Do?a Gracia wouldn’t wait for the waters to part to help them escape these plagues. She had a fleet.
Moishe and the condemned Jews would travel to Morocco—to Fez—where the houses were finely built and curiously painted, tiled and roofed with gold, azure, and other excellent colours, some with crystal fountains and surrounded with roses and other odoriferous flowers and herbs. And where they could be safe.
When she had helped the last of the hidden Jews to escape, she would set sail herself for Morocco, an elf at the end of a difficult Age.
Her plan: We knew that most prisoners were held in a dungeon that had been created below a certain church. She would have someone ply the guard with drink. It was a typical escape story. Moishe would help me get through the bars. I’d get the key from the guard and carry it in my beak. The taste of freedom in a jailbird’s mouth.
I suggested we bring the red capes so that the prisoners, as the saying goes, could be disguised in plain sight. In those times of heightened security, Do?a Gracia thought it would be a good idea.
I looked at Moishe with I-told-you-so eyes.
“But it will be impossible to get the capes from the Catedral,” Do?a Gracia said. “Do you expect that we can just walk out with them?”
Now it was Moishe’s turn for the I-told-you-so eyes.
But then: “I know of a way,” he said. “My father told me this story. Each evening, a servant was seen walking home from the court, carrying a silver plate covered by a cloth. ‘Leftovers,’ he said. The guards at the portcullis began to get suspicious. ‘He’s stealing from the king,’ one said to the other. ‘Let’s search him.’ And so they did. They lifted the cloth from the plate, but there was nothing but a few scraps of ill-used food. Each day for a month the man walked home with a plate and each day the guards found only scraps. At the end of the month, the man did not return to work. The news quickly spread throughout the palace that thirty silver plates were missing from the royal kitchen and the shyster was nowhere to be seen.
“So, my plan: sneak into the Catedral and walk out wearing two red capes. Return wearing only one. Repeat until we have all the capes we need. It’s perfect. Who would think twice about a priest walking in a church?”
“Another priest. Maybe you could put on all the capes at once and pretend to be a fat shnorrer of a priest,” I said.
Do?a Gracia laughed. “And then if you were stabbed, like Queen Isabella’s overdressed ladies-in-waiting, no knife could reach you,” she said.
“So, my idea needs work,” Moishe said.
Chapter Twelve
Midnight. The streets of Seville empty as the wind from either end of a shlemiel. The sky moonless but for a luminous blade disappearing behind cloud. We exit through a small sally port in the west wall of Do?a Gracia’s and into an alleyway. Moishe is Red Riding Hood, carrying a basket of food. Not for his Bubbie but for fairy-tale Christians, the secret Jews held prisoner by red-hooded wolves.
What drink goes best with dungeon food?
The Merlot of Human Kindness?
Molotov cocktails.
We’ll get to that.
Some of the larger homes had night watchmen but more often than not, their beat was the jurisdiction of Nod. Still we crept quietly and kept close to walls.
“Sarah. This sheyneh maideleh, this beautiful girl,” Moishe whispered. He could name her, but didn’t know what came next.
There were guards before the gates of the church, but a behindback such as ours necessitated an unorthodox approach.
Moishe slithered on his kishkas toward the barred windows at the back of the building. He pushed his face close, his shnozz between the bars, but he could see nothing, only smell the rat-ripe dankness of the dungeon.
The prisoners were in darkness. We dared not call them for fear of the shtarkeh guards. I slipped between the bars. It was the deep black of the jungle at night. I navigated by the give of air at doorways, the thicker air as I approached a wall. I went through a doorway and along a hallway lined with cells.
“So, nu,” I said. “Come here often?”
I heard breathing. They hesitated, disoriented in the dark.
“We have food for you. And wine,” I said. “From Do?a Gracia.”
“Strange that you didn’t knock, but yet do not intrude.” It was the rabbi.
“Gracias,” someone else said.
Moishe was at the window. They were in cells. How to get the food to their mouths? I’d be the mother bird, feeding her chicks. “Es, es, mayne feygelech.” Eat, eat, my little birds.
Moishe reached inside the window and dropped the food to the floor. I carried each piece of bread, each portion of cheese from window to cell.
“Aharon. Aharon.” A small voice called my name. A girl’s voice. “Tell him there’s a gap in the stone of my cell. I must speak.”
Moishe, a church mouse against the wall, crawled until he found a face-sized hole. “I’m here,” he whispered. “Moishe.”
A few minutes of breathing only.