THE DEBTERA
1839
Ageze Molla was in the Gondar market when he met the Egyptian trader. He’d gone to the city to buy ingredients for his cures and charms and, not finding what he needed in the smaller markets, made his way to the one in front of the castle where prices were higher but the foreign traders came. There, at the stall of Ahmed Ali the Cairene, he found inks, silver and the tools for working it, and brass screws to repair his sistrum.
Ahmed Ali, black-turbaned and robed in rich silk, nodded knowingly at Ageze’s purchases – this wasn’t his first time in Gondar, nor was Ageze the first debtera who’d come to his stall. “A debtera, are you?” he said. That wasn’t a question, but his next words were: “Nasrani or Yahud?”
Ageze knew no Arabic and didn’t recognize “Nasrani,” but “Yahud” was unmistakable. “I am Esra’elawi. A Hebrew of the House of Israel.”
“Ah,” said Ahmed Ali, smiling. “There are many of you in Cairo. I learned my craft from one of you, who was like a father to me. Are you getting ready for your messiah, like they are?”
Ageze was silent for a moment, taken aback by the conversation’s sudden turn. “I know nothing of that. The kahens have said nothing of it.”
“But Cairo is all in a stir. The six hundredth year of the sixth millennium is coming, they say, and with it will come the redemption. Do you believe in that?”
“I believe there will be a redemption, yes.” Ageze looked around him at the market-stalls, the men in white gabis and women in embroidered habeshas, the armored soldiers going in and out of the castle; there were no portents he could see, but would there be? “I have heard nothing of it happening now.”
“You’d better get to the Holy Land if it does, no? That’s what the Jews of Cairo are saying. But messiah or not, all this will cost you three Maria Theresas.”
“So soon after talking of the messiah, you talk of theft? Three birr would buy all these five times over. I’ll give you two rupees and two measures of salt…”
Twenty minutes later, Ageze had his goods for a Maria Theresa and a pound of salt, and he left unsure of whether he’d got the better of Ahmed Ali or the other way around. He’d almost forgotten the byplay about the messiah, and he might have forgotten it altogether if not for having a dream.
It was a hot, dry day, and Ageze stopped to rest under a tree outside Fasilides’ baths, halfway along the six-mile walk to Wolleka village. He meant to sit for a few minutes only, but without thinking, he drifted to sleep. He dreamed he was climbing a mountain with a stone on his head as he might do on Sigd, the day of penitence, and that atop the mountain stood a fiery angel. And the angel held aloft a Torah, each Ge’ez letter made of starlight; he took the stone from Ageze’s head, put the Torah in his hands, and lifted him up to the stars themselves…
He woke, and walked the rest of the way to Wolleka in a daze, still seeing the fiery Torah written in the heavens.
The synagogue was in a copse of trees just outside the village, a long mud-brick building with fresh thatching. Ageze had put up that thatching. As a debtera – a cantor and itinerant magical healer who hoped one day to be the priest – he had duties at the synagogue as well as in the community. And he had duties there this evening as well. He sang the hymns at the evening service, as a debtera should do. Baruch the kahen – the priest – led the people in the deeper prayers and pleas for intercession, as a kahen should do. And Baruch read from the Torah that was kept in a silver ark behind curtains, and once again Ageze imagined its letters made from starlight.
“An Egyptian trader said it, and I had a dream,” he told Baruch when the service was done and the synagogue floor had been swept. “Moshiach is coming, and all of us must go to the Holy Land. The Jews of Egypt are preparing, and then an angel came to me.”
“An angel, or a whiff of kif?”
“I swear I have smoked nothing…”
“A dream then – one can dream of anything, without this being a prophecy.” Baruch stood straight and raised his hand to steady his white turban. “Did this Egyptian tell you why the Jews of Cairo believe the messiah will come so soon?”
“The six hundredth year of the sixth millennium – a mystic writing of theirs…”
“And we have no such writing, is that not true? Do we care what the false doctrines of foreigners tell us? You should care about completing your studies, or you will never become a kahen.”
