Yiddish for Pirates Read online

  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.

  The master was good to Moishe and taught him much, though his was a pedagogy based on exhaustion and the definite possibility of a mighty zets to the ear. In addition to his work below deck, on deck, and climbing the rigging, working on booms, gaffs and spars, Moishe was a manservant to the master, serving his every wind-changeable whim.

  But he asked and, if his work was done, was allowed to gaze at the maps and charts. Even as they took him away, they recalled his home and his longing to leave. His quick mind pleased the master.

  “Ye shall be a sea artist good and true, right ye will. Your paint shall be the shiny stars in the sky above and your canvas the waves of the salt sea.”

&
nbsp; You think Moishe had any idea what such words meant? Gornisht! Nothing. Nada. Bupkes. Not that boychik. Until he met me, he didn’t know his shvants from a sloop, his dick from a deck.

  Was I good at language? Let’s just say Polly’s been a nautical boy for most of his long life. Since I was press-ganged out of Africa covered in pinfeathers, I’ve been parrot to a whole shipload of shoulders—Arab, Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, Polish—but none like Moishe.

  And I taught the young bubbeleh something other than the mother tongue mamaloshen.

  Hogshead. Rumfustian. Hardtack. Turtles.

  Baldric. Blunderbuss. Muskatoon.

  Cutthroat. Tankard. Stinkpot.

  How d’ye do?

  In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

  Yes sir, very good, sir.

  Captain. Ocean. Syphilis.

  Pirate.

  He was a good mimic, that sheygets, though no parrot.

  “Farshteyst? Do you understand?” I’d say.

  “I oondershtand,” he’d reply.

  I took an immediate liking to him. His narrow shoulder, his earnest face, his kindness, his credulity.

  Ech. A parrot is a one-person bird. I saw Moishe and the boychik was soon imprinted like words in indelible ink on the farkakteh page of my brain. Who decides such a thing? Like waking up the morning after shoreleave with an anchor tattooed across your hiney, it isn’t, emes, exactly the result of choice. But I needed to be needed and this poor shnook needed me.

  His pleasant demeanour and obvious intelligence attracted the attention not only of the master but of the captain, who took a shine to him, would take him under his wing, though not parrot-permanently as I did. He soon had him managing that part of the ship’s stores that were for his private use. Guns, gold, dainties, drink and good meat. If the master’s stores were Versailles, the captain’s were the Vatican. Moishe kept them neat as a marlinspike, free from vermin, insects, and the salt scum that encrusted everything aboard ship.

  “Yes sir, very good, sir,” he’d say.

  He knew on which side the holy toast is buttered. Farshteyst?

  Moishe was kept busy running between the captain, the master, and his other responsibilities. The crew began, if not to trust him, then at least increasingly to regard him as one of them. Mostly they left him to his own devices, dedicated to appearing occupied while diligently avoiding their own chores. Occasionally they’d call for him to help haul on a halyard, or throw him a broom when they were swabbing the deck.

  “Aye, lad, it’s the only thing we sailors wash,” they’d laugh.

  He’d gather round for rum, stand as an equal in surly and superstitious congregation for Sunday prayer, and share the inscrutable mystery of galley stew, though he’d leave what he was able to identify as pork. He’d station himself nearby to listen to the long ramble of their narratives or mewl and warble soprano with their morbid tavern-hacking choir on the choruses of their songs, whether he understood them or not.

  I wish I was back in my native land

  Heave away! Haul away!

  Full of pox, and fleas, and thieves, and sand

  Heave away! Haul away, home.

  Sometimes, as Moishe stood middle watch between dusk and dawn, insomniac sailors, their gigs adrift with drink, staggered onto deck and confided their tsuris woes to him. They were grown men, their brains and skins turned to leather by years out on the open sea, and Moishe was only a boy, his beard barely more than the nub of pinfeathers on his girly skin. Still, though he knew little but his native tongue, he knew the universal language of the nod, of the hmm.

  And though each day his Yiddishkayt became increasingly submerged, thanks to a certain mensch of a parrot and his lexiconjury, the other cabin boys kept to themselves, not trusting Moishe and the farkakteh way he spoke. Association with him, they had surmised, would turn out to be a liability. They were, after all, ambitious young lads and engaged in professional networking with those both before and behind the mast, hoping to seek advancement in their chosen vocation.

  Was Moishe happy to have finally left the firm land?

  Is milk happy coming out of a mother’s tsitskeh?

  The sea, Moishe exulted. I am finally at sea.

