The Midwife of Venice (3 page)

And how had she repaid this husband who, when she was aching from bending for hours over the trestle bed of a labouring woman, would take the
bahnaches
glasses from the cupboard, heat them over a candle, and apply them to her back? In the week before Isaac sailed, she had hurled at him an arsenal of wounding words—said that if he loved her he would not sail to the Levant in search of wealth and prosperity, that he thought only of himself and was deserting her. The words he flung back were like knives. He told her that she was a timid little ghetto mouse, afraid of taking a chance, that he was risking his life for her, for a better life for both of them. Then there was silence between them. They did not look at each other, and slept far apart in bed. She had refused to see him off in his ship,
La Dogaressa
. Now the thought of him alone in Malta, believing she no longer loved him, was more than she could bear. If the Conte would pay, she would go with him. The Rabbi could be as angry as he wanted.

“Will you pay what I ask?” she said to the Conte.

“I will pay this outlandish sum,” he replied. “You can sail to Malta and ransom your husband before they work him to death in the stone quarries.” He picked up his cloak.

Hannah had no time to be astonished by his agreement. She draped a scarf over her hair and slipped on her thin leather sandals as Jacopo and the Rabbi watched. The Rabbi was silent but his frail old body was rigid with fury.

“Take me to your wife,” Hannah said to the Conte.

She hurriedly gathered her equipment—an apron, an iron knife, clean gauze, vials, swaddling cloths, packets of medicinal herbs, and a silver amulet, a
shadai
, inscribed with the Star of David, meant to be hung over the cradles of newborns.
May it not be too late; may it be needed tonight
. She placed her supplies in a bag made of unbleached linen. But before she pulled the drawstring closed, she raised the lid of her
cassone
, patterned in bright marquetry, reached in, and quickly took out a long and narrow object wrapped in cloth. A corner of the material fell away and the light of the candle caught the sheen of her birthing spoons, two silver ladles hinged together. Her face, drawn and white, reflected in the bowl of one of the spoons. Before the men noticed, she tucked them into the bottom of her bag under the swaddling cloths.

Her birthing spoons could save babies, but they could also maim. At a recent confinement, she had exerted too much pressure and had crushed the skull of the baby instead of easing it out. The mother was left with a tiny blue corpse to cradle in her arms. If Hannah made the same blunder tonight, she would be denounced as a slayer of newborns.

“Brother,” said Jacopo, “you are a fool and I will not be a witness to it a moment longer. I will take leave of you.” He bowed from the waist as well as a man so stout
was able. “I have need of some fresh air. I will make my own way home.”

The stairs creaked as he descended and then the door at the entranceway slammed. Hannah wondered at Jacopo’s risking his life on the streets alone at night. Roving gangs of ruffians were commonplace—a well-dressed man might be robbed of his clothes and then shoved off a bridge into the fetid waters of the canal. But she said nothing.

“Come, we can be at ca’ di Padovani in a few minutes. My gondola is moored on Rio di San Girolamo,” the Conte said.

The Rabbi pulled his prayer shawl higher around his shoulders. Hannah waited for him to move from the doorway, but he did not. He glared at her. When he slowly raised both his bony hands to her face, she thought for an instant he meant to strike her. Instead, he made slow circles above Hannah’s head, as he davened from the waist and said in Yiddish, “May God in His Greatness guide you. Be a credit to the Jews and to all women, Hannah. Do not bring destruction upon us.”

The Rabbi then stepped aside to allow her and the Conte to pass through the door.

Once outside, the Conte draped his cloak, smelling of tallow smoke and sweat, over her shoulders. “It is damp on the canals tonight.”

She sagged under the weight of the fur-trimmed wool.

