Yiddish for Pirates(94)

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.

“Where were you thinking we’d go?” Samuel said.

“Azoy,” Moishe said. “Then don’t eat each other.”

“Jews,” Luigi said. “I don’t touch the stuff.”

“We’re not even kosher,” Samuel said.

“It’s our cloven hooves,” Luigi said. “Besides, we’re stringy. Who wants Jew between the teeth?”

“I stick to unbaptized babies. They’re much juicier.”

We put to sea. Moishe and I. Hope may give a man strength, but not sense.

How exactly we would David the Goliath of a Spanish galleon, I didn’t know.

“I once told Sarah that if the only choice is defeat, then even that is bound to fail,” Moishe said.

“Make sure not to tell the Spanish,” I said.

Navigating in the coracle was like walking on water. It’s not that hard if you’re related to God. But we ended spluttering and dunking, up to our tsitskehs in the drink. We did more spinning than moving forward. Eventually, Moishe broke its eely back and we were able to navigate—our path the path of a Celtic snake—around the island to where we expected the galleon to be.

Two cables offshore, there was a stunted forest of three bare trees.

It was the Spanish ship. Sunk beyond its crosstrees. Our fearsome Goliath resembled a sodden and frightened rat.

A shlimazl was clinging to the middle of the three trees.

Are those the books in your britches or are you just glad to see us?

He wasn’t glad to see us.

He grasped the mast like the last autumn leaf in a gale. We had little to offer him.

“Should we brain you and then seize your books?” Moishe looked up at him and asked. “Batter your skull or paunch you with a stake?”

“Cut his wezand with a knife,” I said.

“What’s a wezand?” Moishe asked.

“Sounds like the beginning of a joke,” I said.

Nu:

There was a rabbi, a priest, a shaman.

“What would you like them to say at your funeral?” one of them asks.

The priest says, “His life was a humble offering to the glory of God.”

The shaman says, “He was a hawk and had the strength to eat the eyes of darkness.”

“Both very nice,” the rebbe said.

“And what would you like them to say at yours?” the others asked.

“ ‘Look, he’s moving!’ ” the rebbe said.

The shmegegge up the mast said nothing. Maybe it was a problem with terminology.

“The wezand? It’s a gorgl, a throat,” I said. “Come down or we will slice yours.” Certainly my logic was patchy, however my delivery was impeccable and the man began to descend the timber.