feel myself moving through a world watched by a loving God, neither man nor demon could have kept me from clinging to my master and imploring him to use all his powers to change the future. Could he have mixed some powders and potions together to create another destiny for us? How afraid I am to knock upon myself and listen for the answer.
I first tried to deliver the Book of Psalms, but was unable to do so because the master of the house was not at home. Then, on my way out of Lisbon to buy wine, God granted me with the foresight to purchase
I left the city through the St. Anne’s Gate, and some two hours later, to judge by the descent of the sun, I was knocking at the door to Samson Tijolo’s farmhouse. No one answered, so I slipped around to the cellar door. It was open. I let myself in and took a small wine cask. Having neither ink nor pen to write with, I merely left payment on a table by the door. For a calling card, I left a matzah from my pouch. Samson would understand that it was I who had left my uncle’s letter and taken the wine.
It was a good five miles back to Lisbon, and on the road back, my load had me drenched with sweat and dust in no time. I rested twice inside the long, late-afternoon shadows of wavering olive trees before entering the city. In a grove of pines about a half-mile from St. Anne’s Gate, I took my shoes off to feel the needles, prickly and dry, beneath my feet. While reaching for a matzah to nibble, I re-discovered the paper that had fallen from Diego’s turban. It unfolded into the talismanic form of a Magen David, and it read: “Isaac, Madre, the twenty-ninth of Nisan.” Today was the twenty-fourth.
At the time, I thought nothing of the message.
By my reckoning, it was around four in the afternoon when I saw the walls of Lisbon again. Certainly, it was at least an hour after nones; I had heard church bells calling the faithful to prayers from neighboring villages as I walked. A pungent, smoky odor met me as I entered the city. A vague murmuring as if from a distant arena crowd. Odd it was; houses were shuttered tight, stores locked, as if for night. All around me were empty streets, highly shadowed by the afternoon sun. I crept forward, easing my feet into the cobbles. Beneath the granite walls of the Moorish Castle, two young laborers brandishing scythes ran to me. I tensed to run, realized it was useless. One curved his blade around my neck. He held up the severed head of a young woman by her hair. She dripped blood to the street. She was unknown to me. “Are you a
My heart was pounding a prayer for life. I shook my head, handed my pack to him. “Look!”
He passed it to his bearded friend. Peering inside with a sniff, he growled, “Sausages.” He handed it back.
As I offered thanks to God, the dead-eyed man lowered his scythe and asked, “Is that wine?” When I nodded, he took it from me.
My breaths came greedy and trembling. “The smoke … where’s it …?”
“A holy pyre in the Rossio. The Dominicans want to send a signal to God with a flame created from Jewish flesh.”
A dread for the fate of my people curling in my gut prevented me from asking more. Both men filled themselves with drink, then closed the spigot. I stared at the woman’s head. Her eyes were not vacant. What then? Recoiling from this world? Taking back the cask now offered me, a shiver twisted through my chest as if made by a fleeing spirit. The bearded man held the dangling head up, licked her cheek twice as if savoring the sweat of a lover. Opening the draw string of his pants, he allowed the filth of his uncircumcised penis to unsheathe into the air. The woman’s black mouth was pried open by fingers cracked with dirt. To his waist she was held. He began to do something unspeakable. The other watched while pressing against himself with the palm of his hand. I dared not close my eyes, but I turned away. When his grunting had finished, he laced his pants together and said, “Be careful where you go. People are being mistaken for Jews!”
I squatted under an awning when the laborers had gone. My dizziness slowly subsided. Wine took some of the furry, acid taste in my mouth away. Were all the former Jews being hunted?
Down across the staircases and alleyways of the Alfama I raced until I reached the Rua de Sao Pedro. The gate to our courtyard was lying on the street, bent and twisted. Our donkey was gone. The kitchen door was open. I burst inside as if across a threshold of departure. Silence swelled around my gaze. The hearth was dying away into embers, and the table was set with two cups. Beside one was a matzah, broken in half. Our tattered rug was drawn over the trap door to the cellar. “Uncle!” I yelled. “Mother!” Chilled, confused, I crept into my bedroom, found a landscape of smashed beds and pillaged chests. Peering into the store, I discovered overturned barrels. Spilled olives formed a black and green rug leading out the doorway onto Temple Street.
My mother’s room was empty, undisturbed. As I touched the eagle-shaped vellum talisman she always kept on her pillow, I thought:
I pulled the rug gently away from the trap door so that I would not break the cord which enabled it to be pulled into place from below. Then, peeling open the door itself, I slipped down the stairs onto the landing. The cellar door was locked. “It’s me,” I called in the dark line between the door and frame. “Uncle, open up.” Silence. I rapped on the door. “It’s me,” I called. “Mother, whoever’s there…it’s just me.” When I looked back up the stairs into the silent kitchen, a weighted anxiety trembled my legs. I banged against the door, called out again. No response.
I was sure that nothing could have happened to Uncle, our man of wonders, the kabbalah master who played fugues with Torah and Talmud and Zohar. You couldn’t kill such a maestro of the mystical with man-made tools. But Judah or Cinfa… What if they were inside, afraid to call out? Or was the cellar empty? Had they all fled? Perhaps my master had a secret way of locking the door from the outside. To protect the books. Yes, that must be it.
Was it a premonition? Simple logic? A tremor linked to the possibility that something dreadful
I was inside.
The hard, dry stink of lavender and excrement packed my nostrils. I was staring at two nude bodies cloaked by blood. Uncle and a girl. They were lying a few feet from each other, she on her side, he on his back. Their hands were almost touching. It looked as if their locked fingers had slipped apart after they’d drifted into sleep.
Chapter III
When I saw them, the air was suddenly ripped from me, and my body receded. I was racing down the stairs into a warm cavern bordered by muffled noise and wavering light, breathing in rhythm to the swaying of the walls. Naked, Uncle was. A curtain of blood had closed over his chest. The girl beside him was also free of all covering, and also drenched with blood.
The rotten stench around me seemed to moisten my eyes. Moaning, kneeling over my master, I reached for his wrist, felt for a pulse; it returned a frigid silence.
Old Christian rioters had taken his life!
I looked frantically between the two bodies as if upon unknown scripts. Had they been making love? Who could she be?
Necks and torsos were contoured by liquid brown ribbons. I crouched by Uncle’s head. On his neck, two lips of skin had peeled away from a deep slit still wet with blood.
Someone help me, I thought. Dearest God, please help me.
A cold dread curled up from my bowels and pressed out against my chest when I realized I was alone, that I’d be forever without my master. A wave of sickness rose inside me, and I vomited across the slate of the floor till a stinging liquid dripped from my nose.
For warmth, I wrapped my arms about my shoulders. Nothing must be changed, I thought. Not before I had
