Yiddish for Pirates(36)
He appeared to be alone in his leftover kingdom and so I returned to my Noah in the bookish Ark.
We were chaleshing for a facefull. We’d eaten only the first few ritual seder foods before the table was stormed.
“A chair, Miguel,” Padre Luis said, directing Moishe to a place across from him. “An oasis of food and wine for you who are hungry. And someone to break bread with.”
Moishe sat at the chair that yesterday was Joshua’s. He drank the remaining cup of the seder wine then piled a tall Ararat on Joshua’s plate. At least two of everything.
“Your parents were not glad to see you?” Padre Luis asked, wrestling a joint of lamb with his face, the wet slap like the sea between a dock and a hull. “I am surprised to discover you here. In the house of a Jew.”
Moishe motioned to the food, hoping that this would be explanation enough, relying on two of the perennial certainties of story: appetite and mystery.
Padre Luis nodded and, for awhile, the three of us pursued our appetites and allowed mystery its invisible Elijah-like place at the table. I roamed about this landscape of food, hunting the placid raisin and harvesting the gentle nut.
“You are wise, my young friend,” Padre Luis said, after awhile, “to eat much and speak less.” He drained a silver kiddush cup of its wine. “But I know who you are.”
Moishe’s gaze darted toward me. Should we run?
Padre Luis looked left and right about the room, as if at any moment the red capes of the Holy Office would flame from behind the tapestries.
“I know who you are because Do?a Gracia told me.”
Did they extract this as their hot tongs branded both her mortal flesh and her soul’s thin wings?
“Gey strasheh di vantsen—frighten the bugs off someone else—I am called, ‘Miguel,’ and that is all,” Moishe said with bravado. But I knew he wasn’t certain if this was treachery, something to trick him into dropping his goyishe drawers and revealing the true pomp and circumcision of his Hebrew shvants.
“Miguel. Moishe. Conveyor of forbidden books. I recall little of what I said when we previously met, but I shall repeat what I believe I imprudently revealed,” Padre Luis said. “I am no friend of the Holy Office. In these few years, I have become wasted, wraithlike, my faith consumed by its un-Christian fire. What I did not say was that I was an ally of the Jews, of Do?a Gracia, of the rabbi, that I was to be part of the plan for the escape of those now condemned, that I would leave with them for a new life, holy yet free. Last night, I would have arrived in time to give warning to those in this house for I heard what they said in the Palacio. It is to my eternal regret that I had first immersed myself in a blood-red sea of church wine. Its undertow pulled me under and I drowned. I woke only this noon when all was already lost. And so, what do I do? I sit at this table and eat, I who should have been a sentry at the doorpost, waiting to wave away the Angel of Death with the lamb’s blood of my true Christian faith.”
He filled a jug with wine and drank long and unrelentingly. Finally, he breathed.
“O beati martyris Santiago, Alonso is already dead. He has returned to his God. Joshua may yet still be alive, though it is unlikely that he will survive the efforts of the Holy Office to extract a confession and a list of other names. Sancta Maria mater. And what they have done to Do?a Gracia? Tomorrow they all go to the quemadero to be sacrificed like Jesu Christo, our Lord … or at least, my Lord. Oh, all is darkness,” he wailed, “All is night.” He placed his head on his plate and once again, passed into a drunken sleep.
Moishe looked at me, a glance that was an ocean. Then he looked away and ate the food that was on his plate.
Padre Luis sat up suddenly, his face spackled with lamb and stew. “Hearken unto my sermon of fire for I have had a vision,” he intoned. “Oh, here at this table of plenty. Oh, here in this Andalusian Gethsemane. Yea, He will rescue and redeem them for their lives are precious to him. O sweet wine! O love, who ever burnest and never consumest! O charity! O succulent lamb! O fruit abundant and moist! The beast and the false prophet will be cast into a lake of flame. The fire they kindle for their enemies will burn themselves only. Oh, for I have dreamt of the heifer-red wall of fire, I who drink deeply and stew in both regret and sorrow. O raisins and almonds! The sea shall part and they shall walk through its red flames as if through a curtain. Oh, were I a man and not a lamb or adafina stew. Though our sins be scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. For this has been written in fire and the words themselves are enflamed. Oh, shall I drink!” He reached for a jug of wine but succeeded only in overturning it. Then he rested his addle-pated head on his plate and slept again as the wine overflowed the table.
Moishe stood up. “His vision,” he said. “Now I know what to do.”
“Drink less,” I said. “Few flagons contain as much wine as he. The only vision he has is doubled.”
“He is truly farshikkered, but his pickled words have reminded me. A curtain of flame, some burning letters: fire will save them from fire.”
Moishe recounted a marvel he’d seen at a shtetl wedding where a magician—a kishef-makher—had walked through a wall of fire and been unharmed. Everyone thought it was sorcery or else a propitious and divine intervention for the wedding. Like the gefilte fish. The man had chanted some obscure prayers, touched a torch to the ground, then disappeared into the burning wall of flame that he’d created. After a few horrifying minutes, he reappeared, smiling, bowing, and carrying doves. Moishe wasn’t the only one in tears.