COHEN, SAMUEL

(1660-September 24, 1689)--A Dubrovnik Jew, one of the authors of this book. Banished from the city in 1689 en route to Constantinople, he died after falling into a coma from which he never awoke.

Samuel Cohen's contemporaries describe him as a tall man, with red eyes and a half-gray mustache despite his youth. "He's felt cold ever since I've known him. But he's warmed up a bit in the past couple of years," his mother, Clara, once said of him. She claimed the he traveled vast distances in dreams at night and would sometimes wake up tired and dusty, or would limp until he had rested from his dream. His mother said she felt a strange unease when Cohen slept, because he behaved in his dreams not like a Jew but like a nonbeliever who rides in his sleep even on the Sabbath, sometimes singing the Eighth Psalm, the one sung when you want to find something you have lost, but singing it the Christian way. Besides Hebrew, he also spoke Italian, Latin, and Serbian, but when he dreamed at night he mumbled in some strange language he could not speak when awake, a language that turned out to be Walachian. At his interment, his left arm reveled a terrible scar that looked as though it came from a bite. He longed to visit Jerusalem, and in his dreams did indeed see a city on the shores of time, walked through its straw-strewn streets that deadened sound, lived in a tower full of cupboards as big as a small church, and listened to the rain of fountains. But soon he realized the town he was dreaming about, and had been convinced was Jerusalem, was not the holy city at all, but Constantinople; this was evident from an engraving of Constantinople that he had in his collection of old maps of heaven and earth, towns and stars, in which he recognized the streets, squares, and towers of his dream.

Cohen had indubitable virtues, but, in the opinion of Madame Clara, they did not lean toward the practical. He would calculate the speed of the wind from the shadows of the clouds, he had a good head for relations, actions, and numbers, but easily forgot faces, names, and objects. The people of Dubrovnik remembered him as always standing in the same stop, at the window of his little room in the ghetto, his eyes lowered. In fact, he kept books on he floor of his room and would read them standing up, turning the pages with his bare toes.

Sabljak Pasha of Trebinje had heard that there was a Jew in Dubrovnik who made fine wigs for horses, and that is how Cohen joined the pasha's service, in which he lived up to his reputation. He kept the pasha's horse graveyard in good order above the sea and braided the wigs worn by the pasha's black horses for holidays and on military campaigns. Cohen was content with his work.

He seldom saw the pasha, but he did encounter the pasha's men, who were quick with their swords and smooth in the saddle. Comparing himself with them, he noticed that somehow he was faster in his sleep than when awake. He tested this impression in his own singularly meticulous way. In his dream, he saw himself standing alone under an apple tree, his sword unsheathed. It was autumn in his dream and he was waiting, with blade in hand, for the wind to blow. When it did, the apples started thudding down, like horses' hoofs. As the first one fell, he sliced it in mid-air with his sword. He awoke to the same autumn of his dream, borrowed a sword, and went under the bridge by the Pile Gate. An apple tree stood there, and he waited for the wind to blow. When it did, and apples began falling, he knew he would not be able to spike any of them with his sword. He turned out to be right, confirming that he was swifter and quicker with a sword in his sleep than when awake. Maybe that was because he practiced in his dreams. He often dreamed that he was in the dark, that in his right hand he held a sword and wrapped around his left was a camel rein, which was being pulled at the other end by someone in the darkness. His ears were full of the dense darkness, and through it he could hear somebody unsheathing a sword in the blackness and inching the steel toward his face; unerringly he sensed it coming and met it head on with his own weapon, blocking the invisible, whistling blade that swooped out of the blackness and fell clanging against his saber.

Suspicions concerning Samuel Cohen and the punishments that followed came from various quarters and for various reasons. He was accused of impermissible engagement in having a religious dispute with the Dubrovnik Jesuits, and of having a relationship with a Christian noble-woman, and of propagating the heretical teachings of the Essenes, not to mention the testimony of a monk that, within full view of the entire Stradun, Cohen had swallowed a soaring bird with his left eye.

