CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FISHER
There was no longer need for Yonah and Eleazar to polish the silver objects. Recognizing that he couldn’t sell them for a fair price, Helkias turned all his stock over to Benito Martín for a small amount of cash.
On the middle finger of Yonah’s right hand he wore a wide band of silver, given to him by his father after he had been called to the Torah for the first time. Helkias had made an identical ring for his first-born son, but when Meir’s body had been brought to him, the ring had been missing.
“Remove the ring from your finger,” Helkias told Yonah now, and the youth did so with reluctance. His father threaded the ring onto a length of thin but strong cord and placed the loop around Yonah’s neck, so the ring was hidden inside his shirt.
“If the time comes when we must sell your ring, I promise to make you another as soon as possible. But it may be that with the help of the Lord you will be able to wear this ring again in another place,” he said.
* * *
Helkias brought his two sons to the Jewish cemetery outside the limits of the city. It was a heartrending place, for other families who were leaving Spain stopped at the graves of their loved ones to say good-bye, and their cries and sobbing frightened Eleazar so the boy wept too, although he didn’t remember his mother at all and scarcely recalled Meir.
Helkias had mourned his wife and firstborn son for years. Though his eyes were filled he made no sound, but held his two sons close and dried their tears and kissed them before he set them to neatening the graves and finding small stones to lay on them as a sign they had been visited.
* * *
“Terrible to leave their graves,” Helkias said later to Benito. Martín had brought a skin of wine and the two friends sat and talked as they had so many times in the past. “But worse, somehow, to leave my son’s grave without knowing who placed him there.”
“If it were possible to trace the reliquary, its location might tell a great deal,” Martín said.
Helkias’s mouth twisted. “It has not been possible. By now, the thieves who deal in such objects would already have sold it. Perhaps it is in a church a great distance from here,” he said, and took a long swallow of the wine.
“And yet … perhaps not,” Benito said. “If I spoke to those pastoring the churches of the region, I might learn something.”
“I had thought of doing the same,” Helkias admitted, “yet … I am a Jew. I have been too fearful of churches and priests to take that action.”
“Let me do it for you now,” Martín urged, and Helkias nodded gratefully. He went to his drawing board and fetched sketches of the ciborium that Martín might show the churchmen, and gave them to Benito.
Martín was troubled. “Helkias, feeling against you is high in the city. It’s muttered that you refuse to leave Toledo and yet also refuse to convert. This house on the cliff top is especially exposed. It is too late to seek security in numbers behind the walls of the Jewish Quarter, since the other Jews have departed. Perhaps you and your sons should come to my home, to the safety of a Christian house.”
Helkias knew that an adult and two boys moving into the Martín home, even for a short time, would cause turmoil. He thanked Benito but shook his head. “Until the moment when we must leave we will savor the home in which my sons were born,” he said.
Still, when Benito departed, Helkias took his two sons to the path down the cliff. Off the trail, he showed them an opening into a narrow L-shaped tunnel leading to a small cave.
If ever the need should arise, he told Yonah and Eleazar, the cave would be a safe hiding place.
* * *
Yonah was very aware of doing things in Toledo for the last time.
He had missed the spring fishing. Spring was the best time, when it was still cool but the first warmth of the sun had hatched mayflies and other tiny winged creatures that hovered over the surface of the river.
Now it was hot, but he knew of a deep pool just beyond a natural dam of large rocks and branches, and he knew fish would be lazing almost motionless at the very bottom, waiting for a meal to drift their way.
He gathered the small hooks made for him by a father who knew how to work with metals, and then he went behind the workshop and collected the short wooden pole wound with strong line.
He had taken scarcely three steps when Eleazar was running after him.
“Yonah, are you taking me with you?”
“No.”
“Yonah, I wish to go.”
If their father heard, perhaps he would order them to stay close to home. Yonah cast an anxious glance at the door of the workshop. “Eleazar, don’t spoil it for me. If you fuss, he’ll hear and come out.”
Eleazar looked at him unhappily.
“When I come back I’ll spend the afternoon teaching you to play the guitar.”
“The whole afternoon?”
“The whole.”
Another moment and he was free, ascending the trail toward the river.
At the bottom he attached a hook and then spent a few minutes at the river’s edge, overturning rocks. Several crayfish scuttled away before he found one small enough to please him, then he pounced and secured the bait.
It was his favorite fishing place; through the years he had used it well. A large rock overlooked the pool, easy to reach because its flat top was almost the height of the trail, while an overhanging tree provided shade for both the fish that gathered in the pool and the fisher who sat on the rock.
The baited hook entered the water with a plop. Yonah waited expectantly, but when there was no sign of a strike he settled down on the rock with a sigh. There was a slight breeze, the rock was cool, and the quiet sounds of the river were calming and pleasant. Somewhere far downstream two men called to one another, and nearby, a bird trilled.
He wasn’t aware of drowsiness, just a diminution of sounds and awareness, until he slept.
* * *
He was awakened with a start when someone slid the end of the pole from under his leg.
“You have a fish,” the man said.
Yonah was frightened. The man was tall as Abba, a friar or monk in black robes and sandals. His voice was soft and kind, and Yonah thought he had a good face. “He is a very large fish. You wish the pole?”
“No, you may catch him,” Yonah said reluctantly.
“Lorenzo,” someone called from the trail, and Yonah turned to see another black-robed man waiting there.
The fish was lunging for the brush dam at the top of the pool, but the tall man raised the tip of the pole. He was a good fisher, Yonah noted. He didn’t pull it up so sharply that it endangered the line, but he led the fish back by taking in the line with his left hand, a little at a time, until the catch, a fine bream arching back and forth on the hook, was hauled to the top of the rock.
The man was smiling. “Not so big, after all, eh? They all seem very large at first.” He held out the fish. “You wish him?”
Of course Yonah did, but he sensed that the man wanted the fish too.
“No, señor,” he said.
“Lorenzo,” the other friar called. “Please, there is no time. He will be looking for us.”
“All right!” the tall man said irritably, and slid a finger under a gill the better to carry the fish. Gentle eyes as deep as the pool looked at Yonah.
“May Christ bring you luck,” he said.