Yiddish for Pirates (42 page)

Oy vey iz mir!
I could have laid an ostrich egg, a rabbi’s beard, and a tablesaw altogether.

It was the shaman, speaking perfectly intelligible Spanish.

“I know where it is,” he said.

My tongue and the tongues of Moishe and Jacome positioned themselves as if they too were about to pronounce something intelligible.

But nothing intelligible was intelligible.

“W-w-w …?”

“My people know where this Fountain is. We have always known,” the shaman repeated.

Moishe, coming to, brought a chair to the old man. “Please,” he said. Then: “This tsedreyter confused meshugener sailor”—he indicated Jacome—“is not a subtle man. Sometimes savage, sometimes a beast. His life has been unjust and perilous.”

Moishe quickly distinguishing himself from Jacome, though he had neither untied the shaman nor offered him much beyond the most basic necessities of water and hardtack.

“He means no disrespect or unkindness. Always he has rachmones—compassion—for others. He’s a mensch. Especially with a venerable alteh rov like yourself. So, please, zayt moykhl, accept my apologies as captain.

“Nu, Jacome. Something for the good rebbe to nosh on.”

Purple midnight came to Jacome’s face. Stars collapsed and sucked all light from the room. And he reached for his cutlass.

“
A shandeh far di goyim
,” Moishe said. “You disgrace us in front of others.” And before an inch of Jacome’s blade had slid from the scabbard, Moishe had the point of his sword pressed against Jacome’s gullet, ready to make pretty red snowflakes from his windpipe.

“You would like to be delivered to eternity, already?”

Jacome released the hilt. “So, my name is Jacome. I’ll be your kelner, your server. What can I get you?”

The shaman was untied and food was brought to the table. Salt meat. Dried fruit. Hardtack. A jar of something obscure. It may have been patriarch’s brain or ground and sauced unicorn tuches. But it was sweet tsimmes.

The shaman was hungry and noshed with great spiritual focus. Finally, the remedial ceremony of basic sustenance complete, he told us his name: Utina in his native language of Timucuan. He told us it meant “My land.”

Later.

“You’ve been to the Fountain?” Moishe asked.

“I have returned from there.”

“And you have eternal life?”

“I have not yet died. Let’s wait and see.”

Ach. It’s the emes truth. We are all, af an emes, immortal. Until we die.

And maybe I’d be the world’s greatest violinist. If I had fingers.

“So,” Utina asked Moishe. “What would you do with your undying life?”

“There was a maidel, a girl. Nu, a woman now,” Moishe said.

“Always a girl,” Utina said. “Or many.”

“No, I know it’s meshugeh but this one I have never forgotten, and my parents dead. I would search for her: Sarah. I’d bring water from the Fountain. We could both be young again. Or, nu, in a thousand years, this old will seem young. Ach, if I find her. If she still lives.”

“Cockstubble,” Jacome said. “They’re all dead. Or broken. All those we once knew. Or suckling grandchildren. Mad. They—”

I interrupted. “Does the Fountain bring back youth?”

“When I was a girl,” the shaman said. “My mother caught a shimmering thing. Wings like blue light through rainclouds. A butterfly. I held it on my finger and watched. Then I crushed it in my fist. I always remember.”

He smiled cryptically and said no more.

“When I was a girl”? Un shoyn! If my grandmother had beytsim! The shaman was a yenta.

Nu. So maybe she was a shyster only trying to escape, telling us some bubbameisse cockamamy story to buy herself more time. Extending her own mortality as long as she was able.

Or maybe she was an alter bok after all. An old goat.

Nu. Maybe the fountain was a giant hormone bath. A mikveh where you became soft. Azoy, looking closely, her skin was like paper, crumpled and recrumpled a thousand times. Soft and fissured with fractals.

But I wasn’t volunteering to fly into her gatkes on a reconnaissance mission.

Gevalt. But whatever was there, she had more to say than the three books that weren’t there, and was emes easier to understand than the two we had.

Besides, when you have nowhere to go, any direction is as good as another.

Chapter Nine

“Let the mutinous mamzers become the desiccated shlub-leather they deserve,” Moishe said. “Let them become fasheydikt bewildered with loss and loneliness. I maroon them as they would have marooned me on my own ship. As they would have marooned my blood from my body. I never forget. Only a fool remains a fool.”