It started with Samuel Cohen's highly unusual visit to the Jesuit monastery in Dubrovnik on April 23, 1689, and it ended with prison. That morning, Cohen had been seen rushing up the steps to the Jesuits, placing his pipe between his teeth through a smile, because he had seen the pipe being smoked in his sleep and begun smoking it on awakening. He rang the bell at the monastery and, when the door opened, immediately began asking the monks about a Christian missionary and saint who was approximately eight hundred years older than he, whose name he did not know, but whose biography he knew by heart; he knew that the man had been schooled in Thessalonica and Constantinople and hated icons, that he had learned Hebrew somewhere in the Crimea, and that he converted the misguided to Christianity in the Khazar Empire, taking along his brother to help him. He had died in Rome, Cohen said, in the year 869. Cohen asked the monks if they knew the name of this saint and if they could direct him to his biography. But the Jesuits did not even let Cohen through the door. They listened to what he had to say, constantly making the sign of the cross over his mouth, and sent for the guards to put him in the dungeon. For, ever since 1606, when the synod at the Church of Our Lady had passed a decision against the Jews, it was forbidden in Dubrovnik for inhabitants of the ghetto to engage in any kind of discussion about the Christian faith, this offence being punishable by thirty days in prison. While Cohen served his thirty days, smoothing the rough bench with his ear, two noteworthy things occurred. The Jewish municipality decided to make an inventory of Cohen's papers, and a woman appeared who took an interest in Cohen's fate.

Every afternoon at five o'clock when the shadow of the Mincheta turret fell on the other side of the rampart, Lady Ephrosinia Lukarevich, a respected noble-woman from Lucharitse Street, would pick up her porcelain pipe, fill it with the yellowest tobacco, which had been kept in raisins over the winter, light it with a lump of myrrh or a pine splinter from the isle of Lastovo, give a silver coin to a boy from the Stradun, and send the lighted pipe to Samuel Cohen in prison. The boy would give it to Cohen, who, when he had finished smoking, would send it back to Lady Ephrosinia.

This Lady Ephrosinia, born into the aristocratic Getaldich-Kruhoradich family, had married into the upper class Luccari family of Dubrovnik, and was as famous for her striking beauty as for the fact that nobody had ever seen her hands. It was rumored that she had two thumbs on each hand, that is to say, a second thumb in place of a little finger, so that there was no way to tell which was her left hand and which was her right. They say this could be seen clearly on a portrait completed without her knowledge depicting her clasping a book to her breast with her two-thumbed hands. The story notwithstanding, Lady Ephrosinia lived like everybody else of her class; she did not, as they say, have one ear heavier than the other. But every so often, as though possessed, she would allow herself to visit and attend the maskeratas performed by the Jews in the ghetto. At the time, the Dubrovnik authorities had not yet banned these Jewish plays, and once Lady Ephrosinia even lent the ghetto comedians and clowns one of her dresses, "blue with red and yellow ribbons," for the leading female role, which was played by a man. In February 1687, the female role in the "shepherd's play" went to Samuel Cohen, who played the shepherdess wearing Lady Luccari's blue dress. In their reports to the Dubrovnik authorities, informants observed that the "Judeo Cohen" had behaved oddly, "in a way not befitting a comedy." Dressed up as a shepherdess, "decked out in ribbons and lace, blue and red, made up so that not even his face could be recognized," Cohen was supposed to recite a declaration of love, "told in verse," to a shepherd. But in the middle of the play, he turned to Lady Ephrosinia (whose dress he was wearing) and to everyone's astonishment presented her with a mirror and the following "words of love":

Lady Ephrosinia received this gesture surprisingly calmly and richly rewarded the players with oranges. When with the spring came confirmation time, and Lady Luccari brought her daughter to church, all the world could see she was carrying a doll attired in a blue dress made of the yellow-and-red-ribboned one that the "Judeo Cohen had recited in the maskerata in the ghetto." Cohen pointed at the doll and cried out that this was his daughter receiving Communion, and that the child of his love was being led into a temple, Christian though it may be. That same evening, Lady Ephrosinia met Samuel Cohen in front of the Church of Our Lady just as the ghetto was closing; she gave him the tip of her belt to kiss, led him away on the belt as though it were a rein, and, when they reached the first shadow, gave him a key to the house in Prieko where she would wait for him the next evening.

At the appointed hour, Cohen arrived, to find a door whose keyhole was above the door handle; the only was to unlock it was to insert the key with its notched side up and then push the door handle up. He found himself standing in a narrow hallway in with the right wall was like any other, but that the left was composed of small square stone pillars and, fanning out, it veered off in cascades to the left. Looking over these small pillars, Cohen could see into the distance and the open space; down below, the sea rumbled somewhere far way in the moonlight. But the sea was not laying on its back; it hung straight, like a curtain, its bottom end tucked in, wavy and hemmed with foam. Attached at a right angle to the pillars was something that looked like an iron fence, which prevented anyone from getting to close. Cohen deduced that the entire left wall of the hallway was actually a staircase placed with its flat side against the floor, making in unusable, because the steps stood upright, to the left of the foot, not under it. He followed the staired wall, which took him farther and farther away from the right of the hallway, and somewhere in the middle he suddenly lost the ground from under his feet. He fell against on of the step-pillars and when he tried to get up, he realized he could not get a footing on the floor because, although unchanged, it had turned into a wall. Meanwhile, the staired wall, which was the same as before had turned into a useable staircase, and the light that had glowed at the back of the hallway now shone high above Cohen. He had no problem in climbing the stairs toward the light and the room on the upper floor. Before going in, he peered over the railing and down below he saw the sea as he knew it, spilling with a roar to the abyss beneath his feet.

