Yiddish for Pirates (2 page)

v3.1

For the whole mishpocheh, both fore and aft
.

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Part One: Air

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Two: Fire

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Part Three: Water

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Four: Land

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Five: Quintessence

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Acknowledgements

About the Author

We are going to a different world … and I expect it is the one where all goes well
.

VOLTAIRE
,
Candide

Hello. Howaya? Feh. You think those are the only words I know? Boychik, you don’t know from knowing. You ain’t seen knowing. I may be
meshugeh
crazy, but I know from words. You think I’m a fool shmegegge? I’m
all
words.

Hello? If you want the story of a life, don’t wait for your alter kaker old gramps over there to wake up. Maybe he’ll never wake. But me? Listen to my words. They tell some story. Because I remember. Sometimes too much, but I remember.

So, nu, bench your fat little oysgepasheter Cape Horn tuches down on that chair and listen to my beaking. Comeall ye brave lads, and so forth. I’ll tell you the whole megillah story from fore to aft.

What’s it about? Pirates. Parrots. Jews. Jewels. The Inquisition. Gefilte fish. Gold. A girl.

Boychik, I was a pirate’s parrot, and had I not noshed from the Fountain of Eternal Youth hundreds of years ago, I would rest beside my scurvy captain and Davy Jones hisself at the bottom of the sea where the soulless creatures crawl. And then where would you be?

Without a story.

That life. It was a book made into a life. A wonder tale. The glinty waves. The deep jungle. A world I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t sailed right into it. And for a time, that world had but one shoulder,
blue and fussy with epaulettes hanging off the rigging of a stolen frock coat, a cutlass of a collarbone covered in flesh like mangy beef jerky.

My captain’s shoulder.

Feh, these days no one wants to hear. Maybe not even you. They treat us like leftovers—wizened chicken-gizzard pupiklech in this birdhouse of leftover Yids. But nu, it’s true, most of us look like yesterday’s chicken or its gizzards. Though look at these feathers. A young bird would be proud of such grey.

The Shalom Home for the Aged.

Shalom? In Hebrew, “shalom” means hello, goodbye, peace.

Imagine the crazy farkakteh waving of some poultry-skinned geezer on the fifth floor, squinting out from between the orange curtains. Is he waving hello or goodbye? Ptuh! It’s an old age home, so who knows? Maybe the shlemiel thinks he’s in a crow’s nest and is warning of an invading armada. Alav ha’shalom. Peace be upon him, old nudnik.

But what does peace look like? Is it better to be careened tsitskehs-over-tuches, nipples-over-nethers in dry dock, the dangling clams of your ballsack scraped daily for barnacles by some balmelocheh know-it-all nurse, or lost somewhere on the seventh of the seven seas snorting the scent of new flowers and the soft jellyfish pazookheh breasts of beautiful sheyneh maidens?

Too often, stories in this library of lost people are told in the farmisht confused language of forgetting, but I speak many languages and I’m fluent in both remembering and forgetting. Though, nu, it’s easier to tell the stories you remember.

Or pretend to. And what you don’t remember, the stories tell for you.

Ach. I talk too much. I’ve got myself twisted fardreyt with words turncoating again, thinking about my bastard mamzer captain himself. But what do you expect? Five hundred years old, I’m an alter kaker geezer of the highest degree, with a brain like a cabbage roll. A parrot brain like a chameleon on Jewish tartan.

The horizon, I once told a Spanish painter, it gives you a whole new perspective. It doesn’t exist except from far away. The horizon is always a story, and as soon as we get there, it’s somewhere else.

The horizon, it’s a line we crossed just to see what we could see. And believe me, we saw many things, some things that wouldn’t just stay over the horizon.

They wanted our souls for eternal barbecue so we travelled with Columbus into that braves’ new world as if across a vast and chilly Jordan. An undividing Red Sea. And what did the ancients find? A promising land. Thousands of years of history. Regret. Happiness. The future.

And what did we find? Ach, this is a pirate tale I’m telling you, so it has to be treasure. So, nu, you ask, what is this treasure and where is it buried?

This I’ll try to answer. As well as another, the big question of all stories: And then what happened?

Yes, it brings mazel for a pimply boy like you to hear about blood, kishkas—guts—dangerous books, and shtupping. It puts some hair between your ears and above your skinny-dick shmeckel.

You’ll like it.

So, nu, in the beginning what was there?

