The Convert Read online

  King William of Normandy is dead; his successor is a hothead, she hears from her father, who’s worried about the country’s future. What in God’s name does she care?

  Not long afterwards, news of their clandestine relationship starts to leak out. There are tales and rumours; the sexton has seen them hand in hand. Again, Vigdis is confined to her rooms. This time, her father does send her to a nearby convent for six months. When David is sighted near the convent one evening at dusk, the consequences are swift and grave. At the priest’s request, the rabbi reluctantly orders a search of the yeshiva. This turns up a piece of parchment bearing her handwriting: a poem in calligraphy about golden butterflies in a garden, found on a rack for Torah scrolls among the personal effects of David Todros. She is told she will remain in her convent cell until her father has selected a suitable candidate for marriage. David receives a lecture from the rabbi, who threatens to send him back to Narbonne for his reckless behaviour. He promises to mend his ways, to search his soul; he shows remorse. But the next morning he’s spotted near the convent again, with a piece of rich cloth under his arm. The rabbi writes to the elder Todros in Narbonne and asks him to summon his son back home for a while.

  This is a turning point in their lives. But her prospects look much bleaker than his. A high-born girl’s future tends to be mapped out well before she reaches the age of nineteen, unless she decides for herself by accepting a marriage proposal. Vigdis has already fended off three candidates while her brothers looked on in dismay. Her eldest brother comes to the convent to tell her that their father will soon name a knight of their acquaintance as her intended spouse. This leads to bickering, threats and shouting matches. She tries to bluff her way out, telling her parents she’ll become a nun if they force a husband on her. In the convent chapel she prostrates herself on the cold stone, trying not to think of the Jewish prayers that David has taught her, doing penance, mortifying her flesh – but she remains impure. Hunger, sleeplessness, waves of mystical rapture and panic, nausea and cramps, menstruation and self-mutilation. Prayer, but to which God?

  And after a few weeks, a little miracle: the gardener, who has been eyeing her all this time with a lewd grin, passes on a message from David Todros. This illiterate go-between hopes that by delivering the note he can get into her good graces. The message is terse and factual: a date and time, at the back of the convent garden. No name. But she recognises the handwriting, the strange curlicues on the letters.

  It is eleven o’clock at night when she slips out the back door of the convent’s large kitchen, shivering in her thin clothes. She passes the stables, reaches the walled courtyard, and bangs her left foot into a line of rough rocks around the herb garden. Gropes for the little door that leads out into the fields. It is locked. Silence. The night owl; a dog in the distance. No moon, no light. Her breath quickens; her teeth chatter. Then she hears her name from the other side. A knife slides into the lock; the door rattles, creaks and flies open. She sees a dark shape in front of her. She hears her name. It is not David’s voice. She stumbles over the small stone threshold, is caught in someone’s arms, gasps. The man clamps her by the shoulder and grunts, This way. The grass smells chilly underfoot; moss and bitter-weed, trampled nettles. The taciturn man leads her to a nearby house on the waterside. There a back door opens, and someone with a small torch lights their way in. They are brought to a room; no one speaks a word. She is left alone there. The door is locked. She lies awake on the small couch, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar house. If she’s betrayed now, her punishment will be merciless – maybe even interrogation and torture. She has to be gone before matins, when the nuns will find her cell empty. The door to freedom swings open, but it’s a trap.

  There’s no way back.

  III

  Flight

  1

  I drive out of Brussels in the afternoon, heading south via Tournai and Lille to Rouen. I arrive in the evening. It is late March; a cold wind scours the deserted squares. I walk down Rue du Massacre, snapping a photograph of the street’s name. A moment later, I’m in Rue aux Juifs – a long, straight street where two government buildings face each other. The one on the right is the Palais de Justice, the court building. In 1976, during excavation work for an underground car park, a bulldozer ran into a block of stone with a vague inscription. The foreman brought the work to a halt, and when digging resumed, it was at a slower, more studious pace. Bit by bit, a large structure was unearthed. Archaeological research showed it was part of an eleventh-century Jewish building. Was it a synagogue? A Jewish school? An aristocratic home? Rouen turned out to have once had a flourishing Jewish community. The American scholar Norman Golb threw himself into the subject, writing a scrupulously documented study. The building was found to have been a Jewish school, a yeshiva.

