The Running Years Page 9

  It was his grandson Abdul who was to carry the brunt of the trouble when it came. The second son of the younger son of the Sheik, he had long been the old Man’s favourite, for he was a bright boy with an awesome gift for figures and narrow black eyes and laughed a lot, and yet missed nothing of importance.

  The Sheik made him head of the financial side of the house, when he was only seventeen, his uncles had their own interest, and his older brother like his father had died in the plague, so there was no problem of primogeniture to stop him, and the younger brothers would do as the were told. And Sheik Lamech felt safe having the by there. He was a sensible responsible person, having married since the age of fifteen to a girl of his own age. Leah, the daughter of a merchant of the city, and could be trusted to keep his mind on his business rather than one young men’s nonsense.

  By the time Abdul was twenty-eight, the old man was happy to sit at home with the women, or in the synagogue praying, while Abdul held all the reins of the family fortunes on his capable hands. His practical and very sensible wife had borne him four children, the oldest of whom, Sarah now aged twelve, had inherited his great gift for numbers, and his life seemed to him to be good and comfortable.

  But it was not. His younger brothers squabbled and plotted among themselves as much as some of the other Jews of the city plotted, and eventually, driven more by fraternal jealousy than good sense, the combined with the outsides to pull Abdul Lamech down from his place.

  He was lucky; he heard in time. Like his grandfather, he had always kept his spies active, and he was told almost on the day it happened how his younger brothers Ahab and Elias had laid a complaint before the Sultan in Constantinople about ‘the Nasi who does not remember as he should the benefits which accrue to us from your magnificence, and who therefore withholds from your honour that which is yours.’

  He thought carefully. He thought of the state of the city and the state of trade. He thought of his old grandfather, now almost senile and sitting among the women in his faded mansion where the tiles were falling from the walls and the fountains were blocked with verdigris. There had been so much decay in the past ten years; was there enough to salvage?

  He decided there was not. The time had come to admit that there was real danger to face and to leave it behind. For all the hundred of years during which the Jews of Baghdad had lived in their city on the Tigris, there stirred in Abdul a deep racial memory; a sense of survival that told him when to move on. And of course, he was an educated and informed man. The traders who came to his souks brought more than silks and spices; they brought news as well. He had heard of the sufferings of other Jews in Europe, of the bloody massacres that had accompanied the Crusades, of the places in the west where his fellows had to live in huddled ghettoes, wearing a yellow star to make them off as different, unwanted. And of course he knew well about the Inquisition. Abdul was well aware of the world he lived in, and was also aware that he was no more protected from danger than any other Jew, however long his lineage, however firm his grip on the city of his birth.

  Leah had to do as she what told – which was to remain behind. ‘I would take us all if I could.’ Abdul said. ‘I love and the children too dearly to leave you willingly. But the will come to arrest me any day now, and if they take me, they will strip the house of all there is. If I am here, they will go to seek me, and leave you in peace. I will take what I can carry, no more and leave you all else. Take care of the old grandfather, and I will send for you. You understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leah, and breathed a little more deeply, but it was not a sigh that he could see or interpret as a complaint. That was not Leah’s way. ‘What will you take?’

  ‘As much gold as I can carry.’ The last consignment of pearls. And Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah?’ Now Leah did allow her feelings to show. Woman or not, she had her rights as a mother and Sarah was only thirteen – old enough to be betrothed, even wed, but still very young. ‘You cannot be serious! Take Sarah?’

  ‘She will get me away safe. And I will be in need of a companion. Better Sarah, surely, than – some other?’

  And Leah, knowing of her husband’s eager appetite for the pleasures of the body and the interest with which he looked at the other women in the family could say no more. The presence of his daughter would indeed keep him from misadventure, for he was a careful and concerned father.

  ‘Furthermore,’ Abdul went on, packing gold coins into tight wads, so that they could be tied about his body under his robes. ‘She will be my disguise. I will travel as a deaf mute. She will be my tongue. I will send for you, Leah. Take care.’

  They took a boat at the furthermost jetty along the Tigris, almost as far as the southern edge of the city, paying the captain a huge sum for their passage. It was the only way he could be persuaded to take them at all, especially as Abdul insisted, through Sarah, on having special food provided for him. Even in times as bad as this he could not contemplate eating any but the proper foods, prepared according to the laws of kashrus, and the captain needed much gold to soothe his hurt feelings as this; there is nothing that insults a man more than to despite his victuals.

  The went aboard in the dark of night, when the moon had not yet risen, and sat huddled side by side in the belly of the ship, their feet awash in the bilge water and their heads half covered by stinking sodden fishing nets. The boat slipped away down river towards the Gulf just half an hour before the Sultan’s men arrived at the house on the Kazimayah road to harangue Leah about her husband’s disappearance. Even as she sat in her elegant courtyard, in the light of a yellow lantern, telling them with tranquil self assurance that no, she did not know where her husband was, though she thought he might have gone up country to Kirkuk to deal in wool, and yes, he often went away without telling her where, Abdul and Sarah were watching the black waters disappear beneath the keel and carry them away from the only home they had ever known.

