Yiddish for Pirates

by Gary Barwin

  Then he pointed at an ornate chair. “Sit.”

  Moishe looked warily around the room. He’d learned to check for exits, unless aboard ship. The sea was both escape enough and no escape. There was a door at the end of the chamber. “The Queen is not at the palace?”

  “Today,” the painter said, “there is another parade to celebrate the Reconquista.”

  “Will they also dance in the streets when the Jews are gone?” Moishe asked.

  “As they did in Hamelin when the rats left,” the painter said. “Now, sit.” This time, Moishe sat. The painter turned and repaired the sky.

  “If only such feats could be wrought outside of the canvas,” he said and put down his brushes. “I am Señor Rui Fernández, painter, yes, he that painted for Doña Gracia, but together we worked on greater trickery than mere perspective and flattery. For some years, the Doña and I have arranged safe passage for oppressed and fire-bound Jews. The Doña with the ships of her late husband and brother-in-law who disappeared, likely tied to stone or iron, dropped into the deep. We could lay the foundation for new Jerusalems from such seabones as have collected there.

  “I am Fernández, yes, and cousin to that Sarah who you tried to help. I, too, have spoken with this would-be world-finder Columbus. I will travel with him, through the Pillars of Hercules, across Ocean Sea and beyond history’s vanishing point. With the Doña gone, there are no more rescue ships. And, in truth, this dark tide has already washed my heart to sea, and only habit keeps blood moving through me.”

  There was a great clattering in the courtyard.

  Important people, or perhaps more correctly, the self-important, move either with preternatural silence or with profligate sound. I flew to the window. Bright colours. Hammered metal. Flourishes of cut-sleeved brocade. The landed had landed and they were coming toward us.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  Fernández: “That’s a clever bird.”

  A pageboy was on the steps of the chamber. Moishe ran to the door that he’d previously charted as a sally port for use in sudden storm.

  It was locked.

  I flew to the rafters. Birds and clouds can hide in the sky. Moishe would have to learn from the painter’s horizon and become background. He pressed himself against the wall, miming grout or shadow.

  “Señor Fernández, our queen arrives. She grants you time and her noble visage for the painting of her portrait,” the page said.

  The painter rose in anticipation and soon the royal cortège bustled in. A couple songbird-resplendent maidels-in-waiting, some hildagos, many pages, two priests and Torquemada, Grand biltong-dry Inquisitor of the Holy Office, and the Queen: short, strong, blue-eyed, with hair like the auburn planks of a ship. She had the self-assurance of a statue of herself, though far beneath the staid mantel of steady piety there appeared to be a fiery and excitable core.

  “Su Majestad Católica es muy generosa. Your Catholic Majesty is most generous,” Fernández said, bowing low, and with perhaps a slightly ironic curve to his painterly spine.

  But it might have been artistic foreshortening.

  The Queen acknowledged him with an almost imperceptible nod, then established court by enthroning the grand duchy of her regal tuches in the ornate chair. Once the seat of power was comfortable, she nodded to Torquemada who sat in a smaller chair beside her.

  The pages stood against the wall beside Moishe. An invisible identification line-up. In these times, servants were deferential and soft-focus backgrounds to the prominent foreground of the powerful. It was unlikely the pages would break rank and render themselves visible by singling out Moishe, especially in the presence of the Queen. To be wrong might result in the singling out of their livers or tongues. At the very least, they would be expelled.

  From a high window.

  “Señor Fernández, you may begin,” the Queen said, and struck a noble, world-conquering, Jew-tossing, Moor-expunging, yet humble pose.

  The painter lifted his brush and palette. Soon the oval lake before him began to glow with an expression of inherited power. From amidst a shroud of mist, the face of Isabella appeared, a pious Ozymandias looking faithfully into the future.

  Isabella kibitzed quietly with her ladies-in-waiting.

  Torquemada, the wizened Millenarian vulture, perched on his chair silently, wondering where the Messiah was, waiting for the beginning of the end of the world, reclaiming Zion and positioning Ferdinand as “Last World Emperor.” I could almost see him drying out, his alter kaker apple-doll brain collapsing in on itself like a dead star, his fearsome eyes sucking all available light from the room.

