People of the Book (29 page)

When she reached the mouth of the cave, she collapsed, gasping. When she felt the first pain, she thought it was a stitch. But then it came again, not harsh, but unmistakable; a pressure like a girdle drawn too tight. She cried out, not because the contraction hurt her, but because her child, whom she did not want, this baby, who might have turned into a monster, was about to be born, and she was all alone and very much afraid.

Ruti and Micha were together in the storeroom when they heard the door to the bindery open. The binder cursed. “Stay in here and be silent, for pity’s sake.” He closed the heavy door to the storeroom and stepped out, tugging at his leather apron, trying in vain to hide the bulge beneath. Stifling his annoyance, he arranged his face to greet the client.

His expression changed when he saw that it was a soldier, and no client, who had entered his workshop. The haggadah, complete, splendid, with its gleaming clasps and burnished medallion, sat on the counter, where he and Ruti had been admiring it until their desire had overtaken them. Micha, offering a polite greeting, moved between the soldier and the bench, deftly pushing the book under a pile of parchments.

But the soldier did not care for books and barely noticed his surroundings. He had picked up a thick needle from the workbench and was working it under his nails, sloughing greasy matter in a little cascade of motes that fell, Micha noted with dismay, onto a sheet of prepared parchment.

“Ruth Ben Shoushan,” the soldier said, without preamble.

Micha swallowed hard and made no answer. His inner panic expressed itself in a blank expression that the soldier took for witlessness.

“Speak, dullard! Your neighbor, the wine seller, reports that she came in here.”

No point denying it. “The daughter of the
sofer,
you mean? Ah yes, now that you mention it. She did come, indeed, on an errand for her father. But she left with…ah…a silversmith…I think from Perello. Her family had business with him, it seems.”

“Perello? She has gone there, then?”

The bookbinder wavered. He did not want to betray Ruti, but he was not a brave man. If he gave false information to the authorities, and was discovered…But then, if Ruti was found in his store cupboard, that was already enough to indict him.

“Sh…she did not confide her plans to me. You must know, sir, that unmarried Jewish women do not speak with men outside their families, except briefly, on necessary matters of business.”

“How would I know what your Jewess whores do?” said the soldier, but he turned for the doorway.

“May I ask…that is, might your lordship tell me, why so important an officer would concern himself with the humble daughter of the
sofer
?”

The young man, like most bullies, couldn’t resist a chance to instill fear. He turned back into the shop with an unpleasant laugh. “Humble, maybe, but not the daughter of the
sofer
anymore. He’s already on his way to hell with the rest of your damned race, and she’ll be joining him soon. Her brother’s for the stake, and she’s to go with him. He confessed that she tempted him to Judaize.”

Miriam returned from the
mikvah,
ready to greet her husband as a bride. There had been signs, the past year, that told her there could not be many more months in which the purification ritual would be required of her. She knew she would miss it: the restraint of abstinence, the anticipation of renewed union.

For the previous ten days, since the start of her period, David and Miriam had not even touched hands, according to the ancient laws of family purity. Tonight they would make love. As much as their personalities had grated one against the other, their physical union had always been a mutual pleasure, and no less as their bodies aged.

Miriam was spared from finding her husband dead in his blood on the stones of her courtyard. The whole alley had heard the rough, raised voices, and known all too well what they meant. As soon as the armed men were gone from the Kahal, they had come to do what was necessary and right for their neighbor.

When Miriam saw her house already prepared for shivah, she thought at once of Reuben. They had sat shivah for Reuben for seven days after his baptism as a Christian, to signify that he was dead to them. But now it fell into her heart that her son was truly dead. His father had relented and decided to accord him Jewish rites. She grasped the doorpost.

The neighbors supported her, brought her inside, and gradually made her understand the truth. David’s body had been washed and clad in white. Now the neighbors wrapped the body in a linen sheet and carried it to the burial ground. Shabbat was approaching, and Jewish law required burial without delay.

