We went south down the Guadalquivir and into the sea.
“We’re not sailing into history, but out of it,” Do?a Gracia said. “It’s safer that way.”
The crew hauled and furled, jigged and swabbed. This was a common passage for them: Jews out; spices, gold, and embroidery in. A windblown railroad, not underground but over the sea. They scattered like sparrows when Do?a Gracia walked the deck, a sneeze scattering flour. They weren’t used to the balebosteh herself aboard ship.
She had always directed from the great house in Seville, but here as elsewhere, she took charge. As soon as we were in open water, she had the navigator bring her sea charts and compass and by the binnacle, she spoke with the captain, the Do?a a conductor pointing toward the horizon and along portolan lines. She spoke to the cook and the quartermaster and held conference with the rabbi. The ship had been the Do?a’s trade, and it was now her home.
There was open praying on the deck as the sun rose. A minyan gathered beneath the mainmast and faced the larboard of Jerusalem. Standing close together, davening, swaying back and forth like the ship in the sea, the lapping waters of prayer a salve, a balm for the Gilead of memory.
Few who had gathered there had ever celebrated publicly, their prayers a samizdat circulated in whispers concealed below breath, in secret inter-cellar communion with their interstellar, intercellular God, whose name they dared not speak openly, until now, sailing south upon this synagogue of waves.
The rabbi reminded them that when the Jews crossed the Red Sea, there was music and Miriam sang.
It seemed as if he expected a song and dance of Biblical proportions.
And how do you measure such proportions? In ancient barbers’ reckoning: shave and a haircut cubits? Nu, it is true, in making our exodus, we had had a close shave. And Moishe, I hoped, had been spared blade and bloodloss.
Though there was the chanting of prayer, the singing of psalms, the people remained sullen and quiet. They stayed below deck, or rested in the bow. Their tsuris troubled memories had not been washed away like the Tashlich casting off of sin-saturated bread at Rosh Hashannah. Not yet. They hadn’t yet made the promised landing.
What were they? They were Jews and they were shul-shocked.
“My father, alav ha’shalom,” Sarah said, “always wondered what it was like to travel by ship, always hoped to sail to the Holy Land. Only his books are left to cross the waves.”
They had been taken from the pigsty and carried onto the ship, where they were locked in a large chest then stowed like pirates’ treasure. Inside each book, the written breath, inhaled and held. A library for the future in the language of the not-yet-forgotten.
If only we could have opened the chest, spread wide the books’ wings and let each letter lift from the pages, fly over the distant horizon, a murmuration of words, an escaping sigh. And if only these letters could have raised Sarah, the Do?a, the rabbi and the others, lifted them from the deck on their tiny black wings. If only they could have carried them into the sky and beyond the reach of fire, if only they could have left the ship without a single word, without a single living soul.
But we were in sight of land when a ship came fast upon our starboard side. We were but a pitseleh pipsqueak with few guns and this craft, a big bulvan carrack with cannonfire bursting from its broad sides, and soon we were bleeding in reverse as wounded ships do, the brine spilling into our insides and the Jews screaming the single long vowel of the terrified.
Then the carrack hove to beside us and we were boarded. They were Turks, sent by the Sultan to defend Granada against the Reconquista salivations of the Christian crown, but what’s a bisl robbery and slavery once you’re farpitst—dressed to the nines—for some meshugas? I mean, na, once you’re in the open ocean and you got the boots, what’s a bit of freebooting?
Our crew found their swords and made to make gehakteh leber—chopped liver—of the buccaneers, but too often it was our swabbies’ livers that were gehakt and they fell writhing upon the deck, soon to become livers no more.
I did what I could, clawing eyes and biting through the corsairs’ ringed ears, but I was not much use against blunderbuss and scimitar. These cutthroats, regarding me with eponymous desire, slashed their blades at my larynx and, also, for good measure, at my flagrantly whole body.
“Gey strasheh di vantsen—go threaten the bed bugs,” I said. “You don’t frighten me.”