The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  Aillil told his mentors of the young girl he’d seen—whose eyes he’d seen, he corrected—and how those eyes made him feel. Both of them warned him that seducing a Bedouin girl could cost him his life, but he looked at them as though they hadn’t understood what he’d said. In any case, on that first day in the Muzziena camp, he did not set eyes on her again.

  AL-KAHIRA, 27TH NOVEMBER 1219

  It was another two weeks before the caravan moved off. The passengers joined the Bedus two days before departure. The clan numbered some fifty men, women, and children, and a third of the camels’ loads consisted of their tents and fodder for humans and animals.

  On the trail along the eastern edge of the delta, past the city of Bilbeis, it took the caravan a week to reach the Sinai and venture into the desert. By that time, the passengers had grown used to both spending hours perched on swinging camel humps and to the routine when the sun set behind them and the clan pitched their camp—the traveling one, without the sheikh’s big tent—for the night.

  The landscape from up there seemed to Galatea to run past her as she sat still, but she knew from the ache in her hips that the opposite was the case. After a while she found that camel logic wasn’t so different from horse logic and eventually reached a number of unspoken understandings with her mount.

  But the fact that riding a camel for ten leagues every day seemed tolerable was due to the proximity of the Nile. As soon as they entered the Sinai, the daily marches trudging over wind-whipped dunes and across endless plains, where the weirdest mirages shimmered through the heat, seemed more than they could bear. The wind blew all day, carrying sand that struck their faces, every grain feeling like a hot spark from a fireplace. Soon Galatea was forced to ask one of Twalia’s wives to lend her a niqab. Desert sand became the unwanted companion of every second of each day. They breathed it, swallowed it with their food, and drank it with their water, a fine layer of it floating on every liquid. Galatea even felt it between her buttocks as she walked. All the while, the heightened danger as the distance from towns and villages increased was evident throughout the clan. Fear of raiding parties kept everyone tense and alert, eyes searching the horizon even when dazed by lack of sleep. Those first few days spent on trails not far from the eastern branch of the Nile now seemed like a pleasure ride.

  That week also gave Aillil a chance to meet Yasmine. When Yehezkel had first approached her, the girl shocked him by saying she knew exactly why he wanted to speak with her. She also wanted the blond boy with a mystic’s gaze for herself, but her father had already promised her to a cousin, and anyway Aillil was an infidel. But driven by her own beguilement, she’d agreed to meet him, on condition that the rabbi be present and that the meeting be hidden from the clan.

  It had not been easy to arrange, but in that first week the caravan often camped beside villages—both to avoid using their own water and to pray in a mosque—so one day Yehezkel told Yasmine to find a pretext to go to the well in the evening and turned up there with Aillil as if by chance. Yasmine removed her niqab and smiled a bitter-sweet smile at Aillil. The boy knew what she’d said to Yehezkel about him being an infidel, and the moment he saw her face was the first time the thought of becoming a Mohammedan entered his mind.

  After that, the two youngsters secretly met behind the sleeping camel herd many nights, despite the danger they knew they were running. Soon they discovered that mutual bewitchment provides a hundred ways to overcome differences of language. Hussein taught Aillil to chew jasmine flowers before kissing her, laughing as he did so. During the day, when Aillil looked at Yasmine from afar, he understood the chansons of the troubadours who sang stories of wildly beautiful princesses. Every time she walked out of a tent, it was as if all the torches had been snuffed out.

  Then one night, near the Bir el Malhi well, it happened. The teens became lovers, and though they’d not yet learned a dozen words of each other’s language, the life-and-death decision to never part was as clear as in a long, poetic missive. One memory of the night that would never leave Aillil, even years later, was when, though his soul had just risen to heaven, he worried that his weight might be oppressing her and tried to roll off her sweat-covered body. At once Yasmine’s legs wrapped themselves tightly around him and kept him where he was.

  In the morning, on his camel, Aillil thought languidly, “So this is what love is . . . now I understand why men and women chase each other mindlessly, why husband and wife care so much for each other; now I understand everything!”

