Yiddish for Pirates

by Gary Barwin

  And with plenty to drink.

  He became delirious with thirst and tried to eat his paints. “This cold blue. This liquid green.” Paint dribbled from his mouth and coloured his white beard. Moishe and Yahíma tied him to a post in the hold.

  Together the crew had made the decision to follow the map toward the bookish grave.

  But it was Moishe that they cursed.

  How he had led them into this desert of thirst, this windless wanderlessness. As if it had been only he who craved youth, memory loss and immortality.

  “This map is poxy with evil eyes and farkakte demon scrawl,” Shlomo said.

  “And nu,” said Samuel, “we’ll all be dead before we can live forever or get anywhere close to your poxy frantsevateh fountain.” He slurped a runnel of moisture found in the fold of the sail.

  “We have a covenant of articles, you pus-bloated, maggot-toothed Spanish gonif. We do not horde plunder from others in our minyan,” Shlomo hissed. “Neither gold nor slaves. And especially not water.” He drew his sword, ready to turn Samuel’s body into its own tattered funeral shroud.

  A marlinspike flash and Samuel twisted and pinned Shlomo’s sword hand to a barrel.

  Yahíma, perched high in a mast, leapt from a yardarm, kicking in midair, her heel realigning Samuel’s jawbone and reintroducing his body to the concepts of down, horizontal, and darkness. She landed one foot nimbly on the deck, the other ready to make sauce of Samuel’s gullet. After wrenching the marlinspike from the cribbage board of Shlomo’s hand, she twisted his arm behind his back. Ham arrived with a rope and tied the perforated hand to its undamaged twin then bound their master to the mast. They lugged Samuel’s unconscious rat-sack body over the boards, then sat it up and bollard-hitched it to the mizzen.

  It had been an oratorio of shraying, grunts and gevalts. Moishe, asleep in his hammock, arrived only in time for the curtain call. By then, the rest of the rubber-gorgled crew had gathered to twist their necks and gape.

  Yahíma explained what happened and Moishe considered.

  On a navy ship, Samuel and Shlomo would have remained lashed to the masts. And—with a word from the captain—the captain’s spiteful daughter would have ripped apart the bodice of their flesh and Kama Sutra-ed their naked spines. Or it would have been the spurs of the nine-tailed cat that sank deep into the catacomb of sinew and bone beneath the shambles of their skin.

  Perhaps they would have found themselves in a dory, emigrants to death on the open sea, or Crusoed castaways on a distant island with little but a sword, some water, and a lifetime supply of exile and death.

  But Moishe said, “Release them.”

  Perhaps if, as a boy, he had skipped a few Bible stories and read ahead a little from the future, he would not have been so lenient.

  Though it’s hard to look forward when your own back is scarred.

  But nu, the decision should not have been his alone. Each who had scrawled their name or scribbled their mark on the articles was entitled to a vote. But none spoke.

  I had made a mark on the paper. Vos iz der chilek? What’s the difference? Was I going to disagree with Moishe? Sure, I crowed in the voice of men but, takeh, there was something stronger in my craw. Loyalty, love, companionship—these kept me quiet.

  A pail of seawater was loosed on Samuel, then on Shlomo’s rib-eyed hand. He and Shlomo were untied, Samuel blinking awake and confused as if rescued from a dark mine. Shlomo slinking below deck, holding his wounded hand like a newborn.

  Moishe stood looking out beyond the bowsprit, squinting toward a gust from the future. Beside him, fetchingly perched on the gunwale, plumes superbly dressed in his captain’s light grey shadow, his parrot, dux volucrum, a leader among birds, as the ancients say, and nu, I say it every time anyone eats chicken and not me.

  “Nu, they’re so thirsty that all they do is shecht each other’s gullets,” Moishe said. “Without wind, they’ll kill each other before they die.”

  We looked down into the water and the still surface revealed a doppelganger ship barely hanging onto our hull, in danger of breaking away and falling into the antipodean chasm of the sky. A skinny parrot and a shrubby sailor stared back at us. “See? We’re stand-on-our-headniks. What do we know?” I said.

  “It’s good you’re here,” Moishe said to them. “Mishpocheh. Family.”

