Yiddish for Pirates Page 10

  It seemed an unlikely tale, scaffolded by cloud and as fanciful as the second invisible horn of the unicorn.

  Though it were true.

  Surely the priest would not believe it, even were it to be scrubbed of stain in bucket water, its heresy drowned in a pail like a scrabbling kitten.

  Still, of the megillah of tales that he might tell, Moishe had a sense that, spoken plainly, the authority of the truth, though shaped, sculpted, tailored and trimmed for the Church, might speak most authentically to the priest.

  Truth sounds most true when it is spoken bespoke.

  And it could save our lives. We were, after all, sought by the Inquisition and had been caught crawling up the leg of the Archbishop’s, attempting entry at his back door. This would, we acknowledged, cause him considerable discomfort.

  Moishe began:

  A cabin boy from the east, he had wandered without design across water and into the history of Spain. There had been whipping, a shipwreck, bandits, the execution lessons of the auto-da-fé, warm heaps of soft soil to sleep on, kindly farmers offering sour milk and the desiccated crusts of old bread.

  Yet he should not neglect to recount the assistance of priests and the safe harbour, soft beds and fresh bread of churches.

  And his faith.

  Padre Luis Dos Almos sat for awhile chewing on some of that soft church bread. Tongues of lantern light worried the stumps of shadow in the kitchen’s dim maw.

  “An excellent tale,” he said, finally. “Adventure enough for a bindlestiff of a lad in possession of but a meagre assortment of years. And what you say of history interests me. For it is true, we wander the alleys like flâneurs, sometimes finding ourselves on the main street amidst the chaos of traffic, dodging to avoid becoming flesh shoes on history’s great hooves.”

  He poured more wine into both his own and Moishe’s cups. “I observe, also, that you have, perhaps, also wandered from the narrow path of truth into the broad thoroughfare of invention. ‘Miguel’—is that a name from the East? And what of the Goyas of Zaragoza and their parrot? I was born on some day’s yesterday, but let me be clear that that day was not today.”

  Which way to run? I saw flight in Moishe’s eyes.

  “I requested a story and you have provided a good tale,” Padre Luis said. “I warrant it is a painting with more colour than the pencil outline of the actual. Tonight you will sleep here. When the sun returns day, you will return home, returning to your parents both yourself and their sleep.”

  “Yes, Padre,” Moishe nodded respectfully. Sculpted and trimmed, the truth was not as distant as Moishe might have imagined. Sleep and his parents had not shared a bed for some time unless it be eternal.

  Padre Luis poured himself another cup of wine to water his ripening cheeks. “I myself have been the wandering I of many adventures,” he began. “I was born in the city of Palma on the island of Majorca. From there, I have travelled much and seen more. The iridescent arbour of the peacock’s tail, the grizzled hump on the ape’s back. Great battles and tender love. Silver-hearted heroes and the mewling of cowards, though often each mistook himself for the other. I have known the jealous turnscrew of the human heart and the incomprehensible round dance of kindness. Jews, infidels, pagans and Christians. And those in between.” He paused to drink again, and this seemed to inspire him. “I am drunk from the jagged edges of life’s broken bottle. I have tasted the sweet blackcurrant wine of a woman’s lips. But, these last several years, I have become a ghost.” He imbibed now with less inhibition and more gusto, spilling wine down his cheeks and onto his cassock.

  “I have become a ghost.”

  He did not appear to be so, though at this point, it was clear that he was comprised of a high percentage of spirits.

  “This Inquisition. This Tribunal of the Farkakteh Holy Office. Shh. We must not speak with such vigour if we are to speak plainly.” He leaned conspiratorially over the table and then continued in a hiss. “I am a ghost. How can I be a man? I am hollowed out by such haunting. Watching. Waiting. Not all who wander are lost.”

  Then he placed his soft red face on the table and closed his eyes. “How great is the darkness,” he said and passed out.

  If I, as Christian Goya, had supped too devoutly on the sacred body, this unconscious holy ghost of a man had too greatly sipped of the blood. Likely quarts of it before we’d arrived.

