Yiddish for Pirates (26 page)

Two nights later, we could hear more birds calling overhead in the darkness. I did not know these birds or their voices. A vast crowd muttering “watermelon” in a language I had never heard.

Then the crew of the
Niña
found a small branch bearing delicate blossoms and soon after, the men of the
Pinta
collected from the sea: a cane, a stick, a piece of board, a plant that clearly was born on land, and another little stick fashioned, it appeared, with iron, so intricate was its working. We, on the
Santa María
, found nothing but a vast collection of waves.

Early morning, October 10. Morning watch. Two bells. Columbus high on the forecastle as if he were about to present us—Aspirin-like—with the two tablets of the law. Instead, he announced that he would award a coat of silk to the first sailor to sight land.

Just what any wind-and-salt bitten sailor wants on the other side of the world: a shmancy silk shmatte to wear when swabbing and breaming and when hauling a shroud in a skin-luffing gale.

Later that afternoon at three bells of the watch, a sailor high up in the rigging shouting excitedly,
“Tierra! Tierra!”
Domingo de Lequeitio pointed in frenzy to the larboard-side horizon. A scurrying of the watch to the gunwale. The admiral striding out of his cabin in the forecastle. Men on deck coming to consciousness on their straw pallets, blinking
in the light, fonfering the primeval waking thought, “Huh?” Moishe, too, awakening. In a moment, I was in the air then high on the foretop yardarm. Could it be that we were somewhere, or just before?

Eyes puckered under awnings of hand in the dazzle of bright light.

It didn’t look like land to me.

“That,” said Columbus looking toward where Domingo was pointing, “is a cloud.”

I heard Jacome abaft, muttering beyond the captain’s hearing, “A cloud be good land for us, for soon we be memberless as angels, our pizzles snapped like dead twigs from off a dried-out tree, else we find fresh water or solid land for our watering.”

The crew, as mocking angels, flapped their crooked arms like celestial chickens then made their groins shvantsless with shielding hands.
“Tierra, tierra,”
they jeered at Domingo de Lequeitio high up the foremast. The frivolity lasted only moments until, as a man, they had the realization that they yet remained landless.

Columbus had not appeared to notice this outbreak of heavenly poultry. He had installed himself on the bowsprit, straining his eyes into the Ouija-board distance, attempting, it seemed, to summon forth shore like a spirit from the Olam ha-Ba beyond. He remained like a figurehead, through three watches, willing land to appear, Columbus both dowser and dowsing stick, remembering Exodus. “ ‘We are in the wilderness, Lord, What shall we drink?’ Like Israelites, we seek ‘the twelve wells of water, the threescore-and-ten palm trees. We would encamp there by the waters. Lord, bring us land.’ ”

Later that night, seven bells into a dog watch, Domingo de Lequeitio, Columbus and Rodrigo Sanchez observed a dim flickering. I woke Moishe who was sleeping through some kind of illness, and he saw it, too. Though the moon was but a shtikl less than full, the light was not mere moonshine. There was the orange tinge of fireblaze, small and turbulent, a bonfire on a distant shore. The men on watch took note, whispering quietly to each other, but avoiding the ostentatious mekhaye hoo-hah of hope and celebration and the eventual disappointment of the previous afternoon.

Even Columbus, usually given to chisel-worthy pronouncements spoken in doughty capital letters, only nodded to the pilot, indicating, “Sail toward the light.”

The following night, two hours after midnight, after the fourth bell of the dog watch had sounded.

An arquebus fired into the night sky from the poop deck.

What happens on a ship at 2 a.m. when, without warning, there is a shot?

The rational grog-soused mariner, drowsy and hypnogogic on his pallet, can only assume a murderous infestation of ocean-borne invaders sharp with the flesh-kebabing talons of raptors and blistering with the halitosis of harpies.

Or else the sighting of land.

Under a full moon, Rodrigo de Triana, a sailor from Seville, had seen
una cabeza blanca de tierra
, a white stretch of land.

“
Tierra!
” he called. “
Tierra!
” And for good measure, he again shot the arquebus at the stars.

Perhaps I should consider it auspicious that on this day, when the prodigal halves of the earth were joined once again, no bird or other flying creature was shot from the sky, keneynehoreh.

On deck, the men exulted.

The next day, October 12, 1492, we would make landfall.

If one wants to beat a dog, one finds a shtekn, a stick.

We had found a stick. Now what kind of dog would we beat?

“A golden retriever,” Moishe said and lay back on his pallet, feverish and green.

It was early morning when Rodrigo de Triana had seen land. And now we’d sailed out of night and into the next day until we were but a cannon’s blast away from what we took to be an island. The crew gathered on deck.

After months sailing the featureless ocean, heading toward nowhere but the horizon and the edges of maps, how did we feel about touching tierra firma?

Nisht geferlach
. Could have been worse.

We felt only the way a man lost in the desert would feel about a bucket of water. About a fountain of water. About a thimbleful of water. About a droplet of sweat on a camel’s tuches.

Love at first sighting.

For a season I had perched on barren masts and now there was the prospect of a living tree, heavy with leaves. Of rivers, waterfalls, and clear pools.

And perhaps there would be parrots. The pretty feathers of zaftik island parrots warmed by both sun and desire.

The firm land.

I couldn’t remember the last time.

Chapter One

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
shlepped around the great arc of the Ocean Sea and landed in what he took to be the other side of the world. A great moment.

But Moishe and I weren’t there when those of the old world first met those of the new.

Our luck.
A mensch tracht un Got lacht
. A person plans and God laughs.

