A servant informed me that Donna Reyna didn’t want to be disturbed. I shoved him aside and stepped in. She was sitting at her desk. She wore a mauve dress, and her hair was coiled up on her head, revealing her neck. She merely stared at me, as if taking note of my presence, not even slightly surprised. She had the expression and the posture of someone who wants to get back to her business as soon as possible and will not appreciate superfluous words.
I decided to oblige her. “Did you send her to me?”
She didn’t move. “I told you: sometimes servants are freer than their masters.”
The voice was hers, but her face and body were so expressionless that it might have been another woman speaking.
“So it was her idea?”
“No, it was mine.” She leaned into the back of her chair and gave me an icy look. “Because I couldn’t come myself.”
I didn’t try to reply, I didn’t care and I didn’t want to help her read my mind.
“This is the plot that you have discovered, Signor Cardoso. The envy of a woman forgotten, forced to look at life through the eyes of a chambermaid. You men see a plot behind every coincidence, a threat behind your every uncertainty, and perhaps you’re right. And yet you need only look in the mirror to discover the weaknesses that will bring you down.”
I wanted to turn around and go, but her eyes held me back. She spoke her words clearly, as if firing arrows at my pride. “He has asked me to go to Tiberias, and I will certainly not object.” She paused, to enjoy the effect of this information. “Why are you pulling that face? By fleeing, one admits one’s guilt. You should be pleased.”
I cursed her in silence, and found the strength to leave. My soul was a fistful of shards.
36
The water of the Bosphorus was cloudy and agitated, stirred by the wind that passed up the straits from the south. The dock at Ortaköy echoed with shouts, orders given in Turkish and Ladino. Gulls wheeled between the sea and the clouds, in the hope of taking advantage of the gathering.
I took up my position behind a salt-encrusted shed, a storeroom for nets and sails. At the end of a wooden walkway I recognized a mahona belonging to the Nasis, the same one that had dropped off a cargo of refugees on this shore months previously.
She wasn’t there. Perhaps she had already boarded her ship, and I was too late. I had followed a different road from the usual one, slightly longer. I had calculated, or rather hoped, that I would get there just as Dana had emerged from the labyrinth of streets into the open space in front of the slipway. But there was nothing. I stopped to contemplate the scene of dockland life, as if it were a memory.
Then, on the other side of the open ground, a crowd began arriving. Servants from the Palazzo Belvedere were pushing a cart. Lying on it, its roots wrapped in a jute bag, Dana’s carob faced its second move.
She came after it, a leather bag in one hand and the goldfinch’s cage in the other. She was dressed in her smartest clothes, a highly embroidered, sand-colored dress and a silk shawl that covered her shoulders. I admired her proud bearing, not very appropriate to the life of a chambermaid, or a peasant girl in a remote colony. I wondered why she was wearing such a sumptuous dress, and the answer passed through my mind.
If the stuff of which your limbs are molded is good, if your heart and mind are sound, the vicissitudes of fate will be received like guests of honor. That was what Dana was saying.
She climbed onto the ship and cast a glance around, her last before she left the capital. I had a sense that she had seen me, and instead of hiding, I took a step forward, into the open, but she had just disappeared behind a curtain that was to serve as a shelter for her, stretched between a bulwark and the mainmast.
I stood there motionless, trying to imagine her behind that veil. Was she sitting down, or kneeling in prayer? Was she looking to the south, toward the sea that the Turks call White?
I wondered what our fate together might have been. A house, a serene existence, far from the struggles that consume the world. The goldfinch chirruped, suggesting my reply.
Amid a salvo of curses, the mahona pulled away from the shore. Someone on the jetty was waving. The cries of the gulls became shriller, a screech, as if something had been taken away from them.
37
I endured gloomy days, forcing myself to think about what awaited us. Ahead of me lay a great task, but having lost Dana, I felt as if I were facing it after shedding a limb. I had to stir myself. The generally unfocused enthusiasm of the people around me was impressive enough to overcome my feeling of deprivation and discomfort.
The Sultan’s troops had to be below the walls of Nicosia now, in the teeth of Marcantonio Barbaro and Sokollu Mehmet Pasha. It would all be over soon, and then there would be a kingdom to be governed. We needed to prepare.
Solomon Ashkenazi was studying the revenue of Cyprus, the income from vines and olives, for the future king of the island. Nasi seemed to live in his carriage, between the Palazzo Belvedere and the Seraglio. There had been no sign, on the other hand, from Ismail, since he returned from Bandirma. Nasi told me the old man was writing his memoirs.
Because of my somber mood, the doubts that the German had instilled in me were about to spill out with great violence. They dampened the enthusiasm that I needed to cauterize my self-inflicted wound. That weird old man from a far-off place had placed a little wedge in Nasi’s great edifice, enough to open it up a crack. The story of Joseph began to torment me again. Showered with honors by the pharaoh, he had made the Jews prosper in Egypt, but when that pharaoh died, his successor had enslaved the people of Israel.
What would happen if Selim were suddenly to die? What guarantees did we have that the new sultan would go on protecting us? We didn’t have a Jewish army; we had no weapons. How could we defend the new Zion?
When I set out my doubts, Nasi heard in them my cry for help. I wanted him to startle me again, to take me up a mountain and let me see even further. And my mentor did exactly that.
The place he took me to was the laboratory of the greatest inventor on earth. Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf al-Shami al-Asadi, whom the Turks called more simply Takiyuddin. He was a Syrian who had grown up in Egypt, a man of faith and science, a judge and mathematician, an engineer and astronomer. He had come to the city on the invitation of the Sultan. Selim intended to finance his studies and his inventions, and there was already talk of a huge astronomical observatory, even bigger than the one in Samarkand.
The gray beard and the wrinkles beside his laughing eyes revealed that Takiyuddin was even older than Nasi. I noticed how similar the two men were, though very different in feature. The affinity was intellectuaclass="underline" two geniuses confronting one another.
The precise order that reigned in Takiyuddin’s laboratory did not seem dictated only by practical considerations. Mathematics and geometry also desire to enchant the eye, as happens in the most successful architecture. The desks, the equipment and the machines formed an arabesque that filled the vast room, made of wheels and pulleys, hoists and ladders. Forming a colored backdrop were shelves filled with jars, boxes, powders and liquids. Takiyuddin welcomed us, and with his arms spread wide he introduced us to his creations.
“Just look, my friends. These machines speak for themselves.”
Immediately twelve chimes confirmed his assertion. They came from a clock to my right, the size of a double-doored cabinet, like the one I had seen in the library at Palazzo Belvedere. Judging by the inscriptions, this one was capable of recording not only the hour and the calendar date, but also the time of day, the phases of the moon, and the positions of signs of the zodiac.