Incantation (6 page)

Love

I
n the outskirts, the Muslim quarter was quiet, but the closer I got to the center of the village, the noisier it became. There were riots in the Plaza, neighbor turned against neighbor. Bloody betrayal on every step. Shops had their locks and doors ripped away. People were carrying stolen goods on their backs: rugs and kettles and bolts of cloth. It might have seemed like a carnival except for the screaming, and the rising smoke, and the bitterness in the air. The lime trees in the Plaza had been set on fire. Lime trees when they burn smell black and evil, like honey when it’s scalded, like rotten fruit. People said those trees had always been there and that our town would continue as long as they flowered and grew.

Andres had been waiting for me at the edge of our neighborhood. He’d seen me run off and had been worried.

This is no time to be wandering around,
he said.

I have the feeling I don’t even know who I am.

It was the time when anything could happen. It was the time when a single word could turn your world upside down.

Don’t worry. I know who you are in your heart,
Andres said.
That’s all that matters.

And that was it. That was the moment. Now I knew how I would feel if I ever lost him. That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do was imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.

Andres walked me home in silence; we stayed as near to one another as we dared. It had never taken that long to walk home before, and all the while I wished it would last an eternity. He kissed me when we reached the gate of my house. It was dark and no one could see; all the same I felt as though I were burning so brightly everyone in every house could see the light inside of me.

That was how I knew what the gate in my dreams was made of. It was made of this.

I
WENT TO SPEAK
to my grandmother. I was afraid to ask her the questions I needed to have answered, so I said the rosary before I had the courage to approach her. She was kneading dough at the big table. Our table was so old you could see the dents in the wood where my great-great-grandmother had chopped vegetables. My great-great-grandmother had kneaded bread here so often, the table curved down in the center, and now my grandmother was kneading bread in the very same place. She added olives and garlic to the mix, then braided the dough in three parts so that it rose prettily. My grandmother’s way of dealing with the riots in the Plaza was not to go there and not to think about it.

But I had been there. I’d read the decree.

My grandmother was not the sort of person you could fool with pretty words and long, drawn-out requests.

I have questions for you,
I said.

I’m too busy.
She didn’t even look at me.

Am I Esther?

My grandmother stopped kneading the dough for the briefest instant, then she continued. No answer, so I tried another question.

Are you Sarah?
I asked.

Now my grandmother stopped her work. She pushed the dough away and looked at me. She had never looked at me in this way. She had been too busy hiding things from me. For an instant I could see inside of her. She had stopped protecting me from the truth, and it glimmered between us.

So it was true. I felt my face grow hot. Was everything I’d ever thought and said and done been a lie?

And no one ever told me?

Once you know some things, you can’t unknow them. It’s a burden that can never be given away.

I felt so hot and so stupid; I ran to my chamber and threw myself on my bed. My pallet was made of fresh straw, but I was like the lime now and not the flower. Bitterness longs for bitterness.

My grandmother came after me and sat on the edge of the bed.

We planned to tell you,
she said.

When? When I was in my grave?

I’m telling you now. We are Jews and we always have been, but the only way for us to survive is to pretend to be something else.

I sat up, my face burning with tears. Maybe they were clear or maybe they were blue. What difference did it make?

Marranos,
I said.
Pigs.

My grandmother looked as though she wanted to slap me, but she didn’t. It was the truth after all. That’s what they called us.

You have to tell Luis,
I said.
He’s living a lie. He’ll be furious.

Luis knows. He will take over from Friar deLeon someday so he can protect our people, just as the Friar has. This is how we have a voice the town fathers will listen to.

You told Luis but not me! Because I’m nothing to you!

The world had indeed changed if this was the way I was speaking to my grandmother.

Exactly the opposite,
my grandmother said.
We kept silent because we didn’t want you to carry the burden before you had to.

When I was a little girl, I had wished my grandmother would come and tell me a story at night, but she barely glanced at me when I went off to bed. Now I refused to look at her.

This kind of knowing you can never tell to anyone. If you want us to survive, you cannot trust a soul.

My grandmother ran her hands over my hair.

Esther,
she said.

It was my name after all. My secret name. The one I could never use.

I looked up at my grandmother.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of her.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
, my mother woke me. She shook me, then signaled for me to follow. The moon had risen, and everything looked white. I pulled my cloak on over my nightclothes and stepped into my shoes.

I felt I must be dreaming, but the road we were walking on was very real. We didn’t speak as we made our way through town. Still, I knew my grandmother and my mother had talked about me. Now it seemed they had decided they would trust me with their knowledge. My mother reminded me I could tell no one where she was taking me.

Not for any reason on this earth. You can never tell,
my mother told me.

I swore I would not.

I did not tell her that when she woke me, I had been standing in a garden in my dreams. Someone had called me
Esther.

Esther,
the voice had said in my dream.
Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.

