The Jewel Trader of Pegu Read online

  —Leave this to me, Abraham. Your hands are clean. A little more blood won’t make any difference to mine. I’ll put the bastard out of his misery.

  —What about the other one?

  —We’ll leave him. When he comes to, he can take care of his friend here.

  I caught up with Mya’s cart, and turned in time to see Antonio take a large stone from the side of the road and bring it down with his one good arm on the head of the wounded man. Don’t think harshly of him—he didn’t want the man to suffer. I think he would have wanted the same done to him on the battlefield.

  The half-moon lit our way back, and we finished our journey without incident. Once we arrived at the safety of our home, you can imagine the blessings and offerings Mya made to her idol and the prayers of thanks I offered the Holy One, blessed be He. To see a dead man, laid out pale and lifeless like a painted statue, is far different from a man struck dead in front of your eyes, the anguish of his last moments, the fragility of life writ in red before you. I feel a bit the fool writing as if I had discovered the truth of our fleeting mortality, but just because others have long seen what is fresh to my eyes makes it no less true. The image of that brigand writhing in the throes of death will remain forever in my mind.

  Sleep may be calling, but I am clear-eyed: it is the here and now that is most dear. All the rest, past and future, is as insubstantial as the morning fog. There is time enough in one life to be a righteous man. Joseph, enough talk of rebirth—what good is another life without memory of this one? Of you, of Uncle, of Mya, of all those bound to me by love and affection. This life is the life I must live.

  Safe now in the quiet of my home, I look back on yesterday. When Antonio fired his arquebus to save us all, and held the stone in his hand to save me from whatever punishment God might have meted out or from the guilt I might have inflicted on my own soul, he and I became bound forever beyond the blood we share. I would trust him with all I hold dear. With equal passion, I feel that when I embraced Mya before her people, without pause or shame, I reaffirmed the silent vow I made months ago to take her as my bride. I know in my heart, so long hidden from me and shut off from others, that we are one.

  Your cousin,

  Abraham

  13 August 1599

  Dear Joseph,

  Every gust of wind brings another rumor. If rumors were rice, everyone’s belly would be full.

  —Syriam has fallen.

  —Syriam remains in Pegu hands.

  —The king’s eldest son has thrown in his lot with the king of Toungoo and lives there in pampered splendor.

  —The son was greeted in Toungoo by the sword and his head sits atop a bloody pike.

  —The king has sent his white elephants—dearer than all his kin—to appease the Arakan king.

  —Nandabayin’s own daughter has been sent weeping to Arakan as a royal bride.

  —The Toungoo demand no less than the Tooth of Buddha; and if Nandabayin bows to this demand, the city is doomed; and if he doesn’t, our fate will be the same.

  —Not all the gold statues and precious stones in Nandabayin’s treasure-house will soften the Arakan king’s heart.

  An optimist grabs at a branch, thinking it sturdy enough to float safely to shore, a pessimist thinks it weak as straw. All of us tread water in these tumultuous seas and wait for others on the hilltop to determine our fate. Strong swimmer or weak, we will be saved or drowned by currents outside our control.

  What I do know as a fact is that two merchants, a Dutch trader in spices and a Portuguese doing well in lac, have cut short their pursuit of profits and left for the safety of Melaka. They paid a premium to find a ship that would sail against the winds; and they had to sell some of their stores at a loss because the hold wasn’t large enough for all their goods. I can travel lighter but am not yet ready to leave. Win, my barometer of royal winds and weather, sees the dark clouds, but he clings to the hope that Nandabayin can appease the rulers of Toungoo and Arakan—that gold and jewels and bended knee will pry apart the vise’s jaws and bring peace.—Better for them to yoke a healthy bullock than slay it, he says.

  I can’t stay forever, for the jewels bring Uncle no benefit here. If I must go now, I will have to find a way to bring Mya without harm to her or anyone who helps us. Win cares nothing about keeping Peguan women within the empire.—There are enough for the men here, enough to keep the young men from turning to sodomy. If you must take anyone, take Myint San. She was not amused.

