The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (13 page)

When I returned home in the late morning, Mya was tending the garden. She had a cloak over her shoulders to protect herself from the sun and the mosquitoes flitting among the vines, leaves, and petals of the flowers and spices she was tending. In Venice, I paid no attention to the orphaned flowers that gulped for slivers of sunlight on windowsills and boxes under Auntie’s care. Here flowers bloom and blossom unattended. I could lie down in the garden and awake in the morning entwined with vines, my hair garlanded with wild-flowers like some Greek god. Son of the Ghetto, I am ignorant of much of nature’s handiwork and can name only a few of the flowers and plants that grow in the garden. I do know that it’s orchids that Mya graces with much attention. She stood tending an orchid that grew from among some thick vines hugging a bamboo trellis. Its scalloped yellow petals dotted with purple looked like an aureole of golden butterflies floating about her head. I sat on the steps watching her, and she must have sensed my presence. She turned and smiled and asked if I wanted some sugarcane juice she had pressed that morning, but I told her to keep on in the garden. My eyes were thirstier than my throat and drank up the sweetness of her graceful movements. One of the flowers fell to the ground, and she picked it up and put it behind her ear with a simple swoop of her hand. Not to please me, I think, though it greatly did.

Mya served me a simple midday meal of rice, dried fish, greens flecked with bits of chili pepper, and a few mangosteens. I couldn’t imagine a duke more contented with life than I. The kingdom’s troubles, which cast a cloud over the success of our enterprise, seemed for the moment distant as the sands of Babylon.

Mya came to take away the banana leaves on which I eat, and I did something—or rather, did not do something—whose import I find curious. This afternoon as Mya crouched on her knees to pick up bits of rice dropped on the floor, a mosquito alighted on the back of my left hand. I glanced at it. My eyes caught Mya watching me. I waved my hand and the mosquito flew away. I am certain that she gave me a slight smile before getting up. I stayed my hand, not because Win had said it was wrong to take the life of a living creature—even if that creature lacked thought or feeling and intended to do me ill—not because that creature could have been some ancestor reborn in vile form for an evil he had committed, and not because I might be condemned to a hell where I would be crushed over and over between rams big as mountains. I did it because Mya asked me to do it with her eyes. I did it not to disappoint her. Isn’t it odd, Joseph, that I wanted to be the man this young girl thought I was, or should be?

I go to bed wondering about Mya’s strange effect on me.

Your cousin,

Abraham

Abraham—he says I should call him Abraham—has asked me to teach him our language. He knows many words already, but he says he wants to learn more. He asks me to name things. Some of the words I think he already knows: they are words for children.

Lips, cheeks, neck, arm, hand. Sometimes he points. Sometimes he touches me. I think he wants to hear my voice. I think he wants to touch me. He says that he will teach me the language of his country—the language he and Win speak. I told him I would like that and I pointed. He said “chest.” I said, no, inside. “Heart,” he said, and smiled. It made me feel good to make him smile.

Some nights when I am combing my hair, I feel him watching me. I turned once to see him staring, and his face reddened and he looked away—like a shy, young boy.

I can’t write like Uncle Win or move numbers like he can. But some things I know. I have planted rice since I was a little girl. I was too small to stand in the water when my mother first took me to the field, and I sat on high ground watching her and the other women.

No one said, This is how you know this field will be richer in rice this year than last. No one said, These shoots will grow sturdy, like the king’s guards, and these sickly, like an orphan wandering in the forest. I just knew. The soul of the rice speaks to me. I know which shoots will thrive, which will wither, even if all around them grow strong. When harvest time came and I cut them one stalk at a time with my finger knife, I thanked them for growing full and tall, as I knew they would.

I can’t read the words Abraham writes, and I know only a few of the words he speaks. But I know this: he is a special man.

4 April 1599

Dear Joseph,

Forgive me that I have been derelict in my letter writing. It isn’t that words have deserted me—like a kettle atop the stove, my heart bubbles with words, so many that my pen can’t capture them. Eight nights ago Mya fell asleep in my arms for the second time, but for the first time I slept with a woman out of choice, not obligation or expectation.

