Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature

by Jacob Weisman

  Emily Kefirovsky comes out the back door and down the two wooden steps to the patio. She approaches the flower garden carrying a blue cardigan over her forearm. “Vasi, the sun is behind the clouds. Here.” She hands him the cardigan. “He’s not a young man, Mr. Williams, although the cold never bothers him. During the winters in Berlin, even in Moscow, he never wore gloves. Here in Texas you can’t tell from one minute to the next. The air conditioning makes him dizzy. I wish we could move.”

  Kefirovsky puts on the cardigan. “Go watch the yogurt,” he tells her. “It will be ready to pour in a few minutes.” He strokes the sweater to be certain it is just right. With his pointer he marks the spot where Emily stood. “My wife eats saturated fats. Look at yourself. Probably not forty and I’ll bet your veins are closing up like artichokes.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Professor Kefirovsky, but let’s finish talking about you. I’m not important. I’m just an anonymous pencil at Time, but you’re a famous man. Whether scientists like it or not your works are right up there in general sales, right up there with Dr. Spock and Dr. Rubin and Dr. Atkins.”

  “These are kids’ stuff. Not just Spock, the other ones too. I’ve read all the diet books. Atkins is what they used to call a piss prophet. They ran them out of town in Germany. They would set up fairs and sell medicine like hucksters. They sent you to the toilet with litmus paper and when they read the colors they sold you their medicine. That’s what Atkins is. And Rubin, he doesn’t even know what Wilhelm Reich knew.

  “I knew him in the days before he made the boxes. He used to come over too, to talk to me like Eidler and Fricht and the others. He liked cold asparagus dipped in mayonnaise. He never drank beer. If they hadn’t tortured him in California, I believe he would be alive today.”

  Kefirovsky leads the reporter, single file, through his garden along a circular path. Behind the flowers are green plants and shrubs, some in blossom. In the deep shade there are patches of soft dark moss. The professor points at various plants but does not describe them. “I am not a botanist. Pliny the Elder classified plants and Hippocrates’ son-in-law classified people. There are many plants that can kill you but not a one that will eat you. I was an old man before I thought of this.”

  “Is that so significant?” The reporter has put away his ballpoint. His hands are clasped behind his back, the notebook sticks out of his pocket. He looks bored. From the kitchen Mrs. Kefirovsky calls out, “A hundred and eleven point eight.” The Professor walks briskly toward the house. “After one hundred and ten we switch from the candy thermometer to the new digital types that give you an exact reading.”

  In the stainless-steel kitchen sink he washes his hands with green liquid soap and dries them carefully on a paper towel. The yogurt is in a three-quart glass jar immersed in water within a very deep electric frying pan. The digital thermometer lies in the yogurt just as snugly as if the mixture were a patient’s milky tongue. Kefirovsky takes a plastic container from the refrigerator and spoons a sticky material into the yogurt. The aroma is strong and brisk, it smells almost like wintergreen.

  “What’s that?” Williams asks.

  Mrs. Kefirovsky looks surprised. “He didn’t tell you yet?”

  “No, but I will,” the Professor says. “Now we must wait for at least fifteen minutes while the entire mixture resonates at one hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. Then we pour it into pints, where it can stay for almost a week. The store yogurts are good for two months or more. Mine is not the same. This is good for six days only.”

  Mrs. Kefirovsky sits on a stool, her heavy legs dangling playfully. The reporter and the Professor are on chrome-and-vinyl kitchen chairs facing the yogurt. Kefirovsky has again taken up his pointer. “What I added to the yogurt is a sticky sweet extract of an Arabic plant called ‘mahn,’ spelled m-a-n. I imported it from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco. The Moroccan one grows best here. I harvest it and freeze it. It’s also good for the breath like chlorophyll gum.

  “Fifteen years ago all you heard was chlorophyll. Then everyone got interested in outer space and transistors. I am the opposite. I started with space forty, fifty years ago, and now I’m back to chlorophyll. Science is like that. We are always breaking up substances to look for the soul of the material. My sons, the chemists, don’t know this. They just do jobs for the oil companies.”

