The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

Chapter XXI

In the vacant world beyond Diego’s death, I slept for days on end. Behind the locked doors and sealed windows of my bedroom, inside a stifling atmosphere scented with my own rot. I got up from my bed again only when a vision of Joanna, the Count’s daughter, descended like a silk veil across my face. Her eyes shimmered with the reflective grace of pearls, and she whispered to me in a language beyond understanding. Summoned into the night, my feet took me along the lumbering walls of Lisbon until a destination became obvious. I found myself howling up at what I hoped was her window at the Estaus Palace.

A dwarf with tufted hair opened his shutters. “I’ll have you castrated if you don’t stop your cock crows!” he cried.

“I’m searching for Dona Joanna, the Count of Almira’s daughter,” I explained.

“Not here!” he frowned. His shutters banged closed.

The putrid stench of dungheaps stalked me all the way home. Craving the void of Ein Sof, I sought refuge in my bed once again. Days of wavering edges followed, of mossy light and dark, until Joanna’s voice pierced through my walls as if atop a winged prayer. When she entered my room, she was dressed in black. I was lying under my blankets.

“I cannot stay long,” she said. Her eyes were glassy, as if tears might gush in them at any moment. “Have you been ill?” she asked in a hesitant voice.

“Yes,” I said, sitting up. “I suppose so. Where have you been? I came looking for you.”

“Here, in Lisbon, but I dared not come before now.”

“I have never wanted a woman as much as I want you now,” I confessed. “It’s as if only you can heal me…or save me.”

She sat at the edge of my bed and pressed the delicacy of her tiny, deformed hand to my lips. I was about to beg her to stay with me forever, but she shook her head as if I must not profane the silence between us. She began to unlace her dress. I was already naked. When she lay down beside me and opened her arms, I buried myself in her.

Walled inside her warmth, defended by the softness of her body, a tautness akin to prison rope snapped inside me and I was crying in a voice from so deep in me that it seemed to rip at my bowels. Joanna whispered, “I cannot stay. I am betrothed to another. Do not wait for me. I leave Lisbon tomorrow. Forgive me and forget me.”

When the balm of her fingertips dropped from my cheek, she said again, “Do not wait for me. Do not withhold your love from the next one…”

In my hand, she left behind her pearl necklace.

When loved ones depart forever, all that remains is the light from their eyes trapped in their jewelry. Beyond memory, it is the only souvenir we ever keep.

Madness: if it doesn’t swallow you whole, it may one day loosen its jaws from around your neck. Yet something—or someone—must help tug you free.

When I emerged in the morning, empty of Joanna, Farid read what had happened in my eyes. He dragged me to the Maidenhead Inn. For several months, I lived there, inside the warmth of Lisbon’s temptresses, waiting no longer, clawing and thrusting my way into their life in order to retrieve my own. Farid paid, though from where he got the money I do not know. Maybe he sold some of Dona Meneses’ sapphire and emerald beads; there were only three left when we finally bid goodbye to the Judiaria Pequena.

The miracle, of course, is that none of the diseases of brothels erupted inside me. Perhaps it takes a heart willing to suffer love to know such illnesses.

When I wasn’t nestling inside a woman or squeezing the liquid arc of a wineskin into my mouth, I walked. Once as far as the amber hills above Mafra. Along the scorched dirt roads, I stopped to recite to myself each of the five books of the Torah: Genesis before the temple of Mount Abraham near Belas; Exodus under the bridge of a fallen pine tree beyond Montelavar; Leviticus over a Roman mosaic in Odrinhas; Numbers while balancing on a limb of a carob tree in front of the Visigothic church of Igreja Nova; and Deuteronomy over a honeycomb gifted me by an Old Christian girl just inside the gates of Linhó. The rhythm of walking is good for prayer, I discovered. Sleep, as well. The stars welcomed me at night without protest or judgment. Arrows of woodpeckers hurtling from tree to tree awoke me in the mornings. For a fortnight, I was safe beyond the confines of Lisbon.

Gradually, an energy akin to the rushed expectancy of chant began to surge in me, and I found it possible to work in our store during the day. Cinfa guarded me with fierce allegiance. She even lay beside me in my bed at night, looking up at me without criticism when I left for the ladies of the Inn in the wee hours of morning.

