Death? Azoy gich? So soon?
Hardly time to think of famous last words, but if they have to be mine, I wish they could be: “I hope my friend’s very large arquebus doesn’t wake the city with the sound of your flesh spattering in a sorrowful pink rain.”
When you die, you can say what you want, but for now I said, “Run.”
Chapter Eighteen
Thursday. We were safe and our bed was warm. One of us may have been dreaming of a world of endless Sarahs, or of the land of but a single one. I, however, was flying through the shadow-clotted jungle to a clearing where high water spilled into lucent ponds. Monkeys nattered in the distance like idiot Shakespeares and the scent of ripe fruit came to me like song.
We ate breakfast late. The house was quiet.
Moishe had been faster than the murderous intentions of the thug—a fayer zol im trefn—a fire should meet him and make him crispy. The quick turn, the nimble reverse, the jumped-over fence, the dash through the oysgeshpilt outhouse. Better you’re a flea than a lion when you’re running from the gun.
Or that you’re quick when you’re a boy and he’s got a sword.
And so we ate. The last leavened bread before Passover. After this, forty years of matzoh in eight days. The hardtack of exodus. Not only a covenant, but binding.
For soon we’d be bound for Eretz Africa with a boatful of Jews, books, and … Sarah.
Behind us, a shoreline cluttered with the fists of Inquisitors raised in a holy and impotent anger.
Unless we were all dead.
Would that be—ek velt—the end of the world?
We’d only know when we got there; I hear they don’t take reservations.
So, after this breakfast of a bisl bread, Moishe and I, still exhilarated by our escape, became explorers, charting the unknown. At least, what was unknown to us. That’s usually enough unknown for one day. Passageways, rooms, cellars, courtyards. The peninsulas, islands, caverns, and inland seas of Do?a Gracia’s world. We were left to ourselves to discover what we might.
I rode the thin wave of Moishe’s shoulder up stairs and along hallways. We looked into the doors left ajar. Those in their beds, those sitting at chairs and before small tables. Listless, playing cards with the compulsion of a song that won’t go away. Some were startled, nervous, our gaze the sudden pain of a dart, the surprise annoyance of an insect bite. Some looked with a quick smile or a vacant daze. The Do?a’s home was a hostel for the hurt and the hidden. And their children, charming, snot-nosed, crying, spring-like or rubbery, driftwood in the wash of parents and history.
Two men sat in a courtyard filled with ferns. I recognized one as Alonso, the man who worked in the kitchen.
“Miguel,” he called to me. “Who’s a pretty girl?”
“Aaron,” Moishe said. “His name is Aaron.”
“My father’s name …” he said. “This old jowly rooster”—Alonso motioned—“my friend Isaac.” He was stooped and chicken-thin with an abundant growth of dark moustache on his sallow face. It seemed as if this swart lip-bound earwig had sapped vital strength from the man.
The friend, almost imperceptibly, nodded in greeting.
“He has arrived at the Do?a’s for the seder. We eat, we tell the Passover story, we plan a Spanish exodus.”
The friend again moved a few molecules in assent.
“So you will be joining us?” Alonso asked.
“Unless there’s another secret meeting with good food I should know about?” Moishe said.
“My wife and I cook the food,” Alonso said with pride. “It will be delicious. And secret. As the Torah says, ‘Thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand.’ ”
“I don’t know about the staff, but I consider shoes and, especially, girded loins to be essential for any meal,” Moishe said. “Think of the crumbs.”
“Years ago, I learned from my parents. I was born a Jew,” Alonso said. “When they expelled us from Seville, I did not move. It was only my Jewish name that left me. They say that God Himself drew back to make room for life. This was how it was with us, too. We had no choice. My family: children, parents, wife. I shed my skin, but even with new colours I remained a snake to them. There were riots. We are in Job’s land, tested by God. Alav ha’shalom. Only my wife and I remain.”
He paused and then: “So, tonight, we are Jews. What more could they take from us? ‘I am that I am.’ And soon we will leave Spain to where we will be safe.”
“And where we can always have meals together—at Passover, Shabbos, whenever we are hungry,” Moishe said.
“Next year in Jerusalem,” Alonso said. “Or at least, Africa.”
We continued our exploration. To an attic. Locked storerooms. Down some steps, a passageway into a cellar. It would soon be evening, but here, like Thule in the distant north, it was always dark.
Moishe lit a candle.