By Fire, By Water (9 page)

“Of course God is testing you,” Dina agreed. “God tests all of us.” She poured more tea.

They turned back to the book at hand, a folio of verse by Abraham Ibn Ezra, who had lived near Zaragoza when that region was under Muslim rule, centuries earlier. Judith read the Judeo-Arabic cursive aloud.

I have a cloak that’s a lot like a sieve
for sifting wheat and barley:
at night I stretch it taut like a tent
,
and light from the stars shines on me
.
Through it I see the crescent moon
,
Orion and the Pleiades
.
I weary, though, of counting its holes
,
which look like a saw’s sharp teeth
.

Judith laughed. “Yes, that’s how life is, isn’t it. We stretch out our tattered cloaks and peer through the holes, looking toward the stars.”

    
CHAPTER THREE

A
S THE CHANCELLOR SAT WORKING
, his aide knocked to announce a caller. A hefty fellow with short hair and a close-cropped beard, the visitor did not bow. “Your Excellency,” he said in a deep baritone, “forgive me for intruding. Abram Serero, a scribe by trade, and a teacher. I’ve come to deliver our community’s contribution.”

“Your community?”

“The Jewish community. A small offering, I admit. But as you know, Chancellor, we’re not as prosperous as in the time of our grandfathers.” He waved the paper in his hand. “It’s all accounted for.”

Santángel looked up from his books. “Señor Serero, have a seat.” He turned to his aide. “Señor de Almazón, stay with us. Close the door.” If the chancellor was going to receive a Jew in his office, he wanted a witness.

Serero reached into his satchel and produced a purse of gold coins, which he handed to Santángel along with the accounting sheet. Santángel counted the coins and noted their value. “Normally, these deliveries are not made to my office.”

“I wanted to meet you.”

“Why?”

“I’m new at this.”

Santángel nodded, glancing at the accounting sheet. “Do you read Hebrew?”

“When I said I was a scribe,” Serero explained, “what I meant was, I am a Hebrew scribe. I copy our holy books in the holy tongue. If I did not read and understand Hebrew, I would be going through the motions without experiencing every word. And if I copied the Torah that way …” He shook his head.

The chancellor looked up from the accounting sheet. “What would happen?”

“There’s a traditional way of doing these things. I learned the craft from my father. He learned it from his.”

“Your family,” asked Santángel. “You’ve lived in Zaragoza for some time?”

“My family has lived in Zaragoza and also Valencia for as long as anyone remembers. But others make such claims.” Serero scratched his beard. “Perhaps, Señor Santángel, you’ve heard of the Zinillo family.”

Santángel’s face registered nothing. Being a Christian, and a close collaborator of the king, he did not appreciate Serero’s reminding him of his ancestry.

“They say my forbears have enjoyed the generosity of this land ever since the time of King Solomon,” boasted the scribe.

“Señor Serero, please express to your community His Highness’s gratitude.”

“Thank you.” After a moment, Serero added, “May all your endeavors, and the king’s, be crowned with righteousness.”

On Santángel’s nod, his aide showed Serero the door. The Jew again turned to the chancellor. “If you should need anything further, please, come visit me. I live in the house next to the synagogue, one door to the left.”

“What could I possibly need from a Jew, other than taxes, my good man?” Santángel smiled with deliberate condescension and waved the scribe away.

Serero glanced at him once more, then shuffled out of the office.

“The fellow has no tact,” Santángel muttered, loudly enough so that his aide could hear. Felipe de Almazón stared at the door.

The
judería
, the Jewish quarter of Zaragoza, lay adjacent to its royal palace, not far from Santángel’s home. He almost never ventured there. Enveloped in a dark surcoat, he entered the neighborhood on a chill winter night, scarcely more noticeable than the shadow of a cloud passing under the moon.

He rapped lightly at the door of Abram Serero’s narrow, decrepit, two-story habitation. After a pause, he knocked again. He heard loose shoes shuffling across the floorboards.

Dressed in a long nightshirt, holding a candle, the scribe pulled the door open a crack, then all the way. “Chancellor. What an honor.”

Santángel faced a cramped room with low beams, small windows, a dwindling hearth fire, unvarnished wood floors, and piles of books on a pine table. Serero pulled a coarse, bark-colored curtain to close off the area where his wife and children were sleeping, and led Santángel to his worktable. “What brings so illustrious a visitor to our modest home?” he asked, low.

“It’s your accounts,” replied the chancellor, mindful not to wake the children. “You owe the king seventeen
maravedís
. Look here.”

