Yiddish for Pirates (33 page)

Moishe turned to me and said, sotto voce, “He speaks of these things in court? In the shtetl, it is believed that when a wise man converses with a fool, two fools are speaking.”

“Unless, like us,” I said, “he speaks with sword.”

“Fray Juan,” Moishe asked, “what did you suggest Their Catastrophic Majesties do?”

“Transport slaves from Africa,” he said.

There was a shout from our ship in the distance. They had seen the Spanish skiffs rowing toward them. Moishe went to the bell and signalled an urgent beat to quarters. Five peals repeated.

Then he grabbed Fray Juan. “A little business,” he said, lowering him onto deck and binding him to the shrouds. The three other Spanish crew were soon roped like rodeo calves.

Then night flash and sky-cleaving thunder.

From our ship, the brain-severing tumult of cannons.

And it’s true what is said: someone else’s tuches is easy to smack. Especially when it sits in a rowboat sculling toward your cannonballs. The Spanish: we’d pissed on their backs and told them it was rain. Then we’d codswalloped them to search for umbrellas.

Now the ocean filled the holes in their bodies as they sank into the sea.

Except for Pedro and the Capitan: their kishkas remained unminced. Hostages are best when intact. Yahíma, Jacome and Shlomo paddled to the first skiff where each of their blades greeted the hostages’ gullets with a silver grin.

Jacome: “Be lambs or have your apple sauced.”

Yahíma laughed and shook her naked bristen in their frightened faces. And though they were fulsome fruit of Platonically perfect form, the source of many a non-Platonic thought to those who beheld them, here they were weaponry, a bitter ironic power wielded to humiliate.

Soon we had secured our captives, brought our ships broadside, thrown heaving lines over gunwales, and bound the two together.

“Have Christian mercy—release the boy’s father, my brother,” the Capitan said.

“Father,” wailed Pedro. “Father.”

“Climb down the ratlines from that cross, bubeleh, we need such lumber for masts,” Moishe said to the sheygets. “But first greet your papa who filled his britches in fear.”

“My father is a brave and honourable man,” Pedro said.

Ham signalled to Moishe from his station near the boy’s draped progenitor.

“He tells me your father is dead,” Moishe said. “This I knew. Nu, I was ship’s surgeon ere I was captain. Before we left the ship, your father died of fear.”

“You killed him. He had much courage and was not afraid to die.”

“It seems to me, he had no hesitation,” Moishe said. “But I thank you for your cooperation.”

The boy fainted, now realizing he had danced to a gun that had already discharged. He hung limp from the shrouds that bound him to the mast.

“When Spain learns of your infamy, you will be hunted down,” the Capitan said.

“I am glad,” Moishe said. “Prey that seeks me is easier to find.”

The Capitan pursed his lips and launched a slobber of spit onto Moishe’s cheek.

Moishe remained still and expressionless, allowing the bubbling spawn to slowly roll down his face.

“This mamzer suffers an excess of fluid,” he said. “We shall correct this by withholding food and drink while he convalesces in the hold below.” Moishe turned and nodded to Shlomo and Jacome who carried the Capitan to the hatch.

“History will not forget your evil,” the Capitan said as they dropped him into the hold.

“History is a game played with the dead,” Moishe replied. “The present actually happens. And nu, when they balance the scales, they’ll find a few shlog-whomped Spanish on one side, kvetching and moaning.
And on the other, a heap of dead Jews and Indians. So, we do what we can to add to the Spanish side.”

Unbound from the shrouds, Fray Juan sat on a barrel on the fo’c’s’le, inhaling the smoky ghost of a large tobacco leaf.

“I, too, wish to do what I can for Los Indios,” he said to Moishe. “Though by word and reason, not by murder. Allow me to return to Hispaniola where I will speak for them. I have letters signed by the King. I seek to save souls.”

“As I, too, seek to save souls,” Moishe said. “Our pirate souls. The Spanish will frack the insides of our mortal flesh as soon as you lead them to us. How then can I release you?”

“Because I believe you also wish to save, if not the souls of Los Indios, then at least their bodies,” the priest said. “And … maybe you will accept a ransom for my freedom. A guarantee of my fidelity. You are not the only one who hostages something valuable aboard your ship.”

“We have searched the vessel,” I said. “What remains?”

“Piss buckets,” Moishe said. “A fen of bilge water, black rats which dine on the wounds of the dead. We have plundered all people and goods of any worth.”

