Mr. Mani (44 page)

—Is he listening?

—The Lord be praised.

—But how was I silent? And again, Doña Flora: why was the silent one me? All last winter I prayed for some word from you. The lad was already dead and buried, and our own lives were as dark as the grave, because at the time, madame, his seed alone knew that it had been sown in time. And since I knew that the news would travel via Beirut to Constantinople on the dusty black robe of that itinerant almsman, Rabbi Gavriel ben-Yehoshua. I hoped for a sign that it had reached you. I even entertained the thought that the two of you would hasten to Jerusalem with tidings of strength and good cheer, for I knew that the lad had been dear to you. You took him under your wing ... you indulged him and foresaw great things for him ... you lay him beside you, madame, in His Grace's big bed...

—No, there will be no tears...

—Perish the thought ... God save us ... I will not upset him ... I will speak as softly as I can...

—Not a whimper ... God forbid...

—If there is a lump in my throat, I will swallow it at once.

—At once...

—Of my own free will ... of course, Dona Flora ... I do not deny it...

—I would never pretend that the thought of bringing the boy to you was not mine. He was a present that I made you to keep from losing you, a wedding gift for your most surprising and wondrous marriage that shone in heaven as resplendently as the saints...

—I was afraid that you would rebuff me once more, madame, as you already had done ... and so I hurried to bring the lad to you as a whole-offering ... just as my poor father did with me in his day...

—To be sure. And now suddenly he was a young man ... already a groom, with God's help ... although that match made in Beirut with your motherless niece from Jerusalem was entirely your own doing, madame ... fully your own conception...

—In truth, it had my blessing ... of course it did ... and more than that ... it had my love ... what wouldn't I have done not to lose you? I mean, not to lose His Grace, my only master and teacher, who commands my loyalty “more than the love of women”...

—He understands. He is listening and understands...

—No, I am not crying. No, madame, this time you are wrong. I have not the tail-end of a tear left.

—Once more “vanished”? But even if I did, it was not for very long. I was not, after all, the first to disappear, but the last. Before me came your motherless fiancée, and after her, my only son Yosef. Both were lost in Jerusalem and I went to look for them, not in order to become lost myself but in order to bring them back, although in the end there was nothing to bring...

—The infant, Dona Flora? How could you think of it? Perish the thought! For what purpose?

—Take him and his mother away from Jerusalem?

—But why? After all that went into giving Jerusalem a baby Moses, why take him away from there? And where to? Who would take responsibility for him?

—But how? You amaze me, madame. What would you do with an infant when you are in such perturbation?

—How? You already have an infant of your own, this holy and most venerable babe that needs to be fed and looked after, to be washed and changed and have its every thought guessed—why should you wish for another? Surely, you do not expect them to play together, hee hee...

—His Grace, hee hee...

—But look, Doña Flora, look,
mí amiga,
he is laughing without any sound ... hee hee hee hee ... he is listening ... he understands everything ... in a twinkling he will...

—Señor ... my master and teacher
caríssimo
Rabbi Shabbetai...

—I am not shouting ... but look,
cara
doña, the rabbi is nodding his head ... he is in high spirits ... I know it ... I feel it ... I always knew how to make him merry. Why, back in the good old days, I would cross the Bosporus, go straight to his house, take a carving knife, wrap myself in a silk scarf, and dance the dance of the Janissaries, may they rot in hell...

—No, not one tear ... there are none left...

—I am in full control.

—In truth, my dearest doña, I am in an agitated state. You are looking at a most distraught soul ... do not judge me harshly ... just see how you alarm me by speaking thus of the fatherless infant, whom you crave to have with you. As if it did not already have a faithful young mother at its side! And not only a mother, but a home, the home you yourself grew up in ... and your brother-in-law Re'fael, who has little children of his own ... and Jerusalem itself ... why make light of Jerusalem, the city of your nativity, which is shaking off the dust of centuries now that Christendom has rediscovered it and given new hope to its Jews? Why make them pick up and leave all that? And for where? And how do it without a father? Because there is no one to take a father's place...

