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.