Yiddish for Pirates (31 page)

Soon we were broadside and Moishe placed his boot on their gunwales.

“So maybe you could invite us in for a little something?” Then he leapt aboard. Jacome followed, calling out, “Lokshen-spined pasta-backs, we shall sauce you in your own blood.”

I had a claw in the Spanish captain’s eye before he had decoded the metaphor. Yahíma sent arrows into the shoulders of the crew. Fernández became a pointillist, jabbing his dirk into whatever soft flesh was before him. Ham cleared a path with a broad axe as if clearcutting Pinocchios.

There were native Taino slaves as well as Africans chained together on the foredeck.

“
Nu, vos macht a Yid?
Howaya?” Moishe said to them as Ham and Samuel began severing them one from another, chopping the links of the chains like pretzels.

Some panicked and jumped into the water before they had been unchained.

Moishe seized a nobleman hidalgo by the lacy throat. His cutlass sought the man’s fleshy womb and there began to goulash.

As the man began his slow fall to the planks, Moishe raised the cutlass above his head; a crescent moon to be seen by all. Then he licked the blood from its blade and began, “
Baruch ata Adonai
…” The prayer for wine.

The Spanish did not end their resistance then, though much conviction drained from their fight.

Madness is more frightening than swords.

So, in this case, was feigned madness. When it came to mooning an antic disposition, Moishe was ever a Hamlet among lunatics.

Piracy is as much public relations as plunder.

It was dark before we could rest.

Blood poured from Ham’s thigh. In the confusion Jacome had cleaved Ham’s leg with his sword. Samuel was bereft of several fingers, his career as a maker of dog shadows cut short.

There was much gold. Silver. Meat. Wine.

Under the bright watch of our swords and arquebuses, the Spanish crew heaved our plunder into our ship while we offered the slaves some wine.

Freedom can be thirsty work.

By the end of our battle, we had new crew. Various slaves, both Ethiopian and Caribbean. An Italian cooper. We imprisoned the captain, Capitano Rodriguez, and his son in our hold.

“A bisl something for later,” Moishe said.

We locked the hatches of the Spanish ship with the rest of the crew below deck and lit the ship on fire.

Was this what happened?

Certainly, there was smoke and wailing. The world was tsedreyt confused, a fog that couldn’t find its own foundation. The driftnets of veins in our temples were pulsing and ready to burst with exhilaration, fear, righteousness, wonder.

Did Moishe loop a rope under a priest’s arms then hang him from a yardarm over a menorah?

Did he seize a priest and say, “Afraid to die?”

“I hope to receive my eternal reward,” the priest replied.

“In the meantime, thanks for everything,” Moishe said and lit the seven candles.

Did the priest dance and weep and scream until his soft trotters smelt like barbecue?

I remember the general sense and the certain rage of our victory and our ardour. The cauterizing fire.

Was the treasure equally divided among our crew?

Were the dead pushed through the scuppers to be sharkmeat?

Did Moishe stand above our hatch in a haze of Spanish boat smoke and proclaim to its imprisoned captain and his son a speech for which he had hoped to find occasion?

“A broch upon your pestilient kishkas for you are a sneaking hintl puppy, as are any who submit to be governed by the chazer rich who want only their own security, for the whelps have not the beytsim otherwise to defend what they get by such dreck-mouthed knavery. And,” he continued with an ostentatious wave of his hand, “a broch upon ye altogether. And damn them for a pack of crafty gazlonim thieves, and you, who serve them, for a pekel of hen-hearted shmegegges.
They villify us, the mamzers do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor and weak under the cover of law, and we plunder the rich with no protection but our own chutzpah. You should rather join our minyan than sneak after the tucheses of villains for bread.”

We were then seaborne Robin Hoods, our Sherwood a forest of waves.

Was there then silence from the captain and his son? And did we wait hours to investigate whether it was sleep, death, exhaustion, hopelessness, or villainy that kept their bodies mute?