—No, no, madame. I myself will soon be gone. True, it is written, “A man liveth will he, nill he,” but still, yes, still, a man dieth sometimes when he willeth ... You will yet hear of me, madame. “Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh used to say, ‘The best hope of man is the maggot.'” Ah! Señor ... let him be my judge ... he will do me justice! Would he wish me to remove mother and child from Jerusalem?

—What say you?

—Ah!...

—Did he sign me?

—And what meant it?

—Ah! You see ... thank you, señor! Did I not say?...did I not know?...was I not right? No one knows the rabbi's soul better than I do! I may not have studied much with him, for my poor head is a thick one—a pumpkinhead, that was what he called me—but I never stopped studying
him
I know him better than you do, madame, and I say that with all due respect ... because I have known him for ages ... no, do not be cross with me, Doña Flora ... when you frown like that and bite your lip, I am reminded of our faraway Tamara, our motherless, widowed young bride. I beseech you, Doña Flora, be good enough not to be angry, or else the tears will begin to flow again. Since losing my only son, I am quick to cry ... grief comes easily to me ... it takes but a word ... the least breath is enough to shatter me...

—But...

—As long as I can be here, on this little footstool, sitting at his feet. “Better a tail to the lion than a head to the fox.”

—She has recovered completely, Doña Flora. She bears herself well...

—Of course she is nursing, although not without some assistance. Her left teat went dry within a few days and left her without enough milk, and the consul made haste to send her an Armenian wet nurse who comes every evening with a supplement, for he heard say that the milk of the Armenians is the most fortified...

—In truth, he is a good angel, the consul. He has not withheld his kindness from us, and how could we have managed without him? We have been ever in his thoughts since that black and bitter day. He remains unconsoled for the loss of our Yosef, on whom he pinned great hopes.
Baby Moses
he calls the infant in English, and he has already issued him a writ of protectorship as if he were an English subject. Should he ever wish to leave Jerusalem for England, he may do so without emcumbrance...

—Little Moshe.

—In the Rabbi Yohanan ben-Zakkai Synagogue. Tamara dressed
baby Moses
in a handsome blue velvet jersey with a red
taquaiqua
on his head, and Rabbi Vidal Zurnaga said the blessings and performed the circumcision. The cantors sang, and we let the English consul hold and console the child for his pain, and Valero and his wife Veducha handed out candies and dough rings—here, I have brought you in this handkerchief a few dried chick-peas that I carried around with me for weeks so that you might bless them and eat them and feel that you were there ... may it please you, madame ... the consul and his wife blessed and ate them too...

—And here is one for him too, my master and teacher ... a little pea ... just for the blessing...

—No, he will not choke on it ... ‘tis a very little pea...

—Ah! He is eating ... His Grace understands ... he remembers how he used to bring me “blessings” from weddings, how he woke me from my sleep to teach me them ... now I will say it for him! Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who createth all kinds of food.

—Amen.

—He cannot even say the amen for himself ... ah, Master of the Universe, what a blow!

—No, I will cry no more. I have given my word.

—Of course, madame. God forbid that my tears should lead to his. But what can I do, Doña Flora, when I know that no matter how dry-eyed I stand before him, he—even as he is now—can read my soul! The great Rabbi Haddaya understands my sorrow. I have always, always been an open book to him...”like the clay in the hands of the potter”...ah, Your Grace...

—Slowly but surely ... for I am not yet over my departure from your Jerusalem, madame, which is a most obdurate city—hard to swallow and hard to spew out. And hard too was my parting from the young bride, my son's widow and your most exquisite ward. But most impossible of all, Doña Flora, was parting from the infant Moshe, who is so sweet that he breaks every heart. If only madame could see him ... if only His Grace, my teacher and master, could have seen
baby Moses
in his circumcision suit, his blue blouse and red
taquaiqua,
peacefully stretching his limbs without a sound, without a cry, sucking his thumb, meditating for hours on end ... did I say hours? For whole days at a time, in a basket on the back of a horse...

—A most excellent consular horse, madame, which bore him and his mother from Jerusalem to Jaffa.

—I should bite my tongue!

—'Twere better left unsaid.

—In truth, on a horse. But not a hair of his was harmed, madame. He reached Jaffa in perfect condition.

—What winter? There was no sign even of autumn. I see you have forgotten your native land, Dona Flora, where “summer's end is harsher than summer”...