  We crept into the dark hallway and were gone.

  There’d be time to wonder at Padre Luis’s use of a Yiddish word. I was certain that Moishe had noticed, too.

  It was farkakte.

  We could barely tell left from right in the dim light of the hall.

  “Left,” I said.

  “No, right is better,” he said.

  “Lokshen putz,” I said. Noodle dick.

  “Shmeckel beak.”

  “Dreck shmuck.”

  “Seagull.”

  Fighting words. But he whose legs are on the ground decides which way to walk. We went right.

  A long hallway. The dark shapes of doors.

  Our quarry was behind one of them, asleep, we hoped, on a pallet, his nose guttural with snores, his dreams radiant hot with the burning sanbenitos of those he had betrayed. All but our prey would be in the red cassock of a priest. But soon he, too, would be robed in red: we would slit his duplicitous throat and he would become kosher meat for worms.

  Behind two doors, no one. Behind another, a sleeping priest. The creak of the moving door caused him to stir and so we quickly withdrew.

  The last door before a turn in the hall, a larger room, empty but for a table, a chair, and a Golem-sized bookcase filled with books. A small sconce on the wall, barely alight. A sound from down the hall. We slipped into the room, a place to hide.

  There was a narrow sword, more like a skewer than a blade, resting against the wall. Moishe took it in his hand, raised it for protection. Footsteps. Some murmuring. Where could we hide?

  Moishe did not yet possess the brawn of adulthood. His pisher-thick frame fit behind the shelves. And with room for a bird.

  So, I hid.

  There was no back to the bookcase. We had to rely on the books for cover. It would not be the first time that books had been used to obscure what might otherwise be clearly seen.

  The fluttering of orange-yellow candlelight entered the room. Then a man. He put the candleholder down then looked thoughtfully at the shelves. It is impossible to know if one is invisible without asking, and we weren’t going to ask.

  He moved closer, either to distinguish us from shadow or to read the title on a book.

  It isn’t clear how the book felt, but winter came suddenly to my spine. Now we could see the man clearly. It was the very man that we sought. Abraham. The traitor. He stood in front of the books and reached out.

  It happened in a single moment.

  Abraham pulled a book from the shelf. As the space opened, the birth of a gapped-toothed grin, Moishe manoeuvred the skewer between the books and drove it into the soft flesh between the man’s ribs. Incisive literature, the bookcase had a venomous stinger filled with revenge. Abe folded in half, clutched his chest, and then rolled to the floor. He lay on the ground in fetal position, and died. He made no sound, before or after.

  Moishe stood behind the bookcase for a few minutes, his hand still protruding from between the shelf of books.

  As if waiting to greet a bibliophile with a surprise handshake.

  Then, waking, he retracted the hand and we quickly left the room, Moishe creeping on the toe-ends of his shoes in a silent swan-dance. We would not disturb the fathers in their beds, nor Padre Luis’s wine-fuelled table-top shlof. We were soon through the door, down the rectory’s sloping hill and free again to creep like shadows along the walls of Seville’s sleeping streets.

  Moishe returning home after another night playing Michael the Archangel, converting the living to the dead. Protecting Jews from the fiery furnace.

  Chapter Sixteen

  We followed a
nother armful of bread through the back door and into the kitchen. We were hoping for a warm slice, some cheese, and a mug of hot drink. Instead, Doña Gracia was waiting for us when we returned.

  Hot, bitter, steaming.

  “I offer you my protection and instruct you to remain hidden but instead you creep through the night like a plague-ridden rat laying low I don’t know how many men? This risk that you took, though lit bright by daring and righteousness, endangers not only yourself, but me, this household, and our people. You enrage the Church, the Inquisition, and the powerful like a toreador stabbing banderillas into the shoulders of bulls. Brave, perhaps, but also foolhardy, boy.”

  She led us into a room that was a small library, not unlike the library of the night before where Moishe had indeed been a banderillero, pricking another churchman.

  “Doña …” Moishe began, but she raised her hand for silence.

