The Spaniard was a gibbering shlimazl. Admittedly he gibbered less when Moishe requested that Samuel remove the porging blade from his gizzard.
But he gibbered enough for us to understand that he had been marooned on the island for years. A heretic, he had been condemned. But he escaped into the wilderness and was so marooned when his crew sailed. Most importantly, he had dug up the chest of books, hidden the books in a cave at the northern end of the valley, and filled in the hole.
Moishe pointed at the deep concavity, now a grave.
“This is how you shtup a hole with dirt?”
“I know—knew—they—they come back for the books. A-a-and to kill me. I who ran. I bury the chest again and f-f-fill the hole. The Spanish—”
“The Spanish who now sail from the island?” Moishe asked.
“Yesterday, with spades and with r-r-ropes they came. They dug up the chest. I w-w-watched from the m-m-mountaintop. If they saw me, you would speak now to b-b-bones, red mud, or a ghost. When they break the chest open, they will find the K-k-king, the Queen, the Grand Inquisitor. Dolls, all made of bones, my h-h-hair, my own dung.”
He was encouraged to take us to the cave: a rope around his neck, a short blade pressed to his back.
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.