The Mapmaker's Daughter (38 page)

“Four months,” Samra whispers. “When we’ve been here for centuries.” She looks down at her son, who is calm now and growing droopy-eyed at her breast. “What has this baby done to them? What have any of us done?”

Isaac holds up his hand. “Enough! Talk will change nothing. The king and queen will listen to reason. We must have faith in that. I have already written to Abraham Seneor asking him to go with me to try to persuade them.”

“Dinner smells delicious,” Judah tells Samra, “and Father has been riding all day.” His shoulders are squared and his voice is unwavering, but even as an adult, my beloved first grandchild cannot hide his fear from me.

He helps me to the table. “Look at me,” I command him, but he will not.

***

Hadassah’s baby comes into the world scarlet and howling. He roots at his mother’s breast and falls asleep quickly, while we admire his thick black hair and beautiful features wordlessly, to fool the Evil Eye. Isaac and Judah miss the circumcision because they are still at Madrigal, where Ferdinand and Isabella are currently in residence, but our celebration has added joy, for they have sent word that the edict has been temporarily suspended.

“Ferdinand wants time to think it over,” Judah writes. “Father spoke as I imagine Moses must have, and I could not help but smile at the thought that the Holy One has so inspired him that this time, the pharaoh may be persuaded to let our people stay rather than go.”

From Madrigal, Judah and Isaac travel from court to court, soliciting nobles to support the lifting of the edict. The next we hear is from Guadalajara, where Isaac has returned to discuss the situation with his patron.

“Cardinal Mendoza thinks we are wasting our time,” Isaac writes. “Ferdinand may yet be swayed, but only by money. I am willing to offer our family treasure, confident that the Jews of Spain will repay us if we are successful, but Mendoza tells me Ferdinand is unlikely to accept such tribute. Taking money to let the Jews stay might make people think their majesties care more about gold than Christ.”

Are the Abravanels to be poor again? At least this time, it would be our choice and, knowing our men, it would not be for long. The women discuss these things as we work together to ready each of our homes for Passover. My job is to watch little Isaac, who is just learning to walk and must be kept from underfoot. No wonder I feel something special for him. He is the first son of my first grandson—the boy who, if it is God’s plan, will carry on the family legacy. He’s a beautiful child, with his father’s dark eyes and his mother’s calmness, and of course I am sure he is the smartest baby in all Castile.

When we finish the other houses, we return home to clean our own. Samra goes into the study to dust the bookshelves, while Eliana heads for the kitchen. I take Isaac into the courtyard, turn him on his belly at the fountain, and laugh with him as he splashes his chubby fingers in the water.

When he starts to fuss, I bring him inside. The house is unnaturally quiet, and I find Eliana and Samra in the study weeping. “We were talking about how we may be doing this for the last time here,” Eliana says.

“I don’t think I can bear it,” Samra whispers. “I started moving Judah’s books to dust underneath them, and I thought—” She dissolves into tears on Eliana’s bosom.

“Do you remember cleaning before we left Queluz?” I ask my daughter. “We did it for—” I think a moment. “For the sacredness of it. I was touching everything like a blind person, using my hands to print that house in my memory.” I shut my eyes. “And that’s what happened. I can call that house up in my mind right now, to every last detail, as if I will open my eyes and be standing in it.”

I stroke Samra’s shoulder. “It may be our family’s lot to lose everything again, but let me show you how to keep from saying good-bye.”

***

Isaac and Judah arrive home the day before Passover with news we don’t want to hear. Ferdinand turned down Isaac’s money. “The only glimmer of hope,” he says over supper, “is that the edict is still suspended. Apparently they aren’t sure what to do.”

“He says Isabella feels more strongly than he does,” Judah adds. “If we can convince her, Ferdinand says he will go along.”

Isaac and Judah will be here only for the first two days of Passover, before going back to Madrigal to see Isabella. “Perhaps all this time, we’ve been talking to the wrong person,” Judah says.

Isaac strokes his silver beard. “And then again, perhaps the king’s dinner was waiting, and he just wanted to get rid of us.” He thinks for a moment. “Torquemada has his claws sunk into her. It’s hard to imagine getting much help there.”

