The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

Chapter I

When I was eight, in the Christian year of fourteen ninety-four, I read about the sacred ibises who helped Moses cross an Ethiopian swamp riddled with snakes. I drew a scythe-beaked creature in scarlet and black with my Uncle Abraham’s dyes and inks. He held it up forinspection. “Silver eyes?” he questioned.

“Reflecting Moses, how could they be any other color?”

Uncle kissed my brow. “From this day on, you will be my apprentice. I will help you change thorns to roses, and I swear to protect you from the dangers which dance along the way. The pages that are doors will open to our touch.”

How could I have known that I would one day fail him so completely?

Imagine being outside time. That the past and future are revolving around you, and you cannot place yourself properly. That your body, your receptacle, has been numbed free of history. Because I feel this way, I can see clearly when and where the evil started: four days ago, on the twenty-second of Nisan; in our Judiaria Pequena, the Little Jewish Quarter of the Alfama district of Lisbon.

It was a jeweled morning much like any of the opal beads on the necklace of that spring month. The year was fifty-two sixty-six for the New Christians. April the sixteenth of fifteen and six for the accursed Christians of heart.

From the darkness of early Wednesday morning, hiding here in the cellar, I remember the dawn of Friday as if its sunlight heralded the first notes of an insane fugue.

Concealed behind one of these notes of melody, camouflaged in memory, is the face I seek.

The day of our first Passover seder began dim and dry, like all the dawns of late. We hadn’t been blessed with rain in more than eleven weeks. And would have none today.

As for the plague, it had been sending shivers through our bodies and souls since the second week of Heshvan—more than seven months now.

King Manuel’s half-made Christian doctors had resolved that cattle were perfect for soaking up the airborne essences which they blamed for the disease, and so two hundred dazed and overheated cows had been let loose to wander the streets.

Manuel himself had long fled our misery with most of the aristocracy. From Abrantes, three weeks earlier, he’d issued a decree establishing the construction of two new cemeteries outside the city walls for the scores who were taken to God each week.

The souls of the dead were beyond being encouraged by such a gesture, of course. And one could hardly blame the living for regarding the decree as simply one more indication of the King’s ineffectual pragmatism and cowardice. Was it a turning point? Certainly, daily life began to take on an edge of cruel and despairing madness. In the last three days, I’d seen a collapsed donkey blinded with his master’s dagger, his eyes spurting blood, and a girl of no more than five hurled shrieking from the rooftop of a four-story townhouse.

The poor, to dispel their hunger pangs, had taken to eating a mash of linen fibers and water.

I had just turned twenty years old. Proof that I was a little too devout for my own good was my belief that our city had been gifted generously with the stark significance of Torah. To me, there was a terrible, timeless beauty and horror to everything. Even the filthy feet of the recently deceased sticking out from the burlap of their sour-smelling plague carts possessed a sad and reverent grace. For they made our thoughts turn to Man’s mortality and our covenant with God.

Only Uncle Abraham had the confidence to disregard completely the goat-ribbed preachers roaming the streets screeching that God had abandoned Portugal and that the end of the world was but five weeks away (though it could be postponed, they noted, if we were generous with our handouts of copper coinage). With an irritated frown, he had told me, “Don’t you think that the Lord would show me a sign if He were about to close the last gate upon the Lower Realms?”

Father Carlos, a priest and family friend, could not yet be counted among those unfortunates who’d succumbed completely to the insanity gripping the city. But it seemed only a matter of days. “Drought and plague … they are the Devil’s twin birth!” he told me in a conspirator’s whisper as we stood in the archway of St. Peter’s Church.

I had brought my little brother, Judah, to him that morning for religious instruction in the ways of Christianity. The three of us were watching a candlelight procession of flagellants whipping their backs with leather scourges whose ends trailed wax balls laced with filings of tin and splinters of colored glass. Behind them marched friars from Lisbon’s monasteries unfurling blue and yellow pennons sewn with images of the Nazarene crucified. At the rear, proud-postured guildmen in flowing, silken fineries hoisted up litters bearing effigies of saints.

Crowds had gathered to watch, lined both sides of the street, formed two ragged ribbons against the dusty white façades of the town-houses as far as the cathedral. Shouts for water and mercy rang up like antiphonal choruses. All the variety of our town was there: horsemen and peasants, whores and nuns, beggars and black slaves—even blue-eyed sailors from the north.

Waifs and barking dogs suddenly began running past Father Carlos, Judah and me to the west to keep up with the moving spectacle. The priest closed his eyes, murmured nervous prayers. I inhaled deeply on the chilly perfume of danger in the air. And tonight, I thought, into the unpredictable currents of this sea of madness, we will be launching the forbidden ship of Passover. Yes, our celebrations should have started exactly one week earlier. But most of the secret Jews, including our family, had postponed Passover in the hopes of sailing safely through the tainted waters of Old Christian gossip around us.

A filthy, mop-haired woodcutter standing near us suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs, “For heavenly rain, we must have more blood! Lisbon must be the Venice of blood!

Judah pressed back against my legs, and I gripped his shoulder. Father Carlos rubbed his hands over his domed forehead, as if in defense. He was a corpulent man, squat, with soft, pale skin, a bulbous nose, webs of red veins on both his cheeks from too much drink. Few people took him seriously, but I found him a good friend. His droopy eyes settled on me. He said, “Men like nothing more than profaning the sacred, my boy.”

I was suddenly laden with sadness for our fate. The scent of Indian pepper turned me around, and blood splattered across my pants and Judah’s face. A shrieking initiate had pulled skin loose from his shoulder blade, was spraying spices over himself to capture the sting of God’s love. In my brother’s terrified eyes, I believed I recognized the look of a Hebrew child about to flee across the Red Sea. A fleeting premonition, unusual in its certainty, shook me: We Jews of Lisbon have waited too long to re-enact the Exodus, and Pharaoh has learned of our escape plans.

As I came to myself, Carlos hid his gaze in the wing of his cape, whisper-screamed, “That young initiate’s moans…you can hear the wailing of the Devil’s children in them!”

Judah was looking up at me with stunned, breathless curiosity. When tears caressed his eyes, I picked him up, wiped him, tousled the thick locks of his coal-black hair. He hugged his arms around my neck. “Thanks ever so much,” I told Carlos. “Between you and these madmen, I think we’ve had all the religious instruction we need for today.”

I lifted the woolen hood of Judah’s mantle over his head and patted him as he sobbed and sniffled. After the last penitent had dragged himself past our former synagogue, Carlos led us across the square. At the corner was our house, a single story of whitewashed stucco whose rectangular perimeter was traced with a rim of deep blue. An affinity between colors lifted my gaze to the gauzy turquoise of the dawn sky, then down to the spine of the roof, a horizon of mottled fawn-colored tile pierced near its center by our chimney, a soot-blackened white cone notched with air-holes. From its point rose the tin silhouette of a troubadour pointing east, toward Jerusalem. Thin scarfs of smoke from our hearth were wafting around him and unraveling into the southerly breeze leading toward the river. “Just as well we cancel our lessons today,” Carlos said as I pulled open the gate of iron tracery that served both our home and the house belonging to my beloved friend Farid and his father. “I’ve got some unhappy business I’ve been putting off with your uncle.”

We stepped into the secret landscape of our courtyard. Enclosed by white façades and walls, paved with gray slate, it was centered by a venerable lemon tree circled by oleander bushes. Farid was standing on his stoop in his long underwear, barefoot, combing his hands back through the black locks falling to his shoulders. To me, he had always seemed gifted with all the attributes of a warrior poet of the Arabian desert—a slim, muscular build, sharp green, hawklike eyes, soft olive skin and an agile, unpredictable intelligence. The stubble he always left on his cheeks made him look sleepy but seductive, and men and women alike were often captivated by his dark beauty. Now, he signalled good morning to me with a twist to the forceful hands he’d developed as a weaver of rugs. Though deaf and mute from birth, he’d never had the least difficulty making himself understood to me in this way; as toddlers, we’d developed a language of gestured signs, undoubtedly because we were born just two days apart and grew up holding hands.

Returning my friend’s greeting, I led Father Carlos to the kitchen door, an ogival threshold exuberantly marked with a rim of green and rust mosaic stars. In a doubtful voice, he said, “Might as well get it over with.”

Can a house possess a body, a soul? Ours was bent and fatigued from centuries of rain and sun, but fiercely protective of its residents.

As manuscript illuminators, Uncle Abraham and I had often modeled biblical dwellings on our home. For its walls we applied a milky ceruse, and to approximate the low and sagging chestnut wood ceilings which creaked alarmingly during the rains of Av and Tishri, we applied the rich brown made from vinegar, silver filings, honey and alum. The sandy floor tiles which scratched one’s feet were given a moderated vermillion obtained from a marriage of quicksilver and sulphur.

Cracked foundations sloped the floors toward Mother’s tidy bedroom at the sunset side of the house, little more than a corridor but with the advantage of an entrance to Temple Street for her sewing clients. Facing sunrise was my aunt and uncle’s cozy, light-filled chamber. Between the two were the kitchen, centered by the great oaken table around which our lives passed, and the bedroom I share with Judah and my little sister, Cinfa. Our fruit store, added on two centuries ago judging from the masonry, jutted out from this room toward Temple Street.

As Carlos and I stepped inside, he grimaced at the sour scent of fresh whitewash on the walls. While he and my little brother checked the cellar for Uncle, I went to my room to peer through its inner window into our store. Down the center aisle, beyond baskets of figs and dates, raisins and sultanas, bitter oranges, filberts and walnuts, all manner of fruit and nut then to be found in Portugal, were Cinfa and my mother, Mira, spooning olives from wooden barrels into ceramic bowls for display. I leaned in and called out, “Blessed be He who has illuminated our Lisbon morning!”

Cinfa showed me a quick smile. A gangly, wild sort of girl, with a voice forever seemingly squeaked between knuckles jammed into her mouth, she’d been gifted with grace of late. Almost twelve she was, and an adult beauty was awakening in the secretive fullness of her lips, her high cheekbones and postures of reserve. The girl who had spent hours chasing hares and capturing tadpoles was giving way to one more interested in puzzling over the modest, hazel-eyed twin in the looking glass.

As Cinfa and I kissed, my mother offered me a dull, antagonistic look. A small, puffy woman of lowered eye and bent shoulder, her contours were concealed as always inside a loose-fitting olive tunic and black apron. Her deep-brown hair, streaked a brittle gray at the front, was crowned by a toque of gray lace and clasped into a bun at the back of her head. The bun was tied with a black velveteen ribbon from Jerusalem given her years ago by her elder brother, my uncle Abraham. Its stringent hold seemed to draw the color from her face, which, over the last few years, had swollen into an expression of wan defiance against any possibility of happiness; she would forever be grieving her long-buried husband and first-born son, my elder brother Mordecai. To all who knew the playful young mother she’d been, her wasted state was a reminder that life saved its sharpest arrows for women, the bearers—and mourners—of departed children.

“Either of you seen Uncle?” I asked.

Cinfa shrugged. Mother licked her cracked lips as if displeased by my interruption, shook her head.

Father Carlos and Judah met me in the kitchen. “No sign of him,” the priest said.

We sat together at the table to wait. Aunt Esther appeared suddenly at the courtyard door, dressed in a high-collared black jupe which seemed to light her tawny face. Her dramatic, darkly outlined almond eyes opened in horror. “What are those stains?!” she demanded, pointing to my pants. “Has Judah been crying?!” She clamped her jaw into an expression of judgment, glared at me while tucking wisps of henna-tinted hair under her crimson headscarf. Slender and tall, possessed of a deeply lined and shadowed beauty, she could dominate a room with a single glance down the length of her elegant nose.

“Just a little blood,” I began to explain to her. “The flagellants were…”

She thrust out her hand and sucked in on her cheeks so that she looked like a Moorish dancer. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it! Dear God, can’t you even clean yourselves? And whatever you do, don’t let your mother see Judah like that. We’ll never hear the end of it!”

“Yes, go wash,” Father Carlos agreed with a dismissing twist to his hand. He turned to Aunt Esther and added, “I told him it’s the first thing he should do when we got back.”

I shot the priest a dirty look. He curled his lips into a wry smile and lifted his eyebrows as if we were rivals for my aunt’s affection. To her, he said, “Now, about my little problem…”

I took Judah with me to our bedroom and slipped off his clothes, then my own. As I cleaned him with the vinegar and water solution which my mother always insisted upon, his body went limp in my hands. A compact five-year-old, already muscular and possessed of seductive gray-blue eyes, he seemed destined to grow into a milk-skinned Samson.

Never one for bathing, he dashed back to the kitchen the moment I’d finished dressing him. When I entered the room, he was clinging to the fringe of Aunt Esther’s jupe while fingering his wooden top. She was preparing her beloved coffee with almond milk and honey the way she’d learned in her native Persia.

From outside, the sour rumbling and creaking of refuse carts was suddenly drowned out by a woman’s shrieks. Opening the shutters to listen, I spotted a familiar vermilion carriage careening down the street. As always, the horses were caparisoned in blue-fringed silver cloth. The usual driver, an Old Christian with pockmarks cratering his cheeks, had been replaced, however, by a fair-haired Goliath in a wide-brimmed, amethyst-colored hat. “Guess who’s coming,” I said.

Aunt Esther nudged me partially aside and peered out. “Oh dear, Dona Meneses. More work for Mira,” she grumbled. She squeezed my hand. “You shouldn’t stand here staring out at her.”

I rolled my eyes, turned away. The carriage pounded to a stop and the door squealed open. Dona Meneses’ pattering footsteps trailed toward the Temple Street entrance to my mother’s room. As she entered the house, she began to describe the qualities of the fabric she’d brought in false, lyric tones. Her voice trailed away to a soft murmur as my mother’s door was closed.

Aunt Esther leaned toward us as if to disclose a secret and said, “It’ll be a miracle if Mira can turn that hideous puce velvet she brought with her into anything presentable!” Marching to the hearth, she carried our matzah to the table with a linen mitten.

“It pays our debts,” I said.

“True. And with the drought…”

“It’s the Devil!” Father Carlos exclaimed suddenly in a voice of warning.

“I grant you that Dona Meneses isn’t lovely, but she’s hardly from the Other Side,” I replied.

The priest squinted his eyes and glared at me. His tongue darted between his thick, soft lips. “Not her, you fool! It’s the Devil who’s behind the plague and drought!”

“You’re an absolute lunatic,” Aunt Esther told him in Hebrew with that frown of hers that could freeze bathwater. “And keep your voice down—we don’t want to scare her away!”

The bells of St. Peter’s began tolling tierce. Father Carlos mumbled to himself as if succumbing to the religious call, said a quick grace and picked on a piece of warm matzah with his chubby fingers. In a tone of disgust, he continued in the Holy language, so that Judah wouldn’t understand, “You mean to say, Esther dear, that the Devil doesn’t exist?”

“I mean to say that if you scare my little nephew one more time with your nonsense…” And here, Aunt Esther lifted her iron poker from the fire and aimed its red-glowing tip toward the priest’s bulbous nose, “…I’ll see to it that you meet your Christian savior sooner than you intended! Find someone else to scare!”

“Your aunt has always had a way with threats,” Carlos whispered to me with a lecherous smile. “Remember her the day they dragged you out to be baptized in the cathedral? She cursed them in seven different languages…Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese…”

“We remember,” I interrupted, holding up my hand in a gesture of disapproval so that we could all avoid the memory. Too late; Esther’s eyes, dimmed by isolation, were focused on an inner landscape. She had slipped her hand below her crimson scarf, was tracing the outline of the cruciform scar given her on the accursed morning of our forced baptism. Then, she had fought hardest of all against the bailiffs sent by the King to drag the Jews to the cathedral. As an example, a guard had thrown her to the ground, pinned her legs and arms to the cobbles on the Rua de São Pedro. A Dominican friar had pressed a red-glowing iron cross vertically to her forehead. He’d shouted, so all could hear: “I hereby gift you with the sign of our Lord!”

As for me, I was covered with pig blood and sawdust by Christian children on my way home from the baptism ceremony. But they never learned of the gift they gave me; my burning humiliation summoned the grace of God to me, and I had the first ever of my visions.

This preternatural occurrence began when Farid saw me in the courtyard. Out of shame, I ran from him. As I reached the kitchen door, however, a presentiment of eyes watching over me forced me to stop. When I turned, a white light appeared to me in the sky, far away, above the Moor’s castle. As it drew closer, wings sprouted, and I saw that the luminescence had been but a supernal egg. A radiant heron of ruby red, black and white took form, and as it flew over the Little Jewish Quarter, wind from its flapping blew fiercely against me. When I looked down at myself, the blood and sawdust were gone.

Uncle told me that God had shown me my continued purity and had revealed the Christian stain to be simply an illusion. I answered, “It wasn’t God; it was just a bird.”

“But Berekiah,” he said, “God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze.”

Indeed he was right; at my darkest moments, the Lord has always appeared to me as a kind of bird, perhaps because I most easily see the beauty of creation in those creatures gifted with flight.

Recalling other words of Uncle’s wisdom, I said now to Aunt Esther, “The Devil is just a metaphor. It’s religious language. You can’t expect all words to have everyday meanings.”

“As God is my witness, it’s too early for kabbalistic philosophy!” she answered.

Aunt Esther’s harsh tone of voice moved Judah to climb up next to me on the bench. His lips were pressed together into that slit of forced silence which Mother’s shrieks and slaps had taught him. Of late, he’d learned to do everything he could to avoid being her last, impossible burden—to tiptoe, not run, through childhood.

The trap door to our cellar, located at the southwest corner of the kitchen, suddenly opened. Uncle Abraham, my spiritual master, rose from the staircase, his forehead bathed in sweat and his hair waving off in a hundred different directions, as if he’d been caught in a spiritual storm. A small finchlike man of darting movements, his pointy face was centered by a long, angular nose that gave him an amusing look to strangers, but which connoted a probing intelligence to all those who knew him. His smooth dark skin, the color of cinnamon, seemed to highlight his wild crest of silver hair and tufted eyebrows. Graying stubble softened his cheeks, and where they looped inward, added a shadowing of sagely age to his face. Always, but particularly after prayers, his eyes burned with that secret green light, that piercing strangeness, that distinguished him at once as a powerful kabbalist. “Who’s that?” he asked squinting. “Ah, it’s our friendly priest!”

“Where’d you come from?” demanded Carlos, still unused to my uncle appearing out of nowhere. “We looked in the cellar not five minutes ago. Sometimes I think you’re a lez.”

“What’s a lez?” Judah asked.

“A ghost that comes back to play tricks—a spirit jester,” I answered.

Uncle grinned appreciatively and wiggled his right hand in the air to show his five fingers; in Jewish lore, lezim were reputed to only have four. “My movements parallel life’s mysteries,” he said with a dismissive wave. Raising his eyebrows, he nodded inquisitively toward the muffled voices coming from the back of the house.

“Dona Meneses,” I explained. “She’s brought fabric for another dress. Purple, this time.”

He took coffee and, after a quick blessing, wolfed down a hard-boiled egg. We’d already finished shaharit, morning prayers, together, but he again wished me good morning with a kiss on the lips. Lifting Judah onto his lap, he assaulted him with little popping kisses and growling noises. Not usually demonstrative, the coming of the Passover made Uncle giddy with affection.

“I just came to tell you that I decided not to sell the sapphire,” Carlos said with a sigh that seemed to request forgiveness.

My master’s lips suddenly curled in that way that made him look menacing. He said, “I think you should reconsider.”

“You’re buying gemstones?!” I asked. I looked to my aunt for her protest. But she was busy tracing her glance over a Book of Psalms she’d recently copied for an Old Christian nobleman, proofreading carefully. Turning back to Uncle, I added, “If we had that kind of money, we could close the store, leave this desert for a few weeks.”

My master gave me a challenging look. “A sapphire cut during the time of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol,” he said. He spoke in Hebrew except for the word safira in Portuguese.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a master Jewish poet of the eleventh century from Málaga. “I’m afraid I’ve lost the trail of your thoughts,” I said.

“Petah et atsmehah shetifateh delet. Knock upon yourself as upon a door,” Uncle replied.

That was his condescending way of saying I was to keep quiet and look inside myself for an answer. “Way too early for your mystical advice,” I countered.

He answered by filling my cup with water. “Keep drinking and you won’t get angry. The fluids will carry the white bile from your system.”

“Any more liquid and I’ll drown,” I replied.

“You’ll drown when you disappear in God’s ocean.” Lifting a finger to his lips, he requested silence. Turning back to Carlos, he said in a grave tone, “The safira could be lost, you know.”

“My responsibility.”

My master lifted Judah from his lap and sat him on one of our Persian pillows. “Off you go,” he said. To Father Carlos, he added, “Lost forever, I mean. Your position puts you in danger.”

As he spoke, I realized that we weren’t talking about a gemstone at all. Safira was code for Sefer, Hebrew for book. He was undoubtedly negotiating to purchase a work of Rabbi Solomon Gabirol’s and smuggle it out of Portugal. But why talk in code inside our house, where we were safe from the spying eyes and ears of the Old Christians?

Father Carlos nodded with a gesture of excuse and stood up to take his leave.

“One warning—I’m going to keep trying to convince you,” my master said with fierce determination in his voice.

The priest crossed himself with a trembling hand. Trying to mollify Uncle Abraham, he offered a misguided effort at humor and replied, “Your kabbalistic sorcery doesn’t scare…”

My master jumped up from the table, glaring at Carlos. Motion in the room seemed suspended by his rage. “I never practice magic!” he said, using the Hebrew term, kabbalah ma’asit, practical kabbalah, to designate this forbidden activity. “You should know that well, my friend.”

He was referring to the time Father Carlos had requested an amulet to kill a slanderer spreading rumors about the priest’s continued allegiance to the faith of Moses. Uncle had refused, of course, although he had personally appealed to Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, the King’s astronomer, to see that the evildoer was silenced. Now, he walked to the hearth and stared at the backs of his fingernails in the light of the fire. His topaz signet ring etched with the form of an ibis, symbol of the divine scribe, glowed with an inner sunset. “When Adam and Eve were born in Eden, they were covered with nail from head to toe as armor,” he said. Turning back to Carlos, he added, “And now, our fingernails are all that remain from this primal protection. A tiny border, don’t you think? Not much against the weapons of the Church.”

The priest shrugged off the implication and lowered his eyes.

“It won’t be enough to save you if they find out about the sapphire.”

“I need it,” Father Carlos said, a note of sadness in his voice. “Surely you should understand. It’s the last…” His words trailed away. He added dryly, “I should be going now. I’ve a Mass to prepare.”

“You bastard!” Uncle shouted. “Holding back a safira our children will need, that God will need!” When he turned the wall of his back to Carlos, the priest bowed his head as if to request forgiveness from the rest of us and left.

“You could be more understanding,” I said to my uncle. When he waved away my criticism, I added, “So why were you speaking in code with Carlos? There’s no chance Dona Meneses can hear us way back there. Besides, she must know we still practice Judaism. If it bothered her, she’d have reported us to the authorities by now.”

“The priest trusts no one. ‘Even the dead wear masks,’ he says. And the more I learn, the more I think he’s right.” He scratched his scalp and frowned. “I’m going to pay my respects to Dona Meneses.” He shot me a commanding look and marched out.

“How quickly people forget,” Aunt Esther sighed.

“What do you mean?”

She dabbed some rosewater on her neck, then tied a linen kerchief around it. “The plague. It disappears for a couple years and people think it’s something new the Devil’s conjured up.” She brushed a trembling hand over her forehead, reconsidered her words. “Maybe it’s a kind of grace that we can forget. Imagine if…”

“Not a word, not a gesture, not a single lesion do I forget!”

Aunt Esther grimaced; she knew I was referring to my father and elder brother, Mordecai. During the winter of fifty-two sixty-three, a little more than three years ago, the knife of plague had peeled them open to the moist northern winds of Kislev. My father, lost under running black sores and pustules, shivered to death on the sixth day of Hanukkah. A month later, the living skeleton that had been Mordecai was dead in my arms.

My aunt and I sat in silence. After a few minutes, Dona Meneses left our house with the large basket of fruit which she always took away from her visits. Esther said, “I’ll go to see if Cinfa needs help in the store,” then trudged out of the room with that stiff, forward-tilting walk of hers. I watched Judah playing in the doorway with his top until Uncle returned to me and said, “I need your help in the cellar.”

Below the trap door, we descended five coarse granite steps, one for each book of the Torah, to a small landing centered by a menorah in green and yellow mosaic. Passing through the next entranceway, we started down another stairway of twelve thinner limestone steps—one for each of the books of the Prophets. Since the forced closure of our synagogue in the Old Christian year of fourteen ninety-seven, this had become our temple. As we descended, I picked a blue cylindrical skullcap from a shelf and placed it atop my head. Uncle reached back to his shoulders and lifted his prayer shawl over his head, giving it the form of a hood. Together, we chanted, “In the greatness of thy benevolence will I enter thy house.”

The cellar was low-ceilinged, five paces wide, double that in length, floored with the same rough slate as the courtyard. It had witnessed at least a thousand years of chant, and its cool, musty air, guarded hermetically by walls shimmering with knotted patterns of blue and yellow tile, seemed scented with ancient memory. Window eyelets at the top of the northern wall—at the level of our courtyard paving stones—let in only a soft, dim light. From the bottom of the staircase, which flanked the eastern wall of the room, spread our circle of prayer mat. Around its circumference were seven verdant bushes in ceramic pots, one for each day of creation. Three were myrtle, three lavender and one, symbolizing the Sabbath, was an intermingling of both plants. The half of the room beyond the mat, facing sunset, was our realm of earthly work, where Aunt Esther scripted manuscripts and where Uncle and I illuminated them. Our three desks of the finest polished chestnut faced the north wall, were spaced only a foot apart so we could view one another’s work. Each was gifted with its own high-backed chair. Opposite, against the south wall, were two granite bathtubs sunken into the floor. In between was our hulking storage cabinet of coarse-grained oak. It had lion’s-paw feet and possessed eight rows of ten drawers, each of them thin and long, like the receptacles for type in a printer’s studio. A last row, the lowest, had only two drawers. We kept our gold leaf and lapis lazuli in these.

The most unusual item in the room was undoubtedly the circular, platter-size mirror on the wall above the middle desk belonging to Uncle. Inside a chestnut-wood frame, the looking glass’ silver surface was concave, and hence reflected squashed and distorted images. We stared into it oftentimes at the start of meditation as a way of loosening the mind from its accustomed landscape, particularly from its familiarity with the body. The mirror was somewhat famous locally because on the sixth of June of thirteen ninety-one of the Christian era, it was said to have seeped blood at the death of tens of thousands of Jews killed in the riots then raging across Iberia. In fact, great-grandfather Abraham held that it shed an infinitesimal amount of blood—invisible to the naked eye—whenever even a single Jew died. He believed that the blood had become visible at the time of the anti-Jewish riots only because so very many of us had been murdered. From his time forward, therefore, it had been known as O Espelho a Sangrar, the Bleeding Mirror.

We all hoped it would never reveal its talents to us again.

As Uncle motioned me toward the sunken bathtubs, he said, “I need you to pee.”

“Now?” I asked.

From the rim of a tub, he picked up a jug. “In here. It’s spring. I need a virgin’s pee.”

Each year, just prior to Passover, my master made new dyes and colors for our manuscript illuminations. The acid in the urine ate at certain elements to create varying colors, particularly a fine rose when mixed with Brazil wood, alum and ceruse, and a brilliant carmine when mixed with the ashes of vine branches and quicklime.