  “Not everyone is an original thinker like you, Vasi,” Mrs. Kefirovsky states from her high position on the stool. “Mr. Williams, don’t get the wrong impression about the boys. They’re good chemists. But Vasi has no patience for people who learn to do something and then do it. He learns something and then he does something else.”

  “That’s what science is,” the Professor says.

  “Twelve minutes, Vasi.” Mrs. Kefirovsky watches the kitchen clock from her perch.

  “I started thinking about this only a few years ago, after Hans Fricht died. He was the last of my colleagues. I noticed how all of us pallbearers could hardly carry him. I thought, We’re just too old for such work. But that wasn’t it. Hans Fricht, whom I loved like a brother, ate too much.”

  “He did,” Emily adds. “He liked to eat small meals every hour while he worked.”

  “This started me thinking altogether about eating. Then I went to the old books, the way I did after I studied physics and astronomy. I thought to myself, if the heavens got into these books, why not the foods? So I read all the Greeks, mostly Homer, who is full of eating. I kept tables on who ate what, anybody I could find. Achilles lived on fifteen hundred calories a day and drank enough wine to die of cirrhosis by the time he was twenty-two. Priam had a hundred sons, yet Troy was only as big as a fooball field. Their food came in wagons from the east of the city because the Greeks never cut off their supplies. The Trojan horse is really a story about death from a full belly, but this is not the evidence I sought. I didn’t want to interpret the books, I wanted the evidence right there in black and white for anyone to see.”

  “He didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, there goes Kefirovsky again,’” says Emily. “He wanted it to be exact. Ten minutes, Vasi.”

  “So I kept reading the myths, the Upanishads, the Book of the Dead, the I Ching, until I found it right before my eyes.”

  “Where?” Williams asks, although he makes no attempt to take notes.

  “Exodus. Right there in Exodus. This served me right for not checking earlier. But outside of the Flood I had never found very much decent natural history there. Anyway, that’s where it was, Exodus 16:13. Have you heard of manna, ‘manna from heaven’?”

  “Do you mean what the Israelites ate in the desert?”

  “Don’t call them ‘Israelites,’ you make them sound like flashlights. They were no kind of ‘ites.’ The Egyptians called them Abirus. And they weren’t in the desert. The best evidence is that the Sinai peninsula was in partial bloom at the time, enough to sustain nomads if they went, now and then, into Canaan or Egypt for grain.”

  “Well, forgive me, Professor, I’m only a layman.”

  “You make that sound like ‘amen.’” Kefirovsky laughs. “The flashlights said ‘amen’ in the desert.” He stands and walks over to the yogurt surrounded by simmering water.

  “Still eight minutes,” Emily calls out. The Professor jabs his pointer at Williams’s white patent shoe and looks the reporter in the eye. “I know what the flashlights ate.”

  “Yogurt?”

  Kefirovsky goes to the window and grins out at his rose garden.

  “In Exodus they call it ‘a fine flakelike thing like hoarfrost on the ground.’ They say it tasted like wafers made with honey.”

  “Vasi lets me put a little honey in his, it’s the only sweet he uses and it’s because of that passage that he lets me do it. Six minutes.”

  “Do you know what they call yogurt now in the Middle East, where it is a staple?”

  Williams says he does not know.

  “They call it Leben. This means ‘life’ in German. And that Moroccan plan
t whose sweet milk is thick as motor oil, the Arabs call that one man. Do you see what hangs on in language? Man and life. Plain as the nose on your face. Once you know it, it’s all over the Bible. ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ is only half a sentence.”

  “Wait a minute, Professor, I’m not sure I follow this. The linguistic hints are one thing, but how could yogurt appear in the desert?”

  “You ask questions just like Herman Eidler asked. Right away to the first cause. Well, I don’t know how yogurt appeared to the Abirus. That’s for the theologians. I am a scientist. Science is two things, a problem and a guess. The earth is rocks and organisms decaying together at a fixed rate and under uniform pressure. In Exodus it says that this flakelike stuff melted when the sun grew hot. I don’t know. I don’t sell cough drops. But I can tell you this, the recipe has been before our eyes for a few thousand years and nobody has read it. They all say, look what the flashlights gave us, ethics, morals, ten commandments. But everybody else gave us the commandments too. Every priest in Egypt, every Hindu, every Parsee, every Chaldean, every Hammurabi, even the African cannibals roasting children had do’s and do nots. We read the Bible but we missed the recipes.”

