But for most it was, “you may lead a horse to holy water but soon enough, if you need glue, he’ll be glue.”
Foreskin and seven years ago, ach, even longer than that, a hundred years maybe, many had converted after some pogroms, but now they took to the roads and fields, shaking tambourines and beating drums, struggling, falling sick, dying. When they arrived at the shore, they wailed and shrayed, men and women, the leathery and the soft. “Adonai, merciful God, surely you will again part the seas and make a road for us out of this farkakteh land.”
Nes gadol hayah poh. A great miracle happened here. The sea sloshed and sparkled, the blue crenellations of the waves were surmounted by foam. The seemingly endless sea heaved and tossed, the great ocean was a living, breathing thing, made only of water, brought to life by transcendental sighs.
A liquid Golem. A wonder.
But it did not part.
They had to take boats, wailing on the whale road, hoping for peace on the other side.
The Jews were allowed to take what they could carry: jewels, bonds, cash, children, books, their future, the old, their worries. We heard of someone whose belly was cut open because some bulvan thought he’d eaten his gold to hide it.
True, if it had been possible, many would have shouldered their houses, cows, their anvils and orchards, taken the old Spain with them. But some things are too heavy to carry, though nothing weighs as much as uncertainty.
Except, perhaps, the sea.
We crept through the streets of Granada.
“We’re lox-Jews, ”Moishe said. “Swimming against the tide. We’re sneaking back into Egypt.”
“Reverse-Moses and Aarons,” I said.
Moishe was concealed in a dark cloak. I flew over the moonlit roofs, keeping watch. So naturally, when he turned the corner of an alley, a face appeared.
“I see that unlike most, your shadow is above you,” the face said.
“Se?or,” Moishe replied. “I seek only my master’s door this night. I travel with but a regular kind of dark.”
“But I have seen this shadow once before,” it said. “This bird was at Do?a Gracia’s, as were my paintings. You should not be sneaking around these times, they grow ever more unsafe.”
The painter.
We hadn’t recognized him. There were many faces in our recent past, murderous, friendly, duplicitous and double-chinned.
“Meet me next day,” the painter said. “I work on the distant horizon: the landscape in a portrait of the Queen.” We would meet behind her gold-kirtled back while the Queen attended a parade in celebration of herself.
We continued to the tavern where we were to leave the sack for Columbus. What greater safety than the shtarker-shikkered shadows of an alehouse beneath a brothel? Its staggering occupants cared only for flesh, the fist and the firkin, not for a cartographer’s gift to his brother. And a face-to-face with a member of the Holy Office would be unlikely. Priests did not frequent common houses. They engaged specialists to genuflect before them, to receive their sweaty and unholy secret sacrament.
We were to look for Jacome el Rico, a Genoese sailor. He had a scar down one side of his face in the shape of a zayin, though apparently the Diego who did the deed was not a master of Hebrew calligraphy for, we were told, the letter was nearly illegible.
Moishe walked down the steps and pushed open the door to the tavern.
A hairy stump of a man approached us. “I wants that Polly on your shoulder. Sell it me and these coppers are yours,” he said, thrusting two dun-coloured coins into Moishe’s face. “Refuse and I’ll drive a hawse hole through your giblets an’ wear your jawbone as me bangle.” The subtle scent of unwashed rat was keen on his Sirocco breath.
So, nu, he was a humble tzadik scholar interested in the Talmud and its elaboration of righteousness.
But Moishe, having recently acquired philosophy from the hurly-burly yeshiva of the farmisht and shaken world, engaged the kishkas of this scholar with an unrelenting syllogism: the major premise of knee, followed by a minor premise of fist, resulting in the conclusion that this man, lying on his back and gazing blankly at the rafters, possessed a material reality that could be known by the senses. Except for his own, currently having being knocked out of him.
Ach, we are all in the gutter, some of us unconscious, as we look toward the stars.
We discerned in the desiccated scrubland of his face, a scar shaped like a zayin, confirming that this was the gentle soul for whom we searched: Jacome el Rico.
His resurrection was effected by baptism with a tankard of wine and the appropriate brocheh.
“Wake, you shrunken yard-arm dog,” Moishe said. “Or should I kick the sleep from your eyes?”
The delicate poetry of first meetings.
Jacome spluttered.
“We have a compadre in Cristoforo Colombo,” Moishe said, offering the man an arm to assist in his ascent.
Columbus’s name was a magic spell. The man sprung up into a crouch like a cat on his hands and bent legs.