The Convert Read online

  I have let myself be carried away, she sometimes reflects. The words of the Torah wind around her childhood prayers like tefillin. Thoughts of rabbis and thoughts of priests are equally frightening; she sees her father’s threatening hand lifted over her head. She has no confidante or adviser to tell her how to behave, how to handle this. She had a sheltered upbringing; now that she has obeyed her feverish impulse and taken the initiative, she is lost. The only thing that can save her now is her will, her force of character. After ten days or so, the tough Viking side of her personality surfaces. As the horse trots down the deserted roads, she gradually recovers her poise. The quivering of her heart transforms into tensed willpower. When it all starts to seem like too much, she clenches her teeth and studies the watchful young man beside her. They would like to hurry on, but that would attract the attention of passers-by. Suspicious peasants are quick to pick up rumours from the city: the daughter of a leading burgher has run off with a Jew! The important thing is not to flee as fast as they can, but to keep as low a profile as possible. So they travel in disguise, looking out for danger, and mostly stick to the early-morning hours. They skulk across the thoroughfares, trust no one, and pull their hoods over their heads when they run into horsemen on a country road. They make little detours to avoid the places where they suspect or fear that sentinels are posted.

  One afternoon they see a colourful parade of fools passing by and decide to walk with them for a while. It’s a procession of strange messiahs and would-be saints, stirring up the mobs of the poor and destitute with their speeches and sermons. They quote fragments from the Apocalypse of John, shouting that the Beast with ten horns is coming, that the Antichrist is already among them, that the world will perish by fire and by sword. The commoners respond with a fury of whoops and whistles, dancing around and racing on to the next small village to bang on doors. Everywhere this throng passes, people leave their hovels behind to join them, abandoning their homes and their possessions. Husbands, wives and children march together, in the hope of a better future, joining in the cries about the end time soon to come. They dream of plunder, mayhem and adventure. They have nothing to lose, nor will they gain a thing, but their sheer numbers make them reckless. They drink homebrew and get into fistfights. Here and there, the wounded collapse by the roadside. They are usually left behind.

  David and Vigdis walk with them, their hoods pulled far over their faces, glad to be shielded from the knights pursuing them – since no one would dream of searching or interrogating the crowd of zealots. They keep quiet and try to stay with the women and children. Now and then, they are handed a hunk of bread or some milk. No one asks any questions. They sleep with the others. In the night, fires are lit to protect the group. This sees them across much of the most dangerous stretch of their journey, the first two hundred kilometres or so. But one morning, they wake up and see that their little horse is gone. They have to leave their cart behind and take whatever they can carry on their shoulders. As they shuffle onwards, they watch the unruly mob dwindle into the distance.

  When they arrive in Évreux after that first, hectic stage of their journey, Vigdis Adelaïs has a chance to draw breath. An early cloudburst caught them by surprise, so their garments dried on their sweaty skin, and now they stink. They are taken in by a Jewish family, relatives of one of David’s friends from the yeshiva. There they can finally have a full meal and bathe; clean linen underclothes are laid out for them. Vigdis is given an outfit that won’t draw attention, a dress with a close-fitting top and full skirt. Over it, she wears a cape of plain grey cloth. Their own clothing is cleaned and hung in the garret to dry. They sleep side by side for the first time there, on a bed of felt in a clammy back room, but they barely touch. They lie pressed against each other in their underclothes, eyes open, bodies burning, staring in disbelief. Their heads spin with thoughts.

  Tired, and in a strange blend of euphoria and panic, they hear the first cock crow around half past four in the morning. Next to her, Vigdis hears mumbled words she doesn’t understand. Modeh ani l’fanecha, melech chai v’kayam, she-hechezarta bi nishmati b’chemlah, rabbah emunatecha. Then David rises to his feet. In the half-light of dawn, the girl watches the ritual she has heard described. The man winds one strap around his arm seven times, and the other around his head. The young woman stares at the strange box on his forehead and holds her breath. The young man recites the morning prayer in the bare, silent room. She watches from beneath the coarse sheet. She thinks of the Christian credo, which her father often recited in the morning hours. She is free and in mortal danger.

