The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (3 page)

Oh, this land has loosened my tongue. I best sleep and awake my old self—quiet, observing from the safety of the corner, while you and your friends twirl and dance in the middle of the floor.

Your cousin,

Abraham

Bugs skitter across the surface of the water. The paddy field is alive with tiny creatures no bigger than a speck of dust. I hold my hand over the water, careful to scare them away with my shadow before I plant a seedling. The rice spirit wouldn’t be pleased if her children lived because innocent creatures died. I listen and she speaks to me. She directs my hand beneath the water. My seedlings find a good home, and they take root.

If my mother were alive, I would sing to her, and she would send me back a song, skimming across the water. But I work alone and sing only to myself.

My mother was a handmaid to my father. When he speaks her name, his eyes redden, his voice trembles. I grow small as a sparrow, until I disappear altogether into his sadness. No matter what I do, I am not her. I am not the sons taken from him when they were young. My life is a reminder of theirs not lived.

My aunt says I look like her. I was four when she died. I struggle to remember her face. What I do remember is her hand holding mine when we walked to and from the field. My hand fit into hers, like two pieces of wood cut and smoothed to lock one into the other. When you are a child, an older person grabs your hand and squeezes it tightly or just lets it hang limp. You are expected to do all the work—you clutch three fingers and try to keep up with their long strides. They forget you are there, trailing along like the tail of a kite. But my mother and I walked side by side, her hand a nest for mine.

I remember coming back from the field, my hand in hers. The trees trembled, alive with spirits. When we got to the village gate, we would say together, as she had taught me, “Outside! Outside!” and she would turn and spit on the ground to keep the ghosts from following us into the village. I thought it was a game and tried to spit but could only offer a whoosh of air and a dribble of saliva.

That always made my mother laugh. Even now, though I am no longer a child, I sometimes lie at the edge of the stream and look into the water. I smile, and my mother smiles back at me. I say my name, and I hear my mother’s voice, “Mya, Mya.” A breeze ripples the surface of the water, and my mother comforts me.

It is a great city, very plain and flat, and four square, walled round about, and with ditches that compass the walls about with water, in which ditches are many crocodiles; it hath no drawbridges, yet it hath twenty gates, five for every square on the walls; there are many places made for sentinels to watch, made of wood and covered or gilt with gold; the streets thereof are the fairest I have seen, they are straight as a line from one gate to another… and they are as broad as ten or twelve men may ride abreast in them… these streets… are planted at the doors of the houses with nut trees of India, which make a very commodious shadow; the houses be made of wood, and covered with a kind of tiles in the form of cups… the king’s palace is in the middle of the city, made in form of a walled castle, with ditches full of water round about it, the lodgings within are made of wood all over gilded, with fine pinnacles and very costly work, covered with plates of gold.

—
CESAR
E
FRE
DE
RIC
I, 1581

15 October 1598

Dear Joseph,

My first letter from Pegu, my home for the next year. I write from a table that does not shake with the waves, and sleep on a thick mat that does not swing in the breeze. I apologize for not writing sooner, but this city tests my habits. The activities of the day and walking freely in this spacious city send me early and tired to bed—but this is a freedom I will never complain of.

The eight royal brokers assigned to the foreign merchants stood on the shore to greet our boat with its half dozen traders, I alone from Italy. A more reckless breed, these Gentiles leapt the gap between ship and shore, but I had not come this far to fall in these foul waters. I would not venture farther until they had found a plank long enough to provide a narrow but solid path to land. I did not want to fall and risk losing to the murky water the blessed Talmud and my beloved Dante, carried in the leather pouch I hugged close to my chest.

My broker, a small bald fellow whose name is Maung Win, found me. His parents named him well, or perhaps he grew to be the name they had given him. His name means “Brother Bright” and he appears to wear a permanent smile and see only the sunlight in this world and not its shadows. Though he seemed genuinely saddened, when in answer to his barrage of questions he learned that Ruth of blessed memory had died long ago, leaving me without wife or son—a condition he believes no man should suffer. We would make a fine pair for the commedia dell’arte: he squat and smiling and myself tall and serious. Yes, Joseph, serious, not dour. To my surprise and pleasure he speaks a rudimentary Italian—childlike in its vocabulary and comical in its grammar but passable. The last four years he served a Genoese trader who lived in the house I now oc-cupy and who died suddenly a few months ago. This Genoese seems to have been well liked; when people learn I am living in his former home, his name is met with a nod and a broad smile. I noticed that the columns on the house’s verandah are streaked with red, where many visitors must have wiped their betel-stained fingers.

