The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

by Richard Zimler

  Swallowing hard, I think, an alchemy unanticipated by Uncle turned the love of these friends to fear. Then to hate and finally murder. For who could be more fearful than New Christians? Who more hateful than Portuguese and Spanish nobles? Who, then, better to betray Uncle than aristocratic former Jews helping him smuggle Hebrew books: Zerubbabel and Queen Esther!

  Had something recently gone wrong between them? Tu Bisvat wrote that a safira sent by my master had not reached him. Maybe Dona Meneses had begun diverting profits intended for the purchase of new manuscripts. Or perhaps Uncle’s uncompromising judgments had begun to constrict Zerubbabel’s business dealings. Had he begun selling books elsewhere?

  The villainous Haman, then, would be portrayed in Uncle’s newest Haggadah—the one stolen from our genizah—by the Count of Almira as an old man. His was the face my master had been looking for, the one he had told me he’d finally found just before Passover dinner.

  And yet, if the Count was guilty, if he had wanted to silence Simon and the other threshing group members who might have known his identity, then why did he agree to take Diego to the hospital? To Farid, I signal, “We need to find the missing Haggadah as proof that the Count had Uncle murdered or killed him himself.”

  “How?” he gestures.

  “We’ll have to trap Dona Meneses and the Count somehow. They must have it.”

  “Berekiah!” Reza calls suddenly. “You have a visitor…Father Carlos.”

  Is this a trick designed by my mother to get me upstairs? “Send him down!” I call.

  “Who is it?” Farid signals.

  “The priest,” I answer.

  I slip the Haggadah into its hiding place, lock the lid, then drop the genizah key into the eel bladder.

  Father Carlos feels his way down the stairs. Sweat beads on his forehead and his breathing comes greedily, as if he’s been running.

  “Judah?” I ask.

  “Nothing.” He comes to me, takes my hands. In a quivering voice he says, “You must help me!”

  “Is it the Northerner? Is he after you?!”

  “No, no…not that. But dearest God. I was talking to the Dominicans… They must have summoned a demon to kill me. Berekiah, I’ve realized something—evil is jealous. The Devil wants to destroy what is most good. And your uncle had benevolent powers that healed both the Lower and Upper Realms. If the Devil had wanted… I think he and the Dominicans are sending demons after us all. White Maimon. Gemila did see him! She was right!”

  In his frantic eyes, I can see that the madness of Lisbon has finally overwhelmed the priest. “Carlos, please stop! I have no time for metaphorical speech.”

  “Then look at this!” he shouts.

  He takes out yet another talisman. Upon a square of polished vellum minute Hebrew letters form two poorly sketched concentric circles spelling out quotations from Proverbs: The outer circle reads, Violence is meat and drink for the treacherous; the inner, The embers of the wicked will be extinguished.

  “I found it in the lining of my cape!” Father Carlos shouts. “In my cape! How do you explain that?! How?!”

  “Shush!” I say. I take out from my pouch the talisman he gave me the other day. The writing on this new talisman is in the same precise script in some places and in others far less assured, as if executed by someone weakened by disease or too much wine.

  When I hand it to Farid, he sniffs at it, then licks. “It looks like your ink,” he signals.

  “My ink?!” The solution then descends to me and forces a groan from my gut. I’ve been avoiding the obvious answer. “Carlos, these scribblings have nothing to do with Uncle’s death,” I say. I turn the vellum in my hands, confirm from its texture the identity of the artist responsible. “Come,” I tell the priest.

  He and Farid follow me upstairs. Mother is saying prayers in a fragile voice. She stops to glance at me with resigned, heavy eyes. Reza infuses the silence with her glare of righteous disapproval, an expression which Cinfa copies. We rush to my mother’s bedroom. In the secret panel above her door frame, I find the talismans she’s been working on. The micrographic writing is the same.

  “I don’t understand,” Father Carlos says.

  “She must have overheard your argument with Uncle. She thought she could help. Judgment clouded by worry and grief produces such monstrosities. This last one she must have slipped into your cloak while you were sleeping last night. She’s been taking extract of henbane, cannot write as carefully as normal—nor think with any rigor. I’m sorry. I’m sure she meant no harm. Only to get the book by Solomon Ibn Gabirol which Uncle wanted so badly. In her state, she may even think these talismans will bring her brother back. Two mysteries had woven together. We thought they were one and the same.”

