Yiddish for Pirates (38 page)

It was days without land. Between the four who paddled, two watches were established. While some slept, some wished for sleep. We shared food.

Then, on the starboard horizon: land. On the larboard: a ship.

We gazed at both intently, trying to read their indistinct shapes.

As we rowed closer: “My Yiddishe clipper,” Moishe exclaimed. We recognized the flag: a bloodshot eye radiating over an unfinished pyramid.

Nu, Pharoah, we’d like to stay and finish the job, but what with these plagues and all, the working conditions for slaves have really deteriorated.

Moishe gazed at the boat and sighed. “My ship of mutinous bastard chamooleh fools.”

Chapter Five

Moishe explained his plan.

Shmuntsing, mysticism, and banditry most often occur under the black chuppah of night. And, as with such things, stealth was important, so we waited until after dark. Moishe gave such a look to the parrot that even such a shlepper as that moronic cloaca-shtreimel knew to be silent. As soon as we were in the lee shadow of the boat, Moishe quietly lowered the barrel into the still water and we once again climbed in as if it were a high-gunwaled dory, a floating womb.

“
Zayt gezunt
. Be well,” Moishe whispered to the women.

“
Zay gezunt
,” they replied and rowed into the darkness, dipping the paddles tentatively into the water.

On deck, all was darkness, sleep or inattention.

We paddled up close to the hull, an infant elephant nuzzled against the flank of its vast and sighing mother. Shh. Sleep, mama, sleep.

The ship’s hull was scarred with patches where cannonball or shallows had broken its skin. Until the ship was properly careened and the broad planks replaced, its sides were a Harlequinade of repairs. We searched for such a pockmark, small as two fingers, then Moishe worked at it with the blade of a Spanish dirk until he had reopened the wound.

A hole in the side of the hull.

He had brought the rum-bottle stuffed with a damp shmatte ripped from his ragged and swamp-ripe clothes. Now he would make fire.

In the middle of the sea, it is as simple to procure fire as it is fresh water. Both are possible if you have them already.

The women had given Moishe a firestick, a stone, and some dry grass for kindling. Moishe pressed the end of the stick into the stone with his palms and rubbed back and forth. We should only hope for a happy and propitious ending, nu? Some minutes passed. Then a splash over the rim of the barrel and the grasses were soaked. Moishe—always expecting fate to be a mamzer—removed some still dry grass from a small sack that he had kept in safety in his shirt, and began again.

Eventually, a weak smoke, and then the red spurt of fire. Quickly, Moishe dropped the burning grasses in the bottle and pushed its narrow neck into the wounded hull. The green world of the bottle teemed with smoke. Viperous tendrils would soon be fuming below-deck.

“Let’s hope—keneynehoreh—we haven’t lit the orlop and its store of gunpowder,” Moishe said. “But we will soon know.”

The ship came alive. The meshugeneh mariners aboard the
Gopherwood Shmeckel
scuttled fore and aft as a bees’ nest disturbed.

We heard them buzzing, running to safety up on deck, some into the rigging.

Moishe tipped the bottle and emptied the burning wad into the ship. He manoeuvred the barrel around toward the bow and held fast to some backstay deadeyes.

Soon, as expected:

“Gevalt!” the crew shouted.

“Fire!”

“Gotenyu, get the piss buckets.”

“Lower the hogshead o’er the larboard gunwale.”

“Fire!”

“Flames behind the salt pork store.”

“Shh!
Zog’s nisht oys
—don’t say it!”

And indeed the lovely boucan barbecue fumes of burning meat billowed invitingly from the ship along with an admixture of tar and mouldy lumber—the combined tang, an alter kaker’s shvitz, his shoes, and a variety of ailing muskrat. In the fire-fighting fury and
smoke-filled hoo-hah, Moishe clambered up the hull, clasping chains, deadeyes, and shrouds, then scaled the mainmast. He was a grievous and avenging angel in a fog of rum and pork-fire and from high up the cross-tree, he proclaimed:

“Nu. Look up, for I am the voice of this cloud of sulphurous and tormenting flame. I who have turned this ship into a burning bush around which you now scurry farmisht. But don’t thank me. I have returned from the dead. That’s thanks enough. I whose putz is a great mast which requires no stays. Whose hair is an untamed and piratical porcupinity. Whose grepsn are the fortz of one who has dined on naught but forty years of rats. Whose eyes burn like twin stars and light up treasure maps with their reading. I who is not so easy to get rid of. But who were you expecting? Yoshkeh? The Messiah? A klog, but it is a farkakteh and scurvy world, but which other world would have us? I have returned as your captain and together we shall not perish but shall seek eternal youth and life whether in sea or fire, in earth or air or from the quintessence itself. Or in the sheyneh zaftikeh arms of another and their sweet knish. Remember the days that have been, the seasons we have lived, where we might sing, swear, drink, drab, and kill in vengeance as freely as cake-makers do flies, as parrots speak, or as the waves climb and fall as they seek the distant shores of the world. The white smoke—with your consent and articles—elects me again captain … if we are able to put the fire out.”

