Ach. What did we need to sacrifice? We had lost much already.
A whole world.
Our heart was like a genizah, filled with broken things.
Sarah. Sarah’s father’s books. Moishe’s parents. Moishe’s father’s book.
And I no longer had words for what I had lost. Feygl words. Bird loshen.
What had I lost?
Feh. As I said, there are no words. Except these farkakteh words.
Moishe had turned away from the table and ordered himself to splice the mainbrace: to drink. He had found a bottle of schnapps and was alternating swigs with Jacome.
“Always, we farblondje wander farmisht, confused, only ever with half a map. Farkakteh Columbuses bumping into continents. Bereishith—since the beginning—the world all shards. So I thought these two books would be enough.”
“Like a sloop with only part of its hull,” Jacome said and grepsed with the magnitude and gaseous enthusiasm of an exploding star. Then he sucked the remaining rum from the bottle and threw it to the floor.
Where it rolled balefully, impotently, beneath a chair.
“And the other books?” I asked Moishe.
“In my finsterer cholem—my dream-boiled brain—I imagined them among Sarah’s father’s books. My own father’s book. And the book I cut to hide you. But ver veyst? In this half-baked Golem of a world, they could be anywhere. Buried, fish-knocked, in the library of a putz-faced pottle-snouted yak-sucker, or dropped in a well outside an eastern dacha.
“An umglik! So we thought that some mumbo-jumbo from a shtik-dreck Inquisitor and a shmendrick explorer would lead us anywhere? What do they know of the left-side world?”
“Azoy,” I said. “We’re the shlimazls who believed the whole megillah.”
“You kvetch like milk-hearted piglets,” Jacome scowled. “The Spanish flesh which feeds our swords will now be sweeter. The wenches batamt more delicious.”
“Ech. Vemen art es?” Moishe said. “What does it matter? Odem yesoydeh mey-ofor ve-soyfeh le-ofor—man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end. In the meantime, it’s good to drink.”
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?”