by Naomi Ragen
A chill went up her spine, the chill of the nightmare-spinner alone and helpless, smothered by night.
“It’s too late to visit me. Visit them. Convince them.”
“Send them to me.”
“Where is that? Where shall they look for you?”
“In the book, of course. My book. I wrote it for them.”
“We looked for it. Rare-book dealers, collectors. It’s never turned up. I’ve got only a few pages.”
“They’ll find it.”
“You don’t understand! They have jobs, apartments. Money won’t be enough. They won’t go off just because I tell them. They don’t care about me.”
“Then you must hold your death above their heads. Use their pity, their greed. Tell them you are dying, tell them about your will.”
Catherine was shocked. “That isn’t fair! It’s emotional blackmail! It would be appealing to their worst instincts…!”
“It is all of that, and more.” She nodded. “Do it.”
She hesitated. “And if I don’t?”
The woman shrugged. “Have you ever heard the thud of a large tree in the forest when it dies? It’s a terrible, blasphemous noise, like the crack of a small child’s skull hitting the hard pavement, or the slam of a body thrown against a wall. Everyone who hears such a sound, be they living or dead, can never forget it, or forgive.”
“No! It isn’t fair! You haven’t told me enough! What should I convince them to do? Where should I send them? What should I tell them?!” She felt a rising hysteria.
“Missus, missus. Are you all right, all right, missus?” Carlotta shook her. “You sleep so long. You moan. I think you not feel good.”
Catherine blinked, looking around the empty room. “I slept?” She let out a deep sigh. Her back was sticky with sweat, almost clinging to the chair. She wiped her forehead, trying to calm down. “You probably thought I was drunk.”
Carlotta—who, seeing the open bottle, had wondered exactly that—blushed furiously. “No! Señora. S’not true!”
“It’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m just a bit cranky. I’ll go to bed now.”
“I help you.”
“Oh, don’t fuss! I don’t need any help to get up.” She waved her away in exasperation. Not yet, anyway, she thought grimly, pushing herself out of the chair.
There was a wineglass on its side under the coffee table. It must have rolled out of her hand as she slept, she thought, bending to retrieve it. A tiny thread was stuck to its side. When she removed it, it glinted in the firelight like gold.
3
Handwritten manuscript, author unknown. Constantinople, circa 1574 (?). Microfiche. Guenzburg Library, Moscow.
I will begin with the dream that has always been for me the true beginning of my adult life. It is not even my own dream, but my mother Esther’s, whispered to me in the cellar of our beautiful family mansion in Lisbon, on the eve of my twelfth birthday; whispered with the strangest and most glorious pride and the deepest of sorrow.
This is what she told me:
She was walking through the forest with her mother, my grandmother Rachel, a tall and queenly woman. Her mother’s head was lifted proudly, her reddish hair coiled thick beneath her cap. But as she walked, her cap was stolen by the branches, the hair tangling in the sharp, leafless limbs. She stumbled, falling to her knees and my mother saw her velvet dress and overmantle covered with brambles. And as my grandmother lay there in the forest, the branches gave birth to dark birds that swooped down and filled her mouth with coals that sank through her body, swelling her feet. She fell prostrate on the rocks, her swollen stomach splitting, the red blood pouring to the ground like wine from an unfit gourd. My mother screamed for my grandfather Isaac, for all his physician’s tools, his medicines and books. But he was far away, tending to the long line of marchers who snaked through the hills out of Spain; thousands and thousands of them, my mother said, like some weary caterpillar with a million weak and broken feet.
When my grandfather finally did appear, to my mother’s great shock, he did not rush to heal grandmother’s wounds. Instead, he put his arms around my mother’s waist, lifting her. I imagine his thick mustache must have tickled her young skin, his strong arms banished her childish fears. For she told me that at that moment, she forgot about her mother and leaned into his warm arms, complaining; “Where are the wagon, the horses? My feet are so tired.” And he comforted her, singing a song about the Hebrews leaving Egypt, arriving in the Promised Land.
