Yiddish for Pirates Read online

  “Common thievery, and from the captain, no less. The crew has spoken of your ungodly babbling, your pagan psalms. You have recited our Gospel with a forked and goat-footed tongue. You gather with us to pray yet you’ll not eat pork. This is a Christian ship and there shall be no heresy. If Jew you ever were, your Hebrew soul was flayed to dust by demons, and now no spirit but the devil takes residence in your bones,” the captain said.

  Religion a trump card in a game where the captain is king.

  “What shall I do?” Moishe wailed later as he lay in his bunk.

  “The master,” I said. “Remember the sagging sack he would fill with gold in exchange for you? You are an investment. Men protect their investments as if they were the twin baby moles of their own tender between-the-leg sack.”

  Next watch, with both broken voice and tongue, Moishe begged the master to intervene.

  The master weighed the matter on the scales of his own greed, then agreed to speak to the captain.

  Chapter Four

  The captain was in his cabin at table before a silver plate of meat. “Captain,” the master purred. “My captain, I’s thinking, this boy’s trip should not yet be done. Let us steady his keel, weather his daring by our own hand on our own grim vessel. I’d wager that the prize you seek can be won with but a few drops of red, and then”—the master paused at this point to grin conspiratorially—“at the nearest port, we can sell him, as he were … off the rack. What says you, sir?”

  The captain, reaching deep into his sea chest of compassion and jurisprudence, replied, “Torture, my good man. It’s as effective as truth serum. What’s flayed onto the back speaks more plain and true than lines found in the hand.”

  He would have Moishe stripped, the better to see the naked shmeckel of his immortal soul. Then he’d let the cat out of the red bag that hung from the impressive manhood of the mainmast. He would flog the boy—who was, naturally, free at any time to present a cogent refutation of the accusations against him—until he bled like an innocent saint or a pestilent piss-veined devil. Certainly, the lash spilled stories from the accused, but those who first confessed would still be flogged so their tales, tanned into their backs, became incorruptible and permanent as leather.

  They waited until dawn appeared blood red on the new sky of the next day. The morality play of punishment made more acute by a vivid setting. The crew gathered, the other cabin boys making box seats of barrels for a close view. Moishe’s clothes were rent to rags on the deck, then he was bound to the mast.

  “Sir,” he began to wail. “Very good, sir.” He had command of few words that they’d understand, and most of those learned from his heymishe parrot.

  The bo’sun, a desiccated and diminutive mamzer with rings in his twisted, labial ears, lifted the cat and brought it down hard on Moishe’s back. A crack as of lightning splitting a great tree. A moment only and then rivers of blood seeped from the raised banks of the boy’s flesh.

  “Hogshead,” Moishe cried, bursting open his meagre word horde in desperation. “Rumfustian.”

  The bo’sun struck again.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” Moishe wailed.

  At this the bo’sun paused. Who could flog man or boy who was saying prayers? And in Latin.

  At least what man who feared offending the captain? The bo’sun would have flogged Jesus himself since it gave opportunity to sear flesh with the lash and draw a rich red city map of fresh blood on the mortal canvas of his Lord’s bare back.

  “He knows his Mass, Cap’n,” he said. “What should I do?”

  “We’ve drawn the Christian out,” the captain said. “It’s like tenderizing meat. Perhaps we have saved the boy.”

  No one, except for the master, knew what they’d saved the boy for. He’d be sold soon as they anchored.

  They untied Moishe, who could hardly stand, though he’d received thirty-seven lashes less than Moses’ law, the usual prescription. Salt water was poured from a waiting bucket to stave off infection. He could walk no more than an eel and so, frogmarched below deck, he was deposited wet and sloppy into his hammock.

  Sleep. Silence save for a few moans.

  Nightfall.

  Moishe woke and covered himself with an abundant and foamy tide of his own puke.

  Chapter Five

  By the next morning, the dawn sun was but a pallid cue ball beside the raging red rising on Moishe’s back.

  “Get your dog’s body out of bed, boy,” the master shouted. “Unless you seek another lashing?”

