Yiddish for Pirates (3 page)

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.

And where had he heard the stories? On the shmatte cart, making the rounds with his father. The sun rising, they travelled from home. They didn’t fall off the edge of their world, they circled around it, until by nightfall they were home again. Moishe’s old father, the bent and childless man who had taken in the drownedling, spoke to him of the great world that they shared. Moishe’s father, grey beard, wide black hat, stooped back. The world, he said, was a book. A great scroll. Like the Torah, when it ended, it began again.

Everything began again. Each week with its Shabbos of silver candlesticks and braided challah. Each year with its seasons, festivals, Torah readings. Child, father, child. It was a Moebius strip. At the end of the story, the story begins again and so we live forever, his father said. His father was a mensch. His mother also. Good people. But though they spoke of it, they never tried to find out “and then what happened?” They knew. Second verse same as the first, a little bit more oysgemutshet worn out, a little bit worse.

Before he climbed out the window, Moishe left a letter for his parents.

If the world is a book, I must read it all
.

He had packed only his few clothes, some food, a knife, a book he had often examined when alone, and two silver coins that he took from where his mother had hidden them behind a stone of the hearth. He sewed these into the waist of his pants.

He had come across the book by accident, this book that had a beginning and an end. Playing at a game of catch-and-wrestle with his friend Pinchas, Moishe had slid under his parents’ bed and pushed himself against the wall where he hoped he would be invisible behind the curtain of the embroidered bedspread. Breathing hard, attempting to remain quiet and undetected, Moishe felt its shape beneath his hip. When he was eventually discovered—after he’d deliberately released
a prodigious and satisfying greps, a gaseous shofar-call alerting his friend to his location—he left whatever-it-was beneath the bed to be disinterred and examined later. He knew it was somehow important and secret, so better to wait until he was alone and his mother out at the mikveh.

When he unwrapped the old tallis—a prayer shawl—that surrounded it, Moishe was surprised to discover a book. An ancient book. Grainy brown leather with faded gold lettering and pages the colour of an old man’s hands. The script looked like Hebrew but it was the language of some parallel world, gibberish or the writing of a sorcerer.

Most intriguing were the strange drawings. Charts that seemed to diagram the architecture of heavenly palaces or the dance steps of ten-footed angels. Mysterious arrays of letters, the unspeakable and obsidian incantations of demons. And, most captivating of all, what appeared to be maps of the parallel world itself, filled with ring upon ring of concentric circles, rippling out from the beginning of creation and the centre of everything, as if one fine morning God had cannonballed down from everywhere and nowhere and into the exact middle of the primordial sea.

But perhaps, Moishe wondered, these maps represented the actual earth, the alef-beys of cryptic markings, boats floating upon the waves of a vast ocean, searching for the edges of hidden knowledge.

It was as if Adam and his wife, Eve, had found a map instead of an apple, there in the centre of the garden. Instead of good and evil, they had discovered a map of Eden, the geography, the secrets, the true limits of Paradise and the Paradise that lies beyond.

Maybe that is why his father kept this book hidden where no one—not the rabbis or the shammes or the other men—could find it.

So Moishe took the book and left.

He followed the wide road to the market town of Kaunas and from there to the seaport of Memel. The sea was the widest road. He would follow it, a bottle looking for a message and new shores. Great ships filled the harbour, men crawling over them like flies on a shipment of modern-day pants or—
abi gezunt
—sailors on a shiksa. Decks were
swabbed, rigging secured, barrels and chests heaved along docks and over gangplanks. Men with fruit-leather faces and pigtails close-talked with great weaselly machers in greasy coats, furtively scanning the docks for other great weaselly machers in greasy coats as they exchanged shadows for shine. Broken-toothed taverns lined the wharves, and farmishteh shikkers stumbled in and out, not knowing which direction was up, yet maintaining an unsteady relationship with down. Vendors held stickfuls of pretzels and bagels, stood beside barrels of brine or behind braziers roasting meat. There were other boys shlepping sacks containing all of their world that was worth carrying, seeking a shipboard life as a cabin boy or powder monkey. Several boys, stooped low with their sacks, entered one particular frowsy tavern tumbled between others and Moishe followed.

They formed a shlumpy pack before a table where a huge sailor held court, leaning back, pork-hock hands on his enormous thighs.

“Boys. Why should ye be cabin boys on my ship?” His bristly steak of a face shook as he spoke. “Tells me and maybe ye shall be one.”

Ten boys, tall and short, smooth-faced or pocked, had gathered ’round.

“I’m a strong boy and honest you can be sure,” said a tiny pisher with all the resolution his unbroken voice could muster. “I’ll serve true and learn well,” he said, standing tall.

“You’re a hearty lad, I’s can tell,” the sailor said. “Spoke right up. Ye be welcome. Look to
The Sea’s Pride
early tomorrow and ye’ll sail with us.”

“You,” the sailor said to another. “D’ye have some teeth?” The boy grimaced, showing such teeth as he had. “My father went to sea, and this I aim also.”

“Family,” said the sailor with a grin wide as a plank. “We’re all barnacles stuck to the rump of family. Tomorrow.
The Sea’s Pride
.” He waved the boy away. “And you?” he pointed at Moishe. “Ye be a big lad.”

Moishe wasn’t a Jew.

Until he spoke.

“Vell,” he said. “
A ponim yeh
. It seems.”

As soon as he said it, Moishe realized how foreign his words sounded. Like having a mouthful of something you just realized was treyf, not kosher.

The big man paused.

Moishe was about to run.

“We never had a Chosen People on board. Ye do something nasty? Need to make a quick exodus from Egypt?”

“No … I …”

“You Jews are clever and I don’t knows I trust ye. But there be no baby’s blood on board and if you turns out not honest, we’ll beat you till ye bleed like the baby Jesus hisself.”

That night Moishe slept under a pile of sticks and broken bottles in the lee of a dung heap behind the tavern. At first light, he made his way to
The Sea’s Pride
to leave the solid earth behind.

Chapter Two

To be new to the sea is to have your kishkas become the waves themselves. For days it was white water inside of Moishe, and a team of pugilists bailed out his insides with their convulsions. He’d be a new man, keneynehoreh, for nu, what could be left of the old one after such puking?

The Sea’s Pride
was sailing for Portugal, laden with cargo and a crew of the feckless, the brave, the poor, the drunk and the honourable both, as well as seasoned sailors preserved by salt, farmisht first-timers, and the master, purser, quartermaster, bo’sun, the captain and his parrot, an African Grey, he who has lived to tell the tale.

Moishe’s commission was to serve the master, the big macher sailor who had hired him. In his cabin, the master had created his own private Versailles. Instead of a crew’s shambles of piss buckets, hammocks and a salmagundi of sailors’ chazerai, he had stored an abundance of liquors, sweetmeats, sugar, spices, pickles and other things for his accommodation in the voyage. He had also shlepped a considerable quantity of fine lace and linen, baize and woollen cloth. Not for him the usual shmatte slops of the everyman mariner. And besides, these things could buy him passage on the fleshy sloops of night women or be traded without tax or duty for gold or drink in port.