Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  As Jechidah sat staring into the sockets of the skull above her, a white-shrouded corpse came and sat beside her. For a while the two corpses gazed at each other, thinking they could see, although all corpses are actually blind. Finally the male corpse spoke:

  “Pardon, Miss, could you tell me what time it is?”

  Since deep within themselves all corpses long for the termination of their punishment, they are perpetually concerned with time.

  “The time?” Jechidah answered. “Just a second.” Strapped to her wrist was an instrument to measure time but the divisions were so minute and the symbols so tiny that she could not easily read the dial. The male corpse moved nearer to her.

  “May I take a look? I have good eyes.”

  “If you wish.”

  Corpses never act straightforwardly but are always sly and devious. The male corpse took Jechidah’s hand and bent his head toward the instrument. This was not the first time a male corpse had touched Jechidah but contact with this one made her limbs tremble. He stared intently but could not decide immediately. Then he said: “I think it’s ten minutes after ten.”

  “Is it really so late?”

  “Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Jachid.”

  “Jachid? Mine is Jechidah.”

  “What an odd coincidence.”

  Both hearing death race in their blood were silent for a long while. Then Jachid said: “How beautiful the night is!”

  “Yes, beautiful!”

  “There’s something about spring that cannot be expressed in words.”

  “Words can express nothing,” answered Jechidah.

  As she made this remark, both knew they were destined to lie together and to prepare a grave for a new corpse. The fact is, no matter how dead the dead are there remains some life in them, a trace of contact with that knowledge which fills the universe. Death only masks the truth. The sages speak of it as a soap bubble that bursts at the touch of a straw. The dead, ashamed of death, try to conceal their condition through cunning. The more moribund a corpse the more voluble it is.

  “May I ask where you live?” asked Jachid.

  Where have I seen him before? How is it his voice sounds so familiar to me? Jechidah wondered. And how does it happen that he’s called Jachid? Such a rare name.

  “Not far from here,” she answered.

  “Would you object to my walking you home?”

  “Thank you. You don’t have to. But if you want.... It is still too early to go to bed.”

  When Jachid rose, Jechidah did, too. Is this the one I have been searching for? Jechidah asked herself, the one destined for me? But what do I mean by destiny? According to my professor, only atoms and motion exist. A carriage approached them and Jechidah heard Jachid say:

  “Would you like to take a ride?”

  “Where to?”

  “Oh, just around the park.”

  Instead of reproving him as she intended to, Jechidah said: “It would be nice. But I don’t think you should spend the money.”

  “What’s money? You only live once.”

  The carriage stopped and they both got in. Jechidah knew that no self-respecting girl would go riding with a strange young man. What did Jachid think of her? Did he believe she would go riding with anyone who asked her? She wanted to explain that she was shy by nature, but she knew she could not wipe out the impression she had already made. She sat in silence, astonished at her behavior. She felt nearer to this stranger than she ever had to anyone. She could almost read his mind. She wished the night would continue for ever. Was this love? Could one really fall in love so quickly? And am I happy? she asked herself. But no answer came from within her. For the dead are always melancholy, even in the midst of gaiety. After a while Jechidah said: “I have a strange feeling I have experienced all this before.”

  “Déjà vu—that’s what psychology calls it.”

  “But maybe there’s some truth to it....”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe we’ve known each other in some other world.”

  Jachid burst out laughing. “In what world? There is only one, ours, the earth.”

  “But maybe souls do exist.”

  “Impossible. What you call the soul is nothing but vibrations of matter, the product of the nervous system. I should know, I’m a medical student.” Suddenly he put his arm around her waist. And although Jechidah had never permitted any male to take such liberties before, she did not reprove him. She sat there perplexed by her acquiescence, fearful of the regrets that would be hers tomorrow. I’m completely without character, she chided herself. But he is right about one thing. If there is no soul and life is nothing but a short episode in an eternity of death, then why shouldn’t one enjoy oneself without restraint? If there is no soul, there is no God, free will is meaningless. Morality, as my professor says, is nothing but a part of the ideological superstructure.

