The Last Jew (30 page)

'A natural death?' he said finally.

'No. He was struck down.'

'Killed, you say?'

'Yes, killed ... and robbed,' Yonah added suddenly. There was no premeditation in the decision not to give over to this man his brother's money, only the sudden blinding knowledge that he would not. He went to the burro and untied the bundle of medical instruments.

Nuño Fierro opened the chest and stroked the scalpels, the probes, the clips.

'He made each one of them himself. He let me polish a few, but he made them all.'

The physician tenderly touched these few things his brother had made, lost in a terrible moment. Then he looked up at Yonah. No doubt seeing the marks of long travel. Probably, Yonah thought, smelling him, too.

'You must come inside.'

'No.'

'But you must--'

'No, I thank you. I wish you well,' Yonah said roughly, and went to the gray Arab and swung into the saddle.

He forced himself to keep the beasts at a walk, fleeing slowly, with Nuño Fierro standing in the dust, looking after him in puzzlement.

Yonah traveled farther north, scarcely knowing where. The physician was an old man, he told himself, and clearly he was prosperous. He had no need for his brother's fortune.

Without being conscious of temptation, he realized he had been thinking about the money for a long time. He had come to realize what it would mean for him to have unlimited financial resources.

Why not? Obviously, God had sent them to him. The Ineffable One had sent him a heavenly message of hope. After a while, seated in the saddle that had come to feel like another layer of skin on his ass, he became giddy from thinking of the choices that might be available with the gold, of where he might wish to go to buy a new life.

He found himself in the foothills, glad to travel toward the comforting sanctuary of mountains, but that night he didn't sleep. There was a thin sliver of moon and the same stars that had shone on him when he was a shepherd. He built a fire in a clearing on a wooded slope and sat and gazed into the flames, seeing many things there.

The money was power.

The money would buy him a certain amount of security. A modicum of safety.

But in the chill light of early morning he got up and sighed a peón's curse as he kicked dirt over what was left of his fire.

He traveled back to Saragossa slowly.

Nuño Fierro opened the door of the hacienda as Yonah was unpacking the box of coins. Yonah set the box before him, unbuckled his sword and placed it on the box.

'These were his also, and the animals.'

The intelligent Fierro eyes stared at him, comprehending everything.

'Did you kill him?'

'No, no!'

His horror was recognized as genuine.

'I loved him. He was ... the maestro! He was good and just. Many loved him.'

The physician of Saragossa held wide his door.

'Come inside,' he said.

28

Books

As difficult as it was, before he rested or cleaned himself he recounted in detail for Nuño Fierro the events of the morning when Manuel Fierro had died with Angel Costa's arrow in his throat, and how he had killed Angel. Nuño Fierro listened with his eyes closed. It was a difficult narrative for him to hear, and when it was finished he nodded and went off to be alone.

The physician's housekeeper was quiet and watchful, a strong-bodied woman of perhaps forty years -- older than Yonah had supposed from his first glimpse of her through the crack of the door. Her name was Reyna Fadique. She cooked well and heated his bath water without complaint, and for a day and a half he did nothing but sleep, waking to eat and use the chamber pot and then sleep again.

He found his garments laundered and fresh when he left his pallet on the afternoon of the second day. He dressed and ventured outside, and presently Nuño Fierro found him kneeling by the brook, watching small trout flying through the water.

Yonah thanked him for his hospitality. 'I am rested and ready for the trail again,' he said, then he waited awkwardly. He didn't have enough money to make an offer for the gray horse, but he thought perhaps he might buy the mule. He loathed the thought of wandering on foot.

'I have opened the leather chest,' the physician said.

Yonah detected something in the man's voice that caused him to look up sharply. 'Does something appear to be missing?'

'On the contrary. Something was there I had not expected to find.' Nuño Fierro held out a small piece of paper, torn raggedly from a larger piece. On it, in ink to which a few grains of the blotting sand still clung, was written, 'I believe the bearer to be a New Christian.'

Yonah was stunned. So there had been at least one man he had not misled with his false name and gentile ways! The maestro had thought him a convert, of course, but he had known Yonah for a Jew. The note showed that he had believed Yonah would deliver the wealth to his brother in the event of his own demise. A compliment of trust from the grave, which almost had not been deserved.

Yet he was disappointed because Manuel Fierro had thought it necessary to warn his brother that a Jew was in his house.

Nuño Fierro saw the confusion in his face. 'You must come with me, please.'

Inside the house in his study, Nuño removed a tapestry wall hanging, uncovering a niche in the stone wall. Within the niche were a pair of objects wrapped well in linens that had been tied carefully with strips of fabric. Unwrapped, they proved to be two books.

In Hebrew.

'I apprenticed under Gabriel ben Nissim Sporanis, one of the most revered physicians in all of Spain, and then had the honor to practice medicine with him. He was a Jew. He had lost a brother to the Inquisition. Through the mercy of God he himself died naturally, a very old man in his bed, two months prior to the edict of expulsion.

'At the time of the expulsion his two children and his sister had few funds with which to travel to safety. I bought this house and land from them, as well as these books.

'I am told that one is A Commentary of the Medical Aphorisms of Hippocrates, by Moses ben Maimon, whom your people call Maimonides, and that the other is the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, whom the Moors know as Ibn Sina. I had written to my brother Manuel that I had these books and how I yearned to discover their secrets. And now he has sent me a New Christian.'

Yonah picked up one of the books and his vision embraced the letters he had not seen in such a long time. They appeared strange and unfamiliar, and in his nervous joy they seemed to turn into serpents that writhed.