  In the camp at Damietta he discovered what a wonderful thing a woman’s body was, but doing it with Yasmine was different. This was the enchantment Iñigo spoke of, the one from which only death can free you.

  Almost from the first day, Aillil was enlisted as Hussein’s apprentice. For a boy who’d grown up in the green valleys at the foot of the Pyrenees, his love of the desert was as sudden and intense as his love of Yasmine. Hussein the camel puller, like Yehezkel and Don Sancio before him, found that the boy made up for the shortcomings of his senses with a kind of sixth sense, as well as with an almost uncanny ability to trust his own intuitions.

  With a little help from Yehezkel, but mostly through gestures and facial expressions, Aillil acquired a world of skills from Hussein. He learned to navigate the desert the way Bedus do: by the stars, by familiar landmarks, and by stone markers left on previous treks. Little escaped Hussein’s eye in the desert. If wild animals were scant at a water hole, the water in that oasis was probably brackish or bitter, yet he always knew where good water was. Shrubs told him when it last rained, and how much. Signs left in the sand announced who had been there before them, and when, as well as their directions of arrival and departure, the size of their flock and sometimes even the ages of their camels.

  The animals they saw in the wild delighted Aillil. Most beautiful were the oryxes, their long, straight horns like sharp spears God carelessly wasted on grass eaters. They saw herds of wild donkeys and wild pigs, not that different from the boars in Languedoc, but with bigger and nastier tusks. Day after day, Aillil absorbed desert lore as the sands absorbed rain, his Arabic vocabulary growing daily.

  His questions to Yehezkel on Mahomet grew frequent, and he was happy to find that Mohammedans, just like Cathars, considered Jesus a prophet, but not the son of God. The rabbi didn’t know that the love between the youngsters had been consummated, but Aillil’s sudden curiosity for sharia made him suspect that the young man’s feelings for Yasmine were more than a passing infatuation.

  “In Montréal I didn’t understand girls,” said Aillil to Yehezkel one night. “They laughed at things my friends and I didn’t think were funny. They mocked me when I hadn’t provoked them. Yasmine is the first one . . . I’m not afraid of. She doesn’t speak my tongue, but she always knows what I’m thinking.”

  Around the middle of December, two weeks into the desert trek, they crossed a bigger caravan going west. Two of its passengers were Jews, and they spoke with Yehezkel for a while before both caravans moved on. Galatea noticed that the rabbi’s face grew dark. With a reckless maneuver she would later be proud of, she brought her camel next to Yehezkel’s and asked what was troubling him. Yehezkel waved her away with a smile. “It’s nothing; I’ll tell you tonight.”

  But before evening came and she could hear what caused her teacher’s gloom, she went through the most frightening experience of the desert journey—except for the arrival in Gaza. As she’d suspected from the day she’d first mounted it, her camel had a crazy streak that Hussein forgot to mention. That evening, as the sun dropped behind them and Galatea relished the thought of dismounting, the beast suddenly took off at a gallop, away from caravan and trail.

  The command Hussein taught her to stop the camel sounded something like “Heut!” and as she bounced on the saddle, hanging on for dear life, Galatea shouted it over and over to no avail. She heutted imperiously, she heutted mellifluously, she heutted like a lioness, but it was all useless. The beast chose martyrdom in the w
ilderness, and the caravan looked more distant with every second.

  Her strength waning, she was already desperate enough to consider attacking the animal to force it to slow down and jumping off it, when she caught sight of another camel: Hussein nonchalantly perched on its hump, legs crossed as if sitting by the fire, galloping right behind and slowly catching up. Within minutes, Hussein had stopped the runaway, and both camels were making their way back to the caravan at a leisurely trot, Hussein wearing an only slightly embarrassed grin.

  That evening, by the campfire, Yehezkel told them of the group of Latin monks who had gone by on that trail a month earlier, on their way from the Christian camp at Damietta to Jerusalem. The Jews in the other caravan spoke of their tragic end. There had been six. First they were attacked and robbed and then sodomized and beheaded. Galatea gasped and hid her face in her hands.

  The news of that martyrdom finally convinced the abbess that the Last Days, as Gioacchino called them, were upon them. The thoughts that entered her head that night felt like they were not her own.

