Yiddish for Pirates (18 page)

Moishe dropped the book and stepped forward.

Its wing-like pages opened, a magician releasing a hidden dove. I flew—nu, where else?—onto his shoulder.

He bent down ready to touch the torch to the long inflammable tail of the kuf. Then without warning, those tied to the stakes began to sing as those before had sung.

Sh’ma Yisroel
, they sang. Hear O Israel.

The others, chained together, waiting their own execution, sang also.

Sh’ma Yisroel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad
.

Sarah was bound by ropes to the stake. And she, too, sang with defiance.

The faces of the about-to-die were beatific. The world was a broken vessel and they were pouring like light from between the cracks. This was the incorporeal song of themselves, a quantum song beyond time and space.

There was shouting from the crowd, but the singers continued.

Rabbi Daniel’s arms were tied to his side, but somehow he had managed to free one of his hands. Before anyone else noticed, he had reached up and clasped the tefillin box strapped to his forehead and torn it away. Tefillin, the Judaizing badge his captors were happy to have him display.

A guard ran toward him, sword raised to separate the arm from the rabbi’s body.

The rabbi threw the tefillin box like a hand grenade. It was, we assumed, only filled with prayers.

It burst into flame. A yontef cocktail. He must have planned to light the kindling beneath him. He would not let them take his death from him. The fire was his own.

But his half-tied arm moved as if it were broken and he had missed the pyre beneath him.

Instead, the box landed on the ground and rolled into the trail of oil. The kuf ignited, a wall of flame that surrounded the stakes and separated the condemned from the others. The soldier was caught in between. His robes turned to fire and he ran screaming into the crowd that opened before him. He ran thirty feet and then toppled to the ground, burning like a trash heap.

Moishe dropped his torch and walked before the stands. He looked steadily into the shocked faces of the priests, nobles, the powerful. He raised his hands with the Biblical drama of a prophet.

“This is not the end, it is Ein Sof—there is no end. But I am going now. I bid you all
zay gezunt
—a fond farewell.”

Then he ran into the space at the bottom of the kuf, disappearing into what looked like unrelenting hellfire.

From the outside, it appeared that the heretics—Jews and conversos—would be consumed by this lake of fire.

Inside, we were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace: surrounded though untouched by flame. Then a geshrey wailing. The rabbi’s clothes were on fire, the pyre beneath him burning. Moishe seized the knife from his belt, thrust it through the flames and slashed the ropes binding the rabbi. He threw the rebbe to the ground. We had little time before we’d either be overcome by the heat or else the kuf would consume its fuel. Moishe cut the others free and Sarah ran to cover the rabbi in her shawl. She helped him up and guided him as he staggered.

Moishe could not separate those chained together by iron, but we could lead them to safety, escaping from the open top of the kuf. It led directly into a long alleyway, a street of weavers. Those who stood there, watching the auto-da-fé, moved quickly away, crossing themselves and muttering prayers. We were dybbuk spirits, walking ghosts, consumed by fire, beginning our God-forsaken pilgrimage to hell.

We turned a corner. There was Padre Luis sitting on a barrel.

“Good work,” he said and jumped down. “Now, quick—in the barrel.”

Did he expect us all to climb inside a single barrel? Na, even Ali Baba’s forty thieves had one each.

But Doña Gracia—we hadn’t recognized her in the line of those chained together, she was so stooped and dirty and her clothes were torn—moved forward and pulled back the lid. Inside were the stolen red robes from the Catedral. Those whose hands were free draped the robes around the others, hiding their chains and sanbenito smocks.

Moishe held me beneath his cape.

An apikoros procession—a march of heretics—walking to the water.

As much as possible, we kept to the alley’s dusky arteries, though eventually we had to cross the jugular of Calle del Agua, lined with celebrants waiting for the procession to pass on its way to its final destination, the Catedral. They hadn’t yet heard of the escape from fire.

Murmurs in the crowd as we went by. We were a raggle-tag procession of shlumperdik clerics wandering away from the Catedral and into the dark yard of a cobbler’s shop. Rabbi Daniel wobbled unsteadily, supported by Sarah.

How to kvell with joy and relief, smooch and embrace before a singed rabbi?

“Sarah,” Moishe said.

“Basherter,” Sarah said, touching his soot-streaked cheek.

Then she saw something down the calle.

“Rabbi.” She pulled him into the obscurity of the covered stairs behind the shop. The others quickly followed.

Two huge church bulvans—cattle-thick bruisers. Moishe strode up to them but said nothing. And he did not resist as they seized him and ox-marched him away.

Sarah had saved everyone. Moishe would waddle like a gunsel into the brig if it would continue to keep them safe.

And I would follow.

They dragged us across the city. Finally, they threw us onto the fetid shmutzy straw of a cell. I knew where we were. The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition did not host its guests at a five-star establishment. This place was rated but one farkakteh Yiddish star. And we’d seen it from the other side.

What happened next?

Bupkes.

We waited.

Time can be a scarifying lash when your world is a small room and you’ve nothing to do but wait for the bullwhip of the inevitable.

Night then dawn.

Saturday. At first, we strode about the room.

“We are,” Moishe said, “as my father used to say, ‘
Er dreyt zich arum vi a forts in rosl
.’ A fart blundering around in brine, not knowing what to do.”

We were trying to think of a way out, of what we didn’t know.

Nothing but stone walls and iron bars.

Eventually, Moishe lay in the dirty straw like a sick calf, troubled by what might have happened to the others, about what might happen to us.

Night again.

It was before dawn on the third day, Easter Sunday.

Cimmerian darkness. The hot horse breath of the Andalusian night, a fever dream heavy over the city of Seville. The faint scent of laurel, orange blossom and horse piss.