Win’s Italian will make my life easier. I would not want to depend on Portuguese, Spanish, or even Italian traders to speak on my behalf. I would not want to share with them knowledge of our affairs.

On the ship from India there were Peguans from whom I learned the rudiments of their language—enough to praise a sunset and ask questions about the marvels of this new world—and hopefully by year’s end I will speak with some facility. For the moment, Win and I converse in a humorous stew of Italian and Peguan. Maybe I shall teach him some Hebrew to make me feel closer to home—I have not heard our tongue since I left the Israelites of Cochin.

Unlike our city with its narrow twisting streets and its dark maze of alleys that start, stop, and disappear under names new and confounding, Pegu is a grand city of wide streets ordered with a carpenter’s measuring rod. Coconut palms, taller than a half dozen men one atop another, fan over street corners and shade the walls of houses. The streets glow and glitter with gilded spires. Win tells me that the city is an earthly miniature of the cosmic order, with the king’s palace and royal residences at the center and the number of surrounding blocks of this ordered grid a reflection of their many gods. I do not understand all this convoluted talk of cosmic order—I soon lose my way in these infidels’ phantasma. All I know is that I can stand in the middle of a wide road and look down its long, shaded expanse and not see the road’s end before it narrows into the horizon.

I walk these streets a free man. When I left Venice I put away the yellow hat that marks us, but I still feel strange walking without it.

I am an object of bemused curiosity, especially in these dark clothes that I must shed lest I drown in my sweat, but I am just a barbarian, lumped with all the other barbarians. I am not feared, kept at a distance like a diseased animal. I do not feel the Gentiles’ gaze or even the eyes of other Jews ready to report my words and acts to the Assembly, ever watchful of behavior they fear will inflame Christian hostility. A solitary traveler, I have come to realize how tired I was of living under the constant gaze of others. Though I stand a head above most of these people, I feel I am invisible to them. Here only the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, keep watch over me.

I am not used to getting up in the morning with the city free before me. I can go where my feet take me and do not have to wait for the Marangona chimes to open the Ghetto gates. I do not have to flee for home before the gates close at sunset. I do not have to worry that if I lose track of the hour I will be stuck for the night in the Ghetto Nuovo across the bridge, forced to sleep in another’s bed.

You will be amazed to hear that old Abraham of the Antechamber, who never made the morning’s first prayers and had to wait until others drowsy with sleep straggled in, now arises with the cock’s crow. Without waiting for the bell’s command, I watch the market come to life or simply wander where whim takes me. Even if I were free to do so, I have had little cause to go out of the Ghetto after sunset or early in the morning. But that I cannot is a constant reminder that we Israelites live in Venice at the toleration of the Gentiles—it is like a pebble in my shoe that I cannot remove.

The last two days I have taken walks at sunset, when the palms come alive with the sound of birds, high and shrill like the chatter of Peguan women in the market. Without plan I ended by the river sparkling in starlight. I had no destination. The simple act of walking drew me through the quiet streets in the growing darkness. No guarded gates kept me close to home. I embraced the freedom of walking. I felt for the first time freedom as a presence, as something real that exists in the world. Not just an ideal. Not just a prayer at Passover.

