“You bastard!” Uncle shouted. “Holding back a safira our children will need, that God will need!” When he turned the wall of his back to Carlos, the priest bowed his head as if to request forgiveness from the rest of us and left.
“You could be more understanding,” I said to my uncle. When he waved away my criticism, I added, “So why were you speaking in code with Carlos? There’s no chance Dona Meneses can hear us way back there. Besides, she must know we still practice Judaism. If it bothered her, she’d have reported us to the authorities by now.”
“The priest trusts no one. ‘Even the dead wear masks,’ he says. And the more I learn, the more I think he’s right.” He scratched his scalp and frowned. “I’m going to pay my respects to Dona Meneses.” He shot me a commanding look and marched out.
“How quickly people forget,” Aunt Esther sighed.
“What do you mean?”
She dabbed some rosewater on her neck, then tied a linen kerchief around it. “The plague. It disappears for a couple years and people think it’s something new the Devil’s conjured up.” She brushed a trembling hand over her forehead, reconsidered her words. “Maybe it’s a kind of grace that we can forget. Imagine if…”
“Not a word, not a gesture, not a single lesion do I forget!”
Aunt Esther grimaced; she knew I was referring to my father and elder brother, Mordecai. During the winter of fifty-two sixty-three, a little more than three years ago, the knife of plague had peeled them open to the moist northern winds of Kislev. My father, lost under running black sores and pustules, shivered to death on the sixth day of Hanukkah. A month later, the living skeleton that had been Mordecai was dead in my arms.
My aunt and I sat in silence. After a few minutes, Dona Meneses left our house with the large basket of fruit which she always took away from her visits. Esther said, “I’ll go to see if Cinfa needs help in the store,” then trudged out of the room with that stiff, forward-tilting walk of hers. I watched Judah playing in the doorway with his top until Uncle returned to me and said, “I need your help in the cellar.”
Below the trap door, we descended five coarse granite steps, one for each book of the Torah, to a small landing centered by a menorah in green and yellow mosaic. Passing through the next entranceway, we started down another stairway of twelve thinner limestone steps—one for each of the books of the Prophets. Since the forced closure of our synagogue in the Old Christian year of fourteen ninety-seven, this had become our temple. As we descended, I picked a blue cylindrical skullcap from a shelf and placed it atop my head. Uncle reached back to his shoulders and lifted his prayer shawl over his head, giving it the form of a hood. Together, we chanted, “In the greatness of thy benevolence will I enter thy house.”
The cellar was low-ceilinged, five paces wide, double that in length, floored with the same rough slate as the courtyard. It had witnessed at least a thousand years of chant, and its cool, musty air, guarded hermetically by walls shimmering with knotted patterns of blue and yellow tile, seemed scented with ancient memory. Window eyelets at the top of the northern wall—at the level of our courtyard paving stones—let in only a soft, dim light. From the bottom of the staircase, which flanked the eastern wall of the room, spread our circle of prayer mat. Around its circumference were seven verdant bushes in ceramic pots, one for each day of creation. Three were myrtle, three lavender and one, symbolizing the Sabbath, was an intermingling of both plants. The half of the room beyond the mat, facing sunset, was our realm of earthly work, where Aunt Esther scripted manuscripts and where Uncle and I illuminated them. Our three desks of the finest polished chestnut faced the north wall, were spaced only a foot apart so we could view one another’s work. Each was gifted with its own high-backed chair. Opposite, against the south wall, were two granite bathtubs sunken into the floor. In between was our hulking storage cabinet of coarse-grained oak. It had lion’s-paw feet and possessed eight rows of ten drawers, each of them thin and long, like the receptacles for type in a printer’s studio. A last row, the lowest, had only two drawers. We kept our gold leaf and lapis lazuli in these.
