The Last Jew (47 page)

'Then I will spread the word.'

But that evening, only Asher de Segarra and Pedro Abulafin came to Benzaquen's house, and from their abashed manner Yonah suspected they were there not out of piety but because they had grown to like him as a man.

Along with Micah and Leah, they sat and waited well after the third star became visible in the evening sky and signified the beginning of the Sabbath.

'I don't remember very much of the praying,' Asher said.

'Nor do I,' Yonah said. He might have led them in the Shema. But the previous Sunday Padre Serafino had spoken in the church about the Trinity, telling his flock, 'There are three. The Father creates. The Son saves souls. The Ghost makes the sinners of the world holy.'

It was what the New Christians of Pradogrande had come to believe, Yonah realized. They appeared to be happy as Catholics so long as the Inquisition left them alone. Who was Yonah Toledano to ask them to chant, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One?'

Asher de Segarra put his hand on Yonah's shoulder. 'It does not pay to be sentimental about what is past.'

'You are right,' Yonah said.

Soon he thanked them and said good night. They were good men; but if he couldn't have a minyan of Jews, he didn't want the reluctant participation of these apostates, praying as a favor to him. He knew he would gain more comfort from praying by himself, as he had done for a very long time.

That night at Adriana's house, he touched a sliver of wood to her cooking fire until it flamed, and then he lit her lamp. 'Sit down, Adriana,' he said. 'There are things I must tell you.'

For a moment she didn't speak. '... Is it that you already have a wife?'

'I already have a God.'

In spare language he disclosed that he was a Jew who since boyhood had managed to avoid both conversion and the Inquisition. She listened, sitting straight and still in her chair, her eyes never leaving his face.

'I have been asked to stay here in Pradogrande, by your father and others. But I would not survive here, where every man knows the daily life of every other man. I know myself. I would not change, and sooner or later someone would betray me out of fear.'

'Do you live in a safer place?'

He told her of the hacienda in which he lived on a secluded piece of land, close to the city yet away from prying eyes. 'The Inquisition is strong there, but I am believed to be an Old Christian. I attend Mass. I make certain to tithe to the Church from an excellent income. I have never been bothered.'

'Take me away from here, Yonah.'

'I want so much to take you home as my wife, but I'm filled with fear. If I am someday discovered, I will burn. My wife would face a terrible death.'

'A terrible death may come to anyone, at any time, she said calmly: he saw that she was always practical. She got up now and came to him and held him in a fierce embrace. 'I am honored that you trust me with your life by confiding in me. You have survived. We will survive together.' Her face was wet on his, yet he could feel her mouth turn up when she smiled. 'I think you will die in my arms when we are very old.'

'We have to leave here without delay. People in this valley are so fearful. If they know you are a Jew and sought by the Inquisition, they would kill you themselves.

'Strange,' she said. 'Your people were my own people. When I was a babe my grandfather Isaac decided we were no longer to be Jews. Yet for the rest of her life my grandmother Zulaika prepared a fine meal for the family each Friday eve, and lighted the Sabbath tapers. I have her copper candlesticks.'

'You will bring them with us,' Yonah said.

They rode away next morning just as the blackness turned to gray light on the stony trail leading up from the valley. Yonah was nervous, reminded of a similar dawn ride he had made with Manuel Fierro, on a morning when an arrow had seemed to come from nowhere to end the life of the man he still thought of as the maestro.

No one tried to kill them now. He maintained an uneasy vigilance and didn't slow their horses' canter until they were off the mountain trail and had turned onto the road to Huesca, without a sign of pursuit.

Whenever he looked at her, he wanted to shout.

In Huesca he found that the Aurelio family had readied a large bundle of theriac of excellent quality, and in a short time he had reclaimed the packhorse and they were on their way again. From that moment on he didn't hurry, looking out for her comfort, careful not to ride overlong on a single day.

As they traveled he revealed to her the things about him that were false -- that they were not going to Guadalajara, and that she must become accustomed to being the wife of Ramón Callicó, the physician of Saragossa. Adriana understood at once the reason for the falsehoods. 'I like the name Ramón Callicó,' she said, and it was what she called him from then on, in order to accustom herself to it.

When finally they reached Saragossa she looked at everything as they rode through the town, and when they turned into his own lane she was excited and eager. What Yonah yearned for was a bath, a bowl of gruel, a glass of wine, and Adriana in his own bed, followed by a long sleep; but she begged until, yawning, he led her forth to see what there was to see, walking with her over the land, showing her the olive trees, Nuño's grave, the brook and its tiny trout, the fruit orchard, the neglected garden that had fallen into ruinous condition, and the hacienda.

When finally, then, he was able to have the things he wanted, they slept through half the day and all of the night.

The following day, they married themselves. Yonah lashed four straight sticks to chairs in the common room and hung a blanket over them, a wedding canopy. He lighted candles and they stood together, as under a tent.

'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who has hallowed us with Thy commandments and has brought me this woman in marriage.'

She looked at him. 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who has hallowed us with Thy commandments and has brought me this man in marriage,' she said, her eyes full and shining. He placed on her finger the silver ring his father had made for him when he had turned thirteen, and it was very large. 'Never mind,' he told her. 'You will wear it about your neck on a little chain.'

He broke a glass under his heel to mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but in truth there was little mourning in their hearts that day.

'Mazel tov, Adriana.'

'Mazel tov, Yonah.'

