The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

Chapter IX

It is near noon on Wednesday—seven hours from the sacred descent of the sixth evening of Passover—and I have done all the drawings I will need.

Reza has assured us that the city has quieted, and so she, José, Cinfa, Aviboa, Mother and I creep upstairs in a line, unsure of our footing, as if returning from a long sojourn abroad. To cool Farid, I walk him to my mother’s room and wash his face with brandy. I hold a compress to his forehead. His eyes cannot resist closing, but he remains awake; fingertips cross my arm over and over again asking for Samir.

Esther has remained below to commune alone with the gloom of the cellar.

We are preparing my master and the girl for burial. We chant our prayers as we wash. Seven times I clean Uncle’s face with cold water, three with warm. And as it is written, we cleanse first his stomach, then his shoulders, arms, neck, genitals, toes, fingers, eyes and nostrils.

A warm tide of sadness and joy sweeps over me as I hold the marble hands of Uncle’s old armor; he has escaped to God. Then I am alone again with a murdered man. Insight comes in flashes, says the Zohar. And so it is.

The slit which splits his neck has turned black. The blood has clotted to a ceramic crust.

Four times I wash his fingers, and yet they are still dyed with ink. Just as it should be for an artist meeting God.

Aunt Esther takes a scissors to her hair and places her hennaed locks upon his chest.

Which Hebrew poet was it who said that a widow’s clipped hair consists of tears of blood drawn into filaments?

When my master is dressed in his white robes, Mother sprinkles the symbolic dust of Jerusalem over his eyes and private parts.

I hold Cinfa’s hand as she says goodbye. “We’ll never see him again,” she nods to me. Her weary, bloodshot eyes are wide open and curious, not sad or frightened.

“Not like this,” I agree. “When you next see Uncle, it will be when he holds out his hands to you and welcomes you to God.”

My confident words belie a stiff terror which forces my eyelids closed; I have forgotten the feel of my master’s embrace.

We lay him upon his prayer shawl, then cover him with the linen shroud Reza and Mother have sewn.

When his face disappears from me for the last time, my eyes close to capture him in their darkness. He is only a violet shadow now; I cannot summon his glow. Will he fade until I can no longer even summon his voice?

We wash the girl with no less care. Reza helps now; she has sent Aviboa to play with Roseta in the courtyard.

Brites, our laundress, appears suddenly at the kitchen door. Gifted with an optimistic nature, she generally has a bright sweet face. Today, however, she is glum and hoarse-voiced. In her cart is our last load of laundry, cleaned and pressed. She has brought us a salted hide of codfish the length of a man’s arm.

We kiss, and there is no need to talk. The silence of our solidarity sits in my chest like a heavy stone. “I called for you in the night,” she finally whispers.

“We couldn’t answer. But thank you.” My lips press to her cheek again, then I leave her and mother to mingle their tears together.

There are no coffins to be bought in our neighborhood, no New Christian carpenters left alive to work. And I refuse to pay an Old Christian for this. So we carry Uncle and the girl in their shrouds into the cart I’ve borrowed from Dr. Montesinhos’ widow. The donkey belongs to Brites; she insisted on the loan. When I protested, she whispered, “Please, Beri, you could be my child.”

The urge to draw away from the present tense into a happier past tugs hard at me. I must fight it to perform my religious duties. And more importantly, to find Uncle’s killer.

Esther sits in the cart atop a wooden stool, her lands folded in her lap, her hair chopped at hopeless angles. Mother, Reza and I walk beside the donkey. We leave Lisbon to the east. Christian eyes without questions watch us as we depart; everyone knows our mission. Cinfa remains at home with José, Reza’s husband.

Many Jews have made their way to the Quinta das Amendoas—the Almond Farm, as we call the large property centered by a haunting tower of weathered limestone about two miles east of the city. Aaron Poejo, the owner, was a mountain Jew from Bragança who moved here because his Algarvian bride was shivering to death in that frigid north-eastern climate. To remind him of home, they brought along almond and chestnut saplings and rooted them here. The original cottage, now no more than waist-high rows of cragged stone, was abandoned in favor of an octagonal storage tower following one of Poejo’s visions. Apparently, he saw long-haired blond seafarers in iron masks sacking Lisbon and setting fire to all of its Jewish quarters. The crude structure was redesigned with a third floor belfry to be used as a lookout sight; from there, as Farid and I discovered one day on a mission of childhood espionage, one can see the Tagus and its own granite lookout towers, get an advance warning of attack. The irony, of course, is that years later, during the conversion, Poejo’s wife was stoned to death by dark and squat neighbors whom they’d known for years. In any case, as the story goes, Poejo and his two daughters tried in vain to knock down their tower-home the night his wife was killed. In the morning, exhausted, desperate, they hollowed a great chestnut trunk, hauled the woman up and buried her inside. Although the trunk has filled in over the years, that tree, directly south of the tower, grows with mottled and denuded branches even today, as if poisoned by remorse. It is said, too, to give off a rotten stench on Yom Kippur. Hence the farm’s local notoriety as a place of arcane power fitting for those martyred for Judaism.

As for Poejo, after his wife’s burial, he and his daughters collected cuttings once again, continued south right across the Algarve, survived the sea crossing and settled in Morocco near Tetuán. In consequence, the almond trees of the Quinta das Amendoas, like so many in Portugal, have long gone untended. Yet today, as we pass, we can see that their green fruit have defied neglect, have sprouted like musical notes in the scruffy, overgrown branches.

From Little Jerusalem and the Judiaria Pequena, even the small Jewish street on the other side of town near the Carmelite Church, we drag our dead. A few have donkey carts like us. Most have folded their loved ones into wooden wheelbarrows.

Our elders direct us to the fields that have not been used in the past for graves. I nod my solidarity to all who pass but do not talk except to ask after Judah and the two living threshers—Father Carlos and Diego Gonçalves. No one has seen them.

I dig two pits with the help of three Moorish laborers who’ve come to earn extra money. They have silent black eyes and ask no questions.

Reza insists on helping. “Beri, I need to do something,” she says. “The world starts caving in every time I sit still.” She stares up at me with lost eyes and chews nervously on the ends of her hair, a habit from childhood she has regained.

For Uncle, Mother chooses a spot by a young almond tree whose candelabrum arms are upraised in prayer toward the turquoise sky. The girl has found rest by a broad cork tree whose branches unfurl like the arms of a welcoming grandfather.

The scribe Isaac Ibn Farraj chants with us. He is here burying Moses Almal’s head; it seems that Isaac was the lunatic who had raced in front of the pyre in the Rossio to steal his friend’s last vestige from the flames and spare his ghost from a wandering afterlife in the Lower Realms. “I’ve seen enough Christians for one lifetime,” he confides to me. “I’m learning Turkish. It’s easy, written with Arabic characters. I’m going to get on the first boat to Salonika I can find. They say it’s becoming a Jewish city. Anyway, I suggest you do the same.”

“And what of your home here?”

“Pretty soon all our friends will be gone from Portugal anyway. And believe me, I won’t make the same mistake Lot’s wife made!”

Thinking of the note which slipped from Diego’s turban, which mentioned the name “Isaac,” I ask, “Before the riot, did you set up any special meeting with Diego Gonçalves the printer?”

“Not that I recall.”

“And the twenty-ninth of this month, this coming Friday—does it mean anything special to you?”

Isaac scratches the white, fungus-like hairs on his chin and folds out his lower lip. “Beri,” he says, “I can see you’re in trouble and need help. But you’ll have to talk plainer if you want me to understand.” He takes my hand, and his eyes focus upon me with tenderness.

It suddenly seems ridiculous to have suspected him of being the Isaac mentioned in the note; he has never had any connections to the threshing group, nor any reason for antagonism toward Uncle. I realize that I’m beginning to mistrust everyone. “Never mind,” I say. At my request, he then tries to revive Esther by beseeching her in Persian. She replies with eyes of glass.

Seven times I circle Uncle’s grave praying. As it should be for a Ba’al Shem, Master of the Divine Name. My Hebrew prayer voice, rising and falling like water across walls of weathered sandstone, seems to originate in an ancient past. Forced to walk, I leave my family to bury Senhora Rosamonte’s hand below a lemon tree. With my thanks, I take her aquamarine ring as her last gift and place it in my pouch with Diego’s message and the girl’s wedding band; it may one day redeem the life of another swallow taken by Pharaoh.

On my way back to my family, I pause for a moment to place the palm of my hand flat against the trunk of a massive cork tree whose valuable bark has recently been peeled away. For some reason, perhaps to better feel the power of the verdant giant, I close my eyes. Immediately, a great light sets the darkness ablaze with an orange-black fire and a humid warmth seems to pass right through me. A great rustling of leaves comes to me from high above, as if an eagle or heron has alighted on a topmost branch. “Yes, we are here,” comes Uncle’s voice. “But do not open your eyes. Our radiance would overwhelm you.”

As I squeeze my eyelids closed in protection, he says, “Berekiah, the bark of a tree is not merely a symbol to be used in poetry. It is a real presence which shares the Lower Realms with you. It grows, it dies, and it can be removed by a woodsman. Feel your hand meeting the solidity which lies beneath such bark.”

I squeeze the trunk between my hands, sense a fluid power rising from the earth up through my legs and into my head.

“You have been drawn to this tree because it has reminded you that a mask can be something other than a metaphor,” he says. “It can be a real adornment, as well.”

As I think, Please, Uncle, address me as simply as you can, he replies in a tone of anger: “We speak in the language of the Upper Realms and know of no other way to converse!” Regaining a tone of compassion, he continues: “Remember, our shadow is your light. Our simplest clarity is your greatest paradox. Berekiah, listen. You must never send your illuminations with a courier who doesn’t recognize himself in his mirror from one day to the next. And remember the eyesight of he who speaks with ten tongues.”

At that, there is a quivering in my hands and a flapping sound from above. The blazing darkness behind my eyelids fades to gray; the bird—Uncle—has flown away. Opening my eyes, I stare through the empty canopy of branches above into the great blue sky.

His words repeat inside me: Never send your illuminations with a courier who doesn’t recognize himself in his mirror from one day to the next. Was he referring to a man with no self-knowledge? Or someone without memory, perhaps, who has sought to leave behind his past, to deny its existence. A man who cannot recognize himself because he does not wish to recall the personal history which helped to make him who he is today.

And remember the eyesight of he who speaks with ten tongues. Farid. Uncle could only have been referring to his fingers—his ten tongues. My master meant for me to count on his discernment in learning the identity of this man who could not even recognize himself.

For a moment, I am tempted to pray over the vellum ribbon on my wrist for my master to visit me again, to give me a clearer answer in the language of the Lower Realms. Deep in my gut, however, I fear entering the realm of practical kabbalah; Uncle must have had his reasons for speaking to me in riddles.

“Beri!” It is Mother, calling to me from across the field.

As I start toward her, I think: More and more, the world is intruding on my inner life of contemplation. Just as Uncle knew it would.

After Reza and I wash our hands in a nearby creek, we leave the Almond Farm right away; I am afraid for Farid’s life. And the Old Christians could descend like locusts at any time.

Just before reaching home, I jump down from the cart to enquire about Father Carlos at St. Peter’s Church. There is still no sign of him, and his apartment remains locked. So I climb the streets and outdoor stairways of the Alfama to Diego’s townhouse. The cobbler who helped me avoid capture the day before hails me from his doorway, nods for me to come to him. “Don’t go in,” he whispers.

“Why?”

“A man came looking for your friend Diego. He left a little while ago. But he’s been here before, watching. He may be here even now. Hiding, waiting. Just smile and nod at me, then go away.”

I do him one better and feign a laugh, then ask, “Who is this man?”

“I don’t know. A Northerner. Blond, strong.”

I bow my thanks and leave, my steps repeating the question: Could the same man who killed Uncle now be hunting Diego?

At home, hard-boiled eggs are being prepared for lunch by Reza. Of course, cooking should be a neighbor’s duty during our initial mourning period of seven days, but there is no one left who isn’t grieving. All the ceramic debris has been swept from the kitchen into the courtyard, the floor mopped. Even the leg of our table which had been knocked off has been nailed in place.

“Brites did it while we were gone,” Reza explains. “She’s cleaning the store now with the others.”

“Esther’s with her, too?” I ask.

“No, she’s sitting vigil over Farid in your mother’s room.”

“And Aviboa?”

“Yes, she’s helping clean up, is sticking close to Cinfa.” Reza chews on the ends of her hair and sighs. “I’m going to have to adopt her, you know. I can’t leave her to fend for herself. Graça, her mother, was a widow and an only child.”

“Is she Jewish?”

Reza’s eyes flash. “A four-year-old girl? Who are you, Berekiah Zarco, to ask such a question about an orphan? You think kids are born knowing Hebrew or something? What difference could it possibly…”

“Reza, you misunderstand me. I don’t care. It’s just that it could create complications.”

“I live with nothing but complications.” She sighs again, brushes her hand against my arm as an apology. “Her father was a New Christian, Graça was Old.”

“It’s safer not to tell my mother that…for now, at least.”

As Reza nods, I kiss her cheek. Caressing open the door to my mother’s room, I find Farid lying on his side under two heavy blankets, shivering. Aunt Esther sits on her stool by the foot of the bed, still staring at nothing, her hands folded in her lap. I kiss her cool forehead.

A rumpled and bloodstained sheet has been pulled from the bed, is tucked against the wall.

Farid’s eyes open, but he does not smile or acknowledge me in any way. I take a woolen blanket from my bed and cover him with yet another layer, kneel beside him, move to take his hand. He waves me away. “It could be plague,” he signals.

“Your gestures are stronger,” I lie. We lock fingers, and his eyes close again. I sit picturing map-contours of Portugal, Greece and Turkey as if shapes on a chessboard where my family and I serve as pawns.

When Farid’s shivering subsides and he falls asleep, I caress his hair for a time. Grabbing the stained sheet and balling it up beneath my arm, I tiptoe out and across my bedroom to hide his incontinence from my mother, fearing that she may demand that the family abandon him because of his worsening illness. Reza starts when she sees me, but her subsequent stare denotes solidarity. Behind an oleander bush to the side of our outhouse, I hide the sheet. Later, I will tell Brites that it is there and to be careful of the evil essences it has absorbed when washing it.

Lacking vinegar, I clean my hands with black soap and water, go to the cellar and write my list of suspects—beginning with the two remaining threshers—on a piece of vellum in micrographic letters forming Uncle’s name:

Father Carlos.

Diego Gonçalves.

Rabbi Losa.

Miguel Ribeiro.

With my last stroke, I think: the girl we have buried will point like a vane toward the correct name.

I take my drawing of her, slip my hammer inside my pouch and walk to all the bakeries in the Alfama and Graça neighborhoods, sensing that she is the key, that if I can find her identity, I will also learn who it was who destroyed my future.

Now that calm has returned, my eyes see that Lisbon has become a city of staring Christian eyes, of garbage and dung, of splintered wood and bloody stone. None of a half-dozen bakers or their assistants whom I question knows the girl. I cut down past the cathedral and head into Little Jerusalem. Stores are closed, streets littered with refuse. Women sweep blood from their stoops. A burnt bed sits smoldering right in the middle of the Synagogue Square as if waiting for its owner. Simon Kol’s bakery behind the Riverside Palace is boarded up. I slip around the side, past a pile of rotten cabbages and onions being picked through by feral cats, one of whom has furry testicles swollen to the size of lemons. When I pound on Master Kol’s personal entrance, he peers down from a window. His unshaven cheeks and bewildered eyes are the symptoms of the illness we all share. “Pedro Zarco?” he asks. When I nod, he points to his courtyard. I wait at the gate. As he lets me in, he hugs and kisses me. His chest heaves like a bellows as he sobs.

He is dressed in the coarse linen of mourning. “Kiri?” I whisper, naming his only living child with the same, trespassing fear as I would a secret name of God.

“Yes,” he answers. We hold hands. “How’s your family?” he asks.

“Uncle Abraham is dead.”

Simon gasps. “How could he have…”

His words trail off because we both know that in this world even a gaon, a genius, a man of wonders can be killed by a simple blade.

To my question about Judah, he shakes his head. “Many are missing,” he says. “And they will never be found. Swallowed by Leviathan. And mark my words,” he says in a prophetic voice, “the monster will only be sated when it has taken all of us. Wait and see!”

I hand him my drawing. “This girl…ever see her? I think she may work in a bakery.”

He squints. “Looks a little like Meda Forjaj when she was young,” he says. “Same sloping eyebrows that come together over the bridge of her nose. Like butterfly wings. But I don’t know her.”

“Who’s Meda Forjaj?”

“Fled Little Jerusalem about the time of the conversion. But she’d be about fifty by now. A widow. Couldn’t be her.”

“Where’d she move?”

“Out near Belem, I think.” Belem was the nearby town from which the Portuguese caravels left for Africa, India and the New World. “I think she was hoping to meet a rich explorer if you know what I mean,” Simon adds. He shrugs, gestures that he makes no judgment. “We do what we need to in order to survive.”

“A woman her age—she can’t earn a living just from that,” I say.

“Her husband imported woolens from Flanders. She helped out, kept the books. Maybe she takes in sewing like your mother.”

“Thanks.” We hug lightly, as if afraid to admit we may be parting forever. “You won’t open your bakery again, will you,” I observe.

Simon shakes his head. “I no longer want to feed this country,” he says. “A bleeder,” he whispers. “Its a much better profession for Portugal.”

The collective gaze of the Old Christians massed at St. Catherine’s Gate chills the hairs at the back of my neck, but this readiness of my body to break into flight is unnecessary; their eyes are calm, their breathing easy. Their fear of plague and drought and all the myriad demons who rule their knotted thoughts has been purged, at least for the moment.

I reach the outskirts of Belem in less than an hour. Here, hundreds of Africans and day laborers ruled by the whip are hard at work building a monumental new monastery for King Manuel that should take well into the next century to complete.

A ragpicker in soiled pants points me to a local bakery. A lean woman with an accusing, bitter face meets me at the door. “Can I help you, Senhor?” she asks in harsh, Castilian-edged Portuguese.

From her accent, I know that she is a Castilian New Christian, one of the thousands who fled here after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jews in fourteen ninety-two. In her fierce eyes, I see that she loathes being seen with a compatriot. I show her my drawing. “I’m looking for this girl.”

She turns her back to me and begins transferring buns from wooden pallets into sacks.

“Its important,” I add.

“If you’ve nothing to order, then leave.”

“She’s dead,” I say. “I’d like to tell her parents.”

She turns, and mistrust gives her a squint. “She’s Senhora Monteiro’s girl. Why do…”

“And Senhora Monteiro lives…?” I interrupt; I’ve no more patience for fear, even that which belongs to a Jew.

“Down the street, on the right. A house with yellow trim. But it might be better…”

“Tell me, does Senhora Monteiro have any relation to Meda Forjaj?”

“Her sister-in-law,” she replies. “How did you…?”

“Eyebrows like spreading butterfly wings. And the memory of an old Jew.”

Down the street, a dwarfish, fish-eyed woman with a scaly, leathery face glares up at me from her door as if I’ve interrupted a card game. She wears a ragged wig made from waxed, black-linen thread.

“Are you Senhora Monteiro?” I ask.

“Who wants to know?”

“My name would mean nothing to you.” I hand her my sketch. “Do you recognize this girl?”

“It’s Teresa. What are you doing with this?”

Her husband, a squat, rabbit-like man, appears at the back of the house. He is soiled with white powder, perhaps quicklime, and puffs rise from his bare fat feet as he strides toward us. Above his sleepy dark eyes sprout winged brows.

The woman says, “This man’s got a drawing of Teresa. Look.”

His jaw drops as if he’s never seen artwork—or as if he understands. When I force out clinging words about her death, fists raise to his cheeks. Tears gush in his eyes. When I reach for him, Senhora Monteiro intercepts my wrist. “What are you saying?!” she demands.

“She was killed in the riot in Lisbon. On Sunday.”

The Senhora’s hand muffles her gasp. Terrified eyes focus inside. Silence seals the three of us together till she screams, “I knew it would come to this! Killed with those Jews, wasn’t she?!”

Her husband shoves her, runs back into the house before I can answer. She crashes up against the wall and crumples to the ground. “You bastard!” she shrieks. She cackles, spits after him.

I help the Senhora to her feet, retrieve my drawing from the ground. She has no tears to give, so I say, “She was killed in the Judiaria Pequena. Do you know what she was doing there?”

She snatches my drawing from me and surveys it as if forming a criticism. “That’s her all right. You make this?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Artist, huh? Filthy goat should never have run off. But girls from mixed marriages…cause that’s what she was, you know…I’m not Jewish. Thank God.” She waves toward the back of the house as if shooing away a fly. “He’s a Jew…was, I mean. It’s the mixed blood. Makes girls want a man as soon as they start to bleed. The moon, it causes friction, they say, in the children of mixed marriages.” She rubs her filthy, callused hands together. “All that swirling of blood, the pure with the tainted.” She shakes her head. “You got talent, you know. You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“I was. Now I’m just trying to survive. Like pretty much everyone else in this dungheap.”

Her stare is fixed by inflamed contempt. I try to remember that she, too, is an emanation of God, a ripple from the sapphire of love he cast eons ago into our world. I see only the spittle on her lips and her raven-black wig. “Do you mind telling me what Teresa was doing in the Little Jewish Quarter?” I ask.

“Aren’t you listening? She was getting it between her legs! Wanted a bird that was circumcised!” She sees her tone bothers me, laughs, makes her hand flap. “Liked the way it felt when a big fat Jew-quail hopped all the way up her and began spreading its…”

“Who’s her husband?” I interrupt.

“An importer with lots of brains, big balls, too, they say. Furry…like wool. Only tasting like Moroccan dates.” She licks her lips greedily. “But no money. You don’t all have a talent for making money. Hah! I found that out twice in my life! That husband of mine… And now Teresa’s.” She shakes her head and frowns. “Name’s Manuel Monchique. You’d think she could at least have found one who…”

My heart seems to pound through my chest. Of course, I think, Uncle’s former student—Teresa was his Old Christian bride!

We’d learned only a month before that Manuel had obtained a card of pure blood from the King, effectively erasing the “stain” of his Jewish past. Uncle had recently insulted him on Temple Street because of this seeming betrayal. Now, framed inside Senhora Monteiro’s revelation, this confrontation appears dyed with sinister colors.

Cold fingertips brush against my arm. I focus again into the present tense, see that Senhora Monteiro is grinning up at me, has lifted up her skirt and is pounding her hand between her legs. I tug off her wig, toss it to the floor behind her. Underneath, sickly tufts of gray hair sprout from a louse-infested scalp.

Her clucking laugh accompanies my escape. The streets of Belem, then outer Lisbon open to me, yet I seem to race only into the mystery of my master’s murder. Maybe Manuel had found Teresa with Uncle, taken his knife and…

And yet, a high barrier blocks my way toward an answer; how would Manuel have learned of the location of our trap door and genizah?

Blessed be He who opens the arms of grace; I discover the São Lourenço Gate to the north of the city guarded only by a lazy rabble. Marching through, I skirt the scruffy hillside that holds aloft the battlements of the Moorish Castle and descend quickly to the Alfama; I must check on Farid again before confronting Manuel Monchique. My mother meets me in the kitchen. Diego stands behind her. The gash across his chin is now obscured by several days’ growth of beard, the stitches barely visible. His saffron-colored turban crowns his head. He stares at me over his broad nose as if hoping to glean my thoughts, limps to me like a wounded dog. We hug. But the knowledge that he could have conspired against my master gives me the careful, self-conscious movements of a bad actor.

“I’m so sorry about your uncle,” he says. “And to have been killed by the Christian rabble, it’s almost too much to believe possible.”

Diego’s words are unable to penetrate the rigid gates I erect around myself; not only do I not trust him, but I now see that a stranger stands at the corner of the room by the hearth, and I cannot allow my ripped soul to be seen. A barrel-chested, stone-faced man in the coarse livery of a mercenary, he holds the handle of his sheathed sword with both hands and is fixed at attention. I nod questioningly in his direction.

“My bodyguard,” Diego answers.

“New Christian?”

“Yes. With a card of pardon. I figured that was safer. And now that the mob has killed your uncle and so many others, I think…”

“My master was murdered by a Jew!” I declare.

“What?”

“Uncle’s throat was slit as if by a shohet.”

It is the first time my mother has heard my reasoning. She reaches out for the table as if the world is receding from her.

Diego gasps for breath. He covers his mouth with his hands as if seeking to prevent the possibility of such treason from entering him.

Does he manifest the shock of an innocent philosopher or the dramatic flare of a murderer?

“But why would a Jew take your uncle’s life?!” he demands.

“Maybe jealousy, maybe robbery,” I lie, wishing to test his reaction.

My mother suddenly shouts, “What in God’s name are you talking about, Berekiah?! How could you believe that one of our own people would take my brother’s life?!” Her voice possesses that hysterical tone which indicates that she is but one step away from accusing me of being a bad Jew.

I gulp water from a jug on the mantle, stare into her eyes and say, “A manuscript was stolen. No Old Christian even knew that we had any in the house.”

My mother begins pulling at her hair.

“Are you sure?” Diego asks.

When I nod, he takes my arm. “From where was the manuscript taken?”

“From the cellar.”

“He had books in the cellar! What are you…”

“His last Haggadah,” I explain.

“He was keeping Hebrew books?”

“Yes.”

“Had he lost his mind?!”

Either Diego is skilled at feigning ignorance or he really hadn’t yet been fully initiated into the threshing group, hadn’t yet learned of the genizah. I will have to check with Father Carlos, if he is still alive. And yet, what if he lies in order to implicate his brother philosopher?

“He was smuggling the books out of Portugal,” I tell Diego. “Saving them from flames.”

“Dear God. With whom?!” he demands.

“Don’t know. Listen, when did you last see Uncle?”

“Last Friday. At the hospital. You were there. Why are you…”

“And Sunday?” I ask. “Did you see him then?”

“No. What are all these questions about?”

“I’m trying to trace his movements,” I lie. “Where were you from Sunday until now?”

“Hiding. With a friend.” Diego’s expression hardens into the look he gets before delivering a stern lecture. “Berekiah, I think you need to explain yourself. What makes you think that…”

“I don’t have to explain myself to anyone!” I answer rudely. “Uncle’s death gives me new rights, and one of them is to be able to disregard that surly face you’re now hoping to subdue me with. Judge me if you want. Frown, pray, invoke Torah against me. I don’t care.”

“You should care. What if…”

“Be quiet, Diego! Just tell me if you know who the man is who has been making enquiries about you at your apartment?”

“What man?! What are you talking…”

“When I went to look for you this morning, your neighbor across the street, the cobbler, he told me that a man had been enquiring after you…blond, strong…a Northerner, perhaps.”

Diego’s eyes betray terror.

I ask, “Do you know why someone would be following you?”

“No,” he whispers. He takes my shoulders, grips them hard. “Unless…unless the same man is after me who killed your uncle!”

“Yes, I thought of that. But why would anyone want both of you dead?”

He shakes his head.

“Think!”

“There’s nothing!” he moans. “What could we know that…”

“Had Uncle mentioned any special book he’d discovered? Anything at all?”

He shakes his head. I take out my drawing of the girl murdered with Uncle. “And her?” I ask, unscrolling the sketch for him. “Do you recognize her?”

“Never. Who is she?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I put the drawing back in my pouch. “How about Dom Miguel Ribeiro? What do you know of him?”

“He’s a nobleman, isn’t he? The son of old Rodrigo Ribeiro, if I recall correctly.”

“Yes. Did Uncle mention him?” I ask.

“Not to me. But Beri, you must have other clues to the killer’s identity. What did you find in the cellar? Anything that would indicate this Northerner who’s been looking for me? I must know. If he’s after me, then I will have to…”

“Nothing,” I lie, unwilling to trust him just yet with the knowledge of what I’d discovered. I turn away from his skeptical eyes toward my mother. She stares into the fire dancing in the hearth. I pat her arm. “How’s Farid?” I ask gently.

She turns to me with startled eyes and says, “Berekiah, I need to know more. Was the Haggadah the only book stolen?”

“Yes, I think so. Now how’s Farid been doing?”

“Don’t you think we should…”

“Mother, just tell me how Farid…”

She pulls in her chin and turns away in defiance.

“You’re insane!” I shout. “All your ‘shoulds’ and proper ways of being. What good has it done you?!”

Tears well in her eyes and she says with desperate force, “How could you treat me like this when Judah…?”

“Go sing it to the goats!” I yell. I march away from her and Diego, realize with a mixture of aching regret and pleasure that it is I who have started this argument. Uncle’s death has released me from my past personality and my future, and it seems that rage and frustration are all that I have left of my inheritance.

I peer in on Farid in my mother’s room. He sleeps, breathes in jerks and starts as if possessed by nightmare. I rub his neck and arms with a wet towel till his inner-struggle calms. Hollowed by fear for his safety, I march out of the house.

“Where are you going?!” my mother calls after me.

“Out!”

Diego exhorts me to stop, limps to me by the courtyard gate, rubs the stubble on his cheeks thoughtfully. He says, “If you’re right about your uncle, then perhaps you’re in danger, too.”

“It’s of no importance. No Old Christian will ever hurt me again.” Staring into his eyes, I add, “Or Jew, for that matter!”

He reaches tenderly for my arm. “So innocent you are, my son. You don’t know what they can do. Berekiah, I think you and your family should just pack up and leave. That’s what I’m doing. I’m settling business matters, selling what I can and then getting away any way I can. The King won’t dare to stop us now that…”

“Peace be with you,” I interrupt, then remember the note that belongs to him. I lift it from my pouch, press it into his hand. “This fell from your turban when you were lying on the cobbles. I’m afraid it got a little stained with blood from Senhora Rosamonte. I’m sorry.”

Diego reads it, nods his understanding. “Yes, Isaac. An acquaintance from Andalusia. From Ronda. Reminding myself to meet him on that date. My memory is not what it once was. Your uncle knew him.”

“And Madre?”

“The Fountain of the Mother of God. It was to be our meeting place. We were…” His words trail off and he grabs my arm as if clenched by fear. “But now maybe I understand! Isaac talked about selling your uncle a book! I assumed it was in Castilian, but now that you say he was keeping Hebrew books…”

“When?”

“A few days before his…before Sunday. We met here. You were in the store, I guess. Isaac said he owned a copy of Judah Ha-Levi’s ‘Book of the Khazars’ and your uncle inhaled as if scenting myrtle.”

“I’d very much like to meet him,” I say.

“I’ll try to locate him and bring him by tonight after dinner.”

When I thank him, Diego adds, “Maybe it doesn’t pay to go around Lisbon right now. You should…”

I wave him away, exit through the courtyard gate and start down the Rua de São Pedro. When I take a last look back, I see Diego’s head bobbing above the courtyard wall as he limps back to the kitchen. What if the boys who’d stoned him had been in the pay of someone, another thresher perhaps?

There are no accidents and no coincidences, I hear my uncle say. Everything possesses significance.

A man in white hops out suddenly from a doorway and thrusts a leather book in front of my face. My knife is already at his throat as he begins to scream my name. “Beri! What are you doing?!”

I lower my blade; it is only António Escaravelho and his worm-eaten New Testament. A former Jewish councilman and silversmith of astounding dexterity, he became a fervent Christian after the forced conversion and an even more fervent lunatic a short time later.

António reeks like old garbage. His gray beard is crusted with dirt, and his tan, leathery skin is riddled with red blisters. His gospels exude the smell of cardamon and dung, an unsympathetic combination. I hold my nose.

“God be with you,” he crows, as I put my dagger away. He winks his mad, darting eyes, presses his book up to my chin as if correcting my posture.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep accosting me like this,” I answer. I push the gospels down to his side and sigh at the sight of lice eggs dotting his frayed ropes of hair. Hoping that he can point me further along the trail to my uncle’s murderer, I ask, “Were you in your usual spot near my house when the riot began?”

He disregards my question, replies with a toothless grin, “I’ve petitioned again to go to Rome and see the Pope. It seems that this time I may get my exit card.”

“You’re not still at it!” I shout, for he’d been asking to leave Portugal for years. The King’s decree of the twentieth of April, fourteen ninety-nine, had closed all borders to New Christians.

“Indeed I am!” he exclaims as if hurt by my implication of hopelessness. “And you must join me, my boy. You and Master Abraham!”

“No more journeys for my master,” I whisper to myself, unwilling to risk António’s reaction to his death. With a smile of wistful sadness, I remember that my uncle always used to tell him, “Why make such a long journey to a man so short on holiness?!” To my surprise, I repeat to the beggar another phrase of Uncle’s, “The very thought of seeing the Pope makes my scalp itch.”

So will I now begin to imitate my master’s words? Is that how I will keep him with me?

António observes, “I think you would find a trip to Pope Julius II most liberating. The Moslems throughout the Italian peninsula are friendly, they say.”

Moslems in Italy? I figure the drought has parched his sense of geography. “Listen closely, my friend, were you here Sunday, the first day of the riot?” I question again.

“Nearby…hidden,” he replies. He raises a finger to his lips. “With a four-legged friend.”

“Could you see the gate to our courtyard?”

“Yes,” he replies. “From the cobbles to the sky, it’s all part of the…”

“And did you see anyone enter? Maybe with a knife…or a rosary. Manuel Monchique perhaps? You remember him, one of my uncle’s old students.”

“There may have been a dragon-fly or two,” he says. “And some toads. It’s not always easy to spot them when they hop inside the…”

“But a man?” When he shakes his head, I say, “You’re sure? How about Diego Gonçalves? You know him, he’s a printer…a friend of my uncle’s.”

“No.”

“What about Father Carlos? Or Rabbi Losa?”

He shakes his head after I pronounce each name. It seems that the killer must have entered and exited through our fruit store—or through my mother’s separate entrance to Temple Street. “Then peace be with you,” I tell him, and bow my departure.

As I start away, he screeches, “Have you no lamb from Passover? There’s a hole in my stomach bigger than the one in my soul!”

“Go to see Cinfa,” I call back. “She’ll give you all the fruit you want.”

“Bless you, my boy.”

Ahead, mendicants are clamoring by the cathedral wall; despite threats of death made by the Crown, one of the cows let loose by the King has been slaughtered. A wiry man is slicing its skin away with a rusty sword while a juggler drenched in sweat entrances a group of waifs and dogs by whirling three of its bloody hooves in the air.

Around the corner, Manuel Monchique’s house remains silent to my knocks. The shutter of a window suddenly opens just a whisper. “It’s Pedro Zarco,” I call, using my Christian first name for safety. When no one answers, I slip around the side. Tossing my hammer over the wall to their courtyard, I pry my body up and over. Manuel’s elfin mother stands at the back doorway, robed in black, gripping a blue ceramic pitcher in gnarled hands. She has the expectant look of a frightened animal, a tanned face puckered by age. “It’s me, Pedro,” I say. “I went to school with Manuel for a time. My uncle is Master Abraham.” When I pick up my hammer, she tosses her pitcher at me. It breaks into in two perfect pieces by my feet. She rushes inside.

