Altai: A Novel (16 page)

16.

“You’ve found your place at last.”

Dana was resting her head on my chest. Before she spoke, I thought she had fallen asleep, and I was lost in reflection. My thoughts were rough wool that needed to be carded and spun, and they began with Ashkenazi’s slippers. I would have liked to communicate my suspicions about how the bailiff’s dispatches traveled, but Nasi and Gomez hadn’t yet come back, even though the sun had set an hour before. My thoughts returned to the meeting I had witnessed a few hours previously, with the weird old man and his entourage. Ismail, or Ludovico. Who knows where he and the Nasis had met. Maybe in Venice. I found myself thinking about Braun’s bank, at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. My money was still there, the money I hadn’t been able to withdraw after fleeing from Arianna’s house.

After that brief deviation, here I was again at Palazzo Belvedere. I guessed that right under my nose, and without my understanding it, something important had happened that day.

“My place? What do you mean?”

“By Don Yossef’s side.”

It wasn’t strange to see things in that way. Nasi had given me the chance to return to my job. Basically it was the one I was best at: collecting information. I said as much to Dana. She lifted her face and folded her hands under her chin.

“Information? About Don Yossef’s enemies?”

“Particularly.”

“And who are the most fearsome of them?”

I let her hair glide through my fingers.

“Some of them are Jews like us. Envious men. They don’t support Don Yossef because he sees a hundred miles beyond their horizon. To avenge themselves on his intelligence, they prefer to serve the Venetians, or the Grand Vizier.”

Gusts of wind stirred the leaves in the park. A dogfight began in the distance.

“It was because of his dreams that the brothers sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites,” observed Dana.

Her words startled me. The similarities between the biblical Joseph and Yossef Nasi now struck me as obvious. Both had won the favors of a foreign sovereign. They had both obtained government positions, aristocratic titles, huge wealth. But not the trust of the family they served. Not immediately, at least, and not without a great deal of effort. A question came to my lips, the thin tail of an elephantine thought.

“Why are your mistress and Don Yossef barely talking to each other?”

“You must have noticed: Don Yossef doesn’t appreciate the attentions of women.”

It was true: I’d never seen him in the company of a woman, not even his wife. I hadn’t seen Gomez with a woman, either. In Venice Yossef Nasi was known as the Sultan’s catamite. In the secret service he was spoken of in low terms. On the streets of Constantinople I had heard similar allusions and obscene jokes.

“Incredible that such a man should be destined to live without heirs.”

“You could be his son. You’re the right age.”

In a different situation, the words might have irritated me, and I would have given a harsh reply, but I found myself saying something quite different. “My father was much older than Don Yossef.”

Just as the spinning of wool is followed by the doubling of the yarn, when two threads are twisted together to make one stronger one, in my mind the figures of two old men were superimposed upon one another, I still didn’t know to what end. I said, “This Ismail al-Mokhawi, the old man who arrived today . . . What do you know about him?”

Dana shook her head and let her eye wander along the walls. “Not much. He left Constantinople before I got here. I know what Donna Gracia told me.”

“Down in the drawing room, he spent a long time sitting in silence by her portrait.”

“They loved each other,” said Dana. She must have seen me looking startled, and took advantage of it. “Do you love me?”

I didn’t know what to reply. I stammered something; I felt very stupid. Dana smiled and felt sorry for me. She picked up the story where she had broken it off.

“Before she died, Donna Gracia wrote him a letter. I was with her that evening. At sunset, the Bosphorus was beautiful.” She lost herself in her memory, and I avoided disturbing her with any further questions. A little later, it was she who broke the silence. She sat up in the bed, as if talking about Donna Gracia called for a more respectful posture. “She wanted to see him one last time before she died. She asked him to join her at Tiberias.”

“Why on earth did he leave her?”

“Donna Gracia never explained that to me. She once told me that, faced with a desert, a river has two choices: to hurl itself into the sand, determined to pass through it and irrigate it, at the risk of drying up and disappearing for ever, or else to evaporate and become a cloud, to fly above the desert and, raining down on the mountains, become a river again. She said that Ismail was the river that becomes a cloud.”

I was struck by the simile. “Was Donna Gracia the river that wanted to irrigate the desert?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps she was referring to Don Yossef. What do you think?”

I replied impulsively, “That irrigating the desert is a difficult enterprise, but it’s worth trying.”

We said nothing more. We lay there side by side, waiting for sleep to overtake us.

“Ismail!”

The shout came from the drawing room and made us jump. Dana leaped to her feet, dressed in a flash, said good-bye to me and rushed from the room, swift as a fawn. All that remained was her scent, her perfume. Once I had put on my breeches and my shirt, I crossed the threshold. There was no one in the loggia. I leaned against the balustrade to look down and saw Nasi in the middle of the drawing room, which was lit only by a servant’s oil-lamp, with David Gomez next to him. They were talking to the manservant who had received the old man and called Donna Reyna.

