Yiddish for Pirates (36 page)

“
And dernoch vos?
” Moishe asked. “What then?” Asking what came after the end of the world was like asking someone on a ledge what would happen after they fell to become dispersed dollops on the sidewalk. It wasn’t really the point. At least, not yet. Of course, eventually, the dollops would rise and the buried dead would break through the sidewalks. And as long as you were a good Christian wolf, you could shmunts and cavort with the lamb. It wasn’t clear what would happen with Jews, pagans, heathens, conversos, birds, beasts, and sinners, but there’d be trumpets.

Columbus had klopped into the Novo Mundo, the unfoundland. Now he must get more specific and bump into paradise. Or, at least, the terrestrial Eden. He knew from the book stolen by Pinzón that it was to be sought in the north of the Caribbean, and thence he pointed his bow in that direction.

It wasn’t difficult to persuade Columbus to help regain our ship. The map that had been hidden on board would guide us both to his book and Torquemada’s baby-bound tome. And these books led to the Fountain of Youth, which, takeh, surely must be the emptied Eden, its blank pages no longer inhabited by Adam and Eve, the world’s first DPs.

So there’s this riddle about the first couple and a character called “Vemen-Art-Es”—“What-does-it-matter?”

Adam and Eve and Vemen-Art-Es

Jumped into the Mikveh and bathed
.

Adam and Eve were drowned

Who do you think was saved?

Vemen-art-es?
What does it matter?

But what did happen to Adam and Eve? Did they hollow out the Tree of Knowledge, make a canoe and then paddle east to Europe?

Fnyeh.

Not these Heyerdahls.

But, if there ever were an Adam and Eve, who knows where they went?

Maybe they were Indios—or what came before Indios.

Or parrots.

I mean Adam and Eve: maybe they were birds.

I could see my great-great-great-infinitely-great-grand-parrot forebears fressing on apples, learning to name things, being too clever for their own good.

Or God’s.

Chapter Three

We sailed north. The moon stuck its great shnozz through the sky, a kibitzer wondering where we were going, its glimmering trail a path across water, as if we could walk its undulating silver highway to another place. An eternal place of bodies and souls just over the horizon.

And nu, perhaps that’s where we were going. Are we there yet?

To those over there, we’re always somewhere else.

Especially in our words.

I sat on a yardarm.

Columbus strode about the deck in his black cassock.

I no longer pretended to have words but no understanding.

Columbus said, “St. Francis was said to preach to the birds, and so he must have believed they had understanding.”

“And souls?”

“Why else would he preach?”

“And Los Indios?”

“They have understanding.”

“And souls?”

“Of a kind.”

“There is more than one kind?”

“Perhaps,” he said.

Our problem now: how to find an uncaptained ship of Jews and the righteous among crustaceans in a vast sea. The current pulled us north and we followed its words. We would keep a clear eye for what lay before us, what lay around.

The deck was still, little sound but the soughing of the wind and the steady crosscutting of the men’s snores. Columbus, ever an expectant human breaker for the transcendent fizzle of his God’s unpredictable power surges, positioned himself at the convergence of the bow gunwales and waited. Moishe, grateful to be more than ballast aboard a barrel, tied a hammock between the starboard shroud and the mizzenmast, and slept. The watch slept also, save for the boy uneponymously manning the wheel.

From the fore-crosstree, I watched the phosphorescence of the sea. A mantle of blueish-white covered nearly all the dark water north of us, its edges wavering and trembling within half a mile of the ship. We floated in a sea of liquid radiance, an unearthly, blue glare. The ocean was a vast aurora of blue fire overrun by heavens of almost inky blackness. Iridescent spittle from the lips of Columbus’s God on the dark velvet of a Torah mantle.

