“Eliyahu, if it is my time, then it will come whether or not I am building a wall. The angel of death has his own calendar"

After cantering across flat ground for much of the afternoon, the horses have slowed to a trot, and the rhythm — da-dum, da-dum, da-dum — is helping Eliyahu make sense of his thoughts.

He tugs on the left rein and brings his gray piebald closer to Yannai’s stead. He catches the older man’s eyes, lowers his voice, and says, “We still do not know what we will do when we arrive.”

“True.” Yannai seems unconcerned.

Eliyahu bites his lip. “I…”

Yannai gives a nod. “You are filled with a sense of disquiet. You are not the only one, my friend. And it is not only because of the armed guard.”

Three men Leonora has sent, and the men do not know whether they are being protected or intimidated. The guards each wear long swords that bang against their small, round iron shields, making more noise than the horses’ canter.

“It is just… I have the feeling that we are traveling toward some kind of…” He takes a deep breath and forces himself to say it. “A disaster.”

The horses slow as they negotiate a crop of rocks. Behind them, the sun strokes their backs as it sinks down toward the horizon. Soon enough, they will search for shelter, or the guards will direct them to a nearby caravanserai. Eliyahu would prefer the stars as his ceiling. He feels choked, unsure of the choice that he made to come, unable to rid himself of his fury toward Leonora.

He cannot watch the scenery, or even enjoy the easy competence of his horse, a piebald who enjoys stopping and sniffing at herbs and lavender. Are they prisoners, riding to Jerusalem against their will? Or are they the generation’s heroes, gone to offer prayers at the site of the wall?

And what exactly will they be doing when they arrive?

Eliyahu draws close to Yannai. “With these escorts, we will need to think carefully about what we do when we arrive. I will not let you…”

His horse breaks out into a trot, and he pulls the reins, tighter than he should. The horse tosses its head in protest.

Yannai catches him up and puts an arm on his shoulder. “What? Build the wall? Lug the stones?” He flexes his arms in the air and winks. “Why ever not?”

Because if you do so, you will almost certainly be injured, and most likely die. Eliyahu cannot bring himself to say the words. He sets his face and allows the horse to carry him forward.

“Eliyahu, if it is my time, then it will come whether or not I am building a wall. The angel of death has his own calendar, and it has nothing to do with a woman in This World, no matter how wealthy and powerful. The angel of death, do not forget, is commanded only by the Almighty Himself.”

***

Leonora is about to stand, stretch, and get out of the small room that at times feels like a prison cell, when Amram enters and sets down a sheaf of papers in front of her. She looks up at him, eyes watering slightly from the day’s columns of figures and letters, read and written.

“Amram.”

He dips his head and takes a seat. So no chance of her standing and enjoying a small walk. He has worked on something — what was the latest project she has given him? — and expects acknowledgment.

He gestures to the papers. She picks them up and brings them close to her face, so she can smell the ink, and the letters cease to be a series of black loops and swirls, but resolve into letters and words.

“What have we here?” she asks.

“This.” He points at the papers with a flourish, clearly pleased with his accomplishments. “This is the beginning of our pamphlet. I have called it ‘Words of Redemption.’ There are essays here from the greatest of Tzfat, about the Wall of Jerusalem.”

She faces him, knowing that her surprise and pleasure will buoy him. She had not expected him to act so swiftly. She reads aloud at random.

“And as the wall is slowly erected, we hope and pray that the walls around our hearts will crumble and fall, and we enter fully into the reshut hayachid that is being formed.”

Amram leans forward. “You see, Mama, in this piece there is a play on the idea of reshut hayachid and reshut harabim. The Wall around Jerusalem will transform the territory into a private space, where we can be one with the Almighty.”

“I see.”

He leans forward and kindles the lamp on her desk, to aid her reading. “Mama?”

“Mmm.” She does not look up.

“Have you not heard back from Strasbourg? About the eyeglasses?”

She is touched by his concern. “They wrote back to me with a series of questions. I have to measure the distance at which words become clear, and measure also the size of these words. They have some formula that they use to calculate the strength of the lenses.”

“And?”

She shrugs.

“You have not taken the measurements.”

“Twice Ines tried. But each time, someone came in with an urgent dispatch.”

“I will send in Bellida. In the morning, when the light is good.”

She nods her thanks, opening her mouth to respond, but finding that her words are lodged in her throat. She blinks back the moisture in her eyes.

She skips over a few pages and looks at the title of the essay. “ ‘Chomot Habarzel.’ Iron walls. By the Kadosh Rav Shlomo Molcho.” She looks up sharply. “Why have you included this?”

“It was relevant, honorable Mama.”

Oh. He has reverted to addressing her formally. The moment between them, the concern about the glasses, it has gone, and the loss pinches her.

She softens her voice. “It is just that I would be weary of reminding the nation of the tumult of that time. It is not so long ago.”

“I understand.”

“Unless you think that the essay itself will provide so much hope and comfort that it outweighs the memories.”

She had received a letter from an eyewitness. A long, sprawling scroll, a line-by-line account. The smell. The flames: the height they reached, how they twisted and billowed out sparks as the wind gusted. How long it all took. She had forced herself to read it, not knowing why, but feeling that she owed it to him, somehow. As if it as a way of paying him back for the gift of hope he had given them all.

None of them had dreamed it would end that way.

They may have thought he was Mashiach, but in the end, he was no different than any other Jew from Spain: man, woman, or child, caught kindling the lights on a Friday night.

