Yiddish for Pirates(24)

“ ‘That’s it?’ the man 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.