Reza and my mother fought their moralistic battles against me in silence, their condemning eyes as locked as prison gates. As for the world beyond my borders…

A flotilla of warships entered Lisbon’s port on Monday, April the twenty seventh, and secured the city for the Crown. No justice was really attempted, of course. King Manuel, our melekh hasid, good and gracious king, spoke of the pogrom as “certain negligences.” More to entertain the burghers and peasants than anything else, dear departed Manuel, may his name and his shadow be erased, ordered forty Old Christian rioters picked at random by his royal judge, João de Paiva. Before a crowd of several thousand basking in the sun-filled bleachers of the Rossio, the prisoners were garroted and burned.

Does charring Old Christian flesh smell any different than that of a Jew? I admit that I could tell no difference. “Ah, but if you’d been at the Rossio…” more than one New Christian told me with a caustic smile on his face.

As for the ecclesiastics of the São Domingos Church and Convent, King Manuel ordered the good friars dispersed throughout his kingdom at the end of May. Have no fear for their broken hearts and nostalgic members, however; they were back in their mistresses’ arms in Lisbon by the end of October thanks to the intercession of Pope Julius II, may his name and its shadow be erased as well. Except for two of their number, I should add. Frei João Moucho and Frei Bernáldez, the two men who exhorted the rabble to mass murder that fateful afternoon before the São Domingos Church. Arrested and taken to Evora, they languished there for a time in the municipal dungeon. In October, when few people remembered anymore what they’d done, they were garroted and turned to ash.

It finally rained again on May the ninth.

But little of this do I remember. The first of March, fifteen and seven, is the only date that takes on hard edges for me. (Yes, for a time I learned to think within the Nazarene calendar. I take it as a symptom of my madness. May I forever cast out the Christian from within me!)

That morning, little Didi Molcho pulled me from our store as if toward treasure. “Run!” he shouted. We raced toward the voice of a crier on the steps of the São Miguel Church. He was reading a vellum decree from King Manuel: “Henceforth, New Christians will be allowed to leave my kingdom, and there shall be no…”

Hope for another landscape pulled my head into the sun. I breathed into swelling lungs for the first time since the death of Diego.

A barber shaved my beard while his daughter de-loused me. In her tiny hands, her comb digging my scalp, I began to consider for the first time how I’d paid for Diego’s murder. Should I have felt the claws of sin in my chest? I didn’t. And I don’t now. Maybe that makes me a man bereft of a higher soul. I don’t care. I look not in mirrors, and something in my face seems to elicit discretion from kabbalists who might be able to see a terrible absence in my aura.

And yet, another sin I committed long ago does sometimes trouble me—even penetrates my prayers. That young nobleman whom I pushed from a roof in the Moorish Quarter. Did he survive? I doubt it. Occasionally, in dream, I see him staring up at me from the bottom of a putrid well.

Mother and I gave all of Uncle’s books to Dona Meneses. She got away with her murder of Simon, of course. Not only was I not in any position to cast stones at her, but I knew that any accusations I made would have dire consequences for me and my family. Guarded by her retinue of blond Flemings, she continued to live her charmed Old Christian life above her marble balcony in the Graça. From what I hear, she died four years ago, in the spring of fifteen twenty-six, of an infection caused by an idiot bleeder with slippery fingers.

After seeing my uncle in a dream, Father Carlos also asked Dona Meneses to smuggle to safety his part-Hebrew, part-Arabic copy of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s Mekor Hayim, the Fountain of Life. As far as I know, it is now in Salonika.

Will any of our books survive the centuries, or will Uncle’s fight have been in vain?

With all the New Christians leaving Portugal, houses could only fetch a fraction of their real value. Rather than sell for a pittance, we offered our home to Brites, our laundress; she lived in a slum beyond St. Catharine’s Gate that wasn’t fit for a person of her spiritual grace.

She stamped her feet when we told her and said, “I can’t accept it!”

“You must,” Aunt Esther insisted.

“No!”

“Then on loan,” I suggested. “If Reza ever wants it back, she’ll come for it.”

Tears gushed in her eyes. The deal was sealed with hugs. She ended up spending the rest of her life there.

A few weeks later, just before leaving Portugal, while on a delivery of fruit to a store in the Bairro Alto, I spotted the boy in my drawing who had tried to sell Senhora Tamara my uncle’s Haggadah. He had a naturally kind face, closely cropped black hair. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Diego,” he replied.

I whispered, “My Jewish name is Berekiah Zarco. I need to know what they call you in the holy language.”

“Isaac Belmira Gonçalves,” he said.

