Yiddish for Pirates Page 8

  Jewish freedom was all collar and no dog. And the dog that wasn’t there was free to roam the streets of Fez, Marrakech and Rabat.

  It was only a matter of time, she said, before all Iberian Jews and the sincere or expedient New Christians would be as the Jews of Egypt in ancient times: slaves, servants, and builders of monuments to their masters. The Jews of Andalusia had been expelled, ballast thrown kippah-first off the kingdom’s bow, but even this treacherous fate wasn’t available to conversos. The Inquisition would poke and prod for signs of the vermin-taint of continued Judaizing, take their money and property, but not let them leave, save through Death’s door.

  Doña Gracia wouldn’t wait for the waters to part to help them escape these plagues. She had a fleet.

  Moishe and the condemned Jews would travel to Morocco—to Fez—where the houses were finely built and curiously painted, tiled and roofed with gold, azure, and other excellent colours, some with crystal fountains and surrounded with roses and other odoriferous flowers and herbs. And where they could be safe.

  When she had helped the last of the hidden Jews to escape, she would set sail herself for Morocco, an elf at the end of a difficult Age.

  Her plan: We knew that most prisoners were held in a dungeon that had been created below a certain church. She would have someone ply the guard with drink. It was a typical escape story. Moishe would help me get through the bars. I’d get the key from the guard and carry it in my beak. The taste of freedom in a jailbird’s mouth.

  I suggested we bring the red capes so that the prisoners, as the saying goes, could be disguised in plain sight. In those times of heightened security, Doña Gracia thought it would be a good idea.

  I looked at Moishe with I-told-you-so eyes.

  “But it will be impossible to get the capes from the Catedral,” Doña Gracia said. “Do you expect that we can just walk out with them?”

  Now it was Moishe’s turn for the I-told-you-so eyes.

  But then: “I know of a way,” he said. “My father told me this story. Each evening, a servant was seen walking home from the court, carrying a silver plate covered by a cloth. ‘Leftovers,’ he said. The guards at the portcullis began to get suspicious. ‘He’s stealing from the king,’ one said to the other. ‘Let’s search him.’ And so they did. They lifted the cloth from the plate, but there was nothing but a few scraps of ill-used food. Each day for a month the man walked home with a plate and each day the guards found only scraps. At the end of the month, the man did not return to work. The news quickly spread throughout the palace that thirty silver plates were missing from the royal kitchen and the shyster was nowhere to be seen.

  “So, my plan: sneak into the Catedral and walk out wearing two red capes. Return wearing only one. Repeat until we have all the capes we need. It’s perfect. Who would think twice about a priest walking in a church?”

  “Another priest. Maybe you could put on all the capes at once and pretend to be a fat shnorrer of a priest,” I said.

  Doña Gracia laughed. “And then if you were stabbed, like Queen Isabella’s overdressed ladies-in-waiting, no knife could reach you,” she said.

  “So, my idea needs work,” Moishe said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Midnight. The streets of Seville empty as the wind from either end of a shlemiel. The sky moonless but for a luminous blade disappearing behind cloud. We exit through a small sally port in the west wall of Doña Gracia’s and into an alleyway. Moishe is Red Riding Hood, carrying a basket of food. Not for his Bubbie but for fairy-tale Christians, the secret Jews held prisoner by red-hooded wolves.

  What drink goes best with dungeon food?

  The Merlot of Human Kindness?

  Molotov cocktails.

  We’ll get to that.

  Some of the larger homes had night watchmen but more often than not, their beat was the jurisdiction of Nod. Still we crept quietly and kept close to walls.

  “Sarah. This sheyneh maideleh, this beautiful girl,” Moishe whispered. He could name her, but didn’t know what came next.

  There were guards before the gates of the church, but a behindback such as ours necessitated an unorthodox approach.

  Moishe slithered on his kishkas toward the barred windows at the back of the building. He pushed his face close, his shnozz between the bars, but he could see nothing, only smell the rat-ripe dankness of the dungeon.

  The prisoners were in darkness. We dared not call them for fear of the shtarkeh guards. I slipped between the bars. It was the deep black of the jungle at night. I navigated by the give of air at doorways, the thicker air as I approached a wall. I went through a doorway and along a hallway lined with cells.

  “So, nu,” I said. “Come here often?”

  I heard breathing. They hesitated, disoriented in the dark.

  “We have food for you. And wine,” I said. “From Doña Gracia.”

  “Strange that you didn’t knock, but yet do not intrude.” It was the rabbi.

  “Gracias,” someone else said.

  Moishe was at the window. They were in cells. How to get the food to their mouths? I’d be the mother bird, feeding her chicks. “Es, es, mayne feygelech.” Eat, eat, my little birds.

