Yiddish for Pirates(83)
I thought to call out, “Gevalt! It comes again!” but felt hushed as if in the presence of something sacred. Again the great tide of fire came sweeping up around the vessel and we floated in a sea of illumination that extended in every direction and beyond the limits of vision.
Then I heard, over the radiance, a song. A distant singing. Like the sombre keening of whales, a hollow sorrowing of such beauty that my wings felt lifted as if a sigh had gathered me in its breath and was pulling me toward the warmth of its body.
An island surrounded by phosphorescence. Women swimming near the shore, singing. Their naked bodies rising above the water, dappled in bright light, then sinking again. Brown bodies spangled with radiant life.
“Moishe,” I called. “This is worth waking up for.”
“What’s your rush?” he grumbled. “So, nu, the farkakter Messiah will be born shpeter mit a tog—a day later.”
The singing coiled around us, a honeyed murmuration, an undulating nigun, a writhing shimmy of smoke. It found Moishe and he woke.
“Our ship has been sighted? We’ve got the map? The …” But then he slid from the hammock, and stood mesmerized at the gunwale. Columbus rose and stood beside him. Together they slipped off their clothes and fell into the sea, swimming toward the singing maidelehs.
Before long, the crew, too, glided like sleepwalkers from where they kipped and dived into the luminous dappling of dark water. Only the boy at the helm remained. The lapping water and the sinuous song lulled him to where, I imagine, he dreamed whatever populates a boy’s nodding Eden and he slept with a smile.
And I, too, found my brain rippling warm with the song’s phosphorescent brindling, which caused me to follow the men toward the island’s shallows.
A woman, moon-luminous like the flesh of a pear, soft and glistening as kreplach in soup, stood waist-deep in water, her arms on Moishe’s shoulders. Her eyes, swart and steady, transfixed him. She whispered but who could tell what she said, for her voice was the susurration of lapping water, speech without words. Columbus, too, stood before a machesheyfeh enchantress lost in a distant horizon. The crew wandered somnambulant toward the dark shadows of the forest beyond shore, where naked, both men and women stood waiting between the tangle of branches.
I heard birds—what I was sure were parrot calls—from within the trees. Then I saw, beside a fire on the beach, the extended shadow of a parrot, long and anamorphic, a smear of darkness, a shadow road. Then the pure Harlequin form of the parrot-in-itself appeared to me. I flew toward him, my brain a substance between twilight and lokshen pudding.
The women rose from the water covered in fringed prayer-shawl tallises of water and light. Water that rivered down their skin and fell in moon-bright droplets onto the sand. Moishe and Columbus followed, meek as virgins on their way to spring sacrifice, but led by their keeper’s tucheses, a voluptuary prophet’s round and gluteus vision of both halves of a transcendent world, suggestively tectonic as they moved.
On the beach by a fire, the bo’sun was kneeling before a broad balebosteh of a woman. More Venus of Düsseldorf than a twiggy Giacometti, she was an impressive piece of living shed-sized statuary. Higgs gazed up at her as before an altar and she smiled and kitsled tickled his ears.
Moishe and Columbus now kneeled on the sand beside the bo’sun, their eyes turned to glass. The three women had donned strange robes made of coconut shells, long reeds, mother-of-pearl, and mussels resembling the nether-part knishes of creatures of an elder world. They gathered around the fire, drinking wine.
The parrot was given its own bowl and he drank while gazing at me. Intermittently he chirruped boozily, a low vibration that I felt in my cloaca. I became shikkered drunk by proxy, grinning the idiotic shmendrick-smile of the besotted. I stood on the sand beside the others, dazed by expectation, desire, and some sorcerous variety of island legerdemain.
Then without warning, they threw their capes, which were actually sacks, over the men’s heads and bound them. I woke from my stupor and flew into a tall palm away from my parrot.
I never even knew his name.
If I did, I’d beak him a thousand bespoke curses.
May an unspecified illness, vast and endless as our illusions, fress upon each of your cellwalls until you fall as miserable soup from the wretched sky.
Spanish soldiers rushed from the rainforest and seized Moishe, Columbus and the bo’sun.
“Release me for I am Admiral and Viceroy,” Columbus protested from within his bag. “I am Governor of—”
A soldier paid speedy tribute by puter-kletsling him below his equator with his knee and he collapsed to the sand. Another shmitzed Moishe with a stick and he fell.
The bo’sun quickly lay down on the sand and was silent.
A Spanish captain, fussy with big macher fur and brocade, stumped out of the forest and onto the beach. Behind him, a disheartened procession of Columbus’s crew, bound and led by rope.
“Buenas Noches!” the captain said, bowing slightly toward the bagged Columbus. He was a small blancmange of a man, red-bearded with but one eye, and it like the dull gallstone of a rat. He spoke as if reading the lines of a dandy stage villain. “I am known as Panfilo de Narváez, captain, commander and governor of these northern regions of Cíbola, so appointed by their most refulgent sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella.”
He addressed the bags on the beach.
“It is a pleasure to welcome one who is so distinguished, and who has discovered so much. I trust that you will discover much more as our prisoner. And so, too, your esteemed Hebrew confrère, Moishe, the less-than-a-yardarm pirate—because, as we well know, it was not only his sail that was trimmed.”