Wu Ming - Altai

I woke up rested, surprised to remember the details of my dream. Usually, oneiric visions and real life occupy different rooms in my head, and the first vanish as soon as I open the door of the second.

I washed and chose my clothes carefully: This wasn’t a Saturday like any other.

In the atrium of Palazzo Belvedere a real procession was under way. Servants, family and acolytes abandoned their rooms, came down flights of stairs and crossed corridors to flow together in front of the big portal. Nasi was the last to arrive, dressed in crimson and cobalt, and took his place at the head of the cavalcade.

When the elderly guard opened the door, at least fifty people were ready to descend into the street, arranged in two groups, men at the front and women behind. Along the road, a much larger, disorderly crowd had gathered, ready to join the procession.

We walked along the streets of Ortaköy, savoring the pleasant warmth of that summer morning. The snake of bodies becoming increasingly relaxed, as we approached our destination, the synagogue of the Senyora , the favorite temple of the Sephardic Jews.

We surged into an internal courtyard, protected behind a wall and an iron gate and shaded by an old plane tree. Donna Gracia had had the synagogue built ten years before, and it was said to be our people’s only place of worship planned and financed by a woman.

The sound of many voices reached us from the patio and grew beyond measure to greet the arrival of Don Yossef Nasi. The synagogue would never be able to hold all those people, not even if they climbed on each other’s shoulders. There weren’t only Western Jews there, from Spain and Portugal, like the Campos, the Mendes, the Hamons. Crowding into the courtyard were Romaniots from Greece, Jewish families who had lived in the city since the days of Theodosius, goldsmiths from Balat, weavers from Galata, merchants from Eminonu whom Nasi had helped in the days of the great fire, rabbis of tiny communities who had come from Tripoli and Syria, from the Caucasus and Yemen.

Nasi shook dozens of hands, hugged and stroked, promised money and justice. He was a new Solomon, a new David, the man who had brought the tribes of Israel together, who had reassembled that which had been divided and scattered. Some people definitely thought he was the Messiah.

He had summoned them all with messengers and with gifts, with fascination and seduction. He wanted the chosen people to pray together, celebrating like a single body the news that was coming from Cyprus. The Sultan’s army had disembarked at Limassol, and was marching unopposed toward Nicosia. The generals expected to lay siege by the end of July.

A servant appeared breathless and spoke into the ear of Don Yossef, who immediately interrupted his greetings and turned toward the gate, in a solemn pose. The crowd did likewise, and silence quickly spread.

I understood then, even before I saw them appearing behind the gate, that the last guests, the most important, were arriving.

I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the power of what I saw happening. Yossef Nasi’s money and genius had accomplished a marvel.

When I opened my eyes, Solomon Ashkenazi was entering the courtyard beside his wife, followed by a multitude of men and women got up in their finest clothes.

We entered the temple, leaving doors and windows open, because a huge number of people were still outside, and no one must feel excluded. The women sat down in the loggia that opened halfway up, on three sides of the hall.

We got to our feet and intoned the psalms and blessings of the morning service. My Hebrew was now more fluent than it had been in my schooldays.

Yossef Nasi, the worthy man, opened the doors of the Sacred Ark. Solomon Ashkenazi removed the wooden cylinder that held the Scroll of the Law and handed it to the cantor, who passed with it among the faithful.

When the ark set forward, Moses said, “Rise up, Lord, and let your enemies be scattered.”

Ashkenazi closed the doors of the holy cabinet and joined Nasi in the little procession as it moved through the synagogue and then back toward the pulpit.

Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power and the glory, the majesty and the victory.

They walked among the benches, across the central corridor and along the walls, as the children leaned forward to kiss the Torah scroll with the tips of their lips.

Yours is the kingdom, Lord; you are exalted above all things.

I looked up at the army of women above me, seeking Dana’s face. She was observing the ceremony with a worried expression, as if the gestures of the three men were not the right ones. Perhaps she wanted to correct them, as she had corrected my dance steps in my dream. Beside her, Donna Reyna was whispering complicitly into another woman’s ear. I asked David Gomez who she was.

“Esther Handali,” she replied. “She’s a Sephardi, but she doesn’t usually frequent our synagogue, because she lives in the Old City. She takes care of the affairs of Nurbanu, Selim’s favorite.”

My eyes slipped to the seat to Esther Handali’s right. It was occupied by Bula Ashkenazi. I reflected on her husband’s words when he’d introduced her to me: “She visits servants and concubines, she tells me the symptoms, prepares and sells remedies.” She, too, frequented the Sultan’s harem.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool.

Two Jewish women, among the very few who had direct contact with the favorite without living inside the harem. As far as I knew, the only other women with a similar right were the three princesses, Nurbanu’s daughters: Ismihan, Geherhan and Shah, the wives of the Grand Vizier Sokollu, Piyale Pasha and the Great Falconer.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain .

Nasi and Ashkenazi sat down side by side again, in the front row, on the bench next to mine. The cantor climbed onto the tebah and unrolled the Torah on the big lectern.

Sokollu, Piyale Pasha and the Great Falconer. All three damad , sons-in-law of Nurbanu and the Sultan. The first was an enemy of Nasi and an open opponent of the war against Venice. The second had been a grand admiral and was in command of a flagship in the expedition to Cyprus. The third, for his part, had expressed a sibylic opinion to Ismail about the attack on the island: “Wars are driven by the ambition of powerful men.”

Blessed be the Lord, king of the universe, who has chosen us of all peoples and given us his Law.

I looked again toward the ladies’ balcony, and I felt as if the ceiling of the synagogue had begun to spin. Bula Ashkenazi, Esther Handali, Donna Reyna, Dana. The first and the second frequented Nurbanu, the favorite of Selim, sister-in-law of the Grand Vizier. The fourth, Dana, had been Selim’s personal servant before she arrived at the Palazzo Belvedere.

I had seen her carrying a message from Donna Reyna into the second courtyard of the Seraglio, the one that granted access to the Hall of the Divan. And to the harem.

Follow justice and justice alone, that you may live and possess the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Reyna had spent her girlhood in Venice. Bula was married to a Venetian, the personal physician of the bailiff Marcantonio Barbaro, merchant and shipowner on the route to Crete, a Venetian island. Nurbanu, too, the Princess of Light, was Venetian by origin, kidnapped by Turkish corsairs from an island in the Mediterranean. Like a little Jewish girl by the name of Dana.

A second lector took the place of the first and began to recite in an uncertain singsong voice.

When you have entered the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and dwell therein, you will think, I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me.