Yiddish for Pirates (17 page)

“And, if we don’t make an escape plan,” I said, “they’ll find us, too, sometime in the future, our words forgotten, our bones collecting dust, and they’ll say, ‘They’re from years ago when there once was Spain.’ ”

“Yes,” Moishe said. “Two friends: a looker and a chickenhawk.”

“Nu,” I said. “You can’t have
a pish on a forts
—a piss without a fart.”

“Takeh,” Moishe said. “But we have a plan. We wait until the priests have gone, then you fly out like Noah’s dove to see if it’s safe. Then we rescue Sarah and the hidden Jews, then Doña Gracia and the others, and then we sail to safety—for Africa, your home.”

Feh. What did I know from Africa? I wished only for my boychik’s scrawny coast.

“If they put your brain inside a bird,” I said, “
hi te’ofef le-achor
—it would fly backwards. How are we going to help them? Even a great captain needs a boat.”

“My mother used to say, ‘If one wants to beat a dog, one finds a stick.’ So, nu, I’m looking for a stick.”

Our first battle was with time.

We waited.

Fingers cast by candlelight wavered against the walls as Moishe examined shelves. Prayerbooks and Torahs, but also letters, leases, contracts, deeds, ketubahs, rabbinical court records, and sheaves of
poems by Halevi and Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra. Like the manifold races of man, from Ultima Thule to the lands of Prester John, the books ranged in size from those that could be held like a child’s hand to those that could contain the broad lungs of an ape.

But no sticks.

The candle was becoming an even shorter thumb, a warm wax petseleh, a guttering boyhood. Moishe snuffed it like a priest and we were in the dark. How long would the shtarkers stalk Doña Gracia’s? We slept for hours waiting for the waters to recede.

Finally, Moishe felt his way to the door and hauled on it to make a scupper for my exit. I crept through, found my way past the storage room and flew in darkness down the hall. I stopped at the stairs and listened.

A slurping, a chewing. An animal sound. Some chazzer on the table finishing the seder. The only toughs, twenty white soldiers on a red hill, roughing up the lamb. I climbed the last stair and looked out.

Padre Luis from the Palacio Arzobispal, now emperor of wine bottles and inquisitor of stews. There’s an extra cup left for Elijah at any seder, but this ghost we could not have expected.

“Ah, Christian. Some company here in this desolate sanctuary.” He’d seen me and remembered that I’d baptized myself a “Christian.” “Come enjoy some strange fruit,” he said, holding up the half-noshed flesh of something unidentifiable.

He appeared to be alone in his leftover kingdom and so I returned to my Noah in the bookish Ark.

We were chaleshing for a facefull. We’d eaten only the first few ritual seder foods before the table was stormed.

“A chair, Miguel,” Padre Luis said, directing Moishe to a place across from him. “An oasis of food and wine for you who are hungry. And someone to break bread with.”

Moishe sat at the chair that yesterday was Joshua’s. He drank the remaining cup of the seder wine then piled a tall Ararat on Joshua’s plate. At least two of everything.

“Your parents were not glad to see you?” Padre Luis asked, wrestling a joint of lamb with his face, the wet slap like the sea between a dock and a hull. “I am surprised to discover you here. In the house of a Jew.”

Moishe motioned to the food, hoping that this would be explanation enough, relying on two of the perennial certainties of story: appetite and mystery.

Padre Luis nodded and, for awhile, the three of us pursued our appetites and allowed mystery its invisible Elijah-like place at the table. I roamed about this landscape of food, hunting the placid raisin and harvesting the gentle nut.

“You are wise, my young friend,” Padre Luis said, after awhile, “to eat much and speak less.” He drained a silver kiddush cup of its wine. “But I know who you are.”

Moishe’s gaze darted toward me.
Should we run?

Padre Luis looked left and right about the room, as if at any moment the red capes of the Holy Office would flame from behind the tapestries.

“I know who you are because Doña Gracia told me.”