Clutching to her breast the linen bag containing her birthing spoons, she marched in the wake of the Conte toward the gondola. The Rabbi followed closely behind.
She could not help remembering the incident that had occurred last Purim at a house on the Calle del Forno. The midwife attending the birth had been unable to turn the fetus into proper position. To save the mother’s life, the midwife had used a
crochet
to pierce the baby’s skull, and then had used a silken cord to rip the arms and legs from the child’s body in order to extract it. Tiny limbs had been strewn about the woman’s bedchamber, tossed there by the midwife in her panic. Hannah prayed the same spectacle would not greet her tonight.

I
SAAC HAD GAMBLED
with fate and lost. Trade between Venice and the Levant was so lucrative that huge profits, sometimes upwards of three thousand percent, could be gained from buying and selling spices, timber, and printed silk. And so he had borrowed heavily and bought a warehouse full of silk to resell in Constantinople, planning to buy spices with the profits and sell them in Venice. He had not calculated on his ship being fired upon and mercenaries in the pay of the Knights of Malta, reeking of drink and sweat and religion, clambering over the rail, screaming and brandishing swords and muskets.

There had been twenty of the brutes, savage, hairy men with swinging crucifixes and hearts bursting with hatred for the infidels and greed for their rich Venetian cargo. The smell of gunpowder from their blunderbusses filled the air. Most of his fellow passengers were murdered before they had a chance to gather their wits about them and ask God’s forgiveness for their sins. Isaac thought he would soon be watching his own blood congealing on the foredeck. But God had other plans for him. In the months that followed, he learned the power of His punishment.

Now he was in Valletta, capital city of Malta, stronghold of the Knights. During their long nights and endless days in jail, Simón, another Ashkenazi Jew and a fellow prisoner, had explained to Isaac that in 1530, Charles V of Spain had bestowed this island of rock and wind on the Knights of St. John in exchange for their protecting the archipelago against the infidel Turk. The Knights succeeded in defending the land from the rapaciousness of the Ottomans, but over the years they had grown greedy. Bewitched by their victories, they used the pretext of defending their island to prey not only upon the infidel ships of the Ottomans but on Christian ships as well, seizing cargo and enslaving all on board, rich or poor, merchant or servant, woman or child. They called themselves Knights but they were little more than pirates, grown rich through crimes sanctified in the name of the Holy Crusade.

The Knights had spared the lives of Isaac, Simón and some others in anticipation of large ransoms. They had been trussed up and thrown into the hold of the ship, so slippery
with rat excrement that they had difficulty remaining upright. For many days and nights the steady protest of the ropes and the thrum of the heavy sails made sleep impossible. Isaac’s stomach grew queasy from the stink of pine pitch and rotting timbers, and he vomited from the motion of the ship, the rolling most severe in the hold.

After they landed in Malta, he had languished in a stone cell no bigger than the bed he and Hannah used to share, with a dirt floor and a grated window that allowed little light to penetrate, even at midday.

Worse than the food had been the waiting—weeks of being held in this stinking garrison, expecting death from starvation, hoping for it. Now, at last, the wait was over. He was to be sold to the highest bidder at the slave auction in the main square. Then he must try to stay alive until word of his capture arrived in Venice and the Parnassim dos Cautivos negotiated his ransom.

Isaac peered through the barred window into the corridor, empty except for dust motes settling onto the floor. He was thinking about what he always thought about—his plan of escape. There had been little else to occupy his mind while he was shackled to the wall of his prison cell.

He heard footsteps and the clanking of keys. The door to his cell swung open and two guards strode in. One grabbed him, yanking him to his feet. The other one checked his leg iron, dragged him from the cell, and half-thrust, half-carried him outside. Isaac squeezed his eyes shut against the barbs of sunlight. They frogmarched him and other prisoners, including his friend Simón, from the Grand Master’s
palace, across to the town square, where a platform had been erected. The guard shoved him up the steps.

Once his eyes adjusted, Isaac noticed that the platform, raised a few feet from the ground, was surrounded by a crowd of men and a few women, all shoving and pushing, craning their necks to examine him and Simón and the other prisoners from
La Dogaressa
. In the distance, over the ramparts of St. Elmo, ships bobbed at their lines.

