Mr. Mani (46 page)

—Yes, madame, those were his words. “These are Jews who will understand that they are Jews,” he said. “These are Jews who will remember that they are Jews.” Before I could even stammer an answer, he was chiding them in his friendly manner and making them face east toward Jerusalem, where there was nothing but a black sky full of stars, after which he began to chant the evening prayer in a new melody I never had heard. From time to time he went down on his knees and bowed like a Muslim so that the Ishmaehtes would understand and bow too ... and I, Your Grace—señor—Rabbi Haddaya—my master and teacher—allowed myself to go along with it ... sinful man that I was, I could not resist saying the kaddish and profaning the blessed Name of the Lord. I said it from beginning to end in memory of my parents and of my poor wife ... madame, the blanket ... it is falling off...

—Here, let me, Doña Flora, I'll do it. I ... he is shaking ... something is bothering him ... perhaps...

—I...

—But what means that, madame? “Tu-tu-tu”? What would he say?

—But what wishes he to say, for the love of God?

—But the blanket is wet, Doña Flora. It is most wet. Perhaps we should make a fire and dry it over the stove, and meanwhile I can change His Grace...

—No Why?

—Why a servant? Why a Greek? I am at your complete service, madame, with all my heart ... let the good deed be mine ... he was like a father to me, Doña Flora ... I beg you...

—No. He is listening. His eyes are following me. Rabbi Shabbetai knows my mind ... he remembers what I said ... that every idea has a pocket and in that pocket is another idea...”There is no man without his hour nor any thing without its use”...but what means he by “tu-tu-tu”? What would he say? He seems most agitated...

—Well, then, in a word, in a word, Doña Flora, so my visit began, on that route leading from Jaffa to Jerusalem, seeking to catch up with a caravan of pilgrims that kept a day ahead of us. For three whole days we shadowed and smelled its trail, trampling the grasses it had trampled, coming upon the embers of its campfires, treading on the dung of its animals. The two of us rode, and your mare, madame, which was now just an extra mouth to feed, trotted along between us Sometimes, in the twilight, it even seemed that we could see your silhouette astride her ... My son tried being a good guide to his father. He pointed out to him the threshers in Emmaus, and the winnowers in Dir Ayub, and had him dismount to smell the wild sweet basil and the green geranium, and to chew the stems of shrubs and grasses from which perhaps some new spice might be concocted. The next evening too, by a stone fence belonging to Kafr Saris, he disappeared for a while among some rocks and olive trees and returned with a new group of wraiths, more
Jews who did not know that they were Jews
—which is to say, another band of drowsy peasants and shepherds who were rousted from their first sleep. This time he gave them all a quarter of a bishlik for their pains—and all this, señores, was entirely for my sake, to enable the touring father to satisfy his craving to chant the kaddish, not only for the souls of his parents, but also for those of his grand-, and great-grand-, and even greater grand-grandparents than that, until the first father of us all must have heard in heaven that Avraham Mani had arrived in the Land of Israel and was about to enter Jerusalem.

—Ah! That afternoon we finally caught up with the Russian pilgrims—who, now that Jerusalem was just around the corner, had taken off their fur hats and were walking on their knees from sheer devoutness, following the narrow road up and down in long, crawling columns from the Big Oak Tree to the Little Oak Tree and from there to the Monastery of the Cross, which was bathed by red flowers in its lovely valley. And then suddenly, there was Jerusalem: a wall with turrets and domes, a clear, austere verse written on the horizon. Soon I was walking through its narrow streets by myself, led by the consular mace-bearer.

—Because Yosef could not wait and went to return the horses to the consulate and tell the consul about his trip while I was packed off with my bundles behind the mace-bearer, who struck the cobblestones with his staff and led me along a street and up some steps to a door that did not need to be pushed open because it already was. I stood hesitantly in the entrance, staring in the looking-glass that faced me at the unkempt form of a sun-ravaged, sunken-eyed traveler. And just then, Rabbi Shabbetai, who should step out of the other room but Doña Flora herself, but thirty years younger! It was as if she had flown through the air above my ship and arrived there before me! A most wondrous apparition, señores—here, then, was the secret that explained Beirut and that had, so it seemed, quite swept Yosef off his feet! One passage through life had not been enough for so charming a visage, and so it had come back a second time ... I was so exhausted from the trip and from the sun, and so excited to be in Jerusalem and its winding lanes—I already felt,
mí amiga,
that I had arrived in a city of bottomless recesses—that I whispered like a sleepwalker. “Madame Flora, is it truly you? Has the rabbi then relented?” Hee hee hee hee...