Did they extract this as their hot tongs branded both her mortal flesh and her soul’s thin wings?

“
Gey strasheh di vantsen
—frighten the bugs off someone else—I am called, ‘Miguel,’ and that is all,” Moishe said with bravado. But I knew he wasn’t certain if this was treachery, something to trick him into dropping his goyishe drawers and revealing the true pomp and circumcision of his Hebrew shvants.

“Miguel. Moishe. Conveyor of forbidden books. I recall little of what I said when we previously met, but I shall repeat what I believe I imprudently revealed,” Padre Luis said. “I am no friend of the Holy Office. In these few years, I have become wasted, wraithlike, my faith consumed by its un-Christian fire. What I did not say was that I was an ally of the Jews, of Doña Gracia, of the rabbi, that I was to be part of the plan for the escape of those now condemned, that I would leave with them for a new life, holy yet free. Last night, I would have arrived in time to give warning to those in this house for I heard what they said in the Palacio.
It is to my eternal regret that I had first immersed myself in a blood-red sea of church wine. Its undertow pulled me under and I drowned. I woke only this noon when all was already lost. And so, what do I do? I sit at this table and eat, I who should have been a sentry at the doorpost, waiting to wave away the Angel of Death with the lamb’s blood of my true Christian faith.”

He filled a jug with wine and drank long and unrelentingly. Finally, he breathed.

“
O beati martyris Santiago
, Alonso is already dead. He has returned to his God. Joshua may yet still be alive, though it is unlikely that he will survive the efforts of the Holy Office to extract a confession and a list of other names. Sancta Maria mater. And what they have done to Doña Gracia? Tomorrow they all go to the quemadero to be sacrificed like Jesu Christo, our Lord … or at least, my Lord. Oh, all is darkness,” he wailed, “All is night.” He placed his head on his plate and once again, passed into a drunken sleep.

Moishe looked at me, a glance that was an ocean. Then he looked away and ate the food that was on his plate.

Padre Luis sat up suddenly, his face spackled with lamb and stew. “Hearken unto my sermon of fire for I have had a vision,” he intoned. “Oh, here at this table of plenty. Oh, here in this Andalusian Gethsemane. Yea, He will rescue and redeem them for their lives are precious to him. O sweet wine! O love, who ever burnest and never consumest! O charity! O succulent lamb! O fruit abundant and moist! The beast and the false prophet will be cast into a lake of flame. The fire they kindle for their enemies will burn themselves only. Oh, for I have dreamt of the heifer-red wall of fire, I who drink deeply and stew in both regret and sorrow. O raisins and almonds! The sea shall part and they shall walk through its red flames as if through a curtain. Oh, were I a man and not a lamb or adafina stew. Though our sins be scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. For this has been written in fire and the words themselves are enflamed. Oh, shall I drink!” He reached for a jug of wine but succeeded only in overturning it. Then he rested his addle-pated head on his plate and slept again as the wine overflowed the table.

Moishe stood up. “His vision,” he said. “Now I know what to do.”

“Drink less,” I said. “Few flagons contain as much wine as he. The only vision he has is doubled.”

“He is truly farshikkered, but his pickled words have reminded me. A curtain of flame, some burning letters: fire will save them from fire.”

Moishe recounted a marvel he’d seen at a shtetl wedding where a magician—a kishef-makher—had walked through a wall of fire and been unharmed. Everyone thought it was sorcery or else a propitious and divine intervention for the wedding. Like the gefilte fish. The man had chanted some obscure prayers, touched a torch to the ground, then disappeared into the burning wall of flame that he’d created. After a few horrifying minutes, he reappeared, smiling, bowing, and carrying doves. Moishe wasn’t the only one in tears.

