People of the Book (30 page)

The light flared on a forlorn, bruised figure. Rosa sat with her back to the rock wall, her knees pulled up hard to her chest. Her nightdress was smeared with blood and other fluids. She mouthed the word
water
through cracked lips, and Ruti quickly held the skin to her mouth. Rosa swallowed too much and a second later was bent over, heaving. In the midst of her vomiting, another contraction seized her.

Ruti tried to control her own fear. She had only the most vague idea of how infants came into the world. Her mother had been reticent about matters of the body, considering that Ruti did not need to know such things until she was betrothed. The Kahal was crowded, its homes pressed one against another, so she had heard the cries of laboring women and knew it was a painful, sometimes dangerous, business. But she hadn’t conceived of so much blood and excrement.

She looked around for something to wipe the vomit from Rosa’s face. All she could find were the pungent cloths in which she had wrapped some dry cheeses for her sustenance during the long nights of study. When she brought these near Rosa’s face, the girl heaved again. But this time there was nothing left to vomit.

The night stretched on. The pains came, in the end, without respite. Rosa screamed until her throat was too raw to utter more than a rasping cry. Ruti could only bathe Rosa’s forehead and cradle her shoulders through the spasms. Would this baby never be born? She was afraid to know what was happening between Rosa’s legs, but as the girl began to scream and flail in a new agony, Ruti reluctantly moved from her position and knelt in front of this woman, whom her brother had loved so much. The thought of him, and the agonies he might very well be undergoing even at the same moment, gave Ruti a kind of courage. Gently, she eased Rosa’s knees apart and gasped with a mix of awe and panic. The baby’s dark crown was forcing its way against taut, straining skin. With Rosa’s next contraction, Ruti overcame her fear and touched the head, trying to position her fingers so that she might grasp the small skull and ease its passage, but Rosa was too weak to push. For minutes, an hour, there was no progress. They were all three of them trapped. The infant in the unyielding birth canal, Rosa in her agony, Ruti in her dread.

She moved on her hands and knees close to Rosa’s battered face. “I know you are tired. I know you suffer,” she whispered. Rosa groaned. “But there can be only two endings to this night. Either you find the strength to push this baby out or you will die here.”

Rosa howled and raised a hand in a weak attempt to strike at Ruti. But the words moved her. When the next spasm slammed her, she mustered what little strength remained in her body. Ruti saw the crown of the head straining, the flesh tearing. She cupped her hand around the head and eased it out. Then the shoulders. All in a rush, the baby was in her hands.

He was a boy. But the long struggle to be born had been too much for him. His tiny arms and legs flopped limply in Ruti’s hands, and no cry came from his still face. With distaste, Ruti hacked at the cord with her small knife and wrapped the infant in some cloth she had torn from her own mantle.

“Is he…is he dead?” whispered Rosa.

“I think so,” said Ruti somberly.

“Good,” breathed Rosa.

Ruti rose up from her knees and carried the baby away to the back of the cave. Her knees stung from the pressure of the stone, but that wasn’t why her eyes filled with tears. How dare a mother rejoice in her own infant’s death?

“Help me!” Rosa cried. “There’s something—” She screamed. “It’s the monster! It’s coming out!”

Ruti turned. Rosa was squirming, trying to crawl up the wall away from her own afterbirth. Ruti looked at the glistening mass and shuddered. Then she remembered the cat that had birthed her kittens in a corner of the courtyard, and the messy afterbirth that had followed. Stupid, superstitious Christian whore, she thought, giving vent to all the anger and jealously she felt for this woman. She laid the limp bundle down, took a step toward Rosa, and would have struck her, if the bruises on her face, visible even in the dim lamp light, had not called on her pity.

“You grew up on a farm…. haven’t you seen afterbirth before?”

Ruti’s anger and grief made further conversation with Rosa impossible. Without speaking, she divided the few supplies in the cave—the cheese, the bread and water she’d had from Micha. Half she set beside Rosa.

“Since you care so little for your son, then I do not suppose it is any great matter to you if I bury him according to Jewish rites. I will take the body and see it into the ground as soon as Shabbat ends at sunset.”

Rosa let out a great sigh. “Since he isn’t baptized, it makes no difference.”