“A man named Diego Gonçalves adopted you, didn’t he?”

His eyes opened wide with surprise. “Yes. How did you know?”

“I knew him well.”

In a local inn, over steaming cinnamon bread and wine diluted with water, we talked of his adoptive father’s love of birds and ancient manuscripts. The boy lived with Senhora Belmira’s sister. He was shy, but a quick passion trembled his lips when he spoke of battle. He was going to be a crusader. I will never understand how it is that the young are so eager to die. Before we parted, I kissed his forehead and blessed him silently.

Rabbi Losa, the willing convert and enemy of my Uncle’s, still lives in his house just below the São Miguel Church. He bowed and groveled his way into the Bishop of Lisbon’s heart and has even become one of his advisors in ecclesiastic law. Both his daughters are grown and married, living together in Santarém, I’m told.

Father Carlos decided to stay in Portugal as well. “May God make me either a good Christian or a better actor,” he said when I last saw him, twenty-three years ago. His words reminded me, of course, of Zerubbabel, Isaac of Ronda, the Count of Almira. I have heard nothing of his fate. Maybe his real name was something else entirely. Maybe he wasn’t even Castilian or New Christian. Perhaps Joanna wasn’t even his daughter.

Of course, I have heard nothing from her. Yet, on occasion, even today, she still descends into my dreams. The bitterness is gone from her lips, however, and I ceased forcing comparisons with my wife years ago. Even a Torah memory melts with tears.

Neither have I had news from Helena, the girl to whom I was betrothed so many years ago and with whom I lost my virginity. It is better that way.

In May of fifteen and seven, as we were making plans for departure, a merchant in scarlet and white robes came to our house with a letter from the New Christian beggar, António Escaravelho. Just after the riot against us, long before King Manuel’s decree allowed New Christians to leave Portugal, he was able to secure his exit permit to visit his beloved Pope Julius.

“Do you know if he’s doing well in Rome?” I asked the courier.

“Rome, what are you talking about?! He’s in Jerusalem. Already got himself a silversmith shop in the old Jewish Quarter.”

I ripped open the letter’s wax seal: “Dearest Berekiah, I told you and Master Abraham that you should plan to come with me. This old donkey wasn’t so crazy after all, was he? Fuck Pope Julius. I spit on the whole Italian peninsula. May a plague of venomous serpents descend on Rome and bite all its Christian residents in their fat asses. You will always be welcome with me. Next year in Jerusalem.”

Not next year, but perhaps soon. After all, we have moved closer. And I’m not getting any younger. If I’m ever going to go…

In July of fifteen and seven, Farid took a boat to Constantinople, carrying the address of Tu Bisvat and what money we could spare. Mother, Cinfa, Esther, Afonso Verdinho and I followed him in August, our ship setting sail from Belem on the nineteenth of Av. To our surprise, a ramshackle two-story house in the small Jewish quarter was waiting for us; with help from Tu Bisvat, whose true name I am not at liberty to mention, Uncle had been able to make a small down payment on some property.

Roseta remained behind with Reza; she was pregnant with her first child—Reza, not Roseta, that is—and moved with her husband and Aviboa up to a farm near Belmonte in the mountains in northeast Portugal. I haven’t seen them since the dock at Belem. They have three surviving sons, Mordecai, Judah and Berekiah, and a daughter, Mira. Aviboa is married to a farmer of chestnuts and wine. She lives nearby, has two surviving children. She never did grow a thumbnail or receive news of her parents.

We pray that the fire of the Inquisition will pass over their valley when it spreads into Portugal from Castile. I fear that it is now only a matter of months. So little time for peace we have in this world.

Judah. When I could get his trousers and shirts away from my mother, I buried them on the Almond Farm, by Uncle’s grave. We said a kaddish to ensure that his soul was set free from the Lower Realms.

Twenty-four years have passed since his disappearance and yet, he’s still just a whisper away. Only three years ago, I believed I recognized his moonstone eyes in a man in Portuguese merchant’s garb sunning his face in the garden below the southeast minaret of the Hagia Sophia mosque. My heart boomed as if shot from a cannon. Dizziness swayed me. I thought: It’s all a mistake. He’s alive, been raised by Old Christians. And he’ll explain now where he’s been. I crept to him and said, “Is it you, Judah?” At his confusion, I took his arm. “Don’t you recognize me? It’s Berekiah. Your brother!”

He patted me on the back as if I were a drunken old fool. “Better get home to your wife before she comes looking for you,” he advised. He laughed at me.

