Yiddish for Pirates

by Gary Barwin

  And to kvetch about it meant recovery was likely. Soon he would sing opera and wrest anchors from the seafloor with his teeth.

  Pinzón strode about the deck, surveying his mutinous duchy. He was admiral of this floating nutshell yet considered himself king of infinite space: what was undiscovered was boundless and filled with possibility.

  All about the ship, the crew was ministering to sheets and yardarms while Moishe in the bow herded Xalmiento away from fever. Pinzón went aft to his cabin. Through the small window, I saw him heave a book from chest to table.

  I knew it by the pattern of its cover. We had carried this text from Lisbon—from one Columbus to another. Pinzón had thieved not only boat but book. Onboard were two of the five which spoke of the Fountain. Moishe must find means to poke his nose between the broad flanks of this tome. Such knowledge was power.

  The Pinta sailed in search of a new island. Pinzón certainly sought gold. The yellow teeth of his acquisitive grin seemed to desire a grille-work of the stuff. But perhaps he, too, sought, immortality or to become its gatekeeper.

  Soon he was back at the binnacle directing the helmsman toward a distant shadow.

  An island.

  The native people had seen the white flukes of our sails rising from the horizon. They had gathered on the beach as if awaiting the arrival of a Leviathan or emperor. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with little more than plaited reed loinclothes mantling their scrolls. Several wore headdresses of feathers and shells, some held gourd bowls filled with fruit, coloured stones and feathers.

  Mariners and philosophers regularly state that such newly encountered natives are handsome, as if one could say that noses, beauty and nobility existed in equal quantity among all members of a people. Surely there’s always an Auntie Faygel or a Zaiydee Shmuel with a nose like a tableau from Exodus played out on an anthill. But nu, these people were impressive pieces of bronze. Bright coins on the sand: their skin more lustrous than our sailors’ pockdotted and leathered parchment; their strong bodies, the muscled arms and chests of the men, the smooth torsos and naked breasts of the women.

  Ach. Perhaps these are but overheated words from the ajar mouths of Pinzón’s gawking sailors for each member of this mutinous crew was now a sail billowing full with the Zephyrous thrill of recklessness in a kvelling gale of ambition and freedom. Each thought himself his own admiral, cut lose from the halyards of society, travelling into the unwritten margins.

  Each man, now individual, thought himself impressive. The great canoe of our caravel growing into the barque of a giant as it rose from beyond the horizon, our vast mainsail like the banner of an advancing army entering a city, emblazoned with a green cross: F for Ferdinand, Y for Ysabella, large as trees surmounted with crowns broad as horses.

  Pinzón: “We arrive from the East like the rising sun bringing light to the dark unknowing, these uncivilized lands on the fringes of Cipangu, Cathay, and the territories of the Great Khan. Here, each of us shall be as an emperor or king.”

  Of course, to the islanders we may have appeared as monkeys dressed up in silks. A hundred monkeys typing Shakespeare would seem to them to be chattering gibberish. Though they would have been impressed by the typewriters.

  We dropped anchor and the men rowed to shore, sacks filled with tchatchkes, the swag of visiting gods. Moishe was in the second boat, and I travelled on his leeward shoulder. We stood like rock stars awaiting special effects: Pinzón in his furs and silk breeches, some of the men in metal breastplates, ready to stride into the Promised Land or to re-enter Eden.

  All the men, armed.

  Pinzón wanted to replay Columbus’s landing, with himself in the role of Columbus. But this time we would not trade small talk and worthless chazerei. We were not pedlars and tinkers, but Odyssean conquerors.

  The ship’s master unfurled the flag of the Spanish kingdoms and planted it in the sand. For we shall have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth and have a fancy brocaded flag to prove it.

  The natives fell to their knees and then, their arms stretched before them, touched their foreheads to the ground.

  “They think we’re gods,” Moishe exclaimed.

  “Maybe you,” I said. “Me, they think of as a bird.”

  The islanders rose up and surrounded us. Some held out their gourd bowls of gifts. Our men made ready to receive them. Pinzón looked warily at them, and seeing no gold and not wanting a repeat of Columbus’s giltless meetings with the natives, gave the order for the men to take up their arms and make ready to fire.