  “Francesco is my rightful husband and the returning Christ. If my fate is to conceive the anti-Christ with a Jew born in Babylon on a desert trail far from anywhere, then tenderness toward Yehezkel, even sisterly affection, is a weakness that can make Satan’s plan succeed. What I should be doing to thwart that plan is to leave the rabbi and seek out my heavenly husband. With him, I’ll be safe from the Devil’s plots. But where is Francesco now? And how could I leave Yehezkel and betray our quest, after everything he’s done for me? And what of the prophecy, was that the Devil’s work, too? Oh, Mother Elisabetta, where are you?” she whimpered, alone in the maidens’ tent.

  Two days later, Yasmine was bitten by a scorpion while gathering shrubs not far from the camp.

  Aillil’s eyes always followed her as she performed chores in the camp, so when he saw her walk out into the rocky plain by herself, he at once took a roundabout route to join her. When Yasmine jumped back from a parched bush, clutching the hand stung by the scorpion, Aillil instinctively lunged and crushed the fleeing armored spider underfoot. Then, seeing her short breath and panicked expression, he ran toward the camp, shouting “Rav Yehezkel!” at the top of his voice.

  The first thing Yehezkel asked was, “Did you kill it?” Aillil nodded uncomprehendingly, and the rabbi charged off in the direction the boy came from, his ward hot on his heels. In a minute they reached the spot where Yasmine lay moaning on the ground, muscles already starting to twitch.

  Yehezkel had only once applied the antidote to a scorpion’s sting he had learned from Rav Moshe: the juices of the scorpion itself. He smashed the big female, the color of ripe dates, between two stones and forcefully rubbed the repugnant pulp into Yasmine’s slightly reddish and swollen hand. Aillil understood why the rabbi asked if he’d killed the monster and prayed to God—any God, he thought, and meant it—that the rabbi’s repulsive cure would save his only love. He watched Rav Yehezkel sweep up the girl in his arms as if she were an empty dress and followed them back to the camp.

  For the next two days, the caravan’s journey brusquely interrupted, Yasmine hovered between life and death in Twalia’s tent, looked after by the Jewish tabib. She was conscious, but her speech was slurred, her eyes shifted erratically, and her muscles, even those of her face, twitched uncontrollably.

  Aillil pestered Yehezkel to think of a way for him to see her, but his mentor denied him lest the boy’s anguish might alert the sheikh to what had been going on between his daughter and the unseemingly pale young infidel. During the first night, Aillil could take no more and asked Yehezkel, in solemn tones, to tell Twalia that if Yasmine lived and the sheikh allowed him to marry her, he would accept Allah and his Prophet, convert to Islam, and become a member of the clan.

  To Yehezkel’s great surprise, Twalia consented, either moved by Aillil’s prostration or because he didn’t really think his daughter would survive the poison. Aillil was allowed into Twalia’s tent and never left Yasmine’s side again, holding her hand despite the disapproving looks from the women.

  Pain twisted her lovely features into grimaces that tore his heart to shreds. He stared at her, pushing back the tears. “Is this God’s punishment for our sin? But then why her and not me? And why is it a sin to touch a woman’s body? Does God send scorpions to punish those who surrender to temptation? Well, outside Damietta I saw men do it with mares, and they didn’t die! It’s just the way life is.”

  He dabbed at the sweat on her brow. In his mind’s eye he could see every expression of that face he chose to remember: Yasmine laughing, Yasmine worried, Yasmine annoyed, Yasmine sleeping.

  “If I lose her now,” he thought, “I’ll spend the rest of my days summoning a thousand images of her until I convince myself that she’s still beside me, even if it makes everyone think I’m crazy!”

  God being merciful, Yehezkel’s remedy worked, and on the third day Yasmine came to and wept with joy at the news that Aillil would become her husband and stay with the clan. When Aillil told the rabbi of his vow, Yehezkel joked, “It’s a good thing she lived! Now you don’t have to go back to Provence and live with the ghost of a Bedouin girl!”

