The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (11 page)

A hand fell over my mouth. Breathing came hard against my cheek. A voice I knew was whispering my name. “Quiet, Beri,” he said.

It was David Moses, our former chazan.

“Master David, did you see Solomon, the goldsmith?” I asked.

“I saw many of us,” he replied.

“But Solomon. Did you see…”

Shouts from just outside the door: “Down by the river! Let’s get going! Bring the cart!”

Master David covered my mouth with his hand. We crouched down. Our breathing ebbed together, then separated.

“Have you seen my family? My mother, Judah…”

“No. But they could be anywhere.”

“I must go back…maybe they’ve made it home. I must find them and…”

He gripped my collar. “Listen, the only way to find them is to stay alive. You must get away.”

“How did it start?! Who’s responsible for this…”

“In the Dominican Church. A crucifix with a hole covered by
mirror
. A lit candle slipped in from the back by the friars. They tell
everyone
that the light is a sign from the Nazarene, a miracle. About an hour ago, a New Christian, Jacob Chaveirol, the tailor, he was…”

“I went to school with his son, Menni. He’s brilliant in Torah. A man of wonders. He has a shop up…”

“He’s an idiot! He said how much better it would be if Christ gave us rain instead of fire!”

“And…?”

“Beaten to death. They slit his abdomen and pulled out his… Two priests called on the congregation to kill the Jews. His brother, Isaac, killed as well, ripped to pieces. The head in the bell tower, it’s his. Northern sailors contributed money for the wood of the pyre. And soon…and soon…” David’s words faltered.

“And the King, why doesn’t he come to our defense? Twenty years we were given to…”

“King Manuel?!” Master David sighed. “He a coward, but he’s not stupid. He knows that if he sends troops to our aid, the mob will call for his head. The people hate him almost as much as they hate the Jews. He’ll give the riot time to burn itself out, then take control of the city again.”

He and I clung together in silence. I could not speak of Uncle; my revelations would have confirmed that he would never return to me. And I could trust no New Christian until I learned more about the murder. I asked, “Have you heard anything of the fate of Father Carlos or Diego the printer?” When David shook his head, I added, “And Samson the vintner?”

“Not a word,” he replied.

My eyes were adjusting to the gloom; we were in a spiral stairwell. Above us, dim light filtered through a thin portal covered by a grill. Suddenly, I could distinguish a face above us peering around the
central
axis of the stairs. I lunged. Caught a leg. Stifled a scream with my hand. It was a girl. She struggled, but I held her with the force of my stored fear. “Stop! I won’t hurt you!” I said.

She fought me for a moment more, then shook free of her terror. Her breathing came warm against my hand.

“Damn her!” the chazan whisper-screamed.

“We can’t stay here anyway,” I said. “We’re too close to the Rossio. You go now and I’ll meet you outside the
porta
de
Santa
Ana,
St. Anne’s Gate. Past the monastery, on the crest of the next hill, is a single large oak. Meet me there. I’ll stop her from shouting till you have had time to get away.” I could see my friend clearly now. His prayer shawl had been tugged through his ripped mantle. “And for God’s sake, toss away your
tallis
.”

“But what about you?” he asked.

“You’ve saved me once. I’ll do the rest. Now that I’ve awakened to what is happening, I’ll get away. Just get rid of your shawl.”

“I can’t,” he said. He hid it back inside his mantle.

“And you think that Jacob the tailor was crazy? Look, I’ll meet you beyond St. Anne’s. Go!”

Master David paused as if to speak, then squeezed my arm and dashed out the door.

Power and fear produce a color of emotion unlike any other, and with the girl in my grasp, I felt my body to be silver, reflective, beyond confinement. “I’m going to let you go in a minute,” I said.

She breathed hot against me. As I unfurled my hand, she
straightened
up and tugged my fingers back to her mouth. Her tongue flicked like sexual prayer against my palm, traced edges of desire along my thumb and forefinger. She reached fingertips to my sex. Squeezed once with the pressure of curiosity. The in and out of our intertwining
breathing
gave rhythm to our tongues dancing together. Two sinful lunatics we were, swelling together in a stairwell with a riot just outside. She took my hand. “Upstairs,” she whispered.

