Yiddish for Pirates (7 page)

“My father’s book,” Moishe began enthusiastically, “filled with strange, unreadable writing in beautiful script. Diagrams and drawings of unknown places. The world made larger because drawn on a page.”

“What was this book?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t read it though its letters were Hebrew … I mean of course I couldn’t read it …” Moishe stammered, realizing he had said too much.

“A book of the Jews?” Columbus asked.

Moishe had inadvertently revealed his true background. He quickly began to cover it in false dress.

“My father could not have known what it was. He had meagre learning and read little. He had faith in the teachings of the Church. He was no heretic … he prayed frequently and crossed himself often …”

“I myself am much interested in the ancient holy books,” Columbus said. “The First Testament of the Jews. The Books of Ezra, Joshua …” Then he muttered, as if looking toward the distant Holy Land itself, “God willing, Jerusalem will soon be wrested from the infidels and returned …”

He became lost along the vague trails of imagination and desire.

He hadn’t noticed anything Jewish out of the Christian ordinary. Nu, he saw no light but his own shadow.

“But of course,” he said, suddenly returning, “I also read navigation, history and cosmology. Ancient writings from Ptolemy to Pliny, the travels of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo. And the works of Church Fathers from Cardinal d’Ailly’s
Imago Mundi
to Pope Pius
II
’
S
Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum
.

“And yet there are many books that I still wish to read. Once, I heard my brother speak of a book of the Jews, written in ancient Aramaic; perhaps your father’s was, also. It tells of a fountain that flows from a crack in the edge of the world, a fissure between earth and sky. Its elemental waters bring life eternal. I would travel and drink there, carry away its waters more valued than gold.”

A Fountain of Youth, Columbus? That emes was a wet dream. Time is the only river and it makes you grow old. Or at least, that’s what I thought then. Ach, what did it matter, we now needed water from a more quotidian puddle, for the sun demonstrated an interest in hard-boiling our pates, and so, when we observed a small cluster of buildings at a crossroads a mile away, we quickened our step. We expected to discover an inn, both sustenance and shade. With some gelt from Moishe’s newly acquired money sack, there would soon be plates of meat and cups of wine before us. Me, I was chaleshing for fruit, seeds, and an ocean of fresh water.

Several grey mules, a few bent horses, and one impressive black stallion were tied up outside and tended to by a scrawny boy. The inn was called Dom Venéreo, and it stooped like an old nag, leaning oysgeshpiltedly toward the glue pot. A door sagged open to a dark place of pockmarked tables and wine. An assortment of men with their heads in their hands, faces sombre and brooding. And a tall, handsome man with a red feather in his impressive hat. He was undoubtedly the stallion owner.

We set our course for a table below a shelf cluttered with seashells and wooden mugs. Before our tucheses made landfall, Columbus had already called for food and drink from the barmaid who, it seemed, had been sewn together some time ago from old leather and duck meat.
He left us at the table while he went to speak with the man and his ostentatious hat.

A red feather. Someone I knew?

The barmaid arrived with a wooden plate of amorphous stew, a jug filled with wine, and some bread. Moishe tore some breadcrust for me and held a mug of wine to my beak. Columbus was fathoms deep in words with the man when he motioned to Moishe to bring some money. Moishe fished out two small silver pieces and went to the table.

Moishe had saved Columbus’s life. He had mined the thief’s money sack from its youthful source. Yet, somehow, Columbus assumed the role of captain. As if it were as natural as his haughty self-absorption and blinkless faith in himself. As if he had not been born wet and slippery, but was from some other place. A place where the worth and fame of his future deeds were assured.

Moishe put the money on the table and Columbus pushed the coins toward the man. A game of checkerless checkers. The man promptly lifted the silver and stowed it in a pocket of his embroidered waistcoat with a small twitch of a smile.

We were to ride two mules to Lisbon.

Chapter Four

The scrawny boy stood smartly at attention as Red Feather strode from the inn door, his boots billowing small clouds of dust with each imperious step. A few curt orders and the boy began untying the mules.

Columbus, with the air of a grand knight setting out on a grail quest, took the reins and mounted the mule as if it were a great stallion.