Ruti tied her small bundle of provisions in what remained of her mantle. She slung this over one shoulder. Over the other, she placed a sack that contained a small packet, carefully wrapped in layers of hides and tied up with thonging. Then she reached for the body of the stillborn child. The baby moved in her hands. Ruti looked down and saw the eyes of her brother, warm, kindly, trusting eyes, gazing back at her, blinking. She said nothing to Rosa, who had curled herself up into a ball and was already halfway to exhausted sleep, but passed quickly out of the cave. As soon as she was on the path, she descended as fast as was safe with her burdens, fearful lest the child should cry and give away the secret that he lived.

On Sunday, just after the noon bell, all across Spain, royal heralds sounded a fanfare, and citizens gathered in town squares to hear a proclamation from the king of Aragon and the queen of Castile.

Ruti, dressed in the manner of a Christian woman, in ill-fitting clothes she had pilfered from the box in Rosa’s bedroom, made her way through the gathering crowd in the fishing village’s main square until she was close enough to hear the herald. It was a lengthy text, setting out the perfidies of the Jews and the insufficiency of measures so far taken to stop their corruption of Christian belief.

“Therefore we command…all Jews and Jewesses, of whatever age they may be, that live, reside, and dwell in our said kingdoms and dominions…by the end of the month of July next, of the present year 1492, they depart from our said kingdoms…and that they not presume to return to, or reside therein, or they shall incur the penalty of death.” Jews were not to leave with gold or silver or gems; they had to pay all outstanding debts but were not in a position to collect any monies owed to them. Ruti stood there, as the hot spring sunshine beat on her unaccustomed head covering, and felt as if the world had cracked wide open. All around her, people were cheering, praising the names of Ferdinand and Isabella. She had never felt more alone.

There were no Jews in the village, which was why Ruti had chosen to walk there after taking what she could from the Salvador
masía.
She had not considered it theft, as the things she took were for the support of the Salvadores’ grandchild. In the village, she had sought out a wet nurse, concocting an implausible story about her sister having been lost at sea. Fortunately, the woman was ignorant and dull, and did not question Ruti’s account, or why a woman just delivered of a newborn should have been at sea at all.

As the crowd dispersed, singing and crying out slanders against the Jews, Ruti stumbled across the square toward a fountain, and sat down heavily on its stones. Every path before her was a road into the dark. To go home to her mother was to put herself in the hands of the Inquisitors. To carry on the tenuous pretense of being a Christian was impossible. She had fooled a dull peasant woman, but when she had to find lodging or buy food, the flimsy nature of her story would almost certainly be exposed. To become a Christian—to convert, as the monarchs urged all Jews to do—was unthinkable.

Ruti sat there as the afternoon waned. Anyone who looked closely at the dumpling girl would have seen that she was rocking gently, back and forth, as she prayed to God for guidance. But Ruti had never been the kind of girl that people noticed.

Finally, as the slanting light turned the white stones orange, she arose from her place. She pulled off the head cover of a Christian woman and discarded it by the fountain. From the sack beside her she drew out her own scarf and her surcoat, marked with the distinctive yellow button of a Jew. For once, she did not lower her eyes as she walked through the square, past the staring Christians, but held their gaze and returned it with one of anger and resolve. And so she made her way to the dockside shanty where the wet nurse waited with the baby.

When the sun had set and darkness sheltered her from the eyes of the curious, Ruth Ben Shoushan walked into the sea, the nameless infant tight against her breast, until she stood waist-deep. She unwrapped him, throwing the swaddling cloth over her head. His brown eyes blinked at her, and his small fists, free of constriction, punched at the air. “Sorry, my little one,” she said gently, and then thrust him under the dark surface.

The water closed around him, touching every inch of his flesh. She had a firm grip around his upper arm. She let go. The water had to take him.

She looked down at the small, struggling form, her face determined, even as she sobbed. The swell rose and slapped against her. The tug of the receding wave was about to pull the infant away. Ruti reached out and grasped him firmly in her two hands. As she lifted him from the sea, water sluiced off his bare, shining skin in a shower of brightness. She held him up to the stars. The roar in her head was louder now than the surf. She cried out, into the wind, speaking the words for the infant in her hands.
“Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.”

Then she drew the cloth from her head and wrapped the baby. All over Aragon that night, Jews were being forced to the baptismal font, driven to conversion by fear of exile. Ruti, exultant, defiant, had made a Gentile into a Jew. Because his mother was not Jewish, a ritual immersion had been necessary. And now it was done. Even as the emotion of the moment brimmed within her, Ruti was counting up the days. She did not have very long. By the eighth day, she would need to find someone to perform his brit. If all went well, this would be in their new land. And on that day, she would give the child his name.

