People of the Book (25 page)

D
AVID
B
EN
S
HOUSHAN
was not a rude man, it was just that his mind was on higher things. His wife, Miriam, often chastised him for this, for passing within feet of her sister in the marketplace without a nod of acknowledgment, or failing to hear when the mackerel sellers were hawking their fish at half the usual price.

So he was never quite able to explain why it was that he noticed the youth. Unlike the other beggars and peddlers, this one did not cry out, but just sat, silent, his eyes searching the faces of the passing crowd. Maybe it was his very stillness that caught Ben Shoushan’s attention. In all the clamor and bustle, he was the one quiet, centered thing. But perhaps that was not it at all. Perhaps it was merely a beam of thin winter sunlight, glinting on gold.

The youth had claimed a small patch of ground at the edge of the market, hemmed in by the city wall. It was a damp, windy spot at this time of year; a poor place to attract customers, which was why the local merchants left it for the itinerant peddlers or the ragtag of war-fleeing Andalusians who drifted through the city. The wars in the south had set so many adrift. By the time they reached this far, what little they’d had of value was already sold. Most of the refugees who found places on the market’s edges were attempting to sell worthless things; threadbare cales and surcoats or a few worn-out household goods. But the youth had a piece of leather unrolled in front of him, and on it, bright and arresting, was a collection of small painted parchments.

Ben Shoushan stopped and fought his way through the press to get a better look. He squatted, pressing his fingers into the chill mud for balance. It was as he thought; and the pictures were dazzling. Ben Shoushan had seen illuminations in the Christians’ prayer books, but never anything like this. He stooped and peered, unable to believe his eyes. Someone well acquainted with the Midrash had done these, or at least directed the artist. An idea occurred to Ben Shoushan, an idea that pleased him immensely.

“Who made these?” he asked. The youth stared at him, the bright brown eyes blank with incomprehension. Assuming he did not understand the local dialect, Ben Shoushan switched to Arabic, then Hebrew. But the blank stare did not change.

“He’s deaf-mute,” said a one-armed peasant, hawking a much-mended dough trough and a pair of wooden spoons. “I met up with him and his black slave on the road.” Ben Shoushan looked at the youth more closely. His clothes, though travel stained, were very fine.

“Who is he?”

The man shrugged. “The slave told some wild tale—claimed he’s the son of a physician who served the last emir. But you know how it is with slaves, they like to make up tales, eh?”

“Is the boy a Jew?”

“He’s circumcised, so he’s not Christian, and he doesn’t look like a Moor.”

“Where is this slave? I’d like to know more about these pictures.”

“Slipped off one night not long after we reached the coast at Alicante. Trying to get home to Ifriqiya, no doubt. My wife’s taken a liking to the youth; he’s a willing soul and he surely doesn’t give her any backchat. But when we got here, I made him understand that he’d have to sell something to pay his way. The pictures are all he had with him. That’s real gold on them, you know. You want one?”

“I want all of them,” said Ben Shoushan.

Miriam slapped the meat onto the quadrae so hard that David’s slice broke, letting a trickle of juice dribble onto the table.

“Now look what you’ve done, you filthy man!”

“Miriam…” He knew that the source of her anger was not the broken piece of bread. His daughter, Ruti, had leaped to her feet and was already wiping up the spill. David saw the girl’s shoulders drooping as his wife continued her scolding. Ruti hated raised voices. Sparrow, David called her, for she reminded him of a nervous little bird. Like a sparrow, she was a dull brown thing, with dun-colored eyes and a muddy complexion, who often smelled bad from tending the kettles where he boiled the gallnuts, resins, and copper vitriol that made his inks. Poor Sparrow, he thought. Gentle, willing to work, at fifteen she could have been married to some kindly young man and out of reach of her mother’s bitter tongue. But Ruti lacked both fortune and a fair face. And from the observant Torah families, who did not set such store in those things, she was excluded by the taint of her brother’s conduct.

Miriam, tough as an old saddle, had no patience with the girl’s timidity. She shoved her daughter roughly and snatched the clout from her hand, rubbing at the table with exaggerated vigor. “You know better than me how few commissions you have, and yet you go and spend two months’ income on pictures! And Rachela says you didn’t even bargain with the boy.”

David tried to quash his unneighborly thoughts about Rachela, who always seemed to know the business of the entire Kahal in its most minute particulars.

“Miriam…”

“As if we haven’t enough expense coming up, with your nephew’s wedding!”

“Miriam,” said David, raising his own voice in a way that was highly unusual for him. “The pictures are
for
the wedding. You know I am making a
haggadah shel Pesach
for Joseph’s boy and his bride. Don’t you see? I can have the quires with these pictures bound into the book, and then we will be able to give a gift of substance.”

Miriam pursed her lips. She tucked a curl of hair into her linen headdress. “Oh, well, in that case…” Miriam would rather suck a gall than back down in an argument, but this information brought with it the ease of removing an ill-fitting boot. She had been troubled about this wedding gift. One could hardly come with a trifle to the wedding of Don Joseph’s eldest son and the daughter of the Sanz family. She had worried that a plain haggadah from David’s own hand would seem a paltry gift to those great families. But these pictures, with their gold and lapis and malachite, these, she had to admit, had quality.

