People of the Book (20 page)

A hard hand, the Brighella’s, landed on his own. Aryeh looked up, startled. The eyes behind the other man’s mask were black, the pupils dilated. “No
gentleman
quits the game after having the advantage of the deal.”

“Quite right,” slurred the Pulcinella. “Not done, making off with a man’s money. Think more of gold, do you, than of having a good time? Not the spirit of Carnivale. Not a gentleman. Not even a Venetian, I’ll wager.”

Aryeh flushed deeply beneath his mask. Did they know? Had they guessed? By raising the issue of “otherness,” the drunken Pulcinella probed very close to the vein. He withdrew his hand from under the Brighella’s and placed it over his heart. He stepped back from the table and made a deep bow. “Gentlemen,” he said, in his soft, lilting, unmistakably Venetian accent. “Forgive me. A momentary lapse, merely. Truly I do not know what I was thinking. By all means, let us go on.”

For the next hour, the game continued, each man winning and losing in his turn. Aryeh judged that enough time had passed, and once again made to leave the table. Once again, the Brighella stayed his hand as he reached for his still-significant winnings. “Why such a hurry?” the low voice said. “Do you have a tryst?” And then his voice dropped even lower, and the bulbous mask loomed closer. “Or do you have a curfew you must keep?”

He knows, Aryeh thought. Beneath his cloak, he began to sweat.

“Give us one hand more, at decent stakes, Mr. Plague Doctor! A hand in friendship, eh?” The Brighella reached beneath his cloak then and laid a full purse upon the table. Aryeh, his hand shaking now, pushed all of his winnings forward. The fear of loss—intense, delicious—overwhelmed him.

The Barnabot nobleman had the deal again.
“Uno. Due. Tre…”

Aryeh’s head felt light.

“…Otto. Nove…”

He was finding it hard to breathe through the mask. His heart thumped and banged in his chest. He was about to win again.

“…Fante. Cavallo…”

The exhilaration and the terror held him in their delicious, equal grip. And then, the terror won, pulling him down, smothering him, as the Barnabot turned over a king. The roar in Aryeh’s head muffled the sound of the syllable slowly forming on the noble’s lips.
“Re!”

The Barnabot reached for the pile of gold and swept it to himself, bowing slightly in the direction of the Brighella.

“Now, dear Doctor. Now you may leave us, if you are so very tired of our company.”

Aryeh shook his head. He could not leave. Not now. He had lost not only his winnings, but a full half of his stake. One of Doña Reyna’s purses lay flaccid and empty at his side. He had been determined to wager one purse only. Half to gamble, half to spend on the needs of his flock. That was what he had told himself. But now he fumbled at his other hip for the second purse. As his fingers closed on its reassuring bulk, Aryeh felt as if he were bathed in radiance. He felt complete conviction that the magical luck of the early evening was with him again. Not his own hand, but the very hand of the divine will directed him as he pushed the full purse forward upon the table.

For once, even the impassive face of the Barnabot registered emotion. The eyebrows rose to the edge of his frosted wig, and he gave an almost imperceptible bow toward Aryeh. Then he began to deal.

Aryeh had just a few seconds to feel the exquisite pleasure-pain to which he was enslaved. The card that cost him the purse was an eight. The round vowels of the word
otto
seemed to fall from the Barnabot’s lips and merge with the curved infinity symbol of the number itself, elongating into a tunnel that seemed to suck the soul from the rabbi.

He stared in disbelief at all that gold, pushed into gleaming towers on the dealers’ side of the table. He raised a hand and called for a quill. He shook as he wrote a note for another hundred sequins. The Barnabot nobleman took the note between two fingers, glanced at it, and shook his head in silence. Aryeh felt the blood rise, scalding, to his scalp.

“But I have seen you play with a loser upon his word to the value of ten thousand ducats!”

“The word of a
Venetian
is one thing. Why don’t you go to a Jew bloodsucker if you want credit.” He let the note fall to the floor.

There was a sudden silence at the nearby tables. Masked faces turned in unison, a flock of buzzards sensing carrion.

“A Jew!” the Pulcinella slurred. “’Splains it. I knew he was no Venetian!”

