The Ghost of Hannah Mendes by Naomi Ragen Read Free Book Online Page B

and lay down in it until she died of starvation. Bereft of clothing, some even sewed together the pages of their holy books to cover their nakedness. Most were sold into slavery by the Moors in whose lands they had hoped to find refuge, although the King of Fez, in his kindness, took them in and gave them shelter in the “Valley of Blessing.”
    At the time, my mother knew nothing of such things, although I’m sure my grandfather must have known. All she knew was that instead of the roast lamb her father had promised her, there was pale bread soaked in rancid olive oil, and watery lentil soup. And for her bed, she had rags covering a hard, cold floor. And each day, the house took in more people, until even her small, thin body could no longer find room to stretch out .
    They were the fortunate ones, her father would tell her each time she complained, pointing to the streets, alleyways, gardens, and mountaintops where miserable masses swarmed over one another like panicked ants .
    My mother listened with a child’s peevish unreasonableness, her father’s words bringing her no comfort. All she knew was that her hair was matted and that her scalp and body itched beyond endurance. She scratched endlessly until once, examining her nails, she saw tiny creatures crawling over her hands. When she showed her father, his face blanched and he hurried her outside. But instead of washing her hair in perfume and combing it until it shone like copper, he shaved her scalp and threw the hair into a fire, over which he boiled her clothes in a large, stinking pot .
    For a long time, my mother remembered, she hated him, refusing to speak to him at all. And each day, her father was called away for longer and longer hours. Only as an adult, a wife and mother, did my mother begin to fully understand how brave her father had been, how selfless, to spend his days and most of his nights dropping little boats of hope into that raging ocean of human misery. Or how close he, and all of them, had come to tragedy .
    Instead of being a good, dutiful daughter, filled with the virtues of patience and forbearance, my mother became a little hellish estrie, waiting to pounce upon her father whenever she saw him. Filled with childish fury and consumed by jealousy, my mother played evil tricks on the poor woman who cared for her and her sister, pouring beet juice into her boiling pot of linens and feigning fainting fits to alarm her .
    The woman responded by using the switch on my mother as often as she dared. “Poor woman!” my mother recalled. She was not unkind, but she had three children of her own who sat with pale, bloated faces crying with hunger, and no husband. My mother never did learn what had happened to him, but one day, wanting particularly to vex her, she told the woman’s children, “Your father is a filthy apostate who has stayed behind in Spain to kiss the cross!”
    She often thought that her childish barbed arrow had not strayed far from the mark. For instead of going for the switch, the woman simply flung her apron over her head and wailed. My mother always said this sight filled her with remorse. She waited anxiously for her father’s return, hoping to corner him with a much improved picture of events before the woman could tell him the unpainted truth .
    But when her father finally did appear, he seemed frantic, almost distraught. He quickly gathered them, their goat, and their other belongings together and loaded them into a small wagon pulled by a tired, ancient mule. A few lashes set the animal trotting at a pace which, for the aged beast, must have seemed like a jousting tournament .
    Plague had broken out in the city. Before the year was out, thousands of refugees and their reluctant hosts would be swept away by that appalling and terrible sickness that even my skilled grandfather could do nothing to stem .
    My mother must have been curious; she must have asked him questions, but somehow the only image that remained with her of