And there it was, our freylecheh flag flying high above our ship, snug and intact in turquoise waters. And there were sailors on board. At least two. One had colourful feathers fireworking from his kop.
Another feather in the cap of holocaust haberdashery plucked from the bright tails of birds.
This must be the shaman and the strange underwater bulvan who made naseh arbet—homicidal wet work—of the Spanish captain. We paddled our shifl abaft of the Shmeckel, hoping to remain undetected, else an arquebus make new orifices through which we might suffer.
We were able to nestle in the shadows beneath the taffrail unnoticed and preparing to board.
Then:
“You putz-faced elf-dreck. You couldn’t haul flowers from your scupper hole if it were springtime in your pants.”
The unmistakeable voice of Jacome el Rico. Speaking to the shaman. As was his custom, he was fostering intercultural relations with all the delicacy and sensitivity of a pitchfork.
In the eye.
Moishe called to him. “Gonif! You only live because the sharks couldn’t keep you down and breched up your festering meiskeit fleysh.”
There was much joy in our reunion. Also rum, good nosh, and catching up.
“I should wait with you like a putz to be blitzned by Spanish cannonballs? So, I jumped ship and swam to shore. Then when the Spanish were close, I made a breathing tube of hollow reeds, tied stones to my feet, walked the seafloor. Then I shtupped the cutlass between the hull’s wale planks and made holes.”
“There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the outside gets in,” Moishe said.
“And bilgewater,” I said.
“It was my good mazel I found the captain and the shaman skiff-scarpering with the books as the ship sank,” he said. “Then we rowed to the Gopherwood Shmeckel and sailed it into the cove. I chained this alter kaker to the mainmast just in case, but kept him well fed and in drink.”
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.