Such is what the younger generation make of sorrow.

Samir, Farid’s father, was never heard from again.

I remember Rabbi Verga telling me in our courtyard that we must remember the dead and how they lost their lives. His words make me smile; are there really persons who can forget?

It turns out that Samson Tijolo, who crossed out all of the names of God in his Old Testament, was right about Jews not being able to speak a future tense in Portugal. Had Uncle lived, could he have done anything about that? There are certain powers which great kabbalists have, and perhaps if he had concentrated…

Or is that all a lie? So much of my faith flowed away with my master’s blood.

Rana, Samson’s wife and my old neighborhood friend, still lives on her farm outside Lisbon. Miguel, her son, apprenticed to a silversmith. Late at night, behind locked shutters, he makes Torah pointers and other holy objects, I’m told.

Our neighbor, Senhora Faiam, died in fifteen-twelve. Gemila and her family are living in their old house as secret Jews. Their dog, Belo, died without ever finding the bone for his missing leg, of course. Some vestiges of life can never be recovered. Although that doesn’t stop us from searching.

I think often of the lemon tree growing above Senhora Rosamonte’s hand. So nice it would be to be tossed some of her fruit.

How does Uncle’s almond tree grow? His death still carves deep furrows inside me in the early morning, when the dew sits on my forehead and my resistance is lowered. Lately, I’ve realized that I’m like a tree whose main limbs were cut with a shohet’s knife. From the scars, I succeeded in branching out as best I could. I flowered even. Many times. But the tree is just not the same as it would have been. How much more upright I would have grown had he…

Forty-four years have watched me pass. I am an old man, with children of my own. Yet how dearly I would love to be fixed in Uncle’s emerald eyes, to feel the protective wing of his white robe unfurl around me. To kiss his lips. Never will it be. Not even were I to chant the Zohar every night for an entire year.

Murça Benjamin persevered after her wish to fulfill the obligation of Levirite marriage was refused. She married a wealthy New Christian barrel maker from Porto—a good man, she wrote to me—and works as a translator for merchants in São João da Foz.

Manuel Monchique, whose wife, Teresa, died alongside Uncle, emigrated to Amsterdam and is one of the directors of a banking institution there. I hear that he has developed an interest in sea voyages and has even traveled to Brazil, where he has made lovely sketches of the native butterflies. He no longer lugs around a sword.

So maybe one can find one’s way home in another country.

Before we left Lisbon, my mother was kind enough to sew a new aba for Attar, the man who lent me his clothing as I fled through the Moorish Quarter on that fateful Sunday of Jewish death. He welcomed me with a hug. Before I left his home, I’d eaten an entire chicken bathed in prunes and lemon. We locked hands to pray in silence, then recited suras from the Koran together.

Isaac Ibn Farraj, the ascetic who rescued his friend’s head from the pyre in the Rossio, ended up in Valona and is a successful scribe. I met him by accident once in Rhodes after it was taken by the Turks, and he looked as if he hadn’t eaten a thing since he’d left Lisbon. Goat ribbed, he was. With a beard like a white fungus. Apparently he’d learned a thing or two about the new fruits arriving from the New World, because he kept repeating to me, “Beware of tomatoes!”

Dom Miguel Ribeiro, the nobleman who learned of his Jewish origins from Uncle, still lives in Lisbon as a secret Jew. He lost an eye in a hunting accident shortly after we left. I suppose that he simply could not give up one last Old Christian vice.

Oh, a curious thing happened to Didi Molcho. He rose through the ranks of the Portuguese court system to become a royal secretary. Then, as he recounts it, there appeared before King João, King Manuel’s heir, a swarthy little Jew with glowing eyes akin to my uncle’s claiming to be a representative from the lost tribe of Reuben in the desert wilds of Arabia. His called himself David Reubini, and he came to Portugal hoping to gain troops for a plan to win back Jerusalem from the Turks. Although King João soured of him, Didi was captivated. He embraced Judaism once again and circumcised himself. His study of the kabbalah brought on visions ending in prophecy.

Using his Jewish name of Solomon, Didi journeyed to Italy to preach, and the accuracy of his predictions earned him fame amongst Christians and Jews alike. In May of fifteen twenty-nine, after exchanging correspondence, I received him in my home in Constantinople and, over the next six months, helped him learn Abulafia’s techniques for untying the knots of mind. His book of sermons, based partly on our studies together, was published in Salonika that same year. He’s back in Rome now, following his visions, and has even gained Pope Clement’s favor. I fear for his life, however. Popes are envious of men with true faith and as devious as famished ferrets. And Didi, God bless him, has had his earthly vision clouded by higher landscapes.