The most unusual item in the room was undoubtedly the circular, platter-size mirror on the wall above the middle desk belonging to Uncle. Inside a chestnut-wood frame, the looking glass’ silver surface was concave, and hence reflected squashed and distorted images. We stared into it oftentimes at the start of meditation as a way of loosening the mind from its accustomed landscape, particularly from its familiarity with the body. The mirror was somewhat famous locally because on the sixth of June of thirteen ninety-one of the Christian era, it was said to have seeped blood at the death of tens of thousands of Jews killed in the riots then raging across Iberia. In fact, great-grandfather Abraham held that it shed an infinitesimal amount of blood—invisible to the naked eye—whenever even a single Jew died. He believed that the blood had become visible at the time of the anti-Jewish riots only because so very many of us had been murdered. From his time forward, therefore, it had been known as O Espelho a Sangrar, the Bleeding Mirror.
We all hoped it would never reveal its talents to us again.
As Uncle motioned me toward the sunken bathtubs, he said, “I need you to pee.”
“Now?” I asked.
From the rim of a tub, he picked up a jug. “In here. It’s spring. I need a virgin’s pee.”
Each year, just prior to Passover, my master made new dyes and colors for our manuscript illuminations. The acid in the urine ate at certain elements to create varying colors, particularly a fine rose when mixed with Brazil wood, alum and ceruse, and a brilliant carmine when mixed with the ashes of vine branches and quicklime.
“I’m no longer a virgin,” I said, picturing Helena as she had been in the hills overlooking the vast monastery being built just west of Lisbon. I’d waited so long for her decision. Until it seemed as if sex and life would not happen to me as they did to other people. And then, when all was lost, when the ship set to take her to Corfu was already anchored in Lisbon, her arms opened to me like the gates of God’s grace.
“A whore at the Maidenhead Inn?” Uncle asked, awakening me from daydream. He had often recommended a certain house of ill repute outside the city walls.
When I answered, “Helena,” he raised his eyebrows like a rogue and said, “In any event, you’re the closest thing to a virgin I can get without revealing that we’re still illuminating Hebrew books. Judah’s too young and I’m too old, and women’s pee is too strong—especially your aunt’s. I tried it years ago when we were married. Turns everything black as Asmodeus’ soul.”
We shared a silly grin. “Now I know why you loaded me with fluids,” I said.
As my water cascaded hot and musty into Uncle’s jars, he shuffled to our desks with the modest, duck-like walk he adopted in synagogues and began to dust them.
After I’d peed in six different ceramic jugs and closed their lids securely, we placed them in the sunken bathtubs. Uncle washed his hands and brushed them through the Sabbath bush of myrtle and lavender. With a puzzled frown, he said, “Diego the printer is so late—I don’t understand.”
Diego was a family friend whom Uncle was initiating into his threshing circle, his group of mystics which met in secret to discuss kabbalah. Although a robust man with the graying beard and commanding brown eyes of a patriarch, he’d had his heart reduced to ash in the Inquisitional flames of Seville which had claimed his wife and daughter four years earlier and from which he’d barely managed to escape. Often, Uncle and I sought ways to renew his spirit, and we had convinced him to go for a walk today through Sintra forest so that we might sketch the great white cranes before their migration north.
“Perhaps Senhora Belmira’s family has kept him behind,” I said. A neighbor and friend of Diego’s, she’d been beaten to death in Xabregas, one of the city’s eastern districts, two months before. Diego had been spending a lot of time with her loved ones of late.
Uncle shrugged and cupped his hands around my nose. “
Refresh yourself,” he said, and as I sniffed at his myrtle-scented fingers, he added, “If he isn’t here soon, we’ll go to his place and check. Oh, and when we do go out, I’ll need to pass by New Merchants Street. I promised Esther I’d deliver the Book of Psalms she’s just finished.”
My master had a way of turning business transactions into disputations on the sex lives of angels and other esoteric matters. “You have precisely the time it takes Diego and me to down a cup of wine at the Attic Inn!” It was a tumbledown garret, but it served kosher wine on the sly.
His lips sculpted a dismayed but amused frown. “Look who’s giving orders!” he observed.