  What did war look like to the natives of this island—if they had war? In a war, a duel, or a chess game both sides need to know they are playing. Otherwise it’s hunting. Skeet shooting. Murder.

  To Pinzón, the islanders, though statuesque as rippling stallions or shapely as does, were little more than animals inside: Less-than-Calibans. Un-Christianizables. Primitive though noble Golems without souls. And like Golems or magpies, they knew how to find shiny and precious things.

  The men loaded their arquebuses with powder and gunshot while the natives looked on in fascination. Pinzón’s orders echoed in the stillness. “We don’t need a translator to explain this,” he said.

  Then, “Fire.”

  The sound was like a rank of cannons. The vessel of the world shattered to hellflame and thunder.

  Islanders dropped to the sand, ragged hibiscus-flower wounds on their bare chests and contorted heads. Some ran into the forest. Some began to run and then collapsed. Surely not so many could have been hit. A kick and a brief inspection revealed that some had fainted in terror, while others had been slain by fear alone.

  Pinzón ordered several men captured and chained to the flagpole. Some women he had bound and carried back to the ship. A man adorned in a feather headdress and long cape, likely the cacique, lay on his back in the sand, bleeding from his mouth. Pinzón stood over him, sword pressed against his heaving throat.

  “Gold,” Pinzón said.

  The man looked up at Pinzón, not understanding.

  “Gold,” Pinzón repeated.

  A gloaming light in the man’s eyes. Then darkness.

  “Pah,” Pinzón spat, then drove the sword into the dead cacique’s neck.

  All about us, twisted bodies amongst fallen gourds, the beach strewn with feathers, coloured stone, the bodies of women and men.

  Moishe had an arquebus in his hands. When Pinzón had given orders, he, too, had fired.

  “Sh’ma Yisroel,” he had muttered. He had prayed. He had expected to die. “A bayzeh shu.”

  This was evil.

  He felt that surely God would wake and come down to the island for this.

  And Moishe expected that He would strike him dead.

  After fireworks: smoke and ash. A bitter scent. Pinzón ordered his men over the killing field to pursue the natives who had fled. The bo’sun hoisted Moishe to standing, hauling his arm toward him like a halyard.

  “Come. We hunt. And you, our surgeon: there may be a gash or two which needs your tending, a man rent asunder who’ll want his two halves knitted back together.”

  And so we joined the slavering pack as they left their guns and strode into the foliage.

  The silent woods. Even the songbirds held their breaths. All that was not rooted had fled or disappeared into stillness.

  When soldiers march, all destinations hide.

  Several natives were compelled to be guides and by the evening, they had led Pinzón’s men into a village. The buildings were quiet, but none more quiet than the Indios, haunched in a scrubby square, staring at us toytshreken terrified. At one end of the square was a large bohío, a sizeable structure of tree trunks and thatch. Inside, hundreds of villagers, close-packed and fearful. They did not dare exchange shelter for unprotecting sky.

  The Spanish mariners, only lately pirates and conquerors of land, stood before the village considering the art of plunder.

  But few spoils are as enticing as a good no
sh when a warrior’s kishkas snake with hunger and so, when a steady-faced young woman rose and gathered a basket of roasted chickens—aleychem ha’shalom, peace be upon them—and walked up to the strangely bearded strangers, they accepted them as tributes.

  Each fressed upon this Jeanne d’Arc meat, gnawing on the juicy poulkes with grave enthusiasm.

  Alvaro Sanchez, a cousin to Pinzón, was first among the crew to finish. His thick cheeks glistened with grease, chicken pieces like burrs in his greasy beard.

  He was an ox-large bruiser with a groys belly, fat as a booty sack.

  A body into which the devil entered, for now, his dinner over, a fire enflamed his gaseous soul. He dropped his oily clutch of chicken bones and unsheathed his sword. This was not a spontaneous impulse toward cutlery and the graces of the table, for he howled, a monstrous beast.

  As one, the twenty others seized their blades and they began to hack bellies and slice throats like crazed shochets dispatching sheep—men, women, children, and the old alteh Indios, all of whom were seated, unarmed, and caught off guard.

  Within the time one could croak a single kaddish, there remained not one villager alive in the square.