  This is where I mean to begin my search, a search that will take me – like Vigdis Adelaïs and her Jewish lover – far from home.

  The next afternoon at the appointed time I meet Annie Lafarde, an animated woman who offers tours, on request, of the remnants of the yeshiva. She seems eager to tell the whole story at once; ten people show up and are held captive for an hour in a little room opposite Rouen’s cathedral. The view distracts me. This is the cathedral which so fascinated Monet that he painted it almost thirty times, each time in different hues, in his eagerness to grasp the fleeting light. His passion had an element of pathos, because the light on old stone buildings changes by the instant – like our perspective on the past.

  The group follows our effusive guide outside, entering the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. In the right-hand corner, a glass door with a security gate gives access to the sanctum. Only now do I grasp that a thousand years ago the city lay about two metres lower. We descend a staircase, and what I see at the bottom makes my head spin. In the damp, stale air of this underground chamber, between concrete walls and metal shoring, in hazy neon light, there it lies: the astonishingly well-preserved yeshiva of Rouen. I run my hand over the rough walls pearled with moisture and think, David Todros, a thousand years later I am touching the stone you knew. I soon find the inscription describing this building as a maison sublime – a sublime house, because every yeshiva alludes to the Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed forever by the Romans in the year AD 70 during the Jewish–Roman War described by Flavius Josephus. Unlike Christians, who have rebuilt their great churches time and again, the Jews never erected another central holy place after the destruction of the Temple. Instead, that catastrophe is commemorated in and by all the world’s countless synagogues, as scattered as the diaspora itself – and so all those houses of worship say an architectural Kaddish for the forever-vanished Temple.

  It must have been somewhere in front of the facade of this maison sublime that Vigdis and David first met. I picture David Todros arriving here, but this time I have the actual details of the building in mind. In the wall of the central chamber, I see the round holes for the beams that held up the racks of Torah scrolls. The yeshiva had two doors: one higher up, on the street side, and one at the bottom of the stairs by the entrance. Those doors must have been heavy, considering all the treasures they protected. There are traces of the great fire set during the pogrom of 1096 – by which year Vigdis had assumed a new identity, she and David were living in my distant southern village, and fate found them there all the same. Meanwhile, here in the north, the synagogue and this yeshiva burned down, bringing an end to a period of peaceful coexistence in Normandy. I notice the Babylonian ornaments and columns by the entrance to the building; the vanquished lion, symbol of evil defeated, and on the other side the dragon, symbol of life and struggle, both distinct even now in the worn stone. There is a narrow passage to the first floor, which may have been used for study. All these rooms are much more intimate than I had imagined. They remind me of the tall, narrow houses in my Provençal village. Seeing them, someone once quipped that Jews were given such small plots of land they had to invent the high-rise. Norman Golb has even suggested there
may once have been a third floor here, which would have been quite exceptional back then. Annie Lafarde waves off that idea with a laugh.

  I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. I’m surprised how strong an impression this place makes on me. Besides my southern village and a synagogue in far-off Egypt, it’s the only place I can be certain that Vigdis Adelaïs once stood. This is where her heart pounded as she stood by the gate in the street, aware that she was strictly forbidden to pass through the entrance below. This is where she lingered and waited.

  Knowing her life story and its tragic end, I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead. Walk on, young lady, find a different man, escape this destiny, flee what you most desire. But no: she is so much in love that she leaves her whole world behind. Again, I see her descending the Provençal hill near Monieux with her sprained ankle and muddied clothes, and I realise that not one of the other nine visitors to this crypt full of inscriptions and photographs knows my secret. I feel far from the present, deep in history, however much I might like to join their conversations, which, I must admit, become more and more insightful and absorbing as the afternoon goes on.

