The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

imprinted the scene like a Biblical passage in my Torah memory. I must not faint!

The prayer mat was blotched red, had soaked up the syrup of life they’d spilled.

But the door had been firmly locked. How could the killer have gotten out?

Or was he here?!

I jumped to my feet, reached for my knife. Holding it in front of me like a flame in darkness, I turned back for the stairs, then swiveled around. The silence of expectation trembled my legs.

Yet the wall tiles and window eyelets, desks and chairs returned my gaze without the slightest quiver of motion. The room was empty, seemed hollow, like the rib cage of an animal whose heart had suddenly ceased beating.

The memory of Uncle handing me the vellum ribbon on which Aunt Esther had scripted both our names came to me framed by the silence which follows a wintertime chant. Of course, I thought, he must have known that the Angel of Death was approaching. It was why he warned me of our coming separation.

I stood with my back against the southern wall of the cellar, pressed hard to its granite by the immensity of my loss, and stared at them.

Now, twenty-four years later, every detail is as clear to me as the first lines of Genesis.

My master was lying flat on his back, his head tilted to the left in a solemn and restful pose. The girl was lying on her left side, her body the span of a man’s arms from his.

Uncle’s feet were at the center of the circular prayer mat, his head just short of its perimeter. His eyes were open, darker and glassier than in life, staring at nothing. Blood was smeared on both his cheeks and on the wild silver tufts of hair above his right ear. His left arm was by his side, his hand palm up, his fingers curled. His right arm, however, seemed to be straining toward the girl, and his fingertips were but two inches from her outstretched hand.

If, in the moment before death, he’d been hoping to comfort the girl with his touch, wouldn’t his body and head have been turned to the right side to give him greater reach?

I reasoned that he’d already been dead before reaching this final position, and I imagined a hooded Dominican friar braced behind him, stripping him, slitting his throat, blood splashing down across his chest, cascading onto his feet. Then, for some reason, he’d been lowered gently, respectfully even, to the ground. His right arm had fallen toward the girl by accident. Or had been positioned there to make it look as if he’d been trying to soothe her agony. Why? Were the men who took his life artists of death?

Shit was smeared on Uncle Abraham’s buttocks. More excrement, bloodstained but untrodden, was lying just inside the fringe of the prayer mat by the Sabbath bush of myrtle and lavender.

The stink in the room was an evil marriage of the floral and putrid.

The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty. She was thin and pale, a slip of a girl. With long brown hair, now matted with crusted blood. Perhaps five feet tall, she possessed small, firm breasts, as white as marble, and they, too, were ribboned with blood.

I had so rarely seen a woman’s form unencumbered by clothing that the effect of her graceful contours and deep shadows was to distance me even further from the present. Already numb and disbelieving, I stared at her for a time as if I’d forgotten everything from my past.

Shit soiled her thighs and ankles. Like Uncle, two lips of skin lifted away from a lengthy slit across her throat. She had been treated more cavalierly than he had, however, and after the edge of a blade had freed her soul from its confines, must have been discarded to the ground like tref. She fell heavy and hard, with her nose slamming into one of the lavender bushes; a flower pot was lying smashed by her head, and soil and ceramic pieces were scattered as far as the staircase. Her nose itself had broken, was twisted grotesquely to the right and crusted with blood. She was lying on her left side now, with her head tucked down into her armpit, as if she were seeking to hide her eyes. Her left arm was extended straight toward Uncle; her right was splayed awkwardly behind her back. Her legs were pulled in slightly toward her chest, as if she were seeking to retreat into the protected sleep of childhood.

I found myself staring at a ring of bruises around her neck some two inches higher than the crusted slit. These contusions looked like shadows made by a choker of beads, and at first, without logic, I thought that they were indeed marks made by a decorative necklace.

Then I looked to Uncle and saw that he, too, possessed such shadowing. Bruises circled his neck just above his Adam’s apple.

Had they been strangled with a knotted cord?

I crouched by the girl, held her left hand. It was frigid, but not yet stiff. She wore a wedding band of braided golden filaments on her index finger. Slipping it off, I placed it in my pouch and whispered: May her husband still be alive to cherish it.

It was the sound of my own voice which suddenly pierced the darkness of my initial disbelief; with an audible gasp, I realized that their throats had been cut just below the large ring of the windpipe, as if by a shohet killing in the ritual manner of all Jewish butchers.

Had a traitorous New Christian led the followers of the Nazarene to my uncle, then slit his throat? I pictured a Dominican friar rousing the mob to break into our cellar, my master taken and handed over to this Jewish mercenary like a sacrificial lamb.

The name of the New Christian arms dealer Eurico Damas sounded inside me. His recent threat against Uncle’s life had been relayed to us by Rabbi Losa: Should you ever so much as whisper Damas’ name in your sleep…

Had Damas accepted a pouch of gold sovereigns from the Dominicans to reveal the hiding places of our most honored community members? Had he penned Abraham Zarco’s name at the top of his list?

But could Damas have killed like a shohet?

My gaze was drawn to the staircase. Light from upstairs was glistening off the tiles decorating the cellar’s eastern wall, was revealing to me a pattern of twelve-pointed stars seeming to possess a secret. Stars. Light. Patterns. Secrets. Years of training in Torah and Talmud had taught me to sense when my own reasoning had veered from the path of logic, whether Greek or Jewish, and my mind was searching out a fixed pattern in the tiles with which to cleanse itself. Staring at the whirl of blue, white and gold glazes, I permuted the word azulejo, tile, until the meaning of the word slipped away, until there were only eyes fixed on a glassy surface. Graced with the freedom that is emptiness, a realization tugged me breathless to my feet: Uncle’s soul could not have been set loose by Christian rioters; I’d found the trap door closed, our tattered Persian rug in place. The rampaging mob would not have murdered two people, then closed the door neatly behind them and slid our rug into place. They’d have been emboldened by the Jewish blood warming their hands, stormed out of here overturning everything in sight. Our cellar would be a shambles!

I looked around to certify that the room had not been trampled by Christian feet. The desks and storage cabinet appeared to be untouched. Of the furniture, only the distorted looking glass on the wall above Uncle’s desk bore an obvious bloodstain. A single rivulet of brown descended from its upper rim across the concave silver surface.

Had the murderer held a dripping hand to the mirror’s frame as he peered at his distorted image? Or was the legend of the Bleeding Mirror true?

Whatever the case, no Christians had penetrated; their search had been confounded by the secret threshold of our trap door.

And no Jewish butchers have been here either! came another inner confirmation. For no butcher knew of the existence of our secret entrance. Nor would Eurico Damas have known of it. So the trap door must have been left open. Could Uncle have been so careless?

I placed the palm of my hand flat on my master’s chest, as if seeking the answer from his presence. A faint residue of warmth stilled my breathing. Examining him for blemishes, I found only a dark bruise on his left shoulder, a slight swelling around it. His whitened skin felt thick to my fingertips, like leather, but still retained a terrible trace of the suppleness of life.

I would have guessed that he had been dead no more than half an hour, since just before four o’clock in the afternoon. And that there had been little struggle.

I gripped his right hand, his hand of blessing and illumination, began examining its pores and lines as if seeking to decipher the language scripted on an ancient parchment. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I could