The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  He saw the round white stain of the woman’s gown on the water not two hundred yards from shore. He knew he’d have to grab her on the first attempt, or the wind would carry him beyond her and he would waste precious strength to paddle back upwind to her.

  When he got close, Yehezkel realized the woman was no longer shouting. To his surprise, he thought he heard her singing to herself. He had once heard from a survivor of a Greek shipwreck of the calm euphoria that comes over people about to give up and drown. He thanked the Lord she was still alive and wondered how she would react to his appearance.

  The moment of the rescue was upon him in no time. As he’d feared, when he slipped his hands under her shoulders she was overtaken by panic and thrashed about with unsuspected strength. Yehezkel took a final deep breath and pronounced four words in Latin in a warm, deep voice:

  “Ego sum, nolite timere!”*6

  On hearing those words, the woman opened her eyes wide, drew a deep breath, and went limp in his arms. In a single, uninterrupted movement, the veins in his forehead pulsating and his beard shining with sweat, the rabbi tore the senseless body from the lagoon’s embrace and placed it, belly down, across the low thwart in the center of the skiff.

  He sat down and started paddling furiously back in an easterly direction, against the Bora. But every hundred yards or so he gained windward, he lost fifty to turn and gently sit on the woman’s back, forcing her to expel great gushes of the water she’d swallowed. Under the brutal pressure of Yehezkel’s weight, the woman shook, vomited water, wheezed and coughed horribly. Despite it all, the rabbi could still make out that she was incredibly beautiful.

  He used his alignment to find the pier, reached it with his last ounce of strength, tied a line to it almost without looking, and collapsed, exhausted, in the bottom of the skiff. His eyes closed, he wondered if it had all really happened, but the wind and his gasping breaths were not the only sound: he could hear the woman’s coughs too, each one turning into uncontrolled retching.

  When he had recovered enough, Yehezkel lifted the woman in his arms and managed to carry her, staggering, to the base of the oak. He stretched her out on the grass and tried to revive her, but as he did so some dogs downwind started barking furiously, waking up the fisherman who lived near the convent. Yehezkel saw torches approaching.

  Among those running toward him was Gudrun, Galatea’s young German protégée. A bearded stranger was manhandling her abbess, and she rushed forward, letting out a fearful scream. Yehezkel stood up, his hands raised in a calming gesture. There were also two men he had never seen.

  “It’s a Jew!” shouted one of the two. “He was kidnapping the abbess! Let’s hang him!”

  Yehezkel started his breathing again, but he knew he was too weak and felt the first pang of fear. Whatever he said, these goyim wouldn’t believe him. He had always suspected that if his time came to sanctify the Name, instead of doing so with dignified restraint he would likely try to take as many uncircumcised pagans with him as he could. As he watched the savages approach, he felt that the rage mounting inside him was proof that he’d been right.

  He tried to keep control. The dyers’ cottage was downwind, and he wondered if he should use the power of his voice to call for help rather than try to overcome the rabble.

  Suddenly, Galatea came to. She coughed, spluttered, and then gestured to Gudrun to come closer.

  The big blonde carefully stepped around the Jew and rushed to Galatea’s side, taking her hand.

  The abbess whispered hoarsely, “I . . . I was drowning. He . . . he saved me.”

  Then she passed out.

  CHAPTER 3

  VAYEHI OR

  And There Was Light

  ISLAND OF TORCELLO, TEN YEARS EARLIER–15TH AUGUST 1209

  A ripple of sound spread out on the smooth surface of the silence. The big bell had rung Nocturns.

  The young nun turned over on a narrow pallet beneath a gauze veil protecting her from insects. It couldn’t be—she’d only just drifted off! But the bell chimed again. Galatea opened her eyes. The humid darkness was perfectly still, and the big bed in Castel Romitorio was in another life.

  It was five years since she’d joined the Cistercian house of San Tomà; locals called it I Borgognoni. A double monastery in the old style where the church was the only place monks and nuns shared, all other parts of the compound being separated by a high wall, not to be approached at any time. In that summer of 1209, the old cenoby housed thirty-eight monks and fifteen nuns.

