“Columbus was a Jew?”
“Oh, Holland, don’t disappoint me!” Half the pages of the Esau Letter remained in my lap, half were scattered on the floor beside my armchair. Hanni and Isabella lay on their stomachs on Sandor’s bed, elbows on the duvet, chins on palms, a pair of teenagers.
“You can’t be serious.”
“It has nothing to do with being serious.” Hanni stood up and shuffled through the unread pages of the Esau Letter. “The most you’ll hear Spanish officials admit is that Columbus’s father was a converted Jew, which, technically speaking, makes Columbus no Jew at all. But, ah, here it is!” She handed me a page marked “Bibliography.” “This is just a partial list of the critical articles that the family has written over the centuries.”
“Your family?”
“Who else would bother? Columbus, Esau, the whole Discovery of America—look at how many countries have reinterpreted the story to suit their own purposes.”
“Spain, Italy, the U.S.,” I guessed partially.
“Portugal,” Hanni continued, “Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Colombia, of course, and the rest of South and Central America while we’re at it. Even the Japanese have a theory.”
“Columbus was on his way to Japan,” I added.
“To what Marco Polo called Cipangu.”
“And your family?”
“The Jewish question, at least, was solved at the end of the last century by a cousin on my Mama’s side—a chemist at the University of Oklahoma—through analysis of ink and handwriting. He found a number of short notes written in Hebrew, from Columbus to his son Diego, and published a monograph with an interpretation of Columbus’s signature that proved him to be a practising Jew at the time of his voyage to the New World.”
“But Columbus has always been painted as a rabid Catholic,” I said, “always quoting the Apocrypha, calculating the distance to the Indies with measurements from the New Testament.”
“And as the greatest sailor the world has ever known.”
“Exactly.”
“Two facts about Columbus, trumpeted by all the modern historians?” Hanni smiled and crawled back onto the bed.
“Yes?”
“All the modern methods at their disposal, navigational, historical, forensic?”
“I suppose.”
“If the second—Columbus the Greatest Sailor, et cetera, et cetera—was shown to be not only false but ridiculous, wouldn’t you be inclined to doubt the first?”
“Columbus the Catholic?”
“And replace it with Columbus the Jew?”
“Are there any other options?” I looked over at Isabella, wondering how much of this she was catching.
“Certainly.” Hanni sat up and crossed her legs. “To forget about Columbus, for one.”
“And concentrate on Esau?” I smiled.
“Are you sure you aren’t Jewish?” Hanni stretched her arms above her head, in pleasure, I thought.
“It’s a little difficult,” I said. “Whenever I see the name Esau, I think of Alan Bennett as the Anglican vicar in Beyond the Fringe. ‘But my brother Esau is an Hairy Man …’ ”
“ ‘But I am a Smooth Man.’ Leo and I saw him in Edinburgh in ’61. Wonderful!”
“So you understand why I have difficulty taking the story seriously.”
“The story, or Esau, or Alan Bennett?”
“All three I suppose.” The bed looked awfully inviting. I had just hit the wall of fatigue and ached for a pillow to cushion my fall.
“Holland, sit up!” My eyes, always a giveaway. Hanni ran down the steps to the courtyard and returned with the jar of kipferln. “Open,” she said, and popped two in my mouth. I chewed through my irritation.
“Now don’t answer and just listen to me for a moment, Holland. You are a documentary filmmaker. You keep your eyes open, your ear to the ground for subjects, histories, stories, things, things that might keep a couple of million people awake on a Monday night. I’m not asking you to accept the Esau Letter with the same unquestioning spirit that I and thousands before me have. I’m asking you only to ponder the answer to the following question:
“Here we are, you, I, this child, on the last day of the four hundred and ninety-ninth year since the Columbus expedition to the New World, since the Expulsion of the Jews, somehow thrown together, somehow finding, after a disappearance of almost fifty years, in the villa of a man who may be the incarnation of the thieving corpse, a missing letter, the missing history of that discovery. If my kipferln are not enough to keep you awake, then certainly that miraculous coincidence must jolt you into consciousness.”
“What did you put in those kipferln?” I was awake, but more from the irritation of being lectured on my profession.
“What did I put in the kipferln?” Hanni laughed. “Read.”