The Ghost of Hannah Mendes

by Naomi Ragen

  Marius took her arm. “You look positively spooked! And what’s all that gold stuff on your dress?”

  Little gold threads clung to her sleeve. She stared at them. “Someone sang in my ear! But when I turned around, no one was there.”

  “It’s all my stories! I’m upsetting you.”

  “This is not my imagination, I’m telling you! It was a woman. She sang in Spanish…”

  He touched her shoulder lightly. “You’re shouting.”

  She looked around, mortified, her fingers brushing off the gold threads. Silently, she followed Marius out. As they passed once again through the great prayer hall, she took one last look at its otherworldly beauty. These walls were built to echo with prayer, she thought with sudden, tragic clarity. And that would never happen again.

  The thought was devastating.

  She walked into the adjoining museum. There, behind glass cases, were silver spice boxes, Torah ornaments, charity boxes, menorahs, and Sabbath candlesticks. She touched the cold, protective glass, closing her eyes.

  Once, long ago, she’d breathed in the magic fragrance of myrtle branches and mint, held to her nose in a silver box. “To have a sweet week!” someone had sung. Someone—she couldn’t remember who, but someone very old—had held a tall, bright candle and told her to look at her own reflection flickering in the sweet wine of a silver goblet, a good charm against all harm.

  She stared at her reflection in the cold glass. Museum pieces, she thought. Never again would they need to be polished against the acid and sweat of human hands; the accretions of dust and memories, both tragic and joyful, were ended now forever. They had been removed from time and life, made irrelevant and useless.

  It was so sad, almost unbearable.

  She opened the door and walked out, looking for the exit. Instead, she found herself in an outer courtyard enclosed on all sides. A light sweat suddenly broke out on her brow. Everywhere she looked were old tombstones.

  “‘They are old tombs from ancient times / In which some men sleep the endless rest / Inside them is neither hate nor envy, nor love, nor neighborly enmity / And I cannot know from looking at them, the difference between lords and slaves.’ Moses Ibn Ezra, twelfth century,” Marius said softly, standing beside her.

  She held herself, shivering. “What is this?”

  “They’ve been gathered from ancient Jewish cemeteries all over Spain. It’s out of respect. A way of preserving them.”

  Almost as if someone were leading her by the hand, she found herself wandering around the courtyard until she came to a piece of dark gray granite whose chiseled letters were only barely visible beneath the greenish-black mold. It was hundreds of years old.

  “Can you make out the words?” she asked Marius.

  “The letters are Hebrew script. ‘Chana, bat Yehuda ve Ester Nasi’. Hannah, the daughter of Yuda and Esther Nasi.”

  She looked at it, shocked. “What’s the date, and where did it come from?”

  “Fourteen eighty-two, I think. Somewhere near Seville.”

  Her fingers traced the cold granite. Almost erased, she thought, tears suddenly streaming down her cheeks.

  He reached out to her wonderingly, gently brushing her tear-dampened hair away from her face, smoothing away the tears with his thumb. “Come,” he whispered, tucking her arm through his and leading her back into the street.

  They sat side by side in silence in a quiet quadrangle by a waterless old fountain. From somewhere down the street, music suddenly filled the empty square. It was Vivaldi, she recognized, sweet beyond bearing with an edge of something so sadly beautiful, so exquisitely heartbreaking, it again brought tears to her eyes.

  “That’s my grandmother’s family, you see. It’s our family name.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I feel so stupid! This is not like me at all. You don’t know me well enough to judge, but really, it’s nothing like me,” she insisted, shaking her head, ashamed of losing control.

  He put his arm around her, and she felt the warmth of his skin banish the cold chill of glass museum cases and tombstones. The dead past, she thought. If you got too close to it, it dragged you out of the daylight, into dark, sunless corridors better left unvisited.

  “How can you stand it, Marius? All those graveyards of dead books, all those ghosts of the past?”

