The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

Is not the Torah itself God’s body?

  I say one name to you: Metatron.

  Repeat this name to yourself. Say it one-hundred and sixty-nine times if you dare.

  Will the angel Metatron yet record your good deeds or pass his gaze over your name?

  You are a shipwrecked man trapped on an island. I am on a boat throwing a rope to you. It is not the rope you wanted and I am not the savior you had hoped for. Will you lament your fate and moan your disappointment until I pull up anchor and leave you behind? Or will you realize that none of us gets exactly what we want in this life? Will you not make do with what God has given you? After all, a rope from a Jew on a boat crossing the Red Sea at Passover is not something to spit at!

  You may even find that you like traveling.

  Look at the covenant which has always been with you if you have any doubts. May God bless you whatever your decision.

  Abraham Zarco

  P.S. I was waiting for you next to tell me that Christian doctors could give my wife, dearest Esther, her virginity back!

  A door seemed to open inside me as I finished the letter; Miguel Ribeiro, the renowned Christian nobleman, must have been a secret Jew as well! What else could Uncle have meant by the covenant which has always been with you except the circumcised crown of his sex? Clearly, I thought, Uncle had made a difficult request of Dom Miguel, one that he must have refused. Otherwise, my master would not have made reference to Metatron, the Talmudic angel who records the good deeds of Israel.

  As for the request to repeat Metatron’s name one-hundred and sixty-nine times, that was typical of my uncle; it was the number of times the verb zakhar, to remember, appeared in the Old Testament in its various forms. Whenever my master wanted someone of little experience in philosophy to understand a difficult reading of Torah, he gave them a holy phrase related to the verse in question to repeat this many times. Slowly, through kabbalistic channels, comprehension would take shape in the subject’s mind.

  That Uncle’s request of Dom Miguel had something to do with books was obvious. Was he soliciting more funds in order to purchase some recently uncovered manuscripts? Had he found a book so special, something so valuable that it provoked greed within the threshing group? Was that the connection between this note and the kabbalah masters?

  As I continued up the stairs, I felt for the first time that I was stepping along a path toward the truth. A thresher was involved. Perhaps with someone outside the group. They had murdered Uncle because of a priceless manuscript he had found, something so valuable, so magically empowered that it could turn the golden heart of one of my uncles friends to tin.

  At the top of the stairs, I gazed down on my master and the girl. Both lying on the mat. Reaching toward each other like… The thought that they really could have been lovers twisted away from me, and doubt added a terrible depth to the gulf of death separating me from Uncle. Had I truly known him or only glimpsed him through his mask?

  A woman’s scream suddenly came from down Temple Street. I whispered goodbye to the bodies below as one would to sleeping children.

  In the kitchen, I could hear the ragged voices of a crowd just outside the door to my mother’s room. Creeping footsteps coming from our courtyard. Peering outside, I discovered a weedy boy without shoes, his hair a mop of brown. He was picking lemons from our tree. I stepped forward and whispered in a voice of warning, “Leave this place now!”

  He gasped, whipped around and tore off through the gate.

  I started to peer over the wall after him, but ducked down immediately; to my right, descending Temple Street toward the river, were a hundred or more peasants in rough linen, carrying scythes and hoes, picks and swords. My heartbeat was swaying me from side to side. I sat for a minute or so to end my dizziness, then dashed to the shed for nails and a hammer.

  Working with the speed of desperation, I joined the trap door to its wooden frame with the nails and drew the tattered rug into place, all the while thinking: No one must be allowed to defile the bodies. In my room, I slipped on new clothes; although my chest had been ransacked, there was still a ragged old linen shirt and pants lying discarded at the bottom. My previous clothing, heavy with Uncle’s spilled life, met the lime stench of the outhouse pit.

  Before leaving home, I slipped into Farid’s house. Since he was deaf, I could not shout to him to draw him out of hiding. I called in whispers for Samir, his father. The silence of tile and stone met me. I checked the kitchen and bedrooms. The house had been pillaged, their loom hacked to pieces. But there was no sign of either of them. They must have fled. To make sure, I stamped on the ground thrice, then once, then four more times. I was forming the magic Egyptian number pi, the signal Farid and I used in emergencies. If he were here, he’d feel the number in the soles of his feet.

