Yiddish for Pirates (37 page)

Moishe stood and ducked behind the three sorcerous maidels, capeless yet still preternatural in the flickering shadows of the fire. He pushed the first one and it was distaff dominos as one fell into the other and finally knocked over the captain who fell onto Columbus.

“Oof,” Columbus said.

The scene, a tropical starter kit for Chaplin and Keaton.

Then Moishe ran.

Perhaps it wasn’t a noble escape but it was efficient. He sprinted down the beach, turned into the dark forest, and leapt through the brush. I sped down from the palm where I had hidden and dived at the parrot by the fire, my talons out. The mamzer didn’t see what hit him. And afterwards, blinded by my claws, he saw nothing at all.

Then I, too, disappeared between the leaves.

Chapter Four

Silence or speed. Moishe chose speed, bounding through the forest, his knees pumping nearly to his chin. A stampede of one disappearing into the shadows and the shadows of shadows, panting and shvitzing like the rainforest itself. I dodged branches and shadows, hovering over Moishe.

Behind us, the stomping bootfalls and shouting of the Spanish. The clatter of metal blades. A quick glance back and we could see the dim lights of their lanterns’ crooked progress. They could read Moishe’s bushwhacked path. A red carpet through the green. He had made it easier for them to catch him.

And then?

We’d seen how they forged compliance, how they punished resistance.

They cut off hands, pressed steaming pokers into eyes. Flayed, racked, and sliced. And that was better than what they did to Los Indios.

Moishe turned and slogged through the fetid gizzard of a swamp. Oozy shmutz creamed his thighs and thousands of insects stung his skin. I was spared the shmutz, but I, too, was the nosh of bugs. Constellations of irritation and pain formed over me as if I’d dived into a Tabasco vat and my body vibrated with sting. Moishe dunked down into the swamp, taking cover in the clotted water behind a fallen tree.

I found the dark crook of a nearby tree.

So. Those were pearls that were his eyes.

A broch.

I’d blinded the parrot without thought. Fight or flight. I could do both. If there was a playbook, I hadn’t just stepped outside the text, I was thousands of miles beyond the margin. So far that I’d come around the other side to the very beginning of the game itself.

An eye for an eye.

Or two eyes for treachery.

The Spanish marched forward. Moishe’s trails had disappeared, but desire imagines paths though the thicket, even when none exists. They tromped forward toward where we weren’t.

We did our best to continue to not be there.

We waited for a few hours, then Moishe crawled from the swamp, a slime-covered Golem born from the ooze. The dawn sun, too, shlumped out of the star-bit night and we crept through the gloom. The shriek of monkeys and the thrilling of morning birds. The rainforest waking, beginning its workday with this racket.

Nifter-shmifter, what does it matter, as long as you make a living?

In the distance, a warm breeze and a brightness. We were near shore. We continued forward, listening for the Spanish.

I flew ahead on reconnaissance.

Gornisht. Nothing. We were safe.

Moishe crept from the trees and onto the sand. He was coated in a crust of algae, a woodwose, a greeneh, a vilder Yid of the woods.

And one who was so tired he could plotz.

He collapsed on the shadowy sand beneath a fruit tree. We noshed on the flesh of fallen fruit, soft, overripe and dribbling, and thought only of a warm bath.

Then we slept.

For an afternoon or a day, who knew, but we woke in an instant.

“Hei!” the voice said. “Hei, hei!”

I dove into the air, took refuge on a branch out of cutlass range. Moishe vaulted to his feet, crouched in fighting position, and drew the sword he didn’t have.

His only weapon: chutzpah.

Before us stood the three beguiling young crones who had attempted to entrap us. The now blind parrot rested on the shoulder of the most bountiful. They, too, did not appear to be armed with anything beyond surprise and the sorcerous terror with which they had just turned our spines into gliver human jelly.

“Put the sword down,” the first one said, as if Moishe were brandishing anything but air.

Moishe’s hand dropped to his side. He face rested but his eyes scanned the beach for means of escape. Not for nothing was he the Yam Gazlen, the elusive Yiddish scourge of the Indies.

“
Zorg zich nit
. Don’t worry,” the second said.

“You have your health,” said the third.

“And we have killed the governor, Panfilo de Narváez,” said the first.

“
Eyn toyt iz far im veynik—iz far im veynik,”
said the parrot.

“Takeh,” said the second. “As you say, we killed him only once, though he deserved to die many times.”

“As he caused many deaths.”

“He sat on his horse gnawing cheese and commanded his men to kill thousands from our village, even as they brought them food,” the third said. “Our babies were snatched and broken against rocks. Cuffs, blows, cudgelling. They killed our families. They cut legs and arms off our sisters and mothers, our sons and daughters and fed them to their dogs.”

“I cannot forget. My heart tastes it. I breathe its memory,” she said.

“I, too, have seen such things,” Moishe said. “In worlds both old and new.”

The woman considered him.

“We escaped by hiding in a latrine pit covered by palm leaves,” she finally said. “I would not recommend it. Then we travelled by night in a canoe. We travelled for many nights, not knowing where.

“Then we came to a small island. For years, we lived there alone and were silent. We did not want to remember even the words for what we knew.”

The larger woman continued. “We saw where had once been a small tribe of Jews, but sometime before, they had been murdered: their houses razed, their synagogue burned, their bones, some shoes, candlesticks, all that remained. Except for this parrot.” She indicated the parrot on her shoulder. “Which spoke many of their words.”

