Were we regretful?
Does the braincleaving broadsword of a Visigoth wish it were the doily-delicate scalpel of a soft-handed surgeon rending the spine of a man into two symmetrical servings of dog meat? We were silent conquistadors returning from an El Dorado of revenge and glory. We would eat and boast, then find our beds until night when we would plunder the books from the Catedral.
“Sarah,” Moishe said softly.
What could I say?
Nothing. I said nothing.
We made plans to enter the Catedral and retrieve her father’s books. The red hounds of the Inquisition would be sniffing around the church for whoever skewered the priest. They’d not be expecting book liberators in the Catedral. We ate some breakfast in Do?a Gracia’s kitchen and then slept.
Chapter Thirteen
Imagine: the Inquisition is everywhere. You are a known trafficker of forbidden texts and a helper of hidden Jews. You aid those who are imprisoned under orders of the Pope and the King and Queen of Spain. You are hunted as a murderer and a violator of the holy church and a heretic. You have plans to steal some hidden books. So, nu, how do you sneak into a cathedral?
Through the front door.
It wasn’t locked.
We arrived late in the night—after even the most energetic of lotharios had slipped back into his cassock—and returned to his cell.
Moishe opened one of the Catedral’s front doors a parrot’s-width and I flew to a distant corner and onto the beams below the painted ceiling. I began mumbling what I hoped was the frightening preternatural blarney of Spanish spooks.
A word doesn’t have to know what it means to mean something. A bird, either. I chanted these creepy lokshen noodles of nonsense until a sexton heard. My meshugas wasn’t a raven’s “Nevermore,” but it had the same effect. The sexton’s lantern did the trembling dance of the less-than-happy shades over the dark cathedral as he began his fearful search for the source.
He soon retreated only to return with another sexton. While these two doughty men braved the vivid conniptions of their own baroque imaginations, Moishe was able to find the Madonna and her hollow lucky foot, then open the door to the Jews’ secret chamber. Once on the landing, he lit the candle hidden in his pocket.
Sha. And you thought he was just happy to see me?
I spoke a few more meshugeneh sermons from various rafters around the church, found the entrance to the room of books behind the retablo of the altar, and disappeared. The two sextons, gibbering their own narishkayt nonsense to the saints, had become self-sufficient: they now generated their own fear.
Once inside the room, I heard my name rising from the shaft in the floor.
Was it the devil himself, maybe? Takeh, his hacksaw voice of blood and sex and velvet had beckoned me to the basement many times before.
Nu, who else? It was Moishe.
Sometimes one is struck by a great idea. I pulled the silk cords like worms from the waists of a few red robes and knotted them together. I tied one end to a table and dropped the other down the shaft. The cord klopped Moishe on his Yiddisher kop. Moishe rubbed his head, then began to climb.
Which reminds me:
Two lengths of thread meet at the end of the tallis—the prayer shawl—of the Chief Rebbe of Warsaw.
“Hey, sweet string,” one says to the other. “I’ve been looking for a single bisl of tassel just like you. Are you unattached?”
“I’m a frayed knot,” the other says.
So, you’ve heard it. Still, a story helps you not to brech when times are tough. It keeps your kishkas inside, where they’re supposed to be.
Moishe pulled himself out of the shaft. “The coffin is below,” he said, “Empty?” I asked. It wouldn’t do for our books to share their berth with a corpse.
He looked at me. “Gevalt!”
Sha. He had the chutzpah to offer early retirement to a member of the clergy but not the beytsim to open a forgotten casket in the nether dark of the cathedral? But it’s as they say, Az di bubeh volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeydah. If my grandmother had them, she’d be my grandfather.
We proceeded with our plan. If the coffin were occupied, we’d wish its resident zay gezunt and commend him to the floor.
Moishe gathered the imprisoned books into a sack that we’d filched from Do?a Gracia’s pantry. Then he lowered it into the hole and shimmied down the rope. He was soon born again and back at the shelves refilling the sack. Three more times and we were both in the basement ready to screw our beytsim to the sticking place and open the casket. We were quite like the two sextons: afraid of the shadows cast by our own fear.
There was a scuttling as Moishe lifted the lid. A rat ran from behind the coffin and into the darkness. Thanks God, the casket, Got tsu danken, was empty. The only thing worse than finding a body in a coffin is finding half a body.
Moishe filled the coffin with the books. He left a small space.
I flew in.
He began nailing the casket closed.