Farid lives just down the street from us, has had his poetry published with success here in Constantinople. His lover of seventeen years is a blacksmith named Shamsi who plays the oud and sings with the voice of a rustic flute. He’s an outgoing, humorous man with lean muscles and eyelashes like black rose petals. Not gifted with the dimensions of a Basque, of course, but he seems to keep Farid satisfied. Years ago, they adopted two orphan boys, Samir and Rumi. They were always good, if somewhat rough, playmates for my girl, Zuleikha, and boy, Ari.

We all eat together every night. It is a great comfort to me to be able to converse with Farid with my hands. Sometimes, when memory assaults me and I haven’t the will to hear my words…

When we were last in Lisbon together, all those years ago, I asked Farid, ‘Will God be waiting for us in Constantinople, you think? He’s disappeared without a trace from Lisbon.”

His hands twirled up and around, quoting Uncle: “You must knock upon yourself as upon a door. It is there where you will find Him if He still exists for you.”

I have waited for a reply to my rapping these many years. Apparently, one must play the ever-willing woodpecker to this hard-of-hearing God, and I simply haven’t the beak.

So maybe I have found that secular landscape I predicted so many years ago. The one toward which I sense the world is moving, with neither rabbis nor priests, populated only by mystics and non-believers. Which one of these groups will finally win the throne of my heart, I cannot say.

My daughter, Zuli, is eighteen now, wants to be a scribe like Aunt Esther. But I see more of Reza in her. Naturally aristocratic, with passionate eyes that dance when she talks. And when she’s angry, she intimidates me with the lambent glare she used to practice in looking glasses.

Ari, who is sixteen, has a strong build, my wife’s curly black hair, Uncle’s intelligent and penetrating eyes. He has studied to be an illuminator and could make a fine artist one day. But he’s dreamed of sailing off to adventure in the New World since he was a child.

“A Jewish manuscript illuminator in the jungles of Brazil would be like a matzah on the moon,” I’ve always told him.

The other day, he came up with this reply: “But some of the Indians there are circumcised. Tu Bisvat says they’re Jews.”

Sounds a little like me as a young man, no? I wonder what Uncle would make of him. I suppose that if he really wants to go to Brazil, maybe he should become a mohel.

The loss of Judah and Uncle condemned my mother to a life on the margins of emotion. She began sewing garments for the Turkish aristocracy in Constantinople and took impeccable care of the fruit store we opened here, but shied away from all gestures of approach. Conversation, even with Aunt Esther, came to her with difficulty. In the early morning, I caught her several times standing vigil over my bed with the inhuman stoicism of a sculpted goddess on a ship’s prow. Whenever I needed to voyage far from home, she would pat my hand, then turn quickly away, as if it were already too late to hope for my return. Prayers and chants only made her anxious. Henbane helped some. She died during Passover almost eight years ago.

As for Aunt Esther, she and I reconciled years ago, right after Diego’s death, in fact. Why should I have kept a grudge against her and Afonso Verdinho? Had I the right to deny her whatever companionship the world could still give her? Just before we left for Constantinople, he rode into the Little Jewish Quarter bearing a gold engagement ring. Just like a cavalier in some Arabian legend. They were married when we reached Turkish shores.

So, as my own life should prove, love is not always limited to a single object. And I’ve no doubt that Aunt Esther loved Uncle and would have given up her life for his. Once, while she was bathing, I opened the lid of her silver locket and found several of Uncle’s long gray hairs. I stole a single strand and ate it.

Esther’s a very old lady now, nearing seventy. But her work as a scribe in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Castilian and Portuguese continues to be without equal. She and I recently completed a copy of “The Conference of the Birds” for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, may God bless him each and every day. No notes or drawings were left to me from my birdwatching expeditions back in the hills beyond Lisbon, but my Torah memory is still complete enough to gift me with the curve of a crane’s beak and the tone of an owl’s gorget.

The peacocks I included were of Uncle’s design. I like to think that he would be proud of our artistry.

Cinfa. Life has not been easy for her. No sooner was she gifted with a baby girl named Mira six years ago than did she become a widow. Her husband was an eye doctor from Alexandria. A lean and soft-skinned man, with the kindly look of someone who always forgives.