“True,” said Fray Juan. “But perhaps a map may be of use. Such charts have more value than gold, if they are a guide to what you seek.”

“We seek only two things: revenge and gold. And, even without a map, we know how to find them aboard each Iberian sloop we encounter,” Moishe said.

“The Bible commands us to forgive our enemies,” Fray Juan said.

“But nowhere to forgive our friends,” I said with a cynical tweet, climbing aboard Moishe’s shoulder.

“Beyond what is written in the Bible, I understand little,” Fray Juan said. “And even that is often mysterious. But I know you seek certain books. Books such as you would not want found by those who follow Cristóbal Colón. The Colonizers. Conquistadors of space and—if they were to find these books—time.”

The mad monk knew how to get our attention.

“How do you know of them?” I asked.

“I am a priest in a place of few priests. In confession, many secrets are spoken.”

“You are an honest man, if not an honest priest,” Moishe said. “Lead us to these books, then.”

“These books are my ransom and are hidden beyond the distant horizon,” the priest said. “And aboard no ship. The first belonged to the admiral’s brother and you bore it yourself from one to another. The second was given you like a curse by Torquemada, for it had made him lunatic as the vexed sea. He had it bound in the skin of a child, removed before birth from a heretic’s womb. Both mother and child then sacrificed by fire. Miguel Levante, you may dowse this new world searching for this grimoire, this sanguinary, but it would be futile as seeking a camel in a stack of angels.”

“So, Father, where are they?”

“There is a map.” Fray Juan said. “But, ay,” he said, “once you held these books in your arms. Once you caressed their words with your fingertips. Once you gazed at them longingly. But they were taken away.”

Moishe looked to the sea, again gazing with longing.

He held us ransom with his words.

“The first stolen from Columbus when Pinzón first stole away. The second from your sea chest by Pinzón when you fled into Los Indios’ forest. He did not find eternal youth, but eternity. By year’s end, he died of a fever and was buried in the churchyard in Palos. The books became his brother’s and were then passed like unlucky talismen from man to man until word of them became known by the crazed and clever, the short and ravenous governor of Coquibacoa, Francesco de Ojeda, who seeks them still like magic rings, Jewish Grails. And so they were buried by Captain Israel Manos on an island somewhere in this Caribbean sea.”

“So this chart is a treasure map, then,” Moishe said. “Not to the full set, but to a library of two.”

“So, nu,” I said. “Let’s hope when we arrive, these two are not already checked out.”

Chapter Six

The sun scudded above our black sails, glowering over a gloomy day of dark cumulus and wind. Most of the crew took to their hammocks while Fernández stood piloting at the wheel and splotching gaudy daubs of paint on a canvas propped against the binnacle. His many portraits were of the open sea. The frothy epaulets of its waves, the indecipherable blues of its depths. No faces, bodies, fish, or islands.

Moishe had a small cabin beneath the quarterdeck. Yahíma now joined him in a hammock where they intertwined limbs and faces and sighed. There’s a language more universal than music or than memories of first love: the shvitzy harmony of shuffling bodies, the sweet tart tingling of entangled tongues. A beast with two backs but a Shiva-blur of legs and arms and bellies. The ship swayed on the waves and Moishe and Yahíma played tsung in tsingl, the uvulation of tongues like the shmeckel-in-knish gyrations down below. The cantillation of the mind in the language of the body. Or the other way round. With all this topsy-tuches-over-turvy-tsitskehs shtupping who, except for the participants, knew which way was up or where the pole star was?

And then they slept.

Dreaming of dreaming what they were dreaming, as the mystics say.

Did I watch?

Who can watch another’s dreams or such conjugal hurly burly?

Ach, I knew where my end was, even if not where it belonged.

Except beneath me.

Which sweet parrot would be my dove? Man or maidel, African Grey or Red-spectacled Amazon? I’d loved many but didn’t have the words.

I lived on the border. Neither man nor bird.

Feh. I’m all talk. Words only.

And nu. So maybe I looked at Moishe and Yahíma. A bisl.

The sap-sweet shout, the free-falling yawp.

Hard to ignore. Like the inexorable arrival of a bad joke.

So.

Mrs. Cohen says, “Rabbi, help me. My parrot—from morning till night, it squawks, ‘I want to shmunts with anything that moves. Anything. Want to shtup? Want to shtup?’ Ach, it’s embarrassing.”