She turned back toward the beach, hugging the baby tightly to her breast. She remembered she had the book, wrapped in hide, slung in a shoulder sack. She pulled on the straps to raise it out of the reach of the waves. But a few drops of saltwater found their way inside her careful wrappings. When the water dried on the page, there would be a stain, and a residue of crystals, that would last five hundred years.

In the morning, Ruti would begin to look for a ship. She would pay the passage for herself and the baby with the silver medallion that she had pried off the leather binding, and where they made landfall—if they made landfall—would rest in the hand of God.

But tonight she would go to her father’s grave. She would say the Kaddish and introduce him to his Jewish grandson, who would carry his name across the seas and into whatever future God saw fit to grant them.

London, Spring 1996

I
LOVE THE
T
ATE.
I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit. I went straight, of course, to the Sharansky. I had a compulsion to look up all his works. I knew the Tate had something by him, and I knew I must’ve seen it, but I couldn’t remember the painting. When I finally found it, I knew why. It’s not very memorable. Small, early, hardly hinting at the power of the other things that were coming. Typical Tate, I thought. Get the Aussies on the cheap. Still, it was his. I stood there, thinking: My father made it.

Why
hadn’t she told me? At least I would have grown up with this, which is not nothing: the ability to look at the beauty he left behind. To feel pride in my father, rather than the undertow of shame that had always pulled at my thoughts about him. As I gazed at the picture, I wiped at my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater, but it was no good. Big tears just kept welling up. Standing there, with a class of English schoolkids dressed in kilts and blazers swarming around me, I lost it. I started to sob. First time in my life it had happened to me. It freaked me out. I started to panic, and that had made it worse. Great big embarrassing, overwhelming sobs. I backed up against the wall and tried to brace myself against it while I struggled for self-control. It didn’t work. I felt myself sliding slowly down until I was a puddle on the floor. I crouched there, my shoulders shaking. The Brits gave me a wide berth, as if I were radioactive.

After a few minutes, one of the guards came up to me and asked if I was ill, and did I need help. I looked up at him, shook my head, and gulped air, trying to stop the sobbing. But I couldn’t get a hold of myself. He crouched down beside me and patted my back. “Somebody died?” he whispered. His voice was very kind. Strong regional accent. Yorkshire, maybe. Yes, I nodded. “My father.”

“Ah, well, then. That’s hard, luv,” he said.

After a while, he held out an arm, and I took it, and together we scrambled awkwardly up. I stammered thanks, then I let go of his arm and stumbled through the gallery, trying to find my way to the exit.

Instead, I found myself in the room with all the Francis Bacon paintings. I stopped in front of the one I’ve always loved best. It’s not a really well-known one and they don’t always hang it. There’s a man, walking away, sort of leaning into the wind, while a black dog does a tail-chasing swirl in the foreground. It’s somehow ominous and innocent at the same time. Bacon just got the dog thing. Absolutely nailed it. But this time, looking at it with my eyes all teary, what registered with me wasn’t the dog at all. It was the bloke. Walking away. I stared at it for a long time.

The next day, I woke up in my Bloomsbury hotel room feeling light and washed out. I’ve always been suspicious of people who advocate a good cry as a remedy for anything. But I really did feel much better. I determined to focus on the conference. There were actually a couple of useful papers, if you could overlook the twit accents of the people delivering them. The art world in England is an absolute magnet for the second sons of threadbare lords, or women named Annabelle Something-hyphen-Something who dress in black leggings and burnt orange cashmeres and smell faintly of wet Labrador. I always find myself lapsing into Paleolithic Strine when I’m around them, using words I’d never dream of using in real life, like
cobber
and
bonza.
In the United States, it’s the opposite. Despite my best efforts, I really have to watch myself or I fall right into what they call “linguistic accommodation.” I start losing the
t
out of
water
and plopping down a
d
instead, or start saying “sidewalk” and “flashlight” when I mean “footpath” and “torch.” I guess I resist it more diligently in England because Mum has always affected a kind of plummy, haut-Pom accent I associate with her snobbery. When I was little, she’d actually wince when I talked to her. “Really, Hanna, your vowels! They sound like a lorry has run over them. Anyone would think I was sending you off to the western
suburbs
every morning instead of the most expensive crèche in Double Bay.”

