The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon sc-1

by Richard Zimler

“I put it in my chest for safe keeping.”

  “Good.” He smiled sweetly. “It is a great comfort to know that you have it.”

  I gripped his arm. “Look, Uncle, whatever it is that’s…”

  He silenced me by pressing his hand to my forehead. “You are a worthy heir,” he said. “In spite of what I may shout at you in anger, I have never regretted you being my apprentice. Never. Once you have lived more and put more of your prayer into deed, you will be a great illuminator. Your father once told me, ‘There is a lion of kabbalah dwelling in my Beri’s heart.’ And he was right. Of course, it is a blessing to carry such a lion around with you. But a wild beast, even one born of kabbalah, may become inconvenient at times. Now listen closely. Up until now, it has been of little concern, because you have lived a life of study. But when you go out into the world, when action in the Lower Realms takes its rightful place beside prayer, you may have difficulties. Because you will never be able to wear masks like the rest of us. Every time you try to slip one on, you will hear the growling of the lion inside you. That was why you were in such deep despair at the time of the conversion—why, perhaps, God granted you a vision. You will not have it easy. You may have to live apart from people for a time. Or suffer their earthly judgments. But hold fast and embrace the lion inside you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  When I nodded, he continued: “Then that is enough talk. Woe be the spiritual guide who fills his apprentice with pride. We are being threatened on all sides, and if we are to survive, we must work hard. That is more important than natural talent or inclination. Your lion needs to work!”

  Uncle and I sat at our desks. As he painted his panel of Haman and Mordecai, he began to study me with tender eyes. I sensed that he was caressing my form with his gaze to remind himself that—despite Reza’s imprisonment—the world was still good and beautiful.

  The next day, Sunday, just after the cathedral clocktower had struck sext, there was a knock on the outside door to my mothers room. She shrieked for me. I ran up from the cellar armed absurdly with an ermine brush. In her room stood a black slave, as handsome as midnight. He wore a jacket of fine blue silk, yellow leggings. He was holding a note sealed with thick red wax. “From Dom João,” he said in halting Portuguese, meaning one of the Court Jews we’d petitioned for help.

  Esther came running in, understood immediately. She nodded for me to take the message, covered her mouth with clasped hands, began mumbling in Persian. I took the note and ripped it open. “We have seduced Pharaoh with gold,” it read. “Swallows will be home before nightfall.”

  While I pushed raisins left over from my morning deliveries of fruit on the reticent slave, Esther left to tell Uncle. When I got to the kitchen, they were hugging. “I’d like to be there when she gets out of prison,” my master was saying.

  Esther caressed his cheek. “I’ll heat some lamb for her.” She glared at him suddenly and waved a judgmental finger. “But when you get home, you sleep!”

  Uncle closed his eyes, nodded like a little boy. To me, he said, “Beri, there are two errands I need you to do.” He took a manuscript from his pouch, handed it to me. “First, deliver this Book of Psalms. Do you know where the nobleman lives who ordered it?” When I nodded, he said, “There’s a note inside.” He fixed me with a grave look. “Give it only to the master of the house. Only him! And make sure he reads it in front of you.” In a more casual tone, he added, “Then get some kosher wine from Samson Tijolo.” He handed me a scroll tied with a red ribbon. “This letter is for him.”

  Uncle and I left the house together, but he turned north, toward the prison, while I headed west. We exchanged kisses. Nothing more. Had I understood that after the events of the next few hours I would never again feel myself moving through a world watched by a loving God, neither man nor demon could have kept me from clinging to my master and imploring him to use all his powers to change the future. Could he have mixed some powders and potions together to create another destiny for us? How afraid I am to knock upon myself and listen for the answer.

  I first tried to deliver the Book of Psalms, but was unable to do so because the master of the house was not at home. Then, on my way out of Lisbon to buy wine, God granted me with the foresight to purchase alheiras for our celebration. Alheiras were sausages invented at the time of the conversion to save our necks and Jewish dietary laws. Although similar to pork concoctions in shape and taste, they contained smoked partridge, quail or chicken, breading and spices.

