Yiddish for Pirates(45)

“And this crew here—do they know this?”

“No—keneynehoreh. There’s a priest on board. He saw me floating and had me netted. Though I hardly knew myself if I were man or fish, he recognized me from my quemadero performance and claimed my death for Torquemada’s fire.”

“So, nothing to worry about,” I said. “Just execution.”

“Bupkes,” Moishe agreed. “Abi gezunt. As long as we have our health.”

A week later, the ship arrived at port. Moishe and I escaped before the cargo was unloaded. The details are unimportant. So, nu, it was daring. It was full of wonder and chutzpah. Moishe, now unchained and waiting on the deck for the Holy Office, climbed the rigging and, friend to barnacles, plummeted into the dark water beneath the keel. In these times, sailors didn’t swim. Better to drown immediately rather than splash about until the inevitable end. But in the last five years Moishe had become a pragmatist, a swimmer, a breath-holder. He emerged, wet as a hatchling in the dim space beneath a distant wharf, and slipped onto land like a newly grown frog. The privateers assumed he had sacrificed himself to water in order to avoid fire.

And then?

We took eggs, some bread, a wide-brimmed hat. We stole a horse, and under a crescent moon, we rode toward Granada, “the pomegranate.” The Spanish wouldn’t be interested in Moishe there; they were interested in the city itself. Granada: the last Muslim city in Iberia, an Islamic fruit lodged uncomfortably under the expanding tuches of Christian Spain.

As if it were ongeshnoshket, the road staggered from side to side as it climbed the Sierra Nevadas. By midday, breaded by dust, we came to a hillock. A small spring was tucked into its hip like a sidearm. It was no more than a piss-dribble soaking the gitch of the slope, but the water collected in an inviting pool. Moishe led the horse to water, and, of its own volition—for how could it be otherwise, it was a horse well versed in saws and chochmehs—it drank. Moishe stripped down and immersed his weary fleysh in the drink. I saw then the marks on his body. The red weave of whipmarks, the welts. The written weltschmerz of skin, a library of damage. And instead of his left tsitskeh nipple, there was nothing but a blind scar. His chest was a winking Creeley, a one-eyed Jack.

So, nu, he should replace it with wood as if it were a missing leg?

They say never accept a wooden nipple.

Better then to cover it with an eyepatch like a Blemmyae pirate.

There had been a fight, he said. A flash of blades slicing the air and, in this case, his chest.

“Nisht geferlech. Could have been worse,” he said. “I wasn’t using it, anyway.”

We finished the last of the bread and eggs.

I’m not usually one for eggs, but they were the kinder of no one I knew.

We continued on but decided, after overhearing a group of riders, to travel to nearby Santa Fe. It was 1492 and much had changed—and was about to change—since we’d last been on the peninsula. Granada was under attack. To the crown, it was an irritating Islamic grain of sand and, currently surrounded, would soon become a Catholic pearl in the clammy hands of Ferdinand and Isabella.

They had established Santa Fe, a base several miles from the city walls, but to call it a military encampment would be to call the Great Pyramid of Giza a gravestone, or to think the Grand Canyon a gopher hole.

Santa Fe was a white city of ten thousand soldiers, horses, munitions, weaponry, chapels, and it was often visited by the King and Queen of soon—ptuh, ptuh, ptuh—all the Spains. Granada was so close that one early morning, a doughty Christian knight had left Santa Fe, slipped into the city by a secret tunnel and impaled a parchment inscribed with the words “Ave Maria!” over the doorway to the main mosque. He was back in time for breakfast.

Presiding over the other buildings of Granada was the magnificent palace of the Alhambra. The Alhambra: the world broken into a thousand pieces, then repaired, like a jigsaw puzzle assembled inside a kaleidoscope.

And soon to be a morcellated jewel in the crown of Ferdinand and Isabella.

So we travelled to Santa Fe, for as Moishe said, “A tooth is safest in the dragon’s mouth.”





Chapter Four



We’d been in Santa Fe for almost a week and felt the Spaniards’ rising excitement. And now, in the bright morning, Sultan Abu ’abd-Allah Muhammad XII—Boabdil—was taking part in a carefully planned endgame. Dressed in silks and gold, he left the city with only a few emirs and a modest retinue of a hundred mounted men. He would bring his Moorish lips, more accustomed to dainties and the buxom delicacies of his harem, to the soft and scented hands of Ferdinand and Isabella, Los Reyes Católicos. He would surrender Spain to the Christians.

There had been a deal. They had his son. He had the key to Granada and the last remaining jigsaw piece to a completed Catholic Spain.

They met on a rise of land outside the city. The Spanish had already begun redecorating: royal banners flew from the Alhambra, the colours of Ferdinand and Isabella and the Christian cross. Boabdil climbed down from his horse and approached their highnesses. He began to get down on one knee, but Ferdinand held up his hand. No. They would not accept the key to Granada and the Sultan’s proffered kiss.

This was in the script. A nursemaid guided a small boy toward him. His son. He had been a hostage since the beginning. Boabdil bowed and then he and his son walked back to the Moorish line. They climbed onto his horse and, with their dignity intact, rode away to board a ship bound for Africa.