  The doppelganger Isabella continued to form.

  The priests and hidalgos stood waiting.

  Then Columbus strode into the doorway.

  A sailor with seven-league bootstraps looking for Su Majestad’s permission to begin his long sail over the short sea.

  He bowed but as if only to offer the Queen an exclusive vision of the pure snows that creamed the polar cap of his head.

  “Señor Columbus,” the Queen began. “Admiral of the distant horizon and Viceroy of what isn’t there. It is a surprise.”

  “Su Majestad,” he said.

  “Doubtless, you have come to speak again of savages and kings. So, enter and prophesy.” He walked into the room, a grand procession of one. There was a flicker of recognition as his eyes scanned the far wall—sailors look always to the edges of where they are—Moishe a familiar piss-pool in a lake of pages, though Columbus said nothing.

  “Su Majestad, I will sail to Cathay and Cipangu,” he said. “To the lands of the Great Khan. ‘Most Serene Prince,’ I shall say to him, ‘I have travelled from where the morning begins, west from the east, and yet have arrived at the Farther East. I bring you greetings from your dearest friends, Los Reyes Católicos, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon.’ ”

  He turned toward beef-jerky Torquemada. “And, Your Eminence,” he said, “I will discover how these people are disposed and the manner whereby their conversion to our holy faith might be effected. This I do for Our Lord, enthroned above the circle of our world and who wishes it so.”

  He spoke again to the Queen. “Also,” he said, “I will return with an Ararat of gold, spices, rare treasures, and—before the African-groping Portuguese may grasp them—new conquests of islands and mainlands in the Ocean Sea. These will provide such monies as will allow our stalwart Christian soldiers to retake Jerusalem, even as you’ve returned the good lamb of Granada to your Majesties’ Catholic flock. It is but a small risk for great glory, both here and in the Eternal beyond.”

  I’m a feygeleh parrot who has sailed many seas and travelled in many languages. How would Columbus’s greeting sound to the Great Khan?

  I translate:

  “Great Khan, or Lesser Khan, or Hardly-Khan-at-All, I am Brother Christopher and I was in the neighbourhood. Are you happy with your civilization? I bring Good News. Also, I am here to trade some magic beans for precious things, or else, ransack your house.”

  Torquemada and Isabella heard only Jesus, gold, glory, Jerusalem. And, “Portugal, you conquer the world in your way; we conquer it in His.”

  And: “first.”

  And: “more.”

  Columbus did not wait for a response but launched into a disquisition on distances, ancient Greeks and ocean currents.

  “You could run a sword through their bodies,” Torquemada said, suddenly emerging from his chiliastic stupor. “Though it might puncture or slice, it would not injure their hinkypink souls,” he said, grinning like a chimp. “They have no souls.”

  “Who?” Isabella asked.

  “Heathens.”

  “But, Padre, should we not wish to baptize them?”

  “I hope thereby to win new lands for the Holy Church,” Columbus said.

  “And I believe all people to be human,” Isabella said.

  These words were fighting words then. A colourless green idea sleeping all over Europe,
full of sound and fury, but, ultimately, signifying nothing.

  Or, signifying plenty if you were a slave.

  Isabella continued. “And some of these humans, our Lord God has chosen to allow to serve us.”

  Exactly.

  Who wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would sell some of its members? A barbecue joint that calls its ingredients “patrons”?

  “And,” she said, “these humans, we must teach as children.”

  “Then, Su Majestad,” Columbus interjected, “allow me to discover these kindling gardens for Spain. I will achieve glory, gold, new land, souls, and good servants.”

  “These people cannot be human if being human is to mean anything at all. To be human is to have a soul. To be rational. To understand that there must be a Pater, Filius and a Spiritus Sanctus,” Torquemada said. “Most—such as the Africans—are, at best, human in part only.”

  Columbus turned to Isabella. “Su Majestad,” he said. “These many years, I have been petitioning your illustrious Majesties. The Reconquista has been accomplished, the Jews sent into exile. If there is to be a time for Columbus, before there is no more time in this world, surely this is that time.”