David Ben Shoushan cared nothing for money and less for position; that he was the poorest man in the entire Ben Shoushan family bothered him not at all. But he did care for the peace of his household. Seeing that he had pleased his refractory wife was a relief to him. The idea of the thing satisfied him, too. A decade ago, he might have hesitated at the propriety of images, even religious ones such as these. But his brother was a courtier: he held banquets and enjoyed music and was—though David would never say it to his face—barely distinguishable from a Gentile. Why should his son not have a book to rival the finest Christian psalter? The great Rabbi Duran, after all, had insisted on teaching his students only from beautiful books. These, the rabbi said, strengthened the soul. “It has been one of the virtues of our nation that the rich and important in every generation have tried to produce beautiful manuscripts,” the rabbi had said.

Well, he was neither rich nor important, but by the help of the Almighty, these fine paintings had been put into his hands—hands that had already been gifted with the skill to produce harmonious script. He intended that the book he made would be a glory. Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a
sofer
—a scribe of God’s holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him.

He was at work in the first gray light of morning, waving away Miriam when she came to offer breakfast. Their house, like most in the Kahal, was a tiny tilted thing, just two rooms perched one above the other, so Ben Shoushan had to work outdoors, even in the chill of winter. It was barely ten paces from the street door to the house, and the space was crammed with vats of skins soaking in lime, and others stretched on frames waiting for the few pale beams of sunlight that would slowly dry them. There were skins still thick with their fat and blood vessels, awaiting the careful parings of his rounded blade. But he had a small pile of scraped skins, and these he sorted carefully, looking for those of mountain sheep, that matched the parchments of the illuminations. When he had selected the perfect skins, he set Ruti to work, rubbing them smooth with pumice and chalk. He washed his hands in the chill water of the courtyard fountain, and sat down heavily at his
scriptionale,
carefully ruling up the readied pages with his bone stylus. His letters would hang from these faint lines. When the ruling was done, he passed his cold hands over his face.

“Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach,”
he whispered. Then he took up the turkey quill and dipped it in the ink.

The fiery letters seemed to burn into the parchment.

Ben Shoushan’s stomach growled, protesting his missed breakfast.

There were many in need this year, thanks to the taxes imposed by the king and queen for their interminable wars in the south. Ben Shoushan tried to rein in his racing thoughts. A
sofer
must fill his mind with only the holy letters. He could not be distracted by daily things.
“Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach,”
he whispered to himself again, trying to quiet his mind. His hand formed the letter
shin—
the letter of reason. What reason could there be in this constant fighting with the Moors? Had not the Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared these lands in contentment—in
convivencia
—for hundreds of years? What was the saying? Christians raise the armies, Muslims raise the buildings, Jews raise the money.

This year here, thanks to Don Seneor and Don Abravanel, may their names be inscribed for a blessing, who have dazzled the eyes of Ferdinand with gold, and kept the royal ears closed to the hateful murmuring of jealous burghers.

Ben Shoushan thought of the slave who had served the mute youth. How he wished he had been able to speak with him, to find out something of the history of those marvelous paintings. The
sofer
’s hand moved from ink bottle to parchment as his imagination conjured a lean black figure, walking with a staff along a dusty yellow road toward a settlement of mud-brick houses where a family waited who had imagined him dead. Well, likely he
was
dead, by now, or chained to a galley oar with a bloodied back.

He went on so, all day until the light failed, battling the distractions of his busy mind to set down letter after careful letter. At dusk, he asked his Sparrow to bring him a clean robe, and he walked to the
mikvah,
hoping that by a ritual immersion he might clear himself of the daily clamor and open his mind fully to his sacred work. Returning refreshed, he bade Sparrow fill a lamp so he could work on into the night. When Miriam smelled the rich scent of the lit wick, she came flying from the house like a wasp, scolding about the price of the oil. But David spoke to her with unaccustomed sharpness, and she retreated, muttering.

It was in the still of the early hours, when the stars blazed in the black sky, that it happened. His fasting, the chill, the brilliant flare of the lamp: suddenly the letters lifted and swirled into a glorious wheel. His hand flew across the parchment. Every letter was afire. Each character raised itself and danced spinning in the void. And then the letters merged into one great fire, out of which emerged just four, blazing with the glory of the Almighty’s holy name. The power and the sweetness of it were too much for Ben Shoushan, and he fainted.

When Ruti found him in the morning, he was slumped unconscious under the
scriptionale.
A light frost whitened his beard. But his script, every letter and word of it perfect, covered more pages than a
sofer
could complete in a week of constant labor.

Ruti put him to bed that morning, but in the afternoon he insisted on rising and getting to his work again. His hand was once again an ordinary
sofer
’s, his mind the usual unruly tangle of mundane thoughts, but his heart remained touched by the night’s mystical bliss. The feeling stayed with him the following day, and the text progressed steadily and well.

On the fourth day, when the work of what should have been weeks was nearing completion, a light tapping came on the outer door. Ben Shoushan hissed with exasperation. Ruti, skittering in her silent, birdlike way through the clutter of the courtyard, flung back the crossbar and opened the door. When she recognized the woman who stood there, Ruti straightened, her hands fluttering to adjust her head cover. Her eyes, when she turned to her father, were wide and frightened.

As the woman moved to step across the threshold, Ben Shoushan flung down his quill, outraged. How dare she, whom he would not name, how dare she come to his door? His anger acted on his empty stomach like acid, sending a searing pain through his gut. Ruti, startled by his expression, fluttered back from the street door, heading toward the house.