Yiddish for Pirates (30 page)

Within the time one could croak a single kaddish, there remained not one villager alive in the square.

The young woman leapt onto the outside wall of the bohío and scrambled up onto the thatched roof. She would leave this earth behind.

In a fever, Pinzón’s men rushed through the door of the bohío and by slash and thrust began to murder all inside. The blood of an
entire flock dispatched like floodwater. The girl, banshee-shrieking, emboldened those few villagers who could find their strength, to clamber up the wooden poles of the house. They birthed themselves through the thick thatch and onto the roof. From there they ascended into the trees and escaped into the canopy of leaves.

Moishe had collapsed in the square. Pulled by the tide of unhinged madness, he had drawn his sword.

Blood coloured its blade. He looked for a moment, mute with shock, as if it were a severed leg. His own. Wounded and without feeling.

“An evil spirit afflict my father. An evil spirit afflict my father’s father,” Moishe hissed.

A curse on where he came from. A curse on those who made him.

Then he dropped the sword and ran.

So, tell me, when did you first know you were a pirate?

Chapter Four

Days or weeks or years later. What does it matter? The tide had turned long ago and we were at sea.

“Feh,” I said and glided down to the mainmast.

I’d flown to the sky to sight what was hidden behind the horizon. “Ten four-pounders wait to pestle us into stew,” I announced.

Before long, a galleon loaded with guns and gold rose in the distance. A ship returning to Spain, plotzing with spoils. Our gobs would soon dribble with Pavlovian glee.

We made to haul up from the cove where we’d hove to, ready to broadreach our bowsprit right up the mamzers’ nether hawsehole.

L’chaim
, you Spanish ladies!

“And the crew?” Moishe asked me. “How many sailors?”

“Thirty on deck. Several monks and priests …”

“God spare us from churchmen. When skewered, they make such a woeful noise.” This was Isaac the Blind, an old sailor.

“Ha-Shlossing-Shem spare m’ earwax the wheedling prayers and simpering pleas of clergy as their sickly bodies are pared from soul,” he went on. Isaac the Blind. Most of him was lost. And what remained was hardly seaworthy.

His single seeing eye was a broken and bloody egg. His one grizzled hand the offspring of a spider.

Tefillin slouched over his blind eye, the box like a patch. The stump of his left arm, too, was wrapped in tefillin, the leather phylactery strap
holding a fragment of anchor to serve as his hand. He was whatever he had scrounged.

Like all of us.

Except for those whose lives seemed the scratchpad of fate.

Shlomo. His body was a book of scars. We’d seen him on the island of Jews where he had settled with those who’d sailed away from Spain. Together with Isaac and the others, he had then escaped that new Zion and become part of our crew.

The Isle of Jews had been no easy billet on a sleepy pinnace. When Rabbi Nalfimay died, another quickly stripped the old rebbe of his red fez and orange-gold robes and appointed himself rebbe of the island. Unlike Nalfimay, this Reb Salomo’s rule was grim and sadistic. When Shlomo questioned—when he asked for the passage in the law that explained a severity—Salomo had ordered Shlomo’s arms tied to a palm tree and the words of the Ten Commandments cut into his skin. The Hebrew had scarred, red pus-crusted serpents writhing across his body as if he been flogged with a whip whose grip, you could say, was nowhere yet whose lash was everywhere.

“Ach, it’s not so bad,” Shlomo laughed. “When I call my own name, I’m still the one who answers. I saw a Yid who’d been flayed alive by Salomo, and you’d hardly believe how much it altered him for the worse. Skin and bones he was. Skin there, bones over there.”

Our crew included an African—an Ethiope—whom we’d found floating in the sea, clinging to a barrel of olives. He was half pickled himself, his body like the wrinkled inside of a mouth.

We called him Ham, after Noah’s black son who came across his father ongeshnoshket, pants down, putz rampant. His father cursed him and his children. They were punished by the five-thousand-year enslavement of those races who were also beyond the pale.

We named him because he couldn’t speak. His tongue had been cut out. What we learned later, through a combination of shipboard sign language and writing, was that he had cut it from his own mouth so that he would not have to speak of what he had witnessed.

Though we came to know why Ham didn’t speak, we never knew what he wasn’t telling us.

Ach, but I remember Rabbi Daniel muttering that memory is useless if none of us remembers the same thing.