  I left the city through the St. Anne’s Gate, and some two hours later, to judge by the descent of the sun, I was knocking at the door to Samson Tijolo’s farmhouse. No one answered, so I slipped around to the cellar door. It was open. I let myself in and took a small wine cask. Having neither ink nor pen to write with, I merely left payment on a table by the door. For a calling card, I left a matzah from my pouch. Samson would understand that it was I who had left my uncle’s letter and taken the wine.

  It was a good five miles back to Lisbon, and on the road back, my load had me drenched with sweat and dust in no time. I rested twice inside the long, late-afternoon shadows of wavering olive trees before entering the city. In a grove of pines about a half-mile from St. Anne’s Gate, I took my shoes off to feel the needles, prickly and dry, beneath my feet. While reaching for a matzah to nibble, I re-discovered the paper that had fallen from Diego’s turban. It unfolded into the talismanic form of a Magen David, and it read: “Isaac, Madre, the twenty-ninth of Nisan.” Today was the twenty-fourth.

  At the time, I thought nothing of the message.

  By my reckoning, it was around four in the afternoon when I saw the walls of Lisbon again. Certainly, it was at least an hour after nones; I had heard church bells calling the faithful to prayers from neighboring villages as I walked. A pungent, smoky odor met me as I entered the city. A vague murmuring as if from a distant arena crowd. Odd it was; houses were shuttered tight, stores locked, as if for night. All around me were empty streets, highly shadowed by the afternoon sun. I crept forward, easing my feet into the cobbles. Beneath the granite walls of the Moorish Castle, two young laborers brandishing scythes ran to me. I tensed to run, realized it was useless. One curved his blade around my neck. He held up the severed head of a young woman by her hair. She dripped blood to the street. She was unknown to me. “Are you a Marrano,?” he demanded, meaning converted Jew. His right eye was a milky white, bulging, reflected my fear with a glint of evil. “Because we’re going to get all the Marranos this time!”

  My heart was pounding a prayer for life. I shook my head, handed my pack to him. “Look!”

  He passed it to his bearded friend. Peering inside with a sniff, he growled, “Sausages.” He handed it back.

  As I offered thanks to God, the dead-eyed man lowered his scythe and asked, “Is that wine?” When I nodded, he took it from me.

  My breaths came greedy and trembling. “The smoke … where’s it …?”

  “A holy pyre in the Rossio. The Dominicans want to send a signal to God with a flame created from Jewish flesh.”

  A dread for the fate of my people curling in my gut prevented me from asking more. Both men filled themselves with drink, then closed the spigot. I stared at the woman’s head. Her eyes were not vacant. What then? Recoiling from this world? Taking back the cask now offered me, a shiver twisted through my chest as if made by a fleeing spirit. The bearded man held the dangling head up, licked her cheek twice as if savoring the sweat of a lover. Opening the draw string of his pants, he allowed the filth of his uncircumcised penis to unsheathe into the air. The woman’s black mouth was pried open by fingers cracked with dirt. To his waist she was held. He began to do something unspeakable. The other watched while pressing against himself with the palm of his hand. I dared not close my eyes, but I turned away. When his grunting had finished, he laced his pants together and said, “Be careful where you go. People are being mistaken for Jews!”

  I squatted under an awning when the laborers had gone.
My dizziness slowly subsided. Wine took some of the furry, acid taste in my mouth away. Were all the former Jews being hunted?

  Down across the staircases and alleyways of the Alfama I raced until I reached the Rua de São Pedro. The gate to our courtyard was lying on the street, bent and twisted. Our donkey was gone. The kitchen door was open. I burst inside as if across a threshold of departure. Silence swelled around my gaze. The hearth was dying away into embers, and the table was set with two cups. Beside one was a matzah, broken in half. Our tattered rug was drawn over the trap door to the cellar. “Uncle!” I yelled. “Mother!” Chilled, confused, I crept into my bedroom, found a landscape of smashed beds and pillaged chests. Peering into the store, I discovered overturned barrels. Spilled olives formed a black and green rug leading out the doorway onto Temple Street.

  My mother’s room was empty, undisturbed. As I touched the eagle-shaped vellum talisman she always kept on her pillow, I thought: In the cellar…. They’re all hiding together!

