Yiddish for Pirates(78)
As one Hebrew vowel said to the other, “Everyone’s a diacritic.”
I looked forward, scanning for islands, the Spanish, whales, the Fountain of Youth, and the future.
Instead, like a punchline, I saw the horizon.
Morning. From the south, a happy-go-lucky lebediker breeze had blown since the second half of the dogwatch. At three bells of the forenoon, it died away. In its place, a strong wind from the northeast, which caused us to take our studding-sails in and brace up.
“A cheer for this glad gust from a northern rump,” Jacome said. “Somewhere the skirts of a windgod have been blown to the sky.”
In a couple of hours we were bowling gloriously along, puffed-up sailors returning victorious and carefree after their corporeal ministrations in the cat house.
We were shpritzed with the cool, northeast trade freshening up the sea, and giving us as much as we could carry our topsails to. The bulvan wind blew strong and steady, keeping us upon a bowline, our course about north-north-west. Sometimes, they veered a little to the eastward, and we unfurled a mainmast studding-sail. For a day, we scudded well to northward.
Then the north wind left us.
Azoy gich?
So soon?
For several days after, we humbugged about in a whole gantseh megillah of weather. Occasionally a thunderstorm.
Then the wind left us entirely. Something we said? A brocheh we forgot? For weeks, little but hooch, kibitzing and the wind. Dreaming of the four elements, both succulent and moist: death, revenge, sex and feasting. Water everywhere and we almost dropped from drink. Also, dancing hornpipes as if we were lurching in heavy weather, Luigi del Piccolo trying to pipe up wind and diversion. In such ways we passed our time, watching for dolphins with their idiot savant rubber grins, and the silver sides of fish, a treasure for our supper.
“Watch for a star in the shadow of the crescent moon,” Shlomo said. “It means fair winds.”
“I’m told an albatross is a good sign,” Samuel said.
“So, nu,” said Isaac the Blind. “Watch for two.”
That night, during a deep amidship shlof, Moishe’s pale eyes flipped open. Often those on board had difficult sleep. Terror and keening. Night shouts. Muttering. Weeping. Shmuntsing with Neptune, a Golem, the tooth fairy, or Queen Esther.
“A dream,” Moishe called. “Islands. A channel between words and no words. Pages, wings, a tongue in my ear, a knife-edge, memory, a tongue. Then many of us die.” His eyes closed. Opened again. “Run,” he shouted. “Run!” Then he turned with a snort and slept until two bells o’ morning watch.
Weeks passed. There was neither land nor wind, fish nor albatrosses. I was the only bird near our gopherwood ship of foolhardy shmeckels.
Weeks. Perhaps if the hearty fortz of my gastrointestinally talented crewmates could be coordinated in a methane philharmonic, our sails might curve. Or the humid blasts from their cranky cursing. Water was scarce as popes in a mikveh. We’d eaten all meat fleysh but the stringy gams of Yids and the svelte feathered body of their Pollyglot familiar.
And frankly, I didn’t fancy me, not to mention their sun-tarred sinews.
There was some hardtack remaining. Soon we would have to cook and eat the leather of our boots.
Fernández, the painter of empty seas, wished only for the islands flocked outside his frames. “I’d takeh sell a thousand furlongs of sea for a bisl barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything. Adonai, follow your meshugeneh scheme if you must, but, ach, if you’re asking, I’d rather a dry death.”
And with plenty to drink.
He became delirious with thirst and tried to eat his paints. “This cold blue. This liquid green.” Paint dribbled from his mouth and coloured his white beard. Moishe and Yahíma tied him to a post in the hold.
Together the crew had made the decision to follow the map toward the bookish grave.
But it was Moishe that they cursed.
How he had led them into this desert of thirst, this windless wanderlessness. As if it had been only he who craved youth, memory loss and immortality.
“This map is poxy with evil eyes and farkakte demon scrawl,” Shlomo said.
“And nu,” said Samuel, “we’ll all be dead before we can live forever or get anywhere close to your poxy frantsevateh fountain.” He slurped a runnel of moisture found in the fold of the sail.
“We have a covenant of articles, you pus-bloated, maggot-toothed Spanish gonif. We do not horde plunder from others in our minyan,” Shlomo hissed. “Neither gold nor slaves. And especially not water.” He drew his sword, ready to turn Samuel’s body into its own tattered funeral shroud.
A marlinspike flash and Samuel twisted and pinned Shlomo’s sword hand to a barrel.
Yahíma, perched high in a mast, leapt from a yardarm, kicking in midair, her heel realigning Samuel’s jawbone and reintroducing his body to the concepts of down, horizontal, and darkness. She landed one foot nimbly on the deck, the other ready to make sauce of Samuel’s gullet. After wrenching the marlinspike from the cribbage board of Shlomo’s hand, she twisted his arm behind his back. Ham arrived with a rope and tied the perforated hand to its undamaged twin then bound their master to the mast. They lugged Samuel’s unconscious rat-sack body over the boards, then sat it up and bollard-hitched it to the mizzen.
It had been an oratorio of shraying, grunts and gevalts. Moishe, asleep in his hammock, arrived only in time for the curtain call. By then, the rest of the rubber-gorgled crew had gathered to twist their necks and gape.