  Twalia decided that the conversion would take place in the mosque in Arīsh, a Bedouin town on the coast, and once Aillil—who would meanwhile be given his Mohammedan name—raised his finger to proclaim the oneness of Allah, the wedding would take place forthwith. A young goat was butchered and roasted that night to celebrate Yasmine’s surviving Satan’s assault. Yehezkel was the hero of the evening around the fire, being compared several times to his teacher, the great Musa ibn Maimun.

  Everything in Arīsh went smoothly, and when they moved on, the happiness of the fourteen-year-old newlyweds seemed to give the whole caravan a jauntier step. They were two-thirds of the way to Gaza, but several days behind schedule, what with scorpions and marriages.

  One morning, counting back to their departure on the 27th of November, Galatea realized that the next day would be Christmas. Aillil’s decision to become a Mohammedan had both delighted and rattled the abbess. Albacara, in Crete, feared that the Jew would drag her into his theological blindness and make her reject Christ. Now it was the young Cathar heretic, instead, who had changed his religion and become an infidel, just like the ones his own father hunted down “for Christ’s sake.” Sometimes God’s plans, she thought, were truly obscure.

  Now that Aillil was no longer a Christian—not even one caught up in a Manichean error—Galatea was the only person in the caravan who believed that this was the night the Redeemer was born.

  At first, remembering Christmases in Tuscia when the voices shouting, “Peace on earth among people of good will!” had literally shaken the ground, she felt desperately alone. In that Bedu camp, nobody knew or cared it was Christmas Eve, but somehow that only made her feel more Christian than she’d ever felt before. For a moment, she understood the inner strength that allowed Jews to preserve their faith among gentiles, her head almost spinning with the realization. Late that night, sitting by the spluttering fire as it went out, she told Yehezkel it was Christmas Eve. He said nothing but placed his hand on hers, smiling with empathy.

  She thought, “Yehezkel and I live almost like man and wife by now. Our adventures have made us drop the masks we wore when we met.”

  Suddenly, her eyes wide open and staring into the fire, she had a fleeting vision. Yehezkel was dressed as the sheikh of a Bedu clan, and she was his wife, wearing a niqab and dismantling a tent as the sun rose on the desert. She snapped out of it and turned to him.

  “Know that I’ll never be your beast of burden, Yehezkel!”

  The rabbi was getting used to that woman jerking normality from under him like a carpet. “I don’t know what in the world made you say that, Galatea, but I would really like for you to call me Yehezkel from now on . . . and I’ll call you Galatea. I think we’ve earned that much intimacy, don’t you?”

  She was silent, her face lit by the wa
ning fire, and then turned to him and nodded, smiling.

  After a little while, she said, “Yehezkel, may I ask you for some . . . spiritual advice?”

  Yehezkel was surprised, though not as much as he would have been six months earlier. “Of course, Galatea. I just hope your dilemma is not one that would elicit different responses from our two faiths,” said the rabbi, guardedly.

  “It’s about Brother Francesco,” she said, lowering her voice despite the wilderness around them. “And also the feverish expectation among Jews you told me about, of the imminent arrival of your Messiah.”

  Yehezkel knew the nun sitting next to him was a prophetess and was immediately attentive.

  “Christian Scriptures reveal that in the Last Days, Christ will return,” she went on. “Well, I’ve . . . I’ve had signs that Francesco of Assisi and the returning Christ of the Second Advent are one and the same!”

  Yehezkel said, “And where, pray, does the Jews’ Messiah come into this . . . vision?”

  “Priests say that when Christ returns, Jews will recognize him as their Messiah and claim he is not the same Son of God they crucified the first time around. I’ve been wondering, Yehezkel . . . could predictions of your Messiah and of our Second Advent be referring to the same event?”

  “Mmh . . . I mean no disrespect, Galatea, but if someone claims the Messiah has arrived, isn’t claiming he will also, at some later stage, come again, the perfect insurance against having been wrong?”

  She smiled. “I can see how your use of logic must have sent Domingo crawling up the walls!”

  The distant chorus of hyenas and jackals from the darkness around camp gave her next words an apocalyptic ring. “Still, I have a strong sense that both events are very close, and the excitement among Jews seems to confirm it.”