The Coffee Trader (5 page)

I arrived in Amsterdam with a few coins in my purse and could afford to establish myself in business, though I did not yet know what business I would make my own. However, I soon discovered something to my liking. On the Exchange a new form of commerce had emerged, that of buying and selling what no one owned and, indeed, what no one ever intended to own. It was a gambling sort of trade called
futures,
in which a man wagered on whether the price of a commodity would rise or fall. If the trader guessed correctly, he would earn far more money than if he had bought or sold outright. If he guessed incorrectly, the cost could be formidable, for he would not only lose the money he had invested, he would owe for the difference between what he had bought and the final price. I saw at once that this was no trade for the timid or even for the merely brave. This was a trade for the lucky, and I had spent my life learning how to manufacture my own luck.

I was not alone in doing so. Throughout the Exchange were groups called trading combinations, and they would manipulate markets as best they could. A combination might circulate a rumor that it intended to buy, let us say, British woolens. The Exchange, hearing that a large group of men planned to buy, would respond, and the price would rise accordingly. All along, however, the combination intended to sell, and once the woolens reached a rewarding price, the combination would react accordingly. These organizations, my astute reader will see, engage in a tricky business because these men will have to do as they pretend
most
of the time; otherwise rumors surrounding their movements will never be believed.

I soon found myself something of a purveyor of rumors. I would make commodities do pretty little dances as I saw fit, and I had a knack for disguising my footprints as I did so. Check the dice if you wish, dear sir. You will see that they are but ordinary. A word dropped here, a rumor spread there. Not by me, of course, but done all the same. This commodity bet on, this one bet against. It all proved a handy little trade.

Shortly after my arrival in the city I found myself passing idle hours in a little gambling establishment owned by a fellow called Juarez. Gambling was strictly forbidden by the Ma’amad, but many forbidden things were, in truth, tolerated, so long as they were done quietly. Juarez ran a tasteful little tavern that catered to Portuguese Jews. It offered food and drink that conformed with our holy laws, and he permitted no whores to ply their trade, so the
parnassim
chose not to bother him.

I played cards there with, among other men, a merchant some ten years my senior named Solomon Parido; he disliked me and I disliked him. Why should that be? I cannot say for certain. There was no initial slight that began it, no wrong left to be revenged. It is sometimes so simple as two men having natures that cannot stand to be near each other, like magnets that push each other away. I found him too sour; he found me too ebullient. Though our work and worship often threw us together, neither was ever happy to see the other. We might be in the same room, and for no reason he would scowl at me and I would smile saucily in return. He might make some reference to
cheats,
meaning to needle me for my background; I would return a reference to
idiots,
knowing that his only son had been born deficient of mind.

Perhaps you will say,
Alferonda, you are cruel to mock a man for his misfortune,
and surely you would be right to say so. It
is
cruel, but Parido brought forth the cruelty in me. Perhaps had he been kinder I would have looked upon him compassionately. I might then have seen his wealth—his massive house full of rugs and paintings and gold trinkets, his indulgent coach-and-four, his maneuvers on the Exchange that succeeded simply because of the sheer volume of capital propping them up—as some small compensation for his domestic sadness. I might have looked at his expensive clothes as a mask behind which he could hide his melancholy. I might have viewed his lavish banquets—indulgent affairs with dozens of guests, barrels of wine, wheels of cheese, herds of roast cattle—with new eyes, for I would have been a guest at those banquets and seen what satisfaction he took in playing host. But I never received the handsomely inscribed invitations to Parido’s house. My friends did, I can assure you, and I listened to the tales of their delight. But Parido could find no place for Alferonda in his magnificent house. Why, then, should Alferonda make room in his equally magnificent heart?

One night fate placed the two of us together at a game of cards. I’d had more wine than a gambling man ought, and seeing Parido showing a pleasant face to every man at the table but me, I was unable to resist the urge to cheat him, if just a little.

If a man cheats at cards to win for himself, he is bound to raise the suspicions of all. But if he cheats at cards for no reason other than to make another man lose, he is likely to find more allies than enemies. The more Parido regarded me with disdain, the more I saw to it that the cards did not turn the way he wished. The suit or the number he longed for would find its way to another man’s hand or, if I was desperate, in my sleeve. Moments when he thought all would go his way burst like flimsy bubbles. More than once he cast a suspicious look in my direction, but I had only modest winnings to show for myself. How could I be responsible?

I suppose this might have come to nothing if it had ended there. He lost a few guilders that night, but nothing of consequence. A man like Parido knows never to bring more to the table than he is prepared to lose as the price of an evening’s entertainment. A few months later, however, matters took another turn.

