The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

I tell Manuel, “She would have died before Solomon arrived—back on Sunday. And somehow, she must have gotten from here to my…”

“What girl?!” the mohel demands. “Is it Cinfa? Is she…?”

“No, she’s fine.” I take Solomon’s hands, explain about Uncle and the purpose of our search. “So have you seen anything, anything at all—jewelry, clothing, food…?” I ask.

“Come with me,” he says in a grave voice.

The surgeon leads us past the men’s ritual pool to the dressing alcoves for women that are tiled with six- pointed shields of King David. He walks with the careful, childlike movements of a man who has been fasting for days. Even so, the echo of his footsteps in these caverns pounds like drumming. He takes us to the small dressing room in which he’s been sleeping. Manuel discards a towel that has served as Solomon’s blanket. He lifts up a linen tunic that has been scrunched into a pillow and lets it dangle freely.

“Teresa’s?” I ask.

A veil of shadow closes over Manuel’s face as he lowers his lamp. He kneels. Dark sobbing quivers across the icy sheets of tile.

“She was nude when we found her,” I whisper to Solomon. “I don’t think she would run out on the street that way if she could have helped it. So how do you…”

Manuel suddenly marches out the door and down the hallway toward the central court. I call his name in vain and follow. My echo vibrates around us like a voice disclosing secrets.

Heading east, he races down a ramp into a meditation room, then descends past long-abandoned baths and dank-smelling grottoes. Finally, we reach the room which serves as Master David’s office. Inside, we find his two turreted bookcases overturned, the bathhouse records scattered across the floor. At the far corner of the room, an oil lamp sits on its side. While Manuel inspects it, Solomon slumps to the stone floor. His chest heaves in the damp and heavy air. “My legs are tired,” he shrugs.

“We’ll get you food as soon as we leave,” I assure him.

He holds up his hand to indicate that there is no rush.

“What was this all about?” I ask Manuel.

“Trying to see which way my wife would descend when the Christians came.”

Solomon gazes around, sniffs at the air like a rabbit, leans toward the ground, then stands and raises himself up on his tiptoes like a deer straining to feed from a topmost branch. “Something foul in the air,” he grumbles. He sticks out his tongue. “Like manure.”

He’s right; there is a fiber of evil trailing through the air.

“A dead squirrel or rat,” Manuel says. “Drowned probably.”

A key of understanding turns inside me and I reply, “No, it’s no dead animal. I understand now. I’ll show you what it is back in our cellar.”

Manuel, Solomon and I descend the stairs underneath our secret trap door. The mohel huddles under the blanket I’ve given him, reaches his hand along the wall to keep from stumbling. He’s never been in our cellar before, and he asks in a curious voice, “So how long has all this been here, my boy?”

“For as long as anyone remembers,” I answer.

The prayer mat and myrtle bushes gift Solomon with the knowledge that the room has become our clandestine synagogue, and he chants, “Blessed be He who saves His temple from idolaters.”

Aunt Esther is seated at Uncle’s desk at the far end of the room, staring straight ahead into the Bleeding Mirror. She wears no headscarf, and her raggedly cut hennaed hair gives her a frightening appearance.

“Etti,” Solomon calls to her, since he loves to call everyone by their pet name.

She neither replies nor stirs. Solomon puffs out his lips, looks at me questioningly. I say, “She will not reply for now. We must give her time.”

The mohel nods, then sniffs at the air. “It’s this cellar that’s causing the smell,” he says. “This place stinks as if…” His words end with a gasp when he thinks of the shell of putrefying body left behind by Uncle.

I step straight to the leather tapestries from Cordoba hanging on the western wall of the cellar, just behind Esther. Scrolling one up, I lift it off its hooks and lay it on the slate floor, then do the same with the other. Manuel lights our two silver candelabrums from his oil lamp. Pressing my fingertips against the wall just under the strange bloodstains which end abruptly at a line of tile, I say, “If Samir or Uncle were here, we could save some time. Even one of the threshers.”

“What are you looking for?” Manuel asks.

“You’ll see,” I say. “I’ve just found out how a man—or even several men—can disappear from this room. And how a smell can be carried across space.”

I begin tapping my fist against each tile in a horizontal row just at the height of my head, from the south end of the room by our sunken bathtubs to the north, by Esther.

Solomon whispers to Manuel, “Poor boy, Master Abraham’s death has him thinking from left to right.” It’s local Jewish slang for the notion that I’ve lost all sense.

“I assure you that no gnat has flown in my ear,” I reply, making reference to how King Nimrod lost his mind. “I used to wonder about my uncle appearing out of nowhere all the time. Father Carlos even suggested at times that he was a spirit jester. But now I know how he did it. And why I was never allowed to enter the cellar without his permission.” I continue tapping, and when I don’t find the sound I want, move to the row below. At the fourth row down, one which crosses the wall at the height of my neck, I find what I want—the hollow reply of a tile with only a thin backing of wall.

Cinfa bounds downstairs suddenly, halts on the bottom step, watches me with wary eyes.

Twenty or so more taps, and I have found the outline of tiles which have a meager backing. If I am right, there should be one tile near the right or left border which jiggles when pressed. A few moments later, I have found it. Prying it free, breaking a thumbnail in the process, I toss the tile to Cinfa. Below, there is a circular iron handle on which is crudely etched the Hebrew word, rechizah, bathe. After a deep breath and a prayer for success, I grab it and give it a yank.

When I pull, a break in the wall becomes the edge of a door revolving around a central fulcrum. A room of purest darkness confronts us. Solomon joins me, squats down on his haunches like a Moslem holy man and peers inside with a curious expression. I turn to Manuel. “Give me the oil lamp—I’m going inside.”

“Where’s it lead?” he asks.

“We shall see. But for now, just give me the lamp.”

He hands it to me. We can see ahead into a stone corridor. “I’ll follow you,” he says.

Solomon pats me on the shoulder. “I’ll stay here. And you, Cinfa,” he nods up at my sister, “why don’t you fetch me some matzah and water? A glass of kosher wine, too! And the softest, sweetest pillow you can find!”

We slip behind Manuel’s lamp into the darkness as Cinfa dashes upstairs. The dank hallway ahead smells of cold stone and solitude. It narrows as the ceiling lowers until we are tucked into a crawlspace. We make our way like moles. After about twenty feet, when our limits flow outward and upward, we stand. A limestone door sprouts a rusted iron handle, also circular and also etched with the word, rechizah. Manuel tugs it open around its fulcrum. A humid wind rises against us. I lift our lamp. Blue and green tiles shimmer back at us. Countless papers are scattered across the floor. We are in the chazan’s office in the bathhouse.

After Manuel and Solomon have headed for their respective homes, I go to my mother, armed now with the assurance that the killer was no sorcerer but simply a clever thresher. She is in our store, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees by the light of a slender candle. I tell her what we’ve found. “Did you know about the secret exit?” I ask.

She puts down her brush and kneels. “Before you were born,” she begins, “when the New Christians of this city were Jews, and your father was trying to establish…”

I close my eyes because it seems she is opening the title page to another endless story about my father and his struggles to develop a profitable business. She senses my irritation, snaps, “Our cellar was part of the micvah! It’s where our granite tubs came from.”

“How come you never told me?”

She turns away as if burdened with my presence. Her jaw muscles throb in anger. “You think that you have