People of the Book (28 page)

“But Mother cannot possibly have agreed to this…. I…I…am afraid she will be angry with me.”

“Most assuredly, my Sparrow, she will be angry. But not with you. There is a reason for this that is not your concern, as I have said. Now hurry before that rogue uses your lateness as an excuse to delay the work.”

As it happened, her father need not have worried on that score. Whatever else Micha may have been, he was a proud craftsman, and he knew that the illuminations and text presented to him by Ben Shoushan held the promise of a book of exceptional beauty. It could make his reputation among the wealthiest Jews in the community. Such opportunities didn’t come his way every day, and he had set aside all his lesser commissions to attend to this one.

The haggadah sat on the workbench, bound in the cover he had fashioned of the softest kid, embossed with intricate tooling. There was a blank space at the center of the cover.

The silversmith was a young man, just out of his apprenticeship but gifted in design. He took the packet eagerly from Ruti, unwrapped it, and examined the
ketubah
case. “Very fine. A shame to undo such work. But I promise your mother I will fashion something worthy of her sacrifice.” He had a small parchment with him, which he unrolled on the workbench. He had drawn a design for the cover’s central medallion, which showed the wing of the Sanz family emblem entwined with roses, the symbol of the Ben Shoushan family. He had also designed a set of beautiful clasps, also ingeniously formed of wings and roses.

“I will work all night, if necessary, so that the book will be ready by Erev Shabbat, as your father desires,” he said. He wrapped the book and the case carefully and took his leave then, anxious to cover the miles from Tarragona in daylight, before the brigands began their nightly work.

Ruti ran her finger over a section of stitched quires, pretending to examine the sewing, stalling until the smith left the workshop. She had seen the letter of union, their secret
beit,
scribbled on a parchment scrap on the workbench.

The binder turned from the doorway. He licked his lips. She felt his hand on the small of her back as he propelled her toward the alcove. Inside, the familiar, rich scent of leather aroused her, and she turned to him, circling her plump arms around his thin hips, tugging away his apron and then working loose the garment beneath. The taste of him was sharp and salty in her mouth.

She could still taste him as she stood outside the street door of her house. She was late for the evening meal, but she was afraid to go in. She expected her parents to be at war over the missing case. But when she finally plucked up her courage and entered, as she knew she must, she found her mother nagging, just as she always did, about her father’s everyday inadequacies. There was no tempest, just the usual low tide of bile. Ruti kept her eyes on her bread and did not look at her father, although she wanted to. She wondered what lie he had told and wanted very badly to ask him. But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.

When Renato was to be put to the question for the third time, he was too weak to stand. The
alguaziles
had to drag him, one on each side. He sat in the black-draped room, smelling the scent of candle wax and the rank stink of his own fear.

“Reuben Ben Shoushan, do you confess that you did have in your possession those things required for a Jewish man to pray?”

He tried to speak, but the sound from his raw throat was a whisper. He wanted to say that he had not prayed as a Jew, as the phylacteries suggested. He had walked away from Hebrew prayer when he left his father’s house. It was true that he had loved Rosa before he had loved her church. But the priest who had baptized him explained that Jesus often worked his will just so, and that the love he felt for Rosa was but a particle of the Lord’s love, given to him as a foretaste of the sweetness of salvation. He had wrestled, in his mind, until he could believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah for whom the Jews had waited. He had liked the priest’s hopeful account of heaven. Perhaps most of all, he liked the idea of a wife whose body would be free to him at almost any time, rather than the hard discipline of abstinence that awaited him for half of every month with a Jewish bride.

He had kept the phylacteries not because he missed Jewish prayer, but because he missed his father, whom he loved with all his heart. When he rose, and before he slept, he clasped the leather straps to him, not to pray, but just to think for a moment of his father, and the love with which he had inscribed the parchment within. But to love a Jew and his works was itself a sin to these priests of the Inquisition.

And so he nodded.

“Let the record show that the Jew, Reuben Ben Shoushan, has confessed to Judaizing. Now, admit that you have corrupted your wife with these things. An informant says you have been seen praying together.”