As soon as her husband was buried, Miriam lit the
yahrzeit
candle. She wanted to give herself up to grief. Her husband dead, her son convicted and sentenced to death in the Casa Santa, her daughter…where was she? The soldiers, in their callousness, had invaded the graveside, crudely interrogating the mourners as to the whereabouts of the deceased’s daughter. Miriam struggled to think clearly. For the first of her tragedies, David’s death, she could do nothing but grieve. For the second, her incarcerated son, she could do little but pray. But the third, Ruti, was another matter. There, it might not be too late. If the girl could be found, warned, hidden or spirited out of the city…

Just as she was thinking these things, the neighbors parted, jostling to make room as Joseph Ben Shoushan, still wearing his travel clothes, crossed to his sister-in-law to offer his condolences. His eyes were red from road weariness and grief.

“The servants told me the news as I arrived at my house. I came directly here. Sorrow heaps upon sorrow. David! My brother…if only I had ransomed your son as he asked me, this might not—” His voice broke.

Miriam spoke with a harsh urgency that startled the grieving man. “You did not, and what is done is done and God will judge you. But now you must save our Ruti—”

“Sister,” Joseph interrupted. “Come with me now to my house. I am taking you under my protection.”

Miriam, her eyes blank and uncomprehending, could not focus on his words. She could not leave her house during shivah, surely he knew that. And poor as she was, she did not intend to walk away from her own home to become a charity case in her brother-in-law’s. How could he think she would abandon her little house and all its memories? Miriam’s querulous voice sounded almost normal as she started to list her objections to her brother-in-law.

“Sister,” he said quietly, “soon, very soon, we shall all be forced to leave our homes and our memories, and we all of us shall be charity cases. I wish I could offer you a place in my home. All I am able to offer you is a place at my side on the uncertain road that now faces us.”

Slowly, painfully, Joseph explained to the crowded room the events of the preceding weeks. Husbands and wives, who usually would not touch each other in public, fell upon each other, weeping. Anyone passing by the little house and hearing the lamentation would have thought, Indeed, David Ben Shoushan was a good and pious man, but who would have known his death would provoke such an outpouring?

Joseph did not tell Miriam’s neighbors, simple people like the fishmonger and the wool comber, all the arguments and stratagems that had been tried in the monthlong struggle for the heart and soul of the monarchs. He told them, simply, that their leaders had done their best. Pressing the case for the Jews had been Rabbi Abraham Seneor, eighty years old, the queen’s friend, who had helped negotiate her secret marriage to Ferdinand. He had served as treasurer of her own
hermandad
police force and as tax collector for Castile. Seneor was such a wealthy and important man that when he traveled, it took thirty mules to accommodate his retinue. With him was Isaac Abravanel, renowned Torah sage and the court’s financial adviser. He had won his post in 1483, the very same year that the queen’s confessor, Tomàs de Torquemada, had been named Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Inquisition Against Depraved Heresy.

It was Torquemada who pushed the case for the Jews’ expulsion. He had been unable to act on his hatreds during the Reconquest, when the monarchs relied on Jewish money and tax collecting to fund the war against the Moors; Jewish merchants to supply the troops over miles of difficult, mountainous terrain; Jewish translators, fluent in Arabic, to facilitate negotiations between Christian and Muslim kingdoms. But with the conquest of Granada, the war was over; there were no more Arab rulers to deal with; and sufficient Jewish skills, such as translation and scientific knowledge, craftsmanship and medicine, could be found among the
conversos.

Four weeks passed between the day the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion and the day they finally ordered its proclamation. During that time, they required strict secrecy on the matter, and this encouraged Seneor and Abravanel to hope that their minds were not fixed, that the right persuasions might be effective. Every day during this time, the two men worked to raise more money, to muster more supporters. Finally, Abravanel and Seneor knelt before the king and queen in the throne room of the Alhambra palace. A gentle light, from an alabaster-latticed window behind and above the monarchs, fell on their tired, troubled faces. Each, in turn, argued his case. “Regard us, O King,” said Abravanel. “Use not thy subjects so cruelly. Why do thus to thy servants? Rather exact from us our gold and silver, even all that the house of Israel possesses, if we may remain in this country.” Then Abravanel made his offer: three hundred thousand ducats. Ferdinand and Isabella looked at each other and seemed to waver.

