And my captain, though he’d lost his foreskin to the moyel at seven days, had yet enough foresight to go around. Before boarding, he’d taken a moment to tie limewater and saltpetre fuses into the long scrub-bush of his beard and hair. These he lit and let burn as he stood in the middle of the galleon, firing his flintlocks and shouting fearsome instructions to his men, while the smoke of hellfire itself rose about him.
It wasn’t much of a battle. The Spanish, surprised and afraid, surrendered quickly. There was the customary disembowelling, cutting off of noses, hands, and of shmeckels. Some were taken prisoner to be sold as slaves. Men, not shmeckels. Some—those whose pleading was especially plangent—were left to their fate on the first island we sailed by.
“Why worry?” Moishe said to them. “Abi gezunt. As long as you have your health.”
We were triumphant conquistadors and we’d taken the Spanish ship like a continent. For now, we had a new home unencumbered by its former residents, the shtik dreck Spanish. The men revelled in the plenty of their new found land. There was some freilich music from pipe and tabor. Bungholes from rum barrels were unstopped and drink flowed free. Food stores were opened and the crew fressed on the abundant supplies of salt pork.
Except for us Jews. Moishe might celebrate good fortune and the Lord’s bounty with a nafkeh—a whore—or two, keneynehoreh, those times ashore, but by reason of custom rather than belief, he wouldn’t nosh pork, nor would he, unless compelled by the situation, fight on the Shabbos.
The situation? More gold than usual.
And usual was often none.
We dined on hardtack and salt fish washed down with the Spanish captain’s private store of Madeira. There was a small supply of nuts for me, Aaron, the captain’s familiar. Under his breath, Moishe said the brocheh over wine and then for bread.
“Amen,” I said, between bites. “Amen.”
We ate and Moishe looked at the Spanish charts, a treasure as valuable as gelt for a mensch like him.
Pirates change coats as do snakes, snails, thieves, and Jews in these times of hate. They shed ships and gain others. They shed past lives, identities, names. But: even with a different skin, they still have the same bones. The North Star is always a yellow star.
So, you ask, how did this shell-less cheder-bocher—schoolboy—drawn from the waters of Ashkenaz find himself on the Spanish Main, the blade of his sword pressed against the quivering kishkas of Spanish captains? How did Columbus, the Inquisition, and the search for some books cause us to seek for life everlasting?
And, come to think of it, how did I, an African Grey, become his mishpocheh, his family, and he my perch, my shoulder in the world?
That, wherever I begin, is the story.
And you want to know?
Okay. So I’ll tell.
Chapter One
Moishe as a child. He told me stories. Some were true.
At fourteen, he left the shtetl near Vilnius for the sea. How? First one leg out the window then the other. Like anyone else. Before first light. Before the wailing of his mother.
A boychik with big ideas, his kop—his head—bigger than his body. He would travel beyond the scrawny map of himself, and beyond the shtetl. He’d travel the ocean. There were Jews—he’d heard stories—that were something. Not rag-and-bones shmatte-men like his father, Chaim, always following the dreck of their nag around the same small world. Doctors. Court astronomers. Spanish lords. Tax farmers. Learned men of the world. The mapmakers of Majorca. They were Jews. Rich and powerful, they were respected by everyone. They could read the sky. They knew what was on the horizon and what was over the horizon. Jews had trickled through the cracks of the world and had rained upon the lands.
He’d travel the globe. He’d travel to the unknown edges of the maps, to where the lost tribes had built their golden cities, where they knew the secrets of the waters and of the sky.
And nu, perhaps along the way there might be a zaftik maideleh or two, or his true love, who knew secrets also.
So this Moishe put the cartographer before the horse and left.
Luftmensch, they say. Someone who lives on air, someone whose head floats in the clouds of a sky whose only use is to make the sea blue. The world is wide because the ocean is wide. So, nu, he’d had his Bar Mitzvah, why shouldn’t the boychik sail west on a merchant ship, some kind of cabin boy, learning not to be sick with the waves? A one-way Odyssey away from home, his mother weaving only tears.