Chapter NINE
Fluria’s Confession
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, I WAS VERY YOUNG AND VERY rash and a traitor to my faith, and to all I hold dear. We were in Oxford then where my father was studying with several scholars. We went to Oxford often, because he had pupils there, students who wanted to learn Hebrew and paid him well as a teacher.
Scholars for the first time, it seems, in those days wanted to learn the ancient tongue. And more and more documents from olden days were coming to light. My father was in great demand as a teacher, and much admired by Jews and Gentiles alike.
He thought it a good thing for Christians to learn Hebrew. He disputed with them in matters of faith, but all this was friendly.
What he could not know was that I’d given my heart entirely to one young man who was just finishing the Arts at Oxford.
He was almost twenty-one, and I only fourteen. I conceived a great passion for him, enough to give up my faith, and my father’s love, and any wealth that was to come to me. And this young man loved me as well, so much so that he vowed he would give up his faith, if that’s what was required of him.
It was this young man who came to warn us before the Oxford riots, and we warned as many other Jews as we could to escape. If it hadn’t been for this young man, we might have lost a great deal more of our library than we did, and many valuable possessions as well. My father was devoted to this young man on account of that, but also in general because he loved this young’s man inquiring mind.
My father had no sons. My mother had died giving birth to twin boys, neither of whom survived.
This young man’s name was Godwin, and all you need know of his father is that he was a powerful earl, rich, and furious when he discovered that his son had become enamored of a Jewess, furious when he learned that his studies had put him in the company of a Jewish girl for whom he was ready to give up everything.
There had been a deep bond between the Earl and Godwin. Godwin was not the eldest, but he was his father’s favorite, and Godwin’s uncle, dying childless, had left to Godwin a fortune in France all but equal to that which his older brother, Nigel, was to inherit from their father.
Now his father took vengeance on Godwin for this disappointment.
He sent him to Rome to remove him from me and be educated there in the Church. He threatened to expose the seduction, as he called it, unless I never spoke the name of Godwin again and unless Godwin left immediately, and never spoke my name again aloud either. In truth, the Earl feared the disgrace that would come on him if it was known that Godwin had a great passion for me, or if we were to attempt marriage in secret.
You can imagine the disaster that might have followed for all had Godwin really come over into our community. There have been converts to our faith, yes, but Godwin was the son of a proud and powerful father. Talk of riots! There have been riots for less than a nobleman’s son converting to our faith, and in these restless times when we are constantly persecuted.
As for my father, he did not know what we would be accused of, but he was as wary as he was enraged. That I might convert was unthinkable to him, and soon he made it quite unthinkable for me.
He felt that Godwin had betrayed him. Godwin had come under his roof, to study Hebrew, to talk philosophy, to sit at my father’s feet, and yet he had done this dastardly thing of seducing the great teacher’s daughter.
He was a man with a tender heart for me, as I was all that he had, but he was in a rage against Godwin.
Godwin and I soon realized our love was hopeless. We would bring riot and ruin no matter what we did. If I became Christian, I would be excommunicated, and my inheritance from my mother confiscated, and my father deserted in his old age, which was a thought I couldn’t bear. Godwin’s disgrace would not be much less than if he had converted to become a Jew.
So it was set and determined that Godwin would go to Rome.
His father let it be known that he still had dreams of greatness for his son, a bishop’s miter, certainly, if not a cardinal’s hat.
Godwin had kindred among the powerful clergy in Paris and in Rome. Nevertheless this was a severe punishment, this forcing of vows on Godwin, because Godwin had no faith in any Lord whatsoever and had been a very worldly young man.
Whereas I loved his wit and humor and his passion, others admired the amount of wine he could take in an evening and his skill with the sword, on horseback, and in the dance. In fact, his gaiety and charm, which so seduced me, were wound up with great eloquence, and love of poetry and song. He had written much music for the lute, and he had often played this instrument as he sang to me when my father had gone to bed and did not hear us in the rooms below.
