When I opened my eyes, Solomon Ashkenazi was entering the courtyard beside his wife, followed by a multitude of men and women got up in their finest clothes.
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We entered the temple, leaving doors and windows open, because a huge number of people were still outside, and no one must feel excluded. The women sat down in the loggia that opened halfway up, on three sides of the hall.
We got to our feet and intoned the psalms and blessings of the morning service. My Hebrew was now more fluent than it had been in my schooldays.
Yossef Nasi, the worthy man, opened the doors of the Sacred Ark. Solomon Ashkenazi removed the wooden cylinder that held the Scroll of the Law and handed it to the cantor, who passed with it among the faithful.
When the ark set forward, Moses said, “Rise up, Lord, and let your enemies be scattered.”
Ashkenazi closed the doors of the holy cabinet and joined Nasi in the little procession as it moved through the synagogue and then back toward the pulpit.
Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power and the glory, the majesty and the victory.
They walked among the benches, across the central corridor and along the walls, as the children leaned forward to kiss the Torah scroll with the tips of their lips.
Yours is the kingdom, Lord; you are exalted above all things.
I looked up at the army of women above me, seeking Dana’s face. She was observing the ceremony with a worried expression, as if the gestures of the three men were not the right ones. Perhaps she wanted to correct them, as she had corrected my dance steps in my dream. Beside her, Donna Reyna was whispering complicitly into another woman’s ear. I asked David Gomez who she was.
“Esther Handali,” she replied. “She’s a Sephardi, but she doesn’t usually frequent our synagogue, because she lives in the Old City. She takes care of the affairs of Nurbanu, Selim’s favorite.”
My eyes slipped to the seat to Esther Handali’s right. It was occupied by Bula Ashkenazi. I reflected on her husband’s words when he’d introduced her to me: “She visits servants and concubines, she tells me the symptoms, prepares and sells remedies.” She, too, frequented the Sultan’s harem.
Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his footstool.
Two Jewish women, among the very few who had direct contact with the favorite without living inside the harem. As far as I knew, the only other women with a similar right were the three princesses, Nurbanu’s daughters: Ismihan, Geherhan and Shah, the wives of the Grand Vizier Sokollu, Piyale Pasha and the Great Falconer.
Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain.
Nasi and Ashkenazi sat down side by side again, in the front row, on the bench next to mine. The cantor climbed onto the tebah and unrolled the Torah on the big lectern.
Sokollu, Piyale Pasha and the Great Falconer. All three damad, sons-in-law of Nurbanu and the Sultan. The first was an enemy of Nasi and an open opponent of the war against Venice. The second had been a grand admiral and was in command of a flagship in the expedition to Cyprus. The third, for his part, had expressed a sibylic opinion to Ismail about the attack on the island: “Wars are driven by the ambition of powerful men.”
Blessed be the Lord, king of the universe, who has chosen us of all peoples and given us his Law.
I looked again toward the ladies’ balcony, and I felt as if the ceiling of the synagogue had begun to spin. Bula Ashkenazi, Esther Handali, Donna Reyna, Dana. The first and the second frequented Nurbanu, the favorite of Selim, sister-in-law of the Grand Vizier. The fourth, Dana, had been Selim’s personal servant before she arrived at the Palazzo Belvedere.
I had seen her carrying a message from Donna Reyna into the second courtyard of the Seraglio, the one that granted access to the Hall of the Divan. And to the harem.
Follow justice and justice alone, that you may live and possess the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
Reyna had spent her girlhood in Venice. Bula was married to a Venetian, the personal physician of the bailiff Marcantonio Barbaro, merchant and shipowner on the route to Crete, a Venetian island. Nurbanu, too, the Princess of Light, was Venetian by origin, kidnapped by Turkish corsairs from an island in the Mediterranean. Like a little Jewish girl by the name of Dana.
A second lector took the place of the first and began to recite in an uncertain singsong voice.
When you have entered the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and dwell therein, you will think, I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me.
Nasi muttered an Amen. I couldn’t take my eyes off the balcony. Reyna, Dana, Bula, Esther, Nurbanu, Shah, Ismihan.
You may indeed set above you as your king one of your brothers, and he shall not take many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away.
The words of Ismail, in front of the mosque of Mihrimah Sultan, before he left for Bandirma: “Back in Europe, none of you can imagine that the women of the harem capable of moving money, fleets, armies.”
The words of Donna Reyna, at the military parade in the hippodrome: “There’s something common to all women who are forced to live in the shadow of a great man, weaving tapestries in the silence of a palace.”
If what the prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place, that is a message that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.
Don Yossef feared Sokollu, poured wine for Selim, offered a place to Solomon Ashkenazi in the aristocracy of the Island of Zion. He had managed to block communications between the bailiff, the Doge and the Grand Vizier, but he was too much enthralled by them to notice that very similar messages, rather than in the shoes of a Jewish doctor, could travel among the belongings of a Jewish doctor’s wife, with the fabrics and brocades of a Jewish businesswoman, between the breasts of a chambermaid, on the lips of a princess, between the fingers of a queen, in his own wife’s bedroom.
Dana’s words, when I had asked her about the strange relationship between Donna Reyna and her husband: “You must have noticed, Don Yossef doesn’t appreciate the attentions of women.”
Perhaps he had no idea how many women were devoting their attention to him.
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That night, in bed, Dana’s hand slipping under my clothes repelled me. I was irritated by her caresses, and pushed her away. It was an instinctive movement, completely uncalculated, but it fired my suspicions about the day just past. The worm was gnawing at my mind, even though it was my body taking the initiative.
She mocked me, saying that I had been wrong to refuse the halva with the cannabis resin. Over the past few days I had been in a dark mood, I needed to let myself relax, to set aside my nagging doubts.
I said no, this wasn’t the moment to set them aside, and she must have noticed something in the tone of my voice — something that troubled her and put her on her guard.
Part of me was unwilling to yield to suspicion, afraid to open a door that might reveal my nemesis waiting on the other side. But the worm needed to be crushed.
“Some days ago, after the parade, you told me you had to take charge of some matters for Reyna, but when I asked you what they were, you wouldn’t tell me.”
She nodded, surprised, as if that episode had already slipped into a corner of her mind, amongst unimportant memories, ready to be erased.