The farklemtifying cogworks of the crew required no additional input to become yet more farklemt. Because of the obfuscating fumes of panic and smoke, they did not recognize Moishe but took his voice to be that of a dybbuk or demon of the sea. A Yiddish zombie spirit. When one is truly frightened, all fiends speak your language. In addition to their mortal fear of becoming ship-bound barbecue or drowned pickles in brine, they now felt metaphysical dread. Who was this fallen angel who had climbed the main tree? Moishe had chewed up the sails and—
vo den?
—overacted. He had expected his supernatural alef beytsim routine to win the hustings with eerie machismo. His crew would recognize and be swayed by yet another inventive scheme of chutzpah and
seyhcl by their once-and-fugitive captain, line up obediently, and await further instruction.

Plan B.

“Samuel,” he called. “It’s Moishe.
Vi geyts dir
—how’s it going? You thought I was dead but I’m back.”

“
Abi gezunt
,” Samuel replied. “But what does it matter who you are. We have a fire to kill.”

How do you know if you’re a captain?

Moishe clutched hold of a sheet and soared down to the poop and into the midst of the tumult. He began directing the directionless.

“Shlomo, raise the hogshead. Yankel, dunk and fill the bucket then pass it to Samuel. Samuel, pass it to Yahíma. Down the hatch, Yahíma, pass it through to Ham …”

The ocean was thus carried below-deck, hand to hand, bucket by bucket, and so quelled the fire.

“Jacome and Trachim, take the charred barrels above-deck, break out the pork, and pitch the smouldering staves overboard.”

Clothed in billows, Moishe stood amidship and became captain once again. A captain: the grammarian of ships.

His orders brought order and dinner to the deck. The fire extinguished, the crew gathered for a seder of braised pork, no longer slaves of danger and flame. Moishe, eschewing the treyf, opted for lentils on a trencher of cornbread matzoh.

Moishe did not tell the crew that he started the fire, preferring to leave mythic his sudden appearance in a cloud high above them. It seems we like our leaders to have something wondrous, strange and slightly troubling from their past on their résumé.

Isaac. Samuel. Yahíma. Ham. Shlomo. Jacome. Moishe and me. Gathered amidship around one gap-staved barrel. Yankel, Trachim, others—gathered around another.

Moishe looking into Yahíma’s eyes.

The horizon.

And then what happens?

The old love in the arms of the new.

But before that, Samuel launched into: “Everything is not what it seems. Our ship is a new found land. Let me tell you the whole megillah.”

His megillah, not: “Ach, so sorry—
es tut mir bang
—we mutinied and acted as shochet butcher on you, marlinspiking your jugular into a Trevi fountain.”

Instead, a spiel about a battle.

Shlomo: “We spied the pennant of Spain rising from the sea and we readied for the bubo-poxed bulvans. When we smelled the bilgey rancour of their murderous Spanish breath, I called ‘Fire,’ and we thrust our cannons through the ports and lit the fuses, and soon cannonballs crashed through the bow-bulwarks of the Spanish
Reale
, and raked across its deck. The surprised souls of many Spanish mariners faded as do visions of baizemer bosoms fade when we wake from a dream.”

“But the guns of the
Reale
did not reply,” Shlomo said. “Its bow, towering over the forecastle of our ship—let’s call it
Mamaloshen’s Revenge
—came through the smoke cloud and struck us with a grinding crash. It dug deep, and we were so farmisht we thought we were sinking.”

“Our ship—maybe we should name it the New
World Broygez
—rebounded from the shock,” Samuel said. “We came alongside the
Reale
and we were like behemoths grappling and groping yardarms, rigging and masts. Then the hand-to-hand fighting began.”

“Hand-to-hand?” Jacome said. “More like sword-edge to brainpan. Arquebus to thorax. Fingertip to eyehole. Though my fist followed my pike into the bo’sun’s kidneys and filleted his spine so as he was gimped and could but move like a man o’ war out of water.”

