The Mapmaker's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

Peter, ‘Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven.’” Sister Teresa looks up at me. “Can you tell me what this means?”
    “Does it mean if you die tied up, when you get to heaven you still have the ropes around you?” I don’t understand any of it, though I have been genuinely trying in the six months since the fight in the street. Afterward, my father ordered Mama not to light Shabbat candles anymore and told Susana to oversee my religious education at the convent. The servant was to see us having both meat and dairy on our table, and once a week, she and my mother were to prepare a dish containing ham or pork.
    Mama watches me choke down the same kind of sausage I once threw in the grass and leaves the table uncleared for the servant to see cheese rinds floating in leftover meat stew. She lights one oil lamp upstairs as it grows dark on Friday, choosing a time when she thinks I will not see her mouthing the blessing.
    My mother looks pale and her clothes hang on her. She says she doesn’t care if she starves to death and makes her supper from only cheese and bread if the soup has even a touch of anything forbidden by Jewish law. “The family is abiding by what you have decreed,” she says to Papa in a dull, cold voice, “but I will not.” More than once, I have heard her retching in our courtyard after serving food she never imagined in her home.
    I hear Sister Teresa’s voice through my fog of thoughts. “Only through the church can you be redeemed. That’s what ‘binding’ means. Whoever is bound to God on earth will be bound to him in heaven.”
    “But why aren’t the Jews bound to God? They believe in him too.” I avoid looking at Susana. She says I am difficult on purpose when all I really want are answers that make sense.
    “Jews say they believe in God but they do not,” the nun says. She leans in toward me and I smell her rotting teeth. “Long ago, God was pleased with the Jews. They worshipped him as One, because they did not know his full nature. Then God made himself flesh through his son, Jesus Christ—King of the Jews!” Her voice grows shrill and her eyes flash. “And who rejected him?”
    “The Jews,” I say miserably.
    The nun takes my hands in hers. Her nails are split and ragged, and her fingers are chapped. “The devil wants to lure you back to your family’s cursed race, so you will be lost to God.”
    I want to pull my hand away, but hers are too strong. “You’re scaring me,” I whisper.
    “As well I should.”
    The God Mama speaks to seems so different. That God scorns the proud, not the Jews. That God raises up the downtrodden and pours his wrath on those who persecute them. That God loves those who believe in him. Why does Sister Teresa think he doesn’t love me?
    I look at a statue of the Virgin Mother in a niche across the room. My mother’s gentleness makes her a bit like Mary in my eyes, and when I told her that, she was pleased. “Mary was a Jew,” she said. “We could have been good friends, talking about our children and husbands.”
    Susana’s and the nun’s pitiless eyes bore into me. Jesus was a Jew, and I don’t understand why he would hate me for being like him. I look away again toward Mary, hoping that maybe she knows me, maybe she understands. I wait for a smile, a wink, a nod, but if she responds, even the mother of the Hanged One does not have the power to penetrate the gloom.
    ***
    My mother’s back is turned, but I can see she is holding the crucifix that usually hangs outside our front door. She startles when I come up behind her, and for a moment, she tries to cover up the hollow channel she is carving out of the wood. I unroll a curled paper on the table and see tiny Hebrew writing on it. “What’s this?” I ask.
    “Get me a piece of tree bark from the courtyard and I’ll show you,” she replies. “And be fast about it. I have to finish this before anyone else comes home.”
    When I return, she puts