The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (11 page)

Before I came to Pegu, I had seen only one stranger. A warrior, he came with the king’s men to the village the year my ears were pierced. He was tall as a ghost, and I had never seen a human so hairy—hair exploded from his head and face. I could barely see his mouth, hidden in his thick beard. He and the soldiers stopped for water and some food. If they had spent the night, I’m sure I wouldn’t have closed my eyes for a moment, afraid he would devour me like a hungry ghost. Now I am a woman, and these strangers are more odd than frightening. They waddle down the street.

They drip with sweat, their hair damp and matted like soaked dogs in an afternoon shower. They show their jagged dog teeth and turn red as raw meat when they are angry. Sometimes I want to laugh. I am sad for them—they seem so far from the Buddha.

The master of this house is a quiet man. He has pale skin, and his belly and legs are not beautiful with tattoos, as all men’s should be. But he took on the danger of my blood. What he did, he did for me and not himself.

I know some brides cry out at the pain of the first time. I didn’t, though it did hurt. I thought of the Buddha’s face. I tried to be as calm. I knew this man didn’t want to hurt me. I believe he knew the pain I felt—as if my spirit were his—and he touched my cheek to comfort me, to quiet my anxious heart. What words can I have for something that I never felt before? After he had given me the gift of his body, I lay next to him and floated away, feeling like green rice swaying in the wind. I wanted that feeling again. I wanted him inside me again. Was that wrong? Was I snared by Mara, the Evil One’s sweet song of desire? Was that the moment my husband died?

When I wake in the morning, who can I talk to? Aunt Khaing is an old woman. What will I do in the city? There are no weeds to pull, no rice to harvest.

Surrounded by this strange darkness, my heart is hollow as a bell. I know the bitter truth—this is the last man who will know my body.

I go for refuge to the Buddha.

I go for refuge to the Dharma.

I go for refuge to the Sangha.

I go for refuge to the Buddha.

I go for refuge to the Dharma.

I go for refuge to the Sangha.

I go for refuge to the Buddha.

I go for refuge…

8 March 1599

Dear Joseph,

Two days ago Win heard, through his many ears in the trade, that soldiers sent north had cleared the road of bandits, and a new group of stones had arrived. We were at the trading house the hour its doors opened. There were riches among these rough stones, and we pounced upon the best. A skilled cutter will harvest great value from the stones we secured this morning. Among the sapphires we bought is one as orange and pink as the sun swallowed by the ocean at sunset and two black as crow’s wings. Even an unschooled eye could see in the pinkish red spinels a necklace calling out for the white skin of a duchess. But it was the rubies that set our hearts pounding. They all shine, as if born of lightning. The queen among them has the pigeon-blood red color royalty so prizes. When I held the stone to the light, it glowed like a burning coal. I felt I was holding the beating heart of an angel in my hand.

This is a ruby fit for the legendary helmet of Sultan Suleiman.

When I was little and could not go to sleep, Uncle would sit on the edge of the bed and tell me the story of the sultan’s gold helmet studded with hundreds of diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies, and one enormous turquoise. His eyes sparkled as bright as its stones, and his voice grew hushed with reverence as he told me about the dozen Rialto workshops that fashioned a helmet to rival the grandeur of Alexander. I would fall asleep with its feathered plume fluttering before my drowsy eyes. Now a real stone to rival my dreams is ours.

Today I finally exchanged more than a nod with the Portuguese soldier who I think is a hidden Israelite. His name is Antonio de Bri-ho; he is from Pôrto, but he has been away so long he says his home is wherever he is paid for his services. I guess he is in his midthir-ties—his hard life has left its marks on his scarred and creased face.