'Have you other books by Maimonides?' he asked hoarsely. What he would give for a copy of the Mishne Torah, he thought; Abba had had that book, in which Maimonides commented on the entirety of Jewish practice, describing in detail everything Yonah had lost.

Alas, Nuño Fierro shook his head.

'No. There were several other books, but Gabriel Sporanis's sons carried them off when they departed.' He glanced at Yonah anxiously. 'Are you able to translate these?'

Yonah stared at the page. The serpents were simply beloved letters again, but ... 'I don't know,' he said doubtfully. 'Once I had the Hebrew language effortlessly in my grasp, but I haven't read it or otherwise really used it for a long time.' Nine long years.

'Will you stay here with me, and try?'

He was stunned that he had been brought together again with the language of his father.

'I will stay for a time, he said.

If the choice had been his he would have tried to do the Maimonides book first, because the copy was very old and the pages were dry and crumbling, but Nuño Fierro was eager to read the Avicenna, so Yonah began there.

He was uncertain he could do the translation. He worked with great deliberation, one word at a time, one thought at a time, and slowly the letters that once had been so familiar became familiar again.

'Well? What do you think?' the physician asked after the first day.

Yonah could only shrug.

The Hebrew letters unleashed memories of his father teaching him, discussing the meanings of words, how they apply to man's relationship with other men, how they apply to man's relationship with God, with the world.

He remembered the sounds of quavering old voices and strong young voices chanting raggedly together, the joy of song, the sorrow of the Kaddish. Bits of worship, fragments of verses he had thought gone forever began to spin from the depths of his memory like blossoms before a wind. The Hebrew words he translated spoke of lockjaw and pleurisy, shaking fevers, potions to ease pain; nevertheless, they brought him song and poetry and fervor that had been lost in the brutishness of his coming of age.

Some words he simply didn't know, and he could do no more than retain the Hebrew word in the Spanish sentence. But once he had known this language very well, and slowly it came back to him.

Nuño Fierro hovered anxiously in the periphery of his existence.

'How goes the work?' he asked at the end of each day.

'I begin to show progress,' Yonah finally was able to say.

Nuño Fierro was an honest man and lost little time in warning Yonah that in the past Saragossa had been a dangerous place for Jews.

'The Inquisition came here early and harshly,' he said.

Torquemada had appointed two inquisitors for Saragossa in May of 1484. So eager were these clerics to destroy recalcitrant Jews that they held their first auto de fé without bothering to issue the Edict of Grace designed to allow backsliding New Christians to confess voluntarily, thereby seeking mercy. By June 3, the first two conversos had been executed and a dead woman's body had been exhumed and burned.

'There lived in Saragossa good men, members of the Diputación de Aragon, the Council of the Estates, who were shocked and outraged. They approached the king, saying that Torquemada's appointments and executions were illegal and his confiscations of property violated the fueros of the kingdom of Aragon. They made no objection to trials for heresy, Nuño Fierro said, 'but they petitioned that the Inquisition should function to bring sinners back to the bosom of Holy Mother Church by means of instruction and admonition, using milder penances. They said that aspersions should not be leveled against good and pious men, and insisted there were no notorious heretics in Aragon.'

Ferdinand had dismissed the councillors brusquely. 'He said, if there were so few heretics in Aragon, why did they bother him with this fear of the Inquisition?'

On the night of September 16, 1485, Pedro Arbués, one of the inquisitors, was murdered while at prayer in the cathedral. There were no witnesses to the crime but authorities made the immediate assumption that he had been killed by New Christians. As they had done in the cases of several other imagined insurrections of conversos elsewhere, at once they placed under arrest the leader of the New Christian population. He was a distinguished and elderly jurist, Jaime de Montesa, deputy to the chief justice of the municipality.

A number of his acquaintances were also arrested, men deeply involved in Christian life, the fathers and brothers of monks, whose ancestors had been converts. They included men in high positions of government and commerce, several of whom had been knighted for valor. One by one each was declared judio mamas, 'really a Jew.' Terrible tortures produced confessions of a plot. In December of 1485 two more conversos were burned at the stake, and beginning with February, 1486, monthly autos de fé were held in Saragossa.

'So you see that we must take care. Great care,' Fierro cautioned Yonah. 'Is Ramón Callicó your true name?'

'No. I am sought as a Jew under my true name.'

Nuño Fierro winced. 'Then do not reveal your true name to me,' he said quickly. 'We shall simply announce, should we be asked, that you are Ramón Callicó, an Old Christian from Gibraltar, the nephew of my late brother's wife.'

It proved not to be difficult. Yonah saw no soldiers or priests. He stayed close to the hacienda, which the Jewish physician Gabriel ben Nissim Sporanis had situated cleverly, far enough from the town and sufficiently off the trail to guarantee that only those in need of medical care would bother to come.

Fierro's property covered three sides of a long, sloping hill. Whenever fatigue turned the letters to snakes again and Yonah could translate no more, he left the books and tramped over the land. It showed signs that once it had been a good farm, but it was obvious Nuño wasn't a good farmer. There was a planting of olive trees and a small fruit orchard, both healthy but desperate for pruning, and like the good peón he had been Yonah found a little saw in the barn and pruned several of the trees, piling the cut boughs and burning them the way he had done on the farms of earlier employment. Behind the barn was a trove of old horse manure and bedding from the stalls, and Yonah added the ashes from the fires and spread the mixture under half a dozen of the trees.

Over the crest of the hill and on its northern side was a neglected field Reyna called the Place of the Lost Ones. It was an unmarked cemetery for those unfortunates who took their own lives, because the Church said suicides were damned and barred them from interment in Christian burial grounds.