The peculiar gentleness of this stranger whom I doubted leaves me hugging my sorrow like a lonely widower. When Isaac and Diego are gone, I put Farid to bed. My mother is asleep in Esther and Uncle’s bed, curled into a ball, breathing fitfully. From her hand has fallen a stoppered vial. I snatch it up from the curls of the blanket, caress a viscous drop onto my finger. Bitter comes the taste of extract of henbane and mandrake. To escape both herself and Lisbon’s gates for a time, mother has summoned a twilight sleep akin to trance. Maybe it is for the best.
In the cellar, I find Aunt Esther still sitting at Uncle’s desk like a statue, Cinfa shivering at her feet. I bring down a blanket from upstairs, cover the girl. Her eyes connote separation, fear. Yet she bends away irritably from my touch. In my room, sitting on my bed, I pray for Judah’s safe return before daring to head again into Little Jerusalem to try to wake Senhora Tamara. But before I can summon my legs to help me, chant entwines with sleep and drops like a woolen quilt across me.
I awake in bed. Blind to my borders. The blackness all around seems a hiding place for evil. A hard warmth pushes against my ribs. I jump up. It is Cinfa, her face veiled by hair.
As I regain my composure, she wakes. “Where are you going?” she moans.
“To call on Senhora Tamara.”
“You mustn’t go!”
I caress her cheek. “Nothing will happen. Don’t worry.”
She sits up, ducks her head under my shirt and breathes hot against me. It is a refuge she sought as a child. “I’ll be back sometime after dawn,” I say. “You remember when I used to take you to Senhora Tamara’s bookstore to read ‘The Fox Fables’ while I made my dawn deliveries?”
She nods against my chest.
“We shall do that again soon. Now while I’m gone, will you look in on Farid for me?”
She squirms her head into the air, alert to the task, just as I’d hoped. “And do what?” she questions.
“Feed him more boxwood tea when he wakes. It’s in mother’s blue pitcher. And an egg if he can eat. Wash your hands afterwards with soap.”
She nods thoughtfully, stands up atop the mattress. Towering over me, she shows me the knowing eyes of an adult, the weighted stance of our mother. Does the girl secretly hate me for helping to take away her childhood?
Outside, the dawn of Thursday is upon us. The sun’s chariot has already begun to lift into the sky. When it reaches the western horizon, it will beseech the seventh evening of Passover to gift mankind with its holy descent.
On my way to visit Senhora Tamara, I stop by the New Christian workshops on Goldsmiths’ Street to see if anyone has tried to sell our gold leaf or lapis lazuli. My knocks are answered by the newly widowed and childless who kiss me and press their hands into mine as if I may be able to entreat God to bring back their loved ones. But no one has been offered any lapis or gold of late. They gift me with promises of help when I slip from their arms back outside. Numb, wary lest I be tempted to feel too much, I shuffle into sunrise.
When I ring Senhora Tamara’s bell, she shouts,”
Senhora Tamara shows her toothless smile, unhinges the last chain and pulls me inside as if a kid dragging a parent toward treasure. Silver hair frames her wizened face. “Let me look at you!” she exclaims. She takes mouse steps backwards, squints up at me, her heavy eyelids wrinkling. The wisps of dark hair on her upper lip bristle as she makes a puffing noise and says, “You need to go to a barber and get some sleep!” Her turned cheek invites me to proffer a kiss.
“Did I wake you?” I ask.
“Me? You kidding?! An old lady never sleeps soundly.” She flaps her hand bitterly. “The curse of old age—all those memories clattering keep you distanced from sleep!”
“Where were you then? I came in the middle of the night. There was no answer.”
“Next door,” she replies. “Sleeping with a neighbor. These days, a Jew who still dares sleep alone is putting one foot in the grave!”
We talk of my family. She gasps at Uncle’s death. “Come,” she says, beckoning me to the desk by her hearth. “Sit on the stool.” She shows me a stern but faraway look, as if she is wondering how to reconcile his murder with God’s presence.
With quivering hands, she lifts away a Latin treatise on flowers which she must have been reading. She motions me to my seat, lights two candles sprouting from the cups of a seven-armed silver menorah. Manuscripts in varying states of decay line shelves up to the ceiling, form rickety towers on the floor. She pulls a chair next to mine, sits with her hands on her lap as if squeezing into herself the strength needed to fend off tears. She and the room both reek of vellum and the special dust which rare books dispel; the Senhora keeps her windows closed to forestall the decay of her Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian and European volumes. How I used to love the hermetic otherness of this store as a child, as if it housed my inheritance.
“He was just a child,” she says with a pressing force.
“Who?” I ask.
“The boy who came to sell your uncle’s Haggadah.”
“Did he speak with any accent?”
“No, he’s from Lisbon.”
“Dark skinned?”
She leans into me, her jaws grinding. The bright scent of cardamon alights around her; she is chewing seeds. “Fair skinned,” she says. “Tiny, thin. With wild hair. Like a thistle. Wait.” She darts about the room like a hen, picks out paper, a reed pen and an ink well. She puts them down in front of me. “Start drawing, Beri,” she says, and she stands like a Torah teacher over my shoulder as she commands my sketch: “…No, no, his nose was thinner, with nostrils like the sound slits in a cittern, very elegant you understand. And the lips were fuller, as if he were pouting. More curve…more shape…” She presses into the taut muscle between my neck and shoulder when I’ve captured a feature correctly and whispers,
“And his clothes?” I ask.
“Poor. A ragged little nincompoop. The kind of kid who hawks esparto grass by the quays. He said he was selling the Haggadah for his master. I handed him a fable to look at while I examined it. But the little beggar couldn’t even read.” She frowns as if illiteracy were a Christian sin too beastly to tolerate. She walks me to the door with her hand in mine, says, “I’m sorry. I should have bought it. But all of a sudden I was screaming like a parrot. You know how I get.” She motions for me to bend so that my face is at her level, speaks in a conspiratorial voice. “Berekiah, after all this… When do you think King Manuel will come to his senses and allow us Hebrew books again?”
“Never,” I say.
“Then I must start smuggling, too,” she concludes in a hushed voice.
“When I find out how my uncle did it, I’ll tell you.”
I scroll up my drawing and slip it into my pouch. We kiss goodbye. On the street, gazing over tawny rooftops into the distance, I wonder who would be bold or foolish enough to send an illiterate boy to sell a stolen Haggadah to Little Jerusalem’s most experienced bookseller. The whisper of my uncle’s voice rises with a swirl of dust from the cobbles, bearing the name Miguel Ribeiro, the aristocrat for whom Esther recently scripted a Book of Psalms.
When I ask, “Why him?,” there comes the reply: “Precisely because the acts of a Portuguese nobleman cannot be questioned by a Jew.”
Chapter XII
The Rua Nova d’El Rei is a hell to cross, already a sweating stink of peddlers and animals and spices. I