A hidden door to an anteroom flew open. Torquemada, who had been listening, repelled, to every word praising Jewish loyalty and lauding Jewish contributions to the kingdom, swept into the throne room. The light from the high windows glanced off the gold crucifix he held out before him.

“Behold the crucified Christ whom Judas Iscariot sold for thirty pieces of silver!” he thundered. “Will Your Majesties sell him again? Here he is, take him.” He placed the crucifix on a table before the two thrones. “Take him, and barter him away.” He turned, in a swirl of black cassock, and strode from the room, not even seeking the monarchs’ leave to go.

Abravanel glanced at his old friend Rabbi Seneor and saw a look of defeat. Later, out of hearing of the monarchs, he vented his anger. “As the adder closes its ear with dust against the voice of the snake charmer, so the king hardened his heart against us with the filth of the Inquisitor.”

The bookbinder was the very last of David Ben Shoushan’s close acquaintances to present himself at shivah. He had waited until the nearing hour of Shabbat had driven the other mourners to their homes. He wanted to speak to Miriam as privately as he could.

His strategy worked. Miriam, who had refused to leave with Don Joseph despite her brother-in-law’s sincere entreaties, was alone save for one servant that Don Joseph had required to stay with her. She was irritated when the servant announced Micha. She needed time to think. How could she leave the Kahal, the only world she had ever known? She had been born there. Her parents had lived and died there. Their bones, and now the body of her husband, were buried in the Jewish graveyard. How could a people leave its dead untended? And among Christians! When the Jews were gone, they would plow the land for gain, disturbing the rest of all the beloved dead. And what of the old, the ill, those who could not travel, the women nearing their time? Her mind skipped to the wife of her condemned son. She, at least, would be safe. Able to give birth in her own home, with family to tend to her. Give birth to the grandchild whom Miriam would never see. Her tears began again, and now here was the fool of a bookbinder, and she must try to compose herself.

Micha expressed the usual condolences and then approached Miriam more closely than propriety allowed. He put his face to her ear. “Your daughter,” he said, and she stiffened, ready to receive the blow of even more bad news. Swiftly, Micha told of the soldier’s visit. Any other time, Miriam’s shrewd brain would have led her to wonder why Ruti had tarried so long at the bindery, since her sole purpose in being there was to bring her father news of when he might collect the haggadah. She would have demanded to know what business Ruti had in the binder’s storage alcove. But grief and worry had dulled Miriam’s mind, and her entire focus was on what the binder said next.

“What do you mean, ‘gone’? How can a young girl be gone, alone, on the southern road, at night, with Shabbat beginning? What nonsense is this?”

“Your daughter told me that she knows of a safe hiding place that she could reach before Shabbat. Her intention is to hide there and send you word when she is able to do so. I gave her bread and a skin of water. She said there is food in the hiding place.”

Micha took his leave then, hurrying home through the narrow streets of the Kahal. Miriam was so lost in her worry—what secret place could Ruti know?—that she had failed to ask Micha for the haggadah.

But the bookbinder had given the haggadah to Ruti, at her insistence. As he walked toward his house, he wondered if he had done right. He reached his door just as the notes sounded marking the beginning of Shabbat. As he stepped through the door, the thin cry of the ram’s horn joined with the wailing of his infants within, and he pushed the thoughts of the girl, and her troubles, away from him. Surely he had enough problems of his own.

As Ruti made the familiar approach to her cave, she, too, heard a faint wailing. Ruti was sure-footed in the dark. She had made this illicit night journey many times, creeping from the room in which her parents slept to snatch a few hours of secret study. But the unexpected sound made her stop suddenly on the steep path, and a scatter of smooth stones loosed themselves and clattered off the path and onto the dry rock below.

The wailing stopped abruptly. “Who is there?” a weak voice called. “For the love of the Savior, help me!”

Ruti barely recognized Rosa’s voice. Dehydration had swollen her tongue; terror and pain had exhausted her. For twenty hours she had writhed alone, the contractions mounting. Ruti scrambled into the cave, crying out reassurance and fumbling for the hidden lamp and flints she kept there.