The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

actually feel God’s presence leaving my body. I prayed that the curtain of blood on Uncle had been a dream, counted to five, the number of Books of the Torah, then swiveled my gaze back… The air squeezed in my throat as if a fist had closed. I could not look at him; my sobs, sharp and deep and endless, had begun.

How long did I cry? Time ceases under the pressure of such emotion.

When the blessing of silence descended to me again, I sat, began to rock back and forth. I remembered a deaf and blind little boy I’d once seen swaying like this in the street, and now I understood why; pervaded by an isolation and loneliness so wide that it has no borders, the body seeks to console itself with the grace of its own movement.

Awakening to my own presence, I found myself holding a jagged piece of flower pot. I sat by my master’s chest. Ripped my shirt off and started cleaning the blood from the warped mask of his face. My lips sculpted his name as if in incantation.

I noticed his bloody shawl balled up by the base of one of the myrtle bushes and drew it over my shoulders. Like a reminder. Of what, I had no idea. I was sitting barechested. Shivering. Cleaning ink again from the fingers of his right hand with my shirt, slipping his topaz signet ring off; the crown of God had trapped the emerald glow of my master’s eyes inside, and I needed that light with me always.

After I’d whispered a kaddish for him, then one for the girl, I took his left hand to begin cleaning it. A single thread was caught on the thumbnail. Lifting it to my eyes, I found it was black silk. A name hesitated at the edge of my hearing, was framed by my whispering lips: Simon Eanes, the fabric importer.

Simon was a family friend and member of my uncle’s threshing group who had been ransomed years earlier from the Inquisitors of Seville with a fortune in lapis lazuli paid by my master. His hands appeared before me now, fisted inside the black silk gloves which my mother had sewn for him from remnants of Dona Meneses’ fabric. These gloves were meant to protect his tender grip from calluses; he had only his left leg—the right one having been amputated in his youth—and he walked heavily upon wooden crutches.

Had the thread been pulled from one of these gloves?

As a member of the threshing group, he obviously knew of the existence of the cellar and the location of the trap door. But did a man with only one leg have have the strength and balance to kill like a shohet?

Placing the thread in my pouch, I examined my master’s other nails for particles of skin or hair. Nothing. Then his face. Capillaries in his lips had broken, formed jagged webs. I brushed his eyelids closed. They were dark, seemingly bruised.

The feel of my master’s bloody prayer shawl on my shoulders moved my eyes to our desks, our place of earthly work. Uncle’s slippers and white robe were on the floor below. On walking there, I discovered that one slipper had tumbled over on its back. The other was a good four feet beyond. It seemed that they had been tossed carelessly from some distance away.

All his clothes were deeply stained with blood. Uncle had been killed while wearing them, then stripped.

As I turned in a circle, I surveyed the cellar for other garments, pausing only momentarily to see my dwarfish reflection in the Bleeding Mirror. How vile and ugly I appeared just then, a being of crumpled features and snakelike eyes, my hair knotted like a Gorgon’s.

In the room, I could find nothing belonging to the girl. Not a blouse or scarf. Not a single ribbon.

A possibility harshly lit with shame closed my eyes. Uncle had been deeply troubled of late. For reasons which he’d never fully clarified. What if the girl had been the source of his worries, a lover who’d informed him that this would be the last of their secret liaisons? Or one who was pregnant, who’d given him an ultimatum: divorce your wife or I reveal who the baby’s father is!

Did Uncle strip her upstairs, lead her down to the cellar, turn the bolt on the door, kill her, then take his own life? But the slit across his throat… Was it possible that such a wound was self-inflicted? Was Uncle capable of killing another being bearing a spark of God in her chest?

And where was the knife?! Had he made it disappear by whispering an incantation?

I held my breath as I pried my hands under the bodies to search. Nothing but the sickening feel of cold dead weight pressing toward burial.

I was unable to find the knife anywhere. Yet in the bottommost drawers of our storage cabinet, I discovered that the lids of our two blackwood boxes had been pulled off; our small fortune in gold leaf and lapis lazuli was gone; the killer—or another thief—had passed right over the lesser ingredients and headed for our most precious minerals.

The important thing, of course, was not what the killer had taken, but that he had known exactly where to find our treasures. The number of people so intimately familiar with our storage cabinet could be counted on the fingers of my hands: the family; Farid and his father Samir; and the threshing group members.

The killer had to be one of them.

The names of the four members of Uncle’s group sounded as if read from a kingly decree:

Simon Eanes, the fabric importer and manuscript illuminator.

Father Carlos, the priest, the man to whom we’d entrusted Judah’s education in Christianity. Had not he and my uncle argued about the manuscript of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s which Carlos had refused to give up?

Diego Goncalves, the printer and devout Levite who’d been attacked by boys with stones two days earlier, on Friday morning.

Samson Tijolo, the powerfully built vintner to whom I’d gone this morning for kosher wine.

As Samson’s name sounded inside me, I remembered bitterly the note Uncle had sent to him, cursed myself aloud for not having read it.

I faced the eastern wall and stared into the pattern of tiles; for the first time, I realized the powers of disguise gifted to the man I needed to bring to justice, understood that he had fooled us all with a mask of friendship. I sensed that if I were to catch him, I’d have to know everything that had occurred in this cellar.

Slowly, with the careful steps of a mantis, I began to creep across the room, to imprint the scene in my mind, inch by inch, as if moving my fingertips over an unscrolled portion of Torah.

A single bead with traces of blood was sitting behind the leg of one of our desks. It was dark, grained with thin, serpentine bands. When I picked it up, I imagined a rosary or chaplet tightened around Uncle’s neck. Had it belonged to Father Carlos?

I slipped the bead in my pouch.

Two thick markings of blood stained the bottom fringe of one of the two leather wall hangings gracing the western wall of the cellar. In between these stains was a straight line where the hide had been slit. Undoubtedly, the killer’s hand had folded this section of hanging around the blade, and pulled the knife sharply downwards to clean its edge.

Bloody sandal-prints led back and forth between the western wall, prayer mat and stairs, but did not continue up. The killer had been trapped, was looking for a way out, then simply disappeared.

How many different people had left footprints? Uncle’s and the girl’s were easily visible on the mat. As best I could tell, the killer had worn sandals, and his feet were an inch longer and much wider than Uncle’s.

Might these tracks not have belonged to Diego or Samson?; both of them possessed feet like Goliaths.

Or had there been more than one killer? The rough surface of the mat picked up imprints but imperfectly, and against the dark slate it would have been impossible for me to separate the footprints of two or even three killers if their size and shape were similar.

Simon the fabric importer… I considered him again. Even a man with one leg could kill like a shohet if he’d used surprise as a weapon against a chanting kabbalist. But he would only have created a left footprint. At least two right sandal-prints not made by Uncle were clearly visible.

So if Simon were involved, he had had a partner.

But I was getting ahead of myself; the thread could have been planted to point blame toward Simon, and the bead might easily have been dropped by a cunning hand wishing to focus the hollow light of doubt upon Father Carlos. Even the footprints could have been faked.

I crouched again over Uncle’s chest and lifted his left hand to examine the thumbnail. As is decreed proper,