The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon sc-1

by Richard Zimler

  A neighbor heard me searching and peered at me from the front doorway. He was a tiny man with razor-reddened cheeks and sleepy eyes. He spat up at me when I asked if he’d seen her.

  Did these Christians always expect us to wipe their scorn away with a meek hand and continue shuffling into an uncertain future?

  I shoved him so hard he crashed into the street and fell with a shriek.

  A girl, perhaps four years old, was sitting stoically on a pillow in Reza’s vegetable garden, naked. A square cross had been finger-painted with charcoal on her forehead. She was nibbling raisins, had dark hair cut straight at her shoulders, secretive brown eyes framed by long and elegant lashes. She had no nail on her right thumb. “I run away,” she said.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She looked up at me with distant eyes and shook her head.

  “And where are your parents?”

  She pushed raisins into her mouth. I ripped a sheet in two and covered her. “I’ll bring you to my house,” I told her. “You’ll be safe.” She wanted to be carried on my shoulders. So strange it was to hear a child’s laughter. I lowered her to the cobbles and made her walk.

  At home, I realized for the first time that the kitchen was a shambles. A few precious drops of vinegar were left at the bottom of a cracked pitcher by the cold hearth. I dripped them over my hands and the girl’s forehead. Rubbed off her cross completely. We descended to the cellar.

  “Who’s that?” my mother demanded, staring at the girl as if she were an affront to her grief.

  “I found her at Reza’s house. But Reza wasn’t there. Just her.”

  Mother cursed under her breath, then took the girl from me and held her fast. “And Judah?” she demanded.

  I shook my head. “I lost his trail.”

  She turned her gaze toward the wall. It was the same agonized movement my elder brother Mordecai made just before death. When he finally stopped breathing, I drew his last tear to my fingertip and traced it across my lips. An aching relief swept through me like a desert wind as I tasted his salt.

  It was then that I had the second of my visions, the first since our forced conversion. It burst up from my feet to my head and pushed through my mouth as a scream. In it, I was standing in our courtyard. Mordecai was sitting on our roof, next to the tin weather vane of a troubadour. I wanted to join him, was pervaded with longing. My gaze was drawn by the same faraway light I’ve always seen in my visions. As it approached, it transformed itself into a great, fan-tailed eagle of glowing colors. Its head was a ghost-like white, and its eyes shimmered from violet to red, like prismatic crystals. Its gorget was yellow-green; right wing silver, left gold. Its chest was the purple of murex. Swooping down to our rooftop, this great bird extended its talons and snatched up Mordecai effortlessly. I called to him, “What about me?” Mordecai answered, “Years from now, we will need your help. You still have work to do for God.” Safe inside the eagle’s powerful grip, he continued east, toward Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.

  So had my true work always been to free my family from Pharaoh, to see them safely out of Portugal? Is a man born to accomplish one great goal in his lifetime?

  To Mother, now, I asked, “Did you hear anything curious from Uncle about his threshing colleagues in the last few weeks? Any doubts…anger?”

  She would not answer, began twirling the hair by her temples and pulling it out.

  The girl I’d found in Reza’s garden had plopped down to the slate and was looking up at me blankly. Cinfa stood facing her, staring and squinting, gathering the hair at the nape of her neck. Before the mood of despair could claim me, I ran out to search for the threshers.

  Diego lived alone in an apartment adjacent to the St. Thomas Church, less than a hundred paces from the city’s eastern walls, in a predominantly Christian section of the Alfama. As I climbed through the streets toward it, house shutters began clanging open. Townsfolk in stocking caps pulled low over their foreheads peered out at me, yawning and blinking. Gloomy laborers began trudging off for work. My stomach started growling for a braid of cheese or bit of matzah. But I had forgotten money. Perhaps I could have begged a crust of leavened bread, but it was the day preceding the fifth night of Passover. Chametz, of course, was still forbidden to me.

