Ech. A parrot is a one-person bird. I saw Moishe and the boychik was soon imprinted like words in indelible ink on the farkakteh page of my brain. Who decides such a thing? Like waking up the morning after shoreleave with an anchor tattooed across your hiney, it isn’t, emes, exactly the result of choice. But I needed to be needed and this poor shnook needed me.
His pleasant demeanour and obvious intelligence attracted the attention not only of the master but of the captain, who took a shine to him, would take him under his wing, though not parrot-permanently as I did. He soon had him managing that part of the ship’s stores that were for his private use. Guns, gold, dainties, drink and good meat. If the master’s stores were Versailles, the captain’s were the Vatican. Moishe kept them neat as a marlinspike, free from vermin, insects, and the salt scum that encrusted everything aboard ship.
“Yes sir, very good, sir,” he’d say.
He knew on which side the holy toast is buttered. Farshteyst?
Moishe was kept busy running between the captain, the master, and his other responsibilities. The crew began, if not to trust him, then at least increasingly to regard him as one of them. Mostly they left him to his own devices, dedicated to appearing occupied while diligently avoiding their own chores. Occasionally they’d call for him to help haul on a halyard, or throw him a broom when they were swabbing the deck.
“Aye, lad, it’s the only thing we sailors wash,” they’d laugh.
He’d gather round for rum, stand as an equal in surly and superstitious congregation for Sunday prayer, and share the inscrutable mystery of galley stew, though he’d leave what he was able to identify as pork. He’d station himself nearby to listen to the long ramble of their narratives or mewl and warble soprano with their morbid tavern-hacking choir on the choruses of their songs, whether he understood them or not.
I wish I was back in my native land
Heave away! Haul away!
Full of pox, and fleas, and thieves, and sand
Heave away! Haul away, home.
Sometimes, as Moishe stood middle watch between dusk and dawn, insomniac sailors, their gigs adrift with drink, staggered onto deck and confided their tsuris woes to him. They were grown men, their brains and skins turned to leather by years out on the open sea, and Moishe was only a boy, his beard barely more than the nub of pinfeathers on his girly skin. Still, though he knew little but his native tongue, he knew the universal language of the nod, of the hmm.
And though each day his Yiddishkayt became increasingly submerged, thanks to a certain mensch of a parrot and his lexiconjury, the other cabin boys kept to themselves, not trusting Moishe and the farkakteh way he spoke. Association with him, they had surmised, would turn out to be a liability. They were, after all, ambitious young lads and engaged in professional networking with those both before and behind the mast, hoping to seek advancement in their chosen vocation.
Was Moishe happy to have finally left the firm land?
Is milk happy coming out of a mother’s tsitskeh?
The sea, Moishe exulted. I am finally at sea.
Take a small, dark shtetl. Paint it with the swirling blue and foamy white of the moving waves, the endless blue and curly white of clouds and sky. Hold the edges like a sheet and toss it up and down like a child’s game, the breezes flapping above you, the gust blowing the tang of salt across your face. Your house, the rag-and-bones path of flesh and blood, ever hopeful as it floats toward the beckoning horizon, free from the gravity of ground. To be at sea is to know vastness, to understand the flight of clouds, the reach of the stars and of invention. He was riding the expanding ripples of God’s great cannonball. Moishe felt as if he were travelling in every direction at once, each direction away from home, toward story.
It didn’t take long for the milk to sour.
It was an afternoon of little wind and the crew, having had their food and drink, were becalmed. Moishe shloffed in his hammock below deck, dreaming maps. I had flown up to a spar, my own kind of crow’s nest. In the still air, his master’s voice rose, gramophonic, clear to me, though he was speaking low to an old sea dog on the fo’c’s’le. I flew down into his cabin and bit Moishe’s ear.
“Gey avek,” he moaned. “Get out of here.”
“Listen,” I said. “Listen.” He needed to hear what the master was saying.
“The wits and limbs of my little Hebrew are keen, aye they are,” the master was saying. “I’s reckon I be able to trade him for a few bright pennies on the wharf. That and his wages will add a little fat to my sack and me golden balls’ll swab the deck as I walk.”
The taller the prophet, the greater the fracture of the falling tablets.
“Gonif,” Moishe cursed. He was ready to swab the deck with the master’s beytsim all right, but he knew there was nothing he could do. He’d be swinging from a gibbet, or hacked into lobscouse if he tried anything.
So, nu, what do you do when everything’s farkakte?