hunters scenting blood. I pressed my chest to the ground and waited. The sun had already set, and the sky was pearly with dusk. Crows flapped in the branches of the lone oak above me. I imagined death as an inky pool spreading from my stomach into my hands and feet. For what sin, I began to wonder, was God taking from us the best of Israel? Why was he using these Christians of Lisbon to punish us?
Soon, the voices of the Nazarenes were gone. Fear gripped me again only when I remembered Senhora Rosamonte’s hand in my pouch. Beside her fingers was the note that had slipped out of Diego the printer’s turban, stained now with blood. Reading its words again—
I realized, of course, that I was weaving a complex story from mere threads of evidence, that such a scenario was but a remote possibility. I felt so alone, however, so free of my family and Lisbon and the love of God that I needed to believe in a tale—however unlikely—which placed the events of this most terrible day in a sensible order.
Such is the power of isolation. And I understood then that freedom, of the kind bequeathed to abandoned orphans and apprentices without masters, could be the most dreadful state of all.
Chapter IV
It was late Sunday, the third holy evening of Passover. Long after midnight. Master David had not met me, was either dead or in hiding. St. Anne’s Gate had become ever more clogged with Christian rabble. Not so the Monks’ Gate to the east. Past a few sleepy peasants slurping soup from wooden bowls, I strode across the fortified Visigothic bridge there back into Lisbon, my hand gripping my knife inside my pouch. A crescent moon was skimming over the stream below like a heavenly boat. Pricks of sound prompted me on like ivory needles. I realized with a bitter dread that I was fighting a fever. Yet had I ever been more alive? Every nerve in my body was craning into the present for the touch of sensation.
Was the city safe yet? The answer didn’t seem to matter; a dreadful longing in my chest as powerful as Uncle’s chanting of Torah was pushing me home.
Beyond the gate, a dim music of contrapuntal horns seemed to dance like shadows along the high Moorish walls surrounding the oldest part of the city. As I climbed, the Alcacova Palace rose above me, its garlic-bulb towers beaming with an orange light that slid into the darkness as a mist. Hundreds of feet below me, seeming to protest against my movement, slept central Lisbon and our largest Jewish quarter, Little Jerusalem—twenty thousand moonlit homes reclining across the hillsides and valleys and nestling into a bend of the Tagus. As I prayed for my family, the downy gray moonlight behind my eyelids separated and coalesced as angels.
I descended through the steeply falling labyrinth of ancient stairs and alleys. By the Church of Sao Martinho, the smell of smoke chilled me. I slowed, crept along whitewashed walls. Loios Square opened to me. In front of the brittle arcades of the convent, a raging bonfire was sending jagged butterflies of light and darkness across a crowd. At the center, a group of New Christians from our Little Jewish Quarter had their arms and legs bound with nautical rope. They stood in a ragged line, their clothing tattered, their heads hanging from exhaustion. No one spoke. Wan, hopeless expressions showed they’d been paraded around the city like this for hours.
Rugged men with swords and halberds fixed them in place. I crept back and hid around the flaking wall of the corner tavern.
“I beg you not to do this!”
“Kill me if you want, but save my children!”
A hundred supplications pounded me as I searched the caustic orange torchlight for the faces of my family. Blessed be His name, none of them was there. I recognized all of the linked prisoners, however, including Solomon Eli the surgeon, and I imprinted their faces in my Torah memory.
A monk with a beaked nose was swinging a smoking silver censer and cursing the Jews in Latin.
How many had already been dragged from our neighborhood and rendered ash? Little Didi Molcho, whom we all believed would grow up to be a great poet? Had his future been pried from his mother’s hands and…? Or Murca Benjamin, who gave me my first look at a girl’s dark place out behind St. Vincent’s? Was it her glorious body, within the crown of flames, that was beginning to…?
Samuel Bispo the blacksmith was tied to the monumental stone cross that centers the square and was about to be whipped. I drew away into the darkness without looking back. Empty streets returned my hollow heartbeats. What a coward of Biblical proportions I was to have abandoned him and the rest of our prisoners!
My chest and injured shoulder were aching with a revolving, knotted pain, and I was shamed by my terror. I squatted to catch my breath, prayed for deliverance. A sweet scent stung my nostrils. Reaching my hand up, I discovered my nose was bleeding. Men following? Jumping to my feet and pressing into a slatted doorway, I listened. The plunk of dripping water reached me. When a bat sliced through the air and dove into an open window across the street, fear like violent Moorish drumming struck at me. I set off again. Paupers in rags were sleeping amongst sheep in
Cutting in front of our old neighborhood inn and hostelry, I descended the steps past the accursed house where Isaac Ibn Zachin murdered himself and his children after the conversion. I cut into the alley behind the Church of Sao Miguel. As if landing from a tumbling fall, I found myself trudging along the Rua de Sao Pedro. A thousand onions and garlic heads were scattered by my feet; a cart had been overturned. A tumbling island of black rats was forming over the opened gut of a headless man without clothes. I rushed toward home. Since I had last been here, half a day earlier, our neighborhood had been defiled. Shit had been smeared against all the walls, stores looted, doors and shutters smashed. At the entrance to our former schoolhouse hung a body: Dr. Montesinhos. A cross of blood was finger-painted on his chest. A gold sovereign peeked from his mouth; a daring Jew must have put it there to pay for his ferry ride across the River Jordan. One of his sandals had come free. A sprig of oleander peered over the lip of its heel. I took it.
I crept toward home, slipped through our gate. Two hens loosed from neighbors’ coops scuttled and cackled around the courtyard. Our lemon tree had been felled by an ax. In my mind, I chanted our religious injunction from Deuteronomy against the felling of a fruit tree even during a siege:
I almost called Uncle’s name, but an image of him lying stiff and white pressed my lips toward silence. As I gripped the handle of our door, Roseta hopped gray and ghostly onto the low wall next to me. The cherries were gone from around her neck. “Wait,” I whispered to her. But she leapt inside as the door opened.
“Mother…Esther…” I called in a low voice.
The darkness of night held its breath.
The hearth in our kitchen was cold. I felt along the tile floor. It was wet. Blood? I lifted my fingertips to my mouth. Only water. I cut my hand on the tip of a fallen knife, cursed, then blessed He who gives power to iron. I held it in front of me as I groped my way to the bedroom which I shared with Judah and Cinfa. Caressing the cold, barren mattress where they slept, I whispered a prayer for their safety. I balanced on tottering feet to my mother’s room, whispered for her, felt the taut emptiness of her bed in my fingertips. I swirled her blanket over my shoulders to end my shivers.
Where could they all have gone?
Robbers had rifled through my chest again, but had still left behind most of the frayed hand-me-downs I’d inherited. Discarding the blanket from my shoulders and slipping out of Attar’s cumbersome aba, I put on a pair of my father’s linen pants and one of my elder brother’s shirts. In Uncles chest, I found his ancient woolen cape. Was I alone now, the inheritor of all his clothing, the narrator of his story?
Crossing the courtyard to Farid’s house, I whispered for his father, Samir. Heavy footfalls from outside made me duck. I peered out the window. Two men carried swords. They were swiveling their heads to survey the
