Yiddish for Pirates(34)
Presiding at the end of the table, Do?a Gracia.
She introduced Moishe. The Ashkenazi and his feathered shadow.
We began the seder. First we’d all be Moses and help the Jews scramble over the Red Sea, then onto Do?a Gracia’s boats. Boils and frogs and locusts would give us inspiration.
We recited prayers. We drank wine. We ate bitter herbs, eggs and salt water. The mortar of apples and nut, spread between two matzoh.
We arrived at the Four Questions—the questions about the seder traditionally asked, at least in the East, by the youngest child present. Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh. Why is this night different than all other nights?
“My bird,” Moishe said. “My bird will ask the questions.”
“And then he can find the cracker. The afikomen,” someone laughed.
So now I was a party trick, supposed to fly like an airborne mizinik—the family’s little tousle-headed tyke—to discover the hidden matzoh?
“Jews may appear as Christians. Muhammadans as Moriscos. There may be more in heaven and feathers than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” Do?a Gracia said. “Ofttimes in the cage, an unexpected sage. This bird may prove useful to us.”
“True,” said old Joshua. “As it says in Job, ‘the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.’ So, old greybird, let’s begin with some questions.”
I managed to recite the first few lines before becoming fartshadet—confused. I knew much of Jewish things, but I had not been born to it. The others joined in and we asked the questions in chorus as was the Sephardi custom.
Joshua continued, leading the seder. We retold the Exodus story as he directed us, each taking turns with the telling. Even the fartshadeteh feygeleh, the befuddled bird, yours truly. As each of the ten plagues was mentioned, each person dipped a finger into his wine glass, and spilled individual drops like blood from the stone-cut palms of slaves. I dipped my beak, cut only by seeds and human words.
But we only got to the seventh plague—barad, hail—when some burly shtarkers burst through the door. Behind these oxen-browed air-suckers were two weasely-faced farshtunkeneh priests, plague-red droppings from the pestilent shvants of the church. There’s a way that actions can wear heavy boots even if the actors do not.
In flagrante delicto. We were caught with our hand in the seder jar, our fingers in the sweet wine.
Moishe, having been on red alert for such capes dived below the horizon of the table. I remained a bird and flew to the crow’s nest of a sconce, waiting to see what might transpire, how I might help or hinder.
Each burlyman grabbed someone. It was a country dance of thugs, the priests calling the tune. An arm wrapped around the throat of the old man, Joshua.
“Take my breath, I keep my belief,” he said as he was pulled down.
The fabric of Rebecca’s soft shoulders served as reins as she was driven into the wall then kicked. Alonso was clutched by the elbow but he knocked away the grober’s gorilla hand and ran to protect his wife. Immediately he was surrounded and a fist struck him a mighty boch. He sank like a stone to the floor. His wife screamed.
“May you live to see your children die.”
She lifted the long silver carving knife from the table and plunged it into the thick side of a shtarker. A short-lived revenge for they pulled her arms behind her and bound them tight. The wounded man staggered then collapsed onto a chair, clutching his pierced side. Both Alonso and his wife were weeping.
“This travesty of Easter, this Last Supper, shall indeed be your last,” a priest shrieked above the tumult to no one and everyone. “I charge you in the name of the Holy Office with heresy and Judaizing. With harbouring enemies of the King and Queen, the Church, and of the Holy Father. With murder.”
Do?a Gracia was standing at the end of the table. Motionless, a proud statue radiating power and strength, she had both gravitas and gravitational pull. Space-time turned around her. She had not been touched by the Inquisition.
“Friend, do what you have come to do,” she said, looking at the priest.
It was only a moment before it registered on the priest’s face. The Gospel of Matthew. The words of Jesus to Judas.
Then they came and laid hands on her and seized her and it seemed that time began to move twice as quickly. Some ran for hallways and doors, took up chairs, knives, their own swords. An Inquisition enforcer rushed toward the woman named Leah and she thrust a Haggadah with a great zets at his head. He bent over and she ran, but she was seized by another and bound also. Daniel slashed with a dagger but was quickly overpowered. Moishe had escaped notice below the deck of the table. His dark eyes glinted from the shadows like a rat’s and caught my gaze. It was time for him to make his move. I swept across the room, shrieking the excoriating cry of the harpy. Swords slashed behind my tail as they attempted to cut me from the air. I embedded my claws into a soft face and heard the raw howl.
Moishe, still a rodent, scrabbled on his knees and dove down the stairs in the direction of the cellar.
The room was a torrent of slashing sword and I feared I would soon be diced for lobscouse. In Egypt, it was Moses who burned his tongue on a coal, but here it was Aaron who would eat fire.
What is more powerful than guns or swords?
Darkness.
And in the right circumstances, it can be rendered with a bisl gob of bird spit. I swept from candle to candle, extinguishing flame. And then in that sudden night, I followed the rat I was loyal to, and went underground.