A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  All morning, and well into the afternoon, they examined the infants for moles, dimples, birthmarks, and compared the markings with their charts. Kelila wailed for the breast, Kadia cried for the glass beads around the astrologers’ necks. But golden-haired Kima only wrinkled her tiny brow and held her father’s small finger, as if she in her infant wisdom knew the answer and was merely putting the wise men to the test.

  Finally, as the same summer sun cast its last breath into the Tower of the Laurel, a voice was heard in the room. It seemed at first to emanate from the mouths of the three astrologers. But the sweetness of the voice, its gentle timbre, its desolate concern, told all within that the spirit of their late golden-haired queen was still among them. “O King, Prince of Granada, Star of the Alhambra, my Faithful Mohammed,” the voice began. “You are thrice blessed in your loneliness and thrice cursed. You will need three times the care and three times the luck to see our daughters through to three fortunate marriages. Let them play now in the freshness and innocence that fed me as a girl in my beloved Córdoba. But take care when they reach their thirteenth year. Entrust their days and their nights to no one but yourself, lest they be carried off and gain a husband only to lose a father, as I lost mine.”

  The voice ceased, the mouths of the wise men shut. Poor horse-toothed Penina began to bray with the fear of those impure souls who have some petty misdemeanor to hide from ghosts. But the left-handed Mohammed smiled for the first time in a year. For a moment, the sun paused in its accustomed descent and gave him the additional daylight to carry on.

  The girls blossomed under the watchful eye of their mother’s duenna. They passed their summers chasing cool shadows on the slopes of the Alhambra, their winters on the warm rocks below Mohammed’s Mediterranean castle. Kelila’s headstrong courage shaped her into a long-muscled, determined young woman who could outrun the palace guard by the time she turned nine. Kadia embellished the castle at Salobreña with her works of art, her green eyes tracing the unique variation between one flower and its sister, one snowflake and its cousin, onto paper, onto cloth, into olivewood.

  But deep seriousness led the youngest princess, Kima, to a silver lute she begged her father buy from a wandering minstrel. Even in her earliest years, when she could play only the simplest children’s tunes, the essence of music recognized a kindred spirit and swam to the surface of the strings to meet her fingertips.

  And so the years passed.

  Mohammed el-Hayzari was examining the rich cane fields of the vega one morning from the heights of the Alcazaba when a messenger arrived from the Mediterranean castle of Salobreña. A note from the horse-toothed Penina congratulating him on the birthday of his three daughters lay atop a basket woven with the eight-pointed star of the Moors. Within the basket, on a beach of Mediterranean sand, sat a peach, an apricot, and a nectarine, all dewy and lightly dimpled, firm and tempting in their barely ripened sweetness.

  The message was clear. The time Zehava had warned of had arrived. The girls dangled precariously from the orchard of childhood. They had reached marriageable age. The time of surrogate custodians and duennas had passed. Mohammed must himself protect the fruits of his passion. He galloped down to Salobreña with his house guard, twenty of the best. At dawn the next day, the girls bade farewell to their seaside nursery and set saddle with their faithful duenna for the return to the Alhambra.

  Mohammed praised the foresight of his wife. Connoisseur that he was, he had never before seen feminine beauty more delicately poised, more primed to burst the skin of innocence. Still, it made his too-fond father’s heart ache to watch the tears of Kelila fall on the waves she would race no more, to see Kadia’s green eyes moisten for the blue of the sky, the gray of the sea, search for a last glimpse of the changeable line where the two met at the horizon. But none could remain downcast long, as happy Kima, with her lute as companion, sprung lightly astride her horse and, with her instrument bound firmly around her shoulders, strummed a mountain march that set the horses prancing and the guards laughing.

  At noontime, with the last view of the sea behind them, the party paused to water their horses at a mountain pool. They were about to remount when a most strange and beautiful sound arose. At first it bore the timbre of a woman’s voice, and the left-handed heart of Mohammed, in a state of heightened emotion since receiving the basket of fruit, leapt in the hope of another glimpse of his golden-haired love.