And they were Hebrews and Lisbon was that land. There would be no cruel corregidores in Lisbon to take their coach and horses, he whispered to her. When they left the cursed Spanish border, the land of the demons Ferdinand and Isabella, they would ride in golden coaches drawn by white horses in bejeweled caparisons. He promised my mother her hair would shine like copper, washed clean with hot water and perfumed soap, and she would have little diamonds for her ears and thick gold chains to hang about her throat. There would be lamb, first stuffed with herbs, vegetables, and wine, then roasted slowly over a wood-fired oven lined with clay; tender onions and potatoes marinated in tarragon leaves and olive oil; grapes and almonds and apples dipped in honey for a sweet year; candles in their silver holders would light the Sabbath day and silver spice boxes filled with frankincense and myrrh would lend a sweet fragrance to each new week’s beginning. They would drink almond water chilled by snow, and wine as thick and sweet as honey.
Often, I imagine him standing there, hugging my mother, his face wetting hers with a mourner’s tears, and my mother suddenly waking up and remembering her mother and all the blood…. He didn’t try to comfort her, my mother told me, but wept aloud until his eyes turned milky and his dark pupils swam. When he had finished, he took out a Bible with a beautiful cover of tooled, dark leather and opened it to a page at the very beginning. There was a tree with golden branches, each one with a name and a date. And then he took a quill and dipped it into blue dye and wrote: Malca el Nasi, born July 31, 1492, sister to Esther; and then, next her mother’s name: Rachel el Nasi, died, July 31, 1492.
And this is how my mother learned that her mother had died while giving birth to her sister.
My mother was eight years old the day that her mother died, the day all Jews were expelled from Spain. Many died that day and the days that followed, falling down on the endless, hard road—buried, as my grandmother was, in unmarked graves along the way. So pitiful were they that even Old Christians went out of their houses and stood crying on the roadside, urging them to spare themselves, to accept baptism and remain behind. But the rabbis urged them on, asking the children to play drums and cymbals, to sing.
My mother wanted to go back to her beautiful house outside Seville. So many nights, hard stones rubbing raw her back, she dreamed of the polished steps leading to her zaguán, the smell of the purple flowers and the climbing vines trailing up to the little balcony off her whitewashed bedroom that was always filled with red geraniums. She dreamed of her estrado with its soft pillows, of her bed of down quilts and fresh straw mattresses, and of the spicy breeze that wafted through the tamarind trees.
Many had stayed behind, her father told her later. They had shaken their heads sadly at the foolishness of preferring the hard uncertainty of exile to the soft rain of baptismal waters; waters, they winked, that could always be washed away in the mikvah beneath the synagogue. I can almost see my grandfather’s face as he explained this to my mother: his lips grim, his eyes touched with black humor and contempt mixed with sadness.
But neither those who stayed, nor those like my stubborn grandfather who risked all to leave, understood that both were equally doomed. For in the end, I imagine, there was not enough water to douse Torquemada’s fires as they roasted the flesh of those cunning pretenders. Nor could my grandfather, as far as he wandered, succeed in escaping the flood of holy waters the Church was determined to pour down upon his head.
My mother walked all the way to Lisbon, as my grandfather carried my aun
t Malca, who was just a few days old. All the way, he searched for wet nurses, and when he failed to find them, he finally bought a goat and poured its warm milk through a sucking horn held between Malca’s lips. When she gagged at that, he took lumps of sugar and bread and rubbed them in a piece of linen that he shaped into a teat that Malca sucked.
How my mother envied her infant sister—carried and fed in their father’s arms while she trudged alongside, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth in thirst, her stomach boiling with hunger. But even as a baby, Malca was never content, my mother recalled. At night, she never stopped crying, and during the day she whimpered and screamed.
