Altai: A Novel (21 page)

30.

Somehow, Nasi had got ahead of me. I found him in the central hall, beneath the menorah, confronting a bent old man. I immediately realized that I had seen him before, but it was a few moments before I recognized the chief rabbi, Eli Ben Haim. The contrast between the two men was apparent. Nasi stood splendidly in his brightly colored ceremonial robes, and his resolute expression took years off his age.

The rabbi didn’t seem to notice my arrival. He opened his toothless mouth as if biting the air. “I am just warning you, Don Yossef,” he croaked. “Remember the Proverbs of Solomon: ‘Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall. It is better to be of humble spirit than to share plunder with the proud.’ You want to buy the kingdom of Zion, but only the Lord can give Israel its due.”

Nasi looked fearlessly at him. “In the Proverbs it is also written that ‘a wicked man listens to evil lips, a liar pays attention to a malicious tongue.’ I am neither malicious nor a liar. I want the welfare of our people, and I tell the truth.”

The old man raised a finger and shouted, spraying saliva. “Remember the
Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah
: ‘And do not rise from exile as a wall is raised. Indeed, why will the Messiah come? To bring together the exiles of Israel.’ ”

Nasi walked around him, his hands behind his back, as if he was thinking, then stood in front of him again. “Tell me, Rabbi Eli, why the Lord should punish those who want to give a land back to His people? For centuries they have persecuted us, chased us, killed us. They have burned our sacred books, they have called us deicides, murderers. I want to put an end to all this, and for you it is an outrage against God. Or do you not mean rather that it is an outrage against you? Against you rabbis who taught us to pray and stay in our place, with our heads bowed.”

The old man’s furrowed face wrinkled still further in a grimace of contempt. “You think you can do business with emperors, when it was an emperor who dispossessed our people and a pharaoh who kept us enslaved in Egypt.” He exploded in a fit of coughing. Nasi came closer and spoke to him without rancor, almost smiling.

“I want to repair the world. That is why I observe the commandments, recite the prayers, perform the rituals. That is why I want to give the Jews what you rabbis are not able to give them. A new Zion where they can live in peace and safety. An example of justice for humanity, because we were slaves in Egypt and we will have the fate of every slave on earth within our hearts. This is
tikkun olam
, my contribution to the return of equilibrium.”

The lids of the old man’s glaucous eyes quivered within indignation, and a thread of slobber flowed from the corner of his mouth. “Blasphemy! You think you are the Messiah!”

Nasi shook his head. “No.” He leaned forward until his nose almost touched the rabbi’s. “But I would be a good king. That’s what scares you.”

Rabbi Eli gave a sort of roar, as if he wanted to plunge his fangs into his adversary, and then all of a sudden he turned around and limped out of the building, still chewing on his curses. At that moment, Donna Reyna appeared behind me. She must have been there for some time, enjoying the finale of the scene. She stepped forward to the middle of the room, and passed by Nasi with a half bow. “Majesty,” she said in a simpering voice.

The future king of Cyprus didn’t even seem to notice.

31.

I started keeping an eye on Dana and following her discreetly every time she left Palazzo Belvedere. At the Monday market, hidden behind a pile of dried apricots, I saw her buying a bag of grain for her goldfinch.

On Tuesday evening she entered a run-down building in Kuruçesme, where she stayed for a few hours. I discovered that it belonged to a Greek woman; she, too, had been freed from Selim’s harem and was now the wife of his stable master.

On Wednesday afternoon she sold a pile of her embroidered blankets to a cloth merchant, and with the proceeds she bought two brushes and a box of oil paints. That evening, I decided that I might have to change my strategy.

I would have preferred to talk to her calmly, to persuade her to tell me what she knew, but the memory of her reticence offended my pride. If she hadn’t yielded right away, after the parade, to my first request, it meant that at bottom she was more devoted to Donna Reyna than she was to me. On Thursday morning, when I bumped into her in the drawing room, I told her not to come to my room that night. I said nothing more, and went in search of Don Yossef.

During those days I had thought often about how alone my mentor was. Reyna, the Grand Vizier, the Ashkenazic rabbis and even his oldest friend—none of them believed in him. And yet thousands of Jews owed their lives to him. And yet I was there, a living proof that it was possible to change everything. You just had to want it, and with the help of the Lord things could be turned upside down, chaos canceled, balance reestablished.
Tikkun olam
. That was what Nasi had called it. Righting the world, healing the wound that our people had borne for fifteen hundred years, just as it had healed my own wound, hidden for half my life.

