Yiddish for Pirates(99)

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.

Over each horizon, more horizons. From the printing press to the typewriter to the text message. I have lived long. Oy, there were years of zaftik parrots in Florida. Though no one special. Years of sailing. Shtupping. Kibitzing. Sailing. Remembering. Kibitzing. Shtupping. Remembering.

Ach, it’s a life. A wonder tale. And I try not to notice that—can I help it?—all the time our tucheses are plonked in the sitz-bath of story. You think, genug shoyn, enough already. But nu. Gey plotz. What can you do? You try not to let tsuris make you old.

Which reminds me: A man goes to the theatre with his son.

“One adult and one child,” he says at the box office.

“That’s no child,” the ticket seller says. “He looks at least thirty.”

“I can help it that he worries?”