I sometimes try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother: how long the road was, how hard on the uncallused soles of a small child; how hot the sun, how cold the nights! Isn’t it strange, then, that my mother should also have remembered the beauty of the Spanish sky—turquoise and gold with sunlight? The lovely rolling hills and valleys, the sparkling waters, and the rosy brilliance of distant horizons? Spain’s white castles with their moats and turrets? So that, when she finally reached the border, she could not help but look back with longing, like Lot’s wicked wife as she was led by angels out of Sodom. She looked back and wondered if she, too, would be turned into a pillar of salt for her profane regret.
But she was not to be so stricken. G-d had a different set of terrible punishments selected for her, she told me.
The first was Lisbon.
The confusion at the Portuguese border was terrible. Thousands of people pushing and screaming. My mother remembered bobbing in the stormy human current, her only anchor her father’s strong hand. But something was terribly wrong. They had walked over mountains, waded through streams, and been battered by rocks and branches to reach this goal. And yet, the cries were heartbreaking.
She asked her father what there was to cry about now. But something had come over him. His gentle voice turned suddenly harsh. “Say nothing,” he demanded, his eyes burning like a devil’s.
My mother grabbed on to him like a frightened animal, but he pried her loose, almost cruelly. Covering his eyes with both hands, she heard him say, “My sins have sapped my strength, Lord. Deliver us in your everlasting compassion.”
Then she saw him crouch over his bag of medicines and instruments, taking out his mortar and pestle and crushing some herbs, which he then mixed with goat’s milk and poured through the sucking horn into Malca’s mouth. Slowly her cries quieted, but then, just as suddenly, her body flailed as if in a fit, until it went as rigid as a piece of wood.
My mother started to cry, but her father shook her so hard her teeth rattled like pebbles. She sat down in the dust and wiped her eyes in astonishment, watching as her father took out an old gunnysack and wrapped it around Malca so that even her face was covered. Wrapped so, he placed her in the bottom of a beggar’s pouch and buried her in feathers of down.
Grandfather Isaac was a tall man with a broad forehead and large eyes that seemed always to be amused. She used to think of them as smiling eyes, mother told me. His lips were a calm, generous curve across his handsome chin. But that day when my mother searched his face for regret, kindness, even sorrow, she found only hot, burning coals that flashed through his narrowed lids, and lips that stretched like a jagged wound beneath his mustache. A horror washed over her as she began to understand what had really happened: Her father, her dear father, had been taken from her, and now in his body a demon dwelt.
For this she had several proofs. First, when she searched for his shadow—the truest proof he was no demon—she could not find it. And second, he took nothing to eat, his tongue rolling in his mouth like those that lap up fire, water, air, and slime. Terrified, my mother ran through the wailing women, screaming her father’s name.
“Demon fed on fire, water, dust, and slime, release my father’s shape!” she screamed back at the demon who pursued and overtook her. “You will dry up and return to nothing!” she shouted, wondering if she, too, was to be poisoned and wrapped in a gunnysack. But the demon in the shape of her father caught and held her fast, paying no heed to her hysterical cries.
“All right,” he said in a whisper that was so strangely calm in her ear, a whisper that immediately made her tongue freeze in cold fear. “Maybe I am a demon. But the Portuguese soldiers are bigger devils yet.”
My mother looked at the Portuguese. They were enormous, dark men in metal helmets that hid their faces. They held sharp swords and their horses snorted and stamped the ground, filling the air with a smoky fog of dust. Vicious packs of barking dogs snapped at their heels. She then decided that the demon was preferable, and held his hand and watched quietly as he counted out the head price to the Portuguese, who then allowed him to carry her and their belongings across the border.
As she crossed the border, she felt the dull ache of hopelessness fill her. Her mother and baby sister dead, her father possessed, she waited with stoic acceptance for her turn. She wasn’t surprised when the demon began to run toward the forest, dragging her behind him. In the darkness, she waited for him to reveal himself, to see his clothes evaporate and his head go bald, hair sprouting instead over his face and body.
Behind each dark tree, she could see evil estries lurking, waiting to make a meal of her. Once, she was positive she’d seen the dark coiled hair of Lilith herself flashing among the branches. Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who spent her time sucking away the breath of a hundred babies a day, vengeance against Eve’s children.