  Win believes it’s unsafe to try to smuggle Mya out on a ship.

  —In times of chaos, a bribe to the right people and can’t we sail free? I asked.

  —In hard times, you can’t trust anyone. The customs officers will take your money and then betray you. The risk is too great. Even before you set sail, a crewman might kill her for fear of his own life. You put the sailors’ freedom at risk, the shipowner’s money, and the merchants whose goods lie in the hold. If you are in a burning house, maybe you should flee through the flames and out the back. But be patient, the sparks may not yet set the bamboo aflame.

  Win and Myint San worry about their son, of whom they have heard nothing these last several weeks. When his name comes up, Myint San’s eyes redden, and she struggles to hold back her tears. I try to turn the subject to other things, which is difficult in these darkening times. I look at her undisguised grief and hear the catch in Win’s voice, despite the impassive visage his people have perfected, and I am ashamed of the tales my European “brothers” tell about Peguans. They speak with solemn faces of the Peguans’ line having begun in the mating of a Chinese woman and a dog—sole survivors of a shipwrecked junk on the coast centuries ago. What blasphemy the Portuguese and Dutch have spawned to free them of guilt, while they murder and plunder all those who don’t wear a cross or have skin the color of theirs. Like the blood libel we Israelites have long suffered, these words are just a circle the Gentiles draw around their own kind to exclude those different from themselves from humanity’s embrace.

  I have seen many wonders since leaving Venice, but I haven’t seen men with feet round as oxen or skin scaly as snakes, or fellows with lumps of flesh at the bottom of their spines, large as both my fists, where their ancestors’ tails once grew. These creatures live only in the second-and third-hand tales of those who swear that those who told them swore them to be true. My travels have turned me into a doubter of such certainties. I have dropped “I was told” from my vocabulary. Until I had traveled far from the narrow streets and small squares of our city, I hadn’t noticed how much in our life is told to us by others, how much we take on faith from the eyes and ears of those who have neither seen nor heard what they claim to know. Their opinions are cold dishes served distant from the kitchen where others have prepared them. I have seen so much firsthand on my journey that I am now reluctant to swallow the secondhand notions others serve. I doubt what I haven’t seen myself. Especially when tales come from the mouths of men who believe themselves superior to those they claim to describe and judge. I have seen with my own eyes only men made of flesh and blood no different, beneath their robes and tunics and hair braided and beaded, than those who walk the streets of Venice. I have seen tears flow down heathens’ cheeks as easily and copiously as ours.

  Oh, I have seen wonders fashioned by the Holy One, blessed be He, that have left me awed and silent—the Mouth of Hell’s bubbling field of pitch on the banks of the Euphrates, rainbows arcing the ocean’s waves, palms sparkling in the morning light along rivers half hidden in billowing mist, birds the colors of peacock feathers, and beasts—enough to fill Noah’s ark—not seen by any man who has lived his life behind Ghetto gates. I have seen wonders fashioned by men—castles of desert brick, soaring infidel temples gilded in gold, gentle-faced stone idols with carved gowns draped and diaphanous, so skilled in their workmanship that you would swear they fluttered in the breeze. In winter’s long night in years ahead, I may be that old man boring all who can’t escape his thrice-told tales of dis
tant lands and adventures more fantastic and unbelievable with each telling. But I know that the true wonders I discovered were the ones that lay waiting in my heart.

  Your cousin,

  Abraham

  Some nights I wake in the darkness and Abraham is lying next to me, his eyes wide open, looking at the ceiling, listening to voices only he can hear. I know the perils of the kingdom worry him. Death is dancing everywhere. Strange, but as the times grow more troubled, he seems to have become calmer. When I first came to this house, his hands darted about his head, and he ran his fingers through his hair and twirled strands between his fingertips. His hands had lives of their own. Now he sits like a statue. His hands rest quietly in his lap. Only once has he raised his voice, like other foreigners. Though I know he has his own god, sometimes I think he is one of us.

