Yiddish for Pirates (34 page)

It would be hard to navigate across this mess of chazerai, but the destination was clear:

The subterranean library of two was on an island in the Bermudas. There were Hebrew letters emblazoned in the hills and Hebrew words all around it.

“Nu,” Moishe said. “Always with the commentary.”

Chapter One

We were slumped around the binnacle sucking in pipesmoke and sharing a firkin of rum. We’d salvaged silver cups from Spanish pantries but drank from coconut-shell pannikins, fashioned by Yahíma in the traditional style.

Our parliamentations were made shmoozy and loud by smoke and alcohol.

“Why this map?” Isaac the Blind asked.

Jacome: “Follow that farkakteh map and we’ll be futzing around the edges of the world until the Messiah hisself becomes an old geezer dribbling into both his gatkes and his mangy white beard.”

“But the Fountain of Youth,” Samuel said. “Could it be?”

“Like nipples on a duck. They might exist, but—gevalt—they’re hard to find.”

“So we plonk our tuches in this mikveh, and splash ourselves—oy, oy, oy, mayn Got, this magic vasser, such a mechayeh—but then what?” Shlomo asked. “My scars live forever? I become a boychik, maidel-soft as an unborn elbow but still I toddle around with the Bible scraped into my skin?”

“No matter where we go, there we are,” Yahíma said. “We might as well follow ourselves.”

“Feh. Only if we could leave ourselves behind,” Fernández said.

“We’d have to sail swiftly then,” Ham signed. “Quicker than words and memory.”

“Or Jacome’s temper,” Fernández said.

Jacome raised his fist. “So quick even your mother knows your pig-ugly mieskeit snout was ’cause of the clobbering I gave you before I met you.” He took a titanic swig of rum. “Because I knew you’d deserve it.”

Isaac tightened the tefillin straps holding his hooked hand, and then scritched his head with the point. There was wisdom there, but also fleas. “So if this fountain is the shvitz of memory, and we walk away barnacle free, fresh like a Shabbos tablecloth and empty as the shelves in the shlemiel library of Chelm, then, without tsuris, we could go back to fressing on gold and shteching the Spanish with our swords. If we live forever, we live forever. We’d be Übermenschen who could neither be karsted by arquebus nor cratered by pox.”

“
Ver veyst?
It’d takeh be a very Jewish fountain that makes a Yid immortal but not live forever,” Fernández said. “I’d still look side-to-side and up-and-down before crossing the boulevard.”

“Or jumping out a caravel,” Yahíma added.

“But nu,” Isaac continued. “If this water was good for nothing more than swabbing molluscs from the wrinkled hulls of our beytsim, it’d be worth gold when bottled and sold to the worthy shlemiels of Europe. Map. Books. Exotic puddle. Testimonials. It’s the story not the steak. The brocheh not the brisket.”

Finally, we voted.

Moishe taught me an old saying:
Di tsung iz nisht in goles
. The tongue is not in exile. And it was true, we’d lost everything but our accent. Takeh, many of us had gained one. We were wandering Jews and had no home. So, we might as well wander. We counted hands: We’d seek the book. It was as much home as anywhere.

We began to sail toward our treasure, following the bottom of the pannikin, the shikkering gourd, the North Star, Polaris. Our book at the end of Ursa Minor Beta. Our home at the end of the Little Bear’s tail. Moishe and I would soon dishwash our hearts in the soapy,
soul-scrubbing waters of the Fountain: a map, a book, and then a quick dunk and some bobbing for rebirth in the metaphysical lagoon.

How did we feel about this? If there’s a word to describe it, ach, it’s not on this parrot’s tongue.

Isaac the Blind was at the helm. Shlomo, Ham and Samuel hauled the sheets. I flew to become the polyglot tittle—the dot—on the mainmast’s “i.”

As one Hebrew vowel said to the other, “Everyone’s a diacritic.”

I looked forward, scanning for islands, the Spanish, whales, the Fountain of Youth, and the future.

Instead, like a punchline, I saw the horizon.

Morning. From the south, a happy-go-lucky lebediker breeze had blown since the second half of the dogwatch. At three bells of the forenoon, it died away. In its place, a strong wind from the northeast, which caused us to take our studding-sails in and brace up.

“A cheer for this glad gust from a northern rump,” Jacome said. “Somewhere the skirts of a windgod have been blown to the sky.”

In a couple of hours we were bowling gloriously along, puffed-up sailors returning victorious and carefree after their corporeal ministrations in the cat house.

We were shpritzed with the cool, northeast trade freshening up the sea, and giving us as much as we could carry our topsails to. The bulvan wind blew strong and steady, keeping us upon a bowline, our course about north-north-west. Sometimes, they veered a little to the eastward, and we unfurled a mainmast studding-sail. For a day, we scudded well to northward.

Then the north wind left us.

Azoy gich?

So soon?

For several days after, we humbugged about in a whole gantseh megillah of weather. Occasionally a thunderstorm.

Then the wind left us entirely. Something we said? A brocheh we forgot? For weeks, little but hooch, kibitzing and the wind. Dreaming of the four elements, both succulent and moist: death, revenge, sex
and feasting. Water everywhere and we almost dropped from drink. Also, dancing hornpipes as if we were lurching in heavy weather, Luigi del Piccolo trying to pipe up wind and diversion. In such ways we passed our time, watching for dolphins with their idiot savant rubber grins, and the silver sides of fish, a treasure for our supper.

“Watch for a star in the shadow of the crescent moon,” Shlomo said. “It means fair winds.”

“I’m told an albatross is a good sign,” Samuel said.

“So, nu,” said Isaac the Blind. “Watch for two.”

That night, during a deep amidship shlof, Moishe’s pale eyes flipped open. Often those on board had difficult sleep. Terror and keening. Night shouts. Muttering. Weeping. Shmuntsing with Neptune, a Golem, the tooth fairy, or Queen Esther.

