“It’s safer not to tell my mother that…for now, at least.”
As Reza nods, I kiss her cheek. Caressing open the door to my mother’s room, I find Farid lying on his side under two heavy blankets, shivering. Aunt Esther sits on her stool by the foot of the bed, still staring at nothing, her hands folded in her lap. I kiss her cool forehead.
A rumpled and bloodstained sheet has been pulled from the bed, is tucked against the wall.
Farid’s eyes open, but he does not smile or acknowledge me in any way. I take a woolen blanket from my bed and cover him with yet another layer, kneel beside him, move to take his hand. He waves me away. “It could be plague,” he signals.
“Your gestures are stronger,” I lie. We lock fingers, and his eyes close again. I sit picturing map-contours of Portugal, Greece and Turkey as if shapes on a chessboard where my family and I serve as pawns.
When Farid’s shivering subsides and he falls asleep, I caress his hair for a time. Grabbing the stained sheet and balling it up beneath my arm, I tiptoe out and across my bedroom to hide his incontinence from my mother, fearing that she may demand that the family abandon him because of his worsening illness. Reza starts when she sees me, but her subsequent stare denotes solidarity. Behind an oleander bush to the side of our outhouse, I hide the sheet. Later, I will tell Brites that it is there and to be careful of the evil essences it has absorbed when washing it.
Lacking vinegar, I clean my hands with black soap and water, go to the cellar and write my list of suspects—beginning with the two remaining threshers—on a piece of vellum in micrographic letters forming Uncle’s name:
Father Carlos.
Diego Goncalves.
Rabbi Losa.
Miguel Ribeiro.
With my last stroke, I think:
I take my drawing of her, slip my hammer inside my pouch and walk to all the bakeries in the Alfama and Graca neighborhoods, sensing that she is the key, that if I can find her identity, I will also learn who it was who destroyed my future.
Now that calm has returned, my eyes see that Lisbon has become a city of staring Christian eyes, of garbage and dung, of splintered wood and bloody stone. None of a half-dozen bakers or their assistants whom I question knows the girl. I cut down past the cathedral and head into Little Jerusalem. Stores are closed, streets littered with refuse. Women sweep blood from their stoops. A burnt bed sits smoldering right in the middle of the Synagogue Square as if waiting for its owner. Simon Kol’s bakery behind the Riverside Palace is boarded up. I slip around the side, past a pile of rotten cabbages and onions being picked through by feral cats, one of whom has furry testicles swollen to the size of lemons. When I pound on Master Kol’s personal entrance, he peers down from a window. His unshaven cheeks and bewildered eyes are the symptoms of the illness we all share. “Pedro Zarco?” he asks. When I nod, he points to his courtyard. I wait at the gate. As he lets me in, he hugs and kisses me. His chest heaves like a bellows as he sobs.
He is dressed in the coarse linen of mourning. “Kiri?” I whisper, naming his only living child with the same, trespassing fear as I would a secret name of God.
“Yes,” he answers. We hold hands. “How’s your family?” he asks.
“Uncle Abraham is dead.”
Simon gasps. “How could he have…”
His words trail off because we both know that in this world even a
To my question about Judah, he shakes his head. “Many are missing,” he says. “And they will never be found. Swallowed by Leviathan. And mark my words,” he says in a prophetic voice, “the monster will only be sated when it has taken all of us. Wait and see!”
I hand him my drawing. “This girl…ever see her? I think she may work in a bakery.”
He squints. “Looks a little like Meda Forjaj when she was young,” he says. “Same sloping eyebrows that come together over the bridge of her nose. Like butterfly wings. But I don’t know her.”
“Who’s Meda Forjaj?”
“Fled Little Jerusalem about the time of the conversion. But she’d be about fifty by now. A widow. Couldn’t be her.”
“Where’d she move?”
“Out near Belem, I think.” Belem was the nearby town from which the Portuguese caravels left for Africa, India and the New World. “I think she was hoping to meet a rich explorer if you know what I mean,” Simon adds. He shrugs, gestures that he makes no judgment. “We do what we need to in order to survive.”
“A woman her age—she can’t earn a living just from that,” I say.
“Her husband imported woolens from Flanders. She helped out, kept the books. Maybe she takes in sewing like your mother.”
“Thanks.” We hug lightly, as if afraid to admit we may be parting forever. “You won’t open your bakery again, will you,” I observe.
Simon shakes his head. “I no longer want to feed this country,” he says. “A bleeder,” he whispers. “Its a much better profession for Portugal.”
The collective gaze of the Old Christians massed at St. Catherine’s Gate chills the hairs at the back of my neck, but this readiness of my body to break into flight is unnecessary; their eyes are calm, their breathing easy. Their fear of plague and drought and all the myriad demons who rule their knotted thoughts has been purged, at least for the moment.
I reach the outskirts of Belem in less than an hour. Here, hundreds of Africans and day laborers ruled by the whip are hard at work building a monumental new monastery for King Manuel that should take well into the next century to complete.
A ragpicker in soiled pants points me to a local bakery. A lean woman with an accusing, bitter face meets me at the door. “Can I help you, Senhor?” she asks in harsh, Castilian-edged Portuguese.
From her accent, I know that she is a Castilian New Christian, one of the thousands who fled here after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jews in fourteen ninety-two. In her fierce eyes, I see that she loathes being seen with a compatriot. I show her my drawing. “I’m looking for this girl.”
She turns her back to me and begins transferring buns from wooden pallets into sacks.
“Its important,” I add.
“If you’ve nothing to order, then leave.”
“She’s dead,” I say. “I’d like to tell her parents.”
She turns, and mistrust gives her a squint. “She’s Senhora Monteiro’s girl. Why do…”
“And Senhora Monteiro lives…?” I interrupt; I’ve no more patience for fear, even that which belongs to a Jew.
“Down the street, on the right. A house with yellow trim. But it might be better…”
“Tell me, does Senhora Monteiro have any relation to Meda Forjaj?”
“Her sister-in-law,” she replies. “How did you…?”
“Eyebrows like spreading butterfly wings. And the memory of an old Jew.”
Down the street, a dwarfish, fish-eyed woman with a scaly, leathery face glares up at me from her door as if I’ve interrupted a card game. She wears a ragged wig made from waxed, black-linen thread.
“Are you Senhora Monteiro?” I ask.
“Who wants to know?”
“My name would mean nothing to you.” I hand her my sketch. “Do you recognize this girl?”
“It’s Teresa. What are you doing with this?”
Her husband, a squat, rabbit-like man, appears at the back of the house. He is soiled with white powder, perhaps quicklime, and puffs rise from his bare fat feet as he strides toward us. Above his sleepy dark eyes sprout winged brows.
The woman says, “This man’s got a drawing of Teresa. Look.”
