Yiddish for Pirates (8 page)

“So, Migueleh,” the reb said. “We want you to shlepp some books to the secret Jews in Seville. But no one can know. It would be fatal. Farshteyst? You understand?”

Moishe nodded.

“But you’re not a Jew. You’re a goyisher sailor from Lithuania. You were almost sold at port but you escaped.”

No so far from the truth.

“Besides, what do they know from Ashkenaz?” the reb shrugged.

“You’ll have a horse, something to nosh, a letter of introduction, and a small sword,” the mapmaker said in Portuguese. “You’ll be paid, enough. There are those—like Reb Isaac Abravanel, the treasurer to King Alonso—who have the money to support such things.”

“And if there’s trouble, maybe you’ll let your parrot do the talking,” Bartholomeo said. “As far as I know, there is no Inquisition for birds.”

“At least not yet,” the reb said. I said nothing, but wondered, nu, what’s the right word for snatching parrots like feathered fruit from their perches in Africa?

Your new life, a procession of cages, jesses, clipped wings, and exile.

Starved and poked until you speak the language of those who did it.

Converso parrots singing our Lord’s song in a strange land.

But, as they say, there’s job security.

And, after awhile, the words we spit in rage are the words of those we rail against.

Feh.

Eventually, all that’s left is words.

Chapter Six

A day later we gathered our few things in both sack and saddlebag, and shtupped our pockets full with bread and dried fruit.

“Boychik,” the old rebbe wheezed. “Sit.” The rebbe put his shaky spiderweb fingers on Moishe’s shoulder. “There’s news.”

The story had travelled west, through a network of Jewish learning and trade, taking many months to arrive on this furthest European shore.

There had been pogroms in the distant east. The east which had been Moishe’s home. Shtetls had been plundered then torched. Jews raped then killed.

Cossacks like pirates boarding the landlocked villages.

Moishe’s shtetl. Was it on the banks of the Nevežis near Panevezys?

Ash. Chickens. Lost and baleful dogs.

No one survived.

His parents?

Ha-Shem yikom damo
. May Elohim avenge their blood.

It was a week along the road to Seville, a connect-the-dots route of small villages drawn together by dirt roads, scattered stones, and an assortment of travellers. The thought of his parents burned in Moishe.

“They were the centre of the compass. Where I was travelling from. What do I have left—an accent and a memory of my father’s book?”

Moishe described a shul ceremony. On the bima, the dais, the Torah was passed hand to hand and embraced from
dor l’dor
, generation to generation. He recalled his father telling him that Jews were “the people of the book”—books were akin to blood, something that allowed them to live forever.

“So what did I do? Pitched my father’s book into the sea.
Zay gezunt
, eternal life. Hey, sea cucumbers and shiksa mermaids, here’s all you need. I might as well have dropped my parents into the sea. Never mind eternal life, they have no life and where was I?”

Near Andalusian territory, a shlemiel with a stringy beard stood by the side of the road and invited us to kick his tuches for the price of a few small coins. I suspect he was often compelled to give away his service for free. We stayed overnight in a selection of inns or, to tell the emes truth, in their barns. Each night, after an evening observing the rich variety of human knots becoming unravelled at the inn, we found our way to the sweet scuttling of the barns. Sometimes there were others there: a variety of the bedless and transient, those shlumpers left trailing behind the promise of their own better futures. I encountered no other parrots, but we’re not usually companions for those bound inland, unless they’re buoyed by the jewelled palanquin of privilege and can afford feathered marvels.

Moishe paid with Don Abravanel’s coins, never allowing more than one to be visible at a time. He kept some in his shoes, some strapped to his leg, some beside his own family jewels.

Outside the city, with the sun still seeping like a wound over the Andalusian mountains, we came across what we thought to be a festival procession, loud with bright colour and the wailing, singing and shouting of thousands. Enormous crosses held high, a parade of priests, monks, and the powerful riding in carriages and on huge horses dressed in silks and resembling cantering four-poster beds.

A bright and horrifying line followed. What appeared to be a troupe of clowns savagely beaten and now muttering, weeping, mad, or silent.

They trudged barefoot, arrayed in red, yellow or black sacks covered in a bestiary of demons emerging from amid the lewd tongues of painted flame, pointed and insane. Each clown surmounted with a peaked hat emblazoned with still more fire. Some robes were drawn-and-quartered by a gash-red cross, as if Father-Son-and-Holy-Ghosted by sword. Man, woman and child, each carried a green or yellow candle, and walked with a noose around the neck, macabre neckties dressing them with a grim and dark formality. At the end of the procession, several men, beaten until barely more than stew, carried in cages pulled by mules.

An auto-da-fé, part of the newly created made-in-Spain Inquisition. Bartolemeo’s master had warned us about this, but, oy, a broch, this was persecution dressed like the birthday party of the boy Satan.

People lined the streets bawling religious songs.

“The Jews,” a man shouted. “Those vermin caused the plague.”

We pushed our way into the crowd, wishing and not wishing to see more of this demonic circus. A girl, but a season older than Moishe—dark curls beneath a coloured scarf—sobbed beside us, tear-soaked face half-covered with a handkerchief.

“My father,” she whispered. She gestured toward a rickety man in one of the cages. He gripped the bars, held himself in a crouch. His frail head with its wispy beard and sallow face bobbed as the cage moved forward. He was saying something, singing weakly, but in the din we could not understand.

