Yiddish for Pirates(30)
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.
It happened in a single moment.
Abraham pulled a book from the shelf. As the space opened, the birth of a gapped-toothed grin, Moishe manoeuvred the skewer between the books and drove it into the soft flesh between the man’s ribs. Incisive literature, the bookcase had a venomous stinger filled with revenge. Abe folded in half, clutched his chest, and then rolled to the floor. He lay on the ground in fetal position, and died. He made no sound, before or after.
Moishe stood behind the bookcase for a few minutes, his hand still protruding from between the shelf of books.
As if waiting to greet a bibliophile with a surprise handshake.
Then, waking, he retracted the hand and we quickly left the room, Moishe creeping on the toe-ends of his shoes in a silent swan-dance. We would not disturb the fathers in their beds, nor Padre Luis’s wine-fuelled table-top shlof. We were soon through the door, down the rectory’s sloping hill and free again to creep like shadows along the walls of Seville’s sleeping streets.
Moishe returning home after another night playing Michael the Archangel, converting the living to the dead. Protecting Jews from the fiery furnace.
Chapter Sixteen
We followed another armful of bread through the back door and into the kitchen. We were hoping for a warm slice, some cheese, and a mug of hot drink. Instead, Do?a Gracia was waiting for us when we returned.
Hot, bitter, steaming.
“I offer you my protection and instruct you to remain hidden but instead you creep through the night like a plague-ridden rat laying low I don’t know how many men? This risk that you took, though lit bright by daring and righteousness, endangers not only yourself, but me, this household, and our people. You enrage the Church, the Inquisition, and the powerful like a toreador stabbing banderillas into the shoulders of bulls. Brave, perhaps, but also foolhardy, boy.”
She led us into a room that was a small library, not unlike the library of the night before where Moishe had indeed been a banderillero, pricking another churchman.
“Do?a …” Moishe began, but she raised her hand for silence.
“In these times,” she said, “fear is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. A vicious circle, you might say. The Inquisition gives cause for citizens to fear even themselves.”
Do?a Gracia raised a brass platter and offered Moishe a dried date. He took one, rolled it around in his mouth, then extracted a damp half which he gave to me.
“As my father would say, ‘It is often bitter before it is sweet,’ ” he said.
“If we live to see the sweetness,” the Do?a said. “Trust no one. You must do only as I say and heed my plan for the rescue of the Cathedral Jews and for your exodus over the sea. Torquemada has arrived in Seville this holy week of Easter with many other Inquisitors. They come for Good Friday and now also the auto-da-fé. He has arranged this with grim logic: on the first but not Good Friday, he believes Jews murdered Christ, so, on this day, a Christian will murder Jews.
“Tomorrow, we hold a council in this house to devise a plan. Tomorrow, a Maundy Thursday that is also Passover. We will pray together that the Angel of Death will abide the blood on our doorposts and pass over both those condemned to die and those not yet condemned. That though he may not take their first-born, the escape shall be as a plague to them. But you—Moishe—shall be not our Moses, leading our people to this, if not promised, then this promising land. You will stay within the walls of my house.”