—That is how muddled I was

—No, wait ... I beg you...

—But wait, madame ... You have no idea of the wondrous resemblance between you, which is perhaps what lured you to Beirut in the first place in order to meet your own double and give my poor departed son ... I mean, tacitly ... eh?

—We knew nothing. What did we know?

—The betrothal was carried out in haste ... the rabbi too was notified after the fact...

—Yes. A tremendous resemblance

—Yes. Even now—are you listening,
señor y maestro mío?
—when I look at the
rubissa,
I see as in a vision Tamara thirty years from now. The very spit and image in charm as well as beauty...

—At first she was alarmed. She turned very red but kissed my hand and let me bless her, and then took my bundle and laid it gently and with great respect on your childhood bed beneath the large, arched window, madame, in which henceforward I slept, in hot weather and in cold. She set the table for me and warmed water for me to wash my hands and feet, and then stood over me to serve me as the sun was setting outside. I noticed that she seemed not at all surprised that Yosef was taking so long at the consul's instead of hurrying home, even though he had been away for a week; it was as if she were used to the consul's coming before her When I was all washed and cleaned and full of food, she summoned her father Valero to make my acquaintance and take me with him to the synagogue for the evening prayer, after which we chatted a bit about Jerusalem and its plagues and then lit candles against the darkness of the night. It was only then that Yosef came home at last. He was carrying a lantern and was still disarrayed from his journey, which for him had only now ended. He greeted his wife and the rest of us with a polite nod, but he was so tired that he confused a bag of his clothes with a packet of some documents from the consulate and even began to speak to us in English until he realized his mistake. It was then that I first understood,
chère
madame and señor, that he was in the grips of a notion more important to him than his own marriage—of an
idée fixe,
as the French say, that mattered to him more than having seed.

—His own, madame.

—Of course...

—I will get to that shortly.

—As brief as I can make it.

—What will His Grace eat?

—But why should a little porridge disturb us?

—Of course...

—Perhaps, Your Grace, it was Doña Flora who first fired his imagination and put such mettle into him. The stories you told the lad about Jerusalem, madame, on those nights when he lay by your side in the bed of the
hacham,
were what filled his head with grand thoughts ... what made him think you could roll the world around like an egg without cracking or spilling any of it ... although all he had to roll it on were the
pensamientos pequeños
gathered from those that Rabbi Shabbetai had discarded. Because before many days had gone by, it was clear to me that he had not merely been humoring me by dragging sleepy peasants out of their huts for a quarter of a bishlik apiece. You see, ever since he had come to Jerusalem to fetch Tamara to her wedding and stayed on there because she would not leave, he had resolved that if stay he must, he would stay among Jews, even if they did not know yet that they were Jews or had completely forgotten it. That was why he treated them with such warm sympathy. Their forgetfulness pained him, and he feared the shock of remembrance that would befall them, so that, together with the British consul, he did all he could to soften it in advance.

—Yes,
muy estimada
madame. Is my master and teacher listening? Such was the thought that possessed my son's mind, the
idée fixe
rammed home as forcefully by the consul as if it were an iron rod driven into his brain.

—There was no knowing which of them was the bellwether and which prevailed upon which, because the consul, like all Englishmen, looked upon us Jews not as creatures of flesh and blood but as purely literary heroes who had stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament and would step back into those of the New at the Last Judgment, and who meanwhile must be kept from entering another story by mistake—which made me realize at once that I must be on guard to protect my only son's marriage.

—Of course. The next morning the mace-bearer came to invite us to high tea with the consul and his wife. I bought myself a new fez by the Lions' Gate, Tamara cleaned and ironed my robe, and off the three of us went to present me to the consul at that time of day when Jerusalem is ruled by a cinnamon light.

—The consulate is near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You cut across to it from the Via Dolorosa.

—By way of the Street of the Mughrabites, via Bechar's courtyard and Navon's stairs. ‘Tis behind Geneo's wine shop, on Halfon's side of it.

—No, the other Halfon. The little one who married Rabbi Arditi's daughter.

—The Ashkenazim are a bit further down.

—'Tis all built up there now, madame, all built up. There are no empty lots there any more.

—It is built up behind the Hurva Synagogue too. The Ashkenazim are spreading all over.

—For the moment, no. But they will build there too, never fear. There is nothing to be done about it, madame. You have greatly come up in the world since leaving the Holy City, but although Time remained behind there, it has not stood still either.