  But more miraculous, the melody drifted off the sounding board of the silver lute of Kima, plucked by no finger, hanging, at a distance from its mistress, from the branch of an ancient olive tree. The song was low and mournful, a single melody weaving its spell around a single thread. And though the sound was certainly that of a string vibrating, a human soul seemed just on the edge of making itself manifest, showing its human face, its human mouth, its human voice.

  Kelila was the first to break the spell. “Sisters,” she said, “can’t you see, it’s just the breeze that makes the lute of Kima sing like a woman.” And indeed, her sprints with the wind, her hours of riding on the whims and eddies of the offshore breeze along the cliffs of Salobreña, made her the likeliest authority on the mystical properties of air.

  “But, sister,” Kadia replied, “can’t you feel how motionless the day is, how the leaves of the olive trees hang like iron spurs, as if the sun had tired of its daily ride and the trees had ceased to grow?” None could question the eye of Kadia.

  Kima said nothing but unhooked the lute from the olive tree and looped the leather strap over her head and beneath the full length of her golden hair. Her companion played its mournful music with an uncommon depth and urgency. The strap tugged at her neck with a force that pulled her past a turn in the road, out of sight of her father, her sisters, her beloved sea.

  Even Mohammed el-Hayzari, whose court enjoyed the services of no fewer than two dozen astrologers, needed a moment to shake off the spell of the magical lute and mount his horse in pursuit of his youngest daughter. So hot was his panic that he nearly rode her down in the middle of the road. For there she stood, looking down on a small village, no more than twenty or so buildings. From the center of the hamlet, from a fieldstone meeting house, a procession of bearded figures wound through the streets. They were singing, praying. The sound of their dirge, the very melody of the lute, cried up the hill to Mohammed and his daughters.

  “Ah,” cried Penina, grasping the stirrup of Mohammed more from fatigue than disrespect.

  “What is it?” Mohammed shook her off with some impatience. “Speak! Do you understand the meaning of this procession?” When Penina had swallowed enough air—and indeed her face most resembled the snout of a draft horse when she struggled to catch her breath—she explained the mystery with a single word:

  “Jews!”

  Tears poured down the long jaws of Penina of Córdoba. She remembered her long-forgotten Judería, she remembered her friends and family, the familiar songs, the tasty dishes, the Shabbat rituals—the holiest of which she was breaking by traveling on this Shabbat. She remembered her mother and her mother’s mother and the religion she had deserted on the far bank of the river Guadalquivir. Penina squinted at the sun and guessed the date—the anniversary of the destruction of the temple of the Jews in the holy city of Jerusalem, twice razed to the ground on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av. For the song that reached out from the hearts of the Jews to the silver strings of the lute of Kima was the deep lamentation of the holy day Tisha B’Av, the unrelenting “Al Naharot Bavel”:

  By the rivers of Babylon,

  Where the waters flowed down,

  And yea we wept,

  When we remembered Zion.

  Led by the lute of Kima and the three princesses, the brown-skinned el-Hayzari with his retinue of forty warriors and a single horse-faced duenna, a Muslim river, as richly striped as the Tigris, swirled down the side of the hill, powerless to fight the current of its musical curiosity. And like her sister, the Jewish Euphrates trod its steady course, the
three young sons of the schoolteacher at the crest, boys the day before, men on the Ninth of Av, having that day read from the Torah for the first time—as you did yesterday morning, my Eliphaz, my young man, before the assembled braves of the Mayaimi. Those two great rivers met in the valley and spread out into the marshy ground of open-mouthed youthful fascination, as great rivers are inclined to do. The resultant flood, with its deep, searching looks and shy curiosity was, as you may guess, every bit as violent and fertile as the golden delta of Babylon.

  The walls had been breached, the inner courtyard defiled, the tabernacle destroyed, the oil spilled, the entire temple razed to the ground. Mohammed sped his party up the next hill, away from the Jews. But he was no match for the elements. The air had carried the music to Kelila, the earth had borne the weight of these earthly princes to Kadia, and the beloved lute of silver and fire had sung sufficient testimony to Kima to remind the princesses that these, and not the dusky suitors of their father’s family, were the men they would marry.

