Altai: A Novel (22 page)

33.

We entered the temple, leaving doors and windows open, because a huge number of people were still outside, and no one must feel excluded. The women sat down in the loggia that opened halfway up, on three sides of the hall.

We got to our feet and intoned the psalms and blessings of the morning service. My Hebrew was now more fluent than it had been in my schooldays.

Yossef Nasi, the worthy man, opened the doors of the Sacred Ark. Solomon Ashkenazi removed the wooden cylinder that held the Scroll of the Law and handed it to the cantor, who passed with it among the faithful.

When the ark set forward, Moses said, “Rise up, Lord, and let your enemies be scattered.”

Ashkenazi closed the doors of the holy cabinet and joined Nasi in the little procession as it moved through the synagogue and then back toward the pulpit.

Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power and the glory, the majesty and the victory.

They walked among the benches, across the central corridor and along the walls, as the children leaned forward to kiss the Torah scroll with the tips of their lips.

Yours is the kingdom, Lord; you are exalted above all things.

I looked up at the army of women above me, seeking Dana’s face. She was observing the ceremony with a worried expression, as if the gestures of the three men were not the right ones. Perhaps she wanted to correct them, as she had corrected my dance steps in my dream. Beside her, Donna Reyna was whispering complicitly into another woman’s ear. I asked David Gomez who she was.

“Esther Handali,” she replied. “She’s a Sephardi, but she doesn’t usually frequent our synagogue, because she lives in the Old City. She takes care of the affairs of Nurbanu, Selim’s favorite.”

My eyes slipped to the seat to Esther Handali’s right. It was occupied by Bula Ashkenazi. I reflected on her husband’s words when he’d introduced her to me: “She visits servants and concubines, she tells me the symptoms, prepares and sells remedies.” She, too, frequented the Sultan’s harem.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool.

Two Jewish women, among the very few who had direct contact with the favorite without living inside the harem. As far as I knew, the only other women with a similar right were the three princesses, Nurbanu’s daughters: Ismihan, Geherhan and Shah, the wives of the Grand Vizier Sokollu, Piyale Pasha and the Great Falconer.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain
.

Nasi and Ashkenazi sat down side by side again, in the front row, on the bench next to mine. The cantor climbed onto the
tebah
and unrolled the Torah on the big lectern.

Sokollu, Piyale Pasha and the Great Falconer. All three
damad
, sons-in-law of Nurbanu and the Sultan. The first was an enemy of Nasi and an open opponent of the war against Venice. The second had been a grand admiral and was in command of a flagship in the expedition to Cyprus. The third, for his part, had expressed a sibylic opinion to Ismail about the attack on the island: “Wars are driven by the ambition of powerful men.”

Blessed be the Lord, king of the universe, who has chosen us of all peoples and given us his Law.

I looked again toward the ladies’ balcony, and I felt as if the ceiling of the synagogue had begun to spin. Bula Ashkenazi, Esther Handali, Donna Reyna, Dana. The first and the second frequented Nurbanu, the favorite of Selim, sister-in-law of the Grand Vizier. The fourth, Dana, had been Selim’s personal servant before she arrived at the Palazzo Belvedere.

I had seen her carrying a message from Donna Reyna into the second courtyard of the Seraglio, the one that granted access to the Hall of the Divan. And to the harem.

Follow justice and justice alone, that you may live and possess the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Reyna had spent her girlhood in Venice. Bula was married to a Venetian, the personal physician of the bailiff Marcantonio Barbaro, merchant and shipowner on the route to Crete, a Venetian island. Nurbanu, too, the Princess of Light, was Venetian by origin, kidnapped by Turkish corsairs from an island in the Mediterranean. Like a little Jewish girl by the name of Dana.

A second lector took the place of the first and began to recite in an uncertain singsong voice.

When you have entered the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and dwell therein, you will think, I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me.

Nasi muttered an
Amen
. I couldn’t take my eyes off the balcony. Reyna, Dana, Bula, Esther, Nurbanu, Shah, Ismihan
.

You may indeed set above you as your king one of your brothers, and he shall not take many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away
.

The words of Ismail, in front of the mosque of Mihrimah Sultan, before he left for Bandirma: “Back in Europe, none of you can imagine that the women of the harem capable of moving money, fleets, armies.”

The words of Donna Reyna, at the military parade in the hippodrome: “There’s something common to all women who are forced to live in the shadow of a great man, weaving tapestries in the silence of a palace.”

If what the prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place, that is a message that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed
.

Don Yossef feared Sokollu, poured wine for Selim, offered a place to Solomon Ashkenazi in the aristocracy of the Island of Zion. He had managed to block communications between the bailiff, the Doge and the Grand Vizier, but he was too much enthralled by them to notice that very similar messages, rather than in the shoes of a Jewish doctor, could travel among the belongings of a Jewish doctor’s wife, with the fabrics and brocades of a Jewish businesswoman, between the breasts of a chambermaid, on the lips of a princess, between the fingers of a queen, in his own wife’s bedroom.