  “Books never die! The moment you read them, they live again. As for ghosts, there are all kinds. Some are quite wise and very beautiful,” he murmured against her ear.

  She felt the tingle of his breath against her neck. I should pull away, she thought, trying to resist. To her surprise, her body paid no attention, content and joyful, almost suspended.

  “The first time I went book hunting, it was here in Spain. I had taken off one summer during college to research the family tree. The things I learned…it was enthralling, devastating. It almost destroyed me!”

  She looked up at him, surprised. “Why?”

  “Trying to assimilate hundreds of years of life that came before me, to somehow fit my own existence into that. It was so complicated.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, feeling a strange new connection to him. “Exactly.”

  The music rose, weaving lavender and pale lace into the golden light. Unearthly now in the fading light, it wound around the trees, filling the silent square. The church bells pealed, and a flock of birds rose skyward with a silken rustle.

  “You can almost feel the spirits of those who lived in these houses hundreds of years ago hovering in the air, can’t you? It’s as if they can’t bear to leave.”

  She suddenly sat up straight, clasping her hands tightly around her knees until the knuckles shone white. “What am I supposed to make of all of this?”

  “Ah! The golden enigma. What is one supposed to do with one’s history?” He smiled ruefully. “Come, Señor Almazan is waiting.”

  A distinguished older man, with the sharply defined features one saw in drawings of Spanish conquistadors, opened the door to let them in. Despite his courtesy, there was a dignity and firmness in his expression that made Francesca feel he was not a man to be trifled with, nor one who suffered fools gladly.

  He seemed a bit impatient, too, Francesca thought. But soon she realized that it was simply eagerness.

  “Come up to the study.”

  They followed him up an old staircase leading to a wooden gallery overlooking the high-ceilinged living room. On the walls were framed prints by El Greco, Murillo, and Velàzquez—dark, moody scenes depicting a suffering Christ and saintly apostles in the throes of a passionate devotion to something Francesca couldn’t begin to fathom. Beautifully carved wooden crosses were scattered everywhere.

  “May I offer you some wine?” he asked. “Ah, no. Jews do not drink wine unsupervised by rabbis,” he corrected himself.

  “Well, actually…” Francesca began, about to enlighten him that keeping such religious laws and customs had long ago been lost to her, and to most others she knew. But somehow in this setting, surrounded by the evidence of this man’s own deep, religious devotion, she felt suddenly ashamed to admit it.

  “Please forgive me,” Señor Almazan continued. “Here is some hazelnut liqueur, Frangelica. That, I believe, is all right, is it not?”

  “Yes, perfect. How kind of you, señor, to take such trouble,” Marius interceded.

  “Would you like to see my latest creation, Mr. Serouya?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  He reached up to an open shelf and brought down a silver spice box in the shape of a windmill, decorated with the six-pointed Star of David. He held it up for inspection the way a parent pushes forward his child: proud, yet anxious and hypercritical. “I copied it from a very old one found in a book about Toledo’s Jewish quarter.”

  Francesca looked at Almazan and at the spice box: “Don de Almazan, are you from a Jewish family originally?”

  He seemed taken aback. “Not at all—at least we have no proof.” He hesitated. “But who can tell, really, here in S
pain? The whole history of the Jews in Spain is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. First, threatening the whole Jewish population with expulsion if they didn’t convert, then not believing them when they did! And finally, after all those tortures to verify who were sincere converts, deciding we didn’t want converts after all; that what we really wanted was limpieza, ‘purity of blood.’ A strange desire, wouldn’t you say, after baptizing thousands, intermarrying with them, and letting them rise up as priests and bishops, advisers to the King…?! And meaning only well, of course, dreaming only the purest, most impossible dream!”

  “It’s very strange.”

  “There is something in the Spanish soul that aches for a passionate kind of spiritual purity. Christianity gives us that. But this longing also corrupted us. The Inquisition was supposed to be on the highest, spiritual level, a way to root out heresy and cleanse the nation of all foreign, destructive elements. That is why the priests kept such meticulous records of the trials and tortures they inflicted. Instead, it created a lust for money and for blood.

