Yiddish for Pirates(28)

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.