Yahíma was fearless and knowledgeable. Strong, nimble and lithe. But she was no beauty, though her tawny skin was the colour of Amontillado sherry and there was much of it on display. And, emes, an alter kaker would say, Ze hot sheyneh Moishe v’Arondlach. She had nice little Moses and Aaronses. Was Moishe the right and I the left? This, through a rigorously scientific program of manual ministrations, Moishe appeared to be keen to discern.
It should be said though, at thirty, Moishe himself was no Yohan Smith. Sunburned and scabbed like an accidental lasagne. Greasy. A scar where a scimitar had taken off his left tsitskeh. And he was a hairy yatl with a beard that was a fecund habitat for organic lifeforms, both sentient and insensible, sticks, leaves, and the oily trails of flesh.
Though of course, in the sixteenth century, that was practically dapper.
Before Yahíma, Moishe would sometimes moon about like a lover in a sonnet. “Sometimes, when I sleep on the deck under the star-pimpled prishtshevateh punim sky,” he’d say, “the kitsl tickle of the breeze on my face, the rise and sigh of the waves, my cut gehakteh body aching like an Egyptian slave’s, I think of Sarah, my Shulamite. How beautiful she’d be. In another world, we’d wake, husband and wife in each other’s arms, early morning, the windows open, hooves on the cobbles, the scent of bread, voices in the alleys. We’d have been shtupping all night like the world was new, and now exhausted, we’d lie squeezed together like knishes, wondering what it might be like on the other side of the world. But, feh. That other world is here and where is Sarah? Lost. Murdered. Married off to someone else. A mother. And I’m left mumbling this sub-Solomon Song of Songs.”
Now there was Yahíma. She of the long legs. The loincloth not much bigger than a yarmulke. The sudden eyes and blinkless smile. She who could turn a spear into a lightning flash, skewer a fish before we’d even seen. Or push Moishe into the sea when his back was turned.
Companionship is 90 percent just showing up.
Moishe had grown parrotlike: a pragmatist with the yearning neshomeh soul of a hero.
Who else was on board? Jacome, whom we’d found at sea in a coracle, spiting and cursing, hauling on the paddle with only a cutlass, a jug of water, salt meat, and his own sweet song for a crew. Pinzón had been on an island and had wanted rid of the half-cocked blunderbuss, all bile and gunpowder, that was Jacome. The usual method was to maroon a sailor who was trouble, to set them on a desert island and leave them there. Gey gezunt. Be well. But since they were already on an island, he was set adrift, perhaps with the idea that he would maroon himself.
His potholed punim certainly became enpurpled as he shared his thoughts regarding Pinzón.
“Next I see him, I tie the whoreson’s drooping yardarm into knots,” he said. “I’ll weave a basket of his pizzle an’ I’ll fill it with crabs, black-flies and glass. An’ that’s tenderness besides what I’ll do with his sack.”
Certainly, his relations with his former employer had not remained cordial. “And look at these vittles here,” he said and held up something like a dried fig tied to a string around his neck. “His bo’sun’s ear.”
Fernández the painter sailed with us also. He’d run as Moishe had, though it was some years before they met again.
And life aboard ship?
Lord of the yardarms, king of sails, Moishe, our captain, stood beneath the broiling sun, the radiant blade of his cutlass pointing toward the blood-red cross on the Bermudan shore, the salty wind curling through his princely hair, his preternaturally intelligent African Grey riding faithful and shotgun on the chariot of his clavicle. The crew jigged quick about sheets and halyards, singing out shanties of grog and merriment, hornpipes and contentment.
Oy derry,
ach derry,
freylich derry,
may you not encounter an anchor when you sit down.
Is this what we did? Ach, go bang your head against an onion. The rebbes say that evil spawns when we cannot tell our stories. Or if we’re told to believe only in another’s.
We gathered together on the deck and spoke of what to do. A pirate ship is not the house of any lord, nor the soggy fiefdom of any aspirant pharoah. Any who would believe he transmuted into gems what he pushed through his dark star would be delivered over the gunwales to become the gristle-soother of sharks within a parsec of donning even a single supercilious air.
Or as Jacome put it, “Inside our guts, it’s the same worms that chaw through the same black soup.”
We had signed articles, each sailor inscribing his name or as much of it as he chose to remember. Spoils were divided equally, every man, woman, or parrot—black, white, tawny, or grey—entitled to the same share. Unless there were loss of limbs. The crew’s limbs. We expected some loss in our adversaries. A sailor who was injured and lost an arm or leg received additional money. Severance pay.