By Fire, By Water (7 page)

After eight months of training, Judith sat beside Baba Shlomo, proudly holding a decorated silver alms box. “I’m ready.”

“You’re not ready,” the old man told her. “Ready for what?”

“To fill the order from the Great Synagogue in Cairo.”

“Too much time has passed.”

“But they deserve an explanation, and a gift.”

“How would we pay for the materials? The transportation? You’d be better off selling trays and cups in the marketplace.”

“I’ll borrow the money.”

Baba Shlomo shook his head. “Getting further into debt, just when you’re starting a new enterprise, is not good business. That’s why I said: This is not a job for a woman. Business sense, women are not known for.”

“Nevertheless,” insisted Judith, “we do owe them an explanation. And a gift.”

She borrowed three thousand dirhams from Isaac Azoulay. “My money is as safe in your hands,” the physician assured her, “as in my cabinet. Perhaps safer, since no one knows it’s there.”

“I owe you nothing, then, but the principal?” Judith wanted to establish that this loan did not imply anything beyond mere friendship.

“That is perfectly correct.”

She set about procuring the silver ore and fashioning each of the nine pieces, one at a time, comparing her models with the best she could find and adding touches to improve on them. She refashioned many of the pieces several times. Three weeks into the ordeal, exhausted, coughing, her hands chafed, she considered taking a few days off to recover her strength, then dismissed the thought.

All the while, she shopped, prepared meals, and accompanied Levi and Baba Shlomo to synagogue. More than once she asked Levi for help, but he ignored her. One battle at a time, she reflected.

With Dina she spent a week composing the letter that would accompany her gift to the Great Synagogue of Cairo. She began by describing what had happened to the previous order, what had befallen her brother and his wife, and went on to explain her decision to honor the contract again. She conveyed the respects of her rabbi to the rabbi of the Great Synagogue. Finally, she provided a brief summary of the situation in Granada. “The rattling of sabers near our borders,” she concluded, “as well as the brutal rivalry between our emir, here in Granada, and his nephew in Malaga, has all of us, Jew and Muslim alike, lying awake at night in fear.”

Dina suggested they celebrate the completion of this missive. “For once, we’re all together,” she said, glancing at the doorway. “Stay for dinner. We’ll have carrot salad, lamb, and dates stuffed with almond paste.”

“A most delicious suggestion,” came the sonorous, booming voice of Dina’s husband, Yonatan, from behind Judith. She turned to see him filling the doorway. He waved her over and hugged her, practically lifting her off the ground.

“Tell Levi and Baba Shlomo to join us,” insisted Dina. “There’s plenty for everyone.”

“All right, then. I’ll fetch them.” Judith turned to go.

“Can I walk with you?” asked Sara, Dina’s daughter, appearing from behind her father.

Exquisite, with sparkling green eyes, Sara was every bit as vivacious as Judith had been at twelve. As they walked the two blocks to Judith’s house, the girl noticed the slipper-shaped filigree pin on Judith’s dress. “Oh, I love that.”

Judith touched the slipper-pin. It had belonged to Yossi’s wife, Naomi. “Thank you. You know what’s inside?”

“There’s something inside?”

“A tiny Hebrew scroll. It has the
Shema
written on it.”

“How could anyone write that small?”

“Not many people can. They’re specially trained scribes. All they do is make tiny scrolls like this.”

“Does it bring luck?”

“I don’t know,” said Judith. “When I’m wearing it, there’s no way to know how lucky or unlucky I’d be if I weren’t wearing it. I’d have to live the same day twice, once without it and once with it, to really know for sure.”

Sara giggled.

Fourteen months after her brother was murdered, almost two years after the Great Synagogue of Cairo placed the order, Judith sent off her work and letter in the care of Yonatan Benatar. Unlike Judith’s late brother, Yonatan possessed not an iota of naïveté. When he traveled, he hired armed Islamic guards for protection. “Jews are good at many things,” Yonatan explained, “but wielding sabers is not one of them.”

Following so many months of study and feverish production, Judith bade good-bye to the nine pieces of silver into which she had poured her heart and her labor. She went up to her bedroom and lay down, although it was not yet evening.

The silver objects she had fashioned for the Great Synagogue of Cairo refused to leave Judith’s mind. In her imagination, she continued turning them over and upside down, running her fingertips across their surfaces. She told herself the whole project had been a wager on the direction of the wind. Yet she could not prevent herself from feeling, by turns, worried, hopeful, disappointed, and proud.

She awoke before dawn to the sound of a child softly whimpering, or a cat mewling under the floorboards. She knew that spirits roamed the world at night. Perhaps they wanted to frighten her. She would show them she was not daunted.

