Long before the birth of my mother, in the days of the peacemaker Alfonso the Wise, the wife of the barrio apothecary died giving birth to a girl. The baby was born as smooth and as bald as any other child. But by the morning of her naming day, she had grown a full head of thick hair, as golden as late summer on the palmettos. She was named Zehava, “golden” in Hebrew, the holy language of the Jews. Golden and slender, she was admired and coveted by all the families in the barrio on behalf of their unmarried infant sons.
But her father had other suitors in mind for the girl who had replaced his wife in body and spirit. As the date of her maturity drew near, he became increasingly certain that life without Zehava would lose all flavor. To have her nearby, within the walls of Córdoba, would make his thirst all the more grating. The apothecary resolved to visit a distant cousin, a wealthy olive merchant, in the hillside town of Ventas del Carrizal, a full seven days by horseback from Córdoba, with the aim of marrying his daughter to the merchant’s son.
Zehava sang good-bye to the Córdoba of her golden youth, to the river Guadalquivir, to the orange trees of the mosque, the garlic and oil of the barrio. They set off eastward—on one side her father, on the other her late mother’s sister, the horse-toothed Penina.
On erev Shabbat they arrived at the market town of Alcaudete and shared the evening meal with the rabbi’s family. The rabbi had many harsh things to say about the cousin in Ventas del Carrizal, particularly about his lack of piety. His wife was more realistic.
“It is hard to be a Jew these days,” she said. “The Nasrids”—for they were the particular Muslims in power—“are less inclined than others to let the Jews of Alcaudete pray at the synagogue. Many find it easier to stay in the hills and pray at home.”
“We know what that leads to,” said the rabbi. “Prayers get shorter and excuses longer—the cows must be milked, the hay must be stored before the rain, the merchant insists on paying me on Saturday. Lo and behold, you turn around one Shabbat and find yourself behind an ox, while your sons are throwing dice next to the cute little Moorish fountain you built to keep up with the ibn-Mohammeds on the finca next door. Before you know it, you are no longer a Jew.”
“You are always a Jew,” the rabbi’s wife said, “before you know it and afterward, too.” The rabbi grumbled and poured more wine. The rabbi’s wife smiled at the apothecary. “Your cousin’s son is tall and handsome.”
“As long as he has his health.” Penina pinched the virgin Zehava, with the grin of a fifteen-hand mare.
Refreshed by a full day of rest, the three followed a Moorish servant up a narrow road cut into the purple hills to the olive groves of Ventas del Carrizal. As they climbed, the ground grew darker and richer, the trees older and more elemental. The road twisted up above the clouds, and the heavy-hearted apothecary thought truly he was carrying his only joy to join her mother in another world.
As evening fell, they came upon the large stone farmhouse of the apothecary’s cousin, a gloomy rock, just shy of the top of a windy hill. A single light shone from the stables, and the servant soon established that the cousin and his son were on a ride about the estate and would return well after the guests were in bed. The apothecary, golden-haired Zehava, and the horse-toothed Penina took a quick cold supper—to the grumblings of the servant, who hadn’t counted on extra duty—and were shown to comfortable, if drafty, rooms at the top of the house.
In the middle of the night, Zehava was awakened by the sound of hooves and rose from her bed, careful not to disturb the snoring Penina. In an olive-hued moonlight that made her golden hair sparkle and light up the courtyard, Zehava watched two men dismount, one large and irritable, the other the very description of youthful beauty she had heard from the rabbi’s wife. Joseph, for that was the son’s name, turned to the glimmer at the window and looked up full at Zehava. The light from his perfect smile, the brilliance of her golden hair, the spring glow of the moon—the apothecary’s trip was a success.
It was customary for the fathers of both bride and groom to come to a mutual agreement before the first meeting of the young couple. And so, early the next morning, the apothecary sent Zehava and her duenna off on a ride through the olive groves in the care of the Moorish servant. Young Joseph, however, bred outside the orthodoxy of city Jews, was determined to speak with the golden-haired beauty he had seen so brilliantly framed the night before. Once his father and cousin were well into negotiations, he led the quietest gelding from the stable by the forelock and slid out of the courtyard.
The trail was easy to follow in the deep purple of the olive groves—three fresh tracks, one considerably lighter, one considerably deeper. Joseph rode at a trot up the hill, circling around below the crest, hoping to catch an unnoticed glimpse of his betrothed before displaying himself.