A rough hand pushed him forward and a voice behind him shouted in Maltese—a primitive stew of Italian, Sicilian, and Arabic, which, after weeks of listening to the guards converse, Isaac was beginning to comprehend.

“What am I bid for this Jew? Thirty-five years old or close enough, from Venice, fit to work, free of cholera and rickets.” The auctioneer took a baton and tapped the backs of his limbs. Isaac’s feet, swollen where he had been
bastinado
’d fifty blows, gave way at the touch of the baton. He stumbled. One of the guards caught him and held him upright. The auctioneer tossed the stick to his assistant and said to Isaac, “Open your mouth. Let us have a look at your teeth.” Grabbing him by the jaw, he poked a dirty finger around in Isaac’s mouth, and then turned to the crowd and said, “An impressive set of grinders. White and strong. How many of us can say that?” He grinned, revealing two missing canines. The crowd roared with laughter. “Those who have teeth can eat, and those who can eat can work.” The auctioneer felt Isaac’s limbs. “No fractures, no dislocations, no spavin, or ring-bone.” Motioning Isaac to show his hands, the auctioneer examined the palms.
“Delicate and tender hands. Neither callused nor brawny. He is a merchant or a gentleman and will fetch a good ransom for the Knights. In the meantime, some fortunate purchaser will have the benefit of his labour.”

The sun heated the iron ring around Isaac’s ankle into a circle of fire. He heard a stocky man in the crowd call out, “Tell him to remove his shirt! I want to see if he is strong enough for me.” The man’s face was dotted with smallpox scars. His gold tooth caught the sun.

Isaac had heard tales from his fellow prisoners about farmers who harnessed men to plows like draft animals and worked them to death.
Please, God, by all that is holy and great, not a farm
, he prayed. The auctioneer nodded at him to comply with the man’s request. It was not necessary to remove his shirt—it was little more than a rag, and Isaac’s arms and muscular chest shone white through the tatters—but he pulled what little remained over his head.

The man nodded in appreciation. Then he said, “But if he is a Jew, where is his beard?”

Isaac reached up to rub his chin. He had had a beard ever since he was old enough to grow one. Every Jew did, for the Torah says, “The adornment of a man’s face is his beard.” Now his face felt as vulnerable as a newborn’s. When he had arrived in Malta, one of the jailers had insisted his beard be shaved. “To keep down the lice,” explained the barber who had shaved both his head and his face with a dull razor, leaving ribbons of bloody gashes on his chin and cheeks. When his beard started to grow back, they shaved him again.

The jailer had also stripped him of all his possessions, his extra clothing, his prayer shawl, his thousand ducats destined for the purchase of cardamom and cloves in Constantinople, everything except for a tiny cloth sack no bigger than a walnut shell, filled with the eggs of
Bombyx mori
, the prized silkworm. Another prisoner on the ship, an old Turk who knew he would not survive to see dry land, had pressed the cloth sack into Isaac’s hand and, in exchange, asked Isaac to pen a letter to his wife in Constantinople. Isaac hid the sack inside the shirt of a dead prisoner who had been left to putrefy. A few days later he snatched the bag back just before the Knights skidded the poor man’s body off the aft deck and into the sea. He tucked the bag past the waistband of his breeches, snug up against his
shmekele
. Now the sack was his sole possession. Although he knew nothing of the cultivation of the worms, he knew the value of printed silk fabric and the lure it held for well-born women of Venice. Someday perhaps his worms would serve him well on this island of rock and soldier monks.

The auctioneer turned back to Isaac, scrutinizing him to determine his other marketable virtues. Next to him, Simón stood swaying in the heat of the afternoon sun. As the silence lengthened, the crowd started to drift away. Isaac could imagine what confounded the auctioneer—his broad chest was now so devoid of fat that his muscles showed as though in a painting of Christ in the final stages of exsanguination. His legs, once straight and hard, were no thicker than a table’s.