  It took them eleven days to make the journey down the widening Tigris to the waters of the Gulf and the port of Basrah where they halted for a while, and on at last to Bushire, a dirty reeking fishing port on the eastern side of the Gulf, with a landing stage in such shallow water that ships had to anchor three miles out and ferry their goods and passengers ashore in rowboats.

  Sarah looked across the water to the huddle of buildings with peeling red roofs and took a violent dislike to it. She told the captain that she and her husband – for so they had decided she should pretend to be – would rather go further on. Abdul was furious. He could say nothing nor show any reaction to her words for he was supposed to be deaf and dumb, but his eyes when he looked at her spat venom and she paled and said hastily to the captain that perhaps it was not so bad after all…

  They went ashore, and Abdul had to admit she had been right. The wharves were filthy, rat-infested and stinking. But they could not risk making any fuss or show themselves, for fear that the Sultan would be looking for him even as far afield as this.

  For the gently reared and protected Sarah it was hell on earth. They slept that first night and the three subsequent ones in a warehouse that was used to store drying fish, with rats running over their feet as they slept. And she wept herself to sleep each night, praying for the morning to come. When it came, and they had to go out stealthily into the streets to seek some sort of remedy for their situation, she ached for it to be night so that she need no longer tolerate the treatment meted out to her by passerby who regarded her and her father as the beggars they were pretending to be, spitting on her as she walked, jeering and plucking at her robe. Her misery was so intense that after a day or two she stopped feeling it, just plodding on from place to place as her father led her, tweaking her robe and pinching her hands to give her his instructions.

  At last they found what they were seeking and for which they had not dared to ask in so many words; the synagogue. That there was a Jewish community here in Bushire on the Persian Gulf, miserable though it was, a safe haven. The troubles in Baghdad had made
all his business links with the more salubrious places suspect. Here in Bushire he could start again, and he hoped to find the people there willing to help him establish himself again, to make a home to which to bring his wife and three other children. That it had taken so long to find it dismayed him, for he had expected to see, as he walked about the street, avoiding the glances of the Sultan’s swaggering solders, a building of the same sort of quality as the synagogue in Baghdad. What they eventually found was little more than a hovel, a ramshackle wooden place with painted walls that peeled leprously in the sun and which looked about as inviting as a slaughterhouse.

  But he prodded Sarah and she led him into the small doorway, past the mezuzzah that his sharp eyes had noticed there and which had helped him identify the place, and into the shadowed interior. They could see the light burning erratically before the ark, and Abdul took a deep breath and said aloud, ‘God be praised,’ the first spoken words that had crossed his lips since they had left Baghdad two weeks before. ‘God be praised.’

  An old man came shuffling towards them out of the shadows, his eyes glinting with suspicion. It took Abdul a long time to convince him that here before him stood one of the great family of Lamech of Baghdad, that he was in trouble and throwing himself onto the mercy of his fellow Jews, but when at last Sarah, unable to bear it any more, burst into a great wail of hysterical tears, the old man, alarmed, took action. He brought the rabbi who listened and nodded and believed that he was being told the truth, especially when Abdul, throwing prudence to the wind, untied his money belt from beneath his shabby robe and showed him.

  They allowed him, to stay, and assured him that there had been no whisper of any trouble from the Sultan. They agreed to send messengers back to Basrah, to see if there was news there, and another two weeks later they were told that Jews of that city, resourceful and concerned for the grandson of the great Sheik Lamech, had told the Sultan’s men that indeed yes, Abdul had been amongst them, but had died only a few days after arrival. ‘The plague,’ they had said vaguely and the Sultan’s men had taken fright and gone swiftly away, and sent the message back to Constantinople: the Nasi Lamech, the Sarrif Bashi of the Jews of Baghdad, was dead.

  Abdul was safe.

  ‘Never go back to Baghdad?’ Sarah said miserably, when her father told her the news. ‘Never go home to mother and the children? Must we stay in this hateful place always, father? Can we not go home?’

  ‘We have no home, my child. No place that will always be home. We are Jews, and like other Jews, we live under the sufferance of those above us. You have heard the stories as much as I have – of what happened to those of your ancestors who came to Baghdad from Sepharad, long ago, and why they came. Well, it has always been so. We must stay here. I will find a house for us, and a souk, and in time I will send for your mother.’

  ‘But we belong to Baghdad,’ she said again, clutching at his robe. He pulled her hand away pettishly and shook his head.

  ‘We belong nowhere. We carry our homes on our backs – we as much as any other of the Lord’s people. It is wicked of you to complain. Clean this place up, and prepare food. I will return tonight, when I’ve found a souk.

  So, she cleaned the two dirty rooms he had found for their lodgings, and prepared goats’ milk cheese and bread and olives for his return, and wept for her mother while she did it. She was a lonely homesick child, not the strong daughter of Judah she had been reared to be and she felt very young and very helpless and very very frightened.

  9

  By the time Abdul was ready to send for Leah, it was too late for her. The fretting that she had suffered in the eighteen months that had passed between his departure and the message to follow had ruined her constitution, already enfeebled by her many childbirths, for although she had only four living children, she had borne seven. She was, in truth, very frail for a woman of twenty-nine years.