Only a moment before, the still water had reflected an entire hemisphere of spangled constellations, and the outlines of the ship’s spars were projected as dusky shadows against the Milky Way. Now the sea was ablaze with opaline light, and the yards and sails were painted in faint tints of blue on a background of ebony. A vivid electrical fire was upon the ocean. As I stood farklemt upon the quarter-deck, this sheet of bluish flame suddenly vanished, causing, by its almost instantaneous disappearance, a sensation of total blindness, and leaving the sea, for a moment, an abyss of blackness. But as the pupils of my eyes gradually dilated, I saw as before the dark shining mirror of water around the ship, while far away on the horizon rose the great luminous appearance that had first attracted my attention and that was caused by the lighting up of the haze by areas of phosphorescent water below the horizon line.

I thought to call out, “Gevalt! It comes again!” but felt hushed as if in the presence of something sacred. Again the great tide of fire came
sweeping up around the vessel and we floated in a sea of illumination that extended in every direction and beyond the limits of vision.

Then I heard, over the radiance, a song. A distant singing. Like the sombre keening of whales, a hollow sorrowing of such beauty that my wings felt lifted as if a sigh had gathered me in its breath and was pulling me toward the warmth of its body.

An island surrounded by phosphorescence. Women swimming near the shore, singing. Their naked bodies rising above the water, dappled in bright light, then sinking again. Brown bodies spangled with radiant life.

“Moishe,” I called. “This is worth waking up for.”

“What’s your rush?” he grumbled. “So, nu, the farkakter Messiah will be born
shpeter mit a tog
—a day later.”

The singing coiled around us, a honeyed murmuration, an undulating nigun, a writhing shimmy of smoke. It found Moishe and he woke.

“Our ship has been sighted? We’ve got the map? The …” But then he slid from the hammock, and stood mesmerized at the gunwale. Columbus rose and stood beside him. Together they slipped off their clothes and fell into the sea, swimming toward the singing maidelehs.

Before long, the crew, too, glided like sleepwalkers from where they kipped and dived into the luminous dappling of dark water. Only the boy at the helm remained. The lapping water and the sinuous song lulled him to where, I imagine, he dreamed whatever populates a boy’s nodding Eden and he slept with a smile.

And I, too, found my brain rippling warm with the song’s phosphorescent brindling, which caused me to follow the men toward the island’s shallows.

A woman, moon-luminous like the flesh of a pear, soft and glistening as kreplach in soup, stood waist-deep in water, her arms on Moishe’s shoulders. Her eyes, swart and steady, transfixed him. She whispered but who could tell what she said, for her voice was the susurration of lapping water, speech without words. Columbus, too, stood before a machesheyfeh enchantress lost in a distant horizon. The crew wandered somnambulant toward the dark shadows of the forest beyond
shore, where naked, both men and women stood waiting between the tangle of branches.

I heard birds—what I was sure were parrot calls—from within the trees. Then I saw, beside a fire on the beach, the extended shadow of a parrot, long and anamorphic, a smear of darkness, a shadow road. Then the pure Harlequin form of the parrot-in-itself appeared to me. I flew toward him, my brain a substance between twilight and lokshen pudding.

The women rose from the water covered in fringed prayer-shawl tallises of water and light. Water that rivered down their skin and fell in moon-bright droplets onto the sand. Moishe and Columbus followed, meek as virgins on their way to spring sacrifice, but led by their keeper’s tucheses, a voluptuary prophet’s round and gluteus vision of both halves of a transcendent world, suggestively tectonic as they moved.

On the beach by a fire, the bo’sun was kneeling before a broad balebosteh of a woman. More Venus of Düsseldorf than a twiggy Giacometti, she was an impressive piece of living shed-sized statuary. Higgs gazed up at her as before an altar and she smiled and kitsled tickled his ears.

Moishe and Columbus now kneeled on the sand beside the bo’sun, their eyes turned to glass. The three women had donned strange robes made of coconut shells, long reeds, mother-of-pearl, and mussels resembling the nether-part knishes of creatures of an elder world. They gathered around the fire, drinking wine.