  He went down on one knee. “I am your humble servant, he who will bring you gold, the passage to India, the new edge of the world, great wealth, and much land, yet he who will seek, if he must, the patronage of another crown if the splendid double crown of Spain wishes to wait for the future to wash ashore like seaweed and wet sticks. Su Majestad, I believe it is God’s will that a caravel and its courageous captain should sail the new sea. We wait now only for the King and Queen.”

  “Señor Columbus, we thank you for your words, for your ardent faith, your pressing enthusiasm, your sometime loyalty,” Isabella said. “As you well know, some months ago, the King and I convened a council to discuss your plea. These learned and Godly men have decided that, though your many words stir our imagination, what is unknown is too much not known. We have watched the world unfold as you talk your way around the globe, but the calculations of our council—astronomers, astrologers, cartographers, mathematicians, cosmologists, priests, bishops, navigators, scholars, those with knowledge of the ancients and the lands and distances in their books—make the Ocean Sea a moon away and not some few Canary-distances as you promise. You could wish to travel to the sky with a jump, but, unless your legs were mountains or you had a map charting where the high blue reached close, no words could take you there, and no king or queen could, even if willing, finance such a leap.

  “Señor Columbus, we ask you to leave Santa Fe. Do not tarry, but go now. Your story here has reached its conclusion. It ends on this soil, not on a field lit by the sun’s far side and furrowed by Amazons.”

  Columbus stood. “Su Majestad,” he said with simple dignity. He did not back away from the Queen, mincing into retreat, but turned and strode calmly from the room. For once, he had calculated perfectly. His full and brimming hopes in a slop bucket carried with poise and calibration as he walked steadily out of the door.

  All were silent as the topography of the stairs was told by the waning tale of Columbus’s footfalls.

  A broch tsu Columbusn. A curse on Columbus. A brocheh. A blessing.

  Then a wheezy hyena sawblade of a laugh from Torquemada’s pious hole, his snail tongue pressed against his palate as he rocked back and forth in the chair and hissed. Not all people were human.

  Throughout the scene, the painter had continued painting, the second smaller Isabella gazing steadfastly out from the canvas. The real Isabella posing in imitation of her portrait. Staid. Stolid. Regal.

  Then a flash of colour from the back wall. Limbs suddenly moving. A luffing cape. A baggywrinkle coming alive from the distant horizon of pages. A single tree from Birnam forest sprinting toward Dunsinane.

  A flashing flying fish of a blade.

  Some vants nobody boychik, only the down of a duck’s tuches on his chin, attempting to pay his respects to the inside of the Queen with a knife.

  Assassination. It’s the worst form of succession. Except for all the others.

  Moishe leapt from the wall and dived toward the younger with the raised blade. The retinue around the Queen did not move.

  Dios mio! A ear-wringing kvitch from the Queen. Torquemada did not react but saw only the transtemporal ghosts of his fanatic imagination.

  Moishe embraced the assassin’s ankles and steered him from the Queen, his knife penetrating deep into the side of a lady-in-waiting.

  Wait no more, maidel, the blade is here. The knife surrounded by a dress, the page’s pale sea-creature hand hanging on to its handle, Moishe hanging on the page.

  Moishe grabbed the skinny wrist until the page’s fingers released, then pulled the arms behind and battened them like hatches, each to the other, parbuckling him with his own cape. The knife remained buried in brocade, a flying jibboom over the Spanish lady’s right hip.

  If beauty is skin deep, then this mamaleh should be freylech joyful for the thick Kevlar of fashion that saved her. Her frock, a fat sheath that denied a happy ending to the shtupping knife, nevertheless granted one to its wearer.

  The page hog-tied, the other pages began to flock around him. The hidalgos awoke, their swords drawn, and carried the afraid knot of youth to the cell where he would be imprisoned until execution, executed until death.

  In this way, he would learn. A permanent lesson.

  “Ach,” as Moishe would say. “Nifter-shmifter, a leben macht er.”

  What’s it matter? As long as he makes a living.

  Moishe stood in the centre of a circle of the Queen’s cortège. He was no longer background, nor invisible.

