He looked through the aft port and into the smooth distance. “The gale enslaved us. We could not run behind headland for shelter but were washed without liberty over this accursed ocean. Never did the sky look more terrible.” He turned, waving his hands to indicate the tumult.
“It blazed like a furnace, and the lightning broke with such violence I wondered if it had carried off both sails and spars. The flashes came with fury and frightfulness. We were certain the ship would be blasted. I do not say it rained, for it was like Noah’s deluge: the roof of sky came down low upon the dark water and we were tossed about our roiling barque. The men were so worn, they wished that death would end their dreadful suffering. I counselled them to vow pilgrimage to Holy Jerusalem if only we would survive. And then I saw light without seeing, heard voice without hearing.”
He had sailed the same turvy waters as us but, takeh, he had had opportunity for metaphysics and light. Or perhaps the meshugener had greater access to Madeira than we who only bathed in it.
“A celestial voice. The light had no position but was brighter than the rays which emanate from the sun, and I could discern neither height nor depth but only God’s manifest hand. And from this sparkle came words unlike any which sound from mortal mouth, but rather as dazzling flame and bright cloud moved by the pure air.”
He spread his arms out as if addressing multitudes. “And I saw in this light another light, and I cannot say how I saw it, except not with these two mortal eyes, but while I beheld it, all sadness and pain was lifted from memory, so that I was as an innocent child and not the careworn mariner that I am. I know that the Last World Emperor shall reign and Jerusalem shall be returned from the heathen. The thousand-year end of the world shall soon be found, an Eden at the other side of this ocean of struggle.”
“And dernoch vos?” Moishe asked. “What then?” Asking what came after the end of the world was like asking someone on a ledge what would happen after they fell to become dispersed dollops on the sidewalk. It wasn’t really the point. At least, not yet. Of course, eventually, the dollops would rise and the buried dead would break through the sidewalks. And as long as you were a good Christian wolf, you could shmunts and cavort with the lamb. It wasn’t clear what would happen with Jews, pagans, heathens, conversos, birds, beasts, and sinners, but there’d be trumpets.
Columbus had klopped into the Novo Mundo, the unfoundland. Now he must get more specific and bump into paradise. Or, at least, the terrestrial Eden. He knew from the book stolen by Pinzón that it was to be sought in the north of the Caribbean, and thence he pointed his bow in that direction.
It wasn’t difficult to persuade Columbus to help regain our ship. The map that had been hidden on board would guide us both to his book and Torquemada’s baby-bound tome. And these books led to the Fountain of Youth, which, takeh, surely must be the emptied Eden, its blank pages no longer inhabited by Adam and Eve, the world’s first DPs.
So there’s this riddle about the first couple and a character called “Vemen-Art-Es”—“What-does-it-matter?”
Adam and Eve and Vemen-Art-Es
Jumped into the Mikveh and bathed.
Adam and Eve were drowned
Who do you think was saved?
Vemen-art-es? What does it matter?
But what did happen to Adam and Eve? Did they hollow out the Tree of Knowledge, make a canoe and then paddle east to Europe?
Fnyeh.
Not these Heyerdahls.
But, if there ever were an Adam and Eve, who knows where they went?
Maybe they were Indios—or what came before Indios.
Or parrots.
I mean Adam and Eve: maybe they were birds.
I could see my great-great-great-infinitely-great-grand-parrot forebears fressing on apples, learning to name things, being too clever for their own good.
Or God’s.
Chapter Three
We sailed north. The moon stuck its great shnozz through the sky, a kibitzer wondering where we were going, its glimmering trail a path across water, as if we could walk its undulating silver highway to another place. An eternal place of bodies and souls just over the horizon.
And nu, perhaps that’s where we were going. Are we there yet?
To those over there, we’re always somewhere else.
Especially in our words.
I sat on a yardarm.
Columbus strode about the deck in his black cassock.
I no longer pretended to have words but no understanding.
Columbus said, “St. Francis was said to preach to the birds, and so he must have believed they had understanding.”
“And souls?”
“Why else would he preach?”
“And Los Indios?”
“They have understanding.”
“And souls?”
“Of a kind.”
“There is more than one kind?”
“Perhaps,” he said.