  Jechidah closed her eyes and leaned back against the upholstery. The horse trotted slowly. In the dark all the corpses, men and beasts, lamented their death—howling, laughing, buzzing, chirping, sighing. Some of the corpses staggered, having drunk to forget for a while the tortures of hell. Jechidah had retreated into herself. She dozed off, then awoke again with a start. When the dead sleep they once more connect themselves with the source of life. The illusion of time and space, cause and effect, number and relation ceases. In her dream Jechidah had ascended again into the world of her origin. There she saw her real mother, her friends, her teachers. Jachid was there, too. The two greeted each other, embraced, laughed and wept with joy. At that moment, they both recognized the truth, that death on Earth is temporary and illusory, a trial and a means of purification. They traveled together past heavenly mansions, gardens, oases for convalescent souls, forests for divine beasts, islands for heavenly birds. No, our meeting was not an accident, Jechidah murmured to herself. There is a God. There is a purpose in creation. Copulation, free will, fate—all are part of His plan. Jachid and Jechidah passed by a prison and gazed into its window. They saw a soul condemned to sink down to Earth. Jechidah knew that this soul would become her daughter. Just before she woke up, Jechidah heard a voice:

  “The grave and the grave digger have met. The burial will take place tonight.”

  TRANSLATED BY the Author and Elizabeth Pollet

  HARLAN ELLISON

  I’m Looking for Kadak

  Can the heroic figure be, at the same time, a Ulysses, a mensch, a meshugge, and a comedian with a heart of gold? Perhaps only if he’s Jewish. So here is a tall tale, a myth about a Jewish Ulysses with caterpillar feet and blue skin. It’s a tummel, a joyful shouting in the face of sorrow, an uplifting. It’s a fairy tale with Jewish words—and that presents a problem.

  To quote Harlan Ellison, “There are three ways to write a story using words in a foreign tongue. The first is to explain every single word as it is used, by restating its meaning in English, or by hoping its use in context will clarify for the reader. The second is to attempt by syntactical manipulation an approximation of the dialect and tongue, eschewing the use of any foreign words. The third is to provide a glossary.”

  Therefore, “Ellison’s Grammatical Guide and Glossary for Goyim” has been appended to the end of the story to aid the reader and provide a few belly-laughs. And since a fairy tale should have a picture, award-winning artist Tim Kirk has drawn the hero, Evsise, the Zsouchmoid.

  J. D.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an original story written expressly for this volume.

  *

  YOU’LL PARDON ME but my name is Evsise and I’m standing here in the middle of sand, talking to a butterfly, and if I sound like I’m talking to myself, again you’ll pardon but what can I tell you? A grown person standing talking to a butterfly. In sand.

  So nu? What else can you expect? There are times you got to make adjustments, you got to let be a little. Just to get along. I’m not all that happy about this, if you want the specific truth. I’ve learned, God know
s I’ve learned. I’m a Jew, and if there is a thing Jews have learned in over six thousand years, it’s that you got to compromise if you want to make it to seven thousand. So, let be. I’ll talk to this butterfly, hey you butterfly, and I’ll pray for the best.

  You don’t understand. You got that look.

  Listen: I read once in a book that they found a tribe of Jewish Indians, somewhere deep in the heart of South America. That was on the Earth. The Earth, shtumie! It’s been in all the papers.

  So. Jewish Indians. What a thing! And everyone wondered and yelled and made such a mishegoss that they had to send historians and sociologists and anthropologists and all manner of very learned types to establish if this was a true thing or maybe somebody was just lying.

  And what they found was that maybe what had happened was that some galus from Spain, fleeing the Inquisition, got on board with Cortez and came to The New World, kayn-ahora, and when no one was looking, he ran away. So then he got farblondjet and wound up in some little place full of very suggestible native types, and being something of a tummeler he started teaching them about being Jewish—just to keep busy, you know what I mean? because Jews have never been missionaries, none of that “converting” crap; other, I shouldn’t name names, religions need to keep going, unlike Judaism which does very cute thank you on its own—and by the time all the smart-alecks found the tribe, they were keeping kosher, and having brises when the sons were born, and observing the High Holy Days, and not doing any fishing on the Shabbes, and it was a very nice thing altogether.

