Yiddish for Pirates

by Gary Barwin

  “We tried to staunch the leaks, but it was like trying to plug up a raincloud and the ship began to sink. We broke onto the deck with axes. Many leapt into the ocean and drowned.

  “I climbed the mast. I could see the captain and the shaman. And a reed moving strangely across the water. Then a man surfaced near the captain’s gig. He spatchcocked the captain from behind then climbed aboard, took the books, and threw the captain’s body into the sea. Then he had the shaman continue to row.”

  Moishe took the sword from the sailor’s gorgl, untied a red sash from around his own waist, and offered it to the rattled tsedreyter mariner.

  As if his death would not be colourful enough.

  But Moishe would row our coracle and tow the quivering trawl of the sailor behind us.

  Where would we sail? Into the “And-then-what-happened.” Azoy. Where was that? The man, the shaman, and the books couldn’t just keep rowing. Sha. Did they think they could just Noah it across the ocean in a pea-green shifl and find eternal life? They must have made for the island. We’d catch them.

  Then we’d devise some Crusoe plan to build a boat out of logs, chutzpah, chazerai and tree sap, and be gone.

  And live forever.

  Shoyn tsayt! It’s about time.

  Chapter Eight

  We travelled as far up and down as to and fro—for the waves rose and fell as if we were on horseback. Moishe made repeated attempts to rein in our filly, to bring her to sand, but the wind rippled in the long leaves of the palms and pulled us according to its own fickle whim. We went around a point of the island and found ourselves before the opening to a long cove.

  “Well blow my briny petseleh with an onion,” Moishe said. “Unless my eyes be lying shysters yabbering duplicitous yarns, there anchored in that cove is the Gopherwood Shmeckel.”

  And there it was, our freylecheh flag flying high above our ship, snug and intact in turquoise waters. And there were sailors on board. At least two. One had colourful feathers fireworking from his kop.

  Another feather in the cap of holocaust haberdashery plucked from the bright tails of birds.

  This must be the shaman and the strange underwater bulvan who made naseh arbet—homicidal wet work—of the Spanish captain. We paddled our shifl abaft of the Shmeckel, hoping to remain undetected, else an arquebus make new orifices through which we might suffer.

  We were able to nestle in the shadows beneath the taffrail unnoticed and preparing to board.

  Then:

  “You putz-faced elf-dreck. You couldn’t haul flowers from your scupper hole if it were springtime in your pants.”

  The unmistakeable voice of Jacome el Rico. Speaking to the shaman. As was his custom, he was fostering intercultural relations with all the delicacy and sensitivity of a pitchfork.

  In the eye.

  Moishe called to him. “Gonif! You only live because the sharks couldn’t keep you down and breched up your festering meiskeit fleysh.”

  There was much joy in our reunion. Also rum, good nosh, and catching up.

  “I should wait with you like a putz to be blitzned by Spanish cannonballs? So, I jumped ship and swam to shore. Then when the Spanish were close, I made a breathing tube of hollow reeds, tied stones to my feet, walked the seafloor. Then I shtupped the cutlass between the hull’s wale planks and made holes.”

  “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the outside gets in,” Moishe said.

  “And bilgewater,” I said.

  “It was my good mazel I found the captain and the shaman skiff-scarpering with the books as the ship sank,” he said. “Then we rowed to the Gopherwood Shmeckel and sailed it into the cove. I chained this alter kaker to the mainmast just in case, but kept him well fed and in drink.”

  The shaman smiled affably at us, showing no indication that he understood anything, not even Jacome’s saliva-spraying narrative of spice, shvitzing, sandpaper and bile.

  Dusk. Sunset the vivid crimson of blood sausage.

  We went into the captain’s cabin. Jacome led the shaman on a rope behind us.

  “Ich hob rachmones—pity. At night, I bring him in like an old dog.”

  There was an oak table, big as a shul door. Jacome lit the few candle-stubs that remained. Shadows like lost souls wavered across its surface.

  And swaddled in blankets like the baby Yoshke mangered in a dark barn, our quarry finally lay before us. As if merely objects in a real world.

  The books.

