Yiddish for Pirates(4)

The master was good to Moishe and taught him much, though his was a pedagogy based on exhaustion and the definite possibility of a mighty zets to the ear. In addition to his work below deck, on deck, and climbing the rigging, working on booms, gaffs and spars, Moishe was a manservant to the master, serving his every wind-changeable whim.

But he asked and, if his work was done, was allowed to gaze at the maps and charts. Even as they took him away, they recalled his home and his longing to leave. His quick mind pleased the master.

“Ye shall be a sea artist good and true, right ye will. Your paint shall be the shiny stars in the sky above and your canvas the waves of the salt sea.”

You think Moishe had any idea what such words meant? Gornisht! Nothing. Nada. Bupkes. Not that boychik. Until he met me, he didn’t know his shvants from a sloop, his dick from a deck.

Was I good at language? Let’s just say Polly’s been a nautical boy for most of his long life. Since I was press-ganged out of Africa covered in pinfeathers, I’ve been parrot to a whole shipload of shoulders—Arab, Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, Polish—but none like Moishe.

And I taught the young bubbeleh something other than the mother tongue mamaloshen.

Hogshead. Rumfustian. Hardtack. Turtles.

Baldric. Blunderbuss. Muskatoon.

Cutthroat. Tankard. Stinkpot.

How d’ye do?

In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

Yes sir, very good, sir.

Captain. Ocean. Syphilis.

Pirate.

He was a good mimic, that sheygets, though no parrot.

“Farshteyst? Do you understand?” I’d say.

“I oondershtand,” he’d reply.

I took an immediate liking to him. His narrow shoulder, his earnest face, his kindness, his credulity.

Ech. A parrot is a one-person bird. I saw Moishe and the boychik was soon imprinted like words in indelible ink on the farkakteh page of my brain. Who decides such a thing? Like waking up the morning after shoreleave with an anchor tattooed across your hiney, it isn’t, emes, exactly the result of choice. But I needed to be needed and this poor shnook needed me.

His pleasant demeanour and obvious intelligence attracted the attention not only of the master but of the captain, who took a shine to him, would take him under his wing, though not parrot-permanently as I did. He soon had him managing that part of the ship’s stores that were for his private use. Guns, gold, dainties, drink and good meat. If the master’s stores were Versailles, the captain’s were the Vatican. Moishe kept them neat as a marlinspike, free from vermin, insects, and the salt scum that encrusted everything aboard ship.

“Yes sir, very good, sir,” he’d say.

He knew on which side the holy toast is buttered. Farshteyst?

Moishe was kept busy running between the captain, the master, and his other responsibilities. The crew began, if not to trust him, then at least increasingly to regard him as one of them. Mostly they left him to his own devices, dedicated to appearing occupied while diligently avoiding their own chores. Occasionally they’d call for him to help haul on a halyard, or throw him a broom when they were swabbing the deck.

“Aye, lad, it’s the only thing we sailors wash,” they’d laugh.

He’d gather round for rum, stand as an equal in surly and superstitious congregation for Sunday prayer, and share the inscrutable mystery of galley stew, though he’d leave what he was able to identify as pork. He’d station himself nearby to listen to the long ramble of their narratives or mewl and warble soprano with their morbid tavern-hacking choir on the choruses of their songs, whether he understood them or not.


I wish I was back in my native land

Heave away! Haul away!



Full of pox, and fleas, and thieves, and sand

Heave away! Haul away, home.




Sometimes, as Moishe stood middle watch between dusk and dawn, insomniac sailors, their gigs adrift with drink, staggered onto deck and confided their tsuris woes to him. They were grown men, their brains and skins turned to leather by years out on the open sea, and Moishe was only a boy, his beard barely more than the nub of pinfeathers on his girly skin. Still, though he knew little but his native tongue, he knew the universal language of the nod, of the hmm.

And though each day his Yiddishkayt became increasingly submerged, thanks to a certain mensch of a parrot and his lexiconjury, the other cabin boys kept to themselves, not trusting Moishe and the farkakteh way he spoke. Association with him, they had surmised, would turn out to be a liability. They were, after all, ambitious young lads and engaged in professional networking with those both before and behind the mast, hoping to seek advancement in their chosen vocation.

Was Moishe happy to have finally left the firm land?

Is milk happy coming out of a mother’s tsitskeh?

The sea, Moishe exulted. I am finally at sea.

Take a small, dark shtetl. Paint it with the swirling blue and foamy white of the moving waves, the endless blue and curly white of clouds and sky. Hold the edges like a sheet and toss it up and down like a child’s game, the breezes flapping above you, the gust blowing the tang of salt across your face. Your house, the rag-and-bones path of flesh and blood, ever hopeful as it floats toward the beckoning horizon, free from the gravity of ground. To be at sea is to know vastness, to understand the flight of clouds, the reach of the stars and of invention. He was riding the expanding ripples of God’s great cannonball. Moishe felt as if he were travelling in every direction at once, each direction away from home, toward story.