Yiddish for Pirates (27 page)

The natives gathered around dancing and cheering as if the Tree of Good and Evil had suddenly blossomed on the ground before them. They made a tararam commotion of the flag-raising as if the technology of the flag were the exciting element of the story and not the part where they were being conquered. Perhaps their technology of subjugation
looked different than this. A deft slit of the throat, the hull of the head staved in by handheld rock.

A stooped older man with a flourishing Brillo pad of a beard, grey yet interwoven with coloured feathers, his sagging body daubed into a dark and greasy shadow. Moishe stood close beside him and they exchanged glances. Beady eyes instead of beads.

“Rebbe Daniel?” Moishe said.

The man continued his writhing, as if he were trying to cajole the feathers into flight.

“Shh,” he whispered in Spanish. “Don’t speak. We talk later.”

I looked around. Beneath the paint and the joyous freylech prancing and prattling, the bodies and faces of the band of secret Jews of Seville began to emerge. As if I had suddenly noticed the black-suited puppeteers behind the puppets, the Jim Crowsowitzes behind the minstrelry.

We needed to maintain the illusion. It was unclear what the consequences would be if their true identity were revealed. If Columbus were deprived of his role as first discoverer. If the functionaries of King, Queen and Inquisition learned that these wild menschen of the rainforest were really wandering Jews gambolling about the newborn Spanish soil on which rested so many hopes and symbols.

For now, this carnivalesque charade was exactly what they had expected. These palsied savages had leapt, gaping and mooning out of the pages of Sir John Mandeville, Herodotus, and other tales of the exotic.

The best disguise was to be recognizable.

Moishe remained silent. He did not betray his recognition save for a cocked eyebrow and a crooked, shlemiel-faced smile.

Martín and Vicente Pinzón conferred with Columbus. Then they spoke to Luis de Torres. He, in turn, spoke a goulash of tongues, including Hebrew, to Rabbi Daniel, feathered greybeard leader of this wild island race of tropical woodwose. Torres employed a too-loud voice, the international carrier of communication between cultures, as well as a colourful Berlitz of inscrutable gestures.

The rebbe did not, or pretended to not, understand. Chimplike, he bent and leapt, then grunted like a meshugener.

Torres returned to Columbus and nodded.

“And so,” Columbus announced, as if to history, “we venture into the interior. We seek villages, signs of mining and of agriculture. Gold. Silver. And, perchance, the civilized masters of these people.”

Moishe went to stand with those likely to be assigned to guard the boats and thus, according to the mysterious physics of management, was so assigned. As soon as the party, led by the neoprimitive rising and falling gait of Rabbi Daniel, disappeared into the jungle, Moishe motioned to a group of Vursht Nations people to follow him. We walked the beach and found a thicket where the jungle palms grew close and Moishe and I tucked ourselves behind its leeward side.

Two of the hidden Jews, hidden now inside the painted skins covering their pale paunchy bodies, scurried along the beach after us, singing a conspicuously harmless tune.

“Benito,” Moishe exclaimed. “And Samuel—can it be so?” He beamed with delight. I had told how Samuel’s kishkas had been lobscoused by Turkish musketoon, how he fell dead to the deck.

They, too, smiled and regarded Moishe, now a grown man, with wonder. Years had passed since they had last seen him. He, too, had new skin.

“The
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
sail the Ocean Sea looking for something new and the newest thing we find is you? So I have to ask: Come here often?” Moishe said.

“We could ask the same question,” Samuel replied. “How far do we have to sail to elude the Inquisition? We cross half the world to get away from Spain and then Spain comes to us.”

Moishe: “We must speak with haste. I fear it is but a small island and Columbus will soon return.”

“Yes,” Benito said. “We have discovered that there is not much to discover.”

“How is it you sailed here?” Moishe asked.

“Our ship is moored in a hidden cove on the island’s other side,” Samuel began. “A caravel from Doña Gracia’s fleet. The rebbe will keep it from the Spanish. What else they may discover, they will not discover this.”

“Soon after we arrived in Morocco, a new old persecution began,” Benito said. “We thought to sail to the Canaries, or perhaps the Fortunate Isles, the Ilhas Cassiterides—the islands of Tin and Silver—the Madeiras, or some new island in the Ocean Sea. Perhaps Prester John would be as kind to Jews as he is said to be kind to Mohammedans. But there was a storm and then an ocean current took us we knew not where. It seemed forty years wandering the wet desert.”