  I pulled the rug gently away from the trap door so that I would not break the cord which enabled it to be pulled into place from below. Then, peeling open the door itself, I slipped down the stairs onto the landing. The cellar door was locked. “It’s me,” I called in the dark line between the door and frame. “Uncle, open up.” Silence. I rapped on the door. “It’s me,” I called. “Mother, whoever’s there…it’s just me.” When I looked back up the stairs into the silent kitchen, a weighted anxiety trembled my legs. I banged against the door, called out again. No response.

  I was sure that nothing could have happened to Uncle, our man of wonders, the kabbalah master who played fugues with Torah and Talmud and Zohar. You couldn’t kill such a maestro of the mystical with man-made tools. But Judah or Cinfa… What if they were inside, afraid to call out? Or was the cellar empty? Had they all fled? Perhaps my master had a secret way of locking the door from the outside. To protect the books. Yes, that must be it.

  Was it a premonition? Simple logic? A tremor linked to the possibility that something dreadful had happened to Uncle shook me. Standing atop the mosaic menorah, I was suddenly battering the door with all my strength. Till its iron bolt flew from the wood.

  I was inside.

  The hard, dry stink of lavender and excrement packed my nostrils. I was staring at two nude bodies cloaked by blood. Uncle and a girl. They were lying a few feet from each other, she on her side, he on his back. Their hands were almost touching. It looked as if their locked fingers had slipped apart after they’d drifted into sleep.

  Chapter III

  When I saw them, the air was suddenly ripped from me, and my body receded. I was racing down the stairs into a warm cavern bordered by muffled noise and wavering light, breathing in rhythm to the swaying of the walls. Naked, Uncle was. A curtain of blood had closed over his chest. The girl beside him was also free of all covering, and also drenched with blood.

  The rotten stench around me seemed to moisten my eyes. Moaning, kneeling over my master, I reached for his wrist, felt for a pulse; it returned a frigid silence.

  Old Christian rioters had taken his life!

  I looked frantically between the two bodies as if upon unknown scripts. Had they been making love? Who could she be?

  Necks and torsos were contoured by liquid brown ribbons. I crouched by Uncle’s head. On his neck, two lips of skin had peeled away from a deep slit still wet with blood.

  Someone help me, I thought. Dearest God, please help me.

  A cold dread curled up from my bowels and pressed out against my chest when I realized I was alone, that I’d be forever without my master. A wave of sickness rose inside me, and I vomited across the slate of the floor till a stinging liquid dripped from my nose.

  For warmth, I wrapped my arms about my shoulders. Nothing must be changed, I thought. Not before I had imprinted the scene like a Biblical passage in my Torah memory. I must not faint!

  The prayer mat was blotched red, had soaked up the syrup of life they’d spilled.

  But the door had been firmly locked. How could the killer have gotten out?

  Or was he here?!

  I jumped to my feet, reached for my knife. Holding it in front of me like a flame in darkness, I turned back for the stairs, then swiveled around. The silence of expectation trembled my legs.

  Yet the wall tiles and window eyelets, desks and chairs returned my gaze without the slightest quiver of motion. The room was empty, seemed hollow, like the rib cage of an animal whose heart had suddenly ceased beating.

  The memory of Uncle handing me the vellum ribbon on which Aunt Esther had scripted both our names came to me framed by the silence which follows a wintertime chant. Of course, I thought, he must have known that the Angel of Death was approaching. It was why he warned me of our coming separation.

  I stood with my back against the southern wall of the cellar, pressed hard to its granite by the immensity of my loss, and stared at them.

  Now, twenty-four years later, every detail is as clear to me as the first lines of Genesis.

  My master was lying flat on his back, his head tilted to the left in a solemn and restful pose. The girl was lying on her left side, her body the span of a man’s arms from his.

  Uncle’s feet were at the center of the circular prayer mat, his head just short of its perimeter. His eyes were open, darker and glassier than in life, staring at nothing. Blood was smeared on both his cheeks and on the wild silver tufts of hair above his right ear. His left arm was by his side, his hand palm up, his fingers curled. His right arm, however, seemed to be straining toward the girl, and his fingertips were but two inches from her outstretched hand.

  If, in the moment before death, he’d been hoping to comfort the girl with his touch, wouldn’t his body and head have been turned to the right side to give him greater reach?