—As brief as I can make it. Nevertheless, Doña Flora, I must let the story unfold out of me in its entirety, with all its joys and its sorrows, its tangs and its tastes—and for the moment I was still in Jerusalem as an esteemed visitor, a
passer-through
and not a
stayer-on
The consul and his wife received us most lovingly, and the consul even spoke a bit of Hebrew to me ... Madame?

—Yes, madame, a rather Prophetic Hebrew. Yosef circulated about the house as if it were his own, and once again it struck me how adept the lad was at making himself liked and finding himself a father or a mother when he needed one. Meanwhile, more guests arrived: an old sheikh who had been fetched from the village of Silwan to provide me with company, and his son, an excellent young man who was a clerk at the consulate; some newly arrived French pilgrims; several English ladies who drank tea, puffed hookahs, and seemed quite startled by their own utterances; a German spy in a dark suit who had in tow a baptized Austrian Jew; and so on and so forth. But I, madame—I, my master and teacher—I, señores—did not forget the mission I had entrusted myself with, so that even as I listened to everyone with enthusiasm as a good guest should—“Who is honored? He who honors his fellow man”—I kept one eye, madame, on Tamara, who was sitting there silent but glowing among the Englishwomen, squeezed in between them like a baby lamb in a team of bony old nags and sipping her tea while nibbling a dry English scone in that clear, winy light. She was smiling absently to herself and considering the air, and I could see at once that her absence was due not to plenitude but vacuity. It was as if she were still not over her betrothal and had not yet been properly wed ... and at that moment, I thanked God for having sent me to Jerusalem...

—I am referring to matters of the womb.

—No. Not even a miscarriage. Nothing.

—In a word, nothing, madame. And to make a long story short, it was from that nothing that I commenced my mission, that is to say, that I made it my business to see that that marriage bore seed and not only
idées fixes
that were bound to lead to some fiasco. By the time we guests of the consul returned home that night, each of us carrying his or her lantern
à la
Jerusalem and weaving through the narrow streets behind the mace-bearer, who kept rapping the cobblestones with his staff to warn the inhabitants of the underworld of our approach, I had made up my mind to become a
stayer-on
—that is, to settle as deeply as I could into the young couple's home, and into my bed in your little alcove, from which I could quietly carry out my designs. And that, señores, was the meaning of my
desaparicíon
that you were so worried about. Does Your Grace hear me? How charmingly he nods!

—No, I do not wish to weary him. But if I do not unfold my story to the end, how will he pass his silent verdict on it? Because that same night, Your Grace, I was already having my first second thoughts as I lay secretly plotting in bed not far from the two of them. Their door was slightly ajar; moonlight bathed the bottom of their blanket; a ray of it strayed back and forth between the lookingglasses, and as I listened to their breathing—to the sounds they made as they stirred or murmured in their dreams—to their laughter and their sighs—I tried reckoning how to tell the wheat from the chaff and how to read the signs, that is, to understand where the fault or impediment lay, and if it did not perhaps involve some flight or falling-off, some inversion or infirmity, that must needs be remedied if the seed was to be conjoined by the potency of its yearning with Constantinople and with what I held most dear there, namely,
señor y maestro mío,
with Your Grace. And so I was up the next day before dawn, with the crowing of the first cock, which I encountered strutting in our little street as I groped my way in the dim light to the Wailing Wall, brimming with the lusts and life of Jerusalem, to weep for the destruction of our Temple and say the morning prayer. I licked the dew from the stones of the wall and asked God to prosper my way, and then I turned and ascended the Harat Babel-Silsileh to the silent souk and bought some dough rings, hard-boiled eggs, and orégano from the Arabs there. I took these back to my young couple, \yho were still luxuriating in sleep, brewed them a big pot of strong coffee, brought it all to their bed, and woke them, saying: “I am not merely your father, I am also your two mothers who died in the prime of their lives, and so it is only meet that I pamper you a bit—but in return, as Rachel says to Jacob, “Give me sons or I shall die.” The two of them blushed and smiled a bit, glanced anxiously at each other, pulled the blanket tight around themselves, and turned over in bed. Meanwhile, the muezzin had begun calling the faithful to prayer in the great mosque. Yosef listened carefully to the long wailing chant that was making my head spin and suddenly sat up and said, “That chant,
Papá,
is what we must work our way into until the truth that has been forgotten comes to light, because if we do not, what will become of us?” And with that he threw off his blanket, shook out of it the
idée fixe
that he had spent the night with, clapped it in his fez, and went off to wash and finish waking up.