Samra and Eliana get up to clear the table, but Isaac asks me to stay behind. “Isabella reminded me that you had been her tutor years ago. I don’t think she liked realizing so much time has passed that you have a thirty-year-old grandson.”

“The queen’s a grandmother herself.”

“Yes, but I suppose even queens wonder where the years have gone. She said she’d like to see you and Eliana again, and I think she meant it.”

“Why don’t the two of you come with us to Madrigal?” Judah asks. “Perhaps if she sees the fate she’s decreed for an old friend, she might decide she doesn’t want to go through with it.”

“I’m sixty-six,” I tell them. “Why can’t Eliana go for both of us?” I can see Judah’s idea taking hold in Isaac’s mind, and my heart sinks. He’s going to tell me to do it for the Jews. He’ll say how much his bones have ached from these weeks of traveling and make me feel guilty for not being willing to suffer the same way for our people.

But he doesn’t. “If you don’t think you can do it, that’s the end of it,” Isaac says. Still, I know they are disappointed, and I go to bed wondering if I can bring myself to take on such a journey even if they aren’t going to ask.

***

We have just doused the flame from the habdalah candle at the end of Shabbat a few weeks later when there is a bang on the door. Judah opens it to see a soldier of the Santa Hermandad, the Inquisition’s police. “You are ordered to come to the synagogue,” he barks. “His Reverence Tomás de Torquemada will speak to you there.” The guard looks over Judah’s shoulder. “All the Jews must come.”

Isaac stands in the doorway, shaking a fist and thundering at the soldier sauntering down the street. “What is this about, that you disturb the peace of the Sabbath?” It’s not really true—Shabbat ended the moment the candle was put out—but Isaac does like dramatic effects. Besides, it doesn’t really end like that. Shabbat lingers, even as we get back to the ordinary work of cleaning dishes and stoking fires.

“We should refuse to go,” Eliana says. “Torquemada has power only over Christians.”

Judah shakes his head. “It’s unwise to provoke him, especially with the king and queen pondering our fate.” He’s right of course. We throw on our shawls and go out into the damp chill of the early spring night.

Upstairs, the women’s gallery is so crowded we can hardly breathe. Eliana, my granddaughters, and great-granddaughters are squeezed against the rail, looking down. A buzz grows among the men, and they turn to see the Grand Inquisitor’s guards clearing a path toward the tebah. Torquemada’s burning eyes, obscured by his hood, look out from under thick eyebrows. Dangling on his chest is a massive silver crucifix, the only thing distinguishing him from the two priests flanking him.

He ascends the steps of the tebah and, tossing back his hood, he glowers at the crowd. His flattened, lumpy nose disfigures his face, and his bald pate, fringed with a circle of dark hair, looks oily in the golden light of the lamps.

“The hour is growing late!” He shakes a clenched fist at the men. “Your days are numbered. Leave your dead faith behind, and embrace salvation!”

With a pleading smile, he holds out his arms, as if he wishes to embrace them all. “Why do you turn your back on God?” He sees the men’s impassive faces and sighs loudly. “How can you bear to live with his scorn?” he whines, as if he has been personally hurt by each of us. “Come to mass tomorrow and I will baptize you, for the sake of your immortal souls.”

He takes a deep breath and without warning raises his voice to a scream so loud it lifts the hair on my arms and makes one woman behind me burst into tears. “He has abandoned you just as you abandoned his son. There are no Jews—only heretics!”

He storms down off the tebah and heads toward the ark containing the Torah scrolls. As if they are sidestepping a runaway wagon, the men clear a path for him. He rips the embroidered velvet curtain aside and flings open the carved wooden doors of the ark.

The women gasp, and an angry murmur rises up from the men. The ark is never opened without ceremonies befitting the word of God. Torquemada swats at a silver filigreed crown that tops the scroll case. “Baubles! Do you think you can impress God with such things when you turn your back on him by your wickedness and lies? Do you think he will stand by and watch you lure Christian souls back to darkness?”

Torquemada makes his way back to the tebah as we watch in hushed silence. “My children,” he says, his tone again unctuous as he stretches out his arms. “Come to me. Come to the Savior who died for you. Come to the hope of eternal life.”

