The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler

make a sound when it knocked at the door to Simon’s store. Of course, it did. Shutters opened above. A bearded man in a wide-brimmed blue hat peered out. It was Master João, Simon’s landlord and an Old Christian. “Stop that banging!” he shouted.
    “I don’t know if you remember me…Master Abraham Zarco’s nephew. I’ve come for Simon Eanes. I need to find him. Is he in?”
    “You’re two hours late. The Dominicans came for him. Slit open his belly, then dragged him away toward…” He flipped his hand in the direction of the smoke ribboning above the Rossio. “Now go away. You’d be in hiding if you had any sense!”
    “He’s dead then?”
    “Do you have eyes, you idiot! You see the smoke. That’s him. Nowget away from me, you Marrano dog, before the Dominicans come for me as well!” The shutters slammed closed.
    On walking away, the names of the three remaining threshers were whispered inside me as if summoning me into a biblical wilderness: Samson the vintner, Diego the printer and Father Carlos.
    I would have to find Samson next; his wife Rana, an old friend from the neighborhood, would not be able to hide the truth from me. If he’d come home soaked in Uncle’s blood, her eyes would give the truth away.
     
    Rossio Square opened like an infected wound maggoted with swarms of shouting people. They crowded around trapped carriages, traced their way through the great arcades of the All Saint’s Hospital, leaned laughing across balconies and window sills. Gulls circled overhead, calling in shrieks. A man in rags was dancing with crusted sores oozing yellow on his feet. “Bit by a tarantula!” a leather-skinned old woman shouted at me. “Can’t stop, even for this!” She laughed, then gagged with a hag’s cough.
    Above the heads of the crowd, columns of dark smoke were rising in front of the Dominican Church.
    It was the heat of emotion that drew me forward. To have turned then would have been like walking away from God himself. Or the Devil at his moment of attack. Only saints have that kind of power.
    Suddenly, I saw Master Solomon the goldsmith at the edge of the chaotic crowd. His hands pinned behind his back by a burly giant with a blacksmith’s muscular sheen. Shit smeared in his hair, across his neck. A grimace of recognition for me trembling his legs. His darting eyes begged for me to run. I imagined his voice: “Now, Berekiah, before it’s too late!”
    Pushed forward, he was suddenly swallowed by the swarm.
    I dove in after him, was carried by a sudden surge toward the center. A terror that I would find my family captured at the core of this mob pervaded me. And yet, a heat akin to sexual desire took my strength. Passed ahead, endlessly, like falling through the arms of a dream, there was suddenly space. A pyre. Crackling with flame. Orange and green tendrils unfurling toward the roof of the church. In the bell tower, a Dominican friar with a bloated goiter holding a severed head out to the crowd on the tip of a sword, exhorting the rabble in a raging voice: “Kill the heretics! Kill the devilish Jews! Bring the Lord’s justice upon them! Make them pay for their crimes against the Christian children! Make them …”
    The fire was giving off a terrible heat as it fed on the mass of Jewish bodies with which it had been gifted. Numb, far beyond thought, I stared until I recognized Necim Farol the interpreter and moneylender seeming to peer out at me through a window of flame. His head was charred black, he had white fish-eyes. To spare myself, I lowered my gaze, but there by my feet was the head of Moses Almal the ropemaker resting like a bust of John the Baptist atop a liquid crimson platter. All around the perimeter of the pyre were pools of blood from which bodies were growing.
    Seconds or maybe minutes later, for such a scene defies sequential memory, Almal’s head was swooped up and carried off by a bearded, racing figure.
    As I followed his mad dash through the crowd, a