The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (20 page)

Reza was opening the trap door when I reached the top of the stairs. I motioned for her to let me climb out. “I looked all over for you!” I said, hugging her. It was good to feel her compact, feminine solidity. And I needed the light and air.

Even so, Reza looked as if she’d been hunted. Her great gray eyes, normally so aristocratic—even distant, some said—were lit with burning anxiety. José hadn’t been to a barber in several days, looked ill, bloated with a kind of restrained terror. His eyes were rimmed by deep, dark
circles and his thick red lips were badly chapped.

“You’re okay, Beri?” Reza asked hesitantly.

“Fine, fine. But where have you two been? I went to your house, but there was…”

“We tried to get here, but the way was blocked,” José said, taking my shoulders. “So we left the city for Sobral. Stayed there. Each time we tried to get back till now, the gates…” He shook his head. “We couldn’t risk it.”

Reza removed the toque from her head, asked in an urgent voice, “Is…is everyone here safe?”

“I can’t find Judah,” I replied. My heart throbbed against my chest as if to seek an escape as I added, “And your father, Reza…he’s left his body and returned to God.”

The toque dropped from her fingers. Her eyes opened wide to seek understanding. I moved to take her hands, but she pulled away. I whispered, “What once gave home to your father is lying in the cellar.”

Her face was suddenly white, her eyes glassy. She descended to him as if straining at a yoke.

Downstairs, my mother, Cinfa, José and I stood back as she kneeled to touch hesitant fingers over his form; if death is to be accepted, then it must be met alone for a time.

When she sagged like a child to the floor, I rested my hand atop her hair. I felt her silent tears enter me as if through a whisper. She turned for Esther. “How did it happen, Mother?”

My aunt wouldn’t respond, was still in hiding within herself.

“Do you know if King Manuel has retaken the city?” I asked José.

“Not yet. They say that he is afraid to return. The people are now clamoring for his death.”

Reza prayed over Uncle. When she turned away, Esther rose like a ghost, glided to his body and covered his face again with the prayer rug. She sat back down and returned to stone.

A wall crumbled inside the little girl with no thumbnail when Reza picked her up. She wailed as if her insides were being torn.

“You know her?” I questioned.

“Aviboa. The daughter of my neighbor, Graça. Is she…?”

I shrugged. “The girl was the only one there.”

It was a sin, I know, but as I replied I was thinking:
Why
could
I
not
have
found
Judah
instead?

Chapter IX

It is near noon on Wednesday—seven hours from the sacred descent of the sixth evening of Passover—and I have done all the drawings I will need.

Reza has assured us that the city has quieted, and so she, José, Cinfa, Aviboa, Mother and I creep upstairs in a line, unsure of our
footing
, as if returning from a long sojourn abroad. To cool Farid, I walk him to my mother’s room and wash his face with brandy. I hold a
compress
to his forehead. His eyes cannot resist closing, but he remains awake; fingertips cross my arm over and over again asking for Samir.

Esther has remained below to commune alone with the gloom of the cellar.

We are preparing my master and the girl for burial. We chant our prayers as we wash. Seven times I clean Uncle’s face with cold water, three with warm. And as it is written, we cleanse first his stomach, then his shoulders, arms, neck, genitals, toes, fingers, eyes and nostrils.

A warm tide of sadness and joy sweeps over me as I hold the
marble
hands of Uncle’s old armor; he has escaped to God. Then I am alone again with a murdered man. Insight comes in flashes, says the Zohar. And so it is.

The slit which splits his neck has turned black. The blood has
clotted
to a ceramic crust.

Four times I wash his fingers, and yet they are still dyed with ink. Just as it should be for an artist meeting God.

Aunt Esther takes a scissors to her hair and places her hennaed locks upon his chest.

Which Hebrew poet was it who said that a widow’s clipped hair
consists
of tears of blood drawn into filaments?

When my master is dressed in his white robes, Mother sprinkles the symbolic dust of Jerusalem over his eyes and private parts.

I hold Cinfa’s hand as she says goodbye. “We’ll never see him again,” she nods to me. Her weary, bloodshot eyes are wide open and curious, not sad or frightened.

“Not like this,” I agree. “When you next see Uncle, it will be when he holds out his hands to you and welcomes you to God.”

My confident words belie a stiff terror which forces my eyelids closed; I have forgotten the feel of my master’s embrace.

We lay him upon his prayer shawl, then cover him with the linen shroud Reza and Mother have sewn.

When his face disappears from me for the last time, my eyes close to capture him in their darkness. He is only a violet shadow now; I
cannot
summon his glow. Will he fade until I can no longer even summon his voice?

