who hurls bottles against walls or rattles doors, or heaves ink pots into the air or throws things against a cellar floor. He lived as if he had no heart left. As if he had nothing in him, while I, day and night, talked of better times, of better things, of his marrying again, as he had lost his wife so many years ago, of his perhaps having another son.”
He stopped and shook his head. “Perhaps this was the wrong thing to suggest to him. Perhaps it wounded him more deeply than I supposed. All I know is that he kept his few precious articles to himself, his books to himself, and would never settle into the library or make himself at home with me at any repast. At last I gave up the idea of making him live in and enjoy this house as its proper occupant, and I went on back to my own, and came to see him as often as I could only to find him, often as not, in the cellar of all places, and reluctant to come up to me unless he was certain I was alone. The servants told me he had hidden his treasure in the cellar, and some of his most precious books.
“He was in essence a destroyed man. The scholar no longer existed in him. Memory was too painful for him. The present didn’t exist.
“Then came Holy Week as it does each year and those who were Jews in these streets shut up their doors as always and stayed within as the law requires. And the roughs of the neighborhood, the lowborn, the foolish, went about as always after the heated Lenten sermons heaving rocks at the houses of the Jews and cursing them for the killing of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
“I thought nothing of it as regards Giovanni because he was in one of my houses and I never expected the slightest harm would come to him, but on Good Friday night, I was called by my servants to go at once. The mob had attacked the house, and Giovanni had gone out to face them, weeping, howling in rage, hurling rocks at them as they hurled rocks at him.
“My guards struggled to put an end to the melee. I dragged Giovanni back inside.
“But Giovanni’s desperate actions had touched off a riot. Hundreds were pounding on the doors and the walls, threatening to tear the place apart.
“Now there are many hiding places in this house, behind paneled walls, off staircases which one might not discover for years. But the most secure place is in the cellar, beneath the stones in the middle of the floor.
“With all my strength, I dragged Giovanni down there. ‘You must hide,’ I told him, ‘until I can make this mob go away.’
“He was bloodied and bleeding, cut badly about the head and face. I don’t think he understood me. I lifted the false flags that conceal an underground storage space, and I forced him down into it, roughly and desperately, insisting he remain there until the danger was past. I don’t think he understood what was happening. He fought me madly. Finally I struck him a blow that made him go quiet. Like a child, he turned on his side and, pulling up his knees, put a hand over his face.
“It was then that I glimpsed his treasure and his books in this hiding place, and I thought, it is good these things are hidden, for the ruffians outside are about to breach the house.
“He was shaking and moaning as I put the stones back into place.
“The windows of the house were being broken, the door was being rammed again and again.
“Finally, surrounded by the servants, and armed as best I could be, I opened the door and told the mob that the Jew they sought was not here. I let the ringleaders in to see for themselves.
“I threatened them all with fierce retaliation if they dared harm one item of my property. And my guards and servants watched them as they roamed about the main rooms, down into the cellar and up through some of the bedchambers before finally leaving a good deal more quietly than they had come in. None of them had bothered with the top floor. They did not see the synagogue or the sacred books. What they wanted was blood. They wanted the Jew who had fought them and struck them, and that one they could not find.
“Once the