always be able to gift us with her fruit.”
“What happened?” I gestured, pointing to his tender wounds.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Tell me.”
“In the alley last night—a man tried to stop me. I killed him.”
It was the first time either of us had signalled the verb “to kill” in the first person. We both realized our language of gestures had to change to keep up with this new, Old Christian century. As if unequal to the task, we walked along the Tagus back to Lisbon without conversing. Distanced from my own emotions, I remembered the young noble I’d pushed from the roof. Where would I find forgiveness for removing from the Lower Realms a being imbued with a spark of God’s love?
Just outside the Santa Cruz Gate, we came upon docked salt boats. Women with knobby, blistered feet balancing ceramic jugs of the white crystals on their heads smiled at us. Children played, dogs wagged their tails. A merchant in scarlet and green robes tipped his cap to us for no reason I could fathom. Farid purchased sweet rice and grilled sardines from one of the women who sold food down by the river. He gorged himself, but I, of course, could not.
Coming into the Little Jewish Quarter was like leaving a theater. Suddenly, the image was not born of denial or separation, but as it was, bordered with shit and stinking of violence; etched with the barking of saliva-dripping dogs, centered by folding islands of rats and mice.
Vacant-eyed survivors swept blood from their doorways, wore tearless masks, shuffled on bare, dispirited feet. Bodies waited for our notice: Saul Ha-Kohen folded over the slats of his bedroom window, an arm, stiff as salted meat, moving back and forth in the wind, tapping an unknown code against a shutter. Raziela Mor gutted, an onion in her mouth being pried out by her daughter, Nafa, clouds of flies seeking to lay eggs in her womb. Dr. Montesinhos hanging rigid and bloated from the coiled tracery above our schoolhouse door. A nameless baby without a head sitting in a shovel.
Faced with the unthinkable given physical form, no one dared speak.
Do you know what it means to look at a headless baby sitting in a shovel? It is as if all the languages in the world have been forgotten, as if all the books ever written have been given up to dust. And that you are glad of it. Because such people as we have no right to speak or write or leave any trace for history.
The doors to our store were now lying at oblique angles to each other on the cobbles, like entrances to a cockeyed underworld. Muffled moans in Hebrew were coming from across the way in Senhora Faiam’s house. Her dog Belo’s beseeching blue eyes stared out at me over the wall. In his mouth he now carried a gnarled and splintered bone, yellow with age; it appeared that he had once again found something resembling the remains of his recently amputated left front leg, buried this time by Senhora Faiam in the yard behind St. Peter’s Church. His nose was twitching as if he were on the trail of someone to show it to.
My mother and Cinfa met me in the courtyard. They had been picking up broken pieces of slate. Cinfa ran shouting my name and clawed at me as if afraid to fall. Mother dropped to her knees and wailed. Two vellum talismans dangled from her neck. When I lifted her up, she gripped me with white-knuckled desperation. She sobbed as if she were vomiting. When she had her breath, she said, “Judah’s missing. I don’t know what…”
Mother gripped me so tight that her heartbeat seemed to pound from inside my chest. Dizzy with her presence, I said, “I’ll find him.”
She dragged her disbelieving hand through my hair, over my chest. Cinfa hugged herself into Farid.
“You’re unhurt?” my mother asked. “Nothing happened that you won’t…”
“Yes, I’m fine. What about Esther and Reza?”
“Esther’s bruised but alive. Reza, we don’t know.” Mother turned toward Farid. Although she’d never fully approved of my friendship with him and was terrified of his silence, she looked at him now with anxious concern, raised her hand and approximated our gesture for greeting. “
He smiled gently and bowed his head in thanks.
“He’s fine, too,” I said. “Where were you all last night? I came back but the house was empty.”
“We were here! I was hiding in the store with Cinfa. It was siesta when the Christians first came. We were spending it with Didi and his mother. Rushed back home only to find that…”
“Didn’t you hear me?” I interrupted.
Mother held up hands blotched purple. “I surrounded Cinfa and myself with barrels of beans, then covered us with basketfuls of overripe figs. We stayed that way for as long as we could stand it, couldn’t hear much.”
Stained with violet skin and smelling of fermented sugar, she and Cinfa suddenly seemed possessed of a holy beauty; they glistened with survival. I was laughing with an absurd relief. I kissed her forehead. “Clever girl!” I said, as if I were my father.
“Old Christian men pinned Esther’s arms to the cobbles in front of St. Stevens Church,” she whispered conspiratorially. “And then…”
As I nodded my understanding, she lowered her eyes.
“Mother, have you seen any of the threshers? Father Carlos, Diego, Samson…”
“No one.”
After searching his rooms, Farid signalled that Samir had not returned. We entered my house. Esther was seated in the kitchen with her hand wedged between her legs, her bare feet in a puddle of water. I kissed her forehead. She was cold. She would not talk. I covered her with a blanket from Cinfa and Judah’s bed.
I whispered fearfully to Mother, “Then…then you have not seen Uncle?”
“No. I thought he might be in the cellar. But the trap door, its nailed shut. He must have sealed it. And the curtains on the window eyelets are drawn. We can’t look in. We’ve knocked and screamed for him a dozen times. No answer. I’m afraid to break through. He may have had a reason why he wanted it shut, to protect the books, or something more…more occult. I hope he’s all right. He probably went out looking for us, then couldn’t make it back home.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.
“After lunch on Sunday. Not long before…before they came. He went to the cellar to chant. And Cinfa and I went out to…”
“Mother, I nailed it shut,” I said dryly.
“You? Why?”
“When I came back, I went downstairs and… Wait.” I went to the courtyard, took the hammer from our shed, smashed at the trap door. The last slat of wood dropped free with a cracking sound which seemed to imply a terrible finality, as if we would never again find safety in our house.
“Don’t come down yet,” I said to my mother as I stepped onto the stairs. “Let me take a look.”
It was insane, but I wanted to see Uncle first because in those days I put very little beyond the range of a kabbalah master’s powers. Might he not have swallowed a piece of paper bearing a special prayer formula before his throat was slit, a secret name of God which would effect his revival?
“Why…what is…?” Mother grabbed my arm. “What do you know? Is he down there?!”
“All right, come,” I said, and in the quivering of my own voice, I heard the simple truth of his disappearance forever from the Lower Realms. “But I must warn you, Uncle is with us no longer.”
Mother reached for her mouth to stifle a scream. I reached for her hands but she drew them away as if I were tainted.
She crept downstairs with one hand forming an awning over her eyes, the other gripping the talismans dangling from her neck. But she did not cry. A moan when she saw him. A rasping inhale. As if she were choking for breath. That was all.
As she knelt to put Uncle’s fingertips to her cheek, she began to pull her hair. Her face peeled open to sobs. I turned away; it was a moment which could bear no witness.
Chapter V