  Moishe reached inside the window and dropped the food to the floor. I carried each piece of bread, each portion of cheese from window to cell.

  “Aharon. Aharon.” A small voice called my name. A girl’s voice. “Tell him there’s a gap in the stone of my cell. I must speak.”

  Moishe, a church mouse against the wall, crawled until he found a face-sized hole. “I’m here,” he whispered. “Moishe.”

  A few minutes of breathing only.

  Then: “My father’s books. Will you save them?” Sarah said. “In his memory. For mine.”

  Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, had ordered the burning of Jewish and other heretical books.

  “Libricide, lexicution, biblioclasm. To save our Catholic Spain,” he’d said, “we must first destroy heresy.”

  “All Jewish books were condemned,” Sarah said. “So the community brought their books to my father.”

  “As I’d taken one from mine,” Moishe said.

  “They knew he would keep them safe. They knew he would preserve their history and their future.”

  Sarah’s father’s hidden library. As he’d been a hidden Jew.

  For years her family had lived in secret. They went to church. Received the wafer and the wine. Baptized their children.

  But still, the hands over the eyes and the blessings over candles in the cupboards. The whispered words when walking through doorways.

  And a library of Christian theology. Inside some books, in the compartment cut into the pages, smaller Jewish books.

  As their Judaism was hidden inside each member of the family.

  Like a devil or an angel child. Depending on which midwife you asked.

  Each boy learned his true identity upon Bar Mitzvah. Each girl, usually when she married. But Sarah was an only child and her father taught her as if she was a son.

  There was a priest. Padre Juan Lepe. A good man. A friend. He had known and had helped.

  “He told me a story,” Sarah began. “A man told a rabbi he would convert if the rabbi could explain Judaism to him. There was a catch, though. The man would stand on one leg. The rabbi had to explain everything before the man fell over. The rabbi sent him away, chastising him for insulting God with trivial gymnastics. Later, the man came upon the great sage Hillel and presented him the same challenge. Explain all of Judaism while I stand on one leg.

  “ ‘Left or right?’ Hillel asked.

  “ ‘Either. Does it matter?’

  “ ‘Tell you what, you jump in the air and while you’re there, closer to God, I’ll explain everything,’ the sage said. ‘Ready? Jump!’

  “And what did Hillel say while the man left the ground?

  “He said, ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbour.’

  “ ‘That’s it?’ the m
an said as he returned to earth.

  “ ‘That’s the whole Torah,’ Hillel said. ‘The rest is commentary.’

  “And that, the priest said, is why I help your father. When someone is looking for their footing here on earth, we Christians, Jews and Muslims, have the same things to say. When I jump, I don’t ask religion to tell me how high. I think of this story.

  “As the poet said, ‘Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn people also.’ That priest,” Sarah whispered, “died the same day as my father. I will soon join them. My mother also—aleha ha-shalom—whom we lost in childbirth. The priest and my father had planned to take the books to safety outside of Spain.”

  “But they were discovered,” Moishe said.

  “Betrayed,” she said. “And now I know: my uncle.”

  “I’ll get the books,” Moishe said. “Where?”

  “The Catedral. It’s where all the forbidden books are taken. Padre Juan told me before he was captured. He’d found a coffin there—they’d already taken my father—the padre was going to fill it with books and have it carried to safety. It is too late for my father. You cannot rescue the rest of us. Save at least these books.”

  There was noise at the other end of the hallway. A key rattling in the barred door. A man’s farkakteh singing. I was back at the window, ready to fling more food into the cells. In the Torah, the manna just fell. Here, I had to shlepp it, loaf by loaf. And after thirty trips, I’d rather carry even a schmaltzy tune myself than some cheese.

  The door scraped open and a priest fell in, wine-shikkered and staggering like each leg didn’t know the other was there. He was dressed in hauberk and helmet. Why a priest needed chainmail wasn’t clear. His lamp swayed like he was on the deck of a storm-wracked ship.

  Those in the cells became silent. Hid their unfinished crusts in their clothes. Moishe lay flat against the ground, not daring to look between the stones.

  “There’s a pretty little bird here,” the priest drawled. “And I shall have some dark meat.”

  At first, I thought he was here to fress on my bones, to have parrot pot pie for a late night nosh, but then I understood.

  It was Sarah he was after.

  “Little bird,” he said. “Little bird.” He shone his lurching light at the doors of the cells, looking for Sarah.

  I considered our options. Moishe was outside. Perhaps he could sneak through the church doors, slip past the grobyan guards and klop the priest from behind.

  “L’chaim, Father.”

  Blam!

  Maybe with a chair or a silver church tchatchke. A candlestick.

  A boy of fourteen. Two guards and a shikkered helmeted priest intent on knish.

  Ach. Dreams.

  It would have to be me. The mighty sparrow.

