Yiddish for Pirates(82)

He spread his arms out as if addressing multitudes. “And I saw in this light another light, and I cannot say how I saw it, except not with these two mortal eyes, but while I beheld it, all sadness and pain was lifted from memory, so that I was as an innocent child and not the careworn mariner that I am. I know that the Last World Emperor shall reign and Jerusalem shall be returned from the heathen. The thousand-year end of the world shall soon be found, an Eden at the other side of this ocean of struggle.”

“And dernoch vos?” Moishe asked. “What then?” Asking what came after the end of the world was like asking someone on a ledge what would happen after they fell to become dispersed dollops on the sidewalk. It wasn’t really the point. At least, not yet. Of course, eventually, the dollops would rise and the buried dead would break through the sidewalks. And as long as you were a good Christian wolf, you could shmunts and cavort with the lamb. It wasn’t clear what would happen with Jews, pagans, heathens, conversos, birds, beasts, and sinners, but there’d be trumpets.

Columbus had klopped into the Novo Mundo, the unfoundland. Now he must get more specific and bump into paradise. Or, at least, the terrestrial Eden. He knew from the book stolen by Pinzón that it was to be sought in the north of the Caribbean, and thence he pointed his bow in that direction.

It wasn’t difficult to persuade Columbus to help regain our ship. The map that had been hidden on board would guide us both to his book and Torquemada’s baby-bound tome. And these books led to the Fountain of Youth, which, takeh, surely must be the emptied Eden, its blank pages no longer inhabited by Adam and Eve, the world’s first DPs.

So there’s this riddle about the first couple and a character called “Vemen-Art-Es”—“What-does-it-matter?”


Adam and Eve and Vemen-Art-Es

Jumped into the Mikveh and bathed.

Adam and Eve were drowned

Who do you think was saved?





Vemen-art-es? What does it matter?


But what did happen to Adam and Eve? Did they hollow out the Tree of Knowledge, make a canoe and then paddle east to Europe?

Fnyeh.

Not these Heyerdahls.

But, if there ever were an Adam and Eve, who knows where they went?

Maybe they were Indios—or what came before Indios.

Or parrots.

I mean Adam and Eve: maybe they were birds.

I could see my great-great-great-infinitely-great-grand-parrot forebears fressing on apples, learning to name things, being too clever for their own good.

Or God’s.





Chapter Three



We sailed north. The moon stuck its great shnozz through the sky, a kibitzer wondering where we were going, its glimmering trail a path across water, as if we could walk its undulating silver highway to another place. An eternal place of bodies and souls just over the horizon.

And nu, perhaps that’s where we were going. Are we there yet?

To those over there, we’re always somewhere else.

Especially in our words.

I sat on a yardarm.

Columbus strode about the deck in his black cassock.

I no longer pretended to have words but no understanding.

Columbus said, “St. Francis was said to preach to the birds, and so he must have believed they had understanding.”

“And souls?”

“Why else would he preach?”

“And Los Indios?”

“They have understanding.”

“And souls?”

“Of a kind.”

“There is more than one kind?”

“Perhaps,” he said.





Our problem now: how to find an uncaptained ship of Jews and the righteous among crustaceans in a vast sea. The current pulled us north and we followed its words. We would keep a clear eye for what lay before us, what lay around.

The deck was still, little sound but the soughing of the wind and the steady crosscutting of the men’s snores. Columbus, ever an expectant human breaker for the transcendent fizzle of his God’s unpredictable power surges, positioned himself at the convergence of the bow gunwales and waited. Moishe, grateful to be more than ballast aboard a barrel, tied a hammock between the starboard shroud and the mizzenmast, and slept. The watch slept also, save for the boy uneponymously manning the wheel.

From the fore-crosstree, I watched the phosphorescence of the sea. A mantle of blueish-white covered nearly all the dark water north of us, its edges wavering and trembling within half a mile of the ship. We floated in a sea of liquid radiance, an unearthly, blue glare. The ocean was a vast aurora of blue fire overrun by heavens of almost inky blackness. Iridescent spittle from the lips of Columbus’s God on the dark velvet of a Torah mantle.

Only a moment before, the still water had reflected an entire hemisphere of spangled constellations, and the outlines of the ship’s spars were projected as dusky shadows against the Milky Way. Now the sea was ablaze with opaline light, and the yards and sails were painted in faint tints of blue on a background of ebony. A vivid electrical fire was upon the ocean. As I stood farklemt upon the quarter-deck, this sheet of bluish flame suddenly vanished, causing, by its almost instantaneous disappearance, a sensation of total blindness, and leaving the sea, for a moment, an abyss of blackness. But as the pupils of my eyes gradually dilated, I saw as before the dark shining mirror of water around the ship, while far away on the horizon rose the great luminous appearance that had first attracted my attention and that was caused by the lighting up of the haze by areas of phosphorescent water below the horizon line.