  I know he won’t leave me, but I am frightened. I am frightened of the sea—of water whose bottom disappears into the darkness, whose shores can’t be seen. I am frightened of the monsters I have heard live at the edge of the world and swallow ships as easily as geckos swallow flies. Abraham comforts me with tales of his safe journey. He tells me not to believe the words of those who have never ventured past their paddy fields. Yes, the wind can churn the water, and the water can churn your stomach, he says, until you cannot stand and wish nothing more than to die and escape your misery. But he promises to cradle my head in his lap, to put a cool cloth on my forehead and croak—for he can’t sing—a lullaby to bring me rest. All my discomfort will drift away like smoke, he says, when I see the sun rise from its watery bed and return at night with colors more lovely than any Indian cloth. My heart believes him—I hope my stomach won’t betray my heart.

  Abraham asks if I will be lonely so far from my people. Khaing has comforted me, and Myint San has treated me well; but they will grow old, and there are few who will grieve at my going. My father has sent no words to me since I left. Sometimes I see him in my dreams—that will be enough. Some mornings I may wake in Abraham’s city and want to smell the scent of jasmine, hear our women laughing in the market, or crack open a coconut and drink its cool liquid. I will have to learn to let go. It won’t be easy, but I think there will be curious things in his city to make me smile, new flowers to smell, even food that will please my tongue. Abraham says they have rice in his country, so my sadness won’t stay long.

  I told him I would be happy in his country, as long he didn’t go on long journeys across the sea. If something were to happen to him, every bite of rice would taste like dust, every cup of water would be bitter with sadness and tears. He said he didn’t need to travel anymore—he had everything he needed.

  He tells me that the people of his city burn trees in their houses to keep out the cold. The air is so cold, you must cover all your body with cloth, and no one can tell one person from the other. When I told him that will make me happy, he was surprised. I said that until I learn the right words in his language, I will have to point, and I don’t want people to know who I am.

  During the day he points to things and people and what they do and tells me the words in his language. Before we go to bed, he reads from a book he has brought all the way from his country. He treasures it as if it were the sacred words of the Buddha. It is the story of a man who travels to the Lower Depths of the House of Smoke and sees the punishments that befall evil people. Abraham doesn’t find it sad. The words are beautiful; and though the man is not of his faith, he is of his spirit. Abraham finds the words a comfort, like torches lighting the way at night.

  I can’t read my language. I was never taught. He is teaching me the letters and words of his language. Someday I will be able to write words on a piece of paper for him. I will fold it until it is small enough to put in the pocket of his coat. When he walks through the city, he can take out the paper and hear my voice tell him how deep he dwells in my heart.

  He shows me words in his book. “Amore”—I have learned that word.

  19 August 1599

  Dear Joseph,

  I rose before dawn this morning after another restless night of dreams that fled the moment I awoke, leaving a gnawing unease and tiredness, as if I had carried a basket heavy with rocks up a steep hillside. My soul is burdened with decisions to be made and voices urging me in different directions. While the city still slumbered, I decided to walk the quiet streets to clear my mind. Trying hard not to wake Mya and to dress quietly, I grew clumsy, as often happens when we think too much about something as natural as putting one foot in front of the other. Haven’t you ever been so careful not to drop a fragile cup that the fear of an accident turns your fingers to wood and the cup almost tumbles from your hand? I stumbled against the bead curtain, and it clattered Mya awake. She, like Win and the others, finds my walking an object of amusement. For Win, walking is for servants. Walking without purpose makes no sense to Mya, especially in the heat of the day. Walking to the market or to the pagoda she understands. To walk simply to savor the sights and sounds of the city, she dismisses as some strange custom of “your people.” This morning, I joked and prodded Mya that without her I would stumble and harm myself or get lost and never be found. With feigned grumbling, she agreed to come with me; but only because the sun still wouldn’t be high in the sky when we returned, and she could stop at the market on the way back.

