The Moors Last Sigh

stole his crown.’ After years by his side, this anonymous ancestor crept away from crumbling Boabdil, and took ship for India, with a great treasure in her baggage, and a male child in her belly; from whom, after many begats, came Abraham himself. My mother who insists on the purity of our race, what say you to your forefather the Moor?
    ‘The woman has no name,’ Sara interrupted him. ‘And yet you claim her tainted blood is yours. Have you no shame to make your mummy weep? And all for a rich girl’s love, Abraham, I swear. It stinks, and by the way, so do you.’
    From Flory Zogoiby came a thin assenting wail. But Abraham’s argument was not complete. Consider this stolen crown, wrapped in rags, locked in a box, for four hundred years and more. If it was stolen for simple gain, would it not have been sold off long ago?
    ‘Because of secret pride in the royal link, the crown was kept; because of secret shame, it was concealed. Mother, who is worse? My Aurora who does not hide the Vasco connection, but takes delight; or myself, born of the fat old Moor of Granada’s last sighs in the arms of his thieving mistress – Boabdil’s bastard Jew?’
    ‘Evidence,’ Flory whispered in reply, a mortally wounded adversary pleading for the death-blow. ‘Only supposition has been given; where are hard-fast facts?’ Inexorable Abraham asked his penultimate question.
    ‘Mother, what is our family name?’
    When she heard this, Flory knew the coup-de-grace was near. Dumbly, she shook her head. To Moshe Cohen, whose old friendship he would, that day, forsake for ever, Abraham threw down a challenge. ‘The Sultan Boabdil after his fall was known by one sobriquet, and she who took his crown and jewels in a dark irony took the nickname also. Boabdil the Misfortunate: that was it. Anyone here can say that in the Moor’s own tongue?’
    And the old chandler was obliged to complete the proof. ‘ El-zogoybi.’
    Gently, Abraham set down the crown beside defeated Flory; resting his case.
    ‘At least he fell for a pushy girl,’ Flory said emptily to the walls. ‘I had that much influence while he was still my son.’
    ‘Better you go now,’ said Sara to pepper-odorous Abraham. ‘Maybe when you marry you should take the girl’s name, why not? Then we can forget you, and what difference between a bastard Moor and a bastard Portugee?’
    ‘A bad mistake, Abie,’ old Moshe Cohen commented. ‘To make an enemy of your mother; for enemies are plentiful, but mothers are hard to find.’

    Flory Zogoiby, alone in the aftermath of one catastrophic revelation was granted another. In the sunset’s vermilion afterglow she saw the Cantonese tiles pass before her eyes one by one, for had she not been their servitor and their student, cleaning and buffing them these many years; had she not many times attempted to enter their myriad worlds, those universes contained within the uniformity of twelve-by-twelve and held captive on so-neatly-grouted walls? Flory who loved to draw lines was enthralled by the serried ranks of the tiles, but until this moment they had not spoken to her, she had found there neither missing husbands nor future admirers, neither prophecies of the future nor explanations of the past. Guidance, meaning, fortune, friendship, love had all been withheld. Now in her hour of anguish they unveiled a secret.
    Scene after blue scene passed before her eyes. There were tumultuous marketplaces and crenellated fortress-palaces and fields under cultivation and thieves in jail, there were high, toothy mountains and great fish in the sea. Pleasure gardens were laid out in blue, and blue-bloody battles were grimly fought; blue horsemen pranced beneath lamplit windows and blue-masked ladies swooned in arbours. O, and intrigue of courtiers and dreams of peasants and pigtailed tallymen at their abacuses and poets in their cups. On the walls floor ceiling of the little synagogue, and now in Flory Zogoiby’s mind’s eye, marched the ceramic encyclopaedia of the material world that was also a bestiary, a travelogue, a synthesis and a song, and for the first time in all her years of caretaking Flory saw what was missing from the hyperabundant cavalcade. ‘Not so much what as who,’ she thought, and the tears dried in her eyes. ‘In the whole place, no trace.’ The orange light of evening fell on her like thunderous rain, washing away her blindness, opening her eyes. Eight hundred and thirty-nine years after the tiles came to