“I’m no longer a virgin,” I said, picturing Helena as she had been in the hills overlooking the vast monastery being built just west of Lisbon. I’d waited so long for her decision. Until it seemed as if sex and life would not happen to me as they did to other people. And then, when all was lost, when the ship set to take her to Corfu was already anchored in Lisbon, her arms opened to me like the gates of God’s grace.

“A whore at the Maidenhead Inn?” Uncle asked, awakening me from daydream. He had often recommended a certain house of ill repute outside the city walls.

When I answered, “Helena,” he raised his eyebrows like a rogue and said, “In any event, you’re the closest thing to a virgin I can get without revealing that we’re still illuminating Hebrew books. Judah’s too young and I’m too old, and women’s pee is too strong—especially your aunt’s. I tried it years ago when we were married. Turns everything black as Asmodeus’ soul.”

We shared a silly grin. “Now I know why you loaded me with fluids,” I said.

As my water cascaded hot and musty into Uncle’s jars, he shuffled to our desks with the modest, duck-like walk he adopted in synagogues and began to dust them.

After I’d peed in six different ceramic jugs and closed their lids securely, we placed them in the sunken bathtubs. Uncle washed his hands and brushed them through the Sabbath bush of myrtle and lavender. With a puzzled frown, he said, “Diego the printer is so late—I don’t understand.”

Diego was a family friend whom Uncle was initiating into his threshing circle, his group of mystics which met in secret to discuss kabbalah. Although a robust man with the graying beard and commanding brown eyes of a patriarch, he’d had his heart reduced to ash in the Inquisitional flames of Seville which had claimed his wife and daughter four years earlier and from which he’d barely managed to escape. Often, Uncle and I sought ways to renew his spirit, and we had convinced him to go for a walk today through Sintra forest so that we might sketch the great white cranes before their migration north.

“Perhaps Senhora Belmira’s family has kept him behind,” I said. A neighbor and friend of Diego’s, she’d been beaten to death in Xabregas, one of the city’s eastern districts, two months before. Diego had been spending a lot of time with her loved ones of late.

Uncle shrugged and cupped his hands around my nose. “Refresh yourself,” he said, and as I sniffed at his myrtle-scented fingers, he added, “If he isn’t here soon, we’ll go to his place and check. Oh, and when we do go out, I’ll need to pass by New Merchants Street. I promised Esther I’d deliver the Book of Psalms she’s just finished.”

My master had a way of turning business transactions into disputations on the sex lives of angels and other esoteric matters. “You have precisely the time it takes Diego and me to down a cup of wine at the Attic Inn!” It was a tumbledown garret, but it served kosher wine on the sly.

His lips sculpted a dismayed but amused frown. “Look who’s giving orders!” he observed.

I met his challenge with the bored expression I used to practice to irritate my father when he spoke of Talmud classes. He nodded his agreement. “All right, no more than a half hour.” He motioned for me to bend so he could bless his hand over me. Then, as I picked dyes and colors from the storage cabinet, he unlocked the genizah, the traditional hiding place for old books in a synagogue. Ours was a pit—three feet wide by four feet long—sunken into the floor at the western perimeter of the prayer mat. Its contents were constantly changing; books smuggled out of Portugal were soon replaced with others my master discovered and either bought or begged.

Uncle stepped one foot down into the genizah to retrieve our work. By the time he’d climbed back out, I was at my desk, arranging my brushes and dyes. Placing my manuscript neatly on the slightly inclined surface of the desk in front of me, he circled his hand around the back of my neck and advised me with a parable on the coloration for my most recent illumination, one of the tales from the famous collection of “Fox Fables.” As I began to offer an analysis of his words, his lips began to tremble and his hand grew cold against my skin. “What is it, Uncle?” I asked.

He rubbed his eyes with both his hands, like a child, took a long inhale of breath as if to ready himself for a challenge. “You’re so grown up,” he said gently. “Already my equal in so much. And yet in other matters…” He shook his head, smiled wistfully. “There is so much I’d like to tell you… Beri, God may soon demand that we take separate paths.” He reached into his pouch and took out a scroll of vellum. Handing it to me, he said, “Be so kind as to accept this little gift.”

The scroll unfolded into a vellum ribbon on which were scripted both our Hebrew names in elegant golden lettering. “Esther made it for me,” he continued. He gripped the back of my neck and, in an urgent voice, added, “If ever you should need me, wherever you are, no matter how far or how desperate the circumstances, send this ribbon to me and I will come for you.” He placed his other hand atop my head, stared pressingly into my eyes. “And if, for any reason, you find me beyond your earthly reach, pray over it and I will make every effort to appear before you.”

So touched was I by his grace, by my master’s generosity, that my throat parched with a kind of desperate yearning. Tears clouded the room. I had to swallow several times just to whisper, “But we will never be separated. I will always…”

Uncle told me, “Youth is meant to be separated from age for a time. You will go your way as it should be, then return. But no demon, however powerful, shall stand in my way if you are in trouble!” He took his hand from atop my head and caressed my cheek. “Now come, let’s work together.”

“But is there nothing that I can…?”

He held up his hand and pointed to my manuscript. “Woe betide the kabbalah master who answers every question posed by his apprentice! Now get to work!”

A few minutes later, as I was highlighting the powerful legs of a young dog in my illumination with minute strokes of black, a shriek like shattered glass cut the air. “Go!” my master yelled.

I bounded up the stairs. The kitchen was empty. Harsh voices from outside pounded against the walls. I climbed through my bedroom window into the store, dashed out onto Temple Street. As I removed my skullcap, I spotted Aunt Esther kneeling over our friend, Diego the printer. He was moaning. Blood was spilling from a gash on his bearded chin into her hands.

Chapter II

Diego the printer was the first to contribute to the river of blood which would, over the next few days, lead us into a desert landscape bordered everywhere by grief. But at the time, this geography of death was still a secret from us.

Streams of sweat stained his temples and cheeks with a residue of the city’s endless dust. Blood sluiced over his neck from the gash at his chin. Coughing, he fought for breath. “I was walking here…just walking,” he said in Portuguese. “By the river, I stopped by the Kings Well to wash my hands.” Aunt Esther unbuttoned the top of his crusted doublet, cleaned his chest with fabric rent from her blouse. I noticed the brown line of an old scar on his chest, just under his collar bone, almost as if a worm had burrowed there.

Around us, neighbors were beginning to gather now, to whisper together. “Two boys…” Diego continued, “…they yelled that I was poisoning the well with an essence of plague. They ran after me. I fell. They threw stones. ‘Get the long-tailed rabbi! Get the long…’ A swarthy man in a blue cape saved me. Tall, strong…”

In Diego’s desperation, his last words sought the comfort of Hebrew. “Speak Portuguese,” I whispered to him as we laid him back onto the cobbles.

Diego’s turban slipped off, and I saw for the first time the wisps of thinning gray hair over his ears, the brown birthmarks dotting his scalp. A folded paper dropped free as well. Believing it might contain a personal message or a prayer formula which would incriminate him as a practicing Jew, I snatched it up, hid it in the large drawstring pouch I keep around my neck and which functions as a kind of knapsack. Judah brushed against me, icy with fear, and I had to shake him to get him to run to Dr. Montesinhos. Uncle had joined us, and, after a rushed prayer, said, “I’m going inside to see what medication I can find.”

I tried to hold Diego’s gash closed by pressing my finger into Esthers makeshift bandage, but soon the linen was soaked crimson. Esther ran off for clean water as I substituted cloth ripped from my shirt. Uncle arrived with Farid. They carried extracts of comfrey and bayberry and geranium, sizings and bole, gum arabic and sulfur water. But none of the styptics could effect a clotting. “It’s his accursed beard!” Uncle grumbled. “I can’t get to the wound.” He told Diego, “Dr. Montesinhos is going to have to shave you.”

Diego, who was from the Jewish priestly caste of Levi, pushed us away when he heard that. “I won’t allow it!” he shouted in Hebrew. “I must have my beard. It is forbidden to…”

“There are Levites without beards,” I pointed out, but Diego simply moaned. I turned to Uncle, whispered, “An attack in daylight. It’s a bad sign. A few more weeks of drought and…”

“How can you be sure it wasn’t planned?” Uncle demanded angrily.

I began to ask what he meant, but a shadow crossing over us halted my words. Two horsemen leading a white and gold carriage glared at us from above. Silver morions and greaves gleamed in the sunlight. Scarlet and green pennons decorated with the King’s armored spheres flapped in the dry breeze. “What in God’s name is the disturbance?!” one demanded gruffly.

It was then that I noticed that my master was still in his prayer garb, a white and blue shawl over his shoulders, his left arm circled by the straps of his phylacteries, a leather prayer box on his forehead above his spiritual eye. For such an infringement, he could have been exiled as a slave to Portuguese Africa. Behind my back, I signalled to Farid in our language of hands to spirit him away. “A man has been hurt,” I said.

“Are you a New Christian?!” the horseman demanded.

My heart boomed as if to force a denial. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Farid tugging Uncle back through the crowd.

“I’ve asked if you’re a New Christian!” the horseman repeated menacingly.

The door to the carriage behind him swung open. Silence swept the crowd. Out stepped a thin, delicate man in a violet tunic and bi-colored leggings, black and white. A ruffled collar of gold silk seemed to offer his gaunt, evil face to me as if on a platter. His black eyes surveyed the crowd as if in search of an innocent to punish. While dangling a hand weighted with twin rings of emerald cabochons the size of almonds, he said in imperious Castilian, “We’ll take him with us. There must be a hospital near the Estaus.”

The Estaus Palace, a turreted edifice of shimmering stone, played home to noble guests on official visits to Lisbon. “My lord, the new All Saints Hospital is right on Rossio Square,” I said. “Not a hundred yards from your destination.”

Diego was a bear of a man, over six feet tall, and it took a guard and one of the nobleman’s Moorish-looking drivers to help me lift him. Inside the carriage, a young woman with a peaked, violet tress and a rose-colored silk jupe sat opposite the Castilian nobleman. She was blond, fair-skinned, round-faced. She reached for Diego with stringent concern, looked at me with intelligent eyes burning for an explanation.

“Attacked by foreign seamen,” I lied.

Her sudden look of surprise, the impossibility of her desperation, the kinship of her face to my own banished time. A piercing of meaning it was—a shefa, influx of God’s grace. Akin to a verse of Torah suddenly shedding its clothing and revealing itself in a sparkling of naked understanding.

By the girl’s side was a pug-nosed dog in a blue and yellow troubadour’s suit. A coffer of silver rested on the crimson floor of the carriage. These last details I only noticed as the Castilian called to his driver to make ready. I surveyed the scene as I often do to imprint life in what Uncle calls my Torah memory, backed away. When the door closed, the nobleman leaned out the window to me and whispered with a wine-scented voice, “Have no fear. Your friend won’t die on this holiday.” To his two drivers, he called, “Make haste! We’ve a wounded man here!”

A curiosity akin to dread tugged at my heart as the drivers whipped the horses. Who were these Castilians? Did they know we were secret Jews?! Was the nobleman mocking me or acknowledging his kinship? For a moment, I saw fingers as tiny as a child’s straining in the window of the carriage as it throttled down the street. A curtain lowered, silencing my questions.

I found Uncle in our courtyard, playing chess with Farid. His prayer shawl was neatly folded in his lap and topped with his phylacteries. After I explained what happened with Diego and the Castilian nobleman, he looked up at me and said, “Before my forces are decimated by this heathen’s let us get to the hospital and make sure Diego is treated right.”

Farid read his lips and grinned. Uncle and I wanted to change into street clothes, and as we entered the kitchen I enquired about what he meant about the attack on Diego being planned. By way of reply, he asked, “What lives for centuries but can still die before its own birth?”

I rolled my eyes and said, “No riddles, just an answer.”

He frowned and marched to his room.

A week later, I came upon the answer to Uncle’s paradox. Had I understood earlier, could I have changed our leaden destiny to gold?

My master and I chose a route along the river because the shifting wind was now punishing us with the odor of one of the municipal dungheaps beyond the city’s crenelated walls. The public cemeteries were full, and as of late, dead African slaves had been tossed on top of the heaps. What the vultures and wolves couldn’t pick quickly enough putrefied and mixed with excrement into a nightmare smell that burned into your skin and bones like an unseen acid.

As we passed through the Horse’s Well Gate, I recalled the metallic shiver the gates to the Judiaria Pequena made when the Old Christian guards locked the Jews inside for the night. A shout from above turned us. Our former rabbi, Fernando Losa, was waving at us to wait from the top of the Synagogue Steps. He’d become a dealer in religious Christian garments since the conversion, outfitted even the Bishop of Lisbon, may his tongue turn to powder. “Oh no, not Rabbi Losa,” I moaned. “For what terrible sin are we being made to atone?”

Uncle laughed. A woman suddenly shrieked, “Water!” and we pressed against the wall as a rain of waste cascaded from her third-story window.

Losa joined us puffing for breath, an exquisite scarlet cloak embroidered with a collar of pearls draped over his narrow shoulders. Thin and beak nosed, with deep-set treacherous eyes, a shiny bald head and a frowning slit for a mouth, he looked to me like a vulturine golem constructed for hunting down subterranean rodents. As a boy, I expected him to have talons rather than fingers, and in my dreams, he never spoke, always hissed. “Those wretched, filthy cows are everywhere!” he said now in a false, patrician voice.

“At least they’re kosher,” my master noted.

Rabbi Losa sneered and said, “This bad fortune of Diego the printer’s is what comes from talking to you about the fountain, you know.” He was referring in code to the kabbalah; it was no secret to him that Uncle wanted Diego to join his threshing circle.

My master made a deferential bow and whispered in Hebrew, “Hakham mufla ve-rav rabanan, you are a great scholar and a rabbi of rabbis.” He glanced at me to be sure I’d catch his play on words; he was insulting Losa by accenting the letters h, a, m, and r. Together, they formed the Hebrew word for jackass.

Uncle turned to leave, but the rabbi said, “Wait one moment!” He licked his lips as if savoring a tasty sauce. “I’ve come to give you a warning. Eurico Damas says that should you ever so much as whisper his name in your sleep, he’ll chop you up and serve you inside sausage casing. Best keep your beak out of private affairs, little man!”

My heart sank; Damas was a New Christian arms dealer who’d won contracts from the King for spying on his former brethren and who had recently taken a child bride. Two weeks ago, Uncle had barged in on a secret meeting of the Jewish court and demanded to have him judged for drowning the newborn infant of a flower seller he’d raped and refused to marry. The investigation ended a week ago, when the flower seller herself mysteriously disappeared. Uncle’s name was to have been kept secret by the rabbinical court, but apparently someone—probably Losa himself—had given it to Damas.

“Is that all you came to tell me?” my master demanded.

“That should be quite enough. If it weren’t for my intervention, he’d have come himself.”

“Many thanks, oh great scholar and rabbi of rabbis,” Uncle answered with an ironic bow.

Losa pulled in his chin like a hen, watched us leave with the bitter but patient air of a man who has lost the battle but will continue to wage the war.

As we rushed toward the city center and the hospital, I daydreamed about protecting my master from a succession of kabbalistic demons and Biblical giants. Perhaps I’d never outgrow such fantasies. And yet, passing the clamor of Lisbon’s great fishmarket and port, they seemed suddenly fitting. After all, Uncle had sworn protection over me as a boy in order to take over my mystical guidance. Did it imply a reciprocal promise I’d never before realized?

When we explained our mission to a bailiff at the All Saints Hospital, he informed us proudly that the nobleman who had brought Diego in had been none other than the Count of Almira. The name meant nothing to me, but I wrote it in gold in my Torah memory because of my attraction for his traveling companion. A girlish nun escorted us to Diego’s room. It was gloomy and low-ceilinged, stank of vinegar, amber and death. Over each of the twelve cots hung a bloody crucifix. Yellowing linen curtains opened to show men tied with leather belts to beds, peering white-eyed and hungry for life, encrusted in bandages, stinking like manure. Shutters were partially opened for a view of the Dominican Church across the square.

Diego was in the last bed. Recognizing his large sombre eyes and saffron-colored turban, I smiled with joy and nervousness. But he was wholly changed. His shaved cheeks were the white of marble, nicked here and there with blood. Jowls previously hidden gave his face a heavy, pendulous attitude. He looked suddenly like the kind of tender man who gave presents easily, who doted on children, but who paid a price for neglecting himself—the kind of man he may have been before exile and isolation.

The gash across his chin had been cauterized and stitched. When he spotted us, he gasped and sat up. Involuntarily, he turned his face to the wall as if preparing for death.

My uncle stopped, his penetrating emerald eyes seeking to exchange places with Diego’s. When I prodded him forward, he walked to his friend and offered an encouraging smile. From here, we could see he was feverish with sweat. I prayed it wasn’t plague. “You look well—the bleeding’s stopped,” my master said.

“You shouldn’t have come, seen me like this.” Diego faced the wall again and closed his eyes.

“You can start growing back your beard as soon as your chin has healed,” I observed.

He whispered, “I thank you for coming, but I must ask you both to leave.”

Uncle nodded at me to accede to his request. When I reached the hall, he was sitting at the foot of Diego’s bed. Their whispered conversation was giving my master wild, whirling gestures. Diego hid his eyes behind his hands, bent his head sadly. I said prayers until my uncle came to me. He sighed his frustration. “A bad situation. Diego shall have to suffer for a while.”

“I guess its a good thing we’re not all subject to a Levite’s restrictions,” I replied.

“We’re each of us subject to outside influences. One must accommodate them or live in the wilderness as a hermit. And even there…” My master’s voice trailed away as he scratched his scalp. “Let’s get out of this dungeon,” he said. “I’m beginning to itch all over.”

“Maybe some manuscripts would cheer him up,” I said. “We could ask to borrow those Latin treatises he wants so badly and…”

“No books!” Uncle said, holding up both his hands as if to stop an onrushing carriage.

Outside, a droning chant was shivering the warm air of the Rossio; the daily procession of flagellants was on its way to the Riverside Palace. The sun revealed in Uncle’s drooping eyes that his soul had been brushed with Diego’s despair. He said, “Truth did not come into the world naked, but came clothed in images and names. And lies? What clothes do lies wear?”

“The same ones as truth,” I said. “It’s up to us to distinguish.”

“Yes,” he agreed in a dry voice. “And are all crimes seen by God?”

“You mean, will those boys who attacked Diego be punished?” I asked.

“If you like.”

I was considering my response when Uncle squeezed my hand. “Sorry. I can’t bear to talk any more about this. Let’s go for the walk we’d planned.”

“But I haven’t brought my sketchbook,” I replied.

“Draw the birds in your Torah memory, my son.”

Uncle and I spent a lovely afternoon together, watching our beloved cranes. To see creatures so large and gangly, so white, descending from out of the blue like feathers—it took our breath away. Breezes swept by us with the gentleness of flowers, and when my uncle told me it was time to get back home, I was surprised to find myself separate from the day itself.

When we reached our house, Cinfa and Aunt Esther were preparing our Passover seder in the kitchen, had spread a netting of rice kernels across our best white tablecloth to search for impurities. The house was heavy with humid, intoxicating scents; a magnificent lamb was roasting slowly on a spit in our hearth, its fragrant juices dripping and hissing against the braziers. From its heady scent, I knew it had been basted with the grease from those pouches of luxurious fat that are ewes’ tails—a cooking secret brought by Esther from Persia. “Smells heavenly,” I said.

“Prayer before food,” Uncle scoffed. He slipped down into the cellar.

I took a mortar and pestle, apples, walnuts, dates and honey with me to the store; in between customers I’d prepare haroset.

Waiting on customers freed my mother to help Cinfa and Esther in the kitchen. The store was quiet until I was taken with the idea of displaying our recently arrived bananas from Portuguese Africa nearest the door. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but suddenly we were the place to be. Secret Jews kept me busy all afternoon with last minute orders for that evening’s Passover seder. By the time pink and gold clouds began lighting the sky as heralds of sunset, I was exhausted. I bolted the doors, drew the curtains and sat alone in silent prayer until Uncle called me into the kitchen. He looked splendid under his white robes, had his hair combed forward into its Sabbath swirl. “By any chance, did Reza stop by the store?” he asked in a hopeful voice.

My cousin Reza, Esther and Uncle’s only living child, had married recently and would be spending Passover with her husband’s family. “No, was she supposed to?” I asked. “I thought that she said she wasn’t sure she’d be able to come at all tonight.”

“I just thought that maybe…” Uncle took my hand, and it was with sadness that he told me, “I found the face of Haman for my Haggadah. Perhaps all our work will proceed smoothly now.”

My master was illuminating a Haggadah for a family of secret Jews in Barcelona, had had a difficult time finding a face amongst our acquaintances which could serve as a model for Haman. But why was he sad? Because of Reza’s absence? Before I could ask, he began his blessing over me. I hugged him, and for the first time in memory, he let his body bend to my love. Had I won a greater trust from him in the last few days? Suddenly infused with that resolute force of his, as if he’d drunk in my energy and concern, he kissed my lips and gripped me. “Passover is here!” he whispered. We shared an exultant smile.

Cinfa and Judah set the table. The saffron-colored ceramic Passover plate which our neighbor Samir had made for us was set with the cilantro, lettuce, roasted egg and grilled lamb bone which were symbolic parts of the meal. With Esther’s approval, I added a spoon of my haroset, representing the mortar with which the Israelites, as slaves, built the tombs, palaces and pyramids of Egypt. Our matzah was set under a linen napkin. The silver goblet traditionally set aside for Elijah crowned a corner by my uncle’s place.

How to explain this first night of Passover? Words and faces of relief? Of giddy joy? Sadness for those now departed? We took our places linked by a shared aura of preparation. Uncle, as always, was our guide through the ritual. For although Passover is at its center a festival of remembrance, a re-telling of the story of how God brought the Jews out of bondage, it also has a hidden core. Inside the body of Torah, folded like a phoenix in its egg, is the story of the spiritual journey each of us can make, from slavery to sanctity. The Passover Haggadah is a golden bell whose singing tones tell us: always remember that the Holy Land is in you!

To begin, my mother lit a candle at the hearth, then set flames dancing up and down the tiny steps of candelabra at each end of our table. The present and past were linked. We were the Israelites awaiting Moses at Sinai, just as the table, draped in white, was rendered our altar and the kitchen our temple in the desert.

It was Uncle then, acting as our leader, who opened the initial, most-sacred gate of holiday by intoning a blessing over the first of four cups of wine we traditionally drink. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, creator of the fruit of the vine.” Uncle sang in Hebrew, his gentle voice a tender echo of the trumpet call with which he used to begin our service in the days before Old Christian informants might eavesdrop. After repeating this and the following verses in Portuguese so that Judah—whose Hebrew lessons had fallen behind—would understand, the voices of all those assembled wove together into a single ply of promise and solidarity: “Quem tem fome que venha e coma.Todo necessita doque venhae festeje Pessá.Este ano aqui, no próximo em Israel.Este ano escravos,no próximo homens livres. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are needy come celebrate the Passover with us. This year we are here; next year may we be in the land of Israel. This year we are in bondage; next year may we be free.”

A bit later, as Uncle began to cut steaming pieces of lamb atop our matzahs, he commented that each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is ruled by an angel and that it is the angels, assembled in our written and spoken words, who work the wonders at which ordinary men are amazed.

Surely, our prayers and stories had a winged grace that night.

Yet how fragile angels are; their magic was dispelled in a single moment. Cinfa had gone to open the courtyard door for Elijah, the prophet, whose spirit is said to enter each home during Passover. Ragged shouts from far off came in with the rush of cool air. My master jumped up; the words were in Hebrew. Again, there was a long-journeying shriek. Then silence.

“What could it be?” my mother asked.

Uncle was pale. “Nothing,” he said absently, as if he were entranced by a vision. And for the rest of the meal he wouldn’t utter a sound except to conclude the ceremony. “Next year in Jerusalem,” were the words of eternal homecoming with which we concluded, but they fell hollow between us.

The next day, at cockcrow, a scroll was left mysteriously at our courtyard door giving us the answer to my mother’s question. In New Christian code, it read: Sixteen swallows failed to mark their nests last night and were taken by Pharaoh. Your bird, Reza, was amongst them.

As it turned out, my cousin Reza, along with all the other guests at her clandestine seder, had been arrested the evening before and carted off to the municipal prison. Someone must have informed on them. Had Uncle witnessed this through a mystical window or only guessed that something terrible was happening?

As I read the note that dawn, my mother said, “Esther and Uncle have gone to call on the New Christian aristocrats who serve at court. They’re hoping that one of them will see fit to help.”

It was the Sabbath, the day before the second holy night of Passover, and I was terribly pious in those days, so I resolved to do my part in hastening Reza’s release by chanting all morning and afternoon. Yet it was to no effect; just before sunset, my aunt and uncle returned home dusty and disheartened. “One of the court Jews will try to intervene,” my master said without conviction, scratching his scalp angrily. “All the others…they drip tears and mouth false words.”

The next evening, totally disheartened by Reza’s continued imprisonment, Uncle came to me in our cellar and mentioned for the first time the possibility of our leaving Portugal. “If I asked you to leave this country forever, would you go?” he asked.

“Yes, if I had to,” I replied.

“Good. But your mother…could she leave?”

“She’s frightened. An enemy one knows is often easier to bear than one who is unknown.”

“True. And if your mother doesn’t leave, I doubt Esther would. Nor Reza, now that she’s married and trying to start a family. If we can just get her home.”

“Is that why you’ve been doubly upset? You want to leave? But if you demanded that…”

Uncle waved away my questions, began to chant Queen Esther’s prayer, verses of special meaning to us because she, too, had been forced to hide her Judaism: “Help me who has no helper except the Lord. For I am taking my life in my hands…”

His own hands had formed white-knuckled fists and his lips were trembling. Jumping up, I reached for his shoulders. His eyes gushed with tears. Poor Uncle, I thought, Portugal is driving him to the limits of his body’s tolerance. “The Jewish courtiers will effect Reza’s release,” I said. “Then, if you want to, we will make plans to leave. Somehow, we’ll convince everyone. But now you must rest. Come, I’ll take you upstairs. You may lean on me until we are out of the wilderness.”

“Let us stay here,” he said. “Please.” Nodding his acceptance of my aid, he said, “Lead me to the mat. The atmosphere of prayer helps me.”

We sat together in silence as he wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his robe. When he laid his hand on my head, he said in a breaking voice, “Where is the vellum ribbon with both our names on it which I gave you?”

“I put it in my chest for safe keeping.”

“Good.” He smiled sweetly. “It is a great comfort to know that you have it.”

I gripped his arm. “Look, Uncle, whatever it is that’s…”

He silenced me by pressing his hand to my forehead. “You are a worthy heir,” he said. “In spite of what I may shout at you in anger, I have never regretted you being my apprentice. Never. Once you have lived more and put more of your prayer into deed, you will be a great illuminator. Your father once told me, ‘There is a lion of kabbalah dwelling in my Beri’s heart.’ And he was right. Of course, it is a blessing to carry such a lion around with you. But a wild beast, even one born of kabbalah, may become inconvenient at times. Now listen closely. Up until now, it has been of little concern, because you have lived a life of study. But when you go out into the world, when action in the Lower Realms takes its rightful place beside prayer, you may have difficulties. Because you will never be able to wear masks like the rest of us. Every time you try to slip one on, you will hear the growling of the lion inside you. That was why you were in such deep despair at the time of the conversion—why, perhaps, God granted you a vision. You will not have it easy. You may have to live apart from people for a time. Or suffer their earthly judgments. But hold fast and embrace the lion inside you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

When I nodded, he continued: “Then that is enough talk. Woe be the spiritual guide who fills his apprentice with pride. We are being threatened on all sides, and if we are to survive, we must work hard. That is more important than natural talent or inclination. Your lion needs to work!”

