The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

“Not yet. They say that he is afraid to return. The people are now clamoring for his death.”

Reza prayed over Uncle. When she turned away, Esther rose like a ghost, glided to his body and covered his face again with the prayer rug. She sat back down and returned to stone.

A wall crumbled inside the little girl with no thumbnail when Reza picked her up. She wailed as if her insides were being torn.

“You know her?” I questioned.

“Aviboa. The daughter of my neighbor, Graca. Is she…?”

I shrugged. “The girl was the only one there.”

It was a sin, I know, but as I replied I was thinking: Why could I not have found Judah instead?

BOOK TWO

Chapter IX

It is near noon on Wednesday—seven hours from the sacred descent of the sixth evening of Passover—and I have done all the drawings I will need.

Reza has assured us that the city has quieted, and so she, Jose, Cinfa, Aviboa, Mother and I creep upstairs in a line, unsure of our footing, as if returning from a long sojourn abroad. To cool Farid, I walk him to my mother’s room and wash his face with brandy. I hold a compress to his forehead. His eyes cannot resist closing, but he remains awake; fingertips cross my arm over and over again asking for Samir.

Esther has remained below to commune alone with the gloom of the cellar.

We are preparing my master and the girl for burial. We chant our prayers as we wash. Seven times I clean Uncle’s face with cold water, three with warm. And as it is written, we cleanse first his stomach, then his shoulders, arms, neck, genitals, toes, fingers, eyes and nostrils.

A warm tide of sadness and joy sweeps over me as I hold the marble hands of Uncle’s old armor; he has escaped to God. Then I am alone again with a murdered man. Insight comes in flashes, says the Zohar. And so it is.

The slit which splits his neck has turned black. The blood has clotted to a ceramic crust.

Four times I wash his fingers, and yet they are still dyed with ink. Just as it should be for an artist meeting God.

Aunt Esther takes a scissors to her hair and places her hennaed locks upon his chest.

Which Hebrew poet was it who said that a widow’s clipped hair consists of tears of blood drawn into filaments?

When my master is dressed in his white robes, Mother sprinkles the symbolic dust of Jerusalem over his eyes and private parts.

I hold Cinfa’s hand as she says goodbye. “We’ll never see him again,” she nods to me. Her weary, bloodshot eyes are wide open and curious, not sad or frightened.

“Not like this,” I agree. “When you next see Uncle, it will be when he holds out his hands to you and welcomes you to God.”

My confident words belie a stiff terror which forces my eyelids closed; I have forgotten the feel of my master’s embrace.

We lay him upon his prayer shawl, then cover him with the linen shroud Reza and Mother have sewn.

When his face disappears from me for the last time, my eyes close to capture him in their darkness. He is only a violet shadow now; I cannot summon his glow. Will he fade until I can no longer even summon his voice?

We wash the girl with no less care. Reza helps now; she has sent Aviboa to play with Roseta in the courtyard.

Brites, our laundress, appears suddenly at the kitchen door. Gifted with an optimistic nature, she generally has a bright sweet face. Today, however, she is glum and hoarse-voiced. In her cart is our last load of laundry, cleaned and pressed. She has brought us a salted hide of codfish the length of a man’s arm.

We kiss, and there is no need to talk. The silence of our solidarity sits in my chest like a heavy stone. “I called for you in the night,” she finally whispers.

“We couldn’t answer. But thank you.” My lips press to her cheek again, then I leave her and mother to mingle their tears together.

There are no coffins to be bought in our neighborhood, no New Christian carpenters left alive to work. And I refuse to pay an Old Christian for this. So we carry Uncle and the girl in their shrouds into the cart I’ve borrowed from Dr. Montesinhos’ widow. The donkey belongs to Brites; she insisted on the loan. When I protested, she whispered, “Please, Beri, you could be my child.”

The urge to draw away from the present tense into a happier past tugs hard at me. I must fight it to perform my religious duties. And more importantly, to find Uncle’s killer.

Esther sits in the cart atop a wooden stool, her lands folded in her lap, her hair chopped at hopeless angles. Mother, Reza and I walk beside the donkey. We leave Lisbon to the east. Christian eyes without questions watch us as we depart; everyone knows our mission. Cinfa remains at home with Jose, Reza’s husband.

Many Jews have made their way to the Quinta das Amendoas—the Almond Farm, as we call the large property centered by a haunting tower of weathered limestone about two miles east of the city. Aaron Poejo, the owner, was a mountain Jew from Braganca who moved here because his Algarvian bride was shivering to death in that frigid north-eastern climate. To remind him of home, they brought along almond and chestnut saplings and rooted them here. The original cottage, now no more than waist-high rows of cragged stone, was abandoned in favor of an octagonal storage tower following one of Poejo’s visions. Apparently, he saw long- haired blond seafarers in iron masks sacking Lisbon and setting fire to all of its Jewish quarters. The crude structure was redesigned with a third floor belfry to be used as a lookout sight; from there, as Farid and I discovered one day on a mission of childhood espionage, one can see the Tagus and its own granite lookout towers, get an advance warning of attack. The irony, of course, is that years later, during the conversion, Poejo’s wife was stoned to death by dark and squat neighbors whom they’d known for years. In any case, as the story goes, Poejo and his two daughters tried in vain to knock down their tower-home the night his wife was killed. In the morning, exhausted, desperate, they hollowed a great chestnut trunk, hauled the woman up and buried her inside. Although the trunk has filled in over the years, that tree, directly south of the tower, grows with mottled and denuded branches even today, as if poisoned by remorse. It is said, too, to give off a rotten stench on Yom Kippur. Hence the farm’s local notoriety as a place of arcane power fitting for those martyred for Judaism.

As for Poejo, after his wife’s burial, he and his daughters collected cuttings once again, continued south right across the Algarve, survived the sea crossing and settled in Morocco near Tetuan. In consequence, the almond trees of the Quinta das Amendoas, like so many in Portugal, have long gone untended. Yet today, as we pass, we can see that their green fruit have defied neglect, have sprouted like musical notes in the scruffy, overgrown branches.

From Little Jerusalem and the Judiaria Pequena, even the small Jewish street on the other side of town near the Carmelite Church, we drag our dead. A few have donkey carts like us. Most have folded their loved ones into wooden wheelbarrows.

Our elders direct us to the fields that have not been used in the past for graves. I nod my solidarity to all who pass but do not talk except to ask after Judah and the two living threshers—Father Carlos and Diego Goncalves. No one has seen them.

I dig two pits with the help of three Moorish laborers who’ve come to earn extra money. They have silent