Yiddish for Pirates

by Gary Barwin

  Nothing but stone walls and iron bars.

  Eventually, Moishe lay in the dirty straw like a sick calf, troubled by what might have happened to the others, about what might happen to us.

  Night again.

  It was before dawn on the third day, Easter Sunday.

  Cimmerian darkness. The hot horse breath of the Andalusian night, a fever dream heavy over the city of Seville. The faint scent of laurel, orange blossom and horse piss.

  Footsteps, a distant door opening, the glow of lantern light, then someone approaching our cell. We hoped they were bringing food.

  I hid in the corner, covered in darkness and straw.

  A section of an old man’s face appeared at the small, barred window. A watery eye, a white eyebrow, the side of a blotched and veiny nose.

  The rattle of keys. With some difficulty the man pushed open the cell door with a cassock-covered, spindle-thin shoulder. A monk.

  He stood at the threshold and, still in shadow, scrutinized Moishe for a long time.

  Finally he shuffled forward, hung his lantern from a hook, and spoke. In the dim light, we saw who it was.

  Torquemada, ancient bilious scarecrow of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio. Carrion crow of Paul the Apostle.

  “I know who you are,” he whispered to Moishe.

  So much for a little nosh, hardtack for the empty kishkas of two heretics.

  Moishe stumbled up and onto the bench. He was weak. We had not eaten for two days.

  Torquemada lowered himself down onto the bench beside Moishe. In the lantern light, his sallow skin was a wasted land of shadowy hollows.

  “The condemned disappear like smoke, leave no bones, no ashes. And you walk into fire and are unharmed. The people speak of miracles. I always thought you would come. Yes, I know who you are. I recognize you, though you are only a boy.”

  His penetrating wet eyes were small and dark, windows onto a mind that was a hurricane, its enormous power spinning everything in its path around its vacant centre.

  Whatever he thought Moishe was, it was clear to me what he was.

  Meshugeh.

  Insane.

  A small line of spittle found a desiccated fissure and rolled slowly down his chin. Moishe began, “Father, I …”

  “Be silent!” he said. “What could you say? I know but too well your answer … Besides, you have no right to add one syllable to that which you have said before. Why should you now return to impede us in our work? You’ve come but for that only, and you know that well. Do you know what awaits you this morning? I do not know, nor do I care to know who you might be: be it you or an image of you only. I have condemned you and you will burn at the stake, the most wicked of all heretics.”

  So, nu, they don’t have the Egyptian fire trick out here in Spain? Every conjurer with a match is mistaken for Yeshua, the Messiah?

  Though, the matchstick itself would takeh be some trick. It may not be the souls of the dead rising, but it’s the splintery and sulphurous future of firestarting.

  Torquemada leaned in close to Moishe. “We are not with you, but with him,” he hissed. “The wise spirit. The dread one. That is our secret. For centuries have we abandoned you to follow him. The people have trusted us with their happiness, their souls, your word, their freedom. And we have helped them. Though I am an old man, a tattered cloak upon a pole, I will live for another thousand years. Oh, it is possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, to rejuvenate oneself through cruelty. You have dared to come and trouble us in our work and so deserve the Inquisitorial fires more than any.”

  Moishe remained silent, looking at him, calculating how he could turn this mishugas into an opportunity.

  When the world is upside down, it is best to walk on your hands if you want to be king.

  Moishe looked penetratingly yet tenderly at this old privateer, for that’s what he was. He would not have hesitated to board Noah’s boat and plunder one of every animal, two if when roasted they were choice. So, too, he was with souls. His letter of marque or holy book was from a brine-dead sea, faded, torn, illegible. The self-serving palimpsest of memory the only legible mark.

  Moishe waited, allowing his silence to bloom like a wound. The old man longed to hear his voice, to hear him reply. He’d rather endure words of bitterness and scorn than his silence. I caught Moishe’s sidereal glance at me, a quicksilver glint.

  Then Moishe rose to his feet, slowly and solemnly. He bent toward the Inquisitor and softly kissed the bloodless, ancient lips.

  The Grand Inquisitor shuddered. A convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth. He stood up uncertainly, and hobbled to the door, pushing it open.