  The world was still. The sails were pale papers waiting to be written on by the wind. The ocean was sky and I was a small parrot-shaped greyness, the tiniest of pupils in the infinite star-flecked eye of the entire gantseh megillah.

  And Moishe—his squinty, ferkakteh missing-nipple chest covering the cracked vessel of his heart, badly in need of a cardiologist, Kabbalist, or any kind of specialist—had spoken tenderly to me. We were family.

  I tried not to speak, but instead enjoy the moment.

  Feh. Here I am, doorstopping the journey with words.

  Then Jacome staggered toward us, his face luffing like an unsheeted sail. “We are neither dead nor alive and our dried-out souls become the wraiths our ravenous bodies now be.”

  What could we do? How to invoke the wind?

  Sailors know never to whistle, never to say goodbye, to always drop a few coins into the sea to buy safe passage, as if Yahweh was an infinite beggar waiting for silver on the sea bed. But desperation is often the broodmare of ceremony and Moishe now rose as one of its priestly Cohanim.

  “Get paper. Quill. Ink. And a small box. I know now what we must do.”

  The crew assembled midship, Moishe at the helm of his congregation. He raised his hand and asked for the paper. Jacome pulled it from inside his tunic.

  It was a page torn from a siddur. The last words of a prayer and then the calm waters of the empty page. It was clear from Moishe’s tilted brow that this was—keneynehoreh—bad mojo. Ptuh. Ptuh. Ptuh. Prayerbooks aren’t usually raw material except for hope.

  But he moved quickly to fold and conceal the page. Then he took the quill—from whose avian flesh was it pulled?—and dipped it in the ink.

  “I write now—Baruch ata Adonai—the name of our farkakteh ship.”

  But which name? Let’s hope for something that becomes apt: The Gale-pitched Gonif, The Tempest-chuffed Tummler, or The Whale Road Thrill-Rider.

  “And I write our names.”

  And he did. Including Shlomo’s and Samuel’s.

  Then he folded the page and placed it in a little box.

  If your ship is becalmed, what seems obvious and prudent?

  Lighting a fire on deck. The box burned like a pyre. The crew stood silently as it turned to ash. It could have been a lamb. The paschal paper. Wind, please don’t pass over us.

  Moishe gathered the ashes and stood by the gunwales. He roamed the shoals of childhood and netted some words.

  “Sh’ma ye crew of yam gazlonim,” he said. Listen, Pirates. “In zaltsikn yam fun mentshlecheh trern. In the salty sea of human tears.”

  He raised the ashes above his head. “For the Lord had mind of Noah, and of all things living on the Ark; and He brought forth his breath over the face of the earth.”

  “Then I hope He first brushed the Black Holes of His Infinite Teeth,” I said quietly into the holy sanctum of Moishe’s priestly ear, but Moishe did not flinch.

  He lowered the box and allowed the starling flock of ashes to fall into the sea.

  “Amen,” he said.

  “Amen,” said the crew.

  Superstition may be hope in disguise.

  “You think this will work?” I asked.

  “Do I know the future?” he said. “I just want to be there when it happens.”

  Chapter Two

  Yahíma lay under the still shadow of the foresail. She was telling me stories from her island. Some involved wise parrots and two-spirited shamans.

  “In the early morning of the world, the first man greeted the first dawn, the red and green feathers of the sun …”

  But then we heard shouting and the icy metal scrape of sword.
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  Shlomo and Samuel were on deck. They were no longer fighting against each other. Instead, they had laid siege to Moishe. His throat was a bristly Masada and it seemed he was to be close shaved. Shlomo held Moishe in a full nelson while Samuel pressed a dirk against Moishe’s jugular, threatening to swab the deck with his blood.

  Yahíma and the other hands awake on this still ship ran toward the grisly pre-op, but Ham, larger than all by half, strode in front of us, grinned his bright crescent smile and held up his wide pink palm. “Stop,” it told us. A huge machete slung from his side.

  He bounded up the mainmast shrouds, looped and knotted a halyard, then lowered himself back onto the deck, a noose now hanging openmouthed from the yardarm. A delicate filigree of blood ran over the blade-edge pressed into Moishe’s neck. Shlomo thrust Moishe under the noose. Samuel withdrew the blade. Then Shlomo and Ham hoisted Moishe and placed his head into the yawning maw of the halyard. They released him into the vapourous arms of gravity and the air.