  There came no reply.

  Back in the courtyard, Roseta, our cat, trotted to me, the two sour cherries my mother hung from her neck as identification swinging wildly. Lifting her back into a luxurious curl, she purred as she brushed her gray fur against my leg. I shooed her away with a gentle kick and walked to our gate. Stepping into the Rua de São Pedro, I saw the sky to the west, over central Lisbon, clouded with smoke. I clutched my knife as I thought of my family. And yet, I did not move forward, looked instead back across the empty square to the two-story townhouse just beyond St. Peter’s granite archway. Father Carlos’ apartment was on the top floor. The shutters were closed tight. As a member of the threshing group, was he involved in Uncle’s murder? Or was it even possible that my family was in hiding with him?

  I took the steps of his stairwell three at a time, found his door locked. I called out for him. “Open up!” I said. “You’ll be safer with me. Just tell me if you have Judah with you. Damn you, answer me!” Nothing. The sin of wanting someone to be have been killed so that they could not possibly be responsible for murder entered my heart.

  Outside again, in the eerily empty square, listening to shouts from down by the river, my feet began to move me closer to the cloud of smoke rising from central Lisbon. Like a shell of being, I trudged on, my lengthy shadow retreating behind me as if my footsteps were tainted.

  As I passed the south wall of the cathedral, a group of women ran by as if fleeing an invasion, but none of them tried to stop me or warn me. Were they swallows fleeing Pharaoh? I did not look at faces, and despite what bishops may say, the sound of a Jew fleeing death is no different from that of a Christian.

  A group of youths with hoes and picks was standing outside the Magdalena Church, so I cut quickly left and headed to the river. I found myself on the Rua Nova d’El Rei by the Misericordia Church. Simon the fabric importer’s store was only fifty paces west. As I rushed there, four men in merchants’ dress, conversing in a doorway across the street, gazed in my direction but made no move toward me. Further away, a group of waifs was kicking a wicker basket back and forth as if it were a leather ball.

  How to explain the effect of seeing every shutter on the street locked tight, balconies empty, not a carriage in sight? Such is the look of a city under invasion from within, I thought. Of a city without a future. I imagined myself a phantom, wondered if my fist would make a sound when it knocked at the door to Simon’s store. Of course, it did. Shutters opened above. A bearded man in a wide-brimmed blue hat peered out. It was Master João, Simon’s landlord and an Old Christian. “Stop that banging!” he shouted.

  “I don’t know if you remember me…Master Abraham Zarco’s nephew. I’ve come for Simon Eanes. I need to find him. Is he in?”

  “You’re two hours late. The Dominicans came for him. Slit open his belly, then dragged him away toward…” He flipped his hand in the direction of the smoke ribboning above the Rossio. “Now go away. You’d be in hiding if you had any sense!”

  “He’s dead then?”

  “Do you have eyes, you idiot! You see the smoke. That’s him. Now get away from me, you Marrano dog, before the Dominicans come for me as well!” The shutters slammed closed.


  On walking away, the names of the three remaining threshers were whispered inside me as if summoning me into a biblical wilderness: Samson the vintner, Diego the printer and Father Carlos.

  I would have to find Samson next; his wife Rana, an old friend from the neighborhood, would not be able to hide the truth from me. If he’d come home soaked in Uncle’s blood, her eyes would give the truth away.

  Rossio Square opened like an infected wound maggoted with swarms of shouting people. They crowded around trapped carriages, traced their way through the great arcades of the All Saint’s Hospital, leaned laughing across balconies and window sills. Gulls circled overhead, calling in shrieks. A man in rags was dancing with crusted sores oozing yellow on his feet. “Bit by a tarantula!” a leather-skinned old woman shouted at me. “Can’t stop, even for this!” She laughed, then gagged with a hag’s cough.

  Above the heads of the crowd, columns of dark smoke were rising in front of the Dominican Church.

  It was the heat of emotion that drew me forward. To have turned then would have been like walking away from God himself. Or the Devil at his moment of attack. Only saints have that kind of power.

