Yiddish for Pirates(25)

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 Do?a 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.

Sha. And you thought he was just happy to see me?

I spoke a few more meshugeneh sermons from various rafters around the church, found the entrance to the room of books behind the retablo of the altar, and disappeared. The two sextons, gibbering their own narishkayt nonsense to the saints, had become self-sufficient: they now generated their own fear.

Once inside the room, I heard my name rising from the shaft in the floor.

Was it the devil himself, maybe? Takeh, his hacksaw voice of blood and sex and velvet had beckoned me to the basement many times before.

Nu, who else? It was Moishe.

Sometimes one is struck by a great idea. I pulled the silk cords like worms from the waists of a few red robes and knotted them together. I tied one end to a table and dropped the other down the shaft. The cord klopped Moishe on his Yiddisher kop. Moishe rubbed his head, then began to climb.