  Upon his arrival at the Alhambra, Mohammed ordered that the world be moved to his fortress. Within weeks, tropical fish swam in the fountains and Asian bears danced in the garden, all to distract the lively imaginations of his three captive daughters. All was for naught. After twenty days and twenty nights in the Tower of the Laurel, Mohammed was certain his girls would soon follow their mother. Despite the pleadings of Penina, who had been as moved as her young wards by the Tisha B’Av ceremony but was enough of a realist to move on, the princesses sat on three-legged stools and ate nothing but air. Kelila turned her back on nature and faced the wall. Kadia refused all invitations to stroll among the bougainvillea of the Alhambra, in the deep purple of its summer bloom. And the lute hung abandoned, her mistress’s ears stoppered from the songs of the birds by a desolation thicker than beeswax. In the shadows of the tower the three young princesses saw nothing but the faces of the three Jewish bar mitzvah boys, bright-eyed, familiar, full of hope and the hint of manly beards yet to come. Through the noise of the wind and the gardeners below their window, they heard nothing but the mournful refrain of “Al Naharot Bavel,” in masculine voices only recently descended. The old astrologers were summoned, the heavens were examined. But no amount of stargazing could summon the wisdom of Zehava.

  Although Mohammed had charged Penina with the unsleeping vigil of his precious daughters, there were times during the day, and the night for that matter, when Penina found it necessary to flee the suffocating trances of the princesses. Besides, she was a woman, and over the years a certain accommodation had developed between her and the majordomo, proving not so much that the Moors are a horse-loving people but that the mysteries of love are shared equally between the plums and the prunes.

  It was in the course of one of these late-afternoon accommodations, amidst an empty flask and the seeds of half a dozen pomegranates, that Hussein Baba offered Penina refreshment for her three charges. The three Jewish boys of Tisha B’Av had been captured at the Gate of Justice, attempting to enter the Alhambra disguised as rug merchants. They had immediately confessed their intention, to woo the daughters of Mohammed, and at that moment were being fitted for shackles in the Gate of the Seven Floors.

  “Has the king been informed of their capture?” Penina somewhat carelessly asked Hussein Baba, for though they were on intimate terms, there was little trust between them.

  “Why so curious, my burrita?” Hussein somewhat carelessly answered, knowing full well where the game was leading since he, after all, was leading the game.

  The two lovebirds soon agreed that Hussein Baba would neglect to inform el-Hayzari of the capture of the Jewish boys. The next morning, he would arrange to have them clear the brush from the ravine that led down to the river Darro from the Tower of the Laurel.

  It would be misleading to say that the three princesses awoke at dawn to the sound of the lute of Kima, playing solo on its peg. The state of suspension they had lived in for their three weeks in the Tower of the Laurel was neither total consciousness nor total oblivion. But a blush that lit the shadowy tower from the six royal cheeks gave ample evidence that Penina’s cure was working remarkably well. Slowly they rose from their stools, slowly they stretched their limbs and floated toward the western window of the tower, where the first heat of the morning lit the russet tiles of the roofs of the Albaicín across the river. The ravine still shivered with the darkness of the night. But the song of the lute, as Kima retrieved it from its forgotten corner and looped it over her golden hair, was echoed by three deep, fully descended voices, naturally mournful in the natural captivity that the Israelites have known for thousands of years.

  A single grumbled answer from the sleepy Penina—unaccustomed to being roused from bed so early—told the three how close were their beloveds. And then, what joyous notes poured from the lips of the three beauties, what warmth it gave to the workers! All morning and again after the noon hour, the ravine echoed youthful love and hope, until the sun dropped behind the hill of the Alhambra and the prisoners had to leave their illusions in the garden and return to the Gate of the Seven Floors.

  Happy days followed desperate nights, except when Hussein Baba got wind of his master’s approach to the precinct of the garden in the ravine. Then he would work the prisoners across the gorge, or amid the sugar cane of the vega, or, worse yet for the frantic princesses, keep them chained to the clammy walls of the bottommost of the seven floors of the Gate. Up and down, hope and despair filled the Tower of the Laurel, week upon week, until Penina, ill at ease with bumpy rides of any kind, feared she would expire with the changes in atmospheric pressure.