  So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are Jews here on Zsouchmuhn. Zoochhhhhh-moooohn. With a chhhhh, not a kuh. You got a no-accent like a Litvak.

  It shouldn’t even surprise that I’m a Jew and I’m blue and I have eleven arms thereby defying the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and I am squat and round and move very close to the ground by a series of caterpillar feet set around the rim of ball joints and sockets on either side of my tuchis which obeys the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and when I’ve wound the feet tight I have to jump off the ground so they can unwind and then I move forward again which makes my movement very peculiar I’m told by tourists without very much class.

  In the Universal Ephemeris I am referred to as a native of Theta 996:VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici. The VI is Zsouchmuhn. A baedeker from some publisher in the Crab came here a few turns ago and wrote a travel pamphlet on Zsouchmuhn; he kept calling me a Zsouchmoid; he should grow in the ground, headfirst like a turnip. I am a Jew.

  I don’t know what a turnip is.

  Now I’m raving. What it’ll do to you, talking to a butterfly. I have a mission, and it’s making me crazy, giving me shpilkess, you could die from a mission like this. I’m looking for Kadak.

  Hey you butterfly! A blink, a flutter, a movement it wouldn’t hurt, you should make an indication you can hear me, I shouldn’t stand like a schlemiel telling you all this.

  Nothing. You wouldn’t give me a break.

  Listen: if it wasn’t for that oysvorf that bum, Snodle, I wouldn’t be here. I would be with my family and my lust-nest concubines on Theta 996:III, what the Ephemeris calls Bromios, what we Jews call Kasrilevka. There is historical precedent for our naming Bromios another name, Kasrilevka. You’ll read Sholom Aleichem, you’ll understand. A planet for schlimazels. I don’t want to discuss it. That’s where they’re moving us. Everyone went. A few crazy ones stayed, there are always a few. But mostly, everyone went: who would want to stay? They’re moving Zsouchmuhn. God knows where. Every time you look around they’re dragging a place off and putting it somewhere else. I don’t want to go into that. Terrible people, they got no hearts in them.

  So we were sitting in the yeshiva, the last ten of us, a proper minyan, getting ready to sit shivah for the whole planet, for the last days we would be here, when that oysvorf Snodle had a seizure and up and died. Oh, a look: a question, maybe? Why were we sitting shivah in the rabbinical college when everybody else was running like a thief to get off the planet before those gonifs from the Relocation Center came with their skyhooks, a glitch if ever I saw one, shady, disreputable, to give a yank and drag a place out of orbit and give a shove and jam in big meshiginah magnets to float around where a nice, cute world was, just to keep the Cluster running smooth, when they pull out a world everything shouldn’t go bump together … ? Why, you ask me. So, I’ll tell you why.

  Because, Mr. I-Won’t-Talk-Or-Even-Flap-My-Wings Butterfly, shivah is the holiest of the holies. Because the Talmud says when you mourn the dead you get ten Jewish men who come to the home of the deceased, not eight or seven or four, but ten men, and you sit and you pray, and you hold services, and you light the yorzeit candles, and you recite the kaddish which as every intelligent life-form in the Cluster except maybe a nut butterfly knows is the prayer for the dead, in honor and praise of God and the deceased.

  And why do we want to sit shivah for a world that was such a good home for us for so many turns? Because, and it strikes me foolishness to expect a farchachdah butterfly to grasp what I’m trying to say here, because God has been good to us here, and we’ve got property (which now is gone) and we’ve got families (which now are gone) and we’ve got our health (which, if I continue talking to you, I’ll be losing shortly) and God’s name can be hallowed by word of mouth only in the presence of others—the community of worshippers—the congregation—the minyan of ten, and that’s why.

  You know, even for a butterfly, you don’t look Jewish.

