The Convert Read online

  The synagogue and the home of David Todros must have been close together, at most two hundred metres from the site of the old house where I am writing this. They couldn’t have been any further away, because that would have placed them outside the ramparts. The houses on the south side were on such small plots of land that it seems likely that was the Jewish quarter. Jews were always allotted small parcels for building their homes, a way of limiting their wealth and influence. Because those tapering plots, one of which I live on myself, can be found on Napoleonic copies of the medieval maps, I know the village already had buildings like these back then. The two refugees must have passed through this narrow street often. I can still sense their nearness in the vast silence over the land. I make my way back down to the modern village – as if it were nothing at all to step out of a long-lost age, back into the present.

  I sit down at my desk and start browsing again through a historical article sent to me some ten summers ago by a retired neighbour from southern Germany who has lived in an idyllic old house here for decades. You should read this when you have the time, he told me. I made a copy and placed it in the drawer of my grandfather’s writing desk, next to the notebooks he once gave me. The article, as I later saw, is simply called ‘Monieux’. It was published in 1969 by Norman Golb, a renowned expert on Jewish history.

  3

  Only now, as the young woman soaks her sprained foot in a basin of warm water with lavender oil, does her husband realise how exhausted she is. The swelling won’t subside, and her foot is covered with ugly yellow and black bruises. The child tosses and turns in her womb; the rabbi fears she’s about to go into labour. She is shown to a short oak bed where she can rest. Because she can’t stop shaking, they build a fire. As soon as the warmth reaches her, she falls asleep. Patches of sun slide across the old tiles.

  The day is mild and peaceful. A buzzard hovers over the cliff, near the towers under construction at the top; the vague clink of hammers on stone comes drifting down. The rabbi wonders how he will explain to the distrustful priest at the small church of Saint-Pierre, on the other side of Moniou, that this new arrival, a golden-haired woman with blue eyes, is a Sephardic Jew.

  Around six o’clock, the sun sinks below the high cliff. From one moment to the next, the light turns thin and bluish; the woods across the valley glimmer a deepening red. A gust of wind passes over the plain; for a few breaths, the trees and bushes by the riverbank make a loud rustle. Then the never-ending silence returns to this deserted highland.

  The young woman wakes with a start to find darkness has fallen. She has no idea where she is – a brief surge of panic, and then bit by bit she can make out the contours of a wardrobe, a dark chest, a chair. A sharp pain shoots through her lower back, taking her breath away. She lets out a muffled cry. Right away, the door opens; the faint glow of a flickering flame lights up the walls. It’s an old woman, bringing a basin of water and a stack of towels. She sits down in silence to keep watch, head bowed and hands folded, beside the sweating, thrashing woman in the bed. She murmurs ancient, indistinct prayers. After an hour in which the contractions grow stronger, the young woman falls back into deep sleep. In the middle of the night, she shoots awake with a pounding heart, gagging with pain. The woman is no longer watching over her. An improbably large moon is rising over the hill to the east. The light glints and shimmers its way inside through the small glassless window like a living creature. Feeling an urgent need to urinate, she stumbles out of bed half asleep, gropes for the travel-worn shoes by the bedside and staggers outside. A contraction spears through her body. Now panting and savage, she stares down the unfamiliar alley, staggers on, and finds herself ringed by rocks and low bushes. There she squats, dizzy with pain. She thinks she’s passing urine, but it’s her waters breaking. Her squatting brings on labour, sudden and strong. In a haze of pain, she feels herself tearing open down below. She groans like a dying animal, howls and sobs, and falls backwards between two stones, hurting her lower back. From under her belly, a little head emerges. Panting like a woman possessed, she pushes and moans, digs her fingers into the dry earth, presses her loins helplessly, reaches between her legs, feels the blood running, and shivers with fear and pain. The moon seems to shine still brighter; the night air chills the wet skin of her legs and hips. As the thing glides motionless through her legs into the dust and gravel, she blacks out for an instant. Then all at once the narrow alley fills with cries, footfalls, slamming doors. She is borne up; the afterbirth gushes out of her, along with a thick stream of blood. The ruthless moon glares into her eyes. She weeps, lets out shrill cries, calls her mother’s name. The old woman severs the umbilical cord with a dull knife, splashes water over the delirious woman’s lower body, grabs the pallid newborn by the feet, shakes him back and forth, and smacks him till she can hear the faint start of his cry, a sob that turns into bawling and howling. As the young woman is carried unconscious into the house by three women, the baker points to something that was lying next to the newborn child: a large snake, almost too sluggish to move in the cold night air, creeping away between the rocks, as slow as a serpent in a dream. By the childbed at the first hint of dawn, young David mumbles the old words: Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam …

