Yiddish for Pirates(77)
“For this I went to pirate school?”
He was unsuccessful.
We were about to pry open the secret compartments of the deceitful priest when Yahíma noticed one of the parrots’ eyes was raised. Insert the point of a knife into the pupil, and the bottom of the pot fell open.
I’d noticed the eye, but thought the look was a wistful glimmer of recognition and desire.
(Note to self: schedule more time in the bird-busy bush, close to the zaftik undercarriage of your kind. Parrot-shaped scratches on chamberpots shouldn’t be causing your petseleh to tingle.)
The map was wrapped in oilcloth and we unswaddled it on the captain’s large table.
There was much we recognized. The broadside islands of Hispaniola and Cuba with their fussy ongepatshket shores. Below, the pokey little skiff of Jamaica rowing up from the south. And above, the pebble-scatterings of the Bermudas, like stepping-stones to nowhere.
The map was the two-dimensional roadkill of a sorcerer’s dreams, a brainbox of arcana pressed into two dimensions against the vellum. Archipelagos of eyes cluttered across the Caribbean, their preternatural gaze drawn as radiant points of a compass rose beaming across the sea. An undulating dolphin-dance of Hebrew script twisted between inky waves. And curious sigils, perhaps from Solomon’s time, marks of demons, angels, cartographers, or whorehouses flocking like alchemical birds on both land and deep.
It would be hard to navigate across this mess of chazerai, but the destination was clear:
The subterranean library of two was on an island in the Bermudas. There were Hebrew letters emblazoned in the hills and Hebrew words all around it.
“Nu,” Moishe said. “Always with the commentary.”
Chapter One
We were slumped around the binnacle sucking in pipesmoke and sharing a firkin of rum. We’d salvaged silver cups from Spanish pantries but drank from coconut-shell pannikins, fashioned by Yahíma in the traditional style.
Our parliamentations were made shmoozy and loud by smoke and alcohol.
“Why this map?” Isaac the Blind asked.
Jacome: “Follow that farkakteh map and we’ll be futzing around the edges of the world until the Messiah hisself becomes an old geezer dribbling into both his gatkes and his mangy white beard.”
“But the Fountain of Youth,” Samuel said. “Could it be?”
“Like nipples on a duck. They might exist, but—gevalt—they’re hard to find.”
“So we plonk our tuches in this mikveh, and splash ourselves—oy, oy, oy, mayn Got, this magic vasser, such a mechayeh—but then what?” Shlomo asked. “My scars live forever? I become a boychik, maidel-soft as an unborn elbow but still I toddle around with the Bible scraped into my skin?”
“No matter where we go, there we are,” Yahíma said. “We might as well follow ourselves.”
“Feh. Only if we could leave ourselves behind,” Fernández said.
“We’d have to sail swiftly then,” Ham signed. “Quicker than words and memory.”
“Or Jacome’s temper,” Fernández said.
Jacome raised his fist. “So quick even your mother knows your pig-ugly mieskeit snout was ’cause of the clobbering I gave you before I met you.” He took a titanic swig of rum. “Because I knew you’d deserve it.”
Isaac tightened the tefillin straps holding his hooked hand, and then scritched his head with the point. There was wisdom there, but also fleas. “So if this fountain is the shvitz of memory, and we walk away barnacle free, fresh like a Shabbos tablecloth and empty as the shelves in the shlemiel library of Chelm, then, without tsuris, we could go back to fressing on gold and shteching the Spanish with our swords. If we live forever, we live forever. We’d be übermenschen who could neither be karsted by arquebus nor cratered by pox.”
“Ver veyst? It’d takeh be a very Jewish fountain that makes a Yid immortal but not live forever,” Fernández said. “I’d still look side-to-side and up-and-down before crossing the boulevard.”
“Or jumping out a caravel,” Yahíma added.
“But nu,” Isaac continued. “If this water was good for nothing more than swabbing molluscs from the wrinkled hulls of our beytsim, it’d be worth gold when bottled and sold to the worthy shlemiels of Europe. Map. Books. Exotic puddle. Testimonials. It’s the story not the steak. The brocheh not the brisket.”
Finally, we voted.
Moishe taught me an old saying: Di tsung iz nisht in goles. The tongue is not in exile. And it was true, we’d lost everything but our accent. Takeh, many of us had gained one. We were wandering Jews and had no home. So, we might as well wander. We counted hands: We’d seek the book. It was as much home as anywhere.
We began to sail toward our treasure, following the bottom of the pannikin, the shikkering gourd, the North Star, Polaris. Our book at the end of Ursa Minor Beta. Our home at the end of the Little Bear’s tail. Moishe and I would soon dishwash our hearts in the soapy, soul-scrubbing waters of the Fountain: a map, a book, and then a quick dunk and some bobbing for rebirth in the metaphysical lagoon.
How did we feel about this? If there’s a word to describe it, ach, it’s not on this parrot’s tongue.
Isaac the Blind was at the helm. Shlomo, Ham and Samuel hauled the sheets. I flew to become the polyglot tittle—the dot—on the mainmast’s “i.”