“Fly up and look for the tree.”
I did. There was only one tree that stood out along the bearing marked by the skeleton.
“Nu?” Moishe asked.
“Nu.” I said. “This way.” I pointed with my beak.
And so we marched toward the tree.
“So,” I asked quietly. “This skeleton—Spanish, I wager—is it a trap?”
“Ech. Probably a trap. But if you don’t know where else to go, go toward the tumel—the action.”
We came to another large tree.
But it was just a tree.
We continued descending into the valley between the two hummocks of tuches. The forest began to thin. Rainforest pattern baldness. The way ahead became increasingly clear as more island scalp was revealed.
Then before us: a behemoth of a tree, a darkwood steeple rising halfway to the sky. Hollowed out, we could have made a carrack whole from its Brobdingnagian trunk.
Or all hold hands and only just span it.
There could be no doubt. This was the tree.
Chapter Seven
I leapt from Moishe’s shoulder and flew around the trunk. We would soon sing—keneynehoreh—kvelling with joy at what we had uncovered.
Beneath the vast branches of the tree, an acre of shadows. I beheld that place on the earth where the red yud—the first unutterable letter of YAHWEH—would be so inscribed. Where from beneath its imaginary calligraphy, we would cause the books to rise from their tomb, would cause them to be born.
Of course, eternal life would come from such a place: for Jews, it’s all kishkas and digestion. The karkashteh darkness below. The cloaca. A hole in the ground. We would enter the divine hamantash sex of Shekinah God the mother.
Such an ark!
Thanks God it’s only five hundred years till they invent therapy.
I was the first of our party who could see behind the tree.
A broch.
Es vert mir finster in di oygn: all I see is darkness and, gevalt, the darkness just got darker.
Halevay.
There was already a deep hole.
The books were gone.
The mamzer shyster chazers—pestiferous, lice-souled, pig-bastard thief-abortions. They’d taken our treasure. Whoever they were.
We needed this like God needs a nether hole.
Our lives would end in ending, and not in endless unendingness. Our souls would lisp into the void, a sulphurous fortz from the back end of our mortal hineys.
I flew up into the shade of the leaves.
Not only would our lives end, but they would end soon—after the crew discovered the books missing from their subterranean shelf. This would not be a time for a Mishnaic discussion of the intricacies of the mind/body question but a time of cleaving one from the other, ribboning with blood the flesh that festoons our mortal souls.
I signalled to Moishe. “As my last captain always said, ‘Besser a miyeseh lateh eyder a sheyneh loch.’ ‘Better an ugly patch than a beautiful hole.’ ”
Samuel, Luigi del Piccolo, Shlomo with his supporters, and the other men walked around the left side of the tree. Moishe went to the other side and emerged on the right of the excavation.
They all looked down into the emptiness.
“Nu?” Samuel said. “This, eppes, is a treasure?”
“Oy,” Luigi said. “Oy.” Then, “Time grows longer only to make room for more sorrow.”
Shlomo said nothing, but lifted his arms from Trachim and Yankel’s shoulders. He drew his sword and looked up at the sky. It was not clear who he would fight. If it were God, it would be catch-as-catch-can. Besides, it was unlikely Shlomo’s blade were keen enough to slice infinity in two. Then he looked at Moishe. His eyes narrowed with the ravenous intent of a rat.
A sound from behind the treebole. An off-kilter, unmade bed of a skinny shlumper stepped out and stood twitching behind the men. If Shlomo’s eyes were rats, this Spaniard’s eyes were the febrile deadlights of a meshugener ferret.
A fonfetting mumble from the man’s leafy beard.
Shlomo turned and swung at him with his sword.
Like an animal springing quick from a thicket of leaves, the man retrieved a stout sabre from its nest of rumpled rags and pushed it deep below Shlomo’s sternum.
“Ach!” Shlomo sighed and fell backwards into the empty hole, still spitted by the Spaniard’s blade.
A man’s body may be scabbard for a sword.
And his life, too, may become missing treasure at the bottom of a pit.
The oysgedarteh scrawny Spaniard raised his bladeless hands in guileless surrender as he was surrounded by our crew.
Samuel retrieved Shlomo’s cutlass from the lip of the hole where it had fallen. He would cleave the man’s neck.
“Wait,” Moishe said. He lowered himself into the hole and pulled the Spaniard’s sword out of Shlomo’s kishkas. Shlomo did not move.
Then, without looking back, Moishe climbed up.
“Now, kaddish.”
“Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey raboh,” we said and pushed dirt into the pit, burying Shlomo and our hopes of finding the books and immortality.