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  They must hurry; Hamoutal is seven months pregnant, and it will take them three weeks or so to make the 250-kilometre trip in as straight a line as possible. They could follow the Via Domitia to Apt, but then they would have to be on constant lookout for horsemen. That’s too demanding and dangerous; the Roman road is a trap. But scaling the heights of Saint-Saturnin would be exhausting. After some hesitation, the old rabbi has decided that only one route will allow them to leave unseen: namely, the sea. They are bundled as discreetly as possible onto a covered wagon bound for Gruissan. Hamoutal wears a black scarf pulled tight around her blonde head. That afternoon, they board a ship. A day and half later, it drops them off at the mouth of the Rhône, where a flat-bottomed boat waits to carry them upriver to Avignon. Three days of anxiety and dismay: there is almost no wind, the boat tacks a slow course up the middle of the river, against the tideless current, they eat almost nothing, and Hamoutal sits speechless, staring at the small ripples. In those days, Avignon is little more than a fortress run by the lords of Avignon and Forcalquier. It is not a risky area for them; no Christian knight would ever expect them to go in that direction. But the familiar sense of constant menace from their earlier journey now resurfaces. During her few hours of sleep on the boat, Hamoutal has nightmares.

  They disembark by a waterlogged field out of sight of the fortress’s watchtowers. From there, they cross the windy plains to Carpentoracte, a small walled town with a Jewish community. There they are taken in for a few days by a family informed by the courier of their predicament. They are given a small pack animal – a mule laden with provisions, clothes and a few blankets – as well as a guide to lead the animal by the reins. The next leg of their route takes them to Malemort, in later times part of the Comtat Venaissin. Here and there they see ancient olive trees in meadows of tough, swaying grasses, wild fruit trees with deep black bark, the primitive slate slab structures under which the herdsmen sleep, and in the east a line of Alpine foothills: the Vallis Clausa, or Vaucluse. Jutting out beyond them is the bald summit of the Mons Ventosus, the desolate mountain of the winds. From Malemort they pass through uninhabited terrain, close to where Méthamis is today. Then they cross the mountainous woods and the desolate plateau of Saint-Hubert. Pain shoots through Hamoutal’s lower back; she is heavy and slow now, riding the mule led by the servant. They hardly speak a word for days.

  By this time the three horsemen have returned to Narbonne and laid siege to the home of the Roi aux Juifs. They pound on the heavy door, shouting to him to let them in before they set his house on fire. The door swings open, and they are startled to see the lordly old rabbi looking them straight in the eye and asking what business they have there. They demand entry to his house. He curtly refuses. They repeat their threats, but they are hesitant. He swears to them that the fugitive they seek is not in Narbonne and he doesn’t know where she’s fled, but he suspects she took the busy road to Santiago de Compostela to repent for her sins as a Christian pilgrim. Incredulous, they draw their swords, but when he offers them his neck with a wry smile, they realise it will not do the three of them any good to start a religious riot by murdering the chief rabbi. They spend another day patrolling the city, pester a few of the residents with their questions, check out the Via Domitia one last time, shrug, and head back north to tell her parents they found no trace of the two. Who knows, they may be in Santiago by this time or even further away, in Moorish Spain, among the despicable Saracens – where the knights know better than to venture without reinforcements. Under the Atlantic skies, her father bursts into a fit of Norse berserker rage, and her mother’s sobs are mixed with Old Flemish curses.

  I drive from Narbonne to Montpellier and on to Avignon, where I pick up their trail again. From the N100, I cross the Rhône somewhere near Les Angles. There a stretch of the river forks into western and eastern branches; nearby are the bleak car parks around the high-speed railway station. Busloads of tourists are dropped off at the city gate, by the Palais des Papes. A few pleasure boats drift on the wide water.

