Excerpt

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(Pages 257-258)

When the sun had set and darkness sheltered her from the eyes of
the curious, Ruth Ben Shoushan walked into the sea, the nameless
infant tight against her breast, until she stood waist deep. She
unwrapped him, throwing the swaddling cloth over her head. His
brown eyes blinked at her, and his small fists, free of
constriction, punched at the air. “Sorry, my little
one,” she said gently, and then thrust him under the dark
surface.

The water closed around him, touching every inch of his flesh. She
had a firm grip around his upper arm. She let go. The water had to
take him.

She looked down at the small, struggling form, her face determined,
even as she sobbed. The swell rose and slapped against her. The tug
of the receding wave was about to pull the infant away. Ruti
reached out and grasped him firmly in her two hands. As she lifted
him from the sea, water sluiced off his bare, shining skin in a
shower of brightness. She held him up to the stars. The roar in her
head was louder now than the surf. She cried out, into the wind,
speaking the words for the infant in her hands. “Shema
Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.”

Then she drew the cloth from her head and wrapped the baby. All
over Aragon that night, Jews were being forced to the baptismal
font, driven to conversion by fear of exile. Ruti, exultant,
defiant, had made a gentile into a Jew. Because his mother was not
Jewish, a ritual immersion had been necessary. And now it was done.
Even as the emotion of the moment brimmed within her, Ruti was
counting up the days. She did not have very long. By the eighth
day, she would need to find someone to perform his bris. If all
went well, this would be in their new land. And on that day, she
would give the child his name.

She turned back toward the beach, hugging the baby tightly to her
breast. She remembered she had the book, wrapped in hide, slung in
a shoulder sack. She pulled on the straps to raise it out of the
reach of the waves. But a few drops of saltwater found their way
inside her careful wrappings. When the water dried on the page,
there would be a stain, and a residue of crystals, that would last
five hundred years. In the morning, Ruti would begin to look for a
ship. She would pay the passage for herself and the baby with the
silver medallion that she had pried off the leather binding, and
where they made landfall—if they made landfall—would
rest in the hand of God.

But tonight she would go to her father’s grave. She would say
the Kaddish and introduce him to his Jewish grandson, who would
carry his name across the seas and into whatever future God saw fit
to grant them.

(Pages 275-276)

We do not feel the sun here. Even after the passage of years, that
is still the hardest thing for me. At home, I lived in brightness.
Heat baked the yellow earth and dried the roof thatch until it
crackled.

Here, the stone and tile are cool always, even at midday. Light
steals in among us like an enemy, fingering its narrow way through
the lattices or falling from the few high panes in dulled fragments
of emerald and ruby.

It is hard to do my work in such light. I must be always moving the
page to get a small square of adequate brightness, and this
constant fidgeting breaks my concentration. I set down my brush and
stretch my hands. The boy beside me rises unbidden and goes to
fetch the sherbet girl. She is new here, in the house of Netanel
ha- Levi, and I wonder how he came by her. Perhaps, like me, she
was the gift of some grateful patient. If so, a generous one. She
is a skilled servant, gliding across the tiles silent as silk. I
nod, and she kneels, pouring a rust-colored liquid that I do not
recognize. “It is pomegranate,” she says, in an
unfamiliar tribal accent. She has green eyes, like agate stone, but
her skin gleams with the tones of some southern land. As she bends
over the goblet, the cloth at her throat falls away and I note that
her neck is the golden brown of a bruised peach. I puzzle on what
hues I would combine to render this. The sherbet is good; she has
mixed it so that the tartness of the fruit still tells beneath the
syrup.

‘‘God bless your hands,” I say as she
rises.

“May the blessings be abundant as rain upon your
own,’’ she murmurs. Then I see her eyes widen as they
fall upon my work. As she turns, her lips begin to move, and though
her accent makes it difficult to be sure, I think that the prayer
she whispers is of a different import entirely. I look down at my
tablet then and try to see my work as it must appear to her. The
doctor gazes back at me, his head tilted and his hand raised,
fingering the curl of his beard as he does when he considers some
matter that interests him. I have him, there is no doubt of it. It
is an excellent likeness. One might say he lives.

No wonder the girl looked startled. It puts me in mind of my own
astonishment when Hooman first showed me the likenesses in the
paintings that had enraged the iconoclasts. But it is Hooman who
would be astonished if he could see me now: me, a Muslim, in the
service of a Jew. He did not think he was training me for such a
fate. For myself, I have grown accustomed to it. At first, when I
came here, I felt ashamed to be enslaved to a Jew. But now my shame
is only that I am a slave. And it is the Jew, himself, who has
taught me to feel this.

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