  For the first few days after the birth, their fear runs deep. They remember the shadows of men on horseback in an alley in Narbonne and still feel the threat every day. Yet because nothing happens, because the unchanging hills offer rest and the day-to-day life of this remote village seems to shield them, they gradually find a new calm. David Todros spends the evenings beside his wife’s bed. In the daylight hours, he assists Rabbi Obadiah in the little synagogue school.

  On the eighth day after the boy’s birth, he is circumcised. As the historical record tells us, he is named Yaakov. Hamoutal stays in bed but can hear, through the rumble of prayer, the shrieks and sobs of the child below. Then conversations, laughter, drinking. She falls asleep with an ache in her swollen young breasts.

  The firstborn son is ransomed, as tradition demands. The baby is brought in on a platter ringed by cloves of garlic. The men in the room each nibble at a clove to drive off evil demons. David gives his son to Rabbi Obadiah, who is acting as kohen. After handing over the ritual payment, he takes his son back into his arms. They sit down to a simple meal. It’s a hot day; the sun blazes high over the valley, and the riverbed is almost dry. Lizards dart through the ivy and grapevines across the old stones of the house. Wild spelt and poppies sway in the warm wind. In the cool depths of the gorge a kilometre away, at a little church beneath an overhang, a hermit in prayer to the Lord of the Christians is attacked by a bear, which breaks his neck with a casual flick of its left paw.

  That evening, a group of knights rides across the grassy plain by the river, led by the notorious Raymond of Toulouse, an ambitious nobleman of almost fifty, whose gaze is drawn to the village. He turns on his caparisoned steed and calls out to one of the men, What’s the name of that eyrie over there, up against the mountainside? The knight shrugs. They are headed east on a year-long pilgrimage, from which Raymond of Toulouse, the fearsome warrior celebrated in later years as a heroic crusader, will return with one eye gouged out. He is aware of the search for the high-born fugitive and even knows how much her father has promised the finder; Norman knights on the way to their captured territories in Sicily often pass through Provence, staying with prominent country gentlemen. The thought of looking for her in this village never enters his mind. The new mother, now twenty years old, has no idea how close danger has come. But David sees the knights down on the plain. His heart races; a dark premonition seizes him. He goes inside, consumed with anxiety, to find his wife kneeling by her bed. What are you doing? he asks in dismay. You promised never to say Christian prayers again, remember? She rises, stiff-jointed, to her feet with a guilty look, one hand on her side. I’m not sure any more, she says.

  She lies down again and shuts her eyes. In her memory, she sees incense swirling up past a wind
ow in a church by the sea.

  4

  Now the lime trees and elms are turning yellow and red; the mornings are cold and clear. The young mother sees the men bringing home boar, deer and hares to the village. The charred boar hide gives off an acrid smoke that makes her queasy. Oakwood smoke circles over the low roofs. Rainy days are ahead. The fertile plateau is changing into a dreary grey bowl through which the west wind scours a path.

  It’s hard for her to adjust to the simple, hard life of the village, unlike anything she’s known. The drab cliffs and slopes sometimes seem unreal, as if it’s all a dream. One rainy night, she is struck by the quiet presence of the many snails and toads. The toads chirp – like an owl’s hoot, but thinner and finer. The lethargic creatures leap up against the house fronts as she passes. Helpless, almost human, they stand there with their front legs outstretched against the wall, as if praying to heaven for aid. Once her footsteps have died away, they sink back into apathy.

