Altai: A Novel (9 page)

19.

I was on the deck, still under guard, but I didn’t feel like a prisoner. Exposed to the south wind, which fills the sails and makes men skittish as horses, I felt alive, ready to take on anything, lucid and alert. Efrem brought me food and we swapped some words in Ladino. The sailors talked to each other in lingua franca, and increasingly often in Turkish, as we approached our destination. I had spoken the language since my childhood in Ragusa, and I hadn’t stopped in Venice, but what I heard now sounded strange to me, mixed with Greek, and I imagined that in Constantinople they spoke yet another variant. Or rather, a hundred variants, and more.

Off the coast of Lemnos, the sailors hauled a tunafish on board. It died in the sun, struggling under their blows, amid the victorious shouts of the crew.

The first time I saw a big fish dying, I was still a little boy, in the port at Ragusa. I saw it opening its mouth and its gills, twisting and leaping. It was impossible for it to turn both eyes to the sky. One eye was dazzled by the sun; the other was pressed against the stone of the dock. Perhaps it was screaming, but its scream of death could be heard only in the world of fish, under the sea.

Or perhaps it really was mute, as they said, and this, along with having its eyes on either side of its head, was a very sad fate to endure.

When we entered the Sea of Marmara, the wind changed direction. What we Italians would call the
bora
began to blow shards of ice all the way down to the lower deck, and if you ventured up to the top it sliced the skin of your face. In Istria they say that the
bora
is born in Segna, gets married in Fiume and dies in Trieste. I didn’t know where that wind coming down from the Black Sea was born, but it seemed less tense and fierce than the furious breath of Aeolus that I knew so well, and that, in the Adriatic, would have prevented us from sailing.

The ship struggled on, impelled by oarsmen, battling against the waves and currents. The walls creaked, like scaffolding about to collapse. In the midst of this cacophony of wood, wind and foam, I could barely hear the curses of the crew, and it seemed to me that everyone was speaking incomprehensible, alien languages. I was grateful for the excellent manufacture of the Turkish clothes I had been given in Salonika: a raw-wool cap, thick breeches that reached below the knee, thick stockings. When the temperature fell still further, Efrem gave me a fur coat.

One December morning, the outskirts of Constantinople came into view. I climbed on deck, only to be welcomed by a dense blast of rain and frozen snow. Then, all of a sudden, the wind ceased. Snowflakes started falling slowly, sparse at first, then gradually in greater numbers. It was as if the running sand had slowed in time’s hourglass. I watched the snow melting on the rocking surface of the waves, then I looked at the coast, keen to give a name to places and palaces that Efrem had pointed out to me on a map.

In spite of the inclement weather, boats of every style and size clogged that stretch of sea. They were seeking shelter, heading toward the Golden Horn, the only safe landfall along the shores of the Bosphorus.

We passed by a fortress, the seven towers that gave their name to the suburb of Yedikule. A brackish stench caught my nose, a stench of death and human waste. I was being given an appropriate welcome. I looked at Efrem, who was standing beside me on the deck. He replied without waiting for questions, through a handkerchief with which he was protecting his nostrils. He said it was the tanning works. And the rope works. And the abattoirs.

The ship ran alongside the imposing walls that had enclosed the city for more than a thousand years. A veil of snow was starting to cover the roofs of the wooden houses, but even on that leaden day the gilded domes gave off light. Minarets, towers and steeples, walls enclosing seraglios, gardens were all coated in white. I caught myself counting the hills on which the Second Rome stretched, to check whether there really were seven. I counted only five, but thought it might depend on my observation point.

After rounding the tail end of Europe, the home of emperors, divinities and sultans, the ship slipped into the Golden Horn. It looked like a river estuary, so sheltered and protected, it seemed a work more of art than of nature. It was crowded with vessels of very kind. Big merchant lighters, round-bowed caïques, European carracks. On the left bank, where the Turkish city lay, ruins, the remains of a big fire, appeared like ghosts on the water. Behind them, a huge black swath of charcoal and ashes slashed through the dense network of warehouses and palaces, trees and mosques. The first layer of snow on these burnt carcasses made the scene an Apocalypse painted in black ink. Judging by the ruins, the fire at the Arsenal had been a trifle compared to this catastrophe.

I turned toward the opposite side, Galata, the Christian city, and nostalgia hit me like a sudden whiplash. I wondered if I would ever see St. Mark’s again, if I would ever again walk down the
calli
and canals of the city to which I owed everything, not least my downfall. I thought of my house, of Arianna. I saw Galata reflected in the sea, and below the surface of the water everything was transfigured. The reflection was Venice, and I had a lump in my throat. Beside me, Efrem smiled and stretched out a hand toward the quay.