Uncle and I sat at our desks. As he painted his panel of Haman and Mordecai, he began to study me with tender eyes. I sensed that he was caressing my form with his gaze to remind himself that—despite Reza’s imprisonment—the world was still good and beautiful.

The next day, Sunday, just after the cathedral clocktower had struck sext, there was a knock on the outside door to my mothers room. She shrieked for me. I ran up from the cellar armed absurdly with an ermine brush. In her room stood a black slave, as handsome as midnight. He wore a jacket of fine blue silk, yellow leggings. He was holding a note sealed with thick red wax. “From Dom João,” he said in halting Portuguese, meaning one of the Court Jews we’d petitioned for help.

Esther came running in, understood immediately. She nodded for me to take the message, covered her mouth with clasped hands, began mumbling in Persian. I took the note and ripped it open. “We have seduced Pharaoh with gold,” it read. “Swallows will be home before nightfall.”

While I pushed raisins left over from my morning deliveries of fruit on the reticent slave, Esther left to tell Uncle. When I got to the kitchen, they were hugging. “I’d like to be there when she gets out of prison,” my master was saying.

Esther caressed his cheek. “I’ll heat some lamb for her.” She glared at him suddenly and waved a judgmental finger. “But when you get home, you sleep!”

Uncle closed his eyes, nodded like a little boy. To me, he said, “Beri, there are two errands I need you to do.” He took a manuscript from his pouch, handed it to me. “First, deliver this Book of Psalms. Do you know where the nobleman lives who ordered it?” When I nodded, he said, “There’s a note inside.” He fixed me with a grave look. “Give it only to the master of the house. Only him! And make sure he reads it in front of you.” In a more casual tone, he added, “Then get some kosher wine from Samson Tijolo.” He handed me a scroll tied with a red ribbon. “This letter is for him.”

Uncle and I left the house together, but he turned north, toward the prison, while I headed west. We exchanged kisses. Nothing more. Had I understood that after the events of the next few hours I would never again feel myself moving through a world watched by a loving God, neither man nor demon could have kept me from clinging to my master and imploring him to use all his powers to change the future. Could he have mixed some powders and potions together to create another destiny for us? How afraid I am to knock upon myself and listen for the answer.

I first tried to deliver the Book of Psalms, but was unable to do so because the master of the house was not at home. Then, on my way out of Lisbon to buy wine, God granted me with the foresight to purchase alheiras for our celebration. Alheiras were sausages invented at the time of the conversion to save our necks and Jewish dietary laws. Although similar to pork concoctions in shape and taste, they contained smoked partridge, quail or chicken, breading and spices.

I left the city through the St. Anne’s Gate, and some two hours later, to judge by the descent of the sun, I was knocking at the door to Samson Tijolo’s farmhouse. No one answered, so I slipped around to the cellar door. It was open. I let myself in and took a small wine cask. Having neither ink nor pen to write with, I merely left payment on a table by the door. For a calling card, I left a matzah from my pouch. Samson would understand that it was I who had left my uncle’s letter and taken the wine.

It was a good five miles back to Lisbon, and on the road back, my load had me drenched with sweat and dust in no time. I rested twice inside the long, late-afternoon shadows of wavering olive trees before entering the city. In a grove of pines about a half-mile from St. Anne’s Gate, I took my shoes off to feel the needles, prickly and dry, beneath my feet. While reaching for a matzah to nibble, I re-discovered the paper that had fallen from Diego’s turban. It unfolded into the talismanic form of a Magen David, and it read: “Isaac, Madre, the twenty-ninth of Nisan.” Today was the twenty-fourth.

At the time, I thought nothing of the message.

By my reckoning, it was around four in the afternoon when I saw the walls of Lisbon again. Certainly, it was at least an hour after nones; I had heard church bells calling the faithful to prayers from neighboring villages as I walked. A pungent, smoky odor met me as I entered the city. A vague murmuring as if from a distant arena crowd. Odd it was; houses were shuttered tight, stores locked, as if for night. All around me were empty streets, highly shadowed by the afternoon sun. I crept forward, easing my feet into the cobbles. Beneath the granite walls of the Moorish Castle, two young laborers brandishing scythes ran to me. I tensed to run, realized it was useless. One curved his blade around my neck. He held up the severed head of a young woman by her hair. She dripped blood to the street. She was unknown to me. “Are you a Marrano,?” he demanded, meaning converted Jew. His right eye was a milky white, bulging, reflected my fear with a glint of evil. “Because we’re going to get all the Marranos this time!”

My heart was pounding a prayer for life. I shook my head, handed my pack to him. “Look!”

He passed it to his bearded friend. Peering inside with a sniff, he growled, “Sausages.” He handed it back.

As I offered thanks to God, the dead-eyed man lowered his scythe and asked, “Is that wine?” When I nodded, he took it from me.

My breaths came greedy and trembling. “The smoke … where’s it …?”

“A holy pyre in the Rossio. The Dominicans want to send a signal to God with a flame created from Jewish flesh.”

A dread for the fate of my people curling in my gut prevented me from asking more. Both men filled themselves with drink, then closed the spigot. I stared at the woman’s head. Her eyes were not vacant. What then? Recoiling from this world? Taking back the cask now offered me, a shiver twisted through my chest as if made by a fleeing spirit. The bearded man held the dangling head up, licked her cheek twice as if savoring the sweat of a lover. Opening the draw string of his pants, he allowed the filth of his uncircumcised penis to unsheathe into the air. The woman’s black mouth was pried open by fingers cracked with dirt. To his waist she was held. He began to do something unspeakable. The other watched while pressing against himself with the palm of his hand. I dared not close my eyes, but I turned away. When his grunting had finished, he laced his pants together and said, “Be careful where you go. People are being mistaken for Jews!”

I squatted under an awning when the laborers had gone. My dizziness slowly subsided. Wine took some of the furry, acid taste in my mouth away. Were all the former Jews being hunted?

Down across the staircases and alleyways of the Alfama I raced until I reached the Rua de São Pedro. The gate to our courtyard was lying on the street, bent and twisted. Our donkey was gone. The kitchen door was open. I burst inside as if across a threshold of departure. Silence swelled around my gaze. The hearth was dying away into embers, and the table was set with two cups. Beside one was a matzah, broken in half. Our tattered rug was drawn over the trap door to the cellar. “Uncle!” I yelled. “Mother!” Chilled, confused, I crept into my bedroom, found a landscape of smashed beds and pillaged chests. Peering into the store, I discovered overturned barrels. Spilled olives formed a black and green rug leading out the doorway onto Temple Street.

My mother’s room was empty, undisturbed. As I touched the eagle-shaped vellum talisman she always kept on her pillow, I thought: In the cellar… They’re all hiding together!

I pulled the rug gently away from the trap door so that I would not break the cord which enabled it to be pulled into place from below. Then, peeling open the door itself, I slipped down the stairs onto the landing. The cellar door was locked. “It’s me,” I called in the dark line between the door and frame. “Uncle, open up.” Silence. I rapped on the door. “It’s me,” I called. “Mother, whoever’s there…it’s just me.” When I looked back up the stairs into the silent kitchen, a weighted anxiety trembled my legs. I banged against the door, called out again. No response.

I was sure that nothing could have happened to Uncle, our man of wonders, the kabbalah master who played fugues with Torah and Talmud and Zohar. You couldn’t kill such a maestro of the mystical with man-made tools. But Judah or Cinfa… What if they were inside, afraid to call out? Or was the cellar empty? Had they all fled? Perhaps my master had a secret way of locking the door from the outside. To protect the books. Yes, that must be it.

Was it a premonition? Simple logic? A tremor linked to the possibility that something dreadful had happened to Uncle shook me. Standing atop the mosaic menorah, I was suddenly battering the door with all my strength. Till its iron bolt flew from the wood.

I was inside.

The hard, dry stink of lavender and excrement packed my nostrils. I was staring at two nude bodies cloaked by blood. Uncle and a girl. They were lying a few feet from each other, she on her side, he on his back. Their hands were almost touching. It looked as if their locked fingers had slipped apart after they’d drifted into sleep.

Chapter III

When I saw them, the air was suddenly ripped from me, and my body receded. I was racing down the stairs into a warm cavern bordered by muffled noise and wavering light, breathing in rhythm to the swaying of the walls. Naked, Uncle was. A curtain of blood had closed over his chest. The girl beside him was also free of all covering, and also drenched with blood.

The rotten stench around me seemed to moisten my eyes. Moaning, kneeling over my master, I reached for his wrist, felt for a pulse; it returned a frigid silence.

Old Christian rioters had taken his life!

I looked frantically between the two bodies as if upon unknown scripts. Had they been making love? Who could she be?

Necks and torsos were contoured by liquid brown ribbons. I crouched by Uncle’s head. On his neck, two lips of skin had peeled away from a deep slit still wet with blood.

Someone help me, I thought. Dearest God, please help me.

A cold dread curled up from my bowels and pressed out against my chest when I realized I was alone, that I’d be forever without my master. A wave of sickness rose inside me, and I vomited across the slate of the floor till a stinging liquid dripped from my nose.

For warmth, I wrapped my arms about my shoulders. Nothing must be changed, I thought. Not before I had imprinted the scene like a Biblical passage in my Torah memory. I must not faint!

The prayer mat was blotched red, had soaked up the syrup of life they’d spilled.

But the door had been firmly locked. How could the killer have gotten out?

Or was he here?!

I jumped to my feet, reached for my knife. Holding it in front of me like a flame in darkness, I turned back for the stairs, then swiveled around. The silence of expectation trembled my legs.

Yet the wall tiles and window eyelets, desks and chairs returned my gaze without the slightest quiver of motion. The room was empty, seemed hollow, like the rib cage of an animal whose heart had suddenly ceased beating.

The memory of Uncle handing me the vellum ribbon on which Aunt Esther had scripted both our names came to me framed by the silence which follows a wintertime chant. Of course, I thought, he must have known that the Angel of Death was approaching. It was why he warned me of our coming separation.

I stood with my back against the southern wall of the cellar, pressed hard to its granite by the immensity of my loss, and stared at them.

Now, twenty-four years later, every detail is as clear to me as the first lines of Genesis.

My master was lying flat on his back, his head tilted to the left in a solemn and restful pose. The girl was lying on her left side, her body the span of a man’s arms from his.

Uncle’s feet were at the center of the circular prayer mat, his head just short of its perimeter. His eyes were open, darker and glassier than in life, staring at nothing. Blood was smeared on both his cheeks and on the wild silver tufts of hair above his right ear. His left arm was by his side, his hand palm up, his fingers curled. His right arm, however, seemed to be straining toward the girl, and his fingertips were but two inches from her outstretched hand.

If, in the moment before death, he’d been hoping to comfort the girl with his touch, wouldn’t his body and head have been turned to the right side to give him greater reach?

I reasoned that he’d already been dead before reaching this final position, and I imagined a hooded Dominican friar braced behind him, stripping him, slitting his throat, blood splashing down across his chest, cascading onto his feet. Then, for some reason, he’d been lowered gently, respectfully even, to the ground. His right arm had fallen toward the girl by accident. Or had been positioned there to make it look as if he’d been trying to soothe her agony. Why? Were the men who took his life artists of death?

Shit was smeared on Uncle Abraham’s buttocks. More excrement, bloodstained but untrodden, was lying just inside the fringe of the prayer mat by the Sabbath bush of myrtle and lavender.

The stink in the room was an evil marriage of the floral and putrid.

The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty. She was thin and pale, a slip of a girl. With long brown hair, now matted with crusted blood. Perhaps five feet tall, she possessed small, firm breasts, as white as marble, and they, too, were ribboned with blood.

I had so rarely seen a woman’s form unencumbered by clothing that the effect of her graceful contours and deep shadows was to distance me even further from the present. Already numb and disbelieving, I stared at her for a time as if I’d forgotten everything from my past.

Shit soiled her thighs and ankles. Like Uncle, two lips of skin lifted away from a lengthy slit across her throat. She had been treated more cavalierly than he had, however, and after the edge of a blade had freed her soul from its confines, must have been discarded to the ground like tref. She fell heavy and hard, with her nose slamming into one of the lavender bushes; a flower pot was lying smashed by her head, and soil and ceramic pieces were scattered as far as the staircase. Her nose itself had broken, was twisted grotesquely to the right and crusted with blood. She was lying on her left side now, with her head tucked down into her armpit, as if she were seeking to hide her eyes. Her left arm was extended straight toward Uncle; her right was splayed awkwardly behind her back. Her legs were pulled in slightly toward her chest, as if she were seeking to retreat into the protected sleep of childhood.

I found myself staring at a ring of bruises around her neck some two inches higher than the crusted slit. These contusions looked like shadows made by a choker of beads, and at first, without logic, I thought that they were indeed marks made by a decorative necklace.

Then I looked to Uncle and saw that he, too, possessed such shadowing. Bruises circled his neck just above his Adam’s apple.

Had they been strangled with a knotted cord?

I crouched by the girl, held her left hand. It was frigid, but not yet stiff. She wore a wedding band of braided golden filaments on her index finger. Slipping it off, I placed it in my pouch and whispered: May her husband still be alive to cherish it.

It was the sound of my own voice which suddenly pierced the darkness of my initial disbelief; with an audible gasp, I realized that their throats had been cut just below the large ring of the windpipe, as if by a shohet killing in the ritual manner of all Jewish butchers.

Had a traitorous New Christian led the followers of the Nazarene to my uncle, then slit his throat? I pictured a Dominican friar rousing the mob to break into our cellar, my master taken and handed over to this Jewish mercenary like a sacrificial lamb.

The name of the New Christian arms dealer Eurico Damas sounded inside me. His recent threat against Uncle’s life had been relayed to us by Rabbi Losa: Should you ever so much as whisper Damas’ name in your sleep…

Had Damas accepted a pouch of gold sovereigns from the Dominicans to reveal the hiding places of our most honored community members? Had he penned Abraham Zarco’s name at the top of his list?

But could Damas have killed like a shohet?

My gaze was drawn to the staircase. Light from upstairs was glistening off the tiles decorating the cellar’s eastern wall, was revealing to me a pattern of twelve-pointed stars seeming to possess a secret. Stars. Light. Patterns. Secrets. Years of training in Torah and Talmud had taught me to sense when my own reasoning had veered from the path of logic, whether Greek or Jewish, and my mind was searching out a fixed pattern in the tiles with which to cleanse itself. Staring at the whirl of blue, white and gold glazes, I permuted the word azulejo, tile, until the meaning of the word slipped away, until there were only eyes fixed on a glassy surface. Graced with the freedom that is emptiness, a realization tugged me breathless to my feet: Uncle’s soul could not have been set loose by Christian rioters; I’d found the trap door closed, our tattered Persian rug in place. The rampaging mob would not have murdered two people, then closed the door neatly behind them and slid our rug into place. They’d have been emboldened by the Jewish blood warming their hands, stormed out of here overturning everything in sight. Our cellar would be a shambles!

I looked around to certify that the room had not been trampled by Christian feet. The desks and storage cabinet appeared to be untouched. Of the furniture, only the distorted looking glass on the wall above Uncle’s desk bore an obvious bloodstain. A single rivulet of brown descended from its upper rim across the concave silver surface.

Had the murderer held a dripping hand to the mirror’s frame as he peered at his distorted image? Or was the legend of the Bleeding Mirror true?

Whatever the case, no Christians had penetrated; their search had been confounded by the secret threshold of our trap door.

And no Jewish butchers have been here either! came another inner confirmation. For no butcher knew of the existence of our secret entrance. Nor would Eurico Damas have known of it. So the trap door must have been left open. Could Uncle have been so careless?

I placed the palm of my hand flat on my master’s chest, as if seeking the answer from his presence. A faint residue of warmth stilled my breathing. Examining him for blemishes, I found only a dark bruise on his left shoulder, a slight swelling around it. His whitened skin felt thick to my fingertips, like leather, but still retained a terrible trace of the suppleness of life.

I would have guessed that he had been dead no more than half an hour, since just before four o’clock in the afternoon. And that there had been little struggle.

I gripped his right hand, his hand of blessing and illumination, began examining its pores and lines as if seeking to decipher the language scripted on an ancient parchment. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I could actually feel God’s presence leaving my body. I prayed that the curtain of blood on Uncle had been a dream, counted to five, the number of Books of the Torah, then swiveled my gaze back… The air squeezed in my throat as if a fist had closed. I could not look at him; my sobs, sharp and deep and endless, had begun.

How long did I cry? Time ceases under the pressure of such emotion.

When the blessing of silence descended to me again, I sat, began to rock back and forth. I remembered a deaf and blind little boy I’d once seen swaying like this in the street, and now I understood why; pervaded by an isolation and loneliness so wide that it has no borders, the body seeks to console itself with the grace of its own movement.

Awakening to my own presence, I found myself holding a jagged piece of flower pot. I sat by my master’s chest. Ripped my shirt off and started cleaning the blood from the warped mask of his face. My lips sculpted his name as if in incantation.

I noticed his bloody shawl balled up by the base of one of the myrtle bushes and drew it over my shoulders. Like a reminder. Of what, I had no idea. I was sitting barechested. Shivering. Cleaning ink again from the fingers of his right hand with my shirt, slipping his topaz signet ring off; the crown of God had trapped the emerald glow of my master’s eyes inside, and I needed that light with me always.

After I’d whispered a kaddish for him, then one for the girl, I took his left hand to begin cleaning it. A single thread was caught on the thumbnail. Lifting it to my eyes, I found it was black silk. A name hesitated at the edge of my hearing, was framed by my whispering lips: Simon Eanes, the fabric importer.

Simon was a family friend and member of my uncle’s threshing group who had been ransomed years earlier from the Inquisitors of Seville with a fortune in lapis lazuli paid by my master. His hands appeared before me now, fisted inside the black silk gloves which my mother had sewn for him from remnants of Dona Meneses’ fabric. These gloves were meant to protect his tender grip from calluses; he had only his left leg—the right one having been amputated in his youth—and he walked heavily upon wooden crutches.

Had the thread been pulled from one of these gloves?

As a member of the threshing group, he obviously knew of the existence of the cellar and the location of the trap door. But did a man with only one leg have have the strength and balance to kill like a shohet?

Placing the thread in my pouch, I examined my master’s other nails for particles of skin or hair. Nothing. Then his face. Capillaries in his lips had broken, formed jagged webs. I brushed his eyelids closed. They were dark, seemingly bruised.

The feel of my master’s bloody prayer shawl on my shoulders moved my eyes to our desks, our place of earthly work. Uncle’s slippers and white robe were on the floor below. On walking there, I discovered that one slipper had tumbled over on its back. The other was a good four feet beyond. It seemed that they had been tossed carelessly from some distance away.

All his clothes were deeply stained with blood. Uncle had been killed while wearing them, then stripped.

As I turned in a circle, I surveyed the cellar for other garments, pausing only momentarily to see my dwarfish reflection in the Bleeding Mirror. How vile and ugly I appeared just then, a being of crumpled features and snakelike eyes, my hair knotted like a Gorgon’s.

In the room, I could find nothing belonging to the girl. Not a blouse or scarf. Not a single ribbon.

A possibility harshly lit with shame closed my eyes. Uncle had been deeply troubled of late. For reasons which he’d never fully clarified. What if the girl had been the source of his worries, a lover who’d informed him that this would be the last of their secret liaisons? Or one who was pregnant, who’d given him an ultimatum: divorce your wife or I reveal who the baby’s father is!

Did Uncle strip her upstairs, lead her down to the cellar, turn the bolt on the door, kill her, then take his own life? But the slit across his throat… Was it possible that such a wound was self-inflicted? Was Uncle capable of killing another being bearing a spark of God in her chest?

And where was the knife?! Had he made it disappear by whispering an incantation?

I held my breath as I pried my hands under the bodies to search. Nothing but the sickening feel of cold dead weight pressing toward burial.

I was unable to find the knife anywhere. Yet in the bottommost drawers of our storage cabinet, I discovered that the lids of our two blackwood boxes had been pulled off; our small fortune in gold leaf and lapis lazuli was gone; the killer—or another thief—had passed right over the lesser ingredients and headed for our most precious minerals.

The important thing, of course, was not what the killer had taken, but that he had known exactly where to find our treasures. The number of people so intimately familiar with our storage cabinet could be counted on the fingers of my hands: the family; Farid and his father Samir; and the threshing group members.

The killer had to be one of them.

The names of the four members of Uncle’s group sounded as if read from a kingly decree:

Simon Eanes, the fabric importer and manuscript illuminator.

Father Carlos, the priest, the man to whom we’d entrusted Judah’s education in Christianity. Had not he and my uncle argued about the manuscript of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s which Carlos had refused to give up?

Diego Gonçalves, the printer and devout Levite who’d been attacked by boys with stones two days earlier, on Friday morning.

Samson Tijolo, the powerfully built vintner to whom I’d gone this morning for kosher wine.

As Samson’s name sounded inside me, I remembered bitterly the note Uncle had sent to him, cursed myself aloud for not having read it.

I faced the eastern wall and stared into the pattern of tiles; for the first time, I realized the powers of disguise gifted to the man I needed to bring to justice, understood that he had fooled us all with a mask of friendship. I sensed that if I were to catch him, I’d have to know everything that had occurred in this cellar.

Slowly, with the careful steps of a mantis, I began to creep across the room, to imprint the scene in my mind, inch by inch, as if moving my fingertips over an unscrolled portion of Torah.

A single bead with traces of blood was sitting behind the leg of one of our desks. It was dark, grained with thin, serpentine bands. When I picked it up, I imagined a rosary or chaplet tightened around Uncle’s neck. Had it belonged to Father Carlos?

I slipped the bead in my pouch.

Two thick markings of blood stained the bottom fringe of one of the two leather wall hangings gracing the western wall of the cellar. In between these stains was a straight line where the hide had been slit. Undoubtedly, the killer’s hand had folded this section of hanging around the blade, and pulled the knife sharply downwards to clean its edge.

Bloody sandal-prints led back and forth between the western wall, prayer mat and stairs, but did not continue up. The killer had been trapped, was looking for a way out, then simply disappeared.

How many different people had left footprints? Uncle’s and the girl’s were easily visible on the mat. As best I could tell, the killer had worn sandals, and his feet were an inch longer and much wider than Uncle’s.

Might these tracks not have belonged to Diego or Samson?; both of them possessed feet like Goliaths.

Or had there been more than one killer? The rough surface of the mat picked up imprints but imperfectly, and against the dark slate it would have been impossible for me to separate the footprints of two or even three killers if their size and shape were similar.

Simon the fabric importer… I considered him again. Even a man with one leg could kill like a shohet if he’d used surprise as a weapon against a chanting kabbalist. But he would only have created a left footprint. At least two right sandal-prints not made by Uncle were clearly visible.

So if Simon were involved, he had had a partner.

But I was getting ahead of myself; the thread could have been planted to point blame toward Simon, and the bead might easily have been dropped by a cunning hand wishing to focus the hollow light of doubt upon Father Carlos. Even the footprints could have been faked.

I crouched again over Uncle’s chest and lifted his left hand to examine the thumbnail. As is decreed proper, it was neatly filed, except where a tiny slit encrusted with blood had caught the thread. Wasn’t it likely then that the thread had been placed there by a thresher desiring to implicate Simon?

Without considering the consequences, I lifted the hand I’d been holding to my lips, to receive Uncle’s touch and blessing one last time. When I pulled him to me, I began kissing his cheeks and lips.

I was covered with blood. Dyed with it. Like an illumination come to life.

When I closed my eyes, a cold wind of presentiment swept me to my feet. Sweat beaded on my forehead. The hairs over all my body seemed to stand on end. A scream building in my chest pushed open an inner door, and a vision entered:

Around me was a scorched landscape of stoney hills. It was hot, dry. Sunset was casting jagged shadows across canyons and slopes, giving the scene the stark clarity of Torah. In the distance, from the eastern horizon, a white light was rising and approaching. It twinkled as it continued to ascend in the sky, as if expressing code, and it seemed to me that it was surely journeying to deliver a message. As I stood in a position of prayer, there now rose around me a great swooshing sound. It was as if an invisible creature—or the air itself—were breathing. The white light suddenly showed wings and took on the form of a great, luminescent ibis. It was as if the pigment of its white plumage had been distilled from the moon itself. With its black feet braced in front of its body, this bird swooped down and landed just in front of me, ran for several feet to get its balance, drew its wings closed, then poked its scythe-like beak in its chest to ruffle its feathers. It was the size of a man. Standing regally before me, its great silver eyes seemed to contain liquid mercury, to possess the spiritual allure of Moses. With its beak opening and closing, it spoke in my Uncle’s voice. “Turn around!” As I obeyed, I found that I was at the edge of a body of water, perhaps a mile across, and that the curious breathing sound which had risen up around me was simply the noise of waves crashing and falling away. On the far shore, tens of thousands of men had formed columns like ants, were running up the slopes of faraway hills. “Turn back for me,” the ibis said. I obeyed again. “As you suspected, you have come late for the Exodus this year, and you have been left behind. If you are to get across now, you will have to fly; you have no time to wait for Moses to return.” When I replied, “But I have no wings,” the ibis said, “A kabbalist does not need wings to fly, only the will to do so.” His pronunciation of the word “will”—vontade—was purposely ambiguous and was also intended to imply bondade, “goodness.” The ibis then said, “Now face south.” As I did, the landscape froze in time. The scent of vellum was all around me, and I saw that the sea and hills and even the ibis itself had been but figures painted on a page of an illuminated Haggadah. I was standing on a panel depicting the Exodus, on the Egyptian shore. I had been left behind with Pharaoh.

Shouts from the street woke me into the present. Of course, I thought, the premonition I’d had while watching the flagellants two days earlier had been a precursor to this vision. God had been trying to gain entrance to me and show me this since Friday. How poorly I listenedwhen it was truly necessary!

The question now was: had I the will and goodness to shepherd my family safely across to the Holy Land?

Suddenly, under an instinct of bodily fear, my hand craved the concise certainty of my knife, grabbed it from my pouch. Judah and Cinfa… Mother, Esther… My hands formed fists about their names. The need to find them swelled me with a clenched force so strong each breath seemed to jump within my lungs.

As I raced up the stairs, I lifted from my pouch the Book of Psalms which Uncle had asked me to deliver; the excess weight was suddenly irritating me out of all proportion to its significance. A thought pressed me back against the wall, however: The note inside for the nobleman which Uncle had written! Might it not end some of my confusion?

This letter was slipped in between the cover and the first page of manuscript. Standing on the cellar stairs, pervaded by a feeling of dread, I ripped the wax seal:

Dear and honored Dom Miguel:

Before you, you see your Book of Psalms and my nephew Berekiah. I ask you now: are they so very different? Both beautiful. Both containing worlds worthy of being remembered.

If you have any doubts, look into my nephew’s eyes. Would you condemn such a good and intelligent gaze to death?

I told you that there are some creatures created in God’s image who have no feet, only pages. Then, I stopped short of asking these following questions so as not to scare you. But desperation is propelling my pen across this page and I cannot hold them back.