Footsteps, a distant door opening, the glow of lantern light, then someone approaching our cell. We hoped they were bringing food.

I hid in the corner, covered in darkness and straw.

A section of an old man’s face appeared at the small, barred window. A watery eye, a white eyebrow, the side of a blotched and veiny nose.

The rattle of keys. With some difficulty the man pushed open the cell door with a cassock-covered, spindle-thin shoulder. A monk.

He stood at the threshold and, still in shadow, scrutinized Moishe for a long time.

Finally he shuffled forward, hung his lantern from a hook, and spoke. In the dim light, we saw who it was.

Torquemada, ancient bilious scarecrow of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio. Carrion crow of Paul the Apostle.

“I know who you are,” he whispered to Moishe.

So much for a little nosh, hardtack for the empty kishkas of two heretics.

Moishe stumbled up and onto the bench. He was weak. We had not eaten for two days.

Torquemada lowered himself down onto the bench beside Moishe. In the lantern light, his sallow skin was a wasted land of shadowy hollows.

“The condemned disappear like smoke, leave no bones, no ashes. And you walk into fire and are unharmed. The people speak of miracles. I always thought you would come. Yes, I know who you are. I recognize you, though you are only a boy.”

His penetrating wet eyes were small and dark, windows onto a mind that was a hurricane, its enormous power spinning everything in its path around its vacant centre.

Whatever he thought Moishe was, it was clear to me what he was.

Meshugeh.

Insane.

A small line of spittle found a desiccated fissure and rolled slowly down his chin. Moishe began, “Father, I …”

“Be silent!” he said. “What could you say? I know but too well your answer … Besides, you have no right to add one syllable to that which you have said before. Why should you now return to impede us in our work? You’ve come but for that only, and you know that well. Do you know what awaits you this morning? I do not know, nor do I care to know who you might be: be it you or an image of you only. I have condemned you and you will burn at the stake, the most wicked of all heretics.”

So, nu, they don’t have the Egyptian fire trick out here in Spain? Every conjurer with a match is mistaken for Yeshua, the Messiah?

Though, the matchstick itself would takeh be some trick. It may not be the souls of the dead rising, but it’s the splintery and sulphurous future of firestarting.

Torquemada leaned in close to Moishe. “We are not with you, but with him,” he hissed. “The wise spirit. The dread one. That is our secret. For centuries have we abandoned you to follow him. The people have trusted us with their happiness, their souls, your word, their freedom. And we have helped them. Though I am an old man, a tattered cloak upon a pole, I will live for another thousand years. Oh, it is possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, to rejuvenate oneself through cruelty. You have dared to come and trouble us in our work and so deserve the Inquisitorial fires more than any.”

Moishe remained silent, looking at him, calculating how he could turn this mishugas into an opportunity.

When the world is upside down, it is best to walk on your hands if you want to be king.

Moishe looked penetratingly yet tenderly at this old privateer, for that’s what he was. He would not have hesitated to board Noah’s boat and plunder one of every animal, two if when roasted they were choice. So, too, he was with souls. His letter of marque or holy book was from a brine-dead sea, faded, torn, illegible. The self-serving palimpsest of memory the only legible mark.

Moishe waited, allowing his silence to bloom like a wound. The old man longed to hear his voice, to hear him reply. He’d rather endure words of bitterness and scorn than his silence. I caught Moishe’s sidereal glance at me, a quicksilver glint.

Then Moishe rose to his feet, slowly and solemnly. He bent toward the Inquisitor and softly kissed the bloodless, ancient lips.

The Grand Inquisitor shuddered. A convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth. He stood up uncertainly, and hobbled to the door, pushing it open.

“Go,” he said to Moishe. “Do not come again … never. Never!”

Moishe walked through the open door and vanished into the darkness. Torquemada shuffled back to the bench and collapsed. His head dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. I could see by the twisting runnels of his forehead that he was suffering. He touched his hand to his lips and was still.

When the sails are down, the wind runs free.

So I took my chance. I flew.

Chapter Twenty-One

Outside I could not find Moishe, but knew he would make for the Guadalquivir River and the ship. I would fly ahead to tell them to wait. He would soon be there.

If they had safely arrived. If they hadn’t already set sail toward Cadiz and the sea.

I rose up into the pearlescent before-dawn light. Soon the sun would rise. Soon the son also: the bright rising of Easter with its banners, music and celebration. But when they rolled aside the saviour’s stone in the mouth of Iberia, we’d be gone.

Even in the half-light, there were people on the street. Soldiers, too. Moishe would have to become a shadow, a ruekh—a ghost—and half-light himself, if he were to slip by unnoticed.

At the port, I circled to find our ship in a forest of masts and landed on the mainmast spar.

Below me, Padre Luis was playing with a rope beside the starboard gunwale.

The others must be keeping out of sight below deck.

Padre Luis looked up. “Salve!” he called.

I hadn’t said a word when—a broch, damn it all—there was a tremendous crack. Splintered wood crashed onto the deck. Another burst. A flash from the wharf. A gunshot. Gevalt! It grazed my feathers. They were trying to separate my insides from my out, make a pretty
loch in mayn kop
, a hole in my head.

Doña Gracia shouted to the crew.

More flashes and wood-splintering.

Sailors emerged, unmoored the ship and unfurled the sails.

Another explosion and I was hit a mighty klop from Olam ha-Ba, a divine fist from the world to come. I was returned to the formless void and into complete wordless, sightless, soundless oblivion.

My last thought?

We would have to sail south for the sea and leave Moishe surrounded by gunfire. Parrotless and alone.

Sure the shvants does well without its foreskin. It grows. It prospers.

But which part was Moishe?

Which was me?

Though unlike what the moyel hath rent assunder, I would let no one keep us apart, though it might be years.

It would be five.