Chapter Five

Was I surprised my hopeful pink boychik Moishe had turned pirate?

Feh.

God Hisself would have turned pirate if, on bumping into the New World, He had seen that the othershtupping Spanish had discovered only a larger canvas on which to paint their murderous scenes. The same hateful fire burned inside their poxy hearts as fueled Inquisition flames. They had persecuted Jews. Now they persecuted Los Indios.

But God—being the kind of shmendrik who thinks both of everything and nothing—sailed Himself beyond the margin of the world’s flat map, past the interstellar Borscht Belt, and through the quintessence into His own forever new, forever ancient and unnavigable world. Sha. One day, the oldest alter kaker of them all, Captain Yahweh, ignoring the constellations of yellow stars, pointed his metaphysical bowsprit beyond time and the page and left this world, leaving us no choice but to mutiny.

Gey gezunt
, Captain.

Good riddance, you old tummeler, you cosmic stand-up.

Take all of creation. Please.

Plato, that ancient rebbe, once said we’re each only half a person. And that, far back in some prehistoric Grecian dreamtime, each of us were whole, each of us pickled in an amazement of love, friendship and intimacy instead of having our kishkas roil with the burning loss of the other half of ourselves.

The New World? It was to be the Old World’s other half, the earth whole and healed again. Humans to fill the empty side of the Big Macher Adonai’s chest. Instead, a hollow in all of our chests, beside which the deserted island of our heart keeps beating, because it doesn’t know what else to do.

A pirate? With enough pieces of eight, you can rebuild the world. One kind of chest isn’t that different than another.

Late afternoon. Moishe wrapping Ham’s leg in a bandage fashioned from his own britches. Moishe the physician then applying medicaments to Samuel’s hand. Namely, rum.

“Where to?” Jacome asked. He was bo’sun of the ship.

Our ship. What had we Jews christened it? We had adopted a Talmudic approach and continuously debated an appropriate name. And nu, maybe like the unutterable name of the captain of captains, YHVH—Yahweh or Jehovah Himself, its real name is unpronounceable, hidden, unutterable.

The
Gopherwood Shmeckel
.

The
Eleventh Plague
.

The
Meshugeneh Ship of Fools
.

“Where to?” Jacome repeated.

In an adventure, the next place is always somewhere else but in order to set the sails, we would likely need to be more specific.

We sought revenge and retribution from Spanish ships and their gold. But also: we wanted to forget, we wanted to remember. We wished for the Fountain of Youth. So first we had to find the books hidden on the mouldering shelf of some Spanish mariner that would lead us there.

“We need a human compass,” Moishe said, and so the captain of our recent conquest was dragged on deck, the chains on his wrists and ankles rattling like disconsolate bells. His darkly tanned body was clothed, not in a captain’s uniform but in a nest of calico rags.

“Capitano Rodriguez,” Moishe said. “So, nu. What are your plans?”

Their precise nature was not clear as the captain’s speech was rendered unintelligible by the venomous enthusiasm of his Spanish. We did discern, however, his suggestion of inhospitable destinations for Moishe and the rest of our crew.

“If I were you,” Moishe began, “and perhaps you do see yourself in the fine silver brocade of this vest, the insouciant plenty of these silken sleeves?” Moishe displayed his newly acquired wardrobe before the captain who had good reason to recognize them. They were still warm from the heat of his body.

“So if you were me, then,” Moishe said, “what would I do with you?”

The captain’s frothing oaths suggested that he was not ready for such jocularities.

Time, they say, prepares one for humour. Perhaps there would be time for the captain to laugh again.

“So,” Moishe said. “You guide us toward Columbus, Pinzón, and the next holdful of gold, the routes of which you doubtless know, and I grant your passage toward old age. Otherwise, you shall have brisk crossing to St. Peter or the bile-hearted devil himself in accordance with how Captain Yahweh has set your sails.”

“Parasite,” the captain said. “You are a pestilence well known to Spain. I forfeit my life for God, His pope, my sovereigns.”