Maybe not, thought Ageze as he went to seek his pallet in one of the round huts next to the synagogue. But he’d seen an angel in a dream.
_______
In those days, there were two routes from the Ethiopian highlands to the Red Sea: the northern route to Massawa and the southern one through Harar to Zeila and Berbera. Traders coming from Gondar most often took the northern route, and that was the route taken by the caravan-master who, in exchange for two of Ageze’s precious Maria Theresa thalers, gave him passage.
The caravan took the ancient road along the high plains, winding through the savanna and past the jagged peak of Ras Dahen, through Aksum with its tombs and standing stones, into the rebellious Tigray lands of Mereb Melash. Past the village of Asmara, the track descended steeply and the landscape grew steadily more arid, ending in a salt desert where the port of Massawa lay.
Ageze got his first view of Massawa from above as the caravan came down from a bluff: an island reached by a causeway, full of narrow streets with mosques and filigreed Arabic houses. On the far side, by the sea, the docks were jammed with dhows, and a twelve-gun sambuk with the crescent and three stars of Muhammad Ali anchored in the roads.
“You’ll see that flag a lot,” said the caravan-master. “The Turks used to rule here, but there was a war and Muhammad Ali won. An Isaaq chief called Warsame seized the city last year, but he dances to Egypt’s tune.” He put his hand on Ageze’s shoulder and faced him closely. “And have a care down there. Muhammad Ali has decreed against the slave trade, but a few coins in Warsame’s pocket and a few more in the sambuk captain’s and they can buy and sell as they please. And if you get on the wrong ship, they’re not above taking your passage money and selling you in Yemen or the Trucial Coast. If you don’t want to become a slave, make sure you can trust your captain.”
How would he do that, Ageze wondered, but he held his peace the rest of the way into the city and found space in a dockside serai. If the angel truly wanted him to come to the Holy Land, he wouldn’t come to harm.
He went to the docks the next morning. The first captain he talked to was friendly, but there was something off about the way he negotiated, as if he didn’t really care about his price; Ageze, not wanting to take chances, made his excuses and walked away. “Good job you did,” said a worker at the next dock, “or you’d be halfway to Sharjah by now.” The captain at that dock, said the worker, could be trusted, and he too was cordial – but he wouldn’t go below five Maria Theresas for the passage, and Ageze had only four.
He thought he might make more money by selling his charms, and he did sell one to an Agaw trader in the souk – a pouch made from the hide of a sacrificed lamb with a Ge’ez inscription inside, which would protect from the evil eye. But the trader warned him from selling any others. “I’ve heard of the Beta Israel,” he said, “and I know your charms are powerful. But if the qadis caught you, they would say it was black magic and punish you. I can tell you’re new here – talk to the wrong person and you’ll be in front of the qadis in a minute.” He pressed three rupees and four Egyptian piasters into Ageze’s hand, and whispered, “go.”
There were no more sales to be made, then, and it seemed there was no work going at the docks; since Warsame had taken over, his Isaaq clansmen had those jobs sewn up. But passers-by gave him coins when he played the sistrum and lyre at the market entrance – small coins, but in time they would add up. And one of the songs he sang as he played was a Hebrew hymn, and one of the passers-by recognized it.
The man was short but powerfully built, with the hands of a sailor; he was nearly as dark as Ageze, he wore a dun-colored robe and a black cap, and his sidelocks spilled over his shoulders. He spoke a Hebrew that was difficult for Ageze to follow, but it wasn’t impossible; “I don’t often see Jews here,” he said, “and never from the highlands.”
Ageze wondered how this man would know he was from the highlands, and then remembered that he was still wearing the clothing he’d had on when he left Wolleka. “There are some of us,” he answered.
“And what brings you down to the sea?”
“I’m going to the Holy Land, and I need passage to Aqaba.”
“Then this is a lucky meeting! I’m Dawud Habshush, captain of the Livyatan, under the flag of Emir Bilal of Nablus, and Aqaba is where I’m going.”
“What is your cargo?” asked Ageze carefully.
