The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  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.

  All that comes to me now is a general sense of descending outdoor staircases, the odor of my own terror. The next image that penetrates my Torah memory is of a bell tower. I was in front of the façade of the Church of São Miguel, not two hundred paces from home.

  Without warning, the tower seemed to crash to its side. I had been shifted in space, was on my back against the cobbles.

  Although I was fighting for breath, there was no sense of pain, only silent confusion. My head seemed imprisoned inside an amphora of glass. It was as if the hand of God, without warning, had simply moved me through space.

  A fleeting image of a water lily surrounded by sand, bursting suddenly into flame, seared my gaze. Later, I understood that I had been unconscious for an instant, and upon waking, had caught a glimpse of the dream world flowing beneath the current of my usual thoughts. Even then, however, that image—of a lily in flames—seemed vital to me, a gift from God to which I needed to cling. (The clue to its significance came while illuminating a Book of Esther one day in Constantinople, when I realized that the Lord must have seen Lisbon as a burning flower that fateful Passover.)

  To my left, six or seven feet away, I now noticed a man in a cape of polished hide kneeling, holding his shoulder as if he were wounded. I realized he must have lunged for me from a hidden doorway and knocked me flying, hurt himself in the process.

  Two lanky men in ragged clothing were running toward me from down the sloped street. They appeared to be identical twins. Closely cropped black hair crowned their heads. They both held axes, and I sensed that they wanted to split me like a block of wood.

  Behind them, a rampaging group of men and women was rushing toward me. Everything seemed a whirl of noise and wind, shadow and contour.

  When the two axmen suddenly merged together, I simply could not understand. Then I realized the obvious: my vision had been distorted by my fall.

  Cold iron glinting in the sun has a way of summoning one’s body to arms. I was up in an instant, gripping my knife.

  The serpentine alleys and pathways of the lower Alfama had long ago been incorporated into my interior map, and I cut away to the west just as my wounded assailant struggled to his feet. I reached the steep staircase leading down to Cantina Square in seconds. From the highest step, one can jump easily onto the neighboring rooftops. I took the leap correctly, then spired up and down four rooftops to the next alleyway. Three men were following me. The two closest, perhaps twenty feet away, held swords. The third was a friar using his crosier as a staff. “Get the Marrano!” he was shouting in a hoarse voice. “Bring me his covenant with the Devil!”

  By that, I assumed he wanted my sex for a personal trophy. Having been educated to view the world symbolically, I wondered, of course, if the Dominicans wanted to end our possibilities for reproduction once and for all.

  The alleyway was empty. Dropping down, I scaled a low wall into Senhor Pinto’s courtyard. As I suspected, his kitchen door had been smashed in. The house was a shambles. I cut through his kitchen to the corner of the Rua de São Pedro and the Rua da Adiça. Farid’s house was just across the street. I took his wall with a single leap to the top, then jumped to the courtyard and ran for our kitchen.

  I did not descend to the cellar, however. After verifying that I hadn’t been followed, I lifted away the false frontpiece to the chest in Uncle Abraham and Aunt Esther’s room, took out a dried eel bladder containing a few coins to be used in an emergency. I waited a few minutes for shouts to disappear from Temple Street. Then, when all I could hear was my own heartbeat, I headed to the river. Near to shore, a fisherman whom I have seen since childhood but never spoken to was seated in his blue rowboat, cutting a braid of cheese with a rusty knife. He was old, perhaps fifty, squat, had a suntanned, leathery face and the gray eyes of illiteracy. When he met my gaze, I held up a coin and looked west, down river; once there, beyond the city gates, I planned to walk the five miles to Samson Tijolo’s vineyard.

  The fisherman nodded, rowed toward me and maneuvered his boat alongside the riverbank.

  “I need to get out of the city,” I told him.

  With two of my copper coins sitting in his crawling bait, the fisherman rowed us out a hundred feet or so into the river, puffing and tossing away curses. Above the big toe on his right foot, an angry red sore had eaten into his grayish waterlogged skin.

  “Bit by a crab,” he grumbled. “Never healed properly.”

  Weaving through two large fishing boats and cutting around a galley flying the red Portuguese cross, he turned the boat until we caught the current. As his rowing gained rhythm, Lisbon’s defensive walls trailed behind and became but a ribbon threading through church towers and the tangle of the city’s outer districts. He dropped anchor beyond a rocky outcropping of beach and lifted his hand to bid me good luck.

  I nodded my thanks, rolled up the legs of my pants and waded into the cold water.