“
Sobre este mar, todas las sivdades son la misma sivdad.
”

Yes, on this sea all cities are the same city. His words consoled me. As the ship approached the dock, Galata seemed to be slipping into the sea: Even though my feet had not yet stepped on dry land, by now I felt I was inside the city; I was aware of its comings and goings, the smells of its inns, the movements of its stevedores, the streets, febrile even under the falling snow.

The impression of opulence and relaxed grandeur that I had received from a distance was replaced by disappointment. The houses were small, dirty, made of wood, few of them taller than a single story, and the streets were narrow.

As the crew got to work on the cargo, Efrem asked me to follow him—me and the two guardian angels, who didn’t take their eyes off me. He had to deliver a number of letters in person, and he had to hurry before the alleyways turned into a bog.

Rough streets, dark and encased. The houses looked as if they wanted to crush us. We continued on foot, up and down exhaustingly steep slopes. Carts and coaches couldn’t pass that way, and the few horses to be seen were forced to adopt a gait even slower than ours. Now I understood the agitation of the inhabitants: They had to get their business done before the snow blocked those filthy streets entirely. Struggling along in the sludge, we met men from all parts of the world. Groups of Italians, Venetians and Genoese, red-faced Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Muscovites wrapped in fur. And turbaned Bosnians, Gypsies, Persians and Arabs, Greeks, Turks, stout Armenians. I was at the foot of the tower of Babel, just after God had confused our minds and tongues. The only people missing were the savages of the Americas.

The street opened into a square with a church looming in the middle. It struck me that there were as many churches here as there were in Venice. We passed by a group of men building a house. They went on working even in the snow, since their method of construction allowed them to do so. They had prepared a wooden framework, as you do with ships, and now, after putting on the roof, they were placing boards like ribs between one pole and another. It didn’t look very solid, and I couldn’t see whether there were stone foundations, but at least the men were working in shelter.

Efrem did what he had to do, and we went on, soon reaching a dock just outside the city, where a four-oared boat was already waiting for us. Again I found myself on the sea. The snow fell and fell, but there was no wind. Ahead of me, Asia: the place they call Üsküdar, beneath a white pall. The crossing was brief and silent.

We landed. All I could see were wooden houses, exactly like the ones on the other shore, but less densely crowded. I was led into one of these, which leaned out over the water from the top of a slope. The interior was comfortable and well decorated. Efrem got to work lighting the brazier to heat the room. After a few attempts, the faggots caught fire. He turned his usual smile on me, but this time I knew he was saying good-bye: “I have other business to attend to in town before I go back.” The idea of being left on my own wasn’t entirely consoling.

“And I’m stopping here, really?”

Efrem shook his head. “You’re not quite there yet,” he said. He walked to a side door and threw it open, revealing a covered terrace. I joined him in the doorway, looking out at the white flakes that were still falling. Beyond the gray water stretched the city. Efrem pointed to the right, where the straits continued towards the Black Sea.

“The Palazzo Belvedere is on the far shore. The Nasi residence.”

The cold forced us back inside.

“Will I meet him?”

He turned and looked at me. “If that happens, listen to him.” He nodded good-bye. “
Suerte
. . .”—he paused very slightly—“
amigo mio
.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I had learned to appreciate his sympathetic expression, but I certainly couldn’t call him a friend. He had been polite with me, more like a landlord and a traveling companion than a jailer. But he left the room and my life as lightly as he had entered them.

I was alone. I didn’t know whether there was anyone down below who might be keeping an eye on me, and I didn’t care. I stretched out on the bed, fully dressed. I felt ill, exhausted by my journey and my uncertainty. I was in the snake’s nest, close to the greatest enemy of Venice.

Giuseppe Nasi. The Damned. The Cursed One. The Devil in person. The Sultan’s favorite Jew. Also known in Europe as Juan Micas or João Miquez. I had listened to more gossip and collected more information about him than I had about the Great Turk. For years I had fought, unearthed and punished his agents. Now I was in his hands.

The bed was too high, and too soft.

I fell asleep just as dawn was breaking.

Interlude

The world traveler
Out of Europe, Rabi’al Awwal–Shabban 977

(September 1569–February 1570)

The old man rereads the letter. Marks on paper, entrusted by a woman to a commercial agent. Words that have traveled from Egypt at the bottom of a rucksack, then to the Red Sea by camel, then again on a fast ship, propelled by favorable currents, before finally reaching the shores of Arabia Felix, 2,000 miles southeast of the waters of the Bosphorus.