“Cloth, dye, and…” Dawud trailed off as he realized what Ageze was really asking. “Do I deal in slaves, you mean? My life wouldn’t be worth a grain of salt if I did – the Sanhedrin has decreed the death sentence for any Jew who works in that foul trade.”
Ageze had never heard of the Sanhedrin, but he assumed it was a governing body of Jews – maybe the priests of the Holy Land. If their liqa kahnet, their high priest, had forbidden the slave trade, other Jews would obey. And Dawud’s words had the ring of truth to them.
“How much for passage?”
“To bring a Jew home? Two Maria Theresas, if you help with the work.”
Ageze knew he ought to haggle, but something in Dawud’s voice told him that the price was the price, and besides, it was half what any other captain had demanded. And who would bargain with an angel, with a dream?
_______
Now came the days on the sea, the days of sun-drenched blue water, enervating heat, salt air so different from the air of the highlands. Ageze spent the first day below, barely able to control his seasickness, but by nightfall he was able to come up on deck and redeem his promise to share in the work.
The Livyatan was a medium-size dhow, ninety feet from stem to stern, and it carried sundries to all the ports of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the coast of Zanj. It was indeed carrying cloth and dyes now, from India by way of Aden’s warehouses, and frankincense and myrrh as ships had been carrying since King Solomon’s time. There were eighteen in the crew, most of them Yemenite or Bahraini Jews; Dawud himself was from a family of coppersmiths in Sana’a which had come to the Holy Land seventy years before. They spoke the Arabic of Hejaz and Yemen with a classical accent and were fluent as well in the traders’ tongue of the Swahili coast, but when night fell, they sang in Hebrew under the starlight.
At first they put Ageze to work as a general laborer, but on the Friday after they’d left port, he cooked a Sanbat wat, a slow-cooked Sabbath stew of chicken and onions and lemon juice and spices, and when he laid it out at noon on Saturday with a plate of injera, he was named by acclamation as the ship’s cook. And they welcomed his krar – his highland lyre – to accompany their sailors’ songs, and listened when he sang Ge’ez hymns in exchange.
“What brings you to the Holy Land?” asked Dawud on the seventh night, with three more to go before they made port in Aqaba.
“You don’t know?” said Ageze, genuinely surprise. “A trader in Gondar told me that Moshiach will soon come – that the call has gone out in Egypt, and all over the world. You are not awaiting him?”
“Some people are saying that, so I’ve heard. But most of us don’t put much store in it. There have been so many people who’ve claimed to be the messiah, or who’ve said he was about to come... And if I were you, I wouldn’t speak too loudly of that where the Sanhedrin is listening. They take a dim view of people getting stirred up about Moshiach.”
“Don’t you care if he comes?”
“He will come someday. And men will still sail on the sea when he comes, so nothing will change for me, no?”
Ageze had known people who hoped and prayed for the messianic age and others who were skeptical that such an age would ever come to pass, but he’d never met anyone who simply didn’t care. What kind of person would feel that way, he wondered, and then he looked at Dawud’s face and had his answer: someone supremely content with his lot.
So Dawud might be, but Ageze was not, and he still had a dream driving him onward.
The Livyatan landed at Aqaba three days later. Thirty years ago, Aqaba had been a fishing village, but the Nabulsi emir wanted a Red Sea port to match the Zaydani ports on the Mediterranean, and a town was growing beyond the piers. It was still a rough affair of warehouses, sailors’ inns fragrant with coffee and kif, and huts for the Bedouins who’d come seeking work, but the Nabulsis had built a fine mosque by the caravan-market and, pointedly, a custom-house next to it.
Ageze had nothing to declare, and it took barely an hour to exchange a Maria Theresa for a place on a northbound caravan. In six more days he was at Bir as-Saba, another immemorial village that the Nabulsi emir was building into a way station, trading post and military garrison. The village was surrounded by ruins, and guides crowded the caravan offering to take the travelers to see Abraham’s well and the ancient city gate, but the caravan-master pointed to a small building next to the barracks and said “you go there first.”
“Why there?”
