Yiddish for Pirates(52)

Torquemada folded suddenly as if his spine had turned to sand. The wizened crab of his hand disappeared into a saddlebag.

“For you,” he said, grinning with malice and cleverness, pushing something wrapped in dark cloth toward Moishe. “Take this and bury it over the Ocean Sea where it can only be found again by monsters and savages. Here it will destroy all we have worked for. Something is best hidden with those who don’t need it.”

Moishe took the package and began to unwrap it.

“Do not,” Torquemada hissed. “Beneath the cloth is a book which teaches of life everlasting—if one learns to read its secrets. But there is another book which speaks of this, as you well know, for it is the story of your people.” Torquemada’s lungs were a bellows in seizure. It was a moment before I realized that this defined laughter in the sallow dictionary of his body.

“But that old scribble is but fable and ancient geography. This one reveals a new Eden on this earth where springs a fountain that refreshes both body and soul. He who bathes there will live until the world ends, which, since you have returned again, is a thousand years. A life longer than Methuselah. In this cascade, the soul is cleansed and one begins again without memory or sin. ’Sblood, I say. Without sin, everything we have worked for would be ruined.”

Moishe nodded with solemnity. Let the blateration of the alter kaker continue. In a chamooleh’s dreck, there may be gold.

If the chamooleh eats at the bank.

If he was to be believed, the meshugener Grand Expectorator had given us a book of directions, a Michelin guide to Paradise. Finally: the visiting hours for the Tree of Knowledge and the rules about flash photography and snakes.

“But,” he said, “it’s a Jewish book. And so, requires commentary. I’m told the book has four sisters,” Torquemada continued, “each like a Talmud. The teachings of learned men. Interpretations. Explanations. Maps. Where these others are, I do not know. Now hide this and do not speak of it again.”

Torquemada began making the sign of the cross over Moishe, but stopped midway. Instead he pointed west.

“This Columbus travels the road to France. He hopes to receive both blessing and money from the French king for his westward journey. You shall ride quickly along this road. I expect, this admiral, riding on his mule, will not have travelled further than Pinos. You shall find him and give my command that he return to the Queen. Soon, I shall have you, the book, and the viceroy of the leftmost world far from where you can interfere with our work. I cannot change heaven, but earth shall be my dominion.”

He gave Moishe a great black horse and bade him ride.





A story is a great city, and words are its citizens, jostling and kibitzing in its busy streets. It’s these words that tell the tale, not the parrot.

But it’s also marbeh dvorim, marbeh shtus, the more words, the more foolishness.

So I must have a sharp tongue, be a circumcising moyel, and make short what is long: We found Columbus. He returned to the Queen. He asked for the world and was granted half of it.

After three months of tideless and aimless sloshing, most spent working the monastery gardens of La Rábida, Moishe and I found ourselves with Columbus on the banks of the Rio Tinto at Palos, ready to leave one difficult world for another. Ready to transmute land to sea and then back again. To cross the trough in the centre of the atlas. To sail to the Jewless margins.

Thanks God, a godless place where God withdrew to make space and where roam those free-range souls, unfarmed by tax farmers or religion.

The unquisition.

But what would we find?

It’s like they say about gatkes underwear: zol zayn ergereh, abi andereh. Let it be worse, as long as it’s a change.





Chapter Eight



August 3, 1492. The Port of Palos and its boat-busy river. Moishe and I watching over the larboard gunwale, suffocating in the hot canine breath of summer. Dog days when the sea convulsed, wine turned sour, hounds grew mad, and man became afflicted with burning fevers and frenzies, the brain boiling like an egg in a bone pot.

And now the end of the procession of gangplanking child-and sack-carrying Jews. A sea-crowding exodus for which we waited.

For days, Columbus’s sailors had been loading sufficient nosh for an entire year. Filling small boats with supplies and then rowing to the deeper middle of the river where the ships were anchored.

Salt pork, flour, olive oil, water and manzanilla wine.

And such marvels of our ingenuity as would fill the childlike mind of a great khan or pagan chieftain with wonder, an awareness of our implied military and technological dominance, and knowledge that our God was a bigger macher and more almighty than theirs. Thus would this great leader clap his royal hands in delight and then surrender.

Such marvels? Glass beads and hawks’ bells, which were carried in great quantity onto our ships.

Columbus stood beside us. “This day is Tisha B’Av in the Hebrew calendar,” he said. “The ninth day of Av when we remember the destruction of the ancient temples. And when history will remember the day we made the world new.”

“Me,” said Moishe, “I’m hoping history will remember how I found beautiful women.” In the past five years, Moishe had learned not only the maps, knots and hornpipes of sailing, but also its swagger.

Then from below deck, “Retreat, fetid piss-dribbler, or ye shall wear your red guts for ribbons in your malodorous hair.” The unmistakeable poetry of Jacome el Rico, tavern-dwelling husbander of books with the zayin-scarred face. He was already claiming territory.