  A pretty girl with bits of hay in her sleep-mussed hair was standing in a closed doorway She had swathed herself in a blanket, couldn’t have been more than Cinfa’s age. Hailing me with a whisper, she opened her covering for a moment. She was naked, had tiny breasts and slim, boyish hips. “For two eggs, I’ll carry you into my solitude,” she whispered. “Why not just…”

  Such is what happens when children are abandoned to the god of Lovelessness in our most noble and loyal city.

  Just ahead, at the steep lip of hillside which fronts the tiny square by the Church of São Bartholomeu, I planned to look out across central Lisbon to see if the Christian storm had ended. Naïve I was even to have entertained this notion; centering the valley below was the Rossio, a mile or so distant. At least a thousand Old Christians were already assembled there. Two great conflagrations were blazing into the sky.

  From my vantage point on the crest of hillside, the Old Christians shed their human disguises for a moment and looked like ants feeding in a ragged cluster.

  Suspecting that small groups of marauders would soon begin to spread through the city, I rushed off to Diego’s apartment. The door to his townhouse was locked. He lived on the second floor, so I called up to him. Across the street, a skeletal old cobbler holding two mallets in a claw-like hand began to watch me with suspicious eyes. He looked away abruptly when I returned his gaze.

  Picking up pebbles from the street, I began tossing them at Diego’s shutters. A wan old woman with bloodshot eyes and a pointy chin bristling with gray hairs poked her head out of the third-floor window just above. She clutched a black shawl about her head, had a blunted red nose eaten to nearly nothing by some disease. “Who ya want?!” she snapped with a Navarese accent.

  “Diego Gonçalves. Have you seen him?”

  She shook her head with exaggerated motions and smacked her lips. In a voice which seemed to glue all her words together, she said, “Ain’t my place to interfere in other folks’ business, ya understand. Lord knows, just takin’ care of my husband’s a day’s work. But sometimes, the Lord brings someone with a question and we gotta answer. Because the Lord is watchin’ and if we don’t, we…”

  I guessed she was drunk or insane. “So is he here?” I interrupted.

  “Ojos‚” she said gravely and slowly, as if years of experience were behind that one word.

  “What?

  “Eyes! These Portuguese people got eyes the size a walnuts. And they stare like they want to see what color yer soul is. Ever wonder if that ain’t the problem?”

  “Look, do you know if Diego has been here today?” I asked.

  “God’s always watchin’. The Devil’s always watchin’. And with these walnut-eyed Portuguese everywhere, ya can’t escape. When I was…

  Under my breath, I whispered, “Go sing it to the goats, you witch!” Picking up some more pebbles, I began pitching them harder at Diego’s shutters.

  “He ain’t here!” she shouted defiantly.

  “Where is he then? I don’t have much time!”

  She looked up skyward and crossed herself. “The people on his floor were taken away yesterday,” she cackled. “By men with Portuguese eyes.”

  “May I take a look inside?” I requested.

  “Who are ya?”

  “His nephew,” I lied.

  She leaned out and surveyed the street with her top lip lifted up like an irritated donkey. The cobbler must have been staring at her because she raised a fist toward him and shouted, “Get back to work ya lazy old turnip!”

  He flapped a hand at her like she was crazy, squinted and gave her the sign of the evil eye with an extended pinky and index finger.

  She blocked his malediction by crossing
herself, then shouted at him again. Lifting a key from inside her blouse, she dropped it into my cupped hands. “Don’t eat it, now,” she warned me, “it’s my only one.”

  I expected her to cackle, but she was deadly serious. “You have my word,” I assured her.

  When I reached the second floor, I tried the handle to Diego’s door and found it locked. The door to the apartment belonging to his neighbor, however, had been torn away. A strange smell, like brackish water, was wafting out. Before investigating, I returned the key to the upstairs neighbor. “You a Jew?” she asked. “‘Cause they was Jewish ya understand.”

  “I’m a Jew,” I admitted dryly.

  She gripped my arm. “Now ask me if I’m one too!”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  Her nails bit into my flesh. “Ask me!” she demanded, the spray of her sudden rage hitting me in the face.

  “Are you a Jew?” I repeated matter-of-factly.

