Yiddish for Pirates (40 page)

This was finding a needle in a pine forest.

I flew above the forest canopy. The two cheeks of the island rose round and verdant. Between the two, a valley. A river quick with rapids and waterfalls.

Is the river the movement or the water? Is the story the words or what happens?

Without either one—nu—no river.

In the distance, several trees rose above the others, bodies both dark and colourful emerging from the tangle of its branches.

I saw no sign of our ship. The Spanish had either taken it and sailed away, or sank it.

I flew back into the forest and found my captain’s shoulder. Which tree marked the yud under which the books would be found?

In which direction would we travel?

Forward. We could revise that later.

Shlomo walked before us, chopping through the brush with a machete-like blade. We trudged inside the forest’s closed and clammy hand.

Again, the dark shape through the woods and Moishe raised his musket and fired. The forest echoed with the shot. A Gotenyu wail and then the
fshhht
of an arrow.

“Gevalt,” Shlomo cried. And he fell, his shoulder punctured. The arrow had stuck him through the scar of the “Thou shalt not kill” commandment cut across his chest. Around the rough wood shaft, a tsitseh of blood began to thread down his side.

“So that settles it,” Samuel said. “Man, not animal.”

“But Spanish?” Luigi del Piccolo said. “With bow and arrow?”

“No matter who or what makes you bleed, the blood is still red,” Moishe said.

“If your blood is red,” Samuel said.

“Azoy, I’m not looking to have this confirmed,” Moishe said. “And maybe we should stop so much of it spilling from Shlomo.” He made a bandage from his damp clothes and bound the shoulder.

Two of the remaining able-bodied—Trachim and Yankel—helped him up and we continued toward the tree.

We shlepped on, our flesh made torpid in the heat as if replaced by a ballast of sand. The forest was a shvitz—a steambath—so thick, heavy and sluggish was the air. At this point, treasure hunting was 1 percent slogging and 99 percent perspiration.

We leaked with heat.

Ach. What am I saying? What do I know from shvitzing?

Leave it to those who have sweat glands. I panted like a dog and fanned my wings.

Our less-than-a-minyan trudged on through several grim hours. There was no joy in the honeyed shafts of light that penetrated the dark canopy. Only the gloom of overshadowed distances. From time to time, Shlomo moaned. It wasn’t kvetching, but rather pain weeping from his damaged body. We felt ourselves bewitched, severed from everything
we had once known—somewhere, far away, in another existence perhaps. Nu, maybe the existence where we weren’t spooked.

What we remembered returned to us with the shapeless unrest of a dream, a dull and unsettling ache. We shlepped through this strange green world of unfamiliar plants and silence. Yet this stillness did not resemble peace, but the beyzeh evil redaction of an implacable force brooding over a retenish inscrutable intention.

We had thus proceeded for about half a mile and were approaching the brow of a plateau when Luigi del Piccolo, who had already ascended, began to shriek and kvitch. “Ayyy …”

Surely scorpions sawed his nuts while crabs made hand-shadows in his alimentary canal.

The others began to run in his direction.

“He can’t ’a found the treasure,” Samuel said, hurrying past us from the right, “for that’s still a shlepp past the tree, and the tree is surely a good plod yet.”

Indeed, as Moishe and I found when we reached the spot, it was something very different. At the foot of a big pine veined in creeping vines that had partly lifted some of the smaller bones, there was a human skeleton, with a few shmatte-shreds still clinging to its ribs.

“Once, he was a sailor,” Samuel said, examining the rags. “Nu, this is good sea-cloth.”

“Azoy,” Moishe said. “Who were you expecting? Meshiech—the Messiah—maybe?”

“B-b-but what sort of a way is that for bones to lie?” Luigi said, still tzitering trembling in fear. “It’s unnatural.”

And nu, indeed, it was uncanny: but for some disarray (the work, perhaps, of the creatures that had noshed upon him or of the vines that had gradually wormed through his bones) the poor shlepper lay perfectly straight—his feet pointing in one direction, his hands, raised above his head like a diver’s, pointing directly the opposite way.

Moishe stood over the bones. “What’s this dead shmendrick telling us?”

“H-he’s marking half past twelve o’ the clock?” Luigi said.

“Could as well be quarter past nine, or any other time,” Moishe said.

“As always, it’s hard to know which way is up.”