  When we resurface, I find it hard to put up with the crowds. I walk along the Seine; the evening rush hour has begun; the air I breathe is nothing but exhaust. The seagulls wheel above the waters of the harbour.

  2

  In the first glimmer of sunrise, she hears the lock creak again. David stands before her. He holds her in his arms for a moment, without a word. He has brought her clothes – plain black garments unlike anything her mother ever gave her. They leave the house on the edge of town through the back door. It is six in the morning; the city gates, normally guarded, are opened around that time for the peasants who come to Rouen with deliveries for the merchants.

  The young couple leave the city through St Ouen’s Gate, in the east, pretending to be poor merchants picking up goods on the outskirts of town. From there they walk a long way down the left bank of the Seine with their pushcart and some provisions and borrowed clothes, passing through the fields and meadows of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray and going on to Pont-de-l’Arche, then known by its Latin name Pons ad Archas. No farmers live in this deserted region; there is not a house to be seen for miles around, and the clouds hang low over the countryside. A few foxes and wild dogs cross their path in the early afternoon; rain lashes the earth and their faces. Near Pont-de-l’Arche, one of David’s friends has arranged for a ferry to meet them. He is waiting on the other side with a harnessed mule that they can lead by the reins. He wishes them a safe journey; the friends embrace.

  Vigdis abandons every form of security, her fortune, her social status, her future, and her good name, because a Jewish man has promised to marry her as soon as they reach his home town of Narbonne. David has to keep calming and consoling her; she often flies into a panic, bursts into frightened tears, crosses herself, prays to the God of her childhood, asks for forgiveness, thinks of the Jewish God, David’s Adonai, feels sure of nothing, squeezes her eyes shut, loses her balance, and falls from their mule as it gallops across the fields. She has to be helped back up onto her feet; her wrist is sprained, and she’s dripping with mud. She can no longer pray to the saints; they no longer exist. In the beginning was the word. It’s been taken away from her now, and her young limbs are trembling.

  The only document describing their fate is in the world-renowned Cambridge University manuscript collection known as the Cairo Genizah. At the end of my own wanderings, I will hold this almost thousand-year-old Hebrew document in my hands. It tells us that David and Vigdis arrived in Narbonne in the year 1091, having travelled nine hundred kilometres across medieval France, with innumerable dangers and difficulties along the way. They had the overconfidence of two young people who have struck out on their own. They knew that knights would be sent after them to track them down and bring them back as captives. Their lives hung by a thread; he would be put to death for abduction, and she would spend the rest of her life in a convent, under strict watch, if they were lucky enough not to be accused of devil-worship. In that case, they would both be burned at the stake. But they took their chances, as fugitives always do, because no other tolerable choice remains.

  As I drive out of Rouen, seagulls are skimming over the small harbour. Traffic is heavy on the wide bridge across the Seine. An endless line of cars is crawling towards Évreux and Orléans. On this bright spring morning I try to imagine how two people who had to flee in secret could cross the wide river, their first obstacle. And how they went on from there – what an interminable trek, on foot or on horseback. Now the traffic rushes along the banks. There are no clues for me here.

  I park the car at one of the first lay-bys along the route to Évreux and take in the view from a low hill: the roads, the suburbs and the line of lorries. On the left I see a wooded expanse in the distance. I drive on to where the motorway crosses the Seine.

  Life is peaceful here; a woman sits with her toddler in a playground on the bank. An imposing house with a large car parked outside has a view out over the sandy river water. The Seine is shallow here; was it easy for them to cross? As pointless as it may seem, I want to see the landscape for myself, to absorb the details, the possible views. I want to find out what might still be visible a millennium later. Almost nothing, it seems – except the landscape, here and there. I can scarcely picture what their journey was like, even with the help of historical documents. My whole task is to cross out, take away, pare down to the essence: no bridges, no motorways, no buildings, no hard shoulders, no sound either, and hardly any human presence. To cross it all out with the care of an archaeologist, and then to find the wastelands underneath. Tohu va-vohu in Hebrew: everything still waste and emptiness, formless and void. The clouds and trees, the rivers and rolling hills, the early cities, the boundless woods. To be erased: filling stations, supermarkets, crowded suburbs, housing estates, rural planning, cultivated fields and pastures. Even the modern forests seldom give any impression of how it was then. Empty countryside, with here and there a stray house, a mud hut belonging to penniless peasants, dirt tracks full of bumps and potholes without any road signs or shelters, low church towers the only landmarks. At night, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. To find your way in the daytime, you had to use the sun. You ate whatever you could get; sometimes, you couldn’t find a sheltered place to sleep before sundown and had to spend the night in a ditch, in fear of your life.