  Suddenly, I saw Master Solomon the goldsmith at the edge of the chaotic crowd. His hands pinned behind his back by a burly giant with a blacksmith’s muscular sheen. Shit smeared in his hair, across his neck. A grimace of recognition for me trembling his legs. His darting eyes begged for me to run. I imagined his voice: “Now, Berekiah, before it’s too late!”

  Pushed forward, he was suddenly swallowed by the swarm.

  I dove in after him, was carried by a sudden surge toward the center. A terror that I would find my family captured at the core of this mob pervaded me. And yet, a heat akin to sexual desire took my strength. Passed ahead, endlessly, like falling through the arms of a dream, there was suddenly space. A pyre. Crackling with flame. Orange and green tendrils unfurling toward the roof of the church. In the bell tower, a Dominican friar with a bloated goiter holding a severed head out to the crowd on the tip of a sword, exhorting the rabble in a raging voice: “Kill the heretics! Kill the devilish Jews! Bring the Lord’s justice upon them! Make them pay for their crimes against the Christian children! Make them …”

  The fire was giving off a terrible heat as it fed on the mass of Jewish bodies with which it had been gifted. Numb, far beyond thought, I stared until I recognized Necim Farol the interpreter and moneylender seeming to peer out at me through a window of flame. His head was charred black, he had white fish-eyes. To spare myself, I lowered my gaze, but there by my feet was the head of Moses Almal the ropemaker resting like a bust of John the Baptist atop a liquid crimson platter. All around the perimeter of the pyre were pools of blood from which bodies were growing.

  Seconds or maybe minutes later, for such a scene defies sequential memory, Almal’s head was swooped up and carried off by a bearded, racing figure.

  As I followed his mad dash through the crowd, a shirtless man sweating like a miner began hacking with an axe at the body of an old woman splayed on the ground. First the left hand, then the right were severed. This last one bore a ring: the aquamarine of Senhora Rosa-monte, an elderly neighbor who always gave me lemons as presents. The axman was so lost in the joy of killing that he didn’t notice the gemstone. He laughed and shouted, “The ash of the Jews will make good fertilizer for our fields!” He tossed the Senhoras hands into the crowd. A cheer rose up, and I pushed after them. A pale and pimpled sailor from the north was now wearing the hand with the ring on his head, dancing, singing a drunken song in a language spurting up from his gut. When I faced him, he ceased his jig. I poured all my coins at his feet, pointed to his find. He nodded, spit out guttural words, tossed the hand high in the air, straight up toward the gulls. It fell, splattering blood. I snatched it up, sealed it in my pouch. From the granite steps of the Dominican Church, shouts in a voice of doom turned me: “Kill the heretics! Kill them now!” It was a squat, owl-eyed friar swathed in his robes of evil. Like a heraldic shield, he held a bloody Nazarene stick out to the crowd. Solomon the goldsmith was there, lying on the cobbles at the foot of the church steps. Belly up, bleeding like a wounded dog. As I stepped forward, he shouted my name, once clearly. Crimson ribbons streaked his white robe. Two grunting men soaked in sweat and blood were hitting him with planks of wood formed into Nazarene crosses and driven through with nails. Solomon, who caressed gold leaf into whispers from God. Solomon, who kissed me full on the lips and sobbed when he saw the illuminated Book of Esther I’d made for him. Solomon, who…

  It was hard work this killing. At each whack, spurts of life emerged from the goldsmith as if from fountains viewed from heaven. The ripped meat of his punctured hands was outstretched to make it stop. Screams. Hebrew screams for King Manuel. Now to Abraham, Moses. To God. “Make it stop! O God! Make it stop!” A gurgling blood from his mouth choked him.

  “Let’s shave the Jew before he dies!” one of the men shouted. Lifting a blazing branch from the pyre, he held it to Solomon’s gray beard, set it afire. The tortured goldsmith’s eyes were wide with pain, looking ferociously into the world for help.

  As if an arrow of heresy had split my mind, I was thinking: It is a failing of God that we cannot draw such physical pain away from another human being and make it our own.