  Before I could duck away, she slapped my face with her callused old hand. “You Portuguese bastards never hesitate to insult a Navarrian lady!” she shouted. “But I’m not about to…”

  She was still yelling when I reached Diego’s apartment again. I knocked and called for him, but received only silence. Growing fearful for his safety all of a sudden, I began shouting, “Diego! Diego! It’s just Berekiah!”

  Not a sound was returned to me.

  I entered the apartment next door. Old Levi Califa, the retired pharmacist and Talmud scholar, lived there with his widowered son-in-law and his two grandchildren. The state of his quarters did not bode well for Diego’s safety; the canopied bed in the front room had been stripped. A cross had been finger-painted in blood on the eastern wall, and below it, in foot-high letters, were the words: Vincado Pelo Cristo! Avenged for Christ.

  With contempt for the legions of Old Christian illiterates staining the landscape of Portugal, I noted that the word vingado had been spelled incorrectly. How could they expect to even catch a glimpse of God when they could neither write correctly nor read with any perception?

  “Master Levi?” I called out warily.

  Silence.

  At the far wall, the door to the rest of the apartment was splayed on the ground. Stepping over it and creeping through the open entrance, I entered a tiny room, square, no wider or longer than three paces, with a parquet of the coarsest oak and a single wooden stool as the only furniture. Yet had I ever entered a room more filled?

  Immediately, I knew I’d walked across a holy threshold.

  On the whitewashed walls, written in black, in tiny Hebrew letters, was Exodus. All of it. From the names of the Israelites who entered Egypt with Jacob to the flight of Hebrew slaves across the Red Sea to the raising of the Tabernacle by Moses. The verses began at the top of the eastern wall, continued south in a straight horizontal line, then west and north to form a ring. I guessed that more than two hundred such rings had been written. Lettering covered the entire top half of the room like a holy arbor.

  Leviticus, too, had been started, but had ended abruptly with the commandment not to burn honey to the Lord. That’s when the Christians must have forced their way into the room and taken the scribe.

  There was no need to puzzle over his identity. I knew with certainty it was old Levi Califa. Who else would have been so devout as to spend his time in hiding by recounting the central story of Passover?

  I was so awed that I simply turned and read, my eyes quickening their pace like a dervish finding the rhythm of his dance.

  I didn’t expect to encounter Califa himself. But on the kitchen floor, on a piece of broken plate, was a right hand. I knew it belonged to him because the index finger on which he’d always kept his carnelian signet ring had been sliced away. Close by was the last piece of charcoal with which he’d been writing and which must have fallen from his clutches.

  A severed hand does not look real. But why? Is it because our minds refuse to believe such cruelty possible?

  And why is it that the Christians do not merely kill us, but cut away our body parts? Is it an effort to render us inhuman, to force us to better correspond to their image of us as devils?

  Not far from his fingertips were the hyssop-blue heads of Califa’s beloved Brazilian parrots, whom he’d named Ternura, Tenderness, and Empatia, Empathy, the Talmud scholar’s two-word motto.

  The bodies of Tenderness and Empathy must have been stolen for their precious feathers. Already, perhaps, they were decorating the hat of a Christian nobleman.

  As I leaned over to retrieve the hand for burial, a footfall across a snapping piece of wood turned me. In the front room stood the old cobbler from across the street, patient gray eyes fixed on me. He was thin, tan, wore only a sweat-stained undershirt and the crudest of linen pants. He had to be at least fifty, had thin wrists, narrow and bent shoulders. Wisps of tangled gray hair tufted up from behind his ears.

  In one hand he held a gouging tool, in the other, a mallet.

  I reached for my knife and held it in front of me. They will force me to fight again, I thought. Unwilling to engage him amidst the sanctity of written Torah, I stepped to the front room. As I did so, he said in a hoarse voice, “You haven’t much time.”

  I didn’t respond, thought: Why do Christians always expect Jews to speak before they fight?

  Anger rose in me, and I felt as if hot mercury were running through my veins. Stepping to within three paces of him, I awaited his first lunge, imagining that he would crumple under my knife.