  “So now we should also expect the Messiah with his trumpets, angels, zombie line dances and horas?” Moishe said. “Maybe leave the door open.”

  “I don’t count even hatched chickens. For beslubbering basherteh fate waits to splutter feathers,” Jacome said, ever bright as rainbows shining from the hintn of a pisher pony. “And we only have two of the five books.”

  “Feh,” Moishe said. “Our patriarch Jacob begat twelve and he had but one ball swinging in his covenantal sack. We have two.”

  He began to unwrap the books. Jacome brought straight-edge, compass, protractor and unintelligible kvetching.

  The pale, thin skin of Torquemada’s book. Onion-coloured. I thought of weeping.

  Columbus’s book. It seemed only weary.

  Moishe opened both books to their first pages. Then, like a Ziegfeld Folly of two, turned their pages together to other pages.

  There were maps, charts, diagrams. He measured. He calculated distances between letters. He counted words, the tsitskehs of demons, the tongues of fire. He read backwards, boustrophedon like an ox turning in a field, he imagined encryptions, codes and erasures. He held pages up to the light, looking for palimpsests, moon-writing, knife-cuts in the vellum. He drew maps on cloth and held them over the pages.

  Once I’d been carried in a book with a parrot-shaped hole cut into it. And now, dacht zich, it seemed, there was a Fountain-shaped hole in these two books. Each black letter grinned like a goblin or beyzeh wicked scar but said nothing.

  I remembered the old story about Rabbi Simeon who was farklemt from darkness and suffering. He davened from one twilight to another and back again until his lips cracked, his back ached, and he saw double.

  “Adonai, Adonai,” he said. “What should I do?” But ha-Shem said nothing. Eventually, in despair, the rebbe took an ancient scroll from a dusty shelf and rolled it open to an obscure passage. He lit some candles, scrawled prayers on the shul floor, and chanted a spell to raise spirits from the dead.

  “O ruekh, ruekh, O spirit,” the rebbe said. “How shall I guard against this evil and pain?”

  “Give me one of your eyes and I’ll tell you,” the spirit said.

  And so Rabbi Simeon gouged out an eye and gave it to the spirit. “Now,” he said to the spirit. “Tell me.”

  “The secret,” the spirit said, “is ‘watch with both eyes.’ ”

  What could the rabbi do? He fell to his knees and wept with his one remaining eye.

  Then he said, “Besser a miyeseh lateh eyder a sheyneh loch—better an ugly patch than a beautiful hole,” covered his socket with a patch, and became a pirate.

  Ach. What did we need to sacrifice? We had lost much already.

  A whole world.

  Our heart was like a genizah, filled with broken things.

  Sarah. Sarah’s father’s books. Moishe’s parents. Moishe’s father’s book.

  And I no longer had words for what I had lost. Feygl words. Bird loshen.

  What had I lost?

  Feh. As I said, there are no words. Except these farkakteh words.

  Moishe had turned away from the table and ordered himself to splice the mainbrace: to drink. He had found a bottle of schnapps and was alternating swigs with Jacome.

  “Always, we farblondje wander farmisht, confused, only ever with half a map. Farkakteh Columbuses bumping into continents. Bereishith—since the beginning—the world all shards. So I thought these two books would be enough.”

  “Like a sloop with only part of its hull,” Jacome said a
nd grepsed with the magnitude and gaseous enthusiasm of an exploding star. Then he sucked the remaining rum from the bottle and threw it to the floor.

  Where it rolled balefully, impotently, beneath a chair.

  “And the other books?” I asked Moishe.

  “In my finsterer cholem—my dream-boiled brain—I imagined them among Sarah’s father’s books. My own father’s book. And the book I cut to hide you. But ver veyst? In this half-baked Golem of a world, they could be anywhere. Buried, fish-knocked, in the library of a putz-faced pottle-snouted yak-sucker, or dropped in a well outside an eastern dacha.

  “An umglik! So we thought that some mumbo-jumbo from a shtik-dreck Inquisitor and a shmendrick explorer would lead us anywhere? What do they know of the left-side world?”

  “Azoy,” I said. “We’re the shlimazls who believed the whole megillah.”

