Free The Nature of Blood by Caryl Phillips Page A

of the stories became less conflicting. There was no doubt that the boy had entered the house of Servadio. Someone had noted an unusual number of Jews gathered in the house, and someone else had distinctly heard the sound of a boy sobbing and then suffocating cries, and yet someone else had seen a Jew walking the streets, dragging a sack behind him, at three in the morning. Nearly everyone remembered seeing smoke coming from the chimney of the house of Moses, but no one could remember the name of the boy. The image of the poor boy was clear, but the name was missing, and then one old woman retrieved his name from the corner of her mind. His name was Sebastian. The Jews had killed a beggar boy named Sebastian, and the precise details of this monstrous crime were on everyone's lips. The Jews had killed an innocent Christian boy named Sebastian New. They had dared to make a sacrifice in the Christian town of Portobuffole.

I REMEMBER the afternoon when I first saw
    the woman. Mama and Papa were out in the streets looking for food, and, as
    usual, they had left me in my room, with my books, in the small apartment
    that we shared with the woman. The door to my room was firmly closed, the
    understanding being that it would remain so. In the past, Mama and Papa used
    to lock the door when they went out, but I hated this because I could never
    decide whether they were locking me in, or the woman out. Either way, I would
    spend most of the day crying. Some days I never bothered to open my books,
    and when they returned at the end of the day they would find me bleary-eyed
    and unable to tell them what I had learnt. They mustered hastily assembled
    excuses such as, 'It's for your own good,' or, 'We wouldn't do it unless it
    was absolutely necessary,' but still I cried and ignored my books, so eventually
    they agreed that they would leave the door unlocked. However, I was forbidden
    to venture out and into the small apartment. That was our understanding, that
    the door to my room would be closed – unlocked, but closed – and
    I would submit to voluntary captivity (for my own safety) until they returned
    at the end of each day.
     
    I was standing by the high window in the tiny kitchen. It was my habit to abandon my books after an hour or two of studying, and looking out of the kitchen window had become my own special pastime. First, I would drag a small wooden crate across the floorboards to the window, and then I would mount it so that my chin could rest on the lower sill. From this precarious position, I looked down into the streets. It had been some time now since anyone in our community had witnessed splendid decorative hats upon women's heads, or gentlemen walking with canes. From my perch I observed only bent backs, bare heads and, Uttering the streets, lonely corpses. Occasionally I would see a scholar, an old man in a full-length coat, shamelessly dependent upon his walking stick, beard flowing, eyes damp, a pile of books tucked under one arm, his soup pot hanging idly from his waist. These men peered at the useless future without the aid of their round wire-rimmed spectacles, and they depressed me the most, for it was all too easy to calculate the extent of their fall, wearing as they did the outward garb of their former status. I hoped that Mama and Papa's daily search took them to a better place than this, but in my heart I knew otherwise. I assumed that every street was crowded with people with crazy, despairing eyes, and I imagined that they were all trying to sell something, or beg something. It could not only be this street. We knew that everything in our world had changed. In fact, everything in our world was collapsing all about us.
    And then one hot summer day Rosa appeared, as if from nowhere. I don't know how long she had been standing behind me, but when she spoke I nearly fell from the crate.
    'Can you see anything interesting out there?'
    I turned quickly, then grabbed the tattered curtain. Rosa