Mr. Mani (50 page)

 

With your permission, I will lock the door, because perhaps madame will try to enter nonetheless. And the court must brook no interruption in its labors—is that not what Your Grace taught me when Jews came to seek redress in your home in Constantinople and you shut the door to keep me out? Yes, that's better now, isn't it? And we will stir some life into the fire, because Your Grace is wet and the blanket is damp too. How could they have bound and swaddled you so? With your permission, we will free you a bit. Can this be, ah, can it be the Strong Arm of the Law that presided over an entire age? If I am hurting Your Grace, let him move his strong arm...

 

In actual fact, the case is not at all difficult. The defendant has already brought in a verdict of guilty and given himself the maximum sentence. He simply does not know if this will atone for the crime or if it will only compound it. Or to put it differently: will I have a share in the World to Come—even the tiniest share—no more than a peephole through which to see the honor bestowed there on Your Grace and to say to whomever will listen, “I too knew the man”?

 

Is that better? Here, let me rub your back a bit too, to help the lazy blood circulate. Does Your Grace remember how he taught me as a boy to scratch his back? There, that's better. The
muy distinguida doña
swaddled you too much. Her worry made her overdo it, the poor thing. The ties need to be loosened some more. There was a time, señor, I won't deny it, when I thought of madame as a kind of trust that Your Grace was safekeeping for me, for she had held out against marriage and had no father to impose his will, and I thought that Your Grace was merely trying to tame her. And indeed, I added a son to tame her even more—until little by little it dawned on me that the trust was not meant for me. And yet even when Your Grace forbade her to join me on my journey to Jerusalem, I still supposed that this was only because he wished us not to jump to any hasty conclusions. It was not until I saw my son's anguish in the port in Jaffa as I stepped out of the ship by myself, and watched him producing Jews who did not know yet they were Jews on our way to Jerusalem, that my understanding began to grow by leaps and bounds—and each leap and each bound leaped and bounded still more when I entered their little house and saw madame's motherless niece for the first time, the Jerusalem damsel who had been betrothed in Beirut. Did Your Grace have any idea of the fascinating, the frightening resemblance between them? Why, she is the very image of Dona Flora, just thirty years younger and fresher, a thing of beauty!

 

Perhaps, señor, we should massage the soles of your feet a bit too, both the good foot and the bad one. What made your
cara rubissa
wrap you in so many layers? As if it were not enough for her to feed you with a spoon, she has to diaper Your Grace like a baby! Perhaps she really thinks she has given birth to you, hee hee. With your permission, let me poke the fire a bit and untie you, and then I will tell you a one and only story, a story of sweet perdition—because even if Your Grace realized there was no seed there, you could not have realized that
there could not have been
any seed there, that is, that no answer was given because no question had ever been asked. For by that same secret light that shone from the snow that now was draping the walls and streets of Jerusalem like a newly grown beard on an old man, the time had come to know that there was a truth that came before the truth...

 

Here? Or does it feel better here?...Let us return from the funeral on the Mount of Olives and sit the two mourners, the widow and the father, next to each other on pillows, across from the coal-burning stove, their feet unshod and their tunics slashed. Rabbis Franco and Ben-Atar did their tactful best to ease us into the week of mourning, so that it might enfold us and warm us and cushion the bleeding wound. We were fed dough rings and raisins, and given hard-boiled eggs that are round and have no beginning or end, and gently taught the laws of mourning word by word. The consul, his wife, and their attendants sat pityingly around us, quite chagrined that they too could not slash their clothes, pull off their shoes, slump down on the floor, and eat the never-ending egg. They too grieved greatly for the lad and felt anguished by his death—and perhaps guilty, too, for having plied him with dreams that were too much for him. By the door of the crowded little dwelling, between old Carso and a Turkish gendarme, I was distressed to notice,
señor y maestro mío,
the young sheikh from Silwan, who had returned with us from the cemetery to continue weeping for his friend and join the circle of comforters. And perhaps he too, señor, was asking the unasked question that haunted everyone and made all eyes sear the young woman who sat dressed in black, shivering by the coal-burning stove In the several hours that had gone by since the death she had as though grown older and even more alike our Doña Flora ... ah!...