  “Go,” he said to Moishe. “Do not come again … never. Never!”

  Moishe walked through the open door and vanished into the darkness. Torquemada shuffled back to the bench and collapsed. His head dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. I could see by the twisting runnels of his forehead that he was suffering. He touched his hand to his lips and was still.

  When the sails are down, the wind runs free.

  So I took my chance. I flew.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Outside I could not find Moishe, but knew he would make for the Guadalquivir River and the ship. I would fly ahead to tell them to wait. He would soon be there.

  If they had safely arrived. If they hadn’t already set sail toward Cadiz and the sea.

  I rose up into the pearlescent before-dawn light. Soon the sun would rise. Soon the son also: the bright rising of Easter with its banners, music and celebration. But when they rolled aside the saviour’s stone in the mouth of Iberia, we’d be gone.

  Even in the half-light, there were people on the street. Soldiers, too. Moishe would have to become a shadow, a ruekh—a ghost—and half-light himself, if he were to slip by unnoticed.

  At the port, I circled to find our ship in a forest of masts and landed on the mainmast spar.

  Below me, Padre Luis was playing with a rope beside the starboard gunwale.

  The others must be keeping out of sight below deck.

  Padre Luis looked up. “Salve!” he called.

  I hadn’t said a word when—a broch, damn it all—there was a tremendous crack. Splintered wood crashed onto the deck. Another burst. A flash from the wharf. A gunshot. Gevalt! It grazed my feathers. They were trying to separate my insides from my out, make a pretty loch in mayn kop, a hole in my head.

  Doña Gracia shouted to the crew.

  More flashes and wood-splintering.

  Sailors emerged, unmoored the ship and unfurled the sails.

  Another explosion and I was hit a mighty klop from Olam ha-Ba, a divine fist from the world to come. I was returned to the formless void and into complete wordless, sightless, soundless oblivion.

  My last thought?

  We would have to sail south for the sea and leave Moishe surrounded by gunfire. Parrotless and alone.

  Sure the shvants does well without its foreskin. It grows. It prospers.

  But which part was Moishe?

  Which was me?

  Though unlike what the moyel hath rent assunder, I would let no one keep us apart, though it might be years.

  It would be five.

  Chapter One

  Writing Hebrew, most of the time, you make do without vowels. Of course, when you speak, there are plenty of vowels—no matter how you mumble, you have to open your pisk eventually—unless your strudel-cave has been fully spelunked by cake, when it’s better to wait. When you read, you have to imagine the vowels wheezing between the consonants’ black masts. You know they exist, they’re just not there. Like God to the troubled faithful. Maybe in some other disconsonant world, there are Hebrew books where all the unwritten vowels appear, like the souls of the dead, reunited with their consonant bodies, but in this world, the story goes on without them.

  Atah medaber Ivrit?

  Feh. I never learned Hebrew.

  Moishe was like the vowels. For five years, I mumbled and the stor
y proceeded without me.

  I was blown by the wind. It was above, it was below. It came from outside, it came from inside, depending on the ratio of sea biscuit to salt pork in my three squares.

  So sometimes I didn’t know my insides from what’s out, but sails filled and Moishe travelled from Gibraltar to Ethiopia, from the new islands of the Canaries, to Thule in the north, to the Mediterranean and back many times. Where, I didn’t exactly know.

  I kept myself busy, avoiding the cage and the “and so that’s how the meshugeneh bird met his sorry end” chapter of my story. I sailed with the Jews. I ate. I slept. I learned a new language or two. I drank coffee, wore a beret, argued about art and life, and wrote poetry.

  And when there was rum, I sang. I cursed. And there was this:

  O Moishe is out at sea again, farmisht like the farkrimter sky,

  He’s a skinny ship on a farkakteh sea, with no friends to sail nearby,

  the rum bites and the crew shakes, their shikkereh spume a-flying

  and the seagulls kak on the dreck-slick deck, and always their meshugeneh crying.

  O Moishe is out at sea again, living the wandering sailor’s life,

  it’s a farshluginer escape, and a whip-ward flight from the whetted knife,

  from the mast-like stake and the smokey clouds as you begin to smoulder,

  but all I ask is that he lives on and, nu, to shlof again on his shoulder.

