Yiddish for Pirates (28 page)

There was lush fruit and talk of cannibals. There were new animals to eat.

I sat on Moishe’s ragged shoulder as he rowed a skiff to the shore of what would soon be “Fernandina.” Then the curdling of my own spirit: the scent of death twisted into a braid of smoke, a bloodknot round my brain.

On the beach, skewered bodies and the barbecue of souls—if indeed we parrots have such a weak thing wisped around the spindle of our spines. The native fiends were cooking parrot.

I would rescue, would resurrect those I recognized by scent alone. Their plumes radiant green and blue, their throats red, their beaks Englishflesh pink. I was seized with horror, yet also tender desire. I would salve and groom. Would nestle and preen. Ach, my sheyneh kindred. My petal-florid New World brethren. It had been awhile. I would shtup with grey cloaca your coat of many colours.

Except that you were dead.

Feh.

The soul stirs for the other that is the same.

The skiff bumped into the sand and I woke from my reverie. The beach a Dieppe of death. I threw myself into the air and up over the canopy of trees.

I left the world of men behind.

A long flight of uninterrupted green.

Then there was a river.

Falling from a cleft in the rocks, its water turned to thunder and cloud.

A waterfall.

Azoy? you say. Really?

High in the tall trees, the bright flash of feather rampiking my insides.

Another bird. A bright island parrot.

Take the gloaming shades of an African Grey. Let them be coloured vivid by Fernández the painter. From the indistinct shoals of stone to the shocking bright of the jungle. Green. Red. Blue. Take the atoms of the world and pack them closer together to make such colour.

I landed on a branch nearby.

How should I speak?

What is the green language of the birds? The pigeon’s pidgin, the avian lingua franca, the conference call of the birds.

The parrot on the near branch said nothing. It lowered its head. It fanned its tail. There was deep cooing that I felt in the mortal worm of my innards. It cocked its blue-green head, exposing the hibiscus crimson of its throat.

I knew nothing.

This parrot.

Male.

Female.

Without category.

I could read the language of its colours. The riotous map of its markings. Its illegible scent.

There was a feeling of avalanche as if a great river were moving through me. As if my brain were regurgitating itself. As if a thousand thousand courtship rituals were jangling through the interstellar dulcimer flash of our wings.

I was a pirate. A lovebird. A great ship. A cannon.

The bird preened my neck and chest. My lower body span like a pinwheel.

My vent would soon explode. We rubbed beaks.

I leapt upon the parrot.

It shrieked and hissed.

We pressed our vents together. I rubbed. Azoy, I hissed. I shtupped. I shtupped. I shtupped.

Ach.

Ach.

Ach.

Oy.

Oy.

Oy.

Oy.

Oy.

Nu.

And then it was over.

I looked around. I had lost my mind. There in the shaking green leaves of the rainforest, my body mutinied and I had shtupped this parrot.

I had seen no other for many years.

He and I—for soon I would discover that he was indeed a he—had made the bird with two backs, one both grey and multi-coloured, and with wings enough for both joy and regret.

Am I, too, converso, hidden, changed? A rewritten book, a new calligraphy of desire with a few blotchy wet-spots and a misspelling or two?

I remember an old saying: “Man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end—and in the meantime it is good to drink vodka.”

I wished there were some schnapps then. Some hooch to clarify things by addling me tseshtrudelt.

So. An explorer arrives on a desert island. It’s uninhabited except for one old rabbi. Long white beard, rags for clothes, coconut-shell shoes, a ragged prayerbook tucked under his skinny parsnip arm. His skin is
cooked dry as the prayerbook’s cover. Reb Hershel lives by the shore in a lean-to of branches, leaves, bones and feathers. But, at each end of his island, there is a fine building. Each of these two synagogues is tall, smooth and well made, with a Magen David—a Jewish star—of little blue stones set into its chiselled hardwood dome.

“Tell me, Rabbi,” the explorer asks. “There’s only one of you. Why have you built two shuls?”

“Feh,” the rabbi spits, then points at one of the synagogues. “That one I don’t go to.”

I thought to myself, “Is that how it’s supposed to work with the sexes?”

Ach. But how could I have known? Emes. With a shvants that’s tucked away inside, it’s hard to tell, especially when the feathers are foreign.

