Yiddish for Pirates(95)

He had no books, but instead a parrot in his pants. Azoy. A huge and colourful Macaw.

Love? Not “by any means necessary”—if the bird had feelings, he wasn’t saying. Apparently the mamzer mariner had entrousered the bird in order to have a little something to nosh on later.

We liberated the bird. He had but little thought or gaze for me but flew without hesitation to shore. Perhaps in later years, during times of reflection, there was a place for me amidst his forest of regrets and missed connections when he remembered the noble and shapely African Grey who saved him from the twilight-hued teeth and dawn-red mouth of the Spaniard.

Me: Brightly coloured Macaw down a Spaniard’s pants.

You: Bedraggled grey me-liberator adrift on the goy-tormented sea.

With one hand Moishe held fast to the mast. With the other, he held a blade up to the sailor who, like most sailors, could not swim, could not escape.

But vo den? What did we expect?

Like sailors in the ocean, we are surrounded by life, yet do we know how to survive it? Azoy.

So now we ask this quivering tsiterdiker cabinboy, “What happened to the books?”

Having dug up the chest and finding it filled with a dreck-sculpted triumvirate of little voodoo big machers, the Spanish had blundered into the maroon’s cave. How?

“We captured a shaman on another island. He read tracks that led to the cave and we found the books under some rocks. We carried them to our ship and began to sail away. But our ship began to sink. Somehow it had become full of holes.

“ ‘All hands below deck,’ our captain ordered. We thought we were to patch the hull and bail out the water, but the captain battened the hatches and locked us in. He shot holes in all the jolly boats except one. Then he took the books and the shaman, got into the jolly boat, and rowed away.

“We tried to staunch the leaks, but it was like trying to plug up a raincloud and the ship began to sink. We broke onto the deck with axes. Many leapt into the ocean and drowned.

“I climbed the mast. I could see the captain and the shaman. And a reed moving strangely across the water. Then a man surfaced near the captain’s gig. He spatchcocked the captain from behind then climbed aboard, took the books, and threw the captain’s body into the sea. Then he had the shaman continue to row.”

Moishe took the sword from the sailor’s gorgl, untied a red sash from around his own waist, and offered it to the rattled tsedreyter mariner.

As if his death would not be colourful enough.

But Moishe would row our coracle and tow the quivering trawl of the sailor behind us.

Where would we sail? Into the “And-then-what-happened.” Azoy. Where was that? The man, the shaman, and the books couldn’t just keep rowing. Sha. Did they think they could just Noah it across the ocean in a pea-green shifl and find eternal life? They must have made for the island. We’d catch them.

Then we’d devise some Crusoe plan to build a boat out of logs, chutzpah, chazerai and tree sap, and be gone.

And live forever.

Shoyn tsayt! It’s about time.





Chapter Eight



We travelled as far up and down as to and fro—for the waves rose and fell as if we were on horseback. Moishe made repeated attempts to rein in our filly, to bring her to sand, but the wind rippled in the long leaves of the palms and pulled us according to its own fickle whim. We went around a point of the island and found ourselves before the opening to a long cove.

“Well blow my briny petseleh with an onion,” Moishe said. “Unless my eyes be lying shysters yabbering duplicitous yarns, there anchored in that cove is the Gopherwood Shmeckel.”

And there it was, our freylecheh flag flying high above our ship, snug and intact in turquoise waters. And there were sailors on board. At least two. One had colourful feathers fireworking from his kop.

Another feather in the cap of holocaust haberdashery plucked from the bright tails of birds.

This must be the shaman and the strange underwater bulvan who made naseh arbet—homicidal wet work—of the Spanish captain. We paddled our shifl abaft of the Shmeckel, hoping to remain undetected, else an arquebus make new orifices through which we might suffer.

We were able to nestle in the shadows beneath the taffrail unnoticed and preparing to board.

Then:

“You putz-faced elf-dreck. You couldn’t haul flowers from your scupper hole if it were springtime in your pants.”

The unmistakeable voice of Jacome el Rico. Speaking to the shaman. As was his custom, he was fostering intercultural relations with all the delicacy and sensitivity of a pitchfork.

In the eye.

Moishe called to him. “Gonif! You only live because the sharks couldn’t keep you down and breched up your festering meiskeit fleysh.”

There was much joy in our reunion. Also rum, good nosh, and catching up.

“I should wait with you like a putz to be blitzned by Spanish cannonballs? So, I jumped ship and swam to shore. Then when the Spanish were close, I made a breathing tube of hollow reeds, tied stones to my feet, walked the seafloor. Then I shtupped the cutlass between the hull’s wale planks and made holes.”

“There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the outside gets in,” Moishe said.

“And bilgewater,” I said.

“It was my good mazel I found the captain and the shaman skiff-scarpering with the books as the ship sank,” he said. “Then we rowed to the Gopherwood Shmeckel and sailed it into the cove. I chained this alter kaker to the mainmast just in case, but kept him well fed and in drink.”