Yiddish for Pirates (22 page)

Some.

Abravenel, for example.

But for most it was, “you may lead a horse to holy water but soon enough, if you need glue, he’ll be glue.”

Foreskin and seven years ago, ach, even longer than that, a hundred years maybe, many had converted after some pogroms, but now they
took to the roads and fields, shaking tambourines and beating drums, struggling, falling sick, dying. When they arrived at the shore, they wailed and shrayed, men and women, the leathery and the soft. “Adonai, merciful God, surely you will again part the seas and make a road for us out of this farkakteh land.”

Nes gadol hayah poh
. A great miracle happened here. The sea sloshed and sparkled, the blue crenellations of the waves were surmounted by foam. The seemingly endless sea heaved and tossed, the great ocean was a living, breathing thing, made only of water, brought to life by transcendental sighs.

A liquid Golem. A wonder.

But it did not part.

They had to take boats, wailing on the whale road, hoping for peace on the other side.

The Jews were allowed to take what they could carry: jewels, bonds, cash, children, books, their future, the old, their worries. We heard of someone whose belly was cut open because some bulvan thought he’d eaten his gold to hide it.

True, if it had been possible, many would have shouldered their houses, cows, their anvils and orchards, taken the old Spain with them. But some things are too heavy to carry, though nothing weighs as much as uncertainty.

Except, perhaps, the sea.

We crept through the streets of Granada.

“We’re lox-Jews, ”Moishe said. “Swimming against the tide. We’re sneaking back into Egypt.”

“Reverse-Moses and Aarons,” I said.

Moishe was concealed in a dark cloak. I flew over the moonlit roofs, keeping watch. So naturally, when he turned the corner of an alley, a face appeared.

“I see that unlike most, your shadow is above you,” the face said.

“Señor,” Moishe replied. “I seek only my master’s door this night. I travel with but a regular kind of dark.”

“But I have seen this shadow once before,” it said. “This bird was at Doña Gracia’s, as were my paintings. You should not be sneaking around these times, they grow ever more unsafe.”

The painter.

We hadn’t recognized him. There were many faces in our recent past, murderous, friendly, duplicitous and double-chinned.

“Meet me next day,” the painter said. “I work on the distant horizon: the landscape in a portrait of the Queen.” We would meet behind her gold-kirtled back while the Queen attended a parade in celebration of herself.

We continued to the tavern where we were to leave the sack for Columbus. What greater safety than the shtarker-shikkered shadows of an alehouse beneath a brothel? Its staggering occupants cared only for flesh, the fist and the firkin, not for a cartographer’s gift to his brother. And a face-to-face with a member of the Holy Office would be unlikely. Priests did not frequent common houses. They engaged specialists to genuflect before them, to receive their sweaty and unholy secret sacrament.

We were to look for Jacome el Rico, a Genoese sailor. He had a scar down one side of his face in the shape of a zayin, though apparently the Diego who did the deed was not a master of Hebrew calligraphy for, we were told, the letter was nearly illegible.

Moishe walked down the steps and pushed open the door to the tavern.

A hairy stump of a man approached us. “I wants that Polly on your shoulder. Sell it me and these coppers are yours,” he said, thrusting two dun-coloured coins into Moishe’s face. “Refuse and I’ll drive a hawse hole through your giblets an’ wear your jawbone as me bangle.” The subtle scent of unwashed rat was keen on his Sirocco breath.

So, nu, he was a humble tzadik scholar interested in the Talmud and its elaboration of righteousness.

But Moishe, having recently acquired philosophy from the hurly-burly yeshiva of the farmisht and shaken world, engaged the kishkas of this scholar with an unrelenting syllogism: the major
premise of knee, followed by a minor premise of fist, resulting in the conclusion that this man, lying on his back and gazing blankly at the rafters, possessed a material reality that could be known by the senses. Except for his own, currently having being knocked out of him.

Ach, we are all in the gutter, some of us unconscious, as we look toward the stars.