  “L’chaim!” they said.

  None of us breathed.

  Especially Moishe.

  He remained motionless, no freylecheh Tyburn jig. No headstaving kickboxing of his executioners. He gazed over the horizon. Not walking, dreamhanging.

  I was considering an intervention when Fernández, having escaped his bonds, burst from the hold, shraying like a fresh crucifixation, and hurtled across the deck. In one motion, he embraced Moishe, and with a lightning flash of cutlass blade, cut the rope. Then they both disappeared over the bulwarks and into the water.

  The wind rose and the sails bulged and the timbers of the ship creaked. It was the revivifying downpour of rain after a drought. We began to move.

  Azoy gich? So soon?

  Shlomo, the map in his hand, shouted for the crew to attend to the sheets and sails. All except Yahíma began to haul yards and position booms.

  “My love is gone down to his garden,” she sang quietly. A Hebrew song of Moishe’s. She crept to the stern and rolled a hogshead over the bulwarks where it plunged into the pluming sea, soon bursting up like an overexcited sitting-on-shpilkes dolphin above the new waves.

  She could do no more else she, too, would find herself standing on fishes.

  I flew out over the ocean searching for Fernández and Moishe. There was a long trail like a fallen rainbow, a multicoloured wake stretching over the water.

  I followed. It took over an hour but at the end of this arc-en-mer was Fernández. He had leapt from the ship with a sack of paints slung over his shoulder. Now, emes, he was truly painting the sea.

  The waves swilled over his still face, his unblinking eyes looked toward the sky from beneath an iridescent kaleidoscope of colour.

  Fernández. Painter.

  A righteous man.

  I repeated a psalm for him who would have wished for prayers.

  “I will say of the Lord, surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust. Blessed is the one true judge.”

  And then I flew high into the air.

  I was reminded of a story.

  Once, Rabbi Akiva travelled to the city but found no lodging. Even the mangers were full. “All that Adonai does, He does for the good!” the wise rabbi said. That night he shloffed rough between the stalks of a cornfield. He had with him a parrot, a donkey and a piece of cheese. In the night, a mouse fressed on the cheese, a cat gulped down the parrot, and a lion guzzled the donkey. When he woke up, the rabbi discovered that an army had invaded the city and slaughtered everyone.

  “Nu,” Rabbi Akiva nodded, glad to have been spared. “All that Adonai does, He does for the good!”

  The parrot said, “What did you say, Rabbi? From inside this cat where I’m in the middle of being digested, it’s hard to understand you.”

  And the others?

  The donkey and the cheese said nothing.

  I could see the ship: the billows of its sails were scudding clouds above the crimpling sea. I saw that Fernández’s trail had turned crimson. Fins were circling. Fernández’s gams were the nosh of sharks. He was returning to the ocean. Little by little. Not the place of his birth, but where he had imagined his future and his past.

  And where was Moishe?

  Gevalt. I hoped his limbs had not also become the tsimmes of sharks, that he had not become—in whole or in part—a settler of whales, a belly dweller. I scoured the sea for signs. Of the barrel. Of Moishe. For well-fed sharks and their trail of blood. Gotenyu, I did not want to be rent from him, my only mishpocheh.

  The wind, lost for so long in wandering, now huffed boisterously. The waves surged through the kelpy waters, the seaweed and slime of the sea stirred in a frothing borscht. The ocean’s tiger heart had woken, the waters began to leap and prowl.

  The chutzpah.

  Not a single purr for weeks and then this roar?

  And then—vo den, what did you expect?—the rain.

  Black skies. Lightning. Thunder.

  I was not compelled to follow any route except toward Moishe. So, nu. I went with the wind.

  My kishkas became quoggy in the deluge. And the inside of my kishkas? Archipelagos of guano. I flew between the blue fissures of lightning as it cracked the grim sky.

  S’iz shver tsu zayn a Yid. It’s tough to be a Jew.

  Tougher still when such storm threatens to make barbecue of one’s mortal pork. And then I spied the hogshead. A shtik naches! O hetskeh zich! I shook with joy.

