by Gary Barwin
“Across this new sea, we have avenged the Jews, Los Indios, and Africans with the deaths of these Christ-Colombizing Spanish. We lanced their chazer pig skinsacks to release their pustular souls to the ether where we hope they will be cauterized by stars.”
“What else?” Isaac said, “We should wait for Elohim to cook them with lightning?”
“Takeh. That know-it-all sky-mucking maven?” Jacome said. “He’s too busy swinging his twenty-two dimensional putz around some infinite Seraglio.”
“Oy,” Shlomo said. “The ineffable effing the ineffable.”
“What kind of meshugener are you?” said Samuel. “The rabbis say like Cipangu or Cathay, He’s just over the next horizon.”
Jacome: “And in the meantime, we bump into a gantseh megillah of a continent of immoveable dirt.”
“Nu,” Isaac said. “He’s the eternal converso, always dressed up in somewhere else.”
“That’s eppes a God?” Yahíma said. “My God would have my eyes shoot flame and my body glow with the warm honey of sex and eternal youth. And He’d make sure my life was catered.”
“Fire, sex and food we can get you, yingeleh. And if the map isn’t a shyster’s sham, we can get you eternal youth, too.”
“Feh. I don’t have time to wait for life everlasting,” Jacome said. “It’s enough to have the sound of sword going through bone. And that look in their eyes.” He chewed into another mouthful of pork. “If only Spaniards were kosher, I’d be happy getting fat.”
“And the gold,” Samuel said. “Makes my guts shake and my eyes swell. If only there were a place to spend it.”
“What hoo-hah, you chazer,” Shlomo said. “As the mystics say, its value is in the size of what isn’t there: think of what’s not in the Spanish coffers.”
“Shlimazl. Think of what’s not between your oysgedarteh stick-insect legs,” Jacome said. “Just a dribbling thimble.”
Shlomo sprung up and plunged his rigging knife toward the leather-and-brimstone body of Jacome. Moishe, who had said nothing, appeared to be drifting keellessly on an inner sea, but his hand shot out and caught Shlomo’s arm and twisted it until it clicked like the chambers of a lock. At the same time, he kicked Shlomo’s skinny legs out from under him. Shlomo slammed onto the deck. Moishe leapt up and held up his open hand before Jacome’s scowling jowls.
“Be a mensch. Each day brings forth its own sorrows,” he said, then walked over to the starboard gunwales to look out at the skiffling waves. Shlomo righted himself and sat by the barrel where he remained silent, examining the suddenly intriguing details of his own feet. Jacome glowered at the mizzen, but also said nothing.
Eventually Moishe returned to the others. “I remember the map and the island well: it resembles a tuches sticking out of the sea. And the books are buried in its valley, nu? We do not know where we are on this map—which makes it both simple and difficult to go forward. But I shall chart a course toward where this island might be. Not for nothing, my years davening over maps. I’ve been to the shvitz house and I’d recognize this rumpy atoll anywhere: it’s like the mountainous spotted hiney of my old cheder teacher. But, af an emes, less hairy.”
Later, we unrolled the map in the captain’s quarters. Moishe had asked Shlomo and Ham to make up the morning watch. Jacome, Samuel, Isaac and Yahíma gathered around the captain’s table as if we were dissecting a body.
Moishe navigated around the map. There was an island with soundings, cliffs, rivers, bays and inlets clearly indicated, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to safe anchorage upon its shores. It was more-or-less apple-shaped, about three leagues across, and had a sheyneh fine natural harbour where we could drop anchor. There were, as Moishe had remembered, two enticingly zaftik hills, like the twin kneydlach of a rotund tuches, which dominated the island. They were farprishtcht-poxed by three marks in red ink: one on the north part of the island, two in the southwest. Moishe explained that they were Hebrew letters. Hey. Vav. Hey. In a valley in the centre of this triangle was a small, neat letter yud written in the same red ink. Buried beneath it: the books.