“Oy!” the rabbi exclaims. “That’s terrible. But listen, bring your parrot to shul. All day my parrot reads from his prayerbook and prays. He’ll teach your parrot and in no time, it’ll be praise and worship from morning ’til night.”

Next day, Mrs. Cohen arrives at the synagogue. The rabbi’s parrot is wearing a tiny yarmulke and davening feverishly from a little prayerbook.

Mrs. Cohen puts her parrot on the perch beside him. “I want to shmunts with anything that moves. Anything. Want to shtup? Want to shtup?” Mrs. Cohen’s parrot says.

The rabbi’s parrot immediately drops his prayerbook. “
Baruch ata Adonai
… Praise God. Praise God. My prayers have been answered!”

Distance embiggens the zeal of the heart, and far from everywhere, Yahíma and Moishe had fashioned a kind of heymishe homelike comfort in each other. A temporary autonomous zone.

With benefits.

Our ship of fools itself a shtetl beyond the Pale.

I’d shmuntsed with many birds myself since we’d first arrived here. Here—what I can’t help calling—ech, the words themselves speak—the Nu World. The contingent and continental nu. Nu, as in, “so … what will happen here?” A dreidel with “nu” written on each of its sides. Nu, a great miracle—here? So let’s see this miracle. This nu world.

So far, disease. Death. The mincing sword. The rupturing cannon. The destruction of Los Indios. In these few years, almost no Tainos remaining.

But I was speaking about yentsing.

There were many parrots.

Cockatoos, conures, macaws and Amazons.

Cherry-headed and crimson-bellied; maroon-faced and scaly naped; blue-throated, green-cheeked, and vinaceous; mealy, orange-winged, and lilac-crowned; yellow-shouldered and sulphur-breasted.

Nu, it was a world. And I was inside its varicoloured kaleidoscope.

So, not all were exactly my species, but my mother was far away, and besides, most were Pauls rather than Pollys. It began with surprise, then certainty. Across the Sundering Sea, I was purified with the water of separation.

I would rather this measure of shmuntsing heaven than any isle, save the sanctuary of Moishe’s shoulder.

Both of us transmuted in the alembic of the Caribbean.

Was a map required to guide us to the map that would guide us to the book that would guide us to what we were looking for?

That would be Talmudic.

Dreaming of dreaming what we were dreaming.

But the best place to hide something is right under one’s nose. Throw sniffers off the scent with another scent.

There was a chamberpot in the captain’s cabin with a false bottom.

A fool chamooleh may have a false bottom, too, for in his dreck there may be gold.

Fray Juan described the pot: tin with engravings of parrots in trees, and a handle like a tropical vine. It was beneath the captain’s bed, huddled coyly against the hullside. The tin parrots were idiot-eyed shmegegges. They’d clearly become meshugeh, having to bide their etched and immortal lives beneath the pungent ministrations of the empire’s pimply moon. The priest didn’t know how to open the secret compartment, so Jacome reached his hand into the pot’s piquant lagoon and felt around for a catch or lever.

“For this I went to pirate school?”

He was unsuccessful.

We were about to pry open the secret compartments of the deceitful priest when Yahíma noticed one of the parrots’ eyes was raised. Insert the point of a knife into the pupil, and the bottom of the pot fell open.

I’d noticed the eye, but thought the look was a wistful glimmer of recognition and desire.

(Note to self: schedule more time in the bird-busy bush, close to the zaftik undercarriage of your kind. Parrot-shaped scratches on chamberpots shouldn’t be causing your petseleh to tingle.)

The map was wrapped in oilcloth and we unswaddled it on the captain’s large table.

There was much we recognized. The broadside islands of Hispaniola and Cuba with their fussy ongepatshket shores. Below, the pokey little skiff of Jamaica rowing up from the south. And above, the pebble-scatterings of the Bermudas, like stepping-stones to nowhere.

The map was the two-dimensional roadkill of a sorcerer’s dreams, a brainbox of arcana pressed into two dimensions against the vellum. Archipelagos of eyes cluttered across the Caribbean, their preternatural gaze drawn as radiant points of a compass rose beaming across the sea. An undulating dolphin-dance of Hebrew script twisted between inky waves. And curious sigils, perhaps from Solomon’s time, marks of demons, angels, cartographers, or whorehouses flocking like alchemical birds on both land and deep.