  Moishe?

  I saw a hand emerging from the bunghole, the pale coxcomb fingers of a squid. I became a barrel-rider as I landed, the cask bucking in the breakers.

  “Moishe!” I called, though both my words and myself were near drowned in the gale. “Vi geyt dir? How’s tricks?”

  The fingers curled, the hand turned, then grabbed me and pulled me in.

  It was dark inside the barrel. There was the heavy breathing of a cave bear.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said.

  “Baklog zich nisht. Don’t complain,” he said. “I tried decorating the sea. It’s more difficult.”

  Water sloshed in through the hole, the spouting of an inverse whale. Moishe repositioned himself. “The cork is gone. I use my knee. But it’s dukedom enough, since I’m pickled in Madeira wine.”

  Moishe and I in a barrel. What would you do?

  Of course we spoke of metaphysics. We had the time.

  Feh.

  We spoke of nothing, a nothing that didn’t include philosophy unless one considers the chaloshesdikeh heaving sickness-unto-death for we were thrown up and then down. Or possibly in another direction. But not at the same time. One part of my kishkas went left, another right. The rest attempted escape velocity. The only philosophy was to wait and endure.

  We were tossed about like casks lobbed out of the Ark. The washed world’s first trash. How long did this tempest last? Who knew? Night and day cast the same shadows in our dark cave.

  But then, up and down ceased to be our world. The storm stilled and, like the captain of the Nightingale in the song, we smelled flowers.

  We were near land.

  I was about to stick my head through the bunghole, a parrotscope surveying the antediluvian sea, but our ark received a mighty wallop. I was worried that we might be stoved in like the Kabbalists’ vessels, emanating Moishe, his bird, piss-diluted wine and darkness. But the barrel did not break. It was only the lid that was dislodged. Seawater flooded in. We spluttered to the surface.

  We had run into the hull of a ship. There could be few boats in this part of the sea though all must be pulled by the same tide. Sha. Not fate. The Antilles current. Or perhaps the search for the same spoils.

  A sailor looked over the gunwales.

  “Avast, man off the larboard side.”

  “An Indian in a canoe?”

  “A pale sea cucumber. With a bird.”

  “Marooned?”


  “Haul in this strange fish and we shall talk turkey.”

  And so a ropeladder was lowered that Moishe attempted to climb. But his strength was gone. Instead, he hung like a netted crab and the sailors hove him onto the deck.

  “I’faith! This sailor is known to me.” The man in a cassock seemed to have some authority. He regarded Moishe with interest and spoke loudly, as if Moishe truly had the brains of a fish. “Once he saved me as I have now saved him. Sometime physician Miguel, do you know me?”

  It was Columbus.

  Gevalt.

  Of course he found us. He was the great explorer, discoverer of what was already there.

  In this case, us.

  But we were pleased to be found and given a good Spanish nosh and clear, fresh drink. A little luck to go along with my handsome, brine-logged feathers.

  After a few days of aboard-ship rest, Moishe recovered. We dined in the captain’s cabin with the Admiral of the Ocean Seen and the Viceroy of Visions, for now, Columbus himself had been found.

  “For eight days,” he told us, “I was lost and despaired of hope. The sea chopped and frothed with a rage I had never known.”

  He looked through the aft port and into the smooth distance. “The gale enslaved us. We could not run behind headland for shelter but were washed without liberty over this accursed ocean. Never did the sky look more terrible.” He turned, waving his hands to indicate the tumult.

  “It blazed like a furnace, and the lightning broke with such violence I wondered if it had carried off both sails and spars. The flashes came with fury and frightfulness. We were certain the ship would be blasted. I do not say it rained, for it was like Noah’s deluge: the roof of sky came down low upon the dark water and we were tossed about our roiling barque. The men were so worn, they wished that death would end their dreadful suffering. I counselled them to vow pilgrimage to Holy Jerusalem if only we would survive. And then I saw light without seeing, heard voice without hearing.”

  He had sailed the same turvy waters as us but, takeh, he had had opportunity for metaphysics and light. Or perhaps the meshugener had greater access to Madeira than we who only bathed in it.