  Take a small, dark shtetl. Paint it with the swirling blue and foamy white of the moving waves, the endless blue and curly white of clouds and sky. Hold the edges like a sheet and toss it up and down like a child’s game, the breezes flapping above you, the gust blowing the tang of salt across your face. Your house, the rag-and-bones path of flesh and blood, ever hopeful as it floats toward the beckoning horizon, free from the gravity of ground. To be at sea is to know vastness, to understand the flight of clouds, the reach of the stars and of invention. He was riding the expanding ripples of God’s great cannonball. Moishe felt as if he were travelling in every direction at once, each direction away from home, toward story.

  It didn’t take long for the milk to sour.

  It was an afternoon of little wind and the crew, having had their food and drink, were becalmed. Moishe shloffed in his hammock below deck, dreaming maps. I had flown up to a spar, my own kind of crow’s nest. In the still air, his master’s voice rose, gramophonic, clear to me, though he was speaking low to an old sea dog on the fo’c’s’le. I flew down into his cabin and bit Moishe’s ear.

  “Gey avek,” he moaned. “Get out of here.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Listen.” He needed to hear what the master was saying.

  “The wits and limbs of my little Hebrew are keen, aye they are,” the master was saying. “I’s reckon I be able to trade him for a few bright pennies on the wharf. That and his wages will add a little fat to my sack and me golden balls’ll swab the deck as I walk.”

  The taller the prophet, the greater the fracture of the falling tablets.

  “Gonif,” Moishe cursed. He was ready to swab the deck with the master’s beytsim all right, but he knew there was nothing he could do. He’d be swinging from a gibbet, or hacked into lobscouse if he tried anything.

  So, nu, what do you do when everything’s farkakte?

  It didn’t take long for Moishe to turn what was smashed into a dirty shiv and to spit on the niceties of moral details. After a man is condemned, how could it hurt if he steals?

  Moishe took to helping himself to comestible advances on his pay and to availing himself of the captain’s collection of maps. The maps were of distant places, of waters more like legends than actual destinations.

  And a little gold, a drink or two of the captain’s fine wine, a bit of meat serves to ease the pain and evens out what the world owes you. The captain was almost the same thing as the master—a horse cares little to whose cart it’s tied; besides, the captain would never notice the filching. There was so much and he was casual with his riches, unlike the master who kept a close eye.

  But, a few days later, the captain noticed.

  “Curse the hot piss of the devil himself!” he shouted as he stormed from his quarters. “I’ll have the skin of the man who did this for a sail.”

  Clearly he had a different conception of the equitable redistribution of resources, both savoury and liquid, for the wages of cabin boys.

  He ordered the crew on deck. “No Christian sailor would steal from his own captain,” he hissed, “for he fears the devil hereafter and the lash before. There shall be neither sup nor grog until the man who did this speaks of it to me, or his mate tells the tale.”

  Chapter Three

  It was then that Moishe learned a new word, but not from me.

  The crew had little notion who was the gonif who’d been grazing on the captain’s wares, but when the afternoon’s rations were withheld they went sleuthing for the lost luxuries. Mostly the interrogation was accomplished by the fist, though there was some cross-examination effected by the knee. The crew searched each other’s measly lockers and bestowed smart zetses and slaps upon each other’s chins. Moishe searched also, or did his best to appear engaged in time-s
ensitive tasks of critical importance.

  But soon the cabin boys began considering Moishe’s hobbled and palsied recitation of newly acquired words. Un-Christian hoodoo incantations and organs-on-the-outside spells, they said. The Bible turned backwards. Harelipped prayers that led clubfooted only to sacrilege, damnation, and punishment both eternal and maritime. Naturally they were keen to avoid a messy tryst between their freckled backs and the captain’s daughter, and so little time passed before they attributed the theft to Moishe. Their attribution was, of course, perfectly sound, though they had not a snail’s leg of evidence on which to base their accusation. What was evidence to them? Bupkes. So, nu, they should wait two hundred years for all good sailors to be apprised of the Enlightenment, the scientific method?

  “Heretic,” they called him, and the captain, betrayed by this strange boy whom he’d planned to help, invoked the Inquisition.

  The Inquisition. That Swiss Army–knife trump card of a final solution.

  You’re only the same until you’re different.

  Moishe’s spice-rich accent. His un-Christian curses. His porklessness. Not that it had been his intention to assume a role as anything but Jew.

  Differently Christianed. Jesusly challenged.

  “You, my greedy-fingered lad, will burn at the stake the day we arrive in port. And then we’ll offer your ashes the opportunity to repent.” The captain’s eyes like two fires, condemning him to hell.

  When the going gets tough, the goyim get tough, too.

  There was no escape. In the cold sea it would be water instead of fire that would steal the breath of life from his mortal body. He pled with the captain to spare him, wailing and protesting his youth.