Yiddish for Pirates(5)

It didn’t take long for the milk to sour.

It was an afternoon of little wind and the crew, having had their food and drink, were becalmed. Moishe shloffed in his hammock below deck, dreaming maps. I had flown up to a spar, my own kind of crow’s nest. In the still air, his master’s voice rose, gramophonic, clear to me, though he was speaking low to an old sea dog on the fo’c’s’le. I flew down into his cabin and bit Moishe’s ear.

“Gey avek,” he moaned. “Get out of here.”

“Listen,” I said. “Listen.” He needed to hear what the master was saying.

“The wits and limbs of my little Hebrew are keen, aye they are,” the master was saying. “I’s reckon I be able to trade him for a few bright pennies on the wharf. That and his wages will add a little fat to my sack and me golden balls’ll swab the deck as I walk.”

The taller the prophet, the greater the fracture of the falling tablets.

“Gonif,” Moishe cursed. He was ready to swab the deck with the master’s beytsim all right, but he knew there was nothing he could do. He’d be swinging from a gibbet, or hacked into lobscouse if he tried anything.

So, nu, what do you do when everything’s farkakte?

It didn’t take long for Moishe to turn what was smashed into a dirty shiv and to spit on the niceties of moral details. After a man is condemned, how could it hurt if he steals?

Moishe took to helping himself to comestible advances on his pay and to availing himself of the captain’s collection of maps. The maps were of distant places, of waters more like legends than actual destinations.

And a little gold, a drink or two of the captain’s fine wine, a bit of meat serves to ease the pain and evens out what the world owes you. The captain was almost the same thing as the master—a horse cares little to whose cart it’s tied; besides, the captain would never notice the filching. There was so much and he was casual with his riches, unlike the master who kept a close eye.

But, a few days later, the captain noticed.

“Curse the hot piss of the devil himself!” he shouted as he stormed from his quarters. “I’ll have the skin of the man who did this for a sail.”

Clearly he had a different conception of the equitable redistribution of resources, both savoury and liquid, for the wages of cabin boys.

He ordered the crew on deck. “No Christian sailor would steal from his own captain,” he hissed, “for he fears the devil hereafter and the lash before. There shall be neither sup nor grog until the man who did this speaks of it to me, or his mate tells the tale.”





Chapter Three



It was then that Moishe learned a new word, but not from me.

The crew had little notion who was the gonif who’d been grazing on the captain’s wares, but when the afternoon’s rations were withheld they went sleuthing for the lost luxuries. Mostly the interrogation was accomplished by the fist, though there was some cross-examination effected by the knee. The crew searched each other’s measly lockers and bestowed smart zetses and slaps upon each other’s chins. Moishe searched also, or did his best to appear engaged in time-sensitive tasks of critical importance.

But soon the cabin boys began considering Moishe’s hobbled and palsied recitation of newly acquired words. Un-Christian hoodoo incantations and organs-on-the-outside spells, they said. The Bible turned backwards. Harelipped prayers that led clubfooted only to sacrilege, damnation, and punishment both eternal and maritime. Naturally they were keen to avoid a messy tryst between their freckled backs and the captain’s daughter, and so little time passed before they attributed the theft to Moishe. Their attribution was, of course, perfectly sound, though they had not a snail’s leg of evidence on which to base their accusation. What was evidence to them? Bupkes. So, nu, they should wait two hundred years for all good sailors to be apprised of the Enlightenment, the scientific method?

“Heretic,” they called him, and the captain, betrayed by this strange boy whom he’d planned to help, invoked the Inquisition.

The Inquisition. That Swiss Army–knife trump card of a final solution.

You’re only the same until you’re different.

Moishe’s spice-rich accent. His un-Christian curses. His porklessness. Not that it had been his intention to assume a role as anything but Jew.

Differently Christianed. Jesusly challenged.

“You, my greedy-fingered lad, will burn at the stake the day we arrive in port. And then we’ll offer your ashes the opportunity to repent.” The captain’s eyes like two fires, condemning him to hell.

When the going gets tough, the goyim get tough, too.

There was no escape. In the cold sea it would be water instead of fire that would steal the breath of life from his mortal body. He pled with the captain to spare him, wailing and protesting his youth.

“Common thievery, and from the captain, no less. The crew has spoken of your ungodly babbling, your pagan psalms. You have recited our Gospel with a forked and goat-footed tongue. You gather with us to pray yet you’ll not eat pork. This is a Christian ship and there shall be no heresy. If Jew you ever were, your Hebrew soul was flayed to dust by demons, and now no spirit but the devil takes residence in your bones,” the captain said.

Religion a trump card in a game where the captain is king.

“What shall I do?” Moishe wailed later as he lay in his bunk.