The following morning, the incessant blacksmithing of fiends inside each man’s skull. Inside their bellies, thirty boiling cats, cooking in roiling bilge water. Outside, the sun like a Klieg light, branding the eyes of all who attempted vision. Moishe woke as fresh-faced and pokey as the rest, which is to say, consciousness came upon him like a mallet.
Luis de Torres stumbled down the middeck, his clothing a polyglot-stippling of vomit, wine, New World sand and tropical fruit.
“Don’t tell the admiral, but the savages speak Hebrew,” he said and collapsed onto a pipa-sized barrel.
Moishe opened the slit of an eye.
“How can that be?” he asked.
“I spoke the ancient tongue and they understood. They are Children of Israel—like us,” Torres whispered. “We have found the Lost Tribes. Wherever we are.”
“The savages are Jews?” Moishe said.
Noble cabbages, then, I thought. Haleshkehs stuffed with exotic meat.
“I can’t believe it,” Moishe said, gripping the gunwales and hauling himself onto a knee. “This, I need my own eyes to see.”
But by then Torres was slumped over, brought back to sleep by the continuing effects of the previous night’s revelry.
“It was probably the drink talking Hebrew, not the natives,” Moishe said. “Or Torres heard himself speaking and thought it was someone else.”
“Hebrew,” I said. “It’s always backwards.”
Then it was sometime later that morning. There were no watches, no bells, only the rousing voice of Columbus ringing over the deck, and then the more strident voice of a matchlock shot, waking men from sleep, returning the ship to the regular shape of days. The men of the Ni?a and the Pinta, also submerged in wine-addled shlof, were woken by the shot as it reverberated off the jungle trees fringing the shore. A landing party was established to return to the island. Moishe was to carry baskets and jars to lubricate the parley. Columbus had others bring flags.
The native people were already on the beach, made restive by the matchlock shot. As we rowed closer, I could see they were almost naked, though the entire surfaces of their bodies were rudely emblazoned in black and white paint. Both men and women had coloured feathers woven into their hair, the men having feathers intertwined with their long beards. Feh. My parrot skin turned gooseflesh beneath my bristling plumage. A broch. Imagine the naked skins of the countless plucked and farkakte. The islanders jumped around in an ungainly dance, springing back and forth from skinny chicken polke leg to leg as if sandcrabs had nested in the ragged loincloths that covered beytsim or knish. Closer still, I heard their savage chanting, a disorganized ululation punctuated by guttural roars. If they were the Lost Tribes, they’d lost more than Assyria and Middle Eastern sand. Sense and civilization, for instance.
Surely what Hebrew they knew could be little more than a child’s blather. They were vilde chayes—unruly children. Calibans of the isle. There wasn’t a Yiddisher kop—a sensible mind—among them.
“How do they survive?” Moishe said. “Look at their bellies, their scrawny skillington arms.” Though their hair was curly, they were not the burly-shouldered bulvans that we had expected, tall and thick-limbed as the Ethiopes bought out of Africa.
I could see by the ill-stuffed pallets of their bodies that, since they walked out of history two thousand years before, they had not learned how to hunt or harvest healthy gezunteh food.
“They are simple and wild,” Moishe said. “But something klemt mir in hartsn—something grasps my heart.”
“You should watch what you eat,” I said. “Maybe fewer sardines.”
The skiff’s keel scudded into the sand of the shore and the men scrambled out. They crowded around us, crowing, shraying, mewling as we walked up the beach.
“Gevalt,” Moishe said and froze, his eyes wide, his jaw open. His bones were replaced by the ice of ghosts.
Then, after a minute, “I …” he whispered to me. “I … I know these people.”
The sailors returned to the boat and, like pallbearers, carried a large flagpole up the beach. Columbus pointed at a rise of land near the treeline and bade the crew plant it.
The first thing we built in this new world was a hole.
Soon, after some tottering, they had raised the flag. On the map of the world, a mark: you are here. You, the subject of Aragon and Castile, of the crowned F and Y that now flapped for the first time in a Caribbean wind.
The natives gathered around dancing and cheering as if the Tree of Good and Evil had suddenly blossomed on the ground before them. They made a tararam commotion of the flag-raising as if the technology of the flag were the exciting element of the story and not the part where they were being conquered. Perhaps their technology of subjugation looked different than this. A deft slit of the throat, the hull of the head staved in by handheld rock.
A stooped older man with a flourishing Brillo pad of a beard, grey yet interwoven with coloured feathers, his sagging body daubed into a dark and greasy shadow. Moishe stood close beside him and they exchanged glances. Beady eyes instead of beads.
“Rebbe Daniel?” Moishe said.
The man continued his writhing, as if he were trying to cajole the feathers into flight.