For her wedding trip she went to the garden and pulled weeds and thinned the onions. Yonah went to the farm of his patient Pascual Cabrera and reclaimed the black horse, which he had boarded out to Cabrera's care. Soon the black horse was running in the field with the Arab gray and Adriana's horse, Doña. 'Why do you call your horses the Black and the Gray?' she asked. 'Why do they not have names?'

How could he explain that once long ago a youth had had and lost a burro with two names, and that since then he hadn't been able to give a name to an animal. He shrugged and smiled.

'May I name them?' she asked, and he told her that would be fine. His gray Arab became Sultán. She said the black mare that had been Manuel Fierro's looked like a nun, and she named that horse Hermana, Sister.

That afternoon she began to work on the hacienda. The house had grown a bit musty in his absence and she threw open the door and let in the air. She scrubbed and dusted and polished. She gathered fresh rushes to spread on the floor, moved the comfortable chairs a bit closer to the fire. Her grandmother's candlesticks and the carved bird from Pradogrande went on the mantle.

Within two days, it was as though she had lived there always, and the hacienda was Adriana's.

Part Seven

THE SILENT MAN

Aragon

April 3, 1509

41

A Letter from Toledo

Next to Nuño Fierro, Miguel de Montenegro was the best physician Yonah had ever met. Known as 'the physician to bishops' because of his frequent consultation by the prelates of the Church, he was a valuable friend to someone in Yonah's position. His practice overlapped Yonah's, but the two physicians had been able to support each other without any feeling of competition. Montenegro had overseen the apprenticeship of Pedro Palma and recently had made Palma his partner.

'But Pedro has gaps in his knowledge and experience,' Montenegro told Yonah one day as they relaxed over a glass of wine in a Saragossa taberna. 'I especially feel he requires more experience in the science of anatomy. He would learn a lot by working with you, if the occasion arose.'

Each of them knew that Montenegro was asking Yonah to allow Palma to dissect with him.

It was difficult for Yonah to refuse him anything, but since he had married he had become very conscious of his responsibilities to Adriana, and he didn't want to risk her safety. 'I think you are an excellent surgeon and therefore should teach him yourself, as your friend Nuño taught me,' he said.

Montenegro nodded, understanding his decision and accepting it without rancor. 'How is your wife faring, Ramón?'

'She is the same, Miguel.'

'Ah. Well, as you know, sometimes these things take their own time. She is such a charming woman. You will please extend my greetings?' he said, and Yonah nodded and finished his wine.

He was unable to guess whether Adriana was barren or whether the fault lay within him, because to his knowledge he had never impregnated a woman. Their inability to conceive was the only unhappiness in their marriage. Yonah knew how much his wife wanted a family and it hurt him to see sadness creep into her eyes when she looked at other women's children.

When he had consulted Montenegro the two of them had studied the available medical literature together and had decided to give her an infusion of pulse, camphor, sugar, barley water, and ground mandrake root in wine, reported to be the prescription of the Islamic physician Ali ibn Ridwa. For two years Adriana had been faithfully taking the dosage and a number of other medications, but with no results.

They led a quiet and orderly existence. To keep up appearances Adriana accompanied him to church several Sundays a month but otherwise seldom went to town, where she was treated with respect as the physician's wife. She kept an enlarged kitchen garden, and she and Yonah slowly but steadily had brought to fruition more of the orchard and the olive grove. She greatly enjoyed working on their own land like a peón. It was a satisfying time for Yonah. In addition to the wife he loved, he had work that he cherished, and even the pleasures of scholarship. Only a few months after their arrival from Pradogrande he had reached the final page of The Canon of Medicine. Almost reluctantly he had translated the last folio of Hebrew characters -- a warning to physicians that patients who were in a feeble state, as well as those who had diarrhea or nausea, should not be bled. And then at last he was able to write on his own sheet of paper the final words:

The Seal of the Work, and an Act of Thanks.

May this our compendious discourse upon the

general principles pertaining to the science of medicine

be found sufficient.

Our next task will be to compile the work

on Simples, with the permission of

Allah. May He be our

aid, and Him do we

thank for all His

innumerable

mercies.

The end of the first book of

the Canon of Medicin

Avicenna the Chief

of Physicians.

Yonah used fine sand to blot the ink and carefully shook it off, then he added the page to the pile of manuscript that rose an impressive distance from the surface of his table. He was filled with a special joy that he thought must come only to writers and scholars who have labored at great length and in perfect loneliness to complete a work, and regretted that Nuño Fierro could not see the end product of the task he had set for his apprentice.

Yonah put the Spanish Avicenna away on a shelf and the Hebrew Avicenna back into its hiding niche in the wall, exchanging it for the second half of Nuño's assignment, the Maimonides book on medical aphorisms. And with the time left before Adriana summoned him to their dinner, he sat again at his writing table and began to translate the first page.

They saw few people socially. When Adriana had first arrived in Saragossa they had had Montenegro to dinner. The small, energetic physician was a widower, and he had reciprocated by bringing them to a good dinner at an inn in the city, beginning a pattern they had enjoyed with him ever since.

Adriana was fascinated with the history of their house. 'Tell me about the people who have lived here, Ramón,' she said. She was interested to learn that Reyna Fadique had served as housekeeper to all three of the physicians who had made the hacienda their home. 'How unusual a woman she must be, to be able to satisfy three different maestros of her house,' she said. 'I would like very much to meet her.'