Mr. Mani

The Conversation Partners

AVRAHAM MANI forty-nine years old, born in 1799 in Salonika, then part of Turkey, to his father Yosef Mani.

Avraham’s grandfather, Eliyahu Mani, was a supplier of fodder to the horses of the Turkish Janissaries and followed behind the Turkish army with five large wagons that housed his large family, which included two wives and two young rabbis who tutored his sons. A shrewd merchant, he sensed immediately upon hearing of the outbreak of the French Revolution that Europe was in for a period of upheavals in which his services as a cavalry supplier would be in great demand. With this in mind, he began to move his activities westward. In 1793, as news reached him of the execution of Louis XVI, Eliyahu Mani crossed the Bosporus and proceeded as far as Salonika, where he found a flourishing Jewish community. And indeed, his gamble paid off and the political and military instability of the times proved a boon for his business. He was able to marry off his children to wealthy and prominent families, and these ties in turn enabled him to expand his affairs even more.

Eliyahu Mani dearly loved his eldest grandson Avraham, who was born at the very end of the eighteenth century. He did not, however, have many years of pleasure from the boy, because soon after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, he himself passed away. His concern was taken over by his son Yosef, who was born in 1776 in the Persian town of Ushniyya near Lake Shahi, then part of the Ottoman Empire too. Despite the many reversals suffered by the empire during the first decade of the nineteenth century, Yosef ran the business enterprisingly and did especially well during Napoleon’s campaigns in Eastern Europe. At the same time, he did not neglect his children’s education and sent his eldest son Avraham to study in Constantinople with one of the most profound and original rabbinical minds of the times, Shabbetai Hananiah Haddaya. Avraham Mani developed a great liking for this rabbi, who was wifeless and childless despite his over fifty years. Rabbi Haddaya, for his part, was fond of Avraham and decided to sponsor him for rabbinical ordination even though he was not a particularly keen student.

In 1815, however, Yosef Mani’s business suddenly collapsed in the wake of both the Congress of Vienna peace agreements and the first signs of Greek war of independence against the Turks, which endangered transport and commercial shipments. In 1819 his son Avraham was summoned back to Salonika to help his father, who had lost everything and was reduced to eking out a living from a small spice shop in the port. Before long the brokenhearted man died, leaving the shop in Avraham’s possession.

His forced separation from his rabbi weighed on Avraham greatly. Even though the war with the Greeks made travel perilous, whenever he was able to free himself of his business obligations he would take a week or two off and cross the Bosporus to visit Rabbi Haddaya. Although Avraham never received his ordination, the rabbi presented him with a certificate authorizing him to serve on a nonpaying basis as the spiritual leader of a small synagogue in the port that was frequented mainly by Jewish stevedores and sailors.

Despite his mother’s urging him to marry, Avraham did not take a wife until 1825, when he wed the daughter of a petty merchant named Alfasi. The couple had a son and daughter: Yosef, born in 1826, and Tamar, born in 1829. In 1832 Avraham Mani’s wife died of an unknown illness that was apparently transmitted by a sailor whom the Manis had put up in their home.

As Avraham’s business began to prosper, he was able to travel to Constantinople more often. However, he did not always find his old teacher there, because Rabbi Haddaya, who had traveled widely as a young man, was again smitten by wanderlust and was often away on some journey. Generally, his trips took him south and east, and he once even spent a few months in Jerusalem. There he met a woman who several months later came to Salonika and became, to everyone’s surprise, the wife of his old age.

After his son Yosefs bar-mitzvah, which took place in 1839, Avraham, who was still a widower with two children, decided to bring the boy to Rabbi Haddaya’s school in Constantinople just as his father had brought him. In doing so, he wished both to obtain vicariously the ordination denied to himself and to strengthen his ties with his old rabbi, for whom his admiration had only grown with the years. Before setting out with Yosef, he even taught himself a few words of French, the mother tongue of the rabbi’s wife, in order to help create a bond with her.

Rabbi Haddaya’s wife, Flora Molkho, took a great liking to Yosef, a vivacious and imaginative youngster who was more intellectually gifted than his father. Having no children of her own, she treated him as her own son and made him her closest companion, since her husband was often away on his travels to the various Jewish communities that invited him to arbitrate legal disputes too knotty for others to unravel.

And so, even though young Yosef did not study with Rabbi Haddaya himself but rather in a school where his education was so laxly supervised that he spent much of the time roaming the streets of Constantinople, all were in favor of his remaining at the rabbi’s house: his father because of the connection this gave him with his revered teacher; the rabbi’s wife because the boy helped occupy her solitude; and the rabbi himself because he regarded the youth highly, even if the reason for this was none too clear to him.

Early in 1844 the news reached Dona Flora that her younger sister’s daughter, Tamara Valero, whom she had not seen since Tamara was little, was planning to travel to Beirut with her stepmother Veducha in order to attend the wedding of Veducha’s brother, Tamara’s step-uncle Meir Halfon. Dona Flora asked and received her husband’s permission to travel to Beirut and meet her niece there — and since he himself was unable to accompany her, it was decided that Yosef Mani, who was by now already a young man, should go with her. Avraham Mani raised no objections, and Yosef and Doña Flora sailed to Beirut. They remained there longer than expected and returned with the announcement that — subject of course to the consent of the two fathers and Rabbi Haddaya — Yosef and Tamara were betrothed.

And indeed, when Tamara returned to Jerusalem, her father gave his approval. But although it was agreed that she would come to Constantinople for the wedding, which was to be presided over by her renowned uncle, the revered Rabbi Haddaya, she failed to arrive — and in the end, unable to restrain himself, Yosef set out by himself for Jerusalem in the winter of 1846 with the intention of bringing his bride back with him. Instead, however, as the families in Constantinople and Salonika later found out, the two were married in a modest ceremony in Jerusalem, where Yosef Mani found work in the British consulate that had opened there in 1838.

Avraham Mani and Flora Haddaya were both greatly disappointed, since they had looked forward to a grand wedding in the rabbi’s home in Constantinople and to the young couple’s being close to them. Apparently, however, young Mani felt sufficiently drawn to Jerusalem to wish to remain there. In any event, since the mails between Jerusalem and Constantinople were highly irregular and a long while went by without any word from the newlyweds, Avraham Mani decided to travel to Jerusalem in the hope of persuading them to settle in Salonika, or at least, in Constantinople.

Avraham entrusted his shop to his son-in-law, took with him several bags of his favorite rare spices in the hope of finding a market for them in Jerusalem, and sailed for Palestine, arriving there in the late summer of 1847. Although he had expected to be back within a few months, he remained there for over a year, during which nearly all contact with him was lost. Meanwhile, a mysterious rumor that reached Constantinople in December 1847 told of Yosef Mani’s being killed in a brawl. And indeed, in February 1848, a rabbi from Jerusalem who arrived in Constantinople on a fund-raising mission confirmed this story, to which he added that Avraham Mani had remained in Jerusalem with his son’s wife Tamara in order to be present at the birth of the child she was expecting.

Throughout the first half of 1848, the elderly Rabbi Haddaya and his wife Flora were greatly upset at being out of touch with Jerusalem, especially since they did, not even know when the birth was supposed to take place. The infrequent greetings or bits of news that arrived from Avraham Mani were vaguely worded and confused. And then, unexpectedly, on the first night of Hanukkah, Avraham Mani arrived at the inn in Athens where Rabbi Haddaya had been lying ill for several weeks.

FLORA MOLKHO-HADDAYA was born in Jerusalem in 1800 to her father Ya’akov Molkho, who had moved there several years previously from Egypt. In 1819 her younger and only sister married a man named Refa’el Valero, and soon after a son was born to them. Flora Molkho herself, however, remained unmarried, for there was a dearth of eligible young men in Jerusalem and her attachment to her sister and her little nephew made her spurn all suggestions to travel to her father’s family in Egypt, or to her mother’s family in Salonika, in the hope of finding a match. When Rabbi Shabbetai Haddaya visited Jerusalem in 1827, he stayed with the Valeros and met Flora Molkho, whose refusal to leave the city in search of a husband intrigued him. Indeed, Flora’s adamance wa§ now greater than ever, because her sister, having gone through two difficult miscarriages after the birth of her son, was well into another pregnancy.

Soon, however, all this changed, because shortly after Rabbi Haddaya’s departure a devastating cholera epidemic broke out in Jerusalem that took the life of Flora’s beloved nephew. Her sister, who meanwhile had given birth to a daughter, sank into a depression that led to her death in 1829. Flora Molkho, fearing that her widowed brother-in-law Refa’el Valero would feel obligated to propose marriage to her, hastened to leave Jerusalem for her mother’s family in Salonika. Rabbi Haddaya followed her arrival there with interest and even sought, in 1833, to arrange a match between her and his protégé Avraham Mani, whose wife had recently died. Avraham Mani was keen on the idea, but Flora, although already a woman of thirty-three, refused. Her unmarried state troubled Rabbi Haddaya so greatly that he tried proposing other husbands for her, every one of whom she turned down, until he offered in his despair to marry her himself. Despite being forty years younger than he was, she did not reject his offer. The two were wed within a year and in 1835 Flora Molkho took up residence in Constantinople.

Although the rabbi and his wife had no children and he was away on his travels for weeks on end, the two appeared to get along well. As for Avraham Mani, he quickly recovered from his hurt at being spurned by Flora in favor of his elderly teacher, resumed his ties with the rabbi more intensely than ever, and in 1838 brought him his son Yosef to be his pupil. The rabbi’s wife received the youngster with open arms and — quite taken by his charms, his keen intelligence, and his many interests — chose to have him keep her company. Whenever Rabbi Haddaya went away, he asked his wife to take young Yosef into their home because the latter was an independent and adventurous boy who took advantage of the rabbi’s absence to enjoy the freedom of the city and needed to have an eye kept on him. And indeed, Flora Molkho Haddaya watched Yosef closely. He helped her around the house and sometimes, when the rabbi was gone, even slept beside her in his bed.

In 1844 Doña Flora was informed that her niece Tamara was planning to travel to Beirut with her stepmother Veducha for a family wedding. At once she had the inspiration of arranging a match between Tamara and Yosef in order to formally link her young favorite with her family. She received permission for Yosef to escort her to Beirut from both the rabbi and Avraham Mani, who was thrilled by the prospect of a marriage bond with his revered master. Although Tamara, for some reason, seemed doubtful about the match, the firm inducements of Doña Flora, coupled with Avraham Mani’s encouragements from afar, resulted in a hasty betrothal in 1845. Tamara returned to Jerusalem to prepare for the wedding, which was to be held in Constantinople. She did not, however, set out, and the rather vague letters that arrived from Jerusalem implied that the groom was expected to come there first in order to meet the bride’s family and make the acquaintance of her native city. Finally, in 1846, Yosef Mani complied, and eventually word reached Constantinople that he and Tamara had been married in Jerusalem and that he was working for the British consul there.

In 1847, Flora Haddaya and Avraham Mani, doubly distressed by the wedding’s not having been held in Constantinople and by their separation from the newlyweds, decided to travel to Jerusalem themselves in order to visit their relatives there and persuade Yosef and Tamara to move back to Constantinople. Since Rabbi Haddaya, however, did not consent to his wife’s making the trip alone with Avraham Mani, the latter had to go by himself. Once there, not only did he fail to bring his son and daughter-in-law back with him, he disappeared unaccountably for a long time himself until it became known that his son had been killed and that he was attending the birth of his daughter-in-law’s child.

In 1848 Rabbi Haddaya, who was now over eighty, set out for Jerusalem and Avraham Mani, but on the way he suffered a stroke and lost the power of speech. He now had to be constantly cared for by his wife, who served as the link between him and an outside world that still looked to him for answers that it could no longer understand.

RABBI SHABBETAI HANANIAH HADDAYA did not know the exact date of his birth. His rapid walk and young, energetic exterior often misled people as to his age. He himself did not take the question seriously, and since he had no family, there was no way of ascertaining the truth. In any event, he was in all likelihood born no later than 1766. His birth was known to have occurred aboard a ship that had set sail from the eastern Mediterranean, and it was jokingly said that he had been born straight from the sea, since both his parents died without reaching land from an outbreak of plague that swept through the vessel on its way from Syria to Marseilles. In France the little baby made the rounds of several charitable institutions until, inasmuch as it was circumcised, it was given for adoption to a Jewish family. Its foster parents were a childless old couple named Haddaya; according to one version, the infant was named Shabbetai for the false messiah Shabbetai Tsvi, who had lived in the previous century but whose remaining followers the Haddayas were connected with. The child did not remain with them for long, however. He was soon transferred to a Jewish orphanage, where he was raised and educated and given the additional name of Hananiah. Before long his intellectual capacities became apparent to his teachers, who arranged a special curriculum whereby he could advance in his studies.

Eventually, Shabbetai Hananiah was accepted into the talmudical academy of Rabbi Yosef Kardo, a descendant of a family of Marranos that had returned to Judaism in the early 1700s. So greatly did he excel in his studies that he was chosen headmaster after Rabbi Kardo’s death, even though he was often away on his travels to various Jewish communities, which was something he had a passion for. He was thought highly of by his fellow French rabbis and in 1806 was even invited to Napoleon’s famous convocation of Jewish leaders in the Tuilleries Palace in Paris, which met to debate the civil and national status of the Jewish people in the postrevolutionary era. His experience there, and in the discussions that took place in 1807 concerning the possible reconstitution of the Sanhedrin, was a deeply disturbing one for him. Unlike most of his colleagues, who basked in the honor accorded them and believed they were acting to ameliorate the Jewish condition, Rabbi Haddaya was seized by a strange pessimism. In 1808 he decided to leave the academy in Marseilles. After parting from his pupils, he sailed eastward to Sardinia and from there to southern Italy, from which he proceeded to Venice, where he resided for a considerable period. Subsequently, he moved on to Greece, wandered among its islands, reached as far as Crete, returned to Athens, and worked his way up along the Aegean coast until he arrived in Constantinople. Wherever he found himself, he offered his services as a preacher and a rabbinical judge. Although he kept up his legal erudition, theoretical studies did not greatly interest him and he preferred the active life of sermonizing and sitting on courts.

Not the least remarkable thing about Rabbi Haddaya was his bachelorhood, which seemed particularly inexplicable in light of his fondness for arranging matches and raising doweries for brides. Sometimes he even traveled great distances for the sole purpose of presiding at some wedding. And yet he himself declined to take a wife, a refusal that he justified by claiming that a childhood injury had left him unable to have children.

When Rabbi Haddaya first came to Salonika in 1812, he stayed at the home of Yosef Mani, Avraham Mani’s father, and made a great impression on him and his family, especially by virtue of his observations about Napoleon, who was then in the midst of his Russian campaign. After spending several months in Salonika, the rabbi continued on to Constantinople, where he finally appeared to settle down. He ceased his wandering and opened a small school in the Haidar Pasha quarter along the Asiatic coast, and soon after Avraham Mani arrived to study there. Although the boy was not a particularly good student, Rabbi Haddaya appreciated his good qualities, among which was a great capacity for loyalty.

Young Avraham Mani sought the closeness of the old rabbi and grew so dependent on him that Rabbi Shabbetai sometimes referred to him in private as “that little pisgado” Nevertheless, he was sad to see the boy go when he had to return to Salonika after the failure of his father’s business. Indeed, the emotion that he felt on that occasion quite surprised him. Soon after, his old wanderlust returned. Once again he began to travel all over the Ottoman Empire, particularly to Mesopotamia and Persia, although he also journeyed southward to Jerusalem, where he stayed at the home of Refa’el Valero and became acquainted with Refa’el’s wife and his sister-in-law Flora, whose unmarried state was a cause of great wonderment to him.

Upon his return to Constantinople in the early 1830s, Rabbi Haddaya resumed his ties with ex-pupil Avraham Mani, who crossed the Bosporus from time to time to visit his former teacher. Rabbi Haddaya even tried to arrange a match between Avraham, whose wife died in 1832, and Flora Molkho, who had in the meantime moved from Jerusalem to Salonika after her sister’s death. When Flora Molkho showed no interest in such a marriage, the rabbi invited her to Constantinople in the hope of changing her mind, and when this proved impossible, he suggested several other possibilities, all of which she rejected too. Finally, in a surprising and perhaps even despairing step, he proposed to her himself and was astonished when she accepted. The betrothal took place secretly in order to avoid hurting his dear disciple Avraham Mani; similarly, not wanting tongues to wag over his marriage to a woman forty years his junior, Rabbi Haddaya wed Flora in a ceremony conducted by himself in a remote town in Mesopotamia, for which he was barely able to round up the ten Jews needed for the occasion.

Despite the age difference between them, the couple’s marriage worked out well. Rabbi Haddaya continued to travel widely, and his wife Flora was accustomed to being alone. When Avraham Mani sent him his son Yosef, the rabbi was pleased by the gesture of conciliation and took the boy in, even though he himself hardly taught anymore due to his frequent absences. Although Yosef proved to be a highly imaginative child who at times seemed out of touch with reality, he was able to charm whomever he met, and above all, the rabbi’s wife, whose childlessness had left her increasingly isolated. Thus, he grew up in the Haddaya household, the excitable child of two elderly “parents.”