But the glimpse he caught horrified him beyond his darkest imaginings. There, at the top of the hill, half a dozen mountain ponies, topped by Muslim bandits from the neighboring kingdom of Granada, shuffled their hooves in the purple earth. His beloved Zehava lay bound and gagged in front of one bandit, her duenna trussed and flung across the saddle of her own horse like two jars of olive oil. His Muslim servant stood smiling, pocketing his reward from the leader of the bandits. With no thought of the numbers, Joseph charged. But the bandits, whose expertise was stealth, not swordplay, turned on their heels and galloped with their female cargo through the pass to safety, down into the lush green plain of Granada.
At that time, Granada was ruled by a young Muslim prince who loved music more than war and beauty more than justice. He lived high on a hill in the great walled city called the Alhambra, the red fortress of the Moors—two dozen towers surrounding two magnificent palaces, fountains and pools leading into vineyards and gardens, gardens of grapes and flowers stretching to the horizon. His warriors were the bravest on the peninsula, his musicians the most tasteful. His harem, for he had more than one hundred wives, was an inspiration of fantasy. He had, in the course of his tender years, collected women, placed them under his protection, without regard to any classical ideal of beauty but as the God of the Flood chose the animals of the new world—one female of each type. There were, to be sure, strikingly tall and slender brunettes of the sort favored by the Moors. But there were also short girls, fat girls, blind girls, mute girls, girls lacking limbs, girls lacking hair, dwarfs, albinos, jug-eared, horse-toothed, birthmarked, cross-eyed girls with six fingers on each hand, girls with three breasts, webbed toes, mustaches and side-burns, girls of an age and disposition to suit only the most extreme tastes, and as many cross-combinations and permutations as the design of the Alhambra would allow. Mohammed el-Hayzari—Mohammed the Left-Handed, for that was his tragedy—lived within the walls of his fortress. His imagination traveled unbound.
It was not by accident that the bandits brought the shaken Zehava and her thrashing duenna to the gates of the Alhambra. Spies along the road to Córdoba had sent word to Mohammed’s majordomo that a golden-haired Jewish girl was to be found traveling in the direction of Granada. The majordomo dropped a hint, through a zealous lieutenant who was anxious to make an impression on his prince, that this particular feminine type was missing from the harem of the Alhambra. The lieutenant, of course, was instructed to neither cross the pass into Castile nor use the soldiers of Mohammed to bring this girl—for Mohammed, aesthete that he was, would marry a girl only if she came to him freely. But this brand of transportation had been effected before, and no more than a nod of the head in a certain tavern was needed to assure deniability.
When news of the girl’s arrival reached the perfumed ears of Mohammed, the king rushed from his harem to a hiding place between the marble columns of the Court of the Lions. Zehava was escorted into the courtyard, dignified and composed, surrounded by the triumphant majordomo and seven of his best men. The golden hair, the olive moon of a green-eyed face, the lightness and radiance of the girl, moved el-Hayzari beyond the momentary thrill of a mere collector. He fell in love. Beneath his beard he uttered a vow to his god, Allah, that should he be blessed with the love of Zehava, he would abandon his harem and divide his faith between his god and his wife alone.
No sooner had the prayer left his lips than a wail rose from the depths of Zehava’s soul that sent all the doves of the Alhambra rising like a column of smoke from a burning field of cane. She had seen the famous Fountain of the Lions, ten lions supporting a stone pool. There before her, the ten lost tribes of the Jews confronted her misery, manes bristling and teeth bared.
“O Israel,” she cried, “have you led me through the desert only to return me to Egypt?” for she could see no other reason for her seizure and transportation to the sultan of the Alhambra than a repetition of the biblical story of the enslavement of the Jews. So powerful, so piercing, was her wail that it drew the lips back from the gums of the stone lions and left the Muslim guards weeping, their hands over their ears to protect their delicate brains. Zehava seized that moment of confusion and leapt into the fountain, hoping to breathe the leonine waters into her lungs and find the freedom she had so recently lost.
No one knows if it was Allah who heard Mohammed’s prayer or the God of the Jews, who was not yet ready to receive Zehava’s golden head. But no sooner had the girl jumped than the transparent waters evaporated. No sooner had her feet left the ground than she found her thighs and her back supported by the arms of Mohammed the Left-Handed.
