Yiddish for Pirates(40)

Even in the half-light, there were people on the street. Soldiers, too. Moishe would have to become a shadow, a ruekh—a ghost—and half-light himself, if he were to slip by unnoticed.

At the port, I circled to find our ship in a forest of masts and landed on the mainmast spar.

Below me, Padre Luis was playing with a rope beside the starboard gunwale.

The others must be keeping out of sight below deck.

Padre Luis looked up. “Salve!” he called.

I hadn’t said a word when—a broch, damn it all—there was a tremendous crack. Splintered wood crashed onto the deck. Another burst. A flash from the wharf. A gunshot. Gevalt! It grazed my feathers. They were trying to separate my insides from my out, make a pretty loch in mayn kop, a hole in my head.

Do?a Gracia shouted to the crew.

More flashes and wood-splintering.

Sailors emerged, unmoored the ship and unfurled the sails.

Another explosion and I was hit a mighty klop from Olam ha-Ba, a divine fist from the world to come. I was returned to the formless void and into complete wordless, sightless, soundless oblivion.

My last thought?

We would have to sail south for the sea and leave Moishe surrounded by gunfire. Parrotless and alone.

Sure the shvants does well without its foreskin. It grows. It prospers.

But which part was Moishe?

Which was me?

Though unlike what the moyel hath rent assunder, I would let no one keep us apart, though it might be years.

It would be five.





Chapter One



Writing Hebrew, most of the time, you make do without vowels. Of course, when you speak, there are plenty of vowels—no matter how you mumble, you have to open your pisk eventually—unless your strudel-cave has been fully spelunked by cake, when it’s better to wait. When you read, you have to imagine the vowels wheezing between the consonants’ black masts. You know they exist, they’re just not there. Like God to the troubled faithful. Maybe in some other disconsonant world, there are Hebrew books where all the unwritten vowels appear, like the souls of the dead, reunited with their consonant bodies, but in this world, the story goes on without them.

Atah medaber Ivrit?

Feh. I never learned Hebrew.

Moishe was like the vowels. For five years, I mumbled and the story proceeded without me.

I was blown by the wind. It was above, it was below. It came from outside, it came from inside, depending on the ratio of sea biscuit to salt pork in my three squares.

So sometimes I didn’t know my insides from what’s out, but sails filled and Moishe travelled from Gibraltar to Ethiopia, from the new islands of the Canaries, to Thule in the north, to the Mediterranean and back many times. Where, I didn’t exactly know.

I kept myself busy, avoiding the cage and the “and so that’s how the meshugeneh bird met his sorry end” chapter of my story. I sailed with the Jews. I ate. I slept. I learned a new language or two. I drank coffee, wore a beret, argued about art and life, and wrote poetry.

And when there was rum, I sang. I cursed. And there was this:


O Moishe is out at sea again, farmisht like the farkrimter sky,

He’s a skinny ship on a farkakteh sea, with no friends to sail nearby,

the rum bites and the crew shakes, their shikkereh spume a-flying

and the seagulls kak on the dreck-slick deck, and always their meshugeneh crying.

O Moishe is out at sea again, living the wandering sailor’s life,

it’s a farshluginer escape, and a whip-ward flight from the whetted knife,

from the mast-like stake and the smokey clouds as you begin to smoulder,

but all I ask is that he lives on and, nu, to shlof again on his shoulder.


So Rumi, Whitman or King David I was not, though when shikkered, I sat in the warm tsimmes of my emotions and became a sloppy, weeping Bukowski of a Judah Halevi while imagining myself a psaltery-dog Solomon, a psittacine Shakespeare of the sea.

I said I would speak of treasure.

Treasure? It’s everything you could hope for in the present, but just not yet.

Farshteyst?

But first: Sarah, Do?a Gracia and the others.

We went south down the Guadalquivir and into the sea.

“We’re not sailing into history, but out of it,” Do?a Gracia said. “It’s safer that way.”

The crew hauled and furled, jigged and swabbed. This was a common passage for them: Jews out; spices, gold, and embroidery in. A windblown railroad, not underground but over the sea. They scattered like sparrows when Do?a Gracia walked the deck, a sneeze scattering flour. They weren’t used to the balebosteh herself aboard ship.

She had always directed from the great house in Seville, but here as elsewhere, she took charge. As soon as we were in open water, she had the navigator bring her sea charts and compass and by the binnacle, she spoke with the captain, the Do?a a conductor pointing toward the horizon and along portolan lines. She spoke to the cook and the quartermaster and held conference with the rabbi. The ship had been the Do?a’s trade, and it was now her home.

There was open praying on the deck as the sun rose. A minyan gathered beneath the mainmast and faced the larboard of Jerusalem. Standing close together, davening, swaying back and forth like the ship in the sea, the lapping waters of prayer a salve, a balm for the Gilead of memory.

Few who had gathered there had ever celebrated publicly, their prayers a samizdat circulated in whispers concealed below breath, in secret inter-cellar communion with their interstellar, intercellular God, whose name they dared not speak openly, until now, sailing south upon this synagogue of waves.