  On the beach, two Andalusian pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela wearing scallop-shaped hats approached me and asked me where a tavern might be. I made believe I couldn’t speak their language and walked away.

  C
hapter VII

  Two hours later, Rana, Samson’s wife and an old friend from the neighborhood, answered my knock on her door with her newborn baby, Miguel, suckling at her breast. “Beri…oh my goodness, you’re alive! Come in!” She grabbed me and pulled me into the house, closed the door behind me and locked the dead-bolt. “I can’t believe it!” she smiled.

  We kissed, and I reached out to rub the baby’s downy hair. So young he was that his eyes were shut tight as if never to be opened. “Handsome little thing,” I said, for who could tell a first-time mother that her baby would look like a squirrel until it was at least a month old?

  Rana replied, “Handsome? Have you been meditating too much again?” She tried to smile, but tears trapped in her lashes. Her lowered glance showed a desperate isolation, and I understood that Samson, too, had been lost in the Christian storm.

  We sat by her hearth. “How did you find out about the riot?” I asked.

  “Some neighbors came to warn me.”

  “Maybe we should leave here together. Go back to…”

  “You know I can’t,” she interrupted.

  For protection against dangers from the Other Side, Rana would not leave her house for the first forty days after Miguel’s birth—the number of years Jews wandered in the wilderness and days of the Biblical flood. I replied, “When did you last hear from Samson?”

  “I’ve had no word since Sunday. He was going to Little Jerusalem to buy fabric we needed for…” She nodded toward Miguel. “He was going to Simon Eanes’ store. You haven’t seen him or heard anything? Or spoken to Simon?”

  “No, nothing. But I don’t think Simon made it.”

  She turned to face the wall, and her lips mouthed prayers. I said, “There’s still a chance that he’s found safe haven. Samson was clever. And imposing. He’d frighten away many a Christian. Sure used to scare me when I was a kid. He may yet come back.” I gripped her arm to impart strength, realized I was really trying to convince myself that Judah could be safe.

  “No,” she said. “If he were alive, he’d be back by now.”

  “He could be in hiding.”

  “Samson, in hiding? Beri, a father for the first time after fifty-seven years is not going to go into hiding when his child’s life may be in danger.”

  Rana was one of those rare people who refused to lie to herself. It was why most people found her aggressive, even heartless. She nodded her resignation, rubbed her free hand through her curly brown hair. “If I must go it alone then…” Her words faded and she bit her lip to keep from crying. “All hunger and sleep,” she said of Miguel, trying to smile. Her nipple had slipped free of his mouth, and she pushed it back into place as he fidgeted with his arms. He made a warm, satisfied noise as he suckled. Rana looked up at me with hopeful eyes. “Beri, have you heard anything about my parents?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. I should have checked before coming. I didn’t think.”

  “It’s okay. I suspect they’ll come when they can…if they can.”

  “Rana, I dropped by last Friday to get some wine. I took a cask and left a note.”

  “Yes, we knew it was you because of the matzah.” She patted my arm. “How reassuring it is that some things never change. I must have been asleep. I don’t sleep much. But when it comes, I’m lost to the world. Except when Miguel cries. Then, it’s like a hunter has shot an arrow into my heart.”

  “Listen, do you still have the letter I left that day?”

  “Of course I do,” she answered. “Is it important?”

  “I have to read it. Something Uncle may have told Samson… Where is it?”

  “Taking care of Miguel has made me a bit absent-minded. But I’m sure it’s somewhere in the bedroom.”

  “Can we take a look?”

  “Hold him,” she said, lifting Miguel and handing him to me. As Rana looked through their chests and desks, I held the little boy in the cradle of my arms and remembered the tender feel of Judah. So many late nights Mordecai and I had spent walking with him to keep his tears away; he had not been an easy baby, had been burdened with fluid in his lungs that gave him a harsh cough. I closed my eyes and the feel of the baby’s soft skin tingled my fingertips. Judah, my Judah, I whispered to myself. Please, dear God, let him still be alive.

  To banish the dread descending over me, I engaged Rana in conversation as she searched. We talked of Miguel’s stomach problems. “His turds look like magpie droppings,” she said in a worried tone. “Dr. Montesinhos says it’s nothing to carry on about, so I suppose…”

  “Forget it,” I said with a wave. “Judah’s did, too. I think all babies are part bird.”

  She laughed, but the ensuing silence showed all the more clearly the sullen mood that weighted the air inside the house. We shared a look in which we acknowledged that Samson might never return, and she reached up to caress my face. “Dear Beri,” she said. “I miss the neighborhood.” Our gaze was linked by memories of demons banished together by our children’s army.