“The Sanhedrin. They want to see all the Jews coming north.”
Ageze was bemused, but he obeyed; maybe he would see one of the Holy Land’s priests at last. But the man who sat at a table inside the building, surrounded by shelves of records, was not a priest but a clerk. After a moment’s thought, it made sense that the priests themselves wouldn’t come to such a remote outpost; that still left the question of why the outpost existed at all, but Ageze was not to remain long in ignorance.
“This is the southernmost point of the Land of Israel,” said the clerk after he’d taken Ageze’s name, “so it is the checkpoint for Jewish travelers, because north of here, you will be under the judicial authority of the Sanhedrin. Are you coming as a pilgrim, a merchant, or to stay?”
Ageze began to say that he’d come to await the messiah, but then he remembered Dawud’s warning. “I’ve come to see Jerusalem,” he said.
“There are others of your kind in Jerusalem,” said the clerk, “and their synagogue is by the Fountain Gate.”
Others of my kind? Ageze wondered.
Other Beta Israel? He’d never heard of such a thing, and Dawud surely would have told him, but before he could ask further, the clerk began to go down a list, asking if he had certain books, forbidden foods, pornography, and other items that he presumed to be contraband. The clerk didn’t ask if he had amulets or charms, and he kept them in his pack.
“I have a sistrum and a lyre,” he said.
The clerk smiled. “Those will be welcome. Are you a Sabbatean?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“You are fortunate. Do you have any questions of me? No? Then you are free to go.”
To Jerusalem.
_______
Ageze couldn’t help being awed by the sight of Jerusalem. All his life, he had heard of this city in prayers and read of it in scriptures, and now here he was; he had touched the Wailing Wall, set foot in the pools of Siloam, climbed the Mount of Olives where Israelite prophets and kings were buried. In a place of such holiness, who could doubt that the time of Moshiach was at hand?
But he also learned two things.
On his second day in Jerusalem – the fifth day of Adar in the year 5599 – he visited the synagogue by the Fountain Gate where the Sanhedrin’s clerk had told hm he’d find others of his kind, and they weren’t his kind at all. They were black, as he was, and their faces told him that they might possibly share a distant ancestor, but their families had come to this place from Sudan, not Ethiopia, and they didn’t worship as the Beta Israel did. They had rabbis, not kahens or debtera. They knew no Ge’ez, their scriptures were missing some of the books Ageze had learned, and they had other scriptures which they called the Talmud and Zohar. They were Jews like Dawud and his men, and when he asked if there were any in the city like him, they knew of none.
“Moshiach?” one of them said when he made bold to broach the subject. “Some people say he is coming, yes – in Egypt, in Turkey, even in Poland. But we have seen no signs.”
“It is almost the New Year – it will be Nisan soon. Surely there would have been signs by now?”
“The first of Nisan is the new year for festivals, but the first of Tishri is the new year for years. If Moshiach comes, he will come then.”
Ageze would have to wait six months longer to see his angel. Even the years here were different.
That was the first thing he learned.
The second thing took only a short while longer. Ageze made a few more discreet inquiries while stretching his last Maria Theresa as far as he could; he learned something of the Sanhedrin’s debates, and that not all of them had favored suppressing the messianic prophecies. One of the dissenters, Avraham Ashkenazi, had a synagogue at the edge of the Armenian quarter, and Ageze went to him hoping for an affirmation, or at least a sign to watch for. He expected that he might be turned away; he didn’t expect to be told he would have to wait another hundred years.
“This coming year is only the beginning,” said Ashkenazi. He took a codex from one of the many bookshelves in his workroom, found the passage he wanted, and began to read. “In the six hundredth year of the sixth millennium the upper gates of wisdom will be opened and all the wellsprings of wisdom below, and this will prepare the world for the seventh millennium like a person prepares himself on Friday for Shabbat, as the sun begins to wane…”
He closed the book and leaned over the desk. “You might think from this that Moshiach will come only in four hundred years, but Yehuda Alkalai has shown us, through other writings, that it will only be one hundred. The gathering of all the exiles must begin soon and much will be learned, but your life and mine will pass before Moshiach comes and closes the gates.”
