The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (2 page)
It is quiet now, and I write under a small circle of light cast by the sole lamp swinging gently on deck. The sky is thick with stars brighter than a sparkling Murano chandelier, brighter than the stars that greeted Dante on his return from his dark journey. It is as if the land below the wind is another world under its own sky, under stars and planets that move to their own laws. Tomorrow, like every day, we set out at dawn, so I will put this letter to bed among the others that await trustworthy hands and strong winds to bring them safe to you on your velvet pillow and soft bed.
Your distant cousin,
Abraham
I have a gift for you, my cousin said. He claimed it came from far across the seas, but he was full of tales. He spoke of many things that I didn’t believe. His stories sparkled brighter than the glass beads he put in my hand streaked with the mud of the paddy field.
He came back to the village after many years in the land of Arakan, whose king, he said, had more wives than a sparrow has feathers.
Every year the king takes a new wife from twelve maidens chosen at birth for their princely blood and their mother’s beauty. How sad to be taken from your mother and raised by royal governors who think only of the king’s favor.
Their hands never pick up a needle for fear they will prick their delicate fingers. They rarely go out during the day, even under an umbrella, so that their faces will remain smooth and white as ivory. Attendants rub their bodies with rare oils and bathe them in water scented with secret fragrances. They drink special potions to cleanse the smell of earth and animals from their bodies. For the king has a curious way of choosing his brides. At least this is what my cousin said.
In their sixteenth year, on the eighth day of the eighth month, the twelve girls are brought to the royal palace. Just after sunrise they are led into the palace courtyard, wrapped in robes of new cotton so white that the king’s ministers have to shield their eyes from the glare. They sit on benches far from the shade of the palms, until the sun shines high in the sky and beads of sweat trickle down their necks and shoulders and turn their robes damp. Then the keeper of the royal brides guides them into a bare room where no woman has entered since the ceremony the year before. The teak floor is polished so smooth and swept so clean that their reflections shimmer like lotus blossoms on pond water. Royal maids undress them, and ministers carry their sweat-scented robes like newborn infants to the king’s chamber.
The king has barely splashed sleep from his eyes. He bends over each folded robe. He nestles his face into the moist cotton and inhales the scent of each maiden. Twelve maidens have dreamed their bodies next to the king’s in the royal bed, and the king, my cousin said, chooses his bride with his nose.
I could feel the beads, smooth and hard in my hand. The words of his fanciful tale were made only of air. Who would want to be one among many? Who would want her name forgotten in the morning, her face drifting away like smoke?
My father whistles for the dog and calls my name. The seedlings are waiting.
8 October 1598
Dear Joseph,
We should arrive in Pegu in three days. Soon the beginning will end, and the end begin. I will count the days, cross off the weeks and months, until I write only single digits and can return to where I belong. Like Dante in his sojourn to the netherworld, “Although I come, I do not come to remain.”
My home remains the water, but now it flows smoothly. Life, seen and unseen, surrounds me as we make our way through the web of creeks and streams from Cosmin east to Pegu. Some mornings when I awake, the fog hugs the riverbanks and envelops us in mist so thick I feel I have gone back to the beginnings of time. I alone am here, sprung from the very earth itself—Adam in a new world with silence my only companion. Soon the sun burns off the river’s foggy shroud and my idle imaginings, and I see banks cheek to jowl with villages most strange to an Italian’s eyes. No stone houses, no cobbled streets. Houses of wood and bamboo, thatched with palms.
Many rest on stilts, like Carnival revelers stripped of their finery.
I am told it is cooler to live the elevated life and also much safer from the nightly marauding of the tigers who abide in the jungle.
The people along the river tether their water buffaloes beneath their homes; this lumbering creature, despite its stolid appearance and lethargic demeanor, is a fierce warrior when its life is threatened. I pray to the Holy One, blessed be He, that I am spared witness to such struggles.
I have been told, more than once, by men who have traveled here before that this land of plentitude is an Eden where none can starve.
Fruit falls ripe from trees and vines into brown hands that need do nothing. The Holy One, blessed be He, has balanced their nature’s indolence with Nature’s bounty. Queer that the Dutch travel thousands of miles to waste their youth and lose their lives for spices that grow wild and untended, harvested at leisure by indolent heathens.