—Even if there was a touch of chill in the mountains, it did him no harm. He was wrapped in my robe, my fox fur that I brought from Salonika, and well padded in the basket, most comfortably and securely...

—Indeed, a tiny thing, but flawless. We miscalculated, she and I. Our parting was difficult, and so we longingly prolonged it until obstinacy led to folly...

—No, there was no guile in it; ‘twas in all innocence. When we reached the Jaffa Gate and she saw me standing there, endlessly dejected, amid the camel and donkey train that was bound for Jaffa, she said to me, “Wait, it is not meet that you leave Jerusalem in sorrow, you will be loathe to return”—and she went to the consul's house and borrowed a horse to ride with me as far as Lifta. By the time she had tied the basket to the horse and wrapped the infant, the caravan had set out. We made haste to overtake it, and soon we were descending in the arroyo of Lifta—and the way, which at first seemed gloomy and desolate, quickly grew pleasant and attractive, because there were vineyards and olive groves, fig trees and apricots, on either side of it. When we reached the stone bridge of Colonia, there was a pleasant sweetness in the air. Jerusalem and its dejection were behind us, and perhaps we should have parted there—but then she insisted on continuing with me to Mount Castel. She thought she might catch a glimpse of the sea from there, for she remembered being taken as a child to a place from where she had glimpsed it. And so we began to climb the narrow path up that high hill. In the distance we spied my caravan, lithely snaking its way above us, and there was a great clarity of air, and the voice of the muezzin from the mosque at Nebi Samwil seemed to call to us, and we cried back to it. But we had no idea that thé ascent would take so long or that the approach of darkness was so near, and by the time we reached the top of the hill there was not a ray of twilight left, so that whatever sea was on the horizon could not be seen but only thought. My caravan was slowly disappearing down the slope that led to Karyat-el-Anab, and all we could hear from afar were the hooves of the animals scuffing an occasional stone. What was I to do, Doña Flora? Say adieu there? I did not want to return with her to Jerusalem, because I knew that I then would have no choice but to become an Ashkenazi, and I had no wish to be one...

—Because I was down to my last centavo and all out of the spices I had brought from Salonika, and had I returned to Jerusalem as a pauper, I would have had to join the roster of Ashkenazim to qualify for the dole they give only to their own. And that, Your Grace,
señor y maestro mío,
I was not about to do—would His Grace have wanted me to Ashkenazify myself?

—He would not have, madame, even if he chooses to keep silent. I know him well enough to know he has his doubts about them.

—'Twas no effort, Doña Flora. We were riding now at a fair clip and were over the top of Mount Castel, I on my mule and she on her horse, with nothing but bare hills around us. Even Nebi Samwil was lost in the gloom, not to mention Jerusalem, which had been gobbled up by the mountains. I knew I had left the Holy City for good and would return to it only with the Messiah at the Resurrection, may it come soon! Meanwhile, we had to find lodgings for the night and a wet nurse for our Moshiko. And so we rode, no longer in any great hurry, down toward Karyat-el-Anab, and near Ein-Dilba we came across a shepherd and inquired about a wet nurse, and he gave a great shout into the silent night to a
compañero
of his in Abu-Ghosh, and a shout came back from afar. We headed on in its direction and soon found both midwife and caravan in a large stone house beneath the village of Saris.

—No, madame. Why should there have been rain? The earth was still dry and the air was perfectly clement. It had a great clarity that lured one on—it made the vast countryside seem very near.

—A dream, madame? A dream?

—A sturdy, blond-haired village wet nurse, who gave
baby Moses
his dessert. We put him to sleep between us, protected from night crawlers, and in the morning, when I was sure that now she would bid me farewell and return with a caravan ascending to Jerusalem from Beit-Mahsir, she suddenly swore that she would do no such thing until she had seen the sea that I was about to embark on. And so we climbed to the top of the hill and saw the sea from afar, and I thought, “Now her mind has been set to rest,” and I took my leave —yet it seemed that not only did the sight of the sea not assuage her, it increased her concern even more, because as I was hurrying down to join my caravan, madame, along a horribly winding and dizzying track in Wadi Ali, what did I hear like a far echo in that precipitous silence?