The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  I found myself staring at a ring of bruises around her neck some two inches higher than 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!

  I looked around to certify that the room had not been trampled by Christian feet. The desks and storage cabinet appeared to be untouched. Of the furniture, only the distorted looking glass on the wall above Uncle’s desk bore an obvious bloodstain. A single rivulet of brown descended from its upper rim across the concave silver surface.

  Had the murderer held a dripping hand to the mirror’s frame as he peered at his distorted image? Or was the legend of the Bleeding Mirror true?

  Whatever the case, no Christians had penetrated; their search had been confounded by the secret threshold of our trap door.

  And no Jewish butchers have been here either! came another inner confirmation. For no butcher knew of the existence of our secret entrance. Nor would Eurico Damas have known of it. So the trap door must have been left open. Could Uncle have been so careless?

  I placed the palm of my hand flat on my master’s chest, as if seeking the answer from his presence. A faint residue of warmth stilled my breathing. Examining him for blemishes, I found only a dark bruise on his left shoulder, a slight swelling around it. His whitened skin felt thick to my fingertips, like leather, but still retained a terrible trace of the suppleness of life.

  I would have guessed that he had been dead no more than half an hour, since just before four o’clock in the afternoon. And that there had been little struggle.

  I gripped his right hand, his hand of blessing and illumination, began examining its pores and lines as if seeking to decipher the language scripted on an ancient parchment. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I could actually feel God’s presence leaving my body. I prayed that the curtain of blood on Uncle had been a dream, counted to five, the number of Books of the Torah, then swiveled my gaze back… The air squeezed in my throat as if a fist had closed. I could not look at him; my sobs, sharp and deep and endless, had begun.

  How long did I cry? Time ceases under the pressure of such emotion.

  When the blessing of silence descended to me again, I sat, began to rock back and forth. I remembered a deaf and blind little boy I’d once seen swaying like this in the street, and now I understood why; pervaded by an isolation and loneliness so wide that it has no borders, the body seeks to console itself with the grace of its own movement.

  Awakening to my own presence, I found myself holding a jagged piece of flower pot. I sat by my master’s chest. Ripped my shirt off and started cleaning the blood from the warped mask of his face. My lips sculpted his name as if in incantation.

  I noticed his bloody shawl balled up by the base of one of the myrtle bushes and drew it over my shoulders. Like a reminder. Of what, I had no idea. I was sitting barechested. Shivering. Cleaning ink again from the fingers of his right hand with my shirt, slipping his topaz signet ring off; the crown of God had trapped the emerald glow of my master’s eyes inside, and I needed that light with me always.

  After I’d whispered a kaddish for him, then one for the girl, I took his left hand to begin cleaning it. A single thread was caught on the thumbnail. Lifting it to my eyes, I found it was black silk. A name hesitated at the edge of my hearing, was framed by my whispering lips: Simon Eanes, the fabric importer.

  Simon was a family friend and member of my uncle’s threshing group who had been ransomed years earlier from the Inquisitors of Seville with a fortune in lapis lazuli paid by my master. His hands appeared before me now, fisted inside the black silk gloves which my mother had sewn for him from remnants of Dona Meneses’ fabric. These gloves were meant to protect his tender grip from calluses; he had only his left leg—the right one having been amputated in his youth—and he walked heavily upon wooden crutches.

  Had the thread been pulled from one of these gloves?

  As a member of the threshing group, he obviously knew of the existence of the cellar and the location of the trap door. But did a man with only one leg have have the strength and balance to kill like a shohet?

  Placing the thread in my pouch, I examined my master’s other nails for particles of skin or hair. Nothing. Then his face. Capillaries in his lips had broken, formed jagged webs. I brushed his eyelids closed. They were dark, seemingly bruised.

  The feel of my master’s bloody prayer shawl on my shoulders moved my eyes to our desks, our place of earthly work. Uncle’s slippers and white robe were on the floor below. On walking there, I discovered that one slipper had tumbled over on its back. The other was a good four feet beyond. It seemed that they had been tossed carelessly from some distance away.

  All his clothes were deeply stained with blood. Uncle had been killed while wearing them, then stripped.

  As I turned in a circle, I surveyed the cellar for other garments, pausing only momentarily to see my dwarfish reflection in the Bleeding Mirror. How vile and ugly I appeared just then, a being of crumpled features and snakelike eyes, my hair knotted like a Gorgon’s.