A life in the church was something utterly unappetizing to Godwin. In fact, he would have preferred to take the cross and go crusading to the Holy Land, and find adventure there and along the way.
But his father would not equip him for that, and arranged to send him to the strictest and most ambitious of his clerical relations in the Holy City and told him to succeed in Holy Orders or be disowned.
Godwin and I met one last time, and Godwin told me then that we must never see each other again. He didn’t give two farthings for a great life in the church. He said his uncle in Rome, the Cardinal, had two mistresses. His other cousins he also regarded as blatant hypocrites, with appropriate contempt. “There are wicked and licentious priests aplenty in Rome,” he said, “and bad bishops and I’ll become another one. And with any luck I will someday join the Crusaders, and will in the end have all. But I won’t have you. I won’t have my beloved Fluria.”
As for me, I had come to realize that I could not leave my father, and I was filled with misery. My love for Godwin did not seem to be something I could exist without.
The more we vowed we could not have each other, the more incensed we became. And I think that night we were in the nearest danger of running off together, but we did not.
Godwin came to a plan.
We would write to each other. Yes, this was disobedience on my part to my father, no doubt of it, and certainly disobedience for Godwin, but we saw our letters as a means by which we might obey our parents with greater strength. Our letters, unbeknownst to our elders, would help us to accept their demands.
“If I thought we could not have that,” Godwin said, “the outpourings of our hearts in letters, I would not have the courage to leave here now.”
Godwin went to Rome. His father had made something of a peace with him, as he couldn’t bear to be angry with him. And so Godwin left one day quite early, without any further farewell.
Now my father, fine scholar that he was, and is, was nearly blind, which might account for how well educated I am, though I think I would be, even if he were not.
My point is that it was simple for me to keep our letters secret, but in truth, I thought Godwin would quickly forget me altogether, and be swept up into the licentious atmosphere into which he would surely be plunged.
In the meantime, my father surprised me. He told me that he knew Godwin would write to me, and he said, “I won’t forbid you these letters, but I don’t think there will be very many of them and you only mortgage your heart.”
Both of us were completely wrong. Godwin wrote letters from every town along his journey. Sometimes twice a day, the letters would arrive, by messengers both Gentile and Jewish, and I kept to my room whenever I could and poured out my heart with ink. In fact, it seemed we grew in our love through these letters and became two new beings, deeply bound to each other, and nothing, absolutely nothing, could drive us apart.
No matter. I soon had a greater worry than I’d ever anticipated. Within two months, the measure of my love for Godwin was perfectly plain to me and I had to tell my father. I was with child.
Another man might have abandoned me or worse. But my father has always doted on me. I alone survived of all his children. And I think there was a frank desire in him to have a grandson though he never spoke the words. After all, what did it matter to him that the father was Gentile if the mother was Jewish? And my father hit upon a plan.
He packed up our household and off we went to a small city in the Rhineland where there were scholars who knew of my father, but no kindred we could call our own.
There an elderly rabbi, who had much admired my father’s writing about the great Jewish teacher Rashi, agreed to marry me and to give out that the child born to me was his. He did this really from great generosity. He said, “I have seen so much suffering in this world. I will be father to this child, if you want it, and never claim a husband’s privileges as I am far too old for that.”
There I bore not one child by Godwin, but twins, two beautiful girls, both of exactly the same stamp, so alike that even I could not always tell one from the other, but had to tie a blue ribbon on the ankle of Rosa so that I could know her from Lea.
Now I know you would interrupt me if you could, and I know what you are thinking, but let me go on.
The old rabbi died before the children were a year old. As for my father, he loved these two baby girls, and he thanked Heaven that he still had some sight left to see their beautiful faces before he became completely blind.
Only as we returned to Oxford did he confess to me that he had hoped to place the babies with an aged matron in the Rhineland and had had to disappoint her because of his love for me and for the baby girls.
