“Depends. Which ship is closer to land?” I said.
“And what if we—or sailors not yet born,” Moishe said, “continued to replace the planks? They could replace them an infinite number of times and the ship would last forever.”
“But we’d still be gone. What’s the use of an eternal hat if the head is dead?”
“My father said we’re made of tiny specks and each of these specks changes over a lifetime. Our hair when it’s shorn keeps growing, our skin when it’s cut, so why shouldn’t the rest of our bodies? But we’re still ourselves. A shtetl is always a shtetl even if the people change.”
“So there’s a bisl of me scattered here and there?”
“And tiny bits of shmutz from other people all over you.”
“Now I could use a bath.”
“It’s the same with conversos.”
“They need no bath. Baptism was enough.”
“No, shlemiel, how many planks can you replace and still be yourself?”
“Or how many Jews?” I said, but what I thought was, “What if you change every word that you say?”
“A broch,” he said. “May each Inquisitor become a secret Jew so he can betray himself and haul himself before the Tribunal.”
“May each Inquisitor burn first himself and then the others at the stake.”
“May each Inquisitor host a bowelful of Jewish rats who convert in the churchy dark of his insides and then gnaw like fressers on his unkosher guts.”
“May each Jew change each plank of the world until it is new.”
“Omeyn,” he said. “But let this new world be different than the old.”
Later.
Dark night and the ship cantered on the waves. We were in the admiral’s cabin. A lantern encircled the table in honey light. Wine, cheese, dried plums and nautical charts were spread invitingly before us. Worlds hidden from the crew.
If they had once been buoyed by Columbus’s chutzpah, enthusiasm and professed expertise, by now the crew believed he was meshugeh. Out of his depth and with no clue about where we were or how far we were from any kind of terra—either firma or incognito.
It was an epic and mutinous “Are we there yet?” befitting impatient children, bristle-faced tousle-heads with few teeth but many swords.
If his navigations were to be correct Columbus required the world to be 20 percent smaller than the estimation of the ancients. Perhaps since then the world had shrivelled like Eratosthenes and his friends’ once ripe beytsim. Time can make between-the-leg prunes out of even the most succulent of plums.
Columbus’s calculations were based on his reading a letter from a certain Toscanelli that he worried like a rosary, which agreed with his results. If your mind is a matzoh ball, then everything looks like soup.
But almost from the beginning, the canny mariner understood the measure of his men—that their patience was short—and so he acted with duplicitous and data-massaging cunning.
Mostly, Columbus kept his thoughts and schemes to himself, except when he shared them in loud sermons to the crew of the Santa María. Perhaps the men of the Ni?a and the Pinta also heard his speeches for he stood on the poop deck like the Pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s, and declaimed them in balebos stentorian tones for all—God, the wind, the waves and the reluctant land included—to hear.
But at other times, he would confide his late-at-night thoughts to Moishe in a quieter voice.
“The truth has many fa?ades,” he said. “A man may hide his true face, or faith, with beard or mask. Some sailors taking passage on our three ships—I could mention Luis de Torres—have the skin and words of a good Christian yet Jewish blood pumps from their hearts and their heads are filled with Hebrew prayers.” He had a sip from a cup of wine and continued. “A storyteller may change his tale for that which tells more true, for the truth has two sides, an inside and an outside.” Columbus stood up and walked across the cabin.
“There is something I must show you.”
From a shelf, he hefted a large book and laid it on the table. He ran his hand tenderly over the cover.
Ech, I thought. For a bird whose only library had been the waves, my world was becoming ongeshtupted with books. Moishe seemed to attract them the way analogies attract fools.
It was the ship’s logbook, written in the hand of Rodrigo de Escobedo, the scrivener.
“Look,” Columbus said, pointing to an entry.
Sailed northwest and northwest by north and at times west nearly twenty-two leagues. Sighted a turtledove, a pelican, a river bird and other white fowl; —weeds in abundance with crabs among them. The sea being smooth and tranquil, the sailors muttered that in such a region of smooth water, there would never be sufficient wind to return them to Spain; but afterwards the sea rose without wind, which astonished them. The Admiral spoke on this occasion, thus: “the rising of the sea was very favourable to me, as the waters so lifted before Moses when he led the Jews from Egypt.”