He wiped his hand across his damp black forehead, revealing an olive blaze of naked skin.

“When we saw the island, we sang as Miriam sang when the Children of Israel crossed the Red Sea.”

Samuel: “We did not expect the Spanish or their Inquisition.”

“Columbus has no interest in Inquisition,” Moishe said. “He sails only to fill his map with discoveries, his pockets with gold, and his ears with praise.”

“Still, we are prisoners escaped from the Spanish crown and their attempt to bake us. We would be captured if recognized,” Samuel said.

“Pitch-daubed in island haute couture as you are, I warrant you safe,” Moishe said. “You cut a fine figure in such fashion.”

Benito: “We had little choice seeing the Spanish ships rising over the horizon.”

Samuel: “We thought our brains boiled by hunger and dread.”

Benito: “We hoped the ships would sail past. When they sailed toward shore, we prepared our disguise.”

“We are lost, yet do not wish to be found,” Samuel said. “But how long can we pretend to be what we are not?”

“Samuel means that we are glad to see you. We are grateful that you saved us in Spain,” Benito said. “But we hope you will leave. We hope your Captain Columbus hurries on his search for real islanders, the mainland, or gold.”

“Ay,” Samuel said. “For already, we are part found out. We were gobstruck to see the Spanish. More gobstruck still, to hear Hebrew. So one of us—Salomon—blurted back Hebrew to the translator who spoke the holy tongue.”

“Let’s hope his memory was drowned in wine,” Benito said.

“Today, it surfaced,” Moishe said. “But perhaps when sober, with no new Hebrew, he’ll think it but the meshugas phantasms of wine-brained shikkery.”

There was a borasco of shouts and bootfalls. Columbus had returned.

“Tell us quickly: the reb wants to know if in these last years, you have knowledge of Sarah … or more exactly, of her father’s books,” Samuel said.

“Ach, my Sarah,” Moishe said wistfully. “I thought we would be married.”

“First love,” I said. “He carries it with him like a fracture that never properly heals. Or like syphilis.”

I did not intend then to give tongue to what intelligence I had gained, but, na, there’s no greater ache than an untold story.

When you need to plotz, you need to plotz: I told them what I’d heard of Doña Gracia, how she’d married a Neapolitan count so his money could help Jews. Of Sarah and her capture, of the books and theirs. I had not heard of either since they’d been carried up the gangplank and gone south with the Turks toward an uncertain future.

I did not mention what was inside either the books or Sarah. Those were texts I did not yet know. But, I worried for the tsuris that might come to both.

The Shlepp-and-Kvetchit Jews looked at me with some surprise. They did not know that, though a bird, I was a mensch. That I could speak with intelligence.

Azoy? Were they the only ones who sometimes had needed to hide their words inside?

Down the beach, several small mammals had been hunted and hog- or perhaps opossum-tied to several sticks bridged between sailors’ shoulders. These big macher huntsmen had likely blasted arquebus shot
through the fist-sized kishkas of these small wild things, now as much hole as not.

The rabbi-as-island-chief led the procession, shaking his fists and frightening the clouds with a whinneying recitation of his ninnyhammer Torah.

“And,” Benito said, as he scuttled back toward them. “It’s not Rabbi Daniel but his brother, Nalfimay. Rabbi Daniel was pitched into the sea. A lifetime of wisdom lobbed over the gunwales like bad meat.”

“Such evil.” Samuel spat into the surf and ran after him.

A fire was made. Opossums were cooked.

Kosher?

Opposums have no hooves and do not chew cud.

So: not kosher.

But, nu, what’s a bit of Leviticus when you’re hungry, and the nearest rabbi is on the sea floor. Besides, the best way to appear as if a place is home is to eat some of it.

And so, the Jews ate.

I myself was glad to be considered companion and not poultry—keneynehoreh—and always ready to speak against the roasting of my soul, the fricassee of my mortal body for shmaltz and fislach, fat and chicken feet.

