Yiddish for Pirates (41 page)

“Where were you thinking we’d go?” Samuel said.

“Azoy,” Moishe said. “Then don’t eat each other.”

“Jews,” Luigi said. “I don’t touch the stuff.”

“We’re not even kosher,” Samuel said.

“It’s our cloven hooves,” Luigi said. “Besides, we’re stringy. Who wants Jew between the teeth?”

“I stick to unbaptized babies. They’re much juicier.”

We put to sea. Moishe and I. Hope may give a man strength, but not sense.

How exactly we would David the Goliath of a Spanish galleon, I didn’t know.

“I once told Sarah that if the only choice is defeat, then even that is bound to fail,” Moishe said.

“Make sure not to tell the Spanish,” I said.

Navigating in the coracle was like walking on water. It’s not that hard if you’re related to God. But we ended spluttering and dunking, up to our tsitskehs in the drink. We did more spinning than moving forward. Eventually, Moishe broke its eely back and we were able to navigate—our path the path of a Celtic snake—around the island to where we expected the galleon to be.

Two cables offshore, there was a stunted forest of three bare trees.

It was the Spanish ship. Sunk beyond its crosstrees. Our fearsome Goliath resembled a sodden and frightened rat.

A shlimazl was clinging to the middle of the three trees.

Are those the books in your britches or are you just glad to see us?

He wasn’t glad to see us.

He grasped the mast like the last autumn leaf in a gale. We had little to offer him.

“Should we brain you and then seize your books?” Moishe looked up at him and asked. “Batter your skull or paunch you with a stake?”

“Cut his wezand with a knife,” I said.

“What’s a wezand?” Moishe asked.

“Sounds like the beginning of a joke,” I said.

Nu:

There was a rabbi, a priest, a shaman.

“What would you like them to say at your funeral?” one of them asks.

The priest says, “His life was a humble offering to the glory of God.”

The shaman says, “He was a hawk and had the strength to eat the eyes of darkness.”

“Both very nice,” the rebbe said.

“And what would you like them to say at yours?” the others asked.

“ ‘Look, he’s moving!’ ” the rebbe said.

The shmegegge up the mast said nothing. Maybe it was a problem with terminology.

“The wezand? It’s a gorgl, a throat,” I said. “Come down or we will slice yours.” Certainly my logic was patchy, however my delivery was impeccable and the man began to descend the timber.

He had no books, but instead a parrot in his pants. Azoy. A huge and colourful Macaw.

Love? Not “by any means necessary”—if the bird had feelings, he wasn’t saying. Apparently the mamzer mariner had entrousered the bird in order to have a little something to nosh on later.

We liberated the bird. He had but little thought or gaze for me but flew without hesitation to shore. Perhaps in later years, during times of reflection, there was a place for me amidst his forest of regrets and missed connections when he remembered the noble and shapely African Grey who saved him from the twilight-hued teeth and dawn-red mouth of the Spaniard.

Me: Brightly coloured Macaw down a Spaniard’s pants.

You: Bedraggled grey me-liberator adrift on the goy-tormented sea.

With one hand Moishe held fast to the mast. With the other, he held a blade up to the sailor who, like most sailors, could not swim, could not escape.

But
vo den?
What did we expect?

Like sailors in the ocean, we are surrounded by life, yet do we know how to survive it? Azoy.

So now we ask this quivering tsiterdiker cabinboy, “What happened to the books?”

Having dug up the chest and finding it filled with a dreck-sculpted triumvirate of little voodoo big machers, the Spanish had blundered into the maroon’s cave. How?

“We captured a shaman on another island. He read tracks that led to the cave and we found the books under some rocks. We carried them to our ship and began to sail away. But our ship began to sink. Somehow it had become full of holes.

“ ‘All hands below deck,’ our captain ordered. We thought we were to patch the hull and bail out the water, but the captain battened the hatches and locked us in. He shot holes in all the jolly boats except one. Then he took the books and the shaman, got into the jolly boat, and rowed away.

“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 and 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.”