Then: “My father’s books. Will you save them?” Sarah said. “In his memory. For mine.”
Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, had ordered the burning of Jewish and other heretical books.
“Libricide, lexicution, biblioclasm. To save our Catholic Spain,” he’d said, “we must first destroy heresy.”
“All Jewish books were condemned,” Sarah said. “So the community brought their books to my father.”
“As I’d taken one from mine,” Moishe said.
“They knew he would keep them safe. They knew he would preserve their history and their future.”
Sarah’s father’s hidden library. As he’d been a hidden Jew.
For years her family had lived in secret. They went to church. Received the wafer and the wine. Baptized their children.
But still, the hands over the eyes and the blessings over candles in the cupboards. The whispered words when walking through doorways.
And a library of Christian theology. Inside some books, in the compartment cut into the pages, smaller Jewish books.
As their Judaism was hidden inside each member of the family.
Like a devil or an angel child. Depending on which midwife you asked.
Each boy learned his true identity upon Bar Mitzvah. Each girl, usually when she married. But Sarah was an only child and her father taught her as if she was a son.
There was a priest. Padre Juan Lepe. A good man. A friend. He had known and had helped.
“He told me a story,” Sarah began. “A man told a rabbi he would convert if the rabbi could explain Judaism to him. There was a catch, though. The man would stand on one leg. The rabbi had to explain everything before the man fell over. The rabbi sent him away, chastising him for insulting God with trivial gymnastics. Later, the man came upon the great sage Hillel and presented him the same challenge. Explain all of Judaism while I stand on one leg.
“ ‘Left or right?’ Hillel asked.
“ ‘Either. Does it matter?’
“ ‘Tell you what, you jump in the air and while you’re there, closer to God, I’ll explain everything,’ the sage said. ‘Ready? Jump!’
“And what did Hillel say while the man left the ground?
“He said, ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbour.’
“ ‘That’s it?’ the man said as he returned to earth.
“ ‘That’s the whole Torah,’ Hillel said. ‘The rest is commentary.’
“And that, the priest said, is why I help your father. When someone is looking for their footing here on earth, we Christians, Jews and Muslims, have the same things to say. When I jump, I don’t ask religion to tell me how high. I think of this story.
“As the poet said, ‘Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn people also.’ That priest,” Sarah whispered, “died the same day as my father. I will soon join them. My mother also—aleha ha-shalom—whom we lost in childbirth. The priest and my father had planned to take the books to safety outside of Spain.”
“But they were discovered,” Moishe said.
“Betrayed,” she said. “And now I know: my uncle.”
“I’ll get the books,” Moishe said. “Where?”
“The Catedral. It’s where all the forbidden books are taken. Padre Juan told me before he was captured. He’d found a coffin there—they’d already taken my father—the padre was going to fill it with books and have it carried to safety. It is too late for my father. You cannot rescue the rest of us. Save at least these books.”
There was noise at the other end of the hallway. A key rattling in the barred door. A man’s farkakteh singing. I was back at the window, ready to fling more food into the cells. In the Torah, the manna just fell. Here, I had to shlepp it, loaf by loaf. And after thirty trips, I’d rather carry even a schmaltzy tune myself than some cheese.
The door scraped open and a priest fell in, wine-shikkered and staggering like each leg didn’t know the other was there. He was dressed in hauberk and helmet. Why a priest needed chainmail wasn’t clear. His lamp swayed like he was on the deck of a storm-wracked ship.
Those in the cells became silent. Hid their unfinished crusts in their clothes. Moishe lay flat against the ground, not daring to look between the stones.
“There’s a pretty little bird here,” the priest drawled. “And I shall have some dark meat.”
At first, I thought he was here to fress on my bones, to have parrot pot pie for a late night nosh, but then I understood.
It was Sarah he was after.
“Little bird,” he said. “Little bird.” He shone his lurching light at the doors of the cells, looking for Sarah.
I considered our options. Moishe was outside. Perhaps he could sneak through the church doors, slip past the grobyan guards and klop the priest from behind.
“L’chaim, Father.”
Blam!
Maybe with a chair or a silver church tchatchke. A candlestick.
A boy of fourteen. Two guards and a shikkered helmeted priest intent on knish.
Ach. Dreams.
It would have to be me. The mighty sparrow.
I didn’t risk flying. He might hear. I crept like a rat toward him.
“Little bird,” the priest said.