Her warped door neither closed nor opened all the way. It creaked loudly as she pushed it. She followed the noise to Baba Shlomo’s room. The old man lay on his mattress, his lips slightly parted, uttering muffled, at times almost inaudible howls. Judith shook him. He opened his eyes and stared.

“Were you having a nightmare?”

He answered in the Aragonese dialect of his childhood. “A nightmare, no.”

Judith responded in the same tongue. “I could hear you from my room.”

“It was nothing. Go back to bed.”

“I won’t go back to bed,” she reverted to Arabic, “until you tell me what you were dreaming.”

“It isn’t of any importance.”

He turned onto his side. Judith waited. Finally, Baba Shlomo rolled onto his back. “My parents, of blessed memory. They were standing before me, here in this room.”

“What did they tell you?” She took his hand.

“Strange things. Things beyond my comprehension. The wind blowing over the
aljama
of Zaragoza, after the riots. After they died. The world beyond.”

“What about the world beyond?” She squeezed his hand.

He shook his head. “It was gibberish. Incomprehensible. Frightening.”

“It isn’t good, then,” said Judith, as if Baba Shlomo’s dream were the final word on the afterlife.

“That, I can’t say, since I couldn’t understand what they were saying.” Baba Shlomo sighed. “But I would like to visit their graves. I’ve never seen them. It’s all that’s left.”

“Go back to sleep, Baba Shlomo. We have to attend the military procession in the morning.”

“Another military procession? What is it this time?”

Judith frowned. “Yonatan spoke of it over dinner. You were sitting right there.”

“Perhaps I was dozing.”

“It’s the emir’s nephew. He claims he can defend Granada against the Christians better than his uncle. He marched with his army from Malaga, but General al-Hakim met them halfway and sent them running.”

Baba Shlomo shook his head. “What good is a parade to a blind man? Let the emir arrest me for missing it. But I doubt he’ll care much. He may not even notice.” He closed his eyes.

Early the next morning, Judith and Levi hurried to Dina’s home. Excited about the morning’s festivities, Sara took Levi by the arm. The two ran off together.

“Levi, Sara, stay with us,” Judith called after them.

“We’ll meet you there,” Sara called back.

The residents of Granada thronged the streets, plazas, and balconies of the capital. As morning shadows grew shorter, the citizens heard a steady, insistent beating of drums, the winding melodies of rasping reed instruments, and the rattling of shields and swords—at first far away, but slowly growing louder.

The massive wooden doors of the city, on wheels thick as logs, rumbled open. Into the capital strutted three huge birds, each nearly as tall as a man, perched unsteadily atop long, spindly legs. Great feathery wings flanked their wide bodies, yet they did not fly. Their big eyes, set in heads almost as narrow as their long, S-shaped necks, blinked at the onlookers.

No one had ever seen creatures like these. That their emir could possess them proved his wealth and power. Some children pointed. Others hid behind their parents’ legs as the otherworldly creatures strolled slowly past, urged forward by soldiers with sticks.

Behind them strutted birds whose bright blue and vivid green tail feathers opened into enormous fans, filled with eyes; strange antelopes with horns like oxen and long, tufted tails; dromedaries saddled in silver, their humps and long necks shifting as they walked; bejeweled monkeys who screeched as they ran and jumped between the other animals; and two rare elephants wearing colorful headdresses, shipped for the occasion from the Southern Continent. Suspended between the two elephants, on a litter hung with silk and rugs from Persia, sat the vizier himself, Ibrahim al-Hakim, looking dignified but pleased with his victory and the crowd’s adulation. From the ornate sheath on his hip, the sapphire-encrusted handle of a large saber peeked out like a shy kitten from a bag.

Behind the vizier, on elegant Arabian horses, rode hundreds of dirty and weary archers in ornamented, conical helmets and mail shirts, clutching disk-shaped shields. On long poles, some held aloft the heads of their fallen enemies, whose features, drained of blood, sagged dreadfully like masks of white putty.

The parade slowly wound into the Jewish quarter. Judith and Dina watched, fascinated, as the vizier’s elephants plodded toward them.

An infant started bawling. One of the smaller monkeys, hardly bigger than a human baby, jumped onto someone in the crowd, screeching. Perched on his elephantine throne, the vizier waved his arms. “Stop the procession!”

The drumming ceased, and the reed instruments’ whining, and the rattling of swords and shields. Silence fell upon the Jewish quarter as the vizier turned his head, frowned, and broke into a peal of laughter so loud it echoed off the face of the synagogue.

He climbed down from his litter, aided by two lieutenants, and proceeded forward, cutting a path between the peacocks, the oxen, and the ostriches. He stood on the street at eye-level, a citizen among other citizens, as he waved someone forward.