The king said nothing. Nor did he suffer the terrified girl the look of rattled astonishment that sparked from his eyes. He swept Zehava from the Court of the Lions before his guards had regained their feet, and spirited her to a private chamber in the ornate Tower of the Laurel, high above the ravine of the musical waters of the river Darro. He dispatched his harem straightaway and called for his majordomo to find a guide to the heart of the heart of his desires.
The resourceful Hussein Baba was, as always, several steps ahead of his master. He had seen in the duenna Penina much more than the body of a cow and the spleen of an ox. She was the key to the manners of her golden-haired charge. If the key could be turned, the door would pivot on its hinge like a weathervane.
Hussein Baba was a modern man. Arguments of faith and reason bored him. Take away the trappings of faith, the mosques and the synagogues, the cathedrals of the barbaric Christians, the names of Allah and Jehovah and Jesus Christ, the rituals, the diets, the wafers and the wines, and all that remained was a single god—Fear. Reason fared no better. Reason was merely another one of the thousands of unpronounceable names of God, and argument merely a way to ignore death. He knew with the certainty that comes of long service that manners were all. Lead the right cow down a flower-strewn path and the rest were sure to follow. Thus he wooed Penina, whose mouth was so well suited to grazing.
Within the year, on a single, windless summer sunset, Sultana Zehava gave Mohammed el-Hayzari three beautiful daughters, born three minutes apart. Kelila was the name of the eldest, Hebrew for the laurel wreath that crowns those who win the race. Kadia was the second—“pitcher,” the vessel of water in the desert, wine in the temple. Last to emerge was Kima, whose full head of golden curls, dewy with the liquid of her elder sisters, sparkled like the Pleiades. Three girls, with three Hebrew names. For Mohammed, in the wonder of his love for Zehava, had named his daughters in the language of prophets older than Islam.
Golden-haired Zehava did not survive the sun. To the melody of the river Darro, she died with an infant daughter at each breast, Kima in the arms of the husband she had grown to love with a passion that approached faith. Even the garrulous Penina was struck dumb by the beauty of her passing, and the radiance of the change of fate that had led her from the purple grove of olives to the Tower of the Laurel.
It took a full year to dry the eyes of Mohammed and show him the beauty of his beloved wife in the three gifts she had left him. Kelila flaunted the boldness of the firstborn, pushing aside all obstacles, furniture, sisters, to reach a treasured toy on the far side of the room. Kadia’s beauty flowed gently from her mother’s green eyes, and sought out the most colorful flowers, the most brilliant gems, for her playthings.
In the legends of the Jews, Kima—the Pleiades, the seven sisters of the sky—is wisdom itself. And behind the gentleness and timidity that allowed her sisters, older only by a matter of minutes, to crawl ahead or win the heavy breast of the wet nurse, shone a thoughtfulness, an intelligence that calculated the future before moving an inch.
On the morning of the first birthday of the princesses, Hussein Baba reminded Mohammed that it was well past the customary time for the court astrologers to prophesy the future of the three precious daughters. Mohammed lifted his left hand in a way that neither forbade nor encouraged his majordomo. But within minutes, he found himself back in the dusty, uninhabited Tower of the Laurel with Penina and the three girls. Three soothsayers stood at the three windows, one for each girl, each bearing his own charts of the sun, the stars, the planets, each clothed in a flowing robe, an endless beard, and the scent of rare, fragrant essences and woods.
All morning, and well into the afternoon, they examined the infants for moles, dimples, birthmarks, and compared the markings with their charts. Kelila wailed for the breast, Kadia cried for the glass beads around the astrologers’ necks. But golden-haired Kima only wrinkled her tiny brow and held her father’s small finger, as if she in her infant wisdom knew the answer and was merely putting the wise men to the test.
Finally, as the same summer sun cast its last breath into the Tower of the Laurel, a voice was heard in the room. It seemed at first to emanate from the mouths of the three astrologers. But the sweetness of the voice, its gentle timbre, its desolate concern, told all within that the spirit of their late golden-haired queen was still among them. “O King, Prince of Granada, Star of the Alhambra, my Faithful Mohammed,” the voice began. “You are thrice blessed in your loneliness and thrice cursed. You will need three times the care and three times the luck to see our daughters through to three fortunate marriages. Let them play now in the freshness and innocence that fed me as a girl in my beloved Córdoba. But take care when they reach their thirteenth year. Entrust their days and their nights to no one but yourself, lest they be carried off and gain a husband only to lose a father, as I lost mine.”