 

... Assuming, that is, that it were possible, that the resemblance were not already perfect, that it could have been even greater—because I have already told you, señor, that we both were innocents when we failed to look more deeply into that betrothal in Beirut and to take the necessary precautions ... But be that as it may, the evening prayer was concluded, and I bitterly sobbed the kaddish one last time, and the comforters wept along with me, and I saw Refa'el Valero rise to go, and his wife Veducha put a towel over the tray of food she had brought, the
mahshi, kusa,
and
burekas,
and went to join him, leaving Tamara with me—for such is the custom in Jerusalem, that once a mourner has eaten of the never-ending egg, he or she does not leave the house they are in. It was getting dark, and one by one everyone left,
even that murderer,
who rose and said good night as sweetly as you please. No one stayed behind but old Carso, who was assigned to chaperone us; he sank down between us, warming himself by the stove, his mouth open as if to gulp its heat. And all along I felt Tamara's eyes on me, as if she wished to tell me what my soul was too frightened to ask. The night dropped, slowly. The snowflakes drifted outside, red in the moonlight. Old Carso fell asleep by the stove, taking what heat it gave all for himself. Until,
señor y maestro mío,
I woke him and sent him respectfully home. And even though I knew it was a sin for a man and a woman to be left alone by themselves, I did not lose my presence of mind, for had I lost my presence of mind over a little sin like that, how could I ever have gone on to a much greater one...

 

The fact is, Shabbetai Hananiah, that your silence suits me and that I find it most profound. I only wish that I could be as mute as you—that I could declare: I have said all I have to say, señores, and now you can make what you like of it ... although since no one ever particularly listened to me anyway, no one would notice my silence either. But still, my master and teacher, I pray you not to cast me yet out of your thoughts. All I am asking from you is a nod or a shake of your head, a yes or a no, in accordance with your sentence. I already know the verdict. ‘Tis but the sentence I require.

Well, señor, the stove went out early, because the coals brought by the consul's men were damp and would not catch. It grew colder and colder. I watched her keep going to the closet and take out more and more clothes to put on, but although by now she looked like a big puffball, she could not stop shivering. She even would have put on her husband's Hebron cloak, knife holes and all, had I not made haste to offer her my fox-fur robe, which she took without hesitation and draped over herself. And still the cold grew worse. I too kept donning layer after layer, and finally I wrapped myself in the bloody cloak and looked like a big ball myself. We went from room to room and bed to bed, two dark balls reflected by the moonlight from the looking-glasses, in which you could not tell which of us was which. Jerusalem had shut its gates for the night: no one came, no one went. It was as silent outside as if we were the last two people on earth, alone in the last vestigial shelter, each in his or her room, each on his or her bed, each looking at the other in the looking-glass. The candle was burning down in my hand, and before it went out altogether I blurted, “My daughter, I wish to comfort myself with the child that you will bear, and so I will stay here until the birth, that I may know that I am not the world's last Mani.” And she, in my fox robe, a furry ball on her big bed, answered as clear as a bell: “You are the last. Do not stay, because there is nothing, and will be nothing, and was nothing, and could have been nothing, since I differ in nothing from the woman I was, as you have guessed since you entered Jerusalem. We never were man and wife, for we could not get past the fear and pain. Not even my father knows. I am still a virgin.” At that, Rabbi Shabbetai, my heart froze. I was so frightened by her words that I quickly blew out my candle lest I see even her shadow...

 

But, my master and teacher, although her shadow disappeared, she herself remained sitting there, and the shadow of the disgrace left behind by my dead son fell upon us both and yoked us together. In truth, I wept to myself, I have failed as I knew I must. The marriage could not be shored up, and the lamb slaughtered too soon now lay on the Mount of Olives, his disgrace unavoidable at the hands of whoever married his widow. I was full of a great sorrow and a terrible wrath, Rabbi Haddaya—sorrow for my son, who lay naked beneath earth and snow, and wrath at Doña Flora, at our beloved madame, who had brought this misfortune upon us. And it was then that I thought of the words of Ben Bag Bag, who said, “Turn it and turn it, for all is in it, and in it you shall find all.”

