Yiddish for Pirates (20 page)

The Turks sailed and prayed. Five times a day the renegadoes crouched beneath the billowing sails and spoke to their Adonai at Mecca. Starboard, larboard, toward bowsprit or rudder, as the direction of the ship changed, east moved about as if it were the sun in its orbit around the earth.

It would be another century before Copernicus had the seychl to say, “That’s a tall story you tell me, Ptolemy,” but for now, Sarah’s world was the centre of a sorry tale told by Turks and, except for the downward davening, it was much like being on any ship.

Except that these turbaned swabs treated her well.

“I will not eat,” she moaned, refusing the food that they brought on large brass platters. Yogurt, nuts, dried fruit, mutton and noodles instead of the usual shipboard salt goat. These Turkish sailors intended to keep her succulent—zaftik—for the Sultan or his princes. I’d seen the harem. It was a gold cage for birds with splendid plumage and quick brains. As long as you were happy inside such a cage, you were happy. And so if once or twice you had to shtup in the dark on a soft bed surrounded by perfume, silks and jewels …

So I’d help her escape. My sea-green maideleh.

To be imprisoned on a boat is to have the ocean for a jailer. We would have to wait until landfall.

I cannot read, least of all the stars, so I was unable to determine our position, but as the waves began to rise and the wind whinnied through the rigging, I could read the sails’ pages and knew they foretold storm.

The sailors motioned toward an indistinct ridge of land.

“Sicily,” they said.

The captain and quartermaster would not alter course for the island, one large pock out of Ferdinand’s many on the pimpled face of Europe. Instead the bo’sun called, “All hands ahoy! Tumble up here and take in sail.”

The clouds collected in dark scrolls. We were close-hauled on the wind, and nearly keeled over.

“
Got in Himl
,” I said. “Or wherever you are.”

The great hoofs of sea beat our bows like a meshugener shmid hammering at an anvil. The water shpritzing over the deck turned the crew into world champion shvitzers swimming through hell. The halyards had been let go, and the great sails filled out and backed against the masts. The wind shrayed through the rigging, loose ropes flew about. Orders were shouted from sailor to sailor.

“Tie the boom!”

“Seize the mainsheet!”

“Reef the mizzen tops’il, lad!”

A boychik of a sailor was ordered aloft the mizzen—to where I hid. He climbed and laid out on the yard with all his strength. As he did he vomited into the black sky and I saw his frightened-wide eyes look right at me. I climbed beyond the reach of his arm and his outpourings, higher up the mast, but the sharp whip of the wind lashed me and I was blown over the shuddering black back of the sea, far from Sarah, safe harbour, or solid things.

“An umglik!”
I screamed. A disaster. “
Gey kakn af der levoneh!
Go shit on the moon!” I shouted.

Chapter Two

I thought the wind my true home, but carried by the banshee breath of the unbridled lost-its-mind middle sea I despaired of the touch of earth or gravity. Tree or silver cage, shoulder or floating corpse: I now wished for such hospitable heavens.

I was days in such windborne purgatory. Then I found myself blown over the shores of an island and able to fly into the protective maw of a cave and, thanks God, the howling finally ceased.

A great fire burned in the centre of the cave. It threw such writhing shadows as would cause Plato to kvell with pride at their form. There was a fragrance of cleft cedar and juniper. Roasting fruit and seed. A woman in long silks tended kebab skewers in the flames. I chaleshed for such food and I approached her. My storm-shaken brain was addled, for I was snatched and stuffed into a cage of wooden bars before I was able not to be snatched and stuffed into such a cage. A pale-skinned man in a dirty white kaftan grinned at me with an off-kilter, gold-toothed smile.

“Welcome,” he said from the free world outside the bars.

With a quick twist of her head, a woman tossed her long hair over her shoulders, walked over and kissed him. “You are quick, Strabo.”

The man looked directly at her. “There are many birds on the island, most, I’d expect, more succulent than this. If it speaks, it can be our companion. If not, our stew.”

He smiled his crooked smile and left, not, I hoped, with the intent of seeking a side dish.

I would not sing for my supper, but to avoid being someone else’s.

“I speak,” I said to the woman, somewhat self-evidently. “I hope that excludes me from the menu.”

She had turned toward the fire and did not respond.

