Yiddish for Pirates Read online

  Also by Gary Barwin

  Poetry

  Cruelty to Fabulous Animals

  Outside the Hat

  Raising Eyebrows

  frogments from the frag pool: haiku after Basho (with derek beaulieu)

  The Porcupinity of the Stars

  The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts)

  Franzlations [the imaginary Kafka parables] (with Craig Conley & Hugh Thomas)

  O: eleven songs for chorus SATB (with music by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz)

  Moon Baboon Canoe

  The Wild and Unfathomable Always

  Novella

  The Mud Game (with Stuart Ross)

  Short Fiction

  Big Red Baby

  Doctor Weep and other strange teeth

  I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457

  Books for Younger Readers

  Seeing Stars

  Grandpa’s Snowman (illustrated by Kitty Macaulay)

  The Magic Mustache (illustrated by Stephane Jorisch)

  The Racing Worm Brothers (illustrated by Kitty Macaulay)

  As Editor

  Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poety of Paul Dutton

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 Gary Barwin

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.​penguinrandomhouse.​ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Barwin, Gary, author

  Yiddish for pirates / Gary Barwin.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81551-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81553-8

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A783Y53 2016 C813′.54 C2015-905824-4

  Cover image © C.M. Butzer

  Interior images: (ship) © Charles H. Keith, 1846. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; (flourishes) Topographical Atlas of Jefferson County, New York, 1864, by S.N. Beers and D.G. Beers, and Atlas of Steuben County, New York, 1873, by D.G. Beers, both courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection, www.​davidrumsey.​com

  v3.1

  For the whole mishpocheh, both fore and aft.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One: Air

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: Fire

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Part Three: Water

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Four: Land

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Five: Quintessence

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  We are going to a different world … and I expect it is the one where all goes well.

  VOLTAIRE, Candide

  Hello. Howaya? Feh. You think those are the only words I know? Boychik, you don’t know from knowing. You ain’t seen knowing. I may be meshugeh crazy, but I know from words. You think I’m a fool shmegegge? I’m all words.

  Hello? If you want the story of a life, don’t wait for your alter kaker old gramps over there to wake up. Maybe he’ll never wake. But me? Listen to my words. They tell some story. Because I remember. Sometimes too much, but I remember.

  So, nu, bench your fat little oysgepasheter Cape Horn tuches down on that chair and listen to my beaking. Comeall ye brave lads, and so forth. I’ll tell you the whole megillah story from fore to aft.

  What’s it about? Pirates. Parrots. Jews. Jewels. The Inquisition. Gefilte fish. Gold. A girl.

  Boychik, I was a pirate’s parrot, and had I not noshed from the Fountain of Eternal Youth hundreds of years ago, I would rest beside my scurvy captain and Davy Jones hisself at the bottom of the sea where the soulless creatures crawl. And then where would you be?

  Without a story.

  That life. It was a book made into a life. A wonder tale. The glinty waves. The deep jungle. A world I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t sailed right into it. And for a time, that world had but one shoulder, blue and fussy with epaulettes hanging off the rigging of a stolen frock coat, a cutlass of a collarbone covered in flesh like mangy beef jerky.

  My captain’s shoulder.

  Feh, these days no one wants to hear. Maybe not even you. They treat us like leftovers—wizened chicken-gizzard pupiklech in this birdhouse of leftover Yids. But nu, it’s true, most of us look like yesterday’s chicken or its gizzards. Though look at these feathers. A young bird would be proud of such grey.

  The Shalom Home for the Aged.

  Shalom? In Hebrew, “shalom” means hello, goodbye, peace.

  Imagine the crazy farkakteh waving of some poultry-skinned geezer on the fifth floor, squinting out from between the orange curtains. Is he waving hello or goodbye? Ptuh! It’s an old age home, so who knows? Maybe the shlemiel thinks he’s in a crow’s nest and is warning of an invading armada. Alav ha’shalom. Peace be upon him, old nudnik.

  But what does peace look like? Is it better to be careened tsitskehs-over-tuches, nipples-over-nethers in dry dock, the dangling clams of your ballsack scraped daily for barnacles by some balmelocheh know-it-all nurse, or lost somewhere on the seventh of the seven seas snorting the scent of new flowers and the soft jellyfish pazookheh breasts of beautiful sheyneh maidens?

  Too often, stories in this library of lost people are told in the farmisht confused language of forgetting, but I speak many languages and I’m fluent in both remembering and forgetting. Though, nu, it’s easier to tell the stories you remember.

  Or pretend to. And what you don’t remember, the stories tell for you.

  Ach. I talk too much. I’ve got myself twisted fardreyt with words turncoating again, thinking about my bastard mamzer captain himself. But what do you expect? Five hundred years old, I’m an alter kaker geezer of the highest degree, with a brain like a cabbage roll. A parrot brain like a chameleon on Jewish tartan.
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  The horizon, I once told a Spanish painter, it gives you a whole new perspective. It doesn’t exist except from far away. The horizon is always a story, and as soon as we get there, it’s somewhere else.

  The horizon, it’s a line we crossed just to see what we could see. And believe me, we saw many things, some things that wouldn’t just stay over the horizon.

