Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [6]
The jar-maker listened attentively to the faint sounds in the dark.
“Nothing. Jackals, wild dogs. They won’t come near. Go back to sleep.”
He leaned to his left, feeling around for a stick large enough to club any invading beasts. He stood, and ranged out from the fireside, his eyes on the dark ground. Oh, if only there was wood! But then he remembered a small knife that he used as a tool and kept in his sack of essential belongings. He was bent over, on his knees, feeling around in the sack when they heard the camels.
Chapter Two
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A Hebrew of New York
Some time ago, before our nation split in two and the opposing territories, north and south, initiated a great war over the question of freedom, yours truly, Nathaniel Pereira, climbed the plank on a Manhattan winter morning to board a south-bound yawl called the Godbolt. My father had charged me with a mission of some family business of the import-export variety. Earnest young man that I was, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a handsomely bent nose (which Marzy, our family servant, often joked with me about when I was a child) and just the beginnings of a beard on my pink cheeks, I could then little imagine how much such a journey would change my life and the lives of others in the family.
I awoke that special morning, before dawn, somewhat divided within myself and feeling my nerves. It had been a night of odd dreams about an army of Jews on horseback racing across a windy desert—yes, Jews, Jews, Jews, though I have never been a terribly observant member of my faith—and next came a dream-visitation, not uncommon to me in those days, by my dear late mother, who whispered imperatively about wearing a hat to keep away the cold and the importance of living as a Jew. After saying to the air the elemental prayer we Hebrews make each morning—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”—and, as was my wont, reading a psalm aloud—for the poetry, as my dear old mop-haired fish-eyed master of a teacher George Washington Halevi always suggested (this one being Psalm 32, which I chose, as I usually did, at random, and begins “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered…”)—I lay abed a while despite the urgency of the day.
Sluggard, arise! I heard Halevi’s voice in my mind.
To further prepare me for my inheritance—the care of the family business—my father had hired him as a tutor who worked with me on mathematics and history, philosophy, and Scripture. George Washington Halevi, whose own grandfather had been one of the few Jews who had fought in the Revolutionary War. His grandmother had been a farm girl from a Bronx estate, who attended to a soldier wounded in the Battle of New York. They produced his hybrid father, and his father had wed a Jewess from Rhode Island who produced him. Instead of going to Europe to study for the rabbinate, Halevi had attended Harvard College and was given the only divinity degree our people had received in the New World. Neither a full Hebrew in his own mind nor a Protestant of any standing, Halevi was a curious mixture of Old World and New, Jew and Gentile. A smart fellow then, with only a few difficulties, he was, first, so shy that he could scarcely talk to me about my subjects without trying to withdraw into the woodwork. Second, his breath smelled like manure. And, third, he sometimes stuttered in a terrible way.
Though his manner of speaking in public was less than pleasing, when he settled into himself and found the reassurance to speak, his voice dropped to a whisper and listening to him was like riding a winter sled down a nicely sloped snow-covered hill.
“Master Nathaniel,” he would say in that hoarse rasping way of his (and I laughed to myself as I lay abed recalling it), “to-to-today we will consider the P-P-Principia of Sir Isaac Newton.” Or, “My question for you to consider is the origin of the stars.” Or, “F-free will, Nathaniel, d-d-does it exist?” On this latter topic, we would talk for hours, because in my childish stubbornness I could never agree with his position.