Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“They’re not old enough to know anything,” the sisters whined.

“I know what they will believe on such matters,” Elisheba said, “because they are the children of a saint.”

“If our mother were here …” Sarah wailed.

“Order your wife out of here,” one of the rabbis told Abulafia, but he said resignedly, “She is his daughter. She is allowed to stay.” And the matter was put up to Zaki, who said, “You may stay, Sarah, but do not speak so loudly.”

The discussion went on and on, but nothing could shake Rabbi Zaki from his determination to go to Rome, and it was at last agreed that he should do so. He spent two weeks in finishing his affairs and selling his shoemaker shop to a young man he hoped would marry Elisheba when he was dead. He held long conversations with his children, trusting that they might remember something of the old, white-bearded man who had been their father.

From one synagogue to the other he went, praying with the people who had grown to love him, and on the last Friday he went to the fields with the rabbis and sang joyously at the approach of Shabbat, Then he left them and marched slowly through the streets, calling the Jews to their duty of greeting Queen Shabbat, and it was supposed that he would go to the German synagogue, which his wife attended; but he went instead to that of Rabbi Abulafia, a man who also carried a burden of sin, and the two old rabbis looked at each other across the heads of the congregation.

On Sunday he said farewell to his wife. No more would he embrace those lovely breasts or know her enchanting thighs. Her womb would grow no more with his seed and at night he would not feel her white leg creeping across his. The exact structure of her marvelous face framed in black hair would slowly recede from his memory, except that in the last moment, through the flames, he would see not YHWH, but Elisheba, the daughter of Eliezer bar Zadok.

Early Monday morning the people of Safed, led by their rabbis, walked into the countryside after Rabbi Zaki as he started on his pilgrimage. They gave him money and prayers. He kissed his wife and his children, then kissed his wife again, but the last citizen of Safed with whom he spoke was Dr. Abulafia, who came bearing a small parcel. “You know the sin under which I live,” the Spaniard said. “Help me. When I fled I brought with me this menorah. Take it back to the land of persecution. Someone may cherish it.”

Rabbi Zaki looked at the turbaned man and said with humility, “I judged you harshly. Now God forces me to behave in the same way. Forgive me.” But when he camped that night at the mound of Makor he argued with himself: Taking Rabbi Abulafia’s menorah back to Europe is an act of arrogance, if not of idolatry. He therefore buried it deep in the earth, trusting that at some later date a Jew of the region would find it and consider it a miracle.

On the next morning he rose early and resumed his march toward Rome.

LEVEL

II

Twilight of an Empire

Schematic sketch of a gold coin issued by the Fatimid Dynasty of Egypt. Original reads in part —Obverse: “In the name of God, this dinar was struck at Tiberias 395 A.H. (1004 CE.). Ali al-Mansur Abu Ali being Imam. Al-Hakim hi-Amr-Allah being Commander of the Faithful.” Reverse: “There is no God except Allah alone. He has no partner. [This phrase was included to irritate Christians.] Muhammad is the Apostle of God, sent with instructions to demonstrate the true faith in its entirety, even though the pagans hated this. Ali is the friend of Allah” It was this Caliph al-Hakim who ordered the destruction of the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 100g, thus initiating the series of events that culminated in the Crusades. Deposited at Makor August 21, 1880 C.E., sometime after six o’clock in the afternoon.

It was hot in Tiberias, both within the city and without. A blazing sun beat down upon the molten surface of the lake and hammered at the barren hills like a great torch seeking to set the world afire. Inside the massive black walls of the town the heat was more than a man could bear, so that during the suffocating hours of midday few could be seen in the narrow alleys, down which ran open sewers throwing a hideous stench.

Tiberias was the earth’s lowest settlement, cowering more than six hundred and eighty feet below the level of the sea, and in this torrid summer of 1880 it was also one of the world’s most miserable communities, a somnolent, cramped and dirty little town overburdened with filth and fleas. In the remorseless sun it dozed as if ashamed to show its face to the world.

Legend of the countryside claimed that the king of insects held court in Tiberias and hither summoned his subjects each summer to devise new means of tormenting human beings, their shrewd inventions being first tried out on the citizens of this wretched town. Certainly something in the hot, low place was conducive to the breeding of insects, for each house was alive with fleas and scorpions and bedbugs.

For nearly a thousand years Tiberias had been the butt of jokes, because as early as 985 an Arab traveler, forced against his will to spend some time in the town, reported to his friends: “For two months in the year the citizens gorge themselves upon the fruit of the jujube bush, which grows wild and costs them nothing. For two months they struggle with the numerous flies that are rife there. For two months they go about naked because of the fierce heat. For two months they play the flute, for they suck pieces of sugar cane which resemble flutes. For two months they wallow in mud, for the rains soak their streets, and for the last two months they dance in their beds because of the legions of fleas with which they are infested.” The people of Tiberias enjoyed a reputation no more favorable than that of their insects. A drowsy, undistinguished lot, they drifted through the years with no accomplishments, and a stranger, looking at their town in its present condition, could not have recognized the once-proud city of the Herods nor the center of learning from which the Talmud and the written Bible were given to the world. It would have been impossible to imagine that within these walls a Crusader court had once held sway, for now only a few Arabs huddled in their district, a few Jews in theirs, the Sephardim remaining strictly aloof from the Ashkenazim while a handful of Christians clung to the southern edge of the town, and on stifling days like this, when the thermometer on the kaimakam’s balcony stood at 124 degrees and when no breeze came from any quarter, the citizens of Tiberias lay panting in their beds, hoping that the night would bring relief.

In this flea-bitten town only one man was cool. In an underground room perched over a cellar which had been packed during the winter with ice lugged down from the mountains, a handsome, portly man in his early forties reclined in a bamboo chair, his fat feet higher than his belly and a wet towel about his head. He was naked except for a small breech-clout and he was drinking grape juice into which had been placed chips of ice from the cellar below.

Even so, this amiable man with the long mustaches was sweating, not because of the heat, but because of intricate and dangerous plans in which he was involved. Two different groups of plaintiffs had petitioned him for exactly contrary decisions regarding a matter of land: the white-robed qadi and the red-faced mufti had joined forces to plead for one solution, while Shmuel Hacohen, a sway-backed Jew from Russia, sought an opposing judgment. And Faraj ibn Ahmed Tabari, the kaimakam of Tubariyeh, as Tiberias was now called, had devised a trick whereby he could extort baksheesh from each side while appeasing neither, and such a solution appealed to his sense of administration.