But Moishe said, “Release them.”
Perhaps if, as a boy, he had skipped a few Bible stories and read ahead a little from the future, he would not have been so lenient.
Though it’s hard to look forward when your own back is scarred.
But nu, the decision should not have been his alone. Each who had scrawled their name or scribbled their mark on the articles was entitled to a vote. But none spoke.
I had made a mark on the paper. Vos iz der chilek? What’s the difference? Was I going to disagree with Moishe? Sure, I crowed in the voice of men but, takeh, there was something stronger in my craw. Loyalty, love, companionship—these kept me quiet.
A pail of seawater was loosed on Samuel, then on Shlomo’s rib-eyed hand. He and Shlomo were untied, Samuel blinking awake and confused as if rescued from a dark mine. Shlomo slinking below deck, holding his wounded hand like a newborn.
Moishe stood looking out beyond the bowsprit, squinting toward a gust from the future. Beside him, fetchingly perched on the gunwale, plumes superbly dressed in his captain’s light grey shadow, his parrot, dux volucrum, a leader among birds, as the ancients say, and nu, I say it every time anyone eats chicken and not me.
“Nu, they’re so thirsty that all they do is shecht each other’s gullets,” Moishe said. “Without wind, they’ll kill each other before they die.”
We looked down into the water and the still surface revealed a doppelganger ship barely hanging onto our hull, in danger of breaking away and falling into the antipodean chasm of the sky. A skinny parrot and a shrubby sailor stared back at us. “See? We’re stand-on-our-headniks. What do we know?” I said.
“It’s good you’re here,” Moishe said to them. “Mishpocheh. Family.”
The world was still. The sails were pale papers waiting to be written on by the wind. The ocean was sky and I was a small parrot-shaped greyness, the tiniest of pupils in the infinite star-flecked eye of the entire gantseh megillah.
And Moishe—his squinty, ferkakteh missing-nipple chest covering the cracked vessel of his heart, badly in need of a cardiologist, Kabbalist, or any kind of specialist—had spoken tenderly to me. We were family.
I tried not to speak, but instead enjoy the moment.
Feh. Here I am, doorstopping the journey with words.
Then Jacome staggered toward us, his face luffing like an unsheeted sail. “We are neither dead nor alive and our dried-out souls become the wraiths our ravenous bodies now be.”
What could we do? How to invoke the wind?
Sailors know never to whistle, never to say goodbye, to always drop a few coins into the sea to buy safe passage, as if Yahweh was an infinite beggar waiting for silver on the sea bed. But desperation is often the broodmare of ceremony and Moishe now rose as one of its priestly Cohanim.
“Get paper. Quill. Ink. And a small box. I know now what we must do.”
The crew assembled midship, Moishe at the helm of his congregation. He raised his hand and asked for the paper. Jacome pulled it from inside his tunic.
It was a page torn from a siddur. The last words of a prayer and then the calm waters of the empty page. It was clear from Moishe’s tilted brow that this was—keneynehoreh—bad mojo. Ptuh. Ptuh. Ptuh. Prayerbooks aren’t usually raw material except for hope.
But he moved quickly to fold and conceal the page. Then he took the quill—from whose avian flesh was it pulled?—and dipped it in the ink.
“I write now—Baruch ata Adonai—the name of our farkakteh ship.”
But which name? Let’s hope for something that becomes apt: The Gale-pitched Gonif, The Tempest-chuffed Tummler, or The Whale Road Thrill-Rider.
“And I write our names.”
And he did. Including Shlomo’s and Samuel’s.
Then he folded the page and placed it in a little box.
If your ship is becalmed, what seems obvious and prudent?
Lighting a fire on deck. The box burned like a pyre. The crew stood silently as it turned to ash. It could have been a lamb. The paschal paper. Wind, please don’t pass over us.
Moishe gathered the ashes and stood by the gunwales. He roamed the shoals of childhood and netted some words.
“Sh’ma ye crew of yam gazlonim,” he said. Listen, Pirates. “In zaltsikn yam fun mentshlecheh trern. In the salty sea of human tears.”
He raised the ashes above his head. “For the Lord had mind of Noah, and of all things living on the Ark; and He brought forth his breath over the face of the earth.”
“Then I hope He first brushed the Black Holes of His Infinite Teeth,” I said quietly into the holy sanctum of Moishe’s priestly ear, but Moishe did not flinch.
He lowered the box and allowed the starling flock of ashes to fall into the sea.
“Amen,” he said.
“Amen,” said the crew.
Superstition may be hope in disguise.
“You think this will work?” I asked.
“Do I know the future?” he said. “I just want to be there when it happens.”
Chapter Two