  In the room, I could find nothing belonging to the girl. Not a blouse or scarf. Not a single ribbon.

  A possibility harshly lit with shame closed my eyes. Uncle had been deeply troubled of late. For reasons which he’d never fully clarified. What if the girl had been the source of his worries, a lover who’d informed him that this would be the last of their secret liaisons? Or one who was pregnant, who’d given him an ultimatum: divorce your wife or I reveal who
the baby’s father is!

  Did Uncle strip her upstairs, lead her down to the cellar, turn the bolt on the door, kill her, then take his own life? But the slit across his throat… Was it possible that such a wound was self-inflicted? Was Uncle capable of killing another being bearing a spark of God in her chest?

  And where was the knife?! Had he made it disappear by whispering an incantation?

  I held my breath as I pried my hands under the bodies to search. Nothing but the sickening feel of cold dead weight pressing toward burial.

  I was unable to find the knife anywhere. Yet in the bottommost drawers of our storage cabinet, I discovered that the lids of our two blackwood boxes had been pulled off; our small fortune in gold leaf and lapis lazuli was gone; the killer—or another thief—had passed right over the lesser ingredients and headed for our most precious minerals.

  The important thing, of course, was not what the killer had taken, but that he had known exactly where to find our treasures. The number of people so intimately familiar with our storage cabinet could be counted on the fingers of my hands: the family; Farid and his father Samir; and the threshing group members.

  The killer had to be one of them.

  The names of the four members of Uncle’s group sounded as if read from a kingly decree:

  Simon Eanes, the fabric importer and manuscript illuminator.

  Father Carlos, the priest, the man to whom we’d entrusted Judah’s education in Christianity. Had not he and my uncle argued about the manuscript of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s which Carlos had refused to give up?

  Diego Gonçalves, the printer and devout Levite who’d been attacked by boys with stones two days earlier, on Friday morning.

  Samson Tijolo, the powerfully built vintner to whom I’d gone this morning for kosher wine.

  As Samson’s name sounded inside me, I remembered bitterly the note Uncle had sent to him, cursed myself aloud for not having read it.

  I faced the eastern wall and stared into the pattern of tiles; for the first time, I realized the powers of disguise gifted to the man I needed to bring to justice, understood that he had fooled us all with a mask of friendship. I sensed that if I were to catch him, I’d have to know everything that had occurred in this cellar.

  Slowly, with the careful steps of a mantis, I began to creep across the room, to imprint the scene in my mind, inch by inch, as if moving my fingertips over an unscrolled portion of Torah.

  A single bead with traces of blood was sitting behind the leg of one of our desks. It was dark, grained with thin, serpentine bands. When I picked it up, I imagined a rosary or chaplet tightened around Uncle’s neck. Had it belonged to Father Carlos?

  I slipped the bead in my pouch.

  Two thick markings of blood stained the bottom fringe of one of the two leather wall hangings gracing the western wall of the cellar. In between these stains was a straight line where the hide had been slit. Undoubtedly, the killer’s hand had folded this section of hanging around the blade, and pulled the knife sharply downwards to clean its edge.

  Bloody sandal-prints led back and forth between the western wall, prayer mat and stairs, but did not continue up. The killer had been trapped, was looking for a way out, then simply disappeared.

  How many different people had left footprints? Uncle’s and the girl’s were easily visible on the mat. As best I could tell, the killer had worn sandals, and his feet were an inch longer and much wider than Uncle’s.

  Might these tracks not have belonged to Diego or Samson?; both of them possessed feet like Goliaths.

  Or had there been more than one killer? The rough surface of the mat picked up imprints but imperfectly, and against the dark slate it would have been impossible for me to separate the footprints of two or even three killers if their size and shape were similar.

  Simon the fabric importer… I considered him again. Even a man with one leg could kill like a shohet if he’d used surprise as a weapon against a chanting kabbalist. But he would only have created a left footprint. At least two right sandal-prints not made by Uncle were clearly visible.

  So if Simon were involved, he had had a partner.

  But I was getting ahead of myself; the thread could have been planted to point blame toward Simon, and the bead might easily have been dropped by a cunning hand wishing to focus the hollow light of doubt upon Father Carlos. Even the footprints could have been faked.

