We were slumped around the binnacle sucking in pipesmoke and sharing a firkin of rum. We’d salvaged silver cups from Spanish pantries but drank from coconut-shell pannikins, fashioned by Yahíma in the traditional style.
Our parliamentations were made shmoozy and loud by smoke and alcohol.
“Why this map?” Isaac the Blind asked.
Jacome: “Follow that farkakteh map and we’ll be futzing around the edges of the world until the Messiah hisself becomes an old geezer dribbling into both his gatkes and his mangy white beard.”
“But the Fountain of Youth,” Samuel said. “Could it be?”
“Like nipples on a duck. They might exist, but—gevalt—they’re hard to find.”
“So we plonk our tuches in this mikveh, and splash ourselves—oy, oy, oy, mayn Got, this magic vasser, such a mechayeh—but then what?” Shlomo asked. “My scars live forever? I become a boychik, maidel-soft as an unborn elbow but still I toddle around with the Bible scraped into my skin?”
“No matter where we go, there we are,” Yahíma said. “We might as well follow ourselves.”
“Feh. Only if we could leave ourselves behind,” Fernández said.
“We’d have to sail swiftly then,” Ham signed. “Quicker than words and memory.”
“Or Jacome’s temper,” Fernández said.
Jacome raised his fist. “So quick even your mother knows your pig-ugly mieskeit snout was ’cause of the clobbering I gave you before I met you.” He took a titanic swig of rum. “Because I knew you’d deserve it.”
Isaac tightened the tefillin straps holding his hooked hand, and then scritched his head with the point. There was wisdom there, but also fleas. “So if this fountain is the shvitz of memory, and we walk away barnacle free, fresh like a Shabbos tablecloth and empty as the shelves in the shlemiel library of Chelm, then, without tsuris, we could go back to fressing on gold and shteching the Spanish with our swords. If we live forever, we live forever. We’d be übermenschen who could neither be karsted by arquebus nor cratered by pox.”
“Ver veyst? It’d takeh be a very Jewish fountain that makes a Yid immortal but not live forever,” Fernández said. “I’d still look side-to-side and up-and-down before crossing the boulevard.”
“Or jumping out a caravel,” Yahíma added.
“But nu,” Isaac continued. “If this water was good for nothing more than swabbing molluscs from the wrinkled hulls of our beytsim, it’d be worth gold when bottled and sold to the worthy shlemiels of Europe. Map. Books. Exotic puddle. Testimonials. It’s the story not the steak. The brocheh not the brisket.”
Finally, we voted.
Moishe taught me an old saying: Di tsung iz nisht in goles. The tongue is not in exile. And it was true, we’d lost everything but our accent. Takeh, many of us had gained one. We were wandering Jews and had no home. So, we might as well wander. We counted hands: We’d seek the book. It was as much home as anywhere.
We began to sail toward our treasure, following the bottom of the pannikin, the shikkering gourd, the North Star, Polaris. Our book at the end of Ursa Minor Beta. Our home at the end of the Little Bear’s tail. Moishe and I would soon dishwash our hearts in the soapy, soul-scrubbing waters of the Fountain: a map, a book, and then a quick dunk and some bobbing for rebirth in the metaphysical lagoon.
How did we feel about this? If there’s a word to describe it, ach, it’s not on this parrot’s tongue.
Isaac the Blind was at the helm. Shlomo, Ham and Samuel hauled the sheets. I flew to become the polyglot tittle—the dot—on the mainmast’s “i.”
As one Hebrew vowel said to the other, “Everyone’s a diacritic.”
I looked forward, scanning for islands, the Spanish, whales, the Fountain of Youth, and the future.
Instead, like a punchline, I saw the horizon.
Morning. From the south, a happy-go-lucky lebediker breeze had blown since the second half of the dogwatch. At three bells of the forenoon, it died away. In its place, a strong wind from the northeast, which caused us to take our studding-sails in and brace up.
“A cheer for this glad gust from a northern rump,” Jacome said. “Somewhere the skirts of a windgod have been blown to the sky.”
In a couple of hours we were bowling gloriously along, puffed-up sailors returning victorious and carefree after their corporeal ministrations in the cat house.
We were shpritzed with the cool, northeast trade freshening up the sea, and giving us as much as we could carry our topsails to. The bulvan wind blew strong and steady, keeping us upon a bowline, our course about north-north-west. Sometimes, they veered a little to the eastward, and we unfurled a mainmast studding-sail. For a day, we scudded well to northward.
Then the north wind left us.
Azoy gich?
So soon?