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. “
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.
“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
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:
“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.
“It’s the New Christians’ fault—they caused the drought!” a crone in black kept shouting to anyone who would listen.
A group of peasants armed with the hammers and iron rods of a looted blacksmith’s shop suddenly marched out St. Anne’s Gate in search of
