The woman brought her face right up to Nora’s, engulfing her in heavy chamomile breaths.
“Both our ancestors left us their version of the key to Paradise: Ibn Hazm gave us The Necklace of the Dove and Ibn Nagrela his son Joseph, who inherited his father’s poetry and carried on his ideals and his obsession with Eden. He believed that translation was the solution to the puzzle of the absolute mind, or absolute Paradise. Translation would preserve the dialogue that had taken place between civilizations when Islamic rule flourished in al-Andalus. That gave us the Jewish Golden Age in the kingdoms of Northern Andalusia and the transfer of scientific knowledge to Europe. My ancestor Joseph’s translations opened the door to the world. I was obsessed with him when I was younger — this man who, it is said, was slaughtered along with thousands of other Jews in the streets of Cordoba when contact between religions became a crime known as heresy.” Half-hidden in the darkness, the woman led Nora forward, gradually but firmly, toward the apse, her chamomile-laden breaths intensifying Nora’s concealed longing for the place.
“Joseph provoked his enemies — he wasn’t as humble as his father — and people say that he was killed for it, crucified along with the members of a hundred and fifty Jewish families. The truth is, though, that Joseph managed to escape Granada. According to the story, he went in search of a door that had been revealed to him in a vision, in Aden, at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.” The lights suddenly went out, and the woman pushed Nora into the apse, closing the door behind them. The darkness swallowed them.
“Sit on the ground. Lean back and look at the sky above and below …” Nora found herself being pushed down into the darkness, where she sat with her back against what felt like stairs carved into the wall. Meanwhile, the woman had vanished, and Nora began to think she’d been left there to die. Her body felt so drugged by the darkness she couldn’t even bring herself to get up to look for a way out.
The temple receded into deeper and deeper darkness, to the quickening thump of her heartbeats. The cold floor gnawed at her body through her light dress. Suddenly a shaft of light from the setting sun poured through a central window, illuminating the double rows of golden windows that went all the way around the wall of the temple. The round body of the temple came to life, flooding the space around Nora with rose-colored gold. Nora thought, for a moment, that the sunset was cascading into the temple like a waterfall, and she couldn’t be sure whether the temple was shooting upward into the sky or plummeting down into the earth to burst through to the sky on the other side of the planet. The inside of the temple was engulfed in a pink halo that revealed narrow steps carved in a spiral around the wall; they couldn’t have been there for climbing because they were too narrow and there was no banister. It took a while for Nora to make out the sunlit patches on the walls: from the ground to the sky, the wall was covered not with windows but with brightly colored doors that looked tiny from below and were covered in engravings that deceived the eye in the evening light, which was rosy in some places, bloody in others, and elsewhere absent, leaving an ominous pitch-blackness. Nora blinked, unsure of what she was seeing, and in that split second, the rectangular patches dissolved and whirled into the form of a single, huge door open to the sky above.
“This is what Joseph, who bore the dream of Samuel ibn Nagrela, saw when he finished his nighttime vigil outside Solomon’s Seal near Aden.”
The sun dipped behind the mountains and the temple was plunged into darkness, complete and thick, like a living thing; the darkness embraced Nora, who had no choice but to slump back, feeling the chamomile breaths flow from the fading church murals outside. A distinctive smell — from her childhood — filled Nora’s senses, bringing tears to her eyes. It was just like the smell of the qat the Yemenis chewed at sunset to get high — the woman was trying to drug her, she was certain of it. Her limbs felt heavy and sagged into the ground, and her vision was blurry. She could see through things, and through her own body, which was disintegrating and diffusing into the layers of darkness. It gradually become one with the darkness, and she began to hear distant voices speaking in Arabic; was it the woman resuming her story on the other side of the closed door, or was the story itself flowing through her, as if she were walking through an absolute mind that stretched into the past. Maybe it was the mind of Joseph ibn Nagrela as he stepped out onto the deck of the ship that plowed the Red Sea on its way to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemeni singing rose around him as the crew moored the ship. The waves lapped at Joseph ibn Nagrela’s feet as he stood alone on the seashore at the port of Aden, carrying nothing but the robe on his back, lost in thought and fingering in his pocket the damp, salt-encrusted scrap of paper that bore a drawing of the door.
A stranger woke him up after he’d spent two days sleeping, hungry and forgotten on the beach, licked by the tide. “Brother, go find some shade from this sun!” He gradually became aware of the Arabic words and realized that someone was trying to coax him to consciousness. As soon as he had woken, Joseph pulled the drawing out of his pocket and thrust it at the stranger, gesturing toward the golden door. “This is what I’m looking for.”
Salt-soaked Arabic words flooded from his mouth, reminding him that it had been months since he’d spoken to another human being. Traveling in the infernal hold of one of the ships of the invading Portuguese fleet was like being incubated in a womb from hell.
“It came to me in a dream, a door between heaven and earth. I searched and searched and found that this city, Aden at the base of the Arabian Peninsula, is the gateway to the village of Solomon’s Seal, which contains every door on earth. That’s why your city is called ‘Aden’—because it leads to those doors …”
For days, Joseph ibn Nagrela traveled across the land of Yemen, repeating the story in an Arabic too heavy for the simple people he met to understand; still, the moment they set eyes on that drawing of the door, they realized that he was a man possessed by thoughts of a world other than theirs.
He kept repeating the story until one day he crossed paths with a beggar. “Happy Solomon at your service,” the man greeted him merrily. When Happy Solomon clapped eyes on the door, he fell silent, listening to his genies and subjecting Joseph to careful scrutiny, then said, “My tongue speaks the tongues of all those who believe, every language on earth spoken by men who breathe, even the speech of beasts, so accept my wisdom. I’m a miniature version of the prophet Solomon himself!” He examined the drawing with the help of his genies and explained, “What you are seeking is beyond the destiny of Eve’s sons. My genies speak of a mountain of doors, but there none of those doors will open for a living human.”
“Will they open for a dead person?”
“My genies know about life, nothing else. Don’t tire them out with your riddles about death.”
In the face of Joseph ibn Nagrela’s determination, Solomon the Happy assented to be his guide to the Hadramawt Valley. On foot, they crossed the happy mountains of Yemen, avoiding Seiyun and its famous market where craftsmen sold their products, including doors. Joseph nevertheless saw many Seiyuni women in their wide straw hats and brocade-embellished dresses, stopping travelers with songs and dances and inviting them to come to the market; they tried to tempt Joseph himself to buy one of their doors.
Happy Solomon also avoided al-Hajarayn, the town in the mountains famous for its beekeepers and their curative honey, warning Joseph, “You can say goodbye to your door if you drown in the honey of al-Hajarayn. The mountain’s like our mother Eve, who opened her legs to tempt Adam from Paradise.”