  Moishe staggered to his feet. Soon he was struggling to lug an enormous piss bucket up a ladder, stale urine sloshing over his cross-hatched flesh.

  “Over the larboard side, you thieving piss monkey,” the master said. “Into the wind.”

  There were no chains binding him. The ship was restriction enough. If he jumped overboard, the waves would snatch him in their wet paws, Moishe their plaything while it pleased them. Then—mazel tov!—he would be pulled down into the lair of blind fish and luminescent cucumbers, where the contents of his lungs would find their way to the surface while he died.

  And like most sailors, he couldn’t swim.

  Did the captain provide him vittles for a sultan’s nosh? Feh. He was fed only enough to keep the bones around his marrow. Who needs such decoration as that provided by the ostentatious hoo-hah of flesh and blood?

  One doesn’t re-shoe a horse that is to be glue.

  The bucket emptied, he collapsed on the deck. He was roused, made to return down the ladder, then haul up another bucket of farshtunkeneh bladder-rum squeezed from the syphilitic shmeckels of his bunkmates.

  “Lad, the spume of the sea be cruel, but spurn the sailor’s code and we be crueller.”

  All morning Moishe was compelled to toil. By afternoon he collapsed on the deck and fried like a side of Yiddish bacon under the griddling sun.

  The dog’s watch bells rang.

  As if conjured from the silken sleeve of the duplicitous ocean, three ships appeared close behind, moving quickly. They flew the red St. George’s cross.

  A shout from the crow’s nest. “Caravels. At seven o’ the clock.”

  The master and the captain appeared on deck.

  “English, I’s reckon,” the mate drawled. “They fly the Genoese ensign and pay the doge for the privilege.”

  “Unless in truth they hail from Genoa,” the captain said.

  “Then curse their devilled privates fo’ it’s like then they be privateers.” All able-bodied seamen—and Moishe, the Cain-bodied—were called to prepare. The ship’s few four-pounders were rolled by the gunners into position. The powder was readied in the orlop. The crew made busy adjusting sails and preparing smaller arms.

  Before long, the caravels were arrayed broadside and close. Their guns fired into rigging and across decks.

  Gevalt. They were Genoese. It wasn’t to be a bucolic romp with falsely dressed sheep. We’d soon be muttoned and shtupped with holes.

  I flew to up to the foremast spar, hoping to get above the meshugas like an eagle above a storm.

  But the thunder and flash soon rose to surround me. I looked down on a sea-borne village on fire, seeing nothing but the flicker of flame amidst billows of black smoke, the booming blasts of the guns.

  Shouting. Movement. Fire. The boys running with powder. Men loading muskets. Cannons filled with shot and powder. A call of “clear,” then the lit fuse and the frame-shaking blast. The crack as the cannonballs splintered both ship and man.

  Screaming. Chaos. Explosion.

  Repeat.

  I could not find Moishe in the tumult.

  A Genoese ship rammed against us.

  Gezunterhayt. Let us both die in good health. See if I care.

  A massive crack and the foremast below me was rampiked as if by lightning. A forest fire on the ocean. The sails were aflame. My goose—whatever part of a parrot that is—was soon to be cooked.

  I’d not be poultry nor part
of any recipe.

  Death waits for no man, and neither would I.

  I called, “Gey kakn afn yam”—“go shit on the ocean,” the traditional curse of the irate at sea—and then took to the air.

  Here’s hoping we were near shore.

  Chapter Six

  This is what I know of seagulls: It is not “where there’s a will there’s a way,” but rather “where one finds seagulls one finds shore.”

  Exhaustion had taken flight from my wings, but as I struggled on I saw below me a severed piece of ship’s plank, floating in the waves. I fell from the sky and sought respite and safe harbour, a smoke-damaged surfer, riding in to the sand.

  It was night.

  I hoped for seagulls.

  Seagulls.

  My idiot brothers. Squawking shlemiels farshraying the sky. The Keystone Kops of the air. If only they were silent.

  They can no more think than a brick could weave water into rope.