  “Four minutes, Vasi.” Mrs. Kefirovsky slides off the stool. Beyond the stainless-steel kitchen she disappears amid the dark wood furnishings of other rooms. ‘‘I’ll be back in time,” she says as her voice trails away.

  Kefirovsky stares at his yogurt. The digital thermometer reads a constant 112 degrees. “Pretty soon we’ll pour and when it cools you can have some. If I’d been making this thirty years ago, my friends might still be here. We used meet on most Sundays just to joke about things. Herman would come and Hans Fricht, of course, and Jerome Van Strung. Sometimes Einstein came over from Princeton. You would call us a think tank. They were just a bunch of krauts smacking lips over wurst and sauerbraten. We worried about the war. Eidler lost his whole family and his wife’s family. Van Strung had letters from Walter Benjamin that nobody else ever saw. They all liked to play croquet on my lawn. Sometimes I read sections from Worlds in Confusion out loud while they swung their mallets. Fricht was a beekeeper and clean as a Band-Aid. Einstein and Van Strung could walk barefoot over the dogshit.

  “And after croquet it was food and beer. All the time, Einstein knew about the bomb and ate heavy meals. He never talked about his work. I naturally did and Fricht talked about his bees and Van Strung talked literature. When the war was over, Eidler brought us, one Sunday, three dozen Nathan’s hot dogs straight from Coney Island in an ice chest. He came in a government car with a chauffeur. He brought them with buns and everything, but the ice melted onto the bread. Emily rewarmed the hot dogs and we ate them plain. That was the way we celebrated VE day. We ate and we talked.

  “There is a former football player in California who writes to me. He eats only on the weekends and has done this since he retired as a defensive player four years ago. He knows many people in California who survive on nuts and figs. We are doing metabolism and blood tests on him and keeping data. In the summer he runs a camp for overweight boys. Parents bring their sons there just to watch a man not eat and be cheerful and busy all week.”

  “Vasi, it’s fifteen minutes.” Emily reappears with a large funnel and a photo album. Dr. Kefirovsky removes the thermometer, puts on two stove mittens, and lifting the big glass container out of the boiling water, pours his yogurt into the funnel above the small glass containers which will house the mixture.

  “It’s not ready yet,” Emily says, “still lumpy.” Kefirovsky pours the pint of liquid back into the three-quart jar. “We’ll have to wait a few minutes more for the man to melt. It happens sometimes because it doesn’t freeze uniformly. It doesn’t hurt anything.”

  “We would do this once a week if it was just for Vasi,” Emily says. “But we make it most days to give to others. All the neighbors get some and we mail throughout the area in winter when the spoilage rate is low.”

  “You mail it in glass containers?” the reporter asks.

  “No, we mail it in plastic with tight lids. It can go about three days without refrigeration when it’s fresh. Most of them probably don’t even taste it. In ’72 we mailed one to Nixon and one to McGovern special delivery. Not even a thank you from either one. A few people have heard about it and come to ask for some.”

  “Have you ever tried to sell it?”

  “He talks like Gerald,” Kefirovsky says, and walks back out to the garden still wearing his oven mittens.

  “I didn’t mean to offend him,” the reporter says to Emily.

  “It’s all right. He’s sensitive because Gerald, actually all the boys, stand up to him.” She opens the photo album to what seem to be recent Polaroid snapshots of healthy middle-aged men and women surrounded by children. “We have wonderful sons and grandchildren. They respect their father too, and they wouldn’t try to stop him from doing whatever he wants to do. But they won’t allow me to be on the yogurt diet. Don’t get me wrong, I like it and believe Vasi is discovering scientific truths, but I eat it and I’m still hungry. Gerald ships me cornfed beef from Iowa. I have to send a photograph every month to prove to him that I’m not losing weight like their father. Vasi used to weigh over two twenty, now, you can see for yourself he’s a string bean. The doctors say he’s healthy, but he should take vitamins. Since he’s been growing man down here, he’s eaten nothing but the yogurt and man. We moved here from New Jersey when he realized Texas was the right climate for the man. We tried Florida and California first, and he ate other food there because he admits that yogurt without man isn’t enough. The boys told him to sell the recipe, but he wants to get the book out first. Earth Story, to explain all about it. Otherwise it would just be another food product.