Moishe climbed aboard his mule as if clambering out a window. He had no experience with great horses, but his father’s swayback carthorse was like an old and simple uncle to him and Moishe had taken joyrides about the yard on its rickety back.

We set out along the road to Lisbon. Moishe, the mule and I—mule surmounted by youth surmounted by parrot—resembling the fabled Musicians of Bremen, that motley vertical parade-across-species.

By late afternoon, we saw the broad blue expanse of the Tagus River as it widened into a virtual inland sea before flowing into the ocean. I remembered a
fado marinheiro
sung by a sailor intoxicated with nostalgia and loss, a feeling the Portuguese call
saudade
. “My hair is getting white, but the Tagus is always young,” he sang. And, ach, the sadness and wonder at witnessing a great river opening out into the sea. The current flowing purposefully forward, the always-young river suddenly lost in the endless, bankless vastness of the directionless sea, the stories of the lands that border the river diluted like so much salt.

Soon the lanky towers of the royal palace, the Alcáçova Castle, rose above the city.

Gotenyu, Moishe was gobsmacked. He’d never seen a city of such vastness.

Me, I’d travelled the sea from fort to raft and had seen much. Still, there is that excitement that builds at the approach of a city. The great hive buzzes with its citizens, the energizing mix of honey, work, romance, shtupping, horse dung and thieves.

The Tagus was filled with grand ships leaving, returning, bringing news of new regions of Africa, bringing gold, spices, textiles and slaves.

You know what they say about being a slave: it’s a terrible job, but at least you have job security.

We entered the city proper, guiding our mules through streets filled with a chaos of traffic. Then Columbus stopped. He began explaining to Moishe how to find his brother’s shop.

“You will travel elsewhere?” Moishe asked.

Columbus had a speech ready, in case history were listening.

“Convey my affectionate greetings and regrets to my brother. Though born a weaver’s son, I would be a man of the greater world and, by Jesu, have been granted this chance. Today, I trade weft for wharf and warp for wave. The gentleman met in the Dom Venéreo Inn has a brother who requires mariners for Iceland and Africa. He who wishes to find his way through the labyrinth of the western seas must first learn the winds of the whale roads and the warm waters of Africa. We sail this same day and so you must present yourself before Bartolomeo with this message: you will help him with his maps in my stead. Perhaps together you will chart the new lands I will find.”

And with that, Columbus turned down an alley and was gone.

We were marooned in the great ocean of the city with nothing but a mule and the empty net of Columbus’s words.

A shaynem dank dir in pupik
, as they say. Many thanks to your belly button. Thanks for nothing.

Perhaps not exactly nothing. Mapless, Moishe had travelled in search of maps and those who read them. From the narrow river of his birth, he would soon enter a larger sea. And, takeh, it’s true: what was unmapped for Moishe was maps.

Maps did not lead one to navigate with the eyes only. Reading maps led to following them. Before long, you wanted to be aboard that tiny caravel inscribed on the goatskin sea, blown by the favourable winds of commerce and curiosity, looking with a miniscule telescope at the islands of ink and the monsters that swam about the vague shores beyond.

And the roots of mountains, friable with gold.

Whatever the path, maps led to mariners.

Columbus’s brother, Bartolemeo Colon, lived and worked in a small building bordering on the Jewish quarter of Lisbon. A dun-coloured globe hung from a gibbet sticking out above the door.

A knock and then we were inside the dim room cluttered with books and charts both rolled and laid flat, piled on shelves, tables and the floor. A white-bearded, bent-backed ancient was stooped as if davening—praying—before a large map, dipping the dried-out hook of his nose into the ocean of parchment.

“Bartolemeo Colon?” Moishe asked, though surely this rebbe was more like the brother of Columbus’s ancestors.

The
alter mensch
wheezed a sound between leaves and a handful of phlegm and a young man appeared from behind a tottering shelf. His clear blue eyes revealed him to be the true brother of Columbus and he took us to the small courtyard behind the building.

We sat at a small table and he poured wine from a clay jug.

We were not surprised to learn that Bartholomeo did not actually own the shop but was rather an apprentice to the old man, Angelino Dalorto, a much-celebrated cartographer in his day. We had suspected that Columbus’s art consisted of embellishment, confidence and poetry in equal measure. All codpiece and no cod. All chop with no liver, Indians without India.

