Mrs. Cohen says, “Rabbi, help me. My parrot—from morning till night, it squawks, ‘I want to shmunts with anything that moves. Anything. Want to shtup? Want to shtup?’ Ach, it’s embarrassing.”
“Oy!” the rabbi exclaims. “That’s terrible. But listen, bring your parrot to shul. All day my parrot reads from his prayerbook and prays. He’ll teach your parrot and in no time, it’ll be praise and worship from morning ’til night.”
Next day, Mrs. Cohen arrives at the synagogue. The rabbi’s parrot is wearing a tiny yarmulke and davening feverishly from a little prayerbook.
Mrs. Cohen puts her parrot on the perch beside him. “I want to shmunts with anything that moves. Anything. Want to shtup? Want to shtup?” Mrs. Cohen’s parrot says.
The rabbi’s parrot immediately drops his prayerbook. “Baruch ata Adonai … Praise God. Praise God. My prayers have been answered!”
Distance embiggens the zeal of the heart, and far from everywhere, Yahíma and Moishe had fashioned a kind of heymishe homelike comfort in each other. A temporary autonomous zone.
With benefits.
Our ship of fools itself a shtetl beyond the Pale.
I’d shmuntsed with many birds myself since we’d first arrived here. Here—what I can’t help calling—ech, the words themselves speak—the Nu World. The contingent and continental nu. Nu, as in, “so … what will happen here?” A dreidel with “nu” written on each of its sides. Nu, a great miracle—here? So let’s see this miracle. This nu world.
So far, disease. Death. The mincing sword. The rupturing cannon. The destruction of Los Indios. In these few years, almost no Tainos remaining.
But I was speaking about yentsing.
There were many parrots.
Cockatoos, conures, macaws and Amazons.
Cherry-headed and crimson-bellied; maroon-faced and scaly naped; blue-throated, green-cheeked, and vinaceous; mealy, orange-winged, and lilac-crowned; yellow-shouldered and sulphur-breasted.
Nu, it was a world. And I was inside its varicoloured kaleidoscope.
So, not all were exactly my species, but my mother was far away, and besides, most were Pauls rather than Pollys. It began with surprise, then certainty. Across the Sundering Sea, I was purified with the water of separation.
I would rather this measure of shmuntsing heaven than any isle, save the sanctuary of Moishe’s shoulder.
Both of us transmuted in the alembic of the Caribbean.
Was a map required to guide us to the map that would guide us to the book that would guide us to what we were looking for?
That would be Talmudic.
Dreaming of dreaming what we were dreaming.
But the best place to hide something is right under one’s nose. Throw sniffers off the scent with another scent.
There was a chamberpot in the captain’s cabin with a false bottom.
A fool chamooleh may have a false bottom, too, for in his dreck there may be gold.
Fray Juan described the pot: tin with engravings of parrots in trees, and a handle like a tropical vine. It was beneath the captain’s bed, huddled coyly against the hullside. The tin parrots were idiot-eyed shmegegges. They’d clearly become meshugeh, having to bide their etched and immortal lives beneath the pungent ministrations of the empire’s pimply moon. The priest didn’t know how to open the secret compartment, so Jacome reached his hand into the pot’s piquant lagoon and felt around for a catch or lever.
“For this I went to pirate school?”
He was unsuccessful.
We were about to pry open the secret compartments of the deceitful priest when Yahíma noticed one of the parrots’ eyes was raised. Insert the point of a knife into the pupil, and the bottom of the pot fell open.
I’d noticed the eye, but thought the look was a wistful glimmer of recognition and desire.
(Note to self: schedule more time in the bird-busy bush, close to the zaftik undercarriage of your kind. Parrot-shaped scratches on chamberpots shouldn’t be causing your petseleh to tingle.)
The map was wrapped in oilcloth and we unswaddled it on the captain’s large table.
There was much we recognized. The broadside islands of Hispaniola and Cuba with their fussy ongepatshket shores. Below, the pokey little skiff of Jamaica rowing up from the south. And above, the pebble-scatterings of the Bermudas, like stepping-stones to nowhere.
The map was the two-dimensional roadkill of a sorcerer’s dreams, a brainbox of arcana pressed into two dimensions against the vellum. Archipelagos of eyes cluttered across the Caribbean, their preternatural gaze drawn as radiant points of a compass rose beaming across the sea. An undulating dolphin-dance of Hebrew script twisted between inky waves. And curious sigils, perhaps from Solomon’s time, marks of demons, angels, cartographers, or whorehouses flocking like alchemical birds on both land and deep.
It would be hard to navigate across this mess of chazerai, but the destination was clear:
The subterranean library of two was on an island in the Bermudas. There were Hebrew letters emblazoned in the hills and Hebrew words all around it.
“Nu,” Moishe said. “Always with the commentary.”
Chapter One