  “You kvetch like milk-hearted piglets,” Jacome scowled. “The Spanish flesh which feeds our swords will now be sweeter. The wenches batamt more delicious.”

  “Ech. Vemen art es?” Moishe said. “What does it matter? Odem yesoydeh mey-ofor ve-soyfeh le-ofor—man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end. In the meantime, it’s good to drink.”

  Whatever he felt about this philosophy, Jacome obliged with another bottle.

  “L’chaim,” he said. “To life.”

  “Just not immortal life,” Moishe replied.

  “The books?” I asked.

  “Useless dreck from a rebbe’s tuches,” he spat. And swept them from the table. “Yemakh shmom. May their memory be destroyed forever.”

  “You know,” a quiet voice said. “I could tell you. I could tell you how to find the Fountain.”

  Oy vey iz mir! I could have laid an ostrich egg, a rabbi’s beard, and a tablesaw altogether.

  It was the shaman, speaking perfectly intelligible Spanish.

  “I know where it is,” he said.

  My tongue and the tongues of Moishe and Jacome positioned themselves as if they too were about to pronounce something intelligible.

  But nothing intelligible was intelligible.

  “W-w-w …?”

  “My people know where this Fountain is. We have always known,” the shaman repeated.

  Moishe, coming to, brought a chair to the old man. “Please,” he said. Then: “This tsedreyter confused meshugener sailor”—he indicated Jacome—“is not a subtle man. Sometimes savage, sometimes a beast. His life has been unjust and perilous.”

  Moishe quickly distinguishing himself from Jacome, though he had neither untied the shaman nor offered him much beyond the most basic necessities of water and hardtack.

  “He means no disrespect or unkindness. Always he has rachmones—compassion—for others. He’s a mensch. Especially with a venerable alteh rov like yourself. So, please, zayt moykhl, accept my apologies as captain.

  “Nu, Jacome. Something for the good rebbe to nosh on.”

  Purple midnight came to Jacome’s face. Stars collapsed and sucked all light from the room. And he reached for his cutlass.

  “A shandeh far di goyim,” Moishe said. “You disgrace us in front of others.” And before an inch of Jacome’s blade had slid from the scabbard, Moishe had the point of his sword pressed against Jacome’s gullet, ready to make pretty red snowflakes from his windpipe.

  “You would like to be delivered to eternity, already?”

  Jacome released the hilt. “So, my name is Jacome. I’ll be your kelner, your server. What can I get you?”

  The shaman was untied and food was brought to the table. Salt meat. Dried fruit. Hardtack. A jar of something obscure. It may have been patriarch’s brain or ground and sauced unicorn tuches. But it was sweet tsimmes.

  The shaman was hungry and noshed with great spiritual focus. Finally, the remedial ceremony of basic sustenance complete, he told us his name: Utina in his native language of Timucuan. He told us it meant “My land.”

  Later.

  “You’ve been to the Fountain?” Moishe asked.

  “I have returned from there.”

  “And you have eternal life?”

  “I have not yet died. Let’s wait and see.”

  Ach. It’s the emes truth. We are all, af an emes, immortal. Until we die.

  And maybe I’d be the world’s greatest violinist. If I had fingers.

  “So,” Utina asked Moishe. “What would you do with your undying life?”

  “There was a maidel, a girl. Nu, a woman now,” Moishe said.

  “Always a girl,” Utina said. “Or many.”

  “No, I know it’s meshugeh but this one I have never forgotten, and my parents dead. I would search for her: Sarah. I’d bring water from the Fountain. We could both be young again. Or, nu, in a thousand years, this old will seem young. Ach, if I find her. If she still lives.”

  “Cockstubble,” Jacome said. “They’re all dead. Or broken. All those we once knew. Or suckling grandchildren. Mad. They—”

  I interrupted. “Does the Fountain bring back youth?”

  “When I was a girl,” the shaman said. “My mother caught a shimmering thing. Wings like blue light through rainclouds. A butterfly. I held it on my finger and watched. Then I crushed it in my fist. I always remember.”

  He smiled cryptically and said no more.

  “When I was a girl”? Un shoyn! If my grandmother had beytsim! The shaman was a yenta.

