Is it in truth silence, then? Is señor’s muteness decreed? Perhaps the lute has indeed popped a string. Is it that, then: that there is no longer a voice to give utterance? Even the “tu tu tu” that Your Grace sounded before would be most welcome. “Rabbi Elazar ben Hisma says, ‘Cryptic portents are but the crumbs of wisdom.’” But I would make something whole even of Your Grace’s crumbs, for I am well versed in Your Grace’s manner and have been for ages. Your Grace need not fear me… Ai, will you cling to your silence forever, then, or is this but an interval? Can it be that you will leave us without breaking it? Who would have thought it, señor, who would have imagined it! Not that I did not know that the day would come when His Grace would grow weary of us, but I somehow had never foreseen it as silence, only as a vanishing, a desaparición like all your others: one day the rabbi would set out, again to preach and hold court in some far place, and while we were still thinking that he was there, or elsewhere, he would be already nowhere, quite simply gone and no more. So I imagined your departure: your tobacco on the table, your little nargileh next to it, the quill and inkwell in their usual place, an open book lying beside them, your cloak flapping near the looking-glass by the doorway — and Your Grace gone I would go look for him in a place that I knew he always had yearned for, in Mesopotamia, señor, or Babylonia, where your furthest, your first father is buried. And I already pictured myself, Rabbi Haddaya, following in Your Grace’s tracks and entering a most ancient synagogue at the time of the afternoon prayer, a synagogue rosy with age, in which a sole Jew sat on a divan saying his vigils and asking him about Your Grace — and without ceasing to recite from his book, he would point to the open window with a gesture that meant, “You have a long, long way to go, for he was here and moved on; he has crossed the purple fields in the bounteous light of a tawny, dry Eden and is gone…” He is gone eastward into the great interior, into the land of primeval ruins, into the last light of the shattered blocks of giant idols, headless, buttockless… eastward… so I imagined it… and now, this silence. Is that all, then? Silence? Not a word to clutch at — not even a tiny pearl of wisdom — just this dark little room in a Europe that Your Grace swore never to set foot in again, in an inn run by Greek rebels against the Porte, bound to a bed on wheels? And what is this that I see out the window? A chapel for their dead saints, may their bones rot! Your Grace breaks my heart with his little eyes that are so full of pain and sorrow. See, here I am, maestro y señor mío, come from the Land of Israel, in dire need of a word, of a verdict — ah, su merced Rabbi Shabbetai, I am in need of a judgment from you! I demand that you convene a rabbinical court, right here and now…
Or is this your way, señor, of outwitting death? When my father passed away, and I was called back posthaste to Salonika, and I wept before Your Grace in Constantinople because I did not want to leave you and return home, you said: “It is your duty to return to your mother and say the kaddish for your father.” And I asked, “But who will say the kaddish for you, señor, my master and teacher?” And I offered to do it myself. Your Grace did not answer me. You just stroked my head and smiled to yourself, and I knew at once from your silence that Your Grace did not believe in dying but rather in something else. Is this it, then? And yet nonetheless…
I am in a hurry to seek judgment. And though it says, “Make not an only judge of yourself, for there is One alone who can judge by Himself,” I always knew that you were not one but two, as has now been made so frightfully clear, for half of you is here and half of you is not. The truth is out. “Ben Ha Ha says, ‘According to the sorrow shall be the reward,’” but I, señor y maestro mío, make bold to say: according to the reward shall be the sorrow. And while I regret neither sorrow nor reward, I demand to know if I will have a share in the World to Come…
I am whispering, because perhaps Doña Flora is listening in the next room. Her I wish to spare sorrow, because even though she is a most clever woman, it is inconceivable that she has already understood what Your Grace — I could tell by the gleam in his eyes — understood in silence For in truth, there was no seed, nor could there have been any, so that the seed could not yet know that it was seed but could only hope to be the seed that it longed to be. That is, it was the seed of longing, the seed of yearning to be seed — seed on the doorknob, seed on the parched earth, seed of shroud and sepulcher, “seed of evil-doers, children of corruption…”
With your permission, I will lock the door, because perhaps madame will try to enter nonetheless. And the court must brook no interruption in its labors — is that not what Your Grace taught me when Jews came to seek redress in your home in Constantinople and you shut the door to keep me out? Yes, that’s better now, isn’t it? And we will stir some life into the fire, because Your Grace is wet and the blanket is damp too. How could they have bound and swaddled you so? With your permission, we will free you a bit. Can this be, ah, can it be the Strong Arm of the Law that presided over an entire age? If I am hurting Your Grace, let him move his strong arm…
In actual fact, the case is not at all difficult. The defendant has already brought in a verdict of guilty and given himself the maximum sentence. He simply does not know if this will atone for the crime or if it will only compound it. Or to put it differently: will I have a share in the World to Come — even the tiniest share — no more than a peephole through which to see the honor bestowed there on Your Grace and to say to whomever will listen, “I too knew the man”?
Is that better? Here, let me rub your back a bit too, to help the lazy blood circulate. Does Your Grace remember how he taught me as a boy to scratch his back? There, that’s better. The muy distinguida doña swaddled you too much. Her worry made her overdo it, the poor thing. The ties need to be loosened some more. There was a time, señor, I won’t deny it, when I thought of madame as a kind of trust that Your Grace was safekeeping for me, for she had held out against marriage and had no father to impose his will, and I thought that Your Grace was merely trying to tame her. And indeed, I added a son to tame her even more — until little by little it dawned on me that the trust was not meant for me. And yet even when Your Grace forbade her to join me on my journey to Jerusalem, I still supposed that this was only because he wished us not to jump to any hasty conclusions. It was not until I saw my son’s anguish in the port in Jaffa as I stepped out of the ship by myself, and watched him producing Jews who did not know yet they were Jews on our way to Jerusalem, that my understanding began to grow by leaps and bounds — and each leap and each bound leaped and bounded still more when I entered their little house and saw madame’s motherless niece for the first time, the Jerusalem damsel who had been betrothed in Beirut. Did Your Grace have any idea of the fascinating, the frightening resemblance between them? Why, she is the very image of Dona Flora, just thirty years younger and fresher, a thing of beauty!