Now all the while I had been in the Rhineland, I had written to Godwin, but I had told him not one word about these baby girls. Indeed, I had given him vague reasons for the trip—that it had to do with the acquisition of books which were now hard to come by in France and England, and that my father was dictating quite a lot to me, and needed these books for the treatises that occupied his every thought.
The treatises, his every thought, and the books—all that was simple and true.
We settled into our old house in the Jewry of Oxford in the parish of St. Aldate, and my father commenced taking pupils again.
Since the secret of my love for Godwin had been crucial to all parties, no one knew of it, and they believed my elderly husband to have died abroad.
Now while I was traveling I hadn’t received Godwin’s letters, so there were many of them waiting for me when I came home. I set about opening them and reading them when the nurses had the children, and I argued with myself frantically as to whether I should tell Godwin about his daughters or not.
Was I to tell a Christian man that he had two daughters who would be brought up as Jewesses? What might his response have been? Of course he could have bastards aplenty in the Rome he described to me and among his worldly companions for whom he had nothing but undisguised contempt.
In truth, I didn’t want to cause him misery, and I did not want to confess to him the sufferings I had endured myself. Our letters were filled with poetry, and the depths of our thoughts, undetached perhaps from realities, and I wanted to keep things this way because, in truth, this way was more real to me than day-to-day life itself. Even the miracle of these baby girls did not diminish my belief in the world we sustained in our letters. Nothing could.
But just as I weighed my decision to keep quiet with the greatest scrupulosity, there came a very surprising letter from Godwin, which I want to relate to you from memory as best I can. I have the letter here, in fact, but securely hidden among my things, and Meir has never seen it, and I cannot bear to take it out and read it so let me give you the substance of it in my own words.
I think my own words now are Godwin’s words, anyway. So let me explain.
He began again with his usual excursions of life in the Holy City.
“If I had converted to your faith,” he wrote, “and we were righteous man and wife, poor and happy, surely, that would be better in the eyes of the Lord—if the Lord exists—than a life such as these men live here, for whom the church is nothing but a source of power and greed.”
But then he went on to explain the strange occurrence.
He’d been drawn, it seemed, to one quiet little church over and over, where he sat upon the stone floor, his back to the cold stone wall, as he talked to the Lord contemptuously of the dismal prospects he saw for himself as a wenching and drinking priest or bishop. “How can you have sent me here?” he demanded of God, “to be among seminarians who make my former drunken friends in Oxford seem positively saintly?” He gnashed his teeth as he uttered his prayers, even insulting The Maker of All Things by reminding Him that he, Godwin, did not believe in Him and considered His church an edifice of the filthiest lies.
He went on with his heartless mockery of The Almighty. “Why should I wear the garments of Your church when I have nothing but contempt for all I see, and no desire to serve You? Why have You denied me the love of Fluria, which was the one pure and selfless impulse of my eager heart?”
You can imagine, I shuddered to read this blasphemy and he had written it down, all of it, before he described what then came to pass.
On a certain evening, as he was saying these very prayers to the Lord, in hatred and rage, brooding and repeating himself, and even demanding of the Lord why He had taken from Godwin not only my love but the love of his father as well, a young man appeared before him, and without preamble began to speak to him.
At first Godwin thought this young man was mad, or some sort of tall child, as he was very beautiful, as beautiful as angels painted on the walls, and also he spoke with a directness that was completely arresting.
In fact, for a moment Godwin considered that this might be a woman in male disguise, which was not so uncommon, apparently, as I might think, Godwin said, but he soon realized that this was no woman at all, but an angelic being in his midst.
And how did Godwin know? He knew on account of the fact that the creature knew Godwin’s prayers and spoke directly to him now of his deepest hurt and his deepest and most destructive intentions.