“A dream,” Moishe called. “Islands. A channel between words and no words. Pages, wings, a tongue in my ear, a knife-edge, memory, a tongue. Then many of us die.” His eyes closed. Opened again. “Run,” he shouted. “Run!” Then he turned with a snort and slept until two bells o’ morning watch.

Weeks passed. There was neither land nor wind, fish nor albatrosses. I was the only bird near our gopherwood ship of foolhardy shmeckels.

Weeks. Perhaps if the hearty fortz of my gastrointestinally talented crewmates could be coordinated in a methane philharmonic, our sails might curve. Or the humid blasts from their cranky cursing. Water was scarce as popes in a mikveh. We’d eaten all meat fleysh but the stringy gams of Yids and the svelte feathered body of their Pollyglot familiar.

And frankly, I didn’t fancy me, not to mention their sun-tarred sinews.

There was some hardtack remaining. Soon we would have to cook and eat the leather of our boots.

Fernández, the painter of empty seas, wished only for the islands flocked outside his frames. “I’d takeh sell a thousand furlongs of sea for a bisl barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything. Adonai, follow
your meshugeneh scheme if you must, but, ach, if you’re asking, I’d rather a dry death.”

And with plenty to drink.

He became delirious with thirst and tried to eat his paints. “This cold blue. This liquid green.” Paint dribbled from his mouth and coloured his white beard. Moishe and Yahíma tied him to a post in the hold.

Together the crew had made the decision to follow the map toward the bookish grave.

But it was Moishe that they cursed.

How he had led them into this desert of thirst, this windless wanderlessness. As if it had been only he who craved youth, memory loss and immortality.

“This map is poxy with evil eyes and farkakte demon scrawl,” Shlomo said.

“And nu,” said Samuel, “we’ll all be dead before we can live forever or get anywhere close to your poxy frantsevateh fountain.” He slurped a runnel of moisture found in the fold of the sail.

“We have a covenant of articles, you pus-bloated, maggot-toothed Spanish gonif. We do not horde plunder from others in our minyan,” Shlomo hissed. “Neither gold nor slaves. And especially not water.” He drew his sword, ready to turn Samuel’s body into its own tattered funeral shroud.

A marlinspike flash and Samuel twisted and pinned Shlomo’s sword hand to a barrel.

Yahíma, perched high in a mast, leapt from a yardarm, kicking in midair, her heel realigning Samuel’s jawbone and reintroducing his body to the concepts of down, horizontal, and darkness. She landed one foot nimbly on the deck, the other ready to make sauce of Samuel’s gullet. After wrenching the marlinspike from the cribbage board of Shlomo’s hand, she twisted his arm behind his back. Ham arrived with a rope and tied the perforated hand to its undamaged twin then bound their master to the mast. They lugged Samuel’s unconscious rat-sack body over the boards, then sat it up and bollard-hitched it to the mizzen.

It had been an oratorio of shraying, grunts and gevalts. Moishe, asleep in his hammock, arrived only in time for the curtain call. By then, the rest of the rubber-gorgled crew had gathered to twist their necks and gape.

Yahíma explained what happened and Moishe considered.

On a navy ship, Samuel and Shlomo would have remained lashed to the masts. And—with a word from the captain—the captain’s spiteful daughter would have ripped apart the bodice of their flesh and Kama Sutra-ed their naked spines. Or it would have been the spurs of the nine-tailed cat that sank deep into the catacomb of sinew and bone beneath the shambles of their skin.

Perhaps they would have found themselves in a dory, emigrants to death on the open sea, or Crusoed castaways on a distant island with little but a sword, some water, and a lifetime supply of exile and death.

But Moishe said, “Release them.”

Perhaps if, as a boy, he had skipped a few Bible stories and read ahead a little from the future, he would not have been so lenient.

Though it’s hard to look forward when your own back is scarred.

But nu, the decision should not have been his alone. Each who had scrawled their name or scribbled their mark on the articles was entitled to a vote. But none spoke.

I had made a mark on the paper.
Vos iz der chilek?
What’s the difference? Was I going to disagree with Moishe? Sure, I crowed in the voice of men but, takeh, there was something stronger in my craw. Loyalty, love, companionship—these kept me quiet.

A pail of seawater was loosed on Samuel, then on Shlomo’s rib-eyed hand. He and Shlomo were untied, Samuel blinking awake and confused as if rescued from a dark mine. Shlomo slinking below deck, holding his wounded hand like a newborn.

Moishe stood looking out beyond the bowsprit, squinting toward a gust from the future. Beside him, fetchingly perched on the gunwale, plumes superbly dressed in his captain’s light grey shadow, his parrot,
dux volucrum
, a leader among birds, as the ancients say, and nu, I say it every time anyone eats chicken and not me.

“Nu, they’re so thirsty that all they do is shecht each other’s gullets,” Moishe said. “Without wind, they’ll kill each other before they die.”

We looked down into the water and the still surface revealed a doppelganger ship barely hanging onto our hull, in danger of breaking away and falling into the antipodean chasm of the sky. A skinny parrot and a shrubby sailor stared back at us. “See? We’re stand-on-our-headniks. What do we know?” I said.

“It’s good you’re here,” Moishe said to them. “Mishpocheh. Family.”

The world was still. The sails were pale papers waiting to be written on by the wind. The ocean was sky and I was a small parrot-shaped greyness, the tiniest of pupils in the infinite star-flecked eye of the entire gantseh megillah.

And Moishe—his squinty, ferkakteh missing-nipple chest covering the cracked vessel of his heart, badly in need of a cardiologist, Kabbalist, or any kind of specialist—had spoken tenderly to me. We were family.