The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  Arnald told them that King Baldwin, moved by the joy pilgrims felt on reaching it, renamed the village on the hill Montjoie. Jerusalem, from there, was an ivory-and-ochre stain, perched on a crest of the mountain range a handful of leagues south of them, its minarets jutting out against the ice-blue winter sky.

  Galatea was moved by the sight. She was meditating on the approaching end of her pilgrimage, when suddenly she saw Yehezkel pronounce some words in Hebrew and tear the collar of his sarbel. She would later discover he’d cut the edge of the garment with a knife so it would tear easily when custom prescribed the gesture of mourning, on first catching sight of Zion bereft of Jewish sovereignty.

  She asked what he’d said, and he told her he had thanked the Lord for keeping him alive until the moment he set eyes on Jerusalem and then quoted a sage of the Talmud, “Jerusalem is a desert. . . .” Even from that distance, the rubble of the city’s walls, torn down by al-Mu’azzam ’Isa a year earlier, could be made out.

  “Jerusalem lies open to any attacking army, a defenseless maiden on the side of a road,” he said. Then he unexpectedly straightened up and started singing a joyous melody borrowed from a troubadour. “Od yishama be’arei Yehudah uvechutzot Yerushalaim, kol sasson vekol simchah, kol chatan vekol kalah!”

  “What’s that you’re singing?”

  “It’s Jeremiah. ‘Again shall be heard in the mountains of Judah and in Jerusalem’s courtyards voices of joy and voices of gladness, the voice of a bridegroom and the voice of a bride!’” His voice broke. “I have a vision before my eyes, Galatea, like the ones you’re used to having. Thousands of young Jews are walking around the streets of Jerusalem, their heads high, and . . . and they’re speaking Hebrew!”

  She said sympathetically, “It’s the undying hope of your people, isn’t it, my friend?”

  “No, Galatea. This is no mere hope. I know it will happen. If somewhere in the world everyone should speak the Holy Tongue as a normal, everyday language, the benefit to humanity would be immense. But if that place was Jerusalem . . . well, that would mean the Messiah of David was about to arrive!”

  His friends smiled, their bemusement tinged with admiration for Jewish steadfastness.

  “I already told you, Yehezkel,” said Galatea softly. “When Jesus Christ returns triumphant, Jews will hail him as their long-awaited Messiah.”

  Inspired by the sight of Jerusalem, Yehezkel drew a breath and retorted, “After the centuries of hating Israel—and all those yet to come—I wonder how your theologians will react when God, one day, will gather his people in their land and protect them from their enemies with miracles, his arm stretched out as in the Exodus, to prove to Gentiles that he’d never forgotten his promise to Abraham.”

  Later, Yehezkel heard from the villagers that their name for the place was Nabi Samwil, since both Jews and Mohammedans believed the prophet Samuel to be buried under the small dome on top of the hill. Yehezkel jested with his friends that the prophet’s spirit must have come over him earlier in the day.

  JERUSALEM, 31ST JANUARY 1220

  After taking leave from Arnald by the ruins of Saint Stephen’s and returning the order’s horses to him, the two entered the city from the gate the Latins called Saint Stephen’s and Salah ad-Din renamed Bab el-Amud*60 but that was starting to be called Damascus Gate. They approached it separately, and Yehezkel did not use the sultan’s letter or draw attention to himself in any way.

  In the generation since the founder of the Ayubbid dynasty took al-Quds, Saracens and Jews streamed back until her population surpassed thirty thousand souls. But when, a year before, al-Mu’azzam ’Isa razed her walls, thousands again fled the now defenseless city for Acre. Still, despite half her homes being empty, her streets and markets were still lively and crowded.

  Galatea was told by some nuns she’d met on the ride from Gaza to Château Pélerin that the safest and most tranquil place for her to stay in Jerusalem was the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion, just outside the southern walls. The prioress of this abbey, Marie de Saint-Clair, was happy to host mothers of religious houses on a pilgrimage to the holy places.

  Yehezkel on the other hand, to find a place to stay, only had to walk into one of a dozen synagogues that had sprung up since the Christians were chased out. The three hundred rabbis who’d come from Europe nine years earlier, of course, were not among those who’d fled the city, certain as they were that the upheavals of war were nothing if not the birth pangs of redemption.

