Yiddish for Pirates(67)
Within the time one could croak a single kaddish, there remained not one villager alive in the square.
The young woman leapt onto the outside wall of the bohío and scrambled up onto the thatched roof. She would leave this earth behind.
In a fever, Pinzón’s men rushed through the door of the bohío and by slash and thrust began to murder all inside. The blood of an entire flock dispatched like floodwater. The girl, banshee-shrieking, emboldened those few villagers who could find their strength, to clamber up the wooden poles of the house. They birthed themselves through the thick thatch and onto the roof. From there they ascended into the trees and escaped into the canopy of leaves.
Moishe had collapsed in the square. Pulled by the tide of unhinged madness, he had drawn his sword.
Blood coloured its blade. He looked for a moment, mute with shock, as if it were a severed leg. His own. Wounded and without feeling.
“An evil spirit afflict my father. An evil spirit afflict my father’s father,” Moishe hissed.
A curse on where he came from. A curse on those who made him.
Then he dropped the sword and ran.
So, tell me, when did you first know you were a pirate?
Chapter Four
Days or weeks or years later. What does it matter? The tide had turned long ago and we were at sea.
“Feh,” I said and glided down to the mainmast.
I’d flown to the sky to sight what was hidden behind the horizon. “Ten four-pounders wait to pestle us into stew,” I announced.
Before long, a galleon loaded with guns and gold rose in the distance. A ship returning to Spain, plotzing with spoils. Our gobs would soon dribble with Pavlovian glee.
We made to haul up from the cove where we’d hove to, ready to broadreach our bowsprit right up the mamzers’ nether hawsehole.
L’chaim, you Spanish ladies!
“And the crew?” Moishe asked me. “How many sailors?”
“Thirty on deck. Several monks and priests …”
“God spare us from churchmen. When skewered, they make such a woeful noise.” This was Isaac the Blind, an old sailor.
“Ha-Shlossing-Shem spare m’ earwax the wheedling prayers and simpering pleas of clergy as their sickly bodies are pared from soul,” he went on. Isaac the Blind. Most of him was lost. And what remained was hardly seaworthy.
His single seeing eye was a broken and bloody egg. His one grizzled hand the offspring of a spider.
Tefillin slouched over his blind eye, the box like a patch. The stump of his left arm, too, was wrapped in tefillin, the leather phylactery strap holding a fragment of anchor to serve as his hand. He was whatever he had scrounged.
Like all of us.
Except for those whose lives seemed the scratchpad of fate.
Shlomo. His body was a book of scars. We’d seen him on the island of Jews where he had settled with those who’d sailed away from Spain. Together with Isaac and the others, he had then escaped that new Zion and become part of our crew.
The Isle of Jews had been no easy billet on a sleepy pinnace. When Rabbi Nalfimay died, another quickly stripped the old rebbe of his red fez and orange-gold robes and appointed himself rebbe of the island. Unlike Nalfimay, this Reb Salomo’s rule was grim and sadistic. When Shlomo questioned—when he asked for the passage in the law that explained a severity—Salomo had ordered Shlomo’s arms tied to a palm tree and the words of the Ten Commandments cut into his skin. The Hebrew had scarred, red pus-crusted serpents writhing across his body as if he been flogged with a whip whose grip, you could say, was nowhere yet whose lash was everywhere.
“Ach, it’s not so bad,” Shlomo laughed. “When I call my own name, I’m still the one who answers. I saw a Yid who’d been flayed alive by Salomo, and you’d hardly believe how much it altered him for the worse. Skin and bones he was. Skin there, bones over there.”
Our crew included an African—an Ethiope—whom we’d found floating in the sea, clinging to a barrel of olives. He was half pickled himself, his body like the wrinkled inside of a mouth.
We called him Ham, after Noah’s black son who came across his father ongeshnoshket, pants down, putz rampant. His father cursed him and his children. They were punished by the five-thousand-year enslavement of those races who were also beyond the pale.
We named him because he couldn’t speak. His tongue had been cut out. What we learned later, through a combination of shipboard sign language and writing, was that he had cut it from his own mouth so that he would not have to speak of what he had witnessed.
Though we came to know why Ham didn’t speak, we never knew what he wasn’t telling us.
Ach, but I remember Rabbi Daniel muttering that memory is useless if none of us remembers the same thing.
It was ten years since Moishe had left Martín Pinzón and his men at the village. For hours he’d run blind into the forest, then scrabbled up a tree into the dark canopy, panting, directionless, disoriented, and hungry. He had thrown his weapons and stripped most of his clothing as he sprinted in the heat. At nightfall he’d shloffed in the crook of a giant tree and I slept in the branches above him, listening always for danger.
Early morning and we found ourselves inside the boisterous mechanism of the forest. The flywheels of insects, the flap and flutter of birds. A hum, a purring, the footfalls of animals we didn’t know. Then bright feathers: I was surrounded by a crowd of parrots kibitzing in a language I did not understand.