Yiddish for Pirates(48)
“But I have seen this shadow once before,” it said. “This bird was at Do?a 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 Se?or Rui Fernández, painter, yes, he that painted for Do?a Gracia, but together we worked on greater trickery than mere perspective and flattery. For some years, the Do?a and I have arranged safe passage for oppressed and fire-bound Jews. The Do?a 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.