... Assuming, that is, that it were possible, that the resemblance were not already perfect, that it could have been even greater—because I have already told you, señor, that we both were innocents when we failed to look more deeply into that betrothal in Beirut and to take the necessary precautions ... But be that as it may, the evening prayer was concluded, and I bitterly sobbed the kaddish one last time, and the comforters wept along with me, and I saw Refa’el Valero rise to go, and his wife Veducha put a towel over the tray of food she had brought, the mahshi, kusa, and burekas, and went to join him, leaving Tamara with me—for such is the custom in Jerusalem, that once a mourner has eaten of the never-ending egg, he or she does not leave the house they are in. It was getting dark, and one by one everyone left, even that murderer, who rose and said good night as sweetly as you please. No one stayed behind but old Carso, who was assigned to chaperone us; he sank down between us, warming himself by the stove, his mouth open as if to gulp its heat. And all along I felt Tamara’s eyes on me, as if she wished to tell me what my soul was too frightened to ask. The night dropped, slowly. The snowflakes drifted outside, red in the moonlight. Old Carso fell asleep by the stove, taking what heat it gave all for himself. Until, señor y maestro mío, I woke him and sent him respectfully home. And even though I knew it was a sin for a man and a woman to be left alone by themselves, I did not lose my presence of mind, for had I lost my presence of mind over a little sin like that, how could I ever have gone on to a much greater one...
The fact is, Shabbetai Hananiah, that your silence suits me and that I find it most profound. I only wish that I could be as mute as you—that I could declare: I have said all I have to say, señores, and now you can make what you like of it ... although since no one ever particularly listened to me anyway, no one would notice my silence either. But still, my master and teacher, I pray you not to cast me yet out of your thoughts. All I am asking from you is a nod or a shake of your head, a yes or a no, in accordance with your sentence. I already know the verdict. ‘Tis but the sentence I require.
Well, señor, the stove went out early, because the coals brought by the consul’s men were damp and would not catch. It grew colder and colder. I watched her keep going to the closet and take out more and more clothes to put on, but although by now she looked like a big puffball, she could not stop shivering. She even would have put on her husband’s Hebron cloak, knife holes and all, had I not made haste to offer her my fox-fur robe, which she took without hesitation and draped over herself. And still the cold grew worse. I too kept donning layer after layer, and finally I wrapped myself in the bloody cloak and looked like a big ball myself. We went from room to room and bed to bed, two dark balls reflected by the moonlight from the looking-glasses, in which you could not tell which of us was which. Jerusalem had shut its gates for the night: no one came, no one went. It was as silent outside as if we were the last two people on earth, alone in the last vestigial shelter, each in his or her room, each on his or her bed, each looking at the other in the looking-glass. The candle was burning down in my hand, and before it went out altogether I blurted, “My daughter, I wish to comfort myself with the child that you will bear, and so I will stay here until the birth, that I may know that I am not the world’s last Mani.” And she, in my fox robe, a furry ball on her big bed, answered as clear as a bell: “You are the last. Do not stay, because there is nothing, and will be nothing, and was nothing, and could have been nothing, since I differ in nothing from the woman I was, as you have guessed since you entered Jerusalem. We never were man and wife, for we could not get past the fear and pain. Not even my father knows. I am still a virgin.” At that, Rabbi Shabbetai, my heart froze. I was so frightened by her words that I quickly blew out my candle lest I see even her shadow...
But, my master and teacher, although her shadow disappeared, she herself remained sitting there, and the shadow of the disgrace left behind by my dead son fell upon us both and yoked us together. In truth, I wept to myself, I have failed as I knew I must. The marriage could not be shored up, and the lamb slaughtered too soon now lay on the Mount of Olives, his disgrace unavoidable at the hands of whoever married his widow. I was full of a great sorrow and a terrible wrath, Rabbi Haddaya—sorrow for my son, who lay naked beneath earth and snow, and wrath at Doña Flora, at our beloved madame, who had brought this misfortune upon us. And it was then that I thought of the words of Ben Bag Bag, who said, “Turn it and turn it, for all is in it, and in it you shall find all.”
