The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  “You both know very well,” answered the patron gruffly, “that even if we found a cove with a beach at its end, with such seas we would hit rocks in its entrance, off one of the tongues of land enclosing it.”

  Yehezkel thought grimly, “Maybe Rav Moshe was right . . . maybe sailing is for goyim. If God decides to leave me among the living at the end of this, I shall only sail again when there is no alternative!”

  Don Sancio was at once sobered and exhilarated by the thought that the lines they were reciting were probably the last ones the actors on the quarterdeck would ever deliver. “I want to express my admiration, Master Ezekiel, while I still can, for your precision in quoting Scripture. You have a truly exceptional memory . . .”

  “Thank you for the kind words, Don Sancio; your own memory is no less remarkable. Oh, by the way, since the storm started I heard no quotes from Ecclesiastes. Did Qoheleth never go to sea?”

  His words made everyone smile, Friar Vassayl laughing openly. The scribe seconded the rabbi’s attempt to relieve the tension. “No, Master Ezekiel, I don’t believe King Solomon ever went to sea, but I feel sure that if he had, he would have found it futile!”

  They all laughed, and then the maître brought their minds back to the fate of the Falcus. “At this point, it is probably true that the way to save most lives would be to beach the cog, but it would take a seer to know behind which promontory lies a beach.”

  The word hit Yehezkel like a slap in the face. “But we have a seer! The nun is going to save us all!” he screamed in his thoughts.

  He feverishly planned how to bring her up there and then, without explaining, charged down the ladder. He reached his little flock and tried to convince the abbess to drag herself to the foot of the ladder but realized she would never find the strength. With a deep sigh, under Gudrun’s shocked stare, he picked her up and carried her aft. The gesture seemed to bring some life back into Galatea’s eyes. When she realized she was in the rabbi’s arms, her face went through three expression: first the outraged nun, then the cornered animal, and finally total abandon.

  Yehezkel thought of the night, a month before, when he’d carried her senseless body from the skiff to the oak outside the monastery. The Falcus was doing her best to send them both sprawling down the deck, and as he tried to keep his balance, his hand ended up on the edge of her pelvis. He felt the softness just inside it, as he had that night, and something moved in his loins, like the distant rumble of thunder. As he deposited her at the foot of the ladder, Yehezkel thought, “If we survive, sooner or later this nun will cause me to sin. But not trying to save the cog would be like fishing her out of the Venetian lagoon only to throw her into the Aegean Sea!”

  Now he had to get her on the quarterdeck. He thought of everything. He shouted to a sailor to bring the bosun’s chair,*25 and while the pulley that would hoist her was being set up on the balcony, he tied her down and stepped into the galley. The sheltered clay furnace hadn’t been used that day. Contrasting the cog’s rocking—he twice called the Falcus an evil whirligig!—he managed to light a small fire and warm some vinegar with strong herbs.

  A few minutes later, Galatea was sitting on a short plank for all the world like a child’s swing, tied for safety and rising in brief tugs as the men on the balcony hoisted her up. Yehezkel climbed the ladder next to her, holding on to her habit to contrast the swinging with the cog’s motion. Her eyes regained some awareness of what was happening, but she didn’t find the strength to comment.

  Finally, she stood with the men on quarterdeck. Yehezkel gave her the infusion. She gulped it down and grimaced as she listened to him explain their predicament and the decision to try to find a beach.

  As he spoke, perhaps two leagues away, the rocky cliffs of Candia’s shore appeared for the first time, through a thick mist of rain and sea spray.

  “We should let the pilgrims out on deck,” said Yehezkel, “to take their fate into their own hands.”

  “The heavens are most unkind to the intentions of these penitents,” commented Don Sancio drily.

  As Vidoso went off to let the pilgrims in the hold know the full extent of the tragedy, Yehezkel made his first attempt to stimulate the visionary talents of the abbess. “Close your eyes and think of a beach, madame. Think fine, white sand. When you have that picture in your mind, please try to guess where, along the shore in front of us, there may be sand. Can you see sand anywhere?” Yehezkel was in control, yet his voice came out a little squeaky.

