The Apprentice's Masterpiece (4 page)

Then, out the side of one eye,
I see a swoop of cloth.
It's Amir, down on his belly,
lips to the ground.

This has been law since the Christians
won Cordoba back from the Moors.
All Muslims must prostrate themselves
when an image of Mary or Christ
proceeds past.

Amir stands.
He catches me staring.
“You kneel in your church,
do you not?” he asks.
His Spanish—I gawk—
is smooth as glass.

Questions

So it seems that Amir's understood
every word that I've said.

He tries not to smile
as I come to grips with his trick.
But there's the smallest of smirks,
like the spout of his mouth
has a minuscule crack.

Now, at the market,
he speaks to the merchants,
asking for this many olives (only a few)
or that much salt. (I can't say
I mind this: I hate to shop.)

But on the walk home
we say not a peep.

Of what could we speak?
What I most want to ask
I know I should not.

Why's he a slave? Did he steal something?
Kill?
Has he ever been sold
in a market himself?

How many times
has his back felt a whip?
Does a person—kind of like cramps
in your hands when you write—
get used to it?

Do slaves dread tomorrows?
Plan escape? Dream of death?

I make it a game. Imagine I'll ask him
whatever I want (though I won't).

By the time we are home
I've chosen two.

What do you hope for?
That's one. And the second:
what do you fear?

If I were a slave,
I think I'd fear nothing.
Sure, I would dread
every lash of the whip.

But dread and fear
are not the same thing.

What's there to fear
when you have nothing left?

Pupil

After supper, the roles
are reversed.
I help Mama clean up,
like a servant.

I guess washing dishes is easy enough—
even for blockheads like me.

Papa and Amir sit out
by the fire.
(Yes, for
him
, it is lit!)

They scribble away
on two separate slates.
(Amir's got an old one
of mine. No, no one's asked
if I'd mind.)

What do they write?
What else but Arabic?

You see, our Moorish slave
is teaching Papa—master scribe—
how to write!

Mama must see me scowling.
“Try to be gracious,” she scolds.
“He may be a slave,
but Señor Barico brought him here
for a reason. He was meant
as a gift to Papa.
A great one.”

I nod, say good night.
(Is that gracious enough?)
But I think: Mama has lost
all her fine talent
for comforting me!

Pity

Can it get any worse?
Now I'm pitied
by our slave!

“My language is so difficult.”
He wears a kind smile.
“Many great men do not know it.”

I see. He thinks I think less
of Papa for this.
But that's not the problem.

No one's thought to teach
me
Arabic.
So I think less of myself.
Can you blame me?

The Kingdom barely knows I exist.
And now I'm old rags
here in my own house.

Ache

And why Arabic?
What makes
it
such a great gift?

Hebrew—though it might
get us arrested—
that
I could see
Papa wanting to learn.
Hebrew is tied to us,
to who we are.

Is Papa so quick
to forget this?

Listen to them!
They're at it again.
Studying, reading.
Talking language stew.
Mama waits up, dozing
by the fire.

I retire, but I hear them.
Their sound makes a lump
down deep in my belly.
It feels like I've wolfed a whole bushel
of berries, rotten and soft.

Mark of the Slave

When Amir and Papa finish at last
with their work for the night,
Amir comes to sleep in my room.

Aren't slaves meant to sleep
on the staircase or something?

It's not that he snores.
In fact, he's
too
quiet.

And that thing on his face
gives me nightmares.

Night after night,
he lies the same way.
On his left side.
Cheek against sky.

So unless the night's shade
is blacker than pitch,
I can see that
S.
It shines up from his face
like some dark star.

What manner of man
burned that mark?
A Christian? A Jew?
A slave-trading Moor?

Does it matter?

Most nights, the
S
is the last
thing I see before my eyes close.
And the first thing I see upon waking—

whether or not
I've opened my eyes.

Al-Burak

Amir and I walk to the well
at the end of our street.
A voice from the grate
of a high dark window.

“Hey!”

I look up. The sun blinds my eyes.

“Fly away, al-Burak!”

Should I defend him?
Is a master dishonored
by taunts to a slave?

A rock falls near my foot.
And a second.
Amir's far ahead.

The rocks, and the name, are for me.

It rankles.
We conversos are as used to rude names
as an ass is to slaps.
Marrano. Turncoat.
Jewish wolf in sheep's skin.

Al-Burak
—that's—a new one.
I can't help it.
I like to know what I'm called.

It sounds Arabic. I'll ask Amir.
No, I won't.

A man in the market
called him
damned shit-skinned cur.

He'd laugh to know I was irked
by this one little slur.

Proud

We don't speak a word
on the way home.

I try to act calm, but I'm not.
Water sloshes and jumps
from my pail like the drops are at sea
and abandoning ship.

The black cloud's above me
all through dinner.
Everyone's quiet.
It's clear they can see it.

“You're a fool,” Amir says
as he helps clear the plates.
“Don't you know al-Burak
was a magical steed?

“It carried my prophet, Muhammad,
on its back up to heaven.
I myself would be proud
to be called such a thing.”

That figures.
Amir is just proud to be—
well, Amir.

That's the difference, I guess,
between him and me.

But how can I be proud?
Amir may be a slave,
but he knows who he is.

Mean

You're a fool
.
I should slap him.

And he's wrong, besides.

Those boys didn't mean
I was some noble thing.

A thing, yes, but not noble.
What they meant was:
I'm half like one creature, half like another.
A monster, therefore.
Such as: half-dragon, half-horse.
Half-woman, half-wolf
(I think Hercules
slew at least one of those).

Half-Christian, half-Jew.

Half-human.

At best.