  Galatea got up quickly; the Rule allowed but a few minutes for bodily needs. She’d grown quite tall for a woman. She gathered her hair under the cap. It reached to her shoulders again. Sister Erminia had certainly noticed, and soon she would have to cut it again. As she slipped on a frock, she remembered it was Saturday, and her heart quickened. Today she would go outside! She felt like singing but didn’t. By now she’d learned to hold back impulses permitted to children that Sister Erminia called bestial. Laughing out loud, bursting into tears or song, making faces, screaming . . . all these did not become a nun.

  “Oh my dear Jesus, my sweet bridegroom! So many things don’t become a nun.” She paused, smiling in the dark, “Or for that matter, a wife.”

  The small bell sounded the time for the office. Galatea left her cell for the oratory, mumbling a psalm. She crossed the tiny cloister and joined her sisters as they entered the church, their steps on the gravel the only sound in the night. Hooded monks were walking in from the opposite nave, the candles on the altar projecting two single files of sleepy shadows proceeding toward each other along the curved wall behind the ambulatory, for all the world like ghosts crowding the dreams of some forsaken pagan lagoon divinity.

  Galatea crossed herself before the altar, knelt in her pew, closed her eyes, and prayed.

  She had the vision of the man with the blue shawl again. It happened like the other times, while she was wide awake, eyes open. Suddenly she was standing on a wooden pier above emerald water sparkling in the sun. Before her, a man stretched out his arms, but over his head and arms was a shawl of an intense blue, and all she could see were his hands poking out from under it, dirty fingers strangely splayed out.

  What made this vision different from others she’d had all her life was its capacity to return in powerful yet fleeting shreds. Days after the vision vanished, the smell of water, or the creaking of planks, or the blue of the shawl would be there again, sharper than what actually surrounded her.

  Her visions had not frightened her for years, but she still felt the need to atone for the privilege that she knew to be hers alone. She would seek out a passing holy man or a cleric returning from a pilgrimage in Outremer and give him a silver grosso for his church. Her sin of pride would end up in some windswept monastery in Portugal or Hibernia, and none would ever know of it. Yes, that’s what she would do.

  After Nocturns, Galatea returned to her cell. Silence would reign until the Lauds bell, just before dawn. She looked around the minute quarters and asked herself once more if two flowers, or even—oh, the nerve!—a caged bird by the small, barred window would really corrupt a nun’s devotion to the Lord. She would never be able to go back to sleep. The thought of crossing the crowded island on a market day and entering the cathedral itself; it was so exciting!

  Then her eyes fell on the coat of arms emblazoned on her trunk, and she fell on her pallet and pitied herself for her naive enthusiasm. “Galatea degli Ardengheschi, you’ve been in a convent for just five years, and here you are thinking like an oblate, who never saw the world beyond the walls of the nunnery! A walk to market thrills you like a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. What a sad fate for a countess of Tuscia who used to hunt with men and dreamed of her own fiefdom in Outremer!”

  She laid down, feeling a growing shortness of breath. The walls of the cell slowly closed in. Her chest heaved in silent screams. Mother Elisabetta warned her that such nights had not gone away for good, and if they came back, prayer would bring the only pos
sible relief. Sleep finally took pity on her after a while, halfway through an Ave Maria.

  Back in her cell after Lauds and Prime, Galatea opened the massive chest and took out an expensive copy of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, copied by Tuscan monks from a manuscript that had come directly from Disibodenberg. Galatea opened it reverently and tiptoed into the Sybil’s visions, the only flight from convent life she did not consider a breach of vows.

  Mother Elisabetta shared her enthusiasm for the German mystic, now thirty years dead, and for the past three months the two had been contemplating the first visio, the one of the Creator. A week before, they had moved on to the second visio, Hildegard’s understanding of evil, temptation, and sin. Since then, the sinister image of the visio secunda had drawn Galatea to the book almost every day.

  She turned a page, and it appeared, taking her breath away, as it did every time. Above, a blanket of stars; below, Adam asleep with his head reclining on a pool of evil, black water. Fingers from the water became the snake that splashed its black poison on Eve just as she emerged from Adam’s rib cage in the form of . . . a piece of the starry sky above!

