Yiddish for Pirates (23 page)

I’m a feygeleh parrot who has sailed many seas and travelled in many languages. How would Columbus’s greeting sound to the Great Khan?

I translate:

“Great Khan, or Lesser Khan, or Hardly-Khan-at-All, I am Brother Christopher and I was in the neighbourhood. Are you happy with your civilization? I bring Good News. Also, I am here to trade some magic beans for precious things, or else, ransack your house.”

Torquemada and Isabella heard only Jesus, gold, glory, Jerusalem. And, “Portugal, you conquer the world in your way; we conquer it in His.”

And: “first.”

And: “more.”

Columbus did not wait for a response but launched into a disquisition on distances, ancient Greeks and ocean currents.

“You could run a sword through their bodies,” Torquemada said, suddenly emerging from his chiliastic stupor. “Though it might puncture or slice, it would not injure their hinkypink souls,” he said, grinning like a chimp. “They have no souls.”

“Who?” Isabella asked.

“Heathens.”

“But, Padre, should we not wish to baptize them?”

“I hope thereby to win new lands for the Holy Church,” Columbus said.

“And I believe all people to be human,” Isabella said.

These words were fighting words then. A colourless green idea sleeping all over Europe, full of sound and fury, but, ultimately, signifying nothing.

Or, signifying plenty if you were a slave.

Isabella continued. “And some of these humans, our Lord God has chosen to allow to serve us.”

Exactly.

Who wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would sell some of its members? A barbecue joint that calls its ingredients “patrons”?

“And,” she said, “these humans, we must teach as children.”

“Then, Su Majestad,” Columbus interjected, “allow me to discover these kindling gardens for Spain. I will achieve glory, gold, new land, souls, and good servants.”

“These people cannot be human if being human is to mean anything at all. To be human is to have a soul. To be rational. To understand that there must be a Pater, Filius and a Spiritus Sanctus,” Torquemada said. “Most—such as the Africans—are, at best, human in part only.”

Columbus turned to Isabella. “Su Majestad,” he said. “These many years, I have been petitioning your illustrious Majesties. The Reconquista has been accomplished, the Jews sent into exile. If there is to be a time for Columbus, before there is no more time in this world, surely this is that time.”

He went down on one knee. “I am your humble servant, he who will bring you gold, the passage to India, the new edge of the world, great wealth, and much land, yet he who will seek, if he must, the patronage of another crown if the splendid double crown of Spain wishes to wait for the future to wash ashore like seaweed and wet sticks. Su Majestad, I believe it is God’s will that a caravel and its courageous captain should sail the new sea. We wait now only for the King and Queen.”

“Señor Columbus, we thank you for your words, for your ardent faith, your pressing enthusiasm, your sometime loyalty,” Isabella said. “As you well know, some months ago, the King and I convened a council to discuss your plea. These learned and Godly men have decided that, though your many words stir our imagination, what is unknown is too much not known. We have watched the world unfold as you talk your way around the globe, but the calculations of our council—astronomers, astrologers, cartographers, mathematicians, cosmologists, priests, bishops, navigators, scholars, those with knowledge of the ancients and the lands and distances in their books—make the Ocean Sea a moon away and not some few Canary-distances as you promise. You could wish to travel to the sky with a jump, but, unless your legs were mountains or you had a map charting where the high blue reached close, no words could take you there, and no king or queen could, even if willing, finance such a leap.

“Señor Columbus, we ask you to leave Santa Fe. Do not tarry, but go now. Your story here has reached its conclusion. It ends on this soil, not on a field lit by the sun’s far side and furrowed by Amazons.”

Columbus stood. “Su Majestad,” he said with simple dignity. He did not back away from the Queen, mincing into retreat, but turned and strode calmly from the room. For once, he had calculated perfectly. His full and brimming hopes in a slop bucket carried with poise and calibration as he walked steadily out of the door.

All were silent as the topography of the stairs was told by the waning tale of Columbus’s footfalls.