And yet, we soon learned that he drank anise seed aqua vitae like a Greek sailor. And that he didn’t like that I educated his wife in Torah and Talmud. None of this was evident before their marriage. I’d quite forgotten about masks after leaving Lisbon.

When Cinfa was seven months pregnant, he beat her with a cane across the face. “Your sister corrected my Sabbath prayers,” he told me after I’d seen the tender blue and yellow bruises puffing from her eyes and cheeks. His tone implied: I had to do it.

“As well she should have, you lout!” I replied. “The Sabbath is more important than your skinny pride!”

He apologized because of my spiritual standing as an eccentric but learned kabbalist in the community, but I saw in his defiant eyes that he was hardly repentant. I’m not much of a fighter and resorted to trickery. While I blessed my hand over his head in feigned forgiveness, I kicked him so hard in the balls that he writhed on the ground for a good five minutes. I screamed, “And if you ever do it again…!”

When I explained what I’d done to Aunt Esther, she said, “That’s about as practical as the kabbalah ever gets! Good work!”

But maybe I shouldn’t have tempted him with my warning. The brute repeated his evil deed the next day.

Farid then accompanied me to their home. He held his dagger to the eye doctor’s chin and had me translate his signalling: “Ever touch her again with any intention other than love and I’ll cut your eyeballs out!”

Later, Farid told me, “Always threaten a man with something he knows the value of.”

It seemed like good advice. But brutes don’t change without God’s grace. In her eighth month, the Egyptian doctor kicked Cinfa down the stairs of their home. Broke her right leg and her collar bone. Cinfa had the baby while splayed on the ground. Her screams alerted Zuli and the neighbors. We would have lost little Mira except for their quick work.

I searched for the evil doctor with Farid. Couldn’t find him anywhere. A month later, he turned up dead outside a nearby brothel. Apparently, he got a little fresh with a prized Yemenite girl. As Aunt Esther observed, “Not much risk in beating a Jewish wife. But raise a hand to a high-priced Moslem whore and you won’t last too long.”

Leci, my wife, is gifted with that ironic way of thinking as well. Didn’t start out that way, though. She’s the daughter of a shoemaker who became our first friend here in Constantinople. When I met her, she had long, henna-tinted black-red hair, green eyes of restricted longing that always seemed afraid to ask a secret question. Lips sealed to silence. Maybe it was the death of her mother when she was just five. Frightened she was when I met her, spiritually shivering. And yet, she had the sexual sleekness of a wet cat. When she moved, she seemed to drag the ground and air with her.

I came to her one evening when her father was out of town. Appeared in silhouette in her doorway. She’d been reading. After sharing a look connoting secret adventure, she lay her book on her chest and blew out her candle. Without words, I lifted away my shirt and stepped out of my pants.

When our desires rose beyond the explorations of our mouths and hands, she climbed on top. Bracing herself as if before an altar, she sheathed herself down upon me.

Can the perfect fit of a couple’s sexual organs be symbolic of a spiritual correspondence?

As she gyrated her wet warmth over me, I pictured my old friend Rana Tijolo suckling her baby, Miguel. I buried my head deep in the warmth of Leci’s breasts and thought: Here is the woman I will give myself to.

And so it has been. More than my manuscripts, more than my studies of kabbalah, I consider my life’s accomplishment what I have given her and my children. It hasn’t always been good, or even enough, but I have offered what I’ve had without any mask.

Which leads me to the reason I have taken up my reed pen once again and told you our story.

As I said at the beginning of our tale, I had a visitor just yesterday, around midday: Lourenço Paiva, the son of our old laundress and friend, Brites. Before his mother’s death, she had asked him to come and offer me back ownership of our old house at the corner of the Rua de São Pedro and Rua da Sinagoga, to see if I wanted to return home.

With our old house keys biting into my closed fist, I turned away into a vision of Portugal: Cork trees and poppies. Roseta and her collar of cherries. Mordecai and my father. Lisbon’s houses of white and blue. Rossio Square. The mirror of river beyond our old synagogue. The sweet scent of the oleander bushes in our courtyard. Judah and Uncle. The graves on the Almond Farm.

Then, a vision opened inside me, one in which my master tossed me Portuguese letters knotted into a chain which read: as nossas andorinhas ainda estão nas mãos do faraó—our swallows are still abandoned to Pharaoh. As my gaze passed over these words of New Christian code a second time, they lifted into the air, then broke with a tinkling sound.

