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    This is what she told me:
    She was walking through the forest with her mother, my grandmother Rachel, a tall and queenly woman. Her mother’s head was lifted proudly, her reddish hair coiled thick beneath her cap. But as she walked, her cap was stolen by the branches, the hair tangling in the sharp, leafless limbs. She stumbled, falling to her knees and my mother saw her velvet dress and overmantle covered with brambles. And as my grandmother lay there in the forest, the branches gave birth to dark birds that swooped down and filled her mouth with coals that sank through her body, swelling her feet. She fell prostrate on the rocks, her swollen stomach splitting, the red blood pouring to the ground like wine from an unfit gourd. My mother screamed for my grandfather Isaac, for all his physician’s tools, his medicines and books. But he was far away, tending to the long line of marchers who snaked through the hills out of Spain; thousands and thousands of them, my mother said, like some weary caterpillar with a million weak and broken feet .
    When my grandfather finally did appear, to my mother’s great shock, he did not rush to heal grandmother’s wounds. Instead, he put his arms around my mother’s waist, lifting her. I imagine his thick mustache must have tickled her young skin, his strong arms banished her childish fears. For she told me that at that moment, she forgot about her mother and leaned into his warm arms, complaining; “Where are the wagon, the horses? My feet are so tired.” And he comforted her, singing a song about the Hebrews leaving Egypt, arriving in the Promised Land .
    And they were Hebrews and Lisbon was that land. There would be no cruel corregidores in Lisbon to take their coach and horses, he whispered to her. When they left the cursed Spanish border, the land of the demons Ferdinand and Isabella, they would ride in golden coaches drawn by white horses in bejeweled caparisons. He promised my mother her hair would shine like copper, washed clean with hot water and perfumed soap, and she would have little diamonds for her ears and thick gold chains to hang about her throat. There would be lamb, first stuffed with herbs, vegetables, and wine, then roasted slowly over a wood-fired oven lined with clay; tender onions and potatoes marinated in tarragon leaves and olive oil; grapes and almonds and apples dipped in honey for a sweet year; candles in their silver holders would light the Sabbath day and silver spice boxes filled with frankincense and myrrh would lend a sweet fragrance to each new week’s beginning. They would drink almond water chilled by snow, and wine as thick and sweet as honey .
    Often, I imagine him standing there, hugging my mother, his face wetting hers with a mourner’s tears, and my mother suddenly waking up and remembering her mother and all the blood…. He didn’t try to comfort her, my mother told me, but wept aloud until his eyes turned milky and his dark pupils swam. When he had finished, he took out a Bible with a beautiful cover of tooled, dark leather and opened it to a page at the very beginning. There was a tree with golden branches, each one with a name and a date. And then he took a quill and dipped it into blue dye and wrote: Malca el Nasi, born July 31, 1492, sister to Esther; and then, next her mother’s name: Rachel el Nasi, died, July 31, 1492 .
    And this is how my mother learned that her mother had died while giving birth to her sister .
    My mother was eight years old the day that her mother died, the day all Jews were expelled from Spain. Many died that day and the days that followed, falling down on the endless, hard road—buried, as my grandmother was, in unmarked graves along the way. So pitiful were they that even Old Christians went out of their houses and stood crying on the roadside, urging them to spare themselves, to accept baptism and remain behind. But the rabbis urged them on, asking the children to play drums and cymbals, to sing .
    My