  We followed the fragrances of the flowers, turned at the play of light on the palms, and set a course drawn by the shadows the houses cast. A line of palms drew us to a small temple that neither she nor I had visited; in the courtyard a shaded pond shone with golden carp, large and lazy, floating among underwater islands of pitted rocks. The fish bumped each other when we bent over the water; but without bits of rice to feed them, they soon glided back to their rocky homes. In the calmed water, like Narcissus I saw myself but didn’t fall in love with what I saw. With Mya’s reflection shimmering beside me, I saw the self I had been, the self I left behind.

  I am sure you remember that more than once, when chided by some prospective in-laws for my apparent moroseness or disinterest in the prospect of marrying their daughter, I claimed that I wasn’t a sad person. Nor, I claimed, was I a happy one. I took pride in my self-proclaimed balance—like some finely calibrated scale, I had achieved equilibrium between the depths of sadness, with its self-absorption that with time bores even its bearer, and the giddy heights of happiness, which demand a level of blindness to the world I could never allow. I believed that with the scales in balance, I had attained some special level of wisdom.

  When I looked at my face surrounded by the fish swimming aimlessly in the confines of the small pond that was the ocean to them, it struck me that I hadn’t lived a balanced life—that I had lived no life at all. The only scales I had fashioned covered my eyes. Yes, I was neither a happy nor a sad man: I was no man at all. I was neither here nor there: I grieved over the past, I sleepwalked through the present, and I looked ahead hoping the future would be brighter by some magical energy of its own. I had damped down that part of my heart where emotions spark. How can you be a man, how can you be alive if you don’t live in the present?

  When you last saw me, I believed that I alone suffered. There were beggars and widows in the Ghetto, mothers who had lost their children to the plague or their sons and husbands to the Knights of St. John to die in some dungeon unredeemed. Yet I thought their suffering was different, a lesser mark than mine. I thought myself born under a dark star, the child of death and destruction, arriving in the world between the great earthquake of 1570 and the plague in Padua a year later—none of this an accident in the dark universe at whose center I stood. I thought myself Job when my son died. Why had the Holy One, blessed be He, forsaken me? But my son was just one among many who died in their innocence. When smallpox swept away sixscore children from our community in less than a half year not too many years ago, the tears of those grieving fathers were no more bitter than mine, their rent hearts no less torn. I thought I had a royal monopoly on suffering. What presumption to
think that God had deserted me alone or had chosen me above all others to be the bearer of some dark lesson.

  Soon after I arrived here—forgive me if I have written of this earlier—there was a man who I could not help but notice at the godown. He went everywhere with his son, a child of nine or ten, with fine features, like a marble angel, and a pleasant disposition that made even the sternest customs official smile and joke. The love this man had for his son shone like a blazing hearth. He praised him for the smallest achievement, gave him dried fruit and sweets for accomplishing the simplest task. Win said that the man, a gentle soul who had gone through life with little comment or distinction, saw in his son all that he wished for himself but had not become. One day the son took ill with a fever and died suddenly. The man sat in his garden wailing so loudly that the leaves of the palms shook with his grief. After a day of weeping and keening, he fell into a brooding sadness and wouldn’t move from his house, even to make offerings at the temple. Finally, after almost a week, an old monk, who knew the man well, came to the house and told him that he had invited all who had never suffered in their lives to come to the house the next day to console him. The man ordered his servants to stay up all night preparing food and drink for his guests. In the morning no one came, and by the afternoon still no one had walked up the steps of his verandah. By dusk, the man grew calm and went to the temple. He remembered what he had forgotten in his grief—that he was no different from all other men. At the time, I thought the monk heartless, but now I understand.