Does the body have its own life separate from the mind? How could I have let her lead me on after having seen my uncle? Or does sex serve a healing function which we refuse to admit?

I followed her into a room grayed by a drawn curtain. The lock of the door clicked like a bolt in a dream. Lines of light at the window drew me from her. From here, I could see we were on a side street about fifty paces from Rossio Square, just inside the Moorish Quarter. Shouts filtered up as if through layered fabric. My heart suddenly skipped a beat; Master Solomon’s face was burning before me. Except that he had Uncle Abraham’s emerald eyes. They were vacant, cold,
staring beyond me. So much death, so much blood. The girl’s hand was stroking my behind. I turned for her mouth, but she ducked below, began caressing my desire with a liquid warmth, swirling with a wild craving, hiding me inside a gulping shadow with no form and all need, moaning desperately as I held her to me and swirled her hair over my quivering chest and licked the petals of her ears. As if mounting the contours of darkness itself, I gripped her shoulders and fondled the tickling desire of her breasts, thrust harder and deeper into the warm wet darkness until she was gasping as if crying and I was exploding as if free-falling into a bottomless cavern.

When she had taken everything from me with the maddening tip of a flicking tongue, she caressed my face. “To wash,” came a breeze of whisper. The door clicked open as I lay in bed. Racing footsteps down the stairs. “
Marrano
!” came her shout. “A Jew in my room!”

I tied the string of my pants together and opened the curtain. She was on the street by a carriage, surrounded by men in cloaks, pointing up toward me. I grabbed my pouch and jumped onto the landing, crossed to the roof, slid down to a verandah opposite. Screams
propelled
me forward. I ran across rooftiles, dashed down gutters. Voices from the apartment below brushed like gusts of wind at my hearing. The last ledge came up as sudden as the closing of a book. A blank drop of forty feet led to the cobbles below. The height of two men separated me from the next rooftop. “Stop, Jew!” I turned as if to confront all of Christianity. A young, long-haired nobleman was navigating awkwardly down the roof. He was tall, thin, possessed a gaunt face which jutted forward at the chin with the arrogance of the high-born. His yellow
leggings
were wiped with blood, like the markings of a demonic script. He carried a horsewhip in his long, elegant hands.

A young hunter out to prove his prowess to his friends and
family,
I thought.
And
I
am
to
be
sacrificed
for
the
good
of
his
arro
gance
.
As I waited for him, my feet sought sure footing. He stopped twenty feet away and faced me with a bemused look. I felt strangely at an advantage.

“This is going to be a pleasure,” he observed in a voice of false ease. He braced his feet and arched his whip back, then swung it forward with a shout. Its tip slapped by my feet. Two rooftiles exploded. Moments later, the bitter clacking of their shards below spread a look of satisfaction across his smug face.

A rush like a ghost passed from my toes into my chest and up through my head: the grace of God was ascending. I clung tight to its hold.

“They say if you hit a Jew hard enough you can hear the gold rattling in his rib cage,” he said with a smirk. “I aim to find out!”

It was a legend based on a horrible truth; Jews expelled from Spain in the Christian year of fourteen ninety-two were forbidden from taking valuables. Some of the tens of thousands crossing the border into Portugal dared to eat coinage.

As I spired up to the pinnacle of the roof, a tile came free. I picked it up, held it as a shield in front of my chest. An image of Moses and his tablets entered my mind. The burning sun of the age of Torah seemed to be pulling me toward the sky. My nemesis laughed. He took awkward giant steps, joined me on the apex. We faced each other across a silence of ten feet. His face was twisted with scorn. I began chanting the names of the Unnameable.

“A magical
Marrano
incantation?” he questioned.

To defend myself, I was tempted to invoke a kabbalistic prayer for his death. Forcing my words silent, I withdrew from thought until there was only a light presence weighing my soul.

“Crazy Jew,” he said. “We’ll kill all of you. Peel open your skin and take out your gold!”

A sudden visceral force pushed me. I charged. He lifted his whip slowly, as if mired in a liquid time. Was he surprised that a Jew would attack without warning? He never tried to dodge me. With my tile as a shield, I plowed up into him like a bull, took the very air from him. He flew to the end of the roof, slid past the ledge and screamed all the way down. A sound like a gloved fist knocking once at a door rose up toward me when he hit the ground.

