Free The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler Page A

the possibility that something dreadful had happened to Uncle shook me. Standing atop the mosaic menorah, I was suddenly battering the door with all my strength. Till its iron bolt flew from the wood.
    I was inside.
    The hard, dry stink of lavender and excrement packed my nostrils. I was staring at two nude bodies cloaked by blood. Uncle and a girl. They were lying a few feet from each other, she on her side, he on his back. Their hands were almost touching. It looked as if their locked fingers had slipped apart after they’d drifted into sleep.

Chapter III
    When I saw them, the air was suddenly ripped from me, and my body receded. I was racing down the stairs into a warm cavern bordered by muffled noise and wavering light, breathing in rhythm to the swaying of the walls. Naked, Uncle was. A curtain of blood had closed over his chest. The girl beside him was also free of all covering, and also drenched with blood.
    The rotten stench around me seemed to moisten my eyes. Moaning, kneeling over my master, I reached for his wrist, felt for a pulse; it returned a frigid silence.
    Old Christian rioters had taken his life!
    I looked frantically between the two bodies as if upon unknown scripts. Had they been making love? Who could she be?
    Necks and torsos were contoured by liquid brown ribbons. I crouched by Uncle’s head. On his neck, two lips of skin had peeled away from a deep slit still wet with blood.
    Someone help me, I thought. Dearest God, please help me.
    A cold dread curled up from my bowels and pressed out against my chest when I realized I was alone, that I’d be forever without my master . A wave of sickness rose inside me, and I vomited across the slate of the floor till a stinging liquid dripped from my nose.
    For warmth, I wrapped my arms about my shoulders. Nothing must be changed, I thought. Not before I had imprinted the scene like a Biblical passage in my Torah memory. I must not faint!
    The prayer mat was blotched red, had soaked up the syrup of life they’d spilled.
    But the door had been firmly locked. How could the killer have gotten out?
    Or was he here?!
    I jumped to my feet, reached for my knife. Holding it in front of me like a flame in darkness, I turned back for the stairs, then swiveled around. The silence of expectation trembled my legs.
    Yet the wall tiles and window eyelets, desks and chairs returned my gaze without the slightest quiver of motion. The room was empty, seemed hollow, like the rib cage of an animal whose heart had suddenly ceased beating.
    The memory of Uncle handing me the vellum ribbon on which Aunt Esther had scripted both our names came to me framed by the silence which follows a wintertime chant. Of course, I thought, he must have known that the Angel of Death was approaching. It was why he warned me of our coming separation.
    I stood with my back against the southern wall of the cellar, pressed hard to its granite by the immensity of my loss, and stared at them.
    Now, twenty-four years later, every detail is as clear to me as the first lines of Genesis.
    My master was lying flat on his back, his head tilted to the left in a solemn and restful pose. The girl was lying on her left side, her body the span of a man’s arms from his.
    Uncle’s feet were at the center of the circular prayer mat, his head just short of its perimeter. His eyes were open, darker and glassier than in life, staring at nothing. Blood was smeared on both his cheeks and on the wild silver tufts of hair above his right ear. His left arm was by his side, his hand palm up, his fingers curled. His right arm, however, seemed to be straining toward the girl, and his fingertips were but two inches from her outstretched hand.
    If, in the moment before death, he’d been hoping to comfort the girl with his touch, wouldn’t his body and head have been turned to the right side to give him greater reach?
    I reasoned that he’d already been dead before reaching this final position, and I imagined a hooded