Mokha. City of coffee, a crossroads contested and shared by Arabs, Turks, Abyssinians, Portuguese. Mokha, theater of a rebellion, occupied for months by insurgents. The imperial fleet has just reestablished the authority of Selim II, and the rebels have fled to the high plains. They aren’t warriors; they’re coffee planters who have taken up swords and the Shi’ite faith, weary of the theft and corruption of Ottoman functionaries. A peasants’ revolt once again. Once again, the religion of beggars . . . and business.

The old man has remained. Packing up and leaving belongs to his earlier lives. At least he thought so before this letter arrived.

He looks at the signature once more, he observes its uncertain line, not firm as it once was, back when he imagined he would be by that woman’s side until the winter of his life.

Hard to say when their paths began to diverge. He remembers the day he asked her if he could follow the Nasi family’s trades from that staging post deep in Arabia. She raised no objections. She knew, she had always known, that the world traveler can’t stop, that there’s always another place to see before you close your eyes, an unknown place to be buried. That old Ismail should have taken the coffee route was written in his fate. And yet now she is inviting him to travel that same route in the other direction.
Before it’s too late.

Can words move a mountain? Because that’s the old man, a block of rock eroded by time, whom the letter wants to tease from his lair in the remotest corner of the empire.

The old man will move, but he will have to wait for winter to come, and with it the monsoon that blows to the north. The coffee caravans will come down from the mountain like snakes attracted by water, and Yossef Nasi’s ships, laden with merchandise and lined up along the jetty, will wait for the moment to leave. The pointed sails of the feluccas will travel back up the Red Sea to Suakin, the city of coral, where the barges of Suez will take on board slaves and precious spices.

Wait for the monsoon. Does that wait alone impede the journey? Or is there also the fear of confronting the past, the weight of balancing the books of a life, the fear of seeing in the death of the beloved the fear of one’s own memories?

Winter comes, and the old man can dedicate himself to his luggage. When he was younger, that ritual marked out his days.

He puts in a bag the pages written by his own hand, and impulsively touches the middle of his chest. Beneath the fabric that covers it he feels the outline of the ancient coin, carved with the credo of the kingdom of the mad: “One God, one faith, one baptism.”

His past lives are fading and he doesn’t know what awaits him. The outlines around him are blurring. So he carries his words with him, all the words he has written over the years.

That’s not enough. He also takes a fragment of mirror, to be sure that he recognizes himself at the end of the journey.

He takes his pistols and the twins, Hafiz and Mukhtar, silent and sharp as blades.

Ali Hassan announces that he will go with him. The ascetic friend of God has prepared his bag for him.

Having reached Suez, they entrust the cargo of coffee to the local agents of the Nasi family and then set off again, with a caravan of camel traders heading for Arish, where the ships set sail for the Holy Land.

At the oasis of Elim, a staging post for the Israelites fleeing the pharaoh, the old man falls ill. Ali keeps watch over him for three days and three nights of fever and delirium, and when he thinks has finally lost him, his friend recovers and they resume their march.

The journey by boat from Arish to Haifa restores his strength. God spreads out clear water and propitious winds. In Haifa they buy dromedaries, paying twice their value. Ali tries to protest, but the old man shrugs: The money is his, and fever has already made them lose precious days; there’s no time to haggle.

It’s a silent journey, as if the old man’s taciturn nature has infected everybody else.

Tiberias appears like a mirage, softened by the haze of morning. Behind the city, the lake reflects the gray of the sky. Beyond the mirrored surface of the water, the Golan Heights lead the eye to the horizon.

Outside the arch where they enter the city they have to declare their names and places of origin to a squad of janissaries, who look them up and down suspiciously. Other soldiers guard the walls and the market. The travelers leave their mounts and accept the water offered to them.

The old man climbs down from the saddle, and grits his teeth to keep from groaning. He summons his strength, grips his stick and, accompanied by the others, starts walking, surrounded by the voices, languages and dialects of every corner of the Mediterranean and the Levant.

He finds the house of Gracia Nasi without having to ask for directions. A Spanish-style building on the edge of the square stands out. At a window, a man watches them approach. The old man calls to him from the street, introduces himself, says he has come to visit Gracia Nasi.

The man narrows his eyes and looks at him for a long time, as if to assess the meaning or sincerity of these words. At last he replies, in a voice thick with sadness.

“The
Senyora
said you would come. She waited for you till the very end.”

Only a rough and wordless piece of stone marks the little mound.

The face of Yossef Ben Adret, the man who welcomes them, the administrator of the colonies, is marked by recent grief. The
Senyora
wanted this anonymous grave in the middle of all the others, so that her tomb wouldn’t become an object of veneration.