To pull myself out of the funk I’d allowed myself to fall into, I decided to focus on the haggadah catalog essay. What with all the drama back in Boston, I’d fallen behind on the writing, and the printer’s deadline was closing in. A journo friend, Maryanne, who was back visiting her family in Oz, had offered me her cottage in Hampstead, so as soon as the conference was over, I holed myself up there for a couple of days. It was a fantastic little wooden house beside a lumpy graveyard, with deep blue ceanothus and climbing roses cascading over mossy garden walls. It was an old house, creaky, with hobbit proportions—low doorways and wavy ceiling beams that looped down to brain the unwary. Maryanne was short, unlike me. Woe to anyone over five feet ten—which was the height of the kitchen ceiling. I’d been to parties there where the tall guests spent all night hunched over, like furtive gnomes.

I thought I’d better call Ozren and let him know where I was at with the essay, but when I rang the museum, the assistant librarian answered with a terse, “Not here.”

“When are you expecting him?”

“Exactly, I do not know. Maybe here after tomorrow. Maybe no.” I tried his apartment, but the phone rang into empty space. So I just got on with it. I liked writing in Maryanne’s little study, a tiny room under the eaves at the top of the house. It had great light and a view all the way across London. On rare days, when it wasn’t raining or misty or too polluted, you could see the outlines of the South Downs.

I was pretty confident about the essay. While I hadn’t come up with the big drumroll discovery I always hoped for, I felt that the insights about the
Parnassius
and the missing clasps broke new ground. I was leaving the finishing touches till after I’d checked out the white hair sample I’d extracted from the binding. I’d asked Amalie Sutter about it. She’d said I could have any number of zoologists at the museum look at it. “But the people who really know hair—animal, human—are the police.” She thought a forensics lab would be the place. Having read rather too many P. D. James novels, I’d decided to leave it till London. I had a fancy to see how the real thing squared with the fiction.

Lucky for me, Maryanne had really good contacts at the Metropolitan Police. She was a contributing editor at the
London Review of Books
, and had written a lot about Salman Rushdie, right after the Iranians threatened to top him. She’d been one of the few people Rushdie had trusted enough to see regularly during the worst years, and she’d wound up getting seriously involved with one of the blokes in his Scotland Yard detail. I’d met him once at a party at Maryanne’s—he was definitely a kitchen croucher since he was about six-two and a gorgeous specimen, even when scrunched. He’d finagled an appointment for me at the Metropolitan Police hair-and-fiber lab. “It’s against policy,” Maryanne warned me, “so you’ll need to be discreet about it. But apparently the lab person was just really intrigued by the story about the book and she wanted to do it for you on her own time.”

I was also keen to know if Ozren had had a chance to follow up on the
Parnassius,
on checking out which mountain village the haggadah had been hidden in during World War II. If he had any more info, I wanted to include it in the essay. Generally, these kind of essays are dry as Lake Eyre. Very technical, like the report by the French guy in Vienna, Martell. Full of riveting stuff like how many quires there are and how many leaves per quire, the state of the binding threads, the number of sewing holes, and so on, and on, ho hum. I wanted this one to be different. I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful. So I wrote and rewrote certain sections of historical background to use as seasoning between the discussion of technical issues. I tried to give a sense of the
Convivencia,
of poetry parties on summer nights in beautiful formal gardens, of Arabic-speaking Jews mixing freely with Muslim and Christian neighbors. Although I couldn’t know the story of the scribe or the illuminator, I tried to give a sense of each of them by explaining the details of their crafts and what medieval pavilions of the book were like and where such artisans fitted into the social milieu. Then, I wanted to build up a certain tension around the dramatic, terrible reversals of the Inquisition and the expulsion. I wanted to convey fire and shipwreck and fear.

When the writing stalled, I called up the local Hampstead rabbi and quizzed him on salt—What made it kosher? “You’d be surprised how many people ask me that,” he said, a trifle wearily. “Generally speaking, it’s not the salt that’s kosher, it’s the fact that it’s the right kind of salt for koshering meat—brining it, in other words, to get the traces of blood out, because Jews who keep kosher don’t consume blood.”