On the back of the map, the same hand had written this further information:
Tall tree, south of the valley, top o’ the left hill. Bearing a point to the N. of N.N.E.
Ten feet.
Follow the trend of the east hummock, ten fathoms south of the black crag with the face on it.
Once we had found the island and located the valley, we would know where to go. The tree must be the yud. We wouldn’t have to ask directions from indigenous birds, rodents, snakes, or the yenta know-it-all trees and their smug, trembling little leaves.
But first we had to find the island.
“See how the current flows between—vos?—these two-bit isles, they look like gallstones.”
“A rebbe in my shtetl had moles shaped just like them.”
“Of course, but af an emes, less hairy.”
“Actually, if you want to know, he had more hairs than most Jews have tsuris.”
“I don’t—and I especially don’t want to know where he had such troubles.”
We would sail north looking for landmarks, for the distinct mole-shaped stippling of islands on either side of our passage. And the tuches would stand out plain as the undercarriage of stars.
Chapter Six
An African Grey–coloured dawn, a crimson feathering near the starboard horizon. The ship sighed as the men shloffed, the breeze scuffling through the sails. Moishe stood in the bow, willing the island to appear in the ghostly translucence.
A sound like stones dropping. He turned and squinted starboard. A dark shape on dark water. The slow movement of shadowy wings or fins swimming close to the surface. The ship’s skiff in the distance, rowing away. The undulation of long, tar-black hair. Further away, the obsidian silhouette of an island and the orange glow of bonfire.
“A broch,” Moishe said. “Each day brings forth its own sorrows.”
I stood on his ragged left shoulder. It remained steady though tears rolled steadily into the thicket of his beard. “I do not want to leave the world, but it seems my world wants to leave me.”
Then: “Aaron, I’m glad you’re here.”
We watched as Yahíma rowed toward shore.
“I wish that we, too, could leave this meiskeit-ugly bloodletting. That we, too, could silently row out of this story and find another one, a story where more blood stayed in the body. Sha. I’m only looking for this treasure, these books, this poxy fountain, because, like a shlemiel, I still believe—keneynehoreh—in life instead of death. But, takeh, it’d be easier to be dead.
“Such pain: my parents. Spain and all those I knew there and those I didn’t. Sarah, with whom I thought I could stay young and love forever. And now this new world and Los Indios. This bellyful of spears and eyes rubbed with pepper. I don’t want to forget. But I also don’t want to remember.
“I’d build a hospital, a hospice for memory. I’d line its shores with gold and ale and zaftikeh half-dressed nafkehs. We’d call pirates from the seven and imaginary seas. To smash open and plunder our words and memories. Take these things, you buccaneers, spread this farkakteh hoard thin across the shoulders of the world like a pox so we can breathe again.
“And then we could forget.”
I jumped from Moishe’s shoulder and onto his hand. I bent my head low. Surely it would comfort him to rub the feathers of my neck, and give me pleasure.
“Perhaps the future will rewrite our stories,” Moishe said, “if only the Fountain will wash out our skulls and drown our remembering.”
“We have rum that does that,” I said. “And coca leaves.”
“Ach. Each day we scour and soak both inside and out with them. And with blood and gold. But each day we wake again. Each day, its own sorrows.”
“Each day ends,” I said. “Eventually. Perhaps a month later.” I hopped onto the gunwale. We watched as Yahíma rowed into obscurity.
Past and future.
We birds remember everything. And nothing. The only words we have are those we haven’t forgotten.
We have a different forward and backward. A different up and down.
And so, too, did Yahíma. Pocahontavitz she would not be. She was free to paddle without thinking of us. To find a place where the most dramatic event was the harvesting of tubers. Or the birth of her child.
Soon it was day. We could no longer see the island or its fires. Instead we watched for the shapes of the map to emerge from the blue cerulean of the sea.
We wended in and out of nights and days. Eventually we came to a region skerried with rocks and an assortment of islands. The map was a star chart and we watched for its constellations.
