Yiddish for Pirates

by Gary Barwin

  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.

  It would be hard to navigate across this mess of chazerai, but the destination was clear:

  The subterranean library of two was on an island in the Bermudas. There were Hebrew letters emblazoned in the hills and Hebrew words all around it.

  “Nu,” Moishe said. “Always with the commentary.”

  Chapter One

  We were slumped around the binnacle sucking in pipesmoke and sharing a firkin of rum. We’d salvaged silver cups from Spanish pantries but drank from coconut-shell pannikins, fashioned by Yahíma in the traditional style.

  Our parliamentations were made shmoozy and loud by smoke and alcohol.

  “Why this map?” Isaac the Blind asked.

  Jacome: “Follow that farkakteh map and we’ll be futzing around the edges of the world until the Messiah hisself becomes an old geezer dribbling into both his gatkes and his mangy white beard.”

  “But the Fountain of Youth,” Samuel said. “Could it be?”

  “Like nipples on a duck. They might exist, but—gevalt—they’re hard to find.”

  “So we plonk our tuches in this mikveh, and splash ourselves—oy, oy, oy, mayn Got, this magic vasser, such a mechayeh—but then what?” Shlomo asked. “My scars live forever? I become a boychik, maidel-soft as an unborn elbow but still I toddle around with the Bible scraped into my skin?”

  “No matter where we go, there we are,” Yahíma said. “We might as well follow ourselves.”

  “Feh. Only if we could leave ourselves behind,” Fernández said.

  “We’d have to sail swiftly then,” Ham signed. “Quicker than words and memory.”

  “Or Jacome’s temper,” Fernández said.

  Jacome raised his fist. “So quick even your mother knows your pig-ugly mieskeit snout was ’cause of the clobbering I gave you before I met you.” He took a titanic swig of rum. “Because I knew you’d deserve it.”

  Isaac tightened the tefillin straps holding his hooked hand, and then scritched his head with the point. There was wisdom there, but also fleas. “So if this fountain is the shvitz of memory, and we walk away barnacle free, fresh like a Shabbos tablecloth and empty as the shelves in the shlemiel library of Chelm, then, without tsuris, we could go back to fressing on gold and shteching the Spanish with our swords. If we live forever, we live forever. We’d be Übermenschen who could neither be karsted by arquebus nor cratered by pox.”

  “Ver veyst? It’d takeh be a very Jewish fountain that makes a Yid immortal but not live forever,” Fernández said. “I’d still look side-to-side and up-and-down before crossing the boulevard.”

  “Or jumping out a caravel,” Yahíma added.

  “But nu,” Isaac continued. “If this water was good for nothing more than swabbing molluscs from the wrinkled hulls of our beytsim, it’d be worth gold when bottled and sold to the worthy shlemiels of Europe. Map. Books. Exotic puddle. Testimonials. It’s the story not the steak. The brocheh not the brisket.”

  Finally, we voted.

  Moishe taught me an old saying: Di tsung iz nisht in goles. The tongue is not in exile. And it was true, we’d lost everything but our accent. Takeh, many of us had gained one. We were wandering Jews and had no home. So, we might as well wander. We counted hands: We’d seek the book. It was as much home as anywhere.

  We began to sail toward our treasure, following the bottom of the pannikin, the shikkering gourd, the North Star, Polaris. Our book at the end of Ursa Minor Beta. Our home at the end of the Little Bear’s tail. Moishe and I would soon dishwash our hearts in the soapy, soul-scrubbing waters of the Fountain: a map, a book, and then a quick dunk and some bobbing for rebirth in the metaphysical lagoon.

  How did we feel about this? If there’s a word to describe it, ach, it’s not on this parrot’s tongue.

  Isaac the Blind was at the helm. Shlomo, Ham and Samuel hauled the sheets. I flew to become the polyglot tittle—the dot—on the mainmast’s “i.”

  As one Hebrew vowel said to the other, “Everyone’s a diacritic.”

  I looked forward, scanning for islands, the Spanish, whales, the Fountain of Youth, and the future.

  Instead, like a punchline, I saw the horizon.

  Morning. From the south, a happy-go-lucky lebediker breeze had blown since the second half of the dogwatch. At three bells of the forenoon, it died away. In its place, a strong wind from the northeast, which caused us to take our studding-sails in and brace up.

  “A cheer for this glad gust from a northern rump,” Jacome said. “Somewhere the skirts of a windgod have been blown to the sky.”

  In a couple of hours we were bowling gloriously along, puffed-up sailors returning victorious and carefree after their corporeal ministrations in the cat house.

  We were shpritzed with the cool, northeast trade freshening up the sea, and giving us as much as we could carry our topsails to. The bulvan wind blew strong and steady, keeping us upon a bowline, our course about north-north-west. Sometimes, they veered a little to the eastward, and we unfurled a mainmast studding-sail. For a day, we scudded well to northward.

  Then the north wind left us.

  Azoy gich?

  So soon?

  For several days after, we humbugged about in a whole gantseh megillah of weather. Occasionally a thunderstorm.

  Then the wind left us entirely. Something we said? A brocheh we forgot? For weeks, little but hooch, kibitzing and the wind. Dreaming of the four elements, both succulent and m
oist: death, revenge, sex and feasting. Water everywhere and we almost dropped from drink. Also, dancing hornpipes as if we were lurching in heavy weather, Luigi del Piccolo trying to pipe up wind and diversion. In such ways we passed our time, watching for dolphins with their idiot savant rubber grins, and the silver sides of fish, a treasure for our supper.

  “Watch for a star in the shadow of the crescent moon,” Shlomo said. “It means fair winds.”

  “I’m told an albatross is a good sign,” Samuel said.

  “So, nu,” said Isaac the Blind. “Watch for two.”

  That night, during a deep amidship shlof, Moishe’s pale eyes flipped open. Often those on board had difficult sleep. Terror and keening. Night shouts. Muttering. Weeping. Shmuntsing with Neptune, a Golem, the tooth fairy, or Queen Esther.

  “A dream,” Moishe called. “Islands. A channel between words and no words. Pages, wings, a tongue in my ear, a knife-edge, memory, a tongue. Then many of us die.” His eyes closed. Opened again. “Run,” he shouted. “Run!” Then he turned with a snort and slept until two bells o’ morning watch.

  Weeks passed. There was neither land nor wind, fish nor albatrosses. I was the only bird near our gopherwood ship of foolhardy shmeckels.

  Weeks. Perhaps if the hearty fortz of my gastrointestinally talented crewmates could be coordinated in a methane philharmonic, our sails might curve. Or the humid blasts from their cranky cursing. Water was scarce as popes in a mikveh. We’d eaten all meat fleysh but the stringy gams of Yids and the svelte feathered body of their Pollyglot familiar.

  And frankly, I didn’t fancy me, not to mention their sun-tarred sinews.

  There was some hardtack remaining. Soon we would have to cook and eat the leather of our boots.

  Fernández, the painter of empty seas, wished only for the islands flocked outside his frames. “I’d takeh sell a thousand furlongs of sea for a bisl barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything. Adonai, follow your meshugeneh scheme if you must, but, ach, if you’re asking, I’d rather a dry death.”