me. I strike out, but his callused hands grip my throat. My knife buries deep into the welcome of his shoulder. I am screaming for Farid. Fighting. But he is too strong. The vise of his grip tightens. My chest heaves. An exploding cough trapped in my throat wells tears in my eyes. And yet I see him clearly. As if a scarab trapped in amber: bulging eyes, reflective cheeks, a mouth grimacing with hate.
I learn that there is a moment when death is accepted as inevitable. My hands loosen from around his wrists. Neither anger nor fear possesses me. Only distance. As if I am standing behind myself and turning to walk away. As if Uncle is calling to me from across the Rua de Sao Pedro: “Berekiah, hearken unto me! I’m right here waiting…”
A cringing pain. Constriction like rope burning my throat. Spurts of salty liquid from the Fleming’s mouth. I have been tugged back to my body. My stinging eyes, my lips, are soaked with blood. His hands, like gates parting, drop away. Weight is pushed from me. Farid’s face descends. He grips me with one hand; the other gestures my name.
Gulping for air, I spot Farid’s dagger buried at the back of the Fleming’s neck. “I’m okay,” I signal.
“I killed him,” he gestures. This time, there is no hesitation in Farid’s hand: fingers thrust out, fisted, then twisted palm-down as if to snap a branch from its mother limb.
Farid digs our knives from the assassin’s flesh, wipes them against his pants. Except to express my thanks, we do not gesture; what is there to say? We trudge on to the mills instead. A man lies face-up on the pathway, by the base of the nearest one, blank fish-eyes fixed on the quarter moon high in the sky. His neck is still warm with eclipsed life. When I squat to look more closely, a face I know forms: that of the bodyguard Diego brought to my house.
I whisper a prayer that Diego, too, hasn’t been summoned to God.
“Do you hear anything?” Farid signals. “I sense movement close by.”
“No.”
Suddenly, out steps Diego from behind the mill wheel. He wears a thick, fur-lined cape which descends to his ankles. Even in the pale light, I can see his face is beaded with sweat.
“You’re safe,” I say. “Why didn’t you…”
“Berekiah, they’re…they’re trying to kill everyone in the threshing group!” he moans. “All of us. There’s no safety anywhere. We…we must…”
“Calm down. We killed the Northerner back along the pathway.”
Diego grabs my shoulders. “That won’t end it. They got your uncle and Samson and Simon—and now they tried for me! Don’t you see, the whole threshing group… All of us!”
I place my hands against his chest. “Don’t worry. We know their identities now. It’s Dona Meneses. She and the Count of Almira are behind all this. They must think that the members of the threshing group know their identities and can compromise them to the Royal authorities.”
“Dona Meneses?! It’s impossible! She would never…”
“She was smuggling books with Uncle,” I say.
“But she’s a noblewoman!”
“So much the better for getting Hebrew manuscripts safely out of Portugal, don’t you think?”
Diego stares off into the night as if his response may lie somewhere along the dark horizon. Turning back to me, he says, “I don’t know. I just never thought…” He stares at his dead bodyguard. “Fernando wounded the Northerner in the leg, but the blond bastard was too skillful with his knife. Oh God! I mustn’t go back to Lisbon.”
“So you intend to wait here the rest of your life?”
“I won’t let them get me! When they drip the boiling oil on you, it’s as if your skin is being peeled open with a rusty blade. You pray that your life will end. You’ll do anything. I won’t let it happen again. Ever. You hear me! Never again!”
I suddenly recall the thick line of scar across his chest which I saw when he collapsed on the street. “They gave you the
He replies, “In Seville there was a specialist who could draw pictures across your body with burning oil and ash he rubbed in the scars. Onto the chest of a girl of nineteen whose crime was to use clean sheets on Friday, he dripped an entire Passion scene. She simply would not die. Her breasts became the hills of Jerusalem, her navel the heart of Christ. It was too much to…”
“Diego, listen. They could just as easily send someone after you. Wherever you go. You’ll be safer in town. With people you know.”
“Not my house,” he intones with dread. The wind tousles his silver hair, and I realize he no longer wears his turban; we are becoming less obviously Jewish by the day. “They know to look there. And when they realize that the assassin sent to kill me is dead, they’ll send someone else.”
“I meant that you’ll stay with us,” I say.
Diego gazes down, considering. I can see that he has already agreed. So I ask, “Why did you want me out here in the first place?”
“Berekiah, I remembered something important…that Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman for whom Esther scripted a book of Psalms, had an argument with your uncle a week ago.” He takes my hand, continues in a whisper, “Your master mentioned it in passing in our threshing group. I made some inquiries, learned that Dom Miguel was staying in a stables not far from here. On the outskirts of Benfica. I intended my bodyguard to go with you. To surprise him at night. But now, I’m not…” His words fade as he looks around.
“Diego, I know all about the argument. Miguel and Uncle fought over his refusal to accept his true past, his Judaism. I was told about it by…”
“Not that! It was the book…the Book of Psalms Esther wrote for him. He didn’t want to pay the price they’d agreed upon. Apparently, he threatened to tell the authorities that your aunt and uncle were concealing Hebrew manuscripts if they didn’t gift him with it. Now I think that maybe he was involved with Dona Meneses. There must be a connection there somewhere.”
“No, no. Uncle sent him a note asking him to become a smuggler,” I say.
Farid has had trouble reading Diego’s lips in the dark. When I translate into signs, he gestures back, “But Miguel Ribeiro is rich. He could afford to pay for Esther’s work. And he spared your life when you went to see him. He could’ve killed you with impunity.”
“What’s he telling you?!” Diego demands.
“That it makes no sense.”
The thresher laughs in a single ironic exhale and grips my hand tightly. “Has anything over the past week made any sense? Let me tell you something, my boy. The Lower Realms aren’t ruled by any logic which you’re likely to find scripted in the kabbalah.”
Diego steps across the Northerner’s body. He spits on his head and kicks it. Then on he trudges, sweating like a beast of burden. In his erudite voice, he soliloquizes about leaving for Rhodes and Constantinople on a boat scheduled to depart from Faro in one week. He will begin his journey south from Lisbon tomorrow evening. “And Constantinople is such a lovely town,” he says. “Not like Lisbon at all. It even rains. Big beautiful drops. Like pearls. Good for kabbalists, too. It’s where Asia meets Europe, where two become one like your uncle used to say. Remember when he…”
The dust and night and Diego’s rambling voice intertwine like rope around my thoughts. Vultures spiral overhead, trail us back to Lisbon. When we pause inside the city’s gates at the
Perhaps so. But what defines his inner being? Is he the Wandering Jew in person, a terrified being somehow less than human, ready for the next migration to yet another hostile land? Is that what we’ve all become, characters defined by Christian mythology?
As we reach my house, little Didi Molcho comes running to us from our gate. He shouts, “I’ve found him, Beri! I’ve found him!”
“Who?”
“Rabbi Losa!”