Manuel comes to the doorway draped in a black-fringed scarlet cloak. The blade of a sword held straight up in both his hands splits my vision of his ruddy, youthful face. He seems just another of the great wonders of this era of falsehood with which we’ve been burdened; one would never guess that he’d been the kind of oversensitive boy whose eyes watered at the slightest trace of wind, forever doubled over from the meagerest chase through the woods after his beloved butterflies. Now, he puffs up his chest like a pheasant, designs a letter yod in the air with the tip of his sword and says in a false voice of command, “I don’t know what debt you think you’ve come to collect, but you won’t get anything from me or my family!”

“You can go sing it to the goats, too,” I say. “Save all your Christian bravado for the virgins you seduce on Yom Kippur. I come only with this.” Lifting the scrolled drawing from my pouch, I toss it to him. “Take a look, my brave and handsome crusader for Christ.”

Manuel kneels, picks up my sketch with a wary hand. Immediately, his eyes light with surprise. As if I’ve handed him stolen property, he asks, “Where’d you get this?!”

“I drew it.”

“You’ve seen her?” He sheaths his sword, rushes to me. Reaching for my hands as a friend again, he asks, “Where? When? Is she all right?”

“Manuel, I’m sorry…she’s dead. Murdered at our house.”

When I explain, his touch grows cold. Disbelief echoes inside his quivering breathing. Either he has a talent for lying or this is the first he has heard of her death. “It couldn’t have been her,” he says. “Even your hand might confuse an eye, the curve of a chin, a…”

“Is she a laundress or a baker?” I question.

“Neither,” he smiles. “It’s the wrong…”

When I take her ring of braided gold filaments from my pouch, he grabs it from me. The certainty in his voice falters. “It’s the right kind. But really, it doesn’t prove anything. I know other women who have rings just like it.”

“Her hands smelled of olive oil, rosemary and lemon oil. She had ash stains. And two indentations on her temples. Like the marks made…”

The blood descends from Manuel’s face. He kneels to keep from fainting. As if giving way to sleep, he closes his eyes and begins to weep. When he has his breath, he says, “Candles… She works with Master Bento. They make scented candles together. With floral essences. When the wax has cooled, they’re coated with olive oil to keep them fresh.”

“And the indentations?”

Manuel nods. “At birth. The midwife had to pry her out. With a forceps. She wouldn’t come. Afraid to take first steps, she was. So very timid, as if the world were a steep, descending staircase into a dungeon. I was helping her see that there was a garden below. I was helping her walk to it. We were…we…”

As I wait for his tears to end, I consider the impossibility of a shy girl found naked with my uncle after making love.

Manuel suddenly says in a limp voice, “How was she killed? Was she violated by the Christians?”

“I don’t know if she was raped. I don’t think so. But, Manuel, her throat was cut.”

“Dear God…” His buries his head in his hands for a time. When he looks up, he says, “I…I suppose you’ve already buried her.”

“We couldn’t wait any longer. I’m sorry. At the Almond Farm. I will show you the exact spot when I can. And we will say a kaddish together for her. But do you have any idea what was she doing in my neighborhood?”

“She left the house on Sunday to visit Tomás, her brother. He lives near you. She must have run from the mob and found her way to your place by accident.”

“Did she know my uncle?” I ask.

“She knew of him, of course. But they never met that I know of.”

“How about any of the members of Uncle’s threshing group… Diego, Father Carlos?”

“I don’t think she’d even heard of them.”

“And did she consider herself a Jew?”

He shakes his head. “Not really. Mosaic law about the mother having to be Jewish and all that. Her mother’s Old Christian, was born in Segovia, but has lived in Lisbon since she was little. A peasant really. But don’t try to tell her that. Teresa’s father is a Portuguese New Christian from Chaves. When she decided to marry me, they refused to have anything to do with her. So what do I do? I get a card of pure blood. Logical, no? Does the old whore care? She tells me that a Jew is like a pomegranate because the blood inside always stains what it touches. She has an answer for everything. Like the Devil.” Manuel stands, twists his face away in anguish. “And your uncle, he never understood the pressure I was under.”

“Manuel, Master Abraham is dead, too.”

He starts, leans toward me. His eyes show panic.

I nod to assure him it’s the truth. “Aunt Esther was violated and will not speak. Judah is still missing. And Uncle is with us no longer. Mother, Cinfa and Reza are safe.”

Manuel turns around to hide his tears. Or is it his prior knowledge?

“Master Abraham never did forgive me then,” comes his whisper.

I ask, “Was his forgiveness that important?”

Manuel whips around and glares at me as if it is criminal to pose such a question. “Berekiah, a card from the King doesn’t remove your heart!”

“I did speak to him about you. After we were so rude on the street. He said he would honor you the next time you met. Hate for the concept of pure blood carried him away. He knew that he had acted wrongly. You had his full blessings.”

Manuel’s eyes drip silent tears. He picks up the halves of his mother’s jug. “How did the Christians find him? Didn’t he get out with you?”

I consider trying to trick him, but decide that the truth is riddle enough. As I describe the bodies, he hides his face in his hands again. “It’s impossible!” he says. He moans the word over and over until his voice becomes a whisper disappearing into an ocean of silence.

I come to him and say, “We must find out exactly how she got to our cellar. Perhaps her brother can tell us.”

“If he’s still alive.”

As we walk toward Tomás’ apartment, Manuel whispers his wife’s name as if in incantation. He hides behind an expression of rigid control, grips his sword handle. It is all wrong for him. Instead of polished iron, Manuel should have gone out into the world brandishing a butterfly net and notebook.

Our destination is the third floor of a squalid townhouse in the poor neighborhood below the hillock crowned by St. Steven’s Church. Brittle bells are tolling vespers when we arrive, and Old Christians are shuffling inside. A caretaker is shooing away a pack of prancing dogs who want to join in services. Sunset has lit the horizon. The dark of the sixth evening of Passover is almost within reach.

Manuel’s brother-in-law, a pillow-maker’s assistant, is stuffing feathers into netting when we arrive. His garret smells like a chicken coop. He has no neck, red-veined cheeks like Father Carlos, a receding fringe of dirty brown hair. He wears a bull’s expression of unknowing, obsessive rage, takes the news without looking up. A brief pause in his hand motion is all.

“She said she was going out,” he says. “She was complaining of uncleanliness, the time of women’s pain.”

I motion Manuel outside; we have learned all we need to know.

“What do you know of that man?” I question.

“You need to ask? The half that is Christian has the manners and intelligence of a swine. You can imagine how crazy that makes the half that is Jewish. Teresa must have been adopted. It’s the only explanation.”

When I look up, Tomás is moving back from his window. Could he have followed his sister and killed them both out of some half-formed sense of religious righteousness bequeathed by his mother? Could he and a thresher entrusted with the secret of our genizah have come to kill my uncle at exactly the same moment? Was such a coincidence possible?

Two feathers float down toward us. I reach out for one. “I think Teresa considered herself more Jewish than you think,” I say, gripping it tightly. To Manuel’s puzzled look, I ask, “Where does a Jewish woman go who has just finished her rhythm with the moon?”

“To a bathhouse,” he replies.

“And where’s the nearest bathhouse?”

“On the Rua de São Pedro. Just down the street from your…”

“Exactly.”

Chapter X

Our synagogue in the Judiaria Pequena was built in the Christian year of thirteen seventy-four on a tiny hillock flanking the southern rim of Lisbon’s ancient defensive walls. At the bottom of this slope is a tiny square centered by a great pear tree, a brother to the towering giant which used to shade the yard of our central temple in Little Jerusalem. A staircase of polished limestone rises twenty feet from the tree’s octopus-tangle of roots to Samuel Aurico’s tannery on the first floor and another fifteen to the synagogue on the second.

On the other side of the synagogue runs the Rua de São Pedro. It was here that our ancestors put the entrance to our micvah, a series of cascading pools—two for ritual bathing—carved out of the rock below and gifted with an underground stream as a source. Some nimble negotiation by Rabbi Zacuto and other Court Jews spared it from the mass confiscations of fourteen ninety-seven and enabled our chazan, David Moses, to remain as manager. Of course, our men and boys were no longer expected to immerse themselves in its waters before the Sabbath. But I’ve persisted. After all, a bath is pretty much a bath, and presumably even the Pope cannot prove what’s in one’s head. Now, of course, all that has changed; Portuguese curses have been strung into rope around our wrists, and proof no longer counts for anything. Throughout Spain, bathing on Friday has been declared enough evidence to turn a man to smoke. That Lisbon has begun to welcome the heat of this Inquisitional fire has become only too clear over the last week.

Naturally, our women have been similarly proscribed since the time of the conversion from purifying themselves after the moon has summoned the red of their tides. But Teresa, Manuel’s wife, was apparently more faithful and courageous than he ever imagined. Was she surprised by Old Christians as she bathed? Possibly, she slipped away without time to dress and raced down the street to find safety in our house; it is only four doors east of the micvah, at the triangular corner the Rua de São Pedro makes with Temple Street, the Rua da Sinagoga.

The bathhouse door is locked, and no one answers our knocks. “I don’t think Master David survived Sunday,” I tell Manuel, and I explain to him how the chazan failed to meet me that afternoon at St. Anne’s Gate.

Despite my words, Manuel calls to him in the crack of the doorway. The sixth evening of Passover has already descended gray and windblown over the city, and dust is kicking up from the cobbles in swirling sheets. Manuel covers his nose with his hand and kicks at the door with his foot. There comes no response. He asks, “Where to, now?”

“His apartment,” I answer. “I know where he keeps his keys.”

As we head off, he says, “I never understood why Master Abraham always treasured living so close to the bathhouse and synagogue. The way he and Rabbi Losa always fought, I mean. It seemed only to make things worse.”

“Uncle always said that our location was prime for disappearing into God. The Rua de São Pedro and Rua da Sinagoga come together at our house. He maintained that a kabbalist should try to live at an intersection of lines—‘where two become one.’”

“I suppose it’s a blessing to be sure that life’s made up of definite and discernable patterns,” Manuel notes with a wistful smile, and in his tone I can tell that he, too, is questioning God.

We climb up a side street to the chazan’s apartment and knock on his door. Perched on the eaves of his townhouse roof is an escaped hunting falcon, wary and fitful, a leather strap dangling from its right talon. When a gangly woman with a pointed chin hails us from upstairs, the bird takes wing. “We are all God-fearing Christians here,” the woman says in a trembling voice. “Old Christians, every one of us, with the Lord Jesus risen in our hearts.” She brings her hands together in front of her chest in a position of prayer.

Even from here, I can see that she has bitten her nails bloody. She must think that we, too, are on the hunt for Marranos. “We’re simply looking for Master David,” I say in a reassuring voice. “Nothing is wrong. We just want to know if you’ve seen him.”

“Oh dear, I knew it. But you won’t find him here. I haven’t seen him since Sunday. I believe that he was scheduled that day to warm the heart of God himself from the pyre in the Rossio.”

Scheduled that day to warm the heart of God? Often, in their effort to speak euphemistically, Lisboners gave voice to the most absurd and monstrous expressions. Was there any people on earth more capable of turning a scorpion into a rose with their tongues?

I ask, “Do you have the key to his apartment, by any chance?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” she replies.

“Can we take a look?”

“Give me a minute and I’ll help you.”

She comes downstairs smoothing the front of her black smock with nervous hands. Her gaze will not rise to meet my own. She says in a hesitant voice, “When we first met Senhor David, we thought he was so gentlemanly. That’s why we kept him as a tenant. Later, of course, we found out that he was just a Marrano. He assured us that he would be moving out by the end of this very month.”

In her pathetic way, she is trying to distance herself from her tenant. In a reassuring voice, Manuel says, “He was the local chazan, you know.” He utters these specific words because he suspects—as I do—that she is terrified because she has a Jewish background as well. His use of the Hebrew word “chazan” is his way of letting her know that we, too, know Hebrew—that we are New Christians who mean her no harm.

Due to a similarity of sound, however, the woman confuses “chazan” with the Portuguese word for a bad omen or instance of ill luck, azango. With a great nod, she replies in an excited voice, “Yes, yes, your excellency is right—all the Jews are azango!”

A week earlier and we’d have laughed at her ignorance. As it is, we both inhale deeply as if bracing ourselves for a fight that may last our lifetimes. Emboldened by the solidarity which she believes that she has elicited from us, she rushes to open the door. “Got it!” she says as the lock clicks. When the door squeals open, a foul smell wafts out. She says in a humble voice, “If you would only stay a few minutes, I would be most appreciative.” She meets my gaze for but a moment. “I don’t mean to be rude, dear sirs, but the stars and planets say that we’re not to have strangers in our townhouse today. I’m sure you understand.”

A worn leather runner leads from Master David’s entrance to his cold hearth, five paces of a man distant. But we daren’t move; all along its length, the precious ouds and lutes of Davids collection lie gutted and shredded. A cittern banded with the most beautiful rose and cherrywood, like an agate carved for music, has been broken in half and dangles from a hook on the mantle like a dead crab. Below it sits a small mound of broken glass and ceramic potsherds topped by a tangle of phylacteries which will never again feel the pulse of any arm. The landlady points a stern finger toward us. “You should have seen it before I cleaned up. His fava beans were growing gray beards. Like their rabbis! And the stink… Lord, his people smell, don’t they?”

“Just tell me if you’ve seen his clogs,” I say.

She smooths the front of her smock again. “I’m afraid I don’t keep track of his things. We were not friendly. In fact, we never even…”

I head to his clothes chest as she babbles on about the cold distance she insisted on maintaining from the “musical little Jew,” as she now refers to David. His clogs are huddling together below a jumble of dated velvet caps from the time of King João. With a little prompting and silent cursing in Hebrew, the heel swivels open and three keys fall out. The landlady gapes. I say, “For four years, long before you moved here, I studied the Greek and Arabic modes with David right in this room. Couldn’t you tell by my odor?”

“Ah, I understand,” she whispers with an urgent inhale of breath. A grudging admiration deepens her voice as she says, “You people disguise yourselves well.”

“It’s no disguise,” I say, “it’s magic!” Remembering an old trick taught to me by Uncle, I show her an empty hand, then pull David’s keys from out of her nostrils.

She gasps and crosses herself, falls to the ground in a position of prayer. “I beg you do me no harm,” she moans, tears gushing in her eyes.

I say, “If the ‘musical little Jew’ should return, just tell him that Pedro Zarco has visited.”

“Yes, senhor,” she says, making a little bow with her head. “But I’m afraid that it would be better to tell him in your dreams tonight. That’s the only way your excellency is likely to get a message through at this point.”

The micvah is damp and slimy, and its windows have been nailed shut by some thoughtful Jew. As we descend, I lose my footing in the pure darkness. My behind is rudely introduced to the granite edge of a stair, and a raw pain stabs my shoulder. I cry out.

“I better get an oil lamp before you do yourself some serious damage,” Manuel says. He climbs back up and out into evening, eases the door closed behind him.

As I sit inside the comfort of the black solitude, violet shapes condense, only to then shrink away into spotted shadows. “The lathe of darkness gives form to our wishes and fears,” I hear my uncle say. So I wait. Framed by my soft breathing, Mordecai appears in his youth, then dances away on fawn’s feet. A creak tugs me back from daydream. I jump up. A footstep? My heart pounds a code of warning. My uncle suddenly rises, blue with flecks of gold, an illumination painted by my memory. His expression is hesitant, pensive, as if he is considering the meanings of a difficult verse. Instead of stopping to greet me, he continues floating up and out into the false night of ceiling until he is gone.

Pay it no mind, I think. It is not a vision, but only an illusion.

Faint breathing from below prompts me forward. Or is it only the wind threading through an unseen shaft of cave? It is said there are a dozen different tunnels and borings that meet and surface here, the remnants of a subterranean network created by our ancestors in preparation for the Messiah. I call in Portuguese, “Judeu ou Cristão?” It seems to be the only question that matters anymore.

The breathing is gone. “I come in peace,” I say.

Expectant silence returns my fear. I decide to ask the darkness a riddle; a Jew will know my meaning. “Who is the angel that offers his hands to Abraham?” The answer is “Raziel”; both his name and that of Abraham add up to two hundred and forty-eight in Hebrew, a language in which letters are also numbers. Raziel’s hands are the equal sign that links them.

I ease two steps up the stairs in case a shadow should lunge for the source of my voice. But no movement pierces the darkness. I ask my riddle again, climb still higher. A door creaks open, a flame from above lights Manuel’s face. The staircase below opens gray before me.

“Sorry I took so long,” he says. “No one…”

“Sshhh…I think someone’s here. I’ve heard breathing, a step I think.”

He tiptoes down to me. “Jew or Christian?” he whispers.

“A footstep has no faith.”

“So what is…”

“Raziel,” comes a hoarse whisper. “…Raziel.”

“What’s he saying?” Manuel asks.

I put my finger to my lips to request silence. “Show yourself,” I call below in Hebrew.

A tiny man with blinking eyes and tufts of thinning hair above his ears steps bare feet to the base of the stairs. A thick towel at his waist makes his chest appear shrunken. It is the surgeon, Solomon Eli. Before I realize it, I have bounded down the stairs. “It’s impossible!” I say. “I saw you in Loios Square, roped together with your wife and…”

He pats my shoulders in exultation. “Shalaat Chalom!” he cries. “One of my little boys has escaped with his life!”

Solomon gives pet names to all the babies he circumcises. Mine has always been Shalaat Chalom, meaning “dream request”—a reference to my father’s supplications for another son.

“But I saw you with….”

Solomon blocks my words with a finger to his lips. “My dearest wife, Reina, is dead,” he whispers. He ribbons his hand upward in imitation of smoke. “All but me.”

“But how?”

“How, you ask? A cyst, my dear Shalaat. I cut a painful cyst from one of the thugs who took us. A mason. About a year ago now. He recognized me after Reina had already… They made me watch. I told him I wanted to follow her across the Jordan River. He smiled furtively, hit me. When I awoke, I was lying on the roof of a house above the Church of São Miguel. Yellow wildflowers were growing from the tiles between my legs. Very strange. I thought I was dead. It was night. But when I saw the moon… I mean, I never read that heaven was circled by celestial bodies. Or is the sahar só uma outra sohar, the moon just another prison?” Solomon shrugs, forces a sour smile. “Maybe my mason thought it would be greater punishment to leave me alive. I had no clothes when I awoke. So where should I go? Not home. No one there anymore. I stumbled here. The door was open. Later, someone came and locked it.”

“Has anyone else been here?” Manuel asks. “A girl?”

“No one,” the surgeon replies.

I tell Manuel, “She would have died before Solomon arrived—back on Sunday. And somehow, she must have gotten from here to my…”

“What girl?!” the mohel demands. “Is it Cinfa? Is she…?”

“No, she’s fine.” I take Solomon’s hands, explain about Uncle and the purpose of our search. “So have you seen anything, anything at all—jewelry, clothing, food…?” I ask.

“Come with me,” he says in a grave voice.

The surgeon leads us past the men’s ritual pool to the dressing alcoves for women that are tiled with six-pointed shields of King David. He walks with the careful, childlike movements of a man who has been fasting for days. Even so, the echo of his footsteps in these caverns pounds like drumming. He takes us to the small dressing room in which he’s been sleeping. Manuel discards a towel that has served as Solomon’s blanket. He lifts up a linen tunic that has been scrunched into a pillow and lets it dangle freely.

“Teresa’s?” I ask.

A veil of shadow closes over Manuel’s face as he lowers his lamp. He kneels. Dark sobbing quivers across the icy sheets of tile.

“She was nude when we found her,” I whisper to Solomon. “I don’t think she would run out on the street that way if she could have helped it. So how do you…”

Manuel suddenly marches out the door and down the hallway toward the central court. I call his name in vain and follow. My echo vibrates around us like a voice disclosing secrets.

Heading east, he races down a ramp into a meditation room, then descends past long-abandoned baths and dank-smelling grottoes. Finally, we reach the room which serves as Master David’s office. Inside, we find his two turreted bookcases overturned, the bathhouse records scattered across the floor. At the far corner of the room, an oil lamp sits on its side. While Manuel inspects it, Solomon slumps to the stone floor. His chest heaves in the damp and heavy air. “My legs are tired,” he shrugs.

“We’ll get you food as soon as we leave,” I assure him.

He holds up his hand to indicate that there is no rush.

“What was this all about?” I ask Manuel.

“Trying to see which way my wife would descend when the Christians came.”

Solomon gazes around, sniffs at the air like a rabbit, leans toward the ground, then stands and raises himself up on his tiptoes like a deer straining to feed from a topmost branch. “Something foul in the air,” he grumbles. He sticks out his tongue. “Like manure.”

He’s right; there is a fiber of evil trailing through the air.

“A dead squirrel or rat,” Manuel says. “Drowned probably.”

A key of understanding turns inside me and I reply, “No, it’s no dead animal. I understand now. I’ll show you what it is back in our cellar.”

Manuel, Solomon and I descend the stairs underneath our secret trap door. The mohel huddles under the blanket I’ve given him, reaches his hand along the wall to keep from stumbling. He’s never been in our cellar before, and he asks in a curious voice, “So how long has all this been here, my boy?”

“For as long as anyone remembers,” I answer.

The prayer mat and myrtle bushes gift Solomon with the knowledge that the room has become our clandestine synagogue, and he chants, “Blessed be He who saves His temple from idolaters.”

Aunt Esther is seated at Uncle’s desk at the far end of the room, staring straight ahead into the Bleeding Mirror. She wears no headscarf, and her raggedly cut hennaed hair gives her a frightening appearance.

“Etti,” Solomon calls to her, since he loves to call everyone by their pet name.

She neither replies nor stirs. Solomon puffs out his lips, looks at me questioningly. I say, “She will not reply for now. We must give her time.”

The mohel nods, then sniffs at the air. “It’s this cellar that’s causing the smell,” he says. “This place stinks as if…” His words end with a gasp when he thinks of the shell of putrefying body left behind by Uncle.

I step straight to the leather tapestries from Córdoba hanging on the western wall of the cellar, just behind Esther. Scrolling one up, I lift it off its hooks and lay it on the slate floor, then do the same with the other. Manuel lights our two silver candelabrums from his oil lamp. Pressing my fingertips against the wall just under the strange bloodstains which end abruptly at a line of tile, I say, “If Samir or Uncle were here, we could save some time. Even one of the threshers.”

“What are you looking for?” Manuel asks.

“You’ll see,” I say. “I’ve just found out how a man—or even several men—can disappear from this room. And how a smell can be carried across space.”

I begin tapping my fist against each tile in a horizontal row just at the height of my head, from the south end of the room by our sunken bathtubs to the north, by Esther.

Solomon whispers to Manuel, “Poor boy, Master Abraham’s death has him thinking from left to right.” It’s local Jewish slang for the notion that I’ve lost all sense.

“I assure you that no gnat has flown in my ear,” I reply, making reference to how King Nimrod lost his mind. “I used to wonder about my uncle appearing out of nowhere all the time. Father Carlos even suggested at times that he was a spirit jester. But now I know how he did it. And why I was never allowed to enter the cellar without his permission.” I continue tapping, and when I don’t find the sound I want, move to the row below. At the fourth row down, one which crosses the wall at the height of my neck, I find what I want—the hollow reply of a tile with only a thin backing of wall.

Cinfa bounds downstairs suddenly, halts on the bottom step, watches me with wary eyes.

Twenty or so more taps, and I have found the outline of tiles which have a meager backing. If I am right, there should be one tile near the right or left border which jiggles when pressed. A few moments later, I have found it. Prying it free, breaking a thumbnail in the process, I toss the tile to Cinfa. Below, there is a circular iron handle on which is crudely etched the Hebrew word, rechizah, bathe. After a deep breath and a prayer for success, I grab it and give it a yank.

When I pull, a break in the wall becomes the edge of a door revolving around a central fulcrum. A room of purest darkness confronts us. Solomon joins me, squats down on his haunches like a Moslem holy man and peers inside with a curious expression. I turn to Manuel. “Give me the oil lamp—I’m going inside.”

“Where’s it lead?” he asks.

“We shall see. But for now, just give me the lamp.”

He hands it to me. We can see ahead into a stone corridor. “I’ll follow you,” he says.

Solomon pats me on the shoulder. “I’ll stay here. And you, Cinfa,” he nods up at my sister, “why don’t you fetch me some matzah and water? A glass of kosher wine, too! And the softest, sweetest pillow you can find!”

We slip behind Manuel’s lamp into the darkness as Cinfa dashes upstairs. The dank hallway ahead smells of cold stone and solitude. It narrows as the ceiling lowers until we are tucked into a crawlspace. We make our way like moles. After about twenty feet, when our limits flow outward and upward, we stand. A limestone door sprouts a rusted iron handle, also circular and also etched with the word, rechizah. Manuel tugs it open around its fulcrum. A humid wind rises against us. I lift our lamp. Blue and green tiles shimmer back at us. Countless papers are scattered across the floor. We are in the chazan’s office in the bathhouse.

After Manuel and Solomon have headed for their respective homes, I go to my mother, armed now with the assurance that the killer was no sorcerer but simply a clever thresher. She is in our store, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees by the light of a slender candle. I tell her what we’ve found. “Did you know about the secret exit?” I ask.

She puts down her brush and kneels. “Before you were born,” she begins, “when the New Christians of this city were Jews, and your father was trying to establish…”

I close my eyes because it seems she is opening the title page to another endless story about my father and his struggles to develop a profitable business. She senses my irritation, snaps, “Our cellar was part of the micvah! It’s where our granite tubs came from.”

“How come you never told me?”

She turns away as if burdened with my presence. Her jaw muscles throb in anger. “You think that you have a right to know everything? Life doesn’t work like that, no matter what my brother may have told you.”

I stare at her with contempt even as I know she’s right.

“Maybe he thought you knew and that he didn’t have to discuss it,” she adds in a conciliatory tone, picking up her brush. “Anyway, it wasn’t important.” The little wave of dismissal she gives me connotes exhaustion. She looks down suddenly, frowns; a pimply brown toad has hopped out from a hiding place. “What do you suppose he wants?” she asks.

“Food…a fly. To survive. Just leave him be.”

“Leave him be? An unclean thing like this? One of the ten plagues of Passover?! Sent by God to punish the Egyptians who held us as slaves. In my house?!”

Mother seems to be ricocheting between somnambulism and a kind of vibrant lunacy. As she grabs her broom, I try to bring her back to more important matters and say, “I always thought he must have hid in the genizah with the books. How he loved their touch and smell!”

“Who?” she asks, and she furrows her eyebrows like I’m crazy.

I suddenly feel as if I could slap her. She lifts aside one of the unhinged doors to the store and sweeps the poor toad flying onto Temple Street.

“Can’t you please…” I begin. But there is no point. Her very presence seems to sap my energy. She stares dreamily into the sky. The dazed toad wobbles upright. Roseta drops from out of nowhere, creeps stealthily forward, claws poised. “No you don’t!” I say. I jump outside and sweep the toad into my hand, drop it into my pouch. I await Mother’s protests against filth. But silver clouds rolling in from the west have transfixed her; night, like everything else, has reminded her of Judah.

I drop the toad in the fields upriver, wash my hands, nibble a matzah, then head back to our house to check on Farid. A sliver of crescent moon has risen over the horizon, and a story forms as I watch its halo: Manuel’s wife is bathing in the micvah, hears the shrieks of New Christians being butchered on the street above. Racing through the maze of pools and alcoves, she reaches a cold wall of stars inside the chazan’s office. Are the connecting doors open? Is my uncle, too, in the bathhouse, cleansing for prayer? Or does she scream as the torchlit Christians descend? Perhaps Uncle hears her, opens the secret door, crawls into the bathhouse and pulls her to safety.

Together, my master and the girl wait in our cellar for an end to Lisbon’s madness. But the killers—a thresher and a blackmailer—come first. After they summon death to our home, they slip through the secret entrance to the bathhouse. One of them caresses the door closed, leaves the streak of blood from his fingertips behind, creeps through the tunnel to safety.

Farid is seated in the kitchen when I come inside. His face is etched with pale struggle. I know I should rush to him, but my own strength is eclipsed by despair. “Should you be up?” I signal from the doorway.

My friend nods, indicates with heavy gestures, “I found my house empty. You have not heard from my father, have you?” His arms dangle white, as if angels are already dressing him for…

“No. I’ve asked around. No one’s seen him. In the early morning I’ll go looking for him. Things have quieted enough so that…”

“A note came for you,” he signals, holding up a scroll. “Actually, for your uncle.”

I rip open the seal. It’s from Senhora Tamara, a used book seller in Little Jerusalem with whom we had frequent dealings. It reads:

“Master Abraham, a young boy tried to sell me what appears to have been a storybook from Egypt recently uncovered by you. Was it stolen in the riot? I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have bought it, but I wasn’t thinking straight and chased him out of my store with some hysterical screaming. But I believe I can describe him—the boy who came. Perhaps someone will know him and we can get it back.”

I feel as if I have hooked a great fish for Sabbath: the storybook from Egyptis code for Uncle’s missing Haggadah! I have been informed that the killer has made a careless move. And now that I know how he escaped… It seems that a balance in the Upper Realms is now being weighted in my favor.

And yet, even before my discoveries have had their chance to fill my lungs with the fresh air of hope, Farid enchains me once again to despair; after I read him Senhora Tamara’s note with my hands, he signals, “Another obstacle presents itself before us. I crept down to the cellar to try to find you when the note came and saw the secret door in the wall. I know what you think. But the killer didn’t leave that way.”

“What?!”

“Go there. Look for blood. You will see that there are stains before the passageway narrows. As if the killer were feeling his way along the walls. But all such marks end before one is forced to crawl. The killer did not pass through. He turned back for the cellar.”

I take a deep breath. “Are you sure?”

“At sunrise, you can better verify what I say. Now, by the light of a lamp, your eyes may not be able to tell you what I have seen. But it is the truth. There is no mistake.”

It occurs to me again that it is no accident that God has given me Farid; He knows that I will need the help of so talented a self-portrait of God. I signal, “But knowing that he could escape through the door, why would the killer turn back for the cellar?”

“Maybe he heard someone in the bathhouse…more Christians. Or perhaps, yes… perhaps he was too large or awkward to fit through the passageway. In all probability, he had never been that way before. He may have assumed he could fit. But then he discovered…”

Farid’s hands fall to his sides. He signals weakly that his diarrhea is worsening. Ashamed of my own good health, I lead him to the outhouse. The night air hits us, dry and chill. His face contorts in pain as I wash his raw behind. Fighting dread, I think: not only do I not know how the killer escaped, but now I must battle once again for the life of another. Looking inside myself into Farid’s future, I see the Angel of Death, a shadow of a thousand gaping eyes, standing at my friend’s deathbed. Skeletal hands clutch a sword with a bitter drop suspended at the pointed tip. As Farid sees this hideous being before him, he opens his mouth in terror, sculpts a deaf man’s clucking scream. Quickly, the Angel of Death flings his foul-tasting offering inside.

And from this drop, Farid dies and discolors and putrefies.

There will be no escape.

My friend’s rag-doll body leans on me as we shuffle back inside. “Farid, then where in God’s name did the killer hide when I burst in? The door was locked. There was no one in the cellar. I swear, no one!”

As he gestures a poetic phrase about the will of Allah, I grab an oil lamp hanging from the central beam and head downstairs. Just as he said, drippings of blood and footprints stain the floor and walls of the tunnel, and there are finger-shadows in groups of five where the killer has felt his way forward. As it becomes necessary to crawl, matted bloodstains revealing a woven imprint of fabric are reflected back to me, must have been made by knees pressed to stonework. At the tightest spot, a slashing stain seems to indicate that a hand had reached desperately ahead. When the tunnel begins to open outward, when I can stand again, there is nothing. No bloody footsteps or finger-shadows.

The killer turned back. Or disappeared.

Chapter XI

Farid places his hand against the wall to secure his fragile steps down the cellar stairs. He comes to me, squats down on his haunches to fight the pain carving through his gut, signals, “Now that you know the killer didn’t leave through the secret door, tell me the sequence of your movements after you discovered Uncle…everything.”

It is the magic of words gestured to a friend which gifts me with insight; after I’ve recounted all, the solution comes to me freely. It seems as if it were in me all along, hiding, curled like a sleeping cat in an unseen corner: “The genizah!”

Farid nods as if reading a verse of wisdom. With his hands, he says, “The killer must have hid there as you called through the door for your family. When you burst in, he was lying with the books, hugging the darkness. Later, when you went upstairs to get nails and a hammer, you paused to scare away a robber, to gaze down the street at the mob. You were dizzy and sat for a time. He must have used those moments to escape through your mother’s door to Temple Street.”

“Oh God…I didn’t look…I mean, it didn’t occur to me to look because I thought at first Old Christians had killed him. They would not have known of the genizah.”

“We must check,” Farid signals. “We can afford no mistakes.”

Opening the lid of this hiding place with the key taken from behind the Bleeding Mirror, I lift out our manuscripts and letters—our sack of coins, as well. Inside the now denuded pit, it is then easy to spot the blood stains. They cover the floor like brown shadows of scattered leaves, bear the woven imprint of pressed fabric.

When I turn to Farid, I signal my interpretation of the stains: “The killer was lying on his right side, with his body folded around the pile of manuscripts. Hence all the stains on the floor from the bloody clothing. His legs were tucked up toward his chest, and the tips of his sandals made the smudges on the eastern base. His left elbow was held back against the northern side and left the petal-sized fabric imprint near the top rim. His right arm, held out, was holding his shohet’s knife. As he was lying here, waiting for me to leave, he sliced the blade against the southern side a few times, gifting the plaster with the faint lines of blood.”

Farid nods his approval.

To myself, I whisper, “Diego.”

My friend reads my lips, signals, “What about him?”

“With his size, he might not fit in the crawlspace leading from the cellar to the bathhouse.”

“True. But even Father Carlos might have trouble.”

“Maybe. But look, Diego said he’d be back tonight with a man who wanted to sell Uncle a Hebrew manuscript. What if he told me that only to buy himself some time? I have to find him. Maybe he’s trying to escape even now. And I promise to look for your father. I’ll go to his secret mosque after Diego’s apartment.”

As I lift the books and letters back into the genizah, Farid shuffles to me, takes my arm. “You shouldn’t go near the Rossio.”

“I’ll descend to the Moorish Quarter from the Graça neighborhood. It’ll be fine.”

“Speak only Portuguese.” When I nod, his fingers say, “And take my best dagger. The one from Baghdad which can split even a Sufi’s thinnest thought in two. Get it from my bedroom.”

“What will you use?” I gesture.

“One of my father’s. The long one from Safed. He would want…”

I nod as Farid’s gestures tumble toward grief-stricken silence. We face each other across the distance of the dying. We both know that after a time, my hands will not be able to reach him. He will free-fall just like Mordecai and my father into the black-flame hands of Dumah, the soul-keeper of the world beyond. Farid quivers his hand by his gut, our signal for terror, then punches a weak fist against his chest; he is saying that his spiritual dikes are failing and he cannot continue alone.