  They wanted our souls for eternal barbecue so we travelled with Columbus into that braves’ new world as if across a vast and chilly Jordan. An undividing Red Sea. And what did the ancients find? A promising land. Thousands of years of history. Regret. Happiness. The future.

  And what did we find? Ach, this is a pirate tale I’m telling you, so it has to be treasure. So, nu, you ask, what is this treasure and where is it buried?

  This I’ll try to answer. As well as another, the big question of all stories: And then what happened?

  Yes, it brings mazel for a pimply boy like you to hear about blood, kishkas—guts—dangerous books, and shtupping. It puts some hair between your ears and above your skinny-dick shmeckel.

  You’ll like it.

  So, nu, in the beginning what was there?

  A beginning.

  Introduction

  We’re on a ship and high above us, the pale full moon—keneynehoreh—pus-coloured, to be frank, streaked semen-silver across the shawl of the sea. The clouds bulging dark, spun fat over the slate grey sky. The world is a slow breath. The cool sea air, the quiet ship deck, the crew sleeping below, except for a few rum-soaked shikker and unconscious seamen collapsed against the capstan. The flap of the sails like the wings of a giant seabird, the steady lapping of waves against the hull somewhere far below. Where are we? Ver veyst? Who knows. We could be anywhere, between one place and another in the long night, heading toward another horizon.

  “Gevalt!” the watch calls out suddenly from the wheel, waking from his near stupor. “Galleon! At two o’ the clock.” There’s sudden action from below deck. The dishevelled quartermaster strides onto the scene. A rigger, monkey-like, runs up the main to the crow’s nest. Seamen scatter about deck and rigging. We’ve been waiting for this.

  I’m quick aft to the poop deck, landing on the skinny rigging of the captain’s shoulder. He’s squinting through the spyglass. I totter, almost falling off as he grepses. His breath is like pickled rat.

  “Spanish,” he says.

  The rigger runs down from the crow’s nest.

  “Spanish, Cap’n,” the rigger says.

  “For that, I could have saved him the trip,” the captain says, shrugging.

  Moishe.

  My captain. He was born to cross the Ocean Sea. Which is what we used to call the Atlantic before we knew what it was. His young mother died soon after he’d sailed from her safe inner sea. Then he was thrown like dreck into the river. No basket. No pharaoh’s daughter for him to sail to, unless she be Death’s rat-skinned, sweet and toothless princess herself.

  His father, the great boot and sword, the hot snorting breath of a pogrom.

  But he was rescued, a barely moving, pink conch-flesh baby. A young Jewess beating the laundry on the rocks downstream fished him out of the water and brought the poor little farshtunkeneh back home—finally in a basket—where he was named Moshe. Moses. Moishe. He who is drawn from water. He who was circumcised soon after.

  Years later—it’s the beginning of another story—he named me Aharon. Aaron. Brother of Moses and he who spoke his words.

  But I should keep my tales straight. I was telling you of a galleon.

  “Mach shnel!” I called to no one in particular. “Hurry up!”

  It would take us some hours to catch up to our prey. Already the bo’sun had the men hoisting and securing the sails, netting the wind like a dreamcatcher, the ocean gleaming past us as we ran toward the horizon. With any luck we’d take the Spanish by surprise, hit them in the beytsim before they were even fully awake, and gonifs that we were, have their gelt-laden chests aboard our ship before dawn.

  And so we sailed.

  In the east, a bruise in the sky, the horizon’s bleeding lip. We approached the Spanish caravel. Putzes. They didn’t see us coming, the farshikkered crew rum-addled, the shnorrer captain drooling beneath his poxy sheets.

  From the orlop below deck, the powder monkeys began scrambling, that stilted scarecrow scuffle, careful not to spill powder. The gunners made ready with our eight pounders. We hove broadside to the galleon and Moishe, calling the carpenter surgeon to him, instructed the man to take his greatest drill and bore broad holes in our ship’s sides, an invitation for the ocean to rush aboard and quicken our men’s valour.

  “Captain?” the surgeon inquired.

  “With no ship to ’scape back to,” Moishe said, “it’ll put a spring in the shleppers’ steps.”

  The surgeon did as he was ordered, and soon a cry of panic came from below to which the captain, ever laconic, replied, “Unless you’re Yoshke—Jesus—and can run home on water, we’ve no choice but to take the ship with haste and commend the Spaniards directly to their maker.”

  Soon as we heaved ourselves close with grappling hooks, the crew roared aboard with their dirks and daggers, their cutlasses and bucklers, their marlinspikes, boarding axes, and flintlocks, and most of all, their complete lack of foresight.

  From my perch in the modern world, I’d say—hapless if endearing shlemiels that most crews are—there was nary a frontal lobe between them, save the captain, the quartermaster, and the surgeon.

  And my captain, though he’d lost his foreskin to the moyel at seven days, had yet enough foresight to go around. Before boarding, he’d taken a moment to tie limewater and saltpetre fuses into the long scrub-bush of his beard and hair. These he lit and let burn as he stood in the middle of the galleon, firing his flintlocks and shouting fearsome instructions to his men, while the smoke of hellfire itself rose about him.

  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.