  Even so, I did not desire to hurt him; it is said that the distance between the righteous taking of a life and a cold-hearted murder is but a hair’s-breadth, and I did not presume to have the eyesight necessary to always know the difference.

  He scratched the bald vale centering his head with the end of his mallet. “You don’t understand my meaning, I’m a friend,” he said.

  “Then drop your arms.”

  To my utter amazement, he laid them neatly at his feet. With lines of worry ribbing his forehead, he said, “You haven’t much time. They’re coming up from the river. You’ve got to get home. I came to warn you.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Let’s just say that Master Levi was a good friend.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Come on, son,” he said, holding out a hand to me.

  “Tell me when you last saw him, please. I need to know.”

  “Yesterday,” the cobbler replied. “The Dominicans came for him and his family.” He reached his hand out again and brushed my arm.

  Involuntarily, I backed away. “And Diego Gonçalves? Was he with Master Levi?”

  He turned nervously for the door. “Look, you’ve got to go! Can’t you understand?”

  “Have you seen Diego Gonçalves?”

  “No. He hasn’t been here that I’ve seen. Maybe he was captured.” He shrugged, then continued angrily, “Look, I’m going. You can leave with me or wait for them to come and get you. And don’t worry, the Navarrian hag will make sure they find you quickly. She’s the one who opened the door so they could get Master Levi without working up a sweat.” He leaned forward to pick up his mallet and gouging tool. A sudden urge to stab him in the back of his neck swept through me. What purpose would it have served to hurt this righteous Christian?

  Did the mercury flowing through my veins possess its own desires?

  “Come,” he said, straightening up. His voice possessed the supplicating tone of my father calling me to study. A shout suddenly reached us from behind the house. The cobbler lifted a crooked finger to his lips to suggest silence.

  Together, we crept into the stairwell like children off to a dangerous escapade. The Navarrian hag, as he called her, was standing above us on the staircase, an expression of contempt twisting her wrinkled face. The old man raised his mallet and hit it once lightly against his own head to indicate what he’d do to her should she give our positions away. We made our way down the stairs like cats stalking their prey.
I wanted now to find Samson, to read the letter which my uncle had sent him. My plan was to get to the Porta de São Vicente, St. Vincent’s Gate, exit the city and head northwest to his house.

  In the street, swallows were still swooping madly through the morning chill. A murmur coming from the west was pierced with the caustic laughter of young men hugging danger to their hearts.

  The cobbler pointed down the street to the east, to the wavering eye of sun. “Go with God,” he said, gripping my shoulder.

  I mouthed my thanks. Then I ran.

  I cannot emphasize enough how deeply clouded my judgment must have been by Uncle’s death; any Jew in my position should have realized that the Dominicans would close off all the exits to the city as their first religious calling of the morning.

  It was also a mistake to run. The claps of my footfalls drowned out the sounds of the Old Christians and gave my position away.

  A mob of one hundred or more was fronting St. Vincent’s Gate. When they spotted me, arms pointed toward me like arrows.

  I had stopped, my gut clenched with fear. Even so, a sense of sliding toward doom made me extend a hand as if to seek the assurance of a railing or wall. I grabbed only air, of course, then instinctively sought the protection of my knife. For a breathless moment, I even wavered at the edge of taking my own life. It would have been easy; in those days, I still believed in a personal God and did not fear death. Dying, yes. But not the glorious journey back to the Upper Realms. A last prayer, a single thrust, and then I would have been released. The thought was: better my own hands setting my soul free, than those of men who’ve held a cross.

  Of course, they couldn’t have known for certain by my outward appearance that I was a New Christian. But if they’d stripped me, my covenant with the Lord would have made my allegiance obvious.

  The urge for life is more powerful than thought. Or perhaps my need to find Judah was too strong.

  I turned and ran as if there’d been no other choice. Were my enemies after me? I couldn’t tell; my senses had been dispelled by my quickened pulse. Imagine standing beside a leaden bell tolling madly during a howling windstorm. That was my heartbeat and that was my breath.