Yiddish for Pirates(96)

The shaman smiled affably at us, showing no indication that he understood anything, not even Jacome’s saliva-spraying narrative of spice, shvitzing, sandpaper and bile.

Dusk. Sunset the vivid crimson of blood sausage.

We went into the captain’s cabin. Jacome led the shaman on a rope behind us.

“Ich hob rachmones—pity. At night, I bring him in like an old dog.”

There was an oak table, big as a shul door. Jacome lit the few candle-stubs that remained. Shadows like lost souls wavered across its surface.

And swaddled in blankets like the baby Yoshke mangered in a dark barn, our quarry finally lay before us. As if merely objects in a real world.

The books.

“So now we should also expect the Messiah with his trumpets, angels, zombie line dances and horas?” Moishe said. “Maybe leave the door open.”

“I don’t count even hatched chickens. For beslubbering basherteh fate waits to splutter feathers,” Jacome said, ever bright as rainbows shining from the hintn of a pisher pony. “And we only have two of the five books.”

“Feh,” Moishe said. “Our patriarch Jacob begat twelve and he had but one ball swinging in his covenantal sack. We have two.”

He began to unwrap the books. Jacome brought straight-edge, compass, protractor and unintelligible kvetching.

The pale, thin skin of Torquemada’s book. Onion-coloured. I thought of weeping.

Columbus’s book. It seemed only weary.

Moishe opened both books to their first pages. Then, like a Ziegfeld Folly of two, turned their pages together to other pages.

There were maps, charts, diagrams. He measured. He calculated distances between letters. He counted words, the tsitskehs of demons, the tongues of fire. He read backwards, boustrophedon like an ox turning in a field, he imagined encryptions, codes and erasures. He held pages up to the light, looking for palimpsests, moon-writing, knife-cuts in the vellum. He drew maps on cloth and held them over the pages.

Once I’d been carried in a book with a parrot-shaped hole cut into it. And now, dacht zich, it seemed, there was a Fountain-shaped hole in these two books. Each black letter grinned like a goblin or beyzeh wicked scar but said nothing.

I remembered the old story about Rabbi Simeon who was farklemt from darkness and suffering. He davened from one twilight to another and back again until his lips cracked, his back ached, and he saw double.

“Adonai, Adonai,” he said. “What should I do?” But ha-Shem said nothing. Eventually, in despair, the rebbe took an ancient scroll from a dusty shelf and rolled it open to an obscure passage. He lit some candles, scrawled prayers on the shul floor, and chanted a spell to raise spirits from the dead.

“O ruekh, ruekh, O spirit,” the rebbe said. “How shall I guard against this evil and pain?”

“Give me one of your eyes and I’ll tell you,” the spirit said.

And so Rabbi Simeon gouged out an eye and gave it to the spirit. “Now,” he said to the spirit. “Tell me.”

“The secret,” the spirit said, “is ‘watch with both eyes.’ ”

What could the rabbi do? He fell to his knees and wept with his one remaining eye.

Then he said, “Besser a miyeseh lateh eyder a sheyneh loch—better an ugly patch than a beautiful hole,” covered his socket with a patch, and became a pirate.

Ach. What did we need to sacrifice? We had lost much already.

A whole world.

Our heart was like a genizah, filled with broken things.

Sarah. Sarah’s father’s books. Moishe’s parents. Moishe’s father’s book.

And I no longer had words for what I had lost. Feygl words. Bird loshen.

What had I lost?

Feh. As I said, there are no words. Except these farkakteh words.

Moishe had turned away from the table and ordered himself to splice the mainbrace: to drink. He had found a bottle of schnapps and was alternating swigs with Jacome.

“Always, we farblondje wander farmisht, confused, only ever with half a map. Farkakteh Columbuses bumping into continents. Bereishith—since the beginning—the world all shards. So I thought these two books would be enough.”

“Like a sloop with only part of its hull,” Jacome said and grepsed with the magnitude and gaseous enthusiasm of an exploding star. Then he sucked the remaining rum from the bottle and threw it to the floor.

Where it rolled balefully, impotently, beneath a chair.

“And the other books?” I asked Moishe.

“In my finsterer cholem—my dream-boiled brain—I imagined them among Sarah’s father’s books. My own father’s book. And the book I cut to hide you. But ver veyst? In this half-baked Golem of a world, they could be anywhere. Buried, fish-knocked, in the library of a putz-faced pottle-snouted yak-sucker, or dropped in a well outside an eastern dacha.

“An umglik! So we thought that some mumbo-jumbo from a shtik-dreck Inquisitor and a shmendrick explorer would lead us anywhere? What do they know of the left-side world?”

“Azoy,” I said. “We’re the shlimazls who believed the whole megillah.”

“You kvetch like milk-hearted piglets,” Jacome scowled. “The Spanish flesh which feeds our swords will now be sweeter. The wenches batamt more delicious.”

“Ech. Vemen art es?” Moishe said. “What does it matter? Odem yesoydeh mey-ofor ve-soyfeh le-ofor—man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end. In the meantime, it’s good to drink.”