Yiddish for Pirates(32)

There was a voice from the front of the church.

“Shh, Rabbi,” Moishe hissed. “They’re coming.”

The rabbi retreated into the darkness of the cell and began again to murmur prayers.

Moishe squeezed against the stone wall. We willed ourselves to be stone. I may have been the dot of a vowel, but I did my best to be both silent and invisible.

Torchlight flickered along the path. We were hidden from its illumination by a buttress.

“Anyone there?” the guard’s voice said.

As if “anyone” would answer.

I wanted to say, “I’m not just anyone,” but even a worthy line isn’t worth death. I’d prefer my famous last words to be occasioned by my imminent and inevitable demise, not the cause of it.

I knew Moishe had expected a hero’s welcome, a verbal parade in celebration of his execution of Abraham and not the Mishnah-mad ravings of a farmishteh Rabbi.

And an eight-pounder broadside of a kiss from Sarah.

The guard retreated with his light. We’d have to be even more careful. And quick.

Moishe slithered along the church-side in pursuit of a gun port behind which was the flash of Sarah.

She was curled in the straw of the corner. A seahorse, a foal.

“Sarah,” Moishe whispered. “The guards are close. I must speak low if I speak.”

She came to the space between stones. “You must go. It is too dangerous.”

“Yes. But first …” He began to tell her about Abraham, but then stopped. Abraham, though he had betrayed her, had been her uncle.

This was not a time for more grief. Grief over betrayal. Over family. Over death.

“I will help you. I have a plan. I have arranged—Do?a Gracia has arranged—your escape from Spain. Soon you will be sailing toward Africa.”

“Disgraced. An orphan,” Sarah said. “Alone.”

“But I will help you,” Moishe said. “I will protect you. I am also an orphan. We are bashert. Destined. Let us … let us be farknast. Betrothed.”

She reached her hand toward Moishe. Their fingertips touched. A pretty rondeau composed suddenly in the crenelated castle of Moishe’s excited brain.

But it was interrupted. Torchlight and the return of the guard’s voice. Footsteps.

Moishe withdrew his hand. Turned. Ran into the shadows of dark trees. I flew above him, into the shadows of branches. The guards’ voices calling. Moishe clambering over a short fence and into some kind of shit dreck.

“Ech! Der oylem is a goylem. The world is stupid,” he muttered.

“Like Noah said to Mrs. Noah as the rain began, ‘this is no time to worry about your shoes,’ ” I said. “Now, drey zich. Keep moving!”

We went at full speed down the street, turning again into an alley.

We waited. In darkness, Moishe’s quick breath. Beside it, the smaller gusts of a parrot’s breath, my plum-sized lungs.

He inhaled. Held his breath. Listened.

Voices and footfalls. Becoming distant.

Breathing again. Running again.

Across a wide street, along an alley of tanners’ shops. We waded through the pungent tang in the dimness, Moishe careful to keep his footfall light, to look behind him. Down wide steps, a left turn, the roof of our goal. We’d soon be safe in our bed, ready to dream of the Promised Land and our Sarahs.

Then, from the shadows, a shtarker, a tough, wearing a dark robe, long sword still sheathed in its scabbard. He stepped into the middle of the alley and looked at us.

What else was there to look at, the scenery?

He drew the sword.

Death? Azoy gich? So soon?

Hardly time to think of famous last words, but if they have to be mine, I wish they could be: “I hope my friend’s very large arquebus doesn’t wake the city with the sound of your flesh spattering in a sorrowful pink rain.”

When you die, you can say what you want, but for now I said, “Run.”





Chapter Eighteen



Thursday. We were safe and our bed was warm. One of us may have been dreaming of a world of endless Sarahs, or of the land of but a single one. I, however, was flying through the shadow-clotted jungle to a clearing where high water spilled into lucent ponds. Monkeys nattered in the distance like idiot Shakespeares and the scent of ripe fruit came to me like song.

We ate breakfast late. The house was quiet.

Moishe had been faster than the murderous intentions of the thug—a fayer zol im trefn—a fire should meet him and make him crispy. The quick turn, the nimble reverse, the jumped-over fence, the dash through the oysgeshpilt outhouse. Better you’re a flea than a lion when you’re running from the gun.

Or that you’re quick when you’re a boy and he’s got a sword.

And so we ate. The last leavened bread before Passover. After this, forty years of matzoh in eight days. The hardtack of exodus. Not only a covenant, but binding.

For soon we’d be bound for Eretz Africa with a boatful of Jews, books, and … Sarah.

Behind us, a shoreline cluttered with the fists of Inquisitors raised in a holy and impotent anger.

Unless we were all dead.

Would that be—ek velt—the end of the world?

We’d only know when we got there; I hear they don’t take reservations.

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 Do?a Gracia’s world. We were left to ourselves to discover what we might.