In whispers, Moishe’s father had explained: it only looked like the man had walked through fire. Imagine that the magician had poured oil onto the earth in the shape of a kuf, a
, his father had said. When the letter was on fire, he walked into the space at the bottom, waited inside for a few minutes and then slipped out from the opening at the top. The doves had been in his pocket like two pieces of bread, waiting to make a wondrous—and untoasted—sandwich. “Sometimes,” said Moishe’s father, “we say ‘b’shin, kuf, resh,’ and spell out the Hebrew word for ‘lie,’
sheqer
. Kuf is at the heart of this lie, also, though it is a marvellous lie, like much in this world.”

“With this trick,” Moishe said, “we will arrange the escape.”

There were three things that we needed.

Oil.

A disguise so that Moishe could appear at the lion’s den of the quemadero.

Beytsim the size of lions or small ships. It would help if they would roar or at least tack into the wind.

There was a cloak and a hat on a hook in the hall outside the kitchen. Wearing these things, one could no more recognize Moishe than one could read the Mishnah between the hairs of a twilit pig.

We found lamp oil in the kitchen.

As for the beytsim, we’d have to rely on the principle that, if necessity is the mamaleh of invention, then desperation is the mother of beytsim the size of two shvitzy schooners.

I would be conspicuous and so we went in search of a means of concealment. And Moishe wanted one more look at the genizah.

There was a large thick book, the size of a gravestone. No words were stamped on its mottled rabicano binding, nothing to indicate its Hebrew insides. Moishe hauled it off the shelf, and without reading it, carried it upstairs to the seder table, pushing aside the plates and food and cups. He opened the book and began cutting at its pages with a carving knife.

I did not understand the reason for this surgery.

“Now, there’s room for you. Once I close the cover, I can carry you and no one will know you’re there.”

It was a coffin of words and I was its hidden meaning.

“
Shver tsu zayn a Yid
,” I said. “It’s hard to be a hidden Jew. Just don’t forget me.”

Chapter Twenty

From inside the book, I could hear the shushkeh of Moishe’s voice as he spoke quietly, keeping us both calm, the way one might soothe a skittish horse.

It was a long walk to the quemadero and several times, Moishe turned into an alley and opened the book a crack so that I could have fresh air. It was not difficult to know which way to go. Many had already lined the streets to witness the execution parade: the brotherhoods wearing their pointed hoods, the pasos, the elaborate floats depicting Jesus, Mary, and scenes from the Stations of the Cross. There were penitents carrying crosses, and a swarm of Inquisitors led by the Red Queen himself, the Grand Dragon Torquemada. The procession led to the quemadero and from there its route went to the Catedral. But it wouldn’t arrive. Our fire, the chaos of the kuf, would create a thousand individual processions of panic and fear, in the midst of which the Jews could hide.

Moishe shuffled like an old man into the square, the jug of oil concealed beneath his cape. There were a few guards standing around, kibitzing, laughing, waiting casually for the crowds. I felt Moishe walking, pouring oil in a kuf shape. Or so I imagined.

We waited behind a stumpy wall on the edge of the square. Moishe opened the book a little, as if checking the words were still there. After some time, the sound of crowds and music increased. The procession
had arrived. Moishe closed the book. Once again, everything was filtered through words.

The place would soon be thick with crosses, actual size.

The higher-ups, the balebatim, would climb up into the stands to be a little closer to God than the rest of us. Except for the condemned who would soon be nothing more than an ascending curl of dark smoke that God would inhale, then expel with the full force of His divine lungs, blowing them all to hell.

The expiration of the living.

I heard trumpets. Not the end-of-the-world trumpets of the revelation, but corporeal horns, signalling the end of some Jews.

Then singing.

Venite, adoremus
.

Because I led thee out of the land of Egypt, thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Saviour
.

Because I brought thee into a land exceeding good, thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Saviour.

O My people
.

Then the sound and fury of the Grand Inquisitor, a sermon signifying voluble nothing for I could understand but few words from inside the book. Only his wrath and righteousness, the febrile excoriation of the sinful by an alter kaker.

Then the fervent jeering of the crowd.

More words.