“Wait here.”

Eliyahu jumps down into the cave, then turns and looks up at Yannai, sitting at the entrance. Should he ask him to fall into his arms? Is he strong enough to catch the old man?

He thinks quickly. He pulls out the thick sheep pelt and spreads it over the floor, covering it with another layer of dried grass. If Yannai falls, he will have a soft landing.

“Now, jump into me.” Eliyahu instructs, lifting his arms over his head and motioning to Yannai to grip them.

Yannai nods. He leans forward, swings himself from the entrance and in a second, he is there, on the floor, his fall broken by Eliyahu’s grasp. They are both winded, but Yannai throws his head back and starts to laugh.

“How, just tell me how, I will ever get out of here?”

Eliyahu freezes, but Yannai clutches his arm, and rocks back and forth, great laughs rumbling from him, echoing through the cave, until Eliyahu finds himself smiling along with him. And then they are both standing, looking up at the entrance and then pointing at their bruised and scratched limbs and Yannai is fairly cackling, doubled over, and Eliyahu feels the unlikelihood of it all, no, the impossibility, and suddenly, he is laughing, too.

When they calm, Eliyahu helps Yannai to sit down on the rock ledge that he calls his bed, covered as it is in a sheep pelt.

Yannai looks around. “If I were feeling a bit better, I would be prowling around this place, to see it.”

“There is not much to see.”

“But this is what you have instead of a house.”

He wants to say, actually, I have a house, too. But why say anything at all? He is still not used to the noise he makes when he begins to talk.

Eliyahu watches the other man’s bright eyes explore and appraise. The cave is deep enough, but at the end, the ceiling and floor almost converge. There is a fissure, there, bringing in strange gusts of air, which are sometimes cold and sometimes damp, depending on the season. At one time, a gray dove nested in the space between rock and roof, but it left last winter and has not returned. It was a mess, the dove, but when it left, Eliyahu felt unaccountably alone.

“Rav Yannai, please, I beg you. Rest. Lie down. Close your eyes. And stop the questions.”

Yannai pulls a blanket over him. “But why? They keep my mind off the pain. It is a chesed to let me ask questions.”

Eliyahu folds his arms around himself. “It is not a chesed to be asked them.”

“I come across a strange arrangement — a Jew living like a hunted wolf — and I want to know: Does he think he is a wolf, or does he think that he is hunted?”

“Neither of the two. I came here to find the peace that eluded me in the town.”

“Mmmm. Then we are the same. For this is why I stepped out, over the hills and mountains and up this steep cliff that led me to you.”

Eliyahu feels himself clenching the back of his teeth. “We are not the same. You do not know anything about me.”

Yannai yawns and closes his eyes. “Oh, I disagree. I know that you were willing to send an old man, an injured man, into the hills rather than to bring me here. That is how eager you are to keep this hidden. And then you ask me why I ask so many questions.”

***

It is dark tonight. No moon. The clouds hide the stars and a drizzle of freezing rain leaks from the sky. Leonora throws open the wooden shutters of her bedroom and peers out, pressing herself against the thick stone wall and twisting her neck in the hope of seeing the moon.

Honorable lady, why have you come to Tzfat?

Why does anyone come to Tzfat? Because they are thrown out of one place, and then another, and then a third place begins with its evil decrees and in a fourth place there is no community and in a fifth place there is no money. We come to Tzfat because there is nowhere left.

And Jerusalem?

Jerusalem strikes too much fear. Jerusalem is a city of fire. Tzfat is the city of air, and it is the place where we go when we can no longer breathe.

She closes her eyes and breathes in the cold air.

Or is it because there are clear, bright mornings in Tzfat? It is a place where you can see the valleys, you know that the lowliness exists, but like an eagle, you can fly above it.

She stretches out her hands, catches the rain in her palm, then brings her palm to her mouth and tastes the rain with her tongue.

If only it were wine. If only there was not water that fell from the sky, but wine and honey and sugar-coated nuts dusted with cinnamon. And mahn, like the Jews in the wilderness, why not those pearly white seeds of Heavenly love?