  The road from Avignon to Carpentras has become a busy four-lane motorway passing through Le Pontet – once actually a bridge, now a garish collection of large stores like an imitation of an American suburb. The road passes through marshy terrain, the breeding ground of the swarms of mosquitoes that plague visitors to Avignon’s summer festival. To the east of Carpentras, past the Roman aqueduct, the landscape becomes more rural. Bit by bit, in a whirl of light and memory, I am coming home. The names have changed since then. After Mazan I take the southern road to Blauvac and Méthamis, where I spend a quarter of an hour at the high lookout point by the church, gazing out over a landscape of vineyards and cypresses. I drive on to the large Saint-Hubert farmhouse, about eight kilometres further, and walk along the remains of the plague wall in the woods behind it, dark and primeval in the lonely landscape. Churned soil, boar tracks, a gleaming snakeskin, a raptor’s thin cry. Instead of returning to the car, I continue on foot the rest of the way through the Bois du Défens, reaching La Plane. The end of the gorge is now on my left. The bare tops of the twisted oak trees shake in the brutal wind on this blinding morning; the road is rough and yellow. This is where they first saw the Moniou plateau in the distance.

  But before that, they lose their way, descending too early into the meandering canyon of the Nesque, becoming disoriented, cursing their guide, and wading through the fast-moving river. On a slope too steep for Hamoutal to ride the mule, she sprains her foot on a large slab of rock and cries out in the afternoon silence. She sinks to her knees, closes her eyes and lays her hand on her belly. It can’t be much further, David says, surveying the wild, deserted gorge. They could just as well keep following the riverbed, but they have no way of knowing that. They rise to their feet again and hobble their way up the east bank and the slope, an exhausting route; their mistake costs them nearly a day. They fall asleep under a cold night sky, the ice-white Milky Way glimmering overhead; the dwindling moon hangs red above the black horizon.

  Animal rustlings, fear and light sleep, aching muscles. Lying uncomfortably on the bare ground, shivering in the twilight. Awakened by the cold, they scrabble to their feet and move on in silence. Morning glows faintly over the line of hills to the east. They sip their water; the guide heaps their bags onto the mule’s back. They trudge south-east, past the plateau of La Plane, and see, in the first rays of sunlight, there in the valley that opens below, the village, like a nest of stone clinging to the rocky slope. Small birds are fluttering in the hard, dry oaks. The three of them descend to the lonely, fertile plateau, to the village from which I saw them approach in my mind’s eye. They arrive, exhausted but safe, at the Grande Porte. David knocks three times with his walking stick. It is opened. A cock crows, a dog barks its greetings. It is still 1091. The Western world is sliding slowly towards catastrophe, a fault line in history, and no one can see it coming. The contemporary knows nothing.

  V

  Moniou

  1

  Not long after Yaakov was born, the young couple were assigned a home in the village, a two-storey house narrowing to a point at its southern end. Standing next to its decrepit rear wall, Hamoutal was so touched and relieved to have a place of her own again that, on impulse, she pressed her lips against the stone. Her husband stared at her in surprise and then took her in his arms. You kissed a house, he said, laughing. It was an old house with rough, thick walls. David fixed it up patiently over the months, and by that winter it was a cosy shelter from the icy wind and freezing rain. The house had a large cellar with a deep well from earlier times, which supplied them with clear, pure drinking water. Tranquillity seeped back into their hearts. Now and then they received a message from Narbonne. They lived in hope of returning one day to that spacious house in the centre of the city by the sea.