  She has no way of knowing that, after her husband’s murder, she will take his tefillin with her and leave them in the genizah of an Egyptian synagogue, to be discovered eight centuries later by Rabbi Solomon Schechter, who will treasure them as one of the rare examples of medieval tefillin. A vague grey photograph circulates the Internet of these objects, lifted from the cold silence of their storeroom. The diaspora of things.

  3

  Beyond Évreux, the plains stretch out ahead to the horizon. They pass small villages, moving fast; the level landscape makes for easy progress. They arrive at the present-day site of Nonancourt, where the road rises, and climb the gentle slope to the higher plain. Looking back, they see the road they’ve travelled, a wide view under clouds and flocks of seagulls. Then they move on – undergrowth, thickets, a few pools of still, black water, the occasional shock of a wild boar, thorny brambles they sometimes have to pick their way through, fatigue, discouragement. A fit of crying in the dusk; hunger and thirst; the mistrust shown by the scattered denizens of the few low houses where they knock.

  Here and there spelt has been planted. The fields are small, sloppy and irregular. Lean, dark pigs amble along an embankment beneath tall, old oaks, thrusting their snouts intently into the soil. In the Bois de Saint-Vincent, just south of Blévy, they wander through the enchanting serenity of a friendly forest: ortolans, shrikes, garden warblers, a golden oriole, a woodpecker’s hollow rattle. The rustle of leaves, clusters of tall ferns, Solomon’s seal, a pang of hope. They pick berries. David, who learned how to net birds as a child, outsmarts a few doves and slits their throats in a single stroke. He plucks and cleans them, rinses them in water and a little salt, and hangs them overnight so that the blood drains out – as required by kashrut, Jewish dietary law. The next morning, he roasts them over a fire. Flies buzz around the carcass of a young fox; Vigdis yearns to pray to some saint or other. Confusion. Nightly fears. Gentle wind in the morning twilight. They set off at once and by afternoon are close to where Méréglise is today.

  Then, without warning, by the edge of some burgeoning young wood, he throws his arms around her, overcome by doubt and anxiety. She tries to shrug him off; he squeezes her tighter. It’s like a flame rushing through their bodies. He presses her down into the grass and tugs her clothes off, panting. She is damp with sweat, and the scent of her skin makes him dizzy with lust. She has no idea what’s happening to her. She is glowing; she feels herself grow wet with unbearable desire; he’s already on her and, before she knows it, in her, hard as a nail, but what overwhelms her is nothing but softness. She sees the doves beating their wings; dots of light fall on her face; she is overwhelmed by the smell of the dry grass. David kisses her neck, his caresses are wild and clumsy, he murmurs words she doesn’t understand, they heave in waves against each other, euphoria alternates with fear and trembling, frenzying their bodies. She feels something hot run down her legs. A thrush whistles in a wind-blown young birch. Everything turns vague, there is only this endless sky in her moving, then it ends, he is twitching and crying, she caresses him, they lie there a long while recovering their breath, they are dripping with sweat, they begin again, wordless and determined, it takes almost half an hour this time, she feels something so intense it dizzies her. She hooks her fingers into the grass, then into his shoulders, the scents of their love-breath mingle. Buzzing bees in their ears, ants in the grass below, she feels the acid
biting into her skin. It only heightens her arousal, their feverish thrashing, she sobs and gasps and rubs and bites and licks, it begins again after barely stopping. They go on for hours before coming to rest, he is still heavy on top of her, she underneath him, dreaming, watching a stag beetle buzz over their heads. She bursts into laughter, with a silly, thoughtless happiness in her voice, and says, Now I am your wife.