When he entered the room, Lady Ephrosinia was sitting barefooted and weeping into her hair. On top of a three-legged stool in from of her was a peasant shoe, an opanak, containing a small loaf of bread and, in its nose, a burning wax candle. Lady Ephrosinia's bare breasts showed through her long hair; they had lashes and brows like eyes, and they dripped a dark milk like a threatening glance. She broke off crusts of bread with her double-thumbed hands and dropped them into her lap. As they became wet with her tears and milk, she tossed them onto the floor in front of her feet, which had teeth instead of toenails. Curling the soles of her feet, she voraciously chewed at the food with her feet, but since there was no way for her to swallow it, the masticated morsels of food rolled in the dust on the floor.

She saw Cohen, she pressed him against her, and led him into the bedchamber. That night she took him as her lover, nursed him on her black milk, and said, "You'll age if you suck too hard, because what flows out of me is time. It gives you strength up to a point, and then it weakens you."

After spending the night with her, Cohen decided to convert to her Christian faith. He spoke about it in open rapture, and the story spread, but nothing happened.

When he confided his intentions to Lady Ephrosinia, she told him, "Please, don't do it, because, if you must know, I myself am not of the Christian faith; that is to say, I am only temporarily a Christian, by marriage. Actually, in a very complicated way, I am of your own, Jewish world. You may have sometimes noticed in the Stradun a familiar cloak on an entirely unfamiliar person. We all wear such cloaks, including me. I am the devil; my name is 'sleep,' I come from the Hebrew hell, from Gehenna; I reside on the left side of the temple, among spirits of evil; I am the seed of Gebhurah, of whom it is written: 'atque hic illo creata est Gehenna.' I am the first Eve; I am called Lilith; I know the name Jehovah and quarreled with Him. Ever since, I have been drifting in His shadow, among the seven meanings of the Torah. I was created in my present form, the one you see and like on me, by mixing together the truth and earth; I have three fathers and no mother. And I must no walk backward. If you kiss my brow, I will die. If you convert to Christianity, you will die for me. The satans of the Christian Hades will take you over; they will take care of you, not I. You would be lost to me forever and beyond my reach. Not just in this life, but in other, future lives as well."

And so Dubrovnik Shephardi Samuel Cohen remained what he was. But when he stopped, the rumors did not. His name traveled faster than his person, and things were already happening to it that had yet to happen to Cohen. The cup spilled over at the carnival in 1689 on the Sunday of the Holy Apostles. Right after the carnival, the Dubrovnik actor Nikola Rigi was put on trial for offenses committed by his troupe during the carnival. He was accused of ridiculing the prominent Dubrovnik Jew Papo-Samuel and other Jews in the pageant, of using them in the maskerata, and of abusing Samuel Cohen in front of the entire town. The actor defended himself by saying that he had no idea Cohen was behind the carnival mask. As the young do every year when the wind changes hue, Rigi and the actor Krivonosovich prepared the "Judiata," a carnival play featuring a Jew. But that year Bozho Popov-Saraka and the other landed gentry pulled out, so the common people decided to prepare the masks themselves. They hired an ox-cart and put a scaffold on it; Krivonosovich, who had played the Jew before, got himself a shirt made of sailcloth and a hat of fishnet, used hemp to make a red beard, and wrote the testament read in the "Judiata" by the Jew before he dies. They met at the appointed hour in their (masked) disguises, and Rigi swore to the court that he thought that riding the cart, as in earlier carnival years, was Krivonosovich disguised as a Jew, standing under the scaffold and submitting to the blows, the spitting., and other humiliations envisaged by the play. All the actors, including the hangman and the Jew, piled into the cart and rode through town, from the black monks to the white, performing the play. They went to the Stradun, then headed for Our Lady and Lucharitse Street. At the big fountain, Rigi, playing the hangman, broke the nose off the supposed Jew's mask (behind which he thought was Krivonosovich); at Tabor he singed his beard; at the small fountain he exhorted the crowd to spit at him; at the court in front of the palace (ante Palatium) he ripped off his hand (made out of a sock filled with straw) and noticed nothing unusual except that the rattling of the cart brought bursts of whistling from the Jew's mouth. In front of the Lukarevich home on Lucharitse Street the scenario called for the "Judeo" to be hanged; Rigi put the noose around his neck, still convinced that behind the mask was Krivonosovich. But instead of the testament the man behind the mask read out a poem or something--God knows what it was--and, with the noose around his neck, addressed it to Lady Ephrosinia Lukarevich, who was standing on the balcony of her palazzo, with her hair freshly washed with woodpecker egg. What he read was nothing like the testament of the Jew in the "Judiata"; on the contrary, it went as follows:

Only then--because these words were more appropriate for a muskerata (with its declarations of love) than for a "Judiata", and certainly did not sound like the Jew's testament--did the actors and spectators realize that something was wrong; only then did Rigi think to remove the mask from the reader. To the astonishment of one and all, when the mask was lifted it revealed not the actor Krivonosovich but a real Jew from the ghetto, Samuel Cohen. This Judeo had willingly suffered all the blows, spitting, and humiliations in place of Krivonosovich and Nikola Rigi could not be held responsible, because he had not known that the mask was worn by Cohen, who had bribed Krivonosovich to let him take his place.

And so, to everyone's surprise, it was established that Rigi was not to blame for the abuse of Samuel Cohen or for the insults hurled at him, but, on the contrary, that Samuel Cohen had infringed on the law that forbids Jews to mix with Christians in the carnival pageant. Since Cohen had only recently completed a stint in prison for having visited the Jesuits, the latest verdict came as a finger tilting the scales, for it banished from town this Judeo, whose 'hair hung heavy" and who tended a horse graveyard for the Turks somewhere in Herzegovina. The only thing that was uncertain was whether the Jewish community would stand behind Cohen and protect him, which would postpone if not alter the entire matter. And so Cohen was sent back to prison while everybody waited for the ghetto to have its say.

In the ghetto, it was decided not to wait, as if for a fire in winter. In the second moon of the month of Iyar that year, Rabbi Abraham Papo and Isaac Nehama went to examine and list the papers and books in Cohen's room; his visit to the monks had disturbed not only the Jesuits but the ghetto as well.

When they arrived, nobody was there. They rang the bell could tell from its sound that the key was inside. It was attached to the tongue of the bell. Inside, a candle was burning in the room, although Cohen's mother was out. They found a mortar for cinnamon, a sleeping net strung up so close to the ceiling that a book could be propped against it to read, an hourglass filled with lavender-scented sand, a three-pronged oil lamp with an inscription on each prong bearing the names of man's three souls: nephesh, ruah, and neshamah. On the windowsill were potted plants, whose species led the visitors to believe that they were the kind protected by the stars under the constellation Cancer. On the shelves lining the walls were a lute, a saber, and 132 covers made of red, black, blue, and white sailcloth, containing Cohen's manuscripts or other writings. A plate bore instructions, written with a pen dipped in sealing wax, for waking up easily and quickly: "To become fully awake it suffices to write out any word whatsoever, for writing is itself a supernatural and godly, not a human, act." Written on the ceiling and above the sleeping net were various letters and words spelled out in the course of waking up. Among the books, the visitors attention was drawn to three found on the floor by the window where Cohen used to read. He had obviously leafed through them in turn, reading polygamously. Lying on the floor was a Cracow edition of the book De illustribus familiis (1585) by the Dubrovnik poet Dr. Didak Isaiah Cohen (died in 1599), known as Didak Pir; next to it was Aron Cohen's book Zekan Aron (The Beard of Aron), printed in Venice in 1637, with a transcript of Aron's hymn to Isaac Yushurun (died in the dungeons of Dubrovnik); and beside that, a copy of The Good Oil (Semen Atov) by Shalamun Oeph, Aron Cohen's grandfather. The books had obviously been selected for family reasons, but this fact revealed nothing more. Rabbi Abraham Papo opened the window, and the soft southern breeze swept into the room. The rabbi opened one of the books, listened for a moment to the pages rustling in the breeze, and then said to Isaac Nehama, "Listen! Doesn't sound as if the pages are murmuring the word nephesh, nephesh, nephesh?"

The rabbi let the next book speak, and its rustling could be heard loud and clear, saying ruah, ruah, ruah.

"If the third book utters the word neshamah,: said Papo, "then we'll know that the books are calling Cohen's souls." And as soon as Abraham Papo opened the third book, both men heard it whisper the word neshamah, neshamah, neshamah.

The books are arguing over something in this room," Rabbi Papo declared. "There are some things here that want to destroy some others."

They sat down and stared at the room. Suddenly, flames shot up from the oil lamp, as though summoned by the rustling pages of the books. One of the flames separated from the lamp, weeping in two voices, and Rabbi Papo said, "That is Cohen's first and youngest soul crying for his body, and his body crying for his soul."

The soul then moved to the lute on the shelf and began plucking its strings, playing soft music to accompany its weeping. "Sometimes in the early evening," wept Cohen's soul, "If the last glimmers of sunlight catch your eyes, a passing butterfly may look like a distant bird, fleeting joy like soaring sorrow. . . ."

