Yiddish for Pirates (16 page)

So, after this breakfast of a bisl bread, Moishe and I, still exhilarated by our escape, became explorers, charting the unknown. At least, what was unknown to us. That’s usually enough unknown for one day. Passageways, rooms, cellars, courtyards. The peninsulas, islands, caverns, and inland seas of Doña Gracia’s world. We were left to ourselves to discover what we might.

I rode the thin wave of Moishe’s shoulder up stairs and along hallways. We looked into the doors left ajar. Those in their beds, those sitting at chairs and before small tables. Listless, playing cards with the compulsion of a song that won’t go away. Some were startled, nervous, our gaze the sudden pain of a dart, the surprise annoyance of an insect bite. Some looked with a quick smile or a vacant daze. The Doña’s home was a hostel for the hurt and the hidden. And their children, charming, snot-nosed, crying, spring-like or rubbery, driftwood in the wash of parents and history.

Two men sat in a courtyard filled with ferns. I recognized one as Alonso, the man who worked in the kitchen.

“Miguel,” he called to me. “Who’s a pretty girl?”

“Aaron,” Moishe said. “His name is Aaron.”

“My father’s name …” he said. “This old jowly rooster”—Alonso motioned—“my friend Isaac.” He was stooped and chicken-thin with an abundant growth of dark moustache on his sallow face. It seemed as if this swart lip-bound earwig had sapped vital strength from the man.

The friend, almost imperceptibly, nodded in greeting.

“He has arrived at the Doña’s for the seder. We eat, we tell the Passover story, we plan a Spanish exodus.”

The friend again moved a few molecules in assent.

“So you will be joining us?” Alonso asked.

“Unless there’s another secret meeting with good food I should know about?” Moishe said.

“My wife and I cook the food,” Alonso said with pride. “It will be delicious. And secret. As the Torah says, ‘Thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand.’ ”

“I don’t know about the staff, but I consider shoes and, especially, girded loins to be essential for any meal,” Moishe said. “Think of the crumbs.”

“Years ago, I learned from my parents. I was born a Jew,” Alonso said. “When they expelled us from Seville, I did not move. It was only my Jewish name that left me. They say that God Himself drew back to make room for life. This was how it was with us, too. We had no choice. My family: children, parents, wife. I shed my skin, but even with new colours I remained a snake to them. There were riots. We are in Job’s land, tested by God. Alav ha’shalom. Only my wife and I remain.”

He paused and then: “So, tonight, we are Jews. What more could they take from us? ‘I am that I am.’ And soon we will leave Spain to where we will be safe.”

“And where we can always have meals together—at Passover, Shabbos, whenever we are hungry,” Moishe said.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” Alonso said. “Or at least, Africa.”

We continued our exploration. To an attic. Locked storerooms. Down some steps, a passageway into a cellar. It would soon be evening, but here, like Thule in the distant north, it was always dark.

Moishe lit a candle.

A room filled with spider webs, broken furniture, worn carpets, barrels, clay jugs. Spider webs. Some old swords.

A door at the back that Moishe had difficulty opening. As he struggled, we heard the bells of Maundy Thursday begin to sound.

Tonight it was both Passover and Maundy Thursday’s Last Supper. It was either the devil never shites but he shites in buckets—or a good sign.

They would be holding mass in the churches, washing feet, and singing “Gloria.” We went to find the dining table to begin our own last supper, our secret seder.

We’d leave the door for another time.

So.

It was a few days after Passover, and Moses and Jesus were walking together, kibitzing about this and that, remembering their glory days in Biblical times.

They came to a sea.

“Hey, Yeshua, watch this,” Moses said. He raised his walking stick and parted the sea. “I still got it,” he said. “Just like parting my hair. If I still had hair.”

“Ok, then, Moe,” Jesus said. “I can top that.” And he strode out over the surface of the water, defying gravity and the physics of surface tension. Then suddenly, he began to sink. He swam to shore, spluttering.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “It used to be so easy.”

“That was before you had holes in your feet,” Moses replied.

We’d never seen such a meal. A Constantinople of food. A thousand succulent succubi threatening to make merry with our insides. A Red Sea of sauce. And soon, we’d arrive at the promised lamb.