Instead, there are clouds of gray and rain and rabbis sitting in your dining room asking questions, waving suspicions, asking if she, too, had been polluted by the church.

The wind changes direction and icy needles of rain fall on her, wetting her sleeve, the blanket that is pulled around her. She closes her eyes and stands still, hating the rain, but unmoving. It was raining like this the night her parents fled Lisbon.

The rabbis’ voices echo through her head. And you traveled with them, Donna Leonora?

With a shaking hand, she pours herself a glass of wine and sips.

She was, what? Fourteen years old, but already a mother and a widow. She remembers that his eyes looked too big for his face, but his face has faded. She has not thought of him for years. They were children, just children — maybe those big eyes wanted to take in all that he would miss in his short life.

So simple, so easy it is to dismiss others. Did you leave Portugal? How dare they? Anger fills her so she is no longer cold, though the rain is soaking through her blanket to her skin.

Yes, rain gives life, but it also blocks out the sun and she is greedy, she has always been greedy — why not the two together? Why not warmth and beauty and fecundity, why does not every drop of rain fall on a spot on the soil where a seed will grow? So much rain, so much suffering, and so much of it wasted, come to nothing. The rain falls, but the earth is a cracked, howling wasteland, home to jackals and vultures.

***

They were not in Lisbon, exactly, but in a village, half a day’s journey away, where a convoy of fishing boats wait for them: a boat for Mama and Papa, one for the servants, another for the possessions that were not conveyed by road. They will set sail, first to France and there, they will board a ship to Italy, and from there, who knows.

She stands on the shore, the night so dark that she can scarcely see and the rain so strong that she could not make out where the sea began. She could only smell it, brine and fish, mixed with something rotten. She had dipped her face, hidden it in the bundle that was in her arms, and instead, breathed in the smell of newborn.

It was spring then, too, but the roads were still icy, and the sea rough, as if winter had decided never to leave.

The baby is only a month old and all of her still aches, although Mama says it will get better. Not that Mama knows, for she employed a wet nurse, but of course, everything has changed.

And then her mother leans close and there is the smell of her, lavender and Mama, and then she says, “If you come with us, the baby will not survive.”

And all of a sudden, her mother is in the boat, and she is on the shore, her babe in her arms, and Ines, the oldest of the family servants beside her.

She runs forward, toward the boat, toward her family, but her mother calls out.

“No, Leonora,” she shouts. “The babe will not survive the passage. You must stay here until she is stronger and then you will join us and find us.”

She holds out her hand, a wordless stop that Leonora obeys, because she has always obeyed her mother, she has always worshipped her.

How will she find them? She does not know. None of them do.

She refills her wine glass, gulps now, so that the sweet wine hits the back of her throat. It stings and she swallows, then drinks again.

The cold of the outdoors, of the rain, flows in. And look, now there is hail — a fool’s snow, stones thrown at them from heaven, why not? It does not touch her, though if she looks down at her hand, so strange that it belongs to her, this hand — her hands are shaking. But she is warm inside, she could go outside, so that there is nothing between her and the rain. She has a strange urge to soak herself through so it is as if she is part of the wetness, perhaps it will melt her and she will disappear. But she will not disappear, even if she tries, for she is here, here, and filled up with a mixture of exultance and poison.

She had stood there, and no tears had fallen, but inside was a revolt against the world. An anger that burned in her against her parents for abandoning her, and if she is honest — maybe she can be honest, 40 years later, but maybe not, because though the tears did not fall then, they fall now, mixed with hail and icy raindrops — anger against the bundle she held close.

The eyes, unknowing. Stupid. The cheeks, mottled and pink and ugly. The sheer helplessness of the baby who has rendered her helpless, too. She sags, suddenly, under the weight of the baby, the rain, the fury, and then it turns against herself. She should be able to pull that boat back to shore with the force of her eyes. She should be able to sink it with the power of her rage. But it does not sink, it just moves along through the waves, bobbing left and right, tossing and turning and moving further and further away into the sea.

Until then, she had never known anything darker than the night. But now she sees that the sea is darker still.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 795)