  “Whoever denounced someone as a Judaizer got a share of all his money, the rest going to the Church and the King. So it became the money after a while, not the saving of souls. And the autos-da-fé themselves were huge, crowd-pleasing spectacles, no different from feeding Christians to lions.” He shook his head. “Have you seen Santa Maria la Blanca?”

  “Yes. It was magnificent.”

  “You have to imagine what Toledo was like back then. Teeming with young Christian scholars from beyond the Pyrenees, Jewish poets and philosophers, and Moorish nobles and scientists, and everyone mingling and learning from one another. The Jews had a gift for languages, and so they translated the works the Moslems had brought with them into Arabic, and then into Latin, so the Christian scholars could read them. Works on astronomy, botany, medicine. The whole world was frozen in this terrible black ice of superstition and ignorance, and Toledo was burning with creativity and scholarship, melting the ice, beginning the Renaissance.”

  She twined her fingers together nervously, thinking about another kind of burning.

  As if he had read her mind, he went on. “And yet we destroyed that golden time with our own hands. And all because of a poor self-image.”

  Marius and Francesca exchanged bemused glances at the use of the modern psychological term to explain the passionate religious furies that raged during the Middle Ages.

  “Yes, don’t smile! If one is deeply convinced that one has found the true way, why would one feel the need to oppress others who hold different opinions?” He looked across at them, his face full of sorrow, anger, and something akin to a strange pride.

  “We were just discussing this a little while ago. All this hatred in the name of the G-d of Love.”

  “Exactly. Have you ever heard the story of the three rings?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Francesca admitted.

  “It goes something like this: There once was a man who owned a priceless, magic ring, a gift from someone he deeply loved. It had a stone of rare opal that caught and reflected every color of the rainbow, bestowing on its owner a magic power: Whoever possessed it and believed in its power would be beloved by G-d and man.

  “The ring never left the man’s finger. On his deathbed, he willed it to his favorite child, and asked that each of his descendants do the same.

  “Generations passed, and the ring came to be owned by a father with three children. They were all wonderful, and he loved each one equally. He just couldn’t bring himself to choose among them. So, he took the ring to a jeweler and asked that two additional rings be fashioned to exactly duplicate the original. Before he died, he summoned each one of his children to him separately, giving each of them a ring and a blessing.

  “Well, the father was hardly cold in the earth when all hell broke loose, each one of the children declaring themselves the owner of the only real ring and thus deserving of being looked upon as the unquestioned head of the family. But no one could prove it.

  “Terrible jealousies began, and the family was torn apart, each child seeking to degrade the other to prove his natural superiority, to prove that he, and only he, had inherited the true ring.

  “Bloodied and depressed, they submitted their dispute to a wise judge, who told them the following: “Each of you shall continue to believe he has the real ring. Compete to make the ring’s power manifest by showing humility, tolerance, and piety. And if your children’s children’s children can achieve the love of G-d and man, then it makes no difference who has the real ring.”

  He shook his head.

  “Whenever I think of those hundreds of years in which Christianity was triumphant, there is this image I cannot erase: the hordes rampaging against the defenseless, holding the cross as their banner, and those who faced them wrapped in prayer shawls singing Psalms. It haunts me. And so, I make these objects. In homage, you might say. Or even envy.”

  “Envy?” Francesca repeated, bewildered.

  “Yes. Envy. There is a mystery hidden in your people, a riddle mankind has pondered for centuries. So many times, you’ve been like a tree pulled out at the roots. Instead of withering and dying, you somehow replant yourself, flowering in another place, at another time. Many peoples have been uprooted and dispersed. They simply merged into whatever culture they found themselves. Only the Jews remain stubbornly Jews. Why? How?”