If the scars on his forehead and neck could speak of their origins, I am sure they would make me tremble. I am glad I have not seen the horrors his dark eyes have surely witnessed. He is a short, squat, thick-necked man, solid as a tree trunk. His speech is blunt but not as rough as his appearance. I find his directness a refreshing change from the quiet, circuitous talk of the Peguans, who wander off the path or muddy the waters with politeness. He has been here more than a year training the king’s artillerymen in the use of arquebuses, culverins, and the newest weapons, but he has little good to say about the troops. There is no glory here for him, just silver coins for his pocket. He rattled off, like a gazetteer, the mercenaries fighting with and against Pegu—Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Tatars, Mo-ghuls, Rajputs, Persians, Javanese, Siamese, Gizares from the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, Tanocos of Arabia Felix, Andamans, Celebes, and all manner of men tattooed and pierced.

—
These are men without king or law,
he said.
They fear neither God
nor death, not like these infidels who fight like angels. They would rather
scare the enemy with the deafening sound of their infernal horns and drums
and the fusillades of arquebuses shot in the air than press the battle after
the first have fallen. These are not men who, landing on a distant shore, would set fire to their ships to show themselves ready to fight to the death.

They’re after prisoners, not land. More of these poor louts die marching in
chains through the jungle than in battle.

With a faint smile, he told me —
You and I are brothers. I barter
musket balls for silver, and you, silver for precious stones.
That smile convinced me he is one of us and knows that I know, but I will let him be the first to speak of his faith, if he still has one.

Don’t misunderstand me when I write that some days I forget that I am a Jew. I recite the Shema morning and night, bless my food, say grace after every meal, and celebrate the holy days, as best I can determine when they fall. But when I leave the four walls of the house, the tefillin put gently away in my camphor chest, there is no one to remind me that I am a Jew. No community of brethren with their expectations. No prohibitions in Gentiles’ eyes when I walk past a stall brimming with fruit. A Jesuit from Portugal has arrived, but I have seen him only at a distance, so there has been no occasion for him to spurn me.

Then there are some days when, bidden by no one’s claims or curses, I feel myself more a Jew than ever I did in Venice, surrounded by brethren in the Campiello della Scuola or praying in the dark warmth of the synagogue. I sit in the solitude of my own house and bless some strange fruit or dish Khaing has prepared and that no other Israelite anywhere on earth is eating at that moment or has ever eaten, and I feel that I am not alone. I embrace my evening prayers with my heart, not merely my mouth. Though the words of the mitzvoth make me a sinner, when I lay in the arms of an infidel bride and brush her perfumed hair from her face and touch her check to calm her trembling heart, I feel the Holy One, blessed be He, is guiding my hands and blessing me—and her—with His grace.

Some evenings deep into the night, Win and I, like students at the yeshiva, talk of life and things more sacred than stones. Wine loosens Win’s tongue, and melancholy mine. In the early evening as I walk the city streets, I hear the sounds of gongs, bells, and chimes: groups of men are practicing for a feast or a wedding or a naming celebration. The music floats from hidden courtyards, as if the stars themselves were the source of these strangely bewitching melodies.

What first sounded to my ears like the clinks and clanks of fall-ing pots is now music from the beginning of time that sweeps me away from myself. There is sadness in the melodies that summon forth images of you and Uncle and those whom I miss most. The music’s melancholy airs dampen my usual impatience at speaking about things unseen, things that cannot be touched and measured and put in the ledger.

Win enjoys our sedentary search and doesn’t seem to care if we never reach a destination or even a clearing in the jungle on our nocturnal meandering through the tangled thicket of his beliefs.

Sometimes I think he takes greater pleasure in seeing me wander off the path, entangled among the twisted vines, guiding stars blocked from view, than in drawing me to his side.

Win reads my face well. I hide my confusion and doubt poorly when he talks of his religion without a god, his prayers that aren’t prayers, his dark view of life as suffering. Strange that this comes from your long-faced cousin, this child of the plague, whom you always said was born to wear black. Of course, not yet having reached my first birthday, I do not remember when the plague took both my parents, but some of my earliest memories are of funeral bells peal-ing, a constant din of death that drove me to tears. Uncle says that streets were littered with corpses and the walls of the ghetto echoed 1with more wailing than my own. I was born of suffering, and when Ruth and the little one of blessed memory were taken from me, I wondered why God chose me to bear such trials. What had I done to deserve this pain and loss?

