Yiddish for Pirates (4 page)

The master was good to Moishe and taught him much, though his was a pedagogy based on exhaustion and the definite possibility of a mighty zets to the ear. In addition to his work below deck, on deck, and
climbing the rigging, working on booms, gaffs and spars, Moishe was a manservant to the master, serving his every wind-changeable whim.

But he asked and, if his work was done, was allowed to gaze at the maps and charts. Even as they took him away, they recalled his home and his longing to leave. His quick mind pleased the master.

“Ye shall be a sea artist good and true, right ye will. Your paint shall be the shiny stars in the sky above and your canvas the waves of the salt sea.”

You think Moishe had any idea what such words meant? Gornisht! Nothing. Nada. Bupkes. Not that boychik. Until he met me, he didn’t know his shvants from a sloop, his dick from a deck.

Was I good at language? Let’s just say Polly’s been a nautical boy for most of his long life. Since I was press-ganged out of Africa covered in pinfeathers, I’ve been parrot to a whole shipload of shoulders—Arab, Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, Polish—but none like Moishe.

And I taught the young bubbeleh something other than the mother tongue mamaloshen.

Hogshead. Rumfustian. Hardtack. Turtles.

Baldric. Blunderbuss. Muskatoon.

Cutthroat. Tankard. Stinkpot.

How d’ye do?

In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
.

Yes sir, very good, sir.

Captain. Ocean. Syphilis.

Pirate.

He was a good mimic, that sheygets, though no parrot.

“Farshteyst? Do you understand?” I’d say.

“I oondershtand,” he’d reply.

I took an immediate liking to him. His narrow shoulder, his earnest face, his kindness, his credulity.

Ech. A parrot is a one-person bird. I saw Moishe and the boychik was soon imprinted like words in indelible ink on the farkakteh page of my brain. Who decides such a thing? Like waking up the morning after shoreleave with an anchor tattooed across your hiney, it isn’t, emes,
exactly the result of choice. But I needed to be needed and this poor shnook needed me.

His pleasant demeanour and obvious intelligence attracted the attention not only of the master but of the captain, who took a shine to him, would take him under his wing, though not parrot-permanently as I did. He soon had him managing that part of the ship’s stores that were for his private use. Guns, gold, dainties, drink and good meat. If the master’s stores were Versailles, the captain’s were the Vatican. Moishe kept them neat as a marlinspike, free from vermin, insects, and the salt scum that encrusted everything aboard ship.

“Yes sir, very good, sir,” he’d say.

He knew on which side the holy toast is buttered. Farshteyst?

Moishe was kept busy running between the captain, the master, and his other responsibilities. The crew began, if not to trust him, then at least increasingly to regard him as one of them. Mostly they left him to his own devices, dedicated to appearing occupied while diligently avoiding their own chores. Occasionally they’d call for him to help haul on a halyard, or throw him a broom when they were swabbing the deck.

“Aye, lad, it’s the only thing we sailors wash,” they’d laugh.

He’d gather round for rum, stand as an equal in surly and superstitious congregation for Sunday prayer, and share the inscrutable mystery of galley stew, though he’d leave what he was able to identify as pork. He’d station himself nearby to listen to the long ramble of their narratives or mewl and warble soprano with their morbid tavern-hacking choir on the choruses of their songs, whether he understood them or not.

I wish I was back in my native land

Heave away! Haul away!

Full of pox, and fleas, and thieves, and sand

Heave away! Haul away, home.

Sometimes, as Moishe stood middle watch between dusk and dawn, insomniac sailors, their gigs adrift with drink, staggered onto deck and
confided their tsuris woes to him. They were grown men, their brains and skins turned to leather by years out on the open sea, and Moishe was only a boy, his beard barely more than the nub of pinfeathers on his girly skin. Still, though he knew little but his native tongue, he knew the universal language of the nod, of the hmm.

And though each day his Yiddishkayt became increasingly submerged, thanks to a certain mensch of a parrot and his lexiconjury, the other cabin boys kept to themselves, not trusting Moishe and the farkakteh way he spoke. Association with him, they had surmised, would turn out to be a liability. They were, after all, ambitious young lads and engaged in professional networking with those both before and behind the mast, hoping to seek advancement in their chosen vocation.

Was Moishe happy to have finally left the firm land?

Is milk happy coming out of a mother’s tsitskeh?

The sea
, Moishe exulted.
I am finally at sea
.

