Altai: A Novel (12 page)

6.

I couldn’t think when I had last had a good night’s sleep. I’d spent the night of the Arsenal fire awake, and since then Morpheus had vanished, to be replaced by Cerberus, the three-mouthed dog, guarding the threshold to keep me from leaving hell.

Weeks of horrible dreams, sudden awakenings, pain from the beatings I had received in Ragusa. Then everything changed. After dining with the refugees, I went back to my room and it was a relief to realize that I was going to sleep, calmly, without fighting. As in the
Aeneid
, someone had thrown Cerberus “a sop, in honey steep’d, to charm the guard,” and now “long draughts of sleep his monstrous limbs enslaved.” Virgil, my father’s favorite reading. That was my last conscious thought after I crossed the threshold and left Hades behind me.

I slept, slept, and slept again.

The next day passed slowly, drifting on a lazy breeze. I watched it floating above me like a white cloud, one of the dense, clear, nimbus type, ice vessels floating in the blue of the sky, on those afternoons that you spend in a field with your nose in the air and a blade of grass between your teeth. Afternoons that seemed endless to me as a boy. How long had it been since I had had one like this? My mother took me to play outside the walls, we ran together, we picked flowers.

For the whole of that day I didn’t see Yossef Nasi or David Gomez. Dana made a fleeting appearance, just a flash and a trail of perfume. She left my dinner in my room, but I took the tray and went back down with it into the drawing room, to share a table with the old man and the other refugees.

It was there that Nasi found me, less than an hour later, when he bustled in with Gomez, followed by a troop of servants. He stopped in the middle of the room and spoke in a loud voice: “Listen to me. Some of our brothers and sisters need help from whoever is capable of giving it. It’s not far from here; please come with us.”

With the exception of the infirm, the aged, and mothers nursing babies, almost everyone moved right away. Little knots of people dissolved, people who were sitting down got to their feet, even children left their games. Gomez walked toward the door along with the servants, and everyone else followed after him. Before setting off himself, Nasi glanced at me. I was still at the table, startled by the turn that events had taken.

“You come too, De Zante,” he said. “It’ll do you good.”

Flights of gulls, low, risky parabolas among the masts of the mooring barge and the roofs of the houses by the water. We approached, and the ship slowly came alongside. I began to make out the faces of the people on the deck; on land, the men responsible for mooring the boat were organizing two gangways. Nasi and David Gomez quickened their steps, followed by the little crowd. I stayed behind, confused.

We hadn’t exchanged a word. The sense of expectation was palpable, and the loquacity and affability of my fellow guests seemed to have vanished in the cold air of Ortaköy. Nasi was bustling about on the dockside, issuing orders. Gomez helped him to set up a gangway, and the first people prepared to disembark in the lashing wind.

The men’s faces were ashen. An old man came forward, supported by his children and grandchildren. Nasi had a word of comfort for each of them, and pointed to a building behind us. “In there you will find hot tea, dried figs, and bread.” His firm tone was reassuring. “There are also beds where you can rest. If one of you is ill or in pain for any reason, a doctor will be called.”

I heard people speaking Ladino and Italian, as the servants distributed water and blankets. A middle-aged man who had just come down the gangway stepped forward.

“
Shalom
. Are you Don Yossef Nasi?”

“I am.”

The man, his features distorted with fatigue and excitement, leaned forward and kissed his hand. In my mind’s eye I can still see the image of his dirt-blackened fingers gripping Nasi’s white ones. “What they say of you is true,” the man said. “May the Lord allow you to protect us at all times.”

Nasi smiled at him and led him to the shore. “You’re safe now. Go and warm yourselves. Later you will be accompanied to your lodgings.”

In front of me was the Great Enemy, concerned about people he didn’t know, people he had never seen before, as if they were his children, parents, cousins.

Then I saw the woman and the child. Among the last to disembark; the little one, six or seven years old, clutching his mother’s skirts. They walked cautiously, and there was profound weariness in the woman’s eyes. The child was very fair, and looked around in terror. On the last step, just before they touched dry land, they stumbled.

I leaped forward and gripped the woman’s arm. The child hurried to hide behind her.

The words came to my lips unbidden: “
No tened miedo
,
you are safe.”

The woman thanked me and was helped on her way. I stood where I was, looking out toward the sea, filled with a surge of emotion that swelled my chest and veins. I had just witnessed an ancient scene. I had played my part in a performance that had been going on for centuries, for more than a thousand years.

I felt tears trickling down my cheeks, all the way to my lips, and tasted their bitterness. A hand fell on my shoulder. I still remember the sound of Nasi’s voice, which brought me back to the present, amid all the noise of the ship’s landing.

“Welcome back, Manuel Cardoso.”

7.

The window frames the roofs of Cannaregio. I’m sitting at the table, waiting for the servant to bring in the braised meat, but instead Rizzi comes in with his favorite kind of game: well-roasted Jews on a spit.

