“Well, it is the same where I come from … ,” I had to admit.

“Yes, I shall seek to make a good marriage to a good man who will be a good provider and a good lover to us both, for my brother Aziz is all the family I have.”

“Wait a moment,” I said, scandalized. “A Venetian female’s chastity is often an item of barter, yes, and often traded for a good marriage, yes. But only for the commercial or social advancement of her whole family. Do you mean the women here willingly endorse and connive in the lust of one man for another? You would deliberately become the wife of a man just so you could share him with your brother?”

“Oh, not just any man who comes along,” she said airily. “You should feel flattered that both Aziz and I found you to our liking.”

“Gèsu.”

“To couple with Aziz commits you to nothing, you see, since a male has no sangar membrane. But if you wish to be the breaker of mine, you must wed me and take us both.”

“Gèsu.” I got up from the daiwan.

“You are going? Then you do not want me? But what of Aziz? You will not have him even once?”

“I think not, thank you, Sitarè.” I slouched toward the door. “I simply was ignorant of local custom.”

“He will be desolated. Especially if I have to tell him it was me you desired.”

“Then do not,” I mumbled. “Just tell him I was ignorant of local custom.” And I went on out the door.

2

BETWEEN the house and the stable was a little garden plot planted with kitchen herbs, and the Widow Esther was out there. She was wearing only one slipper, her other foot was bare, and she had the removed slipper in her hand, beating with it at the ground. Curious, I approached her, and saw that she was pounding at a large black scorpion. When it was pulped, she moved on and turned over a rock; another scorpion sluggishly crawled into view and she squashed that one, too.

“Only way to get the nasty things,” she said to me. “They do their prowling at night, when they are impossible to see. You have to turn them up in daylight. This city is infested with them. I do not know why. My late dear husband Mordecai (alav ha-sholom) used to grumble that the Lord erred miserably in sending mere locusts upon Egypt, when He could have sent these venomous Kashan scorpions.”

“Your husband must have been a brave man, Mirza Esther, to criticize the Lord God Himself.”

She laughed. “Read your scriptures, young man. The Jews have been giving censure and advice to God ever since Abraham. You can read in the Book of Genesis how Abraham first argued with the Lord and then proceeded to haggle Him into a bargain. My Mordecai was no less hesitant to cavil at God’s doings.”

I said, “I once had a friend—a Jew named Mordecai.”

“A Jew was your friend?” She sounded skeptical, but I could not tell whether she doubted that a Christian would befriend a Jew, or a Jew a Christian.

“Well,” I said, “he was a Jew when I first met him, when he called himself Mordecai. But I seem to keep on meeting him under other names or in other guises. I even saw him once in one of my dreams.”

And I told her of those various encounters and manifestations, each of them evidently intended to impress upon me “the bloodthirstiness of beauty.” The widow stared at me as I talked, and her eyes widened, and when I was done she said:

“Bar mazel, and you a gentile! Whatever he is trying to tell you, I suggest that you take it to heart. Do you know who that is you keep meeting? That must be one of the Lamed-vav. The thirty-six.”

“The thirty-six what?”

“Tzaddikim. Let me see—saints, I suppose a Christian would call them. It is an old Jewish belief. That there are always in the world just thirty-six men of perfect righteousness. No one ever knows who they are, and they themselves do not realize they are tzaddikim—or else, you see, that self-consciousness would impair their perfection. But they go constantly about the world, doing good deeds, for no reward or recognition. Some say the tzaddikim never die. Others say that whenever one tzaddik dies, another good man is appointed by God to that office, without his knowing he has been so honored. Still others say that there is really only one tzaddik, who can be in thirty-six places simultaneously, if he chooses. But all who believe in the legend agree that God will end this world if ever the Lamed-vav should cease doing their good works. I must say, though, that I never heard of one of them extending his good offices to a gentile.”

I said, “The one I met in Baghdad may not even have been a Jew. He was a fardarbab tomorrow-teller. He could have been an Arab.”

She shrugged. “The Arabs have an identical legend. They call the righteous man an abdal. The true identity of each of them is known only to Allah, and it is only on their account that Allah lets the world go on existing. I do not know if the Arabs borrowed the legend of our Lamed-vav, or if it is a belief which they and we have shared ever since the long-ago time when we were mutually the children of Shem. But whichever yours is, young man—an abdal bestowing his favor on an infidel or a tzaddik on a gentile—you are highly favored and you should pay heed.”

I said, “They seem never to speak to me of anything but beauty and bloodthirstiness. I already seek the one and shun the other, insofar as I can. I hardly need further counsel in either of those respects.”

“Those sound to me like the two sides of a single coin,” said the widow, as she slapped with her slipper at another scorpion. “If there is danger in beauty, is there not also beauty in danger? Or why else does a man so gladly go a-journeying?”

“Me? Oh, I journey just out of curiosity, Mirza Esther.”

“Just curiosity! Listen to him! Young man, do not ever deprecate the passion called curiosity. Where would danger be without it, or beauty either?”

I failed to see much connection among the three things, and again began to wonder if I was talking to someone slightly divanè. I knew that old people could sometimes get wonderfully disjointed in their conversations, and so this one seemed when she said next:

“Shall I tell you the saddest words I ever heard?”

In the manner of all old people, she did not wait for me to say yes or no, but went right on:

“They were the last words spoken by my husband Mordecai (alav ha-sholom). It was when he lay dying. The darshan was in attendance, and other members of our little congregation, and of course I was there, weeping and trying to weep with quiet dignity. Mordecai had made all his farewells, and he had said the Shema Yisrael, and he was composed for death. His eyes were closed, his hands folded, and we all thought he was peacefully slipping away. But then, without opening his eyes or addressing anybody in particular, he spoke again, quite clearly and distinctly. And what he said was this …”

The widow pantomimed the deathbed occasion. She closed her eyes and crossed her hands on her bosom, one of them still holding her dirty slipper, and she leaned her head back a little, and she said in a sepulchral voice, “I always wanted to go there … and do that … but I never did.”

Then she stayed in that pose; evidently I was expected to say something. I repeated the dying man’s words, “I always wanted to go there … and do that …” and I asked, “What did he mean? Go where? Do what?”

The widow opened her eyes and shook her slipper at me. “That was what the darshan said, after we had waited for some moments to hear more. He leaned over the bed and said, ‘Go to what place, Mordecai? To do what thing?’ But Mordecai said no more. He was dead.”

I made the only comment I could think to make. “I am sorry, Mirza Esther.”

“So am I. But so was he. Here was a man in the very last flicker of his life, lamenting something that had once piqued his curiosity, but he had neglected to go and see it or do it or have it—and now he never could.”