People of the Book (27 page)

“You false
conversos
are a dry rot, eating away at the heart of the church,” the priest said. “You pray your filthy prayers in secret and then pollute our church with your lying presence among us.” Renato couldn’t reply, either to confess or to repudiate the charges. Speech was not possible with the cloth wadded tight in his throat. The priest stood there as they inverted the ladder, poured another ewer of water, and then finally, with sudden, shocking force, tugged forth the cloth, which had penetrated to his gut. Renato felt as if his entrails were being pulled up through his throat. He had passed out, and when he came to himself, he was alone again in the cell.

Because he had not known what else to do, David Ben Shoushan had returned to his
scriptionale
and gone right back to work on the Shefoch Hamatcha, near the conclusion of the haggadah. But his mind, like his ink vats, boiled in a poisonous stew. His hand trembled, and his letters were unlovely. From inside the house, he could hear Miriam, her grief warring with her rage, as she poured out torrents of abuse on the name of his brother and shouted at poor Sparrow, who, he gathered, was trying unsuccessfully to comfort her. He had said nothing of his brother’s large mission, or the fate that now hung over all of them. His thoughts swirled from Reuben
in the house of oppression,
to their own plight
beset by enemies,
to poor little Sparrow.
Rise up, my love, and come away.
He had to find her a husband, and swiftly. If they were to take the uncertain road into exile, she would need more protection than he could give her. His mind ran through the list of possible candidates. Avram, the
mohel,
had a son of the right age. The boy stuttered, and had a squint, but his character was good enough. But Avram might not be able to overlook the taint that Ruti carried as sister to a
converso.
Moise, the
shochet,
was a strong man with strong sons, who would be better protectors, but the boys were all headstrong and ill-tempered, and as well, Moise liked money, which David would not be able to provide.

It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearted, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing “meek” with “weak.”

For Ruti had a secret life of which her father could not conceive. For more than three years, Ruti had been immersed in the study of the Zohar, the Book of Splendor. Alone, in secret, she had become a practitioner of the Kabbalah. These studies were forbidden to her, on account of both her age and her gender. Jewish men were supposed to be forty years old before they approached the dangerous realm of mysticism. Women were never thought worthy to undertake it. But the Ben Shoushan family had produced famous Kabbalists, and from the time she was a child, Ruti had been aware of the Zohar’s power and importance in her father’s spiritual life. When her father’s small group of trusted scholars had met at the house to study, Ruti had struggled to listen as they discussed the difficult text, keeping herself awake while feigning sleep.

If Ruti’s soul had a secret life, so too did her dumpling body. She could not study from her father’s books: he would never have permitted it. But she had seen the volumes she needed at the bindery, when she had taken her father’s work there. Micha, the binder, was a young man grown too soon old, with pale jowls and sparse hair that he tugged at nervously whenever his wife entered his workshop. She was frail and drab, often ill, worn out by the bearing of children, several of whom always seemed to be trailing after her, crying.

Ruti remembered the new way the binder had looked at her when she told him what she wanted. At first, she told him her father had asked to borrow the books, but Micha saw through that deception at once; everyone in the Kahal knew that David Ben Shoushan, poor as he was, owned a remarkable library. He guessed what she was about, and he knew the weight of the taboo that she was violating. If she was prepared to break such weighty rules as these, he reasoned, then perhaps there were other areas of transgression into which she might be tempted. In return for the use of the books, he had lain her down upon the soft scraps of hide fallen from the binder’s workbench. She had breathed in the rich scents of fine leather while the binder’s hands, skilled at working flesh, touched her hidden places. She had been terrified, the first time she agreed to this transaction. She had quivered when he had lifted up the rough brown wool of her smock and spread apart her dimpled thighs. But his touch had been subtle, and soon delightful; opening her up to a pleasure she had never guessed existed. When he put his tongue between her legs and lapped at her like a cat, he had brought her to a physical ecstasy akin to the spiritual one she felt on the rare nights in her cave when the letters lifted for her, and soared.

She came to think of it as right, somehow, that these two forbidden ecstasies should be linked: that her femaleness, which should have barred her from this study, actually made it possible for her; the yielding up of her now-willing flesh providing the means to acquire delight of the soul. It was because she knew the power of lust and the pleasures of the body that she had found a way to understand, if not forgive, her brother’s betrayal of his family and his faith. She believed if her father had been less exacting and less rigid, had hinted to Reuben earlier on the mysteries and beauties of the Zohar, her brother would not, could not, have fallen into the thrall of another faith.

But Reuben had been raised by the letter of the law. Every day, he hunched over the
scriptionale,
doing only the most routine of work, with his father always finding fault. She could still hear her father’s voice, always calm, never raised, constantly critical: “The space in the middle of the letter
beit
should be exactly equal to the width of the top and bottom lines. Here, on this line, see? You have made it too narrow. Scrape it off and do the page again. Reuben, you must know by now that the lower left corner of the
tet
is squared, the right corner rounded. You have reversed it here, see? Do the page again.” Do it again, and again, and again.

Never once did her father open the door for Reuben to the glory that swirled in the dark ink. Her own mind was incandescent with it. Any tiny letter was a poem, a prayer, a gateway to the splendor of God. And every letter its own road, its own special mystery. Why had her father not shared some of this with her brother?

When she thought of the letter
beit,
it was not of the thickness of lines or the exactitude of spaces. It was of mysteries: the number two, the dual; the house, the house of God on earth. “They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.”
In them,
not
in it.
He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence. Just a single, tiny letter, and in it, such a path to joy.

