But they did. So, nu, what should I have done—wait for these shtunks to make a half-chicken dinner of me? I needed a hole in my head like a loch in kop, a hole in my head. I flew up to the mainmast spar and watched. Sometimes he who watches and remembers is the best soldier. Hope without memory is like memory without hope. I planned to be an alter kaker talking a kak-storm of memories, an old bird who was also a book.
They threw Rabbi Daniel overboard. To them, he was an old man and of no value. He kicked and spluttered. Just before he went under, he looked at us, then at the sky. On his lips, a brocheh. Baruch ata Adonai … a prayer. He who had survived fire, now a victim of water. May he become the beloved rebbe of a cheder of fish, the gaon—esteemed teacher—of whales.
The pirates plundered the hold. Rolled barrels of wine onto their ship. Salt meat. Hardtack. Pickles. What stores they could carry, they carried. They carried, too, the surviving Jews. Sarah. Do?a Gracia. Bound. Beaten. Bleeding.
Samuel resisted, managing to stab an elbow into a pirate’s bristly pox-blotched punim, the pirate’s jaw suddenly tacking in a new and extreme direction. A musketoon fired into Samuel’s belly made lobscouse fireworks of his kishkas.
“Vu sholem, dort iz brocheh. Where there is peace, there is blessing,” he said and fell to the deck, a warm nosh for rats.
A buccaneer in a tawdry blood-spattered turban, the imperious balebos of the crew, pointed an arquebus as if it were his impressively tooled shlong, and made two of our surviving sailors carry the chest of books over the gangplank and into the hold of his ship. When the Turks broke the lock, I doubted they’d be filled with bookish joy.
Can books be sold into slavery?
A broch! Zong-like, they’d toss them. The rabbi’s deep-sea yeshiva would soon have a library for his scholarly fish.
Unnoticed, I flew to the Ottoman ship and hid behind the futtock shrouds. For this, I thank my grey feathers for the colours they are not.
I hid until I could be sure that their cook did not seek the sauciness of a chutzpenik parrot for a dry dish. Or that those with an arquebus had no interest in the shooting of African skeets.
Twilight like bilgewater.
I flew to the hold where the Turks kept their weary Jewish cargo, bound for the slave markets of Barbary.
“Stowaways in our own world!” Do?a Gracia was saying. “Not only our own ships: we need our own navy, our own soldiers, our own land, our own king.”
“Next year in Jerusalem …” several of the old Jews murmured, repeating the words of the Haggadah.
“We shall never have Jerusalem, not in this life. Not on this earth,” Do?a Gracia said.
“But when the Messiah comes …” one man began, but then was quiet, looking over the horizon to the distant end of the world.
“Maybe in the lands of the Great Khan,” another said. “Far from the Church and our kings. I hear there are Jews …”
“Or in Cipangu or Cathay.”
“Or Ethiope.”
“We’d have to travel to an entirely new world to find a land we could call our own.”
“Maybe the new islands discovered in the Ocean Sea.”
“Maybe,” Do?a Gracia said. “But I fear that even the moon would not be far enough.”
For now, we remained on the Turkish ship.
“Kemal Reis,” I heard the sailors sing. “Kemal Reis.” It was some time before I understood that “Kemal Reis” was the admiral of their fleet, on their way to land soldiers at Malaga.
Except for those currently engaged in the delicate art of midsea brawling, enslaving and plundering.
Ech, if only we’d been captured later, we’d not have been captured at all.
“They call Ferdinand a wise ruler?” Sultan Bajazet said after hearing of the 1492 expulsion order. “He impoverishes his own country and enriches mine.” Then he sent a decree to his provinces to welcome those expelled—both Jews and Muslims—to his empire.
“Excellency, how many to exclude?”
“None is too many.”
Turkish death, keneynehoreh, did not await the Jews, but rather those who treated them harshly or refused them admission.
But sometimes history doesn’t wait for the future. A few days after our capture, Sarah was carried onto a boat bound for the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul where she would become an exotic kaleh-moyd concubine in the Seraglio, the Imperial Harem.
Or, she’d have an audition.
She kicked and wept and clawed.
“Monsters,” she said. “Devils.”
I could do nothing but follow and become witness. When all was quiet, there’d be my words, and they would offer some comfort.
Once history is over, memory is all that’s left.
Later, a merchant sailor who had once sailed with Do?a Gracia told me what I did not know then—no one but the midwife of heaven, her sleeves rolled up in the sweet soup of stars, could have known then—but Sarah’s womb was filling with Inquisition baby, its father, a Father, and killed by Moishe.
Her audition would not go well.
Feh.
May the Sultan’s shmeckel become like a hedgehog or sea urchin: spiny and round and considered a delicacy when cooked and sliced thin.