  A few days before, Don Rosalino, the curate of Santa Fosca, had returned into the arms of his Creator. Galatea had been tasked with cleaning up his sacristy. A little after sixth hour, she emerged from the tiny door in the chapter house with two novices.

  The three nuns stopped, looking in all directions like anxious birds, at once curious and intimidated, as if venturing into the outside world were something sure to bring its own punishment. Galatea snapped out of it first and led the novices through the throng along the canal between Torcello and Majurbio. Their troubled looks followed beggars, lepers, cripples, and drunks wondering from one campo to the next. Under a glaring sun, veiled by the foul vapors rising from the canals, the three nuns crossed the bridge into the borough of Santa Margherita.

  Those vapors had been driving Torcello’s decline for decades. In the thousandth year from the birth of our Savior the island had hosted forty thousand souls, but now there were barely ten thousand left, the rest driven away by waves of pestilence and foul, unbreathable air. As a kind of consolation, the island was blooming with convents and monasteries as more and more patrician families donated their estates to the church before moving to Rialto.

  Traditions in the lagoon told of the flight of the first Christians from the mainland, some six hundred years earlier. The ferocious barbarians on small horses who had raided them constantly possessed no sailing skills—or, in fact, any confidence with water whatsoever—so the inhabitants of Altino found refuge on the islands. It had also been a religious flight of sorts, for those barbarians had also been Christians—o tempora!*7—but of the Arian heresy which at times demanded the persecution of Catholics. The Altinates colonized the islands around Torcello while the Paduans settled Rialto.

  Upon emerging on the Square of the Wheel the three froze again, overwhelmed by the grandiosity of churches and palaces, as well as a little shocked by the gaudy dresses of Torcellans. In front of them rose Santa Maria, Torcello’s incredibly tall cathedral. To its right was the minute San Niccolò with its wooden gate, and farther right the reddish, round Santa Fosca, surrounded by its graceful octagonal portico. To their left, dozens of boats of all sizes were moored along the quay on the Rio Maggiore. Canals, alleys, and fondamenta†2 stretched in any direction the nuns cared to look, all of them crawling with people. Galatea again wrenched her eyes from a spectacle she could have watched all day. She took her sisters by the hand and resolutely crossed the square to Santa Fosca.

  Soon they were ankle deep in dust and cobwebs in the small sacristy behind the church; mice sprinted around them. At first, Galatea was embarrassed to open the doors of Rosalino’s closet, decorated with the symbols of the litanies of the Virgin. A wave of sadness overcame her when she did. The priest’s whole life was there, on two dusty shelves: notebooks, which he jealously closed when someone approached his desk; the trap to defend these books from mice; a bottle of Chios wine he kept for important guests; a few salamis hanging at the back. And in sacrilegious proximity to those venal possessions, the bronze vessel of the Holy Oil, covered by a cloth cap.

  Tears welled as she remembered the little priest, short arms waving excitedly in the air, round eyes as sad as a stray dog’s. He would chide her for some behavior more befitting a young countess than a nun, but the little smile at the end of the sermon always made her feel forgiven. If only Lupo had smiled at her like that, sometimes.

  She noticed two stones on top of the cupboard and took one down. It was covered with strange carvings and brought back Don Rosalino’s obsession with ancient Achaeans. For years the curate tried to convince the self-styled erudite clerics of Torcello and Venice that the archipelagos, far from being founded by refugees from Altino, had been settled by the ancient Greeks—whose tongue he studied all his life—and that their island had at one time been the home of Aeneas himself!

  The doctors of the lagoon always derided him with the kind of condescension that angered the chubby priest far more than serious, argued condemnations of his theses would have done. One day, after listening to his bitter complaints, Galatea wrote a phrase in the notebook she kept in a secret drawer of her chest. Don Rosalino had said, “There is truth and there is untruth, and if you cling to the truth, even against the whole world, it doesn’t mean you’re crazy!” On hearing of his death two days before, Galatea read those words again and wept over the vindication of Rosalino that had never come, and over the great injustice that rules in the world.