It was ten years since Moishe had left Martín Pinzón and his men at the village. For hours he’d run blind into the forest, then scrabbled up a tree into the dark canopy, panting, directionless, disoriented, and hungry. He had thrown his weapons and stripped most of his clothing as he sprinted in the heat. At nightfall he’d shloffed in the crook of a giant tree and I slept in the branches above him, listening always for danger.

Early morning and we found ourselves inside the boisterous mechanism of the forest. The flywheels of insects, the flap and flutter of birds. A hum, a purring, the footfalls of animals we didn’t know. Then bright feathers: I was surrounded by a crowd of parrots kibitzing in a language I did not understand.

Soon they scattered. This I understood: predators.

Several natives walking, chanting, armed with bows. Their leader, the young woman from the village, spotted us immediately. I pressed myself against the tree trunk, not keen to lose a divot of flesh or to have my guts festooned in fletching. Moishe uncurled himself and sat on the branch in plain view. Pale and mostly naked. He did not appear to be a great warrior or bold sailor gluttonous for conquest. Instead, Moishe: a pallid Yiddishe Mowgli lost in the Caribbean.

“Help,” he said and raised his hand.

And now, that same young woman, Yahíma, was part of our crew. Yahíma: our new Sarah. She, too, an orphan, her parents lost amidst the bohío blood.

So, nu, what about all those stories of New World Pocohonawitzes? Beautiful girls who go native in reverse. Sheyneh native maidelehs who put down their porcupine quills and tomahawks for doilies.

Yahíma was fearless and knowledgeable. Strong, nimble and lithe. But she was no beauty, though her tawny skin was the colour of Amontillado sherry and there was much of it on display. And, emes,
an alter kaker would say,
Ze hot sheyneh Moishe v’Arondlach
. She had nice little Moses and Aaronses. Was Moishe the right and I the left? This, through a rigorously scientific program of manual ministrations, Moishe appeared to be keen to discern.

It should be said though, at thirty, Moishe himself was no Yohan Smith. Sunburned and scabbed like an accidental lasagne. Greasy. A scar where a scimitar had taken off his left tsitskeh. And he was a hairy yatl with a beard that was a fecund habitat for organic lifeforms, both sentient and insensible, sticks, leaves, and the oily trails of flesh.

Though of course, in the sixteenth century, that was practically dapper.

Before Yahíma, Moishe would sometimes moon about like a lover in a sonnet. “Sometimes, when I sleep on the deck under the star-pimpled prishtshevateh punim sky,” he’d say, “the kitsl tickle of the breeze on my face, the rise and sigh of the waves, my cut gehakteh body aching like an Egyptian slave’s, I think of Sarah, my Shulamite. How beautiful she’d be. In another world, we’d wake, husband and wife in each other’s arms, early morning, the windows open, hooves on the cobbles, the scent of bread, voices in the alleys. We’d have been shtupping all night like the world was new, and now exhausted, we’d lie squeezed together like knishes, wondering what it might be like on the other side of the world. But, feh. That other world is here and where is Sarah? Lost. Murdered. Married off to someone else. A mother. And I’m left mumbling this sub-Solomon Song of Songs.”

Now there was Yahíma. She of the long legs. The loincloth not much bigger than a yarmulke. The sudden eyes and blinkless smile. She who could turn a spear into a lightning flash, skewer a fish before we’d even seen. Or push Moishe into the sea when his back was turned.

Companionship is 90 percent just showing up.

Moishe had grown parrotlike: a pragmatist with the yearning neshomeh soul of a hero.

Who else was on board? Jacome, whom we’d found at sea in a coracle, spiting and cursing, hauling on the paddle with only a cutlass, a jug of water, salt meat, and his own sweet song for a crew. Pinzón had been on
an island and had wanted rid of the half-cocked blunderbuss, all bile and gunpowder, that was Jacome. The usual method was to maroon a sailor who was trouble, to set them on a desert island and leave them there.
Gey gezunt
. Be well. But since they were already on an island, he was set adrift, perhaps with the idea that he would maroon himself.

His potholed punim certainly became enpurpled as he shared his thoughts regarding Pinzón.

“Next I see him, I tie the whoreson’s drooping yardarm into knots,” he said. “I’ll weave a basket of his pizzle an’ I’ll fill it with crabs, black-flies and glass. An’ that’s tenderness besides what I’ll do with his sack.”