  The young woman leapt onto the outside wall of the bohío and scrambled up onto the thatched roof. She would leave this earth behind.

  In a fever, Pinzón’s men rushed through the door of the bohío and by slash and thrust began to murder all inside. The blood of an entire flock dispatched like floodwater. The girl, banshee-shrieking, emboldened those few villagers who could find their strength, to clamber up the wooden poles of the house. They birthed themselves through the thick thatch and onto the roof. From there they ascended into the trees and escaped into the canopy of leaves.

  Moishe had collapsed in the square. Pulled by the tide of unhinged madness, he had drawn his sword.

  Blood coloured its blade. He looked for a moment, mute with shock, as if it were a severed leg. His own. Wounded and without feeling.

  “An evil spirit afflict my father. An evil spirit afflict my father’s father,” Moishe hissed.

  A curse on where he came from. A curse on those who made him.

  Then he dropped the sword and ran.

  So, tell me, when did you first know you were a pirate?

  Chapter Four

  Days or weeks or years later. What does it matter? The tide had turned long ago and we were at sea.

  “Feh,” I said and glided down to the mainmast.

  I’d flown to the sky to sight what was hidden behind the horizon. “Ten four-pounders wait to pestle us into stew,” I announced.

  Before long, a galleon loaded with guns and gold rose in the distance. A ship returning to Spain, plotzing with spoils. Our gobs would soon dribble with Pavlovian glee.

  We made to haul up from the cove where we’d hove to, ready to broadreach our bowsprit right up the mamzers’ nether hawsehole.

  L’chaim, you Spanish ladies!

  “And the crew?” Moishe asked me. “How many sailors?”

  “Thirty on deck. Several monks and priests …”

  “God spare us from churchmen. When skewered, they make such a woeful noise.” This was Isaac the Blind, an old sailor.

  “Ha-Shlossing-Shem spare m’ earwax the wheedling prayers and simpering pleas of clergy as their sickly bodies are pared from soul,” he went on. Isaac the Blind. Most of him was lost. And what remained was hardly seaworthy.

  His single seeing eye was a broken and bloody egg. His one grizzled hand the offspring of a spider.

  Tefillin slouched over his blind eye, the box like a patch. The stump of his left arm, too, was wrapped in tefillin, the leather phylactery strap holding a fragment of anchor to serve as his hand. He was whatever he had scrounged.

  Like all of us.

  Except for those whose lives seemed the scratchpad of fate.

  Shlomo. His body was a book of scars. We’d seen him on the island of Jews where he had settled with those who’d sailed away from Spain. Together with Isaac and the others, he had then escaped that new Zion and become part of our crew.

  The Isle of Jews had been no easy billet on a sleepy pinnace. When Rabbi Nalfimay died, another quickly stripped the old rebbe of his red fez and orange-gold robes and appointed himself rebbe of the island. Unlike Nalfimay, this Reb Salomo’s rule was grim and sadistic. When Shlomo questioned—when he asked for the passage in the law that explained a severity—Salomo had ordered Shlomo’s arms tied to a palm tree and the words of the Ten Commandments cut into his skin. The Hebrew had scarred, red pus-crusted serpents writhing across his body as if he been flogged with a whip whose grip, you could say, was nowhere yet whose lash was everywhere.

  “Ach, it’s not so bad,” Shlomo laughed. “When I call my own name, I’m still the one who answers. I saw a Yid who’d been flayed alive by Salomo, and you’d hardly believe how much it altered him for the worse. Skin and bones he was. Skin there, bones over there.”

  Our crew included an African—an Ethiope—whom we’d found floating in the sea, clinging to a barrel of olives. He was half pickled himself, his body like the wrinkled inside of a mouth.

  We called him Ham, after Noah’s black son who came across his father ongeshnoshket, pants down, putz rampant. His father cursed him and his children. They were punished by the five-thousand-year enslavement of those races who were also beyond the pale.

  We named him because he couldn’t speak. His tongue had been cut out. What we learned later, through a combination of shipboard sign language and writing, was that he had cut it from his own mouth so that he would not have to speak of what he had witnessed.

  Though we came to know why Ham didn’t speak, we never knew what he wasn’t telling us.