The New World Jews and conquerors gathered together on the shore. Moishe was able to signal to Samuel in a clandestine semaphore of eyebrow and finger indicating that he would communicate nothing of his true identity and yet would strive to return. And soon after, Columbus, after having stuck his colonizing toe in what he took to be the door to Cathay, Cipangu, or an outlander island to the Indies, had his men row back to the ships and ready themselves. We’d sail to stick that same toe in other and, he hoped, more golden sands.

And what else? Just a little thing. Columbus had two burly bulvans of the crew grab two islanders, Geronimovitz and Dances-with-Wolfowitz, tie them up pretty in boat ropes like powder kegs stowed in the orlop, and stick them in the bow.

When you travel, it’s important to return with souvenirs.

The two said nothing to him. What should they say?

Won’t you be disappointed when it rains and—you call this a gift?—all you’ve got is two clean Yids?

Besides, their silence would protect the others.

The skiffs were hoisted from the brine. Columbus, prophetic Ocean seer, conveyed his orders and the bo’sun—an Aaron to the admiral’s Moses—was his master’s voice, speaking to the hands and causing them to scuttle over the ship like crabs. The anchors heaved, the sheets hauled, the yards lifted, and the sails set. We began searching for other pearls to stud the twin diadems of Spain.

Chapter Two

The three ships sailed, three water-borne Magi from the east. The Ocean Sea was smooth as a river, a delicate robin’s egg blue, the air scented with blossoms of island flowers.

That evening, Pedro Gutiérrez saw a great whale breaching, spouting a fountain of water high into the air. At two bells on dog watch, Rodrigo Sanchez observed several large sea creatures that resembled something between tuskless walruses and great sad bloodhounds. We’d later learn the native name, “manatí,” from their word for breast. An accurate name if one expects to see breasts the size of cows, the colour of stones, floating bloated and amiable around the ocean, a forlorn and loveable expression signalling their harmlessness.

The two Jews were stowed on the
Niña
. We’d been on one of the first skiffs and so were unaware of their true identity. I flew over to see who they thought they were.

And so, I revealed to them that I could speak sense.

At least when I wasn’t feather-puffed geshvollen with stultiloquent blather and narishkayt.

And so they revealed who they were. Samuel and another whom I didn’t recognize named Jucef who had sailed for Doña Gracia. They were something between ongeblozn angry and befuddled.

“What will we do?” they asked.

“We’ll have the chutzpah to wait until we have a plan,” I said.

Six or seven leagues after we’d observed the frolicking of the seaborne breasts pushing up against the tide, another island rose from the flat chest of the horizon. Columbus christened it Santa María de la Concepción. We continued toward it until the blood-orange sun sank, and we anchored near a cape on the island’s westward end. The following dawn, Columbus sent a party ashore.

And so, the pattern continued.

Several more small islands, though no more congregations of European denomination. Instead, true island people with whom we exchanged hawks’ bells, tchatchkes and chazerai for small pieces of gold and good favour.

“This pig-ringed gold in your nostils, these bangles round your arms, this nugget plugged into your earlobe—from where did they come?” Columbus gestured to the natives in a handjive of international Esperanto.

South, they’d point. South.

It was apparent that there were people who came from that direction paddling in the large boats they called “canoes,” and who came bearing gold.

Or, at least, south was as good a direction as any to send the furry-faced invaders on a wild and golden goose chase.

“Midas can smooch my flea-speckled hiney for all the good this gold will do me,” Jacome scowled, bending over a barrel of manzanilla wine and filling his mug. “But these swinging rope beds, these native ‘hammocks.’ Ah, there’s something to comfort a weary sailor shaken by the tosser surf. Sleep is more good than gold to a dog-tired navvy worn-down by endless deck work and all this ‘finding.’ ”

“Amen,” Moishe said. “To invent the obvious is the mark of a true genius. To reinvent it makes one a god.”

As we landed on each new island, Columbus seized a few more natives. By this time, he was calling them
Indios
. Indians.

Bet you can’t capture just one.

Besides, what do you get for a king and queen who have everything?

We encountered cotton, silent dogs, the loincloths of pretty island maidelehs, aloe, and the unintelligible singing of birds.

“Ah. This recalls Andalusia in the spring,” Columbus exclaimed, though he must have been referring to a vernal Andalusia of his own imagination. Certainly, the naked Paul Gauguin beauty of the women turned the men’s Iberian peninsulas venal and warm.