This required some virtuoso sheyneh talking.

“I speak of the storm that has ceased,” I said. “And of the luxuriant wood of alder and poplar and sweet-smelling cypress that grows outside. Of birds, long of wing, which nest there, owls and falcons and sea-crows with chattering, if meaningless, tongues. And I speak of the garden vine, richly laden with grapes, that winds about this hollow cave. Also, I speak of the four fountains in a row, the water of the first flowing into the next. And of the soft meadows of violets and parsley which bloom. And, I say also this, you are intelligent of face, beautiful of form, and your hair is bright morning woven with God’s own shuttle.”

The woman did not respond though this was some first-class talking.

So, nu. I’d try another tack.

“O golden-limbed Calypso, I will tell a tale of my compatriot, Moishe,” I began. “He spent months teaching his parrot to pray. On Rosh Hashanah, the parrot insisted he go to synagogue.

“ ‘Shul is not a place for a bird,’ Moishe said, but the bird protested and so he took the parrot.

“ ‘What’s he doing here?’ the old rebbe said.

“ ‘Rebbe, he can daven. He knows all the prayers.’

“No one believed Moishe, but they let the bird in—as long as he wore a yarmulke. The entire congregation bet against the bird. Twenty-to-one the parrot couldn’t daven. How could a bird daven?

“Service began. There was chanting and praying, but the parrot sat on Moishe’s shoulder. Silent.

“ ‘Daven, you mamzer, daven.’ But the bird said nothing. After the service, Moishe was furious.

“ ‘You putz. I’m ruined. I owe a fortune. Why didn’t you daven?’

“ ‘Don’t be a shlemiel,’ the parrot replied. ‘Imagine the odds we’ll get on Yom Kippur!’ ”

Still the woman said nothing. I was going to be soup.

I watched as she tended to the skewers, imagining them piercing my tender breast. I looked around the cave, planning escape. After some time, Strabo returned, covered in mud and carrying the corpse of a small brown animal, something like a rabbit or what once was one. He was singing but the woman did not turn. It has been said that the future is a woman and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to sneak up on her from behind. In truth, I know no other way.

Strabo placed the rabbit down, crept behind the woman and embraced her, a move more amorous but as sudden as when he had snatched me.

“Strabo!” she called. “You know I cannot hear you creeping.”

Strabo laughed, though this surely could not have been the first time that he had played this trick.

They fell upon each other and the meat upon the skewer burned as I watched from my cage.

This, then, was my life for five years more. My wings, though not my speech, were clipped. I became a companion of these amorous two, the king and queen, the sole servants, soldiers, serfs, bakers, hunters, fools and lovers on this otherwise humanless isle.

Sometimes I rode the shoulder of her pale king as he travelled about the island hunting and tending to the gardens, sharing a Scheherazade of stories.

Sometimes I would stay with the woman, Liliana, in her elfin grotto. Though she could read the words on the voluble pages of Strabo’s lips, my immutable beak proved inscrutable. And so, for her, I was a friend without language. She sang, simply for the pleasure of singing, a meaningless Bombadil of songs as she moved about the cave, preparing food and keeping their speleological home both spic and span.

I was becalmed in this paradise, fressing on fruits only recently named, wishing to be expelled from this Eden. I wanted the salt slap of the sea, the astringent wave; to be ship-faced or in a storm and on Moishe’s shoulder.

My shorn feathers grew back though I kept them under my wing. Strabo and Liliana would not know I was a flight risk, not until they saw me flapping like an epileptic “m” or “w” as I disappeared into the sky.

Then, one dawn a nub of mast appeared on the horizon. Like a sprig, it grew, sprouting sails and a ship as I watched it blossom outside the early morning mouth of the cave.

Strabo was hunting while Liliana slept. I crept from my open cage and took to the air. In the cave, the animals began to bark or bray or caw, but Liliana heard only the cloud-sounds of her dreams, Strabo’s looting fingers creeping up her sleeping spine.

I flew over the beach sands and was above the open water before Strabo saw me. He ran to the shore and called out.

What did he say?
Ver veyst?
Who knows? If you put your ear to the sea, you hear only ocean. The open road of the Mediterranean thrilled in my breast and escape foamed up like a rabid wave.

“Fairwell, Strabo,” I shouted. Though he had been my jailer, it was the island that was my prison and his friendship had been sweet.