When I came to, my chest was pounding a verse that said: I have a chance to go home.

And that’s when isolated events in my Torah memory suddenly linked together into a reading of the past which I believe my uncle had counted on me to make so many years ago.

I reached for my wine carafe and grabbed the vellum ribbon on which Aunt Esther had written my name and Uncle’s—the ribbon which he gave me just before his death, when he promised to come to my aid no matter what the circumstances. Alone in my prayer room, I remembered the terrible verses from Genesis about the sacrifice of Isaac which my master made me recite to Judah that fateful Passover… He had explained to us that in order to achieve the highest of goals, the self had to be extinguished. He had meant his self.

Before his death, in our cellar, Uncle had posed questions to me about my willingness to leave Portugal. He spoke of his grave fears that my mother and Reza would never be willing to depart. These fears betray his motivation; he was implying that only the most terrible tragedy could sever my mother and Reza—his only living child—from Portugal.

Even the words of my uncle’s which were quoted by Diego in the bogus suicide note he wrote for Solomon the mohel make reference to an occult reason for his death: “Your iron blade will anneal me to God and maybe even serve a higher purpose.”

What higher purpose could his death have served? What was my master thinking?

Over the last twenty-four hours, I have let my speculations mingle with my questions till they formed a knotted pattern which refused to release me. So I took down my ink well from its shelf and got out the manuscript which I had originally written in the Christian year of fifteen and seven and which—with a few minor alterations—has now become what I refer to as Book One. And that’s when I began to complete our story for you.

Mesirat nefesh, the willingness to risk everything for a goal that will effect reparations in the Lower and Upper Realms. Only now do I believe that I understand how such unspoken courage lit Uncle’s emerald eyes, moved his hands to bless the world.

“I swear to protect you from the dangers which dance along the way,” he had pledged to me when I was but eight. Yes, he had lived up to his words. For here I was, safe, in Constantinople!

What I am trying to say, fitfully, hesitantly, because of my own failing strength and the effect of too much Anatolian wine, is that Uncle sacrificed himself. In part, probably, to try to save the girl, Teresa, who was murdered alongside him. But more importantly, I believe that he let himself be killed for the generations to come. To force my mother and Reza—our entire family—to leave Portugal. To enable our family tree to take root securely in another land. A land with soil willing to accept Jews without masks.

Not that I’m theorizing that my uncle willed Diego down into his cellar or brought him there through practical kabbalah. No. But perhaps Uncle suspected that he’d receive a visit. Whatever the case, there came a moment—maybe only when Diego descended the cellar stairs—when my master began to understand the true meaning of the riot against us, when he saw the possibilities which would spring from his death at the hands of a murderer. For better or for worse, he concluded that our family, our people, had reached a terrible impasse, and that only his violent death would compel us to break through.

Is this theory insanity? Maybe so. Maybe only God knew that my uncle was going to be sacrificed that Passover.

And yet there is more evidence to support my theory, a bit of proof which may convince you that what I say is at least possible.

Years ago, Farid claimed that the drawing of Mordecai in Uncle’s last Haggadah was modeled on my face, that I was cast as the savior of the Jews from the Book of Esther. I didn’t think it possible; Mordecai appeared far too old in the drawing.

I reasoned, too, that even if Uncle had modeled this hero’s face upon my own, it was because he had had a mystical inkling that I would later take revenge on his Haman—Diego.

In examining this illuminated panel yesterday, however, I discovered something astounding. Mordecai looks very much as I do now, twenty-four years after Uncle drew him. We share the same closely cropped graying hair, the same weary eyes—both of us survivors, but witnesses to tragedy as well.

You see, Uncle had so discerning an eye that he was able to paint what I would look like nearly a quarter of a century into the future.

So only now do I begin to accept that my master had gifted me with a greater purpose, had divined that I, like this ancient Jewish hero, would one day fight to save our people.

And I am convinced that this is the reason why—in the vision I had yesterday—my uncle called me “Mordecai.” He wasn’t using my older brother’s name, as I originally thought, but that of the Biblical saviour of our people.

Yet how had he intended for me to rescue them—I, Berekiah Zarco, a man who no longer even believes in a personal God?