“All around you,” said the angel or creature or whatever it was, “you see corruption. You see how easy it is to advance in the Church, how simple to study words for the sake of words, and covet for the sake of coveting. You already have a mistress, and are thinking of taking another. You write letters to the lover you’ve forsworn with little regard for how this might affect her and her father, who loves her. You blame your fate on your love for Fluria and your disappointments, and you seek to bind her to you still, whether it is good or bad for her. Will you live an empty and bitter life, a selfish and profane life, because something precious was denied you? Will you waste every chance for honor and happiness given you in this world simply because you have been thwarted?”
In that instant, Godwin saw the folly of it. That he was constructing a life upon anger and hate. And amazed that this man would speak this way to him, he said, “What can I do?”
“Give yourself to God,” said the strange man. “Give him your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole life. Outsmart all of those others—your selfish companions who love your gold as much as you, and your angry father who has sent you here to be corrupt and unhappy. Outsmart the world that would make of you a common thing when you can yet be exceptional. Be a good priest, be a good bishop, and before you become either one, give away all you possess down to the last of your many gold rings, and become a humble friar.”
Godwin was even more amazed.
“Become a friar, and to be good will become much easier for you,” said the stranger. “Strive to be a saint. What greater thing could you achieve? And the choice is yours. No one can rob you of such a choice. Only you can throw it away and continue forever in your debauchery and your misery, crawling from your lover’s bed to write to pure and holy Fluria, so that these letters to her are the only good thing in your life.”
And then as quietly as he had come, the strange man went away, all but melting into the semidarkness of the little church.
He was there and then he was not there.
And Godwin was alone in the cold stone corner of the church staring at the distant candles.
He wrote to me that at that moment the light of the candles seemed to him to be the light of the dimming sun or the rising sun, a thing precious and eternal and a miracle wrought by God, a miracle meant for his eyes at that moment so that he would understand the magnitude of all that God had done in making him and in making the world around him.
“I will seek to be a saint,” he vowed then and there. “Dear Lord, I give You my life. I give You all that I am and all that I can be and all that I can do. I forswear every instrument of wickedness.”
That’s what he wrote. And you can see that I’ve read the letter so many times that I know it by memory.
The letter went on to tell me that that very day he had gone to the Friary of the Dominicans and asked to be taken among them.
They took him with open arms.
They were very pleased that he was educated, and knew the ancient Hebrew language, and they were even more pleased that he had a fortune in jewels and rich fabrics to give them to be sold for the poor.
In the manner of Francis, he stripped off all the luxuriant clothing he wore, gave them his gold walking stick as well, and his fine gold-studded boots. And he took from them a patched and worn black habit.
He even said he would leave behind his learning and pray on his knees for the rest of his life, if that is what they wanted. He would bathe lepers. He would work with the dying. He would do whatever the Prior told him to do.
The Prior laughed at this. “Godwin,” he said, “a preacher must be educated if he is to preach well, whether to the rich or to the poor. And we are the Order of Preachers, first and above all.
“Your education is to us a treasure. Too many want to study theology who have no knowledge of the arts and sciences, but you possess all this already, and we can send you now to the University of Paris, to study with our great teacher Albert, who is already there. Nothing would give us greater happiness than to see you there in our Paris friary and delving deep into the works of Aristotle, and the works of your fellow students, to sharpen your obvious eloquence in the finest spiritual light.”
That was not all that Godwin had to tell me.
He went on with a ruthless self-examination such as I’d never read from him before.
“You know perfectly well, my beloved Fluria,” he wrote, “this has been the most vicious vengeance upon my father that I could conceivably work, to have become a mendicant friar. In fact, my father at once wrote to my relations here to take me captive, and force women upon me until I had come to my senses and given up the fancy to be a beggar and a wayside preacher, dressed in rags.
“Be assured, my blessed one,” he wrote, “that nothing so simple has happened. I am on my way to Paris. My father has disowned me. I am as penniless as I might have been had you and I married. But I have taken to myself Holy Poverty, to use the words of Francis, who is esteemed by us as highly as our founder, Dominic, and I will serve only my Lord and King now as the Prior orders me to do.”
