Yiddish for Pirates (13 page)

We made plans to enter the Catedral and retrieve her father’s books. The red hounds of the Inquisition would be sniffing around the church for whoever skewered the priest. They’d not be expecting book liberators in the Catedral. We ate some breakfast in Doña Gracia’s kitchen and then slept.

Chapter Thirteen

Imagine: the Inquisition is everywhere. You are a known trafficker of forbidden texts and a helper of hidden Jews. You aid those who are imprisoned under orders of the Pope and the King and Queen of Spain. You are hunted as a murderer and a violator of the holy church and a heretic. You have plans to steal some hidden books. So, nu, how do you sneak into a cathedral?

Through the front door.

It wasn’t locked.

We arrived late in the night—after even the most energetic of lotharios had slipped back into his cassock—and returned to his cell.

Moishe opened one of the Catedral’s front doors a parrot’s-width and I flew to a distant corner and onto the beams below the painted ceiling. I began mumbling what I hoped was the frightening preternatural blarney of Spanish spooks.

A word doesn’t have to know what it means to mean something. A bird, either. I chanted these creepy lokshen noodles of nonsense until a sexton heard. My meshugas wasn’t a raven’s “Nevermore,” but it had the same effect. The sexton’s lantern did the trembling dance of the less-than-happy shades over the dark cathedral as he began his fearful search for the source.

He soon retreated only to return with another sexton. While these two doughty men braved the vivid conniptions of their own baroque
imaginations, Moishe was able to find the Madonna and her hollow lucky foot, then open the door to the Jews’ secret chamber. Once on the landing, he lit the candle hidden in his pocket.

Sha. And you thought he was just happy to see me?

I spoke a few more meshugeneh sermons from various rafters around the church, found the entrance to the room of books behind the retablo of the altar, and disappeared. The two sextons, gibbering their own narishkayt nonsense to the saints, had become self-sufficient: they now generated their own fear.

Once inside the room, I heard my name rising from the shaft in the floor.

Was it the devil himself, maybe? Takeh, his hacksaw voice of blood and sex and velvet had beckoned me to the basement many times before.

Nu, who else? It was Moishe.

Sometimes one is struck by a great idea. I pulled the silk cords like worms from the waists of a few red robes and knotted them together. I tied one end to a table and dropped the other down the shaft. The cord klopped Moishe on his Yiddisher kop. Moishe rubbed his head, then began to climb.

Which reminds me:

Two lengths of thread meet at the end of the tallis—the prayer shawl—of the Chief Rebbe of Warsaw.

“Hey, sweet string,” one says to the other. “I’ve been looking for a single bisl of tassel just like you. Are you unattached?”

“I’m a frayed knot,” the other says.

So, you’ve heard it. Still, a story helps you not to brech when times are tough. It keeps your kishkas inside, where they’re supposed to be.

Moishe pulled himself out of the shaft. “The coffin is below,” he said,

“Empty?” I asked. It wouldn’t do for our books to share their berth with a corpse.

He looked at me. “Gevalt!”

Sha. He had the chutzpah to offer early retirement to a member of the clergy but not the beytsim to open a forgotten casket in the
nether dark of the cathedral? But it’s as they say,
Az di bubeh volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeydah
. If my grandmother had them, she’d be my grandfather.

We proceeded with our plan. If the coffin were occupied, we’d wish its resident
zay gezunt
and commend him to the floor.

Moishe gathered the imprisoned books into a sack that we’d filched from Doña Gracia’s pantry. Then he lowered it into the hole and shimmied down the rope. He was soon born again and back at the shelves refilling the sack. Three more times and we were both in the basement ready to screw our beytsim to the sticking place and open the casket. We were quite like the two sextons: afraid of the shadows cast by our own fear.

There was a scuttling as Moishe lifted the lid. A rat ran from behind the coffin and into the darkness. Thanks God, the casket,
Got tsu danken
, was empty. The only thing worse than finding a body in a coffin is finding half a body.

Moishe filled the coffin with the books. He left a small space.

I flew in.

He began nailing the casket closed.

A terrible sound.

I hoped—keneynehoreh—it was the only time that I heard it from this side. But, takeh, what’s worse than hearing your own casket being nailed shut?

Not hearing it.

Moishe donned one of the robes and pulled the cowl low over his face. Then, disguised as Padre Moishe, he went to speak to the two trembling sextons.

Moishe, newly consecrated canon of the Chutzpenik Church.

“This very night, I have received orders from Torquemada himself,” he told them in a deep, Inquisitorial voice. “The heretical body in the casket is a cancer on the Church. It must be removed and buried in unconsecrated ground immediately.

“And how could you have been so derelict in your duty to Their Highnesses, His Holiness the Pope, and indeed the Father, Son and
the Holy Ghost Itself not to have noticed the secret chamber of the Judaizers right beneath your incense-breathing noses and behind the back of the Holy Virgin Mary, as if she didn’t have enough to do being the mother of God?”

They would question less if accused.

Soon I heard voices. Then the coffin was lifted from the floor.

“By Santiago, if this sinner doesn’t weigh as much as two Jews.”

“You’re certain there’s just one in here?”

“He must be have been filled up right to bursting with heresy.”

My pallbearers hauled the coffin up the stairs. Several sharp turns as we manoeuvred out the door and around the back of what I assumed was the Virgin.

