“Go,” he said to Moishe. “Do not come again … never. Never!”
Moishe walked through the open door and vanished into the darkness. Torquemada shuffled back to the bench and collapsed. His head dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. I could see by the twisting runnels of his forehead that he was suffering. He touched his hand to his lips and was still.
When the sails are down, the wind runs free.
So I took my chance. I flew.
Chapter Twenty-One
Outside I could not find Moishe, but knew he would make for the Guadalquivir River and the ship. I would fly ahead to tell them to wait. He would soon be there.
If they had safely arrived. If they hadn’t already set sail toward Cadiz and the sea.
I rose up into the pearlescent before-dawn light. Soon the sun would rise. Soon the son also: the bright rising of Easter with its banners, music and celebration. But when they rolled aside the saviour’s stone in the mouth of Iberia, we’d be gone.
Even in the half-light, there were people on the street. Soldiers, too. Moishe would have to become a shadow, a ruekh—a ghost—and half-light himself, if he were to slip by unnoticed.
At the port, I circled to find our ship in a forest of masts and landed on the mainmast spar.
Below me, Padre Luis was playing with a rope beside the starboard gunwale.
The others must be keeping out of sight below deck.
Padre Luis looked up. “Salve!” he called.
I hadn’t said a word when—a broch, damn it all—there was a tremendous crack. Splintered wood crashed onto the deck. Another burst. A flash from the wharf. A gunshot. Gevalt! It grazed my feathers. They were trying to separate my insides from my out, make a pretty loch in mayn kop, a hole in my head.
Do?a Gracia shouted to the crew.
More flashes and wood-splintering.
Sailors emerged, unmoored the ship and unfurled the sails.
Another explosion and I was hit a mighty klop from Olam ha-Ba, a divine fist from the world to come. I was returned to the formless void and into complete wordless, sightless, soundless oblivion.
My last thought?
We would have to sail south for the sea and leave Moishe surrounded by gunfire. Parrotless and alone.
Sure the shvants does well without its foreskin. It grows. It prospers.
But which part was Moishe?
Which was me?
Though unlike what the moyel hath rent assunder, I would let no one keep us apart, though it might be years.
It would be five.
Chapter One
Writing Hebrew, most of the time, you make do without vowels. Of course, when you speak, there are plenty of vowels—no matter how you mumble, you have to open your pisk eventually—unless your strudel-cave has been fully spelunked by cake, when it’s better to wait. When you read, you have to imagine the vowels wheezing between the consonants’ black masts. You know they exist, they’re just not there. Like God to the troubled faithful. Maybe in some other disconsonant world, there are Hebrew books where all the unwritten vowels appear, like the souls of the dead, reunited with their consonant bodies, but in this world, the story goes on without them.
Atah medaber Ivrit?
Feh. I never learned Hebrew.
Moishe was like the vowels. For five years, I mumbled and the story proceeded without me.
I was blown by the wind. It was above, it was below. It came from outside, it came from inside, depending on the ratio of sea biscuit to salt pork in my three squares.
So sometimes I didn’t know my insides from what’s out, but sails filled and Moishe travelled from Gibraltar to Ethiopia, from the new islands of the Canaries, to Thule in the north, to the Mediterranean and back many times. Where, I didn’t exactly know.
I kept myself busy, avoiding the cage and the “and so that’s how the meshugeneh bird met his sorry end” chapter of my story. I sailed with the Jews. I ate. I slept. I learned a new language or two. I drank coffee, wore a beret, argued about art and life, and wrote poetry.
And when there was rum, I sang. I cursed. And there was this:
O Moishe is out at sea again, farmisht like the farkrimter sky,
He’s a skinny ship on a farkakteh sea, with no friends to sail nearby,
the rum bites and the crew shakes, their shikkereh spume a-flying
and the seagulls kak on the dreck-slick deck, and always their meshugeneh crying.
O Moishe is out at sea again, living the wandering sailor’s life,
it’s a farshluginer escape, and a whip-ward flight from the whetted knife,
from the mast-like stake and the smokey clouds as you begin to smoulder,
but all I ask is that he lives on and, nu, to shlof again on his shoulder.
So Rumi, Whitman or King David I was not, though when shikkered, I sat in the warm tsimmes of my emotions and became a sloppy, weeping Bukowski of a Judah Halevi while imagining myself a psaltery-dog Solomon, a psittacine Shakespeare of the sea.
I said I would speak of treasure.
Treasure? It’s everything you could hope for in the present, but just not yet.
Farshteyst?
But first: Sarah, Do?a Gracia and the others.