  Only an instinct of self-preservation led Penina to concoct a plan for the elopement of her three charges and their paramours. One noon, during a brief intermission in the song cycle of the sextet, Penina brought the majordomo a small basket of hazelnut tarts, powdered with cane sugar from the plantations of the vega, and fashioned in crescents, like the sword of Mohammed, prophet of the Muslims. It was a recipe of Córdoba, one she had learned side by side with her younger sister, and had passed on to her niece Zehava in the happy days before they left the banks of the Guadalquivir to wander amid alien cane. There was a sweetness in the first bite that led one to bite again; a crunch in the second that satisfied the lust of the mouth for eternal motion; a weight, neither too light nor too heavy, that dissolved on its passage down the throat to the vital organs, that left the eater fully, utterly, unquestionably satisfied.

  So it was with the second Córdoban mystery that the talented Penina visited upon the amazed Moor—a trick of love so delicate and subtle and yet so entirely cathartic that it left Hussein Baba gasping like a beached tuna. Dry and decommissioned, he could do nothing but lie amid the brush and listen to Penina’s plan for escape. At this moment, Mohammed el-Hayzari, king of all Granada, light of the Iberian Moors, on a chance stroll, with a single orderly at hand, happened upon the three Jewish prisoners resting in the shade of the Tower of the Laurel. Fortunately for the two lovebirds, Mohammed never saw them as he marched the three to the Gate of the Seven Floors. For had he understood the extent to which his rule had been compromised, two heads would have rolled into the river Darro with a splash that could be heard halfway to the sierra. Hussein Baba had surrendered his career to the horse-faced duenna. He immediately planned for a mass escape.

  It was all Penina could do to keep the squeals of the princesses from alerting their father. For now she informed them of their Jewish heritage and of their mother’s dying wish that she see her girls safely married to nice Jewish boys. Only Kima sighed with a breath that spoke of great wisdom. Only she pondered how completely their flight would destroy the soul of their father.

  But the determination of her sisters, the argument that her beloved father had kept his own daughters virtual prisoners at the Alhambra, finally silenced Kima’s remaining doubts. They packed.

  The night was moonless, the escape from the Gate of the Seven Floors not without its dangers and casu
alty—a single donkey that threatened to bray when it saw the broad-bottomed Hussein Baba approach. The four men stood at the bottom of the Tower of the Laurel, a stone was touched, the signal given. Penina descended, followed by Kelila and Kadia, who were immediately, passionately, albeit silently embraced by the Jewish boys—which ones, it didn’t matter, they would sort out choice and temperament at greater leisure.

  With her sisters on the ground, it was left to Kima to descend, her lute strapped around her shoulders, her dainty foot perched on the top rung of the ladder. Just then a breeze sprang up. The scent of bougainvillea caused a single note to play on her lute. In those two sensations, everything Muslim that had brought her pleasure, a full and equal half of her soul, drew her back into the Tower. Her sisters pleaded, her suitor entreated, Penina hissed, Hussein Baba threatened. Back and forth that slippered foot appeared, until finally, with a strength neither of her sisters possessed, Kima kicked the ladder to the ground.

  By the time the alarm was raised, the party of seven had forded the river Darro, borrowed some horses from a band of wandering musicians, and galloped far enough on their way to the Sierra Pelada that the fastest of Mohammed’s warriors were unable to catch them. There, above the town of Ventas del Carrizal, at the farm of their father’s father—for by a coincidence that even I find hard to swallow, they were the three sons of the young Joseph, whom the apothecary of Córdoba had hoped to marry to his golden-haired Zehava—they were embraced, fed, married, and then fed again, according to the custom of the Jews. Hussein Baba had no choice but to convert to Judaism and marry the bruised Penina. Though the poor man grew even fatter with the hazelnut tarts that his autumn wife prepared him, he never again enjoyed the second Córdoban mystery that had so compromised him under the walls of the Alhambra.