The Moors Last Sigh

surely as lessons learned by rote. And so, despairing of his absconded father, he found his mother’s secrets out instead.
    What was in the box? – Why, the only treasure of any value: viz., the past, and the future. Also, however, emeralds.

    And so to the day of crisis, when the adult Abraham Zogoiby charged into the synagogue – I’ll show her Fitz , he cried – and dragged the trunk out from its hiding-place. His mother, pursuing him, saw her secrets coming out into the open and felt her legs give way. She sat down on blue tiles with a thump, while Abraham opened the box and drew out a silver dagger, which he stuck in his trouser-belt; then, breathing in short gasps, Flory watched him remove, and place upon his head, an ancient, tattered crown.
    Not the nineteenth-century circlet of gold donated by Maharaja Travancore, but something altogether more ancient was the way I heard it. A dark green turban wound in cloth rendered illusory by age, so delicate that even the orange evening light filtering into the synagogue seemed too fierce; so provisional that it might almost have disintegrated beneath Flory Zogoiby’s burning gaze …
    And upon this phantasm of a turban, the family legend went, hung age-dulled chains of solid gold, and dangling off these chains were emeralds so large and green that they looked like toys. It was four and a half centuries old, the last crown to fall from the head of the last prince of al-Andalus; nothing less than the crown of Granada, as worn by Abu Abdallah, last of the Nasrids, known as ‘Boabdil’ .
    ‘But how did it get there?’ I used to ask my father. How indeed? This priceless headgear – this royal Moorish hat – how did it emerge from a toothless woman’s box to sit upon the head of Abraham, future father, renegade Jew?
    ‘It was’, my father answered, ‘the uneasy jewellery of shame.’
    I continue, for the moment, without judging his version of events: When Abraham Zogoiby as a boy first discovered the hidden crown and dagger he replaced the treasures in their hiding-place, fastened the padlock tight and spent a night and a day fearing his mother’s wrath. But once it became clear that his inquisitiveness had gone unnoticed his curiosity was reborn, and again he drew forth the little chest and again picked the lock. This time he found, wrapped in burlap in the turban-box, a small book made up of handwritten parchment pages crudely sewn together and bound in hide. It was written in Spanish, which the young Abraham did not understand, but he copied out a number of the names therein, and over the years that followed he unlocked their meanings, for instance by asking innocent questions of the crotchety and reclusive old chandler Moshe Cohen who was at that time the appointed head of the community and the keeper of its lore. Old Mr Cohen was so astonished that any member of the younger generation should care about the old days that he had talked freely, pointing towards distant horizons while the handsome young man sat wide-eyed at his feet.
    Thus Abraham learned that, in January 1492, while Christopher Columbus watched in wonderment and contempt, the Sultan Boabdil of Granada had surrendered the keys to the fortress-palace of the Alhambra, last and greatest of all the Moors’ fortifications, to the all-conquering Catholic Kings Fernando and Isabella, giving up his principality without so much as a battle. He departed into exile with his mother and retainers, bringing to a close the centuries of Moorish Spain; and reining in his horse upon the Hill of Tears he turned to look for one last time upon his loss, upon the palace and the fertile plains and all the concluded glory of al-Andalus … at which sight the Sultan sighed, and hotly wept – whereupon his mother, the terrifying Ayxa the Virtuous, sneered at his grief. Having been forced to genuflect before an omnipotent queen, Boabdil was now obliged to suffer a further humiliation at the hands of an impotent (but formidable) dowager. Well may you weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man , she taunted him: meaning of course the opposite. Meaning that she despised this blubbing male, her son, for yielding up what she would have fought for to the death, given the chance. She was Queen Isabella’s equal and opposite; it was reina Isabel’s good fortune to have come up against the mere cry-baby, Boabdil …
    Suddenly, as the chandler spoke, Abraham curled upon a coil of rope felt all the