by Susan Daitch
Fingers followed her out of the room, but without taking the phoenix with him. Bruno walked over to a window and played with the dial of an old bakelite radio balanced on a pile of newspapers. After what seemed like hours, his former teacher returned. Feigen swept the crumpled paper from the table, wadding it in his hand. He didn’t look like a satisfied person who had just eaten a good meal. On the contrary Feigen looked like he was on the verge of losing what little was keeping him moored.
“I know what you’re thinking, but I paid her more than my initial offer, though not quite what she demanded. If Madame Canonbury wants a shylock I’m happy to fulfill the role, that’s all.” He said the words alte goya with a razor’s edge that made me uneasy. It was not a phrase that would ever have been pronounced by the late FFF, but Fingers used the words as if they organized Berlin, Marseilles, all of it, so that its laws and boundaries made sense. “So this is what I think,” he continued. “Part of what she was rambling about is true, the question is: what part? Most of my former colleagues in Berlin believed there is no lost city once known as Suolucidir, and if you were to go looking in the foothills of the Black Mountains, all you’ll find are bones of mirage-obsessed pilgrims. However, if some amateur Rawlinson found evidence of the lost city then we’ve stumbled across something very valuable indeed.”
I assumed by Rawlinson he meant any Englishman explorer, the kind you saw in newsreels about India, a man who looked like the father of Tarzan, maybe. Church bells rang five o’clock. The subject of the lost city nudged Fingers out of the way, just a speck. I expected he would once again hide his prayer shawl fringes, just as he had when Madame Canonbury appeared (which he untucked at her departure) and with the subject at hand, Frederik would return, rhino horn cigarette holder and the gold cufflinks of FFF restored. The university professor took off his gold-rimmed glasses, polished them on his tallis and led us to a part of his apartment I’d never seen before. It was a room with no windows, lined with creaky bookcases, lamps without shades, assorted clutter. He pulled a string to turn on a bare bulb overhead.
He moved a bookcase to reveal a door that led to another room. It wasn’t large, maybe it was no bigger than a closet you could walk into, lie down, not much more than that. Feigen snapped open a slat-backed folding chair and table, dusted them off with his hands and gestured for me to sit down while he and Bruno stood. The room smelled of dust and mold.
“In my father’s house he always made sure we had such rooms,” Feigen explained. “Not to hide valuables, but to hide yourselves.”
The chamber was bare except for a mattress on the floor, a crate of dusty tinned food, and a locked cabinet. Feigen unlocked this to reveal more small drawers, glass-faced panels, and other smaller locked doors.
“A cabinet of curiosities.” Bruno said, and Feigen nodded, but it wasn’t just any hodgepodge of strange things.
“Some of these objects have Kabalistic significance of which I’m ignorant. You have a thing,” he patted one of the drawers, “that in some parts of the world might be considered holy, can’t be touched by human hands, yet somewhere else, these same bits and pieces are considered capable of casting spells, deadly, or they’re considered by others to be nothing more than garbage. The cabinet is the only object I took from Berlin. It was old and damaged, as you can see, and no one at the border bothered with it or knew how to open its doors anyway. There are some compartments even I don’t know how to open. There are other sections which, even if you took an axe to the main body of the cabinet with the intention of reducing the wood to kindling, let me assure you, some of these smaller segments would remain intact, indestructible. In the pile of wood you would find these boxes, turtle-like, head and limbs tucked in.”
Trude’s picture peered out from behind a glass panel, perhaps safeguarded in one of the unbreakable compartments.
Feigen unlocked a curved drawer and removed a silver-plated fish that fit in the palm of his hand. He held the object up by the tail as if it were alive and struggling for air.
“This was said to ward off the evil eye,” he explained, “but the fish also represented a warning, a suggestion that if you swim in the lower parts of a river or sea you will go unnoticed by predators. Even given the proscription against graven images from mosaics in pre-Roman Tunisian temples to nineteenth-century silversmiths working in the ghettos of Venice and Prague you will find these fish, and this is what they symbolized.”