  Ach, but I remember Rabbi Daniel muttering that memory is useless if none of us remembers the same thing.

  It was ten years since Moishe had left Martín Pinzón and his men at the village. For hours he’d run blind into the forest, then scrabbled up a tree into the dark canopy, panting, directionless, disoriented, and hungry. He had thrown his weapons and stripped most of his clothing as he sprinted in the heat. At nightfall he’d shloffed in the crook of a giant tree and I slept in the branches above him, listening always for danger.

  Early morning and we found ourselves inside the boisterous mechanism of the forest. The flywheels of insects, the flap and flutter of birds. A hum, a purring, the footfalls of animals we didn’t know. Then bright feathers: I was surrounded by a crowd of parrots kibitzing in a language I did not understand.

  Soon they scattered. This I understood: predators.

  Several natives walking, chanting, armed with bows. Their leader, the young woman from the village, spotted us immediately. I pressed myself against the tree trunk, not keen to lose a divot of flesh or to have my guts festooned in fletching. Moishe uncurled himself and sat on the branch in plain view. Pale and mostly naked. He did not appear to be a great warrior or bold sailor gluttonous for conquest. Instead, Moishe: a pallid Yiddishe Mowgli lost in the Caribbean.

  “Help,” he said and raised his hand.

  And now, that same young woman, Yahíma, was part of our crew. Yahíma: our new Sarah. She, too, an orphan, her parents lost amidst the bohío blood.

  So, nu, what about all those stories of New World Pocohonawitzes? Beautiful girls who go native in reverse. Sheyneh native maidelehs who put down their porcupine quills and tomahawks for doilies.

  Yahíma was fearless and knowledgeable. Strong, nimble and lithe. But she was no beauty, though her tawny skin was the colour of Amontillado sherry and there was much of it on display. And, emes, an alter kaker would say, Ze hot sheyneh Moishe v’Arondlach. She had nice little Moses and Aaronses. Was Moishe the right and I the left? This, through a rigorously scientific program of manual ministrations, Moishe appeared to be keen to discern.

  It should be said though, at thirty, Moishe himself was no Yohan Smith. Sunburned and scabbed like an accidental lasagne. Greasy. A scar where a scimitar had taken o
ff his left tsitskeh. And he was a hairy yatl with a beard that was a fecund habitat for organic lifeforms, both sentient and insensible, sticks, leaves, and the oily trails of flesh.

  Though of course, in the sixteenth century, that was practically dapper.

  Before Yahíma, Moishe would sometimes moon about like a lover in a sonnet. “Sometimes, when I sleep on the deck under the star-pimpled prishtshevateh punim sky,” he’d say, “the kitsl tickle of the breeze on my face, the rise and sigh of the waves, my cut gehakteh body aching like an Egyptian slave’s, I think of Sarah, my Shulamite. How beautiful she’d be. In another world, we’d wake, husband and wife in each other’s arms, early morning, the windows open, hooves on the cobbles, the scent of bread, voices in the alleys. We’d have been shtupping all night like the world was new, and now exhausted, we’d lie squeezed together like knishes, wondering what it might be like on the other side of the world. But, feh. That other world is here and where is Sarah? Lost. Murdered. Married off to someone else. A mother. And I’m left mumbling this sub-Solomon Song of Songs.”

  Now there was Yahíma. She of the long legs. The loincloth not much bigger than a yarmulke. The sudden eyes and blinkless smile. She who could turn a spear into a lightning flash, skewer a fish before we’d even seen. Or push Moishe into the sea when his back was turned.

  Companionship is 90 percent just showing up.

  Moishe had grown parrotlike: a pragmatist with the yearning neshomeh soul of a hero.

  Who else was on board? Jacome, whom we’d found at sea in a coracle, spiting and cursing, hauling on the paddle with only a cutlass, a jug of water, salt meat, and his own sweet song for a crew. Pinzón had been on an island and had wanted rid of the half-cocked blunderbuss, all bile and gunpowder, that was Jacome. The usual method was to maroon a sailor who was trouble, to set them on a desert island and leave them there. Gey gezunt. Be well. But since they were already on an island, he was set adrift, perhaps with the idea that he would maroon himself.