The parrot was given its own bowl and he drank while gazing at me. Intermittently he chirruped boozily, a low vibration that I felt in my cloaca. I became shikkered drunk by proxy, grinning the idiotic shmendrick-smile of the besotted. I stood on the sand beside the others, dazed by expectation, desire, and some sorcerous variety of island legerdemain.

Then without warning, they threw their capes, which were actually sacks, over the men’s heads and bound them. I woke from my stupor and flew into a tall palm away from my parrot.

I never even knew his name.

If I did, I’d beak him a thousand bespoke curses.

May an unspecified illness, vast and endless as our illusions, fress upon each of your cellwalls until you fall as miserable soup from the wretched sky.

Spanish soldiers rushed from the rainforest and seized Moishe, Columbus and the bo’sun.

“Release me for I am Admiral and Viceroy,” Columbus protested from within his bag. “I am Governor of—”

A soldier paid speedy tribute by puter-kletsling him below his equator with his knee and he collapsed to the sand. Another shmitzed Moishe with a stick and he fell.

The bo’sun quickly lay down on the sand and was silent.

A Spanish captain, fussy with big macher fur and brocade, stumped out of the forest and onto the beach. Behind him, a disheartened procession of Columbus’s crew, bound and led by rope.

“Buenas Noches!” the captain said, bowing slightly toward the bagged Columbus. He was a small blancmange of a man, red-bearded with but one eye, and it like the dull gallstone of a rat. He spoke as if reading the lines of a dandy stage villain. “I am known as Panfilo de Narváez, captain, commander and governor of these northern regions of Cíbola, so appointed by their most refulgent sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella.”

He addressed the bags on the beach.

“It is a pleasure to welcome one who is so distinguished, and who has discovered so much. I trust that you will discover much more as our prisoner. And so, too, your esteemed Hebrew confrère, Moishe, the less-than-a-yardarm pirate—because, as we well know, it was not only his sail that was trimmed.”

He paused for history to appreciate his bon mots.

“
Ach, gey kaken afn yam
,” I wished to say. “May you release your bowels upon the open ocean and may sharks take interest in your sphincter. May their teeth seek hacksaw passage to the twisted phylactery of your intestines.”

But I’d wait. There’d be time for bile. First I had to rescue Moishe. The captain stood over the three sacked men.

“We have played this pretty masked ball of singing sirens for two reasons. We wished to catch you alive, Master Christophorus, who is now desired at court. We shall transport you in chains, for your gubernatorial misdeeds have displeased our sovereigns. We have herded together your entire crew, who—in the unlikely event that they should have wished it—cannot now do anything to save you, but will be of help in our plantations.”

He regarded the burlap sacks with disdain.

“We also wish to secure some particular charts from the circumcised circumnavigator, Moishe,” he said, focussing on the bound feet that he assumed—incorrectly—to be Moishe’s.

“There is a particular book—once buried like storybook treasure—which for a time was in the possession of the now-departed Grand Inquisitor,” the Spanish captain said. “And there is a map. I now command you, in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, and in the name of the Holy Father to give them to me.”

From within the sack, there was only prepling muttering from the bo’sun.

“Provide me one or the other or you shall burn like kindling. Except with screaming.”

Then there was more than mumbling. “It is I. Higgs.”

“I do not know this name.”

“The bo’sun. I led them here to you. I doused their food with the philtre that you gave me. I am your shipboard man, your spy.”

“A spy who cannot be silent should be made so,” the captain said. In one ampersanding motion, he drew his sword and plunged it into the loquacious sack.

Then he moved one sack to the west.

“My odds in this thimblerig shell game have just increased,” he said to Moishe’s sack. “The map or the books?”

“You’ve caught me like a cat-o’-nines in a bag,” Moishe said. “So maybe we can talk?”

The captain sliced the burlap open, the newborn boychik Moishe revealed to the world in a rough C-section. The front of his smock was
cut and a line of blood seeped from chin to nuts, Moishe halfway to bloodlet kosher.