  Soon another year has passed. It’s the summer of 1092, and somehow they never manage to leave the village. Is it the daunting prospect of the 250-kilometre route back? Are they reluctant to pu
t their young boy through such an ordeal? Have they received word from Narbonne that they’re better off there, in anonymity, now that more and more Norman knights are terrorising the coast on the way to the occupied territory of Sicily? By now, Hamoutal is used to their hard, secluded village life. She has learned over time to take pleasure in simple work. Sometimes she sets off first thing in the morning with a few other women for a market in nearby La Loge and comes home energetic and glowing. She helps take care of the synagogue when no men are there. She weaves and mends clothes and has planted a garden of medicinal herbs in crude boxes. In the early-morning hours, before Yaakov wakes up, she studies and reads with her husband. Her build is more robust now, and her fingers are thick and red from working outdoors. David looks out through the window into the dark night; the stars are brighter than ever. He leaps up and calls out to his wife, pointing at something that shines in the night, rushing across the firmament like a runaway star. It’s the great comet of 1092 shooting through the sky, striking fear into the hearts of people across Western Europe. They preach and pray, predict the coming of the Antichrist yet again, and the Christians in the village call it the return of the star of Bethlehem. The comet causes a commotion, not to mention a lively traffic in indulgences. Some quacks sell salves made from stinging nettles and goat droppings, for protecting your skin from the hellfire awaiting one and all. Herdsmen have trouble keeping their animals calm in the strange cometary light. Now David and Hamoutal stand side by side at the window. They feel no fear, only surprise. They have never believed in the prophecy of the end of days, but now Hamoutal wonders in silence how much was true of the childhood stories about the Messiah’s return a thousand years later. But didn’t the reign of the Antichrist come first? She lays herself down and dreams that night that a child is born to her in a stable under the sign of that uncanny wandering star, then wakes like a shot, feeling guilty about her blasphemous dream. But who will judge her? What god sends signs no human can understand? She tells David to go back to sleep and lies struggling through the darkness in her mind. The next morning, she is at the wash house early. The biting cold of the water on her hands does her good.

  Two years later. Hamoutal is pregnant again. She feels strong and healthy. The landscape, the pure cool air, the vast silence – they cure her, day by day, of her doubts and intimate wounds. She is in the fifth month of her pregnancy, which is much easier than her first. She is well fed and carrying the baby high. She roams the plateau, where a few birds of prey soar overhead in the late-afternoon sun.

  One clear day in late October, she returns with three-year-old Yaakov from the heights of Saint-Jean, where they picked wild fruit and the earliest olives. The boy walks ahead with a pointed stick. Along the way, they search for walnuts, chanterelles and ceps, which they put in the coarse wicker basket on Hamoutal’s back. Under a crooked oak, they rest. In the distance, they hear the pealing bell of the small village church. A few sheep and their shepherd are roaming the grassy expanse below. Yaakov is playing with the pointed stick, tracing the path of a yellow fly as it flits from place to place as if searching for something. All at once, the fly seems to plunge its proboscis into the soil. An instant later, it flies off in a straight line. A few minutes later, it repeats the ritual. The boy is paying closer attention to the insect now, placing the point of his stick on each spot in the soil after it flies away, keeping track of its movements. When it darts out of sight, again in a straight line, after thrusting its microscopic mouthparts into the earth one last time, the boy falls to his knees and digs away the soil with his hands. To his surprise, he uncovers a large black clump, which he shows to his mother. Hamoutal recognises his find straight away. She has heard of the power of the black, misshapen truffle and the healing properties ascribed to it. Jews seldom eat truffles because the Christians hunt for them with pigs or dogs, unclean beasts forbidden to touch food. But the boy dug up this truffle with his own two hands; she smiles at him in amazement. They wait for the next fly. Yaakov follows that one too, again placing the tip of his stick on the spot where it just took off. When the insect flies in a straight line out of sight again, the child digs, and soon unearths another truffle, which he hands to his mother in triumph. Without knowing it, he has rediscovered an age-old technique for finding truffles. Over the next few weeks, the mother and child learn to identify the crooked oaks that nurture truffles by looking for the bare oval patch around the roots, because a truffle oak is a sick tree; the truffle is a fungus. Some of the villagers see it as satanic food, saying it’s shaped like a deformed devil’s hoof and its penetrating odour, which contaminates butter, oil and milk, is a sign of witchcraft. So Hamoutal makes her son promise to tell no one in the village about his discovery. At home, she cuts one of the clumps into thin slices; the smell fills the house. They ward off disaster and illness, she reassures David, who scratches his head and reflects that his wife’s mind sometimes leaps in very odd directions.

