The gash in my arm from the boy’s lance finally closed with the aid of extract of comfrey. I painted it with a thin layer of marigold juice to ensure healing, wrapped it with a linen handkerchief.
I gathered my courage once and whispered to Aunt Esther, “Had you ever seen the dead girl before?” She was seated on a bench we’d brought down from the kitchen, my mother’s thick mantilla of brown Flemish wool blanketing her shoulders. Her right hand, wrapped in a bloody linen towel was wedged between her legs in protection of what had been defiled.
She would not utter a sound, and I knew that her soul had fled deep inside her body.
Was it a cruel question to ask Esther? I didn’t care; I had to know if she knew. Not for the prurient reasons she probably thought.
I kept the girl’s golden wedding band in my pouch to give to her husband, prayed that he was still alive to cherish it.
Uncle’s signet ring I kissed and placed in the blackwood box which had held our gold leaf; I felt it might have pained Esther to see me wearing it.
When mother asked me about the whereabouts of this keepsake, I thought it might be a propitious time to talk with her. “Who knew of the
She pulled her head in like a hen, stared at me as if I were insane and told me to ask no more questions.
After the cathedral had tolled midnight, we heard Brites, our Old Christian laundress, calling desperately for us from the courtyard with the shrill voice of a lost gull. I was about to shout up to her when my mother thrust her hands at me and formed a cross.
I realized then that hell was being unsure if a little brother was in the clutches of torturers with respect for neither the beauty of the human body nor the sanctity of the soul.
And I wondered who it was who was etched as Uncle’s murderer on the Enduring Tablet of Moslem tradition. I vowed to discover the girl’s identity. More than ever, I believed that she was the key.
Early Tuesday morning, I found I had had enough of darkness and hesitancy. My legs and arms were clenched with the need for air and movement. In the purplish haze before dawn, I resolved to start looking for Judah, Reza and the members of the threshing group. I reasoned that there would be few Christians about at that hour of the morning.
“You mustn’t go!” my mother whispered to me. Her nails dug in to the pulp of my flesh. “No! It’s not safe. And you have to recite morning prayers. Uncle will be angry if you haven’t done your work for the Lord.”
“Morning prayers will have to wait!” I told her. I broke free, entrusted everything in my pouch save my knife to Farid.
He accepted my offerings without gesture. His eyes were bloodshot, and lines of sweat were sliding across his cheeks. When I kissed his forehead, it burned, tasted of foul disease. He turned away from my probing stare, and I saw that the bruises on his neck had soured to black and yellow.
“What is it that you feel?” I asked with my hands.
“A spiny animal is scraping my gut, trying to get out,” he signalled weakly.
Was it plague? If he were to depart, who would speak my inner language, help me to find Uncle’s killer?
Fixed by hopelessness, I continued to watch him, remembering that it was our old friend Murca Benjamin who first said that he and I were twins gifted to different parents. Dearest Murca was to be remarried soon, after the illness and death of her first husband. Had she even survived?
As I started my search, I grabbed the hammer from our shed and whispered to God, “Return Judah to us and take me in his stead.”
For a shield against Christians, I inner-chanted verses from the Zohar.
Nearest me, the Rua de Sao Pedro was empty. A dark, cottony haze blanketed the city. Those shutters which had resisted the onslaught of rioters were locked as if never to be opened. Gulls flew overhead, luminescent, as if about to burst into flame. Down by St. Peter’s Gate, a stout woman carrying a wicker basket atop her head began running with a painful, bobbing gait. High above her, beyond the twin towers of the cathedral, ribbons of smoke were unraveling into the air; the pyre in the Rossio must have still been raging.
The door to Father Carlos’ apartment was still locked. Inside St. Peter’s, hanging oil lamps sputtered with flame. In the the nave lay corpses splayed like drowned fishermen washed to shore.
Senhora Telo the seamstress was on her back under the fresco of the Annunciation which decorates the transept. Her face was white and waxen, her eyes closed. No blood. None at all. Her tin whistle, meant for calling her children, dangled over her shoulder.
A growl turned me. A pink-nosed, tawny mongrel had its front paws across the stomach of a man whose chest was soaked black. Ears pricked, he raised a crusted, throbbing lip to show fangs, growled from his gut as if I might challenge him for the body.
I headed to St. Michael’s Church. Many lay stiff and silent before the altar of the Nazarene. I took a candle from a side chapel and searched. Judah was not among them.
At St. Steven’s, I found a body of an adolescent girl in the courtyard garden, inside a circular bed of the most perfect marigolds. She was being picked by a hunched, methodical vulture with an indifferent gaze. Watching him, I learned that these birds rip first at the soft tissue—the lips and tongue, the eyes. The girl was beyond recognition.
The caretaker of the church, an Old Christian, came out from his hiding place in a side chapel before I left. To my question, he shook his head and said, “No, not Father Carlos. Others. Most were heading for the river. There was talk of boats carrying Jews to the other side.”
I found that the only thing which could now upset me was kindness. When he hugged me, my foundations slid away. I pushed him away and reached out for a wall. Then I ran.
Dawn was spreading a gauzy light over the horizon. Swallows were scooping great arcs of air all around me, twittering as if in hurried speech. Cutting down to the Tagus, I described Judah to the fishmongers setting up their stalls to sell last night’s catch. They’d seen nothing. “Were Jews killed?” one asked me. As if bored with the very idea, she yawned.
When I overturned her table, she shrieked like a parrot. But no one dared confront me; people recognize madness and draw away.
Then I walked toward the city center as far as the inner rim of the Terreiro do Trigo, Wheat Square. I dared not go any further; at the quayside, two Portuguese longshoremen and a group of blond northern sailors were exchanging shouted curses. Four men were sprawled dead between them. A pack of murdered dogs lay scattered around the ornamental cross at the center of the square, their blood soaking into hay strewn from recently unloaded bales. Further away, on one of the piers used for repairing vessels, a cheering crowd had gathered to watch the violation of an African slave girl. Pressed face-down to the slimy wood planks, she grunted at the crude madness of the little man thrusting against her back. Inside the floating city of ships, sailors and merchants watched and laughed. I turned back for the relative safety of the Little Jewish Quarter. My first steps seemed to pose the question:
The single-story house Reza shared with her in-laws centered the northern perimeter of Lemon Tree Square. The sun had just poked its eye over the eastern horizon when I reached there. Her door was closed but unlocked. The great chestnut wood table in the kitchen was kneeling; it had lost two of its legs.
A neighbor heard me searching and peered at me from the front doorway. He was a tiny man with razor- reddened cheeks and sleepy eyes. He spat up at me when I asked if he’d seen her.
Did these Christians always expect us to wipe their scorn away with a meek hand and continue shuffling into an uncertain future?
I shoved him so hard he crashed into the street and fell with a shriek.
A girl, perhaps four years old, was sitting stoically on a pillow in Reza’s vegetable garden, naked. A square cross had been finger-painted with charcoal on her forehead. She was nibbling raisins, had dark hair cut straight at her shoulders, secretive brown eyes framed by long and elegant lashes. She had no nail on her right thumb. “I run away,” she said.