The voice ceased, the mouths of the wise men shut. Poor horse-toothed Penina began to bray with the fear of those impure souls who have some petty misdemeanor to hide from ghosts. But the left-handed Mohammed smiled for the first time in a year. For a moment, the sun paused in its accustomed descent and gave him the additional daylight to carry on.
The girls blossomed under the watchful eye of their mother’s duenna. They passed their summers chasing cool shadows on the slopes of the Alhambra, their winters on the warm rocks below Mohammed’s Mediterranean castle. Kelila’s headstrong courage shaped her into a long-muscled, determined young woman who could outrun the palace guard by the time she turned nine. Kadia embellished the castle at Salobreña with her works of art, her green eyes tracing the unique variation between one flower and its sister, one snowflake and its cousin, onto paper, onto cloth, into olivewood.
But deep seriousness led the youngest princess, Kima, to a silver lute she begged her father buy from a wandering minstrel. Even in her earliest years, when she could play only the simplest children’s tunes, the essence of music recognized a kindred spirit and swam to the surface of the strings to meet her fingertips.
And so the years passed.
Mohammed el-Hayzari was examining the rich cane fields of the vega one morning from the heights of the Alcazaba when a messenger arrived from the Mediterranean castle of Salobreña. A note from the horse-toothed Penina congratulating him on the birthday of his three daughters lay atop a basket woven with the eight-pointed star of the Moors. Within the basket, on a beach of Mediterranean sand, sat a peach, an apricot, and a nectarine, all dewy and lightly dimpled, firm and tempting in their barely ripened sweetness.
The message was clear. The time Zehava had warned of had arrived. The girls dangled precariously from the orchard of childhood. They had reached marriageable age. The time of surrogate custodians and duennas had passed. Mohammed must himself protect the fruits of his passion. He galloped down to Salobreña with his house guard, twenty of the best. At dawn the next day, the girls bade farewell to their seaside nursery and set saddle with their faithful duenna for the return to the Alhambra.
Mohammed praised the foresight of his wife. Connoisseur that he was, he had never before seen feminine beauty more delicately poised, more primed to burst the skin of innocence. Still, it made his too-fond father’s heart ache to watch the tears of Kelila fall on the waves she would race no more, to see Kadia’s green eyes moisten for the blue of the sky, the gray of the sea, search for a last glimpse of the changeable line where the two met at the horizon. But none could remain downcast long, as happy Kima, with her lute as companion, sprung lightly astride her horse and, with her instrument bound firmly around her shoulders, strummed a mountain march that set the horses prancing and the guards laughing.
At noontime, with the last view of the sea behind them, the party paused to water their horses at a mountain pool. They were about to remount when a most strange and beautiful sound arose. At first it bore the timbre of a woman’s voice, and the left-handed heart of Mohammed, in a state of heightened emotion since receiving the basket of fruit, leapt in the hope of another glimpse of his golden-haired love.
But more miraculous, the melody drifted off the sounding board of the silver lute of Kima, plucked by no finger, hanging, at a distance from its mistress, from the branch of an ancient olive tree. The song was low and mournful, a single melody weaving its spell around a single thread. And though the sound was certainly that of a string vibrating, a human soul seemed just on the edge of making itself manifest, showing its human face, its human mouth, its human voice.
Kelila was the first to break the spell. “Sisters,” she said, “can’t you see, it’s just the breeze that makes the lute of Kima sing like a woman.” And indeed, her sprints with the wind, her hours of riding on the whims and eddies of the offshore breeze along the cliffs of Salobreña, made her the likeliest authority on the mystical properties of air.
“But, sister,” Kadia replied, “can’t you feel how motionless the day is, how the leaves of the olive trees hang like iron spurs, as if the sun had tired of its daily ride and the trees had ceased to grow?” None could question the eye of Kadia.
Kima said nothing but unhooked the lute from the olive tree and looped the leather strap over her head and beneath the full length of her golden hair. Her companion played its mournful music with an uncommon depth and urgency. The strap tugged at her neck with a force that pulled her past a turn in the road, out of sight of her father, her sisters, her beloved sea.