  “I hope you understand that with Vasi there is no halfway. He is his own laboratory. The boys know this. Gerald says, ‘One laboratory is enough for him. Let him starve himself, but if I catch him forcing you to live on that stuff, I’ll break his bony back.’ That’s why he won’t speak to Gerald. But Gerald loves him. All the boys do and the grandchildren too. You can’t just make a whole family, twelve grandchildren and all, stop eating everything but yogurt and man.

  “It’s one thing to have a theory about history. The boys backed him one hundred percent on that. And it wasn’t easy. Here they were studying to be scientists and all the famous scientists saying their father was a fraud. Gerald quit one chemistry class because of something the teacher said about Vasi. The boys think he might be right about the yogurt too, but they don’t want him to starve me and to starve their families. That’s not wrong, is it? Did Pasteur give his kids TB or Salk carry around polio?”

  “It’s not the same.” Dr. Kefirovsky is back in the kitchen carrying a fresh sprig of the man plant. “I wear these mittens because the plant is full of stickers. I’m just showing you a sprig. Outside, we milk it like the maple trees in Vermont.”

  “Is it a lot like maple syrup?” the reporter asks.

  “Much thicker in texture. It freezes slowly and looks like peanut brittle when I put it in the yogurt.”

  Williams feels his pocket to make sure the notebook is there. He uncrosses his legs and seems ready to leave.

  “I’m afraid, Dr. Kefirovsky, that I really don’t follow all of this. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your showing me exactly how you make this yogurt even though I’m here to talk about your earlier work. What I don’t see is the jump from your discovery that yogurt is Old Testament manna, to the point of excluding all other food. I mean the . . . flashlights ate other food too, didn’t they?”

  “Not for forty years. For forty years they lived on this and then, only then, were they ready to pick up the business of destiny. This was a time out in history, just like during a football game. This is built into the organism. In sleep, in a nervous breakdown, in menopause, the body is always saying ‘time out.’ Social organizations too. Governments. There is the New Deal and then an Eisenhower. The Revolution and then Sta
lin. Going out of Egypt, then forty years in the desert. That was the only time they did it right.

  “Imagine if in 1922 we Russians had sat down on the steppes, sat down in our cities, sat down by the Black Sea, in the Urals, in Siberia, all over, Russians sitting down saying to each other; ‘Time out. Congratulations on the revolution, now let’s have a time out for forty years to eat man and yogurt.’ Would there have been Stalinism? Would the people swill vodka and be fat as pigs? There are two things to learn from Exodus. Take time out and eat the right thing.”

  “So you think everyone in the world should at least temporarily go on this diet?”

  “First they should have their teeth pulled.”

  Emily laughs, showing hers. “The boys never even took you seriously on that, Vasi.” Kefirovsky opens his mouth and with his forefinger goes in a circle pushing his upper lip and then his lower lip away from his empty gums.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” the reporter says.

  “Exactly, it doesn’t matter. I happen to have lost mine nine years ago from pyorrhea. When I learned what I now know, I gave away the false ones. Teeth are an evolutionary accident. There is no doubt that we’re losing them faster than chest hair. We needed them only until the domestication of animals. For six or seven thousand years teeth have been an anachronism.”

  “To whom did you give your false teeth? I find that pretty unusual.”

  “To the Illinois College of Optometry. They have all the manuscripts. I went there in 1927.”

  “That’s news to me. I don’t recall that in your biographical profile.”

  “I didn’t stay for a degree. At the time Hans Fricht was a professor of optics there. I knew little English. A Russian astronomer was not needed anywhere. Hans said to me, ‘Become an eye doctor, there is nothing to it.’ He got me a scholarship. It was the first place in this country where we lived. Later I went to New Jersey. The optometry trustees asked for my notebooks and my old eyeglasses. In 1965 they made a Kefirovsky room. In 1973 I sent my teeth also.”