Yiddish for Pirates(35)

We stumbled to the cellar, Moishe feeling a path past rolled carpets, barrels and chairs. He crouched in the corner.

“I should have helped,” he said. “I should have fought to save the others.”

We heard a sound from outside the room, footsteps from somewhere down the passage.

They say that if a baby falls beneath an ox or an elephant, a fearful mother can find strength beyond the weight of matter or of death. And if there’s a bottle of rum beneath a boulder, a shikker drunk can find his strength, too. Moishe fingered his way along the back wall of the room and found the immoveable door. He moved what had likely not been moved for lifetimes. It shifted but a rib cage’s breadth, and he slid himself through the opening.

It was difficult to close the door again, but Moishe managed, hauling on the handle like a sailor hoisting anchor, the door having been reminded of its own possibility.





Chapter Nineteen



“Is this my fault?” Moishe said.

“Moishe, like they say: Noch der chupeh iz shpet di charoteh. After the wedding it’s too late for regrets. Like any story, we must now figure what happens next.”

Voices in the hall?

Only our own nervous breathing in the dark and dusty room.

Then something close clashed against metal.

A few sparks. Moishe had a small tinderbox open and was striking flint with the firesteel. On one knee, the black charcloth was spread beneath a few splinters of tinder wood. On the other, the squat nub of a candle.

With each spark, a small dim circle. Shelves of some kind, barely visible.

Finally, Moishe was able to light the cloth, transfer the fire to the tinder and then to the candle. A small thought passed about in dim whispers.

The flame was a living thing, trembling like an old rabbi.

And by its light, we could see that we were inside that rabbi’s brain.

Shadows. Cobwebs. Dust.

Stacks of books and old scrolls cluttered ongevorfn everywhere. Prayerbooks, parchment, vellum. Inside a rabbi’s brain after it’d been banged about by the Inquisition.

Moishe lifted a few prayerbooks from their pile. They were old and worn and their pages were ripped, stained, or fused together.

This was a hospice or tomb for the broken, the fading, the dead and the dying. I hadn’t seen a binnacle list of such sieve-bodied and fissured-wounded since I watched what the Turks’ cannons did during the battle for Constantinople years before.

“It’s a genizah,” Moishe said. “You’re not allowed to destroy anything containing the name of God.” He held up a page of faded writing, riddled with holes in the shape of lakes, birds, clouds and birthmarks. They store the books until they can be properly buried. But this place looks like it was forgotten. Some of these scrolls could have been made of the skins of Esau’s flock.”

“And, if we don’t make an escape plan,” I said, “they’ll find us, too, sometime in the future, our words forgotten, our bones collecting dust, and they’ll say, ‘They’re from years ago when there once was Spain.’ ”

“Yes,” Moishe said. “Two friends: a looker and a chickenhawk.”

“Nu,” I said. “You can’t have a pish on a forts—a piss without a fart.”

“Takeh,” Moishe said. “But we have a plan. We wait until the priests have gone, then you fly out like Noah’s dove to see if it’s safe. Then we rescue Sarah and the hidden Jews, then Do?a Gracia and the others, and then we sail to safety—for Africa, your home.”

Feh. What did I know from Africa? I wished only for my boychik’s scrawny coast.

“If they put your brain inside a bird,” I said, “hi te’ofef le-achor—it would fly backwards. How are we going to help them? Even a great captain needs a boat.”

“My mother used to say, ‘If one wants to beat a dog, one finds a stick.’ So, nu, I’m looking for a stick.”

Our first battle was with time.

We waited.

Fingers cast by candlelight wavered against the walls as Moishe examined shelves. Prayerbooks and Torahs, but also letters, leases, contracts, deeds, ketubahs, rabbinical court records, and sheaves of poems by Halevi and Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra. Like the manifold races of man, from Ultima Thule to the lands of Prester John, the books ranged in size from those that could be held like a child’s hand to those that could contain the broad lungs of an ape.

But no sticks.

The candle was becoming an even shorter thumb, a warm wax petseleh, a guttering boyhood. Moishe snuffed it like a priest and we were in the dark. How long would the shtarkers stalk Do?a Gracia’s? We slept for hours waiting for the waters to recede.

Finally, Moishe felt his way to the door and hauled on it to make a scupper for my exit. I crept through, found my way past the storage room and flew in darkness down the hall. I stopped at the stairs and listened.

A slurping, a chewing. An animal sound. Some chazzer on the table finishing the seder. The only toughs, twenty white soldiers on a red hill, roughing up the lamb. I climbed the last stair and looked out.

Padre Luis from the Palacio Arzobispal, now emperor of wine bottles and inquisitor of stews. There’s an extra cup left for Elijah at any seder, but this ghost we could not have expected.

“Ah, Christian. Some company here in this desolate sanctuary.” He’d seen me and remembered that I’d baptized myself a “Christian.” “Come enjoy some strange fruit,” he said, holding up the half-noshed flesh of something unidentifiable.