Even Mohammed el-Hayzari, whose court enjoyed the services of no fewer than two dozen astrologers, needed a moment to shake off the spell of the magical lute and mount his horse in pursuit of his youngest daughter. So hot was his panic that he nearly rode her down in the middle of the road. For there she stood, looking down on a small village, no more than twenty or so buildings. From the center of the hamlet, from a fieldstone meeting house, a procession of bearded figures wound through the streets. They were singing, praying. The sound of their dirge, the very melody of the lute, cried up the hill to Mohammed and his daughters.
“Ah,” cried Penina, grasping the stirrup of Mohammed more from fatigue than disrespect.
“What is it?” Mohammed shook her off with some impatience. “Speak! Do you understand the meaning of this procession?” When Penina had swallowed enough air—and indeed her face most resembled the snout of a draft horse when she struggled to catch her breath—she explained the mystery with a single word:
“Jews!”
Tears poured down the long jaws of Penina of Córdoba. She remembered her long-forgotten Judería, she remembered her friends and family, the familiar songs, the tasty dishes, the Shabbat rituals—the holiest of which she was breaking by traveling on this Shabbat. She remembered her mother and her mother’s mother and the religion she had deserted on the far bank of the river Guadalquivir. Penina squinted at the sun and guessed the date—the anniversary of the destruction of the temple of the Jews in the holy city of Jerusalem, twice razed to the ground on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av. For the song that reached out from the hearts of the Jews to the silver strings of the lute of Kima was the deep lamentation of the holy day Tisha B’Av, the unrelenting “Al Naharot Bavel”:
By the rivers of Babylon,
Where the waters flowed down,
And yea we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Led by the lute of Kima and the three princesses, the brown-skinned el-Hayzari with his retinue of forty warriors and a single horse-faced duenna, a Muslim river, as richly striped as the Tigris, swirled down the side of the hill, powerless to fight the current of its musical curiosity. And like her sister, the Jewish Euphrates trod its steady course, the three young sons of the schoolteacher at the crest, boys the day before, men on the Ninth of Av, having that day read from the Torah for the first time—as you did yesterday morning, my Eliphaz, my young man, before the assembled braves of the Mayaimi. Those two great rivers met in the valley and spread out into the marshy ground of open-mouthed youthful fascination, as great rivers are inclined to do. The resultant flood, with its deep, searching looks and shy curiosity was, as you may guess, every bit as violent and fertile as the golden delta of Babylon.
The walls had been breached, the inner courtyard defiled, the tabernacle destroyed, the oil spilled, the entire temple razed to the ground. Mohammed sped his party up the next hill, away from the Jews. But he was no match for the elements. The air had carried the music to Kelila, the earth had borne the weight of these earthly princes to Kadia, and the beloved lute of silver and fire had sung sufficient testimony to Kima to remind the princesses that these, and not the dusky suitors of their father’s family, were the men they would marry.
Upon his arrival at the Alhambra, Mohammed ordered that the world be moved to his fortress. Within weeks, tropical fish swam in the fountains and Asian bears danced in the garden, all to distract the lively imaginations of his three captive daughters. All was for naught. After twenty days and twenty nights in the Tower of the Laurel, Mohammed was certain his girls would soon follow their mother. Despite the pleadings of Penina, who had been as moved as her young wards by the Tisha B’Av ceremony but was enough of a realist to move on, the princesses sat on three-legged stools and ate nothing but air. Kelila turned her back on nature and faced the wall. Kadia refused all invitations to stroll among the bougainvillea of the Alhambra, in the deep purple of its summer bloom. And the lute hung abandoned, her mistress’s ears stoppered from the songs of the birds by a desolation thicker than beeswax. In the shadows of the tower the three young princesses saw nothing but the faces of the three Jewish bar mitzvah boys, bright-eyed, familiar, full of hope and the hint of manly beards yet to come. Through the noise of the wind and the gardeners below their window, they heard nothing but the mournful refrain of “Al Naharot Bavel,” in masculine voices only recently descended. The old astrologers were summoned, the heavens were examined. But no amount of stargazing could summon the wisdom of Zehava.
Although Mohammed had charged Penina with the unsleeping vigil of his precious daughters, there were times during the day, and the night for that matter, when Penina found it necessary to flee the suffocating trances of the princesses. Besides, she was a woman, and over the years a certain accommodation had developed between her and the majordomo, proving not so much that the Moors are a horse-loving people but that the mysteries of love are shared equally between the plums and the prunes.
