The Last Jew (8 page)

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Authors: Noah Gordon

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Jewish

BOOK: The Last Jew
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The contest was held in France periodically, until Violante de Bar, queen of Cataluña and Aragon and wife of King Joan I, brought the poetry competition and some of its French judges to Barcelona in 1388. The Spanish court soon officially adopted the Jocs Florals and celebrated them each year with great pomp. By the time they came to Count Vasca's attention the annual poetry competitions were judged by the royal court. The silver violet was now given as the third prize. Second prize was a rose fashioned of gold. The first prize, with a typical Catalan touch, was a single real rose, on the theory that nothing made by humans could surpass a flower made by God.

Vasca thought it would be splendid to be summoned to the court to receive such an honor, and he made plans to enter the Jocs Florals. The fact that he was illiterate didn't deter him, for he had the wealth to employ someone with writing skills, and he hired Asher ben Yair and told him that he must write a poem. In a discussion about subject matter Vasca said the poem should be about a great and noble soldier, and after a very brief time the count and the clerk agreed that Count Fernán Vasca himself was the warrior most suitable for description in such a work.

When the poem was completed and read to the count it didn't offend his ear. It was sufficient that his bravery and warrior skills were treated with reverence and no little exaggeration, and Count Vasca sent a copy to Barcelona.

The Vasca poem failed to impress the judges of the court. By the time news reached the Count that three others had won the prizes, Asher ben Yair had said good-bye to his uncle, Rabbi Ortega, and had wisely departed for the island of Sicilia, where he believed he could become a teacher of young Jews.

Count Vasca had sent for Helkias Toledano, a Jew who was reputed to be a remarkable worker of precious metals. When Helkias had gone to Tembleque he had found Vasca still enraged that he had been snubbed by a group of effete versifiers. He told Helkias about the Jocs Florals and its imaginative prizes, and then revealed that he had decided to sponsor a more manly contest, a true jousting tourney, with a first prize far more remarkable and magnificent than any given in Barcelona.

'I wish you to fashion a rose of gold, with a silver stem.'

Yonah's father had nodded thoughtfully.

'Listen to me with care: it must be fully as beautiful as a natural rose.'

Helkias had smiled. 'Well, but--'

The Count had held up a hand -- Helkias believed he was unwilling to abide very long discussions with a Jew. Vasca had turned away. 'Just go and do this thing. It will be required after Easter next.' And Helkias had been dismissed.

Helkias was accustomed to the unreasonable demands of difficult patrons, though the particular situation was made more difficult by the fact that Count Vasca had a reputation for brutalizing those who displeased him. He started to work, sitting before rose bushes for many hours, making drawings. When he had a depiction that satisfied him, he began to beat gold and silver with a hammer. After four days he had something very much in the shape of a rose, but it was disappointing, and he broke it apart and melted the metal.

He tried again and again, each time gaining small victories but meeting defeat in the aggregate effect. Two months passed from the day of his meeting with Vasca, and still he wasn't close to fulfilling his commission.

But he kept trying, studying the rose as if it were the Talmud, drinking in its scent and beauty, picking roses apart petal by petal to note the construction of the whole, noting how stems turned and bent and grew toward the sun, observing the way buds were born and ripened and tenderly unfolded and opened. With each attempt to reproduce the simple and stunning beauty of the flower he began to sense the essence and spirit of the rose, and in the attempts and failures gradually he evolved from the craftsman he had been into the artist he would be.

Finally, he had created a flower of glowing gold. Its petals curled with a fresh softness that was perceived by the eye instead of being sensed through touching. It was a believable flower, as if a master horticulturist had achieved a natural rose of a perfect golden color. Below the flower was a single golden bud. The stem and twigs and thorns and leaves were of bright silver, spoiling the illusion, but Helkias had five months until the date of delivery demanded by Count Vasca, and he allowed time to do its work. The gold retained its color but the silver darkened with tarnish until it took on color characteristics that made the flower believable.

Count Vasca was visibly surprised and pleased when he saw what Helkias had wrought. 'I will not give this away as a prize. I have a better purpose for it,' he said.

Instead of paying Helkias he gave him a large order for more objects, and then still a third order. Ultimately he became Helkias's largest debtor, and when the Jews were ordered to leave Spain the Vasca debt had led to their present grave difficulty.

 

The castle was large and forbidding as Yonah and Helkias approached it. The bars of the great gate to the keep were down. Helkias and Yonah stared up at the sentry station atop the high stone wall.

'Halloo the guard!' Helkias called, and presently a helmeted head appeared.

'I am Helkias Toledano, silversmith. I wish to speak with His Excellency the Count Vasca.'

The head withdrew but in a brief time it reappeared. 'His Excellency the count is not here. You must go away.'

Yonah stifled a groan, but his father persevered. 'I come on a matter of important business. If the count is not here, I must speak with his steward.'

Once more the sentry went away. Yonah and his father sat on their horses and waited.

Finally, with a squeal and then a groaning, the barred gate was lifted, and they rode into the castle yard.

The steward was a slender man who was feeding strips of meat to a caged falcon. The meat had been a white cat. Yonah could see the tail, which was still whole.

The man scarcely looked at them. 'The count is hunting in the north,' he said in an irritated voice.

'I seek payment for articles which I made on order and delivered to him,' Helkias said, and the steward cast him a glance.

'I pay no one unless the count commands it.'

'When shall he return?'

'When he wishes.' Then the man relented, perhaps to rid himself of them. 'If I were you, I should come again in six days' time.'