I knew Parido and his trading combination planned a maneuver with Setúbal salt. The price had been depressed for some time, so exports had been reduced. They were therefore due to rise, and Parido’s men wanted to effect that rise themselves rather than be taken by surprise. I caught wind of this from a tavern keeper—one of the many I paid for such information—and saw an opportunity to profit for myself. I want to be clear that I never engaged in any action simply for the purpose of stinging Parido. I did not much like him, nor he me, but that mattered for little when it came to trade. I did what I did to earn a profit. It was nothing more than that.

Parido’s combination began to spread the tale that the latest shipments of Setúbal salt were selling for a much higher price than had been anticipated. By doing so, they hoped to spark a buying frenzy upon the Exchange of those wishing to secure the current low price. Thus they intended to profit from the salt they had themselves acquired and from their puts: wagers that the price would rise. When they began to sell their salt at the new price, I and my agents sold as well, flooding the market in order to capitalize on the price differential. My method enabled me to exploit their scheme for some fair gains. It also had the unavoidable side effect of making their trade unprofitable, and their puts ended up costing them a slightly more than insignificant amount. But that is the price they had to pay for their trickery.

I was always certain to hide myself behind strange and unknown brokers when I attempted these sorts of maneuvers, but Parido prided himself on being mightily well connected, and he found me out. The next day he came up behind me on the Exchange. “You’ve crossed the wrong man, Alferonda,” he said.

I said I knew nothing of his complaint. My father had always told me to deny everything.

“Your lies don’t impress me. You’ve profited from ruining my scheme and costing me money, and I’ll see to it that you get what such a low trickster deserves.”

I laughed off these threats as I had laughed off others. Indeed, as the months and even years passed, I forgot his words. He didn’t much like me, he spoke ill of me when he could, but never that I knew did he act against me in matters of consequence. It could have been, I realized, that he acted against me in any of a number of trades that went bad, but that might have been fate, and I tended to believe that he would not have been shy about taking credit for any harm he might send my way.

But then he was elected to the Ma’amad. As both a wealthy merchant and a
parnass,
he possessed as much power as was possible for a man in our community. I had no reason to celebrate his election, but I had no reason to suspect that he would use his new position to attack me so ruthlessly.

3

Down in the kitchen, Hannah nearly severed her thumb as she chopped asparagus. She’d not been paying attention, and the knife, which had grown dull under months of the maid’s inattention, slipped easily from her grasp and dug into her flesh with amputating force. But the same dullness that made the blade dangerous rendered it impotent, and the wet metal barely broke her skin.

Hannah looked up to see if Annetje had noticed. She hadn’t. The girl was busy grating cheese, humming some drunken ditty to herself—appropriate enough since she’d been dipping into the wine again. If she’d noticed Hannah’s mishap, she’d certainly have said something:
Oh, look how clumsy you are
or
What a fine thing that can’t handle a knife.
She would say it with a laugh and a turn of her pretty head, as though a laugh and a turned head made everything amicable. Hannah would let her pretend that it
did
make everything amicable, though she’d be biting back the urge to slam the half wheel of cheese into the girl’s face.

Hannah stabbed at the drop of blood with her rigid tongue and pushed the asparagus into the bowl, where it would be mixed with the cheese and some old bread and baked into a flan like they had eaten in Portugal, except in Lisbon they had used different vegetables and different cheeses. Annetje thought flans were disgusting—unwholesome, she said, a term she used to describe any food she hadn’t eaten growing up in Groningen.

“Someday,” she was now observing, “your husband will notice that you fix elaborate meals only when his brother plans to dine with you.”

“Two people don’t eat much,” Hannah answered, almost successfully willing herself not to blush. “Three people eat a great deal more.” That was something her mother had taught her, but it was particularly true when her husband was involved. If Daniel had his way, they’d eat nothing but bread and old cheese and pickled fish, anything they could get cheaply. And he was the one who insisted that they make something of the evening meal when his brother joined them, probably so that Miguel wouldn’t think Daniel a miser—which he already did.

But she also liked to feed him well. Miguel did not eat properly when left to himself, and she did not like him to go hungry. Also, unlike Daniel, he always appeared to relish his food, to regard it as a pleasure rather than a mere necessity that kept him alive for one more day. He would thank her and praise the quality. He went out of his way to say little meaningless things to her, observing that the added nutmeg in the herring made the dish sparkle or that the prune sauce she served over the eggs was more delicious than ever.

“The carrots need to be stewed in the prunes and raisins,” Annetje said, seeing that Hannah had taken a moment to rest.

“I’m tired.” She sighed to emphasize her point. She hated pleading weakness to the girl, but she
was
with child now, and that ought to be excuse enough. It ought to be, but there was nothing to be gained by thinking about what ought to be. It ought to be, for example, that the wife of a Portuguese hidalgo was not in a hot and nearly windowless kitchen chopping asparagus with her maid. Still, that was what he asked of her, and that is what she would do. She took grim pleasure in keeping his house in order, in making herself blameless in his eyes.