Aryeh turned, knocking over his wine goblet, and stumbled from the salon. In the room of sighs, a whore reached out a fleshy arm, attempting to pull him down upon her couch. “What’s the rush?” she said, her voice low and seductive. “Everyone loses sometimes. Sit with me and I’ll make you feel better.” Then she raised her voice. “I’ve always wanted to taste a circumcised one!” He shrugged her off and staggered down the stairs to the street, humiliated by laughter closing behind him like water.

In the gray light of the sanctuary, Judah Aryeh pulled his tallis over his head and bowed low before God. “I have trespassed, I have dealt treacherously, I have robbed….” Tears wet his cheeks as he rocked forward and back, reciting the familiar words of the prayer of atonement. “I have acted perversely, and I have wrought wickedness, I have been presumptuous, I have framed lies and I have spoken falsely…I have committed iniquity and I have transgressed…. I have turned away from your commandments and judgments that are good, and it has profited me naught. What shall I say before you, who dwellest on high, and what shall I declare before you, thou who abidest in the heavens? Dost thou not know all things, hidden and revealed? May it therefore be thy will, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, to forgive me, to pardon my iniquity, and to grant atonement for my transgressions….”

He sank down upon a bench, exhausted and heartsick. God might forgive sins against his laws, but Aryeh knew—he had preached it often enough—that forgiveness also must be sought from, and atonement made to, those who had been damaged by sinful acts. He thought with despair of returning to Reyna de Serena to confess his deception. And of the humiliation he must face before his own congregation. He would have to admit to taking the bread from the mouths of the hungriest, the medicines from the dying. And then he, poor man that he was, would have to make good the sum he had stolen. This would require the most stringent economies. He would have to pawn his books, perhaps even move the family to cheaper quarters. With six persons in two small rooms, their home was hardly lavish, yet one of the rooms had a window, and both high ceilings. Aryeh thought about the cheaper alternatives: the
shochet
had shown him a lightless, one-room place hard by his butchery that he had on offer for very fair terms. Privately, Judah had called the place the cave of Makhpelah, but he had promised to keep it in mind if any in his congregation was in need of housing. Rooms were in such short supply in the Geto that even such grim quarters at a fair rent would find many takers. But how could he ask Sarai to move to such a gloomy place? And his daughter, Ester, who worked at home, how would she have space for her bolts of cloth and seamstress bench? How could she sew without daylight? The sin was his, not his family’s. How could he make them suffer so?

Aryeh rubbed his hands over his cheeks. His flesh, in the growing light, was gray and haggard. Soon, the minyan would begin to gather. He would have to prepare a face to greet them.

He left the sanctuary and descended to his rooms. The aroma of frying told him that Sarai was already up. Usually, Aryeh loved the crisped frittatas she made, hot and golden brown. He would sit at the crowded table with his three sons and his beloved daughter, and let their babble and banter flow around him. But this morning the scent of the hot oil assailed him. He felt ill.

He steadied himself against a chair. Sarai was working with her back to him, her hair caught up modestly in a fine wool scarf she had knotted fetchingly at the nape of her neck. “Good morning,” she said. “You were up before the birds….” She turned to glance at him over her shoulder, and the smile on her lips turned to a concerned frown. “Are you ill, husband? You look so pale….”

“Sarai,” he said. But he could not go on. His oldest sons stood together in the corner, making their morning prayers. The youngest, who had completed his, was already at the table with his sister, enjoying their frittatas. He could not speak of his shame before them, even though soon enough the whole Geto must know of it.

“It is nothing. I could not sleep.” That last, at least, was true.

“Well, you must rest, later. You need to be refreshed to greet the Bride Shabbat.” She smiled. For a husband and wife to make love on the Sabbath was a commandment, and it was one requirement of the faith that both of them observed with joy. He gave a weak smile back, and then turned to pour a basin of water. He splashed his face and wet his hair, then replaced his
kippah
and climbed the stairs to the sanctuary.

The minyan had already gathered in the pale light. In these times, thought Aryeh, it was all too easy to gather ten. An outbreak of plague, not quite one year earlier, had claimed so many lives that above twenty eldest sons still came to pray each day, marking their season of sorrow, reciting the prayer for their dead.