  A story. Once there was a meshugener who was so brainless he thought he needed a new brain. On the way to the market he met a merchant who offered him the choice of three bird brains he had for sale. “It’s true that they’re not very big, but that’s good: they’re very portable, and not too heavy so they won’t strain the neck,” he said.

  “Great,” said the brainless one. “How much?”

  “Five kopecs, fifty kopecs, and five hundred kopecs.”

  “They all look the same,” the meshugener said. “Why such different prices?”

  “The first is the brain of a nightingale. Good singer, but not too smart. The second belonged to a parrot. Very intelligent, spoke six languages.”

  “And the last?”

  “A seagull’s. The most expensive.”

  “I didn’t know that seagulls were that clever.”

  “They’re not. The brain’s never been used.”

  By morning there were seagulls.

  The scene: me, a farmisht flotilla of broken wood, seagulls kvetching moronically above me, and a bedraggled youth, draped like seaweed across the remains of half a barrel.

  Moishe.

  He’d survived, keneynehoreh.

  Good thing I’d been there for him.

  But as far as I could determine, given the uncooperative chawing of the waves, the youthful jetsam beside me was tall, red-haired, and strong. Compared to him, Moishe was short, svelte as prayerbook paper, and with hair black and curly as the broadloom that had—in honour of his Bar Mitzvah—sprouted above his shvants.

  The buoyant roytkop was clutching a bundle of rolled papers as if they were the things keeping him afloat and not the barrel.

  We were churned by the sea, but always the tide pulled us as certainly as lust or regret. It concluded our passage by beaching us without comment or ceremony but tossing us blanched and exhausted on the soft sand. The red-haired sheygets had collapsed with half of himself still in the sea. He’d crawled just enough to ensure his rolled charts were beyond the dissolute criticism of the lapping waves.

  I flew low and landed on a sodden seaweed-veiled timber. Around me, the sand was stippled with human, avian, and nautical debris. The distinction was not entirely clear.

  Down the beach, in the shallows before shore, an oysgedarteh skinny beluga of a boy was embracing two fractured flagons. He washed up and down with each foaming wave. A wrinkled white shmeckel between two broken beytsim.

  The pekeleh? It was Moishe.

  I hadn’t realized how worried bazorgt I’d been. He’d become a barnacle stuck to where it chaffed.

  I flew over. “So, nu, vos macht a Yid? Come here often?”

  He was motionless.

  So I spoke to the sky. “O Adonai! Creator of the Universe, thank you for saving this boychik’s life. But I’ve just one complaint: he had a hat! How could you forget his hat?”

  “I had no hat,” Moishe murmured.

  It was good he could speak. Hat or no hat, he was alive.

  The red-haired man pulled himself to his knees. He held the rolled parchment to his chest and crawled further up the beach. When he noticed Moishe roiling in the shallow water, he staggered to his feet and approached. “Stand, sailor,” he said in Spanish. “With these maps I have made, I shall show you marvels.”

  “He’s half-drowned, like a noodle in soup. And he speaks as much Spanish,” I said.

  He looked at me, incredulously.

  “What?” I said. “Is it my accent?”

  He did what people do when they encounter something entirely alien. They pretend there’s nothing out of the ordinary.

  So I spoke intelligible Spanish. Of course: this Polly is something of a polyglot.

  As a parrot, I’m a man of the world.

  The water continued to wash up on Moishe. “In any case, I could use some help hauling him,” I told the mapmaker. “Look. No hands.”

  He stumbled up the beach and secured his maps beneath a knot-holed plank. He grabbed Moishe under the armpits and hauled him to safety on the short grass far above the tide line, a sack of wet, semi-conscious Jew beside some damp charts—his father would be so proud.

  “Thanks,” I said to the mapmaker. “Business or pleasure: which brings you to the beach?”

  I could tell that he was still somewhat fartumelt, a bit shore-shocked, though he spoke with a stiff formality, like jello served on a silver plate.

  “A letter of marque from the Doge of Genoa made us privateers. We sought the sweet cargo of the Alboran Sea. Our three ships came upon a vessel …”

  “My vessel,” I said.