“Oy. Avast.” Samuel said, pointing at an island off the starboard bow. “It does look a tuches—as if some sea-ogre were sticking his hairy nates up at heaven.”
Thumbing his nether-nose at God and His insistence on mortality.
Moishe gave the order to sail close-hauled, working us to windward. Halyards were heaved. Sheets rose. Booms swung across the deck, and sails snapped. Our quick ship rippled and shuddered in the thrill of the wind as we approached the island from the south and were soon sailing upon the cyan-blue skirts of its white sand shores.
Some thirty fathoms away, we dropped anchor on the lee side of a small islet that—as mapped—concealed a broad and congenial lagoon. Our landing party would row in skiffs between the islet and a black cragged spit and into this lagoon. From there, we’d bushwhack to the valley, scouting for the tall marker tree, looking for the earth-bound yud under which our treasure lay.
We mustered on the deck, aft of the fo’c’sle and divided into those to come ashore and those to stay.
None stayed.
Nu, when there’s treasure, go with the shmendrick who has the spade.
“So,” said Moishe, climbing halfway up the fo’c’sle companionway. “I’ve a word to say. This land upon which our feet soon shall fall is where we find freedom from time’s cat-o’-nines, where we find our treasure, those books which will lead us to that fabled freshet of life everlasting. And now, a brocheh, a little kiddush grog. Each one on board has done his duty, alow and aloft, and so let us drink our health and luck. And Baruch atah, a gantseh sea-cheer for we kings of the ocean.”
Each man downed a mugful of schnapps.
The black redaction of booze: some nights disappear into mugfuls of drink and shikkereh song.
We woke, blinking in the Klieg-light of noon, the clapper of day pealing on our uninsulated skulls. Muskrats had revelled in our mouths and left their fuzzy and acrid dreck on our tongues.
“To the island,” Moishe hissed, careful not to let his voice drive a spike into his own earholes.
Though far from jolly, we boarded the jolly boats, pointed the bows northeast and began pulling the oars—and the island—toward us. Then the wind blew from starboard and huffed us beyond the veil of the islet and further out to sea.
The crew’s faces were furled with determination and the hammer-ache of the morning-after-the-night-before as they madly stroked the oars. I chanced to look larboard and saw the dark cloud of a Spanish ship anchored on the islet’s other side. We two boats: two ships that had not passed in the night, but had slept on either side of land like a travelling swain and his farmer’s daughter bedmate, separated by bundling board.
“Moishe,” I said. “Look.”
The Spanish had undoubtedly seen us. Perhaps they had already landed, for we had slept late. There might be a greeting party, ready to skewer us with hospitality and swords.
“Ferkakte,” Jacome scowled, “as the chicken’s pink nuts in the fox’s gob.”
We could row only where the wind might take us.
There was movement on the deck of the Spanish ship, then a skull-staving boom and a cannonball plunged into the water a single fathom from our bow.
“I’ll not wait to be knacker-sausaged,” Jacome said, dove into the water, and swam toward shore.
Another blast and a cannonball divoted the water close enough to Jacome to pull him under. A moment later and he emerged spluttering. Samuel reached out an oar but Jacome turned, disgusted, and resumed his churning.
Another shot from the Spanish eight-pounders.
The wind changed. It rose and with it the peaks of the waves. We lost sight of Jacome in a valley between whitecaps. Both of our jolly boats were blown across the islet’s stern and now into its lee shore, closer to the Spanish ship. Still the waves pulled us from land.
Another crack of powder and a cannonball smashed the other jolly boat into eggshell halves. Blood ran into the sea. The men hung onto the two broken hulls.
The crew in our boat rowed furiously toward them.
Another iron ball plunged into the gaping mouth of the sea as we reached the other boat.
Isaac held onto the boat with his single hook.
The cannonball had removed both his legs from his already depleted inventory.
One eye, one arm.
A firkin of blood, much of it now spilling from his body.
Much suffering. We hauled him into the boat.
