The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  Yehezkel’s face, on seeing her, lit up in a smile that undermined the basis of her resentment. “Good day to you, madame! It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  “Good day, Master Ezekiel.” Gudrun, with an embarrassed giggle, also stuttered a “Good day,” the first words she had ever spoken to a Jew.

  Galatea’s eyes demanded an explanation. Yehezkel remembered what he’d told her and blurted out, “Oh . . . you’re right, of course; I said I would leave yesterday! But you see . . . that night at the Ben-Porats’ a renowned German rabbi who was passing through entrusted me with some letters for two sages in the Holy Land.” He stood straighter, almost proud. “I’m happy to tell you, madame, that in two weeks I shall embark in Venice for Acre and from there, with God’s help, go up to Jerusalem!”

  Galatea was silent, but in her thoughts she screamed, “Take me with you! Please take me with you!”

  She noticed two or three passersby already pointing to the unusual assembly and felt trapped. “I haven’t a single good reason to restrain the Jew of the hermit’s prophecy from going to Jerusalem without me, to solve an enigma to which only I have the key!”

  As if throwing a load off her back, she spat out, “Bereshit!*17 That’s the word!”

  Yehezkel froze. He had just resolved to ignore the pleasant tingle the nun’s attention gave him, and there she was, throwing the first of ALL words in his face!

  “Wha . . . what did you just say, madame?”

  “I said Be - re - shit ! It’s the first word sung by the chorus of virgins in my dream. Does it mean something to you, Master Ezekiel?”

  “No . . . it doesn’t mean something, madame,” said the kabbalist, visibly paler. “It means everything!”

  The abbess let out a long sigh, like someone accused of being crazy for her whole life and suddenly disproving it with one word. From one moment to the next, she was no longer the one asking questions, the rabbi was, and so earnestly it almost made up for their first meeting.

  “Madame, please tell me more about this dream . . . do you remember any other words, beside Bereshit?”

  Galatea smoothed her habit. “Well, let me see . . . they are six white-clad girls with gold bands on their foreheads, but I know they’re virgins . . . the way one knows things in dreams. As for the other words . . . the second one is short, just two syllables, both in ‘aahh.’ Right now I can’t remember exactly . . .”

  “Is it Barah?” prompted Yehezkel.

  Galatea intoned without thinking, “Baa..ràààà.” She stopped, remembering the Jewish interdiction. “The second word is Barah, as you say. I have no doubt. You know the whole phrase, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. “And what do they sing next, madame? What is the third word?”

  Yehezkel’s slightly choked voice made her anxious about something she had always found sublime. “I don’t remember, Master Ezekiel! You forget I don’t recognize the words. You do, don’t you?”

  Yehezkel nodded but didn’t say anything. Galatea had an idea. “When you said Barah, I knew it was the second word. Why don’t you pronounce the third word; I’ll recognize it!”

  “Heaven protect us, madame, don’t you understand? The third word is God’s name, which I can only pronounce while praying! Try to remember, and I’ll wait in silence.”

  Galatea lowered her eyes, smiling. She hadn’t known her rescuer for long but already found it unlikely that he could live up to that simple promise. She concentrated. “In the last weeks I dreamt them every night; no other dream has ever been so persistent. But only until the night of . . . the incident. I’ve not dreamt the choir again since that night.”

  “Not good news,” said Yehezkel. “Soon you’ll forget the little you still remember.” He noticed the growing number of goyim who had stopped to ogle.

  “But it’s a dream, Master Ezekiel! If I’d heard that marvelous hymn while awake, I assure you I would remember all seven words!”

  “Seven? Did you say seven words?”

  Yes, I thought I’d told you that already. Wait, wait, here it is, it’s coming back to me . . . the third word, it’s sung with great power, by five voices . . . three low ones and two high . . .”

  Yehezkel’s eyes widened in a mixture of fascination and horror, as if he expected lightning to incinerate her before his eyes should the nun sing God’s sternest name.

  At first Galatea hummed it, as if to herself. The musical phrase was low and solemn for two syllables and suddenly high-pitched in the third. When she was sure, she sang it. “Eeehh . . . looohh . . . hhííííííím!!”