Two Gifts

Papa journeys to Toledo.
I try to persuade him
he should take me. Everyone knows
bandits haunt the roads.

He refuses. I sulk.
But all is forgiven
upon his return.

He's brought gifts!

Mine is a knife: not just any.
Its blade is fashioned from Toledo steel—
the finest in Spain.

He's also brought back a gift for Amir.
But it's only a book.
How can
that
match a dagger,
especially for us? The air in this shop
is choked up with ink.

Papa sees my thoughts.
“It's not
any
book, boys. Some
say it's magic.
It can help you see truth, or
the future.
If you ask Hafiz something,
his poems will answer.”

Hafiz is the author.
“Let's try it,” I say.
“I've got one for him.”

“O, Great and Potent Hafiz,”
(I'm hamming it up)
“which—the book or the dagger—
is the more precious gift?”

Amir shuts his eyes
and turns to a page,
pointing a place with his finger.

He plays with my patience.
What else is new?

At last he reads it.
He's smirking again.
How can two different eyes behold you as you are?
Each will see according to what it knows.

Just what I needed.
More answers that aren't.

Silver

Here's a question that,
when I heard the word
gift
,
flew out of my mind.
For a time.

How, when we're too poor
to add spice to our meat,
did Papa get presents?

Mama tells me.
A man in Toledo
buys all kinds of things.
Papa had something to sell him—
a set of silver Passover plates.

They had been in his family
for generations.
His mother, my nana,
willed them to him.

“Don't worry, Ramon,” Mama says.
“It's okay. Better they go to his friend,
don't you think? All such things
will be taken from us,
in the end.”

But Papa—carting that silver
on long, lonely roads,
alone on a mule
as slow as wet sand!
He could have been captured, or killed.

“I was just wondering—”
She cuts me off, smiling.
“You'd best limber up. Your hands
have grown flabby, and now work begins.”

I soon learn what she means.
The book and the knife
aren't the end of the bounty.
He's also brought paper—
half my weight in it.

Silver (2)

To tell you the truth,
I feel like an anvil
that sat on my chest
has been lifted off
and thrown far away.

Those silver plates must have been
what was stashed
in that hole of Papa's.
And they're gone!

But why all that scraping?
It's clear why he hid them.
People are burned at the stake
just for having such things.
What I don't understand is,
why fetch them out from their cache
quite so often?
Was it for some ritual,
some heretic prayer?

Well, whatever it was,
it is over.

Unknown Nana, forgive me.
The plates may have been precious
to you,
and your memory.

But I'm glad they're gone.

Order

This
job was worth
Papa's perilous trip?

The lovely, smooth paper
has come with a task that must fill it.

I should be rejoicing.
It's our biggest commission
in more than a year.

One
hundred
copies
of what's surely the dullest
book in the Kingdom.
It's called—are you ready?—
Native Plants of Castile.

I was angry, before,
when Amir shared
our scant work as scribes.

I've changed my mind.
For this job,
I will
graciously
take
any help I can get.

Auto-da-fé
(2)

This one is different.
This time, no scaffolds
haunt the packed plaza.
No gigantic dolls—stand-ins
for men they can't find—
will hang from a tree.

The burning, this time,
isn't of flesh.

This is an
auto
for criminal books.

A cache was found
in the walls of a
mikveh
—
an old Jewish bath.
Builders were razing the place,
making the way for yet
one more church.

Hundreds of books are wheeled to the square.
Monks yell at the carts like they're bad
little boys.

People jeer and guffaw
like they always do.
They warm their cold hands
in the flames of the fire.

But nothing is funny.
From the heaps glint the gold
of old Torah scrolls—the holiest
book of the Jews.

Papa's face is like stone.

Yet—there's a flutter
just under his shoulder.

His tunic moves
with the pounds of his heart,

like a curtain blowing
in a soft, killing wind.

Partners

When it's time for siesta
my hand is so cramped
from
Plants of Castile
I'd prefer
to poke out my eyes
than touch pen and ink.

Papa and Amir
see things differently.
Each siesta, they hole up
in Papa's room.
To “practice,” they say.

One day there's a man
for Papa.
Just as I go to knock on his door,
the sound of my nightmares.
The scrape.

So it wasn't the plates!
The secret remains.
And Amir is deemed worthy
of having it shared.

I am not.

Again

Damn that closed door.
I try once more.
“What are they up to,
really, Mama?”

“They've told you, Ramon.
They're practicing.”

Then I notice their slates.
There they are, stacked neatly
by the fire.

How can they practice
without slates to write on?
It's not like we have
any paper to waste!

Penitents

They pass day and night
clad in long, yellow robes called
sanbenitos
.

The penitents weep as they drag through the streets.
They call upon God for forgiveness.
Some flay their own backs
with cruelly barbed whips.
Blood spurts on bystanders
who don't seem to mind. It's said
blood shed in penance is holy.
Some even
try
to stand in its path.

But this, to me, is the creepiest part:
in his hand, or hers, each penitent
carries a candle,
unlit.

It's like a bad dream to have them around.
No one must greet them.
That's part of their sentence.

You might think they're lucky.
They have erred, yet they haven't been burned.
But their honor is gone. They'll never
again work at good jobs. And what money they had
has been seized by the Office.

Worst of all, when their sentence of weeping
and flogging is through, their
sanbenitos
will hang on the walls of their churches.
Shaming their families forever.

Black

If you
still
won't confess
under torture,
your garment is black.
That means you will burn.

What color would
Papa's
sanbenito
be?

Request

Okay, he's surprised me.
I suspected Amir wanted nothing in life
but to kneel by Papa. To serve every whim
as a page serves a king.

But he's asking permission
to leave. Not for good. (No such luck!)
But for one afternoon
every week.