We wash the girl with no less care. Reza helps now; she has sent Aviboa to play with Roseta in the courtyard.

Brites, our laundress, appears suddenly at the kitchen door. Gifted with an optimistic nature, she generally has a bright sweet face. Today, however, she is glum and hoarse-voiced. In her cart is our last load of laundry, cleaned and pressed. She has brought us a salted hide of
codfish
the length of a man’s arm.

We kiss, and there is no need to talk. The silence of our solidarity sits in my chest like a heavy stone. “I called for you in the night,” she finally whispers.

“We couldn’t answer. But thank you.” My lips press to her cheek again, then I leave her and mother to mingle their tears together.

There are no coffins to be bought in our neighborhood, no New Christian carpenters left alive to work. And I refuse to pay an Old Christian for this. So we carry Uncle and the girl in their shrouds into the cart I’ve borrowed from Dr. Montesinhos’ widow. The donkey belongs to Brites; she insisted on the loan. When I protested, she
whispered
, “Please, Beri, you could be my child.”

The urge to draw away from the present tense into a happier past tugs hard at me. I must fight it to perform my religious duties. And more importantly, to find Uncle’s killer.

Esther sits in the cart atop a wooden stool, her lands folded in her lap, her hair chopped at hopeless angles. Mother, Reza and I walk
beside the donkey. We leave Lisbon to the east. Christian eyes without questions watch us as we depart; everyone knows our mission. Cinfa remains at home with José, Reza’s husband.

Many Jews have made their way to the
Quinta
das
Amendoas
—the Almond Farm, as we call the large property centered by a haunting tower of weathered limestone about two miles east of the city. Aaron Poejo, the owner, was a mountain Jew from Bragança who moved here because his Algarvian bride was shivering to death in that frigid
north-eastern
climate. To remind him of home, they brought along almond and chestnut saplings and rooted them here. The original cottage, now no more than waist-high rows of cragged stone, was abandoned in favor of an octagonal storage tower following one of Poejo’s visions. Apparently, he saw long-haired blond seafarers in iron masks sacking Lisbon and setting fire to all of its Jewish quarters. The crude structure was redesigned with a third floor belfry to be used as a lookout sight; from there, as Farid and I discovered one day on a mission of childhood espionage, one can see the Tagus and its own granite lookout towers, get an advance warning of attack. The irony, of course, is that years later, during the conversion, Poejo’s wife was stoned to death by dark and squat neighbors whom they’d known for years. In any case, as the story goes, Poejo and his two daughters tried in vain to knock down their tower-home the night his wife was killed. In the morning, exhausted, desperate, they hollowed a great chestnut trunk, hauled the woman up and buried her inside. Although the trunk has filled in over the years, that tree, directly south of the tower, grows with mottled and denuded branches even today, as if poisoned by remorse. It is said, too, to give off a rotten stench on
Yom
Kippur.
Hence the farm’s local notoriety as a place of arcane power fitting for those martyred for Judaism.

As for Poejo, after his wife’s burial, he and his daughters collected cuttings once again, continued south right across the Algarve, survived the sea crossing and settled in Morocco near Tetuán. In consequence, the almond trees of the Quinta das Amendoas, like so many in Portugal, have long gone untended. Yet today, as we pass, we can see that their green fruit have defied neglect, have sprouted like musical notes in the scruffy, overgrown branches.

From Little Jerusalem and the Judiaria Pequena, even the small Jewish street on the other side of town near the Carmelite Church, we
drag our dead. A few have donkey carts like us. Most have folded their loved ones into wooden wheelbarrows.

Our elders direct us to the fields that have not been used in the past for graves. I nod my solidarity to all who pass but do not talk except to ask after Judah and the two living threshers—Father Carlos and Diego Gonçalves. No one has seen them.

I dig two pits with the help of three Moorish laborers who’ve come to earn extra money. They have silent black eyes and ask no questions.

Reza insists on helping. “Beri, I need to
do
something,” she says. “The world starts caving in every time I sit still.” She stares up at me with lost eyes and chews nervously on the ends of her hair, a habit from childhood she has regained.

For Uncle, Mother chooses a spot by a young almond tree whose candelabrum arms are upraised in prayer toward the turquoise sky. The girl has found rest by a broad cork tree whose branches unfurl like the arms of a welcoming grandfather.

The scribe Isaac Ibn Farraj chants with us. He is here burying Moses Almal’s head; it seems that Isaac was the lunatic who had raced in front of the pyre in the Rossio to steal his friend’s last vestige from the flames and spare his ghost from a wandering afterlife in the Lower Realms. “I’ve seen enough Christians for one lifetime,” he confides to me. “I’m learning Turkish. It’s easy, written with Arabic characters. I’m going to get on the first boat to Salonika I can find. They say it’s
becoming
a Jewish city. Anyway, I suggest you do the same.”

