Yiddish for Pirates(54)

Over the entire ship, a kind of exhalation as the lamden old salts felt, once again, the wind blowing against their abraded yardang faces. As the mariners returned to marinating.

First, the Santa María; then, like ducklings in our wake, the Ni?a and the Pinta. We had leapt out the window of Europe. We had no choice but to fly or return with a sorry tale between our legs.

I flew.

Moishe was standing at the binnacle overturning an hourglass. It had to be tipped every quarter hour, like a shikker’s hooch-filled flask.

At sea, time isn’t money. It’s position. Longitude and the reconciliation of the sun, stars, and the hour depend on these buxom jars of slipping sand.

It’s important to know where you are, when you’re nowhere.

Moishe looked east.

“I was thinking about Sarah and the others,” he said. “We’re sailing away from Spain. But we’re sailing for Spain, also. For their execrable yemach-shmom Majesties and the stinking black Holy Orifice and Torquemada.”

“Ptuh, ptuh, ptuh,” I said at the mention of the name. And you should know, psittacine spitting, even when its muse is contempt, requires some practice.

“I don’t want to be a nochshlepper,” Moishe said. “A hanger-on. Whatever we find on the other side of this Ocean Sea, whether it’s a cursed farsholtn or promised land, I want it to help—not the King and Queen and their Church—but those ground beneath their feet. We Yids have often seen the tread of those boots coming down.”

The sand had run out of the top of the hourglass and so Moishe inverted it. Like many things, its name didn’t reflect what it was. Hourglass. Feh. It only measured a blaychik sickly quarter of an hour.

I could say something about how each individual sandgrain makes a difference.

Just think how it feels when one gets in your shorts.

But the bo’sun rang the bell and it was time for a nosh in the mess. I hoped for a bisl seed and a snootful of wine, but emes, there are many who wait for the Messiah also.





Chapter Nine



It had been more than a month since we’d left Spain. We’d had a brief sojourn on Gomera in the Canary Islands to take on more supplies—beans, goat cheese, salted beef and pork, salt cod, water, wine, garlic, olive oil, almonds, chick peas and hardtack—and to refit the lateen-rigged Ni?a with square sails. Then we were becalmed offshore for a few days. And now we were in the middle of nowhere.

Where was that?

Exactly.

To know if you’re in the middle, you need to be able to tell where nowhere ends, assuming you still remember where it began. This much we knew: we were, as Dante, il Poeta, wrote, Nel mezzo del cammin, except the dark wood we were in the middle of was water.

We had bobbed for weeks along the deserted surface of the Ocean Sea, the closest terra firma a few miles straight down, though I wouldn’t want to visit. It would be no party, poison jellyfish the only balloons, black brine the only wine. A watery firmament. Cold. Dark. Only the faint preternatural neshomeh glow of bioluminescent tentacles and urine-coloured deep-sea gerkins, jaundiced-faced death-creatures-without-faces floating around in eternal midnight. The cellar-sand of the Ocean Sea miles below whales and the secret Leviathans of the deep, the wet underside of the waves where life wears its soul on the outside.

Feh.

With no land in sight, our minds fill with cabin-fever dreams and create restless sandcastles-in-the-air mirages of thought and word.

And the crew fights, and shtups, and gambles.

And kvetches about Columbus and his futile westward tilting.

Moishe lay against a barrel amidships. I’d thought of what was below us, and having plumbed that subject dry, I dreamed of beautiful birds amourously cooing at us, the sound like wingbeats and the beach-fall of waves.

“So,” Moishe began, his eyes closed. He was almost speaking to himself, “Imagine the ship gets tsekrochn—worn out—and the crew must replace the shmutzik planks one by one—though where we’d get the wood out here, ver veyst—who knows? After awhile, they’ve replaced every klots and nail with another. Is it the same ship or a different one? We’d still be on board, half-asleep against this barrel, kibitzing. But it’d be a different barrel and a different deck. And what if someone took the gantseh pile of wood and made another ship out of it? Is that our ship or a different one?”

“Depends. Which ship is closer to land?” I said.

“And what if we—or sailors not yet born,” Moishe said, “continued to replace the planks? They could replace them an infinite number of times and the ship would last forever.”

“But we’d still be gone. What’s the use of an eternal hat if the head is dead?”

“My father said we’re made of tiny specks and each of these specks changes over a lifetime. Our hair when it’s shorn keeps growing, our skin when it’s cut, so why shouldn’t the rest of our bodies? But we’re still ourselves. A shtetl is always a shtetl even if the people change.”

“So there’s a bisl of me scattered here and there?”

“And tiny bits of shmutz from other people all over you.”

“Now I could use a bath.”

“It’s the same with conversos.”

“They need no bath. Baptism was enough.”

“No, shlemiel, how many planks can you replace and still be yourself?”