Then the second flame elongated into human form, stood in front of the mirror, and began dressing and rubbing on whitener. It took the balsams, brazil-wood, and scented ointments to the mirror, as though only in a looking glass could it tell their color, but when putting on the whitener it turned its face away from the mirror, as though afraid of injury. When it had finished, it was completely transformed into the image of Cohen, with his red eyes and half-gray mustache. Then it took the saber from the shelf and joined the first soul. But Cohen's third soul, the oldest of the three, flickered like a firefly or a small flame high up by the ceiling. While the first two souls leaned against the shelf with the manuscripts, the third stayed hostilely in its ceiling corner, scratching at the letters inscribed above the sleeping net, where it was written:

Rabbi Papo and Isaac Nehama decided that Cohen's souls had quarrels over the bags containing the manuscripts, but there were so many that they could not examine them all.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking about the colors of those bags?"

"Aren't they the colors of a flame?" said Nehama thoughtfully. "Lets compare them with a candle. It has several flames, black, blue, red. This tricolored flame burns and is always in contact with the burning wick and oil. It tipped by another, white flame, which does not burn, yet shines, supported by the tricolored flame below; in other words, fire nourishing fire. Moses stood on the mountain in the white flame that shines but does not burn, while we stand at the foot of the mountain in the tricolored flame, which devours and burns everything except the white flame that stands an the symbol of the greatest and most secret wisdom. Therefore, let us look inside the white covers.

There were not many, just enough for one feed bag. They found an edition by Judah Halevi, printed in Basel in 1660, with a translation from the Arabic into Hebrew by Rabbi Judah ben Tibbon and the printer's Latin version. The other covers contained Cohen's manuscripts. The first to catch the visitor's eye was a Note on Adam Cadmon.

Staring at each other in the half-dark, the two men emptied the remaining white sacks but found nothing in them except several dozen alphabetized words, something Cohen called The Khazar Dictionary (Lexicon Corsi), which they took to be alphabetized information about the Khazars, their religion, their customs, and everybody associated with them, their history, and their conversion to Judaism. The material was similar to that complied many centuries before by Judah Halevi in his book about the Khazars, but Cohen had gone a step further by trying to find out more about Halevi's unnamed Christian and Islamic participants in the Khazar polemic. He tried to discover their names and arguments, and to compile their biographies for his dictionary, which, he believed, ought to include entries neglected by Jewish sources on the Khazar question. And so there was a rough outline for the life of the Christian preacher and missionary, clearly the same person Cohen had inquired about with the Jesuits, but since Cohen had been unable to discover his name it could not be included in the dictionary. "Judah Halevi," wrote Cohen in an annotation to this unfinished biography, "his publisher, and other Hebrew commentators and sources mention by name only one of the three participants in the religious polemic at the court of the Khazar kaghan--the Jewish representative, Isaac Sangari, who interpreted the dream about the angel's visit to the Khazar ruler. Hebrew sources do not name the Christian or Islamic participants in the polemic; they merely say that one is a philosopher; as for the other, the Arab, they do not even mention whether he was killed before or after the polemic. Perhaps, "wrote Cohen, "there is somebody else out there in the world collecting papers and information about the Khazars, like Judah Halevi, and compiling sources or a dictionary, like me. Perhaps he is not of our faith, but a Christian or a person of Islamic law. Perhaps there are two other people somewhere out there in the world searching for me the way I'm searching for them. Perhaps they are dreaming of me, as I of them, and craving for what I know, because my truth is a secret to them, just as theirs is the hidden answer to my questions. It is not in vain that people say that every dream is a sixtieth part of the truth. Perhaps it is not in vain that I dream of Constantinople and of myself there in an entirely different version of my real self--smooth in the saddle and quick with the sword, a bit lame, and pious in a different way from the way I actually am. The Talmud says: 'Let him go forth to have his dream interpreted before three men!' Who are my three? Apart from myself, is the second not perhaps the Christian searching for the Khazars, and the third, the Moslem? Are there three religions in my soul rather than one? Will two of my souls go to hell, and only one to heaven? Or, as always when learning the book about creation of the world, three are necessary and one is not enough, and I rightly yearn for the other two as perhaps they yearn for the third. I don't know, but I do know and have reliably experienced that my three souls are warring inside of me and one of them carries a sword and is already in Constantinople; the second hesitates, weeps, and sings while playing the lute; the third is against me. The third does not appear, or is not yet reaching me. And so I dream only of the first, the one bearing the sword; I do not dream of the second one, with the lute. Because, as Raav Hisda says, 'A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that has not been read,' but I turn around and say, 'An unread letter is like an undreamed dream.' How many dreams have been sent to me that I never received and dreamed? I do not know, but I do know that one of my souls can trace the origin of another by looking at a sleeping man's brow. I feel that pieces of my soul can meet among other human beings, among camels, among rocks and plants; somebody's dream has taken material from the body of my soul and is using it to build its own house somewhere far, far away. Because the self-improvement of my souls requires the cooperation of other souls, souls helping souls. I know my Khazar dictionary includes all ten numbers and twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet; the world can be created out of them, but, lo, I cannot do it. I am missing certain names, and as a result, some of the letters will not be filled. How I would love to use only verbs instead of nouns for the entries in the dictionary! But a man cannot do that, because the letters that designate verbs come from Elohim, are unknown to us, and are divine, not human; only letters designating nouns and names, those that come from the devil in Gehenna, build my dictionary and are accessible to me. I must, therefore, keep to names and the devil. . . ."

