Yiddish for Pirates(58)
Columbus, the mapmaker, the navigator. He inscribed a compass rose on the shore, the New World a map of itself.
San Salvador, he called the island. Holy Saviour.
For it had saved him: if he had sailed to the island and it was not there, he would soon enough have discovered mutiny and the empty sea floor where the island was supposed to be.
But Moishe did not land on San Salvador. Like Moses, his namesake, he had to watch as others entered the Promised Land. And I, like Aaron, also did not enter, though it was Columbus and his kind who worshipped golden things, who practically birthed a golden sea cow in their excitement, joined hands and danced in a ring at the thought of their true God and its value in power, prestige and purchase.
We heard the cheering of the men, heard the singing of the native people as they gathered on the beach. We heard, though we could not make out the words, the speeches given, the long prayers made by Columbus as he trod on what he thought was an older world than the one he came from. Cathay. Cipangu. India. The Indies.
There was an exchange. Food for glass beads. Shells for tchotchkes and chazerai such as little metal toys.
As night fell, there were fires. More singing. Speeches. Cheering.
Moishe slept. I stayed with him on the empty ship, my green shoulder, my blue-eyed boy. I didn’t venture onto the island. Besides, who knew if these natives, or, for that matter, the farklemteh sailors, would make of me a fricassee, spiced with who knew what delicate and unfamiliar spices?
Our men rowed back from shore. Columbus opened the casks to the crew. Laughing, singing, puking, the happy buffeting of each other’s ears like drunken puppies, late into the night until they all collapsed in a historic heap.
The following morning, the incessant blacksmithing of fiends inside each man’s skull. Inside their bellies, thirty boiling cats, cooking in roiling bilge water. Outside, the sun like a Klieg light, branding the eyes of all who attempted vision. Moishe woke as fresh-faced and pokey as the rest, which is to say, consciousness came upon him like a mallet.
Luis de Torres stumbled down the middeck, his clothing a polyglot-stippling of vomit, wine, New World sand and tropical fruit.
“Don’t tell the admiral, but the savages speak Hebrew,” he said and collapsed onto a pipa-sized barrel.
Moishe opened the slit of an eye.
“How can that be?” he asked.
“I spoke the ancient tongue and they understood. They are Children of Israel—like us,” Torres whispered. “We have found the Lost Tribes. Wherever we are.”
“The savages are Jews?” Moishe said.
Noble cabbages, then, I thought. Haleshkehs stuffed with exotic meat.
“I can’t believe it,” Moishe said, gripping the gunwales and hauling himself onto a knee. “This, I need my own eyes to see.”
But by then Torres was slumped over, brought back to sleep by the continuing effects of the previous night’s revelry.
“It was probably the drink talking Hebrew, not the natives,” Moishe said. “Or Torres heard himself speaking and thought it was someone else.”
“Hebrew,” I said. “It’s always backwards.”
Then it was sometime later that morning. There were no watches, no bells, only the rousing voice of Columbus ringing over the deck, and then the more strident voice of a matchlock shot, waking men from sleep, returning the ship to the regular shape of days. The men of the Ni?a and the Pinta, also submerged in wine-addled shlof, were woken by the shot as it reverberated off the jungle trees fringing the shore. A landing party was established to return to the island. Moishe was to carry baskets and jars to lubricate the parley. Columbus had others bring flags.
The native people were already on the beach, made restive by the matchlock shot. As we rowed closer, I could see they were almost naked, though the entire surfaces of their bodies were rudely emblazoned in black and white paint. Both men and women had coloured feathers woven into their hair, the men having feathers intertwined with their long beards. Feh. My parrot skin turned gooseflesh beneath my bristling plumage. A broch. Imagine the naked skins of the countless plucked and farkakte. The islanders jumped around in an ungainly dance, springing back and forth from skinny chicken polke leg to leg as if sandcrabs had nested in the ragged loincloths that covered beytsim or knish. Closer still, I heard their savage chanting, a disorganized ululation punctuated by guttural roars. If they were the Lost Tribes, they’d lost more than Assyria and Middle Eastern sand. Sense and civilization, for instance.
Surely what Hebrew they knew could be little more than a child’s blather. They were vilde chayes—unruly children. Calibans of the isle. There wasn’t a Yiddisher kop—a sensible mind—among them.
“How do they survive?” Moishe said. “Look at their bellies, their scrawny skillington arms.” Though their hair was curly, they were not the burly-shouldered bulvans that we had expected, tall and thick-limbed as the Ethiopes bought out of Africa.
I could see by the ill-stuffed pallets of their bodies that, since they walked out of history two thousand years before, they had not learned how to hunt or harvest healthy gezunteh food.
“They are simple and wild,” Moishe said. “But something klemt mir in hartsn—something grasps my heart.”
“You should watch what you eat,” I said. “Maybe fewer sardines.”
The skiff’s keel scudded into the sand of the shore and the men scrambled out. They crowded around us, crowing, shraying, mewling as we walked up the beach.