Yiddish for Pirates (6 page)

“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.

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.

“I was thinking …” Moishe began.

But then the unmistakeable scrape of a blade drawn from its scabbard. Three men jack-in-the-boxed from behind the rocks. A thin youth soon had a dagger across Columbus’s chicken neck. The older and thicker two stood in front of us. All were wrapped in rags.

“Money,” the one to the left said darkly. An orator, his demands were expressed with near-classical economy.

Moishe had nothing but the book tucked into his shoulderbag and one remaining silver piece sewn into his waistband, the other having being lost in the escape from the burning ship.

I had nothing but my keen wits, my good looks, and my treasure trove of many words.

Columbus, of course, had untold riches.

Just not yet.

I have not found ruffians to be at ease with the concept of IOUs.

It was not long before Columbus was on the ground, the knife ready to carve him into brisket.

One of the shtarkers held Moishe while the orator punched him in the kishkas, hoping, one assumes, to have him puke money.

I took this moment to attempt an old trick. A parrot, desirous of pecking-order dominance, doesn’t futz around with pecking. He stretches his wings wide and swoops clawfirst and topples the rival parrot.

The orator’s head, perched on his shoulders, would be the rival parrot.

I flew up and began my swoop.

If his head didn’t fall off, at least I’d make a nice borscht of his face.

“Avast!” the skinny thief warned and the thick thug let go of Moishe. Moishe slid the book from beneath his shirt and gave the pugilating orator a mighty
klop
on the head. It did not fall off, for it was attached like a dingleberry to the thick tuft of his neck, but the orator collapsed.

Then Moishe heaved the book over the cliff. “Money,” he yelled. The two standing gonifs, taking the bait, ran after the book as it fell toward the sea. I rerouted my attack and hit the skinny thief in the face. Moishe rushed forward and grabbed the knife. Columbus lay still on the ground like an uninhabited island awaiting discovery.

Moishe had boyhood experience playing catch-and-wrestle. And this time he had a knife. The kosher way to slaughter an animal is to slit its throat and let the blood run out. Moishe was the shochet and he had the skinny one ready to be turned to deli meat.

“Money,” Moishe said again, this time into the ear of the skinny youth, and I noted that his pronunciation was rapidly improving. Fear had already drained the blood from the youth’s face. He reached into his pocket and produced a small sack. We heard the muffled chinking of money.

“Money,” Moishe repeated with an ironic smile, tucking away the sack with his free hand. “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself,” he said, demonstrating casual mastery of the idiom.

By this time Columbus was on his feet. Moishe’s blade was still at the youth’s throat. Columbus put his face, with its sea blue eyes, close to the youth’s. “Go,” he said.

The single syllable was sufficient. Moishe removed the knife and the youth fled back along the road like a bullet trying to return to its gun.

Columbus said one more syllable, this time to Moishe.

“Thanks.”

Columbus owned little. Evidently, he had to be frugal, saving even his gratitude as we had saved his life.

Chapter Three

Moishe was learning of the world outside the shtetl: it was the fifteenth century. Bandits were expected roadside attractions. There were no signs that said, “Last mugging for twenty miles,” but du
farshteyst
, you get the idea. You couldn’t trust the eyes in the back of your head not to wink coquettishly at misfortune, once in awhile.

We resumed walking.

Moishe now had a chance to look back and be scared in retrospect at the rush of events. And though it had been unreadable, the worlds in its maps unreachable, Moishe mourned the loss of his father’s book. It had been a tangible memory, a written familiar from his past.

Ach, but he still had me. I might sometimes be a tosser, but I was untossable. I was a flying language guide for travellers, and as we plodded on, I continued to teach. I imagined myself like the chirping feygeleh that landed on Pope Gregory’s shoulder and whispered Gregorian chants in his infallible, pontifical ear.

Who knew what words they would use to offer this Polly a cracker, or a bite of a pretty zaftik morsel? But, nu, it’d certainly be in a language meant for Miguel and not Moishe.

Miguel would need to be ready.

Columbus spoke little. The rudderless coracle of his thoughts bobbed elsewhere. Except when Moishe inquired of his brother’s charthouse.

“My good brother Bartholemeo is a writer and merchant of charts and texts. There are many learned men from Granada to Galicia, from Portugal to the Pyrenees who learn who and where they are by purchasing his finely drawn maps and his well-bound books.”

When the subject was himself or his brother, Columbus did not use one word when two were possible.

Like some parrots, he was—ech—his own echo.

Moishe listened with visible wonder as Columbus roiled on about the beauty and scholarship of his brother’s wares. He spoke of currents, shorelines, Ptolemy and Africa. Of carmine-coloured writing and even of blue. Of inks created of vitriol and black amber, of sugar, the lees of wine, fish-glue, and isinglass, this last being especially appropriate for nautical charts, made as it was from the dried swim bladders of fish.