Rabbi Haddaya did not play an active role in the betrothal of his wife’s niece Tamara Valero to Yosef Mani in Beirut. For a while, he even seemed opposed to it. However, after the newlyweds settled in Jerusalem and Avraham Mani disappeared there too, and especially, after hearing of Yosef Mani’s death from the rabbinical fund-raiser Gavriel ben-Yehoshua, Rabbi Haddaya grew so distraught that his health was affected. He decided to set out for Jerusalem to find out what had happened, and since travel by land was unsafe, he resolved to sail from Salonika on a ship manned largely by Jews. In the late spring of 1848, more than thirty years after last having set foot in Europe, he crossed the Bosporus westward.

Rabbi Haddaya was received in Salonika with great pomp and ceremony and seen off at his ship by Rabbis Gaon, Arditi, and Luverani. Yet his own excitement must have been even greater than theirs, because the robust though slender old man had hardly been at sea for a day when he suffered a stroke, a thrombosis in the left hemisphere of his brain that caused him to lose the power of speech and all control over the right side of his body. Although able to understand everything said to him, he could no longer answer, and when he tried writing, the letters came out backward in an illegible scrawl. Since it was impossible to sail on in such circumstances, the captain changed course for the port of Piraeus, from which the paralyzed man was brought to a Jewish inn in Athens. There he lay, often smiling, nodding, and making sounds like “tu tu tu.”

News of the revered rabbi’s illness spread quickly and Jews gathered from near and far to help Doña Flora minister to him. In no time an entire support system sprang up that was most ably directed by her. The Greek governor of Athens stationed a permanent guard by the entrance to the inn, and Rabbi Haddaya, who sat covered by a silk blanket in a special wheelchair brought from Salonika, seemed almost to be enjoying his new situation, which spared him the need at last to express his opinions and left him free to listen to the Jews who came to see him while smiling at them and occasionally nodding or shaking his head. Nevertheless, his wife, who discerned a slow but gradual deterioration in his condition, did everything she could to avoid exciting him.

Thus, when the “vanished” Avraham Mani turned up unexpectedly one winter day at the inn in a state of great agitation, Doña Flora granted him permission to see his old rabbi “for a brief while and only for a single conversation.”

Doña Flora’s half of the conversation is missing.

— In truth, Doña Flora, for a brief while only, for one short conversation. I am compelled to, for the love of God! Please do not deny me that. Am I not, after all, besides a member of the family, also the eldest of his pupils?

— Yes. I will cry no more.

— There will be no raising of my voice or upsetting him.

— I will be most gentle.

— With much anxious supplication. Who of us does not pray for God’s grace? “Though a sharpened sword lie athwart a man’s throat, he must not…” But does the rabbi know I am here? Has he retained his active intelligence? The Jews outside say, “Rabbi Shabbetai has left his own self; he now ascends from dream to dream.”

— The Lord be praised.

— The Lord be praised, madame.

— No, no more tears, Doña Flora. I swear to you by my departed son to choke back every one of them. As if I had any left! Since morning I have been saying psalms with them all — crying, saying psalms, and crying again.

— Yes, I promise not to cry in his presence. Hallas, as the Ishmaelites say…

— Directly from the ship. Before the first sail was folded I was already in a carriage speeding from Piraeus to Athens.

— No, madame. The bitter news reached us at sea, halfway through the voyage. We were boarded by a pirate boat out of a small port in the devil’s own island of Crete, and after we were relieved of all our valuables, one of the pirates, who knew me from my shop in Salonika, said to me, “Your rabbi’s lute has popped a string.”

— Hush… hush… of course… but how shall I speak to him?

— With all simplicity? Ah… Your Grace… señor… my master… Rabbi Haddaya…

— More softly?

— But how will he hear me when he seems so lost in himself? His very soul is folded inward…

— My master, maestro y señor mío” I create the fruit of the lips; Peace, peace to him that is far off and to him that is near, saith the Lord; and I will heal him.”

— Praise be to God.

— Does he thus sign his awareness? Praise be to God…

— If he does not know me, madame, whom should he know? Ah!…

— In truth, a wondrous smile.

— Most nonpareil.

— Most true, Doña Flora. So winsome a smile never graced his lips in all these years — and six-and-thirty years, Doña Flora, have I been at his side, long, long before you were. ‘Twas ages ago that first I was brought to him! “Yea, I was a lad and I have grown old…”

— Excessively burdened. All his life.

— Of course… as you say… señor, does Your Grace remember me? Truly, it is written, “All my life have I lived among sages and found no better course for a body than silence.”

— Ah!

— Your Grace has consumed himself with his endless wandering and preaching, and now Your Grace deserves to rest. Only “bless me, even me too, my father”!

— Ah… forgive me… forgive me, Doña Flora… my feelings ran away with me…

— I did not know… I was not warned… I only wished to kiss his hand and ask his blessing as is my wont…

— I did not know… I was not warned… oh, madame…

— Ah! Have I hurt him? May I hope to die…

— I did not know… forgive me, Doña Flora, I was not warned…

— In truth, the hand seems stricken and withered.

— The length of his body? Master of the Universe… the entire length?

— How fearful and wondrous are the ways of the Lord! And I in my simplicity had thought it was widthwise — his lower half stilled as over against his upper… but how came it to pass?

— And in a twinkling shall come his salvation, madame. Believe me, in a twinkling! Let the rabbi be silent for a spell, let him smile — in the end we shall rouse him. We shall not let Your Grace leave us, shall we, Your Grace? We shall not!

— No, God forbid; in all quietude. I already have, Doña Flora, a notion for reviving the power of speech in him. I thought of it while still at sea…

— For example, I thought we might put before him a likeness of that French Emperor, the first Napoleon, to pique the rabbi’s soul — for forty years ago Rabbi Shabbetai was summoned to him in Paris, he and some other sages, and since then he often spoke of him. I can remember sitting at his feet in our house in Salonika and listening all night as he dwelled on the ways of that Emperor, who was then sinking deeper and deeper into the snows of Russia…

— Of course not. Perish the thought… I did not mean this minute…

— Slowly but surely… we will bide our time… but did I truly hurt him, Doña Flora? He does appear to be looking at me with great wonder. Why, he cannot even cry out!

— How dreadful is the hand of the Lord! In a thrice it divides a man in two and creates an abyss between the two sides of him. But heaven forbid, señor, that Your Grace should feel diminished or divided, God save us! Your Grace should know that for us, his loving and reverent disciples, he will always be one and the same, his vegetative and animative souls joined together and worthy of our redoubled love. May I, Doña Flora, with your permission, and with the utmost care, take his saintly hand in my own… surely I may, may I not?

— And may I give it a little squeeze? Just a small one?

— And a kiss? May I?

— Bless me, even me too, my father and teacher! Bless your oldest pupil… bless a wretched, a much suffering man…

— No, Doña Flora… God forbid… I will not cry… no more tears… slowly but surely…

— No, madame… ‘tis nothing… God forbid… I am already over it…

— Slowly but surely…

— But how did I vanish? And did I truly?

— How can you say that? Surely you know, Doña Flora, that I was awaiting a birth.

— Indeed it did. The infant was delivered on the night after the Day of Atonement.

— A boy child, señores, a boy child born in Jerusalem — and you, madame, will be his grandmother. Your poor sister of blessed memory did not live to be one, and you must be one for her.

— Yes, I too, it would seem… that is… well, yes… I too, with the help of God…

— Both mother and infant are well. I bring you greetings from them all: a greeting of peace from Jerusalem — from Refa’el Valero — from the rabbis of the city — from its streets and houses — from the Street of the Armenians and the Hurva Synagogue — from the cisterns and the marketplaces — even from your room, Doña Flora, your little alcove by the arched window — yes, even from your bed, the bed of your maidenhood, in which you slept so many a night. Wrapped in your quilt, I thought of your youth and of mine…

— In your very bed… and with great pleasure. Your brother-in-law Refa’el assigned the bed of your parents, may they rest in peace, to our young couple, and that was where the unfortunates slept, while I was put up in the little room nearby, between those two most wondrous looking-glasses that you hung on the walls, which played the very devil with my mind. It is not to be marveled at, Doña Flora, that you never looked for a husband in Jerusalem, because in such a room one feels sure that there is already someone with one, hee hee hee…

— I named him Moshe Hayyim in the hope of a fresh start.

— No, he was not named after his father. It is enough that I am accursedly boxed in by the same name before and after me. I am weary of the names of dead patriarchs commemorating downfalls and defeats; I had my fill of Genesis and went on to Exodus, from which I took the name of Moses in all simplicity. May his great merit stand us in good stead… for there was a miracle here… before death could drain away the vital fluids, life saved a few precious last drops… look, Doña, how wonderfully he smiles again. Does he approve of the name Moshe?

— He is nodding. He understands! God be praised. I promise you, Doña Flora, that the rabbi’s salvation is nigh and that in a twinkling of the eye he will preach again…’tis but an interval…

— With moderation… of course… without compulsion…

— With much travail, Doña Flora, although through clenched teeth…

— Her father Refa’el so feared the birth that he ran off to the synagogue to say psalms, leaving me standing there for ten hours in my robe and shoes like one of the Sultan’s honor guard, ministering with hot water and compresses.

— No, madame. It was in your old bed, which had become my bed and now became Tamara’s. You may rejoice in the thought that the infant was born in your bed.

— At the very last minute Tamara was stricken with fear and refused to give birth in her bridal bed that had belonged to her parents. She beseeched the help of heaven, and so we moved her to the old bed of her beloved aunt, which conducted the efflux of her uncle’s great merit… and in truth, it was only his merit — does Your Grace hear me? — that stood by us in that difficult birth.

— Ten hours, one labor pain after another…

— There were two midwives. One the wife of Zurnaga, and the other a nunlike Englishwoman called Miss Stewart, a lady as tall and thin as a plank, but most proficient. She was sent by the British consul in Jerusalem, who has not yet ceased mourning our Yosef.

—’Twas at night, Doña Flora, before the first cockcrow, that we heard the long-awaited cry. And if I may say so without fear of misunderstanding, the two of us, the mother and I, so longed for you, madame, at that moment that our very souls were faint with desire for you in that great solitude…

— No, I will not cry…

— No, there will be no more tears… señor maestro mío… he is listening… I feel the lump of his silence in my throat…

— Your niece kept calling your name while racked by her pains. She was pining for you — she gave birth for you, madame — and in the times between one labor pain and the next, while I sat in the next room and watched her face dissolve toward me in the small mirror, I could not help but imagine you as a young woman in Jerusalem, lying in your bed in the year of Creation 5848 or ‘49 and giving birth too. We were too much surrounded by the shades of the dead, Doña Flora… we needed to think of the living to give us strength…

— Most truly.

— Again you say I “vanished.” But where did I vanish to?

— In Jerusalem, only in Jerusalem. I walked back and forth between those stony walls with their four gates, thinking, “It was here that little madame toddled about forty years ago, among the stones and the churches, from the Jaffa Gate to the Lions’ Gate, skipping over the piles of rubbish in the fields between the mosques, glared on by the red sun and in the shadow of sickness and plague.”

— In truth, Doña Flora. I took upon myself all your longing for Jerusalem, and all the memories of His Grace too, my master and teacher, who honored our sacred city with a visit in the year 5587. There are men there who still recall sheltering in his presence. Who knows but that that poor city throbs on in his heart if not in his mind. Ah!…

— Is he listening?

— The Lord be praised.

— But how was I silent? And again, Doña Flora: why was the silent one me? All last winter I prayed for some word from you. The lad was already dead and buried, and our own lives were as dark as the grave, because at the time, madame, his seed alone knew that it had been sown in time. And since I knew that the news would travel via Beirut to Constantinople on the dusty black robe of that itinerant almsman, Rabbi Gavriel ben-Yehoshua. I hoped for a sign that it had reached you. I even entertained the thought that the two of you would hasten to Jerusalem with tidings of strength and good cheer, for I knew that the lad had been dear to you. You took him under your wing… you indulged him and foresaw great things for him… you lay him beside you, madame, in His Grace’s big bed…

— No, there will be no tears…

— Perish the thought… God save us… I will not upset him… I will speak as softly as I can…

— Not a whimper… God forbid…

— If there is a lump in my throat, I will swallow it at once.

— At once…

— Of my own free will… of course, Dona Flora… I do not deny it…

— I would never pretend that the thought of bringing the boy to you was not mine. He was a present that I made you to keep from losing you, a wedding gift for your most surprising and wondrous marriage that shone in heaven as resplendently as the saints…

— I was afraid that you would rebuff me once more, madame, as you already had done… and so I hurried to bring the lad to you as a whole-offering… just as my poor father did with me in his day…

— To be sure. And now suddenly he was a young man… already a groom, with God’s help… although that match made in Beirut with your motherless niece from Jerusalem was entirely your own doing, madame… fully your own conception…

— In truth, it had my blessing… of course it did… and more than that… it had my love… what wouldn’t I have done not to lose you? I mean, not to lose His Grace, my only master and teacher, who commands my loyalty “more than the love of women”…

— He understands. He is listening and understands…

— No, I am not crying. No, madame, this time you are wrong. I have not the tail-end of a tear left.

— Once more “vanished”? But even if I did, it was not for very long. I was not, after all, the first to disappear, but the last. Before me came your motherless fiancée, and after her, my only son Yosef. Both were lost in Jerusalem and I went to look for them, not in order to become lost myself but in order to bring them back, although in the end there was nothing to bring…

— The infant, Dona Flora? How could you think of it? Perish the thought! For what purpose?

— Take him and his mother away from Jerusalem?

— But why? After all that went into giving Jerusalem a baby Moses, why take him away from there? And where to? Who would take responsibility for him?

— But how? You amaze me, madame. What would you do with an infant when you are in such perturbation?

— How? You already have an infant of your own, this holy and most venerable babe that needs to be fed and looked after, to be washed and changed and have its every thought guessed — why should you wish for another? Surely, you do not expect them to play together, hee hee…

— His Grace, hee hee…

— But look, Doña Flora, look, mí amiga, he is laughing without any sound… hee hee hee hee… he is listening… he understands everything… in a twinkling he will…

— Señor… my master and teacher caríssimo Rabbi Shabbetai…

— I am not shouting… but look, cara doña, the rabbi is nodding his head… he is in high spirits… I know it… I feel it… I always knew how to make him merry. Why, back in the good old days, I would cross the Bosporus, go straight to his house, take a carving knife, wrap myself in a silk scarf, and dance the dance of the Janissaries, may they rot in hell…

— No, not one tear… there are none left…

— I am in full control.

— In truth, my dearest doña, I am in an agitated state. You are looking at a most distraught soul… do not judge me harshly… just see how you alarm me by speaking thus of the fatherless infant, whom you crave to have with you. As if it did not already have a faithful young mother at its side! And not only a mother, but a home, the home you yourself grew up in… and your brother-in-law Re’fael, who has little children of his own… and Jerusalem itself… why make light of Jerusalem, the city of your nativity, which is shaking off the dust of centuries now that Christendom has rediscovered it and given new hope to its Jews? Why make them pick up and leave all that? And for where? And how do it without a father? Because there is no one to take a father’s place…

— No, no, madame. I myself will soon be gone. True, it is written, “A man liveth will he, nill he,” but still, yes, still, a man dieth sometimes when he willeth… You will yet hear of me, madame. “Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh used to say, ‘The best hope of man is the maggot.’” Ah! Señor… let him be my judge… he will do me justice! Would he wish me to remove mother and child from Jerusalem?

— What say you?

— Ah!…

— Did he sign me?

— And what meant it?

— Ah! You see… thank you, señor! Did I not say?…did I not know?…was I not right? No one knows the rabbi’s soul better than I do! I may not have studied much with him, for my poor head is a thick one — a pumpkinhead, that was what he called me — but I never stopped studying him I know him better than you do, madame, and I say that with all due respect… because I have known him for ages… no, do not be cross with me, Doña Flora… when you frown like that and bite your lip, I am reminded of our faraway Tamara, our motherless, widowed young bride. I beseech you, Doña Flora, be good enough not to be angry, or else the tears will begin to flow again. Since losing my only son, I am quick to cry… grief comes easily to me… it takes but a word… the least breath is enough to shatter me…

— But…

— As long as I can be here, on this little footstool, sitting at his feet. “Better a tail to the lion than a head to the fox.”

— She has recovered completely, Doña Flora. She bears herself well…

— Of course she is nursing, although not without some assistance. Her left teat went dry within a few days and left her without enough milk, and the consul made haste to send her an Armenian wet nurse who comes every evening with a supplement, for he heard say that the milk of the Armenians is the most fortified…

— In truth, he is a good angel, the consul. He has not withheld his kindness from us, and how could we have managed without him? We have been ever in his thoughts since that black and bitter day. He remains unconsoled for the loss of our Yosef, on whom he pinned great hopes. Baby Moses he calls the infant in English, and he has already issued him a writ of protectorship as if he were an English subject. Should he ever wish to leave Jerusalem for England, he may do so without emcumbrance…

— Little Moshe.