When we hug, he has the sick-soft petal feel of Mordecai. His ribs, hard and cold, ripple outward as if seeking to emerge. I hear my uncle warn me: Berekiah, do not abandon the living for the dead! I signal, “I’m going to go for a doctor. The hunt for Diego will have to wait. If you should…”

“No doctors!” Farid interrupts. “All the Christians know is bloodletting.”

“I’ll find an Islamic one.”

“Where?” he gestures skeptically.

“Somewhere…I’ll go wherever I have to.”

We argue for a time. But it is only a show; we both know that Dr. Montesinhos was one of the last who faithfully practiced the wisdom of Avicenna and Galen. Who could I find now who would risk illness to visit a poor and deaf weaver of rugs? He waves away my words with flapping motions. He moans as I wash his arms and legs with water. His skin is free of sores. It is not plague, not the sweating sickness. He is being sucked dry of life. Suddenly, he pushes me away. “Go find Diego!” he gestures angrily. “You’re only wasting time with me.”

“Farid, will you do what I say?” I ask with my hands.

He stills my request with a descending wave of gestures: “You have no oil of life that can be poured into my lamps.”

“Your poetry is of no interest right now,” I signal back. When he continues to protest, I raise my hand to feign a threat of violence. He smiles at the absurdity.

With a descent linked to the inevitable, I think: This is the last time I will see him happy.

I lock the genizah and place its key back in the eel bladder. “Upstairs,” I tell Farid.

“What do you have in mind?” he signals.

“Patience.”

In the kitchen, I boil an egg, pour salt on it and force him to down it with boxwood and verbena tea. Together, we suffer an hour of automatic chewing and agonized heaving. I feed him charcoal ash, more liquid till his belly is distended. On my instructions, he hugs his legs to his chest, and I give him a strong enema of linseed decocted in barley water, another of barley water and a single drop of arsenic. Once he’s clean, Cinfa brings us from the cellar a special incense of poppy and camphor intended to induce drowsiness. Farid wheezes as he inhales. I talk him to sleep with the fables of Kalila and Dimna told me by Esther in my childhood.

After I grab the dagger from Baghdad from under his mattress, I climb through the cool air of the sixth night of Passover into the upper streets of the Alfama to find Diego. Just before I reach his townhouse, however, I spot a man of towering stature looming in the darkness across the street. He is leaning back against the flaking wall of the cobbler’s workshop, wears a wide-brimmed hat and a dark cloak which curtains his body down to his booted feet. He is at least a hand’s length taller than I am, well over six feet, a height almost never seen amongst the Portuguese. Straight hair falls to his shoulders. His right hand grips a rawhide riding whip.

He can only be the Northerner about whom I was warned.

His head raises up suddenly, and he stands upright; he has spotted me. We share a look in which I sense that he knows who I am. Neither of us make a move, however. Questions seem to root my feet to the cobbles: is he here to kill Diego or merely waiting to collect the payment he was promised by this thresher for the murder of Uncle?

What must he be wondering about me?

I don’t stay to learn the answers; they must come from Diego himself, and clearly, he is not in his apartment or this Northerner would not be waiting so diligently outside. I back away and rush toward the Moorish Quarter, checking over my shoulder now and again to make sure I’m not being followed.

In the nighttime streets of Lisbon, harsh orange lights spray from the windows of taverns and brothels. Every time I hear a sound, my heartbeat leaps as if toward a secret refuge; it is that time of night when all noises and objects seem to have turned into oracles foreseeing death.

The secret mosque which Samir frequents is in the second floor of a blacksmith’s workshop near the old Moorish bazaar. The great wooden door, carved with knotted patterns and centered by a horseshoe knocker, is locked. A dead goldfinch, of all things, lies on the cobbles below, a tear of blood near its beak. After a second tap with the knocker, a candlelight blossoms in the window above. “Who is it?” comes a woman’s hissing whisper.

“Pedro Zarco. I’m looking for Master Samir.”

The shutters bang closed. After a few seconds, a man in long underwear, with the wiry frame and squinting eyes of a Sufi ascetic, appears in a doubtful crack of doorway. Lit by a fluttering candle flame, his cheeks show hollow under the crescent moons of his cheekbones.

“I’m looking for Master Samir,” I begin. “He comes here…”

“Who are you?” he asks in Portuguese. His voice is deep, sonorous, as if cut from granite.

“A friend. Pedro Zarco. We live on opposite ends of the same courtyard. If he’s with you, tell him I’m…”

“He’s not here.” He speaks gruffly, as if being seen with me is a risk.

“Do you know where he’s gone?”

“When the pyre started, we scattered. He ran home for Farid. Wait.” He closes the door and bolts it. Footsteps trail off, then return in a rush. When the doorway squeals open, dangling sandals are offered to me. “Samir ran off so fast that he left these,” he explains.

The knowledge that Farid’s father, too, must be dead, prompts me to run to Senhora Tamara’s bookstore and home in Little Jerusalem—to find out about the ‘storybook from Egypt’ which was offered to her.

There comes no answer to my knocks at her door, however. My feet turn me toward home. My body has the emptiness of a cavern, and the night air resonates inside my chest as if inside a leaden bell. I must eat something and pray for nezah, the lasting endurance which emanates at every moment from God into the Lower Realms.

At home, I wash my face, eat some stale matzah and two apples, then sit in front of the hearth and chant.

Beyond my prayers, solitude and slumber descend, catch me in their net.

Suddenly before me are Uncle’s hands, gesturing wildly at the back of the hearth in a language I cannot fathom. Sweat beads on my forehead. A face suddenly leans toward me. Distended with dancing shadows, it burns with an orange light. My heartbeat leaps. I rear back, jump to my feet.

“Berekiah, I’ve brought the man I told you about.” It is Diego, lit by the hearth. He unfurls his hand. “This is Isaac of Ronda.”

I take deep breaths to calm myself, see that Diego’s bodyguard stands with his back to us at the kitchen door. Isaac himself has the gaunt, dim face shared by so many of the New Christian merchants. Draped in scarlet robes, his shoulder-length straight hair is topped by a crested purple cap from which a long dark plume is arching back. When we shake hands, he stares boldly into my eyes as if trying to convince me of his strength or beckon me to share his bed. Peasants sometimes behave in such a way, and I realize that he may have only recently come into money.

My sudden descent from the dreams of half-sleep has left me heavy in body. I light two more oil lamps above our table to give me time to recover my strength. “Have you seen my mother or Esther?” I ask Diego, confused about the time and place into which I have awoken.

“Undoubtedly, they are asleep,” he says. “Dawn will be with us in a few hours. I thought it was safer to come now, however. I suspected you’d still be up.”

The illumination from the lamps has given our shadows more restful, human proportions. I beckon my guests to sit. “Some brandy, perhaps?”

My offer is accepted. Isaac clamps his lips onto his cup, jerks his head back and downs his drink as if it were water. “Toothache,” he says. “Dulls the pain.”

“We have some oil of cloves if you’d prefer,” I say.

“Thank you. But I’ve got some myself.” He reaches in his pouch, takes out a vial and rubs the liquid across his gums. His hands are thin, elegant, his nails immaculately pared. As of yet, it seems, only his hands have had time to adapt to riches. Soon, his lips will learn to caress the wine from his cup, and when he shakes hands, his will descend like a peacock feather in a soft breeze.

“Diego, where have you been?” I ask. “I went looking for you.”

“With a friend. I thought it was safer than going home.”

“It was. That Northerner…I saw him outside your townhouse.”

“A Northerner?” Isaac asks in a voice of surprise.

“Blond, tall, with a rawhide riding whip of the kind made in Castile,” I reply.

Diego shrugs. “I shall not go home. Perhaps he will grow weary of waiting for me and simply leave.”

“What do you suppose he wants?” Isaac asks.

Diego brings his hands up over his face and shudders, stares me straight in the eyes with a look of dread. “We suspect that he wants to kill me. Some enemy whom we, the friends of Master Abraham, have made without being aware of it.”

Isaac fiddles nervously with the hair falling over his ears. “I was sorry to hear of your Uncle Abraham’s death,” he says. His Andalusian accent is thick, his voice deep, slow and graveled like many of his kinsmen.

I say, “I have heard that you have a safira to sell that was cut by Judah Ha-Levi.”

He paraphrases one of the poet’s most famous verses: “‘I shall not rest until the blood of the prophet Zechariah finds peace.’” He gives me a probing look which seems to seek understanding of my own motives.

“My uncle was interested?” I question, wondering how to categorize this Isaac of Ronda.

“Very,” Diego says.

Isaac adds, “He said he would raise enough money to pay me for it over the next few days. But now I…”

“How did you get the safira into Portugal?” I question.

“It was always here. I bought it from a friend in Porto. He was about to burn it. I couldn’t let that happen. I’m sure you understand.”

“If you don’t buy it, Berekiah, I’m afraid another person may get it who doesn’t have your understanding of its importance,” Diego observes.

“So you’re no longer considering it at all?” Isaac asks Diego.

“I was really only interested in order to help Master Abraham until he raised enough money. I prefer Latin manuscripts, myself. Far safer. So I must defer to Berekiah.”

“Was anyone else interested in the book?” I ask.

“I have made several contacts,” Isaac replies. “But no one seems ready to make an offer.”

“Not even Senhora Tamara, the bookseller in Little Jerusalem?” I enquire.

“She wanted nothing to do with it. Isn’t buying anything in Hebrew at present—not even translations from Hebrew. After what happened, you understand.”

Diego says, “Simon, among others, seemed to believe it could fetch a large price elsewhere. In Genoa or Constantinople or Ragusa. Even in Morocco.”

“Simon Eanes, the fabric importer?” I ask.

“Yes,” Diego replies.

My heartbeat sways me from side to side. Were they in competition over books? Was that it?

A perverse desire twists in my gut and rises through my mouth as a devilish prayer that the murderer not be Simon—that I may be granted the privilege of revenge.

Diego pats my shoulder and continues in a wistful tone, “Hard to believe so much effort for manuscripts that we once could take out from our libraries. Our heritage seems to be falling into private hands. One day, all our writings will belong to Christian nobles and be locked away in golden chests and glass display cases.”

“I’m willing to sell it cheap,” Isaac says. The pitch of his voice jumps in order to tempt me. “Or to make a trade even. A silver candelabrum at this point would be enough. I want no more delay in getting back to Ronda.”

“You understand that I can’t fulfill any verbal agreement my uncle may have made,” I explain. “We’ll need all our savings just to eat. But tell me this—did he say who was helping him buy his manuscripts and smuggle them from Portugal?”

“Don’t you know?!” Isaac asks.

“No. My uncle wouldn’t say in case he was ever exposed. The less we knew the better, as far as he was concerned.”

Farid suddenly shuffles into the room. With his hands, he says, “I didn’t realize…”

“Doesn’t matter,” I signal back. “Sit with us if you have the strength.”

Diego and Isaac stand, bow in Farid’s direction. He nods his head, drops next to me and rests a heavy hand on my arm. “My friend is deaf,” I say. “He will read our lips. There is nothing you could say to me that couldn’t be said to him.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t speak of your uncle’s methods,” Isaac continues. He rises to his feet. His smile seems practiced. “And if you’re not interested in purchasing the book…?”

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid our meeting is at an end. Thank you for the brandy.”

At the door, he hooks his arm in mine. In a delicate whisper, as if trying to enchant a child toward sleep, he recites verses of a poem by Moses Ibn Ezra: “‘My night is plunged into a silent, waveless sea of darkness, a sea that has no coast, no shore for those who voyage. I do not know if this night is long or short. How can a man oppressed with grief know such a thing?’” To my ear alone, he whispers, “Have courage!”

The peculiar gentleness of this stranger whom I doubted leaves me hugging my sorrow like a lonely widower. When Isaac and Diego are gone, I put Farid to bed. My mother is asleep in Esther and Uncle’s bed, curled into a ball, breathing fitfully. From her hand has fallen a stoppered vial. I snatch it up from the curls of the blanket, caress a viscous drop onto my finger. Bitter comes the taste of extract of henbane and mandrake. To escape both herself and Lisbon’s gates for a time, mother has summoned a twilight sleep akin to trance. Maybe it is for the best.

In the cellar, I find Aunt Esther still sitting at Uncle’s desk like a statue, Cinfa shivering at her feet. I bring down a blanket from upstairs, cover the girl. Her eyes connote separation, fear. Yet she bends away irritably from my touch. In my room, sitting on my bed, I pray for Judah’s safe return before daring to head again into Little Jerusalem to try to wake Senhora Tamara. But before I can summon my legs to help me, chant entwines with sleep and drops like a woolen quilt across me.

I awake in bed. Blind to my borders. The blackness all around seems a hiding place for evil. A hard warmth pushes against my ribs. I jump up. It is Cinfa, her face veiled by hair.

As I regain my composure, she wakes. “Where are you going?” she moans.

“To call on Senhora Tamara.”

“You mustn’t go!”

I caress her cheek. “Nothing will happen. Don’t worry.”

She sits up, ducks her head under my shirt and breathes hot against me. It is a refuge she sought as a child. “I’ll be back sometime after dawn,” I say. “You remember when I used to take you to Senhora Tamara’s bookstore to read ‘The Fox Fables’ while I made my dawn deliveries?”

She nods against my chest.

“We shall do that again soon. Now while I’m gone, will you look in on Farid for me?”

She squirms her head into the air, alert to the task, just as I’d hoped. “And do what?” she questions.

“Feed him more boxwood tea when he wakes. It’s in mother’s blue pitcher. And an egg if he can eat. Wash your hands afterwards with soap.”

She nods thoughtfully, stands up atop the mattress. Towering over me, she shows me the knowing eyes of an adult, the weighted stance of our mother. Does the girl secretly hate me for helping to take away her childhood?

Outside, the dawn of Thursday is upon us. The sun’s chariot has already begun to lift into the sky. When it reaches the western horizon, it will beseech the seventh evening of Passover to gift mankind with its holy descent.

On my way to visit Senhora Tamara, I stop by the New Christian workshops on Goldsmiths’ Street to see if anyone has tried to sell our gold leaf or lapis lazuli. My knocks are answered by the newly widowed and childless who kiss me and press their hands into mine as if I may be able to entreat God to bring back their loved ones. But no one has been offered any lapis or gold of late. They gift me with promises of help when I slip from their arms back outside. Numb, wary lest I be tempted to feel too much, I shuffle into sunrise.

When I ring Senhora Tamara’s bell, she shouts,” A tinta está quase seca, the ink’s almost dry!” Its her antiquated way of saying that she’s on her way. Half a dozen locks clang open. A pale eye sitting above a deep pouch of skin peers through a crack of doorway. “Berekiah!”

Senhora Tamara shows her toothless smile, unhinges the last chain and pulls me inside as if a kid dragging a parent toward treasure. Silver hair frames her wizened face. “Let me look at you!” she exclaims. She takes mouse steps backwards, squints up at me, her heavy eyelids wrinkling. The wisps of dark hair on her upper lip bristle as she makes a puffing noise and says, “You need to go to a barber and get some sleep!” Her turned cheek invites me to proffer a kiss.

“Did I wake you?” I ask.

“Me? You kidding?! An old lady never sleeps soundly.” She flaps her hand bitterly. “The curse of old age—all those memories clattering keep you distanced from sleep!”

“Where were you then? I came in the middle of the night. There was no answer.”

“Next door,” she replies. “Sleeping with a neighbor. These days, a Jew who still dares sleep alone is putting one foot in the grave!”

We talk of my family. She gasps at Uncle’s death. “Come,” she says, beckoning me to the desk by her hearth. “Sit on the stool.” She shows me a stern but faraway look, as if she is wondering how to reconcile his murder with God’s presence.

With quivering hands, she lifts away a Latin treatise on flowers which she must have been reading. She motions me to my seat, lights two candles sprouting from the cups of a seven-armed silver menorah. Manuscripts in varying states of decay line shelves up to the ceiling, form rickety towers on the floor. She pulls a chair next to mine, sits with her hands on her lap as if squeezing into herself the strength needed to fend off tears. She and the room both reek of vellum and the special dust which rare books dispel; the Senhora keeps her windows closed to forestall the decay of her Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian and European volumes. How I used to love the hermetic otherness of this store as a child, as if it housed my inheritance.

“He was just a child,” she says with a pressing force.

“Who?” I ask.

“The boy who came to sell your uncle’s Haggadah.”

“Did he speak with any accent?”

“No, he’s from Lisbon.”

“Dark skinned?”

She leans into me, her jaws grinding. The bright scent of cardamon alights around her; she is chewing seeds. “Fair skinned,” she says. “Tiny, thin. With wild hair. Like a thistle. Wait.” She darts about the room like a hen, picks out paper, a reed pen and an ink well. She puts them down in front of me. “Start drawing, Beri,” she says, and she stands like a Torah teacher over my shoulder as she commands my sketch: “…No, no, his nose was thinner, with nostrils like the sound slits in a cittern, very elegant you understand. And the lips were fuller, as if he were pouting. More curve…more shape…” She presses into the taut muscle between my neck and shoulder when I’ve captured a feature correctly and whispers, perfeito as if drawing the word into a silken thread. After an hour, she has lifted her hand away in satisfaction.

“And his clothes?” I ask.

“Poor. A ragged little nincompoop. The kind of kid who hawks esparto grass by the quays. He said he was selling the Haggadah for his master. I handed him a fable to look at while I examined it. But the little beggar couldn’t even read.” She frowns as if illiteracy were a Christian sin too beastly to tolerate. She walks me to the door with her hand in mine, says, “I’m sorry. I should have bought it. But all of a sudden I was screaming like a parrot. You know how I get.” She motions for me to bend so that my face is at her level, speaks in a conspiratorial voice. “Berekiah, after all this… When do you think King Manuel will come to his senses and allow us Hebrew books again?”

“Never,” I say.

“Then I must start smuggling, too,” she concludes in a hushed voice.

“When I find out how my uncle did it, I’ll tell you.”

I scroll up my drawing and slip it into my pouch. We kiss goodbye. On the street, gazing over tawny rooftops into the distance, I wonder who would be bold or foolish enough to send an illiterate boy to sell a stolen Haggadah to Little Jerusalem’s most experienced bookseller. The whisper of my uncle’s voice rises with a swirl of dust from the cobbles, bearing the name Miguel Ribeiro, the aristocrat for whom Esther recently scripted a Book of Psalms.

When I ask, “Why him?,” there comes the reply: “Precisely because the acts of a Portuguese nobleman cannot be questioned by a Jew.”

Chapter XII

The Rua Nova d’El Rei is a hell to cross, already a sweating stink of peddlers and animals and spices. I thread my way through the rabble to Goldsmith’s Street and turn up toward Miguel Ribeiro’s mansion. Two armored guards stand outside, halberds poised in gloved hands. The shorter of the two, a sickly looking man with a harelip, follows me with suspicious eyes. I plant myself in front of him and say, “Tell your master that Pedro Zarco wishes to speak with him.”

A black footman with a shaved head is called to carry my message inside. He returns at a trot. The guard opens the gate. On the front steps, a squat servant with oily, copper-colored hair and a sweaty, pimpled forehead rushes to me. He wears blue leggings too tight for his fleshy buttocks, and his green brocade doublet is ripped at the collar. He takes my arm as if escorting me from danger. Up close, I see that his fat neck is scratched raw and red. Is he riddled with mange? He stinks of metal, like an old coin. Perhaps he has been eating antimony pills—a cure-all freely recommended by half-made Christian doctors.

“Inside…inside!” he whispers, his hands waving wildly.

He ushers me into a vaulted waiting room painted with frescoes of roseate gods and goddesses in the Florentine style, then looks me up and down with rapt, jaundiced eyes. In a conspiratorial whisper, he asks, “Is your God really a bull?”

“What?”

“Is the Jewish God a bull?” Forming horns atop his head with his hands, he speaks as if I might not understand Portuguese. “You know, a male cow…a cow’s husband…bull…”

Of course, I’d heard of scholars at the University of Coimbra who believed we had prehensile tails; bishops in Braga who claimed we needed the warm blood of Christian children for Passover rituals; doctors in Porto who said that we possessed an odor similar to that of rotting whale meat—the foetor Judaicus. But this belief that we prayed to a bull was a new slander. An understanding of the misconception involved only came to me weeks later, when I realized that the servant had confused the Portuguese word touro, bull, with Torah. So in reply, I simply sigh and say, “Just let me speak with your master. He knows who I am.”

He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and says in an urgent voice, “Don’t you know where he is? He spoke of needing to find Master Abraham Zarco. He’s you’re uncle, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must know!”

“I assure you I don’t,” I say. “And my uncle can’t possibly be with him—he’s dead.”

“Oh dear.” He holds his head in his hands.

“What is it?” I ask.

He looks up imploringly, whispers, “Dom Miguel has been missing since Sunday. He had mentioned your uncle’s name. I thought…”

“Have you searched for him?”

“Leave?! Leave this house?!” The servant paces the room, curls his hands together, braids and unbraids his arms.

I ask, “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh dear…Sunday afternoon. The riot was starting. Some men came looking for Marranos. He spoke with them, then rode out toward Benfica. He has a stables there. But we’ve had no word. I don’t think he made it.”

“Who was with him?”

“No one. I’ve sent messages there. No one’s seen him.” He begins clawing at his neck, then swipes at a chaffed scar below his ear with catlike ferocity. He squats on the ground as if about to relieve his bowels right into the seat of his leggings, continues scratching. “If he were a Jew, I’d understand,” he groans. “But he’s innocent! Completely innocent!”

I remember Uncle’s comment about Dom Miguel’s covenant with the Lord. Apparently, not even his household staff knows that he’s a secret Jew. “Go sing it to the goats, you ignorant peasant!” I say, turning to leave.

The servant jumps up and grabs my arm. I rip it away. His eyes bulge fish-like in anger, and he hisses, “Yes, you’re one of them! Right to the tip of your horns!”

Grinning cruelly, I say, “Have no fear. I won’t curse you to our touro god.”

He arches his back into a posture of command, peers up at me over his pug nose. “Begone, Marrano!” he shouts in an arrogant voice.

But I am beyond the contempt of mortal men. As I turn away, he calls after me in a terrified voice, “You’re not going, are you?!”

I look back for his beseeching eyes. He is squatting again, swiping at his neck, drawing blood now. I watch him from across a distance which, to my surprise, will admit no sympathy for Christian anguish.

The road to Benfica skirts the quarry pits at Campolide where hundreds of yellow-eyed Africans mine limestone from gouged hillocks. Two breeds of slaves they’ve become: the portadores or carriers, backs braced with baskets woven from vine, who grunt and trudge under their burden of stone; and the picadores or hackers, wide-shouldered and lean-muscled, whose rose-pink hands grip the wooden handles of the iron picks which remove the hills a little at a time.

A third breed lives on a lower level: small, darting Portuguese slave boys known as lebres, hares, who scavenge scree and carry it from the worksite in reed baskets.

In Benfica’s main square, a droopy-eyed grandmother wrapped in a black mantilla is hawking quince marmalade from the steps of the São Domingos Church.

“Do you know where Miguel Ribeiro has his stables?” I ask her.

“Never heard of him,” she replies.

“The local blacksmith will know,” I say. “Be so kind as to tell me where he works.”

She points down the street to a dusty wooden shack and cackles, “So it’s the Basque you’re after, is it!” Her shoulders hunch and she giggles to herself as if a secret has been exposed.

A sorry-looking donkey is hitched to the shack’s door handle. Flies have formed a buzzing nimbus around an enraged wound on the poor creature’s snout. Inside, a pale-skinned giant with thick black hair and oak-branch arms is pumping a bellows the size of a carriage. He wears only sandals and a long, leather apron, and from the side his thick, muscular legs and even buttocks are visible. The bellows’ cylindrical mouth glows red where it enters the forge. The air smells of smoke and metal and heavy toil. I cough to get his attention, excuse myself and ask, “Dom Miguel Ribeiro—do you know him? He’s said to have a stables very near here.”

He turns to me, and with a clipped Basque accent questions, “Who’s asking?” A thick cord of scar tissue runs from his left ear lobe across his cheek. Droplets of sweat cling to his chin, fall patiently, one by one, to the floor.

“My name is Pedro Zarco,” I say. “I’ve word from Lisbon for him. From his sister.”

He turns away from me and returns to his pumping. In an irritated voice, he says, “If you work for his sister then you should know where he lives.”

“She’s had thick cataracts since childhood and couldn’t describe the way.”

My failure to lie convincingly is implicit in the patient, resigned way he lowers his arms and wipes the sweat from his fingers on his apron. “She doesn’t need to see in order to describe the way to her brother’s stables,” he says.

“Look, she came down from Coimbra after the riot. She’s worried. All she knows is that he’s here somewhere in Benfica. Do you need to see my written pedigree to give me an answer? Or will checking my teeth be enough?”

He laughs from his gut, eyes me up and down. “You’re really quite a nice looking young man.” He thrusts out his legs, leans back and reaches his massive hand below his apron to his sex. As he fondles himself, his leering stare makes it obvious what he wants. “For a little price, I might tell you.”

“For a little price, I could buy the information from someone else.”

“My ‘bird’ is mighty nice,” he grins, showing the remnants of a few brown teeth. “Big as a raven. And the way it can kiss your ass cheeks! Young man, I think you’d like it.”

“I’ve a friend who’d love it. But I’m not interested.”

He unstraps his apron and tosses it aside. He’s completely naked underneath, all dripping, matted hair and muscle. His member sticks straight out from his abdomen, big and round as a rolling pin. “I could take you without your permission,” he says, as if favoring me with a forewarning. His eyes are bright with seductive anticipation.

I show Farid’s dagger. “And I could cut it off.”

He laughs, steals forward like a stalking animal, runs his thumb enticingly across the length of his facial scar. “How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never tried?” he asks.

My heart pounds a code of dread as I back up. “I have tried. Once, with that friend I mentioned. But I prefer other unions. And I’ve grown exceptionally fond of my ass in just one piece if you don’t mind.”

He doesn’t smile, but moves his hand to his lips for saliva. I back to the open doorway. Trying to seduce me with his lust, he begins pumping on his sex.

I chant, “Blessed be He who has given me an escape from satyrs,” and race into the street. Looking over my shoulder, I see him by his donkey, showing the poor animal and a good deal of Benfica his private manhood.

Back in the central square, neither a soap seller nor a basketmaker knows where Miguel Ribeiro keeps his horses. “Don’t you mind that your blacksmith shows himself?” I ask, pointing down the dusty street.

“It’s good for business,” the soapseller observes. “People come from all around to see it. ‘The Basque blacksmith who’s larger than his horses!’”

A gorse peddler joins our conversation and informs me that there are several stables along the road to Sintra, so I head through the town’s western gate. After a long row of sumac bushes, a dirt road opens to the north fronted by a chapel to the Virgin Mary. A mouse of a woman enfolded in black prays on her knees to the benevolent effigy. The Nazarene child, in Mary’s hands, looks fragile and solitary. The supplicant turns to me with a delicate face betokening warmth. “Saint Anthony once prayed here,” she says.

If you added up all the Old Christian claims for their Saint Anthony, you quickly came to the conclusion that he covered more territory on his knees than Dias, da Gama and Columbus in all their ships combined. “Then it is a very holy shrine,” I reply in a gentle voice, crossing myself. “Tell me, senhora, do you know where Dom Miguel Ribeiro might have his stables?”

“I believe it’s just down this road,” she answers, pointing to the north. “On the left after another two hundred yards. First you’ll pass the stream where the Melo boy drowned in the flood a few years back, then that series of granite boulders which Father Vasco says was a temple to witches in the time before He was born. A little ways after that.”

I cross myself again and thank her. The landmarks appear just as she said. A humid, putrid scent begins to waft toward me, however. It grows sickening just as I cross the gnarled shadow of a giant oak on which is carved the hollow-eyed skull usually painted above the doors of leper houses. A hare, quick as fear, suddenly darts across my feet. All my senses attuned to the present, I step over a cartwheel abandoned in the middle of the road. On the west side of the road, a grove of orange trees gives way to grasses, and I spot the stables—six arcades flanking a white and blue farmhouse. A low stone wall borders the property. The wooden gate which gives entry is unlocked, squeals open to my touch. Halfway up the dirt path, I call, “Dom Miguel! I am Master Abraham’s nephew. I mean no harm!”

My voice seems to cut dangerously at the rotting air. Only the dull, staccato rapping of a woodpecker from a long ways off dares enter the ensuing silence. I cross the dry field fronting the stables fighting the urge to retch, breathe as lightly as I can. All but one of the sheds is empty. In it is the source of the maleficent odor; an eyeless horse being eaten away by waves of squirming maggots.

The front door of the house is locked. A muffled voice comes to me just as I touch the knocker. My hand peels open my pouch, creeps around the base of Farid’s dagger. The door opens, and a gaunt, beak-nosed man in a rough linen cloak steps out. He points a crossbow at my heart. “Old or New Christian?!” he demands.

“Old,” I answer.

Two more men emerge from the house. Arms grip me from behind, tear open the ache in my shoulder. “Filho da puta! Son of a whore!” a voice spits in my ear.

Using the Hebrew for whore, I say, “If my mother were a zonà, I’d be dressed a lot better than I am!”

“What was that?” The gaunt figure lowers his crossbow, steps to me.

The blue and white fringes of his prayer shawl dangle below his cloak. “Your tzitzit are showing,” I say. “You’re not going to fool many people that way.”

“I’m not aiming to fool anyone,” he says. “Jacob, let him go.”

Set free, we bless each other and exchange names. “I’m looking for Dom Miguel Ribeiro,” I explain. “Is this his stables?”

“Yes,” he answers, unfurling his arm toward the door.

Inside, a man only slightly older than me, with spiky black hair and several days’ growth of beard shadowing his cheeks, sits on the floor at the back of the foyer. He wears a blue brocade doublet that is open at the collar, leather riding pants torn at his thigh, the coarsest of Alentejo boots. The heel of one is missing. Offering me a nod of acknowledgment, he stands and walks toward me, limping a bit because of the missing heel.

“Dom Miguel Ribeiro?” I ask.

He nods. I begin to introduce myself, but the beak-nosed guard with the crossbow now standing at my side exclaims, “He’s Abraham Zarco’s nephew!”

Dom Miguel’s eyes open wide and he takes my hands. His touch is frigid. “Come!” he says, his voice quivering with eagerness. He leads me to a warm kitchen smelling of grilled meat, and we sit alone at a granite table by a hearth of snapping embers. “Where’s your uncle?” he questions.

When I tell him, he turns toward the wall and crosses himself.

“Why did he visit you recently?” I ask.

Dom Miguel continues to face away, however. So I say, “Maybe it’s my lack of sleep, but I’m confused. Do you know that you’re Jewish? Or, at least, that my uncle considered you so. Did that have something to do with his recent visit?”

The nobleman jumps up suddenly and takes down a wine skin from a shelf above the mantle. He pours the burgundy liquid into two ceramic cups and dilutes them both with water. He hands me mine and says, “To your health,” then downs most of his in a single gulp. He drops heavily to his chair. “Drink!” he prompts with a twist to his hand, then quoting a famous Hebrew poem, adds, “‘Drink all day long, until the day wanes and the sun coats its silver with gold.’” As I take a sip, he observes, “Wine is the only thing keeping me going. By now, it’s replaced all my blood.” To my questioning eyes, he adds, “No, I don’t think I’m Jewish…not yet, but I’m learning. And that was indeed part of the reason for your uncle’s visit.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me neither,” he laughs in a single, ironic exhale. “We’d have to ask your uncle again to be sure. And now, that’s impossible. But according to what he told me, I was born in Ciudad Real to Jewish parents. In the year fourteen eighty-two.” He snaps his fingers, “Gained two years just like that. A miracle of sorts. Your uncle said that in fourteen eighty-four my parents were burnt at the second auto-da-fe ever held in Ciudad Real.” He downs the last drops of his wine, scratches the whiskers on his chin. “Considered negativos, they were, since they refused to confess the names of other secret Jews. Your uncle, he said that he handled all the arrangements to have me smuggled into Portugal. He studied for a time with my father apparently, knew my parents well. He said that my mother forced him to pledge that I be raised a true Christian, that I not be told of my origins unless at some future date it were to become absolutely essential. Your uncle said that his attitude toward me at the time was, ‘As long as you’re going to be one of them, you might as well get the most out of it.’ So he waited until he found childless aristocrats who wanted a little boy to inherit their holdings and who wouldn’t ask too many questions about the baby’s circumcised sex. I only found this all out a week ago when your uncle came to my house to inform me that the Book of Psalms your aunt was scripting for me was almost finished.” Miguel pours us both more wine. “He gave me a letter signed by my adoptive father as proof.”

“Why do you think my uncle told you now, after so many years?” I ask.

“Don’t know.” He leans toward me and stares into my eyes as if trying to elicit a reassuring response. I shrug my inability to provide it. He belches loudly, looks away. “Berekiah, I’ve thought about this a lot,” he says without turning back. “Do you suppose that he knew the Old Christians would begin to kill the Jews of Lisbon…that he was worried for my safety?”

“He had powers, but I…” A shiver snaking its way up my spine binds my words to silence.

Miguel holds up his hands as if also unwilling to enter the dangerous territory of prophecy. “Anyway, I lost my temper. After so long, finding out… Now I wish I’d had the chance to ask him more. You see, when it comes down to it, I don’t doubt his word. I suppose that now I’ll never know more about my real parents. Funny sometimes how understanding always arrives a little bit too late.” Two gulps and his new cup of wine is emptied. “Come,” he says, standing up. “I’ve some people I want you to meet.”

As I stare into his drunken eyes, I realize that my master had presented this young nobleman with a dreaded truth. Was death his punishment for destroying an illusion?

“First, some questions,” I say.

“As you wish.” He bows forward, as if he’s my servant.

“You say you were angry when he told you,” I begin.

“Yes, wouldn’t you have been?” he replies.

“For now, Dom Miguel, my hypothetical responses are irrelevant. Where were you Sunday when the riot began?”

“Ah, I understand the direction of your questions.” He feigns pulling an arrow from his chest, laughs too deeply. “Very well. I was at home. Then, when the Dominicans started burning in the Rossio, I set out for here. Berekiah, I’d just been told I was a Jew. Wouldn’t you have…”

“Who came with you?” I demand.

“No one.”

“Then you’ve no witness who can confirm your story.”

Dom Miguel grins, straightens up and unfastens the thick laces of his leather codpiece with the heavy clumsiness given to him by a stomach sloshing with wine. He reveals his sex, lifts up the circumcised tip as if offering me a rose and says, “He’ll confirm my story!”

“Not good enough. He can’t speak.”

Dom Miguel laughs from his gut.