“Leave this with me, Amram. I will read it in its entirely.”

“Of course.” He stands, and she gathers the papers into a bundle.

“You have done fine work, Amram,” she says as he leaves, not knowing if her words will mean anything to him at all.

She blows out the lantern and takes the papers with her as she leaves the house. She walks down the road in the fading light and settles in her corner in the soup kitchen. A servant brings her a bowl of soup, and she savors the pungent flavor, while she skims through the papers. Two essays written from a halachic angle. Another about the prophecy mentioned in Zecharyah, who talks about the Walls of Fire.

It is a tedious enough essay, a shame that the author did not quote the wisdom of Don Isaac Abarbanel, one who knows how ash falls on the skin of one’s hand.

She puts down the bundle, taps it with her fingernail. Amram has done well; though speedy, his work was thorough. Each essay from a personage who is widely respected.

So what is it? What is missing?

She looks up at the wall, sees the embroidery on the wall: pomegranates in lush pink streaked with yellow. The man’s dead wife made this. Eliyahu. She stands up and stares.

She was harsh with him. Well, she had been drinking, and wine always brings out her worst self. She sighs. She regrets speaking as she did, threatening to take away his house. He is a sweet man, though probably too much constituted by the element of earth. There is a lethargy to him, a sadness, that she cannot countenance.

Still, he did not deserve her threat.

She rubs her head and thinks for a minute. Suddenly, it comes to her. She springs up and walks across the room to the wooden chest that sits in the corner. It is filled with papers, but she knows exactly what she seeks; it is what she found when she first came.

The man writes poetry.

She pulls out a piece of parchment and unrolls it. Here. She remembers now.

When the ships final set sail from foreign lands

When we left behind the graves of our dead ancestors and the books of tomorrow

When the tears mingled with the ocean spray

When we declared: The Rock, His deeds are righteous

We knew, You have sent us away, surely, so that being lost, we can find You.

She nods. It is the perfect addition to Amram’s book. Feelings. Yearning. Something to touch the readers’ hearts and open them to Redemption. She smiles as she adds Eliyahu’s poem to the pile.

As well, it will be her way of making amends.

 ***

The man who leans over Bilhah’s desk has a great turban draped in chains of gold, with a large ruby pinned to the front. The first time she saw him she did not know if he was Jew or Muslim. She has never seen a Jew look like this, but word has that the man in charge of building the wall is a great Egyptian Jew, Abraham Castro.

She quickly hands him his dispatches, and he nods and disappears.

Here in the work tent, they do everything. The place is constantly full, and most of the jobs fall to the women: her and Elvira, and three more women who have come from Istanbul.

Elbows and shoulders, voices and demands, coins. Elvira writes slips and signs them and the workers clutch them as they go to the money tent to receive the coins to pay the rent. The wall is bringing prosperity to old, destitute Jerusalem. Just when they thought she was like an old woman who has sunk into poverty until it has become her comfort and her identity, she is helped to her feet, and little girls gather to bang out the dust from her faded skirts.

The workers need to eat, which means the women have jobs preparing food and the little boys have pockets filled with coins from loading and unloading the sacks of flour, brought to Jerusalem from the storehouses of Alexandria. The camels that brought them also need to be fed and housed, which is more cash for those who do not mind the animal stench.

It is like the whole city is taking a great exhale, after a prolonged holding of its breath; the hollow in its belly no longer stabs with pain. There is food and money and sound, too — the ringing of the iron hammers as they shoe new horses and the crack of stone and wooden rollers that move the stones from the quarry or the pile of discarded ruins, to the site of the building.

With its newfound good fortune, as well, come the pickpockets. The petty thieves who want a loaf of bread or a coin to buy a glass of wine — forbidden by their Muslim masters, but knock on any Jewish door and they’ll be happy to sell you a mugful.

The pickpockets bring the thieves and the thieves bring the bandits, who bring more wealth, for now there is a job for ironmongers who come from Alexandria to put bolts on the doors of the wealthy, though the poor still have no money for this, and they wonder if they are worse off now. For before, they did not know where tomorrow’s bread would come from, simply relying on the Almighty as the 100 prophets relied that Eliyahu would send a flock of ravens to bring them bread. But now, they go to sleep with money for tomorrow’s bread under their pillows, but do not know if they will wake up to hear their daughters’ screams and an intruder in the house.

There is expensive wood for the bandits to steal, should they wish to do so, and maybe they can take over an abandoned building or two, which were worthless before, but now that the city has a wall, now that the city has businesses, will quickly come up in value. And there are places to hide — work tents and between the great mounds of stone and rock hefted up from the quarry, and the quarry itself — not too far away from the city, and at night it is a good place to bed down, provided you have a good set of lungs.

For Bilhah and Elvira in the work tent, it means that they do not have one job but 100. Each day, Bilhah arrives at her desk longing to simply go outside and walk around the wall. To see what they are building and make some kind of sense of it in her mind and thought.

But instead, every day her hand aches from writing and her eyes from reading and her head from all the decisions that must be made: where workers will sleep, how much they will eat, to which shift they are assigned.

Often, at night, she and Elvira complain to each other. Where is everyone? Where are all the workers needed to manage all of this? But no matter how they protest to each other, each morning they are back in the work tent, solving problems and issuing orders.

For if they do not do it, there is no one else.

to be continued...

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 825)