Win is gentle with his words but finds fault with me when I speak of my trials. I have wandered far from his faith’s teachings. —
Ab…

ra… ham
,
you speak as if your god has chosen you and only you to suffer.

You love your passing, impermanent self so much you believe suffering is your
burden alone. My dear Abraham, life
is
suffering. That is what the Buddha
teaches. Suffering is to us as water is to the fishes of the sea. It surrounds
us, it is inescapable, we live within it, and it lives within us. Where there
is life there is suffering. I am not a wise man. Even if I spoke your language better or you understood mine, I still wouldn’t be a wise man. I stumble and struggle to remember the sutras
(Joseph, these are his prayers),
and I have
not lived so well in my past lives as to have been reborn a monk in this one.

All I know is what the Buddha teaches—we live, we suffer, we die, and we
are reborn. All of us. Not you or me alone. All of us.

You know, dear cousin, I am not one who laughs easily like Leon or Jacob. I don’t walk around with a smile shining on the world, but Win’s world painted in tears seems too dark even for me. This somber presence, who sits in the corner while you and others swirl by to the music, takes on Win, not to be disputatious like a scholar, but because even I do not want to live in a world so full of suffering, so empty of meaning.

—Is that all, Win? Are we not born to love, to do duty to our family, to our ancestors, to our faith? Loving fine cloth more than man or hoarding
jewels rather than wisdom, that is not what the Holy One, blessed be He,
commands. How can our desire to hold dear those we love be anything but a good?

—
Desire is the waterwheel that churns suffering into the fields of our
lives,
Win said. —
We desire what we don’t have. We desire more of
what we already have. We cling to what we have like a crab to a stone
at high tide. Afraid we will lose what we have or restless to get more, we suffer. Desire—snuff out the flame of desire, Ab… ra… ham, and suffering will disappear like a wisp of black smoke from the candle’s wick.

—
Is a man a crab to want to shelter a child from the hurt that lurks in
the shadows of the world, to want to grow old surrounded by a wife and children and their children?

Win’s face was dim in the flickering light, and he seemed pained by the words he had to speak. —
Hurt is the world
, he said, looking at me as if I were a wayward son.

—
I will pray to the Holy One, blessed be He, to save you and all your
family from hurt.

A slight smile crossed his face.
—Ab… ra… ham, only I can
save myself. I know Massimo was not of your faith. He gave me a carved
piece of wood with a sad man on it with nails in his hands and feet. I
asked what this poor man had done to his king to be punished so harshly.

He said he had done nothing bad—that he was the son of his god and
died to save all those who believed in him. It all sounded so strange, like a
tale told to calm a child frightened by thunder and lightning. But I did not say that—I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I only spoke the same words
I speak to you. It is hard, my dear friend, but no dead man, no god, not
even yours, can save you. He can tell you, “Abraham, go here, do this,” but
it is you who must choose the way.

We and the night grew quiet. Win and I were both sleepy, and we parted down our separate paths, like friends who wave good-bye but know they will meet again. Don’t worry, Joseph, I will not return dressed in a yellow robe, but I will continue to speak with Win 1of these things. He never stands above me, wrapped in holiness, making me feel, as even some men among our own do, that only they speak to the Holy One, blessed be He, and only they are cut from sacred cloth. For Win and his kind, we are all humbler cloth,
strazzaria,
each with our flaws.

I came home to find Mya awake, waiting for my return. She doesn’t go to sleep until I have said my prayers and am ready for bed.

It is strange. Before she came, I felt I lived alone, even though Khaing slept under the same roof. Now when I lie on my mat at night, I can feel the young woman’s presence. I no longer feel alone.

Your cousin,

Abraham

12 March 1599

Dear Joseph,

You would think my adventures would bring me greater wisdom.

Yet the opposite seems to be happening. Axioms turn to questions, certainties turn to doubts, straight roads to twisting paths. Wind ripples the water, and when I look down, my reflection is broken and shifting in the fractured surface.