  The snails are different. They come out after every evening shower, without any sense of danger, onto the small, rounded cobbles of the old streets, creeping together to mate. They often die under the feet of late passers-by, their fine shells cracked and the slime oozing out. Beings that had form and substance become mere matter again, dead and denuded of their delicate structure. Some villagers snatch up the snails from the stones in the middle of their lovemaking, and toss them into a brass pot to be cooked alive and eaten right away.

  These things trouble Hamoutal.

  She grew up with stories of a natural world ruled by God. The Jewish God, whose name she must not utter, is not very different, but she still isn’t always sure where the differences lie. The mere sight of a wasp in a honey jar, stuck fast and dying in loud, buzzing alarm, or of a small, black scorpion crushed underfoot, is enough to make her turn away her eyes, tormenting herself with the question of which God is answerable for this. When she takes little Yaakov, not yet one year old, to her breast, she is sometimes overwhelmed by a tightness in her chest and a formless fear. Is nothing left, then, of her sheltered childhood in that grand house in the north? What is the point of this raw life all around her, absorbed in an anguishing cycle of life and death? The theologians spare no thought for questions like these, as if everything they see around them has a purpose. She sometimes feels that by renouncing her parents’ religion, she has flung herself into a vacuum. No matter how much David teaches her about the Torah and the ancient history of the Jewish people, an abyss has opened under her old certainties, and there’s no one she can speak to about that. Christians would brand her a witch for burning, and Jews would point out that her doubts are unworthy of a proselyte and refuse to accept her into their community. So she does what well-bred women had to do back then, in all places and at all times: she keeps her mouth shut, bows her head and prays in silence. Sometimes she doesn’t know who she’s praying to – perhaps to that voice inside her, a lost angel that sometimes seems to land on her shoulder, sending her into violent trembling until she pulls herself together with mumbled incantations.

  Although she does her best to find a place for herself in the small community, greeting everyone she passes in the streets, most villagers walk on without responding, indifferent. She is unaccustomed to such treatment, whether as a respected Norman woman or as the privileged proselyte she was in Narbonne.

  As it becomes clear to her that she will never fully belong here, she gives up her attempts to be sociable. From that moment on, she is granted a kind of tacit acceptance, because she has resigned herself to the role of outsider. After a while, the Christian worthies give her a gracious nod in passing. The inquisitive gleam in their eyes is not quite friendly, but close enough – given that she’s safe here and her husband is a close friend of Rabbi Obadiah. What business brought her here? No one asks. But the silence around her, when she joins the other villagers in the small square, says more than enough. A blonde Jew with ice-blue eyes – there’s something wrong here, you can see them think it, though no one moves a muscle. One day a few children throw stones at her, chanting Mouri, Jusiou, mouri – die, Jew, die.

  She ponders all this as she limps back home in the dusk on her sore, swollen foot that won’t heal properly, along the rough, uneven stones of the Grande Rue, no more than a wide alley – which today is part of a walking path. She tries not to crush any snails, or in any case, not the spectacular clumps of intertwined snail flesh, those squishy, mobile masses of undisguised instinct, bulging out of their shells, obscene and overwhelming, in slow, dreamlike intercourse.