We discerned in the desiccated scrubland of his face, a scar shaped like a zayin, confirming that this was the gentle soul for whom we searched: Jacome el Rico.

His resurrection was effected by baptism with a tankard of wine and the appropriate brocheh.

“Wake, you shrunken yard-arm dog,” Moishe said. “Or should I kick the sleep from your eyes?”

The delicate poetry of first meetings.

Jacome spluttered.

“We have a compadre in Cristoforo Colombo,” Moishe said, offering the man an arm to assist in his ascent.

Columbus’s name was a magic spell. The man sprung up into a crouch like a cat on his hands and bent legs.

“Do you have it?” he said, narrowing his eyes.

We were still in the frame of light cast by the open door. Few, however, had seemed to notice our scuffle. Such things in such places were like legs in trousers, part of their very definition. Here, those who stood up often fell down, and the opposite was also true. There were also many, like the Grand Old Duke of York, who did neither, and indeed were not able to locate themselves in either the spatial or the temporal world. Ongeshnoshket. Three sheets to the wind.

We went with Jacome, now tottering on his hindquarters, to a table in shadows and effected the transfer. Jacome took the sack and concealed it beneath his shirt. Portly, he had become book-bellied. He quickly left the tavern.

After, that is, ordering a mug of ale, convincing Moishe to pay, then sloshing it down the hatchway of his greedy throat.

Chapter Six

The following morning we travelled to meet the painter in a Mozarabic palace newly collected by Isabella since the fall of Granada. Upon entering, we looked to the horizon, empty except for a few sheepish and indistinct clouds hovering above a bare and misshapen tree. The painter leaned in close, his brush twitching only slightly, his eyes only half open.

He was adding leaves.

If we had wished for blood to paint them autumn, we could have skewered him, so intent was he on each tiny leaf. Sha, we could have had children with him before he noticed and looked up.

By now, Moishe knew how to cough in at least three languages. So, he coughed. The effect was immediate. The painter twitched oily green across the edge of the sky. “Ach! May your kugel cook in hell.”

Then he pointed at an ornate chair. “Sit.”

Moishe looked warily around the room. He’d learned to check for exits, unless aboard ship. The sea was both escape enough and no escape. There was a door at the end of the chamber. “The Queen is not at the palace?”

“Today,” the painter said, “there is another parade to celebrate the Reconquista.”

“Will they also dance in the streets when the Jews are gone?” Moishe asked.

“As they did in Hamelin when the rats left,” the painter said. “Now, sit.” This time, Moishe sat. The painter turned and repaired the sky.

“If only such feats could be wrought outside of the canvas,” he said and put down his brushes. “I am Señor Rui Fernández, painter, yes, he that painted for Doña Gracia, but together we worked on greater trickery than mere perspective and flattery. For some years, the Doña and I have arranged safe passage for oppressed and fire-bound Jews. The Doña with the ships of her late husband and brother-in-law who disappeared, likely tied to stone or iron, dropped into the deep. We could lay the foundation for new Jerusalems from such seabones as have collected there.

“I am Fernández, yes, and cousin to that Sarah who you tried to help. I, too, have spoken with this would-be world-finder Columbus. I will travel with him, through the Pillars of Hercules, across Ocean Sea and beyond history’s vanishing point. With the Doña gone, there are no more rescue ships. And, in truth, this dark tide has already washed my heart to sea, and only habit keeps blood moving through me.”

There was a great clattering in the courtyard.

Important people, or perhaps more correctly, the self-important, move either with preternatural silence or with profligate sound. I flew to the window. Bright colours. Hammered metal. Flourishes of cut-sleeved brocade. The landed had landed and they were coming toward us.

“Who is it?” I asked.

Fernández: “That’s a clever bird.”

A pageboy was on the steps of the chamber. Moishe ran to the door that he’d previously charted as a sally port for use in sudden storm.

It was locked.

I flew to the rafters. Birds and clouds can hide in the sky. Moishe would have to learn from the painter’s horizon and become background. He pressed himself against the wall, miming grout or shadow.