  If I had listened to my own words closely, then the mistake I was about to make would not have been made.

  Farid, Father Carlos and I go to the store where my family cannot hear us to discuss how we should proceed. After I tell the priest of the identities given Zerubbabel and Queen Esther in Uncle’s personal Haggadah, Farid signals with certain gestures, “We go back to the Estaus Palace and confront the Count of Almira again, force an admission of guilt from him.”

  When I translate for the priest, he says, “And if our Count should refuse?”

  Farid lifts out from his pouch the most fearsome dagger from his collection, six inches of deathly sharp iron curved like a sickle. He swivels it menacingly under the priest’s nose. “The Count won’t refuse!” he signals. “And why? Because an actor needs his voice. I shall place the tip against his Adam’s apple and core it with a single twist unless he answers us truthfully.”

  The priest leans back and pushes Farid’s hand away. To me, he says, “I don’t know what he just said, but I don’t like it. Dona Meneses… She’s more likely to admit the truth.”

  “Why, because she’s a woman?” I reply scornfully. “If she’s a secret Jew needing to protect her identity, then she’d have no hesitation ordering her henchmen to chop off our heads!”

  “Joanna, the Count’s daughter,” Farid signals. “She will help us.”

  “If we can get to her.”

  As I translate for Carlos, a knock comes from my mother’s entrance to Temple Street. We rush in, and I open the door to find a round-faced little boy with bulging eyes. He takes a note from his pouch, extends it toward me. “Message,” he says. When I take it from him, he runs off. The note reads:

  “Berekiah, meet me on the King’s Road to Sintra, just before Benfica. I will be waiting by the twin water mills rising beyond the ruined Visigothic church. Come alone. Tell not a soul. And come right away. I found out something you need to know about Master Abraham’s death.”

  The note is signed in Diego’s slashing script.

  Father Carlos takes it from me. After he reads it, he says, “Don’t go, dear boy. It’s still too risky to travel around Lisbon alone.”

  The obligation to warn Diego about the smugglers and inform him of their identities weighs on my chest. Perhaps, too, what he has discovered will help me trap Queen Esther and Zerubbabel. “No, I’ll go,” I say. “It’s night, and there’s little else I can do for now.” Turning to Farid, I take his shoulder and spell an apology for my earlier selfishness. I add, “I’ve no intention of going alone, if you’ll gift me with your presence.”

  His eyes close and he offers me a bow of agreement. We leave before my family’s supplications become wailings and curses, before Cinfa can fix me fully inside her abandoned eyes.

  Farid pauses at home to slip on his father’s sandals.

  Friday night deepens with a fierce wind from the east, from accursed Spain. On the road to Sintra, beyond the exposed arches of the Visigothic church, we head down a foot-trodden path toward the abandoned water mills. Their forms are wild and spidery in the moonlight. Five leagues off, Sintra Mountain rises from the horizon like a fallen cloud pointing upward toward an answer beyond reach. Farid sniffs rabbit-like at the air, surveys the landscape. A wh
ite hawk circles overhead, ghost-riding currents of air, a creature free of land, beyond history. “Is the attraction of birds that they presage our liberation from this world?” I signal to my friend.

  “Perhaps that they both share our journey and escape it,” he gestures. He sniffs around once again. “Deer have passed recently,” he signals. With pensive, cautious movements, he indicates, “And something else.” After a few more steps, he squats, runs his fingers across a streak his deaf-man’s eyes have spotted in the dirt. “Men,” he signals. He points to an impression my vision cannot perceive. “One walking with boots. Heavy, with stomping footsteps.”

  “Maybe Diego,” I say.

  “Two other men, as well. A small one who creeps. The other hesitant, turning constantly to face around.”

  “Now that’s Diego,” I smile. “The others are probably his bodyguards.”

  We rush on. A barrel-like shape on the path before the mills takes on angular contours, shifts suddenly. A fallen man condenses in the silver moonlight. Long-haired and broad-shouldered, he drags himself forward like a caterpillar, his right leg apparently wounded and trailing mercilessly behind. His grunts carve agony in the wind-sounds of night.

