Yiddish for Pirates (21 page)

“Bupkes,” Moishe agreed. “
Abi gezunt
. As long as we have our health.”

A week later, the ship arrived at port. Moishe and I escaped before the cargo was unloaded. The details are unimportant. So, nu, it was daring. It was full of wonder and chutzpah. Moishe, now unchained and waiting on the deck for the Holy Office, climbed the rigging and, friend to barnacles, plummeted into the dark water beneath the keel. In these times, sailors didn’t swim. Better to drown immediately rather than splash about until the inevitable end. But in the last five years Moishe had become a pragmatist, a swimmer, a breath-holder. He emerged, wet as a hatchling in the dim space beneath a distant wharf, and slipped onto land like a newly grown frog. The privateers assumed he had sacrificed himself to water in order to avoid fire.

And then?

We took eggs, some bread, a wide-brimmed hat. We stole a horse, and under a crescent moon, we rode toward Granada, “the pomegranate.” The Spanish wouldn’t be interested in Moishe there; they were interested in the city itself. Granada: the last Muslim city in Iberia, an Islamic fruit lodged uncomfortably under the expanding tuches of Christian Spain.

As if it were ongeshnoshket, the road staggered from side to side as it climbed the Sierra Nevadas. By midday, breaded by dust, we came to a hillock. A small spring was tucked into its hip like a sidearm. It was no more than a piss-dribble soaking the gitch of the slope, but the water collected in an inviting pool. Moishe led the horse to water, and, of its own volition—for how could it be otherwise, it was a horse well versed in saws and chochmehs—it drank. Moishe stripped down and immersed his weary fleysh in the drink. I saw then the marks on his body. The red weave of whipmarks, the welts. The written weltschmerz of skin, a library of damage. And instead of his left tsitskeh nipple, there was nothing but a blind scar. His chest was a winking Creeley, a one-eyed Jack.

So, nu, he should replace it with wood as if it were a missing leg?

They say never accept a wooden nipple.

Better then to cover it with an eyepatch like a Blemmyae pirate.

There had been a fight, he said. A flash of blades slicing the air and, in this case, his chest.

“
Nisht geferlech
. Could have been worse,” he said. “I wasn’t using it, anyway.”

We finished the last of the bread and eggs.

I’m not usually one for eggs, but they were the kinder of no one I knew.

We continued on but decided, after overhearing a group of riders, to travel to nearby Santa Fe. It was 1492 and much had changed—and was about to change—since we’d last been on the peninsula. Granada was under attack. To the crown, it was an irritating Islamic grain of sand and, currently surrounded, would soon become a Catholic pearl in the clammy hands of Ferdinand and Isabella.

They had established Santa Fe, a base several miles from the city walls, but to call it a military encampment would be to call the Great Pyramid of Giza a gravestone, or to think the Grand Canyon a gopher hole.

Santa Fe was a white city of ten thousand soldiers, horses, munitions, weaponry, chapels, and it was often visited by the King and Queen of soon—ptuh, ptuh, ptuh—all the Spains. Granada was so close that one early morning, a doughty Christian knight had left Santa Fe, slipped into the city by a secret tunnel and impaled a parchment inscribed with the words “Ave Maria!” over the doorway to the main mosque. He was back in time for breakfast.

Presiding over the other buildings of Granada was the magnificent palace of the Alhambra. The Alhambra: the world broken into a thousand pieces, then repaired, like a jigsaw puzzle assembled inside a kaleidoscope.

And soon to be a morcellated jewel in the crown of Ferdinand and Isabella.

So we travelled to Santa Fe, for as Moishe said, “A tooth is safest in the dragon’s mouth.”

Chapter Four

We’d been in Santa Fe for almost a week and felt the Spaniards’ rising excitement. And now, in the bright morning, Sultan Abu ’abd-Allah Muhammad
XII—
Boabdil—was taking part in a carefully planned endgame. Dressed in silks and gold, he left the city with only a few emirs and a modest retinue of a hundred mounted men. He would bring his Moorish lips, more accustomed to dainties and the buxom delicacies of his harem, to the soft and scented hands of Ferdinand and Isabella,
Los Reyes Católicos
. He would surrender Spain to the Christians.