“
Oy vey iz mir. Oy vey iz mir
,” the parrot said with impeccable timing.

So, nu, it was a parrot, but though its feathers were brighter than mine, it strutted and fretted like an idiot, full of sound and mamaloshen, but signifying nothing.

“We also found some books of their writing hidden in a tree stump. And so we began to speak again,” she said. “These strangers’ words.”

The women sat with Moishe in the sand. From a small sack hanging around her neck, the first woman retrieved some dried leaves and tobacco that the women assembled. The second woman removed some strands of dried grass, a small stone and a well-worn stick from a similar sack. Then she spun the stick between her palms while the first woman blew. Takeh, like this they could bring even the clay shvants of a Golem to life.

Curls of smoke, then fire. Each woman lit a cigar. The third gave one to Moishe.

They sat together for a few minutes, breathing slowly, exhaling clouds, looking out through the white, almost-creamy smoke.

Then the first woman spoke. “After some years,” she said, “the great schooner of Narváez sailed to our island, anchored off the shore, and soldiers landed. We hid deep in the forest but it was a small island and they searched everywhere, digging and overturning. Finally we were found. But our skins were not their quarry. They wanted the Jews’ books. We showed them such books as we had, but they threw them away. They sought others. Then they took us as prisoners.”

“The devil himself would not say what they did to us,” the second woman said. “How they punctured our insides with their shlechteh barbs. Who would wish to remember?”

“
Miseh meshuneh
,” the third said. “Curse memory. The past poisons every future.”

“
And dos hob ich oykh in dr’erd
. The hell with the present too. It fills with both the past and the bitter future,” the first said.

The second woman continued. “We were taken to their ship and chained below with others. For months in the dark, they raped us. Then we were brought to this island. And this trap was set for you. We did what we were asked. They had broken our bones and picked their teeth with the splinters.”

“After you escaped, Narváez and each of his sailors raped and beat us,” the third said. “And fought and drank and raped and beat us again. As every day. So when they lay shikkered, asleep as if dead, we took their knives, pulled their breeches to their knees and cut off their shlongs.

“They soon woke—who would have expected it?—blood between their legs, pain rampaging through them, each tied to each and the three of us standing before them with arquebuses and swords ready to make portholes in their chests for their souls to breathe the sea air.

“ ‘The good news,’ I said to them, ‘is that you do not have to eat your own shlongs. The bad news is you must eat each others’.’

“The first clamped his mouth shut and refused. So we sliced his throat and pushed the shmuck through the slit.

“After that, none refused.

“Then we took a canoe and sailed around this island. We knew we would find you.”

They had left the Spanish tied together on the shore, one large, emasculated bracelet, a wounded chew toy, soon to be eaten by dogs. Or left to the retributive devices of the islanders for Columbus and his crew had taken a skiff and rowed to their ship, then set sail in search of our ship and Eden.

“It is time for us to leave this island, also,” the first woman said.

So we climbed into the canoe.

Moishe. Three übermoyels. Two parrots. An African Grey and the parrot he had blinded.

Without reason.

Did that parrot have a soul?

Feh.

So, nu, I’m like the Spanish now, counting souls and deciding whose blood to spill?

Moishe and the three shiksas rowing furiously against the waves.

Where were they going?

The women were paddling to that most venerable and storied of places.

Away. A new world in this New World.

And their blind parrot knew no more where he was going than a windcock.

Did I know?

Takeh, of course: with Moishe.

Nu, some maven wrote that a book is a dictionary out of order. You ask me, it’s the dictionary that’s farmisht. It’s a story out of order. Like when the Spanish took apart the great stones of Los Indios’ temples and remade them into their houses.

And this I know: I follow Moishe.

Why? The stones of my parrot heart. Rebuilt.

The susurration and rhythmic plash of the paddles. The kvetching of the breeze. We rowed in silence. Our journey was our words.

“And then what happened?”

We’d search for our crew who had the map, then find the books and the Fountain. This goal had imprinted itself on our empty insides. Both hope and hopelessness abhor a vacuum.

The ocean rose and fell, a sullen companion that said nothing of the future.

And intermittently, the air-raid siren of the nudnik parrot sounded: “
Oy vey iz mir. Oy vey iz mir. Ich hob dich. Ich hob dich
.” Each phrase a doppelgänger of itself and thus a twin irritation.

I should have left both its eyes and ripped out its tongue.

Now that we all travelled as equals, Moishe assumed his role as captain, scanning the horizon, steering the canoe from its stern, choosing which “away” was our destination.

I noticed something low in the water ahead of us, bobbing up and down with a kind of dopey and water-logged optimism. Moishe decided to investigate.

It was his old friend, the barrel in which he had spent several intimate if directionless days. Lidless, it was driftwood.

But it seemed a fated encounter, and so Moishe hauled it into the canoe, even though there was little unclaimed land in the craft and the barrel could no longer pursue its chosen career effectively. We were squeezed between various provisions that the women had brought from the island. Melons. Coconuts. Small sacks of cassava bread and tobacco. Spanish swords. Dried fish. Wineskin-like bladders filled with fresh water. A bottle that winked its green glass eye at Moishe. Drink me, it said. And he did, making a Shabbos-less kiddush with rum.