Eliana pulls her shoulders up tall beside me. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.” Her strong voice floats across the synagogue. “Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not.”

Everyone looks up at the balcony, and I see Isaac’s eyes lock onto his wife. Samra is pressing against the grille now too. “Be thou my judge, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation,” she sings. I recognize the words of the forty-third psalm and I join her.

“Deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.

For thou art the God of my strength…”

Leah, Hadassah, and Nita join us, and our rich women’s voices have a force so profound I am shaking. All Jews who ever suffered for their faith seem to be offering their strength to me, to my family, to the women crowding behind me, and to the men below. I feel our power bursting through the walls of the synagogue, like Samson breaking his chains.

What a small matter my old bones are, compared to the force of my heart. I will walk to Madrigal to see Isabella if I have to. I will crawl. I will put myself in God’s hands and let him use me as he wishes.

Torquemada’s face is scarlet with rage. “Who are those women?” he thunders.

“They are our wives,” Isaac says, “our sisters, our mothers, and our daughters.” His voice breaks, and as he looks up at us, I see tears streaming down his face.

“Bring them down here,” Torquemada growls in a low and menacing voice. Behind me, the women gasp. Does he not know what he is asking? Women do not mingle with men on the floor of the synagogue.

I hear the rabbi call up that it is necessary to obey. Our worried murmurs echo off the stone walls of the narrow staircase as we make our way down and assemble in front of the Grand Inquisitor.

“Who sang?” he demands.

“We all did,” Samra replies.

“Who sang first?”

“I did.” Eliana steps forward.

“And what did you mean by it?”

She looks confused. “We sing to the Holy One all the time. To praise and honor and thank him.”

“‘Deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man?’” Torquemada sneers. “You see, I know the words too.”

“You praise God with the words of our people then,” Eliana says. “The psalms are our prayers. Perhaps we have more to teach you.”

“How dare you?” Torquemada’s face mottles with rage.

Samra and the other women of our family have stepped up to stand with her, and Eliana slips her hand in mine. “We may fear the punishment of man for singing, but not of God,” she tells the glowering priest, “for he has not abandoned us and he will not, regardless of what you do or say.”

I hear Nita next to me, taking huge, gulping breaths. I turn to look at her ashen face. “He was there!” she gasps, staring at the Grand Inquisitor. “He was there when my parents—”

I wrest my hand from Eliana’s and cup it quickly over Nita’s mouth. “Don’t!” I tell her.

Torquemada steps forward. “Who are you?” His eyes narrow with menace as he looks from Nita to me. “What are you keeping her from saying?”

My eyes plead with Nita to understand that she mustn’t let him know she was a converso and we took her in. We’re dead if she does, I think. All of us.

“You can tell me,” Torquemada’s tone is unctuous as he comes nearer to size up his prey.

“I—” Nita gets no further. Her body heaves, and she covers his robe with the pink contents of her supper.

He lets out a cry of shock and indignation and steps back. The guards try to wipe the vomit from his robe, but he shoves them away. “This is how the devil speaks to the servant of Christ!” His shrieking is as shrill as that of his victims at the stake as he gestures to his soiled robe. “You are evil! The devil makes his home in you. You shall see what God has in mind for such enemies!” Without another word, he storms out of the synagogue.

Nita sobs in Leah’s arms as we leave. When everyone is on the street, Torquemada looms out of a darkened doorway. “Lock it!” he says to his guards, pointing to the synagogue door.

One of them brandishes a large padlock while the other throws the bolt. The lock closes with a loud click. Torquemada snorts in derision and walks away, leaving the Jews of Alcalá speechless in his wake.

26

MADRIGAL 1492

There’s not much to say on the road to Madrigal. We aren’t certain Isabella will see us, especially after she’s heard how the Grand Inquisitor was treated at Alcalá. In the emptying of her stomach, Nita had spoken with an eloquence surpassing language. “This is the mess you left when you murdered my parents,” she told Torquemada, “and this is what I think of you.”

We settle in the home of a rabbi to wait for the queen’s summons. To our surprise, she writes personally, saying she has time for us the following afternoon.

Eliana and I are escorted into a large room that, despite the tapestries on the walls and thick carpets on the floor, has the chill of disuse, for the king and queen have only recently returned from Granada.