  Galatea concentrated, grasping the parapet, eyes closed and chest heaving. “I don’t know . . . I see no sand, only different colors, depending on where I look.”

  Yehezkel shouted, “Depending on where you look? Then where is the blue, madame? The blue of your visions, the blue of my wool thread, where is it?”

  “It’s not there . . .” sobbed Galatea. “Every one is an earth color, browns, yellows, greens . . .”

  In the end, thought Yehezkel, he insisted on taking them to certain death when most, even as mamluk slaves, could have survived. The darkest of Ezekiel’s words came out of his mouth by themselves. “Hear what the Lord says, ‘Disaster! Unheard of disaster! See, the end has come! The end is here!’”

  Young de Rosson, abandoning all chivalric fervor, moaned, “Ooh . . . Saint Pierre, Sainte Tecla, Saint Martin! Oh . . . Maman!!”

  Friar Vassayl thought the sky was a dark place, and God was malicious.

  “There it is! There’s the blue! It’s there!” cried Galatea all of a sudden.

  She pointed a finger toward a point of the shore where the waves crashed on rocks that had fallen from the promontory above. Friar Vassayl didn’t hesitate. “An eighth to the east! Ease out the main!”

  A few moments later a cove appeared, hidden between a small island and a round promontory. It was bigger than they expected, with a long white beach at the end, which to their eyes looked like the gates of paradise. For the second time, Yehezkel told himself he must stop underestimating this woman.

  Friar Vassayl and Arnulf ’s superior seamanship brought the Falcus into the cove without getting close to either side of its rocky entrance. The cog, sheltered from the gale and in nearly still water, was suddenly steady and calm, but it was still fast. They had five minutes at most before it reached the beach to hurriedly organize the collective jump into the sea. The boatswain shouted:

  “Everyone jump overboard as late as they have the courage to! Those who can’t swim, jump with someone who can! Leave everything here or you’ll drown, you’ll get your things when the cog is beached!”

  Yehezkel entrusted Aillil to Rustico and Gudrun to Garietto, then climbed on the chest and pulled Galatea up with him. He shot a last glance at the end of the cove, now some three hundred feet away. He couldn’t help thinking of the apocalyptic vision appearing to people ashore: a huge ship, sails aloft, angrily leaving the sea, as if it had had enough of it, and venturing onto dry land.

  Then he turned around, put an arm around Galatea’s waist, and jumped.

  The dive seemed to last forever. For the rest of his days, Yehezkel would never forget the feeling of Galatea’s body clinging to his, or her scream in his beard.

  CHAPTER 10

  VAYIKRAH ELOHIM

  And God Called

  FOUR LEAGUES NORTH OF KALIVIANI, IN THE EXTREME NORTHWEST OF CANDIA, 5TH MAY 1219

  “Con . . . fi . . . teor,”*26 whispered the pilgrim. The young Greek monk bending over him saw the word form on his lips and tightened his grip on the dying man’s hand.

  “All rancor must remain here, brother. Are you at peace with everyone?”

  The pilgrim raised his head with a grimace of pain that resembled a smile, exhaled, “I’ve no more loads,” and fell back on the sand. The monk made small signs of the cross on his forehead, his chest, and the soles of his feet, murmuring the words of the ritual. When he was sure the man’s soul had left this world, he stood up and gestured to the sailors assigned to the burials.

  An hour after the
beaching, the sea was still bringing pilgrims ashore, both dead and dying. Thirty-two of them had not answered Vidoso’s roll call, and twenty-two bodies had been buried so far.

  The Falcus, her underbelly indecently exposed, lay on her side in the sand like a stranded leviathan. The small cove crawled with men recovering their belongings. The cog had majestically sailed up the beach, hesitated as if trying to remain heroically upright, then settled down onto her starboard flank, slightly crushing a central section of the hull, as if to make herself more comfortable.

  The rabbi’s flock was intact, but Don Sancio had been grabbed by the current, and before André could reach him and drag him ashore, the waves flung him twice onto the low rocks at one end of the beach. Now the scribe lay under a rosemary bush, senseless but breathing, and the rabbi thought that with God’s help, he might survive.