How like Feigen to miss the fact that predators lie on the bottom of the sea just as they do near the surface. Under the fish was a leather-bound portfolio. He untied the folder and pulled out a piece of paper that, when unfolded and laid on the table, was a fragment of a map, about 18-by-18 centimeters, edges torn.
As soon as Fingers’ hands touched the map, the last traces of Berlin departed. His voice and his accent changed completely.
“Before I came to the city as a student I lived in Vilna with my family.”
Bruno, who’d been eying the cabinet, looked startled. We’d always believed Feigen, despite his newly found religiosity, was a tenth-generation Berliner, or something like that, a man who could trace his family back to Leibnitz.
“We were Russian speakers but moved west to Vilnius a few years after the revolution. Even then I had my eye on the door, and wanted to travel even further west, but one day a man came to town who called himself Yanek Motke, and this Yanek, whether he knew it or not, was to provide me with a road map for my departure. He appeared in the spring a few days before Passover and said he had come to perform bedikat chametz, the search for leavened bread that must be completed before noon on the 14th day of Nisan. I was thirteen years old and home alone. It was my sisters’ job to clean the house before Pesach, not really my concern. We’d already heard of this Yanek Motke. My sisters were more interested in accidentally bumping into this bicycle mechanic or that printer’s apprentice than looking for crumbs of bread, so if the man came, they said, let him work his magic. It’s one less chore for us. It was evening when he knocked. I opened the door to a man who didn’t look like any itinerant tzaddic I’d ever seen before. Instead of a fur or felt hat, he wore a rag tied around his head in a haphazard fashion, a black coat that buttoned on the side in the Chinese style, and his baggy black pants were tucked into his boots. He looked beyond me at our brass samovar and candlesticks. I agreed to his price, which was only a few coins for his services, and he brushed past me into our small house.
“Yanek performed entirely as was customary. He lit a candle, pulled a long bent feather from within his coat and began the search, chanting as he brushed behind stove tiles and even in between pages of books. Yanek left no surface uninvestigated for renegade crumbs, scouring even chametz k’zait, pieces of bread less than three centimeters, and those you don’t even have to bother with, halachically speaking. All of it he swept into pieces of newspaper that were rolled into a paper bag later to be sold to a non-Jew. When he was finished he began boiling water, and I began to hope my sisters would come home soon to put a stop to this cleaning frenzy.
“Finally he sat down, and I offered him a glass of tea, putting a sugar cube between his front teeth. He made me nervous. I was only thirteen and didn’t know how to say to him, well, you’re finished now, I paid you, thanks, now you can leave. His reflection in the brass samovar looked like a long column of copper with a fringe of gray hair poking out from under the turban, small eyes, nose, and mouth stretched in the middle.
“Yanek looked at my stack of books on the kitchen table as if they amounted to nothing much, as if to say, smart guy, what do you know? ‘The Egyptians,’ he leaned in close, ‘believed that they had been awarded nine of the ten measures of magic dispensed to the world. The tenth flew further east, landing in my country, in a city now buried but just waiting to reemerge. The right party need only travel to Persia, tap the ground in the right place and the city that slept for so long will, in effect, come back to life.’
“I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he asked me if I k
new about die Roite Yiddelech, the red Jews?
“‘What,’ I asked, ‘like in America?’ ‘No,’ he answered, he wasn’t talking about Jewish Apaches, please. The lost tribes of Israel, that’s what he was talking about. Do they still exist? Did they ever exist?”
“What Lost Tribes?” Bruno asked. What a fantastic faker. Even now I admire his sleight of hand as an actor.