So. Nu. We have no penis. It’s in the mind and is mighty as a schooner. A
Flying Dutchman
, it glimmers with the iridescence of a comet riding the sky, and, takeh, is powerful and invisible as God.

The island parrot turned toward me. He tilted his head, gazed into my left eye with his right. I could see the delicate transparent third eyelid closing then opening again, the corona of tiny feathers around the eye.

Did he know?

The stutter and aphasia of our pheromones. The inscrutable whisper of our plumage. We could not speak, except in the language of shtup and gesture, and this served only to make communication more farblondzhet confused.

He bobbed his head a few times and then lifted off into the air. I watched as he rose about the treetops, the fluorescence of his great coloured wings bright against the blue sky.

I was hungry and felt like a nosh.

Nu? We had not yet learned of cigarettes.

The jungle was a fruit-bowl Eden. Below me, flesh, zaftik and luscious, hung invitingly from branches, unfamiliar fruits on strange and unfamiliar trees. Even their shadows were of a different shade.
Several fruits had fallen and split open, spilling black seeds from their yellow-green skin onto the jungle floor. Insects crawled over their soft orange insides. A sweet odour between ripeness and rankness.

I ate and sweet juice dribbled from my beak. This new world had baptized me from both ends.

Chapter Three

When I returned there were only a few pitiful molecules of burnt parrot left wafting over the beach. The air had been cauterized by death and barbecue. Moishe was standing with Columbus, Luis de Torres and a young native man.

“Diego,” Columbus said. “Diego Columbus.” Columbus was pointing at the young man, naming him, claiming him by sticking his finger into his thin chest. He had named the man after his own son, Diego, as he had named the islands after his king, his queen, and his God.

Luis de Torres spoke then. Diego Columbus the native had become Diego Columbus the translator. He was being taught Spanish and he was teaching Luis his native tongue. Two tongues intertwining, this French kissing of linguists.

I landed on Moishe’s shoulder. Diego looked at me and said something.

Maybe it was the native word for bird.

Or lunch.

“Aaron,” Moishe explained, introducing me.

“Ahh-rown,” Diego said.

Shortly thereafter, the sailors gathered their tchatchkes, swords, and a selection of tropical fruits, meats, islanders, a newly made translator, and boarded the skiffs to return to the ships.

I don’t know what word Diego Columbus used to describe his situation, but he might consider: stolen, shipped, transported.

Gaffled and blagged.

Crimped.

The sun sank red like a boil on the seatmeat zitsfleysh of the sky and by the next day, October 28, we had arrived at what Columbus decided was the firm land, the mainland.

Cuba, which he called Juana.

It was the same recipe.

Land. Conquer. Repeat.

Luis de Torres recorded the events for Columbus.

October 28, 1492. Here are palm-roofed houses, barkless dogs, a technology of fishing tackle, clay figurines and silver ornaments.
Los Indios
are timid and artless regarding weapons. They quake at our arquebus. Here grow sea plums, shore lavender, beach morning glory, cedar, and a riotous concatenation of roots known as mangroves. Here are placid rivers, their edge and surface teeming with small frogs and great parti-coloured birds. The natives make chairs of hardwood in a Noah’s Ark of animal shapes.

And so too do they gather certain herbs that they wrap in dry leaf and then enflame. The smoke of this they inhale, by which they become benumbed and almost drunk, and so it is said they do not feel fatigue. This burning leaf we have begun to call “muskets,” but they term “tabacos.”

“Avast, a cloudy lungful of this fuming would be fine satisfaction after festive conjugation with a slattern,” Jacome snorted after a huff of the leaf.

“Aye,” said Fernández the painter, dragging the twilight air from the burning herb and exhaling slowly as if his sighs were ghosts. “Its smouldering tendrils, curling round me as I gaze into the gloaming margins of my own mind, would be a fog of sure drama for those acolytes who would watch me await the faint tintinnabulations of the muse.”

When they smoked, there was always time for talk. Sometimes words can, in certain moments of grace, attain the quality of important deeds.

And emes, the men were quick to enslave themselves to this tobacco, taking to it as to drink. They sucked and posed, they gathered and
kibitzed. This tobacco soon became an existential theatre of smoke and camaraderie.