  The bulk of survivors, some two hundred people led by Vidoso and the Templars, just set off to the nearest village, Kaliviani, four leagues from the cove. Yehezkel climbed to the shrubs behind the beach and was sitting there, drained, surveying the scene. In a corner of the beach the drowned were being buried, one or two relatives mourning them and a row of corpses awaiting their turn. The sun was about to sink into the choppy sea, still full of whitecaps. In the distance behind him, storm clouds crowned the mountaintop in a purplish, crepuscular light.

  For the past hour, people from nearby hamlets had flocked to the cove—which he’d learned was called Gramvoussa—and now either helped the survivors or stood around the edge of the beach, chatting. More were arriving despite darkness falling, for everyone wanted to witness an event that all western Crete—the Greeks never accepted the Venetians’ name for their island—would weave into tales for generations.

  The rabbi snapped out of his reverie and helped Rustico and Garietto build a stretcher for the scribe. Friar Vassayl ordered two sailors to take the stretcher so that Galatea’s armigers could carry her chest, which they’d unloaded from the cog under Yehezkel’s direction using pulleys, suffering small injuries, and cursing in their lagoon dialect all through the process. Just as they were ready to head for the village, Don Sancio came to with a moan, which Yehezkel thought was a good sign.

  Galatea’s mood as they set off was so good it embarrassed her. She was probably the happiest of all the survivors, and not because her gift had saved so many people from drowning, nor because everyone in their little group was safe and sound. No, the abbess was secretly happy because for the first time in eleven days, she wasn’t seasick. Was it right to praise God and be relieved, she asked herself, when a storm had just taken thirty-two lives?

  Then she raised her eyes—and thought she was back on the Falcus. The hill ahead of them leaned to one side and the ground gave way beneath her feet just as that cursed deck had done. She felt light-headed and instinctively grabbed the rabbi’s arm not to fall. Yehezkel almost jumped back to avoid contact with a woman, saw the nun’s expression, and put his arm around her waist just in time to stop her falling headlong on the rocky path. When she was over her fainting spell, Galatea turned to him with a frail little smile, the back of her hand on her forehead. “It was certainly God’s will, Master Ezekiel, but you saved my life twice in the space of a month, once by pulling me out of the water and once by throwing me into it! For the rest of my days, I won’t be able to look at water without thinking of you.”

  Yehezkel laughed for the first time since the peaks had appeared downwind of the Falcus.

  After walking for over an hour they saw white square patches in the moonlight: the roofs of Kaliviani. The first house was crumbling, with the roof beams half exposed and its walls rising to different heights, here above the door, there just to the window sill. Yehezkel guessed it must have been set on fire in one of the innumerable raids on the island by Normans, Saracens, or pirates.

  Standing in front of the house was a woman with a folded kerchief on her head. A little stout, neither fair nor ugly, she wasn’t old but had wilted early and seemed to have been placed there to complete the picture of desolation. Yehezkel thought no woman in the world could have been more clearly a widow.

  When she saw that the man on the stretcher was an aged cleric, the woman stepped into the path and said in a mixture of Greek and gestures, “Someone said ‘Show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Come in for a drink of water.”

  Galatea recognized the apostle’s words but didn’t catch Yehezkel’s response in Greek, which lit a smile on the woman’s face that wiped ten years off it. Galatea asked him what he’d said, and he answered, “That comparing you to an angel is a slight exaggeration, but comparing me to an angel is blasphemy.”

  The abbess stepped into the house, giggling at the compliment, but with her back to the rabbi.

  The woman said the big group of survivors had gone on to Chania, the biggest town in the west of the island, some twenty-five leagues to the east. Yehezkel asked if there were any Jews in the village and when she answered negatively, he gratefully accepted her Christian hospitality.

  Friar Vassayl and the four Falcus men with him chose to follow the main group and took their leave. The maître entrusted Don Sancio to them and then gripped Yehezkel’s forearm, sincere friendship in his eyes. Twenty minutes later, only Yehezkel’s flock, still white with sea salt and quietly stunned by the storm and the beaching, was left in the derelict house.

  “I am Albacara Mudaciol, widow of Vidal Cordier, a settler from Rialto,” said the woman with a curt bow to Galatea. Her features reminded the abbess of Bonarina, her nanny at Castel Romitorio.

