And by its light, we could see that we were inside that rabbi’s brain.
Shadows. Cobwebs. Dust.
Stacks of books and old scrolls cluttered ongevorfn everywhere. Prayerbooks, parchment, vellum. Inside a rabbi’s brain after it’d been banged about by the Inquisition.
Moishe lifted a few prayerbooks from their pile. They were old and worn and their pages were ripped, stained, or fused together.
This was a hospice or tomb for the broken, the fading, the dead and the dying. I hadn’t seen a binnacle list of such sieve-bodied and fissured-wounded since I watched what the Turks’ cannons did during the battle for Constantinople years before.
“It’s a genizah,” Moishe said. “You’re not allowed to destroy anything containing the name of God.” He held up a page of faded writing, riddled with holes in the shape of lakes, birds, clouds and birthmarks. They store the books until they can be properly buried. But this place looks like it was forgotten. Some of these scrolls could have been made of the skins of Esau’s flock.”
“And, if we don’t make an escape plan,” I said, “they’ll find us, too, sometime in the future, our words forgotten, our bones collecting dust, and they’ll say, ‘They’re from years ago when there once was Spain.’ ”
“Yes,” Moishe said. “Two friends: a looker and a chickenhawk.”
“Nu,” I said. “You can’t have a pish on a forts—a piss without a fart.”
“Takeh,” Moishe said. “But we have a plan. We wait until the priests have gone, then you fly out like Noah’s dove to see if it’s safe. Then we rescue Sarah and the hidden Jews, then Do?a Gracia and the others, and then we sail to safety—for Africa, your home.”
Feh. What did I know from Africa? I wished only for my boychik’s scrawny coast.
“If they put your brain inside a bird,” I said, “hi te’ofef le-achor—it would fly backwards. How are we going to help them? Even a great captain needs a boat.”
“My mother used to say, ‘If one wants to beat a dog, one finds a stick.’ So, nu, I’m looking for a stick.”
Our first battle was with time.
We waited.
Fingers cast by candlelight wavered against the walls as Moishe examined shelves. Prayerbooks and Torahs, but also letters, leases, contracts, deeds, ketubahs, rabbinical court records, and sheaves of poems by Halevi and Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra. Like the manifold races of man, from Ultima Thule to the lands of Prester John, the books ranged in size from those that could be held like a child’s hand to those that could contain the broad lungs of an ape.
But no sticks.
The candle was becoming an even shorter thumb, a warm wax petseleh, a guttering boyhood. Moishe snuffed it like a priest and we were in the dark. How long would the shtarkers stalk Do?a Gracia’s? We slept for hours waiting for the waters to recede.
Finally, Moishe felt his way to the door and hauled on it to make a scupper for my exit. I crept through, found my way past the storage room and flew in darkness down the hall. I stopped at the stairs and listened.
A slurping, a chewing. An animal sound. Some chazzer on the table finishing the seder. The only toughs, twenty white soldiers on a red hill, roughing up the lamb. I climbed the last stair and looked out.
Padre Luis from the Palacio Arzobispal, now emperor of wine bottles and inquisitor of stews. There’s an extra cup left for Elijah at any seder, but this ghost we could not have expected.
“Ah, Christian. Some company here in this desolate sanctuary.” He’d seen me and remembered that I’d baptized myself a “Christian.” “Come enjoy some strange fruit,” he said, holding up the half-noshed flesh of something unidentifiable.
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.”