The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

She gripped my arm. “Now ask me if I’m one too!”

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

Her nails bit into my flesh. “Ask me!” she demanded, the spray of her sudden rage hitting me in the face.

“Are you a Jew?” I repeated matter-of-factly.

Before I could duck away, she slapped my face with her callused old hand. “You Portuguese bastards never hesitate to insult a Navarrian lady!” she shouted. “But I’m not about to…”

She was still yelling when I reached Diego’s apartment again. I knocked and called for him, but received only silence. Growing fearful for his safety all of a sudden, I began shouting, “Diego! Diego! It’s just Berekiah!”

Not a sound was returned to me.

I entered the apartment next door. Old Levi Califa, the retired pharmacist and Talmud scholar, lived there with his widowered son-in-law and his two grandchildren. The state of his quarters did not bode well for Diego’s safety; the canopied bed in the front room had been stripped. A cross had been finger-painted in blood on the eastern wall, and below it, in foot-high letters, were the words: Vincado Pelo Cristo! Avenged for Christ.

With contempt for the legions of Old Christian illiterates staining the landscape of Portugal, I noted that the word vingado had been spelled incorrectly. How could they expect to even catch a glimpse of God when they could neither write correctly nor read with any perception?

“Master Levi?” I called out warily.

Silence.

At the far wall, the door to the rest of the apartment was splayed on the ground. Stepping over it and creeping through the open entrance, I entered a tiny room, square, no wider or longer than three paces, with a parquet of the coarsest oak and a single wooden stool as the only furniture. Yet had I ever entered a room more filled?

Immediately, I knew I’d walked across a holy threshold.

On the whitewashed walls, written in black, in tiny Hebrew letters, was Exodus. All of it. From the names of the Israelites who entered Egypt with Jacob to the flight of Hebrew slaves across the Red Sea to the raising of the Tabernacle by Moses. The verses began at the top of the eastern wall, continued south in a straight horizontal line, then west and north to form a ring. I guessed that more than two hundred such rings had been written. Lettering covered the entire top half of the room like a holy arbor.

Leviticus, too, had been started, but had ended abruptly with the commandment not to burn honey to the Lord. That’s when the Christians must have forced their way into the room and taken the scribe.

There was no need to puzzle over his identity. I knew with certainty it was old Levi Califa. Who else would have been so devout as to spend his time in hiding by recounting the central story of Passover?

I was so awed that I simply turned and read, my eyes quickening their pace like a dervish finding the rhythm of his dance.

I didn’t expect to encounter Califa himself. But on the kitchen floor, on a piece of broken plate, was a right hand. I knew it belonged to him because the index finger on which he’d always kept his carnelian signet ring had been sliced away. Close by was the last piece of charcoal with which he’d been writing and which must have fallen from his clutches.

A severed hand does not look real. But why? Is it because our minds refuse to believe such cruelty possible?

And why is it that the Christians do not merely kill us, but cut away our body parts? Is it an effort to render us inhuman, to force us to better correspond to their image of us as devils?

Not far from his fingertips were the hyssop-blue heads of Califa’s beloved Brazilian parrots, whom he’d named Ternura, Tenderness, and Empatia, Empathy, the Talmud scholar’s two-word motto.

The bodies of Tenderness and Empathy must have been stolen for their precious feathers. Already, perhaps, they were decorating the hat of a Christian nobleman.

As I leaned over to retrieve the hand for burial, a footfall across a snapping piece of wood turned me. In the front room stood the old cobbler from across the street, patient gray eyes fixed on me. He was thin, tan, wore only a sweat-stained undershirt and the crudest of linen pants. He had to be at least fifty, had thin wrists, narrow and bent shoulders. Wisps of tangled gray hair tufted up from behind his ears.

In one hand he held a gouging tool, in the other, a mallet.

I reached for my knife and held it in front of me. They will force me to fight again, I thought. Unwilling to engage him amidst the sanctity of written Torah, I stepped to the front room. As I did so, he said in a hoarse voice, “You haven’t much time.”

I didn’t respond, thought: Why do Christians always expect Jews to speak before they fight?

Anger rose in me, and I felt as if hot mercury were running through my veins. Stepping to within three paces of him, I awaited his first lunge, imagining that he would crumple under my knife.

Even so, I did not desire to hurt him; it is said that the distance between the righteous taking of a life and a cold-hearted murder is but a hair’s-breadth, and I did not presume to have the eyesight necessary to always know the difference.

He scratched the bald vale centering his head with the end of his mallet. “You don’t understand my meaning, I’m a friend,” he said.

“Then drop your arms.”

To my utter amazement, he laid them neatly at his feet. With lines of worry ribbing his forehead, he said, “You haven’t much time. They’re coming up from the river. You’ve got to get home. I came to warn you.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Let’s just say that Master Levi was a good friend.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Come on, son,” he said, holding out a hand to me.

“Tell me when you last saw him, please. I need to know.”

“Yesterday,” the cobbler replied. “The Dominicans came for him and his family.” He reached his hand out again and brushed my arm.

Involuntarily, I backed away. “And Diego Goncalves? Was he with Master Levi?”

He turned nervously for the door. “Look, you’ve got to go! Can’t you understand?”

“Have you seen Diego Goncalves?”

“No. He hasn’t been here that I’ve seen. Maybe he was captured.” He shrugged, then continued angrily, “Look, I’m going. You can leave with me or wait for them to come and get you. And don’t worry, the Navarrian hag will make sure they find you quickly. She’s the one who opened the door so they could get Master Levi without working up a sweat.” He leaned forward to pick up his mallet and gouging tool. A sudden urge to stab him in the back of his neck swept through me. What purpose would it have served to hurt this righteous Christian?

Did the mercury flowing through my veins possess its own desires?

“Come,” he said, straightening up. His voice possessed the supplicating tone of my father calling me to study. A shout suddenly reached us from behind the house. The cobbler lifted a crooked finger to his lips to suggest silence.

Together, we crept into the stairwell like children off to a dangerous escapade. The Navarrian hag, as he called her, was standing above us on the staircase, an expression of contempt twisting her wrinkled face. The old man raised his mallet and hit it once lightly against his own head to indicate what he’d do to her should she give our positions away. We made our way down the stairs like cats stalking their prey. I wanted now to find Samson, to read the letter which my uncle had sent him. My plan was to get to the Porta de Sao Vicente, St. Vincent’s Gate, exit the city and head northwest to his house.

In the street, swallows were still swooping madly through the morning chill. A murmur coming from the west was pierced with the caustic laughter of young men hugging danger to their hearts.

The cobbler pointed down the street to the east, to the wavering eye of sun. “Go with God,” he said, gripping my shoulder.

I mouthed my thanks. Then I ran.