Yiddish for Pirates(97)

Whatever he felt about this philosophy, Jacome obliged with another bottle.

“L’chaim,” he said. “To life.”

“Just not immortal life,” Moishe replied.

“The books?” I asked.

“Useless dreck from a rebbe’s tuches,” he spat. And swept them from the table. “Yemakh shmom. May their memory be destroyed forever.”

“You know,” a quiet voice said. “I could tell you. I could tell you how to find the Fountain.”

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.”