“This sinner,” Moishe said, giving two smart knocks on the lid, “died without confession and shall soon take transit to hell.”

As planned, I began to voice the sounds of the dead, an ominous below-deck creaking and shuddering.

“Ghosts and demons fill this box,” a sexton said.

“I expect it is its damned and undead body stirring, for it wishes to confess and repent,” Moishe said. “We must open it.”

I redoubled my groaning. A dybbuk was gnawing my kishkas with its stumpy teeth.

“
Dimitte mihi
, forgive me,” the other sexton said. “I am afraid.” I heard the quick steps of his retreat. His mother would be surprised to see him at this hour and at this age, and with his nappy needing changing. But we had expected that both sextons would run. We would have to improvise.

“Open it,” Moishe commanded. The remaining sexton knelt down and began prying open the lid. I burst out, shrieking.

The sexton fainted.

Moishe quickly removed the books. He replaced them with the insensate sexton and nailed the lid back on. In the morning, there would be more shreking and shraying—from the sexton waking inside the coffin; from everyone else when they heard him.

Later, Moishe confessed that he had given the poor boychik some assistance in leaving his fears behind: he’d been kind enough to administer a mighty zets to the back of his head with a silver crucifix.

A list of properties and dramatis personae present in the current drama:

A Sexton, comatose and in a coffin.

A Second Sexton, fear-footed, courage-lost, whereabouts unknown.

Heretical books piled higgledy-piggledly inside a cathedral.

Brilliantly insightful African Grey. Strikingly plumed in shades of dawn light. Much admired.

Fourteen-year-old Litvak. Male. Proto-pirate. Unarmed.

The sun. Life-giving. Carminizing. Currently rising.

The scene begins: the books must disappear even as night is disappearing.

Moishe hid the books in flour sacks behind the sty-fence outside the Catedral. Doña Gracia would soon send men to take them to her ships. In the meantime, the powerful nose-patshing dreck of the pigs would protect the books from discovery. Moishe removed the red silken robes, stuffed them into the flour sacks, and hid them behind the fence.

And then we walked off into the early morning world of fishermen, bakers, homebound carousers, and privateers of the book.

Curtain.

Chapter Fourteen

In the kitchen, breakfast was waiting. A sweet hormiguilla of honey and hazelnuts. Blood oranges. A mug of cider.

Doña Gracia waited for us also. It was clear from the deferential scurrying of the servants that she was not often in the kitchen. They brushed their food-stained clothing apologetically, bowing as they hurried to bring succulent shtiklach before her, early morning delights for their Maris Stella Esther.

“The pearls have been hidden from the swine?” Doña Gracia asked.

“Four sacks directly under their priestly noses,” Moishe said.

“Soon there will be the morning delivery to the Catedral,” the Doña said. “The books will be recovered and taken to the wharf to begin their exodus to Morocco. They will again find freedom on Jewish shelves.”

Then the Doña asked for a reckoning of our safety record. She knew about the previous night’s Jack in the pulpit.

We told her about this morning’s Jack-in-the-box.

She laughed, but then became serious. Moishe must leave on the boat. With the death of the priest, it was too dangerous to remain in Spain.

“I will sail only with Sarah and the Jews of the Catedral. Another Moses helped the people escape, and so, too, will I.”

“There’s Moses and there’s Moses,” she said. “You’re a brave boy, but he fought with God in his gloves.”

“The back of a guard’s head cannot distinguish between ha-Shem and a rock,” Moishe said. “Besides, I know how we may fight fire with equal fire.”

Crowds would gather around the quemadero. Soldiers. Horses. Priests. Carts. Citizens.

People carried bread and fruit and wine. Nothing like a little nosh before conflagration and death. Food for thought or torture.

Men would also bring something to fill their snoot. Bottles of wine and of liquor. If these bottles were filled with oil, and if, all at once, this oil was used to set alight the many carts filled with straw or the hay bales used for seating, it might be that a rescue would be possible amidst the Judgement Day–like agitation of souls, the excitement of bodies, and a mob flashing mad with a fire-ignited panic.

Fighting fire with fire, Moishe had invented a kind of medieval Molotov cocktail.

The condemned would be taken to a ship before the Inquisition was able to distinguish ground from sky.

“Torquemada travels here, to the Seville Catedral, to celebrate an Easter mass with other Inquisitors. You are at great risk. If you will not leave, I will allow you to remain in my home, but only as long as you stay hidden inside and in the room I have given you. Else, you risk discovery and torture and execution for both of us.”

“I will stay hidden,” Moishe said. “But help me to save the Catedral Jews from the stake. Allow me this.”

“You will stay hidden,” Doña Gracia said. She would not allow Moishe to play a role in the escape that she was planning. “Then successful or not, you will leave for Morocco on that day.”

Back in our room, he said, “I will remain hidden here, as the Doña wills it. So hidden that she won’t know when I leave to find Abraham, the shtik dreck uncle of Sarah. Perhaps he suffers from regret. I intend to spare him such tsuris, such woes.”

“And how will you do this?”

“A heart that does not beat feels no pain.”

“Emes,” I said. “It’s true.”

Like owls and murderers, we slept through the day, waking only when the world was dim and without doubt. Besides, we were so tired we didn’t have the energy to go to sleep. Luckily, it came to us.

Some food and then we slipped into the moonless night, seeing little but the shapes of the less dark against the deeper dark. Lit only by certainty, we crept like shadows along the alley walls.