Yiddish for Pirates(76)

“So this chart is a treasure map, then,” Moishe said. “Not to the full set, but to a library of two.”

“So, nu,” I said. “Let’s hope when we arrive, these two are not already checked out.”





Chapter Six



The sun scudded above our black sails, glowering over a gloomy day of dark cumulus and wind. Most of the crew took to their hammocks while Fernández stood piloting at the wheel and splotching gaudy daubs of paint on a canvas propped against the binnacle. His many portraits were of the open sea. The frothy epaulets of its waves, the indecipherable blues of its depths. No faces, bodies, fish, or islands.

Moishe had a small cabin beneath the quarterdeck. Yahíma now joined him in a hammock where they intertwined limbs and faces and sighed. There’s a language more universal than music or than memories of first love: the shvitzy harmony of shuffling bodies, the sweet tart tingling of entangled tongues. A beast with two backs but a Shiva-blur of legs and arms and bellies. The ship swayed on the waves and Moishe and Yahíma played tsung in tsingl, the uvulation of tongues like the shmeckel-in-knish gyrations down below. The cantillation of the mind in the language of the body. Or the other way round. With all this topsy-tuches-over-turvy-tsitskehs shtupping who, except for the participants, knew which way was up or where the pole star was?

And then they slept.

Dreaming of dreaming what they were dreaming, as the mystics say.

Did I watch?

Who can watch another’s dreams or such conjugal hurly burly?

Ach, I knew where my end was, even if not where it belonged.

Except beneath me.

Which sweet parrot would be my dove? Man or maidel, African Grey or Red-spectacled Amazon? I’d loved many but didn’t have the words.

I lived on the border. Neither man nor bird.

Feh. I’m all talk. Words only.

And nu. So maybe I looked at Moishe and Yahíma. A bisl.

The sap-sweet shout, the free-falling yawp.

Hard to ignore. Like the inexorable arrival of a bad joke.

So.

Mrs. Cohen says, “Rabbi, help me. My parrot—from morning till night, it squawks, ‘I want to shmunts with anything that moves. Anything. Want to shtup? Want to shtup?’ Ach, it’s embarrassing.”

“Oy!” the rabbi exclaims. “That’s terrible. But listen, bring your parrot to shul. All day my parrot reads from his prayerbook and prays. He’ll teach your parrot and in no time, it’ll be praise and worship from morning ’til night.”

Next day, Mrs. Cohen arrives at the synagogue. The rabbi’s parrot is wearing a tiny yarmulke and davening feverishly from a little prayerbook.

Mrs. Cohen puts her parrot on the perch beside him. “I want to shmunts with anything that moves. Anything. Want to shtup? Want to shtup?” Mrs. Cohen’s parrot says.

The rabbi’s parrot immediately drops his prayerbook. “Baruch ata Adonai … Praise God. Praise God. My prayers have been answered!”

Distance embiggens the zeal of the heart, and far from everywhere, Yahíma and Moishe had fashioned a kind of heymishe homelike comfort in each other. A temporary autonomous zone.

With benefits.

Our ship of fools itself a shtetl beyond the Pale.

I’d shmuntsed with many birds myself since we’d first arrived here. Here—what I can’t help calling—ech, the words themselves speak—the Nu World. The contingent and continental nu. Nu, as in, “so … what will happen here?” A dreidel with “nu” written on each of its sides. Nu, a great miracle—here? So let’s see this miracle. This nu world.

So far, disease. Death. The mincing sword. The rupturing cannon. The destruction of Los Indios. In these few years, almost no Tainos remaining.

But I was speaking about yentsing.

There were many parrots.

Cockatoos, conures, macaws and Amazons.

Cherry-headed and crimson-bellied; maroon-faced and scaly naped; blue-throated, green-cheeked, and vinaceous; mealy, orange-winged, and lilac-crowned; yellow-shouldered and sulphur-breasted.

Nu, it was a world. And I was inside its varicoloured kaleidoscope.

So, not all were exactly my species, but my mother was far away, and besides, most were Pauls rather than Pollys. It began with surprise, then certainty. Across the Sundering Sea, I was purified with the water of separation.

I would rather this measure of shmuntsing heaven than any isle, save the sanctuary of Moishe’s shoulder.

Both of us transmuted in the alembic of the Caribbean.


Was a map required to guide us to the map that would guide us to the book that would guide us to what we were looking for?

That would be Talmudic.

Dreaming of dreaming what we were dreaming.

But the best place to hide something is right under one’s nose. Throw sniffers off the scent with another scent.

There was a chamberpot in the captain’s cabin with a false bottom.

A fool chamooleh may have a false bottom, too, for in his dreck there may be gold.

Fray Juan described the pot: tin with engravings of parrots in trees, and a handle like a tropical vine. It was beneath the captain’s bed, huddled coyly against the hullside. The tin parrots were idiot-eyed shmegegges. They’d clearly become meshugeh, having to bide their etched and immortal lives beneath the pungent ministrations of the empire’s pimply moon. The priest didn’t know how to open the secret compartment, so Jacome reached his hand into the pot’s piquant lagoon and felt around for a catch or lever.