  “The Northerner who emptied Simon from his shell!” Farid signals with a flurry of gestures.

  From up close, the dull, thick features of his face are unmistakable. “Yes.”

  We stand above him like towers. He is enormous, bulky, like a bull turned human. He lifts himself to his knees. We step back. Our daggers center our fists. A patch of dark wetness soaks into his thigh.

  “You killed my friend,” I say. “Why?”

  He answers in a foreign tongue which I don’t understand.

  “English, French, Dutch…?” I ask.

  “Flamenco,” he answers in rough Castilian. “De Bruges.”

  Has he had training as a shohet amongst the northern, Ashkenazi Jews? I point to him and ask, “Nuevo Cristiano?”

  He laughs in a single exhale. “Viejo,” he replies. He points to himself, whispers, “Muy Viejo Cristiano, very Old Christian.”

  “Why did you kill Simon?” To his indecipherable shrug, I hold my foot and ankle to my rear to imitate the stump of a leg. “Porqué él?”

  A laugh bursts, becomes a cough. His eyes close and he tilts his head to indicate that it was inevitable.

  “Dona Meneses?” I ask. “Do you know her?”

  He smiles and nods. As I turn to catch a signal of Farid’s, the Fleming leaps for me. His oxen weight topples me. I strike out, but his callused hands grip my throat. My knife buries deep into the welcome of his shoulder. I am screaming for Farid. Fighting. But he is too strong. The vise of his grip tightens. My chest heaves. An exploding cough trapped in my throat wells tears in my eyes. And yet I see him clearly. As if a scarab trapped in amber: bulging eyes, reflective cheeks, a mouth grimacing with hate.

  I learn that there is a moment when death is accepted as inevitable. My hands loosen from around his wrists. Neither anger nor fear possesses me. Only distance. As if I am standing behind myself and turning to walk away. As if Uncle is calling to me from across the Rua de São Pedro: “Berekiah, hearken unto me! I’m right here waiting…”

  A cringing pain. Constriction like rope burning my throat. Spurts of salty liquid from the Fleming’s mouth. I have been tugged back to my body. My stinging eyes, my lips, are soaked with blood. His hands, like gates parting, drop away. Weight is pushed from me. Farid’s face descends. He grips me with one hand; the other gestures my name.

  Gulping for air, I spot Farid’s dagger buried at the back of the Fleming’s neck. “I’m okay,” I signal.

  “I killed him,” he gestures. This time, there is no hesitation in Farid’s hand: fingers thrust out, fisted, then twisted palm-down as if to snap a branch from its mother limb.

  Farid digs our knives from the assassin’s flesh, wipes them against his pants. Except to express my thanks, we do not gesture; what is there to say? We trudge on to the mills instead. A man lies face-up on the pathway, by the base of the nearest one, blank fish-eyes fixed on the quarter moon high in the sky. His neck is still warm with eclipsed life. When I squat to look more closely, a face I know forms: that of the bodyguard Diego brought to my house.

  I whisper a prayer that Diego, too, hasn’t been summoned to God.

  “Do you hear anything?” Farid signals. “I sense movement close by.”

  “No.”

  Suddenly, out steps Diego from behind the mill wheel. He wears a thick, fur-lined cape which descends to his ankles. Even in the pale light, I can see his face is beaded with sweat.

  “You’re safe,” I say. “Why didn’t you…”

  “Berekiah, they’re…they’re trying to kill everyone in the threshing group!” he moans. “All of us. There’s no safety anywhere. We…we must…”

  “Calm down. We killed the Northerner back along the pathway.”

  Diego grabs my shoulders. “That won’t end it. They got your uncle and Samson and Simon—and now they tried for me! Don’t you see, the whole threshing group… All of us!”

  I place my hands against his chest. “Don’t worry. We know their identities now. It’s Dona Meneses. She and the Count of Almira are behind all this. They must think that the members of the threshing group know their identities and can compromise them to the Royal authorities.”

  “Dona Meneses?! It’s impossible! She would never…”

  “She was smuggling books with Uncle,” I say.

  “But she’s a noblewoman!”

