The Last Jew (35 page)

By the third week the signs of final illness were indisputable. The liquid that gurgled in his lungs seemed to have pervaded all the tissues of his body so that he had taken on the appearance of obesity, with legs like posts and a pendulous abdomen that drooped over itself. He had tried not to speak, finding it an effort even to breathe, but at last, in breathless spurts, he gave Yonah instructions.

He was to be buried on his own property, on the crest of the hill. There was to be no memorial stone.

Yonah could only nod.

'My will. Write it ... down.'

So Yonah fetched paper and ink and quill, and Nuño dictated terms in breathless spurts.

To Reyna Fadique he left the savings he had accrued in his career as a medical practitioner.

To Ramón Callicó he left his land and hacienda, his medical books and instruments, and the leather chest and contents that had belonged to Nuño's departed brother, the late Manuel Fierro.

Yonah was unable to absorb it without protest. 'It is far too much. I have no need ...'

But Nuño closed his eyes. 'No relatives ...' he said, and with a weak hand, gestured the subject closed. He reached out for the pen, and when he signed the will the signature was a scrawl.

'Something ... more. You must ... study me.'

Yonah knew what Nuño meant but didn't think he could do it. It was one thing to cut into the flesh of strangers while his maestro was inducting him into the secrets of anatomy. But this was Nuño.

Nuño's eyes blazed. 'You wish ... to be ... like Calca ... or like me?'

What he wished was to be able to do this man's dying for him.

'Like you. I love you and thank you. I do promise.'

Nuño died sitting in his chair, somewhere between the rainy darkness of January 17, 1507, and the gray dawn of January 18.

Yonah sat on his pallet and looked at him for a time. Then he rose and kissed his maestro's forehead, which was still warm, and closed his eyes.

Despite his own size and strength he staggered under the weight as he took the body to the barn, where he carried out the dead physician's wishes as though he could hear his voice.

First he put quill to paper, making note of what he had observed before mortality. He wrote of the coughing that produced blood-tinged sputum. Of skin that was sometimes tinged purple. Of neck veins that had been enlarged and pulsating, of drenching sweats, of a heart that seemed to beat as quickly and erratically as a running mouse. Of rapid, noisy, and labored breathing, and of the softly swelling skin.

After he had finished writing he picked up one of the scalpels that Manuel Fierro had made and, for only a moment, studied Nuño's face as he lay on the table.

When he opened the chest he saw that the heart had a different appearance from the other hearts he and Nuño had examined. There was a blackened area on the outer surface, as if the tissue had been burned. When he sliced it open, the four chambers looked wrong. On the left side, a portion of one of the chambers was blackened and eaten away, part of the damaged section that went all the way to the exterior. In order to study it, he had to use cloths to soak up and wipe away the blood. He thought it had not been able to pump properly, because blood apparently had backed up and had been jammed into both of the left chambers and some neighboring veins. Yonah knew from Avicenna's Canon that to maintain life the blood must be pumped by the heart so that it perfused the whole body, coursing through large arteries and a network of veins that became finer and ever finer until they ended in the very fine, hairlike channels called capillaries. Nuño's ruined heart had destroyed that blood-distribution system and had cost him his life.

When he cut into the swollen tissue of the abdomen he found it was wet, and so were the lungs. Nuño had drowned in his own juices. But from where had all the wetness come?

Yonah hadn't the slightest idea.

He went through the routine he had learned well, weighing the organs and recording the statistics before he put things back into place and closed Nuño up. Then he bathed with raw soap and the bucket of water that was kept by the table, as he had been taught, and added his observations to the writing. Only when that was done did he allow himself to go into the house.

Reyna was calmly making a gruel, but she had known Nuño was dead the moment she had seen the empty chair.

'Where is he?'

'In the barn.'

'Had I best go and see him?'

'No,' Yonah said, and she breathed in sharply and crossed herself, but made no objection. Nuño had told Yonah that almost three decades of serving physicians in this hacienda had made Reyna fully aware of what went on there, and that she could be trusted absolutely. Still, Yonah hadn't known her all his life, and he worried that she might denounce him.

'I'll give you some gruel.'

'No. I have no hunger.'

'You have much to do this day, she said quietly, and she filled two bowls. They sat together and ate without speaking, and when he was finished he asked her if there was anyone else Nuño would have wanted at his burial, but she shook her head.

'There is just us,' she said, and he went outside and began to work.

There were sawn planks in one of the animal stalls, quite old but still sound, and Yonah measured Nuño with a piece of cord and then cut the wood to size. It took him most of the morning to make the coffin. He had to ask her if there were nails anywhere about, and she found them for him.

Then he took a mattock and a spade and went up to the crest of the hill and dug the hole. The winter was upon Saragossa but the ground was unfrozen, and the grave took shape under his steady labor. It had been years since he was a peón and he knew his body would remind him of that the next day. He worked slowly and carefully, making the sides even and smooth, and deep enough so he had to exert himself to get out of it, heaving himself up and sending a shower of dirt and small stones back into the hole.

In the barn he rolled up the bloody rags inside a clean cloth and stuffed them into the coffin next to Nuño. It was the safest way to be rid of them, and as he hammered the top pieces onto the box he knew it was exactly what Nuño would have had him do. Even without the rags to dispose of he would have a difficult time cleaning up to leave no trace of the dissection.

The work took him the whole day. Dusk was near when he hitched Nuño's brown horse and the gray Arab to the farm wagon. Reyna had to help him carry the heavy burden from the barn.