Mulier in fabula
, that was her, a dark outline below her mother’s portrait. Nasi saw her, and pointed at her, followed at a distance by Gomez. From the loggia I couldn’t make out every word; their conversation reached me in scraps.

. . . staying here at the palace?

The tone couldn’t be misunderstood.

. . . his old house in Üsküdar . . . with his retinue . . .

Bitterness, detachment.

. . . miles to get here . . . he was supposed to be our guest . . .

Resentment, aged fury.

. . . you know yourself why he doesn’t want . . .

Then they stopped talking. A lull of silence settled in the room. Then Nasi bowed to his wife and turned on his heel. “Let’s go,” he said to Gomez.

I saw them leaving like arrows in flight, fired from the bow in the direction of Üsküdar.

17.

The Palazzo Belvedere was abuzz with voices. Servants and sutlers, general dogsbodies, gardeners, wood suppliers and whoever happened to be passing through, everyone was coming and going, questions required answers, little knots of people clustered rapidly before scattering like ears of wheat when duty called and reassembling elsewhere, in the drawing room, in the kitchen, in the pantry, in the corridors and even outside, in the park, at the start of the tree-lined avenue. The women tidied up the rooms, talking about the German,
el Alemán
, back from Arabia after all these years,
kon una barba blanka ke lo faze pareser un profeta
, with a white beard that made him look like a prophet, and accompanied by three Moors
ke tienen fachas de lókos
, with the faces of madmen, it would have frightened you to look at them, but if they’re friends of his they must be decent people. A cook said that
el barbarroja
had asked her for five cups of boiling water, and then he’d put some nutshells into them, offered a cup to each of his friends and the last one to her, to try this drink, because apparently they weren’t actually nuts, but a kind of coffee. And it was so good that the woman had asked them to give her a handful, and if anyone wanted to try it she could make it in a moment,
kishir
. The two Indians, meanwhile, had beguiled the time by dancing in the park. What do you mean, dancing, it was a fight, didn’t you see when they drew out their shields and whips? What agility! Did you see when one of the two jumped the other with his feet pressed together?

I turned round, slightly puzzled, in the whirl of voices and stories. No one seemed to be paying me any attention; the day’s news was the reappearance of the old man. Everyone who had known Ismail before he had gone to Mokha—which is why he was known as the Mokhan—seemed to hold him in great esteem, and there was a certain solemnity in the way they talked about him, replying to the questions of new arrivals, boys and girls who had served Don Yossef and Donna Reyna for only a few years, some for only a few months. They listened with admiration to the stories that danced their way from mouth to mouth. They nodded and returned to their tasks filled with more curiosity than before, anxious to see
el Alemán
, when someday soon he would come back to the palace.

I followed these stories, too. They announced themselves as vague references, two sentences thrown there as if to say
pay attention to me, I know what’s going on
, and then they were referred to, commented upon, provided with the kind of glosses applied to ancient poems, and through those glosses they merged together and poured into one another, assuming new forms and consistencies. The old man appeared now in one country, now in another: He had been in Africa and France, in Chipango and Cathay. He had known Martin Luther, I heard a cook saying to a young scullery maid in the doorway to the kitchen. I was listening from behind a column, my back resting against the cool marble, my eyes closed. The woman spoke an enchanting Ladino that reminded me of my childhood, every sentence ending on a high note, a bit like when in Italy you hear people from Ascoli or Ancona talking. Her voice was intoning the story of Ismail and Luther, luring new people to stop and listen.

The old man hadn’t just known Luther, he’d been with him that day when they nailed a big piece of paper on the door of a church in some German city, a paper that was read by lots of people and infuriated the pope. And what had he written on it? That the relics of the saints are nothing but filth, bones to be thrown to the dogs. Such courage! Certainly, but what foolhardiness! Indeed, but such love of truth. But when did Luther die? The replies came flying: Luther’s still alive. No, what are you talking about, he died twenty years ago and he was over a hundred—
el Alemán
is old, certainly, but not
that
old; pay no heed to such nonsense. But it’s true that the papists pursued him halfway around the world, because he’s a heretic of the first water. I’ve heard all sorts of things being said about them. And who told you? Lots of people. I’ve also heard them being told to Don Yossef. I just know that he was Donna Gracia’s lover, a male voice said at last, in the tone of someone bringing castles in the air down to the ground. It’s true, a girl added. They say that she died in his arms, down in Tiberias.

At the mention of Gracia Nasi and her last moments, the listeners became lost in thought, the speakers’ voices grew more serious in tone, and the conversation thinned out. In a few minutes, the cluster of people had dissolved and everyone had returned to their own tasks.

I opened my eyes. Standing in front of me was Yossef Nasi.

“Did you hear them?” he said. “The world traveler has returned.”

18.

Nasi was in a strange mood, melancholy and thoughtful. The event everyone was talking about, Ismail’s strange secret meeting with Reyna, the trip to Üsküdar at dead of night . . . My mentor wore it all stamped on his face, on his forehead and around his eyes, in the wrinkles at the sides of his mouth, in the shadow of a beard that covered his cheeks. All stamped in plain sight, but in characters that I didn’t yet know how to read.