There had been a deal. They had his son. He had the key to Granada and the last remaining jigsaw piece to a completed Catholic Spain.

They met on a rise of land outside the city. The Spanish had already begun redecorating: royal banners flew from the Alhambra, the colours of Ferdinand and Isabella and the Christian cross. Boabdil climbed down from his horse and approached their highnesses. He began to get down on one knee, but Ferdinand held up his hand. No. They would not accept the key to Granada and the Sultan’s proffered kiss.

This was in the script. A nursemaid guided a small boy toward him. His son. He had been a hostage since the beginning. Boabdil bowed and then he and his son walked back to the Moorish line. They climbed onto his horse and, with their dignity intact, rode away to board a ship bound for Africa.

As the unicorn said to the griffin when Noah built the Ark, “See, I told you there’s nothing to worry about.”

After this, the Sultan was called
el chico
, the little, or
el zogoybi
, the unfortunate.

But not to his face.

The royal party returned to Santa Fe, leading a procession of people joyfully singing “Te Deum.” When they entered the central square before the church of Santa María de la Encarnación, the Royals dismounted, knelt, and kissed the torso of a huge cross. “Thanks, God. Let us snog the rood in gratitude.”

Nothing excites more than the potent ragout of power and religion, particularly when accompanied by the tart spices of conquest and expulsion. The gathered crowd wept with pleasure, as did the Cardinal and Master of Santiago and the Duke of Cádiz and all the other grandees who stood there. According to what the Bishop of Leon wrote later, there was no one who did not weep abundantly.

Feh. He wasn’t watching the eyes of the Jews, the conversos, the Marranos, and the Moriscos. They wept tears in disguise, the tears of the disguised, the tears of mourners as spadefuls of earth knock against the coffin, the hollow thud of regret, the sound of ending. Neither Jew nor Muslim, converted or hidden, wanted what they knew would be the inevitable next moves in this bullfight:
tercio de muerte
toward a Christian Spain.

What was abundant was the jostling of sound and colour, the cheering and kibitzing of the crowd. The streets of Santa Fe were alive with the vivid festival of its people, exuberant with change.

“Ech,” Moishe said. “It’s going to get bad before it gets worse.”

The crowd heaved and swelled like the sea, waves of celebrants frothing toward us then being washed away. Moishe and I began in the square on the far side of the church but soon we were close to its massive doors.

We saw him on the other side of the steps.

“Oy,” Moishe said. “Over there.” It was the unmistakable figure of Christopher Columbus, standing taller and straighter than most, proud and haughty despite the raggle-taggle ongepatshket clothes he was wearing, as if a prince and the shmatte cart of Moishe’s father had had
a collision. His vivid blue eyes, his aquiline nose and high cheekbones were the same, yet he now had the wind-knurled face of a sailor. And, though it had been years since we’d seen him, his hair, long and silver, was surely white before its time. We pushed through the crowd and around the steps.

“We had not thought to see you still in this world, Admiral of the Other Side,” Moishe said to him.

“Soon I shall be in the palace of the Great Khan, looking back at you from across the ocean,” he said. “But I did not know they let parrots bring their servants here.”

“In this way, I can say that no man is my master,” Moishe replied. “You, it appears, are still looking for one that will pay you for your service.”

“None but a king or queen,” he said. “And that I hope for soon.” The crowd surged again and for a few moments, we were pulled apart.

“But Miguel Levante,” he said more quietly, “I was not able to thank you for what you did. For the rescue of my life. Since then it has been threatened many more times and I found few as ready to help as you. For that I am in your debt, if not your service.”

Moishe bowed slightly.

“Join me as I sail the Ocean Sea,” Columbus said. “To the Indies. To Cathay. To new worlds and the marvels beyond. To a choice land for the chosen. I wish to repay you with riches and adventure. You shall have gold in a land where gold is the common tongue and—ah—you shall spend it only in contented sighs.”

Certainly, Columbus had no trouble spending words with his gilded tongue. And emes, it was a good thing for it was his only means to worm through the royal earholes and into the moneyed vaults of their pride and imagination.

More than knowledge of the sea, his adventure depended on the guileless confidence and simple optimism that not only would he bump into solid land of one denomination or another—islands, continents, isthmuses, or Asia—but that his incontinent predictions allow him to discover financing.

