Yiddish for Pirates(88)

The ocean was thus carried below-deck, hand to hand, bucket by bucket, and so quelled the fire.

“Jacome and Trachim, take the charred barrels above-deck, break out the pork, and pitch the smouldering staves overboard.”

Clothed in billows, Moishe stood amidship and became captain once again. A captain: the grammarian of ships.

His orders brought order and dinner to the deck. The fire extinguished, the crew gathered for a seder of braised pork, no longer slaves of danger and flame. Moishe, eschewing the treyf, opted for lentils on a trencher of cornbread matzoh.

Moishe did not tell the crew that he started the fire, preferring to leave mythic his sudden appearance in a cloud high above them. It seems we like our leaders to have something wondrous, strange and slightly troubling from their past on their résumé.

Isaac. Samuel. Yahíma. Ham. Shlomo. Jacome. Moishe and me. Gathered amidship around one gap-staved barrel. Yankel, Trachim, others—gathered around another.

Moishe looking into Yahíma’s eyes.

The horizon.

And then what happens?

The old love in the arms of the new.

But before that, Samuel launched into: “Everything is not what it seems. Our ship is a new found land. Let me tell you the whole megillah.”

His megillah, not: “Ach, so sorry—es tut mir bang—we mutinied and acted as shochet butcher on you, marlinspiking your jugular into a Trevi fountain.”

Instead, a spiel about a battle.

Shlomo: “We spied the pennant of Spain rising from the sea and we readied for the bubo-poxed bulvans. When we smelled the bilgey rancour of their murderous Spanish breath, I called ‘Fire,’ and we thrust our cannons through the ports and lit the fuses, and soon cannonballs crashed through the bow-bulwarks of the Spanish Reale, and raked across its deck. The surprised souls of many Spanish mariners faded as do visions of baizemer bosoms fade when we wake from a dream.”

“But the guns of the Reale did not reply,” Shlomo said. “Its bow, towering over the forecastle of our ship—let’s call it Mamaloshen’s Revenge—came through the smoke cloud and struck us with a grinding crash. It dug deep, and we were so farmisht we thought we were sinking.”

“Our ship—maybe we should name it the New World Broygez—rebounded from the shock,” Samuel said. “We came alongside the Reale and we were like behemoths grappling and groping yardarms, rigging and masts. Then the hand-to-hand fighting began.”

“Hand-to-hand?” Jacome said. “More like sword-edge to brainpan. Arquebus to thorax. Fingertip to eyehole. Though my fist followed my pike into the bo’sun’s kidneys and filleted his spine so as he was gimped and could but move like a man o’ war out of water.”

“So,” Samuel said. “We vanquished the Spanish in this chutzpenik manner just as our carrack began to plunge into the sea. We killed every one of them and just had time to retrieve our maps, our books, and some other plunder as our ship sank below the waves.

“You stand aboard The Yellow Star. The Kike’s Revenge. The Golem of the Sea. We are in exile even from our own ship. And we don’t even know what to call it. But, as with all Jews, wherever we put our yarmulke is our home. And so what if our home is usually balding? It’s amazing what they can do with the desert nowadays. This ship? It’s our old ship. Just newer.

“Across this new sea, we have avenged the Jews, Los Indios, and Africans with the deaths of these Christ-Colombizing Spanish. We lanced their chazer pig skinsacks to release their pustular souls to the ether where we hope they will be cauterized by stars.”

“What else?” Isaac said, “We should wait for Elohim to cook them with lightning?”

“Takeh. That know-it-all sky-mucking maven?” Jacome said. “He’s too busy swinging his twenty-two dimensional putz around some infinite Seraglio.”

“Oy,” Shlomo said. “The ineffable effing the ineffable.”

“What kind of meshugener are you?” said Samuel. “The rabbis say like Cipangu or Cathay, He’s just over the next horizon.”

Jacome: “And in the meantime, we bump into a gantseh megillah of a continent of immoveable dirt.”

“Nu,” Isaac said. “He’s the eternal converso, always dressed up in somewhere else.”

“That’s eppes a God?” Yahíma said. “My God would have my eyes shoot flame and my body glow with the warm honey of sex and eternal youth. And He’d make sure my life was catered.”

“Fire, sex and food we can get you, yingeleh. And if the map isn’t a shyster’s sham, we can get you eternal youth, too.”

“Feh. I don’t have time to wait for life everlasting,” Jacome said. “It’s enough to have the sound of sword going through bone. And that look in their eyes.” He chewed into another mouthful of pork. “If only Spaniards were kosher, I’d be happy getting fat.”

“And the gold,” Samuel said. “Makes my guts shake and my eyes swell. If only there were a place to spend it.”

“What hoo-hah, you chazer,” Shlomo said. “As the mystics say, its value is in the size of what isn’t there: think of what’s not in the Spanish coffers.”

“Shlimazl. Think of what’s not between your oysgedarteh stick-insect legs,” Jacome said. “Just a dribbling thimble.”