— In the Rabbi Yohanan ben-Zakkai Synagogue. Tamara dressed baby Moses in a handsome blue velvet jersey with a red taquaiqua on his head, and Rabbi Vidal Zurnaga said the blessings and performed the circumcision. The cantors sang, and we let the English consul hold and console the child for his pain, and Valero and his wife Veducha handed out candies and dough rings — here, I have brought you in this handkerchief a few dried chick-peas that I carried around with me for weeks so that you might bless them and eat them and feel that you were there… may it please you, madame… the consul and his wife blessed and ate them too…

— And here is one for him too, my master and teacher… a little pea… just for the blessing…

— No, he will not choke on it… ‘tis a very little pea…

— Ah! He is eating… His Grace understands… he remembers how he used to bring me “blessings” from weddings, how he woke me from my sleep to teach me them… now I will say it for him! Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who createth all kinds of food.

— Amen.

— He cannot even say the amen for himself… ah, Master of the Universe, what a blow!

— No, I will cry no more. I have given my word.

— Of course, madame. God forbid that my tears should lead to his. But what can I do, Doña Flora, when I know that no matter how dry-eyed I stand before him, he — even as he is now — can read my soul! The great Rabbi Haddaya understands my sorrow. I have always, always been an open book to him…”like the clay in the hands of the potter”…ah, Your Grace…

— Slowly but surely… for I am not yet over my departure from your Jerusalem, madame, which is a most obdurate city — hard to swallow and hard to spew out. And hard too was my parting from the young bride, my son’s widow and your most exquisite ward. But most impossible of all, Doña Flora, was parting from the infant Moshe, who is so sweet that he breaks every heart. If only madame could see him… if only His Grace, my teacher and master, could have seen baby Moses in his circumcision suit, his blue blouse and red taquaiqua, peacefully stretching his limbs without a sound, without a cry, sucking his thumb, meditating for hours on end… did I say hours? For whole days at a time, in a basket on the back of a horse…

— A most excellent consular horse, madame, which bore him and his mother from Jerusalem to Jaffa.

— I should bite my tongue!

—’Twere better left unsaid.

— In truth, on a horse. But not a hair of his was harmed, madame. He reached Jaffa in perfect condition.

— What winter? There was no sign even of autumn. I see you have forgotten your native land, Dona Flora, where “summer’s end is harsher than summer”…

— Even if there was a touch of chill in the mountains, it did him no harm. He was wrapped in my robe, my fox fur that I brought from Salonika, and well padded in the basket, most comfortably and securely…

— Indeed, a tiny thing, but flawless. We miscalculated, she and I. Our parting was difficult, and so we longingly prolonged it until obstinacy led to folly…

— No, there was no guile in it; ‘twas in all innocence. When we reached the Jaffa Gate and she saw me standing there, endlessly dejected, amid the camel and donkey train that was bound for Jaffa, she said to me, “Wait, it is not meet that you leave Jerusalem in sorrow, you will be loathe to return”—and she went to the consul’s house and borrowed a horse to ride with me as far as Lifta. By the time she had tied the basket to the horse and wrapped the infant, the caravan had set out. We made haste to overtake it, and soon we were descending in the arroyo of Lifta — and the way, which at first seemed gloomy and desolate, quickly grew pleasant and attractive, because there were vineyards and olive groves, fig trees and apricots, on either side of it. When we reached the stone bridge of Colonia, there was a pleasant sweetness in the air. Jerusalem and its dejection were behind us, and perhaps we should have parted there — but then she insisted on continuing with me to Mount Castel. She thought she might catch a glimpse of the sea from there, for she remembered being taken as a child to a place from where she had glimpsed it. And so we began to climb the narrow path up that high hill. In the distance we spied my caravan, lithely snaking its way above us, and there was a great clarity of air, and the voice of the muezzin from the mosque at Nebi Samwil seemed to call to us, and we cried back to it. But we had no idea that thé ascent would take so long or that the approach of darkness was so near, and by the time we reached the top of the hill there was not a ray of twilight left, so that whatever sea was on the horizon could not be seen but only thought. My caravan was slowly disappearing down the slope that led to Karyat-el-Anab, and all we could hear from afar were the hooves of the animals scuffing an occasional stone. What was I to do, Doña Flora? Say adieu there? I did not want to return with her to Jerusalem, because I knew that I then would have no choice but to become an Ashkenazi, and I had no wish to be one…

— Because I was down to my last centavo and all out of the spices I had brought from Salonika, and had I returned to Jerusalem as a pauper, I would have had to join the roster of Ashkenazim to qualify for the dole they give only to their own. And that, Your Grace, señor y maestro mío, I was not about to do — would His Grace have wanted me to Ashkenazify myself?

— He would not have, madame, even if he chooses to keep silent. I know him well enough to know he has his doubts about them.

—’Twas no effort, Doña Flora. We were riding now at a fair clip and were over the top of Mount Castel, I on my mule and she on her horse, with nothing but bare hills around us. Even Nebi Samwil was lost in the gloom, not to mention Jerusalem, which had been gobbled up by the mountains. I knew I had left the Holy City for good and would return to it only with the Messiah at the Resurrection, may it come soon! Meanwhile, we had to find lodgings for the night and a wet nurse for our Moshiko. And so we rode, no longer in any great hurry, down toward Karyat-el-Anab, and near Ein-Dilba we came across a shepherd and inquired about a wet nurse, and he gave a great shout into the silent night to a compañero of his in Abu-Ghosh, and a shout came back from afar. We headed on in its direction and soon found both midwife and caravan in a large stone house beneath the village of Saris.

— No, madame. Why should there have been rain? The earth was still dry and the air was perfectly clement. It had a great clarity that lured one on — it made the vast countryside seem very near.

— A dream, madame? A dream?

— A sturdy, blond-haired village wet nurse, who gave baby Moses his dessert. We put him to sleep between us, protected from night crawlers, and in the morning, when I was sure that now she would bid me farewell and return with a caravan ascending to Jerusalem from Beit-Mahsir, she suddenly swore that she would do no such thing until she had seen the sea that I was about to embark on. And so we climbed to the top of the hill and saw the sea from afar, and I thought, “Now her mind has been set to rest,” and I took my leave — yet it seemed that not only did the sight of the sea not assuage her, it increased her concern even more, because as I was hurrying down to join my caravan, madame, along a horribly winding and dizzying track in Wadi Ali, what did I hear like a far echo in that precipitous silence?

— A stone kicked loose by the thoroughbred hooves of the consular horse…

— In truth, doña mía!

— She was all by herself.

— With the infant, of course — with baby Moses in his basket, wrapped in my fox-fur robe and jouncing from bend to bend.

— Riding after me as boldly as you please.

— I took cover on a ledge of the hillside, among some large shrubs in that wild chaparral, from where I could watch her in the distance. She waited for the caravan to round a bend before carefully emerging from her concealment in the arroyo, small but perfectly erect on her black horse. Just then a ray of sunlight glinted off her head, illumining her hair a copper red.

— A saucy spirit, madame — but whom did she get it from? Must I venture a surmise?

— I too asked myself, madame, how far she was prepared to follow me. Well, toward evening, after many long hours of riding on that narrow trail without espying each other, we finally rode out of the verdant gloom into an open valley, which was the Plain of Sharon, and pressed on a ways, camels, donkeys, and mules, through fields of figs and olives, until we came to a high hedge of prickly pears that belonged to the village of Emmaus, where we made camp and asked for water, basking in the setting sun. I turned to Jerusalem to say the afternoon prayer — and there, from out of the dark opening of the arroyo, from its very aperture, appeared the consular horse, ridden by Obstinacy and bound for Folly.

— It went on like that all the way to Jaffa, all the way to the ship.

— We found a wet nurse in Emmaus too. And in Ramleh and Azur also.

— No, Doña Flora. It was not lack of milk that made her go from wet nurse to wet nurse, because I happened to know that the dried-up left teat had begun to flow freely again since the Day of the Rejoicing of the Law. The explanation I gave myself was that she wished to give the infant a taste of all the ambrosias between Jerusalem and Jaffa so that he might retain some memory of his poor father.

— How say you? Have you in truth, madame, forgotten him? Has my only son already been forgotten?

— No, you see no tears, not a trace of them. I will ask His Grace. Rabbi Shabbetai, has my master and teacher forgotten the only son I offered up to him, my Yosef?

— Blessed be the Name of the Lord! Did he not sign clearly, Doña Flora? He has not forgotten. Blessed be His Name! “Rabbi Yannai says, ‘We can account neither for the good fortune of the wicked nor for the torments of the righteous.’ “

— How making sport of you, madame? Why, had you not, Doña Flora, insisted on bringing your motherless niece from Jerusalem for a hasty betrothal, the three of us might still have the pleasure of seeing him alive! Instead of huddling together in this shabby inn run by Greek rebels against the Porte, we could have been sitting with him on your big divan in Constantinople, by the large hearth facing the Bosporus, enjoying the rosebushes in Abdul Mejid’s royal gardens and pondering — but no more than that! — life in Paradise.

— What mean I? What mean you?

— In a word… in a word… with all due respect, you were hasty, madame…

— No, Doña Flora, no, rubissa. How could I dare be angry with you? And what would it avail me if I were? Tell me that! If it would avail me, I would be angry at once. May I hope to die, madame, for not having understood my son, my own flesh and blood! Accursed am I for not realizing where he was leading us! I was an innocent, a cabeza de calabaza; too innocent for words…

— Because I did not know that behind every thought hides another thought.

— A thought born from the indulgence that you showed him in your home. Does His Grace know that when he was away on his travels, Doña Flora had my son sleep by her side, in His Grace’s own bed?

— A boy! Of course… although not such a little one… and a most sensitive and astute one… I, in any case, never had the privilege of lying in His Grace’s bed…

— Why not, madame? Who of us does not desire to lie with those greater and stronger than ourselves and be warmed by their superior heat? I, too, after all, was but a boy when sent to Rabbi Shabbetai… ‘twas many ages ago… my father, may he rest in peace… after the defeat of Napoleon, the cannon would blast away over the Bosporus at night for fear of the Russ… and I was so greatly afraid that I ran to His Grace’s bed from my little room at the end of the corridor. But I was too in awe of him to climb into it… Does His Grace remember me, a little lad standing there in my blouson and singing to him Tia Loja’s conacero

All kiss the mezuzá,

But I, I kiss your face,

Istraiqua, apple of my eye?

He is smiling a bit, madame. He remembers the melody. He is smiling, God be praised! It would take but a word from Him to create him anew. His salvation will come in a twinkling… See, Your Grace, I am back! Your Grace’s pisgado is back, and there yet will be song…

— Go? Where?

— No, madame, do not make me leave!

— No, do not send me away, madame. Nor are you able to…

— Most definitely not!

— I have a right… I am family… I have been for ages…

— I will not sing anymore.

— There will be no singing.

— To make a long story short betahsir, as the Ishmaelites say in Jerusalem…

— That is just it, Doña Flora. Every thought has its pocket, and in every pocket is another thought. And from such a pocket our young lad took the thoughts discarded by the rabbi, those that fell out of his dreams at night and were left between his pillow and the wall, or lying under his bed… because why else would he have put his trust in so frightful a thought as that which led to his death?

— But all that already reached you with that irascible emissary, Rabbi Gavnel ben-Yehoshua…

— Once more?

— He had his throat cut, madame: like a tender lamb, or a black goat in the dead of night…

— Now it is you who shudder, madame — the tears are now yours…

— But what will it avail you?

— Why multiply your pain?

— If you must… Well, then, rubissa, he went out at night without a lantern, which is against the law in Jerusalem, with no light or badge, and in a black robe, to make matters worse…

— He turned into a lane in the Souk-el-Lammamin on his way to the Via Dolorosa. ‘Twas the night of the nativity of the Christians’ messiah, may his bones rot in hell. He was stopped by the watch — and rather than let himself be apprehended and brought to trial, he sought to flee. Nor did he run to the Stambouli Synagogue or the synagogue of Yohanan ben-Zakkai, where he could have hidden in the Holy Ark, but up the lane, through the Vidal house, and to the great mosque on the Haram-el-Sharif, perhaps because he wished to cast suspicion on the Muslims rather than on the Jews. And there, on the steps leading to the Dome of the Rock, he had his throat slit, madame. He was butchered like a black sheep.

— By our Ishmaelite cousins, those masters of the hidden knife.

— And thereabout did I wonder — did I grieve — did I sigh — did I question — did I beg to know — all during my stay with him, from the moment he pulled me to my feet in the sands of Jaffa, which I kissed with great love as soon as I was hurled ashore — yanked me to my feet and asked at once about you, madame — why were you not there — aghast to see me by myself…

— Because he was certain that I had you with me aboard ship, or that you had me with you.

— He knew nothing of Rabbi Shabbetai’s last-minute ban on your coming, Doña Flora. He stood there on the shore, looking mournfully at the deckhands folding the sails, hoping that perhaps they would still produce you from the hold, hee hee hee…

— What was there to explain, Doña Flora? His Grace had explained nothing to me… did His Grace give any reason for it?

— He is looking at me, the poor man… he is thinking…”Heal him now, O God, I beseech Thee”…

— A kind of mother?

— Perhaps, madame. In truth, he never had enough of his own mother, who was in a hurry to depart to a better world. But were you only a mother to him, madame, or were you also a sister of sorts?

— I mean, a sort of elder sister, someone to share one’s secrets with and tell one’s strangest dreams to… There he stood, our Yosef, preoccupied with his own great grief and disappointment, yet at the same time, quite sure of himself and already gazing off into the distance, a high, black consular fez on his head, speaking to the villagers around him with much patience, as if they were his friends. I noticed that he could already chat blithely away in Ishmaelitic, and when I realized that my solo arrival was a far from joyous occasion for him, I sought in my despondency to cast myself reverently back down into the soft, sweet sands of Jaffa. But he seized my arm, and I could tell at once from how he did it that something had changed in him…

— From the firmness of it. He pulled me up out of the sand and commanded me, “That will do, Papá, the horses are waiting and we have a long way to go…”

— In truth, mí amiga in truth, Doña Flora: he had brought neither donkeys nor mules nor camels for us from Jerusalem, but horses, an entire horse for each of us — and most wondrous was the horse he had chosen for you, rubissa… I still can picture it, a most exquisite mare, with a brightly colored saddlecloth laid over her…

— Especially for you. He let no one mount her, and for three whole days she trotted by our side without a rider, all the way to Jerusalem, carrying only my bags of spices. Each time we looked at her, madame, we thought of you and of His Grace’s prohibition. The more we sought to comprehend it, the more we simply sighed.

— With sorrow, but without resentment, for I still felt as if I were in a dream, as if I still were rocked by the motion of the waves. We left the noisy marketplace of Jaffa, which was bubbling with colors and smells, and made our way up streets of stairs that ended in orchards and fields of large flowers and fierce thorns… and suddenly, madame, there were only the two of us, father and son, with the broad land all around us and a harsh, inhuman sun overhead before which the very sky appeared to cringe.

— He pushed on that first day as far as the great khan of Kafr Azur, because he wished to catch the dawn caravan, in such a hurry was he to get back to his consul in Jerusalem. Does His Grace still remember the route?

— Truly, Doña Flora, truly I am confused! Indeed, the rabbi came from Damascus and entered the Promised Land by crossing the Jordan… and so it should be, by the front door and not by the rear one. Then my master and teacher never got to see Jaffa? A pity, for ‘tis a saucy town…

— In truth, I clutch at my memories as one clutches at a lifeline, for I can picture nothing that happened without welling up with compassion. Thus it began — with a father riding behind his son in the Holy Land, rather chagrined and bewildered, regarding the wasteland around him, although ‘twas nôt always waste.

