Yiddish for Pirates(71)

“If I were you,” Moishe began, “and perhaps you do see yourself in the fine silver brocade of this vest, the insouciant plenty of these silken sleeves?” Moishe displayed his newly acquired wardrobe before the captain who had good reason to recognize them. They were still warm from the heat of his body.

“So if you were me, then,” Moishe said, “what would I do with you?”

The captain’s frothing oaths suggested that he was not ready for such jocularities.

Time, they say, prepares one for humour. Perhaps there would be time for the captain to laugh again.

“So,” Moishe said. “You guide us toward Columbus, Pinzón, and the next holdful of gold, the routes of which you doubtless know, and I grant your passage toward old age. Otherwise, you shall have brisk crossing to St. Peter or the bile-hearted devil himself in accordance with how Captain Yahweh has set your sails.”

“Parasite,” the captain said. “You are a pestilence well known to Spain. I forfeit my life for God, His pope, my sovereigns.”

“Perhaps,” Moishe said. “But know that you surrender not one life but two. Your son …”

Captain Rodriguez’s face paled and, for a moment, he examined his bootless feet. Finally: “I understand,” he said quietly. “Have you a son?”

“I know only my parents’ son,” Moishe said.

“Just so,” the captain said. “So you understand a parent’s love?”

“Well enough to thank you for guiding us wherever we so wish.”

We hove our anchor up. The captive captain dejectedly directing a course, we set our sails, ran away from the bay, and bore down the coast again for Hispaniola. As we were now going to leeward, we had a fair wind and plenty of it. As I stood on the binnacle it felt as if I were flying, my imaginary beytsim kitseled by the wind. Sometimes a puff of nothing is enough.

Rodriguez, father and son, were able to roam the deck without manacles for the captain’s son was collateral.

“He’ll be o’er the gunwales like a hogshead o’ piss—just before ye yourself be tossed, if ye think to sink us with treachery,” Jacome said.

They did not join us as we kicked and palsied to the saltarellos of our new cooper’s fife and drum. A delicate man with a moustache like the minge of a squirrel, Luigi del Piccolo had a lively repertory of estampies, courantes, and voltas, much needed sustenance when at sea or between pillage. Such music gave us courage, consolation, and was a convivial badhkin companion far from shore.

At length we were sated by our juddering freylich prancing and so plonked our hintns down onto the deck. The sails were set, the sheets tied, and Isaac the Blind was at the helm.

So we rested.

Fernández lay stretched against the bulwarks and looked east to where all but Yahíma were born.

“I had a brother,” he said. “In Cadiz. Also a painter. Taken by the Inquisition. He had three sons. Vilde chayes, all three. Wild as waves. By now they must be bearded and tall. If they were spared.”

Samuel passed out a few cups of rum. “My parents,” he said. “In Portugal. After the expulsion. Then expelled again. They disappeared.”

Ham pointed to his temple then with a resigned wave, evaporated all knowledge. He knew nothing of his parents’ fate or would rather have his memories fade into sky.

“I, too, know nothing,” Shlomo said from the wheel. “Bupkes. We were separated when I was a child.”

Yahíma’s eyes teared, remembering her parents. They had been among the first slain in the bohío and she had not known to protect them.

We shlemiels aboard spoke many languages, though Yiddish was our lingua franca. Moishe and I had taught the others. The tart sweetness of chopped liver, the spicebox tingle in the nose.

We would not speak the language of their catarrhic majesties, the Church, its words and its people. We couldn’t wash the stink from those farkakte gatkes.

And so we kibitzed in mamaloshen.

Yiddish.

The perfect language for pirates, its words raggletag plundered and refitted from other times and tongues. As the Pirate Bey says, “Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them.”

So we talked in Yiddish.

We remembered, even difficult things.

Which reminds me. There was this sailor, Yankeleh.

He leaves a pair of pants to be repaired baym shnayder—at the tailor’s. After seven years, now covered in scars and tattoos, he returns to pick up his pants.

They weren’t ready.

“Gevalt!” Yankeleh exclaims. “It only took Adonai himself seven days to make the world. You’ve had seven years!”

“What’s to say, now that the world is done?” the tailor replies. “So, nu, your pants are a tragedy … but at least we can talk about them.”

What could I say about Africa, of my pinfeather days and family? This ship and its crew, now baptized buccaneer, were my shtetl, my neighbours, a kind of family. These outsiders to outsiders here in the New World.

But Aaron, I said to myself. Don’t be a putz.

You’re a bird.

I was an outsider to all but Moishe.

And even then.


The captured Captain Rodriguez was tasked with guiding us toward a Spanish convoy of ships. He told us it would be unprotected, for what seaborne bandits roamed this distant side of the Ocean Sea?