It was devilishly hard for the two of them to get the casket into the earth. He stretched two ropes across the hole and then tied the ends into loops that he slipped over stout pegs driven into the ground. When they settled the box over the hole, the ropes held, but they had to work the loops off the pegs and hold the ropes taut on both sides of the grave, so the coffin could be lowered a little at a time. Reyna struggled with one of the loops. She was strong and work-hardened, but when finally the loop came free of the peg she lost control of the other rope long enough so a corner of the coffin dipped and dug into the side of the hole.

'Pull back hard on the rope,' he said, speaking much more calmly than he felt. But she had started to do that even before he spoke. The box still was not quite level, but there was no disaster.

'Take a step,' he said, and they both did so. That way, step by step, they advanced and lowered the coffin until it rested on the bottom.

He was able to pull up one of the rope strands but the other rope caught on something beneath the coffin. Perhaps the loop had snagged on a root; after a few hard tugs he threw his end of the rope back into the grave.

She said a Paternoster and an Ave Maria, crying quietly now, as if ashamed of her grief.

'Drive the wagon horses back to the barn,' he said gently. 'Then you go back into the house. I will finish things here.'

She was a country woman who knew how to handle horses, but he waited until the wagon was halfway down the hill before he picked up the spade. He took the first shovelfuls of dirt on the back side of the spade, the Jewish custom symbolizing that it was a hard duty to bury someone who would be sorely missed. Then he turned the spade right side up and drove it hard into the dirt pile, grunting. At first the rain of dirt rattled hollowly against the box but soon the sound was quieter, dirt falling on dirt.

The hole was only half filled when full night came, but there was a high white moon in the sky, and he could see well enough to work steadily and with few pauses.

He was almost finished when Reyna came back up the hill. She stopped before she reached him. 'How long shall you be?' she called.

'Only a little while now,' he said, and she didn't reply but turned around and went back to the house.

When he had mounded the grave as best he could, he placed his hand on his uncovered head and said the Kaddish for the dead, and then carried the spade and the mattock back to the barn. Inside the house, he saw that she had already gone to her room. She had carried in the copper tub and had placed it before the fire. The water it held was still hot, and there were two more kettles of water over the fire. On the table she had left him wine, bread, cheese, and olives.

He undressed near the crackling fire and left his damp and grimy clothing in a pile, then he sat scrunched in the tub with a piece of Reyna's strong brown soap in his hand, thinking of Nuño -- of his wisdom and tolerance, of his love for the people he had doctored and his dedication to the practice of medicine. Of the kindness he had shown a battered young man who had drifted into his life. Of the difference Nuño Fierro had made in the life of Yonah Toledano. Long, long thoughts ... until he realized the water was growing cold, and he began to wash himself.

32

The Solitary Practitioner

Next morning he went up the hill and neatened the grave by daylight. There was a small sapling oak nearby that reminded him of the unplanted tree growing from his father's resting place, and he dug it up carefully and transplanted it into the soft earth of Nuño's grave. This tree was quite small and bare of leaves, but in warmer weather it would grow.

'You must inform the priests,' Reyna told him, 'and give to the church so they will say a Mass for his immortal soul.'

'First I shall mourn him inside this house for seven days,' Yonah said. 'Then I'll tell the priests and we will go to the church for the Mass.'

Reyna's piety was skin-deep and brought forth only by the solemnity of death, and she shrugged and told him to do as he wished.

He was conscious that he had never observed his father's death properly. Nuño had been like a father to him, and he wished to show his respect in the ways he remembered. He rent one of his garments, went shoeless in the house, shrouded the one small mirror with a cloth, and recited the Kaddish in Nuño's memory morning and evening, as a son would do for a father.

Three times during the week someone came to the house in need of the doctor; once he took a man into the dispensary in the barn and splinted a sprained wrist, and twice he rode out to homes and doctored the sick. He also went to the homes of four patients whom he knew needed his attention, but each time he returned to the hacienda to renew his mourning.

After he had observed the week of shiva, and after the memorial Mass had been said for Nuño, Yonah was left with a life that felt strange to him, an existence for which he had to make new rules.

Reyna waited a week before asking him why he was still sleeping on the pallet in the little storeroom, when now he was the maestro of the house. Nuño's chamber was the best room, with two windows, one facing south and one facing east. The bed was large and commodious, made of cherrywood.

They went through the dead maestro's belongings together. Nuño's clothing was of good quality but he had been smaller than Yonah, and stout. Reyna was clever with a needle and said she would alter some of the garments so they would fit Yonah. 'It will be nice for you to wear something of his now and then, and to think of him.' What Yonah couldn't use she put aside, saying she would bring the garments to her village, where each would be gratefully received.

When Yonah claimed the room, he spent the night in a bed for the first time since he had fled from Toledo. By the time he had slept there a fortnight, he felt a sense of ownership; the house and land had become part of him, and he cherished the place as if he had been born there.

When he dealt with his patients a number of them spoke sadly of Nuño's passing. 'He was ever a good and faithful physician and he had our warm affection,' Pascual Cabrera said. But Señor Cabrera and his wife -- indeed, most of the patients in the practice -- had grown accustomed to Ramón Callicó during his long years of training and seemed to be very satisfied with him, and it took him less time to become acclimated to being a solitary practitioner than it took for him to become conditioned to the bed. He didn't truly feel alone as a physician. When he attended a difficult patient he heard a number of voices in his mind, Avicenna's, and Galen's and Borgognoni's. But always there was Nuño's overriding voice that seemed to say, 'Remember what the great ones wrote, and the things that I taught you. And then look at the patient with your eyes, and smell the patient with your nose, and feel the patient with your hands, and use your own good sense to decide what must be done.'