  So Rumi, Whitman or King David I was not, though when shikkered, I sat in the warm tsimmes of my emotions and became a sloppy, weeping Bukowski of a Judah Halevi while imagining myself a psaltery-dog Solomon, a psittacine Shakespeare of the sea.

  I said I would speak of treasure.

  Treasure? It’s everything you could hope for in the present, but just not yet.

  Farshteyst?

  But first: Sarah, Doña Gracia and the others.

  We went south down the Guadalquivir and into the sea.

  “We’re not sailing into history, but out of it,” Doña Gracia said. “It’s safer that way.”

  The crew hauled and furled, jigged and swabbed. This was a common passage for them: Jews out; spices, gold, and embroidery in. A windblown railroad, not underground but over the sea. They scattered like sparrows when Doña Gracia walked the deck, a sneeze scattering flour. They weren’t used to the balebosteh herself aboard ship.

  She had always directed from the great house in Seville, but here as elsewhere, she took charge. As soon as we were in open water, she had the navigator bring her sea charts and compass and by the binnacle, she spoke with the captain, the Doña a conductor pointing toward the horizon and along portolan lines. She spoke to the cook and the quartermaster and held conference with the rabbi. The ship had been the Doña’s trade, and it was now her home.

  There was open praying on the deck as the sun rose. A minyan gathered beneath the mainmast and faced the larboard of Jerusalem. Standing close together, davening, swaying back and forth like the ship in the sea, the lapping waters of prayer a salve, a balm for the Gilead of memory.

  Few who had gathered there had ever celebrated publicly, their prayers a samizdat circulated in whispers concealed below breath, in secret inter-cellar communion with their interstellar, intercellular God, whose name they dared not speak openly, until now, sailing south upon this synagogue of waves.

  The rabbi reminded them that when the Jews crossed the Red Sea, there was music and Miriam sang.

  It seemed as if he expected a song and dance of Biblical proportions.

  And how do you measure such proportions? In ancient barbers’ reckoning: shave and a haircut cubits? Nu, it is true, in making our exodus, we had had a close shave. And Moishe, I hoped, had been spared blade and bloodloss.

  Though there was the chanting of prayer, the singing of psalms, the people remained sullen and quiet. They stayed below deck, or rested in the bow. Their tsuris troubled memories had not been washed away like the Tashlich casting off of sin-saturated bread at Rosh Hashannah. Not yet. They hadn’t yet made the promised landing.

  What were they? They were Jews and they were shul-shocked.

  “My father, alav ha’shalom,” Sarah said, “always wondered what it was like to travel by ship, always hoped to sail to the Holy Land. Only his books are left to cross the waves.”

  They had been taken from the pigsty and carried onto the ship, where they were locked in a large chest then stowed like pirates’ treasure. Inside each book, the written breath, inhaled and held. A library for the future in the language of the not-yet-forgotten.

  If only we could have opened the chest, spread wide the books’ wings and let each letter lift from the pages, fly over the distant horizon, a murmuration of words, an escaping sigh. And if only these letters could have raised Sarah, the Doña, the rabbi and the others, lifted them from the deck on their tiny black wings. If only they could have carried them into the sky and beyond the reach of fire, if only they could have left the ship without a single word, without a single living soul.

  But we were in sight of land when a ship came fast upon our starboard side. We were but a pitseleh pipsqueak with few guns and this craft, a big bulvan carrack with cannonfire bursting from its broad sides, and soon we were bleeding in reverse as wounded ships do, the brine spilling into our insides and the Jews screaming the single long vowel of the terrified.

  Then the carrack hove to beside us and we were boarded. They were Turks, sent by the Sultan to defend Granada against the Reconquista salivations of the Christian crown, but what’s a bisl robbery and slavery once you’re farpitst—dressed to the nines—for some meshugas? I mean, na, once you’re in the open ocean and you got the boots, what’s a bit of freebooting?

  Our crew found their swords and made to make gehakteh leber—chopped liver—of the buccaneers, but too often it was our swabbies’ livers that were gehakt and they fell writhing upon the deck, soon to become livers no more.