— Well said, madame, that is so. Suddenly you see a fine grain field, or an orchard, or some date palms and fruit trees by a water course, or a peasant’s hut, or a group of children playing by a well — and then there is wasteland again and the remnants of a most ancient devastation. At sunset we reached a large khan and found it deserted, because the caravan had already moved on to pass the night in Ramleh. Fresh straw was scattered for us in a corner of the hall, beside a blackened wall, and our pallets were made there. I stepped outside and looked at thé vast and most exceedingly dark plain in which there shone not a single light. Smoke curled up from an oven where bread was being baked for our supper. Yosef went to see to our horses. I watched him, a handsome, erect young man, stride over to a hedgerow of prickly pears and hang the feedbags on the horse’s necks while patting their heads and talking to them, his head nestled in the mane of your mare. Perhaps he was whispering some consolation to her for her mistress’s failure to arrive! An Ishmaelite standing nearby made some remark to him and he listened with friendly attention — and once again I was struck by how the soft, pampered youth who went shopping with you in the bazaar of Kapele Carse, carrying your dresses and perfumes, had turned into a young man beneath whose newly grown mustache there was already something quite secretive. He resembled my father as a young man, before his bankruptcy, and I suddenly felt such a bitterness of spirit, señores, that I longed to return to the sea I had come from no more than a few hours before, which had played with me and tossed me on its waves. I thought of my parents of blessed memory, and all at once I felt a great desire to say the kaddish for them in the Holy Land and to pray for their souls. And so I asked my son if there might be a village nearby with enough Jews in it for a prayer group. At first he was as startled as if I had asked him to pluck a star from the sky. “Jews? Here?” “And is there anywhere without them?” I marveled. He cocked his head and stared at me, and then he smiled a bit — and I wonder, Your Grace, whether it was then that the frightful idea was born in him, or whether it had been there all along — and after mulling it over for a moment he said softly, “Right away, Papá, right away.” He ducked through a gap in the prickly pear hedge and stepped into some mud huts, from which he pulled out one shadowy form after another and brought them to me. I looked about me and saw these dark-faced, bare-legged Ishmaelites, some with battered fezes on their heads and some with black keffiyehs, most silent and docile, as if they had just been torn out of their first sleep, madame. “Here, Papá,” says Yosef, “here is your minyan ” He frightened me. “But who are these men, son?” I asked him. And he, standing there in the still of evening, señor y maestro mío, he said, mí amiga Doña Flora, as if he were loco in the head, “But these are Jews, Papá, they just don’t know it yet…”

— Yes, madame, those were his words. “These are Jews who will understand that they are Jews,” he said. “These are Jews who will remember that they are Jews.” Before I could even stammer an answer, he was chiding them in his friendly manner and making them face east toward Jerusalem, where there was nothing but a black sky full of stars, after which he began to chant the evening prayer in a new melody I never had heard. From time to time he went down on his knees and bowed like a Muslim so that the Ishmaehtes would understand and bow too… and I, Your Grace — señor — Rabbi Haddaya — my master and teacher — allowed myself to go along with it… sinful man that I was, I could not resist saying the kaddish and profaning the blessed Name of the Lord. I said it from beginning to end in memory of my parents and of my poor wife… madame, the blanket… it is falling off…

— Here, let me, Doña Flora, I’ll do it. I… he is shaking… something is bothering him… perhaps…

— I…

— But what means that, madame? “Tu-tu-tu”? What would he say?

— But what wishes he to say, for the love of God?

— But the blanket is wet, Doña Flora. It is most wet. Perhaps we should make a fire and dry it over the stove, and meanwhile I can change His Grace…

— No Why?

— Why a servant? Why a Greek? I am at your complete service, madame, with all my heart… let the good deed be mine… he was like a father to me, Doña Flora… I beg you…

— No. He is listening. His eyes are following me. Rabbi Shabbetai knows my mind… he remembers what I said… that every idea has a pocket and in that pocket is another idea…”There is no man without his hour nor any thing without its use”…but what means he by “tu-tu-tu”? What would he say? He seems most agitated…

— Well, then, in a word, in a word, Doña Flora, so my visit began, on that route leading from Jaffa to Jerusalem, seeking to catch up with a caravan of pilgrims that kept a day ahead of us. For three whole days we shadowed and smelled its trail, trampling the grasses it had trampled, coming upon the embers of its campfires, treading on the dung of its animals. The two of us rode, and your mare, madame, which was now just an extra mouth to feed, trotted along between us Sometimes, in the twilight, it even seemed that we could see your silhouette astride her… My son tried being a good guide to his father. He pointed out to him the threshers in Emmaus, and the winnowers in Dir Ayub, and had him dismount to smell the wild sweet basil and the green geranium, and to chew the stems of shrubs and grasses from which perhaps some new spice might be concocted. The next evening too, by a stone fence belonging to Kafr Saris, he disappeared for a while among some rocks and olive trees and returned with a new group of wraiths, more Jews who did not know that they were Jews — which is to say, another band of drowsy peasants and shepherds who were rousted from their first sleep. This time he gave them all a quarter of a bishlik for their pains — and all this, señores, was entirely for my sake, to enable the touring father to satisfy his craving to chant the kaddish, not only for the souls of his parents, but also for those of his grand-, and great-grand-, and even greater grand-grandparents than that, until the first father of us all must have heard in heaven that Avraham Mani had arrived in the Land of Israel and was about to enter Jerusalem.

— Ah! That afternoon we finally caught up with the Russian pilgrims — who, now that Jerusalem was just around the corner, had taken off their fur hats and were walking on their knees from sheer devoutness, following the narrow road up and down in long, crawling columns from the Big Oak Tree to the Little Oak Tree and from there to the Monastery of the Cross, which was bathed by red flowers in its lovely valley. And then suddenly, there was Jerusalem: a wall with turrets and domes, a clear, austere verse written on the horizon. Soon I was walking through its narrow streets by myself, led by the consular mace-bearer.

— Because Yosef could not wait and went to return the horses to the consulate and tell the consul about his trip while I was packed off with my bundles behind the mace-bearer, who struck the cobblestones with his staff and led me along a street and up some steps to a door that did not need to be pushed open because it already was. I stood hesitantly in the entrance, staring in the looking-glass that faced me at the unkempt form of a sun-ravaged, sunken-eyed traveler. And just then, Rabbi Shabbetai, who should step out of the other room but Doña Flora herself, but thirty years younger! It was as if she had flown through the air above my ship and arrived there before me! A most wondrous apparition, señores — here, then, was the secret that explained Beirut and that had, so it seemed, quite swept Yosef off his feet! One passage through life had not been enough for so charming a visage, and so it had come back a second time… I was so exhausted from the trip and from the sun, and so excited to be in Jerusalem and its winding lanes — I already felt, mí amiga, that I had arrived in a city of bottomless recesses — that I whispered like a sleepwalker. “Madame Flora, is it truly you? Has the rabbi then relented?” Hee hee hee hee…

— That is how muddled I was

— No, wait… I beg you…

— But wait, madame… You have no idea of the wondrous resemblance between you, which is perhaps what lured you to Beirut in the first place in order to meet your own double and give my poor departed son… I mean, tacitly… eh?

— We knew nothing. What did we know?

— The betrothal was carried out in haste… the rabbi too was notified after the fact…

— Yes. A tremendous resemblance

— Yes. Even now — are you listening, señor y maestro mío? — when I look at the rubissa, I see as in a vision Tamara thirty years from now. The very spit and image in charm as well as beauty…

— At first she was alarmed. She turned very red but kissed my hand and let me bless her, and then took my bundle and laid it gently and with great respect on your childhood bed beneath the large, arched window, madame, in which henceforward I slept, in hot weather and in cold. She set the table for me and warmed water for me to wash my hands and feet, and then stood over me to serve me as the sun was setting outside. I noticed that she seemed not at all surprised that Yosef was taking so long at the consul’s instead of hurrying home, even though he had been away for a week; it was as if she were used to the consul’s coming before her When I was all washed and cleaned and full of food, she summoned her father Valero to make my acquaintance and take me with him to the synagogue for the evening prayer, after which we chatted a bit about Jerusalem and its plagues and then lit candles against the darkness of the night. It was only then that Yosef came home at last. He was carrying a lantern and was still disarrayed from his journey, which for him had only now ended. He greeted his wife and the rest of us with a polite nod, but he was so tired that he confused a bag of his clothes with a packet of some documents from the consulate and even began to speak to us in English until he realized his mistake. It was then that I first understood, chère madame and señor, that he was in the grips of a notion more important to him than his own marriage — of an idée fixe, as the French say, that mattered to him more than having seed.

— His own, madame.

— Of course…

— I will get to that shortly.

— As brief as I can make it.

— What will His Grace eat?

— But why should a little porridge disturb us?

— Of course…

— Perhaps, Your Grace, it was Doña Flora who first fired his imagination and put such mettle into him. The stories you told the lad about Jerusalem, madame, on those nights when he lay by your side in the bed of the hacham, were what filled his head with grand thoughts… what made him think you could roll the world around like an egg without cracking or spilling any of it… although all he had to roll it on were the pensamientos pequeños gathered from those that Rabbi Shabbetai had discarded. Because before many days had gone by, it was clear to me that he had not merely been humoring me by dragging sleepy peasants out of their huts for a quarter of a bishlik apiece. You see, ever since he had come to Jerusalem to fetch Tamara to her wedding and stayed on there because she would not leave, he had resolved that if stay he must, he would stay among Jews, even if they did not know yet that they were Jews or had completely forgotten it. That was why he treated them with such warm sympathy. Their forgetfulness pained him, and he feared the shock of remembrance that would befall them, so that, together with the British consul, he did all he could to soften it in advance.

— Yes, muy estimada madame. Is my master and teacher listening? Such was the thought that possessed my son’s mind, the idée fixe rammed home as forcefully by the consul as if it were an iron rod driven into his brain.

— There was no knowing which of them was the bellwether and which prevailed upon which, because the consul, like all Englishmen, looked upon us Jews not as creatures of flesh and blood but as purely literary heroes who had stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament and would step back into those of the New at the Last Judgment, and who meanwhile must be kept from entering another story by mistake — which made me realize at once that I must be on guard to protect my only son’s marriage.

— Of course. The next morning the mace-bearer came to invite us to high tea with the consul and his wife. I bought myself a new fez by the Lions’ Gate, Tamara cleaned and ironed my robe, and off the three of us went to present me to the consul at that time of day when Jerusalem is ruled by a cinnamon light.

— The consulate is near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You cut across to it from the Via Dolorosa.

— By way of the Street of the Mughrabites, via Bechar’s courtyard and Navon’s stairs. ‘Tis behind Geneo’s wine shop, on Halfon’s side of it.

— No, the other Halfon. The little one who married Rabbi Arditi’s daughter.

— The Ashkenazim are a bit further down.

—’Tis all built up there now, madame, all built up. There are no empty lots there any more.

— It is built up behind the Hurva Synagogue too. The Ashkenazim are spreading all over.

— For the moment, no. But they will build there too, never fear. There is nothing to be done about it, madame. You have greatly come up in the world since leaving the Holy City, but although Time remained behind there, it has not stood still either.

— As brief as I can make it. Nevertheless, Doña Flora, I must let the story unfold out of me in its entirety, with all its joys and its sorrows, its tangs and its tastes — and for the moment I was still in Jerusalem as an esteemed visitor, a passer-through and not a stayer-on The consul and his wife received us most lovingly, and the consul even spoke a bit of Hebrew to me… Madame?

— Yes, madame, a rather Prophetic Hebrew. Yosef circulated about the house as if it were his own, and once again it struck me how adept the lad was at making himself liked and finding himself a father or a mother when he needed one. Meanwhile, more guests arrived: an old sheikh who had been fetched from the village of Silwan to provide me with company, and his son, an excellent young man who was a clerk at the consulate; some newly arrived French pilgrims; several English ladies who drank tea, puffed hookahs, and seemed quite startled by their own utterances; a German spy in a dark suit who had in tow a baptized Austrian Jew; and so on and so forth. But I, madame — I, my master and teacher — I, señores — did not forget the mission I had entrusted myself with, so that even as I listened to everyone with enthusiasm as a good guest should — “Who is honored? He who honors his fellow man”—I kept one eye, madame, on Tamara, who was sitting there silent but glowing among the Englishwomen, squeezed in between them like a baby lamb in a team of bony old nags and sipping her tea while nibbling a dry English scone in that clear, winy light. She was smiling absently to herself and considering the air, and I could see at once that her absence was due not to plenitude but vacuity. It was as if she were still not over her betrothal and had not yet been properly wed… and at that moment, I thanked God for having sent me to Jerusalem…

— I am referring to matters of the womb.

— No. Not even a miscarriage. Nothing.

— In a word, nothing, madame. And to make a long story short, it was from that nothing that I commenced my mission, that is to say, that I made it my business to see that that marriage bore seed and not only idées fixes that were bound to lead to some fiasco. By the time we guests of the consul returned home that night, each of us carrying his or her lantern à la Jerusalem and weaving through the narrow streets behind the mace-bearer, who kept rapping the cobblestones with his staff to warn the inhabitants of the underworld of our approach, I had made up my mind to become a stayer-on — that is, to settle as deeply as I could into the young couple’s home, and into my bed in your little alcove, from which I could quietly carry out my designs. And that, señores, was the meaning of my desaparicíon that you were so worried about. Does Your Grace hear me? How charmingly he nods!

— No, I do not wish to weary him. But if I do not unfold my story to the end, how will he pass his silent verdict on it? Because that same night, Your Grace, I was already having my first second thoughts as I lay secretly plotting in bed not far from the two of them. Their door was slightly ajar; moonlight bathed the bottom of their blanket; a ray of it strayed back and forth between the lookingglasses, and as I listened to their breathing — to the sounds they made as they stirred or murmured in their dreams — to their laughter and their sighs — I tried reckoning how to tell the wheat from the chaff and how to read the signs, that is, to understand where the fault or impediment lay, and if it did not perhaps involve some flight or falling-off, some inversion or infirmity, that must needs be remedied if the seed was to be conjoined by the potency of its yearning with Constantinople and with what I held most dear there, namely, señor y maestro mío, with Your Grace. And so I was up the next day before dawn, with the crowing of the first cock, which I encountered strutting in our little street as I groped my way in the dim light to the Wailing Wall, brimming with the lusts and life of Jerusalem, to weep for the destruction of our Temple and say the morning prayer. I licked the dew from the stones of the wall and asked God to prosper my way, and then I turned and ascended the Harat Babel-Silsileh to the silent souk and bought some dough rings, hard-boiled eggs, and orégano from the Arabs there. I took these back to my young couple, \yho were still luxuriating in sleep, brewed them a big pot of strong coffee, brought it all to their bed, and woke them, saying: “I am not merely your father, I am also your two mothers who died in the prime of their lives, and so it is only meet that I pamper you a bit — but in return, as Rachel says to Jacob, “Give me sons or I shall die.” The two of them blushed and smiled a bit, glanced anxiously at each other, pulled the blanket tight around themselves, and turned over in bed. Meanwhile, the muezzin had begun calling the faithful to prayer in the great mosque. Yosef listened carefully to the long wailing chant that was making my head spin and suddenly sat up and said, “That chant, Papá, is what we must work our way into until the truth that has been forgotten comes to light, because if we do not, what will become of us?” And with that he threw off his blanket, shook out of it the idée fixe that he had spent the night with, clapped it in his fez, and went off to wash and finish waking up.

—’Twas a jest, Doña Flora… a fantastical remark… a mere parable…

— I will not do it again. It was only to explain why I now changed from a passer-through to a stayer-on and began to establish myself in Jerusalem, which was rapidly exchanging the soft breezes of spring for a fierce summer heat that its inhabitants, Your Grace, call the hamseen, though so still is the air that I call it the unseen. Before a day or two had gone by I had a staff of my own to rap the cobblestones with and a lantern to make me visible in the dark, and within a week I was conferring the pleasure of my voice on the worshipers in the Stambouli Synagogue, who let me read from the Torah every Monday and Thursday. By now I was shopping in the market too, and helping Tamara peel vegetables and clean fish, and after another week or two I rented half a stand from an Ishmaelite in the Souk-el-Kattanin and set out on it the spices I had brought from overseas, to which I added some raisins, almonds, and nuts that I sold for a modest profit. I was becoming a true Jerusalemite, rushing up and down the narrow streets for no good reason, unless it were that God was about to speak somewhere and I was afraid to miss it.

