Yiddish for Pirates (14 page)

So, emes, it was Moishe who had such certainty. I did not wish to leave our hiding place, to risk our lives, to think only of revenge, but sometimes, thoughts grow legs and carry you forward and you find yourself sneaking through the streets on the shoulder of an impulse, intent on the hunt. All you can do is hold on, try not to end up on the cobbles.

Abraham.

What would we do when we found him? Does a dog wonder what it will do when chasing the car?

“Sarah. She’ll know where he is,” Moishe said.

We slid along the skirts of the church.

“Sarah,” Moishe whispered into the opening. “Are you there?”

Silence.

Perhaps she had a lunch engagement with the Emperor of Cipangu, or a hair appointment.

My own feathers prickling my own skin.

Fear.

What did they do to her?

Then her voice. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

“I have to ask you something.”

“You can’t be here. I am shamed.”

“Not for me. I want to help.”

Her face, a pale, smudged moon, appeared between the stones, “You must leave.”

“I’m looking for your uncle. This is because of him.”

“If not him, then another. Soon it will end for us. You, still, can run.”

Moishe spoke quietly into the stones. “Kiss me.”

Moishe. Sensitive as a barrel of pickles.

Sarah ignored him. “At the residence of the Archbishop, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. I heard them say that he would be there.”

“Kiss me,” Moishe said again. “For courage.”

“Not for courage,” she said and stretched toward him.

Moishe tried to burrow with great enthusiasm into the side of the church, but, like traitorous crossguards on the hilt of a sword, his shoulders prevented him from plunging fully in. Only his head disappeared into the hole.

A parrot can only know what a parrot can know. In this case, a chicken-slender tuches communicating moonward with avid calligraphic perturbation. I could not read these nether words. Perhaps contact was made, for though the stones were thick, the necks of Moishe and Sarah, in proportion to their bodies, were not.

When it emerged, Moishe’s face, like Sarah’s, was pale and radiant.

Inside him, though this, too, cannot be known from without, adolescent blood, sperm and desire all turned bright silver and quick.

We flew into the night.

Chapter Fifteen

So, nu, if you hadn’t seen the great Cathedral of Seville you might mistake the residence of the archbishop for the actual house of God.

If God had a proclivity for bull’s-blood red and archways.

The Palacio Arzobispal. The residence of the Archbishop Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. It’s a very large building, nu?

And in such a home, Moishe and I had to find a single treacherous Jew. A nebbish in a haystack.

We had been told that, hidden from view like a Kabbalist’s God, there was an almost-forgotten door at the back of the building and far from the main gate. A small star in the tuches of the night sky. A secret entrance to the rectory.

Behind the Palacio, a rumplike hill. Moishe and I crawled up the slope. In such situations, my legs were as good as his. I’m not always a clavicle rider. We scanned for an opening and found a door tall as a dog, wide as the stern of a cow. If the stern of a cow were threshold-wide, and Rover were door tall. Moishe, creeping serpentine on his belly to avoid surveillance, reached for the handle. A door in another part of the wall opened. A grave’s worth of light was thrown on the grass. A man stepped into this bright tomb. A priest carrying a lantern. We lay flat and silent as roadkill on a high street. Sometimes, there’s nothing as good as two dimensions.

The priest turned and our backs were striped with lantern light. A beam-o’-nine-tails.

“The light of God is upon you,” he said, looking in our direction.

We remained still as the bones of the dead. Maybe he didn’t mean us.

Maybe he was rehearsing a sermon.

Maybe he meant those Jewish pixie dybbuks dancing an estampie near us on the lawn.

“I see you,” he said. “Do not move.”

Definitely the dybbuks.
We
were not moving.

It would not be long before we wouldn’t be able to move even if we had wanted to.

Because of fear.

Because of death.

The one not necessarily the result of the other.

He walked toward us. “Speak with me and I shall not speak of you.”

Moishe stood. “Peace be with you, Father,” he said. “We are lost. We are hungry. We look for help.” Soon he would be telling the priest of the seven little Moishelets, his rope-thin younger brothers who were even more lost and hungry than us.

“Come inside. I will give you food,” the priest said. “And you shall tell me your story.”

He set his lantern on a large table and we sat around in its fringes.

“When they are angry and seek ‘Padre Luis Dos Almos,’ I am the one that hides. What name do you hide from?”

“Miguel,” Moishe said. “Miguel Levante.” He would hope to pass for this name.

The priest set out bread and wine. The official nosh of the Church.

And some pieces of cheese.

“I have not seen a parrot before, save in a painting,” he said. “Who’s a pretty boy?” He thrust some bread at me.

Pretty boy? Feh! I should have taken his eyes for grapes, his tongue for a red scarf. But then blindly, and without saying a word, he would have cooked me and I would be soup.

“What is your name, pretty boy?”

“Goy,” I spat, naming both him and myself. I had been too long speaking only the mamaloshen to Moishe, and I was angry.

I knew my name could not be “Aaron.” We were not wearing those feathers. Moishe became Miguel, I’d intended to baptise myself Christian, but not in Yiddish. A Yiddish baptism is hardly a baptism at all.

“Goy?” Padre Luis asked.

Moishe smiled at me slyly. What meshugas, what mischief, was he up to?

“Yes,” he said. “He speaks but little and with limited sense. His name is Goya—in full, ‘Christian Goya’—for when he was the bird of the Goya Family in Zaragoza, if they were not ever vigilant, he would dine upon Eucharist wafers stolen from the chapel. Indeed, it is because of this excess of devotion that he resides no longer with that noble family.”

I smiled sheepishly.

If a parrot could be said to be sheepish.

Or to smile.

A person regarding the scene would not have known that though the bread and wine were only what they were, there had been a transubstantiation of two of the three at the table.

We had named ourselves Miguel Levante and Christian Goya.

For the padre, our Christian names were Lost and Hungry.

As we ate, I reflected that I must not again permit such an outburst of temper, or no matter the names we were known by, we would not be able to hide, would soon find ourselves tempered by fire.

What tale should Moishe relate of our history—for the priest would want details, names beyond Lost and Hungry?

At fourteen he had left the dreary shmatte-cart road-ruts of an insignificant shtetl armed only with a questionable book and a taste for the brine-tart air of the horizons beyond the horizon, only to be whipped as a cabin boy, and find driftwood escape from trade as a slave after shipwreck, then kill a priest, entomb a sexton, liberate what was bound—four sacks of heresy—and now had designs on the traitorous life of a Marrano spy working for the Archbishop and the Holy Inquisition itself, may devils make a coracle of his kishkas, his slime-white spine for a mast.

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.