Nasi needed allies, and I intended to tell him as much. The Sultan’s friendship and the money spent on the Cyprus adventure were solid guarantees, but that investment also exposed him to great risks and for many people was a cause for suspicion. It had been Dana who had reminded me of the story of Joseph, whose brothers envied him because of his dreams and sold him to the merchants.

When I found him, he didn’t give me time to speak, and once again he was ahead of me, reading me as you read a book, perhaps one of those rare copies that had attracted Ralph Fitch in the library at Palazzo Belvedere.

He dragged me outside, and with just a few servants escorting us, we lost ourselves in the hubbub of busy humanity in the Christian quarter. He spoke at length as we walked, and it was as if I had transferred my anxieties to his mind without even opening my mouth.

“The Grand Vizier is very strong, even though we have put him in the minority in the Divan. And above all, and never forget this, Mehmet Sokollu is highly astute. By obstructing Ashkenazi we have stayed one of his hands, but he is like an octopus; he has another seven. As for the Ashkenazic rabbis, don’t worry too much. They’ve been holding us hostage forever. They sow uncertainty among our people; they say that Cyprus is a personal whim, a reward for services given to the Sultan. You understand? They use the divisions between Eastern and Western Jews to undermine our project. They say a Sephardic kingdom will arise in the east, when they know very well that I intend to offer a home to everyone, without distinction. A safe refuge for the wanderers of the earth: Jews,
moriscos
, heretics, slaves. As I did after the fire; you saw the people in my house. They weren’t only Sephardim, and not all of them were even Jews.”

I slowed my pace, overwhelmed by the freight of those words.

“The poor people are with me, but how will we overcome the mistrust of the wealthiest families?” Nasi noticed that he had left me behind, and stopped. “And that’s why we’re here.”

Around us, Venetian and Ottoman accents met: We were in the heart of Galata. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Yossef pointed to a house halfway down the street. “To find ourselves a new ally. Someone who has nothing to lose and everything to gain from joining with us. Come, he’s waiting for us.”

Even today I can’t imagine my face as we stepped inside that house and were invited to sit down in a spacious room, on comfortable cushions, in the presence of the man I had tailed for days.

Solomon Ashkenazi observed us carefully, sipping the coffee that his wife, Bula, had poured into our cups. The Venetian doctor’s clever little eyes darted between Nasi and me. It was clear that the letter that Nasi had sent ahead of him had not revealed the reason for the visit, but Ashkenazi wasn’t a stupid man and he must have guessed something. Perhaps for that reason, when his chief adversary offered to appoint him treasurer of the future Cypriot Jewish kingdom, he didn’t bat an eyelid. At that moment, he was finished: He lived as a recluse. Nasi was giving him the opportunity to climb back up from the abyss into which he had plunged himself. His genius was a blinding light. Bringing the doctor over to his cause and giving him a job in the future government would send a powerful message to the Ashkenazic Jews: It would announce that the new kingdom of Zion was theirs as well.

The master of the house called his wife and told her to prepare lunch, because the guests would be staying. Then he came back and looked at us. We would talk business on a full stomach.

32.

I am walking in a rocky desert, beneath a brilliant golden sky. I’m thirsty, my mouth is dry, my clothes are sticking to my back. I walk wearily toward a lonely, black mountain in a range that stands out on the horizon. The outline of the range recalls the towers of a castle. Around peaks pointed like needles, falcons fly.

Having reached the foot of the mountain, I study the obsidian cliffs in search of footholds. I climb, to conquer the peak, but the mineral cuts my fingers, and I think I’m about to plummet when above my head I suddenly see a stone balcony. With a final effort I hoist myself up and find myself in front of an ivory door, set in the side of the mountain, protected by two warriors. They grip metal scourges like the one I saw Mukhtar using, except in place of whips there are bronze-scaled snakes. I want to escape, but the door opens and the two warriors let Dana through, and she comes toward me, takes me by the hand and leads me inside. “
T’estan asperando
,” I hear her saying in the language of my mother.

We pass through identical rooms, one after another. They all look like the hall of the Divan—all that changes is the color of the carpets. In the red room, the Grand Vizier Sokollu is presiding over a meeting of dignitaries and pashas, but no one is speaking, no one is moving, they all look stuffed. In the yellow room, two janissaries, half naked, are fighting with hatchets, their bodies ragged with cuts and wounds. In the turquoise room there is a gigantic cannon that merges with the features of a male member. In the green one, we plow through a sea of praying Muslims, and only when we are surrounded by them do I notice that they are all women, prostrate as they worship the Sultan.