Can you be sure that a book does not breathe? Can you be sure that it does not reproduce? If not here in our lowly world of veils, then perhaps in the Upper Realms.

Can you be certain, even, that angels are not books gifted with form by God?

Is not the Torah itself God’s body?

I say one name to you: Metatron.

Repeat this name to yourself. Say it one-hundred and sixty-nine times if you dare.

Will the angel Metatron yet record your good deeds or pass his gaze over your name?

You are a shipwrecked man trapped on an island. I am on a boat throwing a rope to you. It is not the rope you wanted and I am not the savior you had hoped for. Will you lament your fate and moan your disappointment until I pull up anchor and leave you behind? Or will you realize that none of us gets exactly what we want in this life? Will you not make do with what God has given you? After all, a rope from a Jew on a boat crossing the Red Sea at Passover is not something to spit at!

You may even find that you like traveling.

Look at the covenant which has always been with you if you have any doubts. May God bless you whatever your decision.

Abraham Zarco

P.S. I was waiting for you next to tell me that Christian doctors could give my wife, dearest Esther, her virginity back!

A door seemed to open inside me as I finished the letter; Miguel Ribeiro, the renowned Christian nobleman, must have been a secret Jew as well! What else could Uncle have meant by the covenant which has always been with you except the circumcised crown of his sex? Clearly, I thought, Uncle had made a difficult request of Dom Miguel, one that he must have refused. Otherwise, my master would not have made reference to Metatron, the Talmudic angel who records the good deeds of Israel.

As for the request to repeat Metatron’s name one-hundred and sixty-nine times, that was typical of my uncle; it was the number of times the verb zakhar, to remember, appeared in the Old Testament in its various forms. Whenever my master wanted someone of little experience in philosophy to understand a difficult reading of Torah, he gave them a holy phrase related to the verse in question to repeat this many times. Slowly, through kabbalistic channels, comprehension would take shape in the subject’s mind.

That Uncle’s request of Dom Miguel had something to do with books was obvious. Was he soliciting more funds in order to purchase some recently uncovered manuscripts? Had he found a book so special, something so valuable that it provoked greed within the threshing group? Was that the connection between this note and the kabbalah masters?

As I continued up the stairs, I felt for the first time that I was stepping along a path toward the truth. A thresher was involved. Perhaps with someone outside the group. They had murdered Uncle because of a priceless manuscript he had found, something so valuable, so magically empowered that it could turn the golden heart of one of my uncles friends to tin.

At the top of the stairs, I gazed down on my master and the girl. Both lying on the mat. Reaching toward each other like… The thought that they really could have been lovers twisted away from me, and doubt added a terrible depth to the gulf of death separating me from Uncle. Had I truly known him or only glimpsed him through his mask?

A woman’s scream suddenly came from down Temple Street. I whispered goodbye to the bodies below as one would to sleeping children.

In the kitchen, I could hear the ragged voices of a crowd just outside the door to my mother’s room. Creeping footsteps coming from our courtyard. Peering outside, I discovered a weedy boy without shoes, his hair a mop of brown. He was picking lemons from our tree. I stepped forward and whispered in a voice of warning, “Leave this place now!”

He gasped, whipped around and tore off through the gate.

I started to peer over the wall after him, but ducked down immediately; to my right, descending Temple Street toward the river, were a hundred or more peasants in rough linen, carrying scythes and hoes, picks and swords. My heartbeat was swaying me from side to side. I sat for a minute or so to end my dizziness, then dashed to the shed for nails and a hammer.

Working with the speed of desperation, I joined the trap door to its wooden frame with the nails and drew the tattered rug into place, all the while thinking: No one must be allowed to defile the bodies. In my room, I slipped on new clothes; although my chest had been ransacked, there was still a ragged old linen shirt and pants lying discarded at the bottom. My previous clothing, heavy with Uncle’s spilled life, met the lime stench of the outhouse pit.

Before leaving home, I slipped into Farid’s house. Since he was deaf, I could not shout to him to draw him out of hiding. I called in whispers for Samir, his father. The silence of tile and stone met me. I checked the kitchen and bedrooms. The house had been pillaged, their loom hacked to pieces. But there was no sign of either of them. They must have fled. To make sure, I stamped on the ground thrice, then once, then four more times. I was forming the magic Egyptian number pi, the signal Farid and I used in emergencies. If he were here, he’d feel the number in the soles of his feet.

There came no reply.

Back in the courtyard, Roseta, our cat, trotted to me, the two sour cherries my mother hung from her neck as identification swinging wildly. Lifting her back into a luxurious curl, she purred as she brushed her gray fur against my leg. I shooed her away with a gentle kick and walked to our gate. Stepping into the Rua de São Pedro, I saw the sky to the west, over central Lisbon, clouded with smoke. I clutched my knife as I thought of my family. And yet, I did not move forward, looked instead back across the empty square to the two-story townhouse just beyond St. Peter’s granite archway. Father Carlos’ apartment was on the top floor. The shutters were closed tight. As a member of the threshing group, was he involved in Uncle’s murder? Or was it even possible that my family was in hiding with him?

I took the steps of his stairwell three at a time, found his door locked. I called out for him. “Open up!” I said. “You’ll be safer with me. Just tell me if you have Judah with you. Damn you, answer me!” Nothing. The sin of wanting someone to be have been killed so that they could not possibly be responsible for murder entered my heart.

Outside again, in the eerily empty square, listening to shouts from down by the river, my feet began to move me closer to the cloud of smoke rising from central Lisbon. Like a shell of being, I trudged on, my lengthy shadow retreating behind me as if my footsteps were tainted.

As I passed the south wall of the cathedral, a group of women ran by as if fleeing an invasion, but none of them tried to stop me or warn me. Were they swallows fleeing Pharaoh? I did not look at faces, and despite what bishops may say, the sound of a Jew fleeing death is no different from that of a Christian.

A group of youths with hoes and picks was standing outside the Magdalena Church, so I cut quickly left and headed to the river. I found myself on the Rua Nova d’El Rei by the Misericordia Church. Simon the fabric importer’s store was only fifty paces west. As I rushed there, four men in merchants’ dress, conversing in a doorway across the street, gazed in my direction but made no move toward me. Further away, a group of waifs was kicking a wicker basket back and forth as if it were a leather ball.

How to explain the effect of seeing every shutter on the street locked tight, balconies empty, not a carriage in sight? Such is the look of a city under invasion from within, I thought. Of a city without a future. I imagined myself a phantom, wondered if my fist would make a sound when it knocked at the door to Simon’s store. Of course, it did. Shutters opened above. A bearded man in a wide-brimmed blue hat peered out. It was Master João, Simon’s landlord and an Old Christian. “Stop that banging!” he shouted.

“I don’t know if you remember me…Master Abraham Zarco’s nephew. I’ve come for Simon Eanes. I need to find him. Is he in?”

“You’re two hours late. The Dominicans came for him. Slit open his belly, then dragged him away toward…” He flipped his hand in the direction of the smoke ribboning above the Rossio. “Now go away. You’d be in hiding if you had any sense!”

“He’s dead then?”

“Do you have eyes, you idiot! You see the smoke. That’s him. Now get away from me, you Marrano dog, before the Dominicans come for me as well!” The shutters slammed closed.

On walking away, the names of the three remaining threshers were whispered inside me as if summoning me into a biblical wilderness: Samson the vintner, Diego the printer and Father Carlos.

I would have to find Samson next; his wife Rana, an old friend from the neighborhood, would not be able to hide the truth from me. If he’d come home soaked in Uncle’s blood, her eyes would give the truth away.

Rossio Square opened like an infected wound maggoted with swarms of shouting people. They crowded around trapped carriages, traced their way through the great arcades of the All Saint’s Hospital, leaned laughing across balconies and window sills. Gulls circled overhead, calling in shrieks. A man in rags was dancing with crusted sores oozing yellow on his feet. “Bit by a tarantula!” a leather-skinned old woman shouted at me. “Can’t stop, even for this!” She laughed, then gagged with a hag’s cough.

Above the heads of the crowd, columns of dark smoke were rising in front of the Dominican Church.

It was the heat of emotion that drew me forward. To have turned then would have been like walking away from God himself. Or the Devil at his moment of attack. Only saints have that kind of power.

Suddenly, I saw Master Solomon the goldsmith at the edge of the chaotic crowd. His hands pinned behind his back by a burly giant with a blacksmith’s muscular sheen. Shit smeared in his hair, across his neck. A grimace of recognition for me trembling his legs. His darting eyes begged for me to run. I imagined his voice: “Now, Berekiah, before it’s too late!”

Pushed forward, he was suddenly swallowed by the swarm.

I dove in after him, was carried by a sudden surge toward the center. A terror that I would find my family captured at the core of this mob pervaded me. And yet, a heat akin to sexual desire took my strength. Passed ahead, endlessly, like falling through the arms of a dream, there was suddenly space. A pyre. Crackling with flame. Orange and green tendrils unfurling toward the roof of the church. In the bell tower, a Dominican friar with a bloated goiter holding a severed head out to the crowd on the tip of a sword, exhorting the rabble in a raging voice: “Kill the heretics! Kill the devilish Jews! Bring the Lord’s justice upon them! Make them pay for their crimes against the Christian children! Make them …”

The fire was giving off a terrible heat as it fed on the mass of Jewish bodies with which it had been gifted. Numb, far beyond thought, I stared until I recognized Necim Farol the interpreter and moneylender seeming to peer out at me through a window of flame. His head was charred black, he had white fish-eyes. To spare myself, I lowered my gaze, but there by my feet was the head of Moses Almal the ropemaker resting like a bust of John the Baptist atop a liquid crimson platter. All around the perimeter of the pyre were pools of blood from which bodies were growing.

Seconds or maybe minutes later, for such a scene defies sequential memory, Almal’s head was swooped up and carried off by a bearded, racing figure.

As I followed his mad dash through the crowd, a shirtless man sweating like a miner began hacking with an axe at the body of an old woman splayed on the ground. First the left hand, then the right were severed. This last one bore a ring: the aquamarine of Senhora Rosa-monte, an elderly neighbor who always gave me lemons as presents. The axman was so lost in the joy of killing that he didn’t notice the gemstone. He laughed and shouted, “The ash of the Jews will make good fertilizer for our fields!” He tossed the Senhoras hands into the crowd. A cheer rose up, and I pushed after them. A pale and pimpled sailor from the north was now wearing the hand with the ring on his head, dancing, singing a drunken song in a language spurting up from his gut. When I faced him, he ceased his jig. I poured all my coins at his feet, pointed to his find. He nodded, spit out guttural words, tossed the hand high in the air, straight up toward the gulls. It fell, splattering blood. I snatched it up, sealed it in my pouch. From the granite steps of the Dominican Church, shouts in a voice of doom turned me: “Kill the heretics! Kill them now!” It was a squat, owl-eyed friar swathed in his robes of evil. Like a heraldic shield, he held a bloody Nazarene stick out to the crowd. Solomon the goldsmith was there, lying on the cobbles at the foot of the church steps. Belly up, bleeding like a wounded dog. As I stepped forward, he shouted my name, once clearly. Crimson ribbons streaked his white robe. Two grunting men soaked in sweat and blood were hitting him with planks of wood formed into Nazarene crosses and driven through with nails. Solomon, who caressed gold leaf into whispers from God. Solomon, who kissed me full on the lips and sobbed when he saw the illuminated Book of Esther I’d made for him. Solomon, who…

It was hard work this killing. At each whack, spurts of life emerged from the goldsmith as if from fountains viewed from heaven. The ripped meat of his punctured hands was outstretched to make it stop. Screams. Hebrew screams for King Manuel. Now to Abraham, Moses. To God. “Make it stop! O God! Make it stop!” A gurgling blood from his mouth choked him.

“Let’s shave the Jew before he dies!” one of the men shouted. Lifting a blazing branch from the pyre, he held it to Solomon’s gray beard, set it afire. The tortured goldsmith’s eyes were wide with pain, looking ferociously into the world for help.

As if an arrow of heresy had split my mind, I was thinking: It is a failing of God that we cannot draw such physical pain away from another human being and make it our own.

A hulking giant with a red cross painted on his forehead, carrying a rusty ax, suddenly came forward shouting for mercy and rain. With a great swing over his head, he sent the jagged blade crashing for Solomon’s neck. Life splattered as far as my feet and his ragged body collapsed like a dolls, his neck spurting blood like new wine from a cask.

When I awoke to my own presence, Christian men were staring at me; it was idiocy, but in my horror, I had involuntarily begun to whisper prayers to myself in Hebrew!

A hand caught me suddenly, tugged me back. Jerked me hard. A face I knew. David Moses? We ran through walls of reaching arms with the weightless speed of nightmare. Raced through a forest of movement. Around corners. Up stone staircases. Down shadowed alleys. Into a house. Through a closing door into welcoming darkness.

A hand fell over my mouth. Breathing came hard against my cheek. A voice I knew was whispering my name. “Quiet, Beri,” he said.

It was David Moses, our former chazan.

“Master David, did you see Solomon, the goldsmith?” I asked.

“I saw many of us,” he replied.

“But Solomon. Did you see…”

Shouts from just outside the door: “Down by the river! Let’s get going! Bring the cart!”

Master David covered my mouth with his hand. We crouched down. Our breathing ebbed together, then separated.

“Have you seen my family? My mother, Judah…”

“No. But they could be anywhere.”

“I must go back…maybe they’ve made it home. I must find them and…”

He gripped my collar. “Listen, the only way to find them is to stay alive. You must get away.”

“How did it start?! Who’s responsible for this…”

“In the Dominican Church. A crucifix with a hole covered by mirror. A lit candle slipped in from the back by the friars. They tell everyone that the light is a sign from the Nazarene, a miracle. About an hour ago, a New Christian, Jacob Chaveirol, the tailor, he was…”

“I went to school with his son, Menni. He’s brilliant in Torah. A man of wonders. He has a shop up…”

“He’s an idiot! He said how much better it would be if Christ gave us rain instead of fire!”

“And…?”

“Beaten to death. They slit his abdomen and pulled out his… Two priests called on the congregation to kill the Jews. His brother, Isaac, killed as well, ripped to pieces. The head in the bell tower, it’s his. Northern sailors contributed money for the wood of the pyre. And soon…and soon…” David’s words faltered.

“And the King, why doesn’t he come to our defense? Twenty years we were given to…”

“King Manuel?!” Master David sighed. “He a coward, but he’s not stupid. He knows that if he sends troops to our aid, the mob will call for his head. The people hate him almost as much as they hate the Jews. He’ll give the riot time to burn itself out, then take control of the city again.”

He and I clung together in silence. I could not speak of Uncle; my revelations would have confirmed that he would never return to me. And I could trust no New Christian until I learned more about the murder. I asked, “Have you heard anything of the fate of Father Carlos or Diego the printer?” When David shook his head, I added, “And Samson the vintner?”

“Not a word,” he replied.

My eyes were adjusting to the gloom; we were in a spiral stairwell. Above us, dim light filtered through a thin portal covered by a grill. Suddenly, I could distinguish a face above us peering around the central axis of the stairs. I lunged. Caught a leg. Stifled a scream with my hand. It was a girl. She struggled, but I held her with the force of my stored fear. “Stop! I won’t hurt you!” I said.

She fought me for a moment more, then shook free of her terror. Her breathing came warm against my hand.

“Damn her!” the chazan whisper-screamed.

“We can’t stay here anyway,” I said. “We’re too close to the Rossio. You go now and I’ll meet you outside the porta de Santa Ana, St. Anne’s Gate. Past the monastery, on the crest of the next hill, is a single large oak. Meet me there. I’ll stop her from shouting till you have had time to get away.” I could see my friend clearly now. His prayer shawl had been tugged through his ripped mantle. “And for God’s sake, toss away your tallis.”

“But what about you?” he asked.

“You’ve saved me once. I’ll do the rest. Now that I’ve awakened to what is happening, I’ll get away. Just get rid of your shawl.”

“I can’t,” he said. He hid it back inside his mantle.

“And you think that Jacob the tailor was crazy? Look, I’ll meet you beyond St. Anne’s. Go!”

Master David paused as if to speak, then squeezed my arm and dashed out the door.

Power and fear produce a color of emotion unlike any other, and with the girl in my grasp, I felt my body to be silver, reflective, beyond confinement. “I’m going to let you go in a minute,” I said.

She breathed hot against me. As I unfurled my hand, she straightened up and tugged my fingers back to her mouth. Her tongue flicked like sexual prayer against my palm, traced edges of desire along my thumb and forefinger. She reached fingertips to my sex. Squeezed once with the pressure of curiosity. The in and out of our intertwining breathing gave rhythm to our tongues dancing together. Two sinful lunatics we were, swelling together in a stairwell with a riot just outside. She took my hand. “Upstairs,” she whispered.

Does the body have its own life separate from the mind? How could I have let her lead me on after having seen my uncle? Or does sex serve a healing function which we refuse to admit?

I followed her into a room grayed by a drawn curtain. The lock of the door clicked like a bolt in a dream. Lines of light at the window drew me from her. From here, I could see we were on a side street about fifty paces from Rossio Square, just inside the Moorish Quarter. Shouts filtered up as if through layered fabric. My heart suddenly skipped a beat; Master Solomon’s face was burning before me. Except that he had Uncle Abraham’s emerald eyes. They were vacant, cold, staring beyond me. So much death, so much blood. The girl’s hand was stroking my behind. I turned for her mouth, but she ducked below, began caressing my desire with a liquid warmth, swirling with a wild craving, hiding me inside a gulping shadow with no form and all need, moaning desperately as I held her to me and swirled her hair over my quivering chest and licked the petals of her ears. As if mounting the contours of darkness itself, I gripped her shoulders and fondled the tickling desire of her breasts, thrust harder and deeper into the warm wet darkness until she was gasping as if crying and I was exploding as if free-falling into a bottomless cavern.

When she had taken everything from me with the maddening tip of a flicking tongue, she caressed my face. “To wash,” came a breeze of whisper. The door clicked open as I lay in bed. Racing footsteps down the stairs. “Marrano!” came her shout. “A Jew in my room!”

I tied the string of my pants together and opened the curtain. She was on the street by a carriage, surrounded by men in cloaks, pointing up toward me. I grabbed my pouch and jumped onto the landing, crossed to the roof, slid down to a verandah opposite. Screams propelled me forward. I ran across rooftiles, dashed down gutters. Voices from the apartment below brushed like gusts of wind at my hearing. The last ledge came up as sudden as the closing of a book. A blank drop of forty feet led to the cobbles below. The height of two men separated me from the next rooftop. “Stop, Jew!” I turned as if to confront all of Christianity. A young, long-haired nobleman was navigating awkwardly down the roof. He was tall, thin, possessed a gaunt face which jutted forward at the chin with the arrogance of the high-born. His yellow leggings were wiped with blood, like the markings of a demonic script. He carried a horsewhip in his long, elegant hands.

A young hunter out to prove his prowess to his friends and family, I thought. And I am to be sacrificed for the good of his arrogance. As I waited for him, my feet sought sure footing. He stopped twenty feet away and faced me with a bemused look. I felt strangely at an advantage.

“This is going to be a pleasure,” he observed in a voice of false ease. He braced his feet and arched his whip back, then swung it forward with a shout. Its tip slapped by my feet. Two rooftiles exploded. Moments later, the bitter clacking of their shards below spread a look of satisfaction across his smug face.

A rush like a ghost passed from my toes into my chest and up through my head: the grace of God was ascending. I clung tight to its hold.

“They say if you hit a Jew hard enough you can hear the gold rattling in his rib cage,” he said with a smirk. “I aim to find out!”

It was a legend based on a horrible truth; Jews expelled from Spain in the Christian year of fourteen ninety-two were forbidden from taking valuables. Some of the tens of thousands crossing the border into Portugal dared to eat coinage.

As I spired up to the pinnacle of the roof, a tile came free. I picked it up, held it as a shield in front of my chest. An image of Moses and his tablets entered my mind. The burning sun of the age of Torah seemed to be pulling me toward the sky. My nemesis laughed. He took awkward giant steps, joined me on the apex. We faced each other across a silence of ten feet. His face was twisted with scorn. I began chanting the names of the Unnameable.

“A magical Marrano incantation?” he questioned.

To defend myself, I was tempted to invoke a kabbalistic prayer for his death. Forcing my words silent, I withdrew from thought until there was only a light presence weighing my soul.

“Crazy Jew,” he said. “We’ll kill all of you. Peel open your skin and take out your gold!”

A sudden visceral force pushed me. I charged. He lifted his whip slowly, as if mired in a liquid time. Was he surprised that a Jew would attack without warning? He never tried to dodge me. With my tile as a shield, I plowed up into him like a bull, took the very air from him. He flew to the end of the roof, slid past the ledge and screamed all the way down. A sound like a gloved fist knocking once at a door rose up toward me when he hit the ground.

When I peered below, I saw him lying at a crazy angle on the cobbles, twisted like a discarded marionette.

There was still the roof to cross if I was to get away. Space seemed to recede from me as I jumped, however. Crashing against the wall, I began a free fall, landed hard on a slatted verandah below. My arm was scraped badly and my face stung with blood. The apartment must have belonged to former orthodox Moslems; I was atop the gallery from which their women had surveyed the world below without being seen in the days before their forms of worship were outlawed as well.

I kicked against the blue slats till they gave, then dropped below. Out of the light, I felt strangely distant from myself. I was in a bedroom of pallets and leather mats. As I trudged breathless into a whitewashed hall, voices came through walls. A family was gathered in front of a smoldering hearth. A tall, cinnamon-complexioned man in green robes and a white skullcap faced me. He had broad, powerful shoulders. His light brown eyes were close together and menacing, like an eagle’s. A tuft of dark hair sprouted between his eyebrows, gave him the look of a man of mystery. The thought came: I am too tired to fight. If this man chooses to take my life, I will offer it to him like a prayer.

“You seek sanctuary?” he asked in hesitant Portuguese.

I answered in my Hebrew-accented Arabic: “They’re after me.” We watched blood dripping from my arm onto a leather mat. I cupped it with my hand. “I’m sorry for staining your…”

He called his wife. She rushed to me with a young girl clinging to her robes. Her hair and fingernails were dyed red with henna. After smearing an olive-green ointment on the cut, she bandaged my arm with a linen remnant. Her black, thickly outlined eyes regarded me fearfully till I complimented the grace of her daughter with an Arabic couplet which Farid had written.

My right shoulder had dislocated when I crashed, however, and now, calmer, I realized I could barely move it. It ebbed with pain, then grew numb.

“My name is Attar,” the man said. “I am a potter. I come from Tavira.”

“Berekiah Zarco. I am a fruitseller, and I have always lived in Lisbon.”

He sat me down on a pillow and gave me water. When I mentioned Samir, Farid’s father, a welcoming smile lit his face; they knew each other and had even studied Koran together in Granada when it was still the capital of an Islamic kingdom. “I’ll get you some more water,” he said when I’d finished my cup. He stepped behind me, grabbed me suddenly. Pushed hard. My shoulder popped. Pain broke over me like a tide, then receded. “You’ll feel better now,” he said. “But no more jumping across rooftops for a little while.”

His wife cleaned my face with warm water as I tested my arm. Attar said, “You’re welcome to stay till the trouble passes.”

“I must try to meet a friend, then get back to my family.”

My pants were badly ripped at the inseam. He made me change into a tawny aba fringed at the collar with delicate arabesques in chartreuse thread.

“How will I ever repay you?” I asked.

He waved away my concern. “The possessions of nomads are meant to leave their hands,” he observed. “It is better. What is without wings has a way of dictating our thoughts.” He placed a knitted skullcap on my head.

“Allah be with you,” he said at the door.

I echoed his closing and bowed my thanks. “I’ll return your clothes as soon as I can.”

He lifted the hood of my robe over my head and bowed back.

The street was empty when I slipped outside. Rushing along the cobbles, I tried in vain to fade my footsteps to silence. The acid smell of burning Jewish flesh was everywhere now. I was sure that a plume of smoke was rising just above me, but would not look. I breathed through my mouth, crossed the Moorish Gate under the scornful eyes of two sentinels on horseback. Dressed as I was, however, these representatives of the crown would not dare to touch me; if there was official violence against former Moslems, there might be reciprocal bloodletting against Christians in Turkish lands and North Africa.

As for the mob, all I had was my knife. I prayed I would not have to use it.

Once outside the city walls, I lowered my hood and ran across the fields fronting St. Anne’s convent, then crawled through thickets of broom and tall, scorched grasses as I approached the great oak crowning the coming hillock. Master David was not there, however. A small crowd of worried Old Christians had assembled just beyond the Roman bridge below; they told frenzied stories of how the mob had turned on anyone even remotely connected to Jews. Some cowards, they said, were even using the riot as an excuse for personal vengeance, or a way of freeing themselves from debt.

“It’s the New Christians’ fault—they caused the drought!” a crone in black kept shouting to anyone who would listen.

A group of peasants armed with the hammers and iron rods of a looted blacksmith’s shop suddenly marched out St. Anne’s Gate in search of Marranos, primping themselves with the good humor of hunters scenting blood. I pressed my chest to the ground and waited. The sun had already set, and the sky was pearly with dusk. Crows flapped in the branches of the lone oak above me. I imagined death as an inky pool spreading from my stomach into my hands and feet. For what sin, I began to wonder, was God taking from us the best of Israel? Why was he using these Christians of Lisbon to punish us?

Soon, the voices of the Nazarenes were gone. Fear gripped me again only when I remembered Senhora Rosamonte’s hand in my pouch. Beside her fingers was the note that had slipped out of Diego the printer’s turban, stained now with blood. Reading its words again—Isaac, Madre, the twenty-ninth of Nisan—I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Uncle’s murder. Had his death, in fact, been originally planned by Diego for five days hence, on Friday the twenty-ninth? Could Isaac have been the name of a killer hired with a handful of coins taken from an ecclesiastical coffer, from the Mother Church, from the Madre?

I realized, of course, that I was weaving a complex story from mere threads of evidence, that such a scenario was but a remote possibility. I felt so alone, however, so free of my family and Lisbon and the love of God that I needed to believe in a tale—however unlikely—which placed the events of this most terrible day in a sensible order.

Such is the power of isolation. And I understood then that freedom, of the kind bequeathed to abandoned orphans and apprentices without masters, could be the most dreadful state of all.

Chapter IV

It was late Sunday, the third holy evening of Passover. Long after midnight. Master David had not met me, was either dead or in hiding. St. Anne’s Gate had become ever more clogged with Christian rabble. Not so the Monks’ Gate to the east. Past a few sleepy peasants slurping soup from wooden bowls, I strode across the fortified Visigothic bridge there back into Lisbon, my hand gripping my knife inside my pouch. A crescent moon was skimming over the stream below like a heavenly boat. Pricks of sound prompted me on like ivory needles. I realized with a bitter dread that I was fighting a fever. Yet had I ever been more alive? Every nerve in my body was craning into the present for the touch of sensation.

Was the city safe yet? The answer didn’t seem to matter; a dreadful longing in my chest as powerful as Uncle’s chanting of Torah was pushing me home.

Beyond the gate, a dim music of contrapuntal horns seemed to dance like shadows along the high Moorish walls surrounding the oldest part of the city. As I climbed, the Alcáçova Palace rose above me, its garlic-bulb towers beaming with an orange light that slid into the darkness as a mist. Hundreds of feet below me, seeming to protest against my movement, slept central Lisbon and our largest Jewish quarter, Little Jerusalem—twenty thousand moonlit homes reclining across the hillsides and valleys and nestling into a bend of the Tagus. As I prayed for my family, the downy gray moonlight behind my eyelids separated and coalesced as angels.