  Moishe: Murderer. Freedom fighter. Fugitive.

  Hero.

  He reached over to the pierced lady-in-waiting and pulled out the dagger.

  “A memento?” he said, holding it before her. “But not a memento mori.”

  “You have performed a great deed for me, for Castile and, I trust, for King Ferdinand,” Isabella said. “What is your name and whom do you serve? Where is this lord?”

  A broch. Moishe had to play this well else he share a death with the hog-tied page. And death, like music, can be shared equally by all who experience it. There is never a shortage. Life is the only thing that comes up short.

  “Majesty. I am Miguel Levante,” he said, bowing low. “Whether I bear wine for a priest at chapel,” he said, rising slowly, “bring supper to a Duke in chambers, or lift sword to protect a ship from pirates, I serve my Lord God, my Queen, and her noble husband, King Ferdinand.”

  I kvelled. I was proud. I had taught him well. He stood before her, confident and gracious. His slim yet sturdy body. His dark hair and monkey-butt beard. He pronounced Spanish trippingly yet without tripping. And meant none of it.

  He had grown into a real mensch.

  A true parrot.

  “Your Excellency,” he bowed before Torquemada who had promised he would burn if seen again. But Moishe acted with such quiet calm and chutzpah that Torquemada, half fardreyt by the wash of ghosts, did not appear to recognize him.

  The Queen motioned to a stunted nebbish of a man whose marmoset punim face was frozen in an expression of surprise and distaste. “Feh” seemed emblazoned on his lips.

  The man reached into his doublet and procured a testicular sack that he presented before the Queen. She raised three fingers whereupon he retrieved three gold coins from within Her Majesty’s scrotum and held them distastefully before Moishe.

  “I shall remember your name, Miguel Levante,” she said. “I give you this token of our gratitude.” She nodded to the nebbish who then presented the coins. “Perhaps you serve the wind or the ocean and yet no man,” she continued. “Or perhaps your master is the same as he whom you have thwarted, but yet you took a different road when the deed was close. I do not know, but God and queens forgive and reward those who choose the right path.

  “This noon, our Grand Inquisitor, our sometime c
onfessor, Torquemada, begins travel to Cordoba. I wish that you ride with him—we will provide you with a mule—and will send word to a soldier of mine who performed great service at Grenada, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba who is now at Loja. You will there be given a position and an opportunity.”

  What could Moishe do? He bowed and thanked her Majesty.

  A nar git un a kluger nemt. A fool gives but the clever one takes.

  Or gets out of town before the fool becomes clever and the clever one is skewered.

  Chapter Seven

  Late afternoon on the road to Cordoba. Moishe, a shnook on a mule in procession with various priests, shtarkers and servants on their way to hunt hidden Jews and sundry heretical bandersnatches.

  Leading them, the Imperial Red Wizard, Torquemada, a breastless wraith riding a black bruiser of an Andalusian horse with a whorl of white like a galaxy on its forehead.

  “It is said to be unlucky for a horse to have a marking that it itself cannot see,” he said to the Inquisitor.

  “I am a Christian and so do not believe in superstition,” Torquemada replied.

  At this, I held my tongue, though the temptation was great.

  “But, I know who you are,” he continued. “Unlucky one, for whom death was not enough. You who seek to create the world anew. I have sent word to the Queen. You and this Genoese Quixote, Christophorus Columbus, shall sail into the west with the sinking sun, far from our work and those whom we serve. Perhaps this sun will not disappear but shall rise again over the Indies and Cathay. Perhaps it will burn over a new land. Perhaps, like any thousand-faced hero, in time, you shall return. This is no concern of mine as I shall be gone. Already it is only dust and disgust which hold my old bones together as I wait for the end.”

  Torquemada folded suddenly as if his spine had turned to sand. The wizened crab of his hand disappeared into a saddlebag.

  “For you,” he said, grinning with malice and cleverness, pushing something wrapped in dark cloth toward Moishe. “Take this and bury it over the Ocean Sea where it can only be found again by monsters and savages. Here it will destroy all we have worked for. Something is best hidden with those who don’t need it.”