  Yehezkel was sweating despite the breeze. The onlookers’ curiosity turned to apprehension at the muffled scream from the abbess. Galatea perceived the frightening speed of the Jew’s thoughts, and for a moment it made her head spin. Yehezkel went after a detail that puzzled him. “You said that God’s name is sung by five girls, madame, but there are six of them. What does the sixth one do, is she silent? And how many voices sing Bereshit?”

  “Holy Mother of God, let me catch my breath, Master Ezekiel! Bereshit is the only word sung by all six virgins, while Barah is sung by . . . wait, by just three of them. Yes, three!”

  That was when Yehezkel abandoned all scepticism about the nun’s dream. Each of the three words was sung by the same number of voices as the letters that make up the word. The numerological harmony convinced the kabbalist that Divine Providence was intervening in his mission, and that he would be a fool to ignore what the Spirit was doing.

  “But why a Christian?” he thought. “And a nun, at that? As for dreaming that verse, of all verses . . . well, there was no better honey to catch this bear, was there?”

  Behind the diffidence, something in the way Yehezkel and Galatea were looking at each other made Gudrun uneasy. The group of onlookers was now less than twenty feet away. The two knew they had to talk more about her dream but that it wasn’t the time or place to do so. Yehezkel wasn’t a Talmudist, but he suddenly remembered a detail of the sages discussing the issue of a woman’s voice. “One may not hear a woman sing,” he suggested, “but several women, such as a choir in a synagogue, that is not forbidden . . .”

  Galatea reflected and then said, “There’s a path along the edge of Sant’Antonio’s marsh, near the southern tip of the island. Be there at dawn tomorrow, Master Ezekiel, and please come alone. God be with you!”

  The next instant, the two nuns had turned away and were marching into the Ottones’ inn.

  That night Galatea paced her room like the lioness she was again. During the months of despondency, she had often wondered if her dreams and visions were just the restless yearnings of a warrior’s daughter. Now she knew that her purpose in life was greater than praising God and weaving wool: she had to solve the enigma in Jerusalem!

  “I must go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre! I’ll make the necessary arrangements for a long absence of the mother superior . . . No! What am I saying? I can’t just leave; that would be running from my responsibilities. If I left for two years the convent would collapse . . .”

  Her hands went to her mouth. “But this is what I was born for! What kind of life would I have in the lagoon, soaking in the damp regret of not having seen Jerusalem? And what of the hermit’s prophecy? No, this is my call, like Hildegard’s, I must not let it pass me by. Madre Santissima, give me strength!”

  She stood at the window, looking at the distant, flat edge of the lagoon that had been the boundary of half her life, and suddenly knew it was one of the last times she would stand there. “I’ll give the bishop his victory. Let him choose the new abbess, even Sister Erminia, if he wants!”

  When the Compline bell sounded, her decision was made. She had thought of everything. Gudrun couldn’t stay behind, for she would suffer the rejection of a fallen favorite, so she would take her with, as Elisabetta had taken her to the hermit’s island. She also decided to hire two armigers for protection on the dangerous roads of Outremer. The idea reassured her, as well as being
an image of herself on a journey she found pleasing. After all, was she or wasn’t she a countess?

  She considered how many golden Bézants she’d have to ask from Uncle Rénard—Blanche’s brother who lived in Rialto and fifteen years earlier had secured a place for her at the Borgognoni—and where to hide them. She even tackled the question of how to take her chest along, since the thought of leaving without it had not even occurred to her.

  Just then, Gudrun knocked and came in without waiting for an answer.

  “One day, Gudrun, I’ll prescribe you penance for every time you entered a room without waiting for permission. Can you imagine the discipline I’ll have to impose on you?”

  Educating Gudrun put Galatea’s virtues to the test, but the harsher the Tuscan abbess disciplined her, the more the young German worshipped her. Over the years, she had attached herself to the abbess like a mongrel and was only happy if she could follow one step behind Galatea, whatever she was doing.

  The day Galatea met her rescuer, Gudrun had silently mouthed a formula against the Jew on the way back from the inn. “Crafty Jewish wizard ensnaring the soul of my abbess! May she be protected from your evil filters and dolls, in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, Amen!”