  I reasoned that he’d already been dead before reaching this final position, and I imagined a hooded Dominican friar braced behind him, stripping him, slitting his throat, blood splashing down across his chest, cascading onto his feet. Then, for some reason, he’d been lowered gently, respectfully even, to the ground. His right arm had fallen toward the girl by accident. Or had been positioned there to make it look as if he’d been trying to soothe her agony. Why? Were the men who took his life artists of death?

  Shit was smeared on Uncle Abraham’s buttocks. More excrement, bloodstained but untrodden, was lying just inside the fringe of the prayer mat by the Sabbath bush of myrtle and lavender.

  The stink in the room was an evil marriage of the floral and putrid.

  The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty. She was thin and pale, a slip of a girl. With long brown hair, now matted with crusted blood. Perhaps five feet tall, she possessed small, firm breasts, as white as marble, and they, too, were ribboned with blood.

  I had so rarely seen a woman’s form unencumbered by clothing that the effect of her graceful contours and deep shadows was to distance me even further from the present. Already numb and disbelieving, I stared at her for a time as if I’d forgotten everything from my past.

  Shit soiled her thighs and ankles. Like Uncle, two lips of skin lifted away from a lengthy slit across her throat. She had been treated more cavalierly than he had, however, and after the edge of a blade had freed her soul from its confines, must have been discarded to the ground like tref. She fell heavy and hard, with her nose slamming into one of the lavender bushes; a flower pot was lying smashed by her head, and soil and ceramic pieces were scattered as far as the staircase. Her nose itself had broken, was twisted grotesquely to the right and crusted with blood. She was lying on her left side now, with her head tucked down into her armpit, as if she were seeking to hide her eyes. Her left arm was extended straight toward Uncle; her right was splayed awkwardly behind her back. Her legs were pulled in slightly toward her chest, as if she were seeking to retreat into the protected sleep of childhood.

  I found myself staring at a ring of bruises around her neck some two inches higher tha
n the crusted slit. These contusions looked like shadows made by a choker of beads, and at first, without logic, I thought that they were indeed marks made by a decorative necklace.

  Then I looked to Uncle and saw that he, too, possessed such shadowing. Bruises circled his neck just above his Adam’s apple.

  Had they been strangled with a knotted cord?

  I crouched by the girl, held her left hand. It was frigid, but not yet stiff. She wore a wedding band of braided golden filaments on her index finger. Slipping it off, I placed it in my pouch and whispered: May her husband still be alive to cherish it.

  It was the sound of my own voice which suddenly pierced the darkness of my initial disbelief; with an audible gasp, I realized that their throats had been cut just below the large ring of the windpipe, as if by a shohet killing in the ritual manner of all Jewish butchers.

  Had a traitorous New Christian led the followers of the Nazarene to my uncle, then slit his throat? I pictured a Dominican friar rousing the mob to break into our cellar, my master taken and handed over to this Jewish mercenary like a sacrificial lamb.

  The name of the New Christian arms dealer Eurico Damas sounded inside me. His recent threat against Uncle’s life had been relayed to us by Rabbi Losa: Should you ever so much as whisper Damas’ name in your sleep…

  Had Damas accepted a pouch of gold sovereigns from the Dominicans to reveal the hiding places of our most honored community members? Had he penned Abraham Zarco’s name at the top of his list?

  But could Damas have killed like a shohet?

  My gaze was drawn to the staircase. Light from upstairs was glistening off the tiles decorating the cellar’s eastern wall, was revealing to me a pattern of twelve-pointed stars seeming to possess a secret. Stars. Light. Patterns. Secrets. Years of training in Torah and Talmud had taught me to sense when my own reasoning had veered from the path of logic, whether Greek or Jewish, and my mind was searching out a fixed pattern in the tiles with which to cleanse itself. Staring at the whirl of blue, white and gold glazes, I permuted the word azulejo, tile, until the meaning of the word slipped away, until there were only eyes fixed on a glassy surface. Graced with the freedom that is emptiness, a realization tugged me breathless to my feet: Uncle’s soul could not have been set loose by Christian rioters; I’d found the trap door closed, our tattered Persian rug in place. The rampaging mob would not have murdered two people, then closed the door neatly behind them and slid our rug into place. They’d have been emboldened by the Jewish blood warming their hands, stormed out of here overturning everything in sight. Our cellar would be a shambles!