“I’m not a concubine,” Dana says to me in a mechanical voice, and then repeats that they’re waiting for me and pulls me by the arm toward the last room, which is dazzlingly white. On the couch that runs along the walls, woman sit winding huge skeins of thread and nursing children. I look at the babies sucking the breasts, and they resemble adult men, all of them the same, with beards and turbans, like the figures in Turkish miniatures. Other women, in the middle of the hall, form a dancing circle, hand in hand. I think I recognize some of them, but really they all look the same: my mother, Arianna, Reyna. The circle opens up to admit me, and I want to dance with them—the steps look simple, except that I can’t hear the music, I can’t catch the rhythm, and the intention of the movements escapes me; I can’t work out if they’re solemn or sad, macabre or grotesque. So I remain motionless, and I feel my legs are hard, stuck, until Dana kneels in front of me and moves them with her hands, to show me what I’m supposed to do. Behind me, another woman takes hold of my arms and suggests the correct moves, her body pressed against mine. I have to struggle not to be aroused, to concentrate only on the dance, understand the steps, listen carefully to the music. In the end, after many attempts, I manage to follow the dance, first moving on the spot, then back and forth, then in an ever faster pirouette that turns the room into a whirlwind and swallows everything up, drags me away, while Dana approaches a golden grille high up in the wall, slips a hand between the metal meshes and hands something to a long-haired shadow. A woman’s shadow.

I woke up rested, surprised to remember the details of my dream. Usually, oneiric visions and real life occupy different rooms in my head, and the first vanish as soon as I open the door of the second.

I washed and chose my clothes carefully: This wasn’t a Saturday like any other.

In the atrium of Palazzo Belvedere a real procession was under way. Servants, family and acolytes abandoned their rooms, came down flights of stairs and crossed corridors to flow together in front of the big portal. Nasi was the last to arrive, dressed in crimson and cobalt, and took his place at the head of the cavalcade.

When the elderly guard opened the door, at least fifty people were ready to descend into the street, arranged in two groups, men at the front and women behind. Along the road, a much larger, disorderly crowd had gathered, ready to join the procession.

We walked along the streets of Ortaköy, savoring the pleasant warmth of that summer morning. The snake of bodies becoming increasingly relaxed, as we approached our destination, the synagogue of the
Senyora
, the favorite temple of the Sephardic Jews.

We surged into an internal courtyard, protected behind a wall and an iron gate and shaded by an old plane tree. Donna Gracia had had the synagogue built ten years before, and it was said to be our people’s only place of worship planned and financed by a woman.

The sound of many voices reached us from the patio and grew beyond measure to greet the arrival of Don Yossef Nasi. The synagogue would never be able to hold all those people, not even if they climbed on each other’s shoulders. There weren’t only Western Jews there, from Spain and Portugal, like the Campos, the Mendes, the Hamons. Crowding into the courtyard were Romaniots from Greece, Jewish families who had lived in the city since the days of Theodosius, goldsmiths from Balat, weavers from Galata, merchants from Eminonu whom Nasi had helped in the days of the great fire, rabbis of tiny communities who had come from Tripoli and Syria, from the Caucasus and Yemen.

Nasi shook dozens of hands, hugged and stroked, promised money and justice. He was a new Solomon, a new David, the man who had brought the tribes of Israel together, who had reassembled that which had been divided and scattered. Some people definitely thought he was the Messiah.

He had summoned them all with messengers and with gifts, with fascination and seduction. He wanted the chosen people to pray together, celebrating like a single body the news that was coming from Cyprus. The Sultan’s army had disembarked at Limassol, and was marching unopposed toward Nicosia. The generals expected to lay siege by the end of July.

A servant appeared breathless and spoke into the ear of Don Yossef, who immediately interrupted his greetings and turned toward the gate, in a solemn pose. The crowd did likewise, and silence quickly spread.

I understood then, even before I saw them appearing behind the gate, that the last guests, the most important, were arriving.

I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the power of what I saw happening. Yossef Nasi’s money and genius had accomplished a marvel.

When I opened my eyes, Solomon Ashkenazi was entering the courtyard beside his wife, followed by a multitude of men and women got up in their finest clothes.