  Then, seeing her fall for his animal sensuality in the square, she had determined to prevent six nuns being alone with a Jewish wizard in a lonely marsh the next dawn.

  Galatea caught her totally by surprise. “You must prepare yourself spiritually with meditations on the Holy Sepulchre, my dove, because very soon you and I . . . are going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land!”

  Gudrun forgot everything and fell to her knees, kissing Galatea’s hands. She pushed an unruly blonde tress back under her cap, weeping with childish joy. “Oh Mother, will we see the wood of the True Cross with our own eyes, and the signs of the nails?”

  That night Galatea couldn’t sleep, her only thought: the Holy Sepulchre.

  The next morning, before dawn, Yehezkel tied the skiff to the roots of a willow along the path Galatea described. Night vapors lingered over the putrid water and the marsh was dimly lit by a bluish glow. Frogs croaked everywhere, perhaps to exploit the stage before leaving it to the choir he was there to hear.

  The fog made the corner of the marshes feel suspended in the middle of fluffy nothingness. Though he expected them, the six nuns startled him. Their voices singing a psalm preceded them, silencing the frogs, and they appeared among the low swirls of fog like a vision before the eyes of a feverish anchorite.

  Yehezkel greeted them with a nod of his head. Galatea appreciated his choice not to break the preternatural silence. The nuns wordlessly lined up elbow to elbow on the grass in front of some reeds. At a gesture from Galatea, they sang the first verse of the Bible in Hebrew.

  “Bereshit Baràh Elohim Et Ha-Shamayim Ve’et Ha-Aretz.”

  Storks and herons took off as they began, the fluttering of wings adding a background drumroll that sent a shiver down Yehezkel’s spine. When the last of the four voices singing “Ha-Aretz” stopped, he made a slow rotating gesture with his hand. Galatea understood at once and signaled to the nuns to sing it again. After the second performance they all stood silently as the colors of the lagoon emerged in the first light.

  Yehezkel was lost in the first morning of the universe, still without a dawn.

  Galatea was close to tears. “A melody worthy of angels,” she said, “especially ‘Ha-Shamayim’! You know, Master Ezekiel, this music was composed by Hildegard of Bingen, a German prophetess. I already knew it before hearing it with these words. When I heard it in my dream I thought I was hearing . . . the beginning of life! And now tell me, I beg you, what did we sing, and . . . did we sing it in Hebrew?”

  Considering she doesn’t know its meaning, her grasp of the verse is miraculous, thought Yehezkel. “You sang the first verse of the Bible, madame, ‘In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth,’ and yes, you sang it in Hebrew, the tongue in which God created the world.” He paused. “As for the music, you’re right . . . it’s like spring blossoming in your heart!”

  There was another silence. They wanted to speak of Jerusalem, but didn’t dare. Yehezkel murmured, “Do you . . . do you often have dreams of this kind, madame?”

  Galatea had been waiting for those words. “Oh, Master Ezekiel, if only you knew! I suffer from a veritable plague of dreams! From the age of ten, I’ve dreamed shreds of events which then happened every time. As I grew older, I learned to keep my dreams to myself, lest I be accused of having dealings with the devil!”

  The words of the abbess troubled the nuns but didn’t surprise Yehezkel, who suspected the nun to be touched by grace from the night he’d set eyes on her. He was moved by the obvious relief she felt in confiding her secret to someone, even to a Jew! Galatea felt his empathy and emptied out the rest of her supernatural baggage.

  “The last premonition to be fulfilled was being saved from drowning while hearing Christ’s words on the lake. . . . Did you know, Master Ezekiel, that ‘Ego sum, nolite timere’ are the words Jesus spoke when he reached the apostles in the middle of the Sea of Gennesaret, walking on the waters?”

  “No, by my beard! I knew Jesus had walked on water, but not the words he spoke to his disciples!”

  Galatea blurted out, “I want you to know that I’ve decided to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem!”

  Yehezkel’s heart skipped a beat. He was overjoyed but didn’t let it show. “In the inn you spoke of ‘an enigma whose solution is in Jerusalem.’ Is that your purpose?”