It was in the course of one of these late-afternoon accommodations, amidst an empty flask and the seeds of half a dozen pomegranates, that Hussein Baba offered Penina refreshment for her three charges. The three Jewish boys of Tisha B’Av had been captured at the Gate of Justice, attempting to enter the Alhambra disguised as rug merchants. They had immediately confessed their intention, to woo the daughters of Mohammed, and at that moment were being fitted for shackles in the Gate of the Seven Floors.
“Has the king been informed of their capture?” Penina somewhat carelessly asked Hussein Baba, for though they were on intimate terms, there was little trust between them.
“Why so curious, my burrita?” Hussein somewhat carelessly answered, knowing full well where the game was leading since he, after all, was leading the game.
The two lovebirds soon agreed that Hussein Baba would neglect to inform el-Hayzari of the capture of the Jewish boys. The next morning, he would arrange to have them clear the brush from the ravine that led down to the river Darro from the Tower of the Laurel.
It would be misleading to say that the three princesses awoke at dawn to the sound of the lute of Kima, playing solo on its peg. The state of suspension they had lived in for their three weeks in the Tower of the Laurel was neither total consciousness nor total oblivion. But a blush that lit the shadowy tower from the six royal cheeks gave ample evidence that Penina’s cure was working remarkably well. Slowly they rose from their stools, slowly they stretched their limbs and floated toward the western window of the tower, where the first heat of the morning lit the russet tiles of the roofs of the Albaicín across the river. The ravine still shivered with the darkness of the night. But the song of the lute, as Kima retrieved it from its forgotten corner and looped it over her golden hair, was echoed by three deep, fully descended voices, naturally mournful in the natural captivity that the Israelites have known for thousands of years.
A single grumbled answer from the sleepy Penina—unaccustomed to being roused from bed so early—told the three how close were their beloveds. And then, what joyous notes poured from the lips of the three beauties, what warmth it gave to the workers! All morning and again after the noon hour, the ravine echoed youthful love and hope, until the sun dropped behind the hill of the Alhambra and the prisoners had to leave their illusions in the garden and return to the Gate of the Seven Floors.
Happy days followed desperate nights, except when Hussein Baba got wind of his master’s approach to the precinct of the garden in the ravine. Then he would work the prisoners across the gorge, or amid the sugar cane of the vega, or, worse yet for the frantic princesses, keep them chained to the clammy walls of the bottommost of the seven floors of the Gate. Up and down, hope and despair filled the Tower of the Laurel, week upon week, until Penina, ill at ease with bumpy rides of any kind, feared she would expire with the changes in atmospheric pressure.
Only an instinct of self-preservation led Penina to concoct a plan for the elopement of her three charges and their paramours. One noon, during a brief intermission in the song cycle of the sextet, Penina brought the majordomo a small basket of hazelnut tarts, powdered with cane sugar from the plantations of the vega, and fashioned in crescents, like the sword of Mohammed, prophet of the Muslims. It was a recipe of Córdoba, one she had learned side by side with her younger sister, and had passed on to her niece Zehava in the happy days before they left the banks of the Guadalquivir to wander amid alien cane. There was a sweetness in the first bite that led one to bite again; a crunch in the second that satisfied the lust of the mouth for eternal motion; a weight, neither too light nor too heavy, that dissolved on its passage down the throat to the vital organs, that left the eater fully, utterly, unquestionably satisfied.
So it was with the second Córdoban mystery that the talented Penina visited upon the amazed Moor—a trick of love so delicate and subtle and yet so entirely cathartic that it left Hussein Baba gasping like a beached tuna. Dry and decommissioned, he could do nothing but lie amid the brush and listen to Penina’s plan for escape. At this moment, Mohammed el-Hayzari, king of all Granada, light of the Iberian Moors, on a chance stroll, with a single orderly at hand, happened upon the three Jewish prisoners resting in the shade of the Tower of the Laurel. Fortunately for the two lovebirds, Mohammed never saw them as he marched the three to the Gate of the Seven Floors. For had he understood the extent to which his rule had been compromised, two heads would have rolled into the river Darro with a splash that could be heard halfway to the sierra. Hussein Baba had surrendered his career to the horse-faced duenna. He immediately planned for a mass escape.
It was all Penina could do to keep the squeals of the princesses from alerting their father. For now she informed them of their Jewish heritage and of their mother’s dying wish that she see her girls safely married to nice Jewish boys. Only Kima sighed with a breath that spoke of great wisdom. Only she pondered how completely their flight would destroy the soul of their father.
