I was counting the days. What I really wanted was to leave the island. My soul was torn: on the one hand, what I had seen prevented me from feeling victorious in any way. The triumph I had been waiting for was a gimlet that pierced my heart. On the other hand, it was a start. The next generation would inherit a Kingdom.
Such reflections were pale attempts to heal my soul. I had never imagined a massacre on such a scale, and yet my eyes had seen it.
The little boy never spoke his name. Not to me, at least. I tried to talk to him on a few occasions, but he sat huddled under the ladder of the fo’c’sle, and wouldn’t let anyone near him. Hafiz and Mukhtar took care of him; they brought him food and water, which he accepted without a word. The young man’s presence in particular seemed to calm him; with Hafiz he was less wary. Coming down the steps, I sometimes spotted a pair of gleaming eyes, and thought of the burden of suffering that their owner had already been forced to carry.
It was a fate common to all of us. Everyone on board was facing up to the tragedy in his own way. I saw the Indian siblings, their faces weary, performing the rites of the Muslim faith. I, too, tried to pray, in my heart. But the words wouldn’t come.
Ali prayed with the Indians, but his way of approaching God took a different form as well. In the shade of a bulwark, he sat ceaselessly repeating a formula. One day I asked him how it was that what he had seen didn’t seem to have touched him.
He replied that, on the contrary, his heart was in mourning. All the people who had died or suffered deserved to be remembered. God was the master of righteousness.
“My old shayk took the words of the Prophet seriously: ‘Go and seek knowledge, even if it’s in China.’ He traveled for years, beyond the boundaries of the Umma, the world run by the Muslims. In a place of idolaters, he had met a wise man and exchanged thoughts with him. God, He who embraces all things, could not have left those people completely deprived of his light.”
A shadow passed across Ali’s face.
“So the wise old man said to my shayk: hope and fear are like two thieves trying to slip into a house. Have you understood, my friend, what the house represents?”
I shook my head. Ali picked up the thread. “The house is man’s conscience. If they find it full, the thieves will steal. If they find it empty, they are forced to leave.”
Perhaps my keenness of mind had been dulled by the last events that I had seen, but I wasn’t sure I had understood. I asked, “How did you interpret the story?”
Ali paused, then continued. “My only fear is to be displeasing in the eyes of God. My only hope is to be pleasing in his eyes. Other than that, my house is empty.”
It was the last moral fable that Ali ever told me.
The next day, they brought Bragadin into the main square. His face was swollen, the remains of his ears reduced to rotting stumps. They kicked and shoved him to the column. Two renegades undertook the task of torturing him; one of them was said to be Genoese. I saw him talking to the victim, but I didn’t catch the words. The hubbub and the shouted insults subsided. Silence fell on the square.
The Genoese ran the blade of a big knife from one shoulder to the other, behind the head Marcantonio Bragadin.
They say he didn’t scream.
They lie.
The Genoese and his assistant, with meticulous slowness, flayed the man. First his back, then his arms and legs, then his trunk and his chest, peeling the fat from his skin. The rector screamed, struggled and tugged at his bonds. Flies settled on his living flesh.
My companions and I couldn’t take our eyes off him.
The rector was spared the sight of his own skin flapping off in front of his eyes. His head sank long before that.
The Genoese and his assistant put the man’s skin in salt and then in vinegar. They stuffed it well with straw and cotton. They sewed up the pieces. They put two mother-of-pearl buttons where the eyes should have been. When the puppet that had once been Bragadin was finished, they dressed it the clothes of a magistrate, the ones he had worn on the day of the surrender. They sat it on a cow, protecting it from the sun with a little parasol. They sent it off among the streets of the city, so that even those who had escaped the horror in the square might see it.
Then they butchered the flayed body and scattered the pieces all around the walls.
11
At last we were granted permission to leave the port. We took to the sea and never looked back. Opposing winds and a rough sea slowed our return. The ship struggled, apparently running through a medium denser than water. Men and things were empty, transparent, bubbles blown by a glass maker, mirages. Famagusta had attached itself to my soul as a long piece of seaweed does to your legs when you’re walking on a beach.
During the days of the journey I exchanged few words with Ismail or my other companions. I had the captain assign me the tasks required to keep body and mind occupied, so that I could do nothing but gaze straight ahead when it came to reporting what I had seen, and demanding an explanation for it.
One day, when we were about halfway through our journey, I saw the little boy smiling at a silly face that Hafiz had made. I stood and watched the scene, to snatch some of the light given off by the two of them.
“You saved one.”
Ismail was beside me, although I hadn’t noticed him.
“Just one,” I replied.
The old man nodded.
“It was what you were able to do, and that’s what counts.”
Yedikule, the village of tanners and slaughterhouse men, greeted me in its own way, announcing the proximity of the capital, just as it had done on the day when I first arrived. Less than two years had passed since then.
The day was gray, the sky milky. A cold wind came down from the Black Sea, the kind that heralds the end of summer.
When we disembarked, I knew that Ismail wouldn’t follow me to Palazzo Belvedere.
“We’ve got to talk to him,” I said to the old man.
“You know what you must do. I have finished here.” He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and set off, followed by the others, in search of a boat for Scutari. Hafiz was holding the child by the hand.
Yossef Nasi welcomed me with a hug. “Welcome back, my brother. There’s no hurry. Have a rest now; we will have time to talk.”
David Gomez greeted me warmly, though with a certain awkwardness. The map of the New Kingdom was still spread out on the table, the wine-stain faded but still visible.
“Famagusta has fallen,” I said.
Nasi replied that he knew. Many rumors had arrived ahead of me. He used the word victory.
“At what price, Yossef?”
Fields plundered and devastated until not a blade of grass remained.
Rivers of blood.
A vast cemetery all around the town.
As I advanced through the story, I saw Nasi’s face darkening. Gomez looked at the floor. I continued undaunted. “Our ally Lala Mustafa revealed himself to be a bloodthirsty lunatic.”
I told them about the violation of the treaties, the captains slaughtered just as they surrendered. About the Venetians pulled off their ships and enslaved, about the city sacked by dogs and murderers. Last of all, I told him of the torture reserved for Rector Bragadin, leaving nothing out, not a single detail. So I reached the end of my story, the empty, stunned expression of that terrible puppet still in front of my eyes.