Now you are gaping at me. At last I have been able to unsettle you—I, your pisgado, I, your faithful, your dull, your charmless little pustema. Do you think, maestro mío, that you might sound another one of your “tu tu tus” to let me know where I stand with you? I remember you, sitting as a boy by the hearth in Salonika with my father, may he rest in peace, an old seafarer from the islands grumbling about Napoleon. Out in the hallway I heard them whispering, “He is a great mind but a most wondrous bachelor; there is none like him.” And when I lived with you in Constantinople and saw how winning, how blushing and guileless, your bachelorhood was, I lost my heart to you. And then my father passed away and we were forced to part. You resumed your journeys in the east, traveling as far as the Promised Land—and there, in Jerusalem, you met Doña Flora and were no more insensitive than others to her charms. And in the goodness of your heart you thought of me, for I had newly lost my wife, and when Doña Flora journeyed to Salonika, you thought of me again. Was it only of me, though? Or was I no more than a pretext? For why, when madame rejected me, did you wed her secretly in a faraway place to the astonishment of your disciples? You, who were so guileless, so blushing, so pure—what was the purpose of it? What end did it serve? There in Salonika, I tormented myself thinking about it. I grieved and was jealous until, able to stand it no longer, I made you a gift of my boy—who, I thought, might unriddle for me the secret of your most wondrous and resplendent marriage. And in truth, he seemed close to doing so, for so Doña Flora, that most wondrous and fearsome woman, wished him to be. For first she introduced him, half a boy and half already a young man, to your bed, my master and teacher, and then she betrothed him to her niece in Beirut, her look-alike motherless virgin of a widow from Jerusalem, whose shadow, señor y maestro mío, was slowly being beamed to me from the looking-glass in the moonlight that now broke through the clouds ... does Your Grace remember?
So you see, this then was the meaning of the idée fixe (I am whispering lest madame be listening impatiently on the other side of the door, for she has been most suspicious of me since the moment I arrived at this inn.) This then was its meaning—for why else would he insist on his surreptitious visits to those unwashed Ishmaelites just as they were dropping off to sleep—why would he think them forgetful Jews, or Jews who would remember that they were Jews—if he had not, señor y maestro mío, already upon arriving in the wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem, been quite simply overwhelmed by his loneliness—a loneliness that only grew greater when he first glimpsed the ramparts and cloistering gates of that obstinate desert city of stone, in which he was awaited by his motherless Beirut fiancée, the look-alike of his adored madame? That was what made him decide to see a former Jew in every Ishmaelite! And yet, señor, or so I often asked myself, this fit of loneliness—was it only because he had been so pampered by you in Constantinople? Everyone knew how shamelessly your madame spoiled him there—why, he would barely appear in the morning at your academy long enough to propose some unheard-of answer to some Talmudic question and already he was off and away to the bazaars, across the Golden Horn to the bright carpets, the burnished copper plates, the fragrant silk dresses fluttering above the charcoal grills and the roast lambs, adored and smiled at by everyone, so that it was perhaps this very coddling that later made him afraid of the solitude that possessed him. Or could it be that he was only coddled in the first place because even then his manliness was in doubt, which was why he so amiably—so mildly—so casually—sought to enlist those drowsy Ishmaeli
tes in the procreation that he himself could not affect from within himself? Are you listening to me, Shabbetai Hananiah? You must listen, for soon I will be gone. The best hope of man is the maggot, says Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh...
And yet why should he have doubted his manly powers already then, as he was wending his way through the savage wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem with the slow caravan, or as he glimpsed from the Little Oak Tree the ramparts and spires of the city written like a sentence in letters whose language was no longer known to men? Why did he not rejoice to see his bride, who had come in all innocence with her kinfolk to a family wedding in Beirut and been trapped there by her aunt’s love, if not for his fear of hurting the look-alike of the one woman he ever loved, half a mother and half an older sister, to whose very scent he had been bound since the days he tumbled in your giant bed, Rabbi Haddaya, a thousand times forbidden though it was?
