The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (38 page)

And where had it led? To this last small outpost of an empire in which they had almost entirely disappeared. For five hundred years since the Expulsion, Sephardic Jews had wandered to North Africa, South America, Bulgaria, England, America, Salonika, and places too numerous to mention. And what had been the result:
Eighty-nine percent of Ladino-speaking Jews in the world had died at Hitler’s hands, many of them in Auschwitz
.

She remembered a passage that Boris Pasternak had written in
Dr. Zhivago
about Jewish leaders: “Why have they not—even if at the risk of bursting like boilers with the pressure of their duty—disbanded this army which keeps on fighting and being massacred, nobody knows for what? Why don’t they say to them: ‘Come to your senses. Stop. Don’t hold on to your identity. Don’t stick together. Disperse. Be with all the rest.’”

Lemmings or survivors? she wondered.

Or simply, very simply, a family.

She wiped away an honest tear drawn up from a well of ties long ignored or forgotten. A tear of bitterness and compassion, of rage and unwilling pride.

28

Fax

TO: CATHERINE DA COSTA

FROM: FRANCESCA ABRAHAM

Dear Gran,

We reached Cáceres just as the afternoon light was fading. It was like being transported back in time. The houses, the churches, the old synagogue, all left exactly the way they must have been five hundred years ago. Marius says it is a well-known tourist spot for that reason. I don’t think that many tourists find their way here very often, though.

The streets are a rough, hard cobblestone that would make any jogger’s teeth bang together like castanets. I swear I could almost hear the echoing clack of hooves. In general, the place seems riddled with ghosts. They peek out at you from the dark, gray granite houses, hiding behind the immense, metal-studded wooden gates and shutters. Despite the intense Spanish sun, the streets are quite dark, leaning over you and whispering conspiratorially behind your back.

From the hilltop, you can see the snow-capped Sierra de Gredos shining in the distance, touching the thick, low clouds. Looking down at the clustered houses, you can still see the smoke rising from chimneys and the ivy overlapping green moss on garden walls. Up in the church spires, I saw a nesting stork, and below I glimpsed this strange hidden garden with an old stone sculpture of an open book.

The former synagogue (for hundreds of years a church, it is unnecessary to add, since there hasn’t been a Jew in Cáceres since the Inquisition) has hardly been touched. There are no crosses on the original building, or any carved images. You can see where the women’s section was, and where the Ark must have stood. How strange it must have been for the new converts, especially the unwilling ones, to suddenly find themselves in their old house of worship, everything so familiar, yet so utterly changed: monstrances instead of Torah scrolls, altars and crucifixes instead of the
tevah
and Star of David.

We arrived full of expectations, but have so far been sorely disappointed. The person who has been selling off the manuscript is a local boy named Juan Martinez Ortega. He had a job working in the church archives—a favor the priest did for his widowed mother. Apparently, he has been stealing for some time to pay his gambling debts. He brought a page from the manuscript to a rare-book dealer almost two years ago, but the dealer wasn’t interested. Then when the international rare-book grapevine starting throbbing with the news that such a manuscript was worth big bucks to some crazy Americans, the dealer remembered the boy and contacted him. That’s where the pages we got in England came from. The boy, either because he was afraid of being caught or was getting wise to the worth of his merchandise, decided to check out its value with dealers in Toledo and Córdoba. Again, he sold only part of it and disappeared with the rest—at least that’s what the dealer in Córdoba says, although he admits it’s just a hunch. There’s no way to know how much of the manuscript was actually available to him in the first place, and how many pages—if any—he’s got left.

How the manuscript made its way to the archives of the Church of San Mateo in Cáceres is anybody’s guess. Local folklore says it was in a suitcase left by a refugee at a border crossing at the base of the Pyrenees. A truckdriver on his way to Cáceres to deliver meat picked it up and was very disappointed to find it full of old books and yellowing papers. He just left it behind him at the inn before starting back to Madrid.

It was the innkeeper who turned it over to the local priest, an educated and very righteous person with an extensive library. Until the priest’s death five years ago, no one had access to his collection. The new priest, also a very decent fellow, has been trying to catalogue the vast collection.

Ortega’s job was to carry piles of the material from the storeroom to the priest’s study, and back again. It was his habit to quietly filch a few pages here and there from things that looked old and valuable. His decision to steal an entire manuscript—that is, whatever pages there were, the priest hadn’t catalogued it yet, so there is no way of knowing—was probably a result of the good price he’d been offered for the pages he’d showed the dealer. (Note: The dangers of announcing you’ll pay any price for a manuscript!)

Anyhow, the final point of it all is that young Mr. Ortega, having filled his coffers with ill-gotten gains, has vanished. Father Serrano says the boy did contact his mother once or twice, but even that has stopped.

We are sort of dancing around each other: Father Serrano is trying not to mind that we have in our possession property stolen from his church archives. He is also gently probing what we plan to do to young Ortega, if and when we get our hands on him (he’s a local boy, after all). We have hinted that we have no claim against the church for not turning over the material to international authorities after the war, and that the young thief doesn’t interest us, only his booty.