“So,” Samuel said. “We vanquished the Spanish in this chutzpenik manner just as our carrack began to plunge into the sea. We killed every one of them and just had time to retrieve our maps, our books, and some other plunder as our ship sank below the waves.

“You stand aboard
The Yellow Star. The Kike’s Revenge. The Golem of the Sea
. We are in exile even from our own ship. And we don’t even know what to call it. But, as with all Jews, wherever we put our yarmulke is our home. And so what if our home is usually balding? It’s amazing
what they can do with the desert nowadays. This ship? It’s our old ship. Just newer.

“Across this new sea, we have avenged the Jews, Los Indios, and Africans with the deaths of these Christ-Colombizing Spanish. We lanced their chazer pig skinsacks to release their pustular souls to the ether where we hope they will be cauterized by stars.”

“What else?” Isaac said, “We should wait for Elohim to cook them with lightning?”

“Takeh. That know-it-all sky-mucking maven?” Jacome said. “He’s too busy swinging his twenty-two dimensional putz around some infinite Seraglio.”

“Oy,” Shlomo said. “The ineffable effing the ineffable.”

“What kind of meshugener are you?” said Samuel. “The rabbis say like Cipangu or Cathay, He’s just over the next horizon.”

Jacome: “And in the meantime, we bump into a gantseh megillah of a continent of immoveable dirt.”

“Nu,” Isaac said. “He’s the eternal converso, always dressed up in somewhere else.”

“That’s eppes a God?” Yahíma said. “My God would have my eyes shoot flame and my body glow with the warm honey of sex and eternal youth. And He’d make sure my life was catered.”

“Fire, sex and food we can get you, yingeleh. And if the map isn’t a shyster’s sham, we can get you eternal youth, too.”

“Feh. I don’t have time to wait for life everlasting,” Jacome said. “It’s enough to have the sound of sword going through bone. And that look in their eyes.” He chewed into another mouthful of pork. “If only Spaniards were kosher, I’d be happy getting fat.”

“And the gold,” Samuel said. “Makes my guts shake and my eyes swell. If only there were a place to spend it.”

“What hoo-hah, you chazer,” Shlomo said. “As the mystics say, its value is in the size of what isn’t there: think of what’s not in the Spanish coffers.”

“Shlimazl. Think of what’s not between your oysgedarteh stick-insect legs,” Jacome said. “Just a dribbling thimble.”

Shlomo sprung up and plunged his rigging knife toward the leather-and-brimstone body of Jacome. Moishe, who had said nothing, appeared to be drifting keellessly on an inner sea, but his hand shot out and caught Shlomo’s arm and twisted it until it clicked like the chambers of a lock. At the same time, he kicked Shlomo’s skinny legs out from under him. Shlomo slammed onto the deck. Moishe leapt up and held up his open hand before Jacome’s scowling jowls.

“Be a mensch. Each day brings forth its own sorrows,” he said, then walked over to the starboard gunwales to look out at the skiffling waves. Shlomo righted himself and sat by the barrel where he remained silent, examining the suddenly intriguing details of his own feet. Jacome glowered at the mizzen, but also said nothing.

Eventually Moishe returned to the others. “I remember the map and the island well: it resembles a tuches sticking out of the sea. And the books are buried in its valley, nu? We do not know where we are on this map—which makes it both simple and difficult to go forward. But I shall chart a course toward where this island might be. Not for nothing, my years davening over maps. I’ve been to the shvitz house and I’d recognize this rumpy atoll anywhere: it’s like the mountainous spotted hiney of my old cheder teacher. But,
af an emes
, less hairy.”

Later, we unrolled the map in the captain’s quarters. Moishe had asked Shlomo and Ham to make up the morning watch. Jacome, Samuel, Isaac and Yahíma gathered around the captain’s table as if we were dissecting a body.

Moishe navigated around the map. There was an island with soundings, cliffs, rivers, bays and inlets clearly indicated, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to safe anchorage upon its shores. It was more-or-less apple-shaped, about three leagues across, and had a sheyneh fine natural harbour where we could drop anchor. There were, as Moishe had remembered, two enticingly zaftik hills, like the twin kneydlach of a rotund tuches, which dominated the island. They were farprishtcht-poxed by three marks in red ink: one on the north part of the island, two in the southwest. Moishe explained that they were Hebrew letters. Hey. Vav. Hey. In a valley in the centre of this triangle
was a small, neat letter yud written in the same red ink. Buried beneath it: the books.