Джеймс Миченер - The Source

With horror he had stood in the public plaza to hear the formal charges against his old patient, Diego Ximeno, and during the procession to the burning grounds he had twice stationed himself in positions where the condemned man would have to pass close to him; but Ximeno, in a kind of mortal trance, had stared straight ahead, refusing to see the doctor. When Ximeno climbed to the stake Dr. Abulafia positioned himself with the secretaries waiting to catch any words the doomed man might utter, but again nothing happened. Yet at the last moment, when Ximeno’s hair was ablaze and his skin had begun to char, he did cast one final, lingering glance at Dr. Abulafia, and their eyes met through flame.

When the fires burned down and there were left only iron chains soiled with greasy soot, Dr. Abulafia walked dumbly homeward, and it was now he who was in a trance. At home Doña Maria asked, “Why are you so pale?” and he replied, “I’ve just seen Diego burned,” and his wife replied, “He must have been guilty. These are not things for us to worry about.”

Abulafia was unable to eat supper, nor did he wish to play with his two sons. He went to his study to examine patients, but he became dizzy and thought he would faint. By exercising will power he succeeded in maintaining control, saying to himself: If I faint now it might be fatal. Who knows which of these patients was sent to spy on me this night? So he worked on.

Dr. Abulafia was a tall man with dark, sympathetic eyes. Handsome and much respected by the people of Avaro, he had a gentle manner with the sick which enabled him to earn more money than most of the doctors in town. He was a skilled surgeon, enjoying a favorable reputation in cities as far distant as Toledo, where he had once treated Emperor Charles. He sprang from a family whose contributions to Spain dated back to the year 400 C.E., and he should have felt secure this ghostly night, when the smoldering fires of the burning still hovered above the city, but he did not. The execution of Diego Ximeno haunted him, so at the earliest chance he closed his office. Avoiding his family he went to a small inner room containing no books, no papers, no pictures. The walls were white, the table and chair rudely made, and he sat staring straight ahead and thinking. He was afraid to write anything down, which he desperately wanted to do, for his wife or some spy might find his writing and give it to the Inquisition. He was afraid to mumble the words his brain formed lest someone be listening and overhear un-Spanish syllables. He was not free to recite any litany, nor to consult books, nor to read manuals, nor to do anything other than sit.

He stared at the wall for nearly an hour, trying to cleanse his mind of the terrible things it had seen that day, but flame and the penetrating eyes of Diego Ximeno haunted him; when he tried to concentrate he saw only the eyes of the counselor, but finally the dreadful visions faded and letters of the Hebrew alphabet began to form in space before the whiteness of the wall, and they began to move hither and about, forming in alternation consoling or condemning patterns. Still he stared, as the letters took meaningful patterns recalling concepts which he had suppressed for many months; then they assumed the form of symbols which evoked other meaningful concepts, and still he sat, motionless, wanting to write down the letters with pen and paper but terrified of doing so; and after a long interval of watching, the Hebrew letters turned to fire and marched purposefully across the wall, and he began to breathe in short gasps. His stomach contracted and these preliminary letters started to fade from sight until the wall was lonely and bare.

Then, from an immeasurable distance behind the wall, came four letters of extraordinary force, too powerful to be looked at directly. He dropped his eyes. The letters came through the wall and across the room right to his forehead; and now without using his eyes he could see them in all their terrible majesty, and they were broken, YH on one side and WH on the other, and try as he might he could not bring them together to form the unspoken, the unspeakable Name; and slowly the letters receded until they stood again upon the wall, and now he could look upon them with his eyes, and they stood accusingly there, YH to one side and WH to the other, and he had not the power to fuse them into one word. For the word he sought was the sacred Name of God Himself, and this Name Abulafia could not speak; for he felt himself to be a man of sin: he could have joined Ximeno at the stake but through cowardice had not done so. After a long while he stopped looking at the accusing letters and found himself muttering an ancient Hebrew prayer, and it was for the salvation of Diego Ximeno’s soul; for Dr. Abulafia knew with certainty that the counselor had been a secret Jew and that the Inquisition was therefore justified, according to its rules, in burning him alive.

On the day in 1540 when he heard that Ximeno had first been arrested, Dr. Abulafia had said to himself, trembling in this white room, “Diego will confess, and he will tell them that I, too, am a Jew.” Then his agony of cowardice began. With unmanly apprehension he watched the prison where Ximeno was kept, expecting each day to be called before the Inquisition with word that the counselor had incriminated him. The three years that Ximeno had lain in silence were to the doctor an eternity, for he could visualize the tortures that his friend was suffering. In recent years several patients, having been set free after preliminary questioning in the torture chamber, had come to Dr. Abulafia with distended joints or horrible scars on their feet and they had wanted to tell him how they had acquired these marks, but he had refused to listen. “The sacred Inquisition does its duty and does it justly,” he told them, for he could never be sure which were spies saved from their own burning in order to trap him.

In the refuge of this silent room he had prayed: “God of Moses our Teacher, save Diego.” And when weeks passed and the Inquisition did not come to arrest him, he said to himself: Maybe Ximeno is not going to confess, and he grew ashamed at having entertained such self-seeking thoughts. A few days ago the broadsheet had come fluttering through the streets, announcing that the next burning of heretics would be headed by Counselor Ximeno, and Dr. Abulafia had suffered fresh moral confusion until at last he had been driven in a kind of self-sacrificing mania to station himself along the path of Ximeno’s march to the fagots, willing to step forward and identify himself if the doomed man gave the signal; but with a fortitude Abulafia considered impossible, Ximeno had marched in silence, protecting the names of others that he alone knew to be secret Jews. Yet as he passed, Abulafia saw something that he would never forget. Ximeno’s face was a mask which revealed nothing, but his bare feet were marked by gaping scars which could have come only from burns. And at the end there had been the last fraternal glance.

Now on the night of death Dr. Abulafia sat again in the white room and asked himself: How many other secret Jews in this city did Ximeno protect through his courage? And when he contemplated the fortitude of the martyred man he had to cry aloud, whether spies heard him or not, “Praise God for those who have the strength to die for the sanctification of the Name.” And he continued with a soaring, poetic invocation to the good Jew who had that day allowed himself to be burned alive rather than escape his agony by incriminating others who would be hounded to death after he was gone.

Dr. Abulafia had met Ximeno twenty years ago, in the winter of 1522. It was an accident, an accident of words: at a formal dinner celebrating the patron saint of Avaro he had asked innocently, “What is this Kabbala the Jewish people speak of?” And after a series of cautious probings the counselor had revealed himself as a master of the Kabbala, that esoteric body of mysticism that had grown up in Germany and Spain as a pathway to the understanding of the Hebrew God. Ximeno had given Dr. Abulafia a manuscript of the Zohar, the arcane book of Kabbalism, believed to have been composed centuries before by a mystical Jew in Granada, and had initiated him into its mysteries. Abulafia had found much to his liking, for while he had never been able honestly to accept the Christian principle that God was of one substance and three manifestations, he found the austere monotheism of Hebraic teaching equally difficult. There was in life, and his Spanish nature sensed it, an additional spirit of flight, the wild movement of the human soul seeking some kind of further identification with God; and only in the Zohar did Abulafia find a solution that satisfied him.