He produced Serero’s accounting sheet and showed him his own. As he studied them, Serero placed his hand on the table, beside Santángel’s. The chancellor observed the scribe’s hand, ink-stained and raw, and his own beside it, gloved in the finest calfskin.

Serero looked up. “Is that all?”

He did not address Santángel by his title. This scribe clearly had a great deal to learn about the standards of hierarchy and proper behavior.

“Is there anything else?” repeated Serero.

“Why, yes. You mentioned the Zinillo family.”

The scribe gestured for him to sit down and took the chair opposite. “What about them?”

“What do you know about them?”

“Of course, you’re curious. To be cut off from your history, your family, your roots. Not to know where you come from.” He shook his head.

“If you please, Señor Serero.”

“The Zinillos were cloth merchants, lawyers, and moneylenders. Most of them lived not here, but in Valencia. Surely you know that. A respectable enough family, until … until one of them, the most ambitious, some would say—but others would argue, the least courageous—decided that his world, the world of the judería, was too small.”

“The least courageous?” echoed the chancellor. “Do you not mean, perhaps, the one who cared most about his wife, his children, grandchildren? The least selfish, perhaps? The one with the strength to elevate himself, to flee this … this …” He waved his hand at the pocked, stained old table, the shabby curtains, the disjointed floor planks.

“If you already know all you need to know, Chancellor, why did you come here?”

No one, certainly no commoner, dared speak to the chancellor with such effrontery. “Why, indeed?” Santángel crossed the room, stopped short of the door, and turned around. He had not found what he had been seeking. He would leave when he was ready to leave. “One more question.”

“As many as you’d like.” Serero smiled.

“Were they devout in their faith?”

“When a man turns his back on his people, Señor de Santángel, there will always be those who wonder how sincere he ever was.”

“Perhaps, but
before
his conversion?”

Serero finally joined his guest at the threshold. “Before, I’m sure no one thought much about your grandfather’s—my great uncle’s—beliefs.”

Santángel crossed his arms. He scrutinized the man’s face, looking for a resemblance and finding none. “You claim, then, Señor Serero, that you and I are cousins?”

“I do not merely claim it. The synagogue in Valencia has records.”

Santángel could hardly fathom Serero’s recklessness. “Now I understand why they sent you. What do you intend to do about those seventeen maravedís?”

“I shall do what’s expected of me.”

“I appreciate that, and so will the king. Good night.”

“Good night, Chancellor.” Serero opened the door. A cold breeze blew in.

Holding a candle, Abram Serero climbed the tiny, twisted staircase to his refuge, a work nook on the second floor. He sat at his desk. A collection of rare books, some dating from the time of his great-great-grandfather, clothed the plaster walls around him.

He resumed copying the words of a Hebrew Bible letter by letter, using the special inks and instruments prescribed in ancient times. His writing tool was a quill. No Hebrew copyist used iron, copper, gold, or silver in this work for fear that someone might later melt such bits of metal into instruments of death.

As Serero wrote each word, he pronounced it aloud. Each letter, with all its extensions, was a holy, living being. If a scribe erred, the rabbis taught, an entire world would be destroyed. Precisely what this meant, no one knew.

When thoughts of his conversation with the chancellor intruded, he pronounced the Hebrew word a second time. This technique, he found, did not dispel the perturbing thoughts. He wiped his quill and closed the inkpot.

We live in two different worlds, he told himself. One world honors tradition. The other tramples upon it. Serero doubted he or anyone else could build a bridge between them. And yet, the survival of the Jewish community in Zaragoza required that such bridges be built, rebuilt, and maintained.

Two weeks later, Santángel again visited the Hebrew scribe. He handed Serero the leather pouch Cristóbal Colón had placed in his trunk. “An acquaintance of mine, a ship’s captain—I hardly know him, mind you—but he placed this in my possession. I have no use for it. Nor do I have any idea what it represents. According to this gentleman, its contents are of some value. Especially to a Jew like you, one would imagine.”

Abram Serero studied the documents, sliding his fingers under certain phrases, sometimes reading them aloud. Finally, he looked up. “Where did you say you obtained these?”

“A sailor. He placed them in my trunk even though I had no use for them and, indeed, refused them.”

Serero nodded slowly. “Did he tell you where he acquired them?”

“He mentioned Lisbon. A mapmaker, I believe. A Jew.”

The scribe lowered his expert eyes and allowed them once again to wander across the fragments and pamphlets until they stopped on the most aged of them, the stained and ragged parchment.