Yiddish for Pirates(44)

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, Do?a 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.”