“I remember,” he said. “My grandfather carved me a little horse. Its shmulky little shoulders, and, after a time, its broken legs. But this little wooden tchatchke looked at me with such tenderness. I kept it close to me. I had nothing …”
He smiled at the memory.
“It waits for me.”
He closed his single eye and died.
Five sailors clung to the gunwales around us. Samuel held onto Luigi del Piccolo, who was too weak to hold on himself.
There was a long sheet coiled in the bow. Moishe passed me one end. “Fly to the island,” he said. “Tie this to a tree.”
I rose then fell, rose then fell. It took me three tries to rise into the air and travel the twenty fathoms to the island. It was three tries also to knot the rope around a mangrove and then alight upon its root.
Several cannonballs crashed into the foliage beside me.
Moishe and the men began hauling on the sheet. Either they would move or the island would.
It was the boat.
It approached the land, barking its nose against mangrove roots. Moishe and the crew scrambled to shore. There was no time to futz around. The Spanish continued to fire and they would soon send crewmen after us.
Samuel, Shlomo and Ham hauled Isaac’s body onto the mangroves. We would hide in the interior of the islet and decide what to do next.
First, though, the wounded must be nursed. Carpentered. Or buried.
At sea, we would have wrapped Isaac in a sail, sewn it up, stitching it—according to tradition—once through the septum of his nose. When we couldn’t spare a sail, we shrouded our dead in a section of Torah scroll and released them to the sea. Luigi would pipe a dirge as they were taken by the water. But now the Spanish were close by. We had but time to carry Isaac to a swamp and cover him in stones.
It’s doubtful that he would have wanted us to say kaddish, but Moishe said the prayer as a stand-in for other words.
“Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey raboh,” he said.
“Omeyn,” we answered.
With Isaac gone, we were one short of a minyan, the required ten for prayer.
“What does it matter?” Shlomo said. “Where’s our eleventh putz-finger God?”
“We speak even if no one hears,” Samuel said. “So. Azoy. We hear.”
“And that helps?” Shlomo said. “Let’s ask Isaac and see what he hears.”
Luigi waved him away from Isaac. “My father would say that we have eternal life. Until we die. And we have God. Until we look for Him.”
“Perhaps,” Moishe said. “But my father used to say, ‘A question is its own answer.’ And I’d ask, ‘What does that mean?’ And he’d say, ‘Exactly.’ ”
We began again to make for the lagoon, bushwhacking our way through the mangroves and the godless synagogue of leaves.
The lagoon. Rivule
ts of light eeled over the rippled sand and through the turquoise water. The soughing air. One sigh fits all. Or causes a satisfied susurration so deep in the mouth, it’s in your tuches.
The men dove into the water and began dog-paddling to the main island. Moishe swam on his back, kicking with fury, his arms raised above the water, holding his arquebus aloft like the Lady of the Lake brandishing a sword.
I flew.
The men clambered out of the lagoon, the water varicosing down their skin.
“Hit zich! Look out,” Samuel shouted. He pointed at a dark shape that flickered between the trees like images in a flip book.
The men pulled out their wet dirks and cutlasses. Moishe loaded his arquebus, the only sailor who had had sufficient seychl to keep his weapon dry.
Was a man running in the woods? Had the Spanish already landed? The strange noises of the island became amplified by our apprehension.
“Hell is empty and the dybbuks run free,” Samuel said.
“Nu,” Moishe said. “We can stand tsitering quaking on the shore. Or we can hide in the woods. Where they can’t see the Yids for the trees.”
We crossed the beach and headed into the dark green of the forest. Our landmark for orienteering: the tall tree south of the valley.
This was finding a needle in a pine forest.
I flew above the forest canopy. The two cheeks of the island rose round and verdant. Between the two, a valley. A river quick with rapids and waterfalls.
Is the river the movement or the water? Is the story the words or what happens?
Without either one—nu—no river.
In the distance, several trees rose above the others, bodies both dark and colourful emerging from the tangle of its branches.