  “In these times,” she said, “fear is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. A vicious circle, you might say. The Inquisition gives cause for citizens to fear even themselves.”

  Doña Gracia raised a brass platter and offered Moishe a dried date. He took one, rolled it around in his mouth, then extracted a damp half which he gave to me.

  “As my father would say, ‘It is often bitter before it is sweet,’ ” he said.

  “If we live to see the sweetness,” the Doña said. “Trust no one. You must do only as I say and heed my plan for the rescue of the Cathedral Jews and for your exodus over the sea. Torquemada has arrived in Seville this holy week of Easter with many other Inquisitors. They come for Good Friday and now also the auto-da-fé. He has arranged this with grim logic: on the first but not Good Friday, he believes Jews murdered Christ, so, on this day, a Christian will murder Jews.

  “Tomorrow, we hold a council in this house to devise a plan. Tomorrow, a Maundy Thursday that is also Passover. We will pray together that the Angel of Death will abide the blood on our doorposts and pass over both those condemned to die and those not yet condemned. That though he may not take their first-born, the escape shall be as a plague to them. But you—Moishe—shall be not our Moses, leading our people to this, if not promised, then this promising land. You will stay within the walls of my house.”

  She left us in the library.

  We ate the remaining dates.

  Then we looked at the shelves. Each book, like a living being, from hand-held sextodecimo sparrows to the ostrich torsos of folio slabs, the soft unarmoured flesh of the interior. The binding as skin. I think to myself, “Gotenyu, that could’ve been me.”

  But it’s a mammal-wrapping of leather, not the feathers of birds. In Latin, these books are incunabula—swadding clothes, a cradle. Every bound book a baby, dropped into the world, waiting to be understood.

  And there were maps.

  Moishe unrolled some of these ribbon-bound charts. Doña Gracia’s library had few practical aids to navigation; instead, it was mostly maps of beautiful nonsense—a cholent of legends, ancient books, explorers’ reports, and the desires and superstitions of kings, islands of real experience and archipelagos of the fanciful mixed together in a speculative and hopeful ocean.

  Skinned creatures with no body. A dream of what is or might be. Some small truth stretched thin, a tattooed shade. Hope and fear transformed horses into camelbacked leopards with the wings of a dove, their riders saddled below them, feet pointing toward the sky.

  “Aaron,” Moishe said. “Look.” He unrolled a large chart and surveyed the waters. “The world is filled with wonders.” He was still the Bar Mitzvah boy, longing for adventure. His finger sailed the waves of the ocean sea. Beyond the Canary Islands to the outrigger islands of Cathay and Cipangu: Anquana, Candyn, Tristis, Java Major, Neacuram and Moabar, the possessions of the Great Khan crowding the left side of the map. Regions wickered by eel-like creatures and Antipodean half-men grimacing from their chests.

  “Yet the world is as small as Columbus told us,” he said. “If only because it is crammed ongeshtupted with marvels. We should take the Jews from the Catedral to this Naye Velt, these new places.”

  “Oh it’d have to be a bahartsteh New World to have such people as people in it.”

  “Bahartst—brave—why?” I said.

  “Where has it gone well with people?”

  We returned to our room and gave sleep to our eyes, each of my six eyelids to slumber. We’d have a night’s worth of day and wake with the moon.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Moishe woke me. The kitchen was empty, except for moonlight. It became emptier after we filled ourselves with food. Oranges and the delicious relic of a gumbo of stewed meat, rice and beans.

  “I must tell Sarah about her uncle.”

  “You’re meshugeh. We can’t leave. Doña Gracia warned us that—”

  “How can I stay here like a shmendrick, shtum silent as a blintz.”

  “Azoy, if it’s filled with anything, your head is filled with soft cheese.”

  The street was deserted. Like our good sense, we disappeared into the night.

  This path of moon shadows was becoming familiar, if more dangerous. The Easter preparations had begun. The road had been cleared for the Good Friday processions. No dreck. No gold. No rotting food.