  Nu. So maybe she was a shyster only trying to escape, telling us some bubbameisse cockamamy story to buy herself more time. Extending her own mortality as long as she was able.

  Or maybe she was an alter bok after all. An old goat.

  Nu. Maybe the fountain was a giant hormone bath. A mikveh where you became soft. Azoy, looking closely, her skin was like paper, crumpled and recrumpled a thousand times. Soft and fissured with fractals.

  But I wasn’t volunteering to fly into her gatkes on a reconnaissance mission.

  Gevalt. But whatever was there, she had more to say than the three books that weren’t there, and was emes easier to understand than the two we had.

  Besides, when you have nowhere to go, any direction is as good as another.

  Chapter Nine

  “Let the mutinous mamzers become the desiccated shlub-leather they deserve,” Moishe said. “Let them become fasheydikt bewildered with loss and loneliness. I maroon them as they would have marooned me on my own ship. As they would have marooned my blood from my body. I never forget. Only a fool remains a fool.”

  And so we did not go back to the island for the rest of the crew. Instead, we turned our stern to the shore, and we raised sail toward the horizon. Utina nestled in the quarterdeck, navigating: watching the shape of waves, the scent of wind, the curl of cloud above us. They say that at any time, such spirit wayfarers can detect five different currents in the open water. And many more of ghosts. They draw islands out of the sea, tectonic Prosperos, reverse dowsers.

  Utina imagined us a path beyond the horizon and soon we were beyond land, except as it appeared in the second sight of her internal compass.

  Dawn. Immense veils of spray rose against our bulwarks and were caught by the wind and whirled away. Bars of purple cloud stretched before us and the green water frothed with delirium. The sky became mauve and scarlet in the east, kishka-coloured. Then west off the starboard bow appeared a vast mass, furlongs in length and breadth, the pale hue of a maideleh’s thighs. It floated on the water, its innumerable long arms radiating from its centre and curling and twisting like a nest of snakes, a monster of flying lokshen. It had no perceptible front: like Adonai, all was face or not-face. It seemed blind and without instinct, more island than living thing, but it undulated on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition. Then without warning, the water stilled and it disappeared.

  “There,” Utina said, pointing with her gnarled alteh kokeh finger, which was a trick finger, not pointing forward, but askew like Adam looking sneakily Eve-ways when God in Eden came down to kvetch, post-apple.
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br />   Utina with her eye fixed on an indistinct place on the long coastline.

  Soon enough, Ponce de Leon would call it La Florida and bring Christianity, cattle, horses, sheep, lemons, pistachios, discount stores, disease, the Spanish language. Death.

  People would come here to die or not to die. Shalom. Who could tell?

  But now, there were no boats in the ocean, nor sign of people on the rock-strewn beach as we dropped anchor. We climbed into a skiff and rowed to shore.

  Utina divined a trail into the seamless jungle and we followed.

  “We’re bilge-headed coffinwits. Soon they jump from the shadows and morcellate us for barbecue,” Jacome said.

  “They could,” Utina said. “Or I could.” And pulled back her cloak to reveal a stubby musketoon. Jacome reached for his cutlass, but Moishe raised his hand.

  “Shat. Hust.” Shh. Be calm.

  “Why am I taking you to the Fountain?” Utina asked then smiled. “Ach, I can’t help myself.”

  We continued to walk, Jacome glowering as we shlepped through the tangle of vines and leaves.

  The sun boiling high above us, we finally came to a clearing. A thin river curled white over boulders then ran into an opening in a rocky mound.

  Utina reached into deep green boughs of tree and pulled down a yellow fruit. She sat on a dry boulder, took a short knife from her cloak and began peeling it.

  She speared a dripping segment on the bladepoint.

  “Pond-apple?” she offered.

  Sha. Was this a stalling tactic or dramatic prelapsarian irony?

  Moishe looked vaguely at the river, then accepted a piece of the fruit. What was he thinking? Ver veyst? Who knows? One may have a head filled with boiling soup yet look like a kneydl. A dumpling. He said gornisht. Nothing.

  “Where’s the Fountain?” Jacome asked, not one to let catering get in the way of eternity.

  “Inside the cavern,” Utina said. “You find what you seek.”