Though nu, a surfeit of enthusiasm caused some to surrender their insides to the outside world in a foaming cascade of near-Iberian expulsion, some alchemy turning smoke to puke even as a zeal for wine can turn the body into the quaking spawn of hammers and swill.

Geyt gezunterhayt
. Go in good health, humans.

I, too, puffed this russet leaf, but beside the polychrome tragicomedies of the Orient’s hashish, it was but the poor exhaust of ferns.

And Moishe? Luftmensch no more, he engaged with the breath of the physical world and smoked himself green.

We spent the days on land, learning from
Los Indios
, for Martín Pinzón had convinced Columbus that the ships needed to be careened and caulked, barnacles riven from their soggy ballix.

Which is a good medicine for any sailor.

“I, too, would delight in doing nothing but lying on my side like a ship in cool water,” Moishe said. “My gildeneh oder golden veins swabbed by a gentle team.” His gildeneh oder. His hemorrhoids. “Though I’d hope for mermaids and the lithe bodies of pretty island girls instead of this stumbling and bristly crew.”

Columbus was certain we were on a mainland. That Cuba was not an island. But nu, if it isn’t water, all land is—eventually—an island. And all men, ultimately, islanders.

After three days in Cuba, Columbus sent explorers down the shore both east and west. And what did they find? More shore. More sons of beaches, more littoral daughters but no large villages, great khans, Cathay emperors, or gold.

After three more days, the admiral sent Luis de Torres and Rodrigo de Xerez inland with two Indians, including Diego Columbus.

Christopher Columbus paced the shore, consulted his astrolabe, his charts, his logbook, and, when it appeared that he was unobserved, the book that we had ferried from his brother. The rest of the crew worked on or under the ships and traded chazerai with the islanders. Some loincloth-chasing shiksa-trollers whose shvants were the true
admiral and viceroy of their fate contrived to engineer discreet assignations with pretty, young Indio girls in the cool murk of evening.

The music of Spanish in the deep woods:

“Come here often?”

“Anyone ever tell you you look just like that painting of Mary in the chapel at Los Palos?”

And some afternoons, Moishe, too, would slip away into the cool of the green canopy of trees and meet a maideleh. Maybe there was the steady burning of memories of Sarah, but here he followed his wick to the flame.

And sometimes, hidden under the loose calico of his shirt, he would bring the book that hate-torqued mad-hatted Torquemada had given him.

There were five books, each of which spoke of a life everlasting.

Ach. There are some books, even with the patience of Job’s boil-wrangling dermatologist and an immortal life, few could spare the time to read. All words and no meaning. All lid and no Yid. All Columbus and no gold.

What were these five books?

He knew of one.

The almost translucent leather binding of Torquemada’s book made one afraid to hold it, or careful to hold it tenderly. “There, there, little bubeleh book, everything will turn out for the best.”

In the jungle, Moishe puzzled over its sigils. Its strange almost-words. Its farmishteh calligraphy that appeared more navigation map of a twisted Meccano alphabet than real writing.

“Why would Torquemada need to hide this? Its meaning is hidden by its words.” Moishe pointed to the opened book. “So, nu, maybe like a women’s knish, it looks strange until you know what to do with it.”

Feh. This feygeleh should talk about knowing what to do.

I had mistaken up from down. Or myself for myself.

“This is different than my father’s book,” Moishe said, pointing to a page. “Yet these books are cousins. Or shvester. Sisters. The same bend in the nose. The slope of the shoulders.” He turned to another page. “Look at this …”

It was filled with Magen Davids. Stars.

“Some kind of constellation,” Moishe said, connecting the stars with his finger.

“Above which land is the sky filled with Jewish stars?” I said.

“Emes,” Moishe said. “Next year in Jerusalem.”

We examined other pages under the slats of light flickering between leaf shadows.

“Somewhere there’s a key, a legend that explains,” Moishe said. “Maybe the other books,” he said, turning to other pages. “Maybe they explain.”

“Ach, who needs immortal life?” I answered. “It’s but a larger sack to fill with misery.”

“But it works the other way, too,” Moishe said. “Trouble would scatter like ashes in the wind over a life-without-end. And anyway, it’s the Fountain of Youth, so you’re made young again. Younger than your memories, younger than your pain.”