Yossef pointed to a house halfway down the street. “To find ourselves a new ally. Someone who has nothing to lose and everything to gain from joining with us. Come, he’s waiting for us.”
Even today I can’t imagine my face as we stepped inside that house and were invited to sit down in a spacious room, on comfortable cushions, in the presence of the man I had tailed for days.
Solomon Ashkenazi observed us carefully, sipping the coffee that his wife, Bula, had poured into our cups. The Venetian doctor’s clever little eyes darted between Nasi and me. It was clear that the letter that Nasi had sent ahead of him had not revealed the reason for the visit, but Ashkenazi wasn’t a stupid man and he must have guessed something. Perhaps for that reason, when his chief adversary offered to appoint him treasurer of the future Cypriot Jewish kingdom, he didn’t bat an eyelid. At that moment, he was finished: He lived as a recluse. Nasi was giving him the opportunity to climb back up from the abyss into which he had plunged himself. His genius was a blinding light. Bringing the doctor over to his cause and giving him a job in the future government would send a powerful message to the Ashkenazic Jews: It would announce that the new kingdom of Zion was theirs as well.
The master of the house called his wife and told her to prepare lunch, because the guests would be staying. Then he came back and looked at us. We would talk business on a full stomach.
32
I am walking in a rocky desert, beneath a brilliant golden sky. I’m thirsty, my mouth is dry, my clothes are sticking to my back. I walk wearily toward a lonely, black mountain in a range that stands out on the horizon. The outline of the range recalls the towers of a castle. Around peaks pointed like needles, falcons fly.
Having reached the foot of the mountain, I study the obsidian cliffs in search of footholds. I climb, to conquer the peak, but the mineral cuts my fingers, and I think I’m about to plummet when above my head I suddenly see a stone balcony. With a final effort I hoist myself up and find myself in front of an ivory door, set in the side of the mountain, protected by two warriors. They grip metal scourges like the one I saw Mukhtar using, except in place of whips there are bronze-scaled snakes. I want to escape, but the door opens and the two warriors let Dana through, and she comes toward me, takes me by the hand and leads me inside. “T’estan asperando,” I hear her saying in the language of my mother.
We pass through identical rooms, one after another. They all look like the hall of the Divan — all that changes is the color of the carpets. In the red room, the Grand Vizier Sokollu is presiding over a meeting of dignitaries and pashas, but no one is speaking, no one is moving, they all look stuffed. In the yellow room, two janissaries, half naked, are fighting with hatchets, their bodies ragged with cuts and wounds. In the turquoise room there is a gigantic cannon that merges with the features of a male member. In the green one, we plow through a sea of praying Muslims, and only when we are surrounded by them do I notice that they are all women, prostrate as they worship the Sultan.
“I’m not a concubine,” Dana says to me in a mechanical voice, and then repeats that they’re waiting for me and pulls me by the arm toward the last room, which is dazzlingly white. On the couch that runs along the walls, woman sit winding huge skeins of thread and nursing children. I look at the babies sucking the breasts, and they resemble adult men, all of them the same, with beards and turbans, like the figures in Turkish miniatures. Other women, in the middle of the hall, form a dancing circle, hand in hand. I think I recognize some of them, but really they all look the same: my mother, Arianna, Reyna. The circle opens up to admit me, and I want to dance with them — the steps look simple, except that I can’t hear the music, I can’t catch the rhythm, and the intention of the movements escapes me; I can’t work out if they’re solemn or sad, macabre or grotesque. So I remain motionless, and I feel my legs are hard, stuck, until Dana kneels in front of me and moves them with her hands, to show me what I’m supposed to do. Behind me, another woman takes hold of my arms and suggests the correct moves, her body pressed against mine. I have to struggle not to be aroused, to concentrate only on the dance, understand the steps, listen carefully to the music. In the end, after many attempts, I manage to follow the dance, first moving on the spot, then back and forth, then in an ever faster pirouette that turns the room into a whirlwind and swallows everything up, drags me away, while Dana approaches a golden grille high up in the wall, slips a hand between the metal meshes and hands something to a long-haired shadow. A woman’s shadow.
I woke up rested, surprised to remember the details of my dream. Usually, oneiric visions and real life occupy different rooms in my head, and the first vanish as soon as I open the door of the second.
I washed and chose my clothes carefully: This wasn’t a Saturday like any other.
In the atrium of Palazzo Belvedere a real procession was under way. Servants, family and acolytes abandoned their rooms, came down flights of stairs and crossed corridors to flow together in front of the big portal. Nasi was the last to arrive, dressed in crimson and cobalt, and took his place at the head of the cavalcade.
When the elderly guard opened the door, at least fifty people were ready to descend into the street, arranged in two groups, men at the front and women behind. Along the road, a much larger, disorderly crowd had gathered, ready to join the procession.
We walked along the streets of Ortaköy, savoring the pleasant warmth of that summer morning. The snake of bodies becoming increasingly relaxed, as we approached our destination, the synagogue of the Senyora, the favorite temple of the Sephardic Jews.
We surged into an internal courtyard, protected behind a wall and an iron gate and shaded by an old plane tree. Donna Gracia had had the synagogue built ten years before, and it was said to be our people’s only place of worship planned and financed by a woman.
The sound of many voices reached us from the patio and grew beyond measure to greet the arrival of Don Yossef Nasi. The synagogue would never be able to hold all those people, not even if they climbed on each other’s shoulders. There weren’t only Western Jews there, from Spain and Portugal, like the Campos, the Mendes, the Hamons. Crowding into the courtyard were Romaniots from Greece, Jewish families who had lived in the city since the days of Theodosius, goldsmiths from Balat, weavers from Galata, merchants from Eminonu whom Nasi had helped in the days of the great fire, rabbis of tiny communities who had come from Tripoli and Syria, from the Caucasus and Yemen.
Nasi shook dozens of hands, hugged and stroked, promised money and justice. He was a new Solomon, a new David, the man who had brought the tribes of Israel together, who had reassembled that which had been divided and scattered. Some people definitely thought he was the Messiah.
He had summoned them all with messengers and with gifts, with fascination and seduction. He wanted the chosen people to pray together, celebrating like a single body the news that was coming from Cyprus. The Sultan’s army had disembarked at Limassol, and was marching unopposed toward Nicosia. The generals expected to lay siege by the end of July.
A servant appeared breathless and spoke into the ear of Don Yossef, who immediately interrupted his greetings and turned toward the gate, in a solemn pose. The crowd did likewise, and silence quickly spread.
I understood then, even before I saw them appearing behind the gate, that the last guests, the most important, were arriving.
I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the power of what I saw happening. Yossef Nasi’s money and genius had accomplished a marvel.