Certainly, his relations with his former employer had not remained cordial. “And look at these vittles here,” he said and held up something like a dried fig tied to a string around his neck. “His bo’sun’s ear.”

Fernández the painter sailed with us also. He’d run as Moishe had, though it was some years before they met again.

And life aboard ship?

Lord of the yardarms, king of sails, Moishe, our captain, stood beneath the broiling sun, the radiant blade of his cutlass pointing toward the blood-red cross on the Bermudan shore, the salty wind curling through his princely hair, his preternaturally intelligent African Grey riding faithful and shotgun on the chariot of his clavicle. The crew jigged quick about sheets and halyards, singing out shanties of grog and merriment, hornpipes and contentment.

Oy derry
,

ach derry
,

freylich derry
,

may you not encounter an anchor when you sit down
.

Is this what we did? Ach, go bang your head against an onion. The rebbes say that evil spawns when we cannot tell our stories. Or if we’re told to believe only in another’s.

We gathered together on the deck and spoke of what to do. A pirate ship is not the house of any lord, nor the soggy fiefdom of any aspirant
pharoah. Any who would believe he transmuted into gems what he pushed through his dark star would be delivered over the gunwales to become the gristle-soother of sharks within a parsec of donning even a single supercilious air.

Or as Jacome put it, “Inside our guts, it’s the same worms that chaw through the same black soup.”

We had signed articles, each sailor inscribing his name or as much of it as he chose to remember. Spoils were divided equally, every man, woman, or parrot—black, white, tawny, or grey—entitled to the same share. Unless there were loss of limbs. The crew’s limbs. We expected some loss in our adversaries. A sailor who was injured and lost an arm or leg received additional money. Severance pay.

We were the governors of a nation that numbered only governors. Each person aboard helped draft our script. Over which horizon would we buckle, which swash, which trembling words of capitulation would we pillage from the mouths of which quaking crew? Whose kishkas would scabbard our swords, whose hatches breach for plunder?

Moishe was captain because of ballots cast by the crew. An immediate referendum could be called if his leadership was questioned. How did this cheder-bocher schoolboy turn captain? Takeh, shtetl-night was day here in the perilous land. But Moishe had wit, seychl, sense, decency, swagger, kindness, words, and the ability to pull endless treasure from behind avaricious Spanish ears. So, nu, in the country of the blind, the quick-tongued, one-nippled mensch was king. Our country: the blind, the scarred, the single-legged, the whole or half meshugeh, the mute, the lost, the faithful, the angry, those who witnessed or suffered, those who remembered or would not remember, the bereft, the curious, the other.

I haven’t told about the others in our crew, but ach, the skittish nag of my tongue bolts away without the cart of sense. We are pirates and we have a profession to uphold: at this moment, there’s a ship heaving up over the horizon and it’s loaded with gold.

We remained cloaked by an island cove until the Spanish sailed close. “All hands,” Moishe cried and we unfurled every sail so the wind could breathe life into our Golem of a ship.

Yahíma sprung up the rigging. Isaac the Blind readied the cannon, a variety of Great Turkish bombard we’d Jerez-rigged from a cauldron. Shlomo hauled up our flag, a linen tablecloth plundered from the cabin of a Spanish captain sent to Hispaniola. Through the years, we had flown under many flags.

A skull in a skullcap kippah over crossed candlesticks.

The image of the hand brandishing a curved sword, the single all-seeing eye in the centre of the palm, never blinking. Keneynehoreh. May I be protected from the evil eye. Or, nu, at least let me be on its side.

Now we sailed under the Great Eye of Providence, radiant beams like bolts of lightning flashing out from its socket, the eye itself hovering over an Egyptian pyramid. We were once slaves in Egypt. And we built this.

And now we will take apart your empire, brick by brick.

At some point, one of the crew made the eye bloodshot.

In Egypt there was sand and dust.

And here, there is such schnapps as to conjunctivate a sailor’s eye.

It was a cloudless day. The waves scalloped high as a man’s shoulders. There were dolphins in the cove. They had simple, shlemiel smiles and they never looked our way.

Sometimes we began with a speech from Moishe to those we intended to board. Sometimes this greeting was accomplished by the brazen sholom aleychem of cannon, and today we chose that sermon of fire. Isaac sent a tsimmes of burning fragments into the Spanish rigging and lit up the sails as if it were sunset.