“So what you’re saying is any salt with a large crystal structure could be kosher salt? It doesn’t matter if it’s mined rock salt or evaporated from the sea or what?”

“That’s right,” he said. “And also it should have no additives. If it had, say, dextrose, which is added to some salt along with iodine, that would be an issue at Passover, because dextrose comes from corn.”

I didn’t bother to get him to explain to me why corn wasn’t kosher at Passover, since I was pretty sure no one was adding dextrose to any salt that would have been used around the haggadah. But I did use the fact that the salt stains came from sea salt as a way into describing the haggadah’s sea voyage, probably at the time of the expulsion, working in quotes from some vivid contemporary accounts of those terrible forced journeys.

I’d got as far as Venice, the Jewish community there in the original ghetto, the pressures of censorship in general and on Jewish books in particular, the threads of commerce and culture that bound the Jewish communities of Italy with those across the Adriatic, the suggestion that the book might have come to Bosnia with an Italian-trained cantor named Kohen. I was so engrossed in the writing—it can get that way, on good days, when you fall down a rabbit hole and the rest of the world disappears—that I almost exploded when the doorbell rang.

I could see a courier’s van parked in the lane and I went down to open the door, unreasonably pissed off that some package for Maryanne had broken my concentration. But what the courier had was an envelope for me, from the Tate. I signed and opened it, wondering what it could be. Inside was an express letter that had already been forwarded once, from Boston. The damn thing had been chasing me around the world.

I slit the envelope, curious. Inside was a copy of an ambrotype and a screed in flamboyant handwriting from Frau Zweig. The photo was of a man and women, formally posed—she seated, he standing behind with his hand on her shoulder. Someone, Frau Zweig, I assumed, had drawn a circle around the woman’s head, which was turned in three-quarter profile. An arrow pointed to her earring.

Frau Zweig’s letter had no preamble, no salutation. It was the written version of a squeal.

“Check it out!!!

“Is the Frau wearing part of our missing clasp??? Remember Martell’s description of the wing??? Turns out Mittl died of arsenic poisoning just after he worked on the haggadah. He had the clap (like at least half the citizens of Vienna!) and this Frau’s husband, Dr. Franz Hirschfeldt, was his clap doctor. I was only able to find all this because they actually TRIED Hirschfeldt for Mittl’s murder. He got off—he was only trying to help the guy—but the case has been written up a lot lately as part of our long-stalled soul search into Austrian anti-Semitism.

“Call me when you get this!”

Of course, I got right on the phone.

“I thought you’d never call! I thought, I know Australians are laid back, but how blasé can she be?”

I explained about the letter, and how I’d just that minute received it. “Now, if we can only find the other piece—the roses. I’m still on the hunt, believe me. It’s MUCH more fun than anything else I have to do here….”

I glanced at my watch and realized that if I didn’t hoof it, I was going to miss my appointment at the Yard. I blathered an effusive thanks to Frau Zweig and shrugged on a jacket as I tried to find the number of a cab. I was way too late to get there on the Tube. While I waited for the cab to show up, I tried Ozren again. I wanted to tell him the news about the clasps, and also maybe have a little brag to him about how well the writing was going. The assistant at the museum was as brusque as she’d been the day before: “Not here. Call back.”

I’d ordered a gypsy cab because London black cabs have gotten ridiculously expensive. I almost had a seizure on the way in from Heathrow when the meter for the trip hit the equivalent of a hundred Australian dollars and we weren’t even out of Hammersmith. The cab that turned up was a shabby gray van, but the driver was a great-looking West Indian, with wonderful long dreads. The van smelled faintly of ganja. He gave a textbook double take when I said where I wanted to go.

“You Babylon, mon?”

“What?”

“Are you filth?”

“Oh. You mean a rozzer? No way, mate. Just visiting the rozzers.”

He stopped a couple of blocks short of the actual address, anyway. “They got sniffer dogs there, mon,” he explained. Since he charged me only ten quid for a trip that would’ve set me back about sixty in the black cab, I didn’t complain, even though it was raining. The rain in London isn’t like the stuff in Sydney. There, it doesn’t rain a whole lot, but when it does, you know about it: big, lacerating downpours that turn the roads into cataracts. In London the drizzle is more or less constant, but it’s hardly even worth putting up your umbrella, it’s so fine. I’ve actually won quite a few drinks from people in London, betting on which of the two cities has the higher average rainfall.