"Baal halomot!" cried Rabbi Papo, looking up from Cohen's papers. "Is he delirious?"

:I think something else," replied Nehama, putting out the candle.

"What do you think?" asked Rabbi Papo, putting out the three branched lamp, as each soul whispered its name before it vanished.

"I am wondering," replied Nehama in the inky blackness that made him confuse the darkness of the room with the dark mouth, "I am wondering whether Zemlin, Kavalla, or Thessalonica is for him."

"Thessalonica, the Jewish mother?" asked Rabbi Papo in surprise.

"Certainly not. He should be sent as a sapper to Siderokapsi!"

"We'll send him to his betrothed in Thessalonica," decided the other old man thoughtfully, and they left without turning on the light.

Outside a southerly wind greeted them, salting their eyes.

And so Samuel Cohen's fate was sealed. He was banished from Dubrovnik and, as the police reports show, he bade farewell to his acquaintances "on the Day of St. Thomas the Apostle in 1689, in a heat that makes cattle tails molt, and fills the Stradun with bird feathers." That evening, Lady Ephrosinia dressed up like a man the way whores do and stepped out. Cohen was walking for the last time from the pharmacy toward the Sponza Palace when, from the shadows of the Garishte arch, she tossed him a silver coin. He picked it up and moved toward her in the dark. At first, he mistook her for a man, but as soon as her fingers touched him he recognized her.

"Don't go," she said. "Everything can be arranged with the judges. You need only say so. There is no exile that cannot be replaced with a few days in maritime prison. I will wrap a few golden pieces in the beard of the right person, and we will not have to part."

"I don't have to go because I've been banished," replied Cohen. "That paper of theirs means about as much as the song spewed by a flying swallow. I have to go because it's high time. Ever since childhood I've been dreaming that I'm fighting with my sword in the dark. limping. I dream in a language I do not understand when I'm awake. It has been twenty-two years now, and it's time for my dream to come true and be explained. It's now or never. And it will come true at the place where I dream it--in Constantinople. For it is not by chance that I see in my dream those crooked streets made to kill the wind, those towers and the water beneath them."

"If we never meet again in this life," replied Lady Ephrosinia, "then we shall see each other in some future life. Perhaps we are only the roots of souls that will sprout from us one day. Perhaps your soul is pregnant and will give birth to my soul. But first they must both travel their assigned paths."

"Even if that were so, we would not recognize each other in that future world. Yours is not Adam's soul, a soul banished to those of all subsequent generations and doomed to die again and again with each one of us."

"Then we shall meet in some other way. And I will tell you how to recognize me. I will be male then, but I will have the same hands I have now--each with two thumbs, so that they can be both my right hand and my left. . . ."

And with these words Lady Ephrosinia kissed Cohen's ring, and they parted forever. Her death, which followed shortly afterwards, was so terrible that poems were written about it. However, Cohen could not be suspected because at the time of her death he had himself already fallen into a coma, into a dream of no return and no awakening.

At first it was thought that Cohen would go to his betrothed, Linisia, in Thessalonica and marry her there, as advised by the Jewish community in Dubrovnik. But this is not what he did. He filled his pipe that evening and smoked it in the morning in the Trebinje camp of Sabljak Pasha, who was getting ready to march on Walachia. Thus, in spite of everything, Cohen headed for Constantinople. But he never got there. Eyewitnesses from the pasha's entourage, bribed by Dubrovnik Jews with plant dye for their wool to tell them about Cohen's end, say the following:

