The youngest of his granddaughters, Esther, is expecting him and waits close at the side of her aged grandfather in a low, dark chamber in which much glitters and glows, and silk and velvet hang softly over the coffers as though to dampen their full, golden flames. Here sits Marcantonio on a silver-embroidered cushion at the foot of the elderly Jew and tells him of Venice as though recounting a fairy tale that never came true so completely anywhere else. He tells of the plays in the theaters, of the battles of the Venetian armies, of foreign visitors, of paintings and sculptures, of the Festa della Sensa on Ascension Day, of the Carnival, and of the beauty of his mother, Catharina Minelli. All of this has the same meaning for him—these are different expressions of power and love and life. To his two listeners, all of it is foreign, for the Jews are strictly excluded from all such intercourse, and even rich Melchizedek has never entered the jurisdictional sphere of the Great Council, although as a goldsmith and because of the high esteem he enjoyed in general, he might have dared to do so. In the course of his long life, the old man has obtained many privileges from the Council for his coreligionists, all of whom look upon him as a father. But ever and again he has had to suffer the backlash. For whenever a misfortune fell upon the state, revenge for it was taken upon the Jews. The Venetians were far too close to them in the set of their minds ever to have used the Jews, as other peoples have, to accomplish their commerce. Instead they tormented them with taxes, despoiled them of their goods, and reduced the area of the Ghetto ever further, so that its families, who in the face of all their hardship still were fruitful and multiplied, were forced to build their houses in the vertical dimension, one on the roof of another. And their city, which did not lie on the sea, grew slowly into the space of heaven as though it were another sea; and all around the square where the well was, buildings rose in dizzy perpendicularity like the walls of some giant’s tower.

Rich Melchizedek, in the eccentricity of advanced age, had made a strange proposal to his fellow citizens and his sons and grandsons. He wished to live in whichever of these tiny houses, jammed in countless stories one on top of the other, was the highest at any given time. People were only too glad to grant him this bizarre wish, since in any case no one any longer trusted the strength of the lower walls, and they built on top of them with such flimsy stones that the wind no longer seemed to take notice of the walls. Thus the old man moved from house to house two or three times a year, and Esther, who was unwilling to abandon him, was always with him. Finally, they were living at such a height that when they stepped out of the narrow confines of their apartment onto the flat roof, their heads already reached a level where a new country began, of whose customs the old man spoke in dark words, as though half caught up in the raptures of a psalm.