I told him that I had something to report: I had worked out how the dispatches were leaving the bailiff’s house. “Let’s go to the library,” he replied. He told a servant to call David Gomez, and off we set.

In the doorway to the book-lined room, we met the kabbalist Meir, pale in the face as I had always seen him, the black velvet
kippah
covering his bald skull. “The German has returned, hasn’t he, Don Yossef?” asked the man whose mind revolved around permutations and calculations.

“Yes, master. Ismail is back amongst us.”

“So, this is a sign, and it will need to be interpreted.”

“What do you see in it?”

“The man with many names defies the Gematria,” said Meir. “Which letters will we match up with a number?”

“You know, everyone has called him Ismail for years,” Nasi replied.

“Yes,
Ishmael
,” repeated the kabbalist, pensive and gloomy, pronouncing the name in Hebrew.

The story of Ishmael is well known to my people. The son of Abraham and the servant Hagar, he was removed from Sarah along with his mother, for mocking his stepbrother Isaac. In the desert, mother and son were helped by an angel, who showed them a spring and urged them not to be afraid, because a great people would be born of the boy’s loins. The Moors saw him as their prophet and the father of their tribe.

If a German heretic had taken that name, did it mean he had turned Muslim?

Anyway, in those letters—
Yod, Shin, Mem, Ayin, Aleph, Lamed
—there must have been something more, because Meir remained silent, plunged in who knows what computation, his eyes fixed on nothing, and Nasi coughed, in an attempt to bring him back among us. “Don’t weary yourself, master. If you had to ruminate like this on all the names that man has had, you would keep yourself busy for a very long time. When I knew him his name was Ludovico, to others he was Tiziano, and yet others remembered him as Gert. Just leave it;
el Alemán
has always defied all calculations.”

I remembered what Dana had said to me: Ismail was a river that evaporates and becomes a cloud, to cross the desert and rain on the mountains.

The kabbalist stirred himself and took his leave. At that moment we were joined by David Gomez. The three of us came into the library at the same time, and stood around the big table. At last I told them my suspicions about Ashkenazi and his slippers.

“Ingenious,” said Gomez. “Precisely because it’s trivial.”

“Stay glued to Ashkenazi’s shadow,” Nasi broke in. “I want confirmation. Discover who the letters are passing to and how they are leaving Constantinople.” Then he left.

“Why is he so troubled by the arrival of this German?” I asked Gomez. Rather than replying, he began nosing around among the shelves, examining the backs of the books. He said, “You know that the first printing press was brought to Constantinople by the Sephardim, in 1493? Jews and books always go together.”

He pulled a book that sat on the shelf at eye level, and set it down on the table with a theatrical gesture. A small yellow volume. I picked it up, studied it and recognized its title. It was a forbidden book, one that had caused a scandal in Venice and throughout the whole of Italy many years before. I opened it at random and read a few lines.

. . . the righteousness of Christ will suffice to make us righteous, and sons of grace without any of our good works, which cannot be good if, before we do them, we are not first made good and righteous by faith.

Calvin’s heresy,
justificatio sola fide
. Words that came from a world now far away. Gomez said, “
Il Beneficio di Cristo
. Do you know it?”

“Of course. It’s the most famous heretical text of our times.”

“It was we who printed and distributed it, to sow discord among the papists.”

“ ‘We,’ who?” I asked him. Meanwhile I was mulling over a phrase I had heard a moment before.

When I knew him his name was Ludovico, to others he was Tiziano
.

“The Nasi family paid the typographers. A bookseller by the name of Perna worked in the field, and with him a great expert in the field of troublemaking. Someone who knew how by spreading certain ideas you can throw things off balance. And that was the old man whose return everyone is talking about.”

When I knew him his name was Ludovico, to others he was Tiziano
. My mouth had dried up. When I joined the Consigliere’s secret service, the older agents still spoke of a heretic, a mysterious character who, years before, had passed through northern Italy, practicing blasphemous baptisms and driving the inquisitors mad. His name was often associated with the
Beneficio di Cristo
.

“Are you telling me that Ismail al-Mokhawi is Tiziano the Anabaptist?”

“The very same. Then events gathered speed, the Inquisition began to tighten its grip, and Ismail escaped from Venice along with Gracia. Yossef, Samuel and I attended to some unfinished business, then joined them here. Ismail loved Gracia, but he soon realized that he was different from her, from the Nasis, from all of us. The fate of the Jews is to defend one another against the perils of the world. Often we are obliged by circumstances to befriend powerful men, but Ismail is a wanderer by choice, and for all of his life he has tried to bring the powerful down.”

I had never heard David Gomez talking at such length. That day, everything was going in the opposite direction. I looked at Takiyuddin’s clock. I was reassured to see the hands turning clockwise, as they always did.