Feigen continued: “The Israelites who disappeared in the 8th Century B.C., forced into exile by invading Assyrians. These ten tribes were dispersed, vanished, but in the intervening centuries a few travelers here and there have tried to find out where this mass of people might have landed and what their fate might have been. Pragmatists waved their hands, dismissing the tribes as a chimera as if to say, get on with it, if you’re fleeing Cartagena or Venice or Prague, what difference could these ghosts possibly make? Dreamers like Yanek, on the other hand, stirred up the dirt, outlining the footprints of the departed tribes; even if in doing so, they tampered with those footprints, that evidence, saying, wait, not so fast, they’re among us still. Well, not us exactly, but in other parts of the earth: down the Nile, across the mountains of Dagestan and Kipling’s Kafirastan. They turned up in many places, only, often enough, they turned out to be either just like the rest of us or complete frauds. They were soldiers, sailors, farmers, all-night partygoers (according to the Midrash), whatever mirror you wanted to hold up, whatever you imagined, that’s what the lost tribes would be. They were supposed to dwell in unmapped and unmappable parts of the world. In the Babylonian Talmud the lost tribes of northern Israel were located in Kurdistan. According to the Jerusalem Talmud they were ‘across the Sambatyon River, enshrouded in cloud beyond the mountains of Darkness’ and ‘under Daphne of Antioch.’ Rabbinical documents stated that the tribes, concealed by an earthquake, were permanently entombed in an underground city. If one found this city you would see streets and houses populated by our ancestors, each and every citizen frozen in suspended animation. The Book of Elijah predicted the tribes would return in 614, and with them ‘a new Jerusalem and a new temple would descend from the skies.’ We’re still waiting.
“So I stared at Motke while he looked around the room carefully, though he’d just cleaned it, as if scanning the kitchen for eavesdroppers. He pulled his chair closer, shook his hands and cuffs, dispersing the crumbs he’s just cleaned back into the atmosphere. His attitude was one of collusion, as if to say, you and I understand these things that most people going about their workaday lives are, as they put one tired foot in front of the other, completely oblivious to. Then he began to tell me the fantastic adventure story of one of the first recorded seekers of the lost tribes: Mar Eldad Ha-Dani.
“Sidonie, Bruno, please, you must try to understand, to a thirteen-year-old boy growing up with no movies and few secular books, the story of Eldad was the greatest comic book, the greatest radio play, I’d ever heard. Who was Mar Eldad? A dark man with long braids from Ethiopia, maybe, or Yemen, he appeared in Quirawan, Tunisia, in 883 making spectacular claims. Speaking in Hebrew, a language no one in the ninth century used for everyday discourse, Eldad claimed to be a member of the lost tribe of Dan himself. Ha-Dani, you see, of the tribe of Dan. Even his first name, an ancient Hebrew calling, long out of use, was a clue as to who he was. No one had heard of such a name. Crowds were held spellbound by his descriptions. His words were said to be sweeter than honey and honeycomb: the Lost Tribes lived in peace in a land where each man owned only one knife used for slaughtering animals, and no person outlived their children. Why did he leave this paradise? No one knows. Eldad described how he was captured by cannibals who kept him alive as long as he was entertaining. When interest in him began to flag, and let’s face it, the cannibals were probably not a very sophisticated audience, just as they were about to roast Ha-Dani, a ship appeared out of the mists of the Straits of Hormuz. Eldad was rescued by pirates who worshipped fire, and whose vessel was accompanied by a ring of sharks trained to eat the men frequently thrown overboard. Living among the brigands for several years, he sailed to Cochin, Bandar, and parts unknown. Eldad was finally ransomed from the Asiatic buccaneers by a merchant from the tribe of Issachar who paid for his freedom in ruby-colored glass that really wasn’t worth all that much, but how were they to know? Traveling by camel and boat he encountered other tribes east of the Persian Gulf and beyond the Caucasus. Finally Ha-Dani was shipwrecked on the coast of Tunisia. He became the authority on the lost ones, though he was often lost himself. According to Eldad, the tribe of Issachar ‘dwelled in the high mountains near to the land of Medes and Persia. Simeon and half the tribe of Manasseh were in the land of the Khozars.’ That is to say, the plains to the north of the Caspian Sea,” Fingers pointed to the map.