  Mamluks and assorted Saracen warriors were everywhere, but this didn’t prevent the strange couple, once they took up their lodgings, from getting lost in the markets and chatting with people—Galatea with Christian pilgrims, Yehezkel with almost everyone else. They avoided being seen together too often and postponed both a reconnaissance on the Haram al-Sharif and Galatea’s first visit to the sepulchre until they were more familiar with the city.

  They expected their every thought to be occupied with finding the places on the map, but at first their conversations were instead about Galatea’s sorry, humiliating life as a Christian in Ayubbid Jerusalem. The Jews, though dhimmis, were a pillar of the city’s commerce, and Yehezkel was their respected Egyptian guest, but the abbess was just one more barely tolerated Christian pilgrim, a category whose lives at that time resembled those of stowaways on ships.

  Salah ad-Din ordered the big iron cross the infidels dared to install on top of the dome to be dragged around the city behind a donkey, before being melted down. Similarly, church bells—whose sound is an abomination to Saracen ears—were smashed and melted. Most churches in the city—including the biggest one, Saint Anne’s—became qu’ranic schools, and in the few Christian holy places allowed to survive, the lives of Greek and Syriac monks became as bitter as unripe olives.

  But pilgrims were treated worse. If they ventured outside the walls, to the Gethsemane or to Mount Zion, children pelted them with rocks from afar and spat on them from close up. Yehezkel said the Saracens were a civilized people, and Galatea complained bitterly to him of their behavior. But her anger at ignorant folk—who, she knew, were much the same everywhere—paled in comparison to her outrage at the shameless frauds perpetrated on pilgrims every day with the trade of false relics.

  On first retaking Jerusalem, the Saracens hadn’t allowed the rare Christian pilgrims into the sepulchre, but they soon found them well heeled and gullible, and a thriving trade of false relics grew around their holy places. Ecstatic pilgrims bought hundreds of thorns from Christ’s crown, hairs of his beard, phials of the Virgin’s breast milk, and countless fingers of Saint Peter. But perhaps the pièce de résistance of the Saracen imagination was Christ’s foreskin, known to hapless pilgrims as the Holy Prepuce.

  One day, as they discussed why pilgrims pretended to believe in the authenticity of such obviously fake relics, Yehezkel said, “A real relic, of a truly holy man, has powers. These pilgrims, I think they know the objects are fake, but they serve as mementos to remind them of their pilgrimage.”

  Galatea made a face. “If it makes them happy. I suppose it feeds what locals call artisans.”

  In Jerusalem Yehezkel frequented and studied Torah and Talmud with four rabbis who’d arrived nine years earlier from Europe: Samuel ben Shimon; Joseph ben Baruch; his brother, Meïr; and Shimshon ben Abraham. It took a week for the four to see that Yehezkel was a kabbalist, but no charlatan, and only then did he confide their quest to them. Meïr ben Baruch was the only one sympathetic to Kabbalah, and Yehezkel discussed the clues in Elisha’s map with him late into Jerusalem’s cold February nights, but all four rabbis recognized at once the connection between finding the confession that would put the lie to Christianity and the imminent arrival of the Messiah of David.

  The anticipation of that arrival had gripped the Jewish third of the city like a fever for a decade. When the Exodus in the Middle of History calculation joined the ranks of unfulfilled prophecies, many rabbis, as Yehezkel had predicted, coped with the chagrin by supposing that 121
2 had really been the year of the Messiah’s birth and began to follow Jewish children born in Jerusalem in that year from so close that their parents eventually complained to the nagid.

  The rabbis took Yehezkel to pray at holy sites that Jews in exile had only heard of in doubtful tales. One such place was the synagogue known as the Cave, a hall below the Temple Mount that had been used as a synagogue for centuries under Islam. The Latins turned it into a cistern, but Salah ad-Din reopened it. Yehezkel felt the messianic thrill of praying twenty feet below the esplanade, in a spot a stone’s throw from where the Ark of the Covenant once stood in the Kodesh Kedoshim.

  Another thing that moved him deeply was seeing the Temple esplanade from the Mount of Olives. Praying on the flank of the hill east of the city on Shabbat had become a custom of Jerusalem Jews, both the Westerners and those, by far the majority, from Yemen, Babylonia, and the Maghreb.