That year, the pasha traveled north with his entourage, while the clouds above drifted south, as though to take them away with their memory. That in itself was not a good omen. They watched their hounds race through the scents of the Bosnian woods as through the seasons of the year and came upon a Sabac inn the night of the eclipse. One of the pasha's steeds had broken its leg, and he summoned his keeper of the horse graveyard. Cohen was fast asleep and did not hear the summons, so the pasha lashed him between the eyes with his whip, drawing the blow as if out of a well, with such force that his arm bracelets snapped. Cohen instantly woke up and rushed off to do his job. Here all trace of Cohen is temporarily lost, because from the pasha's camp he went to Belgrade, which was being held by Austrian troops. There he is known to have visited the huge two-story house of the Turkish Sephardim, with the drafts howling through its corridors--the Jewish home, the abheham, with its more that one hundred and fifty rooms, fifty kitchens, and thirty cellars. In the streets built between two rivers he watched children in paid fights draw blood from one another like cocks, as the circle of spectators placed their bets. He stayed at an old inn, in one of the forty-seven rooms belonging to the local German Jews, the Ashkenazi, and there he found a book about interpreting dreams, written in Ladino. At dusk, he watched the bell towers plow the clouds above Belgrade.

"When they reach the end of the sky," he jotted down, "they turn around and head back through fresh clouds. . . ."

When Sabljak Pasha's troops reached the Danube, one of the four heavenly rivers--symbolizing the allegorical level in the Bible--Cohen rejoined them. And then something happened that was to win Cohen great favor with the pasha. The pasha had brought along on his campaign a well-paid Greek, a cannon forger. With his molds and equipment the Greek had stayed one day's walk behind the troops, and at the sound of the first skirmishes with the Serbs and Austrians, the pasha ordered that a cannon be forged in Djerdap; it was to have a range of three thousand elbows, and each cannonball was to be the size of two Egyptian scales. "Because," said the pasha, "from the roar of the cannon, chicks will die in their eggs, foxes will miscarry, and honey will turn sour in the beehives." He ordered Cohen to bring the Greek. But it was the Sabbath, and Cohen, instead of riding off, went to bed. . . .

The next morning, Cohen chose a camel, the offspring of a double-humped male and a single humped female, which had spent the summer covered with tar and was now ready to travel. He also took along a "joy" horse, the kind they let loose on mares for foreplay before the mares are turned over to the stallions. By riding the camel and the horse in turn, Cohen completed the two-day ride in one and arrived as ordered. When the astonished pasha asked him where he had learned to ride and who had taught him, Cohen replied that he practiced in his sleep. The pasha was greatly pleased by his answer, and he gave Cohen a gift--a nose ring. When the cannon was forged, it began pounding the Austrian positions. Sabljak ordered his men to charge, and they swooped down on the Serbian position, and with them Cohen, who instead of a saber carried a feedbag, although it was known to contain no valuables, just some old, neatly penned sheets of paper in white covers.

"Under a sky as thick as porridge," an eyewitness related, "we stormed a trench where we found only three men, the others having fled. Two soldiers were throwing dice, oblivious to our attack. In front of the tent next to them was a splendidly attired horseman who seemed to be in a delirium of sleep, and the only ones to attack us were his dogs. In a flash our boys slew one of the dice players and rammed a spear into the sleeping horseman. He raised himself up on his elbow, the spear protruding from his body, and looked at Cohen. That gaze felled Cohen like a bullet; his papers spilled out of his feedbag. The pasha asked whether Cohen had been killed, to which the other dice player replied in Arabic, 'If his name is Cohen, then it was not a bullet that hit him; it was sleep that knocked him off his feet. . . ."

This proved to be true, and these unusual words spared the dice player's life for that day. Because the human word is like hunger--it is not always of the same power.

The statement about Samuel Cohen the Jew from the Dubrovnik ghetto ends with a report on his last dream, concerning the heavy, deep coma into which h plunged as into a dense sea of no return. That last report on Samuel Cohen was made to Sabljak Pasha by the dice player whose life had been spared on the battlefield. Wheat he told the pasha remains forever sewn into a silk tent on the Danube, and only fragments of that talk have reached us through the green, rainproof material. The dice player's name was Yusuf Masudi, and he was a dream reader. He could catch a hare in people's dreams, let alone a man who had been woken up by a spear. Now, this horseman was a prominent and affluent man named Avram Brankovich; his greyhounds alone were worth a shipload of gunpowder. Masudi made an incredible claim about this man. He assured Sabljak Pasha that in his heavy sleep, Cohen was dreaming of this very same Avram Brankovich.

"You say you're a dream reader?" asked the pasha. "Well, then, can you read Cohen's dream?"

"Of course I can. I already see what he is dreaming; since Brankovich is dying, he's dreaming of Brankovich's death."

These words seemed to excite the pasha. "That means," he quickly concluded, "that Cohen can now experience what no mortal can: by dreaming of Brankovich dying, he can experience death and yet stay alive?"