In time, Ruti’s heart had opened to the bookbinder, and affection had grown between them. When the bookbinder had suggested some clandestine code they could use when either of them desired the touch of the other, she had proposed the letter of union,
beit.
She would see it scrawled on a corner of one of her father’s bills, and know that Micha’s wife was gone from the house. She would add it to the notes of instruction her father sent to the bindery, to say without words, if other customers were present, that she had time and would not be missed at home if she tarried. She wondered if Reuben had also had a secret signal with his beloved, a mark on a tree, or a cloth placed just so. It would have to have been something like that, for Rosa, like most Christians, could not read.

Reuben had lived for the moment, at the end of every day, when he was finally released from the
scriptionale
to go and run errands. Ruti had watched the way he sprang up, suddenly alive. And she had noticed how a certain errand increasingly brought a smile to his face and a special spring to his step.

When he had been sent to buy olives or oil from Rosa’s father, how could he not have noticed the daughter who was also ripening? Ruti could guess exactly how it had come about, though her brother would never have thought to taint what he believed were her innocent ears with confidences about his physical passions.

After the conversion, the marriage, and the estrangement, Ruti and her brother had met by chance in the marketplace. She knew she was supposed to ignore him, as if he were just another Gentile stranger to be passed with lowered eyes. But her heart could not be schooled so. She let the crowd carry her toward him, and under cover of the press of bodies, she reached out and grasped his hand. How different it felt, how coarse it had become, released from the pen to serve the pruning hook. She squeezed it, pouring all the affection she could into the gesture, before hurrying away.

The next time, a couple of weeks later, he was ready for her. He pushed a note into her palm, imploring her to meet him. He had named the place; south of the town, Esplugües.
Esplugües
means “caves,” and this dry white hillside was riddled with them. One in particular, deep and hidden, had been a favorite retreat of their childhood. Later, he had brought Rosa to it during the secret days of their courtship. He did not know it was the same cave Ruti used now for her clandestine studies. Their first meeting was strained: much as she loved him, she could not help blaming him for the pain and disgrace he had brought upon her family. But her brother was a good man, she knew that in her heart, and most of the kindness she had felt as a child had come from him, not from her querulous mother or her abstracted father. Soon, they met there weekly. On the day he told her news of the baby, due in the springtime, he wept.

“It is only when you are to be a father yourself that you finally know what it is that your own father feels for you,” he whispered. Ruti pulled his head into her lap and stroked her brother’s hair. His voice was muffled. “Does he never speak of me?”

“Never,” she said, as gently as she could. “But I believe that not an hour goes by when he does not think of you.” She ran her hand over the bleached, pitted stone. The place reminded her of bones, an ossuary forged of the remains of unloved dead. The hectic flesh of her ruddy palm was so impermanent, after all. They would all be dead, soon enough, their bones sucked dry, porous as lace. And who would care then that her brother had let a priest dribble water on his forehead and say a few Latin prayers? Ruti, in this very cave, had felt the presence of God. She had trembled before an immanence that would scorch away the water and suck the very breath from the priest’s mouth.

It was at that moment that an idea occurred to her. How harmless it seemed, to give her brother that memento of shared hours between a father and a son, standing together before God.

“I could bring you something,” she said. And the next week, she did.

David Ben Shoushan looked around impatiently for his daughter. “Sparrow!” he called. “I need you, girl. Do make haste, for once, and stop your dawdling.”

Ruti tossed the scrubbing brush into the pail and rose from her hands and knees, rubbing at the place where the tiles had bitten into her flesh. “But I haven’t finished the floor, Father,” she said softly.

“Never mind that, I have an errand that won’t wait.”

“But Mother will be—”

“I will manage your mother.” There was something furtive in her father’s manner that Ruti had never experienced before. His eye was on the street door. “I need you to take this packet to the binder. He has my detailed instructions already. He knows what to do with it. The book must be ready to present to Don Joseph when he returns. They are expecting him in time for Shabbat. Now go, daughter, and be quick. I don’t want to give the rogue an excuse for tardiness.”

Ruti moved to the well. Quickly but with care, she washed and dried her hands before she took the packet, wrapped in a piece of cloth. Her father’s hand, usually so steady, was trembling. As she felt the shape of the fabric-wrapped metal, she recognized it at once. She had polished it often enough, nervous lest she drop it or damage the silver filigree. It was the one precious thing in the household. Her eyes widened.

“What are you staring at? The work does not concern you.”

“But this is the scroll case from Mother’s
ketubah
!” she exclaimed. The
ketubah
itself was the most beautiful Ruti had seen. David had made it himself, the young
sofer
entranced by the idea of this bride, whom he hardly knew, writing every letter of every word of the marriage contract as a perfect tribute to the woman he believed then would be his soul mate. When his own father had seen the work, he had been so proud of his son that he had spent more than he had intended to buy a fine case for it.

“Father,” squeaked Ruti, “you can’t be meaning me to give this in payment to the binder?”

“Not in payment!” David’s own guilt and uncertainty made him terse. “The haggadah must have worthy covers. Where else would we get silver to embellish it? The binder has found a smith from outside of Tarragona who will do the work for nothing because he wants to recommend himself to the Sanz family. He is waiting at the bindery, so go now. Be off with you!”

He had first thought of selling the
ketubah
case as part of the ransom for his son. But the case was inscribed with the word of God, and to sell it to a Christian who would melt it down for coin silver was shameful, probably sinful. Yet at the heart of his faith was a fundamental teaching, that the saving of human life should take precedence over all other
mitzvot,
or commandments. Then he saw the way. He could use the silver to embellish the haggadah, so that the sacred would remain sacred. Surely then so fine a gift would open the hand of his brother. How could it not do so? David had convinced himself of this. It was the one slim hope to which he clung. With extreme annoyance, he noticed that Ruti was still standing before him, holding the packet out as if to give it back to him.