Yahíma lay under the still shadow of the foresail. She was telling me stories from her island. Some involved wise parrots and two-spirited shamans.
“In the early morning of the world, the first man greeted the first dawn, the red and green feathers of the sun …”
But then we heard shouting and the icy metal scrape of sword.
Shlomo and Samuel were on deck. They were no longer fighting against each other. Instead, they had laid siege to Moishe. His throat was a bristly Masada and it seemed he was to be close shaved. Shlomo held Moishe in a full nelson while Samuel pressed a dirk against Moishe’s jugular, threatening to swab the deck with his blood.
Yahíma and the other hands awake on this still ship ran toward the grisly pre-op, but Ham, larger than all by half, strode in front of us, grinned his bright crescent smile and held up his wide pink palm. “Stop,” it told us. A huge machete slung from his side.
He bounded up the mainmast shrouds, looped and knotted a halyard, then lowered himself back onto the deck, a noose now hanging openmouthed from the yardarm. A delicate filigree of blood ran over the blade-edge pressed into Moishe’s neck. Shlomo thrust Moishe under the noose. Samuel withdrew the blade. Then Shlomo and Ham hoisted Moishe and placed his head into the yawning maw of the halyard. They released him into the vapourous arms of gravity and the air.
“L’chaim!” they said.
None of us breathed.
Especially Moishe.
He remained motionless, no freylecheh Tyburn jig. No headstaving kickboxing of his executioners. He gazed over the horizon. Not walking, dreamhanging.
I was considering an intervention when Fernández, having escaped his bonds, burst from the hold, shraying like a fresh crucifixation, and hurtled across the deck. In one motion, he embraced Moishe, and with a lightning flash of cutlass blade, cut the rope. Then they both disappeared over the bulwarks and into the water.
The wind rose and the sails bulged and the timbers of the ship creaked. It was the revivifying downpour of rain after a drought. We began to move.
Azoy gich? So soon?
Shlomo, the map in his hand, shouted for the crew to attend to the sheets and sails. All except Yahíma began to haul yards and position booms.
“My love is gone down to his garden,” she sang quietly. A Hebrew song of Moishe’s. She crept to the stern and rolled a hogshead over the bulwarks where it plunged into the pluming sea, soon bursting up like an overexcited sitting-on-shpilkes dolphin above the new waves.
She could do no more else she, too, would find herself standing on fishes.
I flew out over the ocean searching for Fernández and Moishe. There was a long trail like a fallen rainbow, a multicoloured wake stretching over the water.
I followed. It took over an hour but at the end of this arc-en-mer was Fernández. He had leapt from the ship with a sack of paints slung over his shoulder. Now, emes, he was truly painting the sea.
The waves swilled over his still face, his unblinking eyes looked toward the sky from beneath an iridescent kaleidoscope of colour.
Fernández. Painter.
A righteous man.
I repeated a psalm for him who would have wished for prayers.
“I will say of the Lord, surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust. Blessed is the one true judge.”
And then I flew high into the air.
I was reminded of a story.
Once, Rabbi Akiva travelled to the city but found no lodging. Even the mangers were full. “All that Adonai does, He does for the good!” the wise rabbi said. That night he shloffed rough between the stalks of a cornfield. He had with him a parrot, a donkey and a piece of cheese. In the night, a mouse fressed on the cheese, a cat gulped down the parrot, and a lion guzzled the donkey. When he woke up, the rabbi discovered that an army had invaded the city and slaughtered everyone.
“Nu,” Rabbi Akiva nodded, glad to have been spared. “All that Adonai does, He does for the good!”
The parrot said, “What did you say, Rabbi? From inside this cat where I’m in the middle of being digested, it’s hard to understand you.”
And the others?
The donkey and the cheese said nothing.
I could see the ship: the billows of its sails were scudding clouds above the crimpling sea. I saw that Fernández’s trail had turned crimson. Fins were circling. Fernández’s gams were the nosh of sharks. He was returning to the ocean. Little by little. Not the place of his birth, but where he had imagined his future and his past.
And where was Moishe?