Your hands are touching the answer; I suspect that Uncle sensed that only the nightmare of his death would compel me to write this very book which you are now reading. That only his violent departure from the Lower Realms would make me see that our future in Europe was finished. That only the most terrible tragedy could convince me to beg all the Jews—every last one of us, whether New Christian or not—to move to where we will be safe from the Inquisition and whatever other horrors the Christian kings will one day dream up for us.

For if there is one thing we can say about the European monarchs it is that they have no shortage of dreams about the Jews. We haunt them in their spiritual darkness.

If you don’t admit that there is even a small chance that these speculations are a valid reading of his actions, then I wish you well in your loneliness; it is clear you have never known anyone with my uncle’s spiritual strength, with causeless, unconditional love for you, who would sacrifice himself for your survival.

Or perhaps it would be more appropriate for me to pity my own talents as a writer; my tale has not succeeded in convincing you that Master Abraham Zarco was real. I apologize. But now I tell you, and you must find the courage to believe: there exist men and women with such passionate resolve that they will willingly give up their lives for generations of children whom they will never even meet.

So I was wrong all those years ago when I told my old friend Rana Tijolo that Uncle still believed Jews could speak in the future tense in Portugal. He knew then that there was only the past for us in Iberia and in all the Christian lands of Europe. Can you believe it was mere whimsy that made him plan for us to move to a Moslem land, to Turkey?

No accidents, no coincidences. Is it possible?

So far, I have only dared to tell Farid of my theories, and in reply he signalled, “But don’t you think Uncle could have done more for the Jewish people alive than dead?”

A good question. Events may have moved too quickly for my master to control them. And as I say he may have only understood his purpose in a flash of insight, just as Diego tossed a rosary around his neck.

I believe that he trusted that God could make better use of him dead than alive.

In any event, I have no answer except the faith which burns in my gut. But even if my theory is dreadfully wrong, I still dare not put my pen down or tear up these pages. I cannot bet the survival of the Jews on the righteousness of European Kings who have shown time and again that they bear no sense of justice. Because even if I’m wrong, even if I am reading from left to right, even if my master was so exhausted from his vigil for Reza that he could not lift his hands to fight Diego, can you be sure that the Christians won’t one day come for you, for all of us? That traitors like Diego won’t help them?

And so, we finally come to Diego and to what the true meaning of his betrayal might be. This I have asked myself many times, of course.

The key to my interpretation of his actions resides in the kabbalistic definition of evil—good which has departed from its rightful place.

I believe that Diego was a man who could have flourished amongst his own people. In living with Old Christians, however, in having to struggle against the terror which their Church and Inquisition inspired in him, he turned to evil.

And so I believe that there will be many others like Diego who will conspire against us unless we move from Europe. That, too, is part of the meaning of Uncle’s death.

As for my hesitation to speak of this… Not surprisingly, part of me would like to dismiss my words as rubbish. For if my faith points toward the truth, then I have failed my uncle miserably. Twenty-three years ago, I allowed my cousin, Reza, to remain behind in Portugal. May Uncle forgive me. For if he is right, if my reading of the verses of the past is correct, then her family is doomed.

That is why I must take the blessed keys dear Lourenço has given me and re-enter Portugal’s gates. This manuscript is the weapon which I will carry with me. May its words string together to form the noose that will hang Haman.

Farid says he will accompany me, that I will need his protection. Perhaps he is right. Together, we will fetch Reza and her family and bring them back to Constantinople.

May all the New Christians and Jews accompany us.

And may my children and wife understand my reasons for leaving.

The first thin light of dawn has just pierced my window shutters, and my wrist aches. It is time for me to reach into my ink well for the last few strokes of my pen. Let the angels behind my words press understanding into my soul and yours.

As I said at the very beginning, this is a story of warning. You who read these words, whether Jew or New Christian, Sephardi or Ashkenazi, if the borders of Europe still enclose you, then you are in grave danger. The Inquisition will spread, and very soon our Bleeding Mirror will run with blood as it never has before. That is why Uncle appeared to me now. The killing is only just beginning. You can be assured, the European kings and their hateful bishops will never stop dreaming of us. They will never allow you and your children to live. Never! Sooner or later, in this century or five centuries hence, they will come for you or your descendents. No village, no matter how remote, will be safe. No aristocrat or foreign army will come to protect you. This is the meaning I make of Uncle’s death. So take off your mask. Face Constantinople and Jerusalem. And start walking.

Cast out Christian Europe from your heart and never look back!

Blessed are all of God’s self-portraits.

Berekiah Zarco, Constantinople

The Seventh of Av, 5290