The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

a right to know everything? Life doesn’t work like that, no matter what my brother may have told you.”

I stare at her with contempt even as I know she’s right.

“Maybe he thought you knew and that he didn’t have to discuss it,” she adds in a conciliatory tone, picking up her brush. “Anyway, it wasn’t important.” The little wave of dismissal she gives me connotes exhaustion. She looks down suddenly, frowns; a pimply brown toad has hopped out from a hiding place. “What do you suppose he wants?” she asks.

“Food…a fly. To survive. Just leave him be.”

“Leave him be? An unclean thing like this? One of the ten plagues of Passover?! Sent by God to punish the Egyptians who held us as slaves. In my house?!”

Mother seems to be ricocheting between somnambulism and a kind of vibrant lunacy. As she grabs her broom, I try to bring her back to more important matters and say, “I always thought he must have hid in the genizah with the books. How he loved their touch and smell!”

“Who?” she asks, and she furrows her eyebrows like I’m crazy.

I suddenly feel as if I could slap her. She lifts aside one of the unhinged doors to the store and sweeps the poor toad flying onto Temple Street.

“Can’t you please…” I begin. But there is no point. Her very presence seems to sap my energy. She stares dreamily into the sky. The dazed toad wobbles upright. Roseta drops from out of nowhere, creeps stealthily forward, claws poised. “No you don’t!” I say. I jump outside and sweep the toad into my hand, drop it into my pouch. I await Mother’s protests against filth. But silver clouds rolling in from the west have transfixed her; night, like everything else, has reminded her of Judah.

I drop the toad in the fields upriver, wash my hands, nibble a matzah, then head back to our house to check on Farid. A sliver of crescent moon has risen over the horizon, and a story forms as I watch its halo: Manuel’s wife is bathing in the micvah, hears the shrieks of New Christians being butchered on the street above. Racing through the maze of pools and alcoves, she reaches a cold wall of stars inside the chazan’s office. Are the connecting doors open? Is my uncle, too, in the bathhouse, cleansing for prayer? Or does she scream as the torchlit Christians descend? Perhaps Uncle hears her, opens the secret door, crawls into the bathhouse and pulls her to safety.

Together, my master and the girl wait in our cellar for an end to Lisbon’s madness. But the killers—a thresher and a blackmailer—come first. After they summon death to our home, they slip through the secret entrance to the bathhouse. One of them caresses the door closed, leaves the streak of blood from his fingertips behind, creeps through the tunnel to safety.

Farid is seated in the kitchen when I come inside. His face is etched with pale struggle. I know I should rush to him, but my own strength is eclipsed by despair. “Should you be up?” I signal from the doorway.

My friend nods, indicates with heavy gestures, “I found my house empty. You have not heard from my father, have you?” His arms dangle white, as if angels are already dressing him for…

“No. I’ve asked around. No one’s seen him. In the early morning I’ll go looking for him. Things have quieted enough so that…”

“A note came for you,” he signals, holding up a scroll. “Actually, for your uncle.”

I rip open the seal. It’s from Senhora Tamara, a used book seller in Little Jerusalem with whom we had frequent dealings. It reads:

“Master Abraham, a young boy tried to sell me what appears to have been a storybook from Egypt recently uncovered by you. Was it stolen in the riot? I’msorry. Perhaps I should have bought it, but I wasn’t thinking straight and chased him out of my store with some hysterical screaming. But I believe I can describe him—the boy who came. Perhaps someone will know him and we can get it back.”

I feel as if I have hooked a great fish for Sabbath: the storybook from Egyptis code for Uncle’s missing Haggadah! I have been informed that the killer has made a careless move. And now that I know how he escaped… It seems that a balance in the Upper Realms is now being weighted in my favor.

And yet, even before my discoveries have had their chance to fill my lungs with the fresh air of hope, Farid enchains me once again to despair; after I read him Senhora Tamara’s note with my hands, he signals, “Another obstacle presents itself before us. I crept down to the cellar to try to find you when the note came and saw the secret door in the wall. I know what you think. But the killer didn’t leave that way.”

“What?!”

“Go there. Look for blood. You will see that there are stains before the passageway narrows. As if the killer were feeling his way along the walls. But all such marks end before one is forced to crawl. The killer did not pass through. He turned back for the cellar.”

I take a deep breath. “Are you sure?”

“At sunrise, you can better verify what I say. Now, by the light of a lamp, your eyes may not be able to tell you what I have seen. But it is the truth. There is no mistake.”

It occurs to me again that it is no accident that God has given me Farid; He knows that I will need the help of so talented a self-portrait of God. I signal, “But knowing that he could escape through the door, why would the killer turn back for the cellar?”

“Maybe he heard someone in the bathhouse…more Christians. Or perhaps, yes… perhaps he was too large or awkward to fit through the passageway. In all probability, he had never been that way before. He may have assumed he could fit. But then he discovered…”

Farid’s hands fall to his sides. He signals weakly that his diarrhea is worsening. Ashamed of my own good health, I lead him to the outhouse. The night air hits us, dry and chill. His face contorts in pain as I wash his raw behind. Fighting dread, I think: not only do I not know how the killer escaped, but now I must battle once again for the life of another. Looking inside myself into Farid’s future, I see the Angel of Death, a shadow of a thousand gaping eyes, standing at my friend’s deathbed. Skeletal hands clutch a sword with a bitter drop suspended at the pointed tip. As Farid sees this hideous being before him, he opens his mouth in terror, sculpts a deaf man’s clucking scream. Quickly, the Angel of Death flings his foul-tasting offering inside.

And from this drop, Farid dies and discolors and putrefies.

There will be no escape.

My friend’s rag-doll body leans on me as we shuffle back inside. “Farid, then where in God’s name did the killer hide when I burst in? The door was locked. There was no one in the cellar. I swear, no one!”

As he gestures a poetic phrase about the will of Allah, I grab an oil lamp hanging from the central beam and head downstairs. Just as he said, drippings of blood and footprints stain the floor and walls of the tunnel, and there are finger-shadows in groups of five where the killer has felt his way forward. As it becomes necessary to crawl, matted bloodstains revealing a woven imprint of fabric are reflected back to me, must have been made by knees pressed to stonework. At the tightest spot, a slashing stain seems to indicate that a hand had reached desperately ahead. When the tunnel begins to open outward, when I can stand again, there is nothing. No bloody footsteps or finger-shadows.

The killer turned back. Or disappeared.

Chapter XI

Farid places his hand against the wall to secure his fragile steps down the cellar stairs. He comes to me, squats down on his haunches to fight the pain carving through his gut, signals, “Now that you know the killer didn’t leave through the secret door, tell me the sequence of your movements after you discovered Uncle… everything.”

It is the magic of words gestured to a friend which gifts me with insight; after I’ve recounted all, the solution comes to me freely. It seems as if it were in me all along, hiding, curled like a sleeping cat in an unseen corner: “The genizah!”

Farid nods as if reading a verse of wisdom. With his hands, he says, “The killer must have hid there as you called through the door for your family. When you burst in, he was lying with the books, hugging the darkness.