  So nu, now you understand a little maybe? Zsouchmuhn was the goldeneh medina for us, the golden country; it was good here, we were happy here, now we have to move to Kasrilevka, a world for schlimazels. Not even a Red Sea to be parted, it isn’t slavery, it’s just a world that’s not enough, you know what I mean? So we wanted to pay last respects. It’s not so crazy. And everyone went, and only the ten of us left to sit the seven turns till we went away and Zsouchmuhn was goniffed out of the sky to go God-knows-where. It would have been fine, except for that Snodle, that crazy. Who seized up and died on us.

  So where would we get a tenth man for the minyan?

  There were only nine Jews on the whole planet.

  Then Snodle said, “There’s always Kadak.”

  “Shut up, you’re dead,” Reb Jeshaia said, but it didn’t do any good. Snodle kept suggesting Kadak.

  You should understand, one of the drawbacks of my species, which maybe a butterfly wouldn’t know, is that when we die, and pass on, there’s still talking. Nuhdzhing. Oh. You want to know how that can be. How a dead Jew can talk, through the veil, from the other side. What am I, a science authority, I should know how that works? I wouldn’t lie on you: I don’t know. Always it’s been the same. One of us seizes up and dies, and the body squats there and doesn’t decay the way the tourists’ do when they get shikker in a blind pig bar in downtown Houmitz and stagger out in the gutter and get knocked over by a tumbrel on the way to the casinos.

  But the voice starts up. Nuhdzhing!

  It probably has something to do with the soul, but I wouldn’t put a bet on that; all I can say is thank God we don’t worship ancestors here on Zsouchmuhn, because we’d have such a sky full of nuhdzhing old farts telling us how to run our lives, it wouldn’t be worth it to keep on this side of the veil. Bless the name of Abraham, after a while they shut up and go off somewhere.

  Probably to nuhdz each other, they should rest in peace already and stop talking.

  But Snodle wasn’t going away. He died, and now he was demanding we not only sit shivah out of courtesy for having lived here so prosperously, but we should also, you shouldn’t take it as an imposition, sit shivah for him! An oysvorf, that Snodle.

  “There’s always Kadak,” he said. His voice came from a nowhere spot in the air about a foot above his body, which was dumped upside-down on a table in the yeshiva.

  “Snodle, if you don’t mind,” said Shmuel with the one good antenna, “would you kindly shut your face and let us handle this?” Then se
eing, I suppose for the first time, that Snodle was upside-down, he added, but softly he shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, “I always said he talked through his tuchis.”

  “I’ll turn him over,” said Chaim with the defective unwind in his hop.

  “Let be,” said Shmuel. “I like this end better than the other.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” said Yitzchak. “The gonifs come in a little while to take away the planet, we can’t stay, we can’t go, and I have lust-nest concubines lubricating and lactating on Bromios this very minute.”

  “Kasrilevka,” said Avram.

  “Kasrilevka,” Yitzchak agreed, his prop-arm, the one in the back, curling an ungrammatical apology.

  “A planet of ten million Snodles,” said Yankel.

  “There’s always Kadak,” said Snodle.

  “Who is this Kadak the oysvorf’s babbling about?” asked Meyer Kahaha. The rest of us rolled our eyes at the remark. Ninety-six tsuris-filled eyes rolled. Meyer Kahaha was always the town schlemiel; if there was a bigger oysvorf than Snodle, it was Meyer Kahaha.

  Yankel stuck the tip of his pointing arm in Meyer Kahaha’s ninth eye, the one with the cataract. “Quiet!”

  We sat and stared at each other. Finally, Moishe said, “He’s right. It’s another tragedy we can mourn on Tisha Ba’b (if they have enough turns on Kasrilevka for Tisha Ba’b to fall in the right month), but the oysvorf and the schlemiel are right. Our only hope is Kadak, lightning shouldn’t strike me for saying it.”

  “Someone will have to go find him,” said Avram.

  “Not me,” said Yankel. “A mission for a fool.”