“That’s the emes truth,” Moishe said. “But this is a compass. And there,” he said, pointing to a mountain crag that appeared through the trees, “is the tip-top o’ the left tuches, sticking up like a fat bialy bun. Take a bearing along the line of them bones.”

Samuel removed a compass from the leather bag that hung across his chest. He wiped it dry then held it over the skeleton and aligned it with the peak of the exposed tuches.

“N of NNE,” he said.

“Nu?” said Moishe.

“Nu what?” I asked.

“Fly up and look for the tree.”

I did. There was only one tree that stood out along the bearing marked by the skeleton.

“Nu?” Moishe asked.

“Nu.” I said. “This way.” I pointed with my beak.

And so we marched toward the tree.

“So,” I asked quietly. “This skeleton—Spanish, I wager—is it a trap?”

“Ech. Probably a trap. But if you don’t know where else to go, go toward the tumel—the action.”

We came to another large tree.

But it was just a tree.

We continued descending into the valley between the two hummocks of tuches. The forest began to thin. Rainforest pattern baldness. The way ahead became increasingly clear as more island scalp was revealed.

Then before us: a behemoth of a tree, a darkwood steeple rising halfway to the sky. Hollowed out, we could have made a carrack whole from its Brobdingnagian trunk.

Or all hold hands and only just span it.

There could be no doubt. This was the tree.

Chapter Seven

I leapt from Moishe’s shoulder and flew around the trunk. We would soon sing—keneynehoreh—kvelling with joy at what we had uncovered.

Beneath the vast branches of the tree, an acre of shadows. I beheld that place on the earth where the red yud—the first unutterable letter of YAHWEH—would be so inscribed. Where from beneath its imaginary calligraphy, we would cause the books to rise from their tomb, would cause them to be born.

Of course, eternal life would come from such a place: for Jews, it’s all kishkas and digestion. The karkashteh darkness below. The cloaca. A hole in the ground. We would enter the divine hamantash sex of Shekinah God the mother.

Such an ark!

Thanks God it’s only five hundred years till they invent therapy.

I was the first of our party who could see behind the tree.

A broch.

Es vert mir finster in di oygn
: all I see is darkness and, gevalt, the darkness just got darker.

Halevay.

There was already a deep hole.

The books were gone.

The mamzer shyster chazers—pestiferous, lice-souled, pig-bastard thief-abortions. They’d taken our treasure. Whoever they were.

We needed this like God needs a nether hole.

Our lives would end in ending, and not in endless unendingness. Our souls would lisp into the void, a sulphurous fortz from the back end of our mortal hineys.

I flew up into the shade of the leaves.

Not only would our lives end, but they would end soon—after the crew discovered the books missing from their subterranean shelf. This would not be a time for a Mishnaic discussion of the intricacies of the mind/body question but a time of cleaving one from the other, ribboning with blood the flesh that festoons our mortal souls.

I signalled to Moishe. “As my last captain always said,
‘Besser a miyeseh lateh eyder a sheyneh loch.’
‘Better an ugly patch than a beautiful hole.’ ”

Samuel, Luigi del Piccolo, Shlomo with his supporters, and the other men walked around the left side of the tree. Moishe went to the other side and emerged on the right of the excavation.

They all looked down into the emptiness.

“Nu?” Samuel said. “This, eppes, is a treasure?”

“Oy,” Luigi said. “Oy.” Then, “Time grows longer only to make room for more sorrow.”

Shlomo said nothing, but lifted his arms from Trachim and Yankel’s shoulders. He drew his sword and looked up at the sky. It was not clear who he would fight. If it were God, it would be catch-as-catch-can. Besides, it was unlikely Shlomo’s blade were keen enough to slice infinity in two. Then he looked at Moishe. His eyes narrowed with the ravenous intent of a rat.

A sound from behind the treebole. An off-kilter, unmade bed of a skinny shlumper stepped out and stood twitching behind the men. If Shlomo’s eyes were rats, this Spaniard’s eyes were the febrile deadlights of a meshugener ferret.

A fonfetting mumble from the man’s leafy beard.

Shlomo turned and swung at him with his sword.

Like an animal springing quick from a thicket of leaves, the man retrieved a stout sabre from its nest of rumpled rags and pushed it deep below Shlomo’s sternum.