Aryeh made his way to the bimah. A blue velvet cloth, the color of midnight, lay across the table. It had been sewn by his daughter when she was still a little girl. Even then, her stitching had been fine and even. But the cloth had grown shabby now, like almost everything in the little room. Aryeh had worn the nape off the velvet at the places where his hands gripped the bimah. This did not trouble him, any more than the benches that wobbled or the floor that rippled unevenly underfoot. These things were signs of use, signs of life, evidence that human beings came here, many of them and often, trying to talk to their God.

“Magnified and sanctified may his great name be….” The voices of the mourners rose as one. Kaddish had always been one of Aryeh’s favorite prayers—the prayer for the dead that did not mention death, or grief, or loss, but only life and glory and peace. The prayer that turned its face away from burial plots and moldering remains and set its eyes on the firmament: “May a great peace from heaven—and life!—be upon us and upon all Israel, and say all, amen! May he who makes peace in his high places make peace upon us and all Israel, and say all, amen!”

Aryeh did not linger after the morning service. He exchanged just a few brief words with his congregants on the way out. Neither did he remain at home, where he feared the intuitive scrutiny of Sarai’s loving gaze. He left her, still cooking, calmly preparing the food they would eat that night, and the next day, for on Shabbat itself no work would be done. When he left, she was patiently peeling apart each onion, layer by layer, inspecting the pieces with meticulous attention lest the tiniest insect lay within. To eat such an insect, even by accident, would be to violate the commandment against consuming any of those living things that swarm.

Aryeh made his way to the home of a
strazzaria
dealer who had prospered enough to set aside part of his house as a library. Because Aryeh had tutored the man’s sons, he had been invited to use the room for his own quiet study. There, he carefully unwrapped Doña de Serena’s haggadah, which he had protected in a piece of linen cloth. If he were to go to her to confess his lies and theft, at least he would not go empty-handed. He would read the book carefully to determine if it was safe to submit it to the Holy Office, and if so, he would take it to Vistorini that very day. With luck he would be able to retrieve it, with the necessary words safely inscribed, and visit Reyna de Serena after the Sabbath.

He eased the silver clasps open. What a place must Sepharad have been that the Jews who lived there could make such a book as this! Did they live like princes, these Jews? They must have done, to afford such an amount of gold and silver leaf, to pay such craftsmen as the silversmith and artists of the rank of this illuminator. And now, their descendants wandered destitute over the face of the earth, looking for any safe place that would allow them to lay down their heads in peace. Perhaps there had once been many books like this one, just as fine, all ashes now. Gone and lost and forgotten.

But he could not afford to give in to lament, or to bedazzlement. No good wondering about the illuminator—surely a Christian? For what Jew would have learned to make images such as the Christians made?—or about the
sofer,
who had inscribed the text in such a lovely and accomplished hand.

These stories, intriguing as they were, he had to put from him. Instead, he had to put himself into the mind of Giovanni Domenico Vistorini, a hunter’s mind, fierce in pursuit of the slightest hint of heresy. A suspicious and perhaps a hostile mind. Aryeh hoped that Vistorini, the scholar, would appreciate the book for its beauty and its antiquity. But Vistorini the censor had burned so many beautiful books.

So Aryeh turned the pages of illumination until he arrived at the first pages of Hebrew text. “This is the bread of affliction….” He began to read the familiar story of the Passover as if he were encountering it for the first time.

Vistorini raised the glass to his lips. Not bad, the wine the Jew had brought him. He did not recall drinking kosher wine before. He took another swallow. Not bad at all.

No sooner had he set his glass down than the Jew reached for the wineskin and refilled it. He noted, with pleasure, that it was a very large wineskin, and that the Jew’s own glass stood, barely touched, glowing red in the low afternoon light. He would have to draw this business out, that would be the wise thing. For, once he had said what he proposed to say, the Jew would leave, and likely take his wineskin with him.

“This book of yours, are there many like it, hiding under bushels in your Geto?”

“None that I have ever seen. Truly, I think very few such books have survived from the community of Sepharad.”

“Whose book is it?”