“They call them Aaron and Asser. They’re young, they’ve just entered the house of catechumens so they can become Christians. One of them’s from the ghetto; the other one’s from Poland.”

A report in tiny, neat handwriting. Rizzi hands it to me smugly. I swallow my mouthful and clear my throat. “Is there anything urgent, Sior Rizzi? Some Jews who have only just come to their senses want to become Christian and live in the grace of God. Nothing too dreadful so far. What else have they been up to?”

“That’s easy. It seems that it’s the fault of this guy, a porter they call the Cunt. He’s set the two catechumens to work and cursed the Madonna.” I nod. Rizzi goes on. “Then that one from the ghetto, on Saturday he gets on his clean Sunday shirt, and he goes around saying as how when he’s a Christian he’ll have a fine set of clothes, and it’ll get him a long way.”

“A cheeky fellow, then. But blasphemy and scandal is none of our business.”

But the cook Rizzi has saved his finest course for the end: “They’re both workshop assistants to a printer from the ghetto. His name’s Zanetti.”

I stand up uneasily; that meat will have to wait. Books and printers are always our business.

Facing Tavosanis and Rizzi, the two of them are on their best behavior. They deny the insults to the saints and the Madonna. They confirm their intention to have themselves baptized, although perhaps not right away. Tavosanis conducts the interrogation. Not badly, but all too predictably. The first boy has ready answers.

“So why did you change your shirt that Saturday?”

“It was dirty, so I put on a clean one.”

“They say that in the house of catechumens you’re always quarrelling with the prior, that you plague him with questions.”

“And where’s the sin in that? I ask him all those questions so I can understand the truth.”

He’s a clever young man; he defends himself well. You don’t need to press such people, you don’t need to keep on at them. Better just to let them talk. Scare them a bit and keep listening.

I tell Rizzi to warm his hands, and gesture to Tavosanis to say that’s enough.

A little while later, we know where the books are hidden. Zanetti didn’t present them to the Office for examination, and that’s enough for confiscation and a bonfire. Three hundred copies of the same text. On the frontispiece, Hebrew characters that I read instinctively, without noticing.

And now here they are, in front of my eyes, in the library of Palazzo Belvedere.
Mahzor Sephardim
. The collection of rites and prayers of my mother’s people.

In Venice, the name Sephardim had slipped away among my thoughts. Back then I was Emanuele De Zante, Venetian, member of the apostolic Roman Catholic Church, and these were Jewish books. “Sephardim” had a faraway sound, like the name of a remote population of the Caucasus.

“A very rare copy you’re holding in your hands,” said someone behind me. I turned around and recognized the Englishman, Ralph Fitch, dressed as he had been on the evening when I first saw him. He pointed to the shelves around us and said, “Many of these works escaped the flames, the fanaticism that is intoxicating Europe.”

Again I lowered my eyes to the
Mahzor
. Meanwhile Fitch went on talking, in his singsong, slightly gloomy Italian. I wasn’t listening to him, it was just a sea of syllables, but eventually he stopped and I became aware of the silence.

I looked up again. “Forgive me, you were saying?”

He laughed faintly. “I was saying that this place is precious,” and again he looked around, before adding, “It’s a refuge for runaway books.”

8.

I read greedily, as if to satisfy an ancient hunger. Every day I spent in the library was a new apprenticeship on a long trajectory that urged me toward its conclusion.

I looked at the walls filled with books and they seemed to me a mountain I must climb, to glimpse from its summit a horizon I had never seen before.

I thought of my mother and heard in my ears the echo of her voice. Around me, lined up on the shelves, there were volumes that a good Jew should love. Some of them I had struggled through during my schooldays, others I didn’t know, but they all attracted me like treasures. Perhaps fate had chosen an intricate path to fulfill Sarah Cardoso’s last wish.

I soon found myself remastering the Hebrew letters, even if the meaning of what I was reading sometimes escaped me. I found a Hebrew-Latin dictionary, compiled by a Dominican friar, and this discovery helped me considerably.

I started studying the
Moreh Nevuchim
, the
Guide for the Perplexed
by Moses Maimonides. I realized that I knew the Torah as a donkey knows the carter’s whip. I plunged into the commentaries on the Zohar, which many people held to be equal to the Talmud. Speculations, visions. My mind opened.

I spent whole days in there, while outside it had started snowing again and the garden of the palace was reduced to a narrow passage between white cumulus clouds and icy fountains.

In the morning I was always alone, but during the afternoon, I often met other users of the library, and gradually I began talking to them about what they were reading. Apart from Ralph Fitch, I met a kabbalist called Meir, a poet of Azeri origin and a calligrapher of the Sultan’s, who was devoting his skill to copying out an ancient Mohammedan text.

One day the master of the house came to see me. I was concentrating so hard on the meaning of a sentence that I didn’t notice him entering and suddenly found him standing behind me.

“I see that you like reading, Manuel,” he said, peering at the pages from over my head. “My Aunt Gracia was a keen reader, too. She said that books have only two shortcomings.” He reached out his hand and tapped the cover of a big volume lying on the table. “They’re heavy,” he said. Then he looked up at the walls covered with shelves. “And they need space.”