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  She was a New Yorker. An American. Until this moment, the heritage she had been born with had always seemed like delicate, old lace wrapped in tissue paper in the attic: lovely and useless and quite irrelevant. Perhaps, she thought, the power, whatever it was, had finally disappeared.

  She suddenly heard herself say:

  Pany y bino beo

  En la Ley de Muysen creo

  Dios no a benido, mas Dios bendra

  Dios que me hizo, Dios me salbara

  Marius gazed at her in astonishment.

  “I’m sorry! I don’t even know what it means.”

  “‘Bread and wine my eyes do see/In the Law of Moses I do believe/The Messiah has not come but he will appear/And the Lord, my creator, this Lord will save me,’” Almazan translated. “It is a very old converso prayer. During the Inquisition, anyone heard uttering such words would have signed their death warrant.”

  Francesca turned white. “I heard someone whisper it in my ear in El Transito…”

  “Impossible! Only the most erudite scholars have ever heard of it!”

  “I heard it!” she said stubbornly. “How else? I’m not a scholar. I don’t even know Spanish!”

  Almazan stared at her curiously. “There was an old woman who worked for me as housekeeper. She said it was well-known that the souls of those burned at the stake often came back to Toledo to clothe themselves in corporeal bodies, to visit the places they knew and loved. El Transito, she always said, was full of such spirits.”

  Francesca’s face turned pale as she picked the last gold threads off her dress.

  Marius cleared his throat. “Don de Almazan, you are a remarkable man. And if I might say so, your city, Toledo, holds its history like a beautiful setting holds a fine jewel.” He picked up the spice box and turned it over admiringly in his hands. “As you know, we are searching for the manuscript of Doña Gracia Mendes. Francesca Abraham is one of the last of her descendants. We have found part of it…”

  Señor Almazan held up a hand. “Do not go on. The story is well known to me. And, I’m afraid, it is not a pretty one.”

  Marius looked startled. “In what way?”

  “Please, sit down, both of you.”

  He offered them tall, straight-backed chairs upholstered with antique, tooled leather.

  “The manuscript in question was not the property of the person who sold it to you. It was stolen from the library of a church in the Extremadura, a small town called Cáceres, a few miles from the Portuguese border.”

  “Stolen? And from Cáceres?” Marius exclaimed
. “How would such an important document have wound up in a church in Cáceres? And more important, where is it now?”

  Señor Almazan shook his head firmly. “I can tell you no more. I am a professor of history at the university. I am a respected antiques dealer. I can have nothing to do with such a dirty business. I’m sorry.”

  “You mean…that is…you won’t help us?” Francesca said, devastated.

  “Even were it in my possession, which it no longer is, I could not in good conscience have handed it over to you.”

  “No longer is…” Marius said in a strangled tone. “Do you mean to say that you’ve seen it, the whole thing? That the manuscript exists and was in your hands, here?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I have seen it, although I cannot be certain that what I have seen is all of it. I was only permitted to examine it for a short time in order to appraise its value. The person who brought it to me was a stranger. When I began asking him questions, he disappeared. That is all I can tell you.”

  “Then how do you know it was from Cáceres?” Marius challenged.

  “Ah, that is detective work! You are in rare manuscripts, are you not, Mr. Serouya? Then you know we are all quite a small family. Toward the evening of the very same day that the young man disappeared with the manuscript, I received a phone call from my colleague in Córdoba, Don Elonza, who wanted to consult with me over the value of a manuscript being offered him. When he described it—the watermarks, the color of the ink, the language—it all fit. I realized it was the same one I had seen just a few hours earlier. He said the fellow seemed desperate, saying he needed to return with the money to Cáceres, or he would be in terrible trouble.”

  “What happened?” Francesca inquired anxiously.

  “I preferred to refrain from asking too many questions. I merely stated that I thought the manuscript genuine and worth quite a bit of money.”

  “What happened to it, señor?” Francesca half rose out of her seat in excitement.