with Rabbi Aaron.”
“I figured out that part. But it would really help if I knew their names.”
Acosta looked at the gray sky. I followed his gaze and saw a faint trace of the sun’s rays glowing sideways across the rooftops.
“Some other time,” he said, pulling me from the line and telling me to go aloft and blow the horn that announces the end of the work day.
He cut me off when I started to protest.
“We can handle it without you, señor Benyamin. Besides, Rabbi Loew wanted you to cover the minkhe services, remember?”
“All right,” I said, “but promise me you won’t commit mass suicide till I get back. I wouldn’t want to miss out on that.”
It took him a moment to realize I was just kidding, then he almost cracked a smile.
“This isn’t the time for jokes.”
“No, it never is,” I agreed. “But it’s one of the tricks we use to survive, isn’t it? I bet you can still say a pretty good Ave Maria if you have to.”
My words lingered in the air between us. The empty space was filled with the heavy clunking of stone on stone. Our barrier was already two feet high and rising, but it still wasn’t big enough to be an effective defense against anything larger than a sewer rat.
I counted eleven stones before he said, “My family were conversos,” Acosta said. “You know what that means?”
“Sure.”
“No, you don’t. You can’t possibly know. You’re the original wandering Jew.”
“Aren’t we all?”
He looked at me. “Do you know what it is to love the place you were born? I mean really love it? Do you know what it means to dance with all the pretty girls at harvest time, and drink from the same barrel of cider as their fathers and brothers, and feel your heart swell with pride when the drummers come bearing the royal colors of His Majesty King Phillip, because he’s your king, too, and those are your colors as much as anyone else’s?”
“No, I don’t,” I admitted. “I guess I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere that much.”
“That’s right, you don’t.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“I had friends in the armada who fought in the battle at the Gulf of Lepanto. One of them died, another practically had his hand blown off. And three years later, the Turks took back almost everything we had fought for. It’s still in their hands. So much for our big sacrifice.”
I said, “Do you still have family back there?”
He looked down at the unmoving brick in his hands, leaving me to wonder what this man I had been thinking of as a free-spirited bachelor had left behind in the land that he loved so well.
“What the hell is this?” he said, as if he had just noticed the brick he was holding.
“Looks like we’re running out of stones already.”
“Then it’s time to start tearing up the streets and put those new paving stones to better use.”
I had a thousand questions about how we’d manage to accomplish that without more support from the townsfolk, but one look at the veins bulging in his temples silenced me on that subject.
“Take comfort, my brother,” I told him, laying my hand on his shoulder. “When the Messiah comes, he will re unite the tribes of Israel, and we’ll all be together again.”
“You’re telling me that we’re so divided, it’ll take a messiah to bring us together.”
“That’s one possible interpretation, I suppose—”
“There’s always another interpretation, newcomer. Now go blow that horn before my hot Spanish blood gets the better of me.”
MY BOOTS THUDDED UP THE worm-eaten steps as I climbed to the top floor of the tallest house on the Schwarzengasse carry ing the horn that heralds the coming of Shabbes slung over my shoulder. Away from all the street noise, from the toyhu vo-boyhu of the gutter, I finally found a moment to reflect about what Reyzl had said and done, and to let it sink in that it might actually be time to say the Rabbis’ Kaddish for our marriage, or what ever it was that we once had between us. Something that was once love, surely.
The aggadah says that when Adam was just formed from the earth, before he met Eve, before God breathed life and soul into him, he was a senseless clay figure called a golem. And that’s just what I felt like.
These thoughts flowed through me like a dark river, flooding my heart with memories of how good it was when we were