So you see, this then was the meaning of the idée fixe (I am whispering lest madame be listening impatiently on the other side of the door, for she has been most suspicious of me since the moment I arrived at this inn.) This then was its meaning — for why else would he insist on his surreptitious visits to those unwashed Ishmaelites just as they were dropping off to sleep — why would he think them forgetful Jews, or Jews who would remember that they were Jews — if he had not, señor y maestro mío, already upon arriving in the wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem, been quite simply overwhelmed by his loneliness — a loneliness that only grew greater when he first glimpsed the ramparts and cloistering gates of that obstinate desert city of stone, in which he was awaited by his motherless Beirut fiancée, the look-alike of his adored madame? That was what made him decide to see a former Jew in every Ishmaelite! And yet, señor, or so I often asked myself, this fit of loneliness — was it only because he had been so pampered by you in Constantinople? Everyone knew how shamelessly your madame spoiled him there — why, he would barely appear in the morning at your academy long enough to propose some unheard-of answer to some Talmudic question and already he was off and away to the bazaars, across the Golden Horn to the bright carpets, the burnished copper plates, the fragrant silk dresses fluttering above the charcoal grills and the roast lambs, adored and smiled at by everyone, so that it was perhaps this very coddling that later made him afraid of the solitude that possessed him. Or could it be that he was only coddled in the first place because even then his manliness was in doubt, which was why he so amiably — so mildly — so casually — sought to enlist those drowsy Ishmaelites in the procreation that he himself could not affect from within himself? Are you listening to me, Shabbetai Hananiah? You must listen, for soon I will be gone. The best hope of man is the maggot, says Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh…
And yet why should he have doubted his manly powers already then, as he was wending his way through the savage wasteland between Jaffa and Jerusalem with the slow caravan, or as he glimpsed from the Little Oak Tree the ramparts and spires of the city written like a sentence in letters whose language was no longer known to men? Why did he not rejoice to see his bride, who had come in all innocence with her kinfolk to a family wedding in Beirut and been trapped there by her aunt’s love, if not for his fear of hurting the look-alike of the one woman he ever loved, half a mother and half an older sister, to whose very scent he had been bound since the days he tumbled in your giant bed, Rabbi Haddaya, a thousand times forbidden though it was?
It was then, my master and teacher, it was only then, sitting wrapped like a ball on the bed in that freezing room while seeking in the little looking-glass to make contact again with her shadow, which was traced with exquisite delicacy by the moonlight in its own furry ball, that I felt how my sorrow and pity for my dead son, who was lying naked beneath snow and earth on the Mount of Olives, were deranging my mind, and I wished I were dead. Because, knowingly or not, we had gulled him with a paradox that compelled him to produce his idée as a consolation in his solitude. I could feel it, that solitude, clutching me in its deadly grip, and I wished to atone for it, even though I knew that to be worthy of such atonement I first would have to die with him, would have to lie naked beneath snow and earth too and let myself be slaughtered like he was. And so, Rabbi Haddaya, layer by layer I began to strip off my clothes, until I was standing naked in that frozen room, in that locked, vestigial house, facing a looking-glass that was facing a looking-glass, thinking back to the night I sent him forth out of myself and preparing to take him back again. He was turning among the old graves on the Mount of Olives, he was icy and shredding, his blood was ebbing from him, his flesh was ebbing and being eaten away, and as I drew him back into myself his seed flew through the darkness like a snowflake and was swallowed inside me until we were one again, I was he and he was me — and then, by solemn virtue of his betrothal in Beirut and of his holy matrimony in Jerusalem, he rose, and went into the next room, and unballed the ball, and possessed his bride to beget his grandson, and died once more.
And died once more, Rabbi Shabbetai, do you hear me?
And so I too roundaboutly, along an arc bridging the two ends of Asia Minor, entered your bed, señor, a bed I had never dared climb into even as a lonely boy running down your long hallway in my blouson, scared to death of the cannons firing over the Bosporus. Now, in Jerusalem, I slipped between your sheets and lay with your Doña Flora, thirty years younger, in her native city, in her childhood home, in her parents’ bed, smelling your strong tobacco in the distance, giving and getting love that sweetened a great commandment carried out by a great transgression. At dawn, when old Carso knocked on the door to take me with him to the Middle Synagogue for the morning service and the mourner’s prayer, he scarcely could have imagined that the bereaved father he had left the night before was now a sinful grandfather.
If we undo this knot and that button over there, señor y maestro mío, and loosen the ties, perhaps we can calm the growl in your sore tummy with a little massage, so that the rice gruel cooked for you by that fine-looking young Greek can arrive at its proper destination. I hear little steps behind the door. Perhaps the Jews gathered outside the inn are afraid I am absconding with Your Grace’s last words and are so jealous of our ancient ties that soon they will demand to be admitted too. And yet I have not come to amuse myself with Your Grace but to ask for judgment. Because when I returned from the synagogue, I was certain that Tamara would already have fled back to her father Valero’s home, so that I wondered greatly to find her not only still wrapped in her mourner’s shawl and blowing on the wet coals to make me breakfast, but looking taller and lighter on her feet, with no sign of the infection in her eyes that had clouded them all summer. The beds were made like plain, respectable beds; the floor was sparkling clean; the looking-glasses were covered with sheets as they were supposed to be. I ate, took off my shoes, and sat down in my mourner’s corner to study a chapter of Mishnah. She followed me in her slippers and sat down not far from me. And when she peered in my eyes, it was not as a sinner or a victim, but as a fearless judge who wished to determine whether I was made for love.