then, without a word, the guard takes a leather strap dangling from his belt, puts it around his
victim’s neck, and as the crowd gasps, he strangles him.
The others are led from the platform, and each is tied to a stake. An older man shuts his eyes as his arms are tied behind him. “Shema, Isroel,” he calls out at the top of his voice. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” he repeats. “I am saying aloud what I have only whispered for years! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might. And these words that I command—” A guard stuffs a cloth in his mouth to stop him.
Samuel and I move closer, and we continue his prayer, in a voice loud enough for him to hear. “And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart,” we say, and the man responds by bobbing his head. “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up…”
I am sobbing too hard to go on, but Samuel continues to recite as the girl’s mother is tied to the stake. She looks over at the man next to her, and I realize like a hammer stroke to my chest that it must be the girl’s father. “Be brave,” he says to his wife. She nods, her eyes wild with terror.
“Mama!” I turn to see the little girl stretching out her arms. “Papa!”
A cry comes from deep within me. There is no individual sorrow now, only one universal grief—now, then, forever—reaching out to drown us all.
The mother’s eyes lock on her child, and I see her mouthing to her to run. Oblivious, the girl moves closer until she is pushed back by one of the guards.
“Run!” her mother cries out, as torches are placed on the kindling at the base of each stake.
The flames start softly, innocuously, but as the smoke begins to rise, the screaming starts. At first, the victims thrash in a futile effort to free themselves, but soon they grow rigid with pain as the smell of burning flesh fills the air. Their pleas for death pierce the air as the flames lick their legs, their hips, their chests. The woman slumps and her hair bursts into a halo of fire. One by one, the rest grow quiet, and then the pyres go up in one mighty conflagration that hides the bodies from sight.
Dazed, the girl takes a few steps forward, but is stopped by a guard. She wriggles free and darts off through the sea of legs around her. “Get her!” I say to Samuel.
He reaches her on the edge of the crowd, and by the time I arrive, she is biting and kicking like a trapped animal. Eventually she crumples in exhaustion, and I cradle her in the crook of my elbow and brush my lips on her mussed hair.
Her breath squeaks with fear and confusion as we lead her to the privacy of a side street. “We won’t hurt you,” I tell her. “Is there anyone to take care of you now?”
She shakes her head. “Then we will take you home,” Samuel says. It is exactly what I was going to say, what any Jew would say to one of our own, and I am so proud of him.
“What’s your name?” I ask her.
“Dolores,” she whispers.
“No,” I say. “I mean, what is your real name, your Hebrew name?”
“I don’t have one!”
“It’s all right,” I tell her. “We live on that street you always look down.”
“You live there?” She stares at both of us, and I think she understands only then that we are Jews.
I have to ask her to repeat what she whispers, because I don’t think I could have heard correctly. “Eliana,” she says. “Mama and Papa baptized me Dolores, but they told me it wasn’t my real name.”
Eliana.
Torquemada’s stark vision of divine retribution rises in smoke above the crowd in the square, while in this dark and narrow street, every wall, every cobblestone, every doorway is charged with the sacredness of God’s presence in this moment.
“God has answered,” Samuel says, taking her by the hand. “That’s what your name means.”
I picture her parents’ blackened corpses as we lead the girl away. What happened to her parents was not God’s response to anything, but perhaps we are the answer to this child now for the wrong that has been done in his name.
***
“We need to raise her ourselves,” I repeat behind the closed door of our home.
“She is a baptized Christian,” my daughter says. “We’ll be accused of kidnapping her. We could die at the stake for that.”
I can’t expect anyone else to understand how I feel. This girl is me. The woman at the stake was my mother. Regardless of how crazy anyone else thinks it is, I am determined to take this new Eliana in. “We have the power,” I tell them. “Will we lack the love? Will we walk away from compassion?”
I know that an argument from the Zohar will win Isaac to my side, and Eliana too. The first step, he tells me, is to find out whether the little girl really is alone in the world. If family steps forward, there will be no choice but to abandon my plan. Perhaps her relatives will place her in a convent or sell her into servitude if they cannot keep her, but in their eyes, they will have done their duty by ensuring that she not live among people like us.