  She went back to her hunt, headed to a chest of drawers by the bed. From a small wooden box with a metal lock, she lifted away a scroll. “Got it!” she said in triumph. She handed it to me. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” I placed Miguel into her arms. The scroll curled open into five sheets of paper.

  As if inviting me to share an adventure, Rana said, “Listen, Beri, take a look at the note and I’ll get some challah bread and wine…no, of course, you must be reliving the Exodus. Just some wine, then? You can stay, can’t you? Till you finish the note, at least? You must stay.”

  “I’ll stay till I finish it. Then I must go back to my family. But Rana, if you have chametz in the house…then you haven’t celebrated Passover yet?”

  “No. We were waiting a little while longer to be safe.”

  She led me back to her kitchen table, brought me a cup of wine, then took my free hand. Uncle’s note read:

  Dearest Samson,

  Miguel Ribeiro has refused. So I shall tell you a story. In it, you will find my hopes that you discover the need for all of us to make a sacrifice at this decisive moment. If we do not perform as Rabbi Graviel did during this present fulcrum in time, then all may be lost.

  No matter that your belief is crumbling, it is your acts which count.

  Shall Samael win the day?

  At the top of the next page was written: A História da Crestadura do Sol do Rabbim Graviel—The Tale of Rabbi Graviel’s Sunburn. It was the same story my master had told me on his last Sabbath, and as I mouthed the title, his hand seemed to reach for the reins at the back of my neck. His voice whispered: “Yes, read it again, Berekiah, so you, too, may see its significance. It is no accident that I offered this story to both you and Samson.”

  “What is it?” Rana asked, sensing my sudden agitation.

  “A tale. Of Rabbi Graviel, one of my ancestors. Of how he had to suffer imprisonment in Spain in order for his daughter to survive. I think that my uncle saw in a vision that he’d have to make a great sacrifice as well. Yes… In order for the girl in the cellar to survive, he had to give up his life. He made a deal. But the murderer did not keep his word.”

  “Beri, you mean your uncle… Oh dear, Oh my God.” Realizing for the first time that my master was dead, Rana’s shoulders jerked backward. She placed Miguel on the table, then stood up and covered her ears with her hands. She stared at me in horror.

  When she began to shake, I went to her, peeled her hands down. “Rana! Rana!”

  She looked at me as if trying to decipher my face, to learn my identity. In a monotone leached of apparent emotion, she said, “Samson…. And now Master Abraham… Esther, is she…?”

  “No, she’s safe. With Mother and Cinfa. But Judah’s missing.”

  I sat Rana at the table and fed her wine. She held both her hands around the cup like a child, gulped at the liquid, began rambling about the vineyard’s wells. When silence came to us again, I asked, “Did Samson mention any trouble in th
e threshing group?”

  She shook her head.

  “An argument with my uncle, perhaps?”

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “But then why did Uncle mention Samson’s loss of faith? Was he in some sort of trouble?”

  Rana gripped my arm and whispered, “Samson says the baby should be raised Christian, that it’s no good to be a Jew anymore. We won’t have Passover this year. Even if…” She opened the fold in Miguel’s swaddling clothes to show me the foreskin of his penis; he should have been circumcised on his eighth day. She closed her eyes to despair. Tears bathed her eyelashes. As if in solidarity with his mother, Miguel, too, began crying. I took him and rocked him gently to little avail. Rana’s words flew out suddenly as if tossed in different directions: “If I’d known… how could he change so? When we were married…and then the baby coming along. We were so…so good. Remember Passover as it was? Remember, Beri?! Before the…wait, let me show you something.”

  From the alcove above her hearth, she grabbed a thick book. The intricate, lacy border on the cover identified it as a printed edition of the Old Testament produced when I was a boy by Eliezer Toledano. She held it out to me. “Look!” she ordered.

  Taking it from her, I asked, “What do you mean—what do I look for?”

  “Anywhere! Open it anywhere!”

  I handed Miguel back to her, let the manuscript fall open naturally. The Book of Ezra faced me, verses about the rebuilding of the Temple. Each and every name of God had been crossed out with brown ink. It was chilling, as if a talisman of evil.

  Rana spoke in a hurried voice, as if stalked. “Samson told me, ‘We must bury the Jewish god. After Passover, we’ll say prayers for the Lord and then we must bury Him and then we must forget Him.’ Samson crossed out all His names!”