The streets are dense with shops and stalls the closer you get to the trading houses and the royal storehouse, or what is called in this land a godown. A cat could leap from roof to roof without touching the ground; and if it fell, it could scramble from umbrella to umbrella, shoulder to shoulder and never dirty its paws. What a Babel of tongues, what a mosaic of bodies and colors—bare brown skin, bright-colored cottons and silks, turbans and robes, polished staffs and jeweled daggers, umbrellas bobbing up and down in the bright sunlight. It is as if the world were tipped on its side, and merchants from every heathen land funneled into these market streets: Bengalis, Chinese, Malays, Turks, Arabs, Siamese, Gujaratis, dark-skinned Indians from Coromandel and Calicut, and even dusky Ab-yssinians. Win tells me merchants from these lands set up stalls for six months or more to sell their cloth and thread, earthenware jars, seed pearls, iron and copper pans, spices, and anything else the Peguans have come to desire. You can tell a man of means—even if he is a heathen—from his fine dress and the ease with which he carries himself. Seamen and petty traders, rougher in dress and appearance, sell their wares themselves, or sometimes Peguan women, whom they call their wives, carry on their business. But these men have pledged themselves to women who can speak the local tongue only to turn a profit.

Yesterday, with Win as my guide, I walked through the market amidst the constant jabbering and curious eyes of women, sole rulers of this domain, who sell any creature that slithers, swims, flaps, and flies and anything that grows from tree or earth. Men hover about, flirting with the young ones and gossiping with any with tongue and ears. Baskets and tables were stacked with pyramids of fruits and mounds of vegetables new to my eyes. One fruit has the brown scales of a snake; a second, small, round, and red in color, has crinkly spines like a baby porcupine; and another that looks like a ball of worn leather holds drops of white flesh sweet as pure sugar.

One of the women sliced open the spiny fruit and offered me the white flesh cupped inside. I stood with my hands at my sides until Win bid me take it. Though it has been more than a year since I have been away from the Rialto, the prohibitions we live under are hard to escape—they burrow like termites into your being. Forbidden like a common prostitute from touching fruit in the market, I have to struggle to break this unwanted habit. It is not easy to be a free man. What Win takes for granted without pause—touching, squeezing, and sampling the fruitmonger’s offerings—are gifts for me to savor. The prickly fruit in my hand, its sweet, moist flesh in my mouth, I felt a free man, my soul unshackled.

You will be jealous when I tell you of my home, even though its walls are made of wood, its floor of split bamboo, and its roof cane and plaster mixed with lime—houses of brick and stone are few, even for foreign traders. It is mine alone. Peguans build houses only a single story high, for they think it an insult to their honor to live under others; and the men here, mired in superstition, are afraid for their souls if a woman’s private parts were to pass above their heads. What a dishonored race they would think us poor Venetian Israelites, stacked family upon family, in a warren of quarters carved one from the other.

I have a feeling that this house will bring us good fortune. Whenever I tell a Peguan I live in the house of Massimo the Genoese, they bow their heads and with a slight smile say it is a very auspicious house. One Peguan trader told me that my house bore healthy fruit.

Lush coconut palms shade the verandah. They must bear tasty flesh and refreshing liquid. Likely, the Genoese was a generous man who shared his bounty with others.

Curtains made of wooden beads, not doors, separate the rooms and keep the house cool. I feel like a child at play pushing the beads with my hands when I pass from my sleeping room to the room where I eat my meals and write these letters, cross-legged before a low table under the light of an oil lamp. An old woman named Khaing, who served the Genoese, cooks and sweeps for me. She hides herself in the back of the house, and I do not see her unless I want to.

The house is raised above the ground about five feet and an open verandah covered by the steep-sloping roof stretches the width of the house. Here Win and I speak in the cool air of the morning before setting out on our day, and in the evening when the city turns quiet. How I savor the simple pleasure of standing on my own verandah and watching life’s procession. Do the Gentiles truly believe we would mock their holidays and holy parades if they allowed us open balconies on which to stand? What do they fear we would contaminate by our gaze that they forbid us balconies and brick our windows?

This is a city of wood, not stones, and the danger of fire always lurks. Fire wardens patrol the streets and check to make sure that everyone, Peguan or foreigner, cooks only in pits of prescribed depths and at the prescribed hours. They fear fire so much you cannot even smoke a pipe in these streets. I can still see the smoke-blackened ground where houses once stood near the street of the Portuguese, where Win tells me a half year ago a wind-whipped fire began and consumed dozens of houses and pagodas. The king made sure those responsible paid in blood for their carelessness.