Yiddish for Pirates(11)
“My father’s book,” Moishe began enthusiastically, “filled with strange, unreadable writing in beautiful script. Diagrams and drawings of unknown places. The world made larger because drawn on a page.”
“What was this book?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t read it though its letters were Hebrew … I mean of course I couldn’t read it …” Moishe stammered, realizing he had said too much.
“A book of the Jews?” Columbus asked.
Moishe had inadvertently revealed his true background. He quickly began to cover it in false dress.
“My father could not have known what it was. He had meagre learning and read little. He had faith in the teachings of the Church. He was no heretic … he prayed frequently and crossed himself often …”
“I myself am much interested in the ancient holy books,” Columbus said. “The First Testament of the Jews. The Books of Ezra, Joshua …” Then he muttered, as if looking toward the distant Holy Land itself, “God willing, Jerusalem will soon be wrested from the infidels and returned …”
He became lost along the vague trails of imagination and desire.
He hadn’t noticed anything Jewish out of the Christian ordinary. Nu, he saw no light but his own shadow.
“But of course,” he said, suddenly returning, “I also read navigation, history and cosmology. Ancient writings from Ptolemy to Pliny, the travels of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo. And the works of Church Fathers from Cardinal d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi to Pope Pius II’S Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum.
“And yet there are many books that I still wish to read. Once, I heard my brother speak of a book of the Jews, written in ancient Aramaic; perhaps your father’s was, also. It tells of a fountain that flows from a crack in the edge of the world, a fissure between earth and sky. Its elemental waters bring life eternal. I would travel and drink there, carry away its waters more valued than gold.”
A Fountain of Youth, Columbus? That emes was a wet dream. Time is the only river and it makes you grow old. Or at least, that’s what I thought then. Ach, what did it matter, we now needed water from a more quotidian puddle, for the sun demonstrated an interest in hard-boiling our pates, and so, when we observed a small cluster of buildings at a crossroads a mile away, we quickened our step. We expected to discover an inn, both sustenance and shade. With some gelt from Moishe’s newly acquired money sack, there would soon be plates of meat and cups of wine before us. Me, I was chaleshing for fruit, seeds, and an ocean of fresh water.
Several grey mules, a few bent horses, and one impressive black stallion were tied up outside and tended to by a scrawny boy. The inn was called Dom Venéreo, and it stooped like an old nag, leaning oysgeshpiltedly toward the glue pot. A door sagged open to a dark place of pockmarked tables and wine. An assortment of men with their heads in their hands, faces sombre and brooding. And a tall, handsome man with a red feather in his impressive hat. He was undoubtedly the stallion owner.
We set our course for a table below a shelf cluttered with seashells and wooden mugs. Before our tucheses made landfall, Columbus had already called for food and drink from the barmaid who, it seemed, had been sewn together some time ago from old leather and duck meat. He left us at the table while he went to speak with the man and his ostentatious hat.
A red feather. Someone I knew?
The barmaid arrived with a wooden plate of amorphous stew, a jug filled with wine, and some bread. Moishe tore some breadcrust for me and held a mug of wine to my beak. Columbus was fathoms deep in words with the man when he motioned to Moishe to bring some money. Moishe fished out two small silver pieces and went to the table.
Moishe had saved Columbus’s life. He had mined the thief’s money sack from its youthful source. Yet, somehow, Columbus assumed the role of captain. As if it were as natural as his haughty self-absorption and blinkless faith in himself. As if he had not been born wet and slippery, but was from some other place. A place where the worth and fame of his future deeds were assured.
Moishe put the money on the table and Columbus pushed the coins toward the man. A game of checkerless checkers. The man promptly lifted the silver and stowed it in a pocket of his embroidered waistcoat with a small twitch of a smile.
We were to ride two mules to Lisbon.
Chapter Four
The scrawny boy stood smartly at attention as Red Feather strode from the inn door, his boots billowing small clouds of dust with each imperious step. A few curt orders and the boy began untying the mules.
Columbus, with the air of a grand knight setting out on a grail quest, took the reins and mounted the mule as if it were a great stallion.
Moishe climbed aboard his mule as if clambering out a window. He had no experience with great horses, but his father’s swayback carthorse was like an old and simple uncle to him and Moishe had taken joyrides about the yard on its rickety back.
We set out along the road to Lisbon. Moishe, the mule and I—mule surmounted by youth surmounted by parrot—resembling the fabled Musicians of Bremen, that motley vertical parade-across-species.
By late afternoon, we saw the broad blue expanse of the Tagus River as it widened into a virtual inland sea before flowing into the ocean. I remembered a fado marinheiro sung by a sailor intoxicated with nostalgia and loss, a feeling the Portuguese call saudade. “My hair is getting white, but the Tagus is always young,” he sang. And, ach, the sadness and wonder at witnessing a great river opening out into the sea. The current flowing purposefully forward, the always-young river suddenly lost in the endless, bankless vastness of the directionless sea, the stories of the lands that border the river diluted like so much salt.