“How shall we decide if we will go with Columbus on this non-quest to nowhere?” I asked Moishe.

“The same nothing that is not stopping us is what we have to lose,” Moishe said.

We had no script. Moishe was already a pawn who’d stepped beyond the chessboard when he’d left the shtetl and went beyond the Pale. But nu, beyond the beyond is still the beyond: perhaps an antipodean world, a world turned upside down, not converso, but inverted, where even a pawn could be king, the Jew, a citizen, and where “the land’s the limit,” the tsitskehs-over-tuches birds would say. For Moishe had discovered this craven old world to be built on a foundation of blood and hatred, on power and suffering, on bile and gout. Was it possible that we could leave this world behind and all its kishka-twisting memories, nothing but the bitter taste of its language in our mouths?

“I won’t leave before I save Sarah, the Doña and the hidden Jews who I promised to save,” Moishe said. A tree grows even after an axe is sunk into its young trunk. Sometimes it raises it high. Moishe, the boychik, the blade.

For now, we went with Columbus into a soldiers’ tavern—they were all soldiers’ taverns in Santa Fe—and turned, not the world, but the wine upside down.

He had a proposal. He would address the niggling matter of funding and we would retrace our route back to his brother. There we would receive maps from Bartolomeo and return with a package. What was it?

A book, but Columbus was vague.

Sha. What’s ever gone wrong with a book?

But he had been granted a small stipend from Isabella, perhaps only to dissuade him from seeking sponsorship from the King of France or Portugal. He offered to lighten our load with some of this silver.

Was it a good idea? Ach, ask the silver.

Our plan. First, steal a horse. Next, steal away to Lisbon.

Chapter Five

Several months later: returned from Portugal, we crept into Granada, prodigal rats skulking up a gangplank. Columbus would not be in the city until some weeks hence. He was tilting not at windmills but at moneybags, hoping that if he pricked them right, they’d plotz gold for the voyage.

Moneybags east and west:

Luis de Santángel, a converso from Aragon.

Francisco Piñelo, a Genoese living in Castile.

And from the church: not blood from a stone, but gold from atonements: indulgences sold for profit could raise more than half the necessary millions of maravedis. Columbus also ran at full tilt toward friends who dealt not in Sunday goodness but in sundry goods, such as slaves.

So what had happened since we were away?

Gornisht. Nothing important.

Some months had passed.

So, nu. They passed. It’s a life.

In March, Ferdinand and Isabella had signed a decree. The Jews of Spain must leave by the end of July.

Or turn Christian.

As if that were as simple as converting from imperial to metric.

After their Catholicizing, Jew-spitting majesties had so decreed at the Alhambra, itself now converted, Don Isaac Abravanel, a Jew who had been both their advisor, tax farmer, money lender and treasurer,
offered them more than a Shylock’s-weight in gold to rescind the law. They were considering the plenty of his plea, when the Queen’s own confessor, none other than the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada himself, strode in, a righteous and red-caped storm, a cross in his fist.

You should know: He was descended from Jews. So, nu. We all have our cross to bear.

Torquemada was
unger bluzen
angry and his brain boiled with the fury of a witch’s unbaptized brew cooking over hellfire. He looked at Abravanel, bargaining before
Los Reyes Católicos
and shouted, “I wouldn’t piss in his traitorous mouth if his soul was on fire.” Then he hissed at the Queen, “Judas sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Now you would sell him again?” He pitched the cross across the room. It hit Isabella in the head.

And so, the Queen bled blue, the Edict stood, and the Jews had to leave or change from Yiddishe maggots to Christ-fearing flies.

Did Abravanel change his tune when the piper refused his money?

“Don Isaac,” Isabella said, “since you have been of great service and are much loved, we would consent for you to remain in our kingdom as a Jew. We would allow nine others to remain with you to pray before your God as required by your faith.”

Bowing deeply before the Queen, Abravanel advised her of his intention to travel to Naples but, ever the wheeler-dealer schacher-macher, on the way out he bargained for two extra days for the Jews in Spain and then for lenience in what they could take with them.

The Great Expectorators, Ferdinand and Isabella. They were surprised how many Jews chose to leave. Certainly, many Jews converted, especially those who had a well-heeled leg up. Who would step down and walk away from such privilege?