I roll my eyes at the man’s drunken idiocy. Unconcerned, he begins to lace up his codpiece, his eyes squinting at his fingers as they stumble over their work. Finished, he drops to his chair with a great sigh, stares at me with a yearning expression for far too long, as if he’s trying to invade my thoughts. Everything about this debauched aristocrat irritates me. What I dislike most is that he hasn’t a clue as to who he really is.

As if shot from an arrow, the thought comes to me: This is the man Uncle was referring to when he told me to beware of a courier who can’t recognize himself from one day to the next. Jumping up, I shout, “What would prevent you from killing my uncle with impunity?! You, a nobleman!”

“Look, my friend,” he begins. “Would I kill the only man who could tell me the truth about my parents? If you believe that, you’re a fool!”

“My uncle was the only one who knew you were a Jew…who could prove it! Kill him, and your secret is safe!”

“Berekiah, do I need to show you my covenant with the Lord again? And others knew about it. A boy growing up with servants…people see. They don’t speak about it, but they see. In fact, my covenant is greater proof than all the documents in the King’s archives.” He stands, pounds his fist on the table. “I didn’t kill your uncle! If I did, then why don’t I kill you now?

To this, I can come up with no reply worthy of speech.

“Come with me!” he says. “I must show you something.”

Dom Miguel leads me into a crowded sitting room. Tired-eyed men, women and children offer me solemn, acknowledging nods. Smiles blossom fleetingly, then dry and fade. My host whispers to me, “No need for fear, we are all New Christians here.” To them, he announces, “This is Berekiah, a friend from the Judiaria Pequena.”

A dark, almond-eyed man with a scruffy beard dotted with oat flakes stands and asks, “Do you know Mira and Luna Alvalade? They must live near you.”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen them lately,” I reply.

“They’re my cousins. They…I…” His words trail off.

“When I get back to Lisbon, I’ll try to find out how they are and get word to Dom Miguel.”

“What about Dr. Montesinhos?” asks a handsome woman with a shawl of russet-colored lace wrapped protectively around her head.

“I’m afraid he’s dead. I’m sorry.”

In quivering voices, most of the others gather the courage to ask about friends and relatives. I dispense the news that I can, record the names in my Torah memory so that I can find out about them after I have disembarked fully on the shores of vengeance.

Miguel takes my shoulder, whispers to me, “They’re all from Carnide and Pontinha and other nearby villages. When riots broke out, they came here for shelter. I spread the word that no one would be turned away, armed some of the men as soon as they got here.”

“The horse in the stables?” I enquire.

He grins. “Discourages both the curious and the enraged. Same with the skull carved on the tree.” Miguel belches again, hits himself in the chest. He unfurls his hand to indicate his guests and shakes his head. He whispers into my ear, “They don’t want to leave. One of these days, I suppose I’ll have to kick them out.”

“And is there no more killing in Lisbon?” an intelligent-looking teenage girl suddenly asks me. For a moment, it seems as if God has chosen her to ask this question of me; the room becomes eerily silent. It’s as if we’ve become a congregation assembled to await an answer from the Lord himself. “Its reasonably safe,” I say. I know that this isn’t the answer they want, but it is all I have.

“What does ‘reasonably’ mean anymore?!” the man with the scruffy beard demands angrily.

“As safe as it’s going to be for a while,” I reply. “As safe as the world can be for Jews until the Messiah comes.”

A murmur passes through the room as if I’ve now given the correct response. And yet, what if our faith in His coming is nothing but the hope of the forever shipwrecked?

Miguel and I settle onto a rug by the hearth as the guests talk amongst themselves again. He whispers to me, “If I had killed your uncle, do you think I would have saved all these people?”

“To atone for the sin of murder, you might save all Israel,” I reply.

He closes his eyes tight, as if to shut out the world.

I can see I’ve wounded him. But in my state, the anguish of strangers means little to me, and whatever sympathy beats in my heart doesn’t reach as far as my voice. “My uncle wrote you a letter,” I say dryly. “I brought it to your mansion last Sunday, but your servants said you were out. Uncle Abraham said for me to show it only to you.”

My host opens his eyes. They are red and weary. “Did he tell you what it said?” he asks in a hopeless monotone.

“The letter is guarded inside my memory,” I reply, and I repeat it to him, word for word.

Inexplicably, he laughs from his gut when I’ve finished. “Your uncle asked whether I’d be interested in going into business with him,” he says. He stares at me as if surprised suddenly by my presence. “Yes, you are handsome. It would have been hard to have refused you. He was clever. What he asked had something to do with parcels. And the angel named Metatron mentioned in the letter. And trips to Genoa, I believe. Somewhere on the Italian peninsula. I’m sure I said ‘no,’ but I don’t really recall what exactly it was he was proposing. My mind was racing between the past and present. So many things began to make sense.” He grips my shoulder. “Berekiah, you know that moment when you stop translating a foreign language in your head and you understand the words without thinking? It was just like that. I suddenly understood the cool distance of my adoptive parents, their reticence to travel with me, the shadowed whispers behind closed doors as they put me to bed.”

“So when the riot broke out, you…?”

“I panicked. I mean, I had just found out that I was Jewish and then there’s this pyre in the Rossio rising toward the rooftops of Lisbon. It seemed like it was lit just for me. Strange the sensations you have when the past no longer is yours…when it’s been changed and your own history has been rewritten. So I rode out here.”

“Did my uncle mention anyone else when he spoke with you… other names?”

Dom Miguel shakes his head with exaggerated force.

“No one else? A priest…other Jews? Think hard.”

“I wasn’t paying much attention. He wanted me to travel for him. Because of my connections, it’s easy for me to get overseas. To carry parcels for him. Yes, that was it! A correio, courier…that’s what he wanted me to be.”

“He used that exact word, correio?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And what were you to carry?”

“Angels,” he said. Dom Miguel smiles. “Your uncle said, I remember now, that I would be carrying angels to safety. I had no idea what he meant.”

“Hebrew manuscripts,” I say. “He probably didn’t want to tell you the whole truth until he discovered how you felt about being a Jew…where your allegiances would lie.”

“I don’t understand…angels…books?”

“Books are created from holy letters. Just as angels are, according to some. Viewed from this perspective—through a window of kabbalah, if you like—an angel is nothing but a book given heavenly form…given wings, to use a common metaphor. Apparently, you were to to be given the task of saving these winged manuscripts from flames. He didn’t want to call you a smuggler, used a more pleasant word—courier. Which I suppose must mean…” Speech gives way to greater understanding about the betrayal which led to Uncle’s death.

“What?!” Dom Miguel demands.

“Which means that someone who had been smuggling books with him was betraying him. The present correio. So my uncle needed to find a replacement. And he must have been desperate. That’s why he decided to risk revealing your Judaism to you. Perhaps the courier even knew of the location of our cellar and the genizah. Or maybe he worked with a thresher. Perhaps they hired the Northerner who has been watching for Diego Gongalves at his townhouse.” Dom Miguel’s puzzled expression shows me that I’ve confused him with my references. “It’s simple,” I say. “My uncle needed you precisely because his previously trusted courier had begun to betray him. How, I don’t know. Nor for what reason. But this courier, this smuggler, may be the key.”

“And who has he been until now?” he asks.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out!” I get to my feet. “I’ve got to get back to Lisbon now. Will you be here if I want to talk with you, or back at your palace?”

“Here, it’s where I’m needed.” He laughs in a single exhale. “And where there’s wine. It’s not kosher, but it works just the same.”

In the foyer, a last question which I hesitate to ask makes me pause before the door.

Dom Miguel says, “Would I have saved all these Jews had I not known about my true past? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

“It’s an unfair question. You’ve acted honorably, more than…”

“No, I wouldn’t. Not that I would have applauded the killing, mind you. I’m not a cruel person, and I’ve never believed the Jews very different from… I was about to say ‘us.’ A case of understanding arriving a little late again, no? But I’d have sat in my palace in Lisbon reading by silver candlelight. And when the screams pierced my window frames, I’d simply have had the shutters closed.”

Back in Alfama, irritated with my sweaty exhaustion and the passionate afternoon sun of Lisbon, I knock on Father Carlos’ door to no avail, then enquire after him inside St. Peter’s Church. According to the caretaker, there is still no word of him.

As for Diego, I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for him; with the burly Northerner probably waiting outside his apartment, he is surely not at home. And his only friends that I knew for certain were the members of the threshing group.

Prodded by the hope of finding the names of Uncle’s smugglers or even a suspicious reference to an acquaintance, I decide to check the correspondence belonging to my master which I earlier discovered at the bottom of our genizah. Before going home, however, questions about Rabbi Losa’s whereabouts on Sunday tug me toward his door. In response to my sharp knocks, his gaunt face juts like a gargoyle out the window on the second floor. “What do you want?” he questions unpleasantly.

Strange, but I’m relieved to see his face and hear his crusty voice. I reply, “Just to talk to you, dearest rabbi.”

Perhaps he thinks I’m being sarcastic. “Go back to your accursed kabbalah!” he snaps.

His shutters bang closed. I knock at the door, and sensing my good feelings for him betrayed, shout, “I’m not going away till we’ve talked!” As I wait, an irrational rage seethes in my gut. I begin kicking at the door. “I’m going to break it down! I swear, I’m going break your damn door down!” Fury rises into my head, burns my cheeks and temples. It is as if boiling alcohol has risen into the top chamber of an alchemist’s alembic, and I cannot stop myself from kicking. Obviously, whatever makeshift masonry was giving me firm foundation has suddenly crumbled. Ragged children gather to watch. A scruffy wood carrier shoots me a look of contempt. He dares to say, “You, Marrano, what are you doing there?!” Squatting, he lowers his baskets to the street. His eyes, seemingly unrimmed by lashes, are dim, imply only the vaguest approximation of human intelligence. When he stands, he folds his spindly arms over his chest and leans back into a posture of disdain.

I must be crazed, because I march right up to him behind the silver of my dagger. “I’m about to hack your ears off!” I say, venom spraying from each word. “That’s what I’m doing here!”

In an instant of clarity, I realize that I’m mimicking Farid’s presence in my thoughts. Is that how one gains earthly bravery—by embracing an image of courage and making it one’s own?

Do we learn by carrying into our interior what was once exterior?

The wood carrier continues to eye me defiantly but doesn’t speak. Fear and hate give him a foul odor, redden his cheeks. I turn back for Rabbi Losa’s house. An olive-skinned child with bangs of black hair curtaining his forehead watches me, waves. Suddenly, I realize it’s one of our neighborhood kids, Didi Molcho. Blessed be He who saves the little children. I wave back. He gasps suddenly, points behind me. I turn, jump away from a flying log. Too soon, another one is racing toward my eyes. It catches my ear with a glancing blow. I’m on the ground. Blood stains my fingertips as I explore the wound. My nemesis leans back and grins with sated content. His mouth is a mossy brown ruins. He spits and coughs. I stand, feign wooziness. As he laughs, I run forward, barrel up into him. He is frailer than I expect, all bones and whiskers and yellow skin. Knocked onto his behind, he gasps for breath, then shouts, “Marrano dog!’

I stand over him menacingly and put a finger to my lips. “You’ve still got your ears. If you want to keep them then you’ll keep God’s silence.”

He stands, brushes off his pants, looks away into the crowd. “He’s just a Jew,” he says to save face. “Not worth my trouble.”

As I turn around to walk away, I catch Didi’s eyes. He knows to signal to me should the wood seller approach. He nods that all is well as we come together. “He’s gone?” I ask.

“Already down the street. But listen, Beri, while you were fighting, Rabbi Losa got away. He ran from the house.”

My mother is sweeping the courtyard slate when I arrive at home. She doesn’t ask where I’ve been. “Dirt everywhere!” she says to my questioning eyes.

Reza is preparing codfish and eggs at the hearth.

“Have you checked on Farid by any chance?” I ask.

“He’s still in your mother’s bed. Oh, and look on the table,” she adds. “Something for you from Master Solomon.”

Solomon, the mohel whom I found hiding in the micvah, has dropped off a hulking Latin translation of Averrões commentary on Aristotle’s “De Anima”—perhaps in thanks for liberating him from the bathhouse. “When did he stop by?” I question.

“About an hour ago.”

“Did he mention why he left it?”

Reza shows a fleeting smile. “‘A present for my little Shalaat Chalom,’he said.”

I lug the book to my room and drop it to my bed. Through the inner window, I see Cinfa scrubbing the floor of the store. She looks up with faded eyes as I climb inside. “In the night, I gave water to Farid like you told me,” she says in a dry voice. “And he ate two eggs I made.”

“Thank you. That was sweet. Are you okay?”

“Fine. Why don’t you stay home for a while? Eat something.”

“Listen, I’m going to go down to the cellar. You can come with me if you like. But then I’ve got to go out again.”

“To find who killed Uncle?” she enquires.

“Who told you that?”

“Beri, I’m not stupid. I hear conversations, know what…”

A single knock on the door halts her explanation. Without waiting for our reply, Senhora Faiam, our neighbor from across Temple Street, rushes in. Her black dress is torn at the collar, red scratches arc across her cheek toward her lips.

“The Old Christians?!” I shout, rushing to her, thinking she’s been assaulted.

“No, no,” she says. “Nothing like that.” She grips my hand. Her pale eyes are rimmed red with sleeplessness. Her jowls sag. “I saw you from my house,” she continues. “I’m sorry about Master Abraham.” When she lifts my hand to her lips and gives it a gentle kiss, I sniff at her odor of distress. “Beri, we need you,” she says. “Can you come to my house?” So Cinfa won’t hear, she tugs me down to her level, whispers into my ear, “Bring talismans. An ibbur has possessed Gemila and is clinging as tight as can be.” She grips my hand hard. “And Beri, the ibbur says he knows who killed your uncle!”

Chapter XIII

From our storage cabinet in the cellar, I gather what I need to exorcise an ibbur and head to Senhora Faiam’s house. Gemila, her daughter-in-law, sits bound with rope to a wooden bench in the kitchen, her hands tied together, breathing in gulps, famished for air. How to describe the victim of a possession? Twice before I have seen the symptoms: the white skin like waterlogged parchment; the tormented eyes; the rims of crusted blood inside the lips and nostrils. Gemila is no different, perhaps even worse; she has already ceded a good portion of her human shell, begun to take on the demon’s form. Her chestnut locks are matted with shit, stuck in clumps to her cheeks and neck. The pinky of her left hand has clearly been broken, sticks out to the side at an impossible angle. Her loose-fitting white frock is stained everywhere, looks as if she has been swimming in mud and blood. A being from the Other Side has slithered around her soul, I think, and my first urge is to run. But Uncle has taught me that ibburs are only metaphors—very powerful ones, it is true, but no match for even an incipient kabbalist. And if this demon truly knows who killed my master…

Gemila suddenly tilts her head back as if it is too heavy to control. When she gazes at me, her eyes lose their terror and connote only a contemplative depth of vision. They fix upon the wisps of incense smoke now rising from my censer.

Bento, Gemila’s husband, touches my shoulder and shows me a lost smile meant to ask for help. His black hair is tied back tightly with a blue ribbon, and a weeks growth of beard sprouts thickly on his cheeks. His forehead and hands, pants and shirt, are all streaked black with sweat and the grease of fleece. He earns a living as a traveling shearer and must have made it safely back into Lisbon only to find his wife like this.

Belo, their three-legged dog, normally tethered to Gemila by a fierce fidelity, has backed up against the door to the bedrooms and is staring at her with frightened eyes.

“Sente-se bem?, do you feel all right?” I ask Gemila in Portuguese.

It is a stupid question, I admit. She offers me only silence. Eyes as cold as obsidian resist my penetration. I lift her roped hands. Her pulse races unevenly, as if her essences are scurrying in all directions. She frowns and stares contemptuously at my touch. She gulps again for air. Cringing, she screams in Hebrew, “A bell is falling through my chest!” Her eyes roll white, then fix me with a frigid stare.

Senhora Faiam whispers, “She is ricocheting between our world and the demonic sphere. When I nod, she adds, “We have found that the ibbur speaks no Portuguese, only Hebrew.”

“When did this pain begin?” I ask Gemila in the holy language.

Her chest heaves, then stills. “There is no pain—this vessel is frail but adequate,” comes a voice. It is not Gemila’s. It is monotone, leached of warmth. The Hebrew is Castilian accented.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“White Maimon of the two mouths.”

I look away for a moment to gather my resolve; this is no ordinary ibbur, but a demon. “Why do you say, ‘two mouths?’” I ask.

“One to devour the children of Anusim, the forced converts. Made of blood. With needles for teeth.”

Biting at the air for breath, she suddenly spits red at me. Senhora Faiam gasps. As I wipe my neck, Gemila opens her mouth. Ruined teeth are coated with fresh blood. She laughs.

“God forgive her,” Senhora Faiam moans. “She ate glass just before I ran to you. I tried to stop her but the ibbur can only live on minerals. He’s…”

I wave away the Senhora’s cascade of words, face Gemila. “Why have you come?” I ask.

“Zedek is divorced from Rahamim.”

This demon knows kabbalah! He refers to the break between female justice and male compassion that has given rise to a reign of evil in our era.

“I come with Rahamim,” I say. “Together, Rahamim and I will marry this woman.”

“You may enter and ride me, but you will not emerge!” the demon warns.

It is a double entendre on Gemila’s sex and the chariot of mystical vision; few who ride it can return unscathed. Referencing a second-century Jewish sage who emerged safely back into our world after a journey in the chariot, I say, “I come in peace, like Rabbi Akiva.” Raising my middle finger over the girl, I invoke the power of Moses.

She rears back. With challenge grounding his voice, the demon spits out, “I am neither Amalekite nor asp! And Moses is dead!”

“It is always Passover,” I reply. “Moses parts the Red Sea even as we speak.”

“Then soon he, too, will be on the other side unable to help you.”

“So you refuse to let the woman guide her own vessel?” I ask.

“She has let me inside, and I will stay with her and give her the solace which your God has refused. Otherwise, I would be an ungrateful guest. Don’t you agree?”

“As you wish.” I turn to Bento. “Three things I will need. Cold water from the Tagus. Fill the largest tub or cauldron you can find with it. It must fit Gemila. We have one if you can’t…”

“We have one! What else?!”

“A sole. Bring me the smallest one you can find. And for God’s sake, keep it alive. And lastly, get Cinfa to show you where our magic dye is. Bring it to me and spill some into a plate.”

“What will we do?” Senhora Faiam asks.

“All filth and dirt heighten the Other Side. So the Zohar says. And so this demon knows. Gemila must be cleaned.”

“You may even pare my fingernails, it will do no good!” the ibbur hisses. “The Sabbath is just another sunset to me, and you are a shadow trying to hold a fire.”

“And the sole?” Senhora Faiam whispers, so the demon won’t hear.

“Fish are immune to the likes of Maimon,” I answer. “It will help us in the struggle.”

While Bento is out, I instruct Senhora Faiam on how we will chant Psalm Ninety-One to prepare Gemila. The Senhora grips the censer chain with both hands as she listens.

“Take that foul odor from me, you shit-filled goat!” the demon suddenly shouts. “And know this, Berekiah Zarco—if you attempt to remove me from my home you will never find your uncle’s murderer!”

The evil beings words rip speech from me. I stare into Gemila’s dark eyes to make contact with him. Her head swirls in a lazy circle as if plagued by irresistible sleep. When she straightens up, she laughs from her gut.

“So you’ve seen the murderer?!” I demand.

“I have! But if you raise Moses’ finger against me again, I will cling as tight to the secret as I do to this woman.”

“And you will tell me the identity of the murderer if I leave you be?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Maimon does not lie,” he says. “I have even dared to tell your Lord the truth. I do not fear him. I have nothing to lose. Only Jews like this sinning whore have a need to lie before their Lord!”

Senhora Faiam takes my arm, “Would you listen to an ibbur, Berekiah?”

“But he knows!” I shout. “He knows who did it!”

“Untie me!” the demon demands.

I pry myself from Senhora Faiam’s fevered grasp. With fists raised to her cheeks, she shouts, “Would you serve Samael, the Devil, to avenge your uncle?!”

My confession clutches my throat: Yes! I would do anything to find him! Anything!

So what is holding me back? Gemila herself? She jerks upright with a grunt, her neck craning as she lifts up the bench to which she is tied. When she lets it drop with a crash, she writhes within her bindings as if impaled by a burning sword. She bites at the air for breath. When the tide inside her ebbs, she stares at me with her impenetrable eyes. “Untie me!” she demands.

Yelping turns me. Belo is scratching furiously at the door to the courtyard with his single front paw.

My uncle’s voice sounds inside me: “Do not abandon the living for the dead!” His hands grip my shoulders as I turn back to the demon. I begin to chant Psalm Ninety-One: “You shall find safety beneath his wings, shall not fear the hunters’ trap by night or the arrow that flies by day, the pestilence that stalks in darkness or the plague raging at noonday…”

“You will never find the murderer!” Maimon shouts. “Never!”

Senhora Faiam follows my lead, and the plies of our separate voices are united by the spinning wheel of psalm. We chant together: “You shall watch the punishment of the wicked. For you, the Lord is a safe retreat. You have made Him your refuge. No disaster shall befall you, no calamity shall come upon your home. For he has charged his angels to guard you wherever you go…”

Beyond my words, I turn inwardly from the demon, ascend the steps of silent prayer. Once atop a glowing parapet of inner vibration, supported by the bellows of my chest, I raise again my middle finger over Gemila. She looks around with darting eyes, strains against her ropes, mumbles obscenities in Hebrew, shrieks. Laughs squirt from her. She offers me a grin of beguiling enchantment pierced by a flicking tongue. But she is far below, entwined inside the psalm melody I now entrust to Senhora Faiam. God’s secret names are rising from my throat, flowing in and out of my nostrils as I match my breathing to the rhythm of the words. Light and dark entangle, then separate into stark relief. The world is lit as if by black flame. Time recedes into the distance, and in my heightened state, I see that it is the terror of abandonment that gives rise to Gemila’s laughter. Ascending still higher on the winged melody of psalm, I reach down to caress her cheek. Pain. A grip of evil. Cold wind. Blood sluicing across my hand. Shrieks. Senhora Faiam washing me.

“The demon has bitten you!” she shouts.

I wave her away, take up the chant again till the room grays and Maimon and I are staring at each other across a charged space which breathes slowly in and out. Bento approaches my body, touches its shoulder. “The bath is ready,” he says.

Gemila struggles like an animal as we strip her. I turn toward the bedroom; Gemila’s little boy, Menachim, is sitting inside, hugging Belo, crying. “You must leave us!” I say.

He jumps up, runs past us with the dog at his heels. Together, they dart out of the house.

The river water is pure and frigid. Gemila’s shrieks cut the air. Fists form, tendons strain on her neck. Her arms flail free of the ropes. A blow catches Senhora Faiam and sends her crashing. Gemila’s face contorts in banshee joy. Blood drips from her mouth, sends pink clouds through the churning water. She writhes as we hold her, every muscle slithering toward escape.

Soaked cold but heated by inner prayer, I chant as Bento holds his wife under. Until the airless cold numbs the fight out of her. Her teeth chatter. I hold the smoking incense under her face. Her lips go gray and her eyes glaze.

We lift her out. As Senhora Faiam dries her hair with a towel, she whispers soothing words. Bento kisses her hands.

“Please get back,” I say.

With a prayer from the Bahir, I pick the fish from his jar. I dip it flailing in the magic dye. Gemila sits shivering in her chair. I press the vermilion-dyed wriggling sole to the lifeline on her forehead. She starts as if burned. Quickly, I brush it down across her shoulders and breasts, abdomen, sex and feet, till I have covered each of the ten sefirot—primal points—with dye. When the fish has soaked up her symbolic essences, I drop it to the floor. As it flips across the tile, I close my eyes and intone magic words from Joshua: “Stand still, O Sun, in Bebeon, stand, Moon, in the Vale of Aijalon.”

With my eyes closed I roll my eyeballs until I can see the inner colors, jiggle my breath in and out until the wind of Metatron’s wings spins me. When I open my eyes, the sole is flexing its gills like a bellows. I slip it back in Bento’s water jar; the fish has written a message across the tile floor in exchange for its life.

I read as quick as I can. In a flashing spectrum of Arabic script, I discover the word: tair, bird. In this case, it is a veiled reference to the aperture through which the demon can be extracted.

Footsteps come from behind. Father Carlos faces me. From the mountaintop I have ascended on the inner wind of prayer and chant, it seems natural that he is here. I hold my finger to my lips. His eyes request judgment. I nod my ascent. He turns to Gemila, raises his middle finger over her and begins to chant our psalm in his commanding voice.

With blood from my fingertip, I etch Elohim along the fate-line in the young woman’s forehead in ketav einayim, angelic writing, a version of which I learned from Uncle. Her head tilts back as if her neck has wilted. Her eyes roll white. Before she can sleep, I take her nose between my thumb and forefinger. “I command thee,” I shout, “in the name of the God of Israel, depart from this Jewish body and cling no more!” In Aramaic, I shout a sequence of divine names. And I rip the demon out of her. She shrieks. Blood spurts from her nostrils. Falling forward onto me, she battles for breath. I wipe her face with my sleeve. “You are safe,” I whisper. “The demon is gone.”

She tries to speak but falls from consciousness.

Father Carlos and I keep vigil with Senhora Faiam and Bento. Gemila’s nose has dried. She has been scrubbed with soap and hot water. Her husband has eased her like a newborn baby into their bed. Her pulse comes slow and even, and color has returned to her cheeks. Menachim, her boy, kneels by her side and caresses her hair. The mound of blanket softly breathing at her feet is Belo curled under the covers. Father Carlos sits in his chair praying to himself. When I can face the possibility of another death, I whisper to him, “And Judah?”

He shakes his head and grimaces. “I don’t know where he is. When she wakes, we’ll talk of where I last saw him.” As his eyes close, tears press out and cling to his lashes.

My little brother’s disappearance and the demon’s words of temptation both haunt me with damp chill. I sit on the floor at the eastern corner of the room, chant Torah as a map that may lead both Gemila and me back to God. After a while, Carlos opens the shutters of a western window. The sky glows with fading light. The sun, disappearing below the horizon, seems to be seeking a permanent hiding place.

It is near midnight when Gemila finally wakes. She sits up, gazes with motherly benevolence at Menachim asleep by her side. She starts as she sees me. “Beri, what are you doing here?” she asks.

“You don’t remember?” I ask.

“No. What…what do you mean?”

An eclipse seems to fall over my heart; the demon’s knowledge of the murderers identity must be gone.

Senhora Faiam rushes to the bed. “A dream from the Other Side, dear,” she says, caressing Gemila’s cheek. “You were having a nightmare and I asked Beri to come to see you.”

“Yes,” she says, recalling its fringes inside a faraway look. “A dream.”

Bento presses his lips into his wife’s hands. “It doesn’t matter now.”

She turns to me, confused. “But you…you were in the dream,” she says. “I was being swept away by a river of blood. Like the Nile after Moses touched his… It was cold…so cold.” She speaks carefully, as if stepping back into her nightmare. “And you and your uncle were on the shore calling to me. But you were both birds…ibises. And then you were squawking something fierce. Flapping your wings. I was caught in the current, hitting the rocks. And then I, too, was an ibis. I was flying onto the bank, into your arms.” She stares off into memory. She shrugs, offers me an apologetic smile. “It’s gone. That’s all I remember.”

“The important thing is that it’s over,” I say.

Senhora Faiam kisses my hands. “I’ll never be able to repay you,” she says.

“I have been repaid already,” I say. But my words are false, and are returned to me hollow. The cavern of my uncle’s death has opened before me again. Every step I take from now on will be a descent. Father Carlos takes my arm. “Come, we must talk of Judah now,” he says.

Is he relieved that the girl could not name him as the murderer? “Yes, let us talk,” I answer dryly.

Gemila calls my name as we reach the threshold of her doorway. “Beri, I saw one other thing in my dream,” she says. “A white creature with a human face. Part vulture, perhaps. But with two mouths, the one below closed tight and fringed by blood. Like the demon Maimon, I think. When you were calling to me from the shore, he was ripping at you and your uncle with his talons. And Berekiah, Maimon had come out of your house, out of the entrance to your store. I was not in a river. I was peering over my wall at Temple Street. Its cobbles were flowing with blood, and I was cursing God for having made it so!”

Chapter XIV

Carlos and I stand outside Senhora Faiam’s house. The recent sins of Lisbon lie dormant for now, veiled by the dark grace of the seventh evening of Passover. Craving human warmth but unwilling to unveil my vulnerability to a man who might have helped murder Uncle, I tug on one of the bell sleeves of his long cassock and say, “Tell me about Judah. I need to know everything.”

“He…he was taken. By a group of Old Christians. On Sunday.”

“Is there any chance that he’s safe…that he’s alive?”

“I’d like to think so. But…” The priests brings his palms together into a pose of Christian prayer. “I took him to St. Peter’s when the killing started. We hid together below, in the vault. You’ve been there. Where the relics are. Many New Christians were there. But men came. And they started…” Carlos grimaces, and his voice, having darted between us as if on windblown flame, is extinguished by a gust of horror. He takes my hands, places my fingers over his eyes, inhales as if bathing his soul in the reviving scent of myrtle. He lets my hands drop. “The boy and I slipped out the exit to the courtyard, made our way down to the Tagus,” he continues. “Moses Jagos and his family, they joined us. He had the idea to hire a boat to get across to the other side of the river, to Barreiro. He took out gold sovereigns from the lining of his cap. A boatman agreed. But as we were leaving, more Old Christians came. They…they took Judah and the others. I tried to fight. You must believe me. But they threw me in the river. By the time…” He cringes, hugs himself as if he’s suddenly frigid.

I shake him. “Just tell me now where they took my brother! Was it to the pyres in the Rossio?!”

“I don’t know. Oh God, I…I don’t know. At first, toward the Ribeira Palace. I ran after them. I was going to get Judah back no matter what. That boy…that beautiful boy. Berekiah, your beautiful brother… You know the Boatmen’s Tavern beyond the Misericordia Church? I found them outside there. Judah saw me. He smiled and stuck his tongue out like he was expecting a present. Can you believe it? What must he have been thinking? I ran up to the Dominican in charge. ‘You’ve taken an Old Christian by mistake,’ I told him. I pointed to Judah. ‘That boy. He’s my ward. He’s not a Jew’

“‘God makes no mistakes,’ the friar said. He was like Herod, this Old Christian. Swathed in a kind of lunatic power. He ordered Judah stripped. The men laughed at the boy’s circumcised sex. But he wasn’t crying. He looked like your uncle. Staring at me from behind a kind of sworn silence, as if to say that everything was going as planned. Master Abraham and Judah… I don’t understand.” Carlos gasps, turns away toward a memory which clenches his breathing.

“Then you know about Uncle. How?!”

“Cinfa told me, of course. Before I joined you in Senhora Faiam’s house. She told me about Master Abraham, mentioned what you were doing.” He draws near to me, whispers conspiratorially: “They violated me, Berekiah. They were drunk. I was held down to the rocks at the river’s edge while they… It was their laughter I couldn’t take. When I was able to stand, I rushed to the Rossio. But Judah, he was nowhere to be found.”

“Why didn’t you come sooner to tell us?”

“I was frightened. I was hurt. My bones ached with the wine smell of them…the smoke. I ran for sanctuary in the Carmelite monastery. Berekiah, I’m not a courageous man. Look at these robes, these idols…” He lifts from his chest his crucifix, rips at it till the clasp breaks. “Look at this traitorous wood that burns into me!” His straining, clawed hands separate the Nazarene from the cross with a snap. Jesus, contorted and stiff, drops as a crippled Jew to the cobbles. Animal grunts rise from Carlos’ gut, and he hurls the denuded cross against the whitewashed wall of my house. Becalmed, panting, he surveys the roofs above us, the black mirror of river below. “On Monday,” he whispers, “I tried to find him. I even slipped into the lion’s den of São Domingos. Berekiah, for the first time in nine years, I wasn’t afraid of Christians. Maybe that’s what Judah felt. But how? A little boy can’t feel such things. I even thought that perhaps he’d simply walk right back here. That somehow…”

Hope is strange; it defies all odds. As Carlos continued speaking, I began thinking: Then it is still not certain that Judah is dead. Somewhere he is hiding in a protected corner. I ask Carlos, “Why should I believe what you’ve told me?”

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

“Have you proof of where you were these past days?”

“You mean you suspect me?!”

“I suspect everyone until the Messiah comes,” I say.

He sighs as if ceding to a truth he had long refused to admit. “You can ask the Carmelite nuns.”

I decide to test him by pointing the blame toward Simon. I say, “A silk thread was found under Uncle’s thumbnail. Black silk…like a filament from one of Simon’s gloves.”

“Simon? You mean…?”

“Yes. Why not him?”

“Dear Berekiah, I think so much death has got you reading from left to right. Simon loved your uncle. He would never have raised a hand against him.”

“But they might have had a bitter argument in the threshing group,” I observe.

The priest waves my suggestion away. “An argument over Talmud and Torah may carry one along a path of burning words but will never lead to blood. You should know that by now.”

Carlos has passed this little test. But what if he suspects that I know the thread was planted, wouldn’t he then react in just this way? “And have you told my mother about Judah?” I ask.

“Yes. She’s quiet for now. Cinfa’s with her. When the girl whispered to me that you were battling an ibbur at Senhora Faiam’s house, I thought you might need some help.” Carlos bows his head. “Berekiah, you know who’s dead?”

An absurd laugh comes from me. “Carlos, you never cease to amaze me. Who isn’t dead might be easier to answer just now!”

“Dom João Mascarenhas,” he says.

I nod. “Yes, of course.” Dom João ran the port and customs house for the King, was the Court Jew who ransomed Reza from Limoeiro Prison with gold the previous Sunday. The Old Christians always resented the idea of a New Christian growing wealthy from taxes on their merchandise, and he was the most hated of our compatriots. “How did it happen?” I ask.

“How? Like everyone else. A mob came to his house. Ripped the gates down. He escaped across the rooftops of Little Jerusalem. Imagine, fleeing like a common Jew. Made it to…”

“Carlos, I can’t believe you don’t get it!” I shout. “To them, we’ve all got horns and tails. Every last one of us. No matter whether we drop gold leaf into our soup or only egg yolk!”

A prayer for Dom João’s soul unites our voices. “Enough religious duty,” I say. “Questions… First, do you know the identity of those who helped Uncle smuggle Hebrew books from Portugal?”

Carlos shakes his head.

“Have you no suspicions?” I ask.

“None. Unless it was one of the other threshers. Master Abraham said it was better for no one to know. In case we were caught.”

“Then that leaves Diego…Simon and Samson are dead. Did Uncle say…”

“Dead?!” Carlos interrupts. “But you just said that you suspected Simon!”

“No, they’re dead. I was…was testing you.”

“Berekiah, I need to know the truth. Are my brothers in kabbalah dead or alive? Tell me now!”

“Simon’s landlord said he was dragged away by the mob and turned to ash. Samson’s father-in-law told me that he saw him captured by the mob.”