  This time Galatea was with him, watching the dome that replaced the Temple in her dream. Yehezkel braved the open reproach in the eyes of many Jews at the sight of a disciple of the great Moshe ben Maimon defiling the holy places with his Christian concubine.

  “God punishes me twice,” he thought glumly. “Once by soiling my reputation in the Holy City and a second time by denying me what they all think me guilty of. Just what did I do to deserve this?”

  Meanwhile, in that first week of February, Galatea found a kindred spirit in Marie de Saint-Clair. The Frankish nun was an enthusiast of Hildegard of Bingen and expressed trust in the soul of woman more articulately than Galatea thought she could ever do, yet the abbess still decided to follow the rabbi’s advice and didn’t mention either parchment or confession in her conversations with the prioress.

  Marie told her much about Jerusalem. She learned, for example, that the only church outside the walls still allowed to function—apart from the one next door to where they sat—was the Church of Saint Mary of Jehosaphat, in the valley of that name, a few steps from the Gethsemane, also known as Saint Mary’s Tomb, since ancient Christian traditions told of Mary ascending to Heaven in body and spirit from that place three days after her death, just as her son had done.

  Salah ad-Din had destroyed the upper structure and used the stones to repair the city walls, but the real church, which had always been underground, was allowed to survive—perhaps because of the Qu’ran’s loving veneration of the Mother of Jesus. A small niche indicating the direction of Mecca had even been installed in the cave for Mohammedan prayers.

  Marie said that local traditions spoke of catacombs even deeper than the cave where Mary’s casket was worshipped, since her family’s tomb had been dug at the foot of the Mount of Olives much earlier than her time. On hearing of this, Galatea exclaimed, “I always knew I had to come to Jerusalem, but until I came here, I didn’t know how many things I already knew without knowing they were about this place.”

  As with the glimpse of blue shawl over Francesco’s arms, she was now realizing that childhood visions she’d never understood were visions of places in Jerusalem. This was what started Galatea’s slide into the dreamlike state that would culminate, that Passover night, in her Eucharistic revelation.

  But something else, also little short of a miracle, happened before she solved the Jerusalem enigma. One day, in the throng on the Street of the Chain along the German hospice built by the Latins, now called Muristan, Galatea thought she glimpsed Gudrun’s blonde tresses. She sprinted forward and caught up with two women as they rounded the corner into the perfume market.

  “It is you! God be praised!” she cried.

  Gudrun melted into her arms, weeping, as Albacara fell on her knees, praising the Lord.

  Galatea was flushed with joy. “It’s been six months, but you’re alive! May the Virgin keep you both! That’s why I hadn’t found the courage to enter the Holy Sepulchre . . . I was waiting for you!”

  The three kept hugging each other, crying and laughing at the same time, as women sometimes do. Gudrun had lost weight and, though still florid, was now a Nordic beauty. Albacara looked as if nine months of adventures rekindled the smouldering embers in her eyes that life in Candia covered with ash. When they’d regained their composure, the three went to the abbey on Mount Zion, and Galatea heard the story of their time in Acre, of the kidnapping by the Hashashin, and of the potion they’d been fed. Gudrun could not hold back tears as she told the mother that Bois-Guilbert had sent both armigers to Damietta, and that she would probably never see Garietto again.

  But above all, Galatea heard of the two knights questioning them before freeing them. At the end of the tale, without a word, she rushed out of the abbey to look for Yehezkel, knowing she’d just discovered who Domingo’s agent inside the Temple was.

  “Uuhh . . . if I had that Englishman in front of me, I’d drive a stake through him like a pig!” she said, the goriness of the thought surprising her as she ran to the new Zion Gate, followed by the other two.

  Yehezkel also shuddered to hear Bois-Guilbert’s words, “Father Domingo must hear of this,” and went straight out of the city, to the ruins of Saint Stephen, to pass the news on to Alain de Lille. They also decided to redouble their cautions, but to go up on the Mount as soon as they could.

  At last the day came for the women to visit the tomb of Christ and be absolved from their vows. Yehezkel made up an important meeting to avoid having to tell Galatea that a Jew couldn’t enter a church, which the Talmud considers an impure place of pagan worship. In the crowded patio before the sepulchre stallkeepers sold their blasphemous wares to pilgrims, but it was Friday, and Mohammedans streaming into the nearby mosque of Omar were far more numerous than the tremulous Christians.