It was then, my master and teacher, it was only then, sitting wrapped like a ball on the bed in that freezing room while seeking in the little looking-glass to make contact again with her shadow, which was traced with exquisite delicacy by the moonlight in its own furry ball, that I felt how my sorrow and pity for my dead son, who was lying naked beneath snow and earth on the Mount of Olives, were deranging my mind, and I wished I were dead. Because, knowingly or not, we had gulled him with a paradox that compelled him to produce his idée as a consolation in his solitude. I could feel it, that solitude, clutching me in its deadly grip, and I wished to atone for it, even though I knew that to be worthy of such atonement I first would have to die with him, would have to lie naked beneath snow and earth too and let myself be slaughtered like he was. And so, Rabbi Haddaya, layer by layer I began to strip off my clothes, until I was standing naked in that frozen room, in that locked, vestigial house, facing a looking-glass that was facing a looking-glass, thinking back to the night I sent him forth out of myself and preparing to take him back again. He was turning among the old graves on the Mount of Olives, he was icy and shredding, his blood was ebbing from him, his flesh was ebbing and being eaten away, and as I drew him back into myself his seed flew through the darkness like a snowflake and was swallowed inside me until we were one again, I was he and he was me—and then, by solemn virtue of his betrothal in Beirut and of his holy matrimony in Jerusalem, he rose, and went into the next room, and unballed the ball, and possessed his bride to beget his grandson, and died once more.
And died once more, Rabbi Shabbetai, do you hear me?
And so I too roundaboutly, along an arc bridging the two ends of Asia Minor, entered your bed, señor, a bed I had never dared climb into even as a lonely boy running down your long hallway in my blouson, scared to death of the cannons firing over the Bosporus. Now, in Jerusalem, I slipped between your sheets and lay with your Doña Flora, thirty years younger, in her native city, in her childhood home, in her parents’ bed, smelling your strong tobacco in the distance, giving and getting love that sweetened a great commandment carried out by a great transgression. At dawn, when old Carso knocked on the door to take me with him to the Middle Synagogue for the morning service and the mourner’s prayer, he scarcely could have imagined that the bereaved father he had left the night before was now a sinful grandfather.
If we undo this knot and that button over there, señor y maestro mío, and loosen the ties, perhaps we can calm the growl in your sore tummy with a little massage, so that the rice gruel cooked for you by that fine-looking young Greek can arrive at its proper destination. I hear little steps behind the door. Perhaps the Jews gathered outside the inn are afraid I am absconding with Your Grace’s last words and are so jealous of our ancient ties that soon they will demand to be admitted too. And yet I have not come to amuse myself with Your Grace but to ask for judgment. Because when I returned from the synagogue, I was certain that Tamara would already have fled back to her father Valero’s home, so that I wondered greatly to find her not only still wrapped in her mourner’s shawl and blowing on the wet coals to make me breakfast, but looking taller and lighter on her feet, with no sign of the infection in her eyes that had clouded them all summer. The beds were made like plain, respectable beds; the floor was sparkling clean; the looking-glasses were covered with sheets as they were supposed to be. I ate, took off my shoes, and sat down in my mourner’s corner to study a chapter of Mishnah. She followed me in her slippers and sat down not far from me. And when she peered in my eyes, it was not as a sinner or a victim, but as a fearless judge who wished to determine whether I was made for love.