Father Carlos’ shoulders sag. He reaches up to rub his eyes. I ask, “Did Uncle say anything to you about Haman…or mention anything strange about Diego?”

“Not Diego, too?!” he replies. “You believe that he could have been involved in…”

“Uncle was killed with a shohet’s blade. By someone who knew the location of our trap door and genizah. It could have only been a thresher. Or one of Uncle’s secret smugglers, assuming that they, too, had been entrusted with my master’s secrets.”

“And what’s this about Haman?” the priest asks.

“Uncle’s last Haggadah was stolen. I believe he had modeled the face of Haman upon the smuggler who was betraying him…or whom he suspected of betrayal.”

“He made no mention of it to me,” Carlos says.

“Did he speak ill of anyone of late?”

“No, no one.”

“Had Diego been fully inducted into the threshing group?” I ask.

“You mean, did he know of the existence of the genizah?”

“Yes, and the secret passage from our cellar to the micvah.”

“You found out! How? Or did you already know of it?”

“It would take too long to explain, Carlos. Another death led me to it. Just tell me if Diego knew about it,” I plead.

“Not that I know of,” he replies.

“And the genizah?”

“No. Master Abraham made it quite clear we were not to discuss such matters with him for the time being.”

Then it was nigh impossible that Diego had held the shohet’s blade. And so, if Father Carlos were telling the truth, all the threshers were innocent. The murderer could only be one or more of Uncle’s secret smugglers. I ask, “Did you use the secret passageway often?”

“Hardly ever,” the priest replies.

“Good,” I comment.

“Why, ‘good?’”

“That might explain why the killer didn’t know beforehand that he couldn’t make it through. The tunnel thins. I could barely make it. Anyone larger… So he must have rushed back into the cellar and when he heard me calling from upstairs, hid in the genizah. Then, when I went to the courtyard for nails with which to seal the trap door shut, he crept upstairs and left the house through our store—Gemila saw him on Temple Street, cursed the Lord and thereby opened herself up to the invasion of an ibbur. The killer must have had a demonic appearance. White Maimon of the Two Mouths,’ she called him. He probably had a very light complexion. Might have been cowled. Or maybe he wore a concealing hat whose chin strap looked like another mouth to her.” I take the priest’s shoulder. “Carlos, I must check my uncle’s correspondence to see if he named his smugglers. And there’s a drawing I want to show you. Of a boy who tried to sell the stolen Haggadah. But we need more light.”

I’m about to continue up the street toward our gate, but Father Carlos grabs my arm. “So who do you suppose might have had the courage to smuggle books with your uncle?”

“Don’t know. But we probably know him. Maybe they even feigned dislike.”

With those words, a perverse thought comes to me. Who was it, aside from King Manuel and certain Christian clerics, whom Uncle despised most in this world? Dear old Rabbi Losa! But what if that antagonism was a show? With his burgeoning business as an official outfitter of the clergy, Losa travelled anywhere he wanted, would have been able to shepherd Hebrew manuscripts to safety. I ask the priest, “Did Uncle ever mention Rabbi Losa in the threshing meetings?”

“Only rarely. And usually with contempt.”

“Carlos, would you come with me to Losa’s house, now? The correspondence can wait a little longer. For some perverse reason I cannot fathom, the rabbi always liked you. And I very much need to talk with him.”

“He likes me because I’m as frightened as he is,” Carlos observes. “We occasionally enjoy trembling together.”

As the priest and I head off to the rabbi’s house, he asks in a cowering voice, “So do you forgive me?”

“Forgive you?” I ask.

“For not protecting Judah. I need to know.”

“Of course I forgive you. You are as much a victim as… Look, Carlos, I’m not sure if I’m Jewish anymore, but I’m no Christian Inquisitor either.”

“Not Jewish?! Berekiah, you have to believe in something!”

“Oh, do I? Do I really?!”

“Of course.”

I stop walking. Deep into my belly and up through my chest I inhale the night scents from the thick wilderness surrounding this pitiful settlement called Lisbon. I say, “Breathe in that darkness, Carlos. Something new is out there between the odor of shit and smoke and forest. A new landscape is forming, a secular countryside that will give us sanctuary from the burning shores of religion. We’ve only gotten a whiff of it so far. But it’s coming. And nothing the Old Christians can do can keep it from giving us refuge.”

Carlos answers with a preacherly, skeptical voice: “Pray tell me, dear Berekiah, what will this new landscape have as a foundation if not religion?”

“I haven’t got a clue, Carlos. The landscape hasn’t condensed yet. There’ll be mystics and skeptics, of that I have no doubt. But neither priests nor friars, nor deacons nor bishops nor Popes will find a home there. If they take one step on our land, we’ll throw them right out on their heads. And no didactic rabbis, either. The minute you unfurl your scroll of commandments, we’ll slit your throat!”

“You should beg for God’s forgiveness for that,” Carlos warns me.

“Go sing it to the goats! I’m through begging! My God grants neither forgiveness nor punishment.”

“Ein Sof?” the priest asks, referencing the kabbalistic concept of an unknowable God without any recognizable attributes. When I nod, he adds: “There’s little comfort in a God beyond everything.”

“Ah, comfort… For that, my dear friend, I want a wife to lie with at night and children to hug, not God. You can keep the Lord written on the pages of the Old and New Testaments for yourself. I’ll take the one who’s unwritten.”

Carlos shakes his head as if to consign me to a world he’ll never understand. We’ve reached Rabbi Losa’s house. I wait around the corner. In response to the priest’s knocks, Losa’s teenage daughter Esther-Maria opens an upstairs shutter, brushes tangled hair from weary eyes.

“Sorry to wake you. Your father home?” Carlos asks.

“Out,” she answers.

“Where?”

“Don’t know.”

“Will you tell him that I want to talk with him? I’ll be at Pedro Zarco’s house or St. Peter’s. Tell him to come as soon as he can. Even if he has to wake us. And tell him that we mean him no harm.”

She nods. The priest and I trudge back home, sit in the courtyard. Guilt at our being left alive pervades us both like a morbid melody. I slip inside for an oil lamp, bring it back out, unscroll my drawing of the lad who tried to sell Uncle’s last Haggadah to Senhora Tamara. Shining a circle of light upon the sketch, I ask, “Have you seen him before?”

Carlos holds the drawing right up to his face. “No,” he replies. As I take my drawing back, he asks in a hopeful voice, “May I stay here till morning? I can’t be alone.”

“We’ve got no other choice. You mustn’t go near your apartment or St. Peter’s. A henchman, a blond Northerner, has been sent by the murderer to kill Diego. He may be after you, too.”

“Me?!” The priest starts and his lazy eyes open as if he’s swallowed poison. “Then maybe that explains…” He takes from his cape a square of vellum with tufts of yard sewn at the corners like tzitzit. It looks like a child’s toy. “Read,” he says, holding it out to me.

A crude figure of a man is outlined with miniature Hebrew lettering, each character no bigger than an ant. The language used is a curious mixture of Hebrew and Portuguese, and the words are from the book of Job: She abandons her eggs to the ground, letting them be kept warm by the sand. She forgets that a foot may crush them, or a wild beast trample on them.

“When did you get this?” I ask.

“Last Friday. I found it slipped under the door of my apartment. At first, I thought it was from your uncle. I thought he was trying to scare me so he could get the book he wanted from me.” Carlos smiles as he adds, “Then, I thought that it might have been left by you.”

I roll my eyes. “And now that your mind has come home to roost after its errant voyage?”

“Now I don’t know. But if someone killed your uncle and now wants to kill me… Maybe this talisman is from him. Maybe the book I have has to do with your uncle’s death! Maybe it’s more valuable than we think.”

“Can you get it for me?”

“No. It’s in my apartment. And the Northerner… Beri, it was my last page of Judaism. I held it back because I had to. Your uncle was asking me to retain nothing of what I was.”

“It’s all right, Carlos. But do have any idea why it would be so valuable?”

He shakes his head, says, “There are other copies extant. It’s hardly unique.”

“Are there notes in the margins?”

“Nothing. Perhaps whoever was smuggling books with your uncle decided he simply wanted it for himself, didn’t want it to leave the country.”

“That doesn’t seem plausible. After shepherding a hundred or more valuable works across the border, there’s no logical reason why the smuggler would suddenly turn against Uncle simply because of your manuscript. Not only that, but there were several precious manuscripts in the genizah which the killer passed up to take Uncle’s Haggadah.” I hold up the talisman for inspection, see that the word sand, areia, is spelled incorrectly. “This has been done in haste, probably in secret,” I observe. “By someone without a complete eduction in Torah. And without formal training as a scribe. Although the ink is very good. An amateur scribe who has access to the best, I’d say. Right handed, of course, because of the slope of the characters. As for the yarn…” I sniff at it, run the plies between my fingers. “Rather old, I’d say. Smells of cedar. Kept in a trunk, perhaps. If we want to know more, we’ll need Farid’s help. Perhaps even the ink has a characteristic smell.” I look to Carlos. “The creator of this talisman was someone who wants to scare you. But if he wanted to kill you, he wouldn’t have bothered sending such a warning. May I hold on to it?”

He nods. “Just keep it away from me.” He leans his head back suddenly and yawns. “Sometimes I think that I could sleep for a century or two,” he says.

I say, “Look Carlos, you can take my bed. Grab an extra blanket from the chest.”

“The courtyard’s fine.”

“Your suffering won’t bring anyone back.”

“Beri, I need to see the sky, the stars. Let me sit here. I’ll sleep when God grants me grace.”

With a futile shrug, I wish him sound sleep. On my way to the cellar, I spot my mother standing in her bedroom, a shadow keeping vigil over Farid. I go to her, find her hugging to her chest a vellum talisman in the shape of a magreifah, a mythical ten-holed flute. We look at each other across a landscape beyond speech. With common purpose we shift our gaze to Farid. He breathes freely now, as if re-entering our world. Has an exchange been made? Farid for Judah? Is that why Mother will not take her eyes from him?

I whisper to her, “Thank you for giving him your bed and for watching over him.”

She takes my hand, squeezes it. The scent of henbane clings to her. In a drowsy voice, she says, “If only he were one of us.”

“It no longer matters,” I say.

“You’re wrong, Berekiah. It matters more than ever.”

We seem representatives of different races. I kiss her neck, shuffle down into the cellar. But there is little in Uncle’s correspondence to give me hope. Only two letters hold promise, both from the same person. The first is dated the Third of Shevat of this year and written in Arabic. Uncle must have received it just prior to his death. It is signed in florid script in the shape of a menorah. As best I can make out—for the elder generation of kabbalists love to confound the casual reader—the correspondent’s name is Tu Bisvat. Of course, this is just a pseudonym, Tu Bisvat being the name of a Jewish holiday which our mystics associate with the tree of life and certain reparations performed here and in God’s Upper Realms.

Unfortunately, my Arabic is woefully inadequate for the correspondent’s florid style. There is no doubt, however, that the author makes at least one reference to a safira which Uncle was sending to him.

The second letter dates from almost exactly a year ago, is also in Arabic. I can decipher nothing that makes any sense. If I were forced to make a translation, I’d have said that Uncle was negotiating to buy a tile decorating the center of a sunset.

I will need Farid’s help to remove the serpentine vines of Arabic code from both letters.

Before I close the genizah, I examine all the correspondence once again, this time to compare the writing with Carlos’ talisman. There are none which match.

Upstairs, I find Farid snoring away. His forehead no longer burns. Although tempted, I do not wake him; it is the first sound sleep he’s had in days. I sit in the kitchen to wait for him to stir, the letters from Tu Bisvat safely in my pouch. Onto the smoldering embers of our fire I toss pinches of cinnamon. A shower of red-glowing sparkles pricks at the air like shooting stars. I realize that I’m filthy with dust and grime, but my moist stench is comforting. It is as if it is a Jewish smell, as if I have agreed to make a permanent home in grief, as if revenge—once I find Uncle’s killer—will intensify this musky scent and render it divine.

I awake early Friday morning at the kitchen table to the smell of brackish seawater—great hides of salted codfish are soaking in a cauldron of water by my head. Roosters cry the dawn. Cinfa and Father Carlos are preparing verbena tea.

It is the seventh day of Passover, and the final evening of the holiday will descend tonight. The fear that time is running out for me to catch the killer shakes me fully awake.

Cinfa fixes my gaze with a cheerful face. “Mother says a person can live like a king on just codfish and eggs,” she observes. Her imploring eyes seek to have me confirm her fantasy happiness.

But I am weighted by a sense of entrapment. The house is a prison; Cinfa and Father Carlos unlikely prophets of survival. Jumping up, I ask, “Rabbi Losa hasn’t come, has he?”

“Not yet,” the priest answers.

“And Farid?”

“Still snoring.”

“He’s slept enough! I’ve got to wake him.” As I start away, Cinfa rushes to me and presses warm into my chest. “Please don’t go out again! Something terrible is going to happen to you today, I know it!”

I should be moved, but I only want the girl away from me. I walk her back to the hearth. “Nothing is going to happen,” I whisper. “I promise you that I will never again let an Old Christian hurt me.”

I can see in her hollow expression that the thick layer of disbelief which protected her from grief has been stripped away. I hold her hand while I lead her and Father Carlos in morning prayers. Afterward, the priest says, “I’m going back to São Domingos to make some more inquiries after Judah.”

“Give it up, Carlos,” I advise. “If he’s still alive, we’ll find him. They’re not going to tell you anything. He’s just another bit of Jewish smoke to them.”

“No, I must go.”

“But it’s not safe. The Northerner may be out looking for you.”

“He’ll expect me at home. I’ll slip out the store entrance to Temple Street and walk down by the river. Nothing will happen.” Carlos nods at me as if he needs my approval.

It seems that courage has finally blessed the priest. “Very well,” I nod.

He bows, then shuffles away.

Alone with Cinfa, I say, “Give me a moment with Farid, then I’ll come back to you.”

Her face reddens and bloats. She stares at me ready to burst into tears. I reach for her, but she breaks away from me and runs out through the kitchen door.

Farid is still asleep, but color has animated his face. The skin of his arms and legs is supple, warm. Mother’s talismans dangle over him like crazy confirmations of his health. Knowing that the angels have backed away, a grateful fullness rises as moisture to my eyes, propels me to the window to offer thanks to God. Belo, ears pointing, stares out over the wall of Senhora Faiam’s house, his one front leg propping him up firmly. Blessed are men and women, children and dogs, I think. With so much beauty in the world, does the existence of a personal God really matter so much? Can’t we be satisfied with what we’ve got? When I look down, I discover Carlos’ Nazarene, broken from his cross, still lying in the street. The figure and I share questions aimed at an impenetrable future. Farid wakes, taps the bed frame twice to get my attention. “Have you heard from Samir?” he signals.

“Nothing. I’m sorry. Just a second…” I retrieve his fathers sandals from my room, kneel by my friends side and offer them to him. I gesture, “I didn’t think it right to show you these before, while you were so… The man at the mosque said that your father left so quickly after the riot started that he forgot them.”

When Farid grips the sandals, his eyes shut tight. His thumbs trace the outline of the straps, and he sniffs at the leather. Scenting Samir, his lips curl out, his face seems to peel open. The tendons on his neck strain up toward the judgment of God’s wrath. He begins to moan. I lock both hands with him and attempt to pull him free with the strength of my love.

Slowly, Farid’s waves of grief subside to a silent flow. When he leans up on one elbow and wipes his eyes with his sheet, I gesture a simple, “I’m sorry.”

He nods and blows his nose on his shirt sleeve.

I sit by his side, signal, “You had dysentery. With everything else, I almost missed the diagnosis. I think it was that rice you bought when we were walking back to Lisbon on Monday.”

He sweeps his hand across his lips to thank me, then unfurls it in the air to praise the generosity of Allah. His movements are sure, woven by recaptured faith. Envy for his belief in a beneficent God tugs me to my feet.

“What day is it?” he asks.

“Friday.”

“Already approaching the Sabbath.” He shakes his head and takes a deep breath as if summoning his body’s long-dormant resources. “What more have you found out about Uncle’s murder?”

I explain, then show him my drawing of the ragamuffin who tried to sell Uncle’s Haggadah, then hand him the letters from Tu Bisvat.

“Now we have something,” he signals as he glances over the first letter, and he translates the important information it contains with rhythmic ease: “I have waited to write to you, Master Abraham, in the hopes that more safira would be arriving. But as there has been nothing of late, I am beginning to wonder. Has something happened to our Zerubbabel? Or perhaps you are ill. Please send me news. I begin to worry.”

There is a moment when the miniature world of a manuscript becomes real, when the contours of a prophet’s hands or twinkle in a heroine’s eyes glow again inside the eternal present that is Torah. A similar sentiment of time’s cessation captures me now, turns my vision inside. A path unfurls before me. It leads from Lisbon across Spain and Italy toward the Orient. Uncle walks along it, and he is carrying his beloved manuscripts, smiling with the joy of the gift-giver.

These images descend to me because this letter seems to make it clear that the path of my master’s smuggled books led to Constantinople. And that his accomplice in the Turkish capital, Tu Bisvat, had not received scheduled shipments, was worried that something had befallen Uncle. This news must have alerted him to the possibility that he was being betrayed by one or more of his couriers. Probably, my master kept this information to himself until he could be sure of the criminal’s identity. And in the meantime, he went to see Dom Miguel Ribeiro to try to recruit a new accomplice who could carry manuscripts across Portugal’s borders with relative ease. When the nobleman refused to participate, Uncle wrote to Samson Tijolo, who, because of his wine business, might also have been able to obtain permission to travel abroad.

As for Zerubbabel, he was a character in the Book of Ezra, of course. It was under his leadership that Solomon’s Temple was rebuilt during the reign of King Darius of Persia.

But who was he in this context? A coded name for the man who delivered Uncle’s smuggled manuscripts to Constantinople?

In the second letter from Tu Bisvat, the author makes reference to the zulecha, tile, that he is willing to buy for Uncle in Constantinople. “I don’t understand,” I tell Farid.

He signals, “In this context, I think it is a veiled reference to a building block for a home. Your uncle may have been negotiating to buy a house on the European side of the Bosporus—the sunset side of Constantinople.”

Chapter XV

To Farid, I signal, “So Uncle was planning all along to move, was waiting for the negotiations to be completed before telling us about Constantinople. Byzantium, imagine… A Moslem land. If only he’d shared this information with me. I’m sure we could have all worked harder to raise the money. But perhaps he feared being caught and then compromising.

The cascade of my surprised signalling is halted by Aunt Esther calling to me from the kitchen. “My God, her soul has returned to her body!” I whisper.

He reads my lips, gestures urgently, “Go to her! She may need you to pull her all the way back to our world!”

As I run in, I see that my aunt is not alone. She holds Cinfa in front of her like a human shield. An old man stands next to her. He is gaunt and tall, very pale, with spiky white hair and furry, caterpillar eyebrows. A man constructed from snow, it seems. Esther’s eyes follow me gravely. “You may remember Afonso Verdinho,” she says. “He was in Uncle’s threshing group.”

O Sinistro, the man from the left side, we used to call him with a certain ambivalent affection. It was a double entendre taken from the Italian language referencing Dom Afonso’s left-handedness and grim otherworldliness. Uncle liked him as a curiosity, used to say that he read the Torah as if it were fixed in fish glue—a consequence of the uncompromising asceticism he picked up while studying with Sufis in Persia. So where has it all gone? Now that I know his identity, he appears even older and more wilted, as if he has been starved and stretched in a lightless chamber. Yellowing sweat stains show under the arms of his crumpled white shirt. A shabby black cloak lined with frayed blue silk hangs over his arm. As our eyes meet, his lips twist uncomfortably. Neither of us makes a move toward greeting.

“You remember him, don’t you?” Esther prompts. “You were but a boy when…”

“I remember him,” I answer curtly. A sense of imminent disaster fixes me as if in crystal.

“Berekiah, I’m going to stay with Afonso for a while,” she continues, speaking slowly and gently. “He rode here when word about the riot reached Tomar. He’s rented rooms at Senhor Duarte’s inn by Reza’s house. We’ll be there. Please tell your mother. I don’t want to wake her. But if she needs me, she can come for me.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

My aunt reaches to her temples, rubs them as if trying to center scattering thoughts. Cinfa twists to gaze up at her, then bolts out of the house. Esther calls after her in vain.

Afonso’s expression becomes one of gentle compassion as he whispers to Esther in Persian. His protective arm circles her shoulders. He hugs her to him. To me, he says in a dry voice, “Just give your aunt some time. Try to understand that the journey is far more complex than you once thought.”

He leads Esther into the courtyard. Huddling together, they disappear through the gate. Jealousy, thick and hot as pitch, sluices through my chest; cruel is the knowledge that a virtual stranger could revive my aunt when I could do nothing.

And that she would abandon her family at this time—it seems impossible!

Dom Afonso…does his presence change everything? Could he have been involved in Uncle’s murder, in smuggling his books? But he moved from Lisbon prior to the forced conversion, long before my master and my father dug the genizah.

An absurd disappointment buries itself in my gut, is linked to the knowledge that life is not a book, does not hold margin notes explaining difficult events. If it were, Dom Afonso would have remained seated in front of his fireplace in Tomar. His arrival only serves to complicate what is already out of my control.

I hear my uncle say: dearest Berekiah, life presents us with many paths leading nowhere, doors opening upon sheer drops, staircases rising to locked gates. And I remember that he used to tell me that all life is a pilgrimage to the Sabbath. Even if it is, I think, then nearly all of us take the most circuitous routes trying to get there.

I plod back to Farid. “People are very odd creatures,” I comment.

“Why? What happened?”

When I explain, he signals, “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” I ask.

“They were lovers long ago. Samir told me.”

“Are you crazy, Afonso and…”

“It all ended years ago. It means nothing.”

His words are too simple to understand. The floor grows moist, slides away like sluicing floodwaters. Farid’s gesturing hands anchor me in a spinning world.

Could Esther have been involved in Uncle’s murder after all? Maybe in passing she divulged to Dom Afonso the existence of our genizah. He could have acted on his own out of continuing passion for her.

Farid senses my thoughts, signals, “A house of cards on a slanted table in a sandstorm.”

“Not if she didn’t know about Dom Afonso’s plans. Perhaps he hid his scheming from her. Even now, she doesn’t suspect that the man giving her solace is her husband’s murderer!”

“But from Tu Bisvat’s letter, we know that one of Uncle’s smugglers was very likely to have been involved. Unless you can believe that Afonso was one of them…that he was Zerubbabel.”

Farid and I sit in an expanding silence for quite some time; I am still awe-struck by Esther’s departure. My friend signals to me from time to time, but I pay no attention until he grabs my arm. “Someone with a strange walk has entered the house,” he gestures. “I can feel the vibrations.”

A man calls my name suddenly from the kitchen. I rush in. The “dead” thresher and fabric importer Simon Eanes stands in the doorway, leaning heavily on his crutches, his time-worn mantle of charcoal velvet draped over his shoulders. He hasn’t shaved or bathed, and a large scab centers his forehead like a wounded eye. Cinfa is with him, is hugging him like an abandoned child. As he caresses his gloved hand across her hair, he offers me a nod of solidarity. “Berekiah, I heard about Master Abraham,” he says.

Involuntarily, I look at his foot to make sure that it is human. “You’re not dead,” I observe.

He shakes his head and smiles, a crazy smile, too wide, as if his lips have been pulled apart by a puppeteer working invisible strings.

The power of shared survival tethers us together, and I step toward him. But his gloves! The one covering his right hand is ripped across its back. Could the silk thread found under Uncle’s thumbnail really have been…. Wary, I hold myself back. He fixes another caricature of a grin on his face.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “What happened? Your landlord said….”

“Just fine,” he nods. “I told him to tell anyone enquiring after me that I was dead. It seemed safer at the time. Then I fled Lisbon. I’ve only just gotten back.”

Dearest God, I think, will Judah, too, return from the dead? Or is that too much to hope for?

Simon accepts the stale matzah I offer with gracious bows. “Uncle is not the only thresher who died,” I say. “Samson, too.”

“I know. He had just visited my store. I told him to stay, to hide with me. But he wanted to get back to Rana and their baby. He was grabbed not fifty paces from the doorway…hadn’t a chance with those Christian rioters everywhere.”

My body seems very distant. I want to try to trick him, but all that emerges from my mouth is the truth. “Diego and Father Carlos made it. And now, Afonso Verdinho is back in Lisbon.”

Simon nods, grins fleetingly as if he hasn’t heard me and is being polite. We sit opposite each other. Cinfa mumbles to herself about chores to do so that I’ll think she has not been listening to our conversation. My irritated look forces her to skip off into the courtyard.

A taut smile opens on Simon’s face, seems painted by a talentless illuminator. I ask, “Is something amusing?”

“No.”

I point to his forehead. “You’re injured. Were you hit by someone?”

Simon reaches up to the scab, tells me how he tripped over a tumbrel while hiding in a feather-trimmer’s workshop, laughs while showing more lesions on his knee. Then he tells a silly anecdote about a dog peeing on a false leg he once tried, grins and blinks, grins some more. His eyes dart nervously around the room when silence finally overtakes speech.

In his grief he has decided to become court jester to a tyrant God.

“We’re out of wine,” I tell him. “But would you like some brandy? We have some incense from Goa left that might…”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

Farid shuffles in, lowers himself next to me. He responds to Simon’s smile with an awkward, probing tilt to his head. When it goes unanswered, my friend signals to me, “He’s like a starving jasmine blooming madly before it dies.”

More to dispel his false cheer than anything else, I tell Simon of my mother and Aunt Esther and the disappearances of Judah and Samir. He nods as if he’s heard my stories before. To test his reactions, I say, “I found a rosary bead near Uncle’s body. It is my belief that Father Carlos murdered my uncle.”

“Carlos, but what possible reason could he have for killing Master Abraham?” he asks.

“They argued over a manuscript that the priest wouldn’t give to Uncle,” I reply.

Simon smiles as if he’s humoring me, steps his fingers like a spider across the table.

“Well, what do you say?” I ask angrily.

“What do you want me to say? I think it’s absurd. But if it’s what you want to believe, then who am I to dispel your illusions? I’m through trying to find the truth. Illusions are fine. We should all be blessed with a garden of flowering lies—it’s much easier to live that way.”

Cinfa steps back inside. She huddles under Farid’s arm.

“You shouldn’t listen to me,” Simon suddenly sighs. “I’m an old fool who no longer has any courage. But for Master Abraham’s sake I will try to face the truth, if you like. Now tell me, you believe he was murdered by someone who knew him…a New Christian?” His questioning eyes seem almost hopeful, as if death by a Jew’s hand is preferable to Uncle having been murdered by a follower of the Nazarene.

“It’s very likely,” I answer. As I explain about the shohet’s blade and our stolen minerals, Simon bites his lip. He glances suggestively at Cinfa until his meaning becomes obvious. I ask the girl to fetch some salvaged fruit from the store for our guest.

“I understand,” she seethes. “But he was my uncle too!” She glares at me. “I’ll get fruit to help Farid get well. But not because you asked me!”

When I reach out to her, she twists away and runs out.

“I don’t know what to do with her,” I confess. “One minute she’s frightened for me, the next…”

“Time will take care of it,” Simon smiles.

“You sound like Dom Afonso Verdinho.”

“Yes, when did he return?”

“Just rode in,” I say. “Curious isn’t it?”

“What do you mean? You think that he, too, might have been…”

“It’s possible.”

“Tell me more about Master Abraham’s departure from the Lower Realms.”

In tones that race one step ahead of emotion, I describe to Simon how I found Uncle and the girl, the positions of their bodies, slits on their necks. In response, he grins, but his lips quiver. A battle is being waged for his emotions. Interrupting me suddenly, he says in a pressing tone, “And was there nothing else out of the ordinary on your uncle’s body?”

My heart beats a code spelling out the words, um fio de seda, a silken thread, but I simply say, “Such as…?”

Simon shrugs as if to disclaim his coming words. “Semente branca,” he whispers, using the kabbalist’s term, “white seed,” for semen.

“How did…?” My question is blocked by his upraised hand.

“In Seville, a member of the Jewish community informed on me. I never found out who it was. The Inquisitors don’t tell the prisoners, of course. I recanted, but they locked me away anyway. Those black marks on your uncle’s neck—they were bruises. I’ve seen them before. From hanging or garroting or…” He looks down as his smile fails. He wipes at his eyes with his shirt sleeve. “The semen emerges as a bodily reaction to pressure on the neck and windpipe,” he continues. “Not in everyone. But it happens. I have a theory that as God approaches to rescue the righteous victim, joy mounts. There is an orgasm. Perhaps even God has an orgasm at that very moment. Your uncle might have known. In any case, the victim faces the Creator as ecstasy ascends to meet pain. As a Master of the Names of God, your uncle would, of course, have reached a very powerful orgasm almost immediately.”

“You’re saying he was hanged first. But there was no rope, no…”

“Or garroted, even strangled. With a rope or hands. And…”

“It was with a rosary,” I interrupt. “I didn’t lie about the bead I found.”

“And then your shohet slit his throat,” Simon continues. “Out of habit, perhaps. Or to be certain. One can never be too sure with a kabbalist of such magnitude. There are ways…”

Farid signals, “It would have to be someone he’d allow to get close enough to harm him. Zerubbabel… whoever he is, must have come.”

Wanting to keep secret my knowledge that one of Uncle’s smugglers may have been involved in his murder, I refrain from translating the last sentence for Simon. He laughs in a single exhale. “A man like me, Farid means.”

Simon’s fawnlike hesitation has disappeared completely to make way for this new personality of his.

“Yes,” I say. “Like you.”

“Berekiah, I’m not going to defend myself. Your uncle ransomed me from Christian death. I would sooner have killed myself than…”

“And yet we found something that may belong to you,” I say.

“What?”

“Give me one of your gloves and I’ll tell you.”

He shrugs as if ceding to pointlessness, peels the ripped one free and hands it to me. I reach into my pouch and extract the thread. It is a match; the same black silk, not a shade of difference. “It was caught on one of Uncle’s fingernails. It’s yours.”

After Simon has examined the thread, he pushes up on the table to stand, gives me a sympathetic look. “It may be the same—I’m no expert. But it could have been obtained from my shop, from most any of the silk stores in Little Jerusalem. But of course, you’re wondering just how my glove was ripped.”

To my nod, he responds in a poetic voice, “When running on one leg, one has a tendency to fall. When falling on stone, one will rip silk. A wonderful material, this fabric of worms, but they who spin it for cocoons do not foresee the idiocy of men.”

He reaches for his crutches, inserts their leather pads under his arms. My shame at persecuting a man loved by my master mixes with a perverse desire to continue my assault until I have driven every last possibility of happiness from his soul. I say, “Simon, it’s a time of masks. And I don’t really know what’s under yours. Just like you don’t know what’s under mine. For all I know, the man you truly are is patting himself on the back for having fooled me.”

He hops in order to adjust his crutches. “My old mask was burned long ago in the pyre that consumed my wife. My new one… I don’t even know what it looks like.” He slips on his glove with an air of resignation. “Maybe I did have a terrible fight with your uncle when no one was looking. That’s what would be assumed by an Inquisitor. But is that what you’ve become? A Jewish mystic turned Inquisitor?!” A bitter laugh rises from his gut. “You wouldn’t be the first, would you? Everything is possible in Spain and Portugal. God bless these lands of miracles.”

Is Simon’s the cynical defense of the world-weary or the sham of a killer? I ask, “Do you know who was smuggling books with Uncle?” When he shakes his head, I say, “Have you no suspicions?”

“None. I’ve become skilled at not thinking certain thoughts. In fact, not thinking is a special talent one develops in Castile and Andalusia. Go there someday and you will see how valued it is in the good citizens of those hateful provinces.”

I unscroll for him the drawing of the boy who tried to sell Senhora Tamara my master’s last Haggadah. “Ever see him?”

“Not that I know of,” he replies.

“And Tu Bisvat?”

“What about it?”

“Not ‘it.’ There’s a man in Constantinople who uses that pen name… who was receiving Uncle’s smuggled manuscripts.”

Simon shakes his head, says, “There must be a hundred kabbalists in Constantinople. This Tu Bisvat could be any of them. Master Abraham told us not to concern ourselves with these other activities of his. We respected his wishes. Just as you did, dear Berekiah.”

As he shows me his pitiful grin once again, the desire to slap him burns in my chest. “And Haman?” I ask gruffly.

“What of him?”

“Did Uncle tell you whose face was given to Haman in his last Haggadah?”

Simon shakes his head and walks with his crutches to the door. He turns to me with his hand shading his eyes. The jester has disappeared; he has the vacant look of a man whose hopes have been dashed. He whispers in an urgent voice, “Berekiah, I came to tell you something. A Spanish nobleman staying at the Estaus Palace is asking around town for Hebrew books, illuminated manuscripts in particular. The Sabbath before your Uncle’s death, I was approached about selling some. I don’t know where he got my name. He would not tell me. Beware of all of us if you like. But beware of him in particular. It may be tempting to sell your uncle’s books to raise some money for bribes to escape Portugal. But I don’t trust this man.”

“And his name?”

“He calls himself a count, the Count of Almira—but I suspect it’s all a lie.”

After I explain to Simon and Farid that this is none other than the man who took Diego to the hospital after he was stoned, they both insist on coming with me to talk with him. We walk in silence, and slowly, so that Simon can keep pace on his crutches. All that remains now from the killing are the knowing eyes of the Christians; suspicious, as if marking territory, they inform us that we are not like them. As if we didn’t know that already. Then they begin their whispers and jerk their glances away from us as if we were the living dead. As if we didn’t know that, too.

In the slanting morning shade of the cathedral’s twin bell towers, Farid signals to me that he’s certain a man is tracking us. “Since we left the house,” he gestures. “And he’s a Northerner. But don’t turn just yet.”

We pick up our pace as we descend past the Magdalena Church into Little Jerusalem. Here, we do not walk so much as navigate past the drying cakes of shit hurled by Christians into the streets. Along the cobbles, brown lines zigzag and fade, bloody trails left by Jewish bodies dragged to the pyre. Flies swirl about, poke into our nostrils, feed from our eyes. My thoughts remain with the Northerner tracking us, however. An invisible cord seems to tie us together, to be tugging me back by my shoulders. By the old schoolhouse, I glance behind. Our stalker is striding past pushcarts of dried fish. He’s the blond giant whom I saw waiting outside Diego’s apartment, I’m sure of it.

Is he White Maimon of the Two Mouths because of his pale complexion?

I take Simon’s arm, tell him about our Northern shadow. “He must be after me,” I observe. “Something I may know about Uncle…about the plot to kill him. You must separate from me.”

Simon offers an accepting smile; he will fight fate no longer. But Farid signals, “Wouldn’t it be better to confront him? Three against one.”

I nod toward Simon’s crutches. “Bad idea. Alone, I’ll be able to lose him in the alleys of Little Jerusalem. He’s not from here. He won’t know what he’s doing. I’ll meet you both at the Estaus Palace. Wait for me.”