“And what of your home here?”

“Pretty soon all our friends will be gone from Portugal anyway. And believe me, I won’t make the same mistake Lot’s wife made!”

Thinking of the note which slipped from Diego’s turban, which mentioned the name “Isaac,” I ask, “Before the riot, did you set up any special meeting with Diego Gonçalves the printer?”

“Not that I recall.”

“And the twenty-ninth of this month, this coming Friday—does it mean anything special to you?”

Isaac scratches the white, fungus-like hairs on his chin and folds out his lower lip. “Beri,” he says, “I can see you’re in trouble and need help. But you’ll have to talk plainer if you want me to understand.” He takes my hand, and his eyes focus upon me with tenderness.

It suddenly seems ridiculous to have suspected him of being the
Isaac mentioned in the note; he has never had any connections to the threshing group, nor any reason for antagonism toward Uncle. I realize that I’m beginning to mistrust everyone. “Never mind,” I say. At my request, he then tries to revive Esther by beseeching her in Persian. She replies with eyes of glass.

Seven times I circle Uncle’s grave praying. As it should be for a
Ba’al
Shem,
Master of the Divine Name. My Hebrew prayer voice,
rising
and falling like water across walls of weathered sandstone, seems to originate in an ancient past. Forced to walk, I leave my family to bury Senhora Rosamonte’s hand below a lemon tree. With my thanks, I take her aquamarine ring as her last gift and place it in my pouch with Diego’s message and the girl’s wedding band; it may one day redeem the life of another swallow taken by Pharaoh.

On my way back to my family, I pause for a moment to place the palm of my hand flat against the trunk of a massive cork tree whose valuable bark has recently been peeled away. For some reason, perhaps to better feel the power of the verdant giant, I close my eyes. Immediately, a great light sets the darkness ablaze with an orange-black fire and a humid warmth seems to pass right through me. A great rustling of leaves comes to me from high above, as if an eagle or heron has alighted on a topmost branch. “Yes, we are here,” comes Uncle’s voice. “But do not open your eyes. Our radiance would overwhelm you.”

As I squeeze my eyelids closed in protection, he says, “Berekiah, the bark of a tree is not merely a symbol to be used in poetry. It is a real presence which shares the Lower Realms with you. It grows, it dies, and it can be removed by a woodsman. Feel your hand meeting the solidity which lies beneath such bark.”

I squeeze the trunk between my hands, sense a fluid power rising from the earth up through my legs and into my head.

“You have been drawn to this tree because it has reminded you that a mask can be something other than a metaphor,” he says. “It can be a real adornment, as well.”

As I think,
Please,
Uncle,
address
me
as
simply
as
you
can,
he replies in a tone of anger: “We speak in the language of the Upper Realms and know of no other way to converse!” Regaining a tone of compassion, he continues: “Remember, our shadow is your light. Our simplest clarity is your greatest paradox. Berekiah, listen. You must never send your illuminations
with a courier who doesn’t recognize himself in his mirror from one day to the next. And remember the eyesight of he who speaks with ten tongues.”

At that, there is a quivering in my hands and a flapping sound from above. The blazing darkness behind my eyelids fades to gray; the bird—Uncle—has flown away. Opening my eyes, I stare through the empty canopy of branches above into the great blue sky.

His words repeat inside me:
Never
send
your
illuminations
with
a
courier
who
doesn’t
recognize
himself
in
his
mirror
from
one
day
to
the
next.
Was he referring to a man with no self-knowledge? Or someone without memory, perhaps, who has sought to leave behind his past, to deny its existence. A man who cannot recognize himself because he does not wish to recall the personal history which helped to make him who he is today.

And
remember
the
eyesight
of
he
who
speaks
with
ten
tongues.
Farid. Uncle could only have been referring to his fingers—his ten tongues. My master meant for me to count on his discernment in
learning
the identity of this man who could not even recognize himself.

For a moment, I am tempted to pray over the vellum ribbon on my wrist for my master to visit me again, to give me a clearer answer in the language of the Lower Realms. Deep in my gut, however, I fear
entering
the realm of practical kabbalah; Uncle must have had his reasons for speaking to me in riddles.

“Beri!” It is Mother, calling to me from across the field.

As I start toward her, I think:
More
and
more,
the
world
is
intrud
ing
on
my
inner
life
of
contemplation.
Just
as
Uncle
knew
it
would.