  It had been a bad eighteen months, with no word at all from Abdul or Sarah, and the children constantly asking for both of them. She’d had to hold off her brothers-in-law as they probed and prodded her – and dismantled her husband’s business before her helpless eyes.

  One by one they came, each picking away for himself some aspect of Abdul’s carefully structured business until all that was left for her and her children was a shambles.

  The brothers kept her fed, of course; even Elias and Ahab would not have dared to let starve the wife and children of the brother they had already destroyed. Instead they put on a show of concern for her and made Leah’s burden even heavier.

  She ate less and less, slept less and less, worried more and more, burying her feelings as she had always been trained to do. So, when the message came and she had to bundle up her sons and whatever was left of her possessions that she could carry and take to a ship, she was in no condition to face a long journey.

  The weather was appalling – so hot, even for a Baghdad summer, that the very stones in the street seemed to melt and even the mighty Tigris seemed to have become diminished and oily. She sat in the stern of the ship with her robes over her head and refused to steadfastly eat at all, for unlike her far-sighted husband she had not thought to ask the captain to lay in special food for her, and could not, would not, eat what he was willing to provide.

  The children did (their young hunger could not be gainsaid), and she prayed steadily for them that they might be forgiven their weakness, and reminded God as often as she could that there were not yet responsible for their own sins. The sin was hers, it was all her fault.

  She survived her arrival in Bushire by just five days. They had to carry her from the rowing boat that brought her from the ship to the jetty where her husband was waiting for her, for she could not walk. The boys were silent and frightened, for they had never seen their mother in such a way, and it was so long since they had been their father that he seemed like a stranger. As for Sarah, she seemed to have changed unbelievably. She stood beside her father on the jetty, her head and most of her face covered as modesty demanded, but her eyes were the eyes a woman and not a child, and the boys were strangely shy of her.

  Abdul took them all to the neat house he had bought for them on the far side of the stinking city, where the air was a little cleaner and where a few flowers could grow and watched Leah die and wept into his beard, and buried her as a virtuous Jewish wife should be buried, and mourned her as a devout Jew should mourn his dead, and then set about finding a new wife as fast as he could. Sarah was already betrothed to a local merchant and could not be expected to take on the burden of her younger brothers’ care. They needed a mother, and he needed a wife – badly. It had been a long time being virtuous under his daughter’s eye –

  He married Esther, the daughter of the most respected physician in Bushire. She was just two years older than her step-daughter, Sarah, and the two became close friends, which was a great comfort to Abdul, for he wanted peace now that the miseries were over and the warring women in the household was no was to way to live in comfort. When Sarah married and his son-in-law, Samuel Hazzan (whose great-grandfather had come to live in Bushire from far away Constantinople), bought a house alongside his own, he felt all was well in his world again.

  When he heard the news from Baghdad in the following autumn that Tigris had risen and flooded the city and that a plague had flared up in which four thousand people of the Jewish community had died, including his renegade brothers, he lifted his head piously and thanked his God – not for bringing disaster on others, of course, which would be wicked, but for saving him and his beloveds. To be honest, he had to make quite an effort to control his satisfaction, but he managed it. To be happy at another’s downfall was not the way of a good Jew, and he wanted above all else to be a good Jew.

  He had his family at his side, the hope of more children with Esther, a small but thriving business dealing with silks, and every hope of extending it further. God had smiled on him.

  The years passed tranquilly. Esther bore him more children, although only
three, two sons and a daughter, survived, and Sarah had three sons of her own. The business thrived, as Baghdad caught its breath and began to recover from its disasters, and trade with Bushire picked up once more. Now Abdul was dealing in wool again, sent to him from his old agents in Baghdad who were happy to work with him as in the old days, and was sending back to Baghdad shiploads of cotton which he was importing from India.

  Quite when it was that his restlessness overtook him he was never to be sure. It all seemed enough, and yet, and yet…

  He was bored, that was the truth of it. There was not enough for him here in this stagnant town. It seemed to him that however hard he tried in Bushire, he could never achieve all of which he was capable, and at thirty-five he was far from old, yet. His oldest son was now almost eighteen, and his next one seventeen, both well trained in business matters. He looked at David – named in the Sephardic tradition for his grandfather – and Solomon and chafed at the way their talents could not be put to good use.

  His son-in-law Samuel Hazzan was going very well, with Sarah to help him, for he was an unusual man; he had recognized his wife’s remarkable gift to computation and made use of it. Other men might despise women and women’s ways, but not Samuel. As long as she did all a woman should do in the house and with the children, he would permit her to do his number work as well. And she did it superbly.

  It was almost on an impulse that Abdul made the journey the first time in 1813. He had accepted a cargo of cotton goods from Madras, and by great good fortune had managed to pick up a return cargo of horses to Bombay. There was a great demand there for the best Arab animals, and when a rival trader’s ship was lost at sea, Abdul was swift to seize upon the business. Above all he wanted to see Bombay. There was an instinct stirring deep inside him that told him his fortune was waiting for him there.