  I crouched again over Uncle’s chest and lifted his left hand to examine the thumbnail. As is decreed proper, it was neatly filed, except where a tiny slit encrusted with blood had caught the thread. Wasn’t it likely then that the thread had been placed there by a thresher desiring to implicate Simon?

  Without considering the consequences, I lifted the hand I’d been holding to my lips, to receive Uncle’s touch and blessing one last time. When I pulled him to me, I began kissing his cheeks and lips.

  I was covered with blood. Dyed with it. Like an illumination come to life.

  When I closed my eyes, a cold wind of presentiment swept me to my feet. Sweat beaded on my forehead. The hairs over all my body seemed to stand on end. A scream building in my chest pushed open an inner door, and a vision entered:

  Around me was a scorched landscape of stoney hills. It was hot, dry. Sunset was casting jagged shadows across canyons and slopes, giving the scene the stark clarity of Torah. In the distance, from the eastern horizon, a white light was rising and approaching. It twinkled as it continued to ascend in the sky, as if expressing code, and it seemed to me that it was surely journeying to deliver a message. As I stood in a position of prayer, there now rose around me a great swooshing sound. It was as if an invisible creature—or the air itself—were breathing. The white light suddenly showed wings and took on the form of a great, luminescent ibis. It was as if the pigment of its white plumage had been distilled from the moon itself. With its black feet braced in front of its body, this bird swooped down and landed just in front of me, ran for several feet to get its balance, drew its wings closed, then poked its scythe-like beak in its chest to ruffle its feathers. It was the size of a man. Standing regally before me, its great silver eyes seemed to contain liquid mercury, to possess the spiritual allure of Moses. With its beak opening and closing, it spoke in my Uncle’s voice. “Turn around!” As I obeyed, I found that I was at the edge of a body of water, perhaps a mile across, and that the curious breathing sound which had risen up around me was simply the noise of waves crashing and falling away. On the far shore, tens of thousands of men had formed columns like ants, were running up the slopes of faraway hills. “Turn back for me,” the ibis said. I obeyed again. “As you suspected, you have come late for the Exodus this year, and you have been left behind. If you are to get across now, you will have to fly; you have no time to wait for Moses to return.” When I replied, “But I have no wings,” the ibis said, “A kabbalist does not need wings to fly, only the will to do so.” His pronunciation of the word “will”—vontade—was purposely ambiguous and was also intended to imply bondade, “goodness.” The ibis then said, “Now face south.” As I did, the landscape froze in time. The scent of vellum was all around me, and I saw that the sea and hills and even the ibis itself had been but figures painted on a page of an illuminated Haggadah. I was standing on a panel depicting the Exodus, on the Egyptian shore. I had been left behind with Pharaoh.

  Shouts from the street woke me into the present. Of course, I thought, the premonition I’d had while watching the flagellants two days earlier had been a precursor to this vision. God had been trying to gain entrance to me and show me this since Friday. How poorly I listened when it was truly necessary!

  The question now was: had I the will and goodness to shepherd my family safely across to the Holy Land?

  Suddenly, under an instinct of bodily fear, my hand craved the concise certainty of my knife, grabbed it from my pouch. Judah and Cinfa… Mother, Esther… My hands formed fists about their names. The need to find them swelled me with a clenched force so strong e
ach breath seemed to jump within my lungs.

  As I raced up the stairs, I lifted from my pouch the Book of Psalms which Uncle had asked me to deliver; the excess weight was suddenly irritating me out of all proportion to its significance. A thought pressed me back against the wall, however: The note inside for the nobleman which Uncle had written! Might it not end some of my confusion?

  This letter was slipped in between the cover and the first page of manuscript. Standing on the cellar stairs, pervaded by a feeling of dread, I ripped the wax seal:

  Dear and honored Dom Miguel:

  Before you, you see your Book of Psalms and my nephew Berekiah. I ask you now: are they so very different? Both beautiful. Both containing worlds worthy of being remembered.

  If you have any doubts, look into my nephew’s eyes. Would you condemn such a good and intelligent gaze to death?

  I told you that there are some creatures created in God’s image who have no feet, only pages. Then, I stopped short of asking these following questions so as not to scare you. But desperation is propelling my pen across this page and I cannot hold them back.

  Can you be sure that a book does not breathe? Can you be sure that it does not reproduce? If not here in our lowly world of veils, then perhaps in the Upper Realms.

  Can you be certain, even, that angels are not books gifted with form by God?