“Not with them,” Ismail replied. “To myself in those days.”
“We’re living in different times now,” Nasi said, “and I’m not looking for the apocalypse. Gracia understood, and that’s why she wrote to you. That’s why I’m here. Manuel is leaving for Cyprus with a message for Lala Mustafa. I want you to go with him. You used to go hunting with the general. He respects you.”
Ismail’s mouth shaped itself into a grin. Perhaps he was thinking of Nasi’s words, of his relationship with Lala Mustafa or his former life in Constantinople. We would never persuade him like this. I decided to tell him what I thought.
“You won’t find the answer you’re looking for by staying here.”
The two men turned and suddenly seemed to remember that I was there. I got up, stepping over them both.
“My mother’s last wish was that I should grow up a good Jew. I rebelled against that for all of my life, until I became the opposite, a gadfly to my people. And yet here I am. Perhaps it was meant to be; perhaps I was fated to take such a long and tortuous detour. God’s plan is unfathomable. We cannot know in advance what random events will make us what we are, or know if the means that we choose will turn out to be the right ones. What I do know is that big things are happening. Cyprus is the most ambitious plan that a Jew has ever come up with, and I’m fed up sitting here and waiting. .” I aimed a finger at the old man. “Your defeats don’t mean that there’s no point trying again. You can choose to be useful to a cause again or to stay here trying to catch fish.”
I nodded to Nasi follow me. It was the first time I’d told him what to do, and he obeyed me, albeit reluctantly. He walked behind me, resigned, and then Ismail’s voice rang out in the evening air. “Have you thought of gifts?”
Nasi looked as if he’d been caught off guard, then stopped and replied, “Swords for the officers, silver spurs, harnesses for the horses. .”
I saw Ismail shaking his head. “Something special for Lala Mustafa. He’s a vain old man.” Nasi thought for a few seconds, then his face brightened. “I’ve got exactly what he needs.”
Ismail left his rod where it was. He picked up his stick and joined us. “Sieges are aggravating things, Signor Cardoso, I am aware of that. You won’t like what you see.”
“I’m not going there for pleasure,” I replied.
The old man muttered something, then set off toward the houses.
4
We plowed the waves fast and alone, during those July days. Nasi had put the flagship of his merchant fleet at our disposal, a mahona with an elegant, sinuous line, under the command of a Greek from the Peloponnese. When the wind swelled the sails and impelled the ship along, it seemed to ride the top of a great crest that rose and fell. When the wind subsided, the oarsmen took over. Their coordinated movements, the ancient gestures of pulling, rising, falling and pulling again, meant that we never lost speed. One way or another, the keel sliced the waves like a knife blade, heading south. The crew consisted entirely of marioli, salaried volunteers. No slaves or conscripts on a Jew’s ship.
We carried a personal letter from Yossef Nasi and gifts for Lala Mustafa Pasha. Fazte hermano kon el Guerko fin a pasas el ponte. Become a brother of the Devil until the danger has passed. That was what Nasi had said to me as he handed me the gifts for the general, the man who had been Selim’s tutor and who, unlike Selim, had been on the battlefield for months, amid the flying cannonballs, even though he was the same age as Ismail al-Mokhawi.
During the day we lived on deck, cooked by the sun like herrings set out to dry. At night the stars covered the sky to the horizon.
Hafiz and Mukhtar observed everything with worried eyes: the dark beauty of the sea, the clouds that passed above the mainmast, the flight of the gulls. Ali beguiled the time by roasting and grinding coffee beans, which he then brewed with cinnamon and cardamom. At other times he recited long prayers, or once more honed the blade of his scimitar, producing lugubrious sounds.
Ismail was the one least affected by the rigors of the journey. I struggled to believe that a short time previously he had been in danger of dying. The sea seemed to reinvigorate him and make him even harder than before. He was taciturn, and his friends respected his silence. One afternoon, on the quarterdeck, as he was looking out over the sea, I asked him whether in his long life he had ever been a sailor as well.
“No,” he replied. “But I did trade in the northern seas. Plowing the sea is like crossing the desert. They are free spaces, open to a multitude of possibilities.”
“And yet without the prospect of a landfall we would merely be drifting,” I objected, but I received no reply.
One evening, almost at the end of the voyage, I realized that I hadn’t exchanged a word with a living soul all day. The sun was setting slowly, red in the sky. The men who weren’t at the oars stopped to pray. It was the captain himself who led the worship on the deck, reciting the Koran. Hafiz and Mukhtar joined the others, along with Ali. The few Christians, a little apart from the rest, made the sign of the cross.
I joined Ismail behind the curtain, a place to which he had withdrawn a little while before. I found him naked to the waist, busy greasing his pistols. Drops of sweat shone on his chest, which was covered with white hairs, and on his belly, crisscrossed with scars. On his right forearm I noticed a strip of swollen flesh, perhaps a burn. Around his neck he wore a pendant; it looked like a pierced coin.
“Are you skilled with weapons?” I asked.
From a little trunk at his side he took a short sword in a leather sheath. He handed it to me. “Take this. Keep it under your jacket; no one will see it.” He unsheathed the weapon, a handy, light dagger. The metal visibly bore the marks of time, but the blade had been recently sharpened.
A question formed on my lips. “Have you killed many men?”
He passed the wick into the barrel of the pistol. “Yes. I won’t say they deserved it; it’s not up to me to judge.” He fell silent for a moment, then added, “And you? Have you ever killed anyone?”
“I was a servant of the state. The executioner got his hands dirty on my behalf.”
My own words produced horrible noises in my mind, the echo of screams mixing with vivid memories: the pain inflicted in Venetian prisons. An altar of torment built for the security of the state. “Do you know what we’re going to find down there, do you really know?”
He didn’t reply. He bent over his weapons again and got on with the business of cleaning them.
The next day, in the light of dawn, we made out the dark line of the coast of Cyprus. Along with the two young Indians, I ran to the starboard side, where we found Ismail, as if he had been there since the night before. Young Hafiz said something in Arabic.
“What did he say?” I asked the old man.
“I’m not sure, but I think he said it looks like a fish.”
“Not a fish,” said Ali, who had just joined us.
The boy mimed the spouting of a whale.
5
Even before the city was in view, bits of Famagusta came to meet us. Wreckage, charred planks, bottomless barrels. A woman’s dress floated on the waves, along with a threadbare banner riddled with bullet holes. The body and golden wings of the Lion of Saint Mark could still be seen on it. Where the maned head and the book should have been, there was nothing but a gaping hole.
The distant outline of the city walls looked shattered: piles of stone in an arid, desiccated landscape. Clouds of dust rose up in the wind that blew across the land, and there were no trees to contain them. They carried a slow cadence to the ears, like a drum beaten in the center of the earth. It was the Turks firing at the city. Lengths of fortification collapsed, detritus rained down among clouds of sand. Surrounded by siege fortresses higher than the walls, Famagusta was still resisting. Far away, outside the range of the Venetian cannon, the tents and banners of the encampment seemed to be resting in the haze.