I descended through the steeply falling labyrinth of ancient stairs and alleys. By the Church of São Martinho, the smell of smoke chilled me. I slowed, crept along whitewashed walls. Loios Square opened to me. In front of the brittle arcades of the convent, a raging bonfire was sending jagged butterflies of light and darkness across a crowd. At the center, a group of New Christians from our Little Jewish Quarter had their arms and legs bound with nautical rope. They stood in a ragged line, their clothing tattered, their heads hanging from exhaustion. No one spoke. Wan, hopeless expressions showed they’d been paraded around the city like this for hours.

Rugged men with swords and halberds fixed them in place. I crept back and hid around the flaking wall of the corner tavern.

“I beg you not to do this!”

“Kill me if you want, but save my children!”

A hundred supplications pounded me as I searched the caustic orange torchlight for the faces of my family. Blessed be His name, none of them was there. I recognized all of the linked prisoners, however, including Solomon Eli the surgeon, and I imprinted their faces in my Torah memory.

A monk with a beaked nose was swinging a smoking silver censer and cursing the Jews in Latin.

How many had already been dragged from our neighborhood and rendered ash? Little Didi Molcho, whom we all believed would grow up to be a great poet? Had his future been pried from his mother’s hands and…? Or Murça Benjamin, who gave me my first look at a girl’s dark place out behind St. Vincent’s? Was it her glorious body, within the crown of flames, that was beginning to…? Please, I chanted, let no one be burned tonight. Yet into the breathing spaces of my prayer burst the question: why has He allowed any of His self-portraits to be so desecrated?

Samuel Bispo the blacksmith was tied to the monumental stone cross that centers the square and was about to be whipped. I drew away into the darkness without looking back. Empty streets returned my hollow heartbeats. What a coward of Biblical proportions I was to have abandoned him and the rest of our prisoners!

My chest and injured shoulder were aching with a revolving, knotted pain, and I was shamed by my terror. I squatted to catch my breath, prayed for deliverance. A sweet scent stung my nostrils. Reaching my hand up, I discovered my nose was bleeding. Men following? Jumping to my feet and pressing into a slatted doorway, I listened. The plunk of dripping water reached me. When a bat sliced through the air and dove into an open window across the street, fear like violent Moorish drumming struck at me. I set off again. Paupers in rags were sleeping amongst sheep in Praça do Limoeiro, Lemon Tree Square. One was awake, watched me with idiot-curious eyes.

Cutting in front of our old neighborhood inn and hostelry, I descended the steps past the accursed house where Isaac Ibn Zachin murdered himself and his children after the conversion. I cut into the alley behind the Church of São Miguel. As if landing from a tumbling fall, I found myself trudging along the Rua de São Pedro. A thousand onions and garlic heads were scattered by my feet; a cart had been overturned. A tumbling island of black rats was forming over the opened gut of a headless man without clothes. I rushed toward home. Since I had last been here, half a day earlier, our neighborhood had been defiled. Shit had been smeared against all the walls, stores looted, doors and shutters smashed. At the entrance to our former schoolhouse hung a body: Dr. Montesinhos. A cross of blood was finger-painted on his chest. A gold sovereign peeked from his mouth; a daring Jew must have put it there to pay for his ferry ride across the River Jordan. One of his sandals had come free. A sprig of oleander peered over the lip of its heel. I took it.

I crept toward home, slipped through our gate. Two hens loosed from neighbors’ coops scuttled and cackled around the courtyard. Our lemon tree had been felled by an ax. In my mind, I chanted our religious injunction from Deuteronomy against the felling of a fruit tree even during a siege: You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Out loud, I whispered: “Cinfa, Judah, Esther…”

I almost called Uncle’s name, but an image of him lying stiff and white pressed my lips toward silence. As I gripped the handle of our door, Roseta hopped gray and ghostly onto the low wall next to me. The cherries were gone from around her neck. “Wait,” I whispered to her. But she leapt inside as the door opened.

“Mother…Esther…” I called in a low voice.

The darkness of night held its breath.

The hearth in our kitchen was cold. I felt along the tile floor. It was wet. Blood? I lifted my fingertips to my mouth. Only water. I cut my hand on the tip of a fallen knife, cursed, then blessed He who gives power to iron. I held it in front of me as I groped my way to the bedroom which I shared with Judah and Cinfa. Caressing the cold, barren mattress where they slept, I whispered a prayer for their safety. I balanced on tottering feet to my mother’s room, whispered for her, felt the taut emptiness of her bed in my fingertips. I swirled her blanket over my shoulders to end my shivers.

Where could they all have gone?

Robbers had rifled through my chest again, but had still left behind most of the frayed hand-me-downs I’d inherited. Discarding the blanket from my shoulders and slipping out of Attar’s cumbersome aba, I put on a pair of my father’s linen pants and one of my elder brother’s shirts. In Uncles chest, I found his ancient woolen cape. Was I alone now, the inheritor of all his clothing, the narrator of his story?

Crossing the courtyard to Farid’s house, I whispered for his father, Samir. Heavy footfalls from outside made me duck. I peered out the window. Two men carried swords. They were swiveling their heads to survey the courtyard.

The soles of my feet suddenly recorded three taps on the tile floor. One more. Then four. It was Farid, signalling pi from back in his house. I crept through his front room to the kitchen. A sweaty hand reached out for my arm. We kissed, and I held Farid until his silent sobs seemed to leach across my skin into my heart. I couldn’t allow him to peel me open to emotion and pulled away. “I can’t find anyone,” I indicated against the palm of his hand in our language of signs. I considered telling him about Uncle, but guarded the knowledge of his death as if it might not be true. Was my master a powerful enough kabbalist to cast such an illusion?

Farid started to signal in wild, frenzied movements. I was unused to reading his words inside my hands. “Slowly,” I begged.

“When the Christians came, I tried to escape the Little Jewish Quarter,” he indicated. “But there were too many. It was like a cloud of locusts. I came back and hid. I saw Judah for a moment. Only him. Father Carlos was running with him down the Rua de São Pedro. They disappeared into his church. I tried to call, but my voice…”

So Carlos was alive! Perhaps he was indeed in hiding when I knocked at his door! But what then of Judah?

Farid’s palm flattened and pressed against mine. His pulse raced. Space and time dropped away until there were only two presences meeting at a warm border.

I signalled, “I tapped pi for you once, this afternoon, an hour or two after nones, but there was no reply.”

“I was looking for Samir.”

“Any luck?”

He shook his head. “He was at one of the secret mosques in the Moorish Quarter when they came. I couldn’t make it there. I don’t know.”

“Two peasants with swords have breached the sanctity of our courtyard,” I indicated. “Let’s sneak out and get to St. Peter’s, look for Judah and Carlos.”

Farid stood, guided me through squares of light and darkness toward their back door. As we stepped outside, a long-haired man with a lance surprised us. His blade swept at me. I dove to the cobbles. My right forearm burned. A gash near my elbow dripped blood.

Farid tugged me up, and we ran like madmen toward the river. At the Jews’ Steps, I realized our nemesis was running after us, shouting for help, and would attract a mob if we didn’t silence him. I stopped, caught Farid, signalled to him my plan. He nodded, ran down the steps and cut into the alley past Senhor Benadife’s apothecary.

Dripping blood onto my left hand, I waited on the top step for my assailant. I kicked off my sandals so my footing would be better on the cobbles. He came to me panting. I could see now that he was younger than I, with a round, farmboy’s face, a mop of wild black hair. Yet for all his ferocity, he had frightened eyes. Dangling from his belt were human ears, and a filigree earring twinkled from a lobe by his hip. In another time and place, I would have depicted him as one of Saul’s terrified sons. So what sense did any of this make? It was as if Lisbon had thrown open its gates to a disease of ever-increasing lunacy. Yet my breathing came easy, from an eerie landscape beyond fear. “Go back to your millet and rye,” I told him.

“You stole my father’s best acres!” he answered. He crouched as if preparing to spring. “Don’t you move!” he warned. His lance blade bobbed awkwardly; he was unused to carrying such a weapon.

“I’m a manuscript illuminator and fruitseller. I’ve never stolen anything.”

Strange how humor can come to you at the worst moments; I thought, Hmmmn, that’s not quite true…a sponge cake once with a friend…

“Marrano—over here!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. In a voice of bound rage, he added: “Land that was ours for centuries! Your people… You live off of us, bring us plague, drink the blood of our children!”

“Your grievance is with whoever stole your land!” I told him.

“You do their bidding. You manage their estates, collect their taxes!”

Behind him, Farid dropped down from a rooftop like a cat and crept forward on cottony feet. I said to the boy, “Drop your lance and go. You won’t be injured.”

He lunged suddenly. I ducked away, but a wound burned open on my good shoulder as it was grazed. Watching my blood sluice, I thought: I will never again let an Old Christian hurt me.

Farid took him from behind. His powerful forearm locked around the boy’s neck, the arching blade of his Moorish dagger cut into his cheek. I grabbed the lance and said, “If you threatened the nobles as you threatened us, then all would be well!”

Bellowing cries from down the street turned us: “Hold ‘em son! We’re coming!”

I signalled for Farid to let him go; we had to trade him for our lives. As he was released, the boy spat into my face. “When we catch you, I’m going to slice off your ‘chestnuts’ and hang them on my belt!” he announced.

I slashed the lance across his thigh. He fell. Blood curtained his leg as if seeking to cover his agonized screams. Farid grabbed me and turned me. We raced down the Jews’ Steps to the river. I tossed the accursed weapon on which my blood had mixed with an Old Christian’s into the silver waters.

As we ran, I wondered about the violence which seemed to rise up in me so easily. Had I, too, not simply been wearing a mask of piety and gentility all these years? Was there a true Berekiah whom I’d only glimpsed during moments of rage and desperation?

Dawn rose in tones of pink and rusty gold. We were hidden on a sand bar inside a lagoon of rushes between Lisbon and Santa Iria. I slept without dreams, awoke into Farid’s arms startled, surprised by the return of the sun. As he wiped my brow and sat me up, I was struck by his unadorned beauty, in particular by the dark, youthful stubble bristling on his cheeks and standing out like ornamentation against his olive complexion. Thick ringlets of wild, coal-black hair framed his face like a mane, ribboned over his forehead, cascaded onto his broad shoulders. The look of a schemer, people used to say who feared his silence and the assessments of his light green eyes, who believed in their ignorance that the deaf were evil. But the only schemes Farid ever dreamed up applied to rhymes. A born poet, he was, and more often than not, his eyes were simply focused inward, judging only the curve of a phrase or contour of a rhythm. Now, his lips thinned to a thoughtful slit. He fingered the long lobe of his right ear as he always did when upset. He looked as if he were yearning to speak. But that, of course, was impossible.

For a time, prompted by Farid’s beauty, I stared at my own image in the gentle waters around us. In comparison, my form was graceless, and it seemed as if I couldn’t possibly know this reflective twin looking back at me with the hunted look in his eyes, the dirty stubble on his chin, the mean, knotted hair falling to his shoulders. The young scholar who shared his uncle’s probing profile seemed to have been swallowed by a gaunt, wild-faced youth of the forest, a Pan of vengeance. Had I become the half-human creature the Dominicans believed us all to be?

Farid tapped my shoulder, offered me bread from his pouch. I refused; it was only the third day of Passover and we were still celebrating the Exodus.

“Your fever broke in the night,” he signalled. “You feel better?”

My separated shoulder was stiff with that dull, knotted pain which I would forever associate with that Passover of death. The wound on my forearm was tender with crusted blood. My right foot stung; gashes scarred my toes. I gestured to Farid, “We’ve been abandoned by Moses and will have to get to the other shore of the Red Sea by ourselves. We’re all alone.”

As Farid ate, the reeds around us swayed in unison with the gentle tide. The waters made the lapping sound of fawns drinking. All was calm, as it should be. I began crying as if at the gates of God’s compassion, gestured to my friend, “Which is the real world? This or…?”

He signalled back, “Heaven and hell are the sea and sky. And you are the horizon.”

His words meant nothing then. It was the elegant dance of his powerful hands which was too lovely to bear. And when he caressed my face, the sobs knotted in my throat broke. Memories of the pyre cascaded, molten and furious, onto us both. Even so, I was still unable to talk of Uncle. Farid took Senhora Rosamonte’s hand from me. So frightened he was. Trembling. And yet, he touched its fingertips of bloodstained marble to his closed eyelids as he prayed. I noticed then the bruises and welts on his neck. “We will bury her in a lemon grove,” he signalled. “She will always be able to gift us with her fruit.”

“What happened?” I gestured, pointing to his tender wounds.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Tell me.”

“In the alley last night—a man tried to stop me. I killed him.”

It was the first time either of us had signalled the verb “to kill” in the first person. We both realized our language of gestures had to change to keep up with this new, Old Christian century. As if unequal to the task, we walked along the Tagus back to Lisbon without conversing. Distanced from my own emotions, I remembered the young noble I’d pushed from the roof. Where would I find forgiveness for removing from the Lower Realms a being imbued with a spark of God’s love?

Just outside the Santa Cruz Gate, we came upon docked salt boats. Women with knobby, blistered feet balancing ceramic jugs of the white crystals on their heads smiled at us. Children played, dogs wagged their tails. A merchant in scarlet and green robes tipped his cap to us for no reason I could fathom. Farid purchased sweet rice and grilled sardines from one of the women who sold food down by the river. He gorged himself, but I, of course, could not.

Coming into the Little Jewish Quarter was like leaving a theater. Suddenly, the image was not born of denial or separation, but as it was, bordered with shit and stinking of violence; etched with the barking of saliva-dripping dogs, centered by folding islands of rats and mice.

Vacant-eyed survivors swept blood from their doorways, wore tearless masks, shuffled on bare, dispirited feet. Bodies waited for our notice: Saul Ha-Kohen folded over the slats of his bedroom window, an arm, stiff as salted meat, moving back and forth in the wind, tapping an unknown code against a shutter. Raziela Mor gutted, an onion in her mouth being pried out by her daughter, Nafa, clouds of flies seeking to lay eggs in her womb. Dr. Montesinhos hanging rigid and bloated from the coiled tracery above our schoolhouse door. A nameless baby without a head sitting in a shovel.

Faced with the unthinkable given physical form, no one dared speak.

Do you know what it means to look at a headless baby sitting in a shovel? It is as if all the languages in the world have been forgotten, as if all the books ever written have been given up to dust. And that you are glad of it. Because such people as we have no right to speak or write or leave any trace for history.

The doors to our store were now lying at oblique angles to each other on the cobbles, like entrances to a cockeyed underworld. Muffled moans in Hebrew were coming from across the way in Senhora Faiam’s house. Her dog Belo’s beseeching blue eyes stared out at me over the wall. In his mouth he now carried a gnarled and splintered bone, yellow with age; it appeared that he had once again found something resembling the remains of his recently amputated left front leg, buried this time by Senhora Faiam in the yard behind St. Peter’s Church. His nose was twitching as if he were on the trail of someone to show it to.

My mother and Cinfa met me in the courtyard. They had been picking up broken pieces of slate. Cinfa ran shouting my name and clawed at me as if afraid to fall. Mother dropped to her knees and wailed. Two vellum talismans dangled from her neck. When I lifted her up, she gripped me with white-knuckled desperation. She sobbed as if she were vomiting. When she had her breath, she said, “Judah’s missing. I don’t know what…”

Mother gripped me so tight that her heartbeat seemed to pound from inside my chest. Dizzy with her presence, I said, “I’ll find him.”

She dragged her disbelieving hand through my hair, over my chest. Cinfa hugged herself into Farid.

“You’re unhurt?” my mother asked. “Nothing happened that you won’t…”

“Yes, I’m fine. What about Esther and Reza?”

“Esther’s bruised but alive. Reza, we don’t know.” Mother turned toward Farid. Although she’d never fully approved of my friendship with him and was terrified of his silence, she looked at him now with anxious concern, raised her hand and approximated our gesture for greeting. “O Farid estábem,are you all right?” she mouthed.

He smiled gently and bowed his head in thanks.

“He’s fine, too,” I said. “Where were you all last night? I came back but the house was empty.”

“We were here! I was hiding in the store with Cinfa. It was siesta when the Christians first came. We were spending it with Didi and his mother. Rushed back home only to find that…”

“Didn’t you hear me?” I interrupted.

Mother held up hands blotched purple. “I surrounded Cinfa and myself with barrels of beans, then covered us with basketfuls of overripe figs. We stayed that way for as long as we could stand it, couldn’t hear much.”

Stained with violet skin and smelling of fermented sugar, she and Cinfa suddenly seemed possessed of a holy beauty; they glistened with survival. I was laughing with an absurd relief. I kissed her forehead. “Clever girl!” I said, as if I were my father.

“Old Christian men pinned Esther’s arms to the cobbles in front of St. Stevens Church,” she whispered conspiratorially. “And then…”

As I nodded my understanding, she lowered her eyes.

“Mother, have you seen any of the threshers? Father Carlos, Diego, Samson…”

“No one.”

After searching his rooms, Farid signalled that Samir had not returned. We entered my house. Esther was seated in the kitchen with her hand wedged between her legs, her bare feet in a puddle of water. I kissed her forehead. She was cold. She would not talk. I covered her with a blanket from Cinfa and Judah’s bed.

I whispered fearfully to Mother, “Then…then you have not seen Uncle?”

“No. I thought he might be in the cellar. But the trap door, its nailed shut. He must have sealed it. And the curtains on the window eyelets are drawn. We can’t look in. We’ve knocked and screamed for him a dozen times. No answer. I’m afraid to break through. He may have had a reason why he wanted it shut, to protect the books, or something more…more occult. I hope he’s all right. He probably went out looking for us, then couldn’t make it back home.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“After lunch on Sunday. Not long before…before they came. He went to the cellar to chant. And Cinfa and I went out to…”

“Mother, I nailed it shut,” I said dryly.

“You? Why?”

“When I came back, I went downstairs and… Wait.” I went to the courtyard, took the hammer from our shed, smashed at the trap door. The last slat of wood dropped free with a cracking sound which seemed to imply a terrible finality, as if we would never again find safety in our house.

“Don’t come down yet,” I said to my mother as I stepped onto the stairs. “Let me take a look.”

It was insane, but I wanted to see Uncle first because in those days I put very little beyond the range of a kabbalah master’s powers. Might he not have swallowed a piece of paper bearing a special prayer formula before his throat was slit, a secret name of God which would effect his revival?

“Why…what is…?” Mother grabbed my arm. “What do you know? Is he down there?!”

“All right, come,” I said, and in the quivering of my own voice, I heard the simple truth of his disappearance forever from the Lower Realms. “But I must warn you, Uncle is with us no longer.”

Mother reached for her mouth to stifle a scream. I reached for her hands but she drew them away as if I were tainted.

She crept downstairs with one hand forming an awning over her eyes, the other gripping the talismans dangling from her neck. But she did not cry. A moan when she saw him. A rasping inhale. As if she were choking for breath. That was all.

As she knelt to put Uncle’s fingertips to her cheek, she began to pull her hair. Her face peeled open to sobs. I turned away; it was a moment which could bear no witness.

Chapter V

Time is like a seal certifying existence. And like a seal, it is artificial. As Uncle used to say, past, present and future are really just verses of the same poem. Our goal is to trace its rhyme scheme back to God.

And yet it was already Monday afternoon, a day since Uncle’s death.

The fourth evening of Passover would be descending soon.

My mother had just left the cellar, had told me that she’d never seen the girl before. “You’re sure?” I’d asked her.

“Never,” she’d whispered shamefully, and I could see her thinking: It was carnal sin which drew death to him.

I was now standing above the bodies, my aunt by my side. She wasn’t howling or crying, had simply picked up a shard of pottery and was scarring her fingers with its razor edge.

“Esther, stop that!” I said. “Esther…”

Her transfixed stare, remote and childlike, showed she had severed herself from the finality of Uncle’s death seeking to penetrate our hearts. A groan rising from her belly splintered suddenly into gagging. She looked between him and the girl, leaned forward as if tugged downward by his grip, began slashing at her index finger—the finger graced with her wedding band. I ran to her, ripped the ceramic piece away. Blood sluiced burning over my hands.

Farid rushed from the stairs and folded his arm protectively around Esther’s waist. As he steered her away, she turned, stared at me over her shoulder as if to say goodbye before a long voyage. With Farid following closely behind her, she carried herself up the stairs with a ghostly grace.

Although its exact route is hidden to us, the pathway between sadness and insight must be paved carefully by God; I suddenly realized that the killer, who had been intimately familiar with the contents of our storage cabinet, would also probably have known of our genizah!

Taking a key from inside the eel bladder hanging behind the Bleeding Mirror, I lifted the rim of our prayer mat skirting the north wall and peeled away a piece of slate to reveal a lock. Half a circle to the right I turned. At the sound of a click, I lifted a wooden lid flanking the wall, three feet by four, camouflaged with slate. Our genizah opened with a groan of protest.

I’d been right; smudges of blood stained the top two manuscripts: the “Fox Fables” which I was illustrating and the Book of Esther which my aunt was lettering. Below, for the most part clean, but still tainted here and there with the red finger-shadows of the killer, were family Torahs, Haggadahs and prayer books; a map of the Mediterranean by Judah Abenzara; religious commentaries by Uncle’s friend Abraham Sabah; poetic works by Farid ud-din Attar; and two mystical guidebooks by Abraham Abulafia—our spiritual father—which my master had not yet summoned the courage to entrust to his secret smugglers. Below these, seemingly untouched, there rested a Torah illuminated with magical beasts bequeathed to my master by his late friend, Isaac Bracarense; a Koran from Persia; three piles of my master’s personal correspondence; our woolen sack of coinage, still heavy with copper and silver; and finally, the marriage contract between my aunt and uncle, scripted by one and illustrated by the other.

I locked everything below the genizah door.

It seemed clear to me that the killer had stopped his search before reaching the lower manuscripts; they were unstained. And if he had continued that far, surely he would have taken our money.

The only work missing opened the petals of a new mystery: it was the Haggadah Uncle had been completing just before his death. For all the daring of its knotted patterns and bird-headed letters, it was worth nothing in comparison to the Abulafia manuscripts, portions of which were centuries old and in the master’s own hand.

So my uncle’s Haggadah must have possessed a hidden value to the killer.

That certainty gifted me with another, and I turned around so that I could face our desks: the killer had found the key to the genizah in the eel bladder hidden behind the Bleeding Mirror. This was confirmation that a member of the threshing group was involved. But why had the genizah been re-locked? Out of a simple desire for order?

Seeking a power to enhance my own, I took out Uncle’s ibis ring from my pouch and slipped it on my right index finger.

Farid had returned to the cellar now, was standing between the bodies, staring at the lips of crusted blood peeling away from my uncle’s neck. He began wavering as if foundationless. When he looked at me, something he saw… His eyes rolled back in his head to show a sickly white. His body melted. I jumped up and reached out to break his fall. I held him till he awoke.

Cinfa stood on the landing now. The girl’s eyes, like Torah pointers, were fixed on Uncle. Her hands gripped the hair at the back of her neck. Liquid was dripping down the legs of her pants.

Afraid that she wouldn’t be able to cope with death viewed from any closer, I shouted, “Go up the stairs and guard the door! Let no one down!”

She did as I said. Farid was waking now, and I began to blot his brow with my sleeve. He sat up. “I’m okay,” he signalled. “It was suddenly too much to bear. And something I saw…”

“What?”

“On your uncle’s right thigh…” Farid clasped his hands together and took a deep breath.

“What?!” I demanded.

“Semente branca.” Farid used the kabbalist’s term, white seed, for semen.

“What are you talking about?”

“Come,” he signalled. We crouched together. There, on Uncle’s inner thigh, in between smearings of blood, were patches of crust, like bits of mica.

“That could be anything!” I gestured wildly. “Spilled honey, almond milk. Uncle didn’t pay attention to…”

“It’s semente branca,” Farid repeated with an impatient, downward thrust to his gestures. “I sniffed it and…” Before I could stop him, he peeled a tiny piece free and placed it on his tongue. He tasted it as one might sample a new spice. Gagging suddenly, he spit it back into his hand, wiped it on his pants. “They had just made love,” he signalled with definitive gestures.

It wasn’t shock that Uncle could couple with someone other than Aunt Esther that made me gasp. But that he had brought a lover to his prayer cellar, our synagogue… It was impossible. It changed everything. And yet…

“Listen, I need your help,” I gestured to Farid, realizing that we had reached the appointed time when I needed to count on his singular talents. I pulled the prayer rug off the girl and told him what I already knew and suspected, showed him the note Uncle had written to Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman for whom Aunt Esther had scripted a Book of Psalms. When he finished reading, I grasped his powerful hands and placed them flat against my chest so he could feel my heartbeat. I signalled, “Farid, I’ve been thinking that God may have brought us together for just this Passover. Perhaps he needs us to find Uncle’s killer together. I must go look for Judah soon. But for now, I want you to walk around this room, gift your gaze to every form and shadow and tell me if you spot anything I haven’t. Anything! You must give me your interpretation of what happened.”

Farid did as I said. And when he was ready to tell me what he’d found, he motioned me to follow him to Uncle. We crouched by his head. When will we be able to bury him? I suddenly wondered, recalling with a jolt that we had to see him safely into sanctified ground as soon as possible.

“There is a slight slope to the slit across his throat,” Farid signalled. “I’d say that the killer twisted your uncle’s head to the left from behind, and with a razor-sharp knife in his right hand…” Farid tugged his arm across his chest to indicate the motion that must have ended my master’s life.

He stood up, walked over to the girl, crouched by her hands, leaned over and sniffed at them eagerly, puffing like a dog. Looking up at me, he signalled, “She worked with olive oil and rosemary. Something else that’s almost disappeared, possibly lemon oil.” He touched her thumb with the tip of his index finger. “There’s some ash there. I’d guess she was a baker. The ash may come from the ovens.”

I nodded my agreement; I would be a greater fool than I am to discount Farid’s nose or eyes.

“And look at her right temple,” he gestured. “There’s a small circular indentation there. One on the left as well.”

“What do you think they are?”

“I’ve no idea. But the symmetry is most unusual. Now follow me.” He led me to the leather hanging on the western wall where the knife had been cleaned. Lifting its fringe over his head, he showed me five slashing strokes of blood coming to a sudden end at a clean edge of tile. It was as if a hand with fingertips but no palm had been wiped there.

Was the killer a being able to disappear by fingerpainting arcane symbols in blood? Had one of the threshers summoned a demon or ghost to slay my master? Could such a creature from the Other Side have gotten past the mezuzah on our doorframe?

“What do you make of it?” Farid asked with anxious gestures. When I shook my head, he dropped the hanging back into place and signalled, “Now give me the rosary bead and the thread.”

I took them from my pouch and handed them over.

He sniffed and licked at them. “The bead is carob wood, well polished. Expensive. Made locally, I’d say. But it does not belong to Father Carlos. At least, its not from the rosary of his with which I’m familiar. The thread, as you know, is silk. Very fine quality. I would have to see Simon’s gloves to know if it’s a match. And even then… There must be more miles of black silk in Lisbon than paved streets.” He let his hands fall to his sides.

“Nothing more?” I asked.

“Just that you were right about your uncle being murdered while still wearing his clothes. Inside his robe, there are stains from excrement and from semente branca.”

It was as if my masters body had released all its fluids. Perhaps, at the moment of a violent death, the body seeks to cleanse itself so the soul can depart quickly to God.

