— He would not have, madame, even if he chooses to keep silent. I know him well enough to know he has his doubts about them.
—’Twas no effort, Doña Flora. We were riding now at a fair clip and were over the top of Mount Castel, I on my mule and she on her horse, with nothing but bare hills around us. Even Nebi Samwil was lost in the gloom, not to mention Jerusalem, which had been gobbled up by the mountains. I knew I had left the Holy City for good and would return to it only with the Messiah at the Resurrection, may it come soon! Meanwhile, we had to find lodgings for the night and a wet nurse for our Moshiko. And so we rode, no longer in any great hurry, down toward Karyat-el-Anab, and near Ein-Dilba we came across a shepherd and inquired about a wet nurse, and he gave a great shout into the silent night to a compañero of his in Abu-Ghosh, and a shout came back from afar. We headed on in its direction and soon found both midwife and caravan in a large stone house beneath the village of Saris.
— No, madame. Why should there have been rain? The earth was still dry and the air was perfectly clement. It had a great clarity that lured one on — it made the vast countryside seem very near.
— A dream, madame? A dream?
— A sturdy, blond-haired village wet nurse, who gave baby Moses his dessert. We put him to sleep between us, protected from night crawlers, and in the morning, when I was sure that now she would bid me farewell and return with a caravan ascending to Jerusalem from Beit-Mahsir, she suddenly swore that she would do no such thing until she had seen the sea that I was about to embark on. And so we climbed to the top of the hill and saw the sea from afar, and I thought, “Now her mind has been set to rest,” and I took my leave — yet it seemed that not only did the sight of the sea not assuage her, it increased her concern even more, because as I was hurrying down to join my caravan, madame, along a horribly winding and dizzying track in Wadi Ali, what did I hear like a far echo in that precipitous silence?
— A stone kicked loose by the thoroughbred hooves of the consular horse…
— In truth, doña mía!
— She was all by herself.
— With the infant, of course — with baby Moses in his basket, wrapped in my fox-fur robe and jouncing from bend to bend.
— Riding after me as boldly as you please.
— I took cover on a ledge of the hillside, among some large shrubs in that wild chaparral, from where I could watch her in the distance. She waited for the caravan to round a bend before carefully emerging from her concealment in the arroyo, small but perfectly erect on her black horse. Just then a ray of sunlight glinted off her head, illumining her hair a copper red.
— A saucy spirit, madame — but whom did she get it from? Must I venture a surmise?
— I too asked myself, madame, how far she was prepared to follow me. Well, toward evening, after many long hours of riding on that narrow trail without espying each other, we finally rode out of the verdant gloom into an open valley, which was the Plain of Sharon, and pressed on a ways, camels, donkeys, and mules, through fields of figs and olives, until we came to a high hedge of prickly pears that belonged to the village of Emmaus, where we made camp and asked for water, basking in the setting sun. I turned to Jerusalem to say the afternoon prayer — and there, from out of the dark opening of the arroyo, from its very aperture, appeared the consular horse, ridden by Obstinacy and bound for Folly.
— It went on like that all the way to Jaffa, all the way to the ship.
— We found a wet nurse in Emmaus too. And in Ramleh and Azur also.
— No, Doña Flora. It was not lack of milk that made her go from wet nurse to wet nurse, because I happened to know that the dried-up left teat had begun to flow freely again since the Day of the Rejoicing of the Law. The explanation I gave myself was that she wished to give the infant a taste of all the ambrosias between Jerusalem and Jaffa so that he might retain some memory of his poor father.
— How say you? Have you in truth, madame, forgotten him? Has my only son already been forgotten?
— No, you see no tears, not a trace of them. I will ask His Grace. Rabbi Shabbetai, has my master and teacher forgotten the only son I offered up to him, my Yosef?
— Blessed be the Name of the Lord! Did he not sign clearly, Doña Flora? He has not forgotten. Blessed be His Name! “Rabbi Yannai says, ‘We can account neither for the good fortune of the wicked nor for the torments of the righteous.’ “
— How making sport of you, madame? Why, had you not, Doña Flora, insisted on bringing your motherless niece from Jerusalem for a hasty betrothal, the three of us might still have the pleasure of seeing him alive! Instead of huddling together in this shabby inn run by Greek rebels against the Porte, we could have been sitting with him on your big divan in Constantinople, by the large hearth facing the Bosporus, enjoying the rosebushes in Abdul Mejid’s royal gardens and pondering — but no more than that! — life in Paradise.
— What mean I? What mean you?
— In a word… in a word… with all due respect, you were hasty, madame…
— No, Doña Flora, no, rubissa. How could I dare be angry with you? And what would it avail me if I were? Tell me that! If it would avail me, I would be angry at once. May I hope to die, madame, for not having understood my son, my own flesh and blood! Accursed am I for not realizing where he was leading us! I was an innocent, a cabeza de calabaza; too innocent for words…
— Because I did not know that behind every thought hides another thought.
— A thought born from the indulgence that you showed him in your home. Does His Grace know that when he was away on his travels, Doña Flora had my son sleep by her side, in His Grace’s own bed?
— A boy! Of course… although not such a little one… and a most sensitive and astute one… I, in any case, never had the privilege of lying in His Grace’s bed…
— Why not, madame? Who of us does not desire to lie with those greater and stronger than ourselves and be warmed by their superior heat? I, too, after all, was but a boy when sent to Rabbi Shabbetai… ‘twas many ages ago… my father, may he rest in peace… after the defeat of Napoleon, the cannon would blast away over the Bosporus at night for fear of the Russ… and I was so greatly afraid that I ran to His Grace’s bed from my little room at the end of the corridor. But I was too in awe of him to climb into it… Does His Grace remember me, a little lad standing there in my blouson and singing to him Tia Loja’s conacero
All kiss the mezuzá,
But I, I kiss your face,
Istraiqua, apple of my eye?
He is smiling a bit, madame. He remembers the melody. He is smiling, God be praised! It would take but a word from Him to create him anew. His salvation will come in a twinkling… See, Your Grace, I am back! Your Grace’s pisgado is back, and there yet will be song…
— Go? Where?
— No, madame, do not make me leave!
— No, do not send me away, madame. Nor are you able to…
— Most definitely not!
— I have a right… I am family… I have been for ages…
— I will not sing anymore.
— There will be no singing.
— To make a long story short betahsir, as the Ishmaelites say in Jerusalem…
— That is just it, Doña Flora. Every thought has its pocket, and in every pocket is another thought. And from such a pocket our young lad took the thoughts discarded by the rabbi, those that fell out of his dreams at night and were left between his pillow and the wall, or lying under his bed… because why else would he have put his trust in so frightful a thought as that which led to his death?