  A hulking giant with a red cross painted on his forehead, carrying a rusty ax, suddenly came forward shouting for mercy and rain. With a great swing over his head, he sent the jagged blade crashing for Solomon’s neck. Life splattered as far as my feet and his ragged body collapsed like a dolls, his neck spurting blood like new wine from a cask.

  When I awoke to my own presence, Christian men were staring at me; it was idiocy, but in my horror, I had involuntarily begun to whisper prayers to myself in Hebrew!

  A hand caught me suddenly, tugged me back. Jerked me hard. A face I knew. David Moses? We ran through walls of reaching arms with the weightless speed of nightmare. Raced through a forest of movement. Around corners. Up stone staircases. Down shadowed alleys. Into a house. Through a closing door into welcoming darkness.

  A hand fell over my mouth. Breathing came hard against my cheek. A voice I knew was whispering my name. “Quiet, Beri,” he said.

  It was David Moses, our former chazan.

  “Master David, did you see Solomon, the goldsmith?” I asked.

  “I saw many of us,” he replied.

  “But Solomon. Did you see…”

  Shouts from just outside the door: “Down by the river! Let’s get going! Bring the cart!”

  Master David covered my mouth with his hand. We crouched down. Our breathing ebbed together, then separated.

  “Have you seen my family? My mother, Judah…”

  “No. But they could be anywhere.”

  “I must go back…maybe they’ve made it home. I must find them and…”

  He gripped my collar. “Listen, the only way to find them is to stay alive. You must get away.”

  “How did it start?! Who’s responsible for this…”

  “In the Dominican Church. A crucifix with a hole covered by mirror. A lit candle slipped in from the back by the friars. They tell everyone that the light is a sign from the Nazarene, a miracle. About an hour ago, a New Christian, Jacob Chaveirol, the tailor, he was…”

  “I went to school with his son, Menni. He’s brilliant in Torah. A man of wonders. He has a shop up…”

  “He’s an idiot! He said how much better it would be if Christ gave us rain instead of fire!”

  “And…?”

  “Beaten to death. They slit his abdomen and pulled out his… Two priests called on the congregation to kill the Jews. His brother, Isaac, killed as well, ripped to pieces. The head in the bell tower, it’s his. Northern sailors contributed money for the wood of the pyre. And soon…and soon…” David’s words faltered.

  “And the King, why doesn’t he come to our defense? Twenty years we were given to…”

  “King Manuel?!” Master David sigh
ed. “He a coward, but he’s not stupid. He knows that if he sends troops to our aid, the mob will call for his head. The people hate him almost as much as they hate the Jews. He’ll give the riot time to burn itself out, then take control of the city again.”

  He and I clung together in silence. I could not speak of Uncle; my revelations would have confirmed that he would never return to me. And I could trust no New Christian until I learned more about the murder. I asked, “Have you heard anything of the fate of Father Carlos or Diego the printer?” When David shook his head, I added, “And Samson the vintner?”

  “Not a word,” he replied.

  My eyes were adjusting to the gloom; we were in a spiral stairwell. Above us, dim light filtered through a thin portal covered by a grill. Suddenly, I could distinguish a face above us peering around the central axis of the stairs. I lunged. Caught a leg. Stifled a scream with my hand. It was a girl. She struggled, but I held her with the force of my stored fear. “Stop! I won’t hurt you!” I said.

  She fought me for a moment more, then shook free of her terror. Her breathing came warm against my hand.

  “Damn her!” the chazan whisper-screamed.

  “We can’t stay here anyway,” I said. “We’re too close to the Rossio. You go now and I’ll meet you outside the porta de Santa Ana, St. Anne’s Gate. Past the monastery, on the crest of the next hill, is a single large oak. Meet me there. I’ll stop her from shouting till you have had time to get away.” I could see my friend clearly now. His prayer shawl had been tugged through his ripped mantle. “And for God’s sake, toss away your tallis.”

  “But what about you?” he asked.

  “You’ve saved me once. I’ll do the rest. Now that I’ve awakened to what is happening, I’ll get away. Just get rid of your shawl.”

  “I can’t,” he said. He hid it back inside his mantle.

  “And you think that Jacob the tailor was crazy? Look, I’ll meet you beyond St. Anne’s. Go!”