I said love, señor y maestro mío, and even though, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah, your eyes are shut and your breathing is inaudible, I can feel your flesh tautly listening beneath my massaging hands. I beg you in your lovingkindness, be with me now, for I still do not know what the judgment is on such love, which began to blossom that winter. Does it mitigate my sentence or compound it? For it was not something that I sought for myself, and had she risen that morning and gone back to her father’s home, I would have said nothing. But she remained with me, and all of Jerusalem was so frightened of the great snow brought by the Russian pilgrims that we would have been totally forgotten had not old Carso come every morning to take me to the Middle Synagogue, or to the synagogue of Yohanan ben-Zakkai, and had not Valero and his wife Veducha, along with Alkali, and the Abayos, and a few other acquaintances, come late each afternoon with their pots and trays for the prayer and to talk about the marvels of the snow. And in the evening the consul and his wife would come too, and sometimes they brought the Ishmaelite murderer with them, and they talked about my dead son and his sufferings into the night, until all sighed and lit their lanterns and went home. And then I sent old Carso home too, and spent the night getting deeper into love. And when the week of mourning was over, on a clear, sparkling day, we climbed the Mount of Olives to say farewell to him for the last time, surrounded by a great crowd of family, rabbis, consular attendants, and my son’s Ishmaelite friends, and I saw that a little piece of white ice had remained at the head of the grave like a stubborn casting of the dead man’s seed upward through the earth, and my spirit rebelled and I cast her out of me, falling faint among the gravestones for all to see that I too craved such a death. What says Your Grace to that?
But even if you persist in your silence, my master and teacher, measuring me with narrowing eyes, you must know, Rabbi Shabbetai, that I could not die then, for first I fell ill and ran a high fever and was cared for by the motherless widow of a bride, who looked after me with wondrous composure, with great patience and aplomb. She refused to put me in the hospital of the Italian nuns and insisted on keeping me at home with the help of the consul, who came every day with all the produce of the market. He would look in on me in my room too, and ask how I was in the few Hebrew words that he knew, which were all quite sublime and Prophetic, and whose British accent so alarmed me that it made my fever worse each time. Tamara, though, had the good sense to keep him from me, and by the first month-day of the death, Rabbi Haddaya, I was able to hobble with a cane to the graveyard and consecrate the tombstone that had been erected. And when the “Lord, Full of Mercy” was sung opposite the yellow walls of that drear city while a raw winter wind cut to the bone, I felt most certain, Rabbi Haddaya, that I had succeeded in preventing any future disgrace. That is, if that month of mourning had been started by the two of us, it was now being ended by us three.
The world would have its Manis after all.
And thus, my master and teacher, the months of child-carrying began. The days flowed slowly in Jerusalem, which was battling the winter winds that fell on it from the coast and from the desert. By now the whole city was pining for summer, even if no one knew what plague the summer would bring first. And meanwhile, all of Jerusalem went about feeling sorry for my Yosef, who would never see his own son, and most appreciative of his foresight in taking care to have one. No one wondered that Tamara and I were constantly together, because everyone knew that we were linked by the approaching birth, which wa
s outlined for all to see and approve of by the lovely little belly she paraded in front of us. The consul, especially, took a great interest in it and allotted it a modest consular stipend of one gold napoleon payable on the first of each month. And indeed, without it we might not have made ends meet, even though I did my best to keep up my business, mixing my spices from Salonika, which were strong enough to retain their special flavor, with local ingredients and selling them in the hours before the afternoon prayer in the Souk-el-Lammamin or the Souk-el-Mattarin while Tamara sat by my side. Against her black clothes, her large eyes shone so brightly that passers-by hurrying down the lane sometimes thought that two lanterns had been suddenly beamed at them and turned around to ascertain the reason. And though I did what I could, señor y maestro mío, to persuade her to stay home and spare the little embryo the noise and tumult of the street, she insisted on coming with me everywhere, most gracefully bearing herself and her belly in the afternoon breeze. She showed not the least sign of illness or fatigue, and even her eye infection was late in arriving that year, as if the child in her womb were shielding her from all harm. “Dr. Mani,” I called him in jest, regretful that I could not carry him too as a cure for whatever ailed me. And when spring came, and even the ancient olive trees alóng the Bethlehem Road broke into bloom, I could not keep from thinking, señor y maestro mío, that if my motherless little widow of a bride, the look-alike of her renowned aunt, was following me around everywhere, this could only be because she had been brazen and thoughtless enough to fall ever so slightly in love with me, thus atoning, though no doubt unwittingly, for my unrequited love in Salonika in the year of Creation 5552.
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