“Is that it?” I asked. When he nodded, I signalled, “Then how do you think he escaped? I know for certain the door was bolted firmly from the inside. He’d have had to pass through the cellar walls. There was no way…”

“Only one very poor thought has sought to dispel my ignorance,” he gestured.

“Which is?”

Farid pointed up to the window eyelets. There were three, oval in shape, and each no longer than ten inches and no wider than a man’s hand. They were covered by tiny shutters which could be locked and highly polished hide flaps which allowed only a dim light to enter the room.

I signalled, “Not even a child or dwarf could slip through one of those. Unless the killer was a mink or viper…”

“I told you it was a pauper of an idea.” Farid shrugged, held his thumb and forefinger to his lips, then swirled them upward in a graceful arc. He meant that we had to wait for Allah to give us an answer.

“Can’t wait for Him,” I replied. Walking to the stairs, I sat to consider the mystery. I thought: How strange that I feel nothing but a vague emptiness and weakness of body. It was as if my love had died with Uncle. As if—cut loose from my past and present—I were floating free of everything but an unstoppable need to find the killer.

Suddenly, my heart seemed to leap against my chest; someone was scratching at one of the shutters over the eyelets we were just discussing. I ran up the cellar stairs, dashed through the kitchen to the courtyard. And found Roseta smacking her paw against a ball of vermilion wool which Uncle had recently made for her. She was all wet, looked like she’d been tossed in a well.

“You soulless idiot!” I hissed at her.

I took a long deep breath, apologized to her and walked out our gate to the street. To the east, about a hundred paces down the Rua de Sao Pedro, Dr. Montesinhos’ body was still hanging in the doorway to our old schoolhouse. A small man in a long violet cape stood before him, was raising his right hand to offer a blessing. I could see him only in profile, but he had my master’s wild gray hair and cinnamon complexion.

It’s Uncle! I suddenly thought, as if all my previous conclusions about his death had been sheer idiocy. Of course, he’s used magic to fool us all!

It was insanity, I know, but relief swept through me, and I started to advance toward him. I may even have begun laughing. On hearing my approaching footsteps, however, the small dark man turned toward me, froze, then bolted around the corner toward the back of the Church of São Miguel. By the time I reached there, he was gone from sight.

Desperately confused, I trudged back to Dr. Montesinhos’ body. The gold sovereign which had been placed in his mouth to pay for his heavenly ferry across the Jordan River was missing. With a jolt like that which comes after jumping from a high wall, I thought: The man in the violet cape was not my uncle, had reached up not to bless the body but to steal the coin. He had been just a common thief.

On walking back home, I was pervaded by the sensation that history had taken off on an errant path unforeseen by God Himself. All of us in Lisbon—Jew and Christian alike—were now dependent only on ourselves for survival. It was then that a chilling thought came to me which I never imagined would ever penetrate my mind: There never was any God watching over us!Even at its kabbalistic core,the Torah is simply fiction. There is no covenant. I have dedicated my whole life to a lie.

On descending into the cellar, I sat again on the bottom step of the stairs and hid my head in my hands. Farid came to my side, rested his hand atop my head. “We’re all doubting God right now,” he signalled. “Do not think about the greater troubles which we all have. We have a murder before us. Let us return to that. Now, what special value might your uncle’s missing Haggadah have had to the killer?”

I reminded Farid that my master had always modeled the faces of his Biblical characters on famous Lisboners, neighbors and friends—including his beloved colleagues in the threshing group. Always, he attempted to match them to characters possessing their own predilections and interests, of course.

“Had any of the threshers just been illuminated as an evil man?” Farid gestured.

“No,” I signalled back. “I don’t think he suspected any of them. Or had only learned very recently of the treachery against him. Probably, he wouldn’t have gone back and re-illuminated their panels. It would have been simply too much labor for results…” I stopped in mid-sentence; everything was falling into place. Last Friday, just before our Passover seder, Uncle had told me that he’d found the face of Haman for his latest manuscript. In his voice, sadness and relief had woven together. Now, to Farid, I gestured that he must have discovered the perpetrators of some sort of plot against him that very day. I signalled, “And I think that he used the face of his principal enemy for the villain Haman…the face of the man who would kill him. It’s the only possibility. And that’s why his last Haggadah was stolen. The murderer knew of his characterization. Or suspected it. Or even accidentally came across it as he paged greedily through the manuscripts in the genizah. He panicked, took it with him. That’s why he didn’t leave blood stains on the bottom manuscripts or take our coins.”

Farid tugged on his ear lobe, looked down at me gravely over his broad nose. “We must consider each of the threshers in turn,” he signalled. “Father Carlos, what could have been his motivation? Could he have been Haman?”

“Uncle and he had argued about a safira of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s which Carlos had refused to give up.”

“And Samson Tijolo? Had Uncle spoken of him lately?”

“Just before I went to his house to buy wine, Uncle told me that he wished to talk to him, gave me a note for him.”

“What was the subject he wanted to discuss?”

“Don’t know,” I gestured. “But there’s another thing. They only ever saw each other for threshing meetings. Was it simply the distance between our houses? I wondered about that sometimes.”

“A spark of dislike?”

“More like rivalry. Two intelligent, powerful kabbalists. Competition may exist even amongst the angels.”

“And then there’s Diego,” Farid gestured.

Diego had not yet completed his initiation into the threshing group. I replied, “I don’t know if he’d been informed yet of the secret genizah.”

“You could find that out from one of the other threshers.”

I took out the note fallen from Diego’s turban, showed it to Farid and explained how it had come into my possession. “What do you make of it?” I asked.

“Madre is mother, of course, particularly when used to discuss Our Lady. So I would say that it seems to be a half-Jewish, half-Christian talisman—a prayer to the Virgin for something good to happen to an Isaac on the twenty-ninth.” He handed it back. “Very strange things you Anusim are making of late. You’re like sphinxes with Jewish hearts and Christian heads.”

“There’s another thing, Farid. Diego was injured at the time. After being stoned and chased, could he have mustered the strength to slit two throats?”

“If he felt he’d had to; Diego is a survivor, fled Castile with the Inquisitors salivating over his imminent capture. His injury would be the best of excuses should anyone begin to suspect him.”

“But he lives blocks away. Would he have risked setting sail through a sea of Old Christians to reach us? Unlikely.”

“If, however, he had combined skills with Eurico Damas…”

“Or with Rabbi Losa,” I noted. “He always hated Uncle. And he deals in religious garments, undoubtedly rosaries as well.”

Farid breathed deeply. “And lastly there’s Dom Miguel Ribeiro,” he gestured.

“I think he’d gone to Dom Miguel for funds to purchase a very valuable manuscript. A book that may have provoked an argument in the threshing group. This time, Uncle’s need to save every last page of Hebrew from destruction may have gotten him killed.”

“The girls husband,” Farid signalled. “What about him?” He caught my hands to stifle my protest. “I realize that it’s almost impossible that she and Uncle had been lovers,” he gestured. “But not everyone is blessed with your faith. Perhaps her husband had been convinced she was giving him the sharp horns of a cuckold. She might have come to Uncle for help of some sort, to ask a religious question. The husband could have tracked her under the mistaken assumption that whomever she was meeting was a secret lover. After watching her disappear through the trap door, he burst in and leapt upon Uncle. He took his own wife’s clothing so she couldn’t be traced to him.”

“An obsessively jealous husband, mistrustful, faithless, prone to rage.”

“Lisbon is up to its towers in such vermin. How many men do we both know who do not understand the way of love?”

“But he would have had to realize that his wife’s very face would give him away. Taking the clothes would be an absurd gesture.”

“Unless they possessed a hidden value,” Farid signalled. “A jewel or a letter of credit. Beri, there’s one more possibility.” Farid licked his lips nervously.

“Who?”

“Like amateur beekeepers around an angry hive, we are avoiding the topic of Esther.” He waved away my protests. “No one we know is more prone to rage than her, right or wrong?” he demanded.

I nodded.

“Her silence is most strange. Perhaps upon discovering the girl with your uncle in the cellar…”

“It’s ludicrous!” I interrupted. “Do you think she could have strangled them in a jealous rage with some rosary she just happened to find lying about the courtyard?! Then slit their throats, stolen our lapis lazuli and gold and raced out of here so she could get raped on the street? Farid, it’s a house of cards built on a slanted table! No, her silence is not strange. I understand it perfectly. It has been born of forever disbelief, not of guilt.”

“A house of cards on a slanted table during a sandstorm,” Farid replied with an apologetic grace to his hand movements. “But I had to let the thought into the air, so it could fly freely from us. Now tell me this, Beri… Why would a thresher collaborate with Eurico Damas or anyone else outside the group?”

Blackmail? The word swept into my mind so violently that I jumped to my feet.

“What is it?” Farid gestured. “What have you heard? Who’s coming?!”

“Its not what I’ve heard.” I signalled for him to wait a moment so I could think. Could Eurico Damas have blackmailed one of the threshing members to help him slay Uncle and rob our storage cabinet and genizah? Perhaps he imagined that we kept barrels of gold, coffers filled with rubies. Could he have even brought the girl to the house, killed her there to make us think that she and Uncle had been lovers—to convince us that her husband had done the evil deed?

Another terrible thought occurred to me: perhaps the killer had spilled his own seed on Uncle! It was unspeakably dreadful. But even if we had been gifted with no other knowledge these past two days, we had learned that such evil was always only a single spark away from the present tense.

“Blackmail,” I told Farid. “During our accursed reign of masks, everyone has a secret or two for which he can be made to pay!”

He stood and took my shoulder. “But that, too, presents us with a quandary. For if all of us have secrets to hide, could not anyone have been coerced? How do we proceed if we see everyone wearing the veil of suspicion?”

It was then that the most unimaginable terror spilled into my gut. Sweat beaded on my forehead. I felt sick, moaned aloud. So disturbed I was that I spoke to Farid rather than use our signs. “Father Carlos was with Judah! Might not the boy have witnessed the murders? Carlos couldn’t bring himself to end his life. He took him away!”

Farid read my lips, closed his eyes as if to shut out the possibility. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he signalled weakly. His hands twirled together in a dance of prayer.

I took his shoulder, signalled, “Did you see if Carlos was covered with blood?!”

“They were far away. I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure.”

A grave silence held its fingers to our lips. We were left with Eurico Damas, Rabbi Losa and Dom Miguel Ribeiro. One or more of them had joined forces with a threshing group member.

“We will need to speak to all of them,” Farid said.

As I nodded, my mind began to construct an explanation for the clues we’d found:

Uncle had been in the house all alone, was visited by a girl whom he had known years ago‚ a baker’s assistant‚ the daughter of an old friend perhaps. She was greatly troubled. Her husband had beaten her recently. What should she do? My master sat her at the kitchen table and poured her a cup of wine moderated with water, offered her a matzah. They talked of her desperation until shouts from the street drew their attention. Understanding immediately what was happening‚ Uncle told her to remain quiet‚ crept cat-like to the courtyard and then the store to look for our family members. But I was on the way back from my journey to buy kosher wine and Esther was at the market in front of St.Steven’s. Judah was with Father Carlos. Mother and Cinfa were taking siesta with a neighbor. As Old Christians battered at the doors to the store‚ he took the girl into the cellar‚ slipped the tattered Persian rug in place over the trap door from below. Curtains were drawn over the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall so no one could see in. The tiny shutters were locked.

Sometime later‚ during a brief quiet spell in the riot, there was a knock on the cellar door. A familiar voice calling for help. Rushing up the stairs‚ Uncle opened the threshold to our synagogue to a brother from the threshing group. This man had argued with Uncle about a valuable manuscript‚ may even have plotted to purchase it behind my master’s back. Whatever the particular nature of his sin‚ he had earned the face of Haman. And yet, with a riot raging outside, all bitterness would have been forgotten for the moment.

Eurico Damas suddenly strode in behind the thresher. He lunged without warning, pushed Uncle down the stairs. Hence the deep bruise on his shoulder. As my master rose to one knee, he was grabbed from behind. A rosary was wrapped around his neck. “Give up easily, and I swear on the Torah that I’llspare the girl!” Damas shouted.

Uncle acceded, understanding in that moment the nature of the sacrifice he had been called upon to make. Life was squeezed from him. The thresher, a former shohet, took my master’s body, slit his throat to make sure he would not revive. He was laid gently to the ground. Blood sluiced freely across the prayer mat.

A black thread was placed around his thumbnail to implicate Simon.

By now, the girl had backed to the eastern wall of the cellar, was crouching in fear, begging for her life. Damas broke his promise to Uncle, grabbed her, but as he was strangling her, the rosary broke. He slit her throat, then threw her down. Her head smashed against a flower pot. Her nose broke, was twisted grotesquely out of shape. Within seconds, she had bled to death.

The rosary beads were scattered across the slate floor of the cellar. Damas ordered the thresher to pick them up. One was left behind, lost under our desks.

The thresher then took the key to the genizah from our eel bladder, opened the camouflaged lid. Uncle’s last Haggadah was discovered on top, paged through greedily until the killer came upon his own face as Haman. Terrified, he concealed the manuscript beneath his cape, informed Damas that they had to make an early departure.

Damas had been told where to find our gold leaf and lapis lazuli, had just lifted them from their blackwood boxes.

Together, they stripped the bodies so it would look as if Uncle and the girl had been making love. It was intended to be a last cruel joke to play on our family. And, of course, to point blame toward the girl’s husband. The thresher may have protested. But he was reminded of the seemingly terrible secret for which he was being blackmailed.

All this killing provoked excitement in Damas, for there are men in whom sex is intimately woven with violence. Or perhaps he believed the scene was missing one last, perversely poetic touch. He wished to defile Uncle’s body even more foully.

He unsheathed his sex, spilled his own seed onto Uncle.

As for the girl, she was also known vaguely by the thresher. Her father was not just a good friend of Uncle’s, but one of his as well. And there was something in her clothing which would give this connection away. So he snatched up her dress and blouse, her undergarments even.

Had Judah stood at the top of the stairs witnessing all this? Was he encircled by the killer’s arms and carried away?

A secret name of God was then drawn by the thresher on his own forehead and that of Eurico Damas. On Judah’s as well, perhaps. A powerful name which had been lifted from a manual of practical kabbalah and which would enable them to pass through walls.

And then they were gone.

Chapter VI

As I repeated my scenario to Farid, I heard a man’s voice coming from the courtyard. I ran up. It was a neighbor, Rabbi Solomon Ibn Verga. His bearded face was framed in the kitchen doorway, and he was talking to Cinfa of God’s mercy in comforting tones. He carried three slate tiles in one arm, a basket of onions in the other. “You made it, my boy!” he told me with a smile. As if afraid to cross the threshold into our home, he did not come toward me.

“But most of us haven’t. Judah’s missing. And Uncle…”

“Yes, Cinfa was telling me.” He put his basket down, motioned me over. Taking my shoulder like an elder, he said, “Never forget that your life has been preserved so you can remember. As for me, I shall make this perfidious riot the culmination of the book I’m writing on the history of the Jews.”

“A history book?” I questioned, never having heard of such a work written by a Jew since the days of Josephus.

“Exactly,” the Rabbi replied. “An account of all the gates of nettles we have passed through on our way to the Mount of Olives.”

We are truly emerging into a new era, I thought. It will be a world defined by history texts, not the works of God. The rabbis and kabbalists shall become obsolete.

“I suggest that you make use of what you’ve experienced during the past two days in your illuminations,” the Rabbi added. “Translate what you’ve lived through into images. As Jews, that is our process of artistry.” He handed over the slate. “From your courtyard, I believe. It was on the street.”

After I’d thanked him, he wished me peace and started to turn away. “Oh, and if you need any onions…” He held up his basket. “Someone overturned a cart. They’re not much, but they’ve come to us at bargain prices.”

Again, one would not think humor is possible at such moments. And yet we shared a smile.

Does insanity, like insight, comes in flashes?

Then I heard them. The first of the screaming waves of Old Christians approaching. I pushed past our guest and ran to the gate. From the swelling murmurs and shouts, I reasoned that they were approaching from the west, from the cathedral. And rapidly.

“What is it, my boy?” Rabbi Solomon asked.

I turned for him. “You better get home, Rabbi. I don’t think it’s over.”

He flipped the hood of his cloak over his head. As he passed me, he paraphrased a verse from Proverbs: “‘God punishes the one whom He loves, like the father the son he delights in.’ We are his chosen people. We shall yet see the Temple rebuilt.”

I gathered the family together and told them they had exactly one minute to collect belongings. Rushing to the outhouse, I scooped up a clump of filth with a wooden bowl, then smeared it into the fibers of the tattered rug which covered our trap door; in this way, I hoped to deter robbers or intruders. From my room, I took with me a candlestick and a flint, several blankets and a jar of water. In a secret panel at the bottom of my chest was the vellum ribbon on which was written my name and Uncle’s. I grabbed it and tied it around my wrist, turned the golden writing flat against my skin so that it could not be read. Then, I led us down into the cellar, cursing myself all the while; the minutes I’d used talking with Farid could have been spent searching for Judah. And now…

Atop a weak voice, I lifted a prayer begging forgiveness toward God when I realized that we would not be able to bury Uncle that day. Eyes closed, my body swaying with my heartbeat, I asked that this breach of duty in no way impede his soul’s journey.

For the rest of Monday, we waited—Mother, Esther, Farid, Cinfa and I. We sat in our own separate worlds, no one talking.

The royal blue of the prayer mat which covered the dead girl; the warm thick scent of Cinfa’s hair as she tucked her head below my shirt and breathed hot against me; the nervous buzzing of the cicadas in the courtyard. Every traitorous sensation underlined the same question: why was I here to see, to listen, to smell, when so many had died?

“I almost wish I had died with them,” I whispered to my mother.

“Guilt clings to us like God,” she answered. “How could it be otherwise?”

Every time that I believed my mother wasn’t worth fighting for, she surprised me with such a verse.

“We live to remember,” Cinfa said, repeating Rabbi Solomon’s words.

Is it through mimicry of adults that children are able to cling to hope?

Suddenly, there were shouts coming from the street, accusing the Marranos of having summoned the drought with witchcraft.

It was the first of three separate occasions that day when we heard the followers of the Nazarene. Hundreds of them descended upon us in waves, led by Dominican friars shouting with the strident, high-pitched voices of eunuches for us to come out and be cleansed through flame, shrieking epithets against the devilish Jews. “Bichos meio-humanos, half-human creatures,” they called us. Once, in the late afternoon, the music of bagpipes vibrated the chestnut beams of our cellar ceiling as if to summon us to a fair. The last time, by my reckoning about three hours after the fourth evening of our Passover had descended, sharp squeals reached us in our darkness—as if a pig were being whipped through the streets. I prayed that that was all it was.

Twice, they trampled through our house, shattering what was left of our furniture.

Cinfa huddled between Farid and I. Esther sat stoically. Her eyes no longer had any of their dark make-up, and her graying hair fell carelessly onto her shoulders. An actress whose fellow actors have all died, whose theater has been burnt to the ground, I thought.

Mother gripped her talismans and prayed silently. Whenever she looked at me, I could see her studying my resemblances to Judah.

If the Christians had discovered the trap door, all would have been lost; the planks were hastily nailed back into place and the bolt on the true cellar door was broken when I burst inside to find Uncle. One false step onto the center of the rug above and they’d have literally fallen upon us.

After darkness descended, I painted Uncle and the girl with myrrh to subdue the rising odors that signify the soul’s departure. Covered them again with prayer rugs.

The gash in my arm from the boy’s lance finally closed with the aid of extract of comfrey. I painted it with a thin layer of marigold juice to ensure healing, wrapped it with a linen handkerchief.

I gathered my courage once and whispered to Aunt Esther, “Had you ever seen the dead girl before?” She was seated on a bench we’d brought down from the kitchen, my mother’s thick mantilla of brown Flemish wool blanketing her shoulders. Her right hand, wrapped in a bloody linen towel was wedged between her legs in protection of what had been defiled.

She would not utter a sound, and I knew that her soul had fled deep inside her body.

Was it a cruel question to ask Esther? I didn’t care; I had to know if she knew. Not for the prurient reasons she probably thought.

I kept the girl’s golden wedding band in my pouch to give to her husband, prayed that he was still alive to cherish it.

Uncle’s signet ring I kissed and placed in the blackwood box which had held our gold leaf; I felt it might have pained Esther to see me wearing it.

When mother asked me about the whereabouts of this keepsake, I thought it might be a propitious time to talk with her. “Who knew of the genizah?” I asked her.

She pulled her head in like a hen, stared at me as if I were insane and told me to ask no more questions.

After the cathedral had tolled midnight, we heard Brites, our Old Christian laundress, calling desperately for us from the courtyard with the shrill voice of a lost gull. I was about to shout up to her when my mother thrust her hands at me and formed a cross.

I realized then that hell was being unsure if a little brother was in the clutches of torturers with respect for neither the beauty of the human body nor the sanctity of the soul.

And I wondered who it was who was etched as Uncle’s murderer on the Enduring Tablet of Moslem tradition. I vowed to discover the girl’s identity. More than ever, I believed that she was the key.

Early Tuesday morning, I found I had had enough of darkness and hesitancy. My legs and arms were clenched with the need for air and movement. In the purplish haze before dawn, I resolved to start looking for Judah, Reza and the members of the threshing group. I reasoned that there would be few Christians about at that hour of the morning.

“You mustn’t go!” my mother whispered to me. Her nails dug in to the pulp of my flesh. “No! It’s not safe. And you have to recite morning prayers. Uncle will be angry if you haven’t done your work for the Lord.”

“Morning prayers will have to wait!” I told her. I broke free, entrusted everything in my pouch save my knife to Farid.

He accepted my offerings without gesture. His eyes were bloodshot, and lines of sweat were sliding across his cheeks. When I kissed his forehead, it burned, tasted of foul disease. He turned away from my probing stare, and I saw that the bruises on his neck had soured to black and yellow.

“What is it that you feel?” I asked with my hands.

“A spiny animal is scraping my gut, trying to get out,” he signalled weakly.

Was it plague? If he were to depart, who would speak my inner language, help me to find Uncle’s killer?

Fixed by hopelessness, I continued to watch him, remembering that it was our old friend Murça Benjamin who first said that he and I were twins gifted to different parents. Dearest Murça was to be remarried soon, after the illness and death of her first husband. Had she even survived?

As I started my search, I grabbed the hammer from our shed and whispered to God, “Return Judah to us and take me in his stead.”

For a shield against Christians, I inner-chanted verses from the Zohar.

Nearest me, the Rua de São Pedro was empty. A dark, cottony haze blanketed the city. Those shutters which had resisted the onslaught of rioters were locked as if never to be opened. Gulls flew overhead, luminescent, as if about to burst into flame. Down by St. Peter’s Gate, a stout woman carrying a wicker basket atop her head began running with a painful, bobbing gait. High above her, beyond the twin towers of the cathedral, ribbons of smoke were unraveling into the air; the pyre in the Rossio must have still been raging.

The door to Father Carlos’ apartment was still locked. Inside St. Peter’s, hanging oil lamps sputtered with flame. In the the nave lay corpses splayed like drowned fishermen washed to shore.

Senhora Telo the seamstress was on her back under the fresco of the Annunciation which decorates the transept. Her face was white and waxen, her eyes closed. No blood. None at all. Her tin whistle, meant for calling her children, dangled over her shoulder.

A growl turned me. A pink-nosed, tawny mongrel had its front paws across the stomach of a man whose chest was soaked black. Ears pricked, he raised a crusted, throbbing lip to show fangs, growled from his gut as if I might challenge him for the body.

I headed to St. Michael’s Church. Many lay stiff and silent before the altar of the Nazarene. I took a candle from a side chapel and searched. Judah was not among them.

At St. Steven’s, I found a body of an adolescent girl in the courtyard garden, inside a circular bed of the most perfect marigolds. She was being picked by a hunched, methodical vulture with an indifferent gaze. Watching him, I learned that these birds rip first at the soft tissue—the lips and tongue, the eyes. The girl was beyond recognition.

The caretaker of the church, an Old Christian, came out from his hiding place in a side chapel before I left. To my question, he shook his head and said, “No, not Father Carlos. Others. Most were heading for the river. There was talk of boats carrying Jews to the other side.”

I found that the only thing which could now upset me was kindness. When he hugged me, my foundations slid away. I pushed him away and reached out for a wall. Then I ran.

Dawn was spreading a gauzy light over the horizon. Swallows were scooping great arcs of air all around me, twittering as if in hurried speech. Cutting down to the Tagus, I described Judah to the fishmongers setting up their stalls to sell last night’s catch. They’d seen nothing. “Were Jews killed?” one asked me. As if bored with the very idea, she yawned.

When I overturned her table, she shrieked like a parrot. But no one dared confront me; people recognize madness and draw away.

Then I walked toward the city center as far as the inner rim of the Terreiro do Trigo, Wheat Square. I dared not go any further; at the quayside, two Portuguese longshoremen and a group of blond northern sailors were exchanging shouted curses. Four men were sprawled dead between them. A pack of murdered dogs lay scattered around the ornamental cross at the center of the square, their blood soaking into hay strewn from recently unloaded bales. Further away, on one of the piers used for repairing vessels, a cheering crowd had gathered to watch the violation of an African slave girl. Pressed face-down to the slimy wood planks, she grunted at the crude madness of the little man thrusting against her back. Inside the floating city of ships, sailors and merchants watched and laughed. I turned back for the relative safety of the Little Jewish Quarter. My first steps seemed to pose the question: Do the Old Christians hate us so violently because we gave them Jesus, the savior they never really wanted?

The single-story house Reza shared with her in-laws centered the northern perimeter of Lemon Tree Square. The sun had just poked its eye over the eastern horizon when I reached there. Her door was closed but unlocked. The great chestnut wood table in the kitchen was kneeling; it had lost two of its legs.

A neighbor heard me searching and peered at me from the front doorway. He was a tiny man with razor-reddened cheeks and sleepy eyes. He spat up at me when I asked if he’d seen her.

Did these Christians always expect us to wipe their scorn away with a meek hand and continue shuffling into an uncertain future?

I shoved him so hard he crashed into the street and fell with a shriek.

A girl, perhaps four years old, was sitting stoically on a pillow in Reza’s vegetable garden, naked. A square cross had been finger-painted with charcoal on her forehead. She was nibbling raisins, had dark hair cut straight at her shoulders, secretive brown eyes framed by long and elegant lashes. She had no nail on her right thumb. “I run away,” she said.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She looked up at me with distant eyes and shook her head.

“And where are your parents?”

She pushed raisins into her mouth. I ripped a sheet in two and covered her. “I’ll bring you to my house,” I told her. “You’ll be safe.” She wanted to be carried on my shoulders. So strange it was to hear a child’s laughter. I lowered her to the cobbles and made her walk.

At home, I realized for the first time that the kitchen was a shambles. A few precious drops of vinegar were left at the bottom of a cracked pitcher by the cold hearth. I dripped them over my hands and the girl’s forehead. Rubbed off her cross completely. We descended to the cellar.

“Who’s that?” my mother demanded, staring at the girl as if she were an affront to her grief.

“I found her at Reza’s house. But Reza wasn’t there. Just her.”

Mother cursed under her breath, then took the girl from me and held her fast. “And Judah?” she demanded.

I shook my head. “I lost his trail.”

She turned her gaze toward the wall. It was the same agonized movement my elder brother Mordecai made just before death. When he finally stopped breathing, I drew his last tear to my fingertip and traced it across my lips. An aching relief swept through me like a desert wind as I tasted his salt.