A broch tsu Columbusn
. A curse on Columbus.
A brocheh
. A blessing.

Then a wheezy hyena sawblade of a laugh from Torquemada’s pious hole, his snail tongue pressed against his palate as he rocked back and forth in the chair and hissed. Not all people were human.

Throughout the scene, the painter had continued painting, the second smaller Isabella gazing steadfastly out from the canvas. The real Isabella posing in imitation of her portrait. Staid. Stolid. Regal.

Then a flash of colour from the back wall. Limbs suddenly moving. A luffing cape. A baggywrinkle coming alive from the distant horizon of pages. A single tree from Birnam forest sprinting toward Dunsinane.

A flashing flying fish of a blade.

Some vants nobody boychik, only the down of a duck’s tuches on his chin, attempting to pay his respects to the inside of the Queen with a knife.

Assassination. It’s the worst form of succession. Except for all the others.

Moishe leapt from the wall and dived toward the younger with the raised blade. The retinue around the Queen did not move.

Dios mio!
A ear-wringing kvitch from the Queen. Torquemada did not react but saw only the transtemporal ghosts of his fanatic imagination.

Moishe embraced the assassin’s ankles and steered him from the Queen, his knife penetrating deep into the side of a lady-in-waiting.

Wait no more, maidel, the blade is here. The knife surrounded by a dress, the page’s pale sea-creature hand hanging on to its handle, Moishe hanging on the page.

Moishe grabbed the skinny wrist until the page’s fingers released, then pulled the arms behind and battened them like hatches, each to
the other, parbuckling him with his own cape. The knife remained buried in brocade, a flying jibboom over the Spanish lady’s right hip.

If beauty is skin deep, then this mamaleh should be freylech joyful for the thick Kevlar of fashion that saved her. Her frock, a fat sheath that denied a happy ending to the shtupping knife, nevertheless granted one to its wearer.

The page hog-tied, the other pages began to flock around him. The hidalgos awoke, their swords drawn, and carried the afraid knot of youth to the cell where he would be imprisoned until execution, executed until death.

In this way, he would learn. A permanent lesson.

“Ach,” as Moishe would say.
“Nifter-shmifter, a leben macht er.”

What’s it matter? As long as he makes a living.

Moishe stood in the centre of a circle of the Queen’s cortège. He was no longer background, nor invisible.

Moishe: Murderer. Freedom fighter. Fugitive.

Hero.

He reached over to the pierced lady-in-waiting and pulled out the dagger.

“A memento?” he said, holding it before her. “But not a memento mori.”

“You have performed a great deed for me, for Castile and, I trust, for King Ferdinand,” Isabella said. “What is your name and whom do you serve? Where is this lord?”

A broch. Moishe had to play this well else he share a death with the hog-tied page. And death, like music, can be shared equally by all who experience it. There is never a shortage. Life is the only thing that comes up short.

“Majesty. I am Miguel Levante,” he said, bowing low. “Whether I bear wine for a priest at chapel,” he said, rising slowly, “bring supper to a Duke in chambers, or lift sword to protect a ship from pirates, I serve my Lord God, my Queen, and her noble husband, King Ferdinand.”

I kvelled. I was proud. I had taught him well. He stood before her, confident and gracious. His slim yet sturdy body. His dark hair and monkey-butt beard. He pronounced Spanish trippingly yet without tripping. And meant none of it.

He had grown into a real mensch.

A true parrot.

“Your Excellency,” he bowed before Torquemada who had promised he would burn if seen again. But Moishe acted with such quiet calm and chutzpah that Torquemada, half fardreyt by the wash of ghosts, did not appear to recognize him.

The Queen motioned to a stunted nebbish of a man whose marmoset punim face was frozen in an expression of surprise and distaste. “Feh” seemed emblazoned on his lips.