After their move to Amsterdam, Daniel had allowed her to hire a houseful of servants, but within weeks he had learned it was the Dutch custom for wives, even the wives of the greatest
heren,
to share their labors with their maids. A house with no children never had more than one servant. Eager to save his money, Daniel had dismissed nearly everyone, keeping just the girl, whom he favored because she was a Catholic, to help Hannah with her chores.

“You’re tired,” Annetje repeated sourly. Then a shrug.

Hannah knew only a passable amount of Dutch, and Annetje less Portuguese, so their interactions were often terse and limited. Not limited enough. Hannah—fool, fool, Hannah—had trusted the girl too much in those early days. She’d trusted her pretty smile and her sweet temper and sea-green eyes. In the hours they spent together, toiling like equals—scrubbing walls, washing the stoop, sweating puddles onto the kitchen floor—Hannah had come to like the girl and to confide in her. Annetje taught her as much Dutch as Hannah could learn, and she tried patiently to learn Portuguese. She taught Hannah how to scrub the front stairs of a house (which no one had ever done in Lisbon), how to pick the best produce from the merchants on the Dam, and how to tell if a baker added chalk to whiten his bread.

Hannah had come to look on the girl as her only true ally. She found few friends among the other Jewish women of the Vlooyenburg, and she hardly had time for idle friendship with her chores. Floors to scrub, clothes to launder, meals to cook. Breakfast before dawn, dinner when Daniel returned home from the Exchange—anywhere between two and six, so it had always to be ready—and later, depending on when he had his dinner, a light supper. There were the Sabbath meals he hosted, and the havdalah gatherings. Sometimes when he invited friends or colleagues for meals, he would supervise as Hannah and Annetje prepared the food, making foolish suggestions and getting underfoot.

Hannah had never been made to do so much work in her life. In Lisbon she’d been asked to sew and mend and to help cook on the holidays. She’d minded children for older relatives, and she’d cared for the sick and the elderly. Nothing like this. After a week, Annetje had found her huddled in the corner, weeping so hard she could hardly keep from banging her head against the brick behind her. The girl had pleaded for her to say what was wrong, but where to begin? What was wrong? Amsterdam. Jews. Prayer. Synagogue. Cooking. Scrubbing. And Daniel. It was all wrong, but she could say none of it aloud, so she’d let the girl comfort her and bring her hot wine and sing songs to her as though she were an infant.

Then she began to tell Annetje secrets, like how she had, unbeknownst to her husband, gone to see the witch woman who lived outside of town for a charm that would help her get with child. She told her about Daniel’s quirks and foibles and coolness. For example, he would never, under any circumstances, take off all his clothing. She told Annetje how after he used his chamber pot he would return, hour after hour, to sniff at it.

And she told the girl other things too, things she now wished she could take back. Even as she’d said them, she knew she had confided too much. Maybe that was even why she’d done it. The thrill of speaking the forbidden, of asking for help in doing what must not be done—it had been all too delicious. And it would most likely be her undoing.

“We’ll go tomorrow?” Annetje asked now, as though she sensed Hannah’s thoughts.

“Yes,” Hannah said. These furtive trips had been exhilarating at first. Warm and welcoming, but also exciting in the way forbidden things always were. Now it was a terrible duty, one she could not avoid without seeing a little sparkle in the maid’s eyes, a sparkle that said
Do as I instruct or I’ll tell your husband what you would not want him to know
. She’d only uttered the threat aloud once, when she’d been very angry at Hannah for not wanting to give her more than the secret ten guilders a week above what her husband paid her. That one time had been enough. Now she only hinted. “I’d hate to say things best left unsaid,” she would tell her mistress, or “I fear sometimes that my tongue is too loose, and if your husband is around—well, we’d best not talk of that.”

Hannah looked again at the dull knife. In Lisbon she might have been tempted—truly tempted—to plunge it into the girl’s heart and be done with her. Who would have asked questions if a kitchen girl died in the home of a rich merchant? In Amsterdam, though, with its leveling politics and merchant culture, a housewife would hardly get away with killing a servant. Not that Hannah could really bring herself to murder another human being, no matter how much she might hate her. Still, it was better to have the option.

Daniel’s teeth were bothering him today. She could see that when they sat down for dinner. He had fingers from both hands in his mouth and was fishing around for who knew what. He would do that at night too, digging for hours on end, paying no mind to where his elbow flew or whom it struck.