They each nod their agreement and continue up toward the Rossio. I turn back for our spy so that I’m sure he can see me, then cut down past the lace-trimming stores toward what used to be the Jewish hospital. In a single jump, I nestle out of view into the limestone doorframe of the Inn of the Two Brothers. From here I will slip down the side alley back into the Rua da Ferraria, Blacksmith’s Street.

As I press back into the doorway, several cream-white butterflies flutter in falling angles down onto fresh horse droppings.

The Northerner suddenly stands in the intersection ahead. He removes his hat as he gazes after me. He has high, prominent cheek bones and treacherous eyes. He runs a hand through the front locks of his oily hair, replaces his hat. But his first step is wrong; he marches away from me toward Farid and Simon.

My mistake twists cold inside my gut. I creep forward with the silence of a cat. Yet this Northerner looks over his shoulder directly at me, as if gifted with the powers of a sorcerer. He stares at me with determined eyes, then begins to run. I race after him. His hat falls away. A glimmer of light slips into his fist as he pulls something from his cloak. Farid, too, has sensed danger. A hundred paces up the street, he is motioning in crazy waves toward Simon. They rush through Little Jerusalem’s Northern Gate, through the shade cut by the cupola of the Church of São Nicolau. Simon’s bobbing gait is awkward, hopeless. “Simon, run!” I scream. But it is impossible. He turns, drops a crutch. I see it as if through a honey-textured time: his face opening as the Northerner plunges into him; his last support flying away, his body crashing into a wall. Farid kneels over him, and the cape of the blond assassin whips behind as he flies ahead.

Chapter XVI

Simon is unable to speak. Or maybe it’s no longer necessary. He lays in Farid’s arms and says goodbye to the world with his eyes.

A stiletto with a blackwood handle inserted between his ribs is separating his body from his soul. To Farid, I signal, “Another who will not live to see tonight’s Sabbath.”

Simon’s gloved left hand grasps the handle of the knife. “Take it away,” he moans. Farid pulls it free. Like wine bursting from a spigot, blood spurts onto us. A sigh releases from the old thresher. “Thank you,” he whispers.

Farid holds up the blade as he nestles his arm under Simon’s head as a cushion. “Pointed,” he signals.

I nod my understanding; a shohet’s blade is traditionally square-tipped; this weapon comes to a ferocious point.

“I’m sorry for suspecting you,” I whisper in Hebrew to Simon. “I must have…”

He nods as if it isn’t necessary to give voice to my regrets, drops his delicate hand to my arm. He is looking across the sky and mouthing prayers. I recognize names of God, then those of his lost family. “Graça” is sculpted by his lips.

Simon’s fingers caress my arm as if to offer comfort. At the moment his soul departs, a gurgling issues from his chest and there is a quiver through his hands like a flutter of wings. I brush his eyelids closed.

Surely it is a sin for a man such as I to regard himself as a prophet, even for an instant. Yet I put my lips to Simon’s, my eyes to his eyes, my hands to his hands. I fall upon him like Elisha upon the Shunammite’s dead child. Then, inserting my thumb and forefinger into his mouth, I pry him open to my breath. I fill him with life from my life seven times. A pain on my shoulder descends in waves as my bellows empties into him. Farid is pulling me away. His eyes connote displeasure. Yet he kisses my forehead. “No more,” he signals.

When I look at Simon, there is a flowing movement like an angel’s caress across his hair. “You see!” I say aloud.

“He’s dead,” Farid replies with sure gestures. “He will wake no more.” He hugs me to him. The beats of his heart swell around me. His warmth encloses me in the darkness behind my eyelids.

We wait together. I cry for a time. Then Simon’s death dries in my thoughts, shows me the present of Lisbon. A crowd closes in on us, all curiosity and speculation, for Christians are fascinated by nothing so much as the sight of a Jew’s misfortune. I gaze down the street, signal to Farid that I’ll be away only a moment. I retrieve the Northerner’s hat. A shirtless boy with Judah’s innocent eyes hands it to me.

Back with Farid, I signal, “I’m going to see which way he ran. Can you brave these Philistines alone?”

He nods his agreement. As if spun from a frigid top, I race away. At the opening of Rossio Square, I stop, paralyzed by the twisting conflux of men and woman, carriages and horses. The ridiculous life of the square has hidden him.

An old barber in a tattered doublet calls out in a lazy Algarvian voice, “Senhor, you’re lookin’ a little scruffy. How ‘bout a shave and a haircut. Got hands so swift they could steal the black from a bat.”

“A Northerner, blond, have you seen him?!” I demand.

“Perhaps the drought will end with the new month,” he replies. He has the cheery disregard of the deaf, grips my hand and tries to lead me toward his chair. I break away. His wife is having her tufted scalp picked free of lice by a young girl. She points a hooked finger up toward the northern edge of the square. “Went that way,” she indicates.

I ask shopkeepers there about him in vain until a carpet peddler with a jumpy, effusive manner, points to the left of the São Domingos Church.

I race down the dirt road which we used to call the Rua da Bruxa—Witch’s Street—after the cat-eyed old hag there who used to repair a woman’s virginity for a price. A red-haired water seller playing cards by himself under an awning has seen the Northerner. “That way!” he shouts, pointing east. I enter the Moorish Quarter, continue racing ahead until the blue and white townhouses give way to wooden shacks. Where the street ends, granite steps lead up like a pleated ribbon toward the great limestone cross that marks the lower edge of the Convento da Graça. Two hundred feet up the scorched and worn hillside is the stone crown of towers and battlements that is the convent itself. I’ve reached an impasse.

Ragged waifs with dirty, devious faces, more like dwarfs than children, are kicking around a stuffed leather ball by the stairs ahead. High above, on the crest of the hillside, a tiny nun, the runt of her religious litter, screeches at them in a Galician accent. “Shoo! Get away, you little rats! You’re going to burn in hell before you can beg God’s forgiveness!”

Apparently, the objective of the boys’ game is to unceremoniously score direct hits into her beloved limestone cross.

When he notices my presence, a weedy boy with pale-green eyes yells at her in a prideful voice, “Vai-te fader, vaca!, fuck off, cow!”

The kids laugh. The nun keeps shrieking: “Your sins will lead you to marriage with the Devil’s whores! And your children will all be born eyeless and deaf, with horned tails. Then you will…”

It appears to be a memorized litany, how she responds to this torture every day. Perhaps it is her penance.

I grab the ball when it bounces down the hill my way.

“Hey, give that back!” the kids yell. Their faces are full and furious with irritation.

“Just tell me if you’ve seen a foreigner,” I reply.

“Ain’t nothing but foreigners around here. Give us back the fucking ball!”

“A man with blond hair down to his shoulders. A cape with…”

One points a stubby, dirty finger. “Went up the hill like a spider,” he says.

I drop-kick the ball toward the cross. A near miss. The kids cheer, then chase screaming after it as it rolls back down the scree.

At the top of the hill, out of breath, I face the flying buttresses of the Convento da Graça as if at the Gates of Mystery. On the other side of the street blooms a marketplace. I ask tripesellers and sievemakers, combmakers and birdcageweavers, even a family of Castilian hunchbacks making a pilgrimage to Santiago, but no one has seen him.

As a last resort, I dare to approach the screeching nun. She has one brown tooth that sticks like a rotten dagger into her bottom lip, eyelids like prunes, a scabbed nose. She pauses in her litany long enough to speak in a tone of wisdom offered, “Search for God, not Northerners.”

When I repeat what one of the waifs told her to do, she shrieks like a Brazilian parrot.

Back in Little Jerusalem, I discuss with Farid where to take Simon’s body. Unfortunately, we have no clear idea where his house is. Based on his occasional descriptions of views over the Tagus, we’ve always assumed that he lived on the escarpment crowned by the Church of Santa Catarina outside the western gates of the city. So we borrow a wheelbarrow from Senhora Martins, a friend of my aunt, and begin to trundle the body through the afternoon sun.

Do people stare as we go? I don’t know; an inner world of questions and regrets gives me sanctuary. Farid leads us. All I feel is the drudgery of climbing uphill, a vague, distasteful sense of heat and sweat, sun and dust. I only awake to the jarring white angles of Lisbon when we hear Simon’s name called. To the east, the bell tower of the Santa Catarina church is arrowing into the blue sky. A stocky woman with a dull face, wearing a white headscarf, runs to us shrieking. She stares in horror at the blood on Simon’s clothing. She kneels vomiting. An old man tells me that she is the older sister of Simon’s common-law wife. He points to a sagging townhouse. “They live on the second floor.”

My mood of disbelief deepens and seems to lower me from the scene. Simon’s lover is thin and olive-skinned, possesses a natural, precise elegance as she invites us in, is strikingly strong in profile for such a young woman. She has intelligent eyes, wears a loose-fitting rose-colored tunic. There is an understated regality about her which reminds me of Reza. But almost a girl she is. “This is Graça, Simon’s wife,” the sister says.

Graça runs to the window to see Simon when I tell her of his fate. Her hands grip the sill. Her howls come animal in their intensity, as if she is calling for her missing cub in a language of the gut. She hugs her belly, and I realize in an instant of sinking despair that she is pregnant. When her first waves of horror have subsided, I say, “Yours was the last name sculpted by his lips.”

We descend to the street. People back away. She falls to her knees and caresses Simon’s face, soothes him with talk of Christ and their child to be. I realize then what should have been obvious; she is an Old Christian.

With a desperate, protective force, Graça is suddenly tugged by her sister toward Farid and me. “Tell us every detail of Simon’s death!” she demands.

I explain in a voice belonging to another; Berekiah has fled deep inside the armor of my body.

Graça is unable to speak. Her mouth drops open, and her eyes show a hollow despair. The sister asks with clenched fists, “Where do we get justice?”

I shake my head. “When I find this Northerner, I will let you know.”

Farid and I are covered in Simon’s blood. Kind neighbors help us wash, give us new shirts and pouches, feed us cheese and wine. Too weak to protest, we accept their offerings. Sluggish from drink, wavering in our walk, we slip down into central Lisbon as if leaving behind a Biblical landscape.

After we’ve returned our wheelbarrow, we wander through Little Jerusalem like ghosts. In front of the dyer’s workshop where our Jewish courthouse used to be, I begin to spell “Abraham” in Hebrew with my steps. Then, “Judah.” Farid becomes restless after a time. He stops, faces east like a weather vane. “Let’s go home,” he signals.

I turn to the west to follow the sun’s descent over this accursed city. Tonight, a week from the onset of Passover, we should be escorting the Zohar into the dawn with our recitations. But we no longer have a copy of the sacred text. And even if we did… “No, not home!” I shout in my wine-scented voice. I trudge on until we are standing over Simon’s bloodstain on the cobbles of Little Jerusalem. “A short time ago, this brown crust was in his body,” I signal to Farid. He shakes his head as if this is obvious. But I simply can’t believe it, and I recall the day in reverse—as if reading a text from the wrong direction. Simon’s warning about the Count of Almira is spoken to me as if accompanied by a cadence played by Moorish tambourines.

Farid says with his hands, “Let’s get back to the Alfama. We’ve got to somehow find Diego… warn him that the Northerner will surely kill him if he finds him.”

“No, Diego won’t go near his home, and we won’t be able to locate him. We’re going to the Estaus Palace.” When he shakes his head, I take his arm. “I need you with me. No protests.”

As Farid and I enter the Rossio, ash and wood flakes from the pyres in which the Jews were burnt blow around us. At first, it seems that this is the only vestige remaining from the mountain of Christian sin, and I think: Our murdered compatriots now reside only in our memories.

Farid notices, however, that this is not quite true. “Look down,” he signals, and he points with his foot toward a seam in the cobbles. Human teeth. There must be thousands scattered in the square, trapped in cracks and edges. I look up and notice that women and children are kneeling everywhere, picking up these remains as if it were harvest time. Undoubtedly, they will save them as talismans against the plague.

Ahead of us, at the northeast rim of the square, a regiment of royal footsoldiers has cordoned off the Church of São Domingos by forming a semi-circle in front of its entrance. Behind them is a row of cavaliers, perhaps twenty in all.

“A compromise must have been struck by the governor with the Dominican hierarchy to let them into Lisbon,” Farid signals to me.

“When all the killing is over, the Crown sends in troops,” I reply. “Very comforting to know that he supports us so courageously, no?”

As we walk on, I see townspeople standing in poses of respect who only a day or two before would have called for King Manuel’s head. This passivity is deeply embedded in the souls of the Portuguese Christians, I think. No revolt will ever succeed here.

A crafty-eyed old woman looking to make conversation as people do in the face of regal authority, stops us, says, “Two of the Dominican friars have been arrested. Isn’t it terrible?”

I raise my middle finger over her and chant, “May your wicked soul wander the Lower Realms forever!”

When she shows disdain for me with her Christian eyes, I spit at her feet. We rush on. At the front gate to the Estaus Palace, two burly crossbowmen stand flanking a dandified doorman in a feathered cap. Beyond the gate’s metalwork, in the shade of an orange grove, rest three carriages. One of them, painted white with gold, is the vehicle I remember from the day of Diego’s injury.

“The Count of Almira will see me,” I tell the doorman. “Pray inform him that Pedro Zarco has arrived.”

“Have you correspondence to this effect?” he asks, his face twisting as if he’s had a whiff of something rotten.

I realize then that we look like peasants who’ve come from a day of labor in the fields. “I bear no letter, but he will see me.” As he sizes me up, I hold the Northerner’s amethyst hat to my chest and feign the supercilious posture of a gentleman farmer bored with ill-bred servants. I turn to Farid, grumble in my best Castilian accent about a coming banquet for a fictitious friend named Diaz; Castilians irritate but impress the Portuguese, particularly when they can afford servants. My effort seems forced, but out of the corner of my eye, I can see the doorman passing along my message to a footman inside the gate.

We wait under the monstrous sun of Lisbon, watching slippery lizards streaking through cracks in the cobbles. With longing, Farid gazes east along the rooftops of the Moorish Quarter.

“After we’re done here, we’ll ask again at the blacksmith’s workshop for Samir,” I signal. “Maybe we can find someone who knows something.”

A footman with only one hand shuffles up to me. “I will escort Senhor Zarco to the Count’s rooms,” he says.

“Come,” I say to Farid, and together we pass through the gate.

Inside the palace, the scents are of must and amber. We march down a hallway floored with mosaics imitating Persian carpets. The walls are whitewashed, and every three paces give way to concave alcoves. Centering each alcove is pedestal hoisting aloft a great blue ewer brimming with pink and white rosebuds.

Above us, the vaulted ceilings are painted with gold and white arabesques as a background to carefully executed figures of magpies, hoopoes, nightingales and other common birds. I have no idea what the footman makes of our florid hand movements as Farid and I identify the local names of the various kinds; his eyes betray only a passing interest.

A gnarled tree occupies an immense wire cage at the end of the hallway. Upon reaching it, we discover that finches from Portuguese India and Africa have nested in it, are darting around like arrows of yellow and orange and black. I point to the mess of white droppings they leave in an attempt to spoil the beauty of such a display. Understanding my intention and finding it hopeless, Farid simply gestures in reply, “Even a king may understand something of beauty.”

“If he did, then he would not keep them caged,” I say.

“For a king, freedom and beauty can never mix!” my friend answers back wisely.

The Count’s rooms are on the second floor. The waiting chamber for his apartments is parqueted in a chessboard pattern. A table of rose-colored marble centers the room, is surrounded by four chairs embroidered with the King’s armored spheres. We are invited to sit, but on the wall to the right of the entrance hangs a disturbing triptych which grabs our attention. It depicts a bearded, prostrated saint begging in a ruined city peopled by rat-headed priests and all manner of sphinxes. With a wry smile, Farid signals, “Someone who knows Lisbon well.”

The door to the inner chambers suddenly opens. “Ah, I see you like our little painting,” the Count says to me in Castilian. He purses his lips as if awaiting an important reply. His beaked nose and thick black hair give him the wily, clever profile of an ascetic, a deceitfully youthful air as well.

“I don’t know yet whether it pleases me or not,” I answer. “But the artist has talent.”

“I like a man who doesn’t make his mind up too soon. Less likely to get swindled, no?”

“I’ve no intention of bartering for it,” I say.

He laughs with good humor. There is no hint that he recognizes me from our previous encounter. He leans into the main panel of the triptych after dismissing the footman with the slightest of nods. “Frightful what saints have to put up with,” he says. “Not worth it, I should think. It’s by a Lowlander named Bosch. King Manuel received it as a gift. But he hates it and hangs it here for me when I’m in Lisbon.” He smacks his lips. “We always enjoy the King’s leftovers.”

He gestures for Farid and me to enter his sitting room like an elder inviting youths toward wisdom. The two emerald rings crowning the index and middle fingers of his right hand suddenly seem dyed by holy light.

Inside, the girl from his carriage stands by a shuttered window at the far wall, her right arm behind her back. She wears a long gown of cream-colored silk which rises to a lace partlet and ruffled collar. A violet wimple draws her hair back into a cone ringed with silver filigree. Her face is pale and gentle, curiously girlish, centered by inquisitive eyes. Spurred perhaps by my stare of fond solidarity, she shows her hidden arm. It is short, stubby, reaches only to her waist. A quiver in her tiny fingers as she grips her pearls marks her anxious hesitation, but the longer I gaze upon her, the more solid becomes her expression of tenderness. I sense that she would like to caress the tips of her fingers across my lips.

“My daughter, Joanna,” the Count says.

With a mixture of gratitude and sexual desire, I think: praised be God for not making her his wife. I bow and offer my name. I extend my hand toward Farid and introduce him. “He is deaf and cannot speak. He will read your lips.” Farid bows with the deep Islamic grace he has inherited from Samir. It is intended to remind us that we are representatives of Allah and must meet together with a seriousness equal to our origins.

“I’m overjoyed you’ve come,” the Count says. “You’ve saved me a trip out to that pestilent Alfama. Let’s make ourselves comfortable, no?” He takes the elbow of his daughter’s left arm and leads her across the room as if about to dance. Farid and I slip uncomfortably down into gold and scarlet brocade chairs around a table of marble marquetry. A pewter tray holds a rose-colored ceramic carafe and four silver goblets. Joanna pours us wine. The Count studies us with insistent eyes. The two of us seem awkward, hesitant, like sea gulls on land. Farid signals, “The sooner we leave, the better.”

“I assume that when you gesture like that you are talking together,” the Count remarks. He twists his body to the side as the skeptical often do, stares at me above his nose with a mixture of curiosity and superiority.

“We grew up together and developed a language,” I explain.

“A language of the hands. And for obvious reasons,” he says, nodding toward Joanna, “I am fascinated by hands. Tell me, do you spell every word?”

“A few. But most words have signs.”

“And when you spell, is it in Portuguese or Hebrew?”

The Count smiles cagily at my silence. A grin from a man who likes to pose and prosecute, to confuse his victims before… He laughs suddenly and claps his hands. “Watch,” he says. He leans forward and lays an invisible object onto the table, picks corners apart as if unfolding a piece of expensive material. Bowing his head and mouthing some words, he blankets his head and shoulders with an invisible shawl. Facing east, he chants the opening of Jewish evening prayers in a faint whisper. As his words fade, he turns with a gentle expression requesting patience. He says in whispered Castilian, “From our century forward, acting will be a good profession for Jews to study. I predict that we will be the best, in all countries, in all languages, until the Messiah comes, when we will take no more roles.” He smiles through pursed lips and nods as if seconding his own theory, straightens up and swirls his invisible shawl into the air like a magician. “No matter how lucrative those roles may be. So forgive my little play. An actor without an audience is nothing, and I must use all my opportunities.” He nods at me, then Farid. “I do indeed remember you both from the street. And your uncle of blessed memory, almost caught by the King’s guards in his phylacteries.” He leans across the table to take my hand. “It’s pointless hiding when amongst your own,” he observes.

I slip out of his cold and sweaty touch. “Then you are New Christians?” I ask.

“Yes,” Joanna answers.

“And a little bit ‘no,’” adds the Count with an apologetic shrug.

Has the girl spoken because she senses that I do not trust her father? Sensing my weakness for her, Farid signals, “Do not put your faith in either of them.”

I lay my hand on Farid’s arm as reassurance. To the Count, I say, “You’ll have to speak more plainly with me.”

“Simple really,” the Count says. “We are and aren’t New Christians. We have delightful little cards of pardon from King Ferdinand. Blessed be He who creates a stain and removes it. And he’s also conferred upon me a sweet little title, of course. How did I get this delicious bit of powerful nothing? Marriage, my young man. Remember that when it comes time to plant your seed. Joanna’s mother of blessed memory sprouted from the branches of a very important family tree.” He nods toward his daughter and holds up a finger as if the truth must be told. “Very important, but very broke. So money is also how I became a count. Don’t look at me as if that’s to be belittled. No, senhor. No, indeed! I’m no different from the King of Castile himself. All nobles are fakes. Look below their finery and you’ll find a jealous peasant thrilled to nestle between the legs of his maidservant. And they’re always overspending. Don’t ever forget that! They never learn. It’s one of the ways you know that they’re not Jewish. If they do learn anything, then our dwarf-minded Dominican friars exclaim, ‘Aha! A Jew!’ and turn them to smoke. So make a lot of money and buy what you want, and never learn a thing, and you, too, may become a count!” He moistens his lips with a sip of wine. “What business is it you’re in, anyway?”

“Father…” Joanna says. “I’m sure that’s not necessary.”

“Of course, you my dear would think so. Everything but love to a young woman is unnecessary.”

Farid signals, “That passes for wit in Castile. I think we’re supposed to smile admiringly.”

The Count turns to me with raised, questioning eyebrows. “I asked what business you are in, Senhor Zarco.”

“My family owns a fruit store. But I really…”

“Oh, please!” he exclaims, flapping his hand at me in protest. “Don’t talk to me of family! Family ties are the curse of Spain and Portugal. You must walk away… no run away from them, dear boy!”

I look at Farid for his opinion on what to reply. He sighs and signals, “He’s trying to confuse us for some reason.”

“You’re right,” I observe, standing.

“You’re right’ what?” the Count asks, dumbfounded.

“Just tell us why you wanted to buy manuscripts from Simon Eanes,” I say.

“I just told you, my son! Doubloons, maravedis, cruzados, reis…. Tell me your heartbeat doesn’t quicken just a little when you hear the glorious names of money! Like the names of God, they are. Only not the least bit secret. Blessed be He who creates the obvious.” He leans toward me, whispers, “Maybe I shouldn’t go into it, but… Your uncle knew it. Look, dear boy, I buy the manuscripts here for a pittance. You poor people are just dying to get rid of them. And then I sell them for a fortune in Alexandria, Salonika, Constantinople, Venice—even Pope Julius, blessed be the stone foundations of the Church, is interested. There’s no end to the profits to be made. Now I know that you’ve got a few delicious poems hidden away. So why not sell? Then you can leave this hell. I’ll even help you. I’ve got connections in shipping. Down in Faro, there’s a…”

How does this pilfering, silken weasel know that Uncle was keeping Hebrew manuscripts? I ask Joanna, “Is this true? Is it all for gold?”

She fixes my eyes with a grave expression and nods affirmatively.

So this monied vulgarian is implying that Uncle was smuggling the works of Abulafia and Moses de Leon for mere gold! As if such works of kabbalah even had a price in the Lower Realms!

“The time has come for direct talk,” I tell the Count, as if it’s an order. “Did you have my uncle killed?!”

He leans back, offended, but catches himself and gestures for peace between us. “Of course not. I don’t…”

“But if what you say is true, then you undoubtedly considered him a competitor. You might have tried to…” Rage surges as words fail.

“Then you won’t sell me anything?” he asks. “Not even a Haggadah? A Book of Esther? A single…”

“Father, please,” Joanna begs.

“Nothing!” I say. “And if I find that you killed my uncle, I promise I’ll cut your throat!”

The Count smiles. “How very thrilling to be threatened! I expect it’s good for adding a little color to my complexion, no?”

“You sicken me,” I say. My neck burns as I turn and march to the door. Footsteps run from behind. Joanna’s tiny hand presses into my wrist and she whispers, “You must find the noblewoman my father calls, ‘Queen Esther!’ But beware of her!”

Chapter XVII

Up close, the scent of Joanna’s hair was like an invisible extension of my own desires. She squeezed my hand once, then dashed away. From the back of the room, I heard a slap. “This is serious!” her father growled. “What did you tell him?!”

I turned to her, but her eyes flashed a warning for me to leave. Outside the gates of the palace, breathing in the golden light of sunset, I gesture her words to Farid. He signals, “Every name adds a page to our book of mystery.”

“Yes. And we’ve got to check Uncle’s personal Haggadah to see which page. Now I’m beginning to understand. Zerubbabel has got to be there. Queen Esther, too. And when I find them, I believe that they will have the faces of the smugglers.”

“Something else you should know,” Farid gestures. “This Count, he is the same man as the Isaac who wanted to sell you a Hebrew manuscript.”

“What?!”

“They are one and the same, Isaac of Ronda and the Count of Almira.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. The eyes for one thing. They can’t change. And some of his gestures. Surely you noticed Isaac of Ronda’s elegant hands. He’s a good actor, as he says. He must be able to change his voice or you would have known. And he has an excellent disguise. But it’s not perfect. And underneath his scents, there is one that will not go away. Oil of cloves.”

“His blessed toothache!” I gesture. When Farid nods, I signal, “But why would he want to sell a manuscript one moment, then buy Uncle’s books the next?”

“We do not have enough verses to know the rhyme scheme.”

“Farid, come…we’ve got to get home to check Uncle’s old Haggadah!”

“I need to stay,” his hands answer, and he requests forgiveness by bowing his head. “Now that I’m well, I must search for my father. I’ll meet you as soon as I can.”

His fingertips brush against my forearm, petal-soft. I remember how the angels had him clothed in white and hear Uncle say, “Do not abandon the living for the dead.” Yet I am unable to prevent myself from signaling, “I need you to help me. We’re so close now.”

“Beri, please don’t be selfish,” he gestures.

“Selfish?! Uncle is dead! What do you want me to do? What do all of you want me to do?!”

“I don’t want you to do anything but let me search for Samir! So go from me!”

Farid’s gestures cut the air between us. Yet out of guilt and fear, I follow behind him to his friends’ homes in the neighborhood. “I’ll go as fast as I can,” he says.

But his effort to placate me only spills acid onto my rage.

We search with silence wedged between us. The only clue to Samir’s whereabouts comes from a toothless fishhook maker who lives across the street from the old confiscated mosque. In an Arabic which fuses all consonants, she says that she saw Samir praying atop his blue prayer rug on the hillside below the castle. Had he stopped for a moment in his race home to beg Allah to spare his son? She points a scarred red finger, withered almost to the bone, to where he had been. Dusty weeds and a withered marigold mark the spot. Farid straddles them and gazes across the rooftops of Little Jerusalem and central Lisbon to the Tagus.

“It’s too wide,” he gestures.

“What?” I ask.

“The river. One should be able to see to the other side. As in Tavira or Coimbra. Even Porto. Here, we have no intimacy. We cannot hug this city. The width of the river makes us feel like we’re all just visiting. That we’re all expendable. It’s the city’s curse.”

“We’ll keep looking till we find more clues,” I say. My cushioned words belie the impatience twisting my gut; Uncle is dead and he babbles on about embracing rivers.

Farid’s black eyes target me with a passive light that hides his rage. I realize that we have both put on masks again. For each other. For the first time in many years. Even so, despite all the frustration hidden under my burning cheeks, there descends to me the calming assurance that our connection can never be broken. Then, and during many days since, I have often thought that my life would have been much simpler had I been able to find physical fulfillment in his arms.

We rush home encased in our separate thoughts. The possibility that the Count of Almira has turned us both to marionettes turns the city into a ragged backdrop of gray scenery. Was Joanna’s whisper, too, just a part of a puppeteer’s plot?

By the entrance to our store, Farid marches away from me toward his house without even signalling goodbye.

Mother and Cinfa are arranging fruit at the back of our store. Miraculously, the doors to Temple Street are back on the hinges and have been painted deep blue. I’m about to ask about them when Mother says in a burdened tone, “We’ve been waiting. Are you ready to say prayers?”

Her hair is disheveled, her eyes drowsy. It must be the extract of henbane. I say, “Give me five minutes.”

“Sabbath has waited long enough!” she shouts.

“Two minutes then!”

In the kitchen, Aviboa is asleep on a pillow. Reza is boiling cod in our copper cauldron. “Brites came,” she whispers to me. “I gave her the soiled sheet you hid in the courtyard.”

“Bless you,” I say, kissing her cheek. “Did Rabbi Losa stop by, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Who painted the doors to the store and put them back on?”

“Bento. As partial thanks for extracting the ibbur from Gemila, he told me to tell you.”

“Good. Listen, stall my mother for a few minutes if you can.”

Reza nods. Dashing down into the cellar, I slip the genizah key from our eel bladder and take out Uncle’s personal Haggadah. Sitting with it on my lap, my heart drumming, I page through the illustrations looking for Zerubbabel. His panel tops the sixth page of illuminations prefacing the text. In my uncle’s rendering, he is a young man with long black hair and zealous eyes. He stands in a posture of righteous pride before King Darius, who has the optimistic, outward-looking face of Prince Henry the Navigator. Both men stand in front of the limestone tower of the Almond Farm. In his right hand, Zerubbabel carries a scrolled Torah, the essence of truth. In the left is the golden Hebrew letter Hé, a symbol of the divine woman, Binah. Two emerald rings shine from the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

These gemstones gift me with Zerubbabel’s true identity; men’s faces age, emeralds do not. Zerubbabel is none other than the Count of Almira.

“The sun’s chariot is about to pass beyond the horizon,” Reza calls down. “You’re making the Sabbath bride wait for her betrothal. And it is the last evening of Passover. Come up now!”

“Let her wed without me!” I shout up.

“Stop being so stubborn!”

“Reza, you know the prayers. You’ve got a voice. Do it yourself!”

“What serpent has eaten your sense, Berekiah Zarco? You know I can’t conduct services.”

“Then have Mother,” I say. “Just leave me be. Please.”

“We need a man, you idiot!”

It is blasphemous, but I shout, “The Sabbath bride needs only a voice, not a penis! Get Cinfa to lead you if you’re afraid.”

Reza slams the trap door to the cellar. We have peace.

I page through the panels of the Haggadah searching for Queen Esther. Her regal face confronts me from the bottom of the very next page. Her identity makes my heart race; Esther, the Jewish Queen who kept her religion a secret and who later saved her people from the wrath of the evil courtier Haman, is none other than Dona Meneses! Here, she is depicted carrying the Torah to Mordecai, her adopted father. Partially concealed beneath her arm is a manuscript, probably the Bahir—the Book of Light—since Uncle has gifted it with a brilliant nimbus. The face of Mordecai is someone I’ve never seen. But he wears a Byzantine cross, a Jewish prayer shawl and a blue aba fringed with green arabesques. Is it a reference to a man of the Eastern Church? A Jewish friend in a Moorish kingdom? A dervish from Turkey? “Someone who reconciles all of the Holy Land’s religions,” I hear my uncle say. To myself I whisper, “Or a man who wears all three masks.”

Perhaps, I think, he is Tu Bisvat.

These findings extract thought from me for a time. Then I realize that for so important a discovery, I must have the confirmation of Farid’s falcon eyes. As I poke my head form the trap door into the kitchen, Reza says, “So, Berekiah Zarco, you’ve come to your senses after all!”

I rush past her, ducking my eyes from the Sabbath ceremony. Farid is in his bedroom. On his knees, facing Mecca, his eyes closed, he sways forward toward the ground like a palm leaf bending in a breeze. When his back raises up, a furrowing in his brow indicates that he knows I’m with him. Yet his eyes do not open. He lowers himself again. Anger stiffens me when he refuses to acknowledge my presence with a hand signal. The word betrayal engraves itself in my mind. With my heel, I tap thrice, then once, then four more times. He sits up. Passive eyes open. I signal, “Please, I need your clear vision.”

He stands, his face elongated into a dry expression of feigned disinterest. Gliding like a ghost, he follows me into my house. Reza says in a gentle voice, “Will you join us now?”

I neither look nor answer. We slip into the cellar.

Farid takes one look at Zerubbabel and signals, “Its the Count of Almira.” As for Queen Esther, he isn’t so sure until I point out the choker of emeralds and sapphires which she always wears around her neck. “Yes, that’s her,” he gestures.

Swallowing hard, I think, an alchemy unanticipated by Uncle turned the love of these friends to fear. Then to hate and finally murder. For who could be more fearful than New Christians? Who more hateful than Portuguese and Spanish nobles? Who, then, better to betray Uncle than aristocratic former Jews helping him smuggle Hebrew books: Zerubbabel and Queen Esther!

Had something recently gone wrong between them? Tu Bisvat wrote that a safira sent by my master had not reached him. Maybe Dona Meneses had begun diverting profits intended for the purchase of new manuscripts. Or perhaps Uncle’s uncompromising judgments had begun to constrict Zerubbabel’s business dealings. Had he begun selling books elsewhere?

The villainous Haman, then, would be portrayed in Uncle’s newest Haggadah—the one stolen from our genizah—by the Count of Almira as an old man. His was the face my master had been looking for, the one he had told me he’d finally found just before Passover dinner.

And yet, if the Count was guilty, if he had wanted to silence Simon and the other threshing group members who might have known his identity, then why did he agree to take Diego to the hospital? To Farid, I signal, “We need to find the missing Haggadah as proof that the Count had Uncle murdered or killed him himself.”

“How?” he gestures.

“We’ll have to trap Dona Meneses and the Count somehow. They must have it.”

“Berekiah!” Reza calls suddenly. “You have a visitor…Father Carlos.”

Is this a trick designed by my mother to get me upstairs? “Send him down!” I call.

“Who is it?” Farid signals.

“The priest,” I answer.

I slip the Haggadah into its hiding place, lock the lid, then drop the genizah key into the eel bladder.

Father Carlos feels his way down the stairs. Sweat beads on his forehead and his breathing comes greedily, as if he’s been running.

“Judah?” I ask.

“Nothing.” He comes to me, takes my hands. In a quivering voice he says, “You must help me!”

“Is it the Northerner? Is he after you?!”

“No, no…not that. But dearest God. I was talking to the Dominicans… They must have summoned a demon to kill me. Berekiah, I’ve realized something—evil is jealous. The Devil wants to destroy what is most good. And your uncle had benevolent powers that healed both the Lower and Upper Realms. If the Devil had wanted… I think he and the Dominicans are sending demons after us all. White Maimon. Gemila did see him! She was right!”

In his frantic eyes, I can see that the madness of Lisbon has finally overwhelmed the priest. “Carlos, please stop! I have no time for metaphorical speech.”

“Then look at this!” he shouts.

He takes out yet another talisman. Upon a square of polished vellum minute Hebrew letters form two poorly sketched concentric circles spelling out quotations from Proverbs: The outer circle reads, Violence is meat and drink for the treacherous; the inner, The embers of the wicked will be extinguished.