— And sleeping all the while in your bed, madame, in the little alcove beneath the arched window, where I hung a new looking-glass of my own across from your old one to keep it company and to bring me news of the rest of the house, so that I might work my secret will. And though my big beard kept getting in all the mirrors, the youngsters seemed to be fond of me; not only did I not feel a burden to them, I felt I was breathing new life into a house that I had found dreamy, disorderly, and impecunious, because Yosef was paid more respect than money at the consulate, the consul being a dreamer himself who seemed to think he was not a consul but a government and who was already quite bankrupt from the prodigal sums he spent, partly on the pilgrims whose lord protector he sought to be even though most were not English, and partly on the Jews, whom he considered his wards and the keys to the future. No touring lady could visit Jerusalem from abroad without being royally put up in his home and having Yosef to guide her to the churches of Bethlehem and the mosques of Hebron, down to Absalom’s Tomb and hence to the Spring of Shiloah and from there to the Mount of Olives, first putting everything in its proper perspective and then passionately, by the end of the day, scrambling it all up again, expertly stirring faiths, languages, peoples, and races together and pitilessly baking them in the desert sun until they turned into the special Jerusalem soufflé that was his favorite dish…

— A guide, madame, if you wish; also a dragoman for roadside conversation; plus a courier for light documents; and a scribe for secret correspondence; and sometimes too, a brewer of little cups of coffee; and when the spirit moved him, the chairman of the disputatious literary soirées of the Jerusalem Bibliophile Society. In a word, a man for all times and seasons, particularly those after dark, for so accustomed was he to coming home at all hours that I had developed the habit of waking up in the middle of the night and going to see if he was in his bed yet, and of becoming frantically, heart-strickenly worried if he was not, as if the very life were being crushed out of him at that moment. And since I was afraid to step out into the silent street, I would ascend to the roof to peer through the moonlit darkness at the ramparts of the city, and then down into the bowels of the streets, hardly breathing while I waited to espy, bobbing as it approached from the Muslim or Christian Quarter, a small flame that I knew from its motion to be his. At once, madame, I slipped down from the roof and ran to the gate to admit him into his own house, as if it were he who was the honored guest from afar whose every wish must be indulged, even more than you indulged it when he was a boy, madame. I took off the fez that was stuck to his sweaty hair, helped him out of his shoes, opened his belt to let him out of his idée fixe, brought water to wash his face and feet, and warmed him something to eat, because whole days would go by without his taking anything but coffee. At last, relaxed and with his guard down, the color back in his cheeks, he would tell me about his day: whom he had met, and whose guide he had been, and where he had taken them, and what the consul had said about this or his wife about that, and what was written about them in the English press, and their latest protest to the Turkish governor — and I would listen most attentively and ask questions, and every question received its answer, until finally I teased him about his idée fixe that was lying unguardedly in the open and inquired, “Well, son, and what of your Jews who don’t know that they are Jews yet?” At first my mockery made him angry. But after a while the anger would pass and he would say with a twinkle in his eyes, “Slowly but surely, Papá They’ve only forgotten, and in the end they’ll remember by themselves. And if they insist on being stubborn, I’ll be stubborn too, and if they still don’t want to remember…” Here his eyes would slowly shut, trapping the twinkle inside them until it grew almost cruel. “If they insist,” he would say, weighing my own insistence, “we shall sorely chastise them until they see the error of their ways.”

— Yes. He definitely said “chastise,” although without explaining himself, as if all chastisement were one and the same and there was no need to spell it out chast by chast.

— Your Grace, señor y maestro mío, are you listening?

— Ah! And so, Your Grace, we joked a bit at the expense of his idée fixe until Yosef fell softly asleep and I helped him to his feet with the lantern still in his hand and led him off to bed — where, madame, his wife, silently opened the same beautiful, bright eyes with which you are staring at me right now…

— God forbid, Doña Flora! Not coerced but gently assisted.

— No further.

— My silent support, madame… my fondest encouragement…

— No further.

— I had to know.

— I was looking for a definite sign, madame.

— The looking-glass showed only shadows…

— Someone is knocking, madame… who can it be?

— Is it time for his dinner? Praise God…

— But how in the way? Not at all!

— God forbid! I am not going anywhere. I am most eager, mía amiga Doña Flora, to see how the rabbi is fed…

— I will sit quietly in this corner.

— So this is what Rabbi Shabbetai eats! It is, madame, a dish as pure as snow.

— So it is…

— Soft porridge… so it is…

— So it is. The poor man! Your Grace always hated mushy food…

— Of course. There is no choice. It is the wise thing to do, madame. Nothing else would go down as easily, filling the belly while soothing the soul. And who, may I ask, was the servant who brought it?

— A fine-looking young man. Would it not be best, though, for the holy rabbi to be waited on by one of our own?

— Well, a fine-looking young man.

— God forbid! Nothing to excite him, madame. Nothing to spoil his appetite. Why don’t you rest and let me feed Rabbi Shabbetai myself? It would be a great pleasure and a privilege.

— Well, then, perhaps later.

— His bib? Where is it?

— One minute… in truth, he seems most hungry…

— Master of the Universe! Lord have mercy! Why, ‘tis a perfect infant… a perfect infant…

— What, Your Grace?

— In a word… in a word… in the briefest of words, Doña Flora, but with much fear and trembling, because despite the cloudless summer — that is, we were now in the midst of a fiery, cloudless summer — there had even been a mild outbreak of some sort of plague, the exact name of which no one was quite sure of — I already had, Doña Flora, from all those dreams, nighttime walks, and — whoever was the bellwether — fantasies of that Hebrew-speaking English consul, a sense of impending disaster. Sometimes, when I lost _ patience standing on the roof, I went back down and took the lantern and waited for my son Yosef on the corner, by Calderon’s barred window. I stood beneath the moon and prayed to see that crookedly bobbing little flame, which sometimes appeared from the south, with a herd of black goats coming home late from their distant pasture in the Valley of the Cross, and sometimes from the west, with a band of pilgrims returning from midnight mass in the Holy Sepulchre, to whom my son had attached himself in the darkness as an unnoticed guide to penetrate a place that Jews were barred from…

— Of course, madame. A most flagrant provocation. The Christians themselves are divided into mutually suspicious sects that ambush each other in the naves of the church and brawl over every key and lock, and they certainly did not need an uninvited Jew peeking into God’s tomb and reminding them of what they did not believe they had forgotten and had no intention of remembering. And as if that were not enough, he sometimes proceeded from there to the Gate of the Mughrabites, from where steps lead up to the great mosque, in order to bid a fond good night to its two Mohammedan watchmen before heading home for the one place that he feared most of all — namely, his own bed.

— That is only in a manner of speaking, of course, Doña Flora… most hyperbolically. But see how Rabbi Shabbetai looks at me as he eats! Perhaps my story will take my master’s mind off his mush, hee hee hee…

— No, no, madame. I did not mean the bed itself. Just the idea of it…

— I mean —

— God forbid! ‘Twas always with the most friendly respect and affection…

— Of… why, in all simplicity, of the sleep awaiting him there… that was what troubled him so, madame…

— That he might awake to discover that the world had changed while he slept… that something had happened in it without his knowing or being a party to it… that his idée fixe, whose sole reliable consular representative he considered himself to be, had burst like a bubble before he had time to bring it back to life…

— So he felt, madame. “The day is short and the labor is great.” And perhaps — who knows, maestro y señor mío — he already sensed his approaching death in that much-provoked Jerusalem of his.

— Tamara, Doña Flora, said nothing.

— That is, she heard and saw everything. And waited…

— She was not unreceptive to his views, provided that something came of them…

— At night she slept. I kept an eye on her in the looking-glass I had hung on the wall, which was reflected in your old glass, madame, which in turn was reflected in the glass hanging over their bed, and I saw that she slumbered peacefully… But look, Doña Flora, he is getting food all over his mouth and chin…

— Here…

— Perhaps we need a fresh towel.

— As you wish, madame. I am at your service. Perhaps that handsome young Greek made the porridge a bit too mushy…

— God forbid, madame! I am not interfering in anything. It was just a thought, and I have already taken it back.

— Of course, madame. Briefly and to the point. Which is that I found your niece an admirable housewife who baked and cooked quite unvaryingly excellent food. She simply forgot at times to make enough of it, so that I had to —

— Mahshi, kusa, and calabaza, and certain days of the week a shakshuka…

— Fridays she put up a Sabbath stew with haminados.

— Sometimes it had meat in it, and sometimes it had the smell of meat…

— Of course. She did all her own cleaning and laundering. The house, Dona Flora, was as spic and span as the big looking-glass. And she also helped her father Valero and his young wife, and took her little stepsister and stepbrother to the Sultan’s Pool every afternoon to enjoy the cool water and play with the Atias children among the Ishmaelite tombstones…

— The Atias who married Franco’s youngest daughter.

—’Tis on the tip of my tongue, rubissa, and will soon come to me. Meanwhile, maestro y señor mio, permit me to sketch the picture for you. Is he still listening? I was, you see, in Jerusalem to shore up a marriage that needed consolidating, for it had yet to outgrow its hasty Beirut betrothal; and so I did my best to keep the young bride from sinking into too much housework, and from time to time I took her with me to my spice-and-sundries stand in the Souk-el-Kattanin, where she could sit and catch the notice of the passersby with her winning mien, so that — after walking on and stopping short and doubling back for a better look and possibly even a word with her — they might interest themselves in a spice or two. And meanwhile, the air around her began to shoot sparks — one of which, I hoped, would fly all the way to her young husband, who was busy escorting the consul’s guests to Bethlehem and Hebron. It would do him no harm, I thought, to wonder why his wife was attracting such looks…

— God forbid! God forbid! ‘Twas done most honorably. And each day when the sun began to glow redly in my jars of rosemary, cinnamon, and thyme, and to tint my raisins with gold, I put away my goods and folded my stand and brought her to the woman’s gallery of the synagogue of Rabbi Yohanan ben-Zakkai to listen to the Mishnah lesson and be seen among the widows and old women by the men arriving from the souk for the afternoon prayer. Sometimes Yosef came too, all in a great dither, his idée fixe sticking out of his pocket; and while he said his prayers devoutly enough, he kept running his eyes over us ordinary Jews who could not forget that we were Jews and so had nothing to remember, nothing to do but say the same old prayers in the same old chants. Now and then he glanced up at the women’s gallery, squinting as if into the distance at his petite wife — who, like himself, though a year had gone by since their Beirut betrothal, still was daubed with its honey-gold coat that had to be patiently, pleasurably, licked away. And I, Rabbi Shabbetai, began to lick… slowly but surely, madame…

— A parable, of course, madame, never fear… à la fantastique, as the French would say… ‘twas merely to bring them together… to conclude the good deed started in Beirut, Your Grace. And thus the two of us, madame, the motherless bride and myself, wandered through a Jerusalem summer that burned with a clear, bright light I first caught a glimpse of in your own wondering eyes, Doña Flora, the first time we met in Salonika. I was determined to see this marriage through, and I began taking my daughter-in-law with me everywhere… to the courtyard of the consulate, for example, where we sat in the shade of a tree by the cistern and watched the builders lay the foundations for a new house of prayer that is to be called Christ’s Church, for the greater glory of England. The air shot sparks; the builders put down their tools and turned to look, for nothing disarms more than beauty; men walking down the lane slackened stride, even backtracked a bit, as if the sight of her made them unsure whether they suddenly had lost or found something. A gentle commotion commenced all around us, until the consul’s wife had to step outside and invite us in for a hookah and some English tea with milk while sending a servant to pry Yosef loose from one of the inner rooms. At first he was alarmed to see us there; yet as soon as he saw that all were smiling and in good spirits, he inclined his head with loving resignation and took us under his wing. In this manner I was occasionally able to get him to come home for lunch with us, to have a bite to eat and cool off in his bed with his wife, whom the eyes of Jerusalem were beginning to make him most appreciative of. I did not remain to peer into the looking-glass. I went outside and left them by themselves, locking the door behind me, because by now I had an idée fixe of my own, a much smaller and more modest one than his, to be sure, but every bit as powerful… and with it, señores, with my craving for seed, I kept after them for all I was worth. And in those hot afternoons, at that most still and torrid hour when the air is dry and without a hint of a breeze, which is the best time for olfaction, I strode through the Lions’ Gate and down to the house of the sheikh of Silwan village, where I was shown little fagots of weeds and grasses, roots and flowers that the Ishmaelites had gathered at the old man’s behest from the mountains of Judea and Samaria, from the shores of the Dead Sea to the coast of our Mediterranean, for me to sniff and perhaps find some new species or plant from which to concoct the spice of the century…

— In truth, madame, one sniff was all I needed. And thus, sniff by sniff and weed by weed, I smelled my way through our Promised Land…

— A spice more aromatic and tangy than any of those I had brought from Salonika, which I had begun to run out of by that summer’s end that was harsher than summer itself…

— In truth, madame, they were running low, and even though this drove up my prices, it did not drive the buyers away. They snatched whatever I had, be it thyme or basil or saffron or rosemary or marjoram or nutmeg or oregano, because it was the month of the great Mohammedan fast, which they broke every night with spicy meals that kept them smacking their lips throughout the next day until the boom of the cannon at sunset announced they could eat once again… and that, su merced, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah, was the sound that sent a shiver through my son Yosef one evening, when I found him sitting by himself in the half-light by his bed, straight as a knife blade and wrapped in a sheet, striped by a sun that was in its last throes above the Jaffa Gate. He had finished the siesta I made him take every day and had already smuggled his wife out through the kitchen window into the Zurnagas’ backyard, from where she could proceed to her father’s to take the children to the pool, and was now waiting for me to return from my olfateo in Silwan to open the locked door for him…

— Yes, he was waiting, madame, wrapped with thoughtful patience in a sheet. I took some fragrant herbs and roots from my robe and scattered them on the bed to dispel the mournful ambience of struggle and sorrow in the odor of seed that hung over it and its pale homunculi, sad-faced gossamer ghosts who were none other than the less fortunate brothers and sisters of our future baby Moses, demon children spilled like pollen in that room that still shook from the blast of the cannon, which now fired again, Your Grace, into our holy hills…

— Madame?

— God forbid, muy distinguida rubissa!

— God forbid, Doña Flora, with all due respect…

— God forbid! With all due respect, but also, madame, in all truth…

— But how am I disgusting? Surely not to him!

— No, our Yosef would not be angry. He would not even be upset. He would understand how justified my little idée fixe was… Why, in my honor he even had his own idée fixe devour it, so that now the two of them thrashed about together in his soul, which yearned to join the throng of believers gathered before the great mosque — forgetful Jews who soon, with God’s help, would remember and bow, not southward to faraway Mecca, but inwardly to themselves, happy to be where they were, beneath the sky above them…

— In truth, madame…

— How was it possible, you ask? Oh, but it was!

— More than once. In the mosque and in the Dome of the Rock too.

— In truth, mí amiga, a frightful provocation…

— Yes. To them too. Not just to the Christians.

— A double provocation, the entire justification of which lay in its doubleness, and therefore, in its peaceful intentions, since according to him, once all remembered their true nature, they would make peace among themselves.

— He felt too much compassion to feel fear, Doña Flora. You see, he had already racked his brain for all the chastisements he would chastise them with for their obduracy, for all the pain and sorrow he would inflict on them and their offspring, and he was now so full of compassion that he never dreamed that before he would have time to pity them all they would seize and massacre him…

— But how, madame, do you restrain a thought?

— The consul? But that was the very root of the evil — that boundlessly audacious English consular enthusiasm that made him think that the entire British fleet was at anchor just over the hills, somewhere between Ramallah and el-Bireh, covering his every movement…

— How, Doña Flora? How? Time was already running out!

— Because I had begun to despair of his accursed idée fixe, which devoured every other idée that it encountered as if it were simply grist for the mill, like that which madame is now spooning into His Grace. I was persuaded more than ever that the marriage must be made to bring forth a child, which alone could do battle — yes, from its cradle! — with the unnatural thoughts of a father by means of a simple cry or laugh, or of the riddle of its own future, and thus, Doña Flora, thus, Your Worship, began the race between my son’s death and the birth of his son. It was the month of Elul, whose penitential prayers broke the silence of the night, that time of year when — perhaps you remember, madame — wondrous breezes are born that get their odors and tastes from all over, taking a pinch of the warmth of the standing water in the Pool of Hezekiah, adding a touch of dryness from the scorched thistles in the fields between the houses of the Armenians, mixing in the bitterness of the cracked, furrowed graves on the Mount of Olives, whipping up a flying incense that whirls from street to street. Only now do I realize, señor y maestro mío, that the true spice, the spice of the future, will not come from any root, leaf, berry, or pollen, but from the shapeless, formless wind, for which I shall uncork all my vials and bottles to let it blend with their contents and infuse them with strength for the Days of Awe, awful in every sense of the word…

— No, Doña Flora, no, su merced, I made sure he did not miss the services. The consul and his wife had gone to 8135.5 Jaffa on consular business, and the air was tremulous in that subtle way it is in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, as if the Merciful One, the chief judge Himself, had secretly returned to the city from His travels and was hiding in one of its small dwellings, in which He planned to spend the holy fast day with us, the signed list of men’s fates — “Who by fire and who by water, who in due time and who before his time”—already in His pocket, although He was afraid to take it out and read it. Yosef seemed more at peace with the world too, full of an inner mirth that took the edge off even his idée fixe, while Tamara had been busy cooking her delicious holiday dishes, her eyes, which were inflamed with dust all summer, now clear and wide — indeed, Rabbi Shabbetai, they were so like madame’s that are looking at us right now that the growing resemblance between Constantinople and Jerusalem sent a shiver down my spine. And so I awoke him before dawn, and took him to the synagogue, and stood with him not far from the cantor, so that we could be quick to snatch the tidbits thrown to the worshipers from time to time — a verse from “God the King Who Sitteth on His Mercy Seat,” a word from “O Answer Us,” or even a whole section of “Lord of Forgiveness”—and raise our voices on high in token of our piety and in hope that the Master of the Universe would hear us and let us have our way for once…

— What say you, Dona Flora? I never knew!

— Old Tarabulus? Who does not remember him? Why, he would bring tears to our eyes every Sabbath eve in the Great Synagogue with his “Come, My Love”!

— Truly?

— O my son!

— Yes, that old prayer shawl that was black with age… of course I do… it was already that color when I was a child… I always felt drawn to it too, but I never dared touch it…

— Truly? Oh, the poor boy… my poor son…

— O my poor son… you speak of him with such love…

— No, I will not cry.