  She is right. According to the Jewish traditions of the time, their fit of passion in an insignificant field on the edge of the woods has made them man and wife for the eternity of their short lives. They lie there until dusk and, when they rise, are still unsteady on their feet. I want more, she says, laughing as if drunk. He holds her up; for an instant, she towers naked against the backdrop of the woods. In the distance, wild dogs are chasing each other. He wraps her up in his coat to protect her from the wind and the world, pressing his nose into her wild curls of blonde hair again, into her neck. She giggles, stops, stares at him, and plumps back down in the grass; he helps her dress. They fall asleep then and there and do not awaken until the next morning, by first light and the overwhelming sound of nightingales. They kiss again, their tongues playing over each other, biting each other’s lips. Again they meet in long, furious waves, she claws at his throat, he buries himself in the warmth of her thrusting hips, they lose themselves in each other, it goes on till the new sun grows hot and they sweat again, the paradisiac scent of their mutual desire. Then they lie still, panting in each other’s arms and listening to the sounds in the undergrowth behind them. The place where they are will later be called Illiers, and still later be given another name, Combray, the place where young Marcel Proust will dream away his legendary summers by the overgrown hawthorns, amid yellow fields under vast skies on which time seems to have no hold.

  In the days that follow, their progress is steady but slower; they stop every few hours to dive into the tall grass, tired and aroused, groggy and ravenous, kissing and romping for hours. Love drains them and fills them with unfamiliar energy; they cannot escape this intoxication, they forget hunger, they sleep beneath the stars and no longer seek shelter. As easy as it is to survey the landscape, these are the riskiest days of all. The slightest misfortune – a run-in with a couple of surly vagrants – could mean the end of them, because of their good clothes and the wallet at David’s belt. They lie unprotected, the evening wind runs over their sweat-damp skin, and now and then they hear a wolfdog howling. One day they see a brown bear by the edge of the woods. They laugh and shrug, their hold on reality has weakened; one moment they float free and the next they are trudging again. Navigating by the sun, they head south, but after a while they realise they’ve drifted eastwards too. After another week they see Orléans in the distance. They keep a few kilometres west of the city, reach the sandy banks of the Loire, rinse out their clothes, bathe, and are making love in the water when a man in a flat-bottomed boat comes floating towards them. He stares; you can see him working out his chances. David stands up straight in the water and fixes his eyes on the man till he has passed. Using Vigdis’s underclothes folded into a net, he chases fish for an hour or so; once he’s caught three, they eat one raw and save the others for twilight, when they make a fire and roast them. Their fingers, slippery with fat, slide over each other’s bodies. They decide to go on to Orleáns that very evening and find one of David’s father’s friends, a prominent Jewish merchant with whom he stayed on his way to Rouen.

  4

  In those days, Orléans had a substantial Jewish community – larger than the one in Paris. According to the chronicles, the city had more than a thousand Jewish inhabitants around the year 1090. It was a sensible place for the two of them to seek refuge, but entering a city through a guarded gate was always risky. If they said they were Jews, they ran the risk of discrimination, abuse or extortion. If she revealed herself to be a Christian woman, she might become an object of suspicion, with so many knights out looking for her; a blonde woman travelling with a southern-looking Jew was not hard to pick out. But the Jewish communities, too, were in close communication. There was a network, which sent messengers ahead to a friendly house. The chosen host could then take security measures; someone would come to fetch them outside the city gates and smuggle them into town in his covered wagon. There were as many possibilities as threats.

  In Orléans, the rabbi’s house serves as a yeshiva. There, David meets the renowned Rashi of Troyes, a colourful scholar who has come to discuss gardening, French idiom, Hebrew manuscripts and circumcision. They spend the night in the Jewish merchant’s home. Vigdis is given new clothes. She sits resting beside a well and feels love burning in her body – how far away her parents are, the quiet of their house, her first timid steps past the yeshiva in Rouen. In the evening, she walks along the riverside with David. Children play on the bank; fishermen with small nets wade in the shallows. A man plays a simple shawm; another beats a little drum. A pack of stray dogs lies beside the river, a drunk empties his bowels where the two of them were just sitting, a horsecart creaks onward through the dust. Mosquitoes, beetles, horseflies. The chaos of life surrounds them. They burn with exhaustion, itch with excitement. They sleep in separate rooms, prepared for them at the merchant’s bidding. In the morning, David slinks into her room and pounces on her as if famished. They are caught by a housemaid, who giggles and tries to join them. David holds her off; Vigdis lies still and thinks, Why do I see so many dark spots in the light?