A pirate tale without pirates.

Yet.

And Bartholomeo was not surprised that his brother’s path had veered to the sea, that he’d sent Moishe as his proxy.

“My ambitious brother. One day when he is famous, they will say he was a self-made man who loved his creator.”

Chapter Five

We were a week there, amidst the books and charts. Moishe did what he was asked. Sweeping, lifting, carrying. Drawing water, not on maps but only from the well, though he was taught to decipher portolans and to box the compass from Tramontana to Maestro.

We accompanied Bartholomeo on business, learning something of the alleyways of both the city and the language, the mapmaker’s world. The Jews of Lisbon were unlike any Jews that Moishe—Miguel—had seen. With their Moorish hats and bright flowing robes, they lived in their own quarter of the city. Through the Arco do Rosário was a new world: La Judería. Some were immensely wealthy, merchants and bankers living in grand big macher houses. Indeed some were mathematicians, physicians, cartographers, astronomers, or treasurers employed by the court.

What was familiar were the occasional snatches of Hebrew—prayers, oaths and chochma sayings—like flashes of colour from beneath slashed sleeves. But their Ladino language was an alluring and exotic spice, plangent and musical, russet red and nutmeg against the chopped liver and guttural blue breakers of Yiddish.

One Friday evening, Bartholemeo led Moishe into the shop. The old master and his older, more shrivelled twin were sitting in the unsteady light of the guttering Shabbos candles. The man waved for Moishe to sit down. His face was so abundantly cross-hatched with wrinkles, it appeared he had been shattered, the fragments only held together by a
scaffolding of wispy beard. Still, there was a twinkling bemusement in his expression, and he spoke to Moishe in Yiddish.

“Bocher,” he said. “You like it here?”

Moishe nodded.

“See? One doesn’t forget the mamaloshen,” the old reb said. “Not like the foreskin.”

The rabbi made a scissors motion.

Moishe inhaled sharply.

“Sha. That’s language you don’t forget either. Now I know for certain you’re a Yid.”

“What made you suspect?”

“Words and how they’re said are maps also. But
nisht gedayget
—don’t worry—you’re safe. You’re a hindl, a chick, among chickens.”

Miguel had become Moishe again.

“A hindl with a feygeleh—a bird—on his shoulder,” the rebbe mused. “You’re just the boychik for us. We have a bisl job for you. A delivery.”

The mapmaker, sitting beside him, smiled wanly, though it wasn’t clear if he knew what was being said.

The rebbe explained about the Inquisition. “It’s like the old inquisition but worse,” he said. Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of the combined kingdoms of Castile-León and Aragon, had created a made-in-Spain solution including threatening to withdraw Spanish military support in the war against Turkey—they had received the Pope’s blessing by way of a Papal Bull.

“Ach,” the rebbe said. “It’s still kosher to be a Jew in Spain, if you don’t mind an occasional pogrom. Or to be accused of blood libel or witchcraft, whenever anything goes wrong. Or—as in Seville—you’re ready for the foot-on-tuches invitation to leave your city and all you know.”

Many had converted to Christianity. “But you’d better make sure there’s smoke coming out the chimney on Shabbos, and on Friday, to eat a bisl fish. You want it to look like you’ve had a relapse? That’s heresy. But,” he said, “there’s a cure for that. It’s called death.”

Those converted were called
conversos
: “New Christians.” Some families had been Christian for over a hundred years, converting after a previous outbreak of pogroms and persecutions. They’d left their Jewishness behind like a distant and half-remembered homeland. Some were more recent graduates. At any moment, the Inquisition might ask you to produce a
Limpieza de sangre
—documentation of blood purity. It was how many discovered that they had a Jewish great-grandmother or grandfather. This was tantamount to discovering fatal traces of peanuts in your nut-free lunch.

After you’ve had a bite.

Some conversos were hidden Jews, Marranos, crypto-Jews, practising their faith in secret. The Jewishness that dare not speak its name. They lit Shabbos candles in cupboards, shared Passover meals in cellars, whispered blessings as they walked through doors. Studied the Talmud and davened from prayerbooks late in the night. Hebrew books, Jewish books were treyfeneh bicher: verboten.