And so we did not go back to the island for the rest of the crew. Instead, we turned our stern to the shore, and we raised sail toward the horizon. Utina nestled in the quarterdeck, navigating: watching the shape of waves, the scent of wind, the curl of cloud above us. They say that at any time, such spirit wayfarers can detect five different currents in the open water. And many more of ghosts. They draw islands out of the sea, tectonic Prosperos, reverse dowsers.

Utina imagined us a path beyond the horizon and soon we were beyond land, except as it appeared in the second sight of her internal compass.

Dawn. Immense veils of spray rose against our bulwarks and were caught by the wind and whirled away. Bars of purple cloud stretched before us and the green water frothed with delirium. The sky became mauve and scarlet in the east, kishka-coloured. Then west off the starboard bow appeared a vast mass, furlongs in length and breadth, the pale hue of a maideleh’s thighs. It floated on the water, its innumerable long arms radiating from its centre and curling and twisting like a nest of snakes, a monster of flying lokshen. It had no perceptible front: like
Adonai, all was face or not-face. It seemed blind and without instinct, more island than living thing, but it undulated on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition. Then without warning, the water stilled and it disappeared.

“There,” Utina said, pointing with her gnarled alteh kokeh finger, which was a trick finger, not pointing forward, but askew like Adam looking sneakily Eve-ways when God in Eden came down to kvetch, post-apple.

Utina with her eye fixed on an indistinct place on the long coastline.

Soon enough, Ponce de Leon would call it La Florida and bring Christianity, cattle, horses, sheep, lemons, pistachios, discount stores, disease, the Spanish language. Death.

People would come here to die or not to die. Shalom. Who could tell?

But now, there were no boats in the ocean, nor sign of people on the rock-strewn beach as we dropped anchor. We climbed into a skiff and rowed to shore.

Utina divined a trail into the seamless jungle and we followed.

“We’re bilge-headed coffinwits. Soon they jump from the shadows and morcellate us for barbecue,” Jacome said.

“They could,” Utina said. “Or I could.” And pulled back her cloak to reveal a stubby musketoon. Jacome reached for his cutlass, but Moishe raised his hand.

“Shat. Hust.” Shh. Be calm.

“Why am I taking you to the Fountain?” Utina asked then smiled. “Ach, I can’t help myself.”

We continued to walk, Jacome glowering as we shlepped through the tangle of vines and leaves.

The sun boiling high above us, we finally came to a clearing. A thin river curled white over boulders then ran into an opening in a rocky mound.

Utina reached into deep green boughs of tree and pulled down a yellow fruit. She sat on a dry boulder, took a short knife from her cloak and began peeling it.

She speared a dripping segment on the bladepoint.

“Pond-apple?” she offered.

Sha. Was this a stalling tactic or dramatic prelapsarian irony?

Moishe looked vaguely at the river, then accepted a piece of the fruit. What was he thinking?
Ver veyst?
Who knows? One may have a head filled with boiling soup yet look like a kneydl. A dumpling. He said gornisht. Nothing.

“Where’s the Fountain?” Jacome asked, not one to let catering get in the way of eternity.

“Inside the cavern,” Utina said. “You find what you seek.”

Still, the evasive half-answers of a tzadik.

There was a hot spring that burbled up from the cenote, its waters rising from a crack deep in the earth.

“Now,” Jacome said. “Where’s the door?”

On the top of the mound were several small openings. We peered in but could see nothing. Moishe dropped a rock into one. A minute passed and there was an almost inaudible splash.

The only other entrance was to follow the river into the cave, but the churning water would shlog smash you against the rocks. You’d end up the kind of immortal where you don’t live forever because you’re already dead. Unless you could hold your breath for ten minutes and avoid the rocks.

“The water was not always so strong,” she said.

Ach. As helpful as bloodletting a corpse.

“We’ll dam the river,” Jacome said. “We’ll move boulders.”

Moishe took several sacks of arquebus gunpowder out of the bag hanging from his shoulder. They would blow their way to kingdom come.

I flew to the top of the mound. I’d squeeze myself into one of the openings.

Reverse birth.

It’d be almost entirely dark inside, the small holes like stars far above. Perhaps I could find the Fountain and bring back its waters.

One squeeze of Aaron, the immortal sponge, and they’d forget their pain. Or live forever.

