Yiddish for Pirates(7)

The dog’s watch bells rang.

As if conjured from the silken sleeve of the duplicitous ocean, three ships appeared close behind, moving quickly. They flew the red St. George’s cross.

A shout from the crow’s nest. “Caravels. At seven o’ the clock.”

The master and the captain appeared on deck.

“English, I’s reckon,” the mate drawled. “They fly the Genoese ensign and pay the doge for the privilege.”

“Unless in truth they hail from Genoa,” the captain said.

“Then curse their devilled privates fo’ it’s like then they be privateers.” All able-bodied seamen—and Moishe, the Cain-bodied—were called to prepare. The ship’s few four-pounders were rolled by the gunners into position. The powder was readied in the orlop. The crew made busy adjusting sails and preparing smaller arms.

Before long, the caravels were arrayed broadside and close. Their guns fired into rigging and across decks.

Gevalt. They were Genoese. It wasn’t to be a bucolic romp with falsely dressed sheep. We’d soon be muttoned and shtupped with holes.

I flew to up to the foremast spar, hoping to get above the meshugas like an eagle above a storm.

But the thunder and flash soon rose to surround me. I looked down on a sea-borne village on fire, seeing nothing but the flicker of flame amidst billows of black smoke, the booming blasts of the guns.

Shouting. Movement. Fire. The boys running with powder. Men loading muskets. Cannons filled with shot and powder. A call of “clear,” then the lit fuse and the frame-shaking blast. The crack as the cannonballs splintered both ship and man.

Screaming. Chaos. Explosion.

Repeat.

I could not find Moishe in the tumult.

A Genoese ship rammed against us.

Gezunterhayt. Let us both die in good health. See if I care.

A massive crack and the foremast below me was rampiked as if by lightning. A forest fire on the ocean. The sails were aflame. My goose—whatever part of a parrot that is—was soon to be cooked.

I’d not be poultry nor part of any recipe.

Death waits for no man, and neither would I.

I called, “Gey kakn afn yam”—“go shit on the ocean,” the traditional curse of the irate at sea—and then took to the air.

Here’s hoping we were near shore.





Chapter Six



This is what I know of seagulls: It is not “where there’s a will there’s a way,” but rather “where one finds seagulls one finds shore.”

Exhaustion had taken flight from my wings, but as I struggled on I saw below me a severed piece of ship’s plank, floating in the waves. I fell from the sky and sought respite and safe harbour, a smoke-damaged surfer, riding in to the sand.

It was night.

I hoped for seagulls.





Seagulls.

My idiot brothers. Squawking shlemiels farshraying the sky. The Keystone Kops of the air. If only they were silent.

They can no more think than a brick could weave water into rope.

A story. Once there was a meshugener who was so brainless he thought he needed a new brain. On the way to the market he met a merchant who offered him the choice of three bird brains he had for sale. “It’s true that they’re not very big, but that’s good: they’re very portable, and not too heavy so they won’t strain the neck,” he said.

“Great,” said the brainless one. “How much?”

“Five kopecs, fifty kopecs, and five hundred kopecs.”

“They all look the same,” the meshugener said. “Why such different prices?”

“The first is the brain of a nightingale. Good singer, but not too smart. The second belonged to a parrot. Very intelligent, spoke six languages.”

“And the last?”

“A seagull’s. The most expensive.”

“I didn’t know that seagulls were that clever.”

“They’re not. The brain’s never been used.”





By morning there were seagulls.

The scene: me, a farmisht flotilla of broken wood, seagulls kvetching moronically above me, and a bedraggled youth, draped like seaweed across the remains of half a barrel.

Moishe.

He’d survived, keneynehoreh.

Good thing I’d been there for him.

But as far as I could determine, given the uncooperative chawing of the waves, the youthful jetsam beside me was tall, red-haired, and strong. Compared to him, Moishe was short, svelte as prayerbook paper, and with hair black and curly as the broadloom that had—in honour of his Bar Mitzvah—sprouted above his shvants.

The buoyant roytkop was clutching a bundle of rolled papers as if they were the things keeping him afloat and not the barrel.

We were churned by the sea, but always the tide pulled us as certainly as lust or regret. It concluded our passage by beaching us without comment or ceremony but tossing us blanched and exhausted on the soft sand. The red-haired sheygets had collapsed with half of himself still in the sea. He’d crawled just enough to ensure his rolled charts were beyond the dissolute criticism of the lapping waves.

I flew low and landed on a sodden seaweed-veiled timber. Around me, the sand was stippled with human, avian, and nautical debris. The distinction was not entirely clear.