In the centre of the table, long as a whale, bright flames surmounted two pairs of silver candlesticks that would be the prize of any pirate’s booty.

The chairs were arranged for us, pillows in place, so that we could lie back as was the custom. We were once slaves, now we can recline. At each place, there was set a splendid Haggadah, the prayer book outlining the service.

Even if I had been offered a chair and a pillow, takeh, would I have been able to lean back in comfort? The seder, the Haggadah, the practice of being a Jew. These things were forbidden. In Egypt, the Jews were slaves, but they were allowed to be Jews.

Around the table, Alonso and his wife. Alonso’s friend, jowly Isaac. An older man with a clipped white beard, introduced as Joshua. Two men in red cloaks both named Samuel. Let’s say First Samuel and Second Samuel. One dark man known as Jacob. Near him, a portly woman—though she more resembled ship than port—named Rebecca. A Leah. A Moses. A Daniel. More names than I could remember. All told, we were likely a Jesus-and-apostles’ worth of guests gathered for supper and scheming.

Presiding at the end of the table, Doña Gracia.

She introduced Moishe. The Ashkenazi and his feathered shadow.

We began the seder. First we’d all be Moses and help the Jews scramble over the Red Sea, then onto Doña Gracia’s boats. Boils and frogs and locusts would give us inspiration.

We recited prayers. We drank wine. We ate bitter herbs, eggs and salt water. The mortar of apples and nut, spread between two matzoh.

We arrived at the Four Questions—the questions about the seder traditionally asked, at least in the East, by the youngest child present.
Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh
. Why is this night different than all other nights?

“My bird,” Moishe said. “My bird will ask the questions.”

“And then he can find the cracker. The afikomen,” someone laughed.

So now I was a party trick, supposed to fly like an airborne mizinik—the family’s little tousle-headed tyke—to discover the hidden matzoh?

“Jews may appear as Christians. Muhammadans as Moriscos. There may be more in heaven and feathers than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” Doña Gracia said. “Ofttimes in the cage, an unexpected sage. This bird may prove useful to us.”

“True,” said old Joshua. “As it says in Job, ‘the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.’ So, old greybird, let’s begin with some questions.”

I managed to recite the first few lines before becoming fartshadet—confused. I knew much of Jewish things, but I had not been born to it. The others joined in and we asked the questions in chorus as was the Sephardi custom.

Joshua continued, leading the seder. We retold the Exodus story as he directed us, each taking turns with the telling. Even the fartshadeteh feygeleh, the befuddled bird, yours truly. As each of the ten plagues was mentioned, each person dipped a finger into his wine glass, and spilled individual drops like blood from the stone-cut palms of slaves. I dipped my beak, cut only by seeds and human words.

But we only got to the seventh plague—barad, hail—when some burly shtarkers burst through the door. Behind these oxen-browed air-suckers were two weasely-faced farshtunkeneh priests, plague-red
droppings from the pestilent shvants of the church. There’s a way that actions can wear heavy boots even if the actors do not.

In flagrante delicto
. We were caught with our hand in the seder jar, our fingers in the sweet wine.

Moishe, having been on red alert for such capes dived below the horizon of the table. I remained a bird and flew to the crow’s nest of a sconce, waiting to see what might transpire, how I might help or hinder.

Each burlyman grabbed someone. It was a country dance of thugs, the priests calling the tune. An arm wrapped around the throat of the old man, Joshua.

“Take my breath, I keep my belief,” he said as he was pulled down.

The fabric of Rebecca’s soft shoulders served as reins as she was driven into the wall then kicked. Alonso was clutched by the elbow but he knocked away the grober’s gorilla hand and ran to protect his wife. Immediately he was surrounded and a fist struck him a mighty boch. He sank like a stone to the floor. His wife screamed.

“May you live to see your children die.”

She lifted the long silver carving knife from the table and plunged it into the thick side of a shtarker. A short-lived revenge for they pulled her arms behind her and bound them tight. The wounded man staggered then collapsed onto a chair, clutching his pierced side. Both Alonso and his wife were weeping.