The man reached into his doublet and procured a testicular sack that he presented before the Queen. She raised three fingers whereupon he retrieved three gold coins from within Her Majesty’s scrotum and held them distastefully before Moishe.

“I shall remember your name, Miguel Levante,” she said. “I give you this token of our gratitude.” She nodded to the nebbish who then presented the coins. “Perhaps you serve the wind or the ocean and yet no man,” she continued. “Or perhaps your master is the same as he whom you have thwarted, but yet you took a different road when the deed was close. I do not know, but God and queens forgive and reward those who choose the right path.

“This noon, our Grand Inquisitor, our sometime confessor, Torquemada, begins travel to Cordoba. I wish that you ride with him—we will provide you with a mule—and will send word to a soldier of mine who performed great service at Grenada, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba who is now at Loja. You will there be given a position and an opportunity.”

What could Moishe do? He bowed and thanked her Majesty.

A nar git un a kluger nemt
. A fool gives but the clever one takes.

Or gets out of town before the fool becomes clever and the clever one is skewered.

Chapter Seven

Late afternoon on the road to Cordoba. Moishe, a shnook on a mule in procession with various priests, shtarkers and servants on their way to hunt hidden Jews and sundry heretical bandersnatches.

Leading them, the Imperial Red Wizard, Torquemada, a breastless wraith riding a black bruiser of an Andalusian horse with a whorl of white like a galaxy on its forehead.

“It is said to be unlucky for a horse to have a marking that it itself cannot see,” he said to the Inquisitor.

“I am a Christian and so do not believe in superstition,” Torquemada replied.

At this, I held my tongue, though the temptation was great.

“But, I know who you are,” he continued. “Unlucky one, for whom death was not enough. You who seek to create the world anew. I have sent word to the Queen. You and this Genoese Quixote, Christophorus Columbus, shall sail into the west with the sinking sun, far from our work and those whom we serve. Perhaps this sun will not disappear but shall rise again over the Indies and Cathay. Perhaps it will burn over a new land. Perhaps, like any thousand-faced hero, in time, you shall return. This is no concern of mine as I shall be gone. Already it is only dust and disgust which hold my old bones together as I wait for the end.”

Torquemada folded suddenly as if his spine had turned to sand. The wizened crab of his hand disappeared into a saddlebag.

“For you,” he said, grinning with malice and cleverness, pushing something wrapped in dark cloth toward Moishe. “Take this and bury it over the Ocean Sea where it can only be found again by monsters and savages. Here it will destroy all we have worked for. Something is best hidden with those who don’t need it.”

Moishe took the package and began to unwrap it.

“Do not,” Torquemada hissed. “Beneath the cloth is a book which teaches of life everlasting—if one learns to read its secrets. But there is another book which speaks of this, as you well know, for it is the story of your people.” Torquemada’s lungs were a bellows in seizure. It was a moment before I realized that this defined laughter in the sallow dictionary of his body.

“But that old scribble is but fable and ancient geography. This one reveals a new Eden on this earth where springs a fountain that refreshes both body and soul. He who bathes there will live until the world ends, which, since you have returned again, is a thousand years. A life longer than Methuselah. In this cascade, the soul is cleansed and one begins again without memory or sin. ’Sblood, I say. Without sin, everything we have worked for would be ruined.”

Moishe nodded with solemnity. Let the blateration of the alter kaker continue. In a chamooleh’s dreck, there may be gold.

If the chamooleh eats at the bank.

If he was to be believed, the meshugener Grand Expectorator had given us a book of directions, a Michelin guide to Paradise. Finally: the visiting hours for the Tree of Knowledge and the rules about flash photography and snakes.

“But,” he said, “it’s a Jewish book. And so, requires commentary. I’m told the book has four sisters,” Torquemada continued, “each like a Talmud. The teachings of learned men. Interpretations. Explanations. Maps. Where these others are, I do not know. Now hide this and do not speak of it again.”

Torquemada began making the sign of the cross over Moishe, but stopped midway. Instead he pointed west.