  Above the village, an eagle glides in spirals on the warmest currents of air. The sky is spotless, but over the line of hills a strange, enormous cloud forms, resembling an oyster, umbilical pink and dark purple, veined and hollow. They stare at it, fascinated, as if it were an apparition, a divine annunciation, until the cloud dissolves, leaving only a small vestige like a shell drifting on the horizon. The plateau is as solitary as a dream.

  In the night, as the Milky Way slides like a bright stripe across the heavens, the owls over the valley seem to call out louder. The fire is warm, but through the chinks in the walls they can feel the cold wind on their backs. Obadiah’s wife sits with Hamoutal and tells her the tale of the shepherd who became obsessed with the owl’s cry. One moonlit night he whistled back on a whim, knowing that owls could spend all night calling to each other. The owl responded to his whistle immediately. Amused, the man whistled back a few more times. The owl kept responding. The next night he was sitting outside his cottage, and before he knew it he was whistling back and forth again with the owl on the far slope. He went on for an hour and a half, and when it was time to turn in, he stayed outside, still listening. It took him hours to fall asleep. From that time onwards, he seemed to have fallen under some strange spell; he would stay out all night till the crack of dawn, whistling like a man possessed whenever he heard the owl’s cry. His wife crossed herself and told the women at the market that she feared her husband had been touched by the Devil. She tried to persuade him to stay inside at night and was once even about to bolt the door. They ended up scuffling and cursing each other. The children cried and whimpered because their father spent every night wandering around somewhere outside while their frightened mother stayed in the house and prayed. No one could sleep; the stars sparkled with menace, and a ewe gave birth to a monster with a beard.

  After a couple of weeks of nightly whistling, the shepherd became obsessed with the whimsical notion that God was trying to tell him something; he had been chosen, and now he had to keep responding or else he would miss God’s message. So he sat outside every night and whistled back at the owl until morning. He grew thinner and thinner; his eyes were clouded but full of fire. He scarcely ate, refused to sleep under a roof, and roved the valley whistling like a demon. A few of his sheep went missing; a wolf had its eye on his flock. He hardly noticed. After a month and a half he stopped coming home and wandered, wild and solitary, in the grip of a strange ecstasy. His brothers avoided him and took charge of his flock.

  Autumn came, the nights grew colder, and the shepherd would crawl up into a tree at night, so that from this higher perch he could continue his mystical communion with the owl until first light.

  Because God’s message was becoming no clearer, he decided one night that the Almighty must be calling him to the other side of the valley, where the message would be imparted. He left around five in the afternoon, walked for more than two hours, and arrived after dark among the trees on the far slope. He waited till he heard the first cry and then searched the bushes and fields for the place from which t
he owl was calling to him, trying to come as close as he could and all the while making certain not to miss a response. After every exchange, he would hold still for some time in the foliage before taking a few more steps towards the source. Hour by hour, he drew so close to the spot that he could identify the tree from which the bird was calling. He crept up to the tree, quiet as a mouse, so as not to spook the owl, and looked up. To his chagrin, what he saw perched there was no owl but a man – who, like himself, was whistling back at the other side, though with some misgivings that night as the answering whistle moved closer and closer. The shepherd was so outraged that he started to shake the tree and kick the trunk, hollering curses at the astonished man in the treetop; he ordered him out of the tree, slammed his weight up against it, picked up stones and threw them up into the branches. The other man climbed down, frightened and bewildered, but when he saw the shepherd, he burst into uproarious laughter. The shepherd, however, driven to despair by the thought that he could have misunderstood God’s voice so badly, seized the man by the throat, strangled him and crushed his head with a large stone until only blood and pulp remained. Then he ran all the way back across the valley to Moniou, foaming at the mouth, up the steep, rocky path to the site where the tower was under construction, straight to the edge of the cliff, and made an energetic leap. Two days later, in the spot where he had landed – true story, the rabbi’s wife says – they found not his smashed remains, but the nest of a short-eared owl, surrounded by feathers, bones and mouse fur.