“Then this room solves both problems,” I observed.

He shook his head and settled into the armchair next to mine. “Five hundred and eighty volumes is a troublesome legacy. Gracia also said that a Jew should never unpack his bags, but always keep them ready beside the door.”

“And does that apply even here?”

He narrowed his eyes as if trying to spot something in the distance. “Since I disembarked more than fifteen years ago, not a day has passed when I haven’t asked myself that very question. The Ottoman empire is safer than any other territory, but do you think it’s easy? Our business deals, our movements, our way of dressing. Everything falls under the control of the authorities. We aren’t free to cultivate our dreams. Have you ever had a dream, Manuel?”

The answer came out like a sob. “Yes: not to be Jewish. It was my father who fulfilled it.”

My frankness didn’t seem to bother him. “I understand you better than you imagine. Why be weak when you can become strong? But I’m not just content with transforming myself. I want to transform a people. From weak to strong. From divided to united. From unwelcome guests to masters of their own destiny. From fugitives to protectors of the fleeing. We’ve been running away for fifteen hundred years. The time has come to stop.”

That man went on disorienting me, as when a light enters a room and little by little the corners are illuminated, revealing it as different from the way we imagined it in the gloom.

He slipped a big key into one of the panels that ran along the base of the bookshelves. From the space behind it he took a roll of parchment and spread it out on the table in front of me. It was a map, showing the portion of the world that extends from Crete to the Holy Land, from the coasts of Anatolia to the sources of the Nile.

“Years ago, my aunt received from Suleyman the concession to found a colony on Lake Tiberias.” Nasi’s index finger stopped on a little patch of blue between Jerusalem and Damascus. “It was her dream, and it has been mine, too. Palestine is the land promised to Moses, our land. But things haven’t gone as we hoped, and the colony can’t provide for itself.” He looked up from the map and turned towards me.

“Over time I’ve understood our mistake. I am a merchant and a banker; I invest money in commercial enterprises. Very many Jews have the same vocation, because the sovereigns of Europe have forbidden us to practice any other trade. We need not a lake, but a sea.”

His hand, outstretched and with its fingers spread, stroked the Mediterranean.

“But you already have possessions in the middle of the sea,” I said, pointing at a spot on the map. “You are duke of Naxos and the Seven Islands.”

Nasi sighed. “The Cyclades are a handful of little rocks. Beautiful and polished, and it’s nice to hold them in your hand and shake them like a rattle, but I have something bigger in mind.” He gestured with his hand, and the Cyclades were swept aside. “I imagine a land where we will be able to live in peace, do our business deals, and cultivate the vine, the olive and tolerance. A place where you could choose the residence that we have promised you. A free nation, a refuge for all of us, for the books hated by the despots, and for everyone who is persecuted. Will you help me build that place, Manuel?” It was a sincere question and I felt like answering with one that was equally candid.

“Do I have an alternative?”

“You can leave here and walk all the way to the gate,” he said. “No one has orders to stop you.”

“Why are you giving me this opportunity?”

“Because I’m not Consigliere Nordio. He asked you to be true to Venice. I’m asking you to be true to yourself.”

I swallowed. If the time I had spent at Palazzo Belvedere was supposed to allow us to get to know one another, Yossef Nasi had used that time to great advantage. In only two weeks he seemed to have plumbed the depths of my unease. “How can I choose, if I don’t know what you want from me?”

He looked satisfied. I still hadn’t left, and that was a good sign. He got up and walked around for a moment, brushing the spines of the books with his fingers. “You told Navarro that the architect Savorgnan left his work in Nicosia unfinished. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember in detail what he said to you?”

“That there wasn’t enough money to reface the bastions of Constanza and D’Avila. All eleven fortresses of the city are made of earth, then covered with stone. If they aren’t refaced they’re little more use than sand castles.”

I paused. I lowered my eyes to the map and saw the name of Nicosia, just off the Ottoman coast. “Cyprus . . .” I murmured to myself, and then raised my voice as I looked at him. “The sea, of course, and a big island. Vines, olive trees, commercial ports. That’s how you plan to take your vengeance on Venice. By taking Cyprus away.”

“I have a score to settle with Venice, that’s true. But it isn’t vengeance that inspires me, and not even the Sultan wants the ruin of La Serenissima.” He put his hand in his pocket and took out a gold coin. He held it between his thumb and index finger, so that I could recognize it: a Venetian ducat. “In Constantinople the most important business deals are done with this, and no one wants to stop doing them.”

He approached me again and lowered his voice, as if to lend additional weight to every single word. “The score that needs settling is with history, Manuel. I have the money to do it and I have the support of the Sultan. He promised me the crown of the island, when it is in his hands.” He looked me straight in the eyes. “Thanks to your information, I will soon have a fleet.” He set the gold coin down on the map, in front of me, right on top of the outline of Cyprus.