Dana’s words, when I had asked her about the strange relationship between Donna Reyna and her husband: “You must have noticed, Don Yossef doesn’t appreciate the attentions of women.”

Perhaps he had no idea how many women were devoting their attention to him.

34.

That night, in bed, Dana’s hand slipping under my clothes repelled me. I was irritated by her caresses, and pushed her away. It was an instinctive movement, completely uncalculated, but it fired my suspicions about the day just past. The worm was gnawing at my mind, even though it was my body taking the initiative.

She mocked me, saying that I had been wrong to refuse the halva with the cannabis resin. Over the past few days I had been in a dark mood, I needed to let myself relax, to set aside my nagging doubts.

I said no, this wasn’t the moment to set them aside, and she must have noticed something in the tone of my voice—something that troubled her and put her on her guard.

Part of me was unwilling to yield to suspicion, afraid to open a door that might reveal my nemesis waiting on the other side. But the worm needed to be crushed.

“Some days ago, after the parade, you told me you had to take charge of some matters for Reyna, but when I asked you what they were, you wouldn’t tell me.”

She nodded, surprised, as if that episode had already slipped into a corner of her mind, amongst unimportant memories, ready to be erased.

“I know you were carrying a message. I saw Donna Reyna hand it to you, and believe me, it’s very important for me to know what it was.” I looked her straight in the eyes; she grew increasingly bewildered.

“It was a letter for Nurbanu Sultan. But you . . .”

I gritted my teeth, fists clenched. I had been right. Dana was yielding, and I mustn’t ease my grip on her. “No buts: Listen to me carefully. The next time Donna Reyna gives you a message of that kind, you bring it to me right away, you understand? Even if it’s sealed I know how to open and close it without anyone noticing, without suspicion falling on you.”

“I can’t do that, Manuel. Do you realize what you’re asking of me?”

I did realize, yes, and it wasn’t anything very terrible or dangerous. I insisted, and she refused again. Once, twice. “Come on, don’t tell me you’re the only serving girl in the world who doesn’t read her masters’ correspondence.”

“I’m not a serving girl,” were the only words she managed to say, but I realized that by now she was neither startled nor frightened. She was defying me, and that gave me a pang in my heart, right in the spot where my self-love lay.

“You know why Donna Gracia denied you the honor of going with her when she went to die?”

“She wanted me to stay with her daughter,” she said in the irritable tone of someone who is being forced to repeat herself.

I gave her a joyless smile. Once I would have accepted that explanation, but now it was not enough. Not if I wanted to discover the truth. “Wasn’t it more that she didn’t want you beside her?”

She drew herself up in silence. The moon lit her face. “It’s too late to ask.”

I had struck home, I had hurt her and I was pleased. She turned again, ready to flee. I jumped from the bed and joined her. I gripped her shoulder and forced her to look me in the face. “Perhaps she didn’t trust you. Perhaps she thought you were unworthy.”

She pulled herself free. “Stop it, Manuel. I haven’t done anything to deserve these insults.”

I pretended not to hear. “Or did Donna Reyna tell you stay?”

Again she tried to leave, and again I held on to her, with both hands. “I’ve already told you,” I shouted into her face, “in this palace everyone has to answer my questions. Anyone who doesn’t deserves my suspicion, even if they stuff me with drugged cakes and slip into my bed every night.”

I studied the effect of my words. Dana looked at the floor, and didn’t resist when I raised her chin. Her black hair smelt of almonds, as it had the first time I had smelled it.

“I don’t believe in your devotion to Donna Gracia. You told me that Yossef Nasi saved you from a marriage you didn’t want, to a fat provincial bey. Since when has a harem slave chosen to be a chambermaid rather than the wife of an important imperial functionary?”

Now her eyes were filling with tears of rage, and I realized that I had crossed a line.

“Marrying a Muslim would have meant converting,” she said in a harsh voice. “Christian servants happily barter God for an easier life. I don’t change my faith as one changes one’s clothes.” She was talking about me, she wanted to return the barb, but she couldn’t hurt me. These allusions to my past life now sounded strange and distant to my ears.

“Yes, you’re not one to betray, you are true. The point is . . . to whom have you been true for all this time? Donna Reyna? Nurbanu Sultan?”

She turned her back on my sarcasm, but I held her back once more and pushed her against the wall. She slipped down and crouched with her knees against her chest, like a deer surrounded by dogs. Quivering, I bent over her, drenched in sweat and struggling to overcome my desire to strike her.

She wept in silence, not sobbing, just tears slipping down her face, bent double as if she had been dealt a fatal blow. I nodded to myself.

“Both, of course. Nurbanu sent you here to plot with Yossef Nasi’s wife. Those letters aren’t full of ladies’ gossip, are they?”

