Free The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler

her hair. She dripped blood to the street. She was unknown to me. “Are you a Marrano ,?” he demanded, meaning converted Jew. His right eye was a milky white, bulging, reflected my fear with a glint of evil. “Because we’re going to get all the Marranos this time!”
    My heart was pounding a prayer for life. I shook my head, handed my pack to him. “Look!”
    He passed it to his bearded friend. Peering inside with a sniff, he growled, “Sausages.” He handed it back.
    As I offered thanks to God, the dead-eyed man lowered his scythe and asked, “Is that wine?” When I nodded, he took it from me.
    My breaths came greedy and trembling. “The smoke … where’s it …?”
    “A holy pyre in the Rossio. The Dominicans want to send a signal to God with a flame created from Jewish flesh.”
    A dread for the fate of my people curling in my gut prevented mefrom asking more. Both men filled themselves with drink, then closed the spigot. I stared at the woman’s head. Her eyes were not vacant. What then? Recoiling from this world? Taking back the cask now offered me, a shiver twisted through my chest as if made by a fleeing spirit. The bearded man held the dangling head up, licked her cheek twice as if savoring the sweat of a lover. Opening the draw string of his pants, he allowed the filth of his uncircumcised penis to unsheathe into the air. The woman’s black mouth was pried open by fingers cracked with dirt. To his waist she was held. He began to do something unspeakable . The other watched while pressing against himself with the palm of his hand. I dared not close my eyes, but I turned away. When his grunting had finished, he laced his pants together and said, “Be careful where you go. People are being mistaken for Jews!”
    I squatted under an awning when the laborers had gone. My dizziness slowly subsided. Wine took some of the furry, acid taste in my mouth away. Were all the former Jews being hunted?
    Down across the staircases and alleyways of the Alfama I raced until I reached the Rua de São Pedro. The gate to our courtyard was lying on the street, bent and twisted. Our donkey was gone. The kitchen door was open. I burst inside as if across a threshold of departure. Silence swelled around my gaze. The hearth was dying away into embers, and the table was set with two cups. Beside one was a matzah, broken in half. Our tattered rug was drawn over the trap door to the cellar. “Uncle!” I yelled. “Mother!” Chilled, confused, I crept into my bedroom , found a landscape of smashed beds and pillaged chests. Peering into the store, I discovered overturned barrels. Spilled olives formed a black and green rug leading out the doorway onto Temple Street.
    My mother’s room was empty, undisturbed. As I touched the eagle-shaped vellum talisman she always kept on her pillow, I thought: In the cellar …. They’re all hiding together!
    I pulled the rug gently away from the trap door so that I would not break the cord which enabled it to be pulled into place from below. Then, peeling open the door itself, I slipped down the stairs onto the landing. The cellar door was locked. “It’s me,” I called in the dark line between the door and frame. “Uncle, open up.” Silence. I rapped on the door. “It’s me,” I called. “Mother, whoever’s there…it’s just me.” When I looked back up the stairs into the silent kitchen, a weighted anxiety trembled my legs. I banged against the door, called out again. No response.
    I was sure that nothing could have happened to Uncle, our man of wonders, the kabbalah master who played fugues with Torah and Talmud and Zohar. You couldn’t kill such a maestro of the mystical with man-made tools. But Judah or Cinfa… What if they were inside, afraid to call out? Or was the cellar empty? Had they all fled? Perhaps my master had a secret way of locking the door from the outside. To protect the books. Yes, that must be it.
    Was it a premonition? Simple logic? A tremor linked to