 

Now you are gaping at me. At last I have been able to unsettle you—I, your
pisgado,
I, your faithful, your dull, your charmless little
pustema.
Do you think,
maestro mío,
that you might sound another one of your “tu tu tus” to let me know where I stand with you? I remember you, sitting as a boy by the hearth in Salonika with my father, may he rest in peace, an old seafarer from the islands grumbling about Napoleon. Out in the hallway I heard them whispering, “He is a great mind but a most wondrous bachelor; there is none like him.” And when I lived with you in Constantinople and saw how winning, how blushing and guileless, your bachelorhood was, I lost my heart to you. And then my father passed away and we were forced to part. You resumed your journeys in the east, traveling as far as the Promised Land—and there, in Jerusalem, you met Doña Flora and were no more insensitive than others to her charms. And in the goodness of your heart you thought of me, for I had newly lost my wife, and when Doña Flora journeyed to Salonika, you thought of me again. Was it only of me, though? Or was I no more than a pretext? For why, when madame rejected me, did you wed her secretly in a faraway place to the astonishment of your disciples? You, who were so guileless, so blushing, so pure—what was the purpose of it? What end did it serve? There in Salonika, I tormented myself thinking about it. I grieved and was jealous until, able to stand it no longer, I made you a gift of my boy—who, I thought, might unriddle for me the secret of your most wondrous and resplendent marriage. And in truth, he seemed close to doing so, for so Doña Flora, that most wondrous and fearsome woman, wished him to be. For first she introduced him, half a boy and half already a young man, to your bed, my master and teacher, and then she betrothed him to her niece in Beirut, her look-alike motherless virgin of a widow from Jerusalem, whose shadow,
señor y maestro mío,
was slowly being beamed to me from the looking-glass in the moonlight that now broke through the clouds ... does Your Grace remember?

 

So you see, this then was the meaning of the
idée fixe
(I am whispering lest madame be listening impatiently on the other side of the door, for she has been most suspicious of me since the moment I arrived at this inn.) This then was its meaning—for why else would he insist on his surreptitious visits to those unwashed Ishmaelites just as they were dropping off to sleep—why would he think them forgetful Jews, or Jews who would remember that they were Jews—if he had not,
señor y maestro mío,
already upon arriving in the wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem, been quite simply overwhelmed by his loneliness—a loneliness that only grew greater when he first glimpsed the ramparts and cloistering gates of that obstinate desert city of stone, in which he was awaited by his motherless Beirut fiancée, the look-alike of his adored madame? That was what made him decide to see a former Jew in every Ishmaelite! And yet, señor, or so I often asked myself, this fit of loneliness—was it only because he had been so pampered by you in Constantinople? Everyone knew how shamelessly your madame spoiled him there—why, he would barely appear in the morning at your academy long enough to propose some unheard-of answer to some Talmudic question and already he was off and away to the bazaars, across the Golden Horn to the bright carpets, the burnished copper plates, the fragrant silk dresses fluttering above the charcoal grills and the roast lambs, adored and smiled at by everyone, so that it was perhaps this very coddling that later made him afraid of the solitude that possessed him. Or could it be that he was only coddled in the first place because even then his manliness was in doubt, which was why he so amiably—so mildly—so casually—sought to enlist those drowsy Ishmaelites in the procreation that he himself could not affect from within himself? Are you listening to me, Shabbetai Hananiah? You must listen, for soon I will be gone. The best hope of man is the maggot, says Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh...

 

And yet why should he have doubted his manly powers already then, as he was wending his way through the savage wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem with the slow caravan, or as he glimpsed from the Little Oak Tree the ramparts and spires of the city written like a sentence in letters whose language was no longer known to men? Why did he not rejoice to see his bride, who had come in all innocence with her kinfolk to a family wedding in Beirut and been trapped there by her aunt's love, if not for his fear of hurting the look-alike of the one woman he ever loved, half a mother and half an older sister, to whose very scent he had been bound since the days he tumbled in your giant bed, Rabbi Haddaya, a thousand times forbidden though it was?