Later, Ageze met others who thought that the arrival was more imminent – there was disagreement in that, it seemed, as in everything else in this land. But the angel on the mountain seemed further away than ever, and in the meantime, he had to eat.
Ageze had left Wolleka without really thinking about how he’d make a living in the Holy Land; he’d assumed that Moshiach would arrive soon enough to render the matter moot, or at least that he could be a cantor and magical healer to the Jews of Jerusalem as he’d been in Ethiopia. But no one wanted a cantor who could pray in Ge’ez but couldn’t read Hebrew, and they sacrificed no lambs here so he had no hides to make his amulets. He could work silver after a fashion, but that wouldn’t feed him in a city where there were dozens of true silversmiths, and every synagogue seemed already to have a man of all trades.
And so the first of Nisan was a new year for him after all: it was the day he left Jerusalem for a city that was less holy but where there was work, and where he could wait for Moshiach as long as he had to. A city by a mountain.
_______
Nablus, they said, had been hit hard in the earthquake two years past. By now, Ageze could see little evidence of it. The rebuilding had gone quickly and little of the damage was left – and besides, Nabulsi construction for the past forty years had followed the same code the Sanhedrin used, with framed walls and concrete piers and reinforced corners. What might once have left the city prostrate was now a story shared in the coffeehouses.
There was still plenty of work to do. The new neighborhoods outside the walls were expanding, workshops were growing into factories, and even a man whose skills were made for another place had no trouble earning his bread as a laborer. Ageze would never get rich, but while he waited out the months until Tishri, it would be enough.
“Go to Mayer,” they’d told him in Jerusalem. “He’s Rothschild’s man – he finds jobs for all the Jews who are new in Nablus.” And Mayer, very nearly rich as a Rothschild himself by now, had indeed found a job for him on a builder’s crew. But he’d declined Mayer’s offer to introduce him at the synagogue and find him a room with one of the congregation. He knew he would find little in common with the people who worshiped there – “we have all kinds,” Mayer had said, but they wouldn’t have his kind.
He found lodging instead on the Shari al-Abeed. Despite the name, the people who lived on the street were no longer slaves, and there were fine houses at either end for those who’d grown rich as builders or army officers or caravaneers. But nearly everyone had ancestors who’d come on the slave ships from Zanj or the caravans from Kush – some had come that way themselves in childhood – and Ageze could be anonymous there.
Or maybe not. Unlike the Sudanese of Jerusalem – and, so Ageze was told, the Galilee – the citizens of the Shari al-Abeed were Muslim; one of them, Abdullah Fadel, was a mufti of great learning and greater curiosity. He invited himself to Sanbat wat and listened to Ageze’s stories as the Jews of Jerusalem had not, as no one since Dawud Habshush had.
“There are Jews in Ethiopia!” he said. “And why shouldn’t there be? Where there are Muslims and Christians, so there are also Jews. But you aren’t like other Jews. Cut off too long, alone too long – you’re like the Samaritans, in a way.”
Cut off too long, alone too long – that sounded far too much like Ageze’s own condition. But he was intrigued enough to go to the Samaritans’ Seder, and to go with them seven days later when they climbed Mount Gerizim to sacrifice a lamb. The kohen gadol – the Samaritan high priest – in his robe and turban reminded Ageze of a kahen, and the ritual of climbing the mountain brought back aching memories of doing the same at Sigd. But atop Mount Gerizim there was no angel.
The weeks passed. Ageze worked in the day, shared coffee and stories with Abdullah in the evening, and spent the Sabbath with the Samaritans at their synagogue in the old city. He joined the Jews for their footraces and wrestling matches and ball games at Lag b’Omer and watched the Samaritans ascend Mount Gerizim again at Shavuot, although this time he didn’t go with them. Tammuz came, and full summer with it. And he realized that he wouldn’t last here until Tishri.
“It’s still not home?” asked Abdullah one night late in Tamuz as they sat on the roof of Ageze’s tenement.