  Moishe crawled toward the cellar of the church. There was little sound. The susurration of the wind in the leaves of trees. A distant bird. The rabbi’s thin voice chanting. A subterranean muezzin calling us. We could see that he was wearing tefillin, the small boxes strapped to his forehead and arm. His shadowy figure rocked forward and back in the darkness.

  He stopped. “Who’s there?” He sounded both anxious and exhausted.

  “Rabbi, it is Moishe. We did not mean to interrupt your prayers.”

  “You are not alone?”

  “My parrot.”

  “Of course. I think he is a pinteleh—the dot of a vowel—perched on your shoulder. He helps you, no?”

  “Yes. We did not mean to disturb you.”

  “It is good. I should rest. I have been davening since … well, since before I was a Bar Mitzvah. And I’m tired … But it puts me together with my people. I am with them. And I am near to ha-Shem, the Almighty. He gives me strength for the day. Soon I will be yet nearer to him.

  “It’s almost Passover and I expect you wonder Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh? ‘Why is this night different from all others, and why do I wear the tefillin and repeat the morning prayers?’ ”

  “Yes, I …”

  “Well, my boy, we are like slaves in Egypt but I am not certain that the Angel of Death will pass over us this time, and so I pray as if with each prayer, it is the morning of a new day. As the Mishnah says …”

  I could tell that Rabbi Daniel had become half fardreyt—unmoored by waiting for the upcoming storm. How would I feel two days before my expected execution?

  “Rabbi, we have the books that were in the Catedral. Doña Gracia will help you and the others escape. There is a boat …”

  “Shh. Boychik. Even Moses couldn’t free our people without ha-Shem. I remember …”

  “But I have news to tell you. Abraham is dead.”

  “Abraham?

  “I killed him.”

  “My boy …”

  “He betrayed you. All of you. And Sarah. He—”

  “Only ha-Shem can take vengeance. The Lord came down when Samson sought revenge for the loss of his eyes … And though Abraham died with both eyes, the Mishnah says, ‘Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world.’ But it is not a matter of simple mathematics, one eye given for another taken. I recall that in Leviticus …”

  There was a voice from the front of the church.

  “Shh, Rabbi,” Moishe hissed. “They’re coming.”

  The rabbi retreated into the darkness of the cell and began again to murmur prayers.

/>   Moishe squeezed against the stone wall. We willed ourselves to be stone. I may have been the dot of a vowel, but I did my best to be both silent and invisible.

  Torchlight flickered along the path. We were hidden from its illumination by a buttress.

  “Anyone there?” the guard’s voice said.

  As if “anyone” would answer.

  I wanted to say, “I’m not just anyone,” but even a worthy line isn’t worth death. I’d prefer my famous last words to be occasioned by my imminent and inevitable demise, not the cause of it.

  I knew Moishe had expected a hero’s welcome, a verbal parade in celebration of his execution of Abraham and not the Mishnah-mad ravings of a farmishteh Rabbi.

  And an eight-pounder broadside of a kiss from Sarah.

  The guard retreated with his light. We’d have to be even more careful. And quick.

  Moishe slithered along the church-side in pursuit of a gun port behind which was the flash of Sarah.

  She was curled in the straw of the corner. A seahorse, a foal.

  “Sarah,” Moishe whispered. “The guards are close. I must speak low if I speak.”

  She came to the space between stones. “You must go. It is too dangerous.”

  “Yes. But first …” He began to tell her about Abraham, but then stopped. Abraham, though he had betrayed her, had been her uncle.

  This was not a time for more grief. Grief over betrayal. Over family. Over death.

  “I will help you. I have a plan. I have arranged—Doña Gracia has arranged—your escape from Spain. Soon you will be sailing toward Africa.”

  “Disgraced. An orphan,” Sarah said. “Alone.”

  “But I will help you,” Moishe said. “I will protect you. I am also an orphan. We are bashert. Destined. Let us … let us be farknast. Betrothed.”

  She reached her hand toward Moishe. Their fingertips touched. A pretty rondeau composed suddenly in the crenelated castle of Moishe’s excited brain.

  But it was interrupted. Torchlight and the return of the guard’s voice. Footsteps.