I eyed a likely hole behind a jagged rock.

Perhaps if I weren’t so ample. If I’d watched myself: Did I need to do all that fressing? Still, I thought I might fit inside.

I pushed myself through. How? Like anyone else, first one wing and then the other. Immediately I began to fall. I only knew which way was up because it was the direction I wasn’t going. Then I found my wings and began to flap.

I saw bupkes. Nothing. Nada. I flew in little circles, not knowing where the walls were, not knowing how far was down. I heard the gurgling of water. The Fountain or the shpritzing of a kvetchy sea serpent? I could not tell.

Then a rumbling. Some kind of upset tuml in the kishkas of the cave. Then a raining down of water from above. Then—
Sh’ma Yisroel
—the vessels of the world burst open.

Gevalt. An explosion. Then another. Keneynehoreh. Suddenly it was light and I saw the outside above me.

Boulders fell. Water roared over me as if the sky had turned liquid. Up was down and I was swept into the churning of a hot current, flapping, trying not to drown. The ceiling of the cenote had collapsed. The firmament was broken. There were no stars but only the shocking blue sky.

I’d fallen into the Fountain. If I was going to die, I was going to die wet with immortality. I flapped. Each sinew and bone ached but I was able to rise.

Moishe? Where was Moishe? What had happened?

The cenote was an open volcano, but with water and air instead of fire. And falling stone. I flew into the sky above this grave pit. The river poured over the broken edge, no longer into the cave mouth where Moishe and Jacome had been.

Though I burned with pain, I searched.

My captain. My Moishe. My other.

He was gone.

Nothing but the unbridled river flowing over the open pit of the Fountain. It was a jumble of broken rock. Moses lost before he reached the Promised Land.

They all were gone.

Moishe. Jacome. Utina.

They must have been buried beneath the fallen stones.

Moishe. My captain. My shoulder.

Nu. So there’s that question, And then what happened? Let me tell you. Five hundred years. It happens. It’s takeh why I have these words.

Was I shpritzed by the Fountain when I fell? Or did it pish on the gantseh megillah, the whole story?

They say when I tell it, it seems as if it goes on forever. Na. I was that story, have become the whole shpiel. Have passed it down to a long line of pisher parrots who also tell it. And tell it to you now. What, they were busy being something else? Any life is just another life out of order.

As long as you have the words.

Emes, I always said: I want to live forever. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

And Moishe? I flew over the broken Fountain. Along the river. Through the gantseh jungle. For days. Weeks. Months. I could not find him.

This never leaves my farmishteh feygeleh mind.

I saw bupkes. Nothing. Emptiness. No finger reaching, no shmatte scrap of britches, no moaning voice. Maybe he thought I had died? Maybe he searched for me?

Maybe Jacome pushed him, or he jumped in and spluttered down the river and was dunked in the Fountain, his head klopped, stars prickling for a moment instead of eyes.

Maybe he searched his endless life for Sarah? If only for a second.

Ach, I can see them, hobbling old and toothless. Two zkeynim. An old bubbie and an alter kaker zadie shuffling about, forgotten by time.

“Is good?” Sarah mumbles.

“Yes,
mayn libeh
,” Moishe says. “My love.” He takes her hand. They wobble. “Nu, let us hodeveh cultivate our gortn. As the psalm says, ‘That the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into our garden, and eat the pleasant fruits.’ ”

Or they fall together on the ground and shmunts, their bodies soft as alteh yidn payayas. “Oy, Sarah,” he says. “Oy!”

Ei! I wish I were on his wizened pupiklech shoulder, telling these codswallop bobeh mayseh tales to his eyniklech grandchildren as if they were mine. My Moishe. I wish that the mamzer were here.

Ach but I’m getting shmaltzy. And what parrot wants to get all shmutzik with chicken-fat shmaltz?

They say I repeat myself. But I remember. Too much. Stories I would live again, keneynehoreh. Despite myself.

Not that I mind telling you. As I said, I’m glad you asked. And the zadie over there is still shloffing.

They say I’m living history. Ach. I’m the farkakteh book of geshichte stories. Some wandering siddur, a meshugener crazy Messiah, the flesh made word. So, nu, maybe someone could call an editor,
es tut mir vey
, I ache everywhere. But, azoy, I remember so that Moishe, wherever he is, doesn’t have to.