“Did you bring any food?” Cinfa asked me suddenly. “She’s hungry.”
The little girl with no thumbnail stood by Cinfa, was staring up at me with yearning silence. “I’m sorry, I forgot,” I answered. “I’ll go up now and see what I can find in the store. There must be…”
“No. You sit!” my mother ordered. Her hands were balled into fists and her eyes were flashing. “We wait now until it’s over for good!”
Cinfa and the little girl nibbled on the one matzah I had left. It was blood-stained, but it disappeared all- too-quickly. So hunger accompanied us as well.
Needing something with which to busy my nervous hands, craving to learn the identity of the girl, I took a sheet of paper from our storage cabinet and began to draw her.
Farid awoke maybe an hour later, after I’d finished her face and was beginning the first lines of her hands. Cinfa tapped me on the shoulder and said he was asking for me.
I brought him a cup of water and held it to his lips. He gulped greedily. He was sweating profusely, and his fever had gone up. His pants were stained with flecks of blood and shit. “How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Something is peeling me open from the inside out. And I’m afraid I couldn’t hold back. My pants… I must stink so bad that even Allah is holding his nose.”
Despite his protests, I cleaned Farid’s behind and thighs, then covered him with his blanket again. We hadn’t any extra pillows, so I buttressed his head with several manuscripts from the
As he descended into sleep, I sat by myself against the eastern wall, in the spot where I imagined that the girl had begged for her life. I brought my knees up by my chest into a position of self-sufficiency and solitude; something cold and calculating was drawing me away from my family. Was it my longing for vengeance? They talked in whispers now, but I could not. I needed to run, to shout for all to hear that I would avenge my uncle. I could live no more enclosed in murmurs, enchained by coded conversations. My master had been right; the lion of kabbalah inside me would not let me live as a secret Jew any longer.
And so I learned that the spiritual journey for me that Passover would be an unveiling of my own true face.
I returned to my sketch, and for the rest of the hours of light, disappeared into the contours of first the girl, then Uncle. When darkness came, I found I was unable to say evening prayers. The little girl slept between my legs, using my thigh as a pillow. Cinfa huddled with us under a blanket.
In my sleep that night, it was my own screams which came to me; I was tied to the fountain in Rossio Square and baptized with a burning palm branch.
I awoke into darkness with the smell of smoke, thick with memory, permeating my clothes—an impossibility, I know, for the pants and shirt I was wearing had not borne witness to the pyre in the Rossio. From the viewpoint of kabbalah, however, illusions like this are not so easily dismissed, and later I understood the odor as an indication that some part of me had not advanced past Sunday. Now, however, I simply undressed and doused my clothes with fennel water from our storage cabinet. But the odor, stubborn as an engorged tick, clung tight.
I couldn’t get back to sleep. In the darkness, moonglow shapes of yellow and violet started folding around my family and me in icy sheets. Yet their touch was comforting. It was as if we were enveloped in a blanket that sealed our fates together. (How dearly I would have liked to have said,
And so, the world reached the early hours of Wednesday morning, the morning before the sixth evening of Passover.
Worry brought me back to Farid. His breathing rose against my fingertips, regular but shallow. I recalled how when we were children, he would cry at the scent of spring rain against the oleander bushes in the courtyard; the sweet smell, to him, was overwhelming.
Yes, he has always been more sensitive than me.
And I remembered then how when Judah was born, he and I had danced our prayers by the river.
Judah… Farid… Uncle Abraham…
Names… Are they arbitrary signs or something more meaningful?
When I was despondent over my forced name change from Berekiah to Pedro, Uncle covered my head with his prayer shawl. “God has many names,” he whispered. “So we who are made in His image should have many as well. And what is beyond your name will always be the same.”
My master told me many times that we were all God’s self-portraits.
Would that even include his killer?
Now that I’d seen a pyre of Jewish flame curling high above the steps of the Dominican Church, you’d think that one life—Uncle’s life—wouldn’t matter so much. Perhaps horror must be localized in a single soul, a diamond of pain.
As my thoughts reached a sudden impasse, I looked up to see dawn light beginning to filter through the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall. I took a sip of water from the jug on the storage cabinet, nodded good morning toward my mother who had just woken. Cinfa was lying asleep against her thigh. My mother’s hands were caressing her hair absently. Esther was sleeping on her chair, her head fallen to her right shoulder, her arms hanging limply. Farid, too, was still asleep. His forehead was burning. I wiped it with water, but he did not wake.
Lifting the prayer rug from the girl, I kneeled by her face and made some final adjustments to my drawing of her; the mouth which I had given her was too wide, too melodramatic.
A sketch of a person is a powerful thing; as I stared at it, her image took on the contours of a talisman bearing her unfulfilled hopes.
A few minutes later, while still engaged in correcting her lips, I heard Reza and her husband, Jose, calling to us from the courtyard. Mother sat up, and her mouth dropped open. Yet she did not get to her feet. It was as if she could not trust her ears. I ran to them. Cinfa followed.
Reza was opening the trap door when I reached the top of the stairs. I motioned for her to let me climb out. “I looked all over for you!” I said, hugging her. It was good to feel her compact, feminine solidity. And I needed the light and air.
Even so, Reza looked as if she’d been hunted. Her great gray eyes, normally so aristocratic—even distant, some said—were lit with burning anxiety. Jose hadn’t been to a barber in several days, looked ill, bloated with a kind of restrained terror. His eyes were rimmed by deep, dark circles and his thick red lips were badly chapped.
“You’re okay, Beri?” Reza asked hesitantly.
“Fine, fine. But where have you two been? I went to your house, but there was…”
“We tried to get here, but the way was blocked,” Jose said, taking my shoulders. “So we left the city for Sobral. Stayed there. Each time we tried to get back till now, the gates…” He shook his head. “We couldn’t risk it.”
Reza removed the toque from her head, asked in an urgent voice, “Is…is everyone here safe?”
“I can’t find Judah,” I replied. My heart throbbed against my chest as if to seek an escape as I added, “And your father, Reza…he’s left his body and returned to God.”
The toque dropped from her fingers. Her eyes opened wide to seek understanding. I moved to take her hands, but she pulled away. I whispered, “What once gave home to your father is lying in the cellar.”
Her face was suddenly white, her eyes glassy. She descended to him as if straining at a yoke.
Downstairs, my mother, Cinfa, Jose and I stood back as she kneeled to touch hesitant fingers over his form; if death is to be accepted, then it must be met alone for a time.
When she sagged like a child to the floor, I rested my hand atop her hair. I felt her silent tears enter me as if through a whisper. She turned for Esther. “How did it happen, Mother?”
My aunt wouldn’t respond, was still in hiding within herself.
“Do you know if King Manuel has retaken the city?” I asked Jose.