After months of this she had urged him to see a surgeon—a tricky business, since Daniel took great offense if she suggested anything to him. If his hand were on fire and she suggested that he dunk it in a bucket of water, he’d glare at her and let himself burn. To soften the advice, she’d given it in anecdotal form: “Jeronimo Javeza’s wife tells me her husband had a problem tooth pulled by a skilled dentist who works near the Damrak. She says he hasn’t been so comfortable in five years.”

So Daniel had gone but come back with the same troubling teeth with which he’d left the house that morning. “The brute of a surgeon wanted fifteen guilders to pull five teeth,” he’d said. “Three guilders a tooth. For fifteen guilders, a man should get new teeth, not lose old ones.”

Now, at the table, Daniel looked almost ready to aid his excavation with a knife while Miguel blessed the wine. Miguel prayed over everything they ate, over anything that didn’t move. He might pray over his own turds, for all she knew. When Daniel ate alone with her, he would mutter the Hebrew words or mutter some of them if he couldn’t remember the rest. Often he forgot to pray at all. He would always forget when he ate alone, there being no one to impress or instruct. Miguel, however, would bless his food whenever he ate. She’d seen other men of the Vlooyenburg with their Hebrew and their blessings, and often they seemed to her angry or frightening or alien. With Miguel there was delight in his utterances, as though he were remembering something wonderful each time he said the prayers. It was hard not to hear these strange words anew each time he spoke them—not mumbled and swallowed, the way some men did, but clearly articulated, like oratory. She heard the poetry of a foreign tongue, its cadences and repetitions complementary sounds. And she knew things would be different if Miguel, instead of Daniel, were her husband.

This wasn’t just some idle fancy born from her constant reflection that Miguel was far more handsome and robust than his brother. Where Daniel was thin and looked like a beggar in merchant’s clothes, Miguel was round and pink and hearty. Though Miguel was the elder brother, he looked more youthful and healthy. His large black eyes always darted here and there, not nervously like Daniel’s, but with delight and wonder. And his face was so round—delicate and somehow still strong. What would it be like, she wondered, to be married to a man who loved laughter instead of resenting it, who embraced life instead of squinting at it with suspicion?

That was fate’s little irony. She knew her father had been seeking an alliance with the Lienzos and wanted his daughter to marry the elder son. Hannah had never met either or them, so it was all one to her, but then the elder son had upped and married a penniless girl without his family’s approval, so her father had opted for the next Lienzo in line. By the time Miguel’s wife died, only four months later, Hannah was already married to Daniel.

What would these prayers mean to her if she had married Miguel? Daniel knew almost nothing of the liturgy. He went to synagogue because the
parnassim
expected it of him, particularly his friend Solomon Parido (whom Hannah was inclined to dislike because of his sour attitude toward Miguel). He had often enough spared her the tedium of going herself, but now that he had got her with child, he made her come along so the men of the congregation could be reminded of his virility. More than one had wished him a son so he might have someone to say kaddish for him when he died.

He had not even spoken in private to Hannah of Jewish worship until they began their preparations to move to Amsterdam. Her father and three brothers had all been devoted Secret Jews, but no one had told her so before her marriage. On the eve of her wedding, when she was but sixteen years old, her father had explained that because her mother was renowned throughout the land for her loose tongue, he had assumed that Hannah would have the same streak of womanly treachery and had decided not to entrust the truth to his daughter. For the good of the family she had been allowed to think of herself as a Catholic, worship as a Catholic, and hate Jews as a Catholic. Now, as she prepared to marry this stranger who had been selected without even asking her opinion (he had dined with her family twice and, her father had pointed out, Hannah had politely returned his awkwardly tight-lipped smiles that looked like the grimace of a man in pain), her father had chosen to reveal to her the family secret.

The secret: she was not the person she had always been led to believe she was; even her name had been a lie. “You are not truly Bernarda,” he told her. “You are Hannah, which is also the true name of your mother. You must call yourself Hannah from this moment on, but not in public, for that would betray us all, and I hope you are not so stupid as to do that.”

How could she be a Jew? Was it possible that she was of the race of child-killers and well-poisoners? Surely her father had made some mistake that her husband would clarify, so she had merely nodded and tried not to think too much about it.

But how could she not think about it? Her father had kept her own name from her, and now she had to practice strange rituals, which he explained rapidly and impatiently, assuring her that her new husband would clarify any foolish questions she might be imprudent enough to ask. She never asked and it would be years before he explained. Later she heard strange stories: that only the circumcised can enter the Kingdom of Heaven (did that mean women were forever banned from their eternal reward?); that only flattened bread should be eaten in springtime; that blood must be drained from meat before it can be eaten.

Her father, on the eve of her wedding, had cared nothing for Hannah’s knowledge or for her ability to keep the laws—only her tongue. “I suppose your silence will now be your husband’s problem,” he had said, “but if the Inquisition should take you, I hope you’ll have the good sense to betray
his
family rather than your own.”