“This travesty of Easter, this Last Supper, shall indeed be your last,” a priest shrieked above the tumult to no one and everyone. “I charge you in the name of the Holy Office with heresy and Judaizing. With harbouring enemies of the King and Queen, the Church, and of the Holy Father. With murder.”

Doña Gracia was standing at the end of the table. Motionless, a proud statue radiating power and strength, she had both gravitas and gravitational pull. Space-time turned around her. She had not been touched by the Inquisition.

“Friend, do what you have come to do,” she said, looking at the priest.

It was only a moment before it registered on the priest’s face. The Gospel of Matthew. The words of Jesus to Judas.

Then they came and laid hands on her and seized her and it seemed that time began to move twice as quickly. Some ran for hallways and doors, took up chairs, knives, their own swords. An Inquisition enforcer rushed toward the woman named Leah and she thrust a Haggadah with a great zets at his head. He bent over and she ran, but she was seized by another and bound also. Daniel slashed with a dagger but was quickly overpowered. Moishe had escaped notice below the deck of the table. His dark eyes glinted from the shadows like a rat’s and caught my gaze. It was time for him to make his move. I swept across the room, shrieking the excoriating cry of the harpy. Swords slashed behind my tail as they attempted to cut me from the air. I embedded my claws into a soft face and heard the raw howl.

Moishe, still a rodent, scrabbled on his knees and dove down the stairs in the direction of the cellar.

The room was a torrent of slashing sword and I feared I would soon be diced for lobscouse. In Egypt, it was Moses who burned his tongue on a coal, but here it was Aaron who would eat fire.

What is more powerful than guns or swords?

Darkness.

And in the right circumstances, it can be rendered with a bisl gob of bird spit. I swept from candle to candle, extinguishing flame. And then in that sudden night, I followed the rat I was loyal to, and went underground.

We stumbled to the cellar, Moishe feeling a path past rolled carpets, barrels and chairs. He crouched in the corner.

“I should have helped,” he said. “I should have fought to save the others.”

We heard a sound from outside the room, footsteps from somewhere down the passage.

They say that if a baby falls beneath an ox or an elephant, a fearful mother can find strength beyond the weight of matter or of death. And if there’s a bottle of rum beneath a boulder, a shikker drunk can find his strength, too. Moishe fingered his way along the back wall of the room and found the immoveable door. He moved what had likely not
been moved for lifetimes. It shifted but a rib cage’s breadth, and he slid himself through the opening.

It was difficult to close the door again, but Moishe managed, hauling on the handle like a sailor hoisting anchor, the door having been reminded of its own possibility.

Chapter Nineteen

“Is this my fault?” Moishe said.

“Moishe, like they say:
Noch der chupeh iz shpet di charoteh
. After the wedding it’s too late for regrets. Like any story, we must now figure what happens next.”

Voices in the hall?

Only our own nervous breathing in the dark and dusty room.

Then something close clashed against metal.

A few sparks. Moishe had a small tinderbox open and was striking flint with the firesteel. On one knee, the black charcloth was spread beneath a few splinters of tinder wood. On the other, the squat nub of a candle.

With each spark, a small dim circle. Shelves of some kind, barely visible.

Finally, Moishe was able to light the cloth, transfer the fire to the tinder and then to the candle. A small thought passed about in dim whispers.

The flame was a living thing, trembling like an old rabbi.

And by its light, we could see that we were inside that rabbi’s brain.

Shadows. Cobwebs. Dust.

Stacks of books and old scrolls cluttered ongevorfn everywhere. Prayerbooks, parchment, vellum. Inside a rabbi’s brain after it’d been banged about by the Inquisition.

Moishe lifted a few prayerbooks from their pile. They were old and worn and their pages were ripped, stained, or fused together.

This was a hospice or tomb for the broken, the fading, the dead and the dying. I hadn’t seen a binnacle list of such sieve-bodied and fissured-wounded since I watched what the Turks’ cannons did during the battle for Constantinople years before.

“It’s a genizah,” Moishe said. “You’re not allowed to destroy anything containing the name of God.” He held up a page of faded writing, riddled with holes in the shape of lakes, birds, clouds and birthmarks. They store the books until they can be properly buried. But this place looks like it was forgotten. Some of these scrolls could have been made of the skins of Esau’s flock.”