  Yehezkel told her of the second of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, Omar ibn Al-Khattāb, who conquered Jerusalem and asked to be shown the tomb of Jesus but then told his ulema he would pray outside, so that his followers wouldn’t turn the sepulchre into a mosque because he’d prayed there. As he’d predicted, a mosque dedicated to him stood on the spot where he had thanked Allah, two hundred feet in front of the church.

  The Latins had restored the sepulchre forty years earlier, placing its two parts under one roof. In the new choir between the Chapel of the Golgotha on the east side, and the tomb with its pierced dome on the west side, was a long marble altar. Centuries of kisses and tears had dug a depression in its center, and a small cross in a circle carved on one side marked the spot where Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus laid the Lord’s body to wash it, after detaching it from the Cross.

  Probably not by choice, for the deposition must perforce have taken place between Cross and tomb, the first thing Christians encountered on entering the last station of their pilgrimage was the spot where Christ’s tortured body had been deposed, the women wailing all around. Every pilgrim, memory full of a hundred paintings of the Lamentation, cried their heart out at the thought that this was where it happened. Galatea, Gudrun, and Albacara were no exception.

  When they were ready to leave the holy place, Gudrun had to look for the widow and eventually found her sitting on a stone bench in the patio, chatting with a Venetian pilgrim she had met inside.

  JERUSALEM, 27TH FEBRUARY 1220

  They’d been in Jerusalem for four weeks, and her stones were beginning to speak to them.

  “Jerusalem’s stones are the only stones in the world that can feel pain,” Yehezkel had told her.

  Galatea felt as if the boundary between reality and vision in that city were blurred. It was as if a touch of madness were mixed into everything she did. She started to think that everything she saw around her was a sign somehow connected, even if not clearly, with her personal destiny. Clouds shifting shape were messages that only a stupid detail prevented her from grasping, like a name just out of memory’s reach. Cobblestones, stains on walls, bird flights, even chains of camel and donkey turds started to seem vital clues about Francesco and the confession that she absolutely had to decipher. Every little thing contained a secret, and every secret c
oncerned her mission in Jerusalem.

  At first she tried to hide what was happening from Yehezkel. After all, he was as anxious as she was; why alarm him with her kabbalistic excesses? Then one morning she told him, almost absentmindedly, “You know, don’t laugh at me, Yehezkel, but lately I’ve been hearing voices.”

  “Really?” said Yehezkel, intrigued. “Are they intelligible?”

  “Well, they don’t actually speak. In the middle of the night, a loud voice calls my name . . . and you know the funny thing? I know the voice but can’t remember who it is . . . it’s irritating, but it’s happened so many times I’ve almost grown fond of the irritation.” Yehezkel caressed her shoulder, laughing.

  By the time they felt ready to explore the Mount, they had both—like generations of pilgrims before them, even in the time of the Temples—fallen in love with the city, her olive and orange gardens, her alleys and markets, her terraces, and most of all what the light did to her when the sun was low. Yehezkel loved her inhabitants, too—all of them a little crazy, not one of them boring.

  “You see,” he told her one day, “Jerusalemites—Saracens, Christians, Jews—are more often people of thought than action, because along the paths of thought, one sooner or later understands that all answers are in the stones of Jerusalem. And in my opinion a city where every passerby is a philosopher, every shop owner a prophet, every inn-keeper a visionary . . . is a wonderful place!”

  Jews were allowed on the Haram, unlike fifty years earlier under the Latins, when Yehezkel’s teacher put his life at risk climbing there in disguise. But his Christian companion had no right to be up there, and Yehezkel thought he would have to pull out the sultan’s letter at the gate on the northern side of the esplanade. But the mamluk guard stared at Galatea’s eyes and waved them through.

  So they went. The thousand-foot-long, trapeze-shaped plaza was swept by a chilly wind. The city was not big, and though the Haram wasn’t her highest point, the Judean hills all around, their desert colors bright in the sun, drew their eyes the minute they emerged from the maze of alleys. Everywhere masons and carpenters were busy carrying out al-Mu’azzam’s restoration projects, and the air was full of hammers striking, Arab workers shouting, crows squawking, and the occasional braying of a donkey.