I think the priest would like to be done with this, and with us, as soon as possible. And who can blame him? In the meantime, he’s promised to pump the boy’s mother for clues.

As you can see, a bit sticky.

So, we will wait a few days, then decide where next.

I find that I am quite depressed about it all. It’s not like me to be wandering around impulsively in strange countries where I do not speak the language. I’m ignoring your itinerary (but it’s for your own good). For the very first time since I began this, Gran, I am wondering if it is all doomed to failure, and if the manuscript will slip through our fingers once again for another few hundred years.

This is painful to think about, especially since I know the next part is a really important one. I’m afraid it’s the part where something happens to Francisco. Gracia, after all, called herself a “young widow.” I think I was dreading reading this part, as much as I am curious to know what happened to him.

I will write you soon, hopefully with better news.

My love,
Francesca

P.S. Still not a word from Suzanne?

Catherine put down the letter and closed her eyes, feeling the tubes in her arm fill her veins with the medicinal poison they promised would not kill her. Yet.

I don’t need to read the manuscript to know that part of Gracia’s life, she thought.

I can see her as if she is sitting here across the room. A pale, fractured light comes through the wooden grilles that shade her windows from the harsh Portuguese summers. It falls on her hands, gripped in her lap; hands that are smooth with youth and yet wrinkled with the tension of a grief that startles her body and numbs her mind.

Her eyes are vacant, staring across to where her husband’s body lies draped in black, surrounded by a hundred small candles whose wax drips like solid tears, accumulating on the cold, gray granite. She is waiting for the inevitable steps of the men who will come to carry him down that wide stone staircase and out of the house, never again to enter there or any part of that world of which she is still—to her heartbreak—an unsevered part.

She will wait this way, keening the melodies of mourning remembered from her mother’s passing, and then her father’s, until the other women join her and the keening becomes the shrill scream of grief, its rising volume a kind of homage.

And when they arrive, she will defy them, those learned men who insist she must not come to the cemetery to see his precious body receive the thudding shovels of earth. Oh, the horror of that first heavy clod that lands just above his breast! She will take a step of rage toward the shoveler, until she remembers it is Diogo, her husband’s own beloved brother, whose eyes shift, catching her own in a moment of terrible acknowledgment.

She would have closed her eyes then, reliving the rituals performed to honor the dead, remembering how his tall, beautiful body was purified seven times with clean water mixed with myrtle leaves; how his soft black hair was washed and left gleaming. And her thoughts, the only way she can still be near him, will not wander until once again everything is erased by the outrageous sound of the earth falling from the shovels, a sound that grips her heart with brutal fingers, until that last thud—that last terrible, unbelievable, unbearable thud—finishes the growing mound.

Francisco.

Carl.

I can see her reach for the lace of her collar, the embroidered velvet of her overmantle, ripping both in grief.

It is only the child who will keep her sane, reminding her that there is still something of him left in the world. She will feel a fresh spasm of grief thinking of Reyna, remembering that because of her youth she did not kiss her father’s hand nor feel it rest upon her head; neither did she recite the prayer for the dead. And her love for the child will burn in her like a slow, warming fire, reminding her of her duty, demanding she must rise up in the morning, and open her blouse and give her warm breast to her baby’s sweet, demanding mouth.

For a moment, she will feel confusion, thinking of the child’s warmth and the cold grave wherein her husband lies. Only when she sits by the grave and talks earnestly with Francisco will she hear his voice explain so clearly what it is she must now do.

Does she plead with him, or accept? I think she pleads. Her strength comes later. There, with the scent of the newly turned earth still fresh in her nostrils, she longs for that moment she can join him, wishing away the long years that are ahead.

But soon she will find the years cannot be wished away. That they are slow. Oh, how inexorably slow!

Afterward, there will be the
seudat hav’ra ah
, and she will have the strange sensation of sitting on the floor eating eggs, olives, and bread while the mourner’s candle burns in front of her, and the visitors come in an endless stream, whispering: “May you know no further sorrow. May the deceased have eternal peace and may he pray on behalf of the mourners that they have good health and patience.”

The
meldados
, the sacred learning sessions in honor of the dead, would begin:
corte de mes, corte de siete meses, corte de nueve meses
, and at the beginning of each, a candle would have been lit, helping the soul to rise higher and higher. She would have seen food was served to the poor, and that the old, bearded men whose chanting filled the house were given raisins, drinks, and
biscochatas
.

Diogo would have said kaddish secretly. There was no one else. And she would have mourned that she herself was not permitted to say it for him herself. Mourned, but not raged. She would have bowed her head in obedience to all the customs and rituals demanded by her true faith, despite the heartbreak, the dangers, the pairs of curious eyes among the mourners who would have taken in the unChristian rites, along with the enormous wealth of the young widow and her baby daughter.