Yiddish for Pirates(41)
The rabbi reminded them that when the Jews crossed the Red Sea, there was music and Miriam sang.
It seemed as if he expected a song and dance of Biblical proportions.
And how do you measure such proportions? In ancient barbers’ reckoning: shave and a haircut cubits? Nu, it is true, in making our exodus, we had had a close shave. And Moishe, I hoped, had been spared blade and bloodloss.
Though there was the chanting of prayer, the singing of psalms, the people remained sullen and quiet. They stayed below deck, or rested in the bow. Their tsuris troubled memories had not been washed away like the Tashlich casting off of sin-saturated bread at Rosh Hashannah. Not yet. They hadn’t yet made the promised landing.
What were they? They were Jews and they were shul-shocked.
“My father, alav ha’shalom,” Sarah said, “always wondered what it was like to travel by ship, always hoped to sail to the Holy Land. Only his books are left to cross the waves.”
They had been taken from the pigsty and carried onto the ship, where they were locked in a large chest then stowed like pirates’ treasure. Inside each book, the written breath, inhaled and held. A library for the future in the language of the not-yet-forgotten.
If only we could have opened the chest, spread wide the books’ wings and let each letter lift from the pages, fly over the distant horizon, a murmuration of words, an escaping sigh. And if only these letters could have raised Sarah, the Do?a, the rabbi and the others, lifted them from the deck on their tiny black wings. If only they could have carried them into the sky and beyond the reach of fire, if only they could have left the ship without a single word, without a single living soul.
But we were in sight of land when a ship came fast upon our starboard side. We were but a pitseleh pipsqueak with few guns and this craft, a big bulvan carrack with cannonfire bursting from its broad sides, and soon we were bleeding in reverse as wounded ships do, the brine spilling into our insides and the Jews screaming the single long vowel of the terrified.
Then the carrack hove to beside us and we were boarded. They were Turks, sent by the Sultan to defend Granada against the Reconquista salivations of the Christian crown, but what’s a bisl robbery and slavery once you’re farpitst—dressed to the nines—for some meshugas? I mean, na, once you’re in the open ocean and you got the boots, what’s a bit of freebooting?
Our crew found their swords and made to make gehakteh leber—chopped liver—of the buccaneers, but too often it was our swabbies’ livers that were gehakt and they fell writhing upon the deck, soon to become livers no more.
I did what I could, clawing eyes and biting through the corsairs’ ringed ears, but I was not much use against blunderbuss and scimitar. These cutthroats, regarding me with eponymous desire, slashed their blades at my larynx and, also, for good measure, at my flagrantly whole body.
“Gey strasheh di vantsen—go threaten the bed bugs,” I said. “You don’t frighten me.”
But they did. So, nu, what should I have done—wait for these shtunks to make a half-chicken dinner of me? I needed a hole in my head like a loch in kop, a hole in my head. I flew up to the mainmast spar and watched. Sometimes he who watches and remembers is the best soldier. Hope without memory is like memory without hope. I planned to be an alter kaker talking a kak-storm of memories, an old bird who was also a book.
They threw Rabbi Daniel overboard. To them, he was an old man and of no value. He kicked and spluttered. Just before he went under, he looked at us, then at the sky. On his lips, a brocheh. Baruch ata Adonai … a prayer. He who had survived fire, now a victim of water. May he become the beloved rebbe of a cheder of fish, the gaon—esteemed teacher—of whales.
The pirates plundered the hold. Rolled barrels of wine onto their ship. Salt meat. Hardtack. Pickles. What stores they could carry, they carried. They carried, too, the surviving Jews. Sarah. Do?a Gracia. Bound. Beaten. Bleeding.
Samuel resisted, managing to stab an elbow into a pirate’s bristly pox-blotched punim, the pirate’s jaw suddenly tacking in a new and extreme direction. A musketoon fired into Samuel’s belly made lobscouse fireworks of his kishkas.
“Vu sholem, dort iz brocheh. Where there is peace, there is blessing,” he said and fell to the deck, a warm nosh for rats.
A buccaneer in a tawdry blood-spattered turban, the imperious balebos of the crew, pointed an arquebus as if it were his impressively tooled shlong, and made two of our surviving sailors carry the chest of books over the gangplank and into the hold of his ship. When the Turks broke the lock, I doubted they’d be filled with bookish joy.
Can books be sold into slavery?
A broch! Zong-like, they’d toss them. The rabbi’s deep-sea yeshiva would soon have a library for his scholarly fish.
Unnoticed, I flew to the Ottoman ship and hid behind the futtock shrouds. For this, I thank my grey feathers for the colours they are not.
I hid until I could be sure that their cook did not seek the sauciness of a chutzpenik parrot for a dry dish. Or that those with an arquebus had no interest in the shooting of African skeets.
Twilight like bilgewater.
I flew to the hold where the Turks kept their weary Jewish cargo, bound for the slave markets of Barbary.
“Stowaways in our own world!” Do?a Gracia was saying. “Not only our own ships: we need our own navy, our own soldiers, our own land, our own king.”