Moishe turned from the procession, looked steadily at her, but said nothing.

Ach, what could you say?

Sorry?

As long as you have your health?

I lost my father, too?

Men, women, children. All threw rotten food and dreck that dripped from those in the cages. The girl’s father did not respond but kept muttering, clinging to the bars.

The crowd walked alongside the procession and Moishe, the girl and I followed. We arrived at a large square outside the city walls.
On a large platform, the rich, the aristocratic, the clergy.

Four huge statues of Old Testament prophets stood mutely at each corner, their blind eyes staring grimly into the crowd.

The quemadero. The place of execution.

“The architect for this place,” the girl said, indicating a tall man in a black robe. “But a Jew first.”

A priest in red robes climbed the few stairs to a raised dais on the platform, and began to proclaim, “If a man does not keep himself in Me, he becomes dead and is severed like a dry branch; such branches are taken up and put in the fire and burned. John, chapter fifteen, verse six. We know what should become of these heretics.”

“Laudamus Te” from the choir. The crowd joined in. All around us: “We praise, we bless, we worship, we glorify.”

Several of the condemned fell to their knees, weeping.

Perhaps they did not like the musical selection.

Then they confessed their heresy, the secret Judaizing of their deeds and hearts, their repentance.

“We accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our saviour for the wages of sin are death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

They collapsed before the platform, watering the ground with their tears.

Soldiers strode toward the centre of the quemadero.

“Stand,” a sergeant ordered. The penitants staggered up or were hauled. Then briskly, the soldiers reached around their necks with a red silk cord and strangled them.

May they rest in peace.
Aleyhem ha’shalom
.

The soldiers: their time will come.

When parrots and Jews take over the world.

When is that?

When the Messiah comes to earth and shines my shoes.

When I get shoes.

My luck, they’ll be horseshoes.

The garrotted bodies were carried by pairs of soldiers, then secured to stakes planted throughout the square in a mockery of trees. Then a marquesa stepped from the platform, her brocaded skirts fluttering behind her. A priest passed her a lit torch, and, after a nod from another, she made the sign of the cross over her own mortal body and touched the torch to the kindling at the foot of the stake. The pyre ignited, a burning bush inverted.

The greatest pain wasn’t apparent in the quickly sagging body, curling in the heat, the yellow sack now florid with real fire. It was in the burning horror on the face of the girl, on the faces of the still living, the about-to-die.

A shout like a
shtoch in hartsn
, a stab in the heart, from somewhere in the crowd. A brief commotion as someone collapsed. The soldiers looked over. The crowd attempted to become invisible. The commotion stilled.

Another brocaded dybbuk descended the stairs and received a lighted torch. Then another. The faces of the living burned even more fiercely. The girl gasped for air, her shoulders heaving.

The living bound in ropes. The broken taken from their cages, each carried then tied to a stake. This time several of the lords stepped from the platform and received torches. The girl sank to her knees.

First one, then several of the bound began to sing in desperate voices, the Sh’ma, the central affirmation of the Jewish faith.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One …”

“
Adonai Eloheinu
, the world ends. Soon the Messiah will come,” a man beside us shouted. He was quickly overpowered, brought down by the fists and feet of a band of cursing men.

The girl sobbing on her hands and knees.

Moishe crouched close to her.

In the middle of such tsuris, such misery, she was the painful centre of the world. And beautiful.

Moishe’s mind became a syrup of ragged light and electricity. I could almost see the girl being imprinted into the brain of this boychik, like this boychik had imprinted on me.

“Moishe,” he said to her. It was a naming, a consolation, an explanation for something he had no other words for.

An affirmation.

Then he turned and ran, a loud snap behind him as kindling at the foot of the remaining stakes burst into flame and the crowd cheered.

Chapter Seven

We ducked into an alley. It’s a paradox if a parrot ducks, but in this case, it would have been a good idea because:

Blam!

A shtik fleysh mit tsvey oygn
—a piece of meat with two eyes—hit me right in the punim with his fist and I fell off Moishe’s shoulder. They hit the bird when they want the boy. I fell to the ground and our narration almost ended here, with me farkakte, looking up at the thin blue sky above the alleyway.

A gangly shmendrick of a man looked down at me.

“Splinterwit,” he said. “You ran into my fist. Who are you running from?”

“The wrong person, obviously,” Moishe said.

The shmendrick pointed at the small shuttered window of a goldsmith’s shop. “I was breaking in. If it weren’t for your stupid bird, I’d’ve been inside already.”

I attempted to return to Moishe’s shoulder but I’d hurt my wing.

Moishe held out his hand. I climbed on and he lifted me back onto his shoulder. His other head. His second thoughts.

“Miguel,” Moishe said, introducing himself to the shmendrick. “I’m … a sailor. They were going to sell me but I escaped.”

“They call me Diego,” the shmendrick said.

And perhaps it was true.

Diego gave us directions to the place where we would meet the secret Jews. The Catedral de Sevilla, the enormous cathedral that stood over the city. An old mosque dressed in Christian drag. We didn’t require the convolutions of complex directions: its bell tower, La Giralda, once a minaret, pointed like a giant finger toward heaven. We’re number one.