A beginning.

Introduction

We’re on a ship and high above us, the pale full moon—keneynehoreh—pus-coloured, to be frank, streaked semen-silver across the shawl of the sea. The clouds bulging dark, spun fat over the slate grey sky. The world is a slow breath. The cool sea air, the quiet ship deck, the crew sleeping below, except for a few rum-soaked shikker and unconscious seamen collapsed against the capstan. The flap of the sails like the wings of a giant seabird, the steady lapping of waves against the hull somewhere far below. Where are we?
Ver veyst?
Who knows. We could be anywhere, between one place and another in the long night, heading toward another horizon.

“Gevalt!” the watch calls out suddenly from the wheel, waking from his near stupor. “Galleon! At two o’ the clock.” There’s sudden action from below deck. The dishevelled quartermaster strides onto the scene. A rigger, monkey-like, runs up the main to the crow’s nest. Seamen scatter about deck and rigging. We’ve been waiting for this.

I’m quick aft to the poop deck, landing on the skinny rigging of the captain’s shoulder. He’s squinting through the spyglass. I totter, almost falling off as he grepses. His breath is like pickled rat.

“Spanish,” he says.

The rigger runs down from the crow’s nest.

“Spanish, Cap’n,” the rigger says.

“For that, I could have saved him the trip,” the captain says, shrugging.

Moishe.

My captain. He was born to cross the Ocean Sea. Which is what we used to call the Atlantic before we knew what it was. His young mother died soon after he’d sailed from her safe inner sea. Then he was thrown like dreck into the river. No basket. No pharaoh’s daughter for him to sail to, unless she be Death’s rat-skinned, sweet and toothless princess herself.

His father, the great boot and sword, the hot snorting breath of a pogrom.

But he was rescued, a barely moving, pink conch-flesh baby. A young Jewess beating the laundry on the rocks downstream fished him out of the water and brought the poor little farshtunkeneh back home—finally in a basket—where he was named Moshe. Moses. Moishe. He who is drawn from water. He who was circumcised soon after.

Years later—it’s the beginning of another story—he named me Aharon. Aaron. Brother of Moses and he who spoke his words.

But I should keep my tales straight. I was telling you of a galleon.

“Mach shnel!”
I called to no one in particular. “Hurry up!”

It would take us some hours to catch up to our prey. Already the bo’sun had the men hoisting and securing the sails, netting the wind like a dreamcatcher, the ocean gleaming past us as we ran toward the horizon. With any luck we’d take the Spanish by surprise, hit them in the beytsim before they were even fully awake, and gonifs that we were, have their gelt-laden chests aboard our ship before dawn.

And so we sailed.

In the east, a bruise in the sky, the horizon’s bleeding lip. We approached the Spanish caravel. Putzes. They didn’t see us coming, the farshikkered crew rum-addled, the shnorrer captain drooling beneath his poxy sheets.

From the orlop below deck, the powder monkeys began scrambling, that stilted scarecrow scuffle, careful not to spill powder. The gunners made ready with our eight pounders. We hove broadside to the galleon and Moishe, calling the carpenter surgeon to him, instructed the man to take his greatest drill and bore broad holes in our ship’s sides, an invitation for the ocean to rush aboard and quicken our men’s valour.

“Captain?” the surgeon inquired.

“With no ship to ’scape back to,” Moishe said, “it’ll put a spring in the shleppers’ steps.”

The surgeon did as he was ordered, and soon a cry of panic came from below to which the captain, ever laconic, replied, “Unless you’re Yoshke—Jesus—and can run home on water, we’ve no choice but to take the ship with haste and commend the Spaniards directly to their maker.”

Soon as we heaved ourselves close with grappling hooks, the crew roared aboard with their dirks and daggers, their cutlasses and bucklers, their marlinspikes, boarding axes, and flintlocks, and most of all, their complete lack of foresight.

From my perch in the modern world, I’d say—hapless if endearing shlemiels that most crews are—there was nary a frontal lobe between them, save the captain, the quartermaster, and the surgeon.

And my captain, though he’d lost his foreskin to the moyel at seven days, had yet enough foresight to go around. Before boarding, he’d taken a moment to tie limewater and saltpetre fuses into the long scrub-bush of his beard and hair. These he lit and let burn as he stood in the middle of the galleon, firing his flintlocks and shouting fearsome instructions to his men, while the smoke of hellfire itself rose about him.