Take a small, dark shtetl. Paint it with the swirling blue and foamy white of the moving waves, the endless blue and curly white of clouds and sky. Hold the edges like a sheet and toss it up and down like a child’s game, the breezes flapping above you, the gust blowing the tang of salt across your face. Your house, the rag-and-bones path of flesh and blood, ever hopeful as it floats toward the beckoning horizon, free from the gravity of ground. To be at sea is to know vastness, to understand the flight of clouds, the reach of the stars and of invention. He was riding the expanding ripples of God’s great cannonball. Moishe felt as if he were travelling in every direction at once, each direction away from home, toward story.

It didn’t take long for the milk to sour.

It was an afternoon of little wind and the crew, having had their food and drink, were becalmed. Moishe shloffed in his hammock below deck, dreaming maps. I had flown up to a spar, my own kind of crow’s nest. In the still air, his master’s voice rose, gramophonic, clear to me, though he was speaking low to an old sea dog on the fo’c’s’le. I flew down into his cabin and bit Moishe’s ear.

“
Gey avek
,” he moaned. “Get out of here.”

“Listen,” I said. “Listen.” He needed to hear what the master was saying.

“The wits and limbs of my little Hebrew are keen, aye they are,” the master was saying. “I’s reckon I be able to trade him for a few bright pennies on the wharf. That and his wages will add a little fat to my sack and me golden balls’ll swab the deck as I walk.”

The taller the prophet, the greater the fracture of the falling tablets.

“Gonif,” Moishe cursed. He was ready to swab the deck with the master’s beytsim all right, but he knew there was nothing he could do. He’d be swinging from a gibbet, or hacked into lobscouse if he tried anything.

So, nu, what do you do when everything’s farkakte?

It didn’t take long for Moishe to turn what was smashed into a dirty shiv and to spit on the niceties of moral details. After a man is condemned, how could it hurt if he steals?

Moishe took to helping himself to comestible advances on his pay and to availing himself of the captain’s collection of maps. The maps were of distant places, of waters more like legends than actual destinations.

And a little gold, a drink or two of the captain’s fine wine, a bit of meat serves to ease the pain and evens out what the world owes you. The captain was almost the same thing as the master—a horse cares little to whose cart it’s tied; besides, the captain would never notice the filching. There was so much and he was casual with his riches, unlike the master who kept a close eye.

But, a few days later, the captain noticed.

“Curse the hot piss of the devil himself!” he shouted as he stormed from his quarters. “I’ll have the skin of the man who did this for a sail.”

Clearly he had a different conception of the equitable redistribution of resources, both savoury and liquid, for the wages of cabin boys.

He ordered the crew on deck. “No Christian sailor would steal from his own captain,” he hissed, “for he fears the devil hereafter and the lash before. There shall be neither sup nor grog until the man who did this speaks of it to me, or his mate tells the tale.”

Chapter Three

It was then that Moishe learned a new word, but not from me.

The crew had little notion who was the gonif who’d been grazing on the captain’s wares, but when the afternoon’s rations were withheld they went sleuthing for the lost luxuries. Mostly the interrogation was accomplished by the fist, though there was some cross-examination effected by the knee. The crew searched each other’s measly lockers and bestowed smart zetses and slaps upon each other’s chins. Moishe searched also, or did his best to appear engaged in time-sensitive tasks of critical importance.

But soon the cabin boys began considering Moishe’s hobbled and palsied recitation of newly acquired words. Un-Christian hoodoo incantations and organs-on-the-outside spells, they said. The Bible turned backwards. Harelipped prayers that led clubfooted only to sacrilege, damnation, and punishment both eternal and maritime. Naturally they were keen to avoid a messy tryst between their freckled backs and the captain’s daughter, and so little time passed before they attributed the theft to Moishe. Their attribution was, of course, perfectly sound, though they had not a snail’s leg of evidence on which to base their accusation. What was evidence to them? Bupkes. So, nu, they should wait two hundred years for all good sailors to be apprised of the Enlightenment, the scientific method?

“Heretic,” they called him, and the captain, betrayed by this strange boy whom he’d planned to help, invoked the Inquisition.

The Inquisition. That Swiss Army–knife trump card of a final solution.

You’re only the same until you’re different.

Moishe’s spice-rich accent. His un-Christian curses. His porklessness. Not that it had been his intention to assume a role as anything but Jew.

Differently Christianed. Jesusly challenged.

“You, my greedy-fingered lad, will burn at the stake the day we arrive in port. And then we’ll offer your ashes the opportunity to repent.” The captain’s eyes like two fires, condemning him to hell.

When the going gets tough, the goyim get tough, too.

There was no escape. In the cold sea it would be water instead of fire that would steal the breath of life from his mortal body. He pled with the captain to spare him, wailing and protesting his youth.

“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?”