I met his challenge with the bored expression I used to practice to irritate my father when he spoke of Talmud classes. He nodded his agreement. “All right, no more than a half hour.” He motioned for me to bend so he could bless his hand over me. Then, as I picked dyes and colors from the storage cabinet, he unlocked the genizah, the traditional hiding place for old books in a synagogue. Ours was a pit—three feet wide by four feet long—sunken into the floor at the western perimeter of the prayer mat. Its contents were constantly changing; books smuggled out of Portugal were soon replaced with others my master discovered and either bought or begged.
Uncle stepped one foot down into the genizah to retrieve our work. By the time he’d climbed back out, I was at my desk, arranging my brushes and dyes. Placing my manuscript neatly on the slightly inclined surface of the desk in front of me, he circled his hand around the back of my neck and advised me with a parable on the coloration for my most recent illumination, one of the tales from the famous collection of “Fox Fables.” As I began to offer an analysis of his words, his lips began to tremble and his hand grew cold against my skin. “What is it, Uncle?” I asked.
He rubbed his eyes with both his hands, like a child, took a long inhale of breath as if to ready himself for a challenge. “You’re so grown up,” he said gently. “Already my equal in so much. And yet in other matters…” He shook his head, smiled wistfully. “There is so much I’d like to tell you… Beri, God may soon demand that we take separate paths.” He reached into his pouch and took out a scroll of vellum. Handing it to me, he said, “Be so kind as to accept this little gift.”
The scroll unfolded into a vellum ribbon on which were scripted both our Hebrew names in elegant golden lettering. “Esther made it for me,” he continued. He gripped the back of my neck and, in an urgent voice, added, “If ever you should need me, wherever you are, no matter how far or how desperate the circumstances, send this ribbon to me and I will come for you.” He placed his other hand atop my head, stared pressingly into my eyes. “And if, for any reason, you find me beyond your earthly reach, pray over it and I will make every effort to appear before you.”
So touched was I by his grace, by my master’s generosity, that my throat parched with a kind of desperate yearning. Tears clouded the room. I had to swallow several times just to whisper, “But we will never be separated. I will always…”
Uncle told me, “Youth is meant to be separated from age for a time. You will go your way as it should be, then return. But no demon, however powerful, shall stand in my way if you are in trouble!” He took his hand from atop my head and caressed my cheek. “Now come, let’s work together.”
“But is there nothing that I can…?”
He held up his hand and pointed to my manuscript. “Woe betide the kabbalah master who answers every question posed by his apprentice! Now get to work!”
A few minutes later, as I was highlighting the powerful legs of a young dog in my illumination with minute strokes of black, a shriek like shattered glass cut the air. “Go!” my master yelled.
I bounded up the stairs. The kitchen was empty. Harsh voices from outside pounded against the walls. I climbed through my bedroom window into the store, dashed out onto Temple Street. As I removed my skullcap, I spotted Aunt Esther kneeling over our friend, Diego the printer. He was moaning. Blood was spilling from a gash on his bearded chin into her hands.
Chapter II
Diego the printer was the first to contribute to the river of blood which would, over the next few days, lead us into a desert landscape bordered everywhere by grief. But at the time, this geography of death was still a secret from us.
Streams of sweat stained his temples and cheeks with a residue of the city’s endless dust. Blood sluiced over his neck from the gash at his chin. Coughing, he fought for breath. “I was walking here…just walking,” he said in Portuguese. “By the river, I stopped by the Kings Well to wash my hands.” Aunt Esther unbuttoned the top of his crusted doublet, cleaned his chest with fabric rent from her blouse. I noticed the brown line of an old scar on his chest, just under his collar bone, almost as if a worm had burrowed there.
Around us, neighbors were beginning to gather now, to whisper together. “Two boys…” Diego continued, “…they yelled that I was poisoning the well with an essence of plague. They ran after me. I fell. They threw stones. ‘Get the long-tailed rabbi! Get the long…’ A swarthy man in a blue cape saved me. Tall, strong…”
In Diego’s desperation, his last words sought the comfort of Hebrew. “Speak Portuguese,” I whispered to him as we laid him back onto the cobbles.
