Yiddish for Pirates(59)



“Gevalt,” Moishe said and froze, his eyes wide, his jaw open. His bones were replaced by the ice of ghosts.

Then, after a minute, “I …” he whispered to me. “I … I know these people.”

The sailors returned to the boat and, like pallbearers, carried a large flagpole up the beach. Columbus pointed at a rise of land near the treeline and bade the crew plant it.

The first thing we built in this new world was a hole.

Soon, after some tottering, they had raised the flag. On the map of the world, a mark: you are here. You, the subject of Aragon and Castile, of the crowned F and Y that now flapped for the first time in a Caribbean wind.

The natives gathered around dancing and cheering as if the Tree of Good and Evil had suddenly blossomed on the ground before them. They made a tararam commotion of the flag-raising as if the technology of the flag were the exciting element of the story and not the part where they were being conquered. Perhaps their technology of subjugation looked different than this. A deft slit of the throat, the hull of the head staved in by handheld rock.

A stooped older man with a flourishing Brillo pad of a beard, grey yet interwoven with coloured feathers, his sagging body daubed into a dark and greasy shadow. Moishe stood close beside him and they exchanged glances. Beady eyes instead of beads.

“Rebbe Daniel?” Moishe said.

The man continued his writhing, as if he were trying to cajole the feathers into flight.

“Shh,” he whispered in Spanish. “Don’t speak. We talk later.”

I looked around. Beneath the paint and the joyous freylech prancing and prattling, the bodies and faces of the band of secret Jews of Seville began to emerge. As if I had suddenly noticed the black-suited puppeteers behind the puppets, the Jim Crowsowitzes behind the minstrelry.

We needed to maintain the illusion. It was unclear what the consequences would be if their true identity were revealed. If Columbus were deprived of his role as first discoverer. If the functionaries of King, Queen and Inquisition learned that these wild menschen of the rainforest were really wandering Jews gambolling about the newborn Spanish soil on which rested so many hopes and symbols.

For now, this carnivalesque charade was exactly what they had expected. These palsied savages had leapt, gaping and mooning out of the pages of Sir John Mandeville, Herodotus, and other tales of the exotic.

The best disguise was to be recognizable.

Moishe remained silent. He did not betray his recognition save for a cocked eyebrow and a crooked, shlemiel-faced smile.

Martín and Vicente Pinzón conferred with Columbus. Then they spoke to Luis de Torres. He, in turn, spoke a goulash of tongues, including Hebrew, to Rabbi Daniel, feathered greybeard leader of this wild island race of tropical woodwose. Torres employed a too-loud voice, the international carrier of communication between cultures, as well as a colourful Berlitz of inscrutable gestures.

The rebbe did not, or pretended to not, understand. Chimplike, he bent and leapt, then grunted like a meshugener.

Torres returned to Columbus and nodded.

“And so,” Columbus announced, as if to history, “we venture into the interior. We seek villages, signs of mining and of agriculture. Gold. Silver. And, perchance, the civilized masters of these people.”

Moishe went to stand with those likely to be assigned to guard the boats and thus, according to the mysterious physics of management, was so assigned. As soon as the party, led by the neoprimitive rising and falling gait of Rabbi Daniel, disappeared into the jungle, Moishe motioned to a group of Vursht Nations people to follow him. We walked the beach and found a thicket where the jungle palms grew close and Moishe and I tucked ourselves behind its leeward side.

Two of the hidden Jews, hidden now inside the painted skins covering their pale paunchy bodies, scurried along the beach after us, singing a conspicuously harmless tune.

“Benito,” Moishe exclaimed. “And Samuel—can it be so?” He beamed with delight. I had told how Samuel’s kishkas had been lobscoused by Turkish musketoon, how he fell dead to the deck.

They, too, smiled and regarded Moishe, now a grown man, with wonder. Years had passed since they had last seen him. He, too, had new skin.

“The Ni?a, the Pinta, and the Santa María sail the Ocean Sea looking for something new and the newest thing we find is you? So I have to ask: Come here often?” Moishe said.

“We could ask the same question,” Samuel replied. “How far do we have to sail to elude the Inquisition? We cross half the world to get away from Spain and then Spain comes to us.”

Moishe: “We must speak with haste. I fear it is but a small island and Columbus will soon return.”

“Yes,” Benito said. “We have discovered that there is not much to discover.”

“How is it you sailed here?” Moishe asked.

“Our ship is moored in a hidden cove on the island’s other side,” Samuel began. “A caravel from Do?a Gracia’s fleet. The rebbe will keep it from the Spanish. What else they may discover, they will not discover this.”

“Soon after we arrived in Morocco, a new old persecution began,” Benito said. “We thought to sail to the Canaries, or perhaps the Fortunate Isles, the Ilhas Cassiterides—the islands of Tin and Silver—the Madeiras, or some new island in the Ocean Sea. Perhaps Prester John would be as kind to Jews as he is said to be kind to Mohammedans. But there was a storm and then an ocean current took us we knew not where. It seemed forty years wandering the wet desert.”

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