As they directed the horses back to Toledo, Helkias was quiet, lost in troubled thought. Yonah tried to recapture some of the pleasantness of the earlier ride.

'"Oh, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb ..."' he sang, but his father took no notice, and they rode the rest of the way mostly in silence.

 

*

 

Six days later Helkias made the trip again, by himself, and this time the functionary said the count wouldn't return until fourteen days hence, the twenty-sixth day of the month.

'It is too late,' Aron said in despair when Helkias told him.

'Yes, it is too late,' Helkias said.

But the following day there were tidings that the monarchs in their mercy had granted one extra day for the Jews to leave Spain, moving the final date from the first day of August to the second day.

'Do you think? ...' Aron asked.

'Yes, we can do it! I shall be waiting at the castle when he arrives. We can leave as soon as I am paid,' Helkias said.

'But to make the trip to Valencia in seven days!'

'It is not that we have a choice, Aron,' Helkias said. 'Without money, we are doomed.'

When Aron sighed, Helkias placed his hand on his brother's arm. 'We shall do it. We shall push ourselves and the beasts, and we will find our way.'

But even as he spoke, he was considering the uneasy fact that August the second was the ninth day of the Jewish month of Ab, an infamous date and perhaps a bad omen, for the ninth of Ab was the date of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, when large numbers of Jews were forced to begin wandering the world.

 

8

The Fisher

 

There was no longer need for Yonah and Eleazar to polish the silver objects. Recognizing that he couldn't sell them for a fair price, Helkias turned all his stock over to Benito Martín for a small amount of cash.

On the middle finger of Yonah's right hand he wore a wide band of silver, given to him by his father after he had been called to the Torah for the first time. Helkias had made an identical ring for his firstborn son, but when Meir's body had been brought to him, the ring had been missing.

'Remove the ring from your finger,' Helkias told Yonah now, and the youth did so with reluctance. His father threaded the ring onto a length of thin but strong cord and placed the loop around Yonah's neck, so the ring was hidden inside his shirt.

'If the time comes when we must sell your ring, I promise to make you another as soon as possible. But it may be that with the help of the Lord you will be able to wear this ring again in another place,' he said.

 

*

 

Helkias brought his two sons to the Jewish cemetery outside the limits of the city. It was a heartrending place, for other families who were leaving Spain stopped at the graves of their loved ones to say good-bye, and their cries and sobbing frightened Eleazar so the boy wept too, although he didn't remember his mother at all and scarcely recalled Meir.

Helkias had mourned his wife and firstborn son for years. Though his eyes were filled he made no sound, but held his two sons close and dried their tears and kissed them before he set them to neatening the graves and finding small stones to lay on them as a sign they had been visited.

 

'Terrible to leave their graves,' Helkias said later to Benito. Martín had brought a skin of wine and the two friends sat and talked as they had so many times in the past. 'But worse, somehow, to leave my son's grave without knowing who placed him there.'

'If it were possible to trace the reliquary, its location might tell a great deal,' Martín said.

Helkias's mouth twisted. 'It has not been possible. By now, the thieves who deal in such objects would already have sold it. Perhaps it is in a church a great distance from here,' he said, and took a long swallow of the wine.

'And yet ... perhaps not,' Benito said. 'If I spoke to those pastoring the churches of the region, I might learn something.'

'I had thought of doing the same,' Helkias admitted, 'yet ... I am a Jew. I have been too fearful of churches and priests to take that action.'

'Let me do it for you now,' Martín urged, and Helkias nodded gratefully. He went to his drawing board and fetched sketches of the ciborium that Martín might show the churchmen, and gave them to Benito.

Martín was troubled. 'Helkias, feeling against you is high in the city. It's muttered that you refuse to leave Toledo and yet also refuse to convert. This house on the cliff top is especially exposed. It is too late to seek security in numbers behind the walls of the Jewish Quarter, since the other Jews have departed. Perhaps you and your sons should come to my home, to the safety of a Christian house.'

Helkias knew that an adult and two boys moving into the Martín home, even for a short time, would cause turmoil. He thanked Benito but shook his head. 'Until the moment when we must leave we will savor the home in which my sons were born,' he said.

Still, when Benito departed, Helkias took his two sons to the path down the cliff. Off the trail, he showed them an opening into a narrow L-shaped tunnel leading to a small cave.

If ever the need should arise, he told Yonah and Eleazar, the cave would be a safe hiding place.

 

Yonah was very aware of doing things in Toledo for the last time.

He had missed the spring fishing. Spring was the best time, when it was still cool but the first warmth of the sun had hatched mayflies and other tiny winged creatures that hovered over the surface of the river.

Now it was hot, but he knew of a deep pool just beyond a natural dam of large rocks and branches, and he knew fish would be lazing almost motionless at the very bottom, waiting for a meal to drift their way.

He gathered the small hooks made for him by a father who knew how to work with metals, and then he went behind the workshop and collected the short wooden pole wound with strong line.

He had taken scarcely three steps when Eleazar was running after him.

'Yonah, are you taking me with you?'

'No.'

'Yonah, I wish to go.'

If their father heard, perhaps he would order them to stay close to home. Yonah cast an anxious glance at the door of the workshop. 'Eleazar, don't spoil it for me. If you fuss, he'll hear and come out.'

Eleazar looked at him unhappily.

'When I come back I'll spend the afternoon teaching you to play the guitar.'

'The whole afternoon?'

'The whole.'

Another moment and he was free, ascending the trail toward the river.

At the bottom he attached a hook and then spent a few minutes at the river's edge, overturning rocks. Several crayfish scuttled away before he found one small enough to please him, then he pounced and secured the bait.

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