It was the peasants of Tiberias who issued the invitation, he says. When they discovered that she was ill and that God was preparing to receive her into his peace, they asked her to come and die here, in the valley where we will rise again together when the Messiah comes to save us. Recently she detached herself from the world; her thoughts were for God alone. When she passed away, a crash of thunder shook the Sea of Galilee, and a storm struck the earth with unexampled force.

“Never again will our people know a woman like her.”

The old man kneels by the grave and murmurs incomprehensible words. Ben Adret asks Ali what language he is praying in.

“He isn’t praying. He’s speaking the language of ghosts.”

Incredulous, Ben Adret asks him who the old man is. The Yemeni replies, “He is the stories he tells. When he feels like it, which he seldom does. Usually he prefers to write them down.”

And why on earth have the others come with him, all the way here? Ali points to the two Indians. “He bought them from a Portuguese galley, then freed them. They follow him everywhere.” The reply is incomplete. Ben Adret waits.

Ali puts a hand on his heart: “I’m with him because God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, gave me the task of converting him to the true faith.”

Ben Adret hasn’t time to be startled, because the old man turns and calls to him. He asks him to recite a Jewish prayer. In the silence that follows, Ben Adret utters the words. Flowing sounds, pure sounds, and even those who don’t understand them bend their heads. As the words rise towards God, they will become everyone’s words.

. . . ul’assaqa yathon l’chayyey ‘al’ma

ulmivne qarta dirushlem

ulshakhlala hekhleh b’gavvah . . .

The boats move calmly on the lake, toward the bare hills on the opposite shore. The orchards of the plain can be seen in the distance.

Once the simple ritual is over, they return to the home of the Nasis. For a long time, the old man remains locked in a dark silence. When he opens his mouth again it is to ask why it was, as they approached the city, that they saw more soldiers than sheep in the fields.

Ben Adret tells him how things are. The inhabitants of the region treat the Jewish colonists as unwelcome guests. Before the siege there were mostly Christians and Muslims there. Yossef Nasi bought their lands, their plots, their pastures. He built houses and moved the colonists into them. Recently there have been raids against the farms, and fires and threats. Don Yossef persuaded Sultan Selim to reinforce the garrison.

“If our security depends on the janissaries, sooner or later they will end up in charge,” Ben Adret concludes bitterly. “We will have to be able to defend ourselves on our own. Don Yossef should get hold of weapons, not guards. But he doesn’t want to contradict his friend Selim, and if the rumors going around are true, things can only get worse.”

Ben Adret says nothing more, but the old man presses him. What rumors? What are people saying? Ben Adret hesitates, sighs, then replies, “They are saying that Yossef Nasi wants to make himself king.”

Gracia’s room contains only a bed, a carved wooden chest and an armchair upholstered in damask, luxurious enough to look out of place. The air smells of sandalwood and incense.

“The
Senyora
wanted to give away all her surplus furniture, her clothes, her books. And her tapestries.”

Ben Adret is on his feet, standing by the door. He lets Ismail come in and touch the deathbed of the woman who let him hope for a new start many years before.

The old man moves slowly, as if afraid of colliding with invisible presences. He stops in front of a shelf on the wall that holds a Hebrew Bible and a Talmud. The latter volume looks familiar. It was printed by Usque, a bookseller in Ferrara, many years before. The name makes him smile. He limps, without using his stick, to the chest and opens it. Inside, an old brocade blanket covers a few ornaments, a rolled-up carpet and a bundle. He picks this up, unties the knot that fastens it, and takes out two volumes: a Christian Bible written in Greek and the Koran. As he puts them back in, the spine of a third, much smaller book attracts his attention:
Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Gesú Cristo Crocifisso, verso i cristiani.

In the evening, Ali finds the old man sitting in the doorway, covered with the cloak adopted by the Moors, the same color as the night. He doesn’t look sad, but weighed down by thoughts and memories. The Yemeni has never asked about the letter that has brought them there. He does so now. What was written on it?

“That she was dying,” the old man replies.
Beatriz
, as he calls her, was summoning him to Tiberias. She wanted to see him one last time.

“That’s all?”

The old man chews over his reply before giving it to his friend. Beatriz exhorted him to help her nephew Yossef at a difficult moment. Ali understands: the old man has made a decision. “We aren’t going back, are we?”

The old man huddles in the cloak. There is a debt to be honored, he says. Many years ago, the Nasi family brought him to safety when his fate was decided. At any rate, he adds, Ali is not obliged to follow him. The Arab studies the Crab fixed to the zenith of the sky.

“Well, here I am,” he murmurs. “I, too, have an undertaking to honor. To God, the Sublime and Munificent. Now you should sleep, old man. Constantinople is still a long way away.”