“I found it in the lining of my cape!” Father Carlos shouts. “In my cape! How do you explain that?! How?!”

“Shush!” I say. I take out from my pouch the talisman he gave me the other day. The writing on this new talisman is in the same precise script in some places and in others far less assured, as if executed by someone weakened by disease or too much wine.

When I hand it to Farid, he sniffs at it, then licks. “It looks like your ink,” he signals.

“My ink?!” The solution then descends to me and forces a groan from my gut. I’ve been avoiding the obvious answer. “Carlos, these scribblings have nothing to do with Uncle’s death,” I say. I turn the vellum in my hands, confirm from its texture the identity of the artist responsible. “Come,” I tell the priest.

He and Farid follow me upstairs. Mother is saying prayers in a fragile voice. She stops to glance at me with resigned, heavy eyes. Reza infuses the silence with her glare of righteous disapproval, an expression which Cinfa copies. We rush to my mother’s bedroom. In the secret panel above her door frame, I find the talismans she’s been working on. The micrographic writing is the same.

“I don’t understand,” Father Carlos says.

“She must have overheard your argument with Uncle. She thought she could help. Judgment clouded by worry and grief produces such monstrosities. This last one she must have slipped into your cloak while you were sleeping last night. She’s been taking extract of henbane, cannot write as carefully as normal—nor think with any rigor. I’m sorry. I’m sure she meant no harm. Only to get the book by Solomon Ibn Gabirol which Uncle wanted so badly. In her state, she may even think these talismans will bring her brother back. Two mysteries had woven together. We thought they were one and the same.”

If I had listened to my own words closely, then the mistake I was about to make would not have been made.

Farid, Father Carlos and I go to the store where my family cannot hear us to discuss how we should proceed. After I tell the priest of the identities given Zerubbabel and Queen Esther in Uncle’s personal Haggadah, Farid signals with certain gestures, “We go back to the Estaus Palace and confront the Count of Almira again, force an admission of guilt from him.”

When I translate for the priest, he says, “And if our Count should refuse?”

Farid lifts out from his pouch the most fearsome dagger from his collection, six inches of deathly sharp iron curved like a sickle. He swivels it menacingly under the priest’s nose. “The Count won’t refuse!” he signals. “And why? Because an actor needs his voice. I shall place the tip against his Adam’s apple and core it with a single twist unless he answers us truthfully.”

The priest leans back and pushes Farid’s hand away. To me, he says, “I don’t know what he just said, but I don’t like it. Dona Meneses… She’s more likely to admit the truth.”

“Why, because she’s a woman?” I reply scornfully. “If she’s a secret Jew needing to protect her identity, then she’d have no hesitation ordering her henchmen to chop off our heads!”

“Joanna, the Count’s daughter,” Farid signals. “She will help us.”

“If we can get to her.”

As I translate for Carlos, a knock comes from my mother’s entrance to Temple Street. We rush in, and I open the door to find a round-faced little boy with bulging eyes. He takes a note from his pouch, extends it toward me. “Message,” he says. When I take it from him, he runs off. The note reads:

“Berekiah, meet me on the King’s Road to Sintra, just before Benfica. I will be waiting by the twin water mills rising beyond the ruined Visigothic church. Come alone. Tell not a soul. And come right away. I found out something you need to know about Master Abraham’s death.”

The note is signed in Diego’s slashing script.

Father Carlos takes it from me. After he reads it, he says, “Don’t go, dear boy. It’s still too risky to travel around Lisbon alone.”

The obligation to warn Diego about the smugglers and inform him of their identities weighs on my chest. Perhaps, too, what he has discovered will help me trap Queen Esther and Zerubbabel. “No, I’ll go,” I say. “It’s night, and there’s little else I can do for now.” Turning to Farid, I take his shoulder and spell an apology for my earlier selfishness. I add, “I’ve no intention of going alone, if you’ll gift me with your presence.”

His eyes close and he offers me a bow of agreement. We leave before my family’s supplications become wailings and curses, before Cinfa can fix me fully inside her abandoned eyes.

Farid pauses at home to slip on his father’s sandals.

Friday night deepens with a fierce wind from the east, from accursed Spain. On the road to Sintra, beyond the exposed arches of the Visigothic church, we head down a foot-trodden path toward the abandoned water mills. Their forms are wild and spidery in the moonlight. Five leagues off, Sintra Mountain rises from the horizon like a fallen cloud pointing upward toward an answer beyond reach. Farid sniffs rabbit-like at the air, surveys the landscape. A white hawk circles overhead, ghost-riding currents of air, a creature free of land, beyond history. “Is the attraction of birds that they presage our liberation from this world?” I signal to my friend.

“Perhaps that they both share our journey and escape it,” he gestures. He sniffs around once again. “Deer have passed recently,” he signals. With pensive, cautious movements, he indicates, “And something else.” After a few more steps, he squats, runs his fingers across a streak his deaf-man’s eyes have spotted in the dirt. “Men,” he signals. He points to an impression my vision cannot perceive. “One walking with boots. Heavy, with stomping footsteps.”

“Maybe Diego,” I say.

“Two other men, as well. A small one who creeps. The other hesitant, turning constantly to face around.”

“Now that’s Diego,” I smile. “The others are probably his bodyguards.”

We rush on. A barrel-like shape on the path before the mills takes on angular contours, shifts suddenly. A fallen man condenses in the silver moonlight. Long-haired and broad-shouldered, he drags himself forward like a caterpillar, his right leg apparently wounded and trailing mercilessly behind. His grunts carve agony in the wind-sounds of night.

“The Northerner who emptied Simon from his shell!” Farid signals with a flurry of gestures.

From up close, the dull, thick features of his face are unmistakable. “Yes.”

We stand above him like towers. He is enormous, bulky, like a bull turned human. He lifts himself to his knees. We step back. Our daggers center our fists. A patch of dark wetness soaks into his thigh.

“You killed my friend,” I say. “Why?”

He answers in a foreign tongue which I don’t understand.

“English, French, Dutch…?” I ask.

“Flamenco,” he answers in rough Castilian. “De Bruges.”

Has he had training as a shohet amongst the northern, Ashkenazi Jews? I point to him and ask, “Nuevo Cristiano?”

He laughs in a single exhale. “Viejo,” he replies. He points to himself, whispers, “Muy Viejo Cristiano, very Old Christian.”

“Why did you kill Simon?” To his indecipherable shrug, I hold my foot and ankle to my rear to imitate the stump of a leg. “Porqué él?”

A laugh bursts, becomes a cough. His eyes close and he tilts his head to indicate that it was inevitable.

“Dona Meneses?” I ask. “Do you know her?”

He smiles and nods. As I turn to catch a signal of Farid’s, the Fleming leaps for me. His oxen weight topples me. I strike out, but his callused hands grip my throat. My knife buries deep into the welcome of his shoulder. I am screaming for Farid. Fighting. But he is too strong. The vise of his grip tightens. My chest heaves. An exploding cough trapped in my throat wells tears in my eyes. And yet I see him clearly. As if a scarab trapped in amber: bulging eyes, reflective cheeks, a mouth grimacing with hate.

I learn that there is a moment when death is accepted as inevitable. My hands loosen from around his wrists. Neither anger nor fear possesses me. Only distance. As if I am standing behind myself and turning to walk away. As if Uncle is calling to me from across the Rua de São Pedro: “Berekiah, hearken unto me! I’m right here waiting…”

A cringing pain. Constriction like rope burning my throat. Spurts of salty liquid from the Fleming’s mouth. I have been tugged back to my body. My stinging eyes, my lips, are soaked with blood. His hands, like gates parting, drop away. Weight is pushed from me. Farid’s face descends. He grips me with one hand; the other gestures my name.

Gulping for air, I spot Farid’s dagger buried at the back of the Fleming’s neck. “I’m okay,” I signal.

“I killed him,” he gestures. This time, there is no hesitation in Farid’s hand: fingers thrust out, fisted, then twisted palm-down as if to snap a branch from its mother limb.

Farid digs our knives from the assassin’s flesh, wipes them against his pants. Except to express my thanks, we do not gesture; what is there to say? We trudge on to the mills instead. A man lies face-up on the pathway, by the base of the nearest one, blank fish-eyes fixed on the quarter moon high in the sky. His neck is still warm with eclipsed life. When I squat to look more closely, a face I know forms: that of the bodyguard Diego brought to my house.

I whisper a prayer that Diego, too, hasn’t been summoned to God.

“Do you hear anything?” Farid signals. “I sense movement close by.”

“No.”

Suddenly, out steps Diego from behind the mill wheel. He wears a thick, fur-lined cape which descends to his ankles. Even in the pale light, I can see his face is beaded with sweat.

“You’re safe,” I say. “Why didn’t you…”

“Berekiah, they’re…they’re trying to kill everyone in the threshing group!” he moans. “All of us. There’s no safety anywhere. We…we must…”

“Calm down. We killed the Northerner back along the pathway.”

Diego grabs my shoulders. “That won’t end it. They got your uncle and Samson and Simon—and now they tried for me! Don’t you see, the whole threshing group… All of us!”

I place my hands against his chest. “Don’t worry. We know their identities now. It’s Dona Meneses. She and the Count of Almira are behind all this. They must think that the members of the threshing group know their identities and can compromise them to the Royal authorities.”

“Dona Meneses?! It’s impossible! She would never…”

“She was smuggling books with Uncle,” I say.

“But she’s a noblewoman!”

“So much the better for getting Hebrew manuscripts safely out of Portugal, don’t you think?”

Diego stares off into the night as if his response may lie somewhere along the dark horizon. Turning back to me, he says, “I don’t know. I just never thought…” He stares at his dead bodyguard. “Fernando wounded the Northerner in the leg, but the blond bastard was too skillful with his knife. Oh God! I mustn’t go back to Lisbon.”

“So you intend to wait here the rest of your life?”

“I won’t let them get me! When they drip the boiling oil on you, it’s as if your skin is being peeled open with a rusty blade. You pray that your life will end. You’ll do anything. I won’t let it happen again. Ever. You hear me! Never again!”

I suddenly recall the thick line of scar across his chest which I saw when he collapsed on the street. “They gave you the pinga?” I ask.

He replies, “In Seville there was a specialist who could draw pictures across your body with burning oil and ash he rubbed in the scars. Onto the chest of a girl of nineteen whose crime was to use clean sheets on Friday, he dripped an entire Passion scene. She simply would not die. Her breasts became the hills of Jerusalem, her navel the heart of Christ. It was too much to…”

“Diego, listen. They could just as easily send someone after you. Wherever you go. You’ll be safer in town. With people you know.”

“Not my house,” he intones with dread. The wind tousles his silver hair, and I realize he no longer wears his turban; we are becoming less obviously Jewish by the day. “They know to look there. And when they realize that the assassin sent to kill me is dead, they’ll send someone else.”

“I meant that you’ll stay with us,” I say.

Diego gazes down, considering. I can see that he has already agreed. So I ask, “Why did you want me out here in the first place?”

“Berekiah, I remembered something important…that Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman for whom Esther scripted a book of Psalms, had an argument with your uncle a week ago.” He takes my hand, continues in a whisper, “Your master mentioned it in passing in our threshing group. I made some inquiries, learned that Dom Miguel was staying in a stables not far from here. On the outskirts of Benfica. I intended my bodyguard to go with you. To surprise him at night. But now, I’m not…” His words fade as he looks around.

“Diego, I know all about the argument. Miguel and Uncle fought over his refusal to accept his true past, his Judaism. I was told about it by…”

“Not that! It was the book…the Book of Psalms Esther wrote for him. He didn’t want to pay the price they’d agreed upon. Apparently, he threatened to tell the authorities that your aunt and uncle were concealing Hebrew manuscripts if they didn’t gift him with it. Now I think that maybe he was involved with Dona Meneses. There must be a connection there somewhere.”

“No, no. Uncle sent him a note asking him to become a smuggler,” I say.

Farid has had trouble reading Diego’s lips in the dark. When I translate into signs, he gestures back, “But Miguel Ribeiro is rich. He could afford to pay for Esther’s work. And he spared your life when you went to see him. He could’ve killed you with impunity.”

“What’s he telling you?!” Diego demands.

“That it makes no sense.”

The thresher laughs in a single ironic exhale and grips my hand tightly. “Has anything over the past week made any sense? Let me tell you something, my boy. The Lower Realms aren’t ruled by any logic which you’re likely to find scripted in the kabbalah.”

Diego steps across the Northerner’s body. He spits on his head and kicks it. Then on he trudges, sweating like a beast of burden. In his erudite voice, he soliloquizes about leaving for Rhodes and Constantinople on a boat scheduled to depart from Faro in one week. He will begin his journey south from Lisbon tomorrow evening. “And Constantinople is such a lovely town,” he says. “Not like Lisbon at all. It even rains. Big beautiful drops. Like pearls. Good for kabbalists, too. It’s where Asia meets Europe, where two become one like your uncle used to say. Remember when he…”

The dust and night and Diego’s rambling voice intertwine like rope around my thoughts. Vultures spiral overhead, trail us back to Lisbon. When we pause inside the city’s gates at the Chafariz da Esperança, Fountain of Hope, I douse my face and hair. I wonder what the hidden connection between Miguel Ribeiro and the smugglers might be. I stare at Diego through the dripping water. He’s combing the new beard which already covers his cheeks and chin. “Neatness is a holy duty,” he reminds me.

Perhaps so. But what defines his inner being? Is he the Wandering Jew in person, a terrified being somehow less than human, ready for the next migration to yet another hostile land? Is that what we’ve all become, characters defined by Christian mythology?

As we reach my house, little Didi Molcho comes running to us from our gate. He shouts, “I’ve found him, Beri! I’ve found him!”

“Who?”

“Rabbi Losa!”

“Where is he?!” I demand.

“In the micvah. Murça Benjamin is being married.”

“What….now? It was to be tomorrow. It must be long after midnight. And it’s still the Sabbath!”

He whispers, “To fool the Christians, the wedding has been changed to tonight.”

We walk together to the courtyard. Father Carlos comes out to meet us. He, Didi, Diego, Farid and I stand by the stump of our felled lemon tree. I say, “I must confront Rabbi Losa, make sure he’s got nothing to do with this. I’ll be back soon.”

Everyone begins to raise their voices against me. “It’s too dangerous for Jews to meet together in ritual,” Diego concludes, speaking for all of them. “What if the Christians find you?!”

My distrust of Losa is so complete that I cannot resist the urge to confront him. “Even so,” I say, “I must go. Besides, there is nothing we can do about Queen Esther and Zerubbabel in the night. At dawn, I will begin to draw them out of hiding.”

I leave my friends for the micvah and Murça Benjamin’s marriage ceremony. As a childless widow, she has been obliged by the law of Levirite marriage to wed her late husband’s elder brother now that he has chosen to take her as his bride.

A weedy man whose face is hidden in a cowl guards the bathhouse door. “May I go in?” I ask. “I’m a friend of Murça’s.”

“Hurry.”

The stairs are lit by wall torches. A small gallery of witnesses draped in cloaks of fluttering shadow and light is assembled in the central chamber, men in front, women behind. But as I descend, I notice that something is amiss. Rabbi Losa sits at the center of a tribunal of five judges. He starts as if burned when he spots me. His wicked eyes show cold dread. Rage presses into my groin, hot and demanding.

And yet, what is happening? Murça stands opposite her brother-in-law, Efraim. Her hair has been gathered up under a burlap headscarf. Her face is drawn, hopeless, and her hands are trembling. A black ceramic plate rests on the ground between them. The halizah! Oh God, when will Thy mercy ever reach us? After the riot against the Jews, Efraim must have reneged on his agreement to marry. We are well along in the ceremony that will free him from this duty. As for Murça, she, too, will be liberated. But into what future? With little dowry and half the Jewish youths of Lisbon gone to ash, her chances of finding the happiness she deserves are slim.

Efraim announces his refusal to marry Murça in a judgmental voice. In quivering, hesitant syllables, Murça replies in Hebrew, “Me’en yeba-mi lehakim leahiv shem beyisrael lo aba yabmi,” then repeats her words in Portuguese so all may understand: “My husband’s brother has refused to establish a name in Israel for his brother and does not wish to marry me in the Levirite marriage.” A sigh comes from deep in her gut as she finishes.

“Do you understand what she said?” Rabbi Losa asks Efraim.

“Yes.”

The judges rise. Murça trudges toward Efraim, crouches, and with her right hand alone begins to undo the leather sandal straps circled three times around his right calf. Her agonized breaths scrape the air. When the laces finally dangle free, she raises his foot and slips off his shoe. Lifting herself up, she reaches back for leverage and throws the sandal to the ground between Efraim and the judges.

Rabbi Sabah nudges Losa and whispers in his ear; the traitorous lout has forgotten his place in the ceremony because of his fear of me. In a rushed voice, he says to Efraim, “Take a look at the spittle which is coming out of her mouth until it reaches the ground.”

Murça trembles, manages with great effort to lean over and spit into the black plate to symbolically humiliate her brother-in-law for refusing to give her children.

Defiant, Efraim retrieves his sandal and hands it to Rabbi Losa as if serving a summons. All five judges intone in unison: “May it be God’s will that the daughters of Israel will never come to need the halizah or the Levirite marriage.”

The ceremony over, Murça melts to the floor. As the women rush to her, Losa breaks for the stairs. All rabbis know how to kill like a shohet! I think. He was the one blackmailing Uncle’s smugglers. That is why God meant for me to attend this halizah!

I push past the men of the gallery, rush up after him. Outside, I spot him lumbering toward his house. In a moment, I have reached him. My hands form fists around the silk of his collar. When I shove him against the wall of Samir’s house, I say, “A great scholar and rabbi of rabbis like you should not be in such a hurry to leave.”

He pushes back at me. “Let me pass, you little catamite.”

“You mistake me for Farid, a lover of men whose name you are unequal even to pronounce.”

“Would you beat me right in the street in front of everyone?” He looks around to force me to consider the small crowd that has gathered.

“I might,” I say. “I care not what the others think of me. But I will be fair. I will not kill you for your crimes against your people, only if I find you murdered my uncle.”

“Murdered your uncle? Me?!”

“Is that so astounding? You betrayed him! You dare deny it? You took out your shohet’s blade and slit his throat!”

“I do indeed deny it. Of course, we disliked each other. But there is a Red Sea between hate and murder. And I have not crossed it.”

“Where were you the Sunday of the riot?” I demand.

“In my home praying. One of my daughters is ill.”

“To God or to the Devil?”

“May a wild boar press its tongue into…”

I knock his head against the whitewashed wall. He shrieks, groans. “And witnesses?!” I ask.

“Both my daughters were there with me!”

“All day?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did the Dominicans spare you?”

He shouts, “I work for the Church now, you fool!”

“Are your daughters at home?”

“Don’t you dare…”

A week of little sleep and food is beginning to take its toll on my reasoning and balance. I tug the terrified rabbi down the Rua de São Pedro toward his house. A retreating part of me realizes that I have let my desperation get the better of me. Am I afraid to see the truth, to string all the clues together into an easily understood verse? They are all safely placed in my Torah memory: White Maimon of the Two Mouths; Diego’s stoning; the shohet’s slashing cut across my uncle’s neck; the letters from Tu Bisvat. If they were citations from Torah or kabbalah, I could weave them together into a sensible commentary, an answer. Am I simply afraid to end the journey toward vengeance and pass through the final Gate of Emptiness beyond my master’s death?

Chapter XVIII

According to kabbalah, honey has one-sixtieth the sweetness of manna; dream one-sixtieth the power of prophesy; the Sabbath one-sixtieth the glory of the world to come.

And the sleep of sickness, what is its fraction of death?

Rachel, Rabbi Losa’s youngest daughter, lies under a woolen blanket, on her side, the back of her hand curled like a flipper over her forehead as if she is seeking protection from an ogre. Her eyes are closed, but every few seconds she shudders, seeming to cast away an inner damp. Esther-Maria, her older sister, sits vigil at the end of the bed with the worry-reddened eyes of failing resolve. A chaplet threads through her fingers. She nods up at me as those beyond speech do, acknowledging kinship yet distance.

I consider the failure of the child’s body as if aligned to Efraim’s denial of Murça. The broken promises of betrayal seem to be the binding glue that seals all our lives together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just as well,” I sneer.

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

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

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

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

“Will my sister die?” she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“By whom?”

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

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

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

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

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

Is this, then, a forgery scripted by Zerubbabel and Queen Esther? Do they suspect that I am walking within their shadows?

“How long had he been dead when his sister found him?” I signal to Farid.

“She said she found him this morning. But the note only just now. She hadn’t the strength to go through his possessions any sooner.”

“What are you two signalling about?” Carlos demands. “And what’s it say, damn you?!”

After I read Solomon’s words aloud, Farid takes the note from me and sniffs at it, licks its edge. “Very cheap quality,” he says.

“As a mohel, Solomon was very skillful with knives,” Carlos observes.

“It might explain things,” Diego adds. “We certainly never suspected he was working with Master Abraham. That’s just the way they both would have wanted it.”

He’s right. And yet, could Gemila have mistaken a balding, olive-skinned finch of a man for White Maimon of the Two Mouths? And for what reason would he have hired a Northerner to kill Simon and Diego?

“You have opened another gate,” I hear Uncle tell me. “Now, Berekiah, fill your lungs with the breath of the Lower Realms and jump through before it has a chance to bang closed.”

I take the letter back from Farid. My pounding feet lead me to the cellar so that I can meditate upon its script. “Alone,” I whisper, and Farid lets my hand slide from his.

Downstairs, I take Uncle’s topaz signet ring from the storage cabinet and slip it onto my right index finger. I sit on our prayer mat above his bloodstains. After opening the doors of my mind with patterned breathing exercises, I transpose the scripted letters of Solomon’s note using the monotone of chant. When his words lift from the paper and twist like a juggler’s rings in the air, they shed their meaning as unnecessary weight. My arms and legs grow light with grace.

Imagine looking upon a cuneiform tablet. When the knots of mind are untied, Hebrew becomes that foreign. The letters reveal themselves as dismembered shapes; music without melody; animals unnamed by Adam. The solidity of the world grows translucent and finally opens.

Through the largest God-given space—the one of emptiness beyond thought—words with the certainty of prayer come to me: This must be the script of Uncle’s killer; it is his confession, not Solomon’s. He left it in the mohel’s house after his suicide. For his sister or someone else to find and bring to me…to tempt me away from his trail.

Perhaps he even killed poor Solomon to advance his plans in some way!

I sit alone, exhausted; the effort to summon insight has been costly for my weakened body. My hands are weighted as if by lead. Rest till dawn,I think to myself. In response, my eyelids close. My uncle speaks to me. “Sleep,” he says, his voice plaintive, seductive. “You need to slumber in silence if you are to complete the journey.”

“No, not now,” I answer aloud. Opening my eyes, I think: I must check Solomon’s apartment, talk to his sister. Then go back to the Estaus Palace. I must try to speak to Joanna, the Count’s daughter.

“As defiant as ever,” Uncle replies. I close my eyes to see his smile. “You must give way to dream,” he continues. “The desert of Lisbon has passed beneath your feet. You are indeed close. Rest your head upon my lap. Use your dreams to ask a question.”

“Is that not a sin?” I ask. “One must not question the dead, the prophets say.”

“One may always speak with God. It is within his ocean that this single drop now resides. Simply take the ribbon with both our names scripted in gold from your wrist and place it over your eyes. Then sleep.”

I obey my master. And a dream does indeed descend.

I am enfolded by a warmth akin to homecoming. My master is standing above me, framed by the tiles of the cellar wall, his prayer shawl draped over his head and shoulders.

“I do not believe that Dom Miguel Ribeiro or any Northern henchman in the pay of your secret smugglers would have planted a silk thread on your thumbnail or killed like a shohet,” I say. “So who else is involved? Who did Queen Esther send to murder you?”

“You already know who separated my body from my soul,” he replies with a cagey smile. “The question is ‘where’ and ‘when’ you shall realize it.”

“As usual, Uncle, you want to make me work for an answer. Very well. Where and when shall I learn his name?”

As the white wing of his robe unfurls, a breeze scented with myrtle blows over us. The ceiling thins and fades. Walls drop away. The sky opens, is washed pink and violet at the western horizon. We sit together below the tower of the Almond Farm.

“Why here?” I ask. “Why at sundown?”

Uncle shows me his piercing look meant to indicate that I must listen closely. He raises his hand of blessing over me and says, “The map of a town is in a blind beggars feet.”

Golden light shines through the eyelets of windows at the northern rim of the cellar ceiling. It is Saturday morning. The eighth and last day of Passover. I sit up and gaze back at my dream as if upon a departing guest. Opening the genizah, I search in vain for handwriting that matches that of Solomon’s bogus note. Then, just to be sure of my reasoning, I page through Uncle’s personal Haggadah. Solomon the mohel was not given a Biblical cognate. In all likelihood, he could not have been involved in smuggling books with Zerubbabel and Queen Esther.

Upstairs, Reza is building a fire in the hearth, Aviboa in her arms, balanced on her hip. A plump orange marigold is pinned in the girl’s hair. Diego and Carlos sit across from each other at the kitchen table sipping steaming barley water from ceramic cups.

Reza is the first to turn to me. Her eyes betray the grudge she carries for my not leading Sabbath services the night before.

“You’ve slept,” Carlos says. “That is good.”

We exchange blessings. “Where’s Farid?” I ask.

“At home, saying prayers,” Diego replies.

I make for the door to the courtyard.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Father Carlos demands.

“Out,” I reply.

“You’re going to Solomon the mohel’s apartment, aren’t you?” Reza asks bitterly. Before I can tell her my true destination, she says, “Can’t you just let it be? He’s dead. We have our vengeance. So now we must find a way to move on, to care for the family we still have. That’s what your master would want. And believe me, Berekiah Zarco, there’s a boatload of chores for you to do should you ever want to rejoin the living!”

Reza stares at me as if I’d better give her the response she wants.

“My path is not yours,” I tell her. “If I don’t proceed on my own now, I’ll never be able to rejoin you later.” The destination she has chosen for me serves as a convenient lie, however, so I add, “Besides, I’m only going there to pay my respects. Even a murderer deserves our prayers.”

Diego stands and says, “I’ll be leaving this evening for Faro and the boat to Constantinople. Perhaps we should say our goodbyes.”

“I’ll be back soon. No time for farewells just yet.”

Farid is praying in his front room when I enter his house. When he spots me, he lifts straight up as if reeled in by the hands of Allah.

Chapter XIX

As Farid and I spire up the hillside of mottled scrub toward the towers of the Graça Convent and morning sun of Lisbon, the dwarf nun with the single saber-tooth who guards the sanctuary’s limestone cross swivels around to glare at us.

Dona Meneses’ mansion is perched on the dirt road which rims the northern slope of the hill. A stone fortress adapted from an abandoned Romanesque battlement, its only modern exuberance is a marble balcony supported by four flying buttresses braced into the exposed limestone of the hillside below. I have come here twice before, both times to deliver silk dresses my mother had been commissioned to sew. As we walk to the gated entrance to the side of the house, a garden of towering Moroccan cedars offers us shade. From here, we can see the edge of the balcony at the back. A gaunt man in a plumed blue beret stands at the far end. He holds a red glass goblet, is conversing leisurely with someone I can’t see from this angle. As he turns to his left to note something in the distance, I recognize him: the Count of Almira.

Zerubbabel and Queen Esther have come together.

At the gate, a blond guard in the characteristic amethyst hat of Dona Meneses’ henchmen takes my message inside the house. As we slip away, Farid signals, “Maybe she gets a discount for ordering those northern monsters in bulk.”

I would like to laugh, if only to confirm that I am still the young man I was, but I no longer seem to possess the ability. As we pass the saturnine nun still standing guard at the convent, my heart seems to leap from my chest. I think: If my life were to end here, what would it have meant?

There is no time to consider a reply. We run-slide-run down the hill. Lisbon’s insanely tangled streets welcome us with anonymity.

Back at home, I take from the genizah two priceless philosophic treatises by Abraham Abulafia, “The Life of the Future World” and “The Treasury of the Hidden Eden.” Both are gifted with margin notes in the master’s own hand.

“What are you doing?” Diego asks from the stairs. He and Father Carlos stand on the steps giving me motherly looks of worry.

“I understand now what Uncle wants me to do. If Dona Meneses is seeking to purchase Hebrew manuscripts through the Count of Almira, she will have them. But for a very high price. I want my master’s last Haggadah. It’s the proof I need.”

The priest says, “But you told us that you believed Solomon was responsible for…”

“Who cares what I said!” I interrupt. “Do you believe everything you hear?!”

He frowns as if he’s smelled something rotten.

Diego asks, “An exchange? Master Abraham’s books for the Haggadah?”

“Exactly.”

“You’ve got your uncle’s guile,” Father Carlos tells me, his tone wary. “Can’t argue with that. But maybe you’re a bit too clever.”

“You’re tempting the Devil, you know,” Diego counsels.

“You two are beginning to sound alike,” I observe. “I think fear makes all Jews say the same things. And it’s getting tiresome. Anyway, I’m not tempting any devil. Dona Meneses is just a frightened Jew like the rest of us.”

“A Jew?!” Diego exclaims. “She’s no Jew!”

“She portrays Queen Esther in Uncle’s personal Haggadah…is depicted bringing the Torah to Mordecai.”

“That’s no proof!” he scoffs.

“It is for me!”

With the voice of a learned elder, Diego says, “Even if you’re right, she’s no Jew. She’s a New Christian. The gap grows wider between the two each day.” When I roll my eyes, he adds, “In any event, a knife knows no religion. And her bodyguards have very sharp ones in their possession. We have all found that out from close range of late.”

“So what do you want me to say? I know all that.”

The priest steps to the bottom of the stairs and approaches me. With supplicating eyes, he says, “Berekiah, now that you have neither your father nor your uncle…”

“Save it, Carlos! I don’t want your protection.”

He gives me the burdened sigh I’ve heard all my life meaning that I’m too obstinate for my own good. I slip the manuscripts into the leather day pack Uncle used to take on his spiritual outings to Sintra Mountain.

Diego comes to me. “So where will you confront her?” he questions.

“At the Almond Farm,” I reply.

“Why there?”

“It’s where my uncle said to go.”

Father Carlos gasps. As I pass him, he grabs my arm. “Master Abraham appeared to you?” When I nod, he asks in a hushed voice, “And you spoke with him?”

“I asked God a dream question and Uncle appeared to me.”

“What…what did he say?”

“That the last gate would be crossed at the tower on the Almond Farm.”

Diego says, “Berekiah, if you’re right, then Dona Meneses and the Count of Almira had Master Abraham and Simon killed. You shouldn’t go. I’ll get your mother. I can see you won’t listen to us.”

“Stop! Don’t bring her here! Simon wasn’t prepared. And neither, apparently, was my uncle. They didn’t know how dangerous she really was. I do.”

He continues to protest in a voice ascending toward hysteria. I raise my hand to call for silence. “If you tell my mother, she’ll just start sewing some more of her hideous talismans. Leave her in the store. We should say goodbye now. You may be gone by the time I return.”

Diego and I hug, but it is impossible for my emotions to reach toward his tears; there is a callous deadness in me linked to revenge. “May you find those pearls of rain you want from the skies over Constantinople,” I say. I smile as best I can. “And don’t forget those treatises you wanted from Senhora Tamara. You won’t be able to get them just anywhere. If you need some money…” I reach into my pouch and hand him Senhora Rosamonte’s aquamarine ring.

He takes it from me. “Berekiah, I don’t know what…”

“Say nothing. All will be well for you in Turkey.”

“I will miss the wonders of Portugal. And the good Jews of Lisbon most of all.” He blesses his hand over me. “May you and your family find the peace you so long have deserved.”

As Farid and I walk to the Almond Farm, the amber grasses and blossoming trees of Portugal seem to connote separation. We Jews are scattering again, and these mulberry and lavender bushes, poppies and magpies will not hear their Hebrew names for centuries to come, perhaps never again. Maybe it is even a good thing for them.

The scores of graves on the farm remain free of weeds because of the drought. Wooden markers scribbled in Portuguese sprout like hands reaching toward life. We enter the tower and ascend the spiral staircase. Round and round we climb, into the belfry, empty now except for a patchwork of bird droppings. We gaze out at the carpets of golden barley and plowed earth separated by rims of cork trees, their twisted, noble trunks stripped to a vulnerable red.

And we wait.

The sunset which marks the end of Passover rises with reflections of the great topaz-colored palm leaves which canopy Eden.

A few minutes later, just as I requested in my note, Dona Meneses’ coach approaches, stops at the property line of the farm. Alone, she strolls toward us through the old grove of almond trees, a scarlet parasol over her head. Yet she holds no manuscript in her hand. Farid signals, “The time has come.” He places his dagger in the waistband of his pants. Trying to remain calm, I lift up my pack weighted with Abulafia’s manuscripts. We descend from the belfry, Uncle’s hand guiding me at a leisurely pace wholly out of step with my nervous breathing.

On the ground floor, Farid and I stand amidst the stone rubble and await the noblewoman.

Dona Meneses does not disappoint. She steps confidently across the threshold of the tower and acknowledges me with a stiff nod, the kind of regal gesture she shows her drivers to ready them for departure. Her face, though not unpleasant to look at, seems too round and small, perhaps because her brown tresses have been drawn tightly back and wrapped inside a tall black cone tasseled with yellow ribbon. Her flowing silken jupe bears vertical stripes of royal blue and brilliant green, is puffed fashionably at her belly to give the impression of pregnancy. Staring at her as I never have before, I have the impression that she is terrified of aging; her flaring eyebrows and long lashes are thickly penciled, black as midnight, and an unsightly pinkish powder pales her olive complexion. Her lips are pursed to indicate impatience, are the red of rubies. She closes her parasol suddenly, fingers her choker of emerald and sapphire beads with exquisite reserve. She targets her gaze at Farid. Turning back to me, she assumes a kind of false and urgent sympathy. “I came as you asked,” she says. “So would you be kind enough to please tell me what it is…”

“Why haven’t you brought my uncle’s Haggadah?” I demand.

“Rude, you are,” she says, as if that’s a proper answer to my question.

“Where is it?” I repeat.

“I don’t know.” She raises her eyebrows as if puzzled by my concern. “But you can rest assured that I haven’t got it.”

“That’s impossible,” I say.

“But it’s true,” she replies. “Tell me, have you told anyone about me, about…”

“Don’t worry, we will trail no spies to your door. As far as the world outside knows, you are as Old Christian as the Castilian Inquisition itself.”

“Would you tell me how you found out?” she asks. “Your mother, perhaps?”

“Does she know?!”

“Ah, so dear Mira kept her word and didn’t tell you.” She caresses her fingers down from her chin across her neck with noticeable relief.

“No, she said nothing.” As I speak, insight comes with a jolt. “The basket of fruit with which you always left our house,” I say. “The books were always hidden below. She knew.”