Renato felt a new surge of fear. His wife. His innocent, ignorant wife. Surely he was not to be the cause of her suffering. He shook his head as vigorously as his depleted state allowed.

“Admit it. You taught her your vile prayers and forced her to pray with you. There was a witness.”

“No!” Renato rasped, finally finding his voice. “They lie!” He dragged the words from his shredded throat. “We prayed the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. Only those. My wife had no idea I had brought Jewish things into our house.”

“Did you have these things with you when you contracted the sacrament of marriage?”

Renato shook his head.

“How long, then, have you been a Judaizer?”

He opened his cracked lips and whispered, “Only one month.”

“You claim you have been a Judaizer for only one month?”

He nodded.

“Then who supplied you with these things?”

Renato winced. He had not foreseen this.

“Who supplied you? Name the man!”

Renato felt the room begin to spin and clutched his chair.

“Name him! I give you one chance more.”

The priest signaled, and the masked hulk moved toward him. The
alguaziles
grasped Renato and tugged him from the chair. He held his peace as they dragged him from the room and down the dimly lit stairs. He held his peace as they tied him to the ladder and inverted it over the basin. Dry sobs wracked his body as he heard the well water pouring into the ewers. Still, he held his peace. It was when they picked up the linen and forced open his jaws that he cried out. The pain of the one word seared his throat.

“Sparrow!”

When an
alguazil
made an arrest in the Christian quarters, he took care to do it at dead of night. That way, their victim would be at his lowest ebb, confused, unlikely to put up significant resistance or raise a fuss among neighbors who might complicate the business. But the Holy Office of the Inquisition did not send its own soldiers into the Kahal. It was concerned with the rooting out of heresy among those who pretended to have accepted Christ, not with those who persisted in their old, erroneous faith. The crimes of Jews who meddled with Christians and tempted them from the true religion were a matter for the civil authorities, and they sent their soldiers at any time they chose.

So it was afternoon, and still light, when a preemptory banging shattered the peace of the Ben Shoushan house. Only David was within; Miriam had gone to the
mikvah,
and Ruti to the bindery to see if her father might collect the finished work that evening in time to deliver it to his brother, whose return was expected. David had noticed, with annoyance, that she was late returning from the errand, as usual.

He shuffled to the door, crying out as he went against whatever uncouth caller had the effrontery to pound so on his door. As he flung the bar back and saw who stood there, the imprecations died in his mouth. He took a step backward.

The men moved into the courtyard. One spat into the well. Another turned, slowly and purposefully, letting the tip of his sword’s scabbard catch on the edge of the bench that held David’s delicate writing implements. Ink bottles tumbled to the ground.

“Give us Ruth Ben Shoushan,” the tallest of the armed men commanded.

“Ruti?” said David in a small voice, his eyes widening in surprise. He had been sure the men had come for him. “There must be a mistake. You can’t want Ruti.”

“Ruth Ben Shoushan. Now!” The man raised a booted foot with an almost languid motion and kicked over David’s
scriptionale.

“She…she is not here!” said David, his scalp prickling with fear. “She went out on an errand for me. But what can you possibly want with little Ruti?”

In reply, the solider drew back his fist and struck the
sofer
in the face. David reeled, lost his balance, and fell backward, landing hard on his buttocks. He wanted to howl in pain, but the air had been forced from him, and when he opened his mouth, no sound came.

The soldier reached down and tore off his head cover, then grasped the knot of silver hair in his fist and pulled him up off the ground.

“Where did she go?”

David, wincing, cried out that he didn’t know. “My wife sent her and I—”

Before he could finish his sentence, the soldier wrenched on his hair, flinging him to the ground. A boot landed hard against the side of his head.

His ear roared and rang. He felt a burning on the side of his face, then wetness.

Another kick landed against his jaw. He felt the bones grind against each other.

“Where is your daughter?”

Even had he wanted to reply, his broken jaw would not open to form words. He tried to raise an arm to protect his fractured skull, but it was as if a lead weight had been tied to it. His left side would not move. He lay there, powerless under the blows, as the blood leaking into his brain spread further, and extinguished the light entirely.