But the determination of her sisters, the argument that her beloved father had kept his own daughters virtual prisoners at the Alhambra, finally silenced Kima’s remaining doubts. They packed.
The night was moonless, the escape from the Gate of the Seven Floors not without its dangers and casualty—a single donkey that threatened to bray when it saw the broad-bottomed Hussein Baba approach. The four men stood at the bottom of the Tower of the Laurel, a stone was touched, the signal given. Penina descended, followed by Kelila and Kadia, who were immediately, passionately, albeit silently embraced by the Jewish boys—which ones, it didn’t matter, they would sort out choice and temperament at greater leisure.
With her sisters on the ground, it was left to Kima to descend, her lute strapped around her shoulders, her dainty foot perched on the top rung of the ladder. Just then a breeze sprang up. The scent of bougainvillea caused a single note to play on her lute. In those two sensations, everything Muslim that had brought her pleasure, a full and equal half of her soul, drew her back into the Tower. Her sisters pleaded, her suitor entreated, Penina hissed, Hussein Baba threatened. Back and forth that slippered foot appeared, until finally, with a strength neither of her sisters possessed, Kima kicked the ladder to the ground.
By the time the alarm was raised, the party of seven had forded the river Darro, borrowed some horses from a band of wandering musicians, and galloped far enough on their way to the Sierra Pelada that the fastest of Mohammed’s warriors were unable to catch them. There, above the town of Ventas del Carrizal, at the farm of their father’s father—for by a coincidence that even I find hard to swallow, they were the three sons of the young Joseph, whom the apothecary of Córdoba had hoped to marry to his golden-haired Zehava—they were embraced, fed, married, and then fed again, according to the custom of the Jews. Hussein Baba had no choice but to convert to Judaism and marry the bruised Penina. Though the poor man grew even fatter with the hazelnut tarts that his autumn wife prepared him, he never again enjoyed the second Córdoban mystery that had so compromised him under the walls of the Alhambra.
What of the lute, the lute Mohammed found in the arms of his only remaining Kima, mournfully playing that song of hope and despair “Al Naharot Bavel”? Mohammed’s right hand embraced his daughter, praising Allah or Jehovah or whoever might listen that he had spared him one of his treasures. But his left hand, his cursed hand, throttled the silver lute by the neck and flung it into the darkness of the unawakened day, until it lit up the sky like a shooting star. In an instant, that fatal mistake wrought such amazement and contrition upon him that he didn’t feel his daughter slip from his arm and fly after the lute until she was halfway down to the ground, halfway up to grasp the soft hand of his beloved golden-haired wife, Zehava.
The band of musicians camping by the river Darro, separated from their horses by Hussein Baba’s wedding party, were also awake when the silver star fell with a musical splash just outside their tent. My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother retrieved the lute from the rocks among which it floated, crushed and bent by Mohammed’s rage, and carried it back to the fire, where the band quickly determined that its value as molten silver was greater than its value as art.
But try as they might, they could not melt the silver into a smooth liquid. The lute gave up its original shape quite readily but insisted on taking the form of four silver strands of four thicknesses, as if in memory of Zehava and her three daughters, who had finally escaped their own tragic histories at the Alhambra.
It was, of course, those four magical strings that my mother’s father removed from their stone case in the courtyard of his tavern. No one knew for certain how long they had lain there, who had hidden them, how they had made the journey to Córdoba. Ten Mohammeds ruled from the Alhambra in the two hundred years before Isabel and her Fernando drove Islam out of Granada. Which of the ten was left-handed? Who were the traveling musicians? What happened to Joseph, and what of the apothecary?
I believe that, left-handed though he might have been, it was Mohammed and not Hussein Baba who effected the escape of the princesses. I believe that his greatest grief was the secret he had kept of his bottomless love for his youngest, his golden-haired daughter, a secret he had kept too long, until she had joined her mother in a red fortress he would never see.
And I believe that there was a magic in the silver of the lute, of the viol, a charm that made one long for the impossible—to gather loved ones, to sing songs of people long dead, to celebrate, conquer, triumph.
And I thank God, the God of Mayaimi and Calusa of Jerusalem and Mecca, that the strings lie at the bottom of the sea, in the grip of my poor, poor brother, who may finally have learned where the music and the musician part company.