“Once, Attar’s ‘Conference of the Birds’ got stained by grapes. Your uncle was furious.” Dona Meneses shows me a false, practiced smile. Seeing I won’t reciprocate, she asks in an arrogant voice, “So how did you find out about me?”

“You’re illuminated in my uncle’s personal Haggadah as Queen Esther. There could be no doubt of your religious origins. And in his depiction, you are shown not merely bringing a Torah to Mordecai, but also concealing a copy of the Bahir below your arm.”

She fingers her necklace and proffers a deferential bow. “Clever. My compliments. But I must say that your uncle took far too many chances in his work.”

“Is that why you killed him?” I ask.

She starts. “Killed him? Me?!”

“Your surprise is as false as those crystals around your neck.”

“These gemstones happen to be worth more than both your lives,” she points out.

“These days, that means they are worth almost nothing, dear lady.”

“I can see you are much like your uncle.”

“But not as naive,” I reply. “I know who you are and what you’ve done.”

“Do you?” She tilts her head and grins, as if amazed by the tricks of a dog. “Tell me what you think you know!”

“I’ll tell you nothing.” I take out the manuscripts from my pack. “I’ve come to offer you these for my uncle’s last illuminated Haggadah. I know you have it. And these are worth far more. Both have annotations in the hand of Master Abraham Abulafia himself, blessed be his name.”

“If you’re sure I’ve killed your uncle then why haven’t you already tried to take my life?”

“Your death would not bring him back,” I say.

“Logic matters not to revenge. Your hesitation must mean that you’re not absolutely sure about my guilt.” She nods up at me as if to receive my assent.

“I want his Haggadah!” I shout. “And you won’t leave here unless I get it!”

Disregarding my threat, she asks in a calm voice, “Why here? Why the Almond Farm?”

“It was also illuminated by Uncle, in the same panel with Zerubbabel. When I dreamt of it, he told me that I would cross the last gate of this mystery here. Now where’s…”

“He told you that? Master Abraham?” She traces her fingers along the taut tendons of her neck. She is as nervous as I am.

“Yes, I spoke with my uncle,” I reply.

“When?” she asks urgently.

“That’s of no concern to you. You are simply here to…”

“Did you know that it was here that we sealed our fate together?” she interrupts in a voice which seems to come from her gut, from fear. “Four winters ago, on the thirteenth of Adar, the day before Purim. We were to symbolically re-enact the ancient victory of the Hebrew people over the Syrian army which took place on that day” She stares inside herself at memory. “Your uncle insisted that I meet him here at the Almond Farm to set up our smuggling network.”

“Why here?” I demand.

“You know the story of Aaron Poejo and his…”

“Yes,” I interrupt.

“And his vision…?” she asks.

“The blond savages with iron masks over their mouths who would come to sack Lisbon.”

“Iron masks to prevent communication,” she says, as if offering a citation of wisdom. “Blonds because they are Christians. You should understand. You were Master Abraham’s chosen one. Imagine it as scripture.”

“Yes. It was a vision that the Christians would one day take our words from us, our books.”

“And it was here, your uncle said, that we would plan their downfall.”

The answer to a riddle which Uncle posed to me just before his last Sabbath sprouts inside me. He had asked, What lives for centuries but can still die before its own birth?

A book, I now realize; it is born anew in each of us when we read it. And it can die in the Inquisitional flames as surely as any of us.

Dona Meneses peers at me over her nose. “You know, if you hadn’t asked to meet me here, I might have had you killed, as well. But there is something about this place…”

“Where’s the Haggadah?!” I ask her with renewed fervor.

“I haven’t got it. Berekiah, let me…”

“I do not grant you permission to speak my true name! Use my Christian one!”

“As you like. Pedro, I was working with your uncle. For more than three years now. Tell me, do you remember Senhora Belmira?” she asks.

“The Jewish woman beaten to death by the Madre de Deus Fountain a few months ago.”

“Yes. Have you wondered why she was killed?”

“There are Old Christian men in Lisbon who will do anything to a…”

“No! It was my driver. Remember him? The swarthy one I used to have. Not one of these new Flemings I’ve got.”

“Your driver killed her?” I ask.

“Yes. A note had been sent to me. A blackmail note. I was to start handing over the Hebrew manuscripts your uncle was entrusting to me or the blackmailer would reveal my Jewish past. Not a very good position for me to be in. And not just for me, but for members of my family, as well. I was to leave a first manuscript in a hiding place by the Madre de Deus Fountain. So I did. Or rather, my driver did. He hid and waited. A woman came for it at nightfall. Senhora Belmira. My driver took her, tried to find out who had sent her. But she would not talk. Nothing he did… I’m afraid he got carried away in his loyalty to me. A boorish man. I’ve sent him back to his family in Toledo. Castilians are born murderers. Never hire them except for bullfights.”

“Did you tell my uncle?” I ask.

“I told no one,” she replies.

“You didn’t trust him?”

“In my position, I can’t afford trust. For all I knew, he was the one who had betrayed me.”

“My uncle never betrayed anyone!”

“No, perhaps he never did. But in such a dilemma… Pedro, trust is something that few of us can afford these days. It can be too…too costly.”

Her face suddenly elongates toward the sadness of regret. She takes a step toward me, but I raise my hand to keep her away. I feel as if she is tainted with a dangerous kindness.

“I began to have him watched, your family, as well.” Dona Meneses’ words fade as she takes a deep breath. “In any case, I received another note after Senhora Belmira was killed. This time, the blackmailer wrote that if I tried to find out about him, my secrets would be revealed to the Church and to King Manuel himself. He had proof, he said, of my Jewish background. So I began leaving manuscripts for him which your uncle had entrusted to me.”

“Do you still have the notes?” I ask.

She nods cagily. “You want to know if we can trace the man from his writing. I thought of that. His notes have always been scribbled, written as if in someone’s left hand. Or by a child perhaps. But I came up with a plan. I have an old friend from childhood. Someone beyond doubt who was helping us smuggle books across the Spanish border. You know him as…”

“The Count of Almira,” I interrupt.

“Yes. He came…”

“And Isaac of Ronda,” I add.

She purses her lips and gives me an astonished look. “So you figured that out, too.”

“Farid did,” I reply.

“How?”

Farid points to his eyes and nose.

She bows towards him. “My compliments. So I devised that the Count would come to Lisbon in order to offer books for sale in one guise, buy them in another. We hoped to flush out this blackmailer one way or another. To be neat and clean about it. I know that he, this blackmailer, tried to sell your uncle’s Haggadah to Senhora Tamara. A mistake on his part. He must have panicked right after the riot. Unfortunately, the Senhora scared his messenger away without making him talk. It was then that the blackmailer realized his error and became more cautious. In any event, I know that he has to be someone who was in—or had been in—Master Abraham’s threshing group. Only they were entrusted with the secret of his smuggling books. He told me so when we made our agreement. I began having them all watched. The Count himself was following one of them, that old misfit Diego, when he was attacked by Old Christian boys that Friday before everything in Lisbon began unraveling. One of the Count’s drivers saved him. And then came Sunday…the pyres. After that, with everyone calling for Jewish blood, I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. My instincts told me it was Simon Eanes, the fabric importer. So I had him…‘relaxed.’”

She speaks as if the order to kill came naturally to her, uses the accursed terminology of the Inquisition; since no ecclesiastic person is supposed to shed blood directly, those condemned by the Church in Spain are handed over or “relaxed” to civil authorities for burning. “I had hoped that my troubles were over, but I got another blackmail note,” she continues. She takes another step toward me, implores me to suspend judgment with a fragile look in her eyes. “I was to hand over more books by the Madre de Deus Fountain just yesterday. But I didn’t.”

“So then you tried for Diego,” I say.

“Yes, God forgive me, I did!” Her hands have formed fists. “What would you do?!”

“Me, I wouldn’t kill anyone because I haven’t the courage to admit who I am!”

“Very honorable. When the Inquisition swoops down upon Portugal and you feel its talons around your neck, we shall see if you still feel that way.”

“Will you try for Diego again?”

“Yes. And Father Carlos, as well. I cannot risk… They will be located soon. And my men have their orders. I can wait no longer. I have no choice.”

Farid points at her choker and signals with angry, chopping gestures, “Too many emeralds at stake, no doubt!”

When I translate his condemnation of her, she shouts, “You’re heartless!” She curls her fingers around her necklace and tears at it. Beads scatter on the floor. “Take it!” she says, offering what’s left of the string of jewels to me, then Farid. “It’s not about money. It’s my life! It’s all our lives!” A grimace of anguish crosses her face. The slap I feel is her necklace thrown against my cheek.

The three of us stand silently in the room like prisoners who dare not escape into language out of guilt and shame. I close my eyes and follow my breathing. Farid takes my hand and names a suspect with the shape of his fingers. “Yes,” I signal back. “It could still be him.” As I turn, however, a magic moment occurs; the marble-white ring of skin that was always hidden below Dona Meneses’ necklace confirms another stunning possibility.

“There are only two people left who could have murdered my uncle,” I say. “Give me until morning before you have anyone else killed.”

“Too long!”

“Until midnight then. You are killing innocent men!”

Dona Meneses nods her agreement, glares over her nose at Farid and me like a defiant princess scanning men who have violated her. She lifts the train of her dress and sweeps it behind, turns and marches out the door.

Chapter XX

Farmlands give way to the wooden shacks and dungheaps of the city’s outer districts as Farid and I race back to Lisbon.

At the Senhor Duarte’s Inn of the Sacred Body, we approach the manager. A tiny man with wisps of hair combed forward into bangs, he sits ladling soup into a toothless mouth. His cheeks open and compress like a stretched bellows.

We stand over him. “When did Dom Afonso Verdinho arrive?” I demand.

He squints up at me and sticks a chunk of soggy millet bread into his mouth. “Who’s asking?”

“Pedro Zarco. Dom Afonso is with my aunt. When did he come?”

Each chomp squashes his face and closes his eyes. “I’ll have to check my books,” he says. His cracked lips drip soup. “And as you gentlemen can see, I’m eating.”

I reach into my pouch for Senhora Rosamonte’s ring, then remember with a curse that I’d given it to Diego. Farid catches my desperate look with a smile. He takes out one of Dona Meneses’ emeralds and hands it to the man, then furtively slips several more gemstones into my pouch.

Shaping the words, “Bless you,” against Farid’s arm, I say to the innkeeper, “The gem is yours if you tell me when Dom Afonso Verdinho arrived.”

His tongue slips snake-like between his lips. With a ribald nod up toward me, he scrapes the bead against his ceramic bowl. A curl of glaze lifts away from a dot-sized impurity jutting from the emerald. His eyes shine. “She’s a beauty,” he observes with a greedy smile.

“I ask you now, when did he come?!”

“Wednesday.” He holds the stone up to the light of his candle.

“This past Wednesday, after the riot, or the one before?”

“This past one.”

“You’re absolutely positive?!” I demand.

He tucks the bead into the inner curl of his lower lip as if it’s a cardamon seed. “See those men over there?” he questions, pointing to some merchants eating at a dining table.

“Yes.”

Between slurps of soup, he says, “The one with a beard deals in sugar but stinks like rotten cabbage. Arrived yesterday sweatin’ like a priest in heat. He likes big-busted women without teeth. The clean-shaven one is from Evora, is here to buy copperware. Arrived today. He likes carne preta, black meat, if you know what I mean.” He squints at me. “Nothin’ goes on here I don’t know about. Your man arrived Wednesday, lookin’ and smellin’ worse than his horse.”

“What room is he in?”

“Upstairs.” He points to an open door at the back of the dining room. “To the left. Last door on the right.”

Aunt Esther answers my knock with a gasp. “Berekiah! Is everything all…”

I push past her. Afonso sits on an unmade bed in his long underwear. His feet are shriveled and coarse, like unearthed mandrake roots. “Ever hear of Simon the fabric importer?” I ask him.

“A friend of your uncle’s. Esther wrote to me about…”

“So she wrote to you.” I bow toward her. “You’ve been using your gifts well, dearest aunt.”

Her face becomes hard and cold. “Your judgment is noted,” she says. “Now get out!”

“Did you ever meet him?” I ask Afonso.

“What’s this about?” he questions, his face all shock and puzzlement.

“Just answer my question!”

Esther pushes against me as Afonso answers, “I honestly don’t remember. I may have.”

Without warning, my aunt slaps my face. As I grab her wrist, Afonso jumps up. “Leave her alone!” he shouts.

Farid steps between Esther and me, removes my hand. He glares at me, signals, “Don’t you dare touch her again,” then leads her to the bed.

She sits and rubs at her wrist. Her eyes are glassy, and her back is bent forward as if she’s weighed down by a locket bearing her grief. Such is my rage, however, that her figure cannot elicit from me even the ash of the burning solidarity I once felt for her. To Afonso, I say, “So you wouldn’t know if he has any disabilities? That he has crutches, wears black silk gloves to…”

Farid signals that I talk too much and suddenly tosses a few of Dona Meneses’ emeralds and sapphires toward Afonso. The old thresher thrusts a hand out and catches one. “What’s this…?!” he demands, showing it to me.

Farid grips my shoulder. “Forget about him!” he signals with a cutting motion. “Not only wasn’t he in town, but look at which hand he used!”

“The left!” I signal back.

“And the slope of the cut across your uncle’s neck, it was…”

Each step in our flight back to my house seems to fix the last of the missing verses of a long-lost poem into place. White Maimon of the Two Mouths! Of course, Gemila was right! In her hysteria, who else would she form out of a hooded killer with scars on his face and blood on his hands? Everything fit: the timing of Uncle’s discovery of Haman’s persona; the blackmailer’s choice of Senhora Belmira as a go-between; even the murderer’s own words about never being tortured again.

And the date on which the blackmailer demanded that Dona Meneses turn over the latest manuscripts to be smuggled from Portugal—that, too, implicated only one suspect.

The garments of mystery drop away one by one until a single face stares at me.

In our courtyard, a donkey with raw saddle sores is tossing flies away with his tail. From the inner window in my bedroom, I see that Cinfa, Reza and my mother are standing in the store with my cousin Meir from Tavira. “Beri!” he cries. He rushes to me open-armed.

“Not now!” I say, raising my hands to keep him away. “Mother, where’s Diego and Father Carlos?”

“Why?”

“Must you ask questions! Where are they?!”

“The priest has gone back again to the Church of São Domingos. Diego is in the cellar. He went downstairs to say evening prayers. What do you…”

Cinfa interrupts, “No, Diego came upstairs while we were in here. Just a few minutes ago. You weren’t looking, Mother.”

“Let’s go!” Farid signals.

“Wait, I think I know why he went to the cellar. And what we discover there may help us cross the last gate.”

I unhook one of the lamps hanging from the crossbeam above the table. After sliding away our Persian carpet, Farid rips open the trap door. I take out my knife, descend. But the darkness gives up only emptiness. The genizah is closed. Neatness is a holy duty, I think. It was the murderer himself who reminded me that. With the key from the eel bladder, Farid opens the lid. I shine my light into the hiding place. All of Uncle’s manuscripts are gone! Even our pouch of coins.

We rush up the stairs and head through the courtyard to the Rua de São Pedro. Farid’s fingers play against my shoulder blade. “Do you know where he was leaving from?” he gestures.

I shake my head. “But I think I know where he’s gone. He wouldn’t dare try to leave Portugal with Hebrew books. If he were caught—pinga. He must…”

“Berekiah!”

António Escaravelho, the New Christian beggar, is slumped in his usual spot across the street, calling to me.

“Have you seen anyone come from my house—out the courtyard gate?” I shout.

He nods and points down the street toward the Cathedral. “Set off that way just a little while ago.”

Farid grabs my arm, signals, “So where’s he gone?”

“To trade them. With what he stole and the ring I gave him, he could get anything he wanted. He could even buy the volumes of Plato he wanted.”

Soft candlelight frames the shutters of Senhora Tamara’s bookstore. “Blessed be He who opens the Gate of Vengeance,” I whisper as the door handle turns in my hand. Farid comes panting to my side. I caress the wood open. We step inside.

Diego.

Surprise crosses his face for only a moment. He stands over the desk at the back of the room, wary, an owl’s impenetrable silence concealing his thoughts. The books stolen from our genizah are piled by his feet. Senhora Tamara is seated on a stool, her hands linked in her lap. She speaks, but I do not hear. Behind her stands a wiry African slave with large, dull features and the imploded cheeks of a starving man. Confusion and fear crease his sweaty brow.

I fix the scene in my Torah memory.

Diego and I continue to stare at each other across a ritual space of flame-like heat and clarity. Senhora Tamara stands. Her mouth moves. The shadows on Diego’s white robes tremble as he straightens up. My legs tense as if preparing me for flight. My heartbeat swells toward a grace akin to sexual power. Beneath his beard, I imagine the scar on his marble-white chin, red, lined with vertical stitches, a second mouth of betrayal and murder. “White Maimon of the Two Mouths,” I whisper.

He slips a knife from his cloak, long, squared at the end; a shohet’s blade. The slave takes a stiletto from his pouch. In his other hand, he clutches a cane ending in a serpent’s head.

Senhora Tamara’s words penetrate my nervous rage for the first time: “Berekiah, what’s wrong?” She steps toward me.

“Leave!” I order her. My glaring eyes remain fixed on Diego.

She comes to Farid, presses desperate hands to his chest. “What’s wrong, my boy? Tell me!”

“He killed Uncle,” I say.

“Diego?!” She whips around to him. “Is this true?!”

He opens his hands palm up in a peacemaking gesture. “Of course I didn’t,” he replies.

I reach for the Senhora and tug her toward the door. “Go!” I shout.

She stands firm. Still keeping my eyes focused on Diego, I pull the door open. She resists my prodding, caresses my chin. “But dear boy, Diego said you had given him permission to trade the books…that your mother was too frightened to keep Hebrew books in her house.”

“In the name of God, leave!” I say.

“What will you do?!” she demands.

I signal to Farid, “Stay here.” I tug Senhora Tamara fighting and shrieking through the door.

Outside, she shouts at me in a voice entreating further explanation. But a caped giant standing across the street in the shadow of a moonlit burlap awning draws my attention; he wears a wide-brimmed amethyst hat. “God bless Queen Esther,” I whisper to myself.

The man and I talk in racing tones. He accepts my offering, thanks me in halting Castilian.

I rush into the bookstore again, lock the door behind me. Diego proffers an acknowledging bow and says, “There you are, Berekiah! I was just telling Farid here how surprised and pleased I am that Dona Meneses let you both live. But I’m never sure that he understands a thing I say.”

“Farid understood more than you the day he was born,” I remark.

A twinkle of humor is reflected in his eyes. “So condescending you always are. But really, who would expect her to show mercy now? Must be her Jewish blood coming to the fore.”

“Why did you kill Uncle?” I ask.

“Why? You mean you haven’t guessed that, too? You seem to have found out everything else. Too clever, you are, just like dear Carlos is always saying. Seville… Think of Seville.”

“What about it?”

The door handle jiggles. Senhora Tamara begins knocking and calling for me.

“She won’t give up,” Diego says with a smile.

“None of us will,” I reply.

“She must like you. We all do really. In spite of yourself. It’s why I tried so hard to talk you out of continuing your troublesome search.” When I frown, he says, “So where was I… Yes, Seville. It was there, of course. An accident. Your uncle had seen me. Too volatile, he was, all passion and energy. When you’re like that, you create accidents. He was there to free Simon from the Inquisition. At my home, he pushed past my servants at the wrong moment carrying his ransom of lapis lazuli. The Bishop’s legal assistant and I were discussing my…my salary. For informing on Simon and the others. Of course, I turned my back to your uncle immediately, left the room without another word. But he had a good Torah memory. Not as good as yours, but quite out of the ordinary.”

“You went clean-shaven in those days,” I observe.

“Yes. You figured that out too, did you? The beard was for Lisbon. A mask for every city is essential these days, don’t you think?”

“Then you’re not even a Levite?”

“No, I am. The lie does not have that many layers. But you were right. We don’t all have beards. Even in orthodox Andalusia. No, I know you’ve never been. And now, if you’re not careful, you’ll never get a chance to go. And there’s so much to see. The Alhambra, the great mosque of Cordoba. There are jewels in the walls there that…”

Farid brushes his hand along my spine. “You take the slave and I will take Diego. It will be a pleasure to end his life.”

“Wait,” I gesture back. To Diego, I ask, “Why did you inform on Simon and the others to the Inquisition?”

“So naïve you are.” He grits his teeth and closes his fist. “When the Church surrounds you, squeezes you, you do what you are told. Anything you’re told!” He smiles. His hand unfurls. “You Portuguese Jews have had a life of milk and honey—you wouldn’t know.”

“More smoke than milk and honey of late.”

“That was just a small bonfire,” he notes. “Wait a few years and things will really light up. Then you’ll do what you’re told or…” He pulls open his cloak, unties his shirt. The line of scar on his chest reflects the glare of candlelight. “…Or you’ll pay with your flesh. I told you of the pictures they sear into your skin. My landscape had just begun. Can you see the horizon? If you come closer, you can make out the gates of Jerusalem.” He closes his shirt. “This mortal body we have is weak. You’ll find pain most disagreeable.”

“After your beard was shaved last week, Uncle recognized you as the informer he’d seen in Seville,” I say. “In the hospital, that discussion you had….my master’s whirling gestures… It’s why you were so desperate to have the beard kept, why you didn’t like us visiting you.”

“Another accident. Life is full of them. One gets used to it after a while. Though I expect that chance still bothers you. Your uncle didn’t understand it either. Many things were beyond him. He wasn’t a man of compassion. To have compassion, you must be like other men and he…”

“How dare you!” I shout.

“One who has lost his family can dare most anything!” he replies. ‘Why, look at you! Vengeance from a kabbalist? What would Uncle say?”

“He’d say that you lost your central core of soul long ago, that returning you to the Other Side was a mitzvah. Metatron will record your murder as a righteous deed.”

“A convenient self-deception,” he says.

“Deceptive conveniences are your specialty,” I note.

He holds up his knife and proffers a bow. “My specialty is meat and fowl.”

“You should have stuck to it.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” he sighs. “Life tugs you. Like a tide. You can fight the ocean only so long. But you’re too young to…”

“You discovered the girl, Teresa, in our cellar, when you went to see Uncle, didn’t you?”

“He’d already pulled her to safety. He’d been bathing. The secret door to the bathhouse was open a crack so he could listen for anyone else needing help. I’d been coming to see him when the riot reached the Alfama. I’d put on a big wooden cross to protect myself, even blessed a few murderers along the way. Amazing what people will bless one another to do.” He crosses himself and rolls his eyes. “As a pious Christian, I slipped inside your house.”

“And so you killed him.”

“Not so fast. You make everything sound easy. Life isn’t Torah. You can’t read the verses at top speed and reread them when you don’t quite grasp what they mean. He wasn’t reasonable. He said he’d have me judged by a Jewish council for informing on Simon all those years ago, that he’d find some way to see me punished. I knew your uncle well. He would have discovered some way to make my life hell. Even when I told him that I’d informed on Reza and her in-laws, that if he didn’t desist I would do it again, he refused to listen. I thought it would convince him. I was silly to think that your uncle would behave like a normal father. And if he had ever told Dona Meneses that I had been the one blackmailing her, that I knew that she was Jewish, my life wouldn’t have been worth the price of a turnip! Only his swearing on the Torah to keep our secret would have saved his life. And he refused.”

“So you were responsible for Reza’s imprisonment, as well.”

“Whatever the situation demands. One must be flexible…change one’s form according to circumstance. A beard and sumptuous clothes for Lisbon… In Constantinople, I may even become a Moslem. It’s the same God, after all. Right Farid?”

As Farid signals something obscene in Diego’s direction, I think: A courier who cannot recognize his own face. Uncle meant Diego, the Wandering Jew, a courier not of books or merchandise, but his own soul. I say, “And so what you wrote in Solomon’s fake confession was true…applied to my uncle.”

“Yes. The mohel’s suicide was convenient. When I heard, I went there, paid a little ragamuffin to buy some paper from a witch who shreds linen, then left the note for Solomon’s sister to find. Most people are so easily fooled.”

“You told Uncle you’d spare the girl if he gave up his life?”

“Yes. He spoke of sacrifice. It meant a lot to him. I think he expected to die. ‘For a greater good and higher purpose,’ he said. He had strange ways of reasoning, don’t you think? I told him, ‘I could kill you without batting an eyelash.’ And he answered, “And I could die without batting one either!’ Imagine that! And imagine, at this late date, wanting to assemble a Jewish council! He never realized that it’s the Christian year of fifteen and six, not the Hebrew year of fifty-two sixty-six. And dear Berekiah, it’s time to reset your own clock before it’s too late. Accept the Christian calendar before time runs out for you.”

“You didn’t go to see Uncle just to argue with him. You planted that silk thread of Simon’s. You must have known beforehand that you were going to kill him.”

“One must have a back-up plan. You can’t begrudge me prudence.”

“Prudence? You even wanted to kill me and Farid! That’s why you sent the note for me to meet you by the water mills.”

“Another good improvisation ruined by Dona Meneses and her henchmen.”

“And you stole Uncle’s Haggadah. Our lapis lazuli and gold leaf. Like a common thief!”

“Why not? Are you above such desires? I think not. And manuscripts. Yes, that was, after all, how this started. So it seemed…”

“But how did you find out about them? Simon and Carlos said you hadn’t yet learned of the genizah.”

“Even a kabbalist makes mistakes, dear boy. Our friends were simply wrong. Your uncle approached me in secret, explained all about his smuggling activities, told me that he would be getting some valuable manuscripts and would need my vigilance in making sure his smugglers did their work—in particular, he was having doubts about Dona Meneses. He felt that she was growing weary of the risks she was taking. Your uncle feared betrayal. I began tracking her, learning her methods. I found out about Zerubbabel, how he took the manuscripts across the border to Cadiz. Master Abraham didn’t want anyone to know that he’d told me about the genizah and his smuggling activities so that I would attract no special attention.”

“He trusted you,” I say.

“I’m afraid he did. A mistake. In our age, no one merits trust. Remember that if you remember nothing else.”

“He should have asked me. If only he’d…”

“You still don’t understand, do you?” Diego asks.

“Understand what, you bastard?”

“He couldn’t risk your life. You were to be his heir, carry forward his plans for healing the Upper and Lower Realms…the greatest kabbalist Lisbon had ever seen! You don’t risk such a man’s life by getting him involved with smugglers. As it stands now, you’ll probably be the last kabbalist of Lisbon.” Diego shrugs and offers me a weak smile, as if accepting an inevitable truth. “No books, no kabbalists, no Jews. A shame, but such is life.”

Amazing, I think, that this murderer could understand so clearly what was hidden from me. Was I afraid of the responsibility? Or of being the last of my kind? I ask Diego, “Why didn’t you take all the books from the genizah when you killed him?”

“I was looking at the manuscripts, evaluating them, taking my time. I wasn’t worried, knew that with the riot raging and my knowledge of the secret passageway to the bathhouse that I was safe. Then I came upon Master Abraham’s last Haggadah. Beautiful work. I leafed through it and found my image as Haman, tore it out, of course, put the whole book in my pouch for safekeeping. To see my face in his illuminations, it was a shock… I was suddenly panicked. Silly, I suppose. I was about to go through the secret door when you began calling for your family from above. I started to go through, but I’m afraid that with my girth I couldn’t make it. I turned back, entered the cellar again, closed the door after me. Just before…”

“Why didn’t you just hide behind the secret door, in the passageway?”

“I’d never been through before. I worried that if I closed the door, some secret latch would fall and I’d be entombed there. Not a very nice fate that would be! So just before you came down, I managed to curl myself into the genizah and shut the lid. Thank goodness for all the banging you were making. By the time you came downstairs, I was safe in my nest. Though I was worried that you could hear my heartbeat, that I might have to kill you as well. But I was fairly confident that you’d be fooled at first, that you’d think Old Christians had done it. When you went upstairs, I emerged, locked the lid and put the key back in the eel bladder. I slipped out through your store to Temple Street. I didn’t think anyone had seen me. But that Gemila… It’s lucky for her she’s such a hysterical cow with her hallucinated demons or I’d have had to…”

“Senhora Belmira? Why her?”

“Miriam? She was in love with me. Don’t look surprised. I’m quite a nice man to those who… Remember the hours we spent sketching birds together? Anyway, it was safer that way. If she were caught, she’d have preferred death rather than give up my name. And she did. Women are stronger than men in that way. I learned that in the dungeons of Seville. They’ll see their feet melted and still won’t sell the Moses in their hearts to the Christians.”

“The boy who went to sell Uncle’s Haggadah to Senhora Tamara? Who was he?”

“I’m afraid that was my mistake. I got nervous. I have my frailties, as I’ve already admitted. As for the his identity, some things should remain a mystery, don’t you think? His name is Isaac. He’s a good, sweet child. It is all I’ll tell you.”

“The note that fell from your turban? Was it really about the Count of Almira or this Isaac?”

“Another mystery I will not solve for you. Sorry.”

“So, now that you’ve got your Plato…?”

“I’ll be leaving tonight as I said. By carriage to Faro. You can forget all about me.”

“I won’t let you leave,” I note.

“You have no choice.” Diego taps the edge of his knife against his slave’s shoulder. “My new bodyguard is skinny but desperate,” he says. “He wouldn’t want to return to his old master. Put a bit in his mouth. Beat and fucked him senseless. They say he even knows spells. A regular black kabbalist if you ask me. From one of our lost tribes perhaps. You’d better just back outside and let us go. Or you’ll end up with your soul separated from your body just like Master Abraham.”

“And a curtain of blood across my neck. I’ll never forget what you did to him!”

“Poetic words. Yours or Farid’s?”

Diego picks up two leather-bound volumes from the desk. He motions the slave before him. The African crouches, holds his knife and cane out in front of his chest, slides forward.

Farid signals against my back, “You take the slave and…”

“No.” I toss my knife to the floor, twist around, grip Farid’s upraised arm.

He tugs against me, signals, “What do you think you’re doing?!”

“Go now!” I shout to Diego. “I cannot hold him long!”

I wrap my arms around Farid, pin him back to a wall of books. Though he still grips his dagger, I know he’ll never use it against me. As he struggles to break free, I shout again, “Leave, demon, before I change my mind!”

I press against Farid with the terrible strength of my vengeance. The slave and Diego rush past. “You’ve chosen wisely,” the murderer hisses.

My eyes close tight as if to shut out sin as the bolt on the door clicks open. The night air, sharp and chill, blows against us. “Fly back to hell, Diego!” I whisper to myself.

“Berekiah!” Farid’s voice comes garbled, honked, but clear as prayer. At the same time, his fist catches my shoulder and opens its old ache. With a sweeping kick, I manage to take his feet from under him.

The door slams closed. We are alone. A warm and bitter pleasure rises into my chest.

Farid jumps up, glares at me. I open my hands in a gesture of peace, take his shoulders. “You spoke!” I signal with a smile; it seems a crowning miracle atop all this debased horror, a sign from the Lord, perhaps, that I have chosen Diego’s fate correctly.

With whirling gestures, Farid says, “Because you were letting him get away. It’s all for nothing now. Nothing. Unless we can…”

“Don’t worry,” I signal. “Diego was wrong. Some men can be trusted. You shall see.”

Outside, Senhora Tamara stands trembling in her bare feet and nightgown. As Farid wraps his arm around her, I spot Diego running down Goldsmith’s Street behind his slave toward the Rua Nova d’El Rei. The moon lights him as a stealthy animal, a night creature fleeing hunters. To myself, I whisper words from Jeremiah: “He shall dwell among the rocks in the scorched wilderness, in a salt land where no man can live.”

“But he’s getting away!” Senhora Tamara moans. She gives me an imploring stare.

Her words etch a line of burning doubt across my gut. I start walking, then sprint ahead as if in search of Uncle.

A dark shadow suddenly crosses from the right. It trails Diego for a few moments, shows a hatted profile, swings closer. A glint of metal. An arm raised. When it falls, Diego melts to the cobbles. A sound like the knocking of Simon’s gloved fist on our door is carried to me by the dry wind. It is unable to reach the gates of my compassion.

Farid, who has been running behind me, holds out a hand as I slow to a walk. He signals, “Who was…”

“One of Dona Meneses’ killers,” I answer. “He was waiting for Diego. He had orders not to strike until midnight just like we asked.” I take out a few of the sapphire and emerald beads left from Dona Meneses’ necklace. “But I changed the timing.”

“You paid for him to kill Diego?!”

“He would have anyway. But I couldn’t risk the wait. May God forgive me.”

I cup the noblewoman’s beads in my hand. “It only took one to convince him to kill Diego right away,” I say. “A Jew’s life, a man’s life, costs almost nothing.”

Approaching Diego on wary feet, we find him clutching his volumes of Plato. A line of blood runs from the corner of his mouth toward a speckled lizard asleep inside a crack in the cobbles. In his pouch is the vellum plate of Haman.

Inside a timeless silence, we watch the body as if we are facing an empty Torah ark that will never be filled. When I awake to myself, I step into the light of a candelabrum centering a nearby window and study Uncle’s drawing. Yes, Haman is Diego. There is no mistake.

A shiver snakes up my spine as I consider that Uncle’s last act of artistic creation was to illuminate the face of his own killer.

In the panel, Diego-Haman is a stooped and vulturine figure with an unmistakable line of scar across his chin. He is pictured whispering in King Ahasuerus’ ear of his desire to exterminate the Jews. In his left, claw-like hand, he clutches a shimmering portion of the ten thousand talents of silver which he has promised to give to the royal treasury in exchange for approval to carry out his monstrous plan. In his right hand, at the same moment, he is receiving the royal signet ring from the King, a sign of permission granted.

The deal has been made.

Queen Esther is not pictured in the panel. But her step-father, Mordecai, is there. He stands humbly in the corner, in the sackcloth of mourning with which he clothed himself upon hearing of the decree for his people’s destruction. His pose is one of pride, however, and his expression is wily, almost humorous. Undoubtedly because he holds in front of his chest the noose with which Haman will later be hanged. A spark of emerald passion in his eyes convinces me that Mordecai is modeled on Uncle himself.

Farid squeezes my arm, points to the drawing and signals, “It’s you.”

“What is?”

“The man in the corner. The one with the noose. Mordecai.”

The pounding of my heart comes wild and forlorn. Could Farid be right? It doesn’t seem possible that Uncle could illuminate me as the savior of the Jews. And the Mordecai pictured is simply too old.

My hands clutch the vellum. Tears come to my eyes when I consider that he may have gifted me with the guise of a Jewish hero.

So many questions I should have asked him will never be answered.

My glance is drawn into the sky by a moonlit sea gull crossing the night. Mosquitoes buzz at my ears as if seeking entry to my thoughts. My Hebrew prayer for Diego’s peace, for the world’s peace, comes edged with the texture of Uncle’s hand squeezing hard at the back of my neck, then dropping away. His movement toward forever absence is so immediate that I gasp and turn around. My eyes survey the empty street until they reach the moist emerald light of two candles guarding over me from the highest window on the block.