Sailing down the river, the jungle billows behind the villages, like cascading green clouds. Where man’s work is not seen, the lush green vegetation spills over the banks into the water itself. Some nights we anchor offshore in fear of bandits who, we are told, have multiplied recently in the countryside. The nights that we have anchored ashore, I have not ventured, even in good company, beyond the borders of the village. These jungles are nothing like the forests of our native land. In our familiar forests, though so thick with towering trees that sunlight rarely pierces their branches, you still feel you can hear the echo of an ax. You sense the hand of man is nearby, though hidden from view—you can hear the distant march of ox and plow. Here, these jungles appear to have existed from the beginning of time. Dense, twisted trees, hung with creepers, sprout roots from trunks and branches—some tangled branches so thickly knotted that even Alexander could not cut them asunder.
Palms and ferns hang heavy as damask curtains. If the Holy One, blessed be He, sends another flood to cleanse the world of our sin-ful creations, when the waters recede, these jungles with all their mysteries will remain.
Even the Ghetto with its daily bustle and chatter grows quiet at night as we sleep behind wooden gates and bricked windows, but there is no silence in this land. Fruit bats, large as cats, hang head down from the trees along the river during the day; when night arrives, they unfold their black wings and swoop away into the approaching darkness. Flitting insects like tiny flying lanterns spangle the shore with darting sparks of pulsing light. I stand on deck, the ship asleep, all human sound put to bed, and I listen to the world come alive. The chirp and clack of insects, the whistle of birds, the croaking choir of frogs, the whoops and chatter of monkeys hidden in the treetops. It is like an orchestra playing from a dozen different scores. What wondrous music God composes.
Sometimes, I admit, all these sounds frighten me. The world is so much larger, so much more populated by beings that I could not have imagined when I waved farewell to you at the dock. Abodes line the river like fragile dollhouses, while a short walk away lies the vast unknown darkness. The Gentiles outside our walls primp and parade, praising the creations of their hand and mind. And among us Israelites there are some who are not shy to proclaim the pinnacles of learning they have reached or recite the wisdom of the Rambam, as if he alone put pen to paper. Yet beneath our silken and plumed finery, I have begun to wonder if we are not more brothers than we care to admit to the half-naked heathens.
Forgive me, but I have sailed beyond Cosmin with my words.
Let me return to this port where we first landed and discharged our goods under the gimlet-eyed gaze of the royal customs officials.
We had sailed around Cape Negrais, drawn through treacherous shoals by a huge golden structure where these people pray to their god: imagine the Campanile but higher, story upon story like some baker’s confection, a gilded sugar loaf that flashed in the sunlight, a bright beacon from the headland. Its reflected light and the mumbled prayers of the crew brought us safely into the harbor, where we were greeted with much pomp and surprising kindness.
We anchored two hundred yards from shore and were soon greeted by the governor of the city himself. Out he came in a long, thin ship, as narrow at the stern and bow as a gondola but at least one hundred rowers long. He sat in a cabin raised in the middle of this low sliver of a ship, hidden behind shuttered windows painted gaily with red and gold dragons, magical birds and flowers. He was only a governor of this one port, not a king or prince as one would have thought from the glittering appearance of his vessel and the four trumpeters sitting before his cabin urging on the rowers with the rhythm of their bellowing. You should have seen our ship owner play the fawning subject. He, who for these many weeks had ruled our floating world like a despot, whose simple scowl turned both freeman and slave silent, now bowed and stood meekly before a small brown man no taller than a boy just old enough to make a minyan.
I took pleasure in how the wheels of divine justice had turned, and I saw in the crew’s eyes and their half-hidden smiles this pleasure shared. The governor welcomed us with baskets brimming with oranges, whose sweetness bathed the brackishness from our mouths, and crates of squawking chickens, whose sacrifice later that night brought full bellies and no tears. After a customs inspection more thorough than a prospective groom’s inquisition, we and our goods were allowed to come ashore. The king of Pegu wants no diamonds, pearls, and fine cloth smuggled into the kingdom, for smuggled goods rob his treasury of duties; and I have quickly learned that the king’s ambitions and follies have left the treasury much diminished.
