Yiddish for Pirates (25 page)

Feh.

With no land in sight, our minds fill with cabin-fever dreams and create restless sandcastles-in-the-air mirages of thought and word.

And the crew fights, and shtups, and gambles.

And kvetches about Columbus and his futile westward tilting.

Moishe lay against a barrel amidships. I’d thought of what was below us, and having plumbed that subject dry, I dreamed of beautiful birds amourously cooing at us, the sound like wingbeats and the beach-fall of waves.

“So,” Moishe began, his eyes closed. He was almost speaking to himself, “Imagine the ship gets tsekrochn—worn out—and the crew must replace the shmutzik planks one by one—though where we’d get the wood out here,
ver veyst
—who knows? After awhile, they’ve replaced every klots and nail with another. Is it the same ship or a different one? We’d still be on board, half-asleep against this barrel, kibitzing. But it’d be a different barrel and a different deck. And what if someone took the gantseh pile of wood and made another ship out of it? Is that our ship or a different one?”

“Depends. Which ship is closer to land?” I said.

“And what if we—or sailors not yet born,” Moishe said, “continued to replace the planks? They could replace them an infinite number of times and the ship would last forever.”

“But we’d still be gone. What’s the use of an eternal hat if the head is dead?”

“My father said we’re made of tiny specks and each of these specks changes over a lifetime. Our hair when it’s shorn keeps growing, our skin when it’s cut, so why shouldn’t the rest of our bodies? But we’re still ourselves. A shtetl is always a shtetl even if the people change.”

“So there’s a bisl of me scattered here and there?”

“And tiny bits of shmutz from other people all over you.”

“Now I could use a bath.”

“It’s the same with conversos.”

“They need no bath. Baptism was enough.”

“No, shlemiel, how many planks can you replace and still be yourself?”

“Or how many Jews?” I said, but what I thought was, “What if you change every word that you say?”

“A broch,” he said. “May each Inquisitor become a secret Jew so he can betray himself and haul himself before the Tribunal.”

“May each Inquisitor burn first himself and then the others at the stake.”

“May each Inquisitor host a bowelful of Jewish rats who convert in the churchy dark of his insides and then gnaw like fressers on his unkosher guts.”

“May each Jew change each plank of the world until it is new.”

“Omeyn,” he said. “But let this new world be different than the old.”

Later.

Dark night and the ship cantered on the waves. We were in the admiral’s cabin. A lantern encircled the table in honey light. Wine, cheese, dried plums and nautical charts were spread invitingly before us. Worlds hidden from the crew.

If they had once been buoyed by Columbus’s chutzpah, enthusiasm and professed expertise, by now the crew believed he was meshugeh. Out of his depth and with no clue about where we were or how far we were from any kind of terra—either firma or incognito.

It was an epic and mutinous “Are we there yet?” befitting impatient children, bristle-faced tousle-heads with few teeth but many swords.

If his navigations were to be correct Columbus required the world to be 20 percent smaller than the estimation of the ancients. Perhaps since then the world had shrivelled like Eratosthenes and his friends’ once ripe beytsim. Time can make between-the-leg prunes out of even the most succulent of plums.

Columbus’s calculations were based on his reading a letter from a certain Toscanelli that he worried like a rosary, which agreed with his results. If your mind is a matzoh ball, then everything looks like soup.

But almost from the beginning, the canny mariner understood the measure of his men—that their patience was short—and so he acted with duplicitous and data-massaging cunning.

Mostly, Columbus kept his thoughts and schemes to himself, except when he shared them in loud sermons to the crew of the
Santa María
. Perhaps the men of the
Niña
and the
Pinta
also heard his speeches for he stood on the poop deck like the Pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s, and declaimed them in balebos stentorian tones for all—God, the wind, the waves and the reluctant land included—to hear.

But at other times, he would confide his late-at-night thoughts to Moishe in a quieter voice.

“The truth has many façades,” he said. “A man may hide his true face, or faith, with beard or mask. Some sailors taking passage on our three ships—I could mention Luis de Torres—have the skin and words of a good Christian yet Jewish blood pumps from their hearts and their heads are filled with Hebrew prayers.” He had a sip from a cup of wine and continued. “A storyteller may change his tale for that which tells more true, for the truth has two sides, an inside and an outside.” Columbus stood up and walked across the cabin.

“There is something I must show you.”

From a shelf, he hefted a large book and laid it on the table. He ran his hand tenderly over the cover.

Ech, I thought. For a bird whose only library had been the waves, my world was becoming ongeshtupted with books. Moishe seemed to attract them the way analogies attract fools.

It was the ship’s logbook, written in the hand of Rodrigo de Escobedo, the scrivener.

“Look,” Columbus said, pointing to an entry.

Sailed northwest and northwest by north and at times west nearly twenty-two leagues. Sighted a turtledove, a pelican, a river bird and other white fowl; —weeds in abundance with crabs among them. The sea being smooth and tranquil, the sailors muttered that in such a region of smooth water, there would never be sufficient wind to return them to Spain; but afterwards the sea rose without wind, which astonished them. The Admiral spoke on this occasion, thus: “the rising of the sea was very favourable to me, as the waters so lifted before Moses when he led the Jews from Egypt.”