It was then that I had the second of my visions, the first since our forced conversion. It burst up from my feet to my head and pushed through my mouth as a scream. In it, I was standing in our courtyard. Mordecai was sitting on our roof, next to the tin weather vane of a troubadour. I wanted to join him, was pervaded with longing. My gaze was drawn by the same faraway light I’ve always seen in my visions. As it approached, it transformed itself into a great, fan-tailed eagle of glowing colors. Its head was a ghost-like white, and its eyes shimmered from violet to red, like prismatic crystals. Its gorget was yellow-green; right wing silver, left gold. Its chest was the purple of murex. Swooping down to our rooftop, this great bird extended its talons and snatched up Mordecai effortlessly. I called to him, “What about me?” Mordecai answered, “Years from now, we will need your help. You still have work to do for God.” Safe inside the eagle’s powerful grip, he continued east, toward Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.

So had my true work always been to free my family from Pharaoh, to see them safely out of Portugal? Is a man born to accomplish one great goal in his lifetime?

To Mother, now, I asked, “Did you hear anything curious from Uncle about his threshing colleagues in the last few weeks? Any doubts…anger?”

She would not answer, began twirling the hair by her temples and pulling it out.

The girl I’d found in Reza’s garden had plopped down to the slate and was looking up at me blankly. Cinfa stood facing her, staring and squinting, gathering the hair at the nape of her neck. Before the mood of despair could claim me, I ran out to search for the threshers.

Diego lived alone in an apartment adjacent to the St. Thomas Church, less than a hundred paces from the city’s eastern walls, in a predominantly Christian section of the Alfama. As I climbed through the streets toward it, house shutters began clanging open. Townsfolk in stocking caps pulled low over their foreheads peered out at me, yawning and blinking. Gloomy laborers began trudging off for work. My stomach started growling for a braid of cheese or bit of matzah. But I had forgotten money. Perhaps I could have begged a crust of leavened bread, but it was the day preceding the fifth night of Passover. Chametz, of course, was still forbidden to me.

A pretty girl with bits of hay in her sleep-mussed hair was standing in a closed doorway She had swathed herself in a blanket, couldn’t have been more than Cinfa’s age. Hailing me with a whisper, she opened her covering for a moment. She was naked, had tiny breasts and slim, boyish hips. “For two eggs, I’ll carry you into my solitude,” she whispered. “Why not just…”

Such is what happens when children are abandoned to the god of Lovelessness in our most noble and loyal city.

Just ahead, at the steep lip of hillside which fronts the tiny square by the Church of São Bartholomeu, I planned to look out across central Lisbon to see if the Christian storm had ended. Naïve I was even to have entertained this notion; centering the valley below was the Rossio, a mile or so distant. At least a thousand Old Christians were already assembled there. Two great conflagrations were blazing into the sky.

From my vantage point on the crest of hillside, the Old Christians shed their human disguises for a moment and looked like ants feeding in a ragged cluster.

Suspecting that small groups of marauders would soon begin to spread through the city, I rushed off to Diego’s apartment. The door to his townhouse was locked. He lived on the second floor, so I called up to him. Across the street, a skeletal old cobbler holding two mallets in a claw-like hand began to watch me with suspicious eyes. He looked away abruptly when I returned his gaze.

Picking up pebbles from the street, I began tossing them at Diego’s shutters. A wan old woman with bloodshot eyes and a pointy chin bristling with gray hairs poked her head out of the third-floor window just above. She clutched a black shawl about her head, had a blunted red nose eaten to nearly nothing by some disease. “Who ya want?!” she snapped with a Navarese accent.

“Diego Gonçalves. Have you seen him?”

She shook her head with exaggerated motions and smacked her lips. In a voice which seemed to glue all her words together, she said, “Ain’t my place to interfere in other folks’ business, ya understand. Lord knows, just takin’ care of my husband’s a day’s work. But sometimes, the Lord brings someone with a question and we gotta answer. Because the Lord is watchin’ and if we don’t, we…”

I guessed she was drunk or insane. “So is he here?” I interrupted.

“Ojos‚” she said gravely and slowly, as if years of experience were behind that one word.

“What?

“Eyes! These Portuguese people got eyes the size a walnuts. And they stare like they want to see what color yer soul is. Ever wonder if that ain’t the problem?”

“Look, do you know if Diego has been here today?” I asked.

“God’s always watchin’. The Devil’s always watchin’. And with these walnut-eyed Portuguese everywhere, ya can’t escape. When I was…

Under my breath, I whispered, “Go sing it to the goats, you witch!” Picking up some more pebbles, I began pitching them harder at Diego’s shutters.

“He ain’t here!” she shouted defiantly.

“Where is he then? I don’t have much time!”

She looked up skyward and crossed herself. “The people on his floor were taken away yesterday,” she cackled. “By men with Portuguese eyes.”

“May I take a look inside?” I requested.

“Who are ya?”

“His nephew,” I lied.

She leaned out and surveyed the street with her top lip lifted up like an irritated donkey. The cobbler must have been staring at her because she raised a fist toward him and shouted, “Get back to work ya lazy old turnip!”

He flapped a hand at her like she was crazy, squinted and gave her the sign of the evil eye with an extended pinky and index finger.

She blocked his malediction by crossing herself, then shouted at him again. Lifting a key from inside her blouse, she dropped it into my cupped hands. “Don’t eat it, now,” she warned me, “it’s my only one.”

I expected her to cackle, but she was deadly serious. “You have my word,” I assured her.

When I reached the second floor, I tried the handle to Diego’s door and found it locked. The door to the apartment belonging to his neighbor, however, had been torn away. A strange smell, like brackish water, was wafting out. Before investigating, I returned the key to the upstairs neighbor. “You a Jew?” she asked. “‘Cause they was Jewish ya understand.”

“I’m a Jew,” I admitted dryly.

She gripped my arm. “Now ask me if I’m one too!”

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

Her nails bit into my flesh. “Ask me!” she demanded, the spray of her sudden rage hitting me in the face.

“Are you a Jew?” I repeated matter-of-factly.

Before I could duck away, she slapped my face with her callused old hand. “You Portuguese bastards never hesitate to insult a Navarrian lady!” she shouted. “But I’m not about to…”

She was still yelling when I reached Diego’s apartment again. I knocked and called for him, but received only silence. Growing fearful for his safety all of a sudden, I began shouting, “Diego! Diego! It’s just Berekiah!”

Not a sound was returned to me.

I entered the apartment next door. Old Levi Califa, the retired pharmacist and Talmud scholar, lived there with his widowered son-in-law and his two grandchildren. The state of his quarters did not bode well for Diego’s safety; the canopied bed in the front room had been stripped. A cross had been finger-painted in blood on the eastern wall, and below it, in foot-high letters, were the words: Vincado Pelo Cristo! Avenged for Christ.

With contempt for the legions of Old Christian illiterates staining the landscape of Portugal, I noted that the word vingado had been spelled incorrectly. How could they expect to even catch a glimpse of God when they could neither write correctly nor read with any perception?

“Master Levi?” I called out warily.

Silence.

At the far wall, the door to the rest of the apartment was splayed on the ground. Stepping over it and creeping through the open entrance, I entered a tiny room, square, no wider or longer than three paces, with a parquet of the coarsest oak and a single wooden stool as the only furniture. Yet had I ever entered a room more filled?

Immediately, I knew I’d walked across a holy threshold.

On the whitewashed walls, written in black, in tiny Hebrew letters, was Exodus. All of it. From the names of the Israelites who entered Egypt with Jacob to the flight of Hebrew slaves across the Red Sea to the raising of the Tabernacle by Moses. The verses began at the top of the eastern wall, continued south in a straight horizontal line, then west and north to form a ring. I guessed that more than two hundred such rings had been written. Lettering covered the entire top half of the room like a holy arbor.

Leviticus, too, had been started, but had ended abruptly with the commandment not to burn honey to the Lord. That’s when the Christians must have forced their way into the room and taken the scribe.

There was no need to puzzle over his identity. I knew with certainty it was old Levi Califa. Who else would have been so devout as to spend his time in hiding by recounting the central story of Passover?

I was so awed that I simply turned and read, my eyes quickening their pace like a dervish finding the rhythm of his dance.

I didn’t expect to encounter Califa himself. But on the kitchen floor, on a piece of broken plate, was a right hand. I knew it belonged to him because the index finger on which he’d always kept his carnelian signet ring had been sliced away. Close by was the last piece of charcoal with which he’d been writing and which must have fallen from his clutches.

A severed hand does not look real. But why? Is it because our minds refuse to believe such cruelty possible?

And why is it that the Christians do not merely kill us, but cut away our body parts? Is it an effort to render us inhuman, to force us to better correspond to their image of us as devils?

Not far from his fingertips were the hyssop-blue heads of Califa’s beloved Brazilian parrots, whom he’d named Ternura, Tenderness, and Empatia, Empathy, the Talmud scholar’s two-word motto.

The bodies of Tenderness and Empathy must have been stolen for their precious feathers. Already, perhaps, they were decorating the hat of a Christian nobleman.

As I leaned over to retrieve the hand for burial, a footfall across a snapping piece of wood turned me. In the front room stood the old cobbler from across the street, patient gray eyes fixed on me. He was thin, tan, wore only a sweat-stained undershirt and the crudest of linen pants. He had to be at least fifty, had thin wrists, narrow and bent shoulders. Wisps of tangled gray hair tufted up from behind his ears.

In one hand he held a gouging tool, in the other, a mallet.

I reached for my knife and held it in front of me. They will force me to fight again, I thought. Unwilling to engage him amidst the sanctity of written Torah, I stepped to the front room. As I did so, he said in a hoarse voice, “You haven’t much time.”

I didn’t respond, thought: Why do Christians always expect Jews to speak before they fight?

Anger rose in me, and I felt as if hot mercury were running through my veins. Stepping to within three paces of him, I awaited his first lunge, imagining that he would crumple under my knife.

Even so, I did not desire to hurt him; it is said that the distance between the righteous taking of a life and a cold-hearted murder is but a hair’s-breadth, and I did not presume to have the eyesight necessary to always know the difference.

He scratched the bald vale centering his head with the end of his mallet. “You don’t understand my meaning, I’m a friend,” he said.

“Then drop your arms.”

To my utter amazement, he laid them neatly at his feet. With lines of worry ribbing his forehead, he said, “You haven’t much time. They’re coming up from the river. You’ve got to get home. I came to warn you.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Let’s just say that Master Levi was a good friend.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Come on, son,” he said, holding out a hand to me.

“Tell me when you last saw him, please. I need to know.”

“Yesterday,” the cobbler replied. “The Dominicans came for him and his family.” He reached his hand out again and brushed my arm.

Involuntarily, I backed away. “And Diego Gonçalves? Was he with Master Levi?”

He turned nervously for the door. “Look, you’ve got to go! Can’t you understand?”

“Have you seen Diego Gonçalves?”

“No. He hasn’t been here that I’ve seen. Maybe he was captured.” He shrugged, then continued angrily, “Look, I’m going. You can leave with me or wait for them to come and get you. And don’t worry, the Navarrian hag will make sure they find you quickly. She’s the one who opened the door so they could get Master Levi without working up a sweat.” He leaned forward to pick up his mallet and gouging tool. A sudden urge to stab him in the back of his neck swept through me. What purpose would it have served to hurt this righteous Christian?

Did the mercury flowing through my veins possess its own desires?

“Come,” he said, straightening up. His voice possessed the supplicating tone of my father calling me to study. A shout suddenly reached us from behind the house. The cobbler lifted a crooked finger to his lips to suggest silence.

Together, we crept into the stairwell like children off to a dangerous escapade. The Navarrian hag, as he called her, was standing above us on the staircase, an expression of contempt twisting her wrinkled face. The old man raised his mallet and hit it once lightly against his own head to indicate what he’d do to her should she give our positions away. We made our way down the stairs like cats stalking their prey. I wanted now to find Samson, to read the letter which my uncle had sent him. My plan was to get to the Porta de São Vicente, St. Vincent’s Gate, exit the city and head northwest to his house.

In the street, swallows were still swooping madly through the morning chill. A murmur coming from the west was pierced with the caustic laughter of young men hugging danger to their hearts.

The cobbler pointed down the street to the east, to the wavering eye of sun. “Go with God,” he said, gripping my shoulder.

I mouthed my thanks. Then I ran.

I cannot emphasize enough how deeply clouded my judgment must have been by Uncle’s death; any Jew in my position should have realized that the Dominicans would close off all the exits to the city as their first religious calling of the morning.

It was also a mistake to run. The claps of my footfalls drowned out the sounds of the Old Christians and gave my position away.

A mob of one hundred or more was fronting St. Vincent’s Gate. When they spotted me, arms pointed toward me like arrows.

I had stopped, my gut clenched with fear. Even so, a sense of sliding toward doom made me extend a hand as if to seek the assurance of a railing or wall. I grabbed only air, of course, then instinctively sought the protection of my knife. For a breathless moment, I even wavered at the edge of taking my own life. It would have been easy; in those days, I still believed in a personal God and did not fear death. Dying, yes. But not the glorious journey back to the Upper Realms. A last prayer, a single thrust, and then I would have been released. The thought was: better my own hands setting my soul free, than those of men who’ve held a cross.

Of course, they couldn’t have known for certain by my outward appearance that I was a New Christian. But if they’d stripped me, my covenant with the Lord would have made my allegiance obvious.

The urge for life is more powerful than thought. Or perhaps my need to find Judah was too strong.

I turned and ran as if there’d been no other choice. Were my enemies after me? I couldn’t tell; my senses had been dispelled by my quickened pulse. Imagine standing beside a leaden bell tolling madly during a howling windstorm. That was my heartbeat and that was my breath.

All that comes to me now is a general sense of descending outdoor staircases, the odor of my own terror. The next image that penetrates my Torah memory is of a bell tower. I was in front of the façade of the Church of São Miguel, not two hundred paces from home.

Without warning, the tower seemed to crash to its side. I had been shifted in space, was on my back against the cobbles.

Although I was fighting for breath, there was no sense of pain, only silent confusion. My head seemed imprisoned inside an amphora of glass. It was as if the hand of God, without warning, had simply moved me through space.

A fleeting image of a water lily surrounded by sand, bursting suddenly into flame, seared my gaze. Later, I understood that I had been unconscious for an instant, and upon waking, had caught a glimpse of the dream world flowing beneath the current of my usual thoughts. Even then, however, that image—of a lily in flames—seemed vital to me, a gift from God to which I needed to cling. (The clue to its significance came while illuminating a Book of Esther one day in Constantinople, when I realized that the Lord must have seen Lisbon as a burning flower that fateful Passover.)

To my left, six or seven feet away, I now noticed a man in a cape of polished hide kneeling, holding his shoulder as if he were wounded. I realized he must have lunged for me from a hidden doorway and knocked me flying, hurt himself in the process.

Two lanky men in ragged clothing were running toward me from down the sloped street. They appeared to be identical twins. Closely cropped black hair crowned their heads. They both held axes, and I sensed that they wanted to split me like a block of wood.

Behind them, a rampaging group of men and women was rushing toward me. Everything seemed a whirl of noise and wind, shadow and contour.

When the two axmen suddenly merged together, I simply could not understand. Then I realized the obvious: my vision had been distorted by my fall.

Cold iron glinting in the sun has a way of summoning one’s body to arms. I was up in an instant, gripping my knife.

The serpentine alleys and pathways of the lower Alfama had long ago been incorporated into my interior map, and I cut away to the west just as my wounded assailant struggled to his feet. I reached the steep staircase leading down to Cantina Square in seconds. From the highest step, one can jump easily onto the neighboring rooftops. I took the leap correctly, then spired up and down four rooftops to the next alleyway. Three men were following me. The two closest, perhaps twenty feet away, held swords. The third was a friar using his crosier as a staff. “Get the Marrano!” he was shouting in a hoarse voice. “Bring me his covenant with the Devil!”

By that, I assumed he wanted my sex for a personal trophy. Having been educated to view the world symbolically, I wondered, of course, if the Dominicans wanted to end our possibilities for reproduction once and for all.

The alleyway was empty. Dropping down, I scaled a low wall into Senhor Pinto’s courtyard. As I suspected, his kitchen door had been smashed in. The house was a shambles. I cut through his kitchen to the corner of the Rua de São Pedro and the Rua da Adiça. Farid’s house was just across the street. I took his wall with a single leap to the top, then jumped to the courtyard and ran for our kitchen.

I did not descend to the cellar, however. After verifying that I hadn’t been followed, I lifted away the false frontpiece to the chest in Uncle Abraham and Aunt Esther’s room, took out a dried eel bladder containing a few coins to be used in an emergency. I waited a few minutes for shouts to disappear from Temple Street. Then, when all I could hear was my own heartbeat, I headed to the river. Near to shore, a fisherman whom I have seen since childhood but never spoken to was seated in his blue rowboat, cutting a braid of cheese with a rusty knife. He was old, perhaps fifty, squat, had a suntanned, leathery face and the gray eyes of illiteracy. When he met my gaze, I held up a coin and looked west, down river; once there, beyond the city gates, I planned to walk the five miles to Samson Tijolo’s vineyard.

The fisherman nodded, rowed toward me and maneuvered his boat alongside the riverbank.

“I need to get out of the city,” I told him.

With two of my copper coins sitting in his crawling bait, the fisherman rowed us out a hundred feet or so into the river, puffing and tossing away curses. Above the big toe on his right foot, an angry red sore had eaten into his grayish waterlogged skin.

“Bit by a crab,” he grumbled. “Never healed properly.”

Weaving through two large fishing boats and cutting around a galley flying the red Portuguese cross, he turned the boat until we caught the current. As his rowing gained rhythm, Lisbon’s defensive walls trailed behind and became but a ribbon threading through church towers and the tangle of the city’s outer districts. He dropped anchor beyond a rocky outcropping of beach and lifted his hand to bid me good luck.

I nodded my thanks, rolled up the legs of my pants and waded into the cold water.

On the beach, two Andalusian pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela wearing scallop-shaped hats approached me and asked me where a tavern might be. I made believe I couldn’t speak their language and walked away.

Chapter VII

Two hours later, Rana, Samson’s wife and an old friend from the neighborhood, answered my knock on her door with her newborn baby, Miguel, suckling at her breast. “Beri…oh my goodness, you’re alive! Come in!” She grabbed me and pulled me into the house, closed the door behind me and locked the dead-bolt. “I can’t believe it!” she smiled.

We kissed, and I reached out to rub the baby’s downy hair. So young he was that his eyes were shut tight as if never to be opened. “Handsome little thing,” I said, for who could tell a first-time mother that her baby would look like a squirrel until it was at least a month old?

Rana replied, “Handsome? Have you been meditating too much again?” She tried to smile, but tears trapped in her lashes. Her lowered glance showed a desperate isolation, and I understood that Samson, too, had been lost in the Christian storm.

We sat by her hearth. “How did you find out about the riot?” I asked.

“Some neighbors came to warn me.”

“Maybe we should leave here together. Go back to…”

“You know I can’t,” she interrupted.

For protection against dangers from the Other Side, Rana would not leave her house for the first forty days after Miguel’s birth—the number of years Jews wandered in the wilderness and days of the Biblical flood. I replied, “When did you last hear from Samson?”

“I’ve had no word since Sunday. He was going to Little Jerusalem to buy fabric we needed for…” She nodded toward Miguel. “He was going to Simon Eanes’ store. You haven’t seen him or heard anything? Or spoken to Simon?”

“No, nothing. But I don’t think Simon made it.”

She turned to face the wall, and her lips mouthed prayers. I said, “There’s still a chance that he’s found safe haven. Samson was clever. And imposing. He’d frighten away many a Christian. Sure used to scare me when I was a kid. He may yet come back.” I gripped her arm to impart strength, realized I was really trying to convince myself that Judah could be safe.

“No,” she said. “If he were alive, he’d be back by now.”

“He could be in hiding.”

“Samson, in hiding? Beri, a father for the first time after fifty-seven years is not going to go into hiding when his child’s life may be in danger.”

Rana was one of those rare people who refused to lie to herself. It was why most people found her aggressive, even heartless. She nodded her resignation, rubbed her free hand through her curly brown hair. “If I must go it alone then…” Her words faded and she bit her lip to keep from crying. “All hunger and sleep,” she said of Miguel, trying to smile. Her nipple had slipped free of his mouth, and she pushed it back into place as he fidgeted with his arms. He made a warm, satisfied noise as he suckled. Rana looked up at me with hopeful eyes. “Beri, have you heard anything about my parents?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I should have checked before coming. I didn’t think.”

“It’s okay. I suspect they’ll come when they can…if they can.”

“Rana, I dropped by last Friday to get some wine. I took a cask and left a note.”

“Yes, we knew it was you because of the matzah.” She patted my arm. “How reassuring it is that some things never change. I must have been asleep. I don’t sleep much. But when it comes, I’m lost to the world. Except when Miguel cries. Then, it’s like a hunter has shot an arrow into my heart.”

“Listen, do you still have the letter I left that day?”

“Of course I do,” she answered. “Is it important?”

“I have to read it. Something Uncle may have told Samson… Where is it?”

“Taking care of Miguel has made me a bit absent-minded. But I’m sure it’s somewhere in the bedroom.”

“Can we take a look?”

“Hold him,” she said, lifting Miguel and handing him to me. As Rana looked through their chests and desks, I held the little boy in the cradle of my arms and remembered the tender feel of Judah. So many late nights Mordecai and I had spent walking with him to keep his tears away; he had not been an easy baby, had been burdened with fluid in his lungs that gave him a harsh cough. I closed my eyes and the feel of the baby’s soft skin tingled my fingertips. Judah, my Judah, I whispered to myself. Please, dear God, let him still be alive.

To banish the dread descending over me, I engaged Rana in conversation as she searched. We talked of Miguel’s stomach problems. “His turds look like magpie droppings,” she said in a worried tone. “Dr. Montesinhos says it’s nothing to carry on about, so I suppose…”

“Forget it,” I said with a wave. “Judah’s did, too. I think all babies are part bird.”

She laughed, but the ensuing silence showed all the more clearly the sullen mood that weighted the air inside the house. We shared a look in which we acknowledged that Samson might never return, and she reached up to caress my face. “Dear Beri,” she said. “I miss the neighborhood.” Our gaze was linked by memories of demons banished together by our children’s army.

She went back to her hunt, headed to a chest of drawers by the bed. From a small wooden box with a metal lock, she lifted away a scroll. “Got it!” she said in triumph. She handed it to me. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” I placed Miguel into her arms. The scroll curled open into five sheets of paper.

As if inviting me to share an adventure, Rana said, “Listen, Beri, take a look at the note and I’ll get some challah bread and wine…no, of course, you must be reliving the Exodus. Just some wine, then? You can stay, can’t you? Till you finish the note, at least? You must stay.”

“I’ll stay till I finish it. Then I must go back to my family. But Rana, if you have chametz in the house…then you haven’t celebrated Passover yet?”

“No. We were waiting a little while longer to be safe.”

She led me back to her kitchen table, brought me a cup of wine, then took my free hand. Uncle’s note read:

Dearest Samson,

Miguel Ribeiro has refused. So I shall tell you a story. In it, you will find my hopes that you discover the need for all of us to make a sacrifice at this decisive moment. If we do not perform as Rabbi Graviel did during this present fulcrum in time, then all may be lost.

No matter that your belief is crumbling, it is your acts which count.

Shall Samael win the day?

At the top of the next page was written: A História da Crestadura do Sol do Rabbim Graviel—The Tale of Rabbi Graviel’s Sunburn. It was the same story my master had told me on his last Sabbath, and as I mouthed the title, his hand seemed to reach for the reins at the back of my neck. His voice whispered: “Yes, read it again, Berekiah, so you, too, may see its significance. It is no accident that I offered this story to both you and Samson.”

“What is it?” Rana asked, sensing my sudden agitation.

“A tale. Of Rabbi Graviel, one of my ancestors. Of how he had to suffer imprisonment in Spain in order for his daughter to survive. I think that my uncle saw in a vision that he’d have to make a great sacrifice as well. Yes… In order for the girl in the cellar to survive, he had to give up his life. He made a deal. But the murderer did not keep his word.”

“Beri, you mean your uncle… Oh dear, Oh my God.” Realizing for the first time that my master was dead, Rana’s shoulders jerked backward. She placed Miguel on the table, then stood up and covered her ears with her hands. She stared at me in horror.

When she began to shake, I went to her, peeled her hands down. “Rana! Rana!”

She looked at me as if trying to decipher my face, to learn my identity. In a monotone leached of apparent emotion, she said, “Samson…. And now Master Abraham… Esther, is she…?”

“No, she’s safe. With Mother and Cinfa. But Judah’s missing.”

I sat Rana at the table and fed her wine. She held both her hands around the cup like a child, gulped at the liquid, began rambling about the vineyard’s wells. When silence came to us again, I asked, “Did Samson mention any trouble in the threshing group?”

She shook her head.

“An argument with my uncle, perhaps?”

“Nothing,” she replied.

“But then why did Uncle mention Samson’s loss of faith? Was he in some sort of trouble?”

Rana gripped my arm and whispered, “Samson says the baby should be raised Christian, that it’s no good to be a Jew anymore. We won’t have Passover this year. Even if…” She opened the fold in Miguel’s swaddling clothes to show me the foreskin of his penis; he should have been circumcised on his eighth day. She closed her eyes to despair. Tears bathed her eyelashes. As if in solidarity with his mother, Miguel, too, began crying. I took him and rocked him gently to little avail. Rana’s words flew out suddenly as if tossed in different directions: “If I’d known… how could he change so? When we were married…and then the baby coming along. We were so…so good. Remember Passover as it was? Remember, Beri?! Before the…wait, let me show you something.”

From the alcove above her hearth, she grabbed a thick book. The intricate, lacy border on the cover identified it as a printed edition of the Old Testament produced when I was a boy by Eliezer Toledano. She held it out to me. “Look!” she ordered.

Taking it from her, I asked, “What do you mean—what do I look for?”

“Anywhere! Open it anywhere!”

I handed Miguel back to her, let the manuscript fall open naturally. The Book of Ezra faced me, verses about the rebuilding of the Temple. Each and every name of God had been crossed out with brown ink. It was chilling, as if a talisman of evil.

Rana spoke in a hurried voice, as if stalked. “Samson told me, ‘We must bury the Jewish god. After Passover, we’ll say prayers for the Lord and then we must bury Him and then we must forget Him.’ Samson crossed out all His names!”

I stared at the defilement, then caressed the pages closed, vowing never to look again. I put the book on her table.

“I can’t live as a Christian!” Rana suddenly yelled. “I’d sooner kill myself!”

Her shout seemed to split the air between us. “But your son?” I asked. “Who would care for him?! Now that…”

“I’d rather he were dead!”

Some Jewish parents had murdered their children, then committed suicide to avoid the forced conversion nine years earlier, acts which were written in a script I’d never comprehend. “You can’t mean that,” I told Rana.

She leaned forward, placed Miguel in my arms. Her eyes glowed with frightening resolve. She grabbed a thick bread knife from the table, jumped up, pointed it toward me, her body clenched with rage. “I would do it now if you told me that I must sew a shroud for my God!”

“You would be sinning gravely if you were to ever harm this baby. He is God’s ambassador to us. Would you kill Abraham, Isaac, Moses if they stood here before you?”

She held her knife in place.

