Yiddish for Pirates(57)

Later that afternoon at three bells of the watch, a sailor high up in the rigging shouting excitedly, “Tierra! Tierra!” Domingo de Lequeitio pointed in frenzy to the larboard-side horizon. A scurrying of the watch to the gunwale. The admiral striding out of his cabin in the forecastle. Men on deck coming to consciousness on their straw pallets, blinking in the light, fonfering the primeval waking thought, “Huh?” Moishe, too, awakening. In a moment, I was in the air then high on the foretop yardarm. Could it be that we were somewhere, or just before?

Eyes puckered under awnings of hand in the dazzle of bright light.

It didn’t look like land to me.

“That,” said Columbus looking toward where Domingo was pointing, “is a cloud.”

I heard Jacome abaft, muttering beyond the captain’s hearing, “A cloud be good land for us, for soon we be memberless as angels, our pizzles snapped like dead twigs from off a dried-out tree, else we find fresh water or solid land for our watering.”

The crew, as mocking angels, flapped their crooked arms like celestial chickens then made their groins shvantsless with shielding hands. “Tierra, tierra,” they jeered at Domingo de Lequeitio high up the foremast. The frivolity lasted only moments until, as a man, they had the realization that they yet remained landless.

Columbus had not appeared to notice this outbreak of heavenly poultry. He had installed himself on the bowsprit, straining his eyes into the Ouija-board distance, attempting, it seemed, to summon forth shore like a spirit from the Olam ha-Ba beyond. He remained like a figurehead, through three watches, willing land to appear, Columbus both dowser and dowsing stick, remembering Exodus. “ ‘We are in the wilderness, Lord, What shall we drink?’ Like Israelites, we seek ‘the twelve wells of water, the threescore-and-ten palm trees. We would encamp there by the waters. Lord, bring us land.’ ”

Later that night, seven bells into a dog watch, Domingo de Lequeitio, Columbus and Rodrigo Sanchez observed a dim flickering. I woke Moishe who was sleeping through some kind of illness, and he saw it, too. Though the moon was but a shtikl less than full, the light was not mere moonshine. There was the orange tinge of fireblaze, small and turbulent, a bonfire on a distant shore. The men on watch took note, whispering quietly to each other, but avoiding the ostentatious mekhaye hoo-hah of hope and celebration and the eventual disappointment of the previous afternoon.

Even Columbus, usually given to chisel-worthy pronouncements spoken in doughty capital letters, only nodded to the pilot, indicating, “Sail toward the light.”

The following night, two hours after midnight, after the fourth bell of the dog watch had sounded.

An arquebus fired into the night sky from the poop deck.

What happens on a ship at 2 a.m. when, without warning, there is a shot?

The rational grog-soused mariner, drowsy and hypnogogic on his pallet, can only assume a murderous infestation of ocean-borne invaders sharp with the flesh-kebabing talons of raptors and blistering with the halitosis of harpies.

Or else the sighting of land.

Under a full moon, Rodrigo de Triana, a sailor from Seville, had seen una cabeza blanca de tierra, a white stretch of land.

“Tierra!” he called. “Tierra!” And for good measure, he again shot the arquebus at the stars.

Perhaps I should consider it auspicious that on this day, when the prodigal halves of the earth were joined once again, no bird or other flying creature was shot from the sky, keneynehoreh.

On deck, the men exulted.

The next day, October 12, 1492, we would make landfall.

If one wants to beat a dog, one finds a shtekn, a stick.

We had found a stick. Now what kind of dog would we beat?

“A golden retriever,” Moishe said and lay back on his pallet, feverish and green.

It was early morning when Rodrigo de Triana had seen land. And now we’d sailed out of night and into the next day until we were but a cannon’s blast away from what we took to be an island. The crew gathered on deck.

After months sailing the featureless ocean, heading toward nowhere but the horizon and the edges of maps, how did we feel about touching tierra firma?

Nisht geferlach. Could have been worse.

We felt only the way a man lost in the desert would feel about a bucket of water. About a fountain of water. About a thimbleful of water. About a droplet of sweat on a camel’s tuches.

Love at first sighting.

For a season I had perched on barren masts and now there was the prospect of a living tree, heavy with leaves. Of rivers, waterfalls, and clear pools.

And perhaps there would be parrots. The pretty feathers of zaftik island parrots warmed by both sun and desire.

The firm land.

I couldn’t remember the last time.





Chapter One



In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The Ni?a, the Pinta, and the Santa María shlepped around the great arc of the Ocean Sea and landed in what he took to be the other side of the world. A great moment.

But Moishe and I weren’t there when those of the old world first met those of the new.

Our luck. A mensch tracht un Got lacht. A person plans and God laughs.

Moishe was green, puking with fever and shaking with palsy. Bent heaving over the gunwales, he saw the New World, saw the sailors rowing, saw them land. He saw Columbus kneel down and kiss the reassuring shore. He saw Columbus take his sword and draw in the sand. What was it: a cross, a prayer? Was he writing, “Ferdinand and Isabella,” as if labelling luggage? Was he signing his name? “Ah, yes, my pretty picture. Think I’ll call it ‘America.’ ”