While Isaac inquires, we hide her, which isn’t hard to do because she barely moves. We comfort her when she awakens screaming in the night, and during the day, we sit with her for hours while she stares at the walls. As the months pass, I feel both relief and sadness that no one comes forward to claim her and that I have a chance to honor her mother’s wish that the little girl live as a Jew.
Then, to my joy, Isaac announces that his service to their Catholic majesties requires that we leave Toledo. That fall, shortly after Yom Kippur, we pack again. We will be moving to Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, with a new member of our family, my grandchild Leah’s daughter, Eliana.
25
ALCALÁ DE HENARES 1487
My five-year-old grandson studies the long feather in his hand as his brother Samuel supports him on his hip. “Take the feather and put it up there,” he says, in the husky voice of a young man one year past his bar mitzvah. “We need to see if there’s any hametz left.”
Hadassah’s five-year-old daughter holds Nita’s hand and watches solemnly as the little boy makes a clumsy pass with a long quill feather over the top of a cabinet. “There’s something there,” he says. Samuel reaches up and offers him a cookie he planted earlier, then taps his hand again to find the one he left for the girl. Both children examine their treat solemnly before taking a bite.
“Oh no! Some crumbs fell on the floor!” Elianita—or Nita, as we now call her—says in mock horror when they have finished, and together she and the little ones wipe the spot clean.
Passover begins this evening, and all traces of hametz, unleavened bread, must be removed from the house before sundown. The children are too young to know how unlikely it is to discover a cookie—and an undusty one at that—atop a cabinet any time of year, but the women have worked so hard there would be nothing for the children to find now unless it was planted. Despite the rain flooding the streets and the mud encroaching on the entryway, the feather will be as white at the end as when the ritual started.
Nita is eight now, and already she is so much a part of our traditions that it is hard to remember that she once wore a crucifix. Three years after witnessing the deaths of her mother and father, she receives her new father’s blessing at the start of every Shabbat, as if she has been with us her whole life. Perhaps it is the love of a merciful God that makes children’s memories fade, but I am still haunted by the screams coming from the human torches that were her parents and the animal ferocity with which she fought off Samuel, unable to imagine anyone could mean her any good.
She has a special affection for Samuel, who from that terrible day took her deep into his heart. Samuel and his older brother attend a yeshiva in Guadalajara, where they live with my daughter. Though Samuel and Nita do not see each other often, when they are together, they form a community of two, just like Eliana and Isaac did.
When I see them building our sukkah, lighting the candles at our Festival of Lights, and wishing each other a sweet w
eek with a sniff of the spices and a taste of membrillo, I can’t help but imagine the future. Wouldn’t it be strange if their story ended up like my daughter’s—a second Eliana taken into a family and ensuring its legacy through the children she bears?
Isaac comes out of his study and laces his boots on a stool near the door. “It’s time to go to the synagogue for the minyan,” he says to his youngest son.
“I found some hametz on the cabinet,” my little grandson says, patting the feather.
“No, you didn’t,” Nita tells him. “The feather’s just getting ragged.” She looks worried. “Can you check, Nonna?” she asks me. Just as with my Eliana, everything needs to be exactly according to our law.
As he waits for Samuel to lace his boots, I watch Isaac with the same admiration I always feel for him. During the bleak days of our escape from Portugal, we sewed gold coins and jewelry into our hems and left with a few boxes on a cart. Now, thanks to Isaac’s acumen and the will of the Holy One, the Abravanel family has several houses in Alcalá and another in Guadalajara, where Isaac can be closer to his patron, Cardinal Mendoza. Eliana and Isaac’s house in Guadalajara is small because only they and two of their sons live there. Their three older children, Judah, Leah, and Hadassah, have their own homes in Alcalá. Judah and his wife Samra have no children yet, but Leah and Hadassah have five between them.
We are happy now, and safe from want, but no Jew is foolish enough to be certain any day will end as well as it starts. We all understand that a time in which the only problems we face are keeping a curfew and wearing a badge must be counted as a good one.
I feel at peace in Alcalá, living in Judah’s house, surrounded by my grandchildren and my first great-grandchildren. Perhaps these little ones will live in a better world than I have known, a better one than Nita witnessed.
“Ken yehi ratzon,” I whisper in Hebrew. “May it be so.”
ALCALÁ DE HENARES 1492
The Mapmaker's Daughter Page 28