I walked back from Win’s after a long night talking of spiritual matters and the World to Come. These followers of Buddha, merchant or street sweeper, love to talk of these things. The stars seemed closer and brighter than even in the middle of the ocean. The moon, a day or two shy of fullness, shone like a beacon. Believe me, I hadn’t come back with any plan to take her into my bed. I didn’t realize until later how much I had already taken her into my heart. Usually she doesn’t lay her mat down outside my room until I have gone in for the evening. This night she must have grown tired waiting. She was already sleeping when I returned. Strips of moonlight through the shutters lit her face. Something—I believe without blasphemy it was the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He—directed me to crouch before her as I stared at her face, gentle as a child’s. Lying on her back, she turned, still asleep, to face me, and as she did, the sarong, doubling as a sheet under which she slept, slipped from her shoulders. I reached down to cover her from the evening air, and without opening her eyes, her hand reached out and grasped mine, as if she knew I was there. Then she opened her eyes, smiled, and squeezed my hand. We held hands.

We became one, no mine or hers. The world slowed, the world quieted. I could hear the rustle of palm leaves outside the shutters. I could feel my heart beat, feel the blood coursing through my body. I did not think, “Abraham, you must do this, Abraham you must do that.” She sat up, still holding my hand, and many of the words she spoke I couldn’t understand. I did understand “yours” when she placed her other hand over her heart. I kissed her on the forehead and placed my hand over my heart and heard myself say, as if I were a father speaking to his child for the first time, “Yours.” We rose as one, our hands still clasped. We walked over the threshold, through the beaded curtain and into my room.

We lay together that night in a oneness so complete, so new to me that words seem a false language. I am like a blind man trying to describe a rainbow. The boundaries of our bodies disappeared—

there was a moment when I didn’t know whether I was in her, or she was in me. In that precious moment, I stopped thinking, stopped floating outside myself, stopped observing myself. In that precious moment, we were blessed without words and prayers. In that silent union, I, Abraham, took her, Mya, for my wife.

Spent, we lay entwined in each other’s arms, her cheek pressed against mine. Her perfumed hair brushed my lips, and the fragrance of her body filled me with every breath I took. In the languor and quiet of the gray light that traced the curve of her back and the swell of her buttocks, I swore I would willingly be reborn for one hundred million eons to love Mya for one night.

Perhaps the old Abraham has died little by little each day since I left Venice. Perhaps I died in greater degree after I arrived in Pegu—

this I can’t say, how can any man make himself such an object of study? When I awoke the next morning, the somber, resigned man you knew seemed like a distant relative faintly remembered. Yet I don’t feel a stranger to myself: I feel a truer self than ever before when I lay next to my Shulamite, dark but comely, her smooth-skinned brown arm resting across my heart.

Uncle has trained me well to grade stones, and there are other Peguan women more ample in their beauty, but they are not the ones I desire, not the ones I love. “Love,” a word long foreign to my tongue and pen. It is not a word that can be dissected by reason or dictated by the eye’s optic power—it springs from the heart. Like her sisters’, Mya’s teeth are blackened, her face powdered, her ears lengthened from large plugs of amber. An Israelite might think her a Carnival reveler, but all of that is the costume her people drape over the soul God has given her. When her eyes sparkle as she pours water into a cup, or when she combs her hair or moves her hand in the simplest of gestures, I feel honored by her being.

She wears only a skirt, but there is nothing shameful about her bare flesh. What in Venice would be vulgar, even for a courtesan, is to her what nature commands. I am a man of my country and can’t help but be aroused with desire by her breasts—her breasts—not the breasts of other women. I’m not like the European merchants walking through the market, wiping the sweat from their ruddy faces and necks, leering at the bare-breasted women, sending sly smiles and raised eyebrows as signals to induct me into their guild of lust—
You’re a man, you’ve got a member just like us all. Look at that heathen, all she’s good for is taking a gallop on your stick. Right?
They are so certain they know the answer. As soon as I took Mya in after her husband’s death, word spread in the trading house that she was my concubine, taken in to satisfy my carnal needs. They think she is my servant in the day and my concubine at night. They think I am one of them. They think they know my heart.