  “And I am Galatea degli Ardengheschi, abbess of San Maffìo, in Torcello,” answered Galatea.

  “Oh, you’re from Torcello! I have a cousin there! Do you know a man called Raniero Zanin?”

  Soon the two women were deep in lagoon gossip. A little later, after Galatea introduced the others to the widow, they hung sheets to divide the big kitchen, men and women improvising pallets to sleep on in the two halves of the room, which, like all Greek homes, smelled strongly of myrrh. Now and then the rabbi checked Don Sancio’s pulse and raised one of his eyelids with a finger. The scribe reacted well and as the evening turned to night was increasingly aware of his surroundings.

  When the chorus of regular breaths indicated everyone was asleep, Yehezkel went outside to pray Ma’ariv. After thanking the Lord with all his heart for the presence of the Christian prophetess on the Falcus, he reflected on the situation. The Templars said they would rest in Chania and then purchase mounts and ride on to the capital of the island, Heraklion, also unsuccessfully renamed Candia by the Venetians. Yehezkel’s hope, both to save Don Sancio’s life and to get his flock off the island, had been the presence of Jews, if not in Kaliviani, then at least in Chania. What to do?

  The night was so dark that though the only light in the house was a candle, the derelict structure was incapable of containing it. Light seeped from the gaps between the roof beams, from every fissure in the walls, and from the small kitchen window, splashing onto the rocks and shrubs outside. Yehezkel thought it looked like a bonfire was raging in the kitchen, yet it was just a candle.

  Sun, sea, and silence filled the next days. The widow’s guests did little and said even less. Don Sancio improved and began to speak but felt weak and complained of pains in his abdomen. Yehezkel laid him on his side, palpated gently to see where he felt the greatest pain, and concluded that one of the scribe’s organs had probably broken its envelope. Galatea suggested that they carry him to Chania.

  “Has ve-Halilah!”*27 cried Yehezkel in Hebrew. “A Greek medicus would kill him! I can do more for him in this village than half the physicians in the Polis, madame, even if you don’t seem to think so. . . .”

  Galatea felt the haughtiness that occasionally escaped Master Ezekiel’s control, but since Don Sancio was visibly better—he had even taken some warm milk with honey without vomiting—chose not to insist.

  In the days before the
scribe’s condition took a turn for the worse, a strange friendship, of the kind that sometimes blooms between old people and adolescents, developed between Don Sancio and Aillil. When asked, “Do you like it?” the boy would often answer, “I don’t quite know what to think of it,” an attitude that soon endeared him to the old philosopher.

  Don Sancio began to instruct Aillil in those subjects that most intrigued the boy, trusting Aillil’s nose to lead him to the best all-round education one could hope to impart in a few days of conversations. Aillil was enthusiastic. Released from the cage of the rabbi’s verbose ethical sermons, he was fascinated by the theory and notation of music, and found that even the conjugation of Latin verbs had a strangely satisfying logic. On the second day, Don Sancio asked him, “Did your father ever tell you about Outremer?”

  Aillil smiled disarmingly. “I never met my father, sir, but knights who were there told me of white towns and palm trees, of castles watching over desert trails, and strange animals unknown in the West. I’ve thought of nothing else for years. It’s why I’m going there. And to find my father.”

  When Yehezkel thanked him for his efforts with Aillil, Don Sancio mumbled, “Qoheleth says, ‘Better a poor but wise youth than an old but foolish king who no longer knows how to heed a warning.’”

  That afternoon Galatea, Yehezkel, and Don Sancio were sitting in the shade of a fig tree behind the house, discussing how the presence of sand behind the rocks had been revealed by the blue. The rabbi explained the importance kabbalists attribute to the color Scripture calls saphir, the celestial blue beneath the divine throne when Moses ascended Mount Sinai.

  “I always knew it,” sighed Galatea. “Did I not tell you how many times that heavenly blue appeared in my visions?”

  “Interesting,” murmured Don Sancio. He spoke with difficulty, pausing often.

  “Forgive my bluntness, Don Sancio,” butted in Yehezkel, “but do you really not know any more about the Parchment of Circles than what you told us that night on the Falcus?”