We remembered that day of waves without wind and what Columbus had said. Moishe had whispered to me, “Ech, but each day his land becomes more ‘promised.’ ”

“Soon,” I said, “he’ll think himself more Moses than you.”

Not long after this logbook day, we had entered a region of deep blue, thick with seaweed. The waters were of such exceptional clarity that, looking over the gunwales, it seemed as if we could stand on the fishes and eels that swam in myriad constellations far below us. This was the “sea without shores” spoken of by Portuguese
marinheiros
. The Sargasso Sea. A viscous Atlantis. Some of the crew had heard of this place. Most appeared bazorgt worried and agitated, not knowing what this plenitude of seaweed, this sea change, might mean.

Columbus now left the logbook, then unlocked a chest in the corner of the cabin and lifted out another book. He carried it to the table, and spread, too, its wings beside the other book and pointed to the entry of September 23, the same day’s date.

“Twenty-seven leagues,” Moishe said. The direction is the same but the distance is different.”

“On this voyage,” Columbus said, “as elsewhere, there are two truths. One longer than the other.”

The truth and the shvants-truth, I thought.

“The first book is for the pilot and others of the crew. For now. The second is for history and the future. When we have crossed this great ocean and the men’s feet walk on the shores of Cipangu or the palace paths of the Great Khan, then can the true tale be told. I tell you so that this second truth can be known by one other. Many things may befall an admiral. Sickness. Capture. Mutiny. Death.”

If there were a mutiny and—Gotenyu—the admiral’s journey came to a sudden and definitive end, we would be quiet. Very quiet. What second log book?

It would be no time to reveal that we were intimates of he who’d gone overboard.

Already, the sailors questioned his books, his charts and his maps.

Several weeks in, the pilots had noticed that the compass needles no longer pointed to the North Star. They muttered that even the heavens were unsure of the journey.

Columbus reassured them. The needles must have been pointing to some invisible point on earth. North was different in the west. The west that would soon become east.

For now, they accepted his explanation, deferring to his self-assurance which was, emes, astronomical.

The compass readings were critical: like all navigators of the time, he used dead reckoning. Appropriate, for as his crew reckoned it, they’d be dead soon enough.

So, when he rode the pitching deck, attempting to determine latitude by pointing his new-fangled astrolabe at the stars, such meshugas inspired even less confidence. These instruments required a steady horizontal, and relations between ship and sea most often resembled a shore-leave sailor writhing between the roiling legs of his shvitzing maideleh.

I’d heard Domingo de Lequeitio muttering with others of the crew.

They were getting restless with too much rest and not enough discovery. If Columbus would not soon agree to turn the ship around, Domingo suggested they could drop him into the Ocean where he would be admiral of an ever-diminishing quantity of air and, eventually, Viceroy of the ocean floor.

“And,” he said, “the tale we sailors will well recollect is that his eyes peeped through his astry-lad only, an’ he stepped into the pitchy brine without knowing. Time enough before he fell, we’d see’d him staggering about the tossing deck with no thought but the stars.”

Moishe and I weren’t troubled by the length of the voyage.

“Know where we’re going?” Moishe asked.

“Of course,” I said, shrugging my grey-wing shoulders.

“Where?”

“West toward—”

“—the west,” Moishe finished. Not content with fishing for the moon, we were chasing the setting sun. Putting distance between us and Spain required time. You couldn’t hurry time. We had no expectations about the unexpected. The world was large, the sea was wide, and there was still salt pork, hardtack, wine and water.

But surely even the sun must need to take a load off and rest a biseleh on a daybed of land before shlepping over the next horizon and rising.

Moishe and I left Columbus’s cabin. Some of the Basque sailors were sitting abaft the forecastle kvetching and making oakum from old rope. Their blaberation concerned the captain.

“The scupper-skulled futtock is willing to die to make hisself gran señor of lands we’ll not return from.”

The group of them nodded in assent.

“The walty Genoese is sailing us into the barathrum of nowhere ’tils we starve an’ our flesh dries to bouillon.”

They nodded again. They sang the bitter shanty of kvetchers.

Moishe turned to me.

“We all have our across to bear,
azoy
?”

Before long, Martín Pinzón was rowed across the scalloping water between the
Pinta
and the
Santa María
.

“The men can endure no more,” he said to Columbus as he climbed on board. Columbus did not reply but ordered a lombard signal to be fired. Soon after, Martín Pinzón’s brother Vicente Yañez Pinzón, captain of the
Niña
, appeared over the starboard bow. He clambered up a ladder and the three captains went into Columbus’s cabin and
haken a tsheinik
, argued and flosculated late into the night.

The following day, Columbus gathered the crew. “Three more days,”
he said. “On the Third Day, He created Dry Land. I need only as much time as God.”

“What’s the difference between the great God Adonai and Columbus?” Moishe asked me.

“What?” I said, knowing the answer.

“God doesn’t think he’s on a mission from Columbus.”

And so we passed the time.

On the second day, the sky was dark. The feathered millions of a great forest were above us, their voices like storm. A twisting hurricane of birds, as if every leaf of a great continent—or the shadow of every leaf—had taken flight and was flying west-southwest. Where there are birds, there must be land. Columbus ordered an alteration of our course to follow this migration, to sail in its shadow.