Yiddish for Pirates(9)

The sun was a gold piece against the smooth ocean of sky. The three of us, having nothing, carried nothing, save Columbus’s charts and Moishe’s book, concealed in a shouldersack worn under the clothes like a prayer shawl. My tatterdemalion companions appeared washed up, dredged like seaweed from the bottom of the sea. I, adorned in my usual crepuscular feathers, appeared no different than if I were a parrot king dressed for his coronation. By noon we needed a nosh, so stopped at a farmhouse to beg some bread.

The farmer eyed us suspiciously.

Moishe was dark, curly haired, but as long as he did not speak he was no more Jew than Portuguese. His head was uncovered—ach, he had no hat, remember?—and his clothes were faithless rags. Columbus was bedraggled, yet his supercilious bearing impressed the farmer and so he believed our story. “Just this morning, we were beaten and robbed on our way to an audience with the King.”

“And he,” I said, indicating Moishe with a nod of my beak, “lost his hat.”

The farmer brought bread, grapes and wine to the table. Miguel, under his breath, made the brocheh for both bread and drink. Soon, his inner Moishe would learn to sound like someone else.

Who better than a parrot to teach such a thing?





Chapter Two



A cool night breeze. We sat outside the farmer’s cottage with Columbus and a flagon of the farmer’s wine. The self-actualized liberators of libation, we’d helped ourselves, for as Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” The ancient sage clearly knew a thing or two about schnapps.

Moishe set a bowl of wine on the sandy ground. I drank.

“They say that I shall be nothing but viceroy of a continent of water, an admiral of seaweed and fishes only, but I have studied the maps. I have made the calculations.” Columbus spoke as if he could guarantee a thing by speaking boldly.

He explained his plan to sail west across the Ocean Sea to Cathay, Cipangu, and the lands of the Great Khan.

“I have studied the ancients. Their books mark out the miles—the Ocean Sea is not so large as we imagine. If we approach from the west, we do not need to crawl like Polo over the hackles of the world.”

Columbus spoke of Marco Polo’s account of his travels. A book, written while Polo was imprisoned, had been later chained to the Rialto Bridge in Venice so all could read its marvels.

“I will spend some years attaining complete mastery of the ways of the tides and winds. I will sail to Thule, to Galway, and south to the new territories of Africa. And then I shall seek a king who will provide me ships and the mariners to sail them, and who shall grant me governance of the new lands that I shall discover on my great voyage.”

Of course he would stand astride the world. With such beytsim, he could bring his legs together?

“What of the dragons and the monstrous whirlpools which hunger for your ship?” Moishe said.

“Some also believe the woods filled with witches, ghosts and demons, but these are only shadows or squirrels made infernal by fear.” Columbus emptied his mug of wine with a flourish and sleeved his mouth. “A traveller with a good stick can easily manage these travails.”

He stood up, the better to continue his enthusiastic oration to the crowd of boy and parrot.

“Not long ago, they thought a book could only be made through the crablike crawling of the human hand, but Gutenberg showed us a new route was possible. Soon they will take their moveable type and print books with my name in them. Histories and new maps of the world with ‘Columbus’ written over the western seas.”

Then this lord of the new ocean listed toward the barn where he would collapse beside pigs and chickens.

“Do you think that what he says could be true—that the world is a snake with its tail in its own mouth?” Moishe asked. “Could he sail to the Indies?”

“I’m sure by now that that balmelocheh has the chickens ready to wager their eggs on it. But ver veyst? Who knows? Here am I, an African Grey, speaking to a boy, five thousand miles from where I was born. Could my mother have dreamt this when I was hatched from the egg?”

Later, as he staggered toward sleep, Moishe took his father’s book from its hiding place beneath a bundle of rags. Columbus’s words reminded him of its circular maps. But, unwrapping the cloth that protected it, he discovered that the book, waterlogged when he was wrecked off the coast, had dried into a paper brick and would not open.

Perhaps all it needed was another good dunking. The hair of the dog that fressed upon it.





Early morning. The sun squinting bloodshot over the droop-eyed horizon.

An early exodus along the coast road. We were to work for the farmer in exchange for food and lodging, but planned to be far away by the time he came looking for us. You’re no one’s worm if you’re earlier than the early bird.

The two of them held their heads and shielded their eyes against the daylight and the effects of wine. I sat on Moishe’s shoulder and closed my eyes.

A worn path through the rolling hills, the beaches and the steady breaking of the waves far below. We walked between dusty boulders and stunted trees, the only sounds the shuffle of their feet and the occasional bird. Then low murmuring, but, half asleep, I imagined it nothing but the rumble of Moishe’s belly.

We continued over a small rise and along a curving cliffside road.