  I didn’t risk flying. He might hear. I crept like a rat toward him.

  “Little bird,” the priest said.

  “Stay away from her,” a man shouted from his cell.

  “The caged bird sings,” the priest said. “But can do nothing.”

  I’d lost sight of Moishe. He might have remained prone and invisible on the ground. Perhaps he was entering into strategic negotiations with the guards’ fists.

  “Little bird,” the priest said. The lamplight crept over Sarah.

  The priest put his key in the lock.

  This was my chance. I leapt with my claws before me. I would turn his eyes to raspberries.

  Sarah shrieked. The priest heaved open the cell door and I crashed into it and fell to the floor.

  When I came to, I heard weeping and the prayers of those around me. I did not know what they were praying for.

  For Sarah. For themselves. For the Messiah. For another world.

  For the priest, may his beytsim be rat-chewed until the Messiah comes. Then may the Messiah continue with His teeth of broken wedding glass.

  May his soul gnaw on itself through each of eternity’s endless nights as it thinks about what he has been and what he has done.

  Sarah was on the floor of her cell. Sobbing.

  I had been as powerful as a raspberry in her protection. I was bupkis as a hero, the protector of but a small patch of floor.

  There was a draft from the end of the room: the priest had left the main door open and so I flew through the darkness, up the stairs, and into the church.

  I had few ambitions: Find Moishe. Burn everything. Escape.

  I entered the transept, the church’s stubby wing. A barely visible light glowed at the altar. A candle. Someone kneeling before a cross, praying. His clothing shone with dappled light, the sun on shallow water. The priest in his chainmail.

  I landed in the open hand of a marble saint and waited, considering what to do. One thing occurred to me immediately: Here, Saint Chutzpenik. Let me fill your palm with grey-white dreck, an extruded offering in payment for your sacred chutzpah. Why did you not help us, you stone bystander?

  Before the altar, the priest shifted in his genuflections and began mumbling a new prayer.

  A sound in the other transept. The brief shine of metal from behind another unmoving saint’s back.

  Moishe lowering the blade of a halberd slowly in the darkness, readying its sharp end.

  He crept forward and hid behind a pillar, ten feet from the priest and his pin-cushion back.

  So, an ethical question:

  Boy. Back. Sharp stick.

  A priest on his knees, praying.

  Is it kosher to skewer one who is davening, maybe even repenting?

  What should I do?

  The priest was about to be caught on the horns of a dilemma.

  And so I recalled that we are all birds, festooned with feathers, lifted equally by the breath of God. From the wren to the swan, we are a single flock. Whether we congregate and are called a brood, a brace, a murder, or a clutch. All of us, whether we gather into a wisp of snipes, a wisdom of owls, a wing of plovers, or remain like a single regretful priest on his knees before his God, we are one and it is not for us to decide another’s fate. Unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

  Did I think this?

  Of course.

  Me, Yeshua, and Gandhi.

  Really, I thought only, Give him a shtup he will not forget, my Maccabee. Stab your murderous blade into the hymen of his immortal soul until Sarah is revenged with robe-red blood.

  And then Moishe charged. The priest, hearing footfalls on the stone floor, raised his bowed head and turned half around. A moment of intimacy: Moishe’s eyes and the priest’s connecting.

  Moishe found a gap in his chainmail and penetrated the priest’s side.

  Pork on a spit. His God would provide fire.

  Moishe recoiled from the weapon as if it were already hot with flame. Moishe and the priest: the same horror-torqued face.

  The priest was pinned to the cross.

  Then Moishe turned and ran.

  What had happened?

  I can explain it while standing on one leg: Do unto others as they have done unto you.

  So, nu, that’s not exactly it. An eye for an eye lacks foresight, but what about an eye for twenty eyes? For a hundred, a thousand, for as many had suffered?

  Sha. That is visionary.

  And what did we care that the priest had been praying?

  The Inquisition had given Moishe his first letter of marque. His first murderous thrust at death.

  I flew off to find his shoulder as blood pooled around the knees of the priest. There were no guards at the door. The priest must have excused these protectors of the church and possible witnesses.

  It was already tomorrow. Nothing like hastening someone’s entry into the hereafter to make time pass quickly. Moishe and I stole through the streets, the pinks and reds of dawn seeping like a wound. The colours of regret, and of moving on.

  Were we regretful?

  Does the braincleaving broadsword of a Visigoth wish it were the doily-delicate scalpel of a soft-handed surgeon rending the spine
of a man into two symmetrical servings of dog meat? We were silent conquistadors returning from an El Dorado of revenge and glory. We would eat and boast, then find our beds until night when we would plunder the books from the Catedral.

  “Sarah,” Moishe said softly.

  What could I say?

  Nothing. I said nothing.

  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.