Her heart stopped cold. Suddenly, she bit the terrible hand that gripped her, drawing blood, and ran ahead, hiding behind the pines. To her surprise, the demon-father didn’t try to follow her. Instead, all his attention was riveted on her sister. My mother watched as he spilled out the down and unwrapped the gunnysack, taking out her sister’s motionless form. He slapped the baby’s face very hard, rubbing his hands roughly along her chest and back.
My mother always stopped at this point in the story, her face flushing red. “I must tell the truth,” she would say. “I did not so much mind seeing my sister peacefully dead, all her nagging cries stilled. But I could not abide seeing her abused.”
She ran to the demon and threw all her weight against him, making up in swiftness for what she lacked in bulk, knocking her demon-father over. Just at that moment, she screamed at him the words her own dead mother had taught her to say at bedtime to keep the night demons away: “Behold, the guardian of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers! The angel who redeemed me from all evil, bless the children so that my name and the names of my fathers, Abraham and Yitzchak be carried on….” My mother said that her demon-chasing prayer was suddenly interrupted by her father’s laughter and her sister’s cries. She looked, startled, into the demon’s face and suddenly saw it was again her father’s, whom she loved. As she held his hand and he stroked her hair, he explained how he had put Malca to sleep with mandragora and opium in order to smuggle her across the border because he had not had enough gold to pay her head price. He apologized for frightening her with tales of devils. He hadn’t known how else to keep her from accusing him of witchcraft in front of the Portuguese soldiers, who might have put him in a basket and carried him to prison—the fate of witches.
There were no such things as demons, he told her. The only thing one had to fear in this world were human beings who had chosen evil over good.
My mother, Esther, always repeated these words to me with pride, but I knew she herself did not believe them. She was convinced her powerful incantation had undone the devil’s work and restored her father and sister to her.
I bless my mother in her grave for having passed such power of belief down to me. For even as a small child, I, too, felt in possession of a wondrous secret that would allow me to outwit the myriad hosts of evil spirits that roam the world threatening me and my family. For as far back as I can remember, I shared my mother’s unshakable conviction that I, too, had the cunning and strength to save myself and those I loved. I must
admit, it is a feeling that has sustained me through most of my troubled life, deserting me only on two significant occasions that I shall describe in greater detail at a later time.
But the fool is half a prophet, she liked to say. And her terrifying entrance into Portugal was a portent of things to come.
Once across the border, it took my mother several more days to reach Lisbon. If the inn she stayed in was horrible—filthy and overcrowded—then the streets were unbearable. My mother did not mince her words in delicacy and false modesty. The slop of chamber pots dumped, making dry roads into rivers of stink; people emptying their guts from all ends where they stood; the smell of dead animals and the rotting meat—all this a thousand times over as the city swelled until there were more people than stars for counting. And as if that wasn’t enough, conditions worsened daily as thousands more arrived in the city.
The Portuguese king had allowed those who couldn’t afford his fees to pay less on condition that they hire boats and leave for North Africa and Saloniki. And so whole families took up residence in the streets and hillsides, homeless and nearly penniless, for they had been robbed of all their worldly goods by the decrees of the Spanish monarch, and relieved of even the small remainder by paying the head price.
Years later, I understood that some who had paid for passage to the Levant never saw a boat; while others were put afloat in unseaworthy vessels without food or water, the captains refusing to let them disembark. Thousands died at sea from disease and hunger. And of those who reached shore, many were despoiled and murdered, robbers slitting open the stomachs of young women to search for swallowed rings. And those who survived lived to see their wives and daughters unbearably outraged in public orgies. One mother, having seen two daughters murdered thus, dug herself a grave and lay down in it until she died of starvation. Bereft of clothing, some even sewed together the pages of their holy books to cover their nakedness. Most were sold into slavery by the Moors in whose lands they had hoped to find refuge, although the King of Fez, in his kindness, took them in and gave them shelter in the “Valley of Blessing.”