  In the merchant’s house, she receives her first lessons in kashrut, the law prescribing how to prepare kosher food. She learns that animals may be eaten only if they chew their cud and have cloven hooves, and that she’s forbidden to boil a kid in its mother’s milk. She learns that there are two rinsing tubs, one for meat and one for milk, and two sets of dishes and cutlery. She also comes upon a strange new thing: a two-pronged fork, a rarity in those days, which shows that her host family is wealthy and well mannered. Laughing, she stabs the newfangled object into a morsel of goat’s cheese and brings it to her mouth. Nausea sweeps over her, she grabs the edge of the table to stay upright but is pressed down into a chair. The women around her whisper and shake their heads.

  Later, she is walking with a few Jewish women past the city’s Romanesque church. She feels a stabbing pain and wishes she could go inside the cool cathedral to pray. One woman says, ‘That’s for the goyim.’ Vigdis stares at the carvings of saints in the stone and tries not to think.

  While they’re on the subject of Christians, the woman says, ‘When my grandmother was a child, twelve heretics were burned alive here. It was the first public burning for heresy. The whole town still talks about it today.’ The story also lives on in the Jewish community. The men in question were distinguished clerics, and the debate at the tribunal is said to have been scholarly and impassioned. The piety and dignity of the accused led to confusion. Maybe the strange fervour of their faith was in fact the most threatening thing about them. Their beliefs must have resembled the doctrines of the later Cathars. They showed signs of theological rationality, taking the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body of Christ not as a literal truth but as a symbol, of denying the possibility that the Holy Spirit could enter a person at baptism, and of ruling out forgiveness after murder and manslaughter. They also rejected the idea – again, like the Cathars – that Christian marriage provided any divine sanction. The most fascinating thing about them may have been their vegetarianism; they believed it was unclean, and forbidden, to eat animals. Innocent of any ill will, they had thought of themselves as contributing to theological debate. In the end, the accused all confessed their heretical ideas. Outside, the crowd clamoured for their execution. They were thrown in a cell and, a few days later, brought to the edge of a forest outside the city, where they were locked in a wooden cage that was set on fire. The sight of those high-ranking churchmen screaming as they perished made a great impression on the common folk. Since that time, prominent Jewish citizens have been more careful, knowing how ea
sily tolerance can give way to hate and purges.

  Vigdis Adelaïs thinks of the changes in her own life. The story shocks her; when she asks for more explanation, the women shrug. A man with a hurdy-gurdy passes. The world seems menacing yet familiar, so close yet inscrutable. Not that she knows what that means – ‘inscrutable’. Those are not the terms in which she thinks. In her parents’ world, she is now a heretic. To her husband-to-be, she is a convert. It’s so hard to learn the prayers by heart, she blurts. The other women raise their eyebrows and ask if she can say a Jewish prayer. She stutters and stumbles; she gasps for air. One woman says she will never really be Jewish. Another takes her by the arm and says, ‘It’s late, let’s head for home.’ In that instant, Vigdis realises there’s only one person left in the world who can save her: the man who has put her beyond saving.

  After three days they have to go. They’ve heard there were knights in the city, asking about them – fortunately, they only went to Christian households, but you never know who may have noticed the couple on the banks of the Loire and thought they might meet the description. They are sent off with a mule, new clothes and sheets, a skin of wine, one pouch of dried meat and one of flour and matzos – back on the road, rushed and apprehensive, watchful and sticking close together, hurrying down dusty byways. The first heat of June hits them as they reach the road running south to the town of Bourges, across the marshes of Sologne. On the way there, they are stung many times by insects. They use an ointment given to them by the merchant’s wife; it makes them glisten, stinks and doesn’t help. They scratch themselves half mad in the hot nights under the naked sky, lying awake and listening to the cries of small wild creatures, smelling the penetrating odour of droppings nearby. Most of all, they listen for horses trotting past in the dark. Because of the heat, they haven’t built a fire to keep animals at bay; that would be too risky anyway. David has made a circle of pointed sticks around their sleeping place and draped animal skins over it. It surrounds them like a small, safe citadel, but they cannot sleep until the cold of morning comes. In Vigdis Adelaïs’s young belly, something is growing that she does not yet understand.