I had just blocked one dangerous correspondence, and already another was requiring my attention. I felt the blood quickening under my skin, and then I turned into the street that ran down to the Golden Horn and allowed myself to be filled by the hunting instinct.
30
Somehow, Nasi had got ahead of me. I found him in the central hall, beneath the menorah, confronting a bent old man. I immediately realized that I had seen him before, but it was a few moments before I recognized the chief rabbi, Eli Ben Haim. The contrast between the two men was apparent. Nasi stood splendidly in his brightly colored ceremonial robes, and his resolute expression took years off his age.
The rabbi didn’t seem to notice my arrival. He opened his toothless mouth as if biting the air. “I am just warning you, Don Yossef,” he croaked. “Remember the Proverbs of Solomon: ‘Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall. It is better to be of humble spirit than to share plunder with the proud.’ You want to buy the kingdom of Zion, but only the Lord can give Israel its due.”
Nasi looked fearlessly at him. “In the Proverbs it is also written that ‘a wicked man listens to evil lips, a liar pays attention to a malicious tongue.’ I am neither malicious nor a liar. I want the welfare of our people, and I tell the truth.”
The old man raised a finger and shouted, spraying saliva. “Remember the Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah: ‘And do not rise from exile as a wall is raised. Indeed, why will the Messiah come? To bring together the exiles of Israel.’ ”
Nasi walked around him, his hands behind his back, as if he was thinking, then stood in front of him again. “Tell me, Rabbi Eli, why the Lord should punish those who want to give a land back to His people? For centuries they have persecuted us, chased us, killed us. They have burned our sacred books, they have called us deicides, murderers. I want to put an end to all this, and for you it is an outrage against God. Or do you not mean rather that it is an outrage against you? Against you rabbis who taught us to pray and stay in our place, with our heads bowed.”
The old man’s furrowed face wrinkled still further in a grimace of contempt. “You think you can do business with emperors, when it was an emperor who dispossessed our people and a pharaoh who kept us enslaved in Egypt.” He exploded in a fit of coughing. Nasi came closer and spoke to him without rancor, almost smiling.
“I want to repair the world. That is why I observe the commandments, recite the prayers, perform the rituals. That is why I want to give the Jews what you rabbis are not able to give them. A new Zion where they can live in peace and safety. An example of justice for humanity, because we were slaves in Egypt and we will have the fate of every slave on earth within our hearts. This is tikkun olam, my contribution to the return of equilibrium.”
The lids of the old man’s glaucous eyes quivered within indignation, and a thread of slobber flowed from the corner of his mouth. “Blasphemy! You think you are the Messiah!”
Nasi shook his head. “No.” He leaned forward until his nose almost touched the rabbi’s. “But I would be a good king. That’s what scares you.”
Rabbi Eli gave a sort of roar, as if he wanted to plunge his fangs into his adversary, and then all of a sudden he turned around and limped out of the building, still chewing on his curses. At that moment, Donna Reyna appeared behind me. She must have been there for some time, enjoying the finale of the scene. She stepped forward to the middle of the room, and passed by Nasi with a half bow. “Majesty,” she said in a simpering voice.
The future king of Cyprus didn’t even seem to notice.
31
I started keeping an eye on Dana and following her discreetly every time she left Palazzo Belvedere. At the Monday market, hidden behind a pile of dried apricots, I saw her buying a bag of grain for her goldfinch.
On Tuesday evening she entered a run-down building in Kuruçesme, where she stayed for a few hours. I discovered that it belonged to a Greek woman; she, too, had been freed from Selim’s harem and was now the wife of his stable master.
On Wednesday afternoon she sold a pile of her embroidered blankets to a cloth merchant, and with the proceeds she bought two brushes and a box of oil paints. That evening, I decided that I might have to change my strategy.
I would have preferred to talk to her calmly, to persuade her to tell me what she knew, but the memory of her reticence offended my pride. If she hadn’t yielded right away, after the parade, to my first request, it meant that at bottom she was more devoted to Donna Reyna than she was to me. On Thursday morning, when I bumped into her in the drawing room, I told her not to come to my room that night. I said nothing more, and went in search of Don Yossef.
During those days I had thought often about how alone my mentor was. Reyna, the Grand Vizier, the Ashkenazic rabbis and even his oldest friend — none of them believed in him. And yet thousands of Jews owed their lives to him. And yet I was there, a living proof that it was possible to change everything. You just had to want it, and with the help of the Lord things could be turned upside down, chaos canceled, balance reestablished. Tikkun olam. That was what Nasi had called it. Righting the world, healing the wound that our people had borne for fifteen hundred years, just as it had healed my own wound, hidden for half my life.
Nasi needed allies, and I intended to tell him as much. The Sultan’s friendship and the money spent on the Cyprus adventure were solid guarantees, but that investment also exposed him to great risks and for many people was a cause for suspicion. It had been Dana who had reminded me of the story of Joseph, whose brothers envied him because of his dreams and sold him to the merchants.
When I found him, he didn’t give me time to speak, and once again he was ahead of me, reading me as you read a book, perhaps one of those rare copies that had attracted Ralph Fitch in the library at Palazzo Belvedere.
He dragged me outside, and with just a few servants escorting us, we lost ourselves in the hubbub of busy humanity in the Christian quarter. He spoke at length as we walked, and it was as if I had transferred my anxieties to his mind without even opening my mouth.
“The Grand Vizier is very strong, even though we have put him in the minority in the Divan. And above all, and never forget this, Mehmet Sokollu is highly astute. By obstructing Ashkenazi we have stayed one of his hands, but he is like an octopus; he has another seven. As for the Ashkenazic rabbis, don’t worry too much. They’ve been holding us hostage forever. They sow uncertainty among our people; they say that Cyprus is a personal whim, a reward for services given to the Sultan. You understand? They use the divisions between Eastern and Western Jews to undermine our project. They say a Sephardic kingdom will arise in the east, when they know very well that I intend to offer a home to everyone, without distinction. A safe refuge for the wanderers of the earth: Jews, moriscos, heretics, slaves. As I did after the fire; you saw the people in my house. They weren’t only Sephardim, and not all of them were even Jews.”
I slowed my pace, overwhelmed by the freight of those words.
“The poor people are with me, but how will we overcome the mistrust of the wealthiest families?” Nasi noticed that he had left me behind, and stopped. “And that’s why we’re here.”
Around us, Venetian and Ottoman accents met: We were in the heart of Galata. “Where are we going?” I asked.