  5

  Winter comes, unexpectedly harsh. For weeks the village lies beneath a thick layer of frozen snow. On clear days, an ice-cold mistral blows through the valley. Life comes to a standstill in the dazzle of white and blue. In the gloomy houses, people sit close to the fireplace, coughing, and burning the oak logs and branches they piled carefully against a low wall in late summer. Blue smoke rises from the ramshackle chimneys and gathers in the rooms. The villagers subsist on whatever remains in their damp cellars and attics: root vegetables and hard spelt, ground with effort into sticky flour, and hunks of salted meat boiled in water or roasted in ash. Famine is near. Dead dogs, frozen stiff in the snow with spots of blood on their noses, are skinned, cut open, and boiled with herbs into a weak, nasty stew. Bunches of dry thyme, brewed in hot water with a little leftover honey, help to soothe inflamed lungs. The straw in the beds goes soggy; the children tremble and grow thin. Rats squeak in the cellars. Day after day, it’s deathly white and bright. Nothing moves. Or the stealthy wind sends a rough gust ramming into the walls in the early afternoon, as warm and cold air masses change places in the valley. Woooovvvv, it howls, woooovvv, and through a crack comes a sudden sharp whistle, before the lasting silence returns. David reads aloud in synagogue; the drone of voices consoles him. Icicles hang from low eaves; snow blows into drifts by the doors of the few larger houses. Curses, entreaties, tribulations; praying, waiting, sleeping. Footsteps crunching down a bluish lane. The creak of old hinges. It is the month of Tevet in the Jewish year of 4852. For Christians, it is January 1092, and yet again it’s snowing, darkness falls before half past three, a few crows whirl among the snowflakes, which, when you look up, seem black instead of white. They swoop up along the rocky slope, like a horde of tiny scouts combing every crevice; they blanket the mouths of the caves where bears hibernate; they cling to watchtowers and eyelashes. Nothing to do but pray and shiver. A preacher tramps through the snow, shaking his rattle and calling for repentance, announcing the end of days.

  In Fontaine-lès-Dijon, a boy Yaakov’s age is wrapped in woollens and coddled by his mother Aleth. His name is Bernard. Decades later, when he is full-grown and Hamoutal’s skeleton already bleached with age, he will be named after the bright valley where he founded a Cistercian abbey – Clairvaux.

  On the rocky slope over the village, a huge mass of stone suddenly splits, a hundred tons of rock prised loose from the mountainside by the bitter cold. A crack forms, metres long and only a hundred metres above the synagogue. If the colossus falls, it is large enough to crush half the village on its way down to the valley. The probable route of its fall passes straight through the Jewish quarter. But it will remain stubbornly suspended where it is, sinking into the gravel and bearing down on the topmost stones of the old rampart. There it stands a thousand years later; I can see it when I open the back door of my house. The mistral still whistles around it. The villagers make the sign of the cross and pray to God to spare them. The young woman dreams of her father’s hand striking out, and awakes with a start, trembling, the night the thaw sets in.

  6

  A few years later. Time slips past. Little has changed in their lives, except that their skin is rougher, their faces are tanned, and their past life is fading.

  Most of the time, little Yaakov plays by himself in the street. He sometimes ventures as far as the Place des Boeufs, downhill near the lowest village gate, where the oxen are slaughtered, the watchtowe
r stands, doing double duty as a jail, and all day long the children shout and play. He always returns alone.

  David has been teaching Hamoutal the old Provençal language, the langue d’oc, but she still has trouble with the local variety, especially when spoken fast. Jokes in dialect go over her head, and the villagers look on in amusement as she stumbles and stutters her way through an explanation in the language of the north. While David debates with Obadiah in the synagogue or sits bent over his Torah scrolls, she wanders the valley with her boy on her back, ranging further and further from home, in the company of a few other Jewish women. They pick herbs, collect edible roots, make nosegays, and sit looking out over the landscape. The Western world is booming with controversy and conflict, with political tensions rising by the day; Christians are at odds with Christians, the pope in Rome is embroiled in a perpetual power struggle with the German emperor, but here, sheep roam the pastures in timeless peace. City people are growing rebellious. There are tales of heresy, robbery, murder, retaliation, rioting and false prophets, and frequent whispers that the Antichrist has come to earth. The monster of the final, millennial age, prophesied in the Apocalypse, has arrived after all this time, they say, but nobody recognises him – beware the Devil and his many masks. Could that misshapen man there, with the gouged eye, be the Antichrist? What if that limping beggar with the clubfoot is the Old Serpent in a crafty disguise?