Our goods now travel to Pegu on a larger vessel, while we proceed upriver on smaller boats, close cousin to our gondolas.
Cosmin is a bustling entrepôt where peoples from lands that are only undecorated voids on our maps crowd the markets and storehouses, scurrying back and forth like frightened deer, one hand on their money pouch, the other stroking their chins as they calculate in their mental ledgers the play of profit and worldly advantage. In this land, everything has a value and is fair game for the trader’s eye.
Melaka, Sumatra, Arakan, Aceh, Chieng Mai, Java, Siam, Yunnan—
these strange lands sound like magical incantations an alchemist might chant, hunched over his vials and flasks. Though I have no desire to travel beyond the needs of our business, I must admit there is fascination in these names and the images they conjure up.
Our time in Cosmin was only two nights, but it seems these heathens love their gods more than money. You cannot walk a hundred yards without coming across a temple—or what they call a pagoda—with gilded images of their god in all sizes and poses. There is no solemnity in these places. Beggars crowd the steps, women crouch on their haunches selling trinkets and spitting red gobs of betel juice on the ground, and monkeys scamper everywhere. You may claim that some of our brothers act the monkey at synagogue; but we can count them on one hand, and if they keep their tongues, they are hard to discover. Here dozens clamber everywhere, running wildly among idols and idolaters, who feed and care for them as if they were orphans beloved by their god. Yellow-robed monks walk the streets in silence, leather pads about their necks and begging bowls in their hands. They take the pad from their neck and sit cross-legged upon it when begging for food or coin—a wise custom on ground strewn with spit and rotting fruit. While these monks show in this practice some wisdom, most heathens, like children, wallow in superstition before their gods. Walking the streets with a Portuguese trader in pepper and nutmeg, who has traveled several times to these lands over the last decade, I remarked on the fear-some naturalness of two large wooden tigers standing guard before the high steps leading to a grand pagoda. From the craftsman’s fine touch, you almost expected a frightening roar to shake the ground.
He said that a native trader told him with convincing earnestness that he had seen one of these guardians raise its lethal claws and swipe dead with one blow a blustering official from the customs house, who claimed loudly that no one’s prayers could save the king from his follies. The Holy One, blessed be He, works in mysterious ways, but not through the paws of some heathen idol.
Each bend in the twisting river we now travel brings sights strange and mystifying. The Ghetto’s face does not change from day to day, while on the river, when you think you have seen all the pages in the book of life, another opens before your eyes. In the late afternoon we had just passed a floating village of fishermen—hundreds of barks with straw houses straddling them from bow to stern.
The families living there sold fresh and salted fish. The stench was fierce, and black clouds of flies hovered over fish drying on straw mats. The village disappeared in the curve of the river, and soon a swirling cloud of black flies floated toward us. My first thought was that a small boat had come back to join its neighbors. Our jabbering boatman and laughing crew fell silent, as if under a choirmaster’s command. What I saw later than they was a small raft of coconut palms lashed together, and tied atop it, feast for the flies, the bloated body of a woman. I had to cover my nose and mouth, the smell was so overpowering. I wish I had covered my eyes so that the vision did not bore itself into my memory: a grimace of black teeth exposed by skin drawn taut from starvation and the sun, her tattered sarong bunched around her waist. Death spared her no shame. The boatman steered the boat toward the opposite shore, as far as we could get from the raft without running aground among the fallen trees tangled in the shallows. Two crewmen, as if on silent cue, spat in the direction of the stinking body and in mumbled singsong chanted this unbidden omen downstream toward the sea. I was told that it is the custom in this land for an adulteress to be set adrift to die far from the shame she has brought family and village. We shun our adulteresses too but do not set them afloat in the canal or exile them to die alone on some islet in the Lagoon. I have not been among these Peguans long enough to know what they believe or how they think, but it is hard to imagine these people, so small and childlike in appearance, so cruel and inhuman to their own. There was only one Eden, and it is long past.