“Maybe when Moshiach comes.” Ageze shook his head. “Or maybe… The captain who brought me here told me once that whether the messiah came or not, he’d still sail the sea. Wolleka wasn’t that place for me. Nor is this.”
“In Acre, they hold that all languages are holy,” Abdullah answered, and Ageze sensed that he wasn’t really changing the subject. “They might be interested in your Ge’ez, no? And in the nagidah’s lands, they don’t submit so meekly to the Sanhedrin, and in Acre not at all – if you reach Acre, you will have crossed the Land of Israel and come out the other side.”
“But close enough to return if Moshiach comes after all?”
Ageze stayed in Nablus another week, thinking that every day might be his last there, and finally woke to the one that was. He thought he might stay a while in Tzfat and then find his way to Acre. But he only got as far as Beit Mina.
_______
Beit Mina was a fishing village on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee, near the place where the Tzfat road branched off into the hills. It had a hundred forty people, and nearly a third of them belonged to one family. The patriarch was a Frenchman of sixty-eight named Lucien, burned dark as a Yemeni by forty years on the boats; his hair was sparse and white but his sidelocks were still long. His wife Salma was purest Sudanese and had borne him eight children, of whom six lived. Three of them had married into Sudanese families, one had married a Yemenite, one a Baghdadi and one a Spaniard, and a rainbow of twenty-nine grandchildren was everywhere.
Ageze reached the village at nightfall and, for a piaster, spent the night in one of the children’s houses – he would never remember which one, although in time he’d come to know all of them as well as if they were brothers and sisters. In the morning, Lucien told him that Ephraim, the village’s man of all work, was getting on in years and could use an assistant, and would he care to take the job for a lira a month and found?
Ageze gathered that Lucien had asked that question to every traveler who’d passed through the village since Ephraim started to falter, but he was the one who said yes. He had time.
For the rest of the day, he accompanied Ephraim on his rounds – tending the goats and chickens, collecting eggs, clearing the pathways, doing minor repairs. Ephraim was close to eighty, of uncertain Portuguese and Moroccan ancestry, and he talked enough for two. By nightfall Ageze knew everything about the village and the news from Tzfat and Acre. “The serais are full of people who think Moshiach will come – can you believe it?” Ephraim laughed at them, but there was no malice in his laughter, and Ageze discovered that he didn’t mind.
Later, when the boats returned and Lucien’s family fed him at their table, he learned that they, too, liked to talk. They told him about the war, about how they’d fled the Turkish armies invading the Galilee and how that meant they hadn’t been in the village when the earthquake hit and the standing wave washed over the shore. Some had taken shelter in Tzfat, where the nagidah had stood on the wall to command the defense; three of them had gone to fight, and a great battle had taken place the very day of the quake.
“We’d been fighting the Turks all day, and suddenly the earth fell from under us!” said Gideon, the oldest of Lucien and Salma’s sons. “The Turks were in a panic, but we stood – we stood – and then the emir, who’d stayed on his horse somehow, shook his saber above his head and said ‘Allah akbar! God fights for us!’ And the Turks ran like lions were chasing them, and they didn’t stop until we took Damascus.”
Ageze went to sleep with confused dreams of a queen holding a sword above a city wall. In the morning he returned to work. He and Ephraim helped the women in the kitchen garden; some men might have complained of doing women’s work, but Ephraim didn’t so neither did he. There was other work in the afternoon and the next day, and the evening after that was Shabbat.
That, too, was at Lucien and Salma’s table. The family dined together – they praised the Sanbat wat that was Ageze’s contribution – and after Salma lit candles, they prayed. The prayers were again different from those Ageze knew, but somehow it wasn’t as it had been in Jerusalem; there was no rabbi here laying down the law, just a family following the customs they’d made for themselves over three generations. When Ageze sang a hymn in Ge’ez, they made no objection; Lucien himself followed with a prayer in French, like the soldier of Napoleon that he’d been before he was taken prisoner at Mount Tabor and his life changed forever.