"That's right," said Masudi, "but he cannot wake up to tell us what he saw in the dream."

"But you can see his dreaming of that death. . . . "

"Yes, I can, and tomorrow I will report to you on how it is to die and what a man feels. . . ."

Sabljak Pasha never discovered, nor will we, whether the dice player said this in order to prolong his life by an extra day, or because he really could see into Cohen's dream and find Brankovich's death there. But the pasha felt it was worth a try. He would say that every tomorrow is worth an unused horseshoe and every yesterday the used shoe off a camel, so he let Masudi live one more day.

Cohen spent the night sleeping for the last time; his huge nose peered like a bird's body through the smile of his sleep, and that smile looked like a leftover from a dinner eaten long, long ago. Masudi did not leave his pillow until the morning, and when day broke the Anatolian was changed by his vigil, as though he had been whipped in the dreams he had read. And what he read in them was this:

It was as though Brankovich was not dying from his spear wound at all. In fact, he did not even feel it. He felt many more wounds than one, and their number rapidly multiplied. He felt he was standing high up on a stone pillar, counting. It was spring, bringing the wind that plaits the branches of willow trees, and all the willows from the river Muresul to the rivers Tisa and Danube wore braids. Arrows seemed to be piercing his body, but it all happened backward: with each arrow he felt first the wound, then the penetrating stab; then the pain would stop, something would whistle through the air, and finally there was the zing of the bow string as it released from the arrow. Dying, he counted the arrows from one to seventeen and then fell from the pillar and stopped counting. He fell against something hard, immovable, and vast. But it was not the ground: it was death. The collision sent his wounds flying in all directions, so that one could no longer feel another, an only then did he hit the ground, already dead.

And then, in that same death, he died a second time, although it do not look as though there were any more room for even the slightest pain. In between the stabs of the arrow he was dying once again, but completely differently; now he was dying the premature death of a boy, and his only fear was that he would not be fast enough to complete the huge job (because death is hard work) and to finish with this second death before the time came to fall off the pillar. And so he hurried. He lay in that motionless rush behind the colored heating stove built like a small toy church with read and golden cupolas. Searing and icy pain surged from him into the room, as though the years were fighting to break free of his body in quick succession. The dark spread like dampness, every room in the house darkening differently; only the windows were still invested with the last light of the day, hardly distinguishable from the darkness of the room. Someone with a candle was coming from the invisible vestibule and, as if the frame had as many black doors as a book has pages, he leafed through them briefly, shifting the light as he came in. Then something started pouring out of him, and he peed out his entire past, until he was empty. Like rising water, night crept up from the ground to the sky, and suddenly all his hair fell out, as though a fur ha had been knocked off his head, which was already dead.

And now Brankovich's third death appeared in Cohen's dream. It was barely noticeable, shrouded by something that could have been mounds of time. Hundreds of years seemed to stand between Brankovich's first two deaths and this third, which was barely visible from where Masudi was standing. At first, Masudi thought that Brankovich was now dying the death of his foster son, Petkutin, but since he knew how Petkutin had ended he quickly realized that this was not Petkutin's death. The third death was swift and short. Brankovich was lying in a strange bed, and a man took a pillow and begun smothering him with it. But Brankovich could think of only one thing: he had to reach the egg on the little table by the bed and crack it. Brankovich did not know why this had to be done, but as the man smothered him with the pillow, he knew that this alone was important. He also realized that humanity had discovered its yesterday and tomorrow very belatedly, a million years after its appearance--first tomorrow, and then yesterday. It discovered them one night long ago, when the present started dying out in the darkness, caught in the most stifled between the past and the future, which that evening had swelled until they almost merged. That is what it was like now. The present was fading, smothered by two converging eternities--the past the future--and Brankovich dies for the third time, exactly when the past and the future collided inside him, crushing him just as he was about to crush that egg. . . .

Suddenly, Cohen's dream was as barren as a dry riverbed. It was time to wake up, but there was nobody left to dream Cohen's own reality, as he had done during Brankovich's lifetime. And so what happened to Cohen had to happen. Masudi saw how, in Cohen's dream, which was turning into a death rattle, all the names of all the things around him began dropping off like hats, and the world was left as virgin pure as on its first day in the beginning. Only the first ten numbers and the letters of the alphabet designating verbs glittered like golden tears above the things surrounding Cohen. And it was then that he learned that the numbers of the Ten Commandments are also verbs, that they are the last to be forgotten when one is forgetting a language and remain as an echo when even the Commandments themselves vanish from memory.

That moment Cohen awoke in his death, and the path before Masudi disappeared, because a veil descended over the horizon on which, written with water from the river Yabok, were the following words:

"For your dreams are the days in the nights."