Yiddish for Pirates(8)

Down the beach, in the shallows before shore, an oysgedarteh skinny beluga of a boy was embracing two fractured flagons. He washed up and down with each foaming wave. A wrinkled white shmeckel between two broken beytsim.

The pekeleh? It was Moishe.

I hadn’t realized how worried bazorgt I’d been. He’d become a barnacle stuck to where it chaffed.

I flew over. “So, nu, vos macht a Yid? Come here often?”

He was motionless.

So I spoke to the sky. “O Adonai! Creator of the Universe, thank you for saving this boychik’s life. But I’ve just one complaint: he had a hat! How could you forget his hat?”

“I had no hat,” Moishe murmured.

It was good he could speak. Hat or no hat, he was alive.

The red-haired man pulled himself to his knees. He held the rolled parchment to his chest and crawled further up the beach. When he noticed Moishe roiling in the shallow water, he staggered to his feet and approached. “Stand, sailor,” he said in Spanish. “With these maps I have made, I shall show you marvels.”

“He’s half-drowned, like a noodle in soup. And he speaks as much Spanish,” I said.

He looked at me, incredulously.

“What?” I said. “Is it my accent?”

He did what people do when they encounter something entirely alien. They pretend there’s nothing out of the ordinary.

So I spoke intelligible Spanish. Of course: this Polly is something of a polyglot.

As a parrot, I’m a man of the world.

The water continued to wash up on Moishe. “In any case, I could use some help hauling him,” I told the mapmaker. “Look. No hands.”

He stumbled up the beach and secured his maps beneath a knot-holed plank. He grabbed Moishe under the armpits and hauled him to safety on the short grass far above the tide line, a sack of wet, semi-conscious Jew beside some damp charts—his father would be so proud.

“Thanks,” I said to the mapmaker. “Business or pleasure: which brings you to the beach?”

I could tell that he was still somewhat fartumelt, a bit shore-shocked, though he spoke with a stiff formality, like jello served on a silver plate.

“A letter of marque from the Doge of Genoa made us privateers. We sought the sweet cargo of the Alboran Sea. Our three ships came upon a vessel …”

“My vessel,” I said.

“My father is a weaver and I began travelling to sell his wares, and to study maps and winds. But I am paid better than weaver’s wages to sail, and sometimes to board merchant ships. I am sorry for your loss. It is, unfortunately, as my father says: ‘Quien no sabe de mar, no sabe de mal—He who knows nothing of the sea, knows nothing of suffering.’ ”

Who was this haughty, geshvollener young man, with his father’s Ladino sayings and Ashkenazi “I-am-sorry-for-your-loss” consolations?

He continued with his silver patter.

“And as for myself, though I be a weaver’s son, my warp and woof are the waves. My home is nowhere, but my heart is everywhere. Soon I shall be an admiral as indeed another in my family has been. And before I die, I intend to sail both the charted and uncharted places of this world. The isles wait for me. Marvels, also.”

Moishe groaned and then rolled over. “Vi heystu?” he moaned.

“What does he say?” the weaver’s son asked.

“Who are you?”

“My name,” he replied with a flourish of self-importance, “is Christoval Colon.”

I translated the name for Moishe. “Christopher Columbus.”

“I’m supposed to know him?” Moishe asked, and put his head back onto the green grass and passed out.





Chapter One



Columbus stood over Moishe’s inert body. “It is because of me that he has arrived here,” he said. “He should thank me for his good fortune.”

“If he knew he was anywhere,” I said, “my master would indeed be grateful to be there.”

“Lisbon is a place of bounteous opportunity,” Columbus continued. “I myself am bound for the studio of Bartholomeo, my brother, whose maps grace the courts of popes and philosophers, the chambers of captains and kings.”

One could do worse than follow the route of one who makes maps. Besides, these several months past Moishe had sought to chart a course from shtetl cart to court cartographer.

We agreed that we would set out together, the three of us, once Moishe had regained himself.





The pickling in the ocean had changed Moishe.

Azoy bald—so soon?

Ay, it was a kind of briny baptism.

“From now on, like a knife in a boot, I’m keeping my Jewishness hidden,” he said. “It’s safer if no one knows. So, nu, I need a new name.”

“Miguel,” I said. “It’s Spanish and Portuguese. But you need a last name too. You can’t be Miguel Ben Chaim.”

“So what should I be?”

“Rich. But in the meantime, you could try Levante. It means ‘where the sun rises’: the east.”

Moishe tried it out. “Miguel Levante. Yes. I could be him,” he said.

It was late in the morning when we began walking the road to Lisbon. Or rather, they walked and I rode on my now customary shoulder.