Yiddish for Pirates (15 page)

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 another 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.

Moishe withdrew his hand. Turned. Ran into the shadows of dark trees. I flew above him, into the shadows of branches. The guards’ voices calling. Moishe clambering over a short fence and into some kind of shit dreck.

“
Ech! Der oylem is a goylem
. The world is stupid,” he muttered.

“Like Noah said to Mrs. Noah as the rain began, ‘this is no time to worry about your shoes,’ ” I said. “Now,
drey zich
. Keep moving!”

We went at full speed down the street, turning again into an alley.

We waited. In darkness, Moishe’s quick breath. Beside it, the smaller gusts of a parrot’s breath, my plum-sized lungs.

He inhaled. Held his breath. Listened.

Voices and footfalls. Becoming distant.

Breathing again. Running again.

Across a wide street, along an alley of tanners’ shops. We waded through the pungent tang in the dimness, Moishe careful to keep his footfall light, to look behind him. Down wide steps, a left turn, the roof of our goal. We’d soon be safe in our bed, ready to dream of the Promised Land and our Sarahs.

Then, from the shadows, a shtarker, a tough, wearing a dark robe, long sword still sheathed in its scabbard. He stepped into the middle of the alley and looked at us.

What else was there to look at, the scenery?

He drew the sword.

Death?
Azoy gich?
So soon?

Hardly time to think of famous last words, but if they have to be mine, I wish they could be: “I hope my friend’s very large arquebus
doesn’t wake the city with the sound of your flesh spattering in a sorrowful pink rain.”

When you die, you can say what you want, but for now I said, “Run.”

Chapter Eighteen

Thursday. We were safe and our bed was warm. One of us may have been dreaming of a world of endless Sarahs, or of the land of but a single one. I, however, was flying through the shadow-clotted jungle to a clearing where high water spilled into lucent ponds. Monkeys nattered in the distance like idiot Shakespeares and the scent of ripe fruit came to me like song.

We ate breakfast late. The house was quiet.

Moishe had been faster than the murderous intentions of the thug
—a fayer zol im trefn
—a fire should meet him and make him crispy. The quick turn, the nimble reverse, the jumped-over fence, the dash through the oysgeshpilt outhouse. Better you’re a flea than a lion when you’re running from the gun.

Or that you’re quick when you’re a boy and he’s got a sword.

And so we ate. The last leavened bread before Passover. After this, forty years of matzoh in eight days. The hardtack of exodus. Not only a covenant, but binding.

For soon we’d be bound for Eretz Africa with a boatful of Jews, books, and … Sarah.

Behind us, a shoreline cluttered with the fists of Inquisitors raised in a holy and impotent anger.

Unless we were all dead.

Would that be
—ek velt
—the end of the world?

We’d only know when we got there; I hear they don’t take reservations.