  I did what I could, clawing eyes and biting through the corsairs’ ringed ears, but I was not much use against blunderbuss and scimitar. These cutthroats, regarding me with eponymous desire, slashed their blades at my larynx and, also, for good measure, at my flagrantly whole body.

  “Gey strasheh di vantsen—go threaten the bed bugs,” I said. “You don’t frighten me.”

  But they did. So, nu, what should I have done—wait for these shtunks to make a half-chicken dinner of me? I needed a hole in my head like a loch in kop, a hole in my head. I flew up to the mainmast spar and watched. Sometimes he who watches and remembers is the best soldier. Hope without memory is like memory without hope. I planned to be an alter kaker talking a kak-storm of memories, an old bird who was also a book.

  They threw Rabbi Daniel overboard. To them, he was an old man and of no value. He kicked and spluttered. Just before he went under, he looked at us, then at the sky. On his lips, a brocheh. Baruch ata Adonai … a prayer. He who had survived fire, now a victim of water. May he become the beloved rebbe of a cheder of fish, the gaon—esteemed teacher—of whales.

  The pirates plundered the hold. Rolled barrels of wine onto their ship. Salt meat. Hardtack. Pickles. What stores they could carry, they carried. They carried, too, the surviving Jews. Sarah. Doña Gracia. Bound. Beaten. Bleeding.

  Samuel resisted, managing to stab an elbow into a pirate’s bristly pox-blotched punim, the pirate’s jaw suddenly tacking in a new and extreme direction. A musketoon fired into Samuel’s belly made lobscouse fireworks of his kishkas.

  “Vu sholem, dort iz brocheh. Where there is peace, there is blessing,” he said and fell to the deck, a warm nosh for rats.

  A buccaneer in a tawdry blood-spattered turban, the imperious balebos of the crew, pointed an arquebus as if it were his impressively tooled shlong, and made two of our surviving sailors carry the chest of books over the gangplank and into the hold of his ship. When the Turks broke the lock, I doubted they’d be filled with bookish joy.

  Can books be sold into slavery?

  A broch! Zon
g-like, they’d toss them. The rabbi’s deep-sea yeshiva would soon have a library for his scholarly fish.

  Unnoticed, I flew to the Ottoman ship and hid behind the futtock shrouds. For this, I thank my grey feathers for the colours they are not.

  I hid until I could be sure that their cook did not seek the sauciness of a chutzpenik parrot for a dry dish. Or that those with an arquebus had no interest in the shooting of African skeets.

  Twilight like bilgewater.

  I flew to the hold where the Turks kept their weary Jewish cargo, bound for the slave markets of Barbary.

  “Stowaways in our own world!” Doña Gracia was saying. “Not only our own ships: we need our own navy, our own soldiers, our own land, our own king.”

  “Next year in Jerusalem …” several of the old Jews murmured, repeating the words of the Haggadah.

  “We shall never have Jerusalem, not in this life. Not on this earth,” Doña Gracia said.

  “But when the Messiah comes …” one man began, but then was quiet, looking over the horizon to the distant end of the world.

  “Maybe in the lands of the Great Khan,” another said. “Far from the Church and our kings. I hear there are Jews …”

  “Or in Cipangu or Cathay.”

  “Or Ethiope.”

  “We’d have to travel to an entirely new world to find a land we could call our own.”

  “Maybe the new islands discovered in the Ocean Sea.”

  “Maybe,” Doña Gracia said. “But I fear that even the moon would not be far enough.”

  For now, we remained on the Turkish ship.

  “Kemal Reis,” I heard the sailors sing. “Kemal Reis.” It was some time before I understood that “Kemal Reis” was the admiral of their fleet, on their way to land soldiers at Malaga.

  Except for those currently engaged in the delicate art of midsea brawling, enslaving and plundering.

  Ech, if only we’d been captured later, we’d not have been captured at all.

  “They call Ferdinand a wise ruler?” Sultan Bajazet said after hearing of the 1492 expulsion order. “He impoverishes his own country and enriches mine.” Then he sent a decree to his provinces to welcome those expelled—both Jews and Muslims—to his empire.