  Animals prowled at night: bears and wolves, wild dogs and the dreaded European wildcat. So did the other nocturnal predators: poachers and thieves, vagrants and swindlers – scum. In the daytime there were tramps, preachers, false knights out for personal gain, double-dealing pedlars, clairvoyant charlatans and zealots – enough rogues on their long route to keep the young couple vigilant in the extreme. They could trust almost no one; the news of their elopement preceded them, brought by her father’s messengers and the abbess of the convent. So they couldn’t take refuge in abbeys, churches or rectories, nor in forts or castles, and rarely with city folk. The safest places were the barns of uninformed peasants.

  It must have taken them at least a month and a half, since their average speed was no more than twenty kilometres a day, unless they had fast horses – and they surely didn’t, not until much later. That would have drawn too much attention. There were only a few places along the route where they could go from door to door in search of lodging for the night – concealing their true identities. They would have seized those opportunities to recover their strength and lie low, hiding from wandering knights. Such interruptions must have extended their journey to almost three months. At least until they passed Orléans, they had to be careful not to attract attention; they heard from a Jewish family near Évreux that the knights had already passed that way and ordered every Jewish household to confess if they had seen the two fugitives. They threatened to burn down the houses of anyone who aided the couple or withheld information.

  Nowadays the distance be
tween Rouen and Narbonne can be traversed in a nearly straight line on the French autoroutes. After poring over maps for potential signs of old country roads, I decide that the lines of the autoroutes would, with a few exceptions, have been sensible choices even in those days. For example, the most comfortable route that would have taken them far away from Rouen, fast, was the Roman road known as the Chaussée Jules César, which cut straight through the Bois de Vexin and was still in heavy use. But it curved south-east, towards the capital, and that would have exposed them to great danger. Messengers used the road to zip back and forth between Rouen and Paris. It was packed with people who might recognise them. No, the runaway lovers must have remained west of Paris, in the rural parts of Normandy and Eure-et-Loir. They went from Rouen by way of Chartres to Orléans, where courageous Jews gave them shelter despite the risks – their first chance to spend a few days resting and recuperating. By then they had already come a long way: the total distance to Chartres was 130 kilometres, and to Orléans 250. The same trip now takes me half a day by car on local roads, at the sedate speed of fifty kilometres per hour.

  How many waterways must they have crossed on that ceaseless slog, if they kept detours to a minimum? Between Rouen and Narbonne, there are – at a rough estimate – fifty, including smaller streams. Bridges are risky, because they’re bottlenecks. Just after crossing the Seine at Pontde-l’Arche, they had to cross another river: the Eure, which merges with the Seine nearby.

  Standing on the sandy riverbank, I’m assailed by fresh doubts about their escape route. Why wouldn’t they have been smuggled out of the city in a nondescript boat by a helpful Jewish fisherman who lived nearby? They could have followed the looping course of the Seine southwards. No, then they might have been discovered and betrayed at any time. I imagine their pursuers conducting a systematic sweep of the river. The other stretch of the Seine, north-west from Rouen to the river’s mouth in Honfleur, was also combed by a number of small, fast-moving snekkjas, since Vigdis’s father had just as much reason to suspect that his daughter and the Jewish southerner had taken the sea route from Rouen to Bordeaux (and travelled on by land). Of course, that’s assuming he guessed that the young kidnapper was taking her to his home town. The Hebrew manuscript in the Genizah Collection in Cambridge, on which this story is based, at least tells me this much: her father’s knights pursued her all the way to Narbonne.