Diego’s turban slipped off, and I saw for the first time the wisps of thinning gray hair over his ears, the brown birthmarks dotting his scalp. A folded paper dropped free as well. Believing it might contain a personal message or a prayer formula which would incriminate him as a practicing Jew, I snatched it up, hid it in the large drawstring pouch I keep around my neck and which functions as a kind of knapsack. Judah brushed against me, icy with fear, and I had to shake him to get him to run to Dr. Montesinhos. Uncle had joined us, and, after a rushed prayer, said, “I’m going inside to see what medication I can find.”
I tried to hold Diego’s gash closed by pressing my finger into Esthers makeshift bandage, but soon the linen was soaked crimson. Esther ran off for clean water as I substituted cloth ripped from my shirt. Uncle arrived with Farid. They carried extracts of comfrey and bayberry and geranium, sizings and bole, gum arabic and sulfur water. But none of the styptics could effect a clotting. “It’s his accursed beard!” Uncle grumbled. “I can’t get to the wound.” He told Diego, “Dr. Montesinhos is going to have to shave you.”
Diego, who was from the Jewish priestly caste of Levi, pushed us away when he heard that. “I won’t allow it!” he shouted in Hebrew. “I must have my beard. It is forbidden to…”
“There are Levites without beards,” I pointed out, but Diego simply moaned. I turned to Uncle, whispered, “An attack in daylight. It’s a bad sign. A few more weeks of drought and…”
“How can you be sure it wasn’t planned?” Uncle demanded angrily.
I began to ask what he meant, but a shadow crossing over us halted my words. Two horsemen leading a white and gold carriage glared at us from above. Silver morions and greaves gleamed in the sunlight. Scarlet and green pennons decorated with the King’s armored spheres flapped in the dry breeze. “What in God’s name is the disturbance?!” one demanded gruffly.
It was then that I noticed that my master was still in his prayer garb, a white and blue shawl over his shoulders, his left arm circled by the straps of his phylacteries, a leather prayer box on his forehead above his spiritual eye. For such an infringement, he could have been exiled as a slave to Portuguese Africa. Behind my back, I signalled to Farid in our language of hands to spirit him away. “A man has been hurt,” I said.
“Are you a New Christian?!” the horseman demanded.
My heart boomed as if to force a denial. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Farid tugging Uncle back through the crowd.
“I’ve asked if you’re a New Christian!” the horseman repeated menacingly.
The door to the carriage behind him swung open. Silence swept the crowd. Out stepped a thin, delicate man in a violet tunic and bi-colored leggings, black and white. A ruffled collar of gold silk s
eemed to offer his gaunt, evil face to me as if on a platter. His black eyes surveyed the crowd as if in search of an innocent to punish. While dangling a hand weighted with twin rings of emerald cabochons the size of almonds, he said in imperious Castilian, “We’ll take him with us. There must be a hospital near the Estaus.”
The Estaus Palace, a turreted edifice of shimmering stone, played home to noble guests on official visits to Lisbon. “My lord, the new All Saints Hospital is right on Rossio Square,” I said. “Not a hundred yards from your destination.”
Diego was a bear of a man, over six feet tall, and it took a guard and one of the nobleman’s Moorish-looking drivers to help me lift him. Inside the carriage, a young woman with a peaked, violet tress and a rose-colored silk jupe sat opposite the Castilian nobleman. She was blond, fair-skinned, round-faced. She reached for Diego with stringent concern, looked at me with intelligent eyes burning for an explanation.
“Attacked by foreign seamen,” I lied.
Her sudden look of surprise, the impossibility of her desperation, the kinship of her face to my own banished time. A piercing of meaning it was—a shefa, influx of God’s grace. Akin to a verse of Torah suddenly shedding its clothing and revealing itself in a sparkling of naked understanding.
By the girl’s side was a pug-nosed dog in a blue and yellow troubadour’s suit. A coffer of silver rested on the crimson floor of the carriage. These last details I only noticed as the Castilian called to his driver to make ready. I surveyed the scene as I often do to imprint life in what Uncle calls my Torah memory, backed away. When the door closed, the nobleman leaned out the window to me and whispered with a wine-scented voice, “Have no fear. Your friend won’t die on this holiday.” To his two drivers, he called, “Make haste! We’ve a wounded man here!”
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