You may want to keep news of Mya from Uncle. He may think I have lost my way. Mya told me that her name means “emerald” in her language. Just tell Uncle I have done well at what he instructed me to do: I have found a jewel of great value.

Your cousin reborn,

Abraham

I dreamed Abraham into my arms. Like pebbles dropped on a path, my dreams led him to me.

Last night, with gestures and touch, we pledged ourselves to each other. Last night, I chose him as my husband, and he chose me as his bride. Last night, his mat was my bridal bed.

This morning, Abraham brought my mat into his room and put it next to his. He did it solemnly, like a priest making an offering.

1 May 1599

Dear Joseph,

Win amuses me. You would think Mya were his daughter the way he fusses over her, or I his son the pleasure he takes in my happiness. He was quick to find out which day of the week each of us was born; and once certain ours would be a compatible coupling that will bring neither childlessness nor early death to one of us, he has taken our happiness as his charge. He finds excuses to go to the market and bring us a basket of rambutans or snakefruit or a jackfruit so enormous his servant struggles to carry it. He constantly compliments Mya on the sweetness of her sugarcane juice or the firmness of her rice, as if these simple tasks demanded the skill of a builder of bridges over the Rialto. She in turn treats him with a daughter’s respect and affection and spoils him with sweets and laughter. I think he genuinely likes her—I suspect that he thinks she will make a good bride for his son after I leave. But for now, he is happy that I have such a caring woman, and yet he seems pulled in two directions, like a mule caught between two bushels of feed. In one bushel—
A man needs a woman. To be alone is punishment
for past sins
.
Mya is more precious than fine stones.
But in the other bushel—
Don’t show affection; you don’t want her to take advantage of
you.
In this bushel is the Buddha who fled wife and child to find the truth, who spoke of his son as a fetter. Imagine calling the flesh of your flesh a fetter, an obstacle to salvation. For Win those we love are the fishhooks of desire and suffering. When I hold Mya in my arms, I am not a fish snared in a net, wildly flopping and gasping for breath. Desire may cause pain; yes, it may bear the seeds of evil in its extreme, but I can’t believe that all desire is evil.

Win believes that he turns away from his Buddha’s teachings when he loves another. Little did I know when I praised God in the synagogue that I was a devout follower of Win’s faith—I went about my life smug in the certainty that I did not need love, that I was whole without it. I was like a drunk man stumbling home in the dark, who trips and cuts open his head, but staggers on so drunk he doesn’t know he’s wounded and, if unattended, will die from his wound. Now surrounded by thousands of glittering statues and hundreds of yellow-robed monks unfettered by love and longing, I am turning away from the Buddha I had unknowingly embraced and returning to the Holy One, blessed be He.

I pray that He doesn’t turn His back on me. I’m not an apostate.

I’m not deaf to the deep, rumbling voice of Rabbi Sforno, his head shaking back and forth in condemnation. —
You cannot marry a Gentile. It is forbidden.
Don’t think his words don’t pain me. I hold no less today to the articles of our faith than when I set sail. The words of the law may damn me, but what am I to do? Not to have loved is to turn away from God, who gave us body and soul—not to have loved is a sacrilege. How can the law be just if it means not listening to my heart?

Last night, the late hour and the palm wine Mya poured whenever his cup grew empty put Win in a philosophical mood.
—My wife and family are too dear to me. I cannot meditate: my mind is too much on them. Maybe in my next life I will be born a monk, and then I will
meditate. How weak a man I have been,
Win said, shaking his head.

—
I should leave my wife and children behind and wander solitary as a
rhinoceros. I am like one of those wild young men the Buddha rebuked for chasing after a courtesan who had stolen their money. “Which is better for you?” he asked. “To look for a woman or to find yourself?” In my next
life,
Win said, raising his hand as if swearing before a tribunal,
—I
will find myself.

—My friend, with all you have drunk, it may be hard for you to find
your way home.