When I peered below, I saw him lying at a crazy angle on the
cobbles
, twisted like a discarded marionette.

There was still the roof to cross if I was to get away. Space seemed to recede from me as I jumped, however. Crashing against the wall, I began a free fall, landed hard on a slatted verandah below. My arm was scraped badly and my face stung with blood. The apartment must have belonged to former orthodox Moslems; I was atop the gallery from which their women had surveyed the world below without being seen in the days before their forms of worship were outlawed as well.

I kicked against the blue slats till they gave, then dropped below.
Out of the light, I felt strangely distant from myself. I was in a bedroom of pallets and leather mats. As I trudged breathless into a whitewashed hall, voices came through walls. A family was gathered in front of a smoldering hearth. A tall, cinnamon-complexioned man in green robes and a white skullcap faced me. He had broad, powerful shoulders. His light brown eyes were close together and menacing, like an eagle’s. A tuft of dark hair sprouted between his eyebrows, gave him the look of a man of mystery. The thought came:
I
am
too
tired
to
fight.
If
this
man
chooses
to
take
my
life,
I
will
offer
it
to
him
like
a
prayer.

“You seek sanctuary?” he asked in hesitant Portuguese.

I answered in my Hebrew-accented Arabic: “They’re after me.” We watched blood dripping from my arm onto a leather mat. I cupped it with my hand. “I’m sorry for staining your…”

He called his wife. She rushed to me with a young girl clinging to her robes. Her hair and fingernails were dyed red with henna. After smearing an olive-green ointment on the cut, she bandaged my arm with a linen remnant. Her black, thickly outlined eyes regarded me fearfully till I complimented the grace of her daughter with an Arabic couplet which Farid had written.

My right shoulder had dislocated when I crashed, however, and now, calmer, I realized I could barely move it. It ebbed with pain, then grew numb.

“My name is Attar,” the man said. “I am a potter. I come from Tavira.”

“Berekiah Zarco. I am a fruitseller, and I have always lived in Lisbon.”

He sat me down on a pillow and gave me water. When I mentioned Samir, Farid’s father, a welcoming smile lit his face; they knew each other and had even studied Koran together in Granada when it was still the capital of an Islamic kingdom. “I’ll get you some more water,” he said when I’d finished my cup. He stepped behind me, grabbed me suddenly. Pushed hard. My shoulder popped. Pain broke over me like a tide, then receded. “You’ll feel better now,” he said. “But no more jumping across rooftops for a little while.”

His wife cleaned my face with warm water as I tested my arm. Attar said, “You’re welcome to stay till the trouble passes.”

“I must try to meet a friend, then get back to my family.”

My pants were badly ripped at the inseam. He made me change
into a tawny aba fringed at the collar with delicate arabesques in
chartreuse
thread.

“How will I ever repay you?” I asked.

He waved away my concern. “The possessions of nomads are meant to leave their hands,” he observed. “It is better. What is without wings has a way of dictating our thoughts.” He placed a knitted skullcap on my head.

“Allah be with you,” he said at the door.

I echoed his closing and bowed my thanks. “I’ll return your clothes as soon as I can.”

He lifted the hood of my robe over my head and bowed back.

The street was empty when I slipped outside. Rushing along the cobbles, I tried in vain to fade my footsteps to silence. The acid smell of burning Jewish flesh was everywhere now. I was sure that a plume of smoke was rising just above me, but would not look. I breathed through my mouth, crossed the Moorish Gate under the scornful eyes of two sentinels on horseback. Dressed as I was, however, these
representatives
of the crown would not dare to touch me; if there was official
violence
against former Moslems, there might be reciprocal bloodletting against Christians in Turkish lands and North Africa.

As for the mob, all I had was my knife. I prayed I would not have to use it.

Once outside the city walls, I lowered my hood and ran across the fields fronting St. Anne’s convent, then crawled through thickets of broom and tall, scorched grasses as I approached the great oak
crowning
the coming hillock. Master David was not there, however. A small crowd of worried Old Christians had assembled just beyond the Roman bridge below; they told frenzied stories of how the mob had turned on anyone even remotely connected to Jews. Some cowards, they said, were even using the riot as an excuse for personal vengeance, or a way of freeing themselves from debt.