“You’re mad,” I heard her murmur.

I walked over to the window and sought comfort in the air of the Bosphorus, but it was as thick and dense as a mildewed wall. “Perhaps. And perhaps this city isn’t all that different from Venice. Back there I was betrayed by a woman. That isn’t going to happen again here.”

I heard her getting up and I didn’t turn around. She left without a sound, leaving me prey to my obsessions, my eyes lost in the night.

35.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your strength.
The kabbalist Meir interpreted that line of the
Qoheleth
as an invitation to completeness.

The will is not enough, he said, to bond with an important task. You need a soul that is all of a piece. My own had been much mended, but I hoped the Lord would grant me a new one. The soul of a raptor, which would plunge down on its prey, its instinct incorruptible by doubts or hesitations. A creature capable of seizing the body and the mind for an enterprise that waited only to be accomplished: defending Yossef Nasi from the perils that surrounded him.

When I joined him in the big drawing room that morning, he gave me a worried look. I must have looked as if I’d slept on an anthill. I set out my deductions in the clearest and most linear way that my fatigue allowed. I said that there was a chain of distaff-side relationships linking the Imperial Palace, the palace of the Grand Vizier, Ashkenazi’s house and Palazzo Belvedere. Through Dana and Esther Handali, Nurbanu had allied herself with the Jewish gentlewomen who favored Venice. We had been harboring the Lion of Saint Mark within our own walls.

Nasi listened with great attention and few questions. Then he pointed to the painting that hung above the door. The woman in the portrait looked down at us like a wise queen.

He said that he, the nephew of Gracia Nasi, would certainly not have been one to underestimate the power of women. Over the past six months, through Selim, he had given Nurbanu dozens of presents, jewels, precious books, Italian fabrics, mirrors. Anything to soften her resistance to the war. As to Reyna, he added that her rancor was fundamentally comprehensible, and she had no choice but to support him. Perhaps I was right. Perhaps she and Nurbanu were plotting behind our backs, but the war had started now, and female diplomacy was no longer a crucial weapon.

As he said this, he lowered his eyes to the mosaic of the Mediterranean that filled the whole floor. Right beneath our feet was the outline of the island of Cyprus. I asked him what he planned to do with Dana, and his reply left me flabbergasted.

“Nothing. The cannon are speaking now.”

I was speechless, and a queasy sense of unease took hold me. I took my leave and strode away.

Above the garden, a sky full of clouds. At any moment I expected to hear thunder exploding over the hills, but the storm seemed reluctant to break, and flies buzzed crazily around over the grass. My mind echoed with Arianna’s voice. “They forced me, Emanuele. Against my will.”

No, no one had forced Dana. I knew that her kisses weren’t false, or her embraces or the fluids that we had exchanged. And yet suspicion had dug an unbridgeable gulf between us. Doubt and suspicion were my vocation, but that part of me wasn’t the one I felt getting the upper hand; it was the part of me that was frightened by what I had surmised.

And there was another passage of the Scriptures, buried in memories of my life as a Christian, where Jesus says that he doesn’t pour new wine into old bottles, because the new wine bursts them and you lose both bottle and wine. I clenched my teeth in rage and turned on my heel. The rain had started falling, but I didn’t care about that. I stopped under a plane tree, holding my breath, drenched through by the summer storm, staring at the houses of Scutari and the forests of Asia.

A servant informed me that Donna Reyna didn’t want to be disturbed. I shoved him aside and stepped in. She was sitting at her desk. She wore a mauve dress, and her hair was coiled up on her head, revealing her neck. She merely stared at me, as if taking note of my presence, not even slightly surprised. She had the expression and the posture of someone who wants to get back to her business as soon as possible and will not appreciate superfluous words.

I decided to oblige her. “Did you send her to me?”

She didn’t move. “I told you: sometimes servants are freer than their masters.”

The voice was hers, but her face and body were so expressionless that it might have been another woman speaking.

“So it was her idea?”

“No, it was mine.” She leaned into the back of her chair and gave me an icy look. “Because I couldn’t come myself.”

I didn’t try to reply, I didn’t care and I didn’t want to help her read my mind.

“This is the plot that you have discovered, Signor Cardoso. The envy of a woman forgotten, forced to look at life through the eyes of a chambermaid. You men see a plot behind every coincidence, a threat behind your every uncertainty, and perhaps you’re right. And yet you need only look in the mirror to discover the weaknesses that will bring you down.”

I wanted to turn around and go, but her eyes held me back. She spoke her words clearly, as if firing arrows at my pride. “He has asked me to go to Tiberias, and I will certainly not object.” She paused, to enjoy the effect of this information. “Why are you pulling that face? By fleeing, one admits one’s guilt. You should be pleased.”

I cursed her in silence, and found the strength to leave. My soul was a fistful of shards.