“Ach!” Shlomo sighed and fell backwards into the empty hole, still spitted by the Spaniard’s blade.

A man’s body may be scabbard for a sword.

And his life, too, may become missing treasure at the bottom of a pit.

The oysgedarteh scrawny Spaniard raised his bladeless hands in guileless surrender as he was surrounded by our crew.

Samuel retrieved Shlomo’s cutlass from the lip of the hole where it had fallen. He would cleave the man’s neck.

“Wait,” Moishe said. He lowered himself into the hole and pulled the Spaniard’s sword out of Shlomo’s kishkas. Shlomo did not move.

Then, without looking back, Moishe climbed up.

“Now, kaddish.”

“
Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey raboh
,” we said and pushed dirt into the pit, burying Shlomo and our hopes of finding the books and immortality.

The Spaniard was a gibbering shlimazl. Admittedly he gibbered less when Moishe requested that Samuel remove the porging blade from his gizzard.

But he gibbered enough for us to understand that he had been marooned on the island for years. A heretic, he had been condemned. But he escaped into the wilderness and was so marooned when his crew sailed. Most importantly, he had dug up the chest of books, hidden the books in a cave at the northern end of the valley, and filled in the hole.

Moishe pointed at the deep concavity, now a grave.

“This is how you shtup a hole with dirt?”

“I know—knew—they—they come back for the books. A-a-and to kill me. I who ran. I bury the chest again and f-f-fill the hole. The Spanish—”

“The Spanish who now sail from the island?” Moishe asked.

“Yesterday, with spades and with r-r-ropes they came. They dug up the chest. I w-w-watched from the m-m-mountaintop. If they saw me, you would speak now to b-b-bones, red mud, or a ghost. When they
break the chest open, they will find the K-k-king, the Queen, the Grand Inquisitor. Dolls, all made of bones, my h-h-hair, my own dung.”

He was encouraged to take us to the cave: a rope around his neck, a short blade pressed to his back.

If there were blazes on the trees or some discernible path, they existed only in the X-ray world of his desiccated brain. But the maroon, Luis Sera del Rojo Oscuro, led us surely between the dark trees of the valley and to a series of cave openings in the east.

As he stood before the second cave mouth, he began to twitch uncertainly.

“Nu?” Moishe asked.

Del Rojo Oscuro walked into the cave, his gaze still weaving nervously.

“Something wrong?”

Samuel pulled back on the noose. “Now is no time for meshugas. For funny business.”

Del Rojo Oscuro: “Th-th-the books—they are behind these …” At the back of the cave, there was a scattering of rocks tumbled over some parchment-like leaves. “But … they were h-h-here,” he said and began lifting the leaves and gazing at the baleful empty earth below. “I wrapped them like b-b-babies and hid them under rocks.”

He lifted another leaf. Beneath: a gold coin like a Eucharist wafer that had seen better caves.

“Spanish,” he said bitterly, picking it up. “They have entered my cave. The b-b-books. They have taken.”

“Have you some boat?” Moishe said.

“A pitful coracle,” he said.

“Take us there,” Moishe said. “Aaron: find out if the Spanish mamzers have weighed anchor.”

I flew to the sky. I would break into the quintessence, suck milk from God’s fulsome moons.

Or schnapps.

I would pump my heart till it brast and my body would shisn come like the radiant feathers of shooting stars. Already I was heavy with the
tsuris of humans. I needed this? I would escape like Yahíma. Though this, Moishe did not know: the thing with feathers, his pain. How I wore it like a thorn-crown.

From the sky, I could see the Spanish ship, anchored now off the eastern shore.

We ran toward the coracle. We would save the books.

Sha.

We would steal eternal life from the Spanish.

And scatter or gather what we couldn’t forget into—what?—some alter kaker codger dictionary of memory.

Feh. What was that the rabbis said about writing? It’s the art of remembering what you read but forgetting where you read it.

We arrived at a rock-strewn shore. A small spit stuck a tongue into the froth. Under a farvorfeneh jumble of branches, Del Rojo Oscuro had hidden his coracle on the lee side. The boat was but a small carapace of goatskin, tree branches and curved bones from the rib cage of a Leviathan. There were no oarlocks, but there was a single paddle. It, too, was made from the bone of a giant. Perhaps a whale.

There was room for one mariner only. Or one mariner and his parrot.

“Wait for us,” Moishe said.