“Perhaps,” Moishe said. “But know that you surrender not one life but two. Your son …”

Captain Rodriguez’s face paled and, for a moment, he examined his bootless feet. Finally: “I understand,” he said quietly. “Have you a son?”

“I know only my parents’ son,” Moishe said.

“Just so,” the captain said. “So you understand a parent’s love?”

“Well enough to thank you for guiding us wherever we so wish.”

We hove our anchor up. The captive captain dejectedly directing a course, we set our sails, ran away from the bay, and bore down the coast again for Hispaniola. As we were now going to leeward, we had a fair wind and plenty of it. As I stood on the binnacle it felt as if I were flying, my imaginary beytsim kitseled by the wind. Sometimes a puff of nothing is enough.

Rodriguez, father and son, were able to roam the deck without manacles for the captain’s son was collateral.

“He’ll be o’er the gunwales like a hogshead o’ piss—just before ye yourself be tossed, if ye think to sink us with treachery,” Jacome said.

They did not join us as we kicked and palsied to the saltarellos of our new cooper’s fife and drum. A delicate man with a moustache like the minge of a squirrel, Luigi del Piccolo had a lively repertory of estampies, courantes, and voltas, much needed sustenance when at sea or between pillage. Such music gave us courage, consolation, and was a convivial badhkin companion far from shore.

At length we were sated by our juddering freylich prancing and so plonked our hintns down onto the deck. The sails were set, the sheets tied, and Isaac the Blind was at the helm.

So we rested.

Fernández lay stretched against the bulwarks and looked east to where all but Yahíma were born.

“I had a brother,” he said. “In Cadiz. Also a painter. Taken by the Inquisition. He had three sons.
Vilde chayes
, all three. Wild as waves. By now they must be bearded and tall. If they were spared.”

Samuel passed out a few cups of rum. “My parents,” he said. “In Portugal. After the expulsion. Then expelled again. They disappeared.”

Ham pointed to his temple then with a resigned wave, evaporated all knowledge. He knew nothing of his parents’ fate or would rather have his memories fade into sky.

“I, too, know nothing,” Shlomo said from the wheel. “Bupkes. We were separated when I was a child.”

Yahíma’s eyes teared, remembering her parents. They had been among the first slain in the bohío and she had not known to protect them.

We shlemiels aboard spoke many languages, though Yiddish was our lingua franca. Moishe and I had taught the others. The tart sweetness of chopped liver, the spicebox tingle in the nose.

We would not speak the language of their catarrhic majesties, the Church, its words and its people. We couldn’t wash the stink from those farkakte gatkes.

And so we kibitzed in mamaloshen.

Yiddish.

The perfect language for pirates, its words raggletag plundered and refitted from other times and tongues. As the Pirate Bey says, “Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them.”

So we talked in Yiddish.

We remembered, even difficult things.

Which reminds me. There was this sailor, Yankeleh.

He leaves a pair of pants to be repaired
baym shnayder
—at the tailor’s. After seven years, now covered in scars and tattoos, he returns to pick up his pants.

They weren’t ready.

“Gevalt!” Yankeleh exclaims. “It only took Adonai himself seven days to make the world. You’ve had seven years!”

“What’s to say, now that the world is done?” the tailor replies. “So, nu, your pants are a tragedy … but at least we can talk about them.”

What could I say about Africa, of my pinfeather days and family? This ship and its crew, now baptized buccaneer, were my shtetl, my neighbours, a kind of family. These outsiders to outsiders here in the New World.

But Aaron, I said to myself. Don’t be a putz.

You’re a bird.

I was an outsider to all but Moishe.

And even then.

The captured Captain Rodriguez was tasked with guiding us toward a Spanish convoy of ships. He told us it would be unprotected, for what seaborne bandits roamed this distant side of the Ocean Sea?

Rodriguez would guide us to a line of ships: a wind-driven pantry, a floating larder sailing from Spain.