  “So much the better for getting Hebrew manuscripts safely out of Portugal, don’t you think?”

  Diego stares off into the night as if his response may lie somewhere along the dark horizon. Turning back to me, he says, “I don’t know. I just never thought…” He stares at his dead bodyguard. “Fernando wounded the Northerner in the leg, but the blond bastard was too skillful with his knife. Oh God! I mustn’t go back to Lisbon.”

  “So you intend to wait here the rest of your life?”

  “I won’t let them get me! When they drip the boiling oil on you, it’s as if your skin is being peeled open with a rusty blade. You pray that your life will end. You’ll do anything. I won’t let it happen again. Ever. You hear me! Never again!”

  I suddenly recall the thick line of scar across his chest which I saw when he collapsed on the street. “They gave you the pinga?” I ask.

  He replies, “In Seville there was a specialist who could draw pictures across your body with burning oil and ash he rubbed in the scars. Onto the chest of a girl of nineteen whose crime was to use clean sheets on Friday, he dripped an entire Passion scene. She simply would not die. Her breasts became the hills of Jerusalem, her navel the heart of Christ. It was too much to…”

  “Diego, listen. They could just as easily send someone after you. Wherever you go. You’ll be safer in town. With people you know.”

  “Not my house,” he intones with dread. The wind tousles his silver hair, and I realize he no longer wears his turban; we are becoming less obviously Jewish by the day. “They know to look there. And when they realize that the assassin sent to kill me is dead, they’ll send someone else.”

  “I meant that you’ll stay with us,” I say.

  Diego gazes down, considering. I can see that he has already agreed. So I ask, “Why did you want me out here in the first place?”

  “Berekiah, I remembered something important…that Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman for whom Esther scripted a book of Psalms, had an argument with your uncle a week ago.” He takes my hand, continues in a whisper, “Your master mentioned it in passing in our threshing group. I made some inquiries, learned that Dom Miguel was staying in a stables not far from here. On the outskirts of Benfica. I intended my bodyguard to go with you. To surprise him at night. But now, I’m not…” His words fade as he looks around.

  “Diego, I know all about the argument. Miguel and Uncle fought over his refusal to accept his true past, his Juda
ism. I was told about it by…”

  “Not that! It was the book…the Book of Psalms Esther wrote for him. He didn’t want to pay the price they’d agreed upon. Apparently, he threatened to tell the authorities that your aunt and uncle were concealing Hebrew manuscripts if they didn’t gift him with it. Now I think that maybe he was involved with Dona Meneses. There must be a connection there somewhere.”

  “No, no. Uncle sent him a note asking him to become a smuggler,” I say.

  Farid has had trouble reading Diego’s lips in the dark. When I translate into signs, he gestures back, “But Miguel Ribeiro is rich. He could afford to pay for Esther’s work. And he spared your life when you went to see him. He could’ve killed you with impunity.”

  “What’s he telling you?!” Diego demands.

  “That it makes no sense.”

  The thresher laughs in a single ironic exhale and grips my hand tightly. “Has anything over the past week made any sense? Let me tell you something, my boy. The Lower Realms aren’t ruled by any logic which you’re likely to find scripted in the kabbalah.”

  Diego steps across the Northerner’s body. He spits on his head and kicks it. Then on he trudges, sweating like a beast of burden. In his erudite voice, he soliloquizes about leaving for Rhodes and Constantinople on a boat scheduled to depart from Faro in one week. He will begin his journey south from Lisbon tomorrow evening. “And Constantinople is such a lovely town,” he says. “Not like Lisbon at all. It even rains. Big beautiful drops. Like pearls. Good for kabbalists, too. It’s where Asia meets Europe, where two become one like your uncle used to say. Remember when he…”

  The dust and night and Diego’s rambling voice intertwine like rope around my thoughts. Vultures spiral overhead, trail us back to Lisbon. When we pause inside the city’s gates at the Chafariz da Esperança, Fountain of Hope, I douse my face and hair. I wonder what the hidden connection between Miguel Ribeiro and the smugglers might be. I stare at Diego through the dripping water. He’s combing the new beard which already covers his cheeks and chin. “Neatness is a holy duty,” he reminds me.