My mother was so at home in the woods she didn’t notice when her skirts caught on thorns; little blue flags were left behind. I had to struggle to keep up with her. My breathing was so hard my sides hurt; still we went on. There were stones, but we went around them. There were low branches, but we ducked beneath them. There was a small stream, but we found our way over by stepping on some flat rocks.

We passed hidden graves on the way, all with blue stone markers, each engraved with a star. We didn’t stop until we came to a far place, one that was even more distant than the spot where my father was buried. We walked through a grove of plum trees, then crawled through a tall hedge covered by white blooming flowers. In the clearing on the other side of the hedge there was a pool made from cedar wood planks. My mother said the pool was very old and had to be repaired and filled with clean rainwater once a year by the men of our church. My mother told me the word for this wooden rainwater holder was called a
mikva,
a bath. It was only for women, to purify us and make us stronger. All of the women in our church shared our secret; all journeyed here when they came of age.

My mother pinned up her long hair and took off her clothes. She was so beautiful, I was stunned. I felt like nothing compared to her, a child; but when she told me to undress and enter the bath with her, I did.

We floated in the dark water. Above us the sky was so filled with stars, it seemed more white than black. I thought of salt and flour on my grandmother’s tabletop. I thought of pearls in the sea. All this way from town we could still breathe in the odor of the lime flowers from the burnt trees in the Plaza. Some things were strong; they stayed with you. The place where you grew up, the scent of lime flowers, the dreams you had. When I stared into the bathwater, I thought of the bowl of water my mother had me gaze into so many times, and I thought,
It is all here.
The beginning and the end.

Later, when I dressed, I could feel the burden of who we were. All the same, I felt like my truest self walking under the stars, so clean I shivered, so much who I was and always had been, whether or not they’d told me.

It was a long way back to town, and I had one more question to ask.

Why didn’t our great-great-grandparents leave this place instead of living false lives?

The court took the children when they cast out the Jews. They wouldn’t give them back until the people of your great-great-grandparents’ time converted.

They should have run away after that.

We’ve always lived here,
my mother said.
Five hundred years of bones are in this earth.

My mother knew how hard it was to leave the dead. But didn’t we carry them with us? Wasn’t my father with us as long as we thought of him?

We walked the rest of the way in silence. It was nearly sunrise when we sneaked into our own yard, our own house. We stopped in the yard and took off our shoes so we wouldn’t wake my grandfather. The chickens were still asleep, but there was the hawk above the fields, making its way through the lightening sky. I had seen these same fields every day of my life, the same olive and almond trees, the same horizon. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a mistake for people like us to be tied to a place. If we weren’t meant to be ready and willing to wander. If everything we needed was contained in who we were.

And what we remembered.

DARKENING LIGHT

Who Can You Tell

Sorrow

O
ver the next few days, there was so much looting that the streets became too dangerous to walk. My grandfather made a new lock for our door and nailed the windows shut. We did not go to the market or the dye vats or to the well in the Plaza. We took in the animals at night, letting the chickens lay their eggs on our rugs, the sheep shelter under our table, allowing the pigs to sleep beside the stove, all except for Dini, whom I sneaked up to my room at night.

Dini was very well behaved and quiet; he slept on a pile of rags, curled up in a corner. I could hear him snuffling in his dreams while I fell asleep, happy enough just to be near me. I wished I could sleep as deeply as he did. I wished I could be so easily comforted.

O
NE EVENING
, I went out for walk with Catalina. We were both restless, and we missed each other. Maybe I was wrong about the distance between us. Maybe we could be friends. Crow and Raven. Two girls who looked like sisters, with the same long black hair. Two girls who believed they could be anything they wanted to be.

Remember when we used to pretend we were donkeys and run through the field?
I asked.

We were silly children,
Catalina said.

You were faster than I was,
I said.

I was.
Catalina looked pleased.

In truth, I always slowed down at the end of every race. I was the sort of donkey who didn’t need to win. Maybe that was why whenever Catalina wanted something of mine, I was only too happy to give it to her.

But you were prettier,
Catalina said.

She had slipped her arm away from mine.

A donkey is a donkey.
I laughed.
None are pretty.

That may be,
Catalina said,
but some birds are called ravens and others are called crows. We’re too old to pretend anymore.
Catalina stopped and gave me a hard stare.
I don’t like the way you look at Andres,
she said.

I wanted to say
I can’t help myself,
but I didn’t say anything.

Stay away from him,
Catalina said.
I won’t tell you again.

O
NE MORNING
when we woke up, we found that a window had been pried open. Someone had broken in. My grandmother checked and made sure that her greatest treasure, her silver candlesticks, were still there. She searched through the rest of our belongings. All the robbers seemed to have taken was food. Olives, flour, a jar of honey. People were afraid to go to the shops or even to work in their own fields. These days it was not safe for a woman to venture to the market alone, lest she be taken by soldiers and questioned about her friends and neighbors. My grandmother decided that from that day forward she would leave a basket of food in the yard for anyone who might be hungry.

After we’d set out some bread and feta cheese for passersby, my grandmother turned to me and asked where my pearls were. Could they have been stolen?