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mother wanted to go back to her beautiful house outside Seville. So many nights, hard stones rubbing raw her back, she dreamed of the polished steps leading to her zaguán, the smell of the purple flowers and the climbing vines trailing up to the little balcony off her whitewashed bedroom that was always filled with red geraniums. She dreamed of her estrado with its soft pillows, of her bed of down quilts and fresh straw mattresses, and of the spicy breeze that wafted through the tamarind trees .
    Many had stayed behind, her father told her later. They had shaken their heads sadly at the foolishness of preferring the hard uncertainty of exile to the soft rain of baptismal waters; waters, they winked, that could always be washed away in the mikvah beneath the synagogue. I can almost see my grandfather’s face as he explained this to my mother: his lips grim, his eyes touched with black humor and contempt mixed with sadness .
    But neither those who stayed, nor those like my stubborn grandfather who risked all to leave, understood that both were equally doomed. For in the end, I imagine, there was not enough water to douse Torquemada’s fires as they roasted the flesh of those cunning pretenders. Nor could my grandfather, as far as he wandered, succeed in escaping the flood of holy waters the Church was determined to pour down upon his head .
    My mother walked all the way to Lisbon, as my grandfather carried my aunt Malca, who was just a few days old. All the way, he searched for wet nurses, and when he failed to find them, he finally bought a goat and poured its warm milk through a sucking horn held between Malca’s lips. When she gagged at that, he took lumps of sugar and bread and rubbed them in a piece of linen that he shaped into a teat that Malca sucked .
    How my mother envied her infant sister—carried and fed in their father’s arms while she trudged alongside, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth in thirst, her stomach boiling with hunger. But even as a baby, Malca was never content, my mother recalled. At night, she never stopped crying, and during the day she whimpered and screamed .
    I sometimes try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother: how long the road was, how hard on the uncallused soles of a small child; how hot the sun, how cold the nights! Isn’t it strange, then, that my mother should also have remembered the beauty of the Spanish sky—turquoise and gold with sunlight? The lovely rolling hills and valleys, the sparkling waters, and the rosy brilliance of distant horizons? Spain’s white castles with their moats and turrets? So that, when she finally reached the border, she could not help but look back with longing, like Lot’s wicked wife as she was led by angels out of Sodom. She looked back and wondered if she, too, would be turned into a pillar of salt for her profane regret .
    But she was not to be so stricken. G-d had a different set of terrible punishments selected for her, she told me .
    The first was Lisbon .
    The confusion at the Portuguese border was terrible. Thousands of people pushing and screaming. My mother remembered bobbing in the stormy human current, her only anchor her father’s strong hand. But something was terribly wrong. They had walked over mountains, waded through streams, and been battered by rocks and branches to reach this goal. And yet, the cries were heartbreaking .
    She asked her father what there was to cry about now. But something had come over him. His gentle voice turned suddenly harsh. “Say nothing,” he demanded, his eyes burning like a devil’s .
    My mother grabbed on to him like a frightened animal, but he pried her loose, almost cruelly. Covering his eyes with both hands, she heard him say, “My sins have sapped my strength, Lord. Deliver us in your everlasting compassion.”
    Then she saw him crouch over his bag of medicines and instruments, taking out his mortar and pestle and crushing some herbs, which he then mixed with