Moishe was green, puking with fever and shaking with palsy. Bent heaving over the gunwales, he saw the New World, saw the sailors rowing, saw them land. He saw Columbus kneel down and kiss the reassuring shore. He saw Columbus take his sword and draw in the sand. What was it: a cross, a prayer? Was he writing, “Ferdinand and Isabella,” as if labelling luggage? Was he signing his name? “Ah, yes, my pretty picture. Think I’ll call it ‘America.’ ”

Columbus, the mapmaker, the navigator. He inscribed a compass rose on the shore, the New World a map of itself.

San Salvador, he called the island. Holy Saviour.

For it had saved him: if he had sailed to the island and it was not there, he would soon enough have discovered mutiny and the empty sea floor where the island was supposed to be.

But Moishe did not land on San Salvador. Like Moses, his namesake, he had to watch as others entered the Promised Land. And I, like
Aaron, also did not enter, though it was Columbus and his kind who worshipped golden things, who practically birthed a golden sea cow in their excitement, joined hands and danced in a ring at the thought of their true God and its value in power, prestige and purchase.

We heard the cheering of the men, heard the singing of the native people as they gathered on the beach. We heard, though we could not make out the words, the speeches given, the long prayers made by Columbus as he trod on what he thought was an older world than the one he came from. Cathay. Cipangu. India. The Indies.

There was an exchange. Food for glass beads. Shells for tchotchkes and chazerai such as little metal toys.

As night fell, there were fires. More singing. Speeches. Cheering.

Moishe slept. I stayed with him on the empty ship, my green shoulder, my blue-eyed boy. I didn’t venture onto the island. Besides, who knew if these natives, or, for that matter, the farklemteh sailors, would make of me a fricassee, spiced with who knew what delicate and unfamiliar spices?

Our men rowed back from shore. Columbus opened the casks to the crew. Laughing, singing, puking, the happy buffeting of each other’s ears like drunken puppies, late into the night until they all collapsed in a historic heap.

The following morning, the incessant blacksmithing of fiends inside each man’s skull. Inside their bellies, thirty boiling cats, cooking in roiling bilge water. Outside, the sun like a Klieg light, branding the eyes of all who attempted vision. Moishe woke as fresh-faced and pokey as the rest, which is to say, consciousness came upon him like a mallet.

Luis de Torres stumbled down the middeck, his clothing a polyglot-stippling of vomit, wine, New World sand and tropical fruit.

“Don’t tell the admiral, but the savages speak Hebrew,” he said and collapsed onto a pipa-sized barrel.

Moishe opened the slit of an eye.

“How can that be?” he asked.

“I spoke the ancient tongue and they understood. They are Children of Israel—
like us
,” Torres whispered. “We have found the Lost Tribes. Wherever we are.”

“The savages are Jews?” Moishe said.

Noble cabbages, then, I thought. Haleshkehs stuffed with exotic meat.

“I can’t believe it,” Moishe said, gripping the gunwales and hauling himself onto a knee. “This, I need my own eyes to see.”

But by then Torres was slumped over, brought back to sleep by the continuing effects of the previous night’s revelry.

“It was probably the drink talking Hebrew, not the natives,” Moishe said. “Or Torres heard himself speaking and thought it was someone else.”

“Hebrew,” I said. “It’s always backwards.”

Then it was sometime later that morning. There were no watches, no bells, only the rousing voice of Columbus ringing over the deck, and then the more strident voice of a matchlock shot, waking men from sleep, returning the ship to the regular shape of days. The men of the
Niña
and the
Pinta
, also submerged in wine-addled shlof, were woken by the shot as it reverberated off the jungle trees fringing the shore. A landing party was established to return to the island. Moishe was to carry baskets and jars to lubricate the parley. Columbus had others bring flags.

The native people were already on the beach, made restive by the matchlock shot. As we rowed closer, I could see they were almost naked, though the entire surfaces of their bodies were rudely emblazoned in black and white paint. Both men and women had coloured feathers woven into their hair, the men having feathers intertwined with their long beards. Feh. My parrot skin turned gooseflesh beneath my bristling plumage. A broch. Imagine the naked skins of the countless plucked and farkakte. The islanders jumped around in an ungainly dance, springing back and forth from skinny chicken polke leg to leg as if sandcrabs had nested in the ragged loincloths that covered beytsim or knish. Closer still, I heard their savage chanting, a disorganized ululation punctuated by guttural roars. If they were the Lost Tribes, they’d lost more than Assyria and Middle Eastern sand. Sense and civilization, for instance.

Surely what Hebrew they knew could be little more than a child’s blather. They were
vilde chayes
—unruly children. Calibans of the isle. There wasn’t a Yiddisher kop—a sensible mind—among them.

“How do they survive?” Moishe said. “Look at their bellies, their scrawny skillington arms.” Though their hair was curly, they were not the burly-shouldered bulvans that we had expected, tall and thick-limbed as the Ethiopes bought out of Africa.

I could see by the ill-stuffed pallets of their bodies that, since they walked out of history two thousand years before, they had not learned how to hunt or harvest healthy gezunteh food.

“They are simple and wild,” Moishe said. “But something
klemt mir in hartsn
—something grasps my heart.”

“You should watch what you eat,” I said. “Maybe fewer sardines.”

The skiff’s keel scudded into the sand of the shore and the men scrambled out. They crowded around us, crowing, shraying, mewling as we walked up the beach.

“Gevalt,” Moishe said and froze, his eyes wide, his jaw open. His bones were replaced by the ice of ghosts.

Then, after a minute, “I …” he whispered to me. “I … I know these people.”

The sailors returned to the boat and, like pallbearers, carried a large flagpole up the beach. Columbus pointed at a rise of land near the treeline and bade the crew plant it.

The first thing we built in this new world was a hole.

Soon, after some tottering, they had raised the flag. On the map of the world, a mark: you are here. You, the subject of Aragon and Castile, of the crowned F and Y that now flapped for the first time in a Caribbean wind.