Later, the family passed the book of prayers around the table and Ageze again had to confess that he couldn’t read Hebrew. “Then we’ll have to teach you,” said Miriam, at nineteen the oldest of the grandchildren. Ageze was twenty-two.
Av passed that way, and Elul, and it came almost as a surprise to Ageze when Tishri began and with it the year 5600. The family marked the occasion with apples and honey, a custom borrowed from the Ashkenazim, and Lucien blew a ram’s horn, which was something the Beta Israel also did. Ageze looked up to the sky that night to see if anything had changed, but there were no signs, no portents. Nor, though he asked passers-by and fishermen returning from the markets, was there any news of such signs elsewhere.
Yom Kippur was nine days later, also a holiday that the Beta Israel shared. Was it a sin to hope for the messiah, to dream of an angel? Or was Ahmed Ali the Cairene, who’d given him the false prophecy, the one who’d sinned? He forgave Ahmed Ali, if so.
Then it was Sukkot, and Ageze joined the villagers in gathering wood and branches. He expected to build the sukkah behind the houses, but Lucien led everyone to the boats – “we harvest fish!” he said – and that evening, they celebrated on the calm waters.
It became Heshvan. The days grew shorter. The work continued. By Kislev, Miriam had taught him to read and write the Hebrew alphabet. Sometimes he took a stick and wrote in the earth, making the letters for words he knew in Ge’ez. He made the letters for Sigd. It was a holiday unknown here, but one that could be written.
“It will be Sigd on the twenty-ninth,” he told Lucien one night. “At home, we would climb a mountain and pray for forgiveness.”
“Tzfat is on a mountain.”
“People climb that mountain every day, for work, for trade.”
Lucien leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. “Mount Tabor, then? Holy things have happened there. And it’s a place where we defended our homeland.” He spoke without irony even though he’d fought for the other side; he’d chosen the Jews as his people since then, and after forty years he scarcely remembered that he’d ever had any other allegiance.
“How far is it?”
“Twenty miles. It took a day once, but the roads are good now. A horse or cart will get you there in a morning.”
“Then I’ll find a cart somewhere…”
“We will take you.”
“Why? It’s not your holiday. It isn’t your custom.”
“One of the great rabbis of the Sanhedrin…”
“Which one?”
“What do I know of one rabbi from another? I’m not a scholar. And does it matter who said it, as long as it was said? But he said that while each of us should follow our own custom, we must also help our neighbors follow theirs. So if there’s no one else to come with you, we will.”
In the end, it was ten of the family that came, dressed in white clothing with fringes of many colors, because that was all that would fit in the donkey-cart. And despite Lucien’s optimism, it was afternoon before they reached the foot of the mountain. But it was an imposing mountain, a prominent one rising high above the surrounding countryside, and it looked enough like the hills around Wolleka that for a moment Ageze could imagine that he was there.
He looked down and found a flat stone, which he put on his head as a sign of penance. “You don’t need to do this,” he said. Lucien and Miriam did; the others did not. Then they climbed.
The summit was fifteen hundred feet above the base, and the sun was low by the time they got there. It wouldn’t be the twenty-ninth of Kislev for very much longer. Ageze walked through the ruins of churches and an old fortress until he found a place still undisturbed.
“O God, have mercy on us,” he said – in Hebrew, not Ge’ez, though he didn’t realize it. “Elohe, Elohe, gracious God, forgive us.” He said that over and over, prostrated himself in prayer, and when he stood again, sang a Ge’ez hymn that he’d learned as a child. Lucien sang it with him; he’d recited it enough times at the family table that they knew it.
Ageze wasn’t sure how to end the prayers; he was a debtera, not a kahen, and it had never been his place to lead such things. The setting sun ended the service for him. One moment he was praying, the next he was simply there, standing in silence and watching the first stars come out.
There was no angel, no messiah. But somewhere in those stars, all was written.
_______
Of all the thousands and thousands who would climb Mount Tabor to mark the day of Sigd, Ageze Molla was the first. He didn’t know this yet on the thirtieth of Kislev in the 5600th year of the creation of the world, but he would live long enough to hear it said.