  She gathered the contents of the cupboard in a cloth. Putting the Holy Oil behind the altar would give her an excuse to peer into the cathedral. She told Floridiana and Gualfarda not to leave the sacristy until she came back. On an afterthought she added, in the sternest tone she could muster, that if anyone walked in, they should pretend to have taken a vow of silence. Then, before the novices could question that last instruction, she slipped out, crossed San Niccolò’s narthex, and discreetly slid into Santa Maria.

  The lion’s share of the relics looted from Constantinople in the infamous campaign five years earlier went to Saint Mark’s Basilica, still unfinished and more flamboyant with every passing month, but trades and coups de main between Venice and Torcello were not altogether over.

  Torcello’s Santa Maria, the oldest church in the lagoon, secured no less than a fragment of the True Cross. In five years, the gold-plated reliquary, high above the altar and surmounted by the inscription HIC EST DE LIGNO CRUCIS, transformed life on the island. Churches endowed with famous relics soon became fetid, noisy hospitals; the sick laid out on pallets along the naves, their distance from the altar supposedly dictated by the nobility of their birth, but usually determined by the size of their donations.

  Galatea’s eyes were immediately drawn to the mosaics taking shape at the church’s extremities: a Virgin showing her Child in the apse and an immense Last Judgment on the wall opposite. As she admired the triumphant Christ in the Resurrection, taking Adam by the hand and trampling the doors of hell, she suddenly noticed the color of his mantle. It was exactly the same blue as the shawl on the head and arms of the man in her vision!

  She gasped. “Oh, Madre Santissima . . . it must be Jesus!”

  But two more figures in the mosaic were clad in the same blue. She had to find out who they were. She asked a passing monk if anyone in the cathedral could tell her about the contents of the mosaics.

  “Abbot Cipriano can tell you anything you need to know, sister. He’s here from Ravenna precisely to dictate the contents of the mosaics and knows the meaning of every smallest detail.”

  She thanked him and walked to the center of the apse. Short, hunchbacked, and with a pointed hood over his head, Father Cipriano looked more like a gnome than a cleric, his head down over the drawings. When he looked up, eyeballs so deepset they looked like they’d been hammered into his skull, Galatea almost jumped back. She curtsied, thinking of monsters an
d basilisks, and then stammered, “Ego, paupercola et imbecillis forma,*8 dare to beg for a pearl of the abbot’s wisdom. Which Old Testament figures in the Anastasis wear cloaks of the same blue as our Savior?”

  Cipriano smiled, his upper lip curling just enough to turn the smile into a smirk. “Such questions should not preoccupy a young nun, but you ask with such courtesy and humility that it would be heartless to refuse you.”

  As he raised his eyes to the mosaic, the hood slipped off. He was totally bald and huge, fleshy lobes hung below pale ears. The similarity with the gargoyles adorning the churches of her Tuscan childhood was complete. Galatea stared at him as if one of those grotesque statues had suddenly addressed her.

  “The figures in the blue cloaks are King David and the prophet Ezekiel, sister, but I can assure you that the color of their cloaks bears no significance at all. If it had any, I would know. But if you’ll forgive a witticism, how come you to seem so interested in the mosaic part of the mosaic?”

  Cipriano giggled at his own jest. Galatea thought she’d done enough silly things for one day and had better go back to her novices before she caused any more damage. But the abbot started rattling off the sources for the Judgment. “. . . and from Saint Ephrem of Syria and Saint John of Damascus. And, of course, from Saint John’s Apocalypse.”

  At the mention of that book, Galatea became attentive again and turned to the mosaic.

  “The Apocalypse? But then, Father, the child sitting in Satan’s lap must be the Antichrist, isn’t that so?”

  The abbot’s face darkened. Galatea felt a powerful desire to kick herself.

  “You are only supposed to read Psalms and Gospels, sister. . . .” Cipriano looked her in the eyes, and then his expression softened. “But these are dark times; laymen read the Scriptures by themselves, so why should I be surprised that a nun has heard some crazy preacher talk of the Antichrist? That is where you heard that name, is it not?”