Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin
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.
It wasn’t much of a battle. The Spanish, surprised and afraid, surrendered quickly. There was the customary disembowelling, cutting off of noses, hands, and of shmeckels. Some were taken prisoner to be sold as slaves. Men, not shmeckels. Some—those whose pleading was especially plangent—were left to their fate on the first island we sailed by.
“Why worry?” Moishe said to them. “Abi gezunt. As long as you have your health.”
We were triumphant conquistadors and we’d taken the Spanish ship like a continent. For now, we had a new home unencumbered by its former residents, the shtik dreck Spanish. The men revelled in the plenty of their new found land. There was some freilich music from pipe and tabor. Bungholes from rum barrels were unstopped and drink flowed free. Food stores were opened and the crew fressed on the abundant supplies of salt pork.