The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

betrayal seem to be the binding glue that seals all our lives together.

“How long has she been like this?” I ask.

“Since last Friday,” Esther-Maria replies. “But at first it wasn’t so bad.”

“And was your father with her all day Sunday?”

“This is preposterous!” Losa bellows. “Asking my own…”

Esther-Maria raises her hand to quiet her father. “Yes,” she whispers. “All day and night.”

She stands, presses her fists into an ache in her lower back. I say, “I’m asking because my uncle, he was…”

She nods. “We’ve all heard. You don’t need to explain. Look, when the Old Christians came, we stayed here and hid. Father said we’d be spared, but how can killers be trusted? Until…was it Tuesday? I can’t seem to recall days very well.”

I turn to Rabbi Losa. “Then why didn’t you let me in when I came for you before? Or stop by my house? And just now in the micvah, when you…”

“Are you delirious?! You were kicking down my door. I had a sick child here. Everyone knows you wish to avenge your uncle. And now, if you… Wait…” Losa marches across the room, unhooks a tarnished mirror from the wall and carries it to me. “Look!” he demands. “Wouldn’t you run from this?”

In the faded silver, by the dim candlelight, a drawn and debased figure with lichenous stubble on his cheeks sprouts wild and filthy hair.

“You’re right,” I admit. “I’m quite a sight.” I take out from my pouch my drawing of the waif who tried to sell Uncle’s Haggadah. “Do either of you recognize this boy?”

Esther-Maria studies him as she leans into the aureole circling the candle flame. “No,” she says. She hands it to her father. He shakes his head.

To the rabbi, I say, “Then you never helped my uncle smuggling Hebrew books?” When he shakes his head, I add, “You must swear it on the Torah.”

As he swears, Rachel wheezes in her sleep like a torn bellows. “May I touch her?” I ask.

Losa nods. The pulse in her wrist races. Her forehead burns, but curiously, she does not sweat. “What other symptoms does she have?” I ask.

“She cannot eat,” Esther-Maria says. “And she bleeds from her bowels when she…” The girl leans toward me, and her expectant eyes show that my interest has unintentionally offered her hope.

“It’s either dysentery or the Spanish rash,” I say. “Spread by the foul air and muck.” Passages from Avicenna trail across the pages of my Torah memory. “Boxwood tea with vervain, and plenty of it,” I say. “She needs liquid to sweat out her tumors. And give her enemas of arsenic diluted with pomegranate juice and water. Not too much of the poison, though. A few drops at the most.” Losa peers at me over the tip of his flattened, owlish nose with a look that could make even a prophet itch. And yet, after all that’s happened, his pose strikes me as humorous rather than insolent. “Save your foolish looks for Sabbath services,” I tell him.

“No more such services,” he says sadly. “Never again.”

“Just as well,” I sneer.

“What would you know?!” he shouts. “What did you give up but your Jewish name?! Did you take a vow never to set foot in a synagogue again if the Lord would save our community? Did you give up what you held dearest? What would you know of sacrifice?! You were an eleven-year-old boy. Yes, I remember you clinging to your father. And you remember me racing to the baptism font. Did you ever ask why? Did your uncle? Can you understand that it was to prevent more of us from dying or killing our children. I’d made a pact with our Lord—save the Jews of Lisbon and I will convert. Was it wrong? Who can say? Can you?! Can your uncle?!”

Losa wipes spittle from his mouth with his sleeve, glares at me with years of rage burning red on his cheeks.

Esther-Maria comes to him. Caressing his shoulder, she whispers, “Calm yourself, Father.”

“My uncle is dead and cannot say anything,” I answer in a calm dry voice which belies my anger. “And if I were a more faithful kabbalist than I am, perhaps I wouldn’t judge you. Maybe you did betray us for a higher loyalty. Or maybe that’s what you’ve told yourself so you can go on living. Anyway, your motives don’t matter to me anymore. It’s your actions which counted so many years ago, that count now I am learning that for men like you and me, our acts are more important than our words, than all our secret pacts and whispered prayers. For Uncle, I think it was different. His chanting summoned angels into this world. For men of wonders like that…” My words fade; Rabbi Losa, bloated with fury, has turned away. Talk seems pointless. I brush Esther-Maria’s shoulder to fix her attention. “Keep Rachel washed with rosewater boiled with vervain and egg yolk. And for God’s sake, change these foul sheets. Or better still, burn them!” I hold my hand over her head and bless her.

“Will my sister die?” she asks.

“Only He can say,” her father intones. His pious look upward toward the Christian heaven is meant to remind me of the sacrifice he claims to have made.

“Probably she will,” I answer with the callous tone of a challenge; at this point, affirmations of the existence of a cloud-dwelling God guarding over us seem cruel and absurd. Yet for Esther-Maria, for myself, I add, “But if you do as I say, she has a chance.”

The girl nods her thanks. Rabbi Losa pulls in his chin as he’s always done in my presence and suffers my bow of goodbye with disdain. I amble home looking at the jagged constellations quilting the sky, knowing at long last that he, and all the self-righteous rabbis the world over, have lost their power over me. Forever. That, too, has been the journey this Passover.

Whenever you think you’ve recognized the true form of a verse from Torah, it has a way of shedding its clothes to reveal inner layers. So, too, the events of everyday life.

Diego, Father Carlos and Farid meet me in the kitchen with a letter from Solomon Eli, the mohel with whom we discovered the secret entrance from our home to the bathhouse. “Berekiah Zarco” is scribbled on coarse, badly made linen paper whose surface is pressed with an arc.

“While you were gone, we got some bad news,” Diego says. “Solomon the mohel was found hanging by his tallis from the rafters of his home. Suicide. Farid, Carlos and I went there. He left this note for you.”

“But he’d survived!” I shout. My words fall hollow between us. What, after all, is the endurance of the body compared to the decay of a grieving soul? “The note’s not sealed,” I observe. “And he wrote my given name, Berekiah. He never called me that. I was ‘Shaalat Chalom.’”

“It was the way it was handed to us,” Carlos shrugs.

“By whom?”

“His sister, Lena,” Diego answers. “Apparently, she found the body, and while going through his things, she found the note.”

Master Solomon’s words to me are written in a hurried, childlike script, framed inside a circular impression pressed into the paper:

“Does one’s training as a mohel make one callous to the pain of the flesh? I did it. That is proof of something. My body is slack. The New World will never feel my footsteps. Too many discoveries in this century. It is good for some things to remain hidden. I informed on New Christians. On Reza, too. I had to, really. The threat ofpinga is a burning  shadow, and the body is a terrible coward when clothed in darkness. A single drop of oil sends it racing toward screams that curl from the bowels like shedding snakes and… Master Abraham swore that he would have me judged at a Jewish Tribunal. That he would find a way to see me punished. We argued that Sunday morning. Fear. He must have smelled it on me. He said, ‘You carry a knife, and yet you are terrified.’ He smiled as if to welcome me to his home. ‘Your iron blade will anneal me to God and maybe even serve a higher purpose, but the girl is not yet ready. Solomon, leave her be and I will come to you like a bride.’ But a girl breathes Inquisitional fires as well as a man. To be like Adam…if only I could. I didn’t intend to take his life. Or that of the girl. I cannot ask your forgiveness or the forgiveness of Esther and Mira, but when I am gone, please say a kaddish for me so that I may leave the Lower Worlds. Will there be peace for such a man as I? A blessing for you, Solomon.”

“What’s it say?!” Diego demands as I read.

My lips are sealed together by the jagged confession and its flaws. The suicide explains the book he left for me as a gift. But why the sudden doubt of the profession he loved? Why no mention of his wife? Was there no