— Oh, madame, oh, Your Grace, what sweet sorrow I feel at the thought of my boy standing wrapped in that grimy prayer shawl by the hearth of your salon in Constantinople, pretending to be the great Tarabulus…

— Of course…”This Day Hath the World Conceived”…the Rosh Hashanah prayer…”Be We Thy Sons or Slaves”…

— No, I will not sing now… ah, the poor lad… my poor son… because you see, even though I knew that all things were decided in heaven, I knew too that “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”…and so I kept after him… because to whom could I pass on what consumed me if I let go of it? Your most agreeable brother-in-law Refa’el Valero had little children of his own, and his Veducha was pregnant again, and they certainly did not need another child, not even if it was only a grandchild… and so, because if I was not for myself who would be for me, and if not now, when, I began to pursue him through courtyards and down alleyways on his visits to Jews and to Gentiles. I never let him out of my sight, until I acquired a most infernal knowledge of Jerusalem myself, of the city of your tender youth, Doña FLora.

— Why, I was able to pop up anywhere, like a wise old snake…

— Because — and this I learned from Yosef — it is a city in which all places are connected and there is a way around every obstacle. You can traverse the whole of it by going from house to house without once stepping out into the street…

— For example, for example, by climbing Arditi’s stairs you can get to Bechar and Geneo’s roof, and then through their kitchen to the courtyard of the Greek patriarch, from where, if you cut straight through the chapel, you need only open a little gate to find yourself in She’altiel’s salon. If She’altiel is home, you may have a cup of coffee with him and ask his leave to proceed, but if he is not, or if he is sleeping, you need not turn back. Just tiptoe down his little hallway without peeking into the bedroom and you will come to five steps belonging to the staircase of an old building destroyed by the accursed Crusaders, which lead directly to the storeroom of Franco’s greengrocery. Once there, you need only move some watermelons and sacks aside and stoop a bit to enter the little synagogue of the Ribliners, where you will find yourself behind the Holy Ark. If they happen to be praying, you can join them, even if they are Ashkenazim, and if they are in the middle of a Mishnah class, you can ask to go to their washroom, which is shared by the guard of the Muslim wakf — who, no matter how sleepy he seems, will be happy to take half a mejidi to lead you across the large hall of the Koran scholars and back out into the street, where you will look up in amazement to espy the house of your parents, may they rest in paradise, the very house of your childhood, madame…

— From the rear? Why from the rear?

— But it is all built up there, madame… the buildings are now conjoined… that empty space is no more…

— Never once, Doña Flora. I myself was amazed that I was not once lost… because in Constantinople — does Your Grace remember? — does he? — that happened to me all the time, not just as a boy but as a young man too, and without the slightest effort, hee hee…For example, rubissa, if I was sent to fetch something for Rabbi Shabbetai, some tobacco, or coffee, or a sesame cake, or cheese, I would end up wandering from bazaar to bazaar, past the rug dealers, past the fabric stalls, past all the colorful, good-smelling dresses, across the Golden Horn without even noticing, passing from Asia to Europe — and there, madame, I would get so hopelessly confused that I could no longer find my way back, so that evening would come — does Your Grace remember? — and Rabbi Shabbetai would see that there was no tobacco, no coffee, no sesame cake, no cheese, and no Mani, and he would have to leave his books, go downstairs, find some horseman or soldier from the Sultan’s Guard, and give him a bishlik to go to Galata and bring me back home to Asia, frightened and white as a sheet… hee hee hee… he remembers… by God, he is smiling! Even after so many years, that Constantinople of yours is a maze for me… your crooked Stamboul, which to this day I cannot get straight in my head… whereas Jerusalem, madame, could not only be gotten straight, it was getting too straight for comfort… night by night I felt it tighten around me…

— Because at night, Dona Flora — in those nights that grew longer and longer now that we had seen the last of the last holiday, and on which the sun set sooner and sooner — the idée fixe that I thought had faded with summer’s end now raised its head again with winter’s start and was soon raging out of control, like an illness that had gone to sleep not because it had run its course but in order to wake up stronger than ever. And by now I was mortally afraid for my own soul…

— Of his idée fixe infecting me too, Dona Flora, so that I would start seeing the world through his eyes Because there was more strength in his silence, in the calm way he shut his eyes while quietly listening to me, than there was in all my warnings and rebukes, which he crossed out with a single thin-lipped smile before donning a large, odd cloak that he had found in the market in Hebron and setting out on his nighttime excursions. It did not even help to hide his lantern, because his pockets were full of little candles, which he stuffed them with in case he had to light one and declare himself to the Turkish watch. The spirit moved him with the fall of night, so that while the two of us, Tamara and I, were preparing for bed, he slipped out of the house without his lantern despite the danger of it and — in the same roundabout way he had of going from Jewish house to Jewish house — went to call on his Jews who did not know yet they were Jews, most boldly walking in and out of their homes, without once stepping into the street, in his eagerness to find some sign or testimony that would prove them wrong…

— For example, madame, a scrap of parchment, a piece of cloth, a potsherd, a stone, some old ritual object — and when he despaired of all these, he would strain to catch some word murmured in their dreams and to seize it as if it were the handle of a coal scoop burning in the fire of forgetfulness, which he must snatch from the embers to let its contents cool until they regained, like soft white gold, their elemental form. And thus, Rabbi Shabbetai, thus, Doña Flora, he entered the houses of his forgetful Jews as they were turning in for the night, which was young enough for their doors to be still open, passing through hallways, up and down stairways, and in and out of dwellings whose inhabitants, soft with sleep, were getting ready for bed and having a last cup of tea while their new cuckoo clocks — for German salesmen had been to Jerusalem too — cooed away in the corners. He conversed with them gently, with that slight inclination of his head, most amiably and politely; gave them regards from one another; asked them for news of themselves; and listened to what they had to say. Not that they had the least idea of who he was or what he wanted from them — but his good nature was infectious and they welcomed him so warmly that they hardly even noticed that he was already in their bedrooms, bending down to look at something, pulling back a blanket, reaching out to touch a baby or to turn over one of the many children who lay wrapped in their little bed smocks, sound asleep as only youngsters can be who are busy growing in their slumber and not merely resting in it, their eyes sealed by the thin yellow crust still left over from the summer’s trachoma. And then, thinking of the chastisements he must bring upon them for their obduracy, my poor son felt his resolve weaken, swallowed the lump in his throat, and ran his hands over the walls as if looking for a dark opening that memory might burst forth from. And thus, madame, thus, Your Grace, the autumn came and went with the winter on its heels. Freezing rains lashed the walls of the holy city, to which the Russian pilgrims were still crawling on their knees, bundled in their heavy fur coats, their reddish beards and mustaches making them look like so many giant silkworms with their heads in the air. They packed the square of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the streets all around, waiting in puddles of rain and mud for the birth of their god, their hate for the Jew greater than ever, because not only he had killed their Christ he had done it in the remotest and most forsaken of places instead of in Mother Russia…

— Because they were already mourning their approaching departure from that lavish sepulcher, which they were growing fonder of by the minute, and were quite distraught at not being able to tear it out of the earth in one piece and carry it back to their native land with them. And so, madame, it was hardly surprising that they should have been looking in their most pious ardor for a substitute corpse, preferably a young Jew’s… and in truth, it was given them…

— He was given them.

— He gave himself… he let himself be passed from hand to hand…

— In parable …à la fantastique Your Grace understands…

— Again? But have I not made you shudder enough, madame? I have already brought tears to your eyes…

— Again? I cannot.

— I saw nothing… I only know what I was told…

— I have already told you all I know.

— They slit his throat.

— There, you are shaking again, madame. And Rabbi Haddaya has stopped eating…

— He was passed from hand to hand.

— In truth, he stole into that pilgrim crowd, and on the night of the holy fire…

— I suppose his idée fixe had swallowed all his fears and made a fine grist of them.

—’Tis no wonder, madame. Even the Mohammedans are afraid to approach on such a night…

— Perhaps he expected to convert them too… who knows?

— I am saying that I do not know what my son really thought, or what he thought that he should have thought. Insofar as he had decided that everyone in Jerusalem was connected, not even the wildest or strangest of pilgrims could fail to arouse his insatiable curiosity, which was forever looking for ways to link strangers together and do battle with what he deemed their self-immurement…

— At first, perhaps, the motherless bride you found for him, madame… and possibly, he considered me too to be such a case of self-inflicted isolation…

— No, God forbid — he loved her, madame! He loved and honored her greatly, and always spoke to her with much tact and circumspection, as if they were still in the midst of their betrothal and he must not encumber her — which is why he went off each evening and left her to her own devices. And once he realized that I would stay with her, he grew more unbridled than ever…

— Followed him at night too, madame?

— At first I tried. But the nights grew colder and colder, the pilgrims having managed to their great satisfaction to bring their Russian snow and hail with them, and his idée fixe could no longer hold in check my own dreadful fright. And so I begged his friend from the consulate, the son of the sheikh from Silwan, to do all he could to save him from himself while I sat home by the coal-burning stove and sang Tía Loja’s conacero to that little drop of fluid, which I knew by the first candle of Hanukkah, madame, to be safely deposited where it belonged… Here, this is how I sang it, Doña Flora —

— Because I saw no sign of menstrual blood.

— I always noticed, although don’t ask me how. And I was so happy that I sang like this —

— I have a pleasant voice. Come, listen, madame…’tis but a short conacero….

— No, he is. He knows the song…

— No, I will not!

— It was his favorite of all Tía Loja’s conaceros. I beg you… I desire to sing it for him!

— No, he is looking at me. He is pleased. I will not sing much… soon I will be gone, madame… the best hope of man is the maggot…

— No. ‘Tis not I but you who needs rest, Doña Flora. Your face is so pale that the light passes right through it. And the worst times are still to come…

— I will stay here… I will watch over him… I will take it on myself…

— I will not be a burden to him… I will lullaby him to sleep…

— Most pleasantly… until he falls asleep. Does Your Grace remember? Go now, madame. Adieu, madame. I am only lullabying him… go, madame… adieu, madame…

When all go to the kehillá,

I go to your house,

Istraiqua, apple of my eye

When all kiss the mezuzá,

I kiss your own face,

Istraiqua, apple of my eye

To the graveyard has your mother gone

For my death to pray,

That I may take you as my bride not

To the graveyard have your sisters gone

For my death to pray,

That I may take you as my bride not.

She is finally gone, then, the woman! And you and I, my master and teacher, are alone again as once when we were young. She is most wondrous, Doña Flora! “A woman of valor who can find? For her price is far above pearls; the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.” But will she have the strength? In the port in Salonika we had a saying, “What good is gold when the husband is old?” And suppose he is sick too? Once it seemed to me, Rabbi Shabbetai, that I envied Your Grace for his marriage, but today I understand that my envy was of her, for taking Your Grace away from me. Will she prove equal to the task, though? ‘Tis the hand of God that has brought me, Your Grace’s oldest and most trusty disciple, back to him. Now that the two of us are alone, I would be most grateful if Your Grace would kindly whisper a word to me. I am all silent anticipation. What can be the meaning of this great silence of yours?

Is it in truth silence, then? Is señor’s muteness decreed? Perhaps the lute has indeed popped a string. Is it that, then: that there is no longer a voice to give utterance? Even the “tu tu tu” that Your Grace sounded before would be most welcome. “Rabbi Elazar ben Hisma says, ‘Cryptic portents are but the crumbs of wisdom.’” But I would make something whole even of Your Grace’s crumbs, for I am well versed in Your Grace’s manner and have been for ages. Your Grace need not fear me… Ai, will you cling to your silence forever, then, or is this but an interval? Can it be that you will leave us without breaking it? Who would have thought it, señor, who would have imagined it! Not that I did not know that the day would come when His Grace would grow weary of us, but I somehow had never foreseen it as silence, only as a vanishing, a desaparición like all your others: one day the rabbi would set out, again to preach and hold court in some far place, and while we were still thinking that he was there, or elsewhere, he would be already nowhere, quite simply gone and no more. So I imagined your departure: your tobacco on the table, your little nargileh next to it, the quill and inkwell in their usual place, an open book lying beside them, your cloak flapping near the looking-glass by the doorway — and Your Grace gone I would go look for him in a place that I knew he always had yearned for, in Mesopotamia, señor, or Babylonia, where your furthest, your first father is buried. And I already pictured myself, Rabbi Haddaya, following in Your Grace’s tracks and entering a most ancient synagogue at the time of the afternoon prayer, a synagogue rosy with age, in which a sole Jew sat on a divan saying his vigils and asking him about Your Grace — and without ceasing to recite from his book, he would point to the open window with a gesture that meant, “You have a long, long way to go, for he was here and moved on; he has crossed the purple fields in the bounteous light of a tawny, dry Eden and is gone…” He is gone eastward into the great interior, into the land of primeval ruins, into the last light of the shattered blocks of giant idols, headless, buttockless… eastward… so I imagined it… and now, this silence. Is that all, then? Silence? Not a word to clutch at — not even a tiny pearl of wisdom — just this dark little room in a Europe that Your Grace swore never to set foot in again, in an inn run by Greek rebels against the Porte, bound to a bed on wheels? And what is this that I see out the window? A chapel for their dead saints, may their bones rot! Your Grace breaks my heart with his little eyes that are so full of pain and sorrow. See, here I am, maestro y señor mío, come from the Land of Israel, in dire need of a word, of a verdict — ah, su merced Rabbi Shabbetai, I am in need of a judgment from you! I demand that you convene a rabbinical court, right here and now…

Or is this your way, señor, of outwitting death? When my father passed away, and I was called back posthaste to Salonika, and I wept before Your Grace in Constantinople because I did not want to leave you and return home, you said: “It is your duty to return to your mother and say the kaddish for your father.” And I asked, “But who will say the kaddish for you, señor, my master and teacher?” And I offered to do it myself. Your Grace did not answer me. You just stroked my head and smiled to yourself, and I knew at once from your silence that Your Grace did not believe in dying but rather in something else. Is this it, then? And yet nonetheless…

I am in a hurry to seek judgment. And though it says, “Make not an only judge of yourself, for there is One alone who can judge by Himself,” I always knew that you were not one but two, as has now been made so frightfully clear, for half of you is here and half of you is not. The truth is out. “Ben Ha Ha says, ‘According to the sorrow shall be the reward,’” but I, señor y maestro mío, make bold to say: according to the reward shall be the sorrow. And while I regret neither sorrow nor reward, I demand to know if I will have a share in the World to Come…

I am whispering, because perhaps Doña Flora is listening in the next room. Her I wish to spare sorrow, because even though she is a most clever woman, it is inconceivable that she has already understood what Your Grace — I could tell by the gleam in his eyes — understood in silence For in truth, there was no seed, nor could there have been any, so that the seed could not yet know that it was seed but could only hope to be the seed that it longed to be. That is, it was the seed of longing, the seed of yearning to be seed — seed on the doorknob, seed on the parched earth, seed of shroud and sepulcher, “seed of evil-doers, children of corruption…”

With your permission, I will lock the door, because perhaps madame will try to enter nonetheless. And the court must brook no interruption in its labors — is that not what Your Grace taught me when Jews came to seek redress in your home in Constantinople and you shut the door to keep me out? Yes, that’s better now, isn’t it? And we will stir some life into the fire, because Your Grace is wet and the blanket is damp too. How could they have bound and swaddled you so? With your permission, we will free you a bit. Can this be, ah, can it be the Strong Arm of the Law that presided over an entire age? If I am hurting Your Grace, let him move his strong arm…

In actual fact, the case is not at all difficult. The defendant has already brought in a verdict of guilty and given himself the maximum sentence. He simply does not know if this will atone for the crime or if it will only compound it. Or to put it differently: will I have a share in the World to Come — even the tiniest share — no more than a peephole through which to see the honor bestowed there on Your Grace and to say to whomever will listen, “I too knew the man”?

Is that better? Here, let me rub your back a bit too, to help the lazy blood circulate. Does Your Grace remember how he taught me as a boy to scratch his back? There, that’s better. The muy distinguida doña swaddled you too much. Her worry made her overdo it, the poor thing. The ties need to be loosened some more. There was a time, señor, I won’t deny it, when I thought of madame as a kind of trust that Your Grace was safekeeping for me, for she had held out against marriage and had no father to impose his will, and I thought that Your Grace was merely trying to tame her. And indeed, I added a son to tame her even more — until little by little it dawned on me that the trust was not meant for me. And yet even when Your Grace forbade her to join me on my journey to Jerusalem, I still supposed that this was only because he wished us not to jump to any hasty conclusions. It was not until I saw my son’s anguish in the port in Jaffa as I stepped out of the ship by myself, and watched him producing Jews who did not know yet they were Jews on our way to Jerusalem, that my understanding began to grow by leaps and bounds — and each leap and each bound leaped and bounded still more when I entered their little house and saw madame’s motherless niece for the first time, the Jerusalem damsel who had been betrothed in Beirut. Did Your Grace have any idea of the fascinating, the frightening resemblance between them? Why, she is the very image of Dona Flora, just thirty years younger and fresher, a thing of beauty!