I flew to the ship. It was made of solid gold and,
oy vey iz mir
, soft parrot girls purred my name and wished to preen me.

I should have such luck. It was the caravel of Andalusian privateers bound for Spain heavy with the plunder of its shnorrer mission: treasure both dry—spices, metals, jewels—and wet—wine, prisoners, and slaves, held in chains.

But sometimes God plays craps, for I discovered Moishe, pale and weak, hanging from the beams as from a gibbet. Where he was not the pallor of his own yellow eyes, he was bruise purple. He was no longer a cheder-bocher schoolboy. His fallow pisher’s face was now carpeted by a patchwork of shag and his once scarecrow body was now filled with something more substantial than straw. My Moishe. My skinny shoulder. My own grown mensch of a boychik.

His eyes were closed and he moaned weakly. He was fortunate to have such misfortune just then for I had arrived and would help him. We had been diasporas of each other. Now we were home.

“Moishe,
vos machstu
?” I said, flying onto his shoulder. “Howaya?”

Chapter Three

Five years. You can fit ten or twenty years into such a span, particularly when you’re crossing the equator of childhood.

“So,” I said. “Tell me everything from the beginning. Your breakfast the morning I left Spain. Was it eggs?”

He recounted his equinoctial transit into the tropic of young men: He had been imprisoned. Had escaped. Was imprisoned again. Had escaped and had helped others escape.

He’d stolen eggs from under others’ stolen chickens. He’d stolen his own chickens and even pigs. He’d made it south to Sanlúcar on the coast and signed on with the first ship leaving Andalusia. He’d travelled the shores of Ethiope, had been to Bristol, one of the new-found Canary islands, to Genoa and other ports in the Mediterranean.

And more eggs: those of the African turtle and of the English quail. He had learned some shipcraft, some surgery, carpentry and medicine, and something of the chart reading and reckoning of the sea artist. He had navigated his naked astrolabe through the ripe nafkeh-warmth of the brothel and had had such rum as to have his green and puke-mewling flesh discover morning before he himself arrived there.

He had been Miguel Levante and Moishe ben Chaim, as well as other names. And all the while trying to find Sarah, Doña Gracia, news of the safety of the escaping Jews of Seville, and … me.

We wept together then like maidelehs. Young girls.

Farklemt.

But this was no time for schmaltz. Moishe was, after all, chained and starving, and I was a free bird, befriended by the crew.

I flew to the galley and schmoozed the cook for a nosh, tilting my head invitingly and nuzzling his ear. When he turned to the roiling stew, I beaked a sheet of some dun-coloured thing, perhaps salted foresail or the foreskin of whale, and brought it to Moishe.

“Es, es, my friend,” I said, standing one-legged on his shoulder and holding out the food so he could gnaw the salt sheet. Later, I found him wine and hardtack. He became stronger but remembered to dangle like a nauseous and neglected marionette when members of the crew came to offer him sips of fetid water.

“Ahh, ahh,” he moaned in their presence and they called him “girl.”

It would be a week to Spain. We decided—after close consultation with the uncommunicative chains and the lockpicking skills of both beak and filched nail—to arrange for Moishe’s escape after we arrived at port. During the commotion of arrival, we’d find a means to free Moishe while the crew patchked around readying him for transportation.

Where were they planning to take him? Why had they captured him?

“I was in the middle of the Middle Sea,” Moishe said. “Actually over a barrel.”

“Moishe: Admiral of a Hogshead and a fleet of fishes.”

“Azoy! Rather
that
august maritime office—keneynehoreh—than goulash for sharks,” he said. “He didn’t know it yet, but the captain of the ship on which I was sailing and where the barrel was berthed, was about to pitch me caskless into the deep.”

“Because of the Inquisition?” I asked.

“I stole extra rations of drink, got shikkered, potched the mamzer bo’sun on his shmutzik chin, and he died. And so, I sought safe passage on the barrel away from such tsuris before it was discovered.”

“And this crew here—do they know this?”

“No—keneynehoreh. There’s a priest on board. He saw me floating and had me netted. Though I hardly knew myself if I were man or fish, he recognized me from my quemadero performance and claimed my death for Torquemada’s fire.”

“So, nothing to worry about,” I said. “Just execution.”