  “Yes, but not only. I’ve wanted to make that journey for years, and now you turn up and boast that you’re sailing in ten days! I can’t just rot in these marshes while you, Master Ezekiel, embrace a destiny that should have been . . . ours!”

  The reddish top of the sun appeared above the haze, stained with flying birds. Yehezkel reflected on the truly transcendent power of the word “ours.” After a while, he asked Galatea to step aside with him, out of the nuns’ hearing. “Let me handle it, madame,” he said. “We will board a Templar cog, which sails ten days after Easter. Don’t tell anyone we’re . . . traveling together. There must be no connection between your pilgrimage and the journey of a Jew. We will just happen to be on the same ship.”

  The precaution seemed wise to her, and she nodded approval but was also irked by the male way in which he reserved to himself responsibility for arranging the passage.

  “I’m not a child, Master Ezekiel; I can assure you I shall not be a burden to this . . . expedition.”

  He said, “There are other questions I’d like to ask you about your dreams and visions, madame, but there will be time enough for that when we’re at sea.”

  She felt excited by the imminent adventure but vaguely apprehensive, as for a premonition about being “at sea.” She swept the thought away, telling herself that four days after being saved from drowning, anyone had a right to look with suspicion on the idea of being “at sea.”

  The white-clad chorus took leave of its bizarre audience—made of a single listener, and that one an unbeliever—and walked off down the path. Far away, across the fields, the tolling of the iron bell called the faithful to their knees, to hear the softly spoken magic spells.

  CHAPTER 6

  BEIN MAYIM LA-MAYIM

  Between Waters and Waters

  TORCELLO, 20TH APRIL 1219

  The nine days before they met again were a trying time for the abbess, who announced her pilgrimage to her sisters on Holy Friday and spent her thirtieth Easter torn between euphoria over the endeavor—a true Paschal resurrection from her previous condition—and teary separations from her heartbroken nuns.

  Aillil, instead, was beside himself with happiness. The news that Rav Yehezkel would sail to Syria and help him find his father had injected a feverish enthusiasm into the boy, not unlike—Yehezkel told him—the effect of the bite of some scorpions. He ran from one person to the other, showering each with chivalrous
vows and resolutions that didn’t excite in that humble Jewish dyers’ home the kind of admiration the boy seemed to expect.

  That Sunday churches were so full birds didn’t dare enter them. Torcellans praised God with jarring but sincere songs, their booming voices rising heavenward from the whole archipelagos. Sequestered in the dyers’ cottage, the other rabbis gone, Yehezkel could hear the bellow of their prayers. Fifteen years earlier, when he’d left Muslim lands, he’d been horrified to discover that the role Christians assigned to the Children of Israel in the story they commemorated at Easter was that of Satan’s emissaries.

  Two days after Easter, having learned of the two guards who would accompany the abbess—raising San Maff ìo’s contingent to four—Yehezkel went to Venice to ensure the ship’s consul would allow the group to board. He was looking for a cog named Falcus, belonging to the Templar commanderie of Acre. The Templars had a base near the Church of Ascension, but the order’s ships—the waters of the Canal Grande and the souls of Venetians both being narrow—had to stay at anchor at Spinalunga.

  Once there, it didn’t take the rabbi long to find the northern-type round cog, almost two hundred feet long, weighing, he guessed, some 250 millaria (about 125 tons) and with two masts rigged for square sails. He wondered how to obtain an audience with its consul. Within an hour, he’d bought a Greek sailor a drink and been taken on board, his nonchalance on the tallowed gangplank raising seamen’s eyebrows. He was introduced to the Cypriot scribe, a shabby little creature with a spark of something human in his eyes. The scribe knew of a Jew among the passengers, but his reaction to the news that Yehezkel intended to bring five more people with him—two of them women!—was undisguised mirth.

  Yehezkel discovered that the presence of women on pilgrim ships was forbidden but also learned—after a first taste of money by the scribe—that the prohibition didn’t apply to princesses. He cautiously inquired about the kind of sum that might suffice to bend that rule to include countesses, and after a lively and enjoyable negotiation, the two men made a deal.