Perhaps, señor, we should massage the soles of your feet a bit too, both the good foot and the bad one. What made your cara rubissa wrap you in so many layers? As if it were not enough for her to feed you with a spoon, she has to diaper Your Grace like a baby! Perhaps she really thinks she has given birth to you, hee hee. With your permission, let me poke the fire a bit and untie you, and then I will tell you a one and only story, a story of sweet perdition — because even if Your Grace realized there was no seed there, you could not have realized that there could not have been any seed there, that is, that no answer was given because no question had ever been asked. For by that same secret light that shone from the snow that now was draping the walls and streets of Jerusalem like a newly grown beard on an old man, the time had come to know that there was a truth that came before the truth…

Here? Or does it feel better here?…Let us return from the funeral on the Mount of Olives and sit the two mourners, the widow and the father, next to each other on pillows, across from the coal-burning stove, their feet unshod and their tunics slashed. Rabbis Franco and Ben-Atar did their tactful best to ease us into the week of mourning, so that it might enfold us and warm us and cushion the bleeding wound. We were fed dough rings and raisins, and given hard-boiled eggs that are round and have no beginning or end, and gently taught the laws of mourning word by word. The consul, his wife, and their attendants sat pityingly around us, quite chagrined that they too could not slash their clothes, pull off their shoes, slump down on the floor, and eat the never-ending egg. They too grieved greatly for the lad and felt anguished by his death — and perhaps guilty, too, for having plied him with dreams that were too much for him. By the door of the crowded little dwelling, between old Carso and a Turkish gendarme, I was distressed to notice, señor y maestro mío, the young sheikh from Silwan, who had returned with us from the cemetery to continue weeping for his friend and join the circle of comforters. And perhaps he too, señor, was asking the unasked question that haunted everyone and made all eyes sear the young woman who sat dressed in black, shivering by the coal-burning stove In the several hours that had gone by since the death she had as though grown older and even more alike our Doña Flora… ah!…

… Assuming, that is, that it were possible, that the resemblance were not already perfect, that it could have been even greater — because I have already told you, señor, that we both were innocents when we failed to look more deeply into that betrothal in Beirut and to take the necessary precautions… But be that as it may, the evening prayer was concluded, and I bitterly sobbed the kaddish one last time, and the comforters wept along with me, and I saw Refa’el Valero rise to go, and his wife Veducha put a towel over the tray of food she had brought, the mahshi, kusa, and burekas, and went to join him, leaving Tamara with me — for such is the custom in Jerusalem, that once a mourner has eaten of the never-ending egg, he or she does not leave the house they are in. It was getting dark, and one by one everyone left, even that murderer, who rose and said good night as sweetly as you please. No one stayed behind but old Carso, who was assigned to chaperone us; he sank down between us, warming himself by the stove, his mouth open as if to gulp its heat. And all along I felt Tamara’s eyes on me, as if she wished to tell me what my soul was too frightened to ask. The night dropped, slowly. The snowflakes drifted outside, red in the moonlight. Old Carso fell asleep by the stove, taking what heat it gave all for himself. Until, señor y maestro mío, I woke him and sent him respectfully home. And even though I knew it was a sin for a man and a woman to be left alone by themselves, I did not lose my presence of mind, for had I lost my presence of mind over a little sin like that, how could I ever have gone on to a much greater one…

The fact is, Shabbetai Hananiah, that your silence suits me and that I find it most profound. I only wish that I could be as mute as you — that I could declare: I have said all I have to say, señores, and now you can make what you like of it… although since no one ever particularly listened to me anyway, no one would notice my silence either. But still, my master and teacher, I pray you not to cast me yet out of your thoughts. All I am asking from you is a nod or a shake of your head, a yes or a no, in accordance with your sentence. I already know the verdict. ‘Tis but the sentence I require.

Well, señor, the stove went out early, because the coals brought by the consul’s men were damp and would not catch. It grew colder and colder. I watched her keep going to the closet and take out more and more clothes to put on, but although by now she looked like a big puffball, she could not stop shivering. She even would have put on her husband’s Hebron cloak, knife holes and all, had I not made haste to offer her my fox-fur robe, which she took without hesitation and draped over herself. And still the cold grew worse. I too kept donning layer after layer, and finally I wrapped myself in the bloody cloak and looked like a big ball myself. We went from room to room and bed to bed, two dark balls reflected by the moonlight from the looking-glasses, in which you could not tell which of us was which. Jerusalem had shut its gates for the night: no one came, no one went. It was as silent outside as if we were the last two people on earth, alone in the last vestigial shelter, each in his or her room, each on his or her bed, each looking at the other in the looking-glass. The candle was burning down in my hand, and before it went out altogether I blurted, “My daughter, I wish to comfort myself with the child that you will bear, and so I will stay here until the birth, that I may know that I am not the world’s last Mani.” And she, in my fox robe, a furry ball on her big bed, answered as clear as a bell: “You are the last. Do not stay, because there is nothing, and will be nothing, and was nothing, and could have been nothing, since I differ in nothing from the woman I was, as you have guessed since you entered Jerusalem. We never were man and wife, for we could not get past the fear and pain. Not even my father knows. I am still a virgin.” At that, Rabbi Shabbetai, my heart froze. I was so frightened by her words that I quickly blew out my candle lest I see even her shadow…

But, my master and teacher, although her shadow disappeared, she herself remained sitting there, and the shadow of the disgrace left behind by my dead son fell upon us both and yoked us together. In truth, I wept to myself, I have failed as I knew I must. The marriage could not be shored up, and the lamb slaughtered too soon now lay on the Mount of Olives, his disgrace unavoidable at the hands of whoever married his widow. I was full of a great sorrow and a terrible wrath, Rabbi Haddaya — sorrow for my son, who lay naked beneath earth and snow, and wrath at Doña Flora, at our beloved madame, who had brought this misfortune upon us. And it was then that I thought of the words of Ben Bag Bag, who said, “Turn it and turn it, for all is in it, and in it you shall find all.”

Now you are gaping at me. At last I have been able to unsettle you — I, your pisgado, I, your faithful, your dull, your charmless little pustema. Do you think, maestro mío, that you might sound another one of your “tu tu tus” to let me know where I stand with you? I remember you, sitting as a boy by the hearth in Salonika with my father, may he rest in peace, an old seafarer from the islands grumbling about Napoleon. Out in the hallway I heard them whispering, “He is a great mind but a most wondrous bachelor; there is none like him.” And when I lived with you in Constantinople and saw how winning, how blushing and guileless, your bachelorhood was, I lost my heart to you. And then my father passed away and we were forced to part. You resumed your journeys in the east, traveling as far as the Promised Land — and there, in Jerusalem, you met Doña Flora and were no more insensitive than others to her charms. And in the goodness of your heart you thought of me, for I had newly lost my wife, and when Doña Flora journeyed to Salonika, you thought of me again. Was it only of me, though? Or was I no more than a pretext? For why, when madame rejected me, did you wed her secretly in a faraway place to the astonishment of your disciples? You, who were so guileless, so blushing, so pure — what was the purpose of it? What end did it serve? There in Salonika, I tormented myself thinking about it. I grieved and was jealous until, able to stand it no longer, I made you a gift of my boy — who, I thought, might unriddle for me the secret of your most wondrous and resplendent marriage. And in truth, he seemed close to doing so, for so Doña Flora, that most wondrous and fearsome woman, wished him to be. For first she introduced him, half a boy and half already a young man, to your bed, my master and teacher, and then she betrothed him to her niece in Beirut, her look-alike motherless virgin of a widow from Jerusalem, whose shadow, señor y maestro mío, was slowly being beamed to me from the looking-glass in the moonlight that now broke through the clouds… does Your Grace remember?

So you see, this then was the meaning of the idée fixe (I am whispering lest madame be listening impatiently on the other side of the door, for she has been most suspicious of me since the moment I arrived at this inn.) This then was its meaning — for why else would he insist on his surreptitious visits to those unwashed Ishmaelites just as they were dropping off to sleep — why would he think them forgetful Jews, or Jews who would remember that they were Jews — if he had not, señor y maestro mío, already upon arriving in the wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem, been quite simply overwhelmed by his loneliness — a loneliness that only grew greater when he first glimpsed the ramparts and cloistering gates of that obstinate desert city of stone, in which he was awaited by his motherless Beirut fiancée, the look-alike of his adored madame? That was what made him decide to see a former Jew in every Ishmaelite! And yet, señor, or so I often asked myself, this fit of loneliness — was it only because he had been so pampered by you in Constantinople? Everyone knew how shamelessly your madame spoiled him there — why, he would barely appear in the morning at your academy long enough to propose some unheard-of answer to some Talmudic question and already he was off and away to the bazaars, across the Golden Horn to the bright carpets, the burnished copper plates, the fragrant silk dresses fluttering above the charcoal grills and the roast lambs, adored and smiled at by everyone, so that it was perhaps this very coddling that later made him afraid of the solitude that possessed him. Or could it be that he was only coddled in the first place because even then his manliness was in doubt, which was why he so amiably — so mildly — so casually — sought to enlist those drowsy Ishmaelites in the procreation that he himself could not affect from within himself? Are you listening to me, Shabbetai Hananiah? You must listen, for soon I will be gone. The best hope of man is the maggot, says Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh…

And yet why should he have doubted his manly powers already then, as he was wending his way through the savage wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem with the slow caravan, or as he glimpsed from the Little Oak Tree the ramparts and spires of the city written like a sentence in letters whose language was no longer known to men? Why did he not rejoice to see his bride, who had come in all innocence with her kinfolk to a family wedding in Beirut and been trapped there by her aunt’s love, if not for his fear of hurting the look-alike of the one woman he ever loved, half a mother and half an older sister, to whose very scent he had been bound since the days he tumbled in your giant bed, Rabbi Haddaya, a thousand times forbidden though it was?

It was then, my master and teacher, it was only then, sitting wrapped like a ball on the bed in that freezing room while seeking in the little looking-glass to make contact again with her shadow, which was traced with exquisite delicacy by the moonlight in its own furry ball, that I felt how my sorrow and pity for my dead son, who was lying naked beneath snow and earth on the Mount of Olives, were deranging my mind, and I wished I were dead. Because, knowingly or not, we had gulled him with a paradox that compelled him to produce his idée as a consolation in his solitude. I could feel it, that solitude, clutching me in its deadly grip, and I wished to atone for it, even though I knew that to be worthy of such atonement I first would have to die with him, would have to lie naked beneath snow and earth too and let myself be slaughtered like he was. And so, Rabbi Haddaya, layer by layer I began to strip off my clothes, until I was standing naked in that frozen room, in that locked, vestigial house, facing a looking-glass that was facing a looking-glass, thinking back to the night I sent him forth out of myself and preparing to take him back again. He was turning among the old graves on the Mount of Olives, he was icy and shredding, his blood was ebbing from him, his flesh was ebbing and being eaten away, and as I drew him back into myself his seed flew through the darkness like a snowflake and was swallowed inside me until we were one again, I was he and he was me — and then, by solemn virtue of his betrothal in Beirut and of his holy matrimony in Jerusalem, he rose, and went into the next room, and unballed the ball, and possessed his bride to beget his grandson, and died once more.

And died once more, Rabbi Shabbetai, do you hear me?

And so I too roundaboutly, along an arc bridging the two ends of Asia Minor, entered your bed, señor, a bed I had never dared climb into even as a lonely boy running down your long hallway in my blouson, scared to death of the cannons firing over the Bosporus. Now, in Jerusalem, I slipped between your sheets and lay with your Doña Flora, thirty years younger, in her native city, in her childhood home, in her parents’ bed, smelling your strong tobacco in the distance, giving and getting love that sweetened a great commandment carried out by a great transgression. At dawn, when old Carso knocked on the door to take me with him to the Middle Synagogue for the morning service and the mourner’s prayer, he scarcely could have imagined that the bereaved father he had left the night before was now a sinful grandfather.

If we undo this knot and that button over there, señor y maestro mío, and loosen the ties, perhaps we can calm the growl in your sore tummy with a little massage, so that the rice gruel cooked for you by that fine-looking young Greek can arrive at its proper destination. I hear little steps behind the door. Perhaps the Jews gathered outside the inn are afraid I am absconding with Your Grace’s last words and are so jealous of our ancient ties that soon they will demand to be admitted too. And yet I have not come to amuse myself with Your Grace but to ask for judgment. Because when I returned from the synagogue, I was certain that Tamara would already have fled back to her father Valero’s home, so that I wondered greatly to find her not only still wrapped in her mourner’s shawl and blowing on the wet coals to make me breakfast, but looking taller and lighter on her feet, with no sign of the infection in her eyes that had clouded them all summer. The beds were made like plain, respectable beds; the floor was sparkling clean; the looking-glasses were covered with sheets as they were supposed to be. I ate, took off my shoes, and sat down in my mourner’s corner to study a chapter of Mishnah. She followed me in her slippers and sat down not far from me. And when she peered in my eyes, it was not as a sinner or a victim, but as a fearless judge who wished to determine whether I was made for love.

I said love, señor y maestro mío, and even though, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah, your eyes are shut and your breathing is inaudible, I can feel your flesh tautly listening beneath my massaging hands. I beg you in your lovingkindness, be with me now, for I still do not know what the judgment is on such love, which began to blossom that winter. Does it mitigate my sentence or compound it? For it was not something that I sought for myself, and had she risen that morning and gone back to her father’s home, I would have said nothing. But she remained with me, and all of Jerusalem was so frightened of the great snow brought by the Russian pilgrims that we would have been totally forgotten had not old Carso come every morning to take me to the Middle Synagogue, or to the synagogue of Yohanan ben-Zakkai, and had not Valero and his wife Veducha, along with Alkali, and the Abayos, and a few other acquaintances, come late each afternoon with their pots and trays for the prayer and to talk about the marvels of the snow. And in the evening the consul and his wife would come too, and sometimes they brought the Ishmaelite murderer with them, and they talked about my dead son and his sufferings into the night, until all sighed and lit their lanterns and went home. And then I sent old Carso home too, and spent the night getting deeper into love. And when the week of mourning was over, on a clear, sparkling day, we climbed the Mount of Olives to say farewell to him for the last time, surrounded by a great crowd of family, rabbis, consular attendants, and my son’s Ishmaelite friends, and I saw that a little piece of white ice had remained at the head of the grave like a stubborn casting of the dead man’s seed upward through the earth, and my spirit rebelled and I cast her out of me, falling faint among the gravestones for all to see that I too craved such a death. What says Your Grace to that?

But even if you persist in your silence, my master and teacher, measuring me with narrowing eyes, you must know, Rabbi Shabbetai, that I could not die then, for first I fell ill and ran a high fever and was cared for by the motherless widow of a bride, who looked after me with wondrous composure, with great patience and aplomb. She refused to put me in the hospital of the Italian nuns and insisted on keeping me at home with the help of the consul, who came every day with all the produce of the market. He would look in on me in my room too, and ask how I was in the few Hebrew words that he knew, which were all quite sublime and Prophetic, and whose British accent so alarmed me that it made my fever worse each time. Tamara, though, had the good sense to keep him from me, and by the first month-day of the death, Rabbi Haddaya, I was able to hobble with a cane to the graveyard and consecrate the tombstone that had been erected. And when the “Lord, Full of Mercy” was sung opposite the yellow walls of that drear city while a raw winter wind cut to the bone, I felt most certain, Rabbi Haddaya, that I had succeeded in preventing any future disgrace. That is, if that month of mourning had been started by the two of us, it was now being ended by us three.

The world would have its Manis after all.

And thus, my master and teacher, the months of child-carrying began. The days flowed slowly in Jerusalem, which was battling the winter winds that fell on it from the coast and from the desert. By now the whole city was pining for summer, even if no one knew what plague the summer would bring first. And meanwhile, all of Jerusalem went about feeling sorry for my Yosef, who would never see his own son, and most appreciative of his foresight in taking care to have one. No one wondered that Tamara and I were constantly together, because everyone knew that we were linked by the approaching birth, which was outlined for all to see and approve of by the lovely little belly she paraded in front of us. The consul, especially, took a great interest in it and allotted it a modest consular stipend of one gold napoleon payable on the first of each month. And indeed, without it we might not have made ends meet, even though I did my best to keep up my business, mixing my spices from Salonika, which were strong enough to retain their special flavor, with local ingredients and selling them in the hours before the afternoon prayer in the Souk-el-Lammamin or the Souk-el-Mattarin while Tamara sat by my side. Against her black clothes, her large eyes shone so brightly that passers-by hurrying down the lane sometimes thought that two lanterns had been suddenly beamed at them and turned around to ascertain the reason. And though I did what I could, señor y maestro mío, to persuade her to stay home and spare the little embryo the noise and tumult of the street, she insisted on coming with me everywhere, most gracefully bearing herself and her belly in the afternoon breeze. She showed not the least sign of illness or fatigue, and even her eye infection was late in arriving that year, as if the child in her womb were shielding her from all harm. “Dr. Mani,” I called him in jest, regretful that I could not carry him too as a cure for whatever ailed me. And when spring came, and even the ancient olive trees alóng the Bethlehem Road broke into bloom, I could not keep from thinking, señor y maestro mío, that if my motherless little widow of a bride, the look-alike of her renowned aunt, was following me around everywhere, this could only be because she had been brazen and thoughtless enough to fall ever so slightly in love with me, thus atoning, though no doubt unwittingly, for my unrequited love in Salonika in the year of Creation 5552.

