Yiddish for Pirates Read Online Free Page B

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?
    It didn’t take long for Moishe to turn what was smashed into a dirty shiv and to spit on the niceties of moral details. After a man is condemned, how could it hurt if he steals?
    Moishe took to helping himself to comestible advances on his pay and to availing himself of the captain’s collection of maps. The maps were of distant places, of waters more like legends than actual destinations.
    And a little gold, a drink or two of the captain’s fine wine, a bit of meat serves to ease the pain and evens out what the world owes you. The captain was almost the same thing as the master—a horse cares little to whose cart it’s tied; besides, the captain would never notice the filching. There was so much and he was casual with his riches, unlike the master who kept a close eye.
    But, a few days later, the captain noticed.
    “Curse the hot piss of the devil himself!” he shouted as he stormed from his quarters. “I’ll have the skin of the man who did this for a sail.”
    Clearly he had a different conception of the equitable redistribution of resources, both savoury and liquid, for the wages of cabin boys.
    He ordered the crew on deck. “No Christian sailor would steal from his own captain,” he hissed, “for he fears the devil hereafter and the lash before. There shall be neither sup nor grog until the man who did this speaks of it to me, or his mate tells the tale.”

Chapter Three
    It was then that Moishe learned a new word, but not from me.
    The crew had little notion who was the gonif who’d been grazing on the captain’s wares, but when the afternoon’s rations were withheld they went sleuthing for the lost luxuries. Mostly the interrogation was accomplished by the fist, though there was some cross-examination effected by the knee. The crew searched each other’s measly lockers and bestowed smart zetses and slaps upon each other’s chins. Moishe searched also, or did his best to appear engaged in time-sensitive tasks of critical importance.
    But soon the cabin boys began considering Moishe’s hobbled and palsied recitation of newly acquired words. Un-Christian hoodoo incantations and organs-on-the-outside spells, they said. The Bible turned backwards. Harelipped prayers that led clubfooted only to sacrilege, damnation, and punishment both eternal and maritime. Naturally they were keen to avoid a messy tryst between their freckled backs and the captain’s daughter, and so little time passed before they attributed the theft to Moishe. Their attribution was, of course, perfectly sound, though they had not a snail’s leg of evidence on which to base their accusation. What was evidence to them?