He went on to write, “I have asked of my superiors only two things: one, that I be allowed to keep my name Godwin, indeed to receive it anew as my new name, as the Lord would call us by a new name when we enter upon this life, and secondly, that I be allowed to write to you. I must confess, to obtain the last indulgence, I revealed some of your letters to my superiors and they marveled at the elevation and loveliness of your sentiments as much as I do myself. Permission for both has been granted, but I am Brother Godwin now to you, my blessed sister, and I love you as one of God’s tenderest and dearest creatures, and with only the purest thoughts.”
Well, I was astonished by this letter. And I soon learned that others had been astonished by Godwin as well. Happily, he wrote to me, his cousins had given him up as hopeless, seeing in him a saint or an imbecile, neither of which any of them thought to be useful, and they had reported to his father that no blandishment on earth could make Godwin leave the life of the Friars Minor to which he’d given himself.
I received a constant flow of letters from Godwin, as I had before. These became the chronicle of his spiritual life. And in his newfound faith, he had more in common with my people than ever before. The pleasure-loving youth who had so enchanted me was now a serious scholar as my father was a serious scholar, and something immense and wholly indescribable now made the two men in my mind very much alike.
Godwin wrote to me of the many lectures he attended, but also much about his life in prayer—how he had come to imitate the ways of St. Dominic, the founder of the Black Friars, and how he had come to experience what he felt was the love of God in a wholly wondrous way. All judgment dropped from Godwin’s letters. The young man who had gone to Rome so long ago had had only harsh words for himself as well as everyone around him. Now this Godwin, who was still my Godwin, wrote to me of the wonders he beheld everywhere he looked.
But, I ask you, how could I tell this Godwin, this wondrous and saintly person who had blossomed from the young shoot I had earlier loved, that he had two children living in England, both being brought up to be exemplary Jewish girls?
What good would such a confession have done? And how might his zeal have affected him, loving as he was, had he known that he had daughters living in the Jewry of Oxford, far from any exposure to the Christian faith?
Now, I have told you that my father did not forbid these letters. He had thought in the early years that they would not go on. But as they did go on, I made them known to him for more reasons than one.
My father is a scholar, as I’ve told you, and he not only studied the Talmud commentary by the great Rashi, but had translated much of it into French to aid those students who wanted to know it, but did not know the Hebrew in which it was written. As he became blind, he dictated more of his work to me, and it was his desire to translate much of the great Jewish scholar Maimonides into Latin if not French.
It came as no surprise to me that Godwin began to write to me on these very subjects, of how the great teacher Thomas of his order had read some of Maimonides in Latin, and how he, Godwin, wanted to study this work. Godwin knew Hebrew. He had been my father’s best pupil.
So as the years passed, I revealed Godwin’s letters to my father, and frequently commentary of my father on Maimonides, and even on Christian theology, made its way into the letters I wrote to Godwin.
My father himself would never dictate an actual letter to Godwin, but I think he came to know better and to love better the man whom he believed had once betrayed him and his hospitality and so a form of forgiveness was granted there. It was granted to me at least. And every day, after I was finished listening to my father’s lectures to his students, or copying out his meditations for him, or aiding his students to do it, I would retire to my room and write to Godwin, telling him all about life in Oxford, and discussing all these many things.
Naturally in time, Godwin put the question to me: why had I not married? I gave him vague answers, that the care of my father consumed all my time, and sometimes I said simply that I had not met the man who was meant to be my husband.
All this while, Lea and Rosa were growing into beautiful little girls. But you must give me a moment here because if I don’t weep for both my daughters I simply cannot go on.
At this point, she did begin to cry, and I knew there was nothing I could do to comfort her. She was a married woman, and a pious Jewish woman, and I couldn’t dare put my arms around her. It was not expected. In fact, it was likely forbidden for me to take such a liberty.
But when she looked up and saw the tears in my eyes, too, tears I couldn’t quite explain because they had as much to do with all she’d told me about Godwin, as about herself, she was comforted by that, and seemed to be comforted by my silence as well, and she went on.