  “My father is a weaver and I began travelling to sell his wares, and to study maps and winds. But I am paid better than weaver’s wages to sail, and sometimes to board merchant ships. I am sorry for your loss. It is, unfortunately, as my father says: ‘Quien no sabe de mar, no sabe de mal—He who knows nothing of the sea, knows nothing of suffering.’ ”

  Who was this haughty, geshvollener young man, with his father’s Ladino sayings and Ashkenazi “I-am-sorry-for-your-loss” consolations?

  He continued with his silver patter.

  “And as for myself, though I be a weaver’s son, my warp and woof are the waves. My home is nowhere, but my heart is everywhere. Soon I shall be an admiral as indeed another in my family has been. And before I die, I intend to sail both the charted and uncharted places of this world. The isles wait for me. Marvels, also.”

  Moishe groaned and then rolled over. “Vi heystu?” he moaned.

  “What does he say?” the weaver’s son asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name,” he replied with a flourish of self-importance, “is Christoval Colon.”

  I translated the name for Moishe. “Christopher Columbus.”

  “I’m supposed to know him?” Moishe asked, and put his head back onto the green grass and passed out.

  Chapter One

  Columbus stood over Moishe’s inert body. “It is because of me that he has arrived here,” he said. “He should thank me for his good fortune.”

  “If he knew he was anywhere,” I said, “my master would indeed be grateful to be there.”

  “Lisbon is a place of bounteous opportunity,” Columbus continued. “I myself am bound for the studio of Bartholomeo, my brother, whose maps grace the courts of popes and philosophers, the chambers of captains and kings.”

  One could do worse than follow the route of one who makes maps. Besides, these several months past Moishe had sought to chart a course from shtetl cart to court cartographer.

  We agreed that we would set out together, the three of us, once Moishe had regained himself.

  The pickling in the ocean had changed Moishe.

  Azoy bald—so soon?

  Ay, it was a kind of briny baptism.

  “From now on, like a knife in a boot, I’m keeping my Jewishness hidden,” he said. “It’s safer if no one knows. So, nu, I need a new name.”

  “Miguel,” I said. “It’s Spanish and Portuguese. But you need a last name too.
You can’t be Miguel Ben Chaim.”

  “So what should I be?”

  “Rich. But in the meantime, you could try Levante. It means ‘where the sun rises’: the east.”

  Moishe tried it out. “Miguel Levante. Yes. I could be him,” he said.

  It was late in the morning when we began walking the road to Lisbon. Or rather, they walked and I rode on my now customary shoulder.

  The sun was a gold piece against the smooth ocean of sky. The three of us, having nothing, carried nothing, save Columbus’s charts and Moishe’s book, concealed in a shouldersack worn under the clothes like a prayer shawl. My tatterdemalion companions appeared washed up, dredged like seaweed from the bottom of the sea. I, adorned in my usual crepuscular feathers, appeared no different than if I were a parrot king dressed for his coronation. By noon we needed a nosh, so stopped at a farmhouse to beg some bread.

  The farmer eyed us suspiciously.

  Moishe was dark, curly haired, but as long as he did not speak he was no more Jew than Portuguese. His head was uncovered—ach, he had no hat, remember?—and his clothes were faithless rags. Columbus was bedraggled, yet his supercilious bearing impressed the farmer and so he believed our story. “Just this morning, we were beaten and robbed on our way to an audience with the King.”

  “And he,” I said, indicating Moishe with a nod of my beak, “lost his hat.”

  The farmer brought bread, grapes and wine to the table. Miguel, under his breath, made the brocheh for both bread and drink. Soon, his inner Moishe would learn to sound like someone else.

  Who better than a parrot to teach such a thing?

  Chapter Two

  A cool night breeze. We sat outside the farmer’s cottage with Columbus and a flagon of the farmer’s wine. The self-actualized liberators of libation, we’d helped ourselves, for as Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” The ancient sage clearly knew a thing or two about schnapps.

  Moishe set a bowl of wine on the sandy ground. I drank.