But Your Grace must listen to me, he must listen and not sleep! Here, let me rub your weary bones a bit with some of this oil. Not that I have any reason to doubt the excellent intentions of Doña Flora and her attendants, Jewish or not, but I do believe, señor, that they are afraid that you will come apart in their hands, which is why they wrapped you like a mummy, swaddling band by swaddling band, until, God forbid, you were hardly able to breathe. Let us then, my master and teacher, remove the last of these ties without a qualm, because only a trusty old disciple like myself who has known your most unphlegmatic body for ages will not fear to hurt you in order to make you feel better. There… that does it… a bit more… and now, Rabbi Haddaya, lie back and listen to how the passer-through who became a stayer-on was now a beloved-of in a Jerusalem that was being built from day to day, not always by us, to be sure, but always, with God’s help, for our benefit — and there were times, I must say, when the love of that motherless widow both astonished and frightened me, because what could possibly come of it? “Why, I am a dead man, my child,” I would say to her every evening when we sat down to our dinner of radishes, tomatoes, and pita bread dipped in olive oil while the sun set outside the window and the muezzin sounded his mournful call. “I will go to Rabbi Haddaya in Constantinople and get leave to strangle myself like Saul son of Kish.” She would listen and say nothing, her big, bright eyes wide with tears, her little hands trembling on her belly, as if above all she wished to assure young señorito Mani that he need not fear the grandfather who had skipped a generation to sow him and was now threatening to miss the harvest. Then she would rise, go to wash the bowls at the cistern, and come back to make the beds, trim the candles, and take up the red blouse and taquaiqua that she was knitting for little Mani, never taking her eyes off me, as if I were already preparing the rope to hang myself. Now and then she glanced in the mirror over her bed to see what I was up to in the mirror over my bed. And thus, señor y maestro mío, from mirror to mirror I was so encircled by anxiety and love that I lost all my strength and began to flicker out like a candle. I went up to the roof to say good night to the last breeze of the day, which was winging its way to the Dead Sea above the last lanterns bobbing in the narrow streets, and when I came down again, I found her still awake, sitting up in bed. Unable to hold it back any longer, she burst out all at once into a great, bitter cry that I had to make haste to calm, swearing to her that I would not abandon her before the birth. And although, my master and teacher, she was firm in her belief that the final truth bound us together, even she did not know that behind that truth too yet another truth was hiding…

There, they are starting to bang on the door, Rabbi Shabbetai, they want me out of here. But I am not leaving until I have been given a clear judgment, even though “His son Rabbi Yishmael used to say”—is not that what you taught me, rabbi? — “‘he who judges not has no enemies.’” And he used to say: “Whoever is born, is born to die, and whoever dies, dies to live again, and whoever lives again, lives to be judged, to know, to make known, and to be made known.” Well, let us stir the fire a bit to warm this room, and raise the curtain for a look at the sky dropping low over their chapel of graven images, may they all rot in hell, and tell at last and in truth the final, the one and only story, the story of sweet perdition that recurs in every generation.

Quickly, quickly, though, because the banging on the door is growing louder, and soon, señor y maestro mío, Doña Flora and her men will come bursting in here. It is time, Rabbi Haddaya, betahsir, vite-vite, to come forth with the story that I have kept for last, the story of a murderer — because I have already told you, señor y maestro mío, that there was a bit of a murderer here — or, si quiere, su merced, a manslaughterer, a shohet-uvodek — to whom, ever since that first night, one felt drawn again and again in the crowded lanes of Jerusalem — in the souks, by the cisterns, gazing out from the gates of the city — by a lightning-like glitter of a glance — a wordless nod — an imperceptible bow — a casting-down of the eyes — a sudden shudder. Ah, how drawn — on the chalky hillside of Silwan, among the olives on the road to Bethlehem — so powerfully that sometimes one’s feet stole of an evening to the consulate, to one of its literary soirées, to listen to some Englishwoman praise some British romance that no one ever had read or ever would read, for the sole purpose of staring wordlessly at the silent shade standing in the doorway and bearing the memory of my poor son — oh, rotting! oh, beloved in his grave! Yosef, my only one — who on that accursed night of snow and blood… But who could restrain himself, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah, from running after him through the streets in an attempt to forestall an assault that was in truth a retreat, a provocation that was in truth a flight from the pain and punishment that he imagined twirling over his bed like an angry, patient carving knife? And it was thus that slaughterer joined slaughterer by the light of the torches of the Russian pilgrims, who were bellowing their piety on the stone floor of the Holy Sepulchre — thus that the two of them, the frantic father and the Ishmaelite friend, the aristocratic, mustachioed sheikh’s son — linked forces to catch in time the idée fixe that in its passionate pride was about to turn on its own self and become the very prototype that it was searching for of the Jew forgetful of being a Jew, an example and provocation for all recalcitrants. For as he elbowed his way into the crowd of pilgrims that was excitedly tramping through the mud and snow, wary of being recognized by some excitable Christian who might inform on him to the Turkish soldiers surrounding the square, he was seeking, or so I felt, Rabbi Shabbetai, to forget us all — Salonika, Constantinople, myself, yourself — as if he had been conceived and born from the very floor of the church, rising up from the cisterns and the souk as a new Ishmaelite who had discovered that he was a forgetful Jew who might remember… only what?

In truth, Your Grace has good reason to hold his breath and shut his eyes, fearful in thought and spirit for the story’s end… and no less fearfully, although ever so gently and clandestinely, did the two of us, the murderer and myself, plan to pluck my son from that crowd of celebrants and lead him back home to his bed. But when we stepped up and seized his lantern so as to make him follow us, he took fright and started to flee — and seeing us run after him, the celebrants at once joined in the pursuit. He ran down the long, deserted street of the Tarik Babel-Silseleh with his cloak flapping behind him like a big black bird — or so, from that moment, I began to think of him, an odd bird that must be pinioned before it flew away above our heads. He ran and ran through the cover of snow that made all of Jerusalem look like a single interconnected house, but instead of heading for home, for the quarter of the Jews, and then doubling back through the Middle Synagogue or the synagogue of Yohanan ben-Zakkai, he kept going straight ahead, turning neither left nor right until he came to the Bab, the Gate of the Chain leading up to the great mosque. He shook it a bit until he realized that it was locked, and then, without giving it any thought, as if trusting in the snow to protect him, turned left and proceeded in the same easy, flying, unconcerned lope to the second gate, the Bal-el-Matra, from which he entered the great, deserted square in front of the golden dome, which the snow had covered with a fresh head of white hair. The echoes of his footsteps were still ringing out when he was seized by two sleepy Mohammedan guards. Perhaps they too thought that he was some kind of black bird that had fallen from on high and soon would fly back there, because why else would they have hurried to bind him with long strips of cloth and lay him on the stairs amid the columns, where his squirming shape now made an imprint in the snow?

My master and teacher. Rabbi Shabbetai. My master and teacher. Your Grace. Rabbi Haddaya. Señor y maestro mío Shabbetai Hananiah. Hananiah Shabbetai. Su merced… can it be?

In no time he was surrounded, because the news spread quickly from gate to gate across that huge deserted square, from the golden dome to the silver dome, so that soon more sleepy guards appeared, although this time there was no telling what time of sleep my son had roused them from. They crowded about him and bent over him to read in his eyes the mad chastisements that he planned for them and that he was begging them to inflict now on himself so that he might demonstrate how he was the first to awaken and recollect his true nature. And although the guards could see for themselves that the man in the cloak spread out in the snow on the steps was an infirm soul, they did not, simple beings that they were, give credence to this soul’s suffering but rather suspected it of taking pleasure in itself and its delusions and sought to share that pleasure with it, so that they began to make sport of it and roll it in the snow, a glitter marking the passage of a half-concealed knife from hand to hand. And I, my master and teacher, was outside the gate, I was watching from afar while listening to the distant bell of a lost flock, silently, wretchedly waiting for the worst of the night to wear itself out and the morning star to appear in the east, faint and longed-for, so that I might go to him, to the far pole of his terror and sorrow, whether as his slaughterer or whether as the slaughterer’s inspector, and release him from his earthly bonds, because I was certain that he had already deposited his seed…

You have become, señor y maestro mío, most silent. Can it be that you are already gone?

Wait! I want to come too, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah… Why don’t you answer me?…For the love of God, answer me…

‘Twould take but a nod…

‘Tis not as if I need words to understand…

In truth…

Is it self-murder, then?

Yes?… No?…

Biographical

Supplements

AVRAHAM MANI received no answer to his question, nor was there the least movement of the rabbi’s head for him to interpret as a yes or a no; indeed, at this stage of the conversation, even he, as agitated and carried away as he was, had to admit that Rabbi Shabbetai Haddaya, whose judgment he had sought, was dead. There was no way of knowing exactly when the rabbi had breathed his last, and although often, in the years to come, he sought to go over those last minutes in his mind, even staging them there by playing both roles, his own and that of his teacher, he was unable to decide when the moment of death had occurred. In any event, he remembered well his desperate, bizarre, and persistent attempts to resuscitate the rabbi, which were accompanied by loud, angry bangs on the locked door that was finally broken in. Once a local doctor was fetched and the rabbi’s death officially announced, a great wave of emotion swept over the Jews of Athens. While Rabbi Haddaya’s death had been more or less expected, those ministering to him, and especially Dona Flora, felt no sense of relief, for during the forty days they had been tending him they somehow had come to believe that he might remain as he was for many years. Naturally, an accusing finger was pointed at Avraham Mani, who served as the target of angry words and hostile looks, it being felt that his stubborn insistence on remaining by the bedside, where he cried and behaved unrestrainedly, had brought on the old man’s death. Avraham Mani himself, however, was too absorbed in his own private mourning to be perturbed by these accusations, and especially, in the dilemma that continued to haunt him of whether or not to take his life and of the effect such an action might have on his share in the World to Come.

Be that as it may, though, Avraham Mani made himself a central figure at the funeral and during the week of mourning that followed. Although he was not a blood relation of the departed, he slashed his clothing, said the mourner’s prayer by the grave in a loud, ceremonious voice, and spent the week of mourning sitting on a cushion at Madame Flora’s feet as though he were a member of the family. He seemed to enjoy the many condolence calls, which included visits by Greek and Turkish religious and political dignitaries who came all the way from Salonika and Constantinople, and — since he was the only one present to have known the deceased from as far back as the Napoleonic wars in Russia — he dominated the conversation with his stories and anecdotes about Rabbi Haddaya.

Following the first month-day of the death, when Dona Flora began to pack her things, Avraham Mani considered proposing marriage to her, both as a way of “doing what the old man had always wanted,” as he thought of putting it to her, and of making up for his original rejection. In the end, however, Dona Flora was so chillingly aloof toward him that he dared not even hint at the matter. She, for her part, apprehensive that he would follow her to Constantinople, decided at the last minute to set out for Palestine and visit her niece and her niece’s baby, whom Mani’s stories had made her greatly desirous of seeing.

Fearful that the secret of his paternity might be revealed and place him in an impossible position in Jerusalem, Avraham Mani did not follow her there. Reluctantly, he returned to Salonika and to his daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons, still preoccupied with the thought of suicide and with various possibilities of carrying it out. Meanwhile, he comported himself as a mourner and went from synagogue to synagogue to tell of the rabbi’s death. He especially liked to mount the podium on the Sabbath when the Torah scrolls were being taken out of the Holy Ark, give the prayer book a loud clap that brought the congregation to its feet, and compel the cantor to sing the special requiem for distinguished souls, which begins with the verses: “Whence then cometh wisdom, and where is the place of understanding? Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. Oh, how great is Thy goodness that Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee; which Thou has wrought for them that trust in Thee before the sons of men.”

Yet not even these dramatic ceremonies were able to soothe his soul or to give it respite from the question of whether to take his life for his sin. In the end, he decided to wander in the footsteps of his master, seeking, in his words, “to fulfil his unfulfilled disappearance.” In 1853 he set out for Damascus, from where he sent a brief missive to his five-year-old son-grandson with a conacero he had written himself, which was full of obscure allusions. But he found no peace in Damascus either, and after the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, he journeyed onward to Mesopotamia until he reached the region where his grandfather had been born. The last known Jews he lived among, word from whom eventually got back to his daughter and son-in-law in Salonika, were those of a small town called Dahaman, near Midshakar, an ancient port that had been silted in over time and was now no longer near the sea. Avraham Mani served as a rabbi-cantor there and died — from natural causes, it would seem — in 1860, the year of Herzl’s birth, or in 1861, the year of the start of the American Civil War. He was sixty-one or sixty-two at the time.

FLORA MOLKHO-HADDAYA was deeply shocked by the death of her husband Rabbi Haddaya. Despite his paralyzing stroke, his loss of speech, and the difficulties imposed by their extended stay in an inn in Athens, the childless Dona Flora derived a special pleasure from caring for her distinguished invalid of a husband, who had become, as Avraham Mani accurately put it, “a venerable babe.” When she and the Greek servant broke down the locked door and found Mani cavorting around the rabbi’s dead body, she burst into uncontrollable tears and screams and fell upon Mani in a fury. She quickly got a grip on herself, however, and retained her aristocratic bearing through the period of mourning, even behaving with restraint toward Mani himself out of respect for her late husband. As soon as the month-day ceremony was over, though, she resolved to have no more to do with him and set out for Palestine in order to visit her niece Tamara and Tamara’s baby boy.

Doña Flora arrived in Jerusalem in the spring of 1849 after having been away from the city for eighteen years, and was received with great warmth and honor. She moved into her parents’ old apartment, in which she was given back her childhood bed, and became little Moshe’s “second grandmother,” as he called her. The British consul and his wife, who had recently inaugurated the new Christ’s Church in a lavish ceremony, were quick to see that the distinguished doña, “Yosefs aunt,” had much to recommend her and grew to be very fond of her. They even invited her to a soirée of the Jerusalem Bibliophile Society for a discussion of the newly published novel David Copperfield, although her English was all but nonexistent.

Tamara, of course, did not reveal to her aunt the true identity of her son’s father, and Doña Flora felt happy to be back in her native city and country. She even consulted several of her acquaintances about the possibility of transferring her late husband’s remains from Athens to Jerusalem and publicly reburying them on the Mount of Olives. But in 1853, during the Crimean War, a letter written by Avraham Mani arrived from Damascus with a poem for his grandson that contained several oddly phrased hints that Mani might soon come to Jerusalem. Tamara was gripped by great anxiety and emotion, and after much soul-searching and many excruciating nights of insomnia, she broke down and confided her secret to her beloved aunt. Doña Flora was horrified. Although at first she seemed to make her peace with her niece’s confession, she gradually developed a strange revulsion for her surroundings, including Jerusalem and Palestine themselves. In 1855, following an earthquake in the city and riots between Greeks and Armenians in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and after taking part in the dedication of a new trade school for Jews established by the British consul in an uninhabited area outside the walled city that would one day become the neighbor of Abraham’s Vineyard, she left Jerusalem for Alexandria, where her late father Ya’akov Molkho had cousins. She settled down there, lapsed into a prolonged melancholia, and died in Egypt in 1863 at the age of sixty-three.

There was no way of knowing exactly when RABBI SHABBETAI HANANIAH HADDAYA died or for how long Avraham Mani had been talking to a corpse. Nor was it clear how avoidable the death was. True, a local Greek physician, who had been brought for a consultation soon after Rabbi Haddaya’s arrival at the inn in Athens in the autumn of 1848, told Doña Flora that he personally knew several aphasic victims of strokes in the Pallaka quarter near the Acropolis who had lived to a ripe old age, but this was in all likelihood an overly optimistic prognosis. At the same time, it was not inconceivable that the rabbi’s death was hastened by the excitement of Avraham Mani’s sudden appearance. Was he still alive when his old pupil, the “little pisgado,” asked his final question? Did he attempt to rack his failing brain for a rabbinical ruling on the permissibility of suicide in such a case? And again: was his death foreordained, or could it have been prevented? There can be no definite answer to any of these questions. Certainly, Rabbi Haddaya was greatly frightened when Doña Flora left the room and Avraham Mani locked the door behind her and launched into a long harangue, in the course of which he took off the rabbi’s clothes and removed his diapers. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the Jews who broke down the locked door and found Mr. Mani dancing and singing before a naked corpse that he was trying to revive were extremely angry at him, even though they never doubted he meant well.