Rosa del Salvador had not slept properly in days. Her huge belly would not let her find a comfortable position. Her face throbbed from the blows her father, in his rage, had landed on her earlier in the evening. Even when exhaustion dragged at her and she dozed, a terrible dream always came. Tonight the dream had been of an old horse from her childhood, a black gelding with a white star on his forehead. He had been the blindfolded horse who worked the oil press, plodding in patient circles. One day the horse had fallen lame, and her father had sent for the knacker. Rosa remembered how the man had put the iron bolt to her old friend’s head, right on the star, and given the great hammer blow. As a little girl, she had cried for the death of the horse. But in her dream, the horse did not die, but reared, screaming, with the metal bolt embedded in his head and blood flying from his tossing mane.

Rosa awoke, sweating. She sat up in the dark and listened to the night sounds of her family’s
masía.
The farmhouse was never really silent. There was always the creaking of the old beams, the ragged snores of her father in his wine-drenched slumber, the scratching of mice among the amphorae where the grain was stored. Usually these sounds soothed her, but not tonight. She rubbed her hands over her belly. These dreams, surely, were curdling the blood that should nurture her child. She feared that the child inside her might be turning monstrous.

Why had she let herself love a Jew? Her father had warned her. “Don’t trust him. He says he will give up his faith for you, but they never do. In the end, he will blame you, and the bitterness will poison your later years.”

Well, if only that was all that had happened. A commonplace misery, such as a marriage gone sour in old age. Now it was likely that neither of them would see their old age. Without ransom, which her father refused to pay, her husband faced the stake. She had begged her father to buy her husband’s life, and received blows for it. Her stubborn choice in marriage had put them all at risk, he said. The entire family was now suspected of being secret Jews. Any jealous neighbor who wished for one less competitor in the oil market, any greedy man who eyed their fine groves, could make an accusation against them. It could be some trifling thing: that her mother had choked on a piece of ham, that her father had changed his shirt on a Friday, that she, Rosa, had lit candles too early in the evening. Her father feared it, that was plain. Every evening he tormented himself, running through lists of his competitors, of customers who might have a grievance, of relatives with whom he had not been open-handed enough in their times of need. He would berate her mother for having once, long ago, bought kosher meat because it was selling cheaper at market than the cuts of the Christian butcher. At such times, Rosa tried to be anywhere in the
masía
that would keep her from falling under his eye. Once, when he beat her, he had cried out that he wished she would miscarry, that her infant, with its Jew-polluted blood, might be born dead. Rosa’s great guilt was that, as the blows fell, she, too, began to wish for it.

Agitated, she eased herself up off her pallet and reached for her mantle. Air, that was what she needed. The heavy farmhouse door creaked as she pressed against it. The night was mild; the scent of loamy earth carried the first hint of spring. She threw a blanket around her shoulders but did not take a lamp; her instep knew the path to the grove that she had traversed all her life. She loved the trees, the gnarly strength of them. The way they could be blasted by lightning or charred by a brushfire, and look quite dead, then send forth a new green shoot out of the old wood and keep living, in spite of everything. She would have to be like an olive tree, she decided. She ran her hand over the rough bark.

She was there, in the groves, when the
alguazil
and the bailiff came on horseback up the path that led from the town. She watched, hidden in the tree shadows, as the lamps flared in the house. She heard her mother’s cries of fear, her father’s shouts of protest, as the bailiff took note of the contents of the farmhouse. Everything they owned would be forfeit to the crown if the charges against them were proved. She shrank to the ground, pulling the dun-colored blanket tight to hide the whiteness of her bed gown, covering herself in earth and leaf litter, afraid lest the torches move toward the groves. But her father must have told some lie about her whereabouts to the
alguazil,
for he did not even make a cursory search. She watched, helpless, as her parents were led away. And then she ran, with her strange, slow, pregnant gait, through the groves, across the neighbor’s fields. She could not go to them for help; she could not know if they were the Inquisition’s informants. Beyond the neighbor’s fields, the land rose abruptly toward Esplugües. She could hide there, in the cave where she and Renato had met in secret courtship. Why had she gone to him? Why had she brought this misery upon their heads? The bulk of the baby compressed her lungs so that she could barely breathe as she climbed. The sharp stone scraped her bare feet. She was cold. But fear drove her on.