“This child is Abraham, Isaac, Moses. He is the Lord our God!” I exclaimed.

Rana dropped her weapon and began to sob. I sat her down and caressed her hair. The baby seemed entranced by her wails. Yet when she calmed, he began to kick and fuss. I gave up on trying to soothe his discomfort and handed him back to her.

Without giving myself time to consider, I took the defiled Old Testament from the table, held my breath and threw it into the hearth.

Rana gasped. “Berekiah! No! What you’ve done…”

As smoke and flame crackled from the curling, yellowing pages, I spoke in a voice that seemed to come from Uncle: “I don’t need words written for me. Not even the Torah. And you don’t either. Keep an internal Judaism. God will meet you inside, just beyond where you speak to yourself. If Samson returns…and we will all pray for his safety, then let him talk of Christianity while you breathe Judaism. Your son will know the difference. And when he is old enough to keep secrets, you shall tell him of the bride that is the Sabbath who has been waiting inside him patiently all through his childhood. And you shall celebrate their wedding together.”

The baby sought her breast again. Rana fed him, stared at his face as if seeking a glance of that future ceremony beyond his eyes.

How wonderful, I thought with burning jealousy, to be able to offer your own nourishment to another being.

Does one’s life goal always appear without warning, in the space of a single instant? For I knew then that I sought to offer myself as fully as Rana to someone before I died.

She shrugged as if unconvinced. “We’ll see,” she said.

At the door, we kissed. “Rana, was Samson angry with Uncle or any of the other threshers? Did that have anything to do with his loss of faith.”

“No. It was the baby. It’s one thing to live in terror yourself, quite another to condemn one you love to a similar fate. He took a long look at the baby’s future as a Jew, and he didn’t like what he saw.”

“Do you want to come with me?” I asked. “You know you’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you need to. And you mustn’t be afraid of the Other Side. It’s superstition. You’ve no need to fear leaving the house.”

“No. Thank you.” She caressed my arm. “My parents will try to come to me. If they can…”

“I understand. Remember, build an inner garden where you can hide, where you can invite Miguel when he’s old enough.” I brushed the baby’s wisps of hair again. “And if Samson returns, send him to me. We can all still use the future tense when speaking of Jews in Portugal. Perhaps he will regain his faith.”

We kissed. Yet she called me back as I set out. Her hand was trembling by her lips. “Do you think that the Lord has taken Samson in revenge…for what he did to the Old Testament?”

I closed my eyes to search for an answer, and with a chill, realized I no longer trusted God. I inscribed the sweeping gesture Farid and I make to express the unknowable.

Chapter VIII

As I walked away from Rana’s home, my descent into a hollow world unwatched by God made me cling tightly to Uncle’s story of Rabbi Graviel. On reading his words again, I recalled the last lesson he had given Judah and me; in it, my master had spoken of the need for making a sacrifice, as well. This lesson was spoken during our Passover seder, last Friday. As turnip and saffron soup was being ladled by Esther into our wooden bowls, he had nodded to me and said, “The Lord showed favor upon Sarah…”

His words had been a cue for me to chant Torah from memory beginning with that verse in Genesis. In Portuguese, so Judah would understand, I began: “The Lord showed favor upon Sarah as He had promised, and made good what he had said about her. She conceived and bore a son to Abraham for his old age, at a time…”

My uncle had me continue through the following fifty-two verses. Pausing only to wet my lips with wine, I recounted the story of Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, whose name means “he laughed” in Hebrew—a reference to Abraham’s great pleasure at having been able to sire a son despite his one hundred years of age.

When I recited the verse, “The time came when God put Abraham to the test,” Uncle nodded with lifted eyebrows for me to talk directly to Judah. Cupping the boy’s chin, I received the gift of his gaze. In my best theatrical voice, I continued the story:

“‘Abraham!’ the Lord called, and Abraham replied, ‘Here I am!’

“God said, ‘Take your beloved only son Isaac and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a sacrifice on one of the hills which I will show you.’”

Judah wriggled in his seat and bit his lip, disturbed by the prospect of Isaac’s death. I could sense him recoiling from the memory of our mother’s cursing, wounded in his soul by the way she denied him a place in her life. I took his hands in mine and told him how Abraham had bound Isaac and laid him atop an altar he’d built of wood, and how just as he raised his knife to cut life from his son, the Lord in the person of an angel intervened: “‘Do not raise your hand against that boy; do not touch him! Now I know that you are a God-fearing man. You have not withheld from me your son, your only son. I shall bless you abundantly and give you descendants until they are numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore.’”

Judah was hardly put at ease by this peaceful ending; his face swelled with yearning for reassurance. My stomach sank as I realized it was cruel of Uncle and me to have thrust a sword of Torah through his fragile defenses. I fixed my hand at the back of his neck as he looked down and away from the eyes of the family, trying to caress encouragement into him. “Eat some more soup,” I said. “It’s getting cold.”

Uncle frowned, waved my advice away and said, “Now Judah dear, I had Beri tell you this story for a reason. Tell me what you think of it.”

Eyes focused on the little boy. But his lips were sealed tight. My hand began to pat encouragement at his back; he was near crying. I stared at Uncle with bound anger, wanting to shout, “Hasn’t he been through enough in five short years! Leave Judah be or so help me…!”

“I want to know what you think,” Uncle prompted. “I will never judge you badly for telling me the truth. Never! On that you have my word.”

“Tell us, Judah,” Esther said. She smiled maternally.

Mother was looking at him with a stoney face, had begun picking nervously at the wisps of hair by her temples. When I pinched his neck for him to get it over with, Judah whimpered, “I didn’t like it.”

“Me neither,” I interjected.

“Why didn’t you like it?” Uncle asked, shooing away my help with a flapping wrist.

Judah balled up his fists and rubbed his eyes. “Because…because I don’t know. Because I didn’t.”

“Tell me why?” Uncle said softly.

“Because Isaac didn’t do anything wrong!” Judah blurted out.

“Exactly,” Uncle said. He stood up and leaned toward the boy, his hands braced on the table. “Now I’m going to tell you a secret, Judah. And secrets are very powerful things. So you must not tell it to anyone. It is only for us. Okay?”

Judah nodded, and his mouth fell open as if he were suddenly entranced; he loved Uncle’s secrets.

“Many people say that this story means that sometimes it is necessary to make a sacrifice for God,” my master began. “A terrible sacrifice, if need be. And on one level they are right. Abraham was willing to kill his son. Then there are some people who say that it was wrong of God to have asked this of a man. And wrong of the man to have agreed. Maybe they are right. I sometimes believe so myself. But here is the secret…” Uncle lowered himself across the table so that his face was but a foot from Judah’s. His eyes were flashing. Lifting a finger to his lips, he whispered, “Do not forget that Isaac means, ‘he laughed.’ That is the proof we need to be sure that the Torah is speaking metaphorically, in riddles of a very particular sort. Isaac is not Abraham’s son in this world. He is a kind of son inside Abraham himself. He is a child made up of Abraham’s laughter and sorrow, anger and tenderness, fears and dreams. And what was God asking from Abraham? That he be willing to give these up. That he be willing to give up his innermost emotions and thoughts, his dearest possessions. That he untie the knots of his mind. That he extinguish part of himself. And why? So that a door might open inside him through which God could enter. Dearest Judah, this story is asking you to open yourself to God and nothing more.” Uncle reached out to tousle his nephew’s hair, then twist his nose. “God loves you so much that he is willing to tell a terrible story and have you think bad of Him. All this so that you may one day meet Him inside yourself. He wants to be able to hug you, nothing more. Okay?”

Judah, still entranced, gave a great big nod. With gratitude, I noted how children’s moods could be altered so easily.

The lesson for me in all this—at the time—had been to think twice before doubting Uncle. But now, as I walked toward home, I thought of what he had been telling us all about sacrifice. God had asked the Biblical Abraham to give up his most cherished possession. Had He asked Uncle to give up his own life? Why? Was it so that more books could be saved from Christian flames?

Such speculations were interrupted a few minutes later by a man shouting my name. Rana must have had intuition concerning her parents; her father, Benjamin, and mother, Rachel, were rushing toward me from the top of a coming ridge. “Beri,” Benjamin shouted, running to me, his dark eyes wild with fear. “Rana, is she…?”

“She’s fine. And Miguel is fine, too. They’re safe for now.”

“Thank God.” He placed his hands against my chest. “Listen, we cannot talk, we must get to her. Give our blessings to your entire family.”

“I will.” I held his arm. “Just one thing. Have you seen Samson? He was supposed to be in Lisbon buying…”

Benjamin raised his fingertips to my lips. “As of Sunday, my daughter is a widow,” he whispered. “Samson was captured when the riot broke. He was unprepared.”

Rachel twirled her hand in the air. “Smoke. Samson is nothing more than smoke.”

“And are the pyres still burning in the Rossio?” I enquired.

Benjamin nodded. “The fires will never go out as long as we remain ourselves.”

His words seared through the numbness which seemed to advance and recede inside me at its own pace, and I realized that I had been too long away from my family. Rushing back to the city, I found the eastern and northern gates clogged with crowds of Christians and Dominican friars. The young men among them were hitting one another, cursing, preparing like bear cubs for a chance to test their prowess. To the west, however, at the St. Catherine’s Gate, I found only a small crowd of drunken old men. Later, I discovered that word had spread through the city that the King would be sending troops from the east to re-establish order in his capital; hence, this negligence of the western gates.

Apparently, I looked less like a Marrano than even my mother imagined; the Old Christians whom I passed raised not a single sword, instead entreated me to share their crude jokes about women and Jews. For the sake of my life, may God forgive me, I acceded to their wishes. “How is a Jew like a praying mantis?” asked a man with a thin and empty face. When I shook my head, he said, “Spit at it, it continues praying. Lock it away, it still continues praying. Only solution is to take out your sword and cut off its head!”

Amazing that anyone could find that sort of thing amusing. But the Christians stained the air with their toothless howls, and I joined them as best I could.

As I strode away from them, I began to suspect that God had allowed me to enter Lisbon at this gate so that I might visit the New Christian arms dealer Eurico Damas on my way back to the Alfama; his home was in the wealthy Bairro Alto neighborhood crowning the slope above the great shantytown just ahead. As to this enviable location, Damas told my uncle shortly after his own voluntary conversion, when the two men were still on speaking terms, “I never want to forget where I came from. No faithful New Christian would.”

Honorable sentiments. But when he was out of sight, Uncle plucked a hair from the middle of my head. Shushing my yelp, he said, “Berekiah, that man’s noble words are as anchored in his soul as this filament was in your scalp. One little tug and it’s…” He swirled his hands in the air and feigned amazement at the disappearance of the hair. “Never trust anyone who gains by the death of another. Especially such a man who later shows off his prayer shawl in public.”

With the sun low in the sky, I climbed up the tangle of unpaved streets that switchback across the western hillsides toward the Bairro Alto. Passing the jumble of wooden barracks where the poorer classes spent lives of dreamless servitude, dirty faces regarded me over shoulders as if I were an unusual sight. Children scattered dust as they chased chickens and cats. Flies fed at the corners of their eyes. A tall African slave chained at his ankle to a rusted anchor, stared at me with the intense eyes of a storyteller recording the passing of a character. I recognized a kinship in him and nodded, but he turned from me as if he’d been suspected of a crime. The air was modulated with the scents of shame and anger. Yet here and there, a few homes sprouted gardens planted with marigolds and lavenders, cabbage, turnip and fava beans.

A cobblestone plaza umbrellaed with powerful chestnut trees marked the end of the King’s tolerance; beyond this point, the pinewood planks and cloth patches of these wretched squatters ended and the polished stone of Lisbon’s aristocracy began.

I recognized Damas’ house immediately; sprouting from the limestone cornice were horned, cavern-mouthed gargoyles which had petrified me as a child. From beyond the roof, where the courtyard undoubtedly was, smoke was rising in tufts. I slipped my hand in my pouch and took out my knife, concealed it in the waistband of my pants.

To my banging on the iron grating that fronted the door, a delicate boy with a sweet round face answered. He stood on his stoop, hands on his hips. A green silk shirt and scarlet vest billowed from his chest—presumably, hand-me-downs prematurely given. With an irritated gesture, he swept a long lock of amber hair away from his cheek and tucked it under the rim of his blue beret. His hands were ash-stained. He seemed to think I was a foreign peddler; in his lilting voice, he said slowly and definitively, “We don’t have any need of whatever you’re selling.” Rubbing his chin, he left a sweaty black streak behind.

“I’m not selling anything. I’m looking for Eurico Damas.”

He looked up skeptically into the sky, then down to the ground and shrugged. “I’d start digging if I were you.” He twisted his lips into a sneer and jerked his thumb upward. “He ain’t gonna make it up there if I got any say in it.”

“Dead?”I asked.

The boy knocked against the stone doorframe. “Couldn’t be no deader.”

“You’re sure?”

“Saw his body myself. Opened his mouth and spat in it to make sure.”

“Was he killed during the riot against the New Christians?”

He shrugged. “Look, Master Eurico had lots of enemies. Did you really expect him to survive? He should’ve hidden himself like a bedbug in a mattress seam.” He nodded up at me. “Who are ya, anyway?”

“Pedro Zarco,” I replied, using the Christian first name I’d accepted under the sword of conversion. “I live in…”

“Ah, Master Abraham’s nephew!”

“How do you know who I am?!”

The boy approached me, slipped his fingers around the grating of the gate as if planning to scamper up. From here, I saw that bruises and scrapes were what reddened his cheeks. “Master Eurico hated your uncle,” he said. “Talked all the time about capturing him and giving him the pinga just to see what curses and drivel would come out. Strange, but in a way, I think he kinda liked him, too. In the way that he liked anyone. But he thought your uncle was a little crazy…and dangerous.”

Pinga, meaning “drop,” was a torture in which droplets of boiling oil were dripped one by one across your body. Sometimes they spelled the victim’s name with the burns; Portuguese appellations can be very long and most people will confess to just about anything before a boiling drop even touches their family name.

“Are you a servant?” I asked.

“I’ve sent them away.” He peeled off his beret with the grin of someone revealing treasure. A cascade of silken amber hair dropped across his shoulders. He was most definitely a she. “I’m his widow,” she said with a great nod. She shrugged as if to excuse her previous disguise and unlocked the gate. She took my arm as if inviting me to dance. “Come!” she said.

So this boy was Damas’ child bride! She ran me into a bloodstained kitchen and tugged me through the larder into a courtyard shaded with orange trees thick with fruit. On the brick terrace by the back of the house, a raging pyre of clothing and wood was crackling. A colorful pile of shirts, coats and trousers was heaped nearby. Flakes from the flames were drifting up into the sky and falling back to earth like feathers. “I’ve been burning his things all night,” she said with an exhale of triumph. “The boots were the first to go. Eight pairs he had. One for each day of the week. And an extra one of sharkskin for Mass on Sunday. If he didn’t like my polishing, he’d change his water on them and make me start over. And let me tell you, that man’s pee smelled like a cat’s! Only problem now is that they stink when they burn! Just like he did!”

Tendrils of flame were jumping like tugged marionettes. “You threw Eurico Damas into the fire?!” I demanded.

“I think you’ll find his teeth if ya look hard!” she grinned. She licked her lips as if tasting a treat. “He had more than his share so I’m sure they’re there somewhere.” She fixed my stare with a bemused look, burst into laughter. “He went to kidnap your uncle, you know.”

“Did he find him?! What did he…”

“No, he came back all snarly. Couldn’t locate where Master Abraham was hiding. I heard him say so.”

So my intuition was wrong; Eurico Damas had not been involved. And Samson was dead. That left Father Carlos and Diego as the only threshers who could have betrayed Uncle; Miguel Ribeiro and Rabbi Losa as those who might have stooped to blackmail.

“He wanted to pinga your entire group of kabbalists,” the girl continued. “Force ‘em to admit it was all a lie. Lately, he was kind of obsessed with it. Getting old, I guess. He didn’t believe in that sort of thing, ya see.”

“What sort of thing? I don’t understand.”

She laughed as if to ridicule me, tugged with showy pride on the ends of her silken vest. “An ever present God, stupid!” As she spoke, a black-haired, weedy teenager with wisps of mustache on his upper lip ran out of the house trailing a bloody sword. His eyes were targeted upon me.

“It’s all right, José,” she said. “He’s Master Abraham’s nephew.” To me, she whispered. “It was José who killed him. He’s not much good with a sword. But when a man’s as drunk as a pig in a trough of grapes, it don’t take more than one little skewer and…” She thrust her hands down in imitation of a swordsman delivering a deathblow, grinned, then left me to toss a cloak onto the fire. José acknowledged me with the serious nod of an adolescent who has assumed the role of a protector, and in an eerie, reverent silence, we three watched the garments smoke and twist and blacken. The girl’s expression hardened. She touched her cheeks as if blotting stains. She turned to me. “I’ve other marks on my back, you know. For a year, I was his whipping post. Used to flap his ‘bird’ himself while hitting me if ya know what I mean.” She grinned, “I want to erase the very memory of him.” She took my hand. “You can understand, can’t ya?” When I nodded, she looked at me gravely, pointed to her chest. “Do kabbalists really believe God resides in here?”

“There and everywhere else. And nowhere. God will come to you in a form which you can perceive—clothed as you can see Him. It depends on His grace…and your vision.”

“Then He won’t come to me as a man—I’ve no need for a male God. I’ve already had one, and I hated him! I’ll kill the next male god that shows his ‘purple head’ to me!”

“A female emanation then. Or neither sex. Or both more likely.”

“A woman. Yeah, I’d prefer a woman.” She made a fist, and with gritted teeth, shouted, “I’ll never have another man thrust inside me!” Her look became haughty as she twisted her beret back on. Tucking in her hair, she said, “Grab any of his clothes you want, then go!”

We stared at each other as if to take in the world’s cruelty. In a trembling voice, she said, “Once upon a time there was a happy girl who swam in the Tagus and who was spied from afar and sold by her parents into slavery.” She closed her eyes and folded her arms about her chest, as if comforting her own despair.

I replied, “And a young man who lost his uncle and little brother.”

Her eyes opened in understanding, and we nodded at each other like siblings who must part. The weight of our solidarity held me in place another moment, then I turned and strode away.

Sunset had washed the sky with rosewater and copper. As I surveyed the massive crowd still assembled in the Rossio from afar, Uncle’s hand held the back of my neck. “If you dye your hands red, no one will bother you,” he whispered. I knew what he meant and pulled off the scab which had formed on my shoulder where the boy’s lance had caught me. The blood sluicing out came warm against my fingertips. I coated my hands and arms with it. “Now descend to the river,” Uncle whispered. “Walk along the bank, and to any one who hails you, tell them you are hunting Marranos!”

As I knew I would, I made it home without incident. The shit-stained rug over our trap door was still in place. Yet I descended into the cellar as if into imprisonment. I was young and proud, and such a hideaway only provoked shame.

Cinfa ran to me as I reached the bottom of the stairs and said that only a half-hour before men had stood in the kitchen above them, offering clemency for any Marrano who showed himself. “Don’t go out again!” she begged.

“Judah?” my mother asked breathlessly.

“Nothing,” I replied.

Farid and the little girl with no thumbnail were sleeping under blankets by our desks. Esther was sitting in silence, her profile that of a limestone sculpture.

After I’d comforted Cinfa, I lifted up the prayer rug over Uncle, and as I did, his putrid odor stung my nostrils. Dear God, how long until we can get him into the earth? I thought. I painted him again with myrrh, told myself with each brush stroke: Keep looking at his face; you must remember everything in order to take revenge.

As I chanted to myself, my body, miraculously, began to shed its accumulated frustration, to vibrate and flex with a holy force. Such is the power of Torah—or so advanced were my powers of self-deception, perhaps—that I was growing convinced that it was I who had been chosen to save Israel from Lisbon’s Philistines and that by solving the mystery of Uncle’s murder, I would somehow be turning the key in the door of our salvation. What exactly the connection was between my master’s death and the survival of the Portuguese Jews, I hadn’t a clue at the time.

As I looked up at the leather blinds drawn down over the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall, I wondered again about the killer’s escape. There must be a hidden exit, I thought, a tunnel—some way out that was known only to the threshers. That was why Uncle never wished me to enter the cellar without his permission. I hadn’t yet been initiated into the secrets of our temple.

“Did you bring any food?” Cinfa asked me suddenly. “She’s hungry.”

The little girl with no thumbnail stood by Cinfa, was staring up at me with yearning silence. “I’m sorry, I forgot,” I answered. “I’ll go up now and see what I can find in the store. There must be…”

“No. You sit!” my mother ordered. Her hands were balled into fists and her eyes were flashing. “We wait now until it’s over for good!”

Cinfa and the little girl nibbled on the one matzah I had left. It was blood-stained, but it disappeared all-too-quickly. So hunger accompanied us as well.

Needing something with which to busy my nervous hands, craving to learn the identity of the girl, I took a sheet of paper from our storage cabinet and began to draw her.

Farid awoke maybe an hour later, after I’d finished her face and was beginning the first lines of her hands. Cinfa tapped me on the shoulder and said he was asking for me.

I brought him a cup of water and held it to his lips. He gulped greedily. He was sweating profusely, and his fever had gone up. His pants were stained with flecks of blood and shit. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Something is peeling me open from the inside out. And I’m afraid I couldn’t hold back. My pants… I must stink so bad that even Allah is holding his nose.”

Despite his protests, I cleaned Farid’s behind and thighs, then covered him with his blanket again. We hadn’t any extra pillows, so I buttressed his head with several manuscripts from the genizah. What better purpose for Hebrew writing at this point could there have been?

As he descended into sleep, I sat by myself against the eastern wall, in the spot where I imagined that the girl had begged for her life. I brought my knees up by my chest into a position of self-sufficiency and solitude; something cold and calculating was drawing me away from my family. Was it my longing for vengeance? They talked in whispers now, but I could not. I needed to run, to shout for all to hear that I would avenge my uncle. I could live no more enclosed in murmurs, enchained by coded conversations. My master had been right; the lion of kabbalah inside me would not let me live as a secret Jew any longer.

And so I learned that the spiritual journey for me that Passover would be an unveiling of my own true face.

I returned to my sketch, and for the rest of the hours of light, disappeared into the contours of first the girl, then Uncle. When darkness came, I found I was unable to say evening prayers. The little girl slept between my legs, using my thigh as a pillow. Cinfa huddled with us under a blanket.

In my sleep that night, it was my own screams which came to me; I was tied to the fountain in Rossio Square and baptized with a burning palm branch.

I awoke into darkness with the smell of smoke, thick with memory, permeating my clothes—an impossibility, I know, for the pants and shirt I was wearing had not borne witness to the pyre in the Rossio. From the viewpoint of kabbalah, however, illusions like this are not so easily dismissed, and later I understood the odor as an indication that some part of me had not advanced past Sunday. Now, however, I simply undressed and doused my clothes with fennel water from our storage cabinet. But the odor, stubborn as an engorged tick, clung tight.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. In the darkness, moonglow shapes of yellow and violet started folding around my family and me in icy sheets. Yet their touch was comforting. It was as if we were enveloped in a blanket that sealed our fates together. (How dearly I would have liked to have said, a blanket bequeathed by God, but such poetry was lost to me by then.)

And so, the world reached the early hours of Wednesday morning, the morning before the sixth evening of Passover.

Worry brought me back to Farid. His breathing rose against my fingertips, regular but shallow. I recalled how when we were children, he would cry at the scent of spring rain against the oleander bushes in the courtyard; the sweet smell, to him, was overwhelming.

Yes, he has always been more sensitive than me.

And I remembered then how when Judah was born, he and I had danced our prayers by the river.

Judah… Farid… Uncle Abraham…

Names… Are they arbitrary signs or something more meaningful?

When I was despondent over my forced name change from Berekiah to Pedro, Uncle covered my head with his prayer shawl. “God has many names,” he whispered. “So we who are made in His image should have many as well. And what is beyond your name will always be the same.”

My master told me many times that we were all God’s self-portraits.

Would that even include his killer?

Now that I’d seen a pyre of Jewish flame curling high above the steps of the Dominican Church, you’d think that one life—Uncle’s life—wouldn’t matter so much. Perhaps horror must be localized in a single soul, a diamond of pain.

As my thoughts reached a sudden impasse, I looked up to see dawn light beginning to filter through the window eyelets at the top of the northern wall. I took a sip of water from the jug on the storage cabinet, nodded good morning toward my mother who had just woken. Cinfa was lying asleep against her thigh. My mother’s hands were caressing her hair absently. Esther was sleeping on her chair, her head fallen to her right shoulder, her arms hanging limply. Farid, too, was still asleep. His forehead was burning. I wiped it with water, but he did not wake.

Lifting the prayer rug from the girl, I kneeled by her face and made some final adjustments to my drawing of her; the mouth which I had given her was too wide, too melodramatic.

A sketch of a person is a powerful thing; as I stared at it, her image took on the contours of a talisman bearing her unfulfilled hopes.

A few minutes later, while still engaged in correcting her lips, I heard Reza and her husband, José, calling to us from the courtyard. Mother sat up, and her mouth dropped open. Yet she did not get to her feet. It was as if she could not trust her ears. I ran to them. Cinfa followed.

Reza was opening the trap door when I reached the top of the stairs. I motioned for her to let me climb out. “I looked all over for you!” I said, hugging her. It was good to feel her compact, feminine solidity. And I needed the light and air.

Even so, Reza looked as if she’d been hunted. Her great gray eyes, normally so aristocratic—even distant, some said—were lit with burning anxiety. José hadn’t been to a barber in several days, looked ill, bloated with a kind of restrained terror. His eyes were rimmed by deep, dark circles and his thick red lips were badly chapped.

“You’re okay, Beri?” Reza asked hesitantly.

“Fine, fine. But where have you two been? I went to your house, but there was…”

“We tried to get here, but the way was blocked,” José said, taking my shoulders. “So we left the city for Sobral. Stayed there. Each time we tried to get back till now, the gates…” He shook his head. “We couldn’t risk it.”

Reza removed the toque from her head, asked in an urgent voice, “Is…is everyone here safe?”

“I can’t find Judah,” I replied. My heart throbbed against my chest as if to seek an escape as I added, “And your father, Reza…he’s left his body and returned to God.”

The toque dropped from her fingers. Her eyes opened wide to seek understanding. I moved to take her hands, but she pulled away. I whispered, “What once gave home to your father is lying in the cellar.”

Her face was suddenly white, her eyes glassy. She descended to him as if straining at a yoke.

Downstairs, my mother, Cinfa, José and I stood back as she kneeled to touch hesitant fingers over his form; if death is to be accepted, then it must be met alone for a time.

When she sagged like a child to the floor, I rested my hand atop her hair. I felt her silent tears enter me as if through a whisper. She turned for Esther. “How did it happen, Mother?”

My aunt wouldn’t respond, was still in hiding within herself.

“Do you know if King Manuel has retaken the city?” I asked José.

“Not yet. They say that he is afraid to return. The people are now clamoring for his death.”

Reza prayed over Uncle. When she turned away, Esther rose like a ghost, glided to his body and covered his face again with the prayer rug. She sat back down and returned to stone.

A wall crumbled inside the little girl with no thumbnail when Reza picked her up. She wailed as if her insides were being torn.

“You know her?” I questioned.

“Aviboa. The daughter of my neighbor, Graça. Is she…?”

I shrugged. “The girl was the only one there.”

It was a sin, I know, but as I replied I was thinking: Why could I not have found Judah instead?