“Señor Fernández, our queen arrives. She grants you time and her noble visage for the painting of her portrait,” the page said.

The painter rose in anticipation and soon the royal cortège bustled in. A couple songbird-resplendent maidels-in-waiting, some hildagos,
many pages, two priests and Torquemada, Grand biltong-dry Inquisitor of the Holy Office, and the Queen: short, strong, blue-eyed, with hair like the auburn planks of a ship. She had the self-assurance of a statue of herself, though far beneath the staid mantel of steady piety there appeared to be a fiery and excitable core.

“
Su Majestad Católica es muy generosa
. Your Catholic Majesty is most generous,” Fernández said, bowing low, and with perhaps a slightly ironic curve to his painterly spine.

But it might have been artistic foreshortening.

The Queen acknowledged him with an almost imperceptible nod, then established court by enthroning the grand duchy of her regal tuches in the ornate chair. Once the seat of power was comfortable, she nodded to Torquemada who sat in a smaller chair beside her.

The pages stood against the wall beside Moishe. An invisible identification line-up. In these times, servants were deferential and soft-focus backgrounds to the prominent foreground of the powerful. It was unlikely the pages would break rank and render themselves visible by singling out Moishe, especially in the presence of the Queen. To be wrong might result in the singling out of their livers or tongues. At the very least, they would be expelled.

From a high window.

“Señor Fernández, you may begin,” the Queen said, and struck a noble, world-conquering, Jew-tossing, Moor-expunging, yet humble pose.

The painter lifted his brush and palette. Soon the oval lake before him began to glow with an expression of inherited power. From amidst a shroud of mist, the face of Isabella appeared, a pious Ozymandias looking faithfully into the future.

Isabella kibitzed quietly with her ladies-in-waiting.

Torquemada, the wizened Millenarian vulture, perched on his chair silently, wondering where the Messiah was, waiting for the beginning of the end of the world, reclaiming Zion and positioning Ferdinand as “Last World Emperor.” I could almost see him drying out, his alter kaker apple-doll brain collapsing in on itself like a dead star, his fearsome eyes sucking all available light from the room.

The doppelganger Isabella continued to form.

The priests and hidalgos stood waiting.

Then Columbus strode into the doorway.

A sailor with seven-league bootstraps looking for Su Majestad’s permission to begin his long sail over the short sea.

He bowed but as if only to offer the Queen an exclusive vision of the pure snows that creamed the polar cap of his head.

“Señor Columbus,” the Queen began. “Admiral of the distant horizon and Viceroy of what isn’t there. It is a surprise.”

“Su Majestad,” he said.

“Doubtless, you have come to speak again of savages and kings. So, enter and prophesy.” He walked into the room, a grand procession of one. There was a flicker of recognition as his eyes scanned the far wall—sailors look always to the edges of where they are—Moishe a familiar piss-pool in a lake of pages, though Columbus said nothing.

“Su Majestad, I will sail to Cathay and Cipangu,” he said. “To the lands of the Great Khan. ‘Most Serene Prince,’ I shall say to him, ‘I have travelled from where the morning begins, west from the east, and yet have arrived at the Farther East. I bring you greetings from your dearest friends,
Los Reyes Católicos
, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon.’ ”

He turned toward beef-jerky Torquemada. “And, Your Eminence,” he said, “I will discover how these people are disposed and the manner whereby their conversion to our holy faith might be effected. This I do for Our Lord, enthroned above the circle of our world and who wishes it so.”

He spoke again to the Queen. “Also,” he said, “I will return with an Ararat of gold, spices, rare treasures, and—before the African-groping Portuguese may grasp them—new conquests of islands and mainlands in the Ocean Sea. These will provide such monies as will allow our stalwart Christian soldiers to retake Jerusalem, even as you’ve returned the good lamb of Granada to your Majesties’ Catholic flock. It is but a small risk for great glory, both here and in the Eternal beyond.”