“Though dead for over one thousand years Eldad spoke to Yanek Motke in his dreams. Ha-Dani’s work was unfinished, and Motke could, in his travels, do a great deal to hasten the return of these lost peoples. Motke took up the quest, and he sensed in me,” Fingers pointed to himself, “an intelligent, willing accomplice. You might ask what did Yanek Motke, an itinerant who-knows-what, want with a thirteen-year-old boy who’d never been anywhere? I’ve no answers. In any case, in the dream Eldad told Motke where to go and what he would find when he got there. In a genizah in the Crimea, itself rumored to house members of the Lost Tribes, Motke found this map,” Feigen pointed to the paper on the table, “which confirmed Mar Eldad’s claims. I don’t know where the map really did come from, maybe where he claimed, maybe he drew it himself to pass the time on a train to Moscow. Those were the last words I remember hearing from Motke, though I’ve often since repeated them to myself. I fell asleep, and when I awoke our candlesticks were gone, but the map was lying on the table.
“After his visit I became more intrigued, obsessed with that margin of time before the common era, but to find it you had to first enter a modern age of radios, automobiles, elections, doctors in Vienna. In four years I was gone, too, never to return.
“When I began my studies in Berlin I learned that even if Motke had been a charlatan, Eldad was a real person, and his story had caused so much excitement that several versions of it appeared soon after his arrival in Tunisia. If you lived at a time when beliefs in unknown lands populated by unknown people were strongly held, even with little or no concrete evidence to support every Camelot and Atlantis, Eldad gave the lost tribes gravity and residence in a specific topography. His tale was much in demand, so much so that his so-called diary was one of the first books ever printed. The first edition was printed in Mantua, Italy in 1480, only twenty years after the Gutenberg Bible. He wrote, no worldly yoke is upon them, but only that of heaven, they are not at war with anybody, but their energy is devoted to the discussion of the Law; they are at peace with all, and have no enemies. The only weapon they possess is a knife for slaughtering animals. They speak Persian, Hebrew, and Tatar,” Feigen quoted
“Over the centuries others followed in Eldad Ha-Dani’s footsteps, or tried to. In 1160 Benjamin of Tudela traveled as far as the western reaches of the Qing Empire and far into India and Ceylon. He, too, claimed to have located four of the tribes in northeastern Persia. Next of note, Manasseh ben Israel, a contemporary of Spinoza and Rembrandt, tried to find the tribes. So maybe there was something to the stories of Yanek Motke, the thief. Then in 1840 Lost Tribe studies suffered a terrible blow. A man named Abraham Firkowitsch, a fellow with both one of the largest collection of Hebrew manuscripts and a record as a con artist, concocted a fraudulent document, which he claimed had a message from the Lost Tribes. Many were duped, and those who contributed both large and small sums of money became seriously and very publicly disillusioned when he was unmasked. You see, the document also declared Firkowitsch himself to be a descendant from the tribe of Naphtali. Firkowitsch was not a name that was in common usage in biblical times. Newspapers in all the languages of Europe blasted the faker, and for years afterwards the smear of Firkowitsch tainted the whole subject. To speak of the lost
tribes was to have your name associated with fraud, and eventually in Berlin, I gave up talking about the search to anyone. Even my wife knew nothing of my quest, its origins, and how it had propelled me to Berlin in the first place. It became clear that no one would take me seriously if I continued along those lines of inquiry, and unwilling to risk being known as that knucklehead embarrassment Feigen from the east, and finally unwilling to be associated with subjects that smacked of quakery, I soon devoted myself to other things. The tribes are fixers, instigators, promoters of a longing for something perhaps never experienced; I turned my back on them and in exchange was rewarded with a professorship and a house on Oranienburgerstrasse. There were stories about two Englishmen who found a Babylonian Talmud in a Persian cave, but no confirmation of this came from London or anywhere else. From Motke’s visit I’ve never seen concrete evidence of the city until now.”
Feigen translated the lettering in the margins of the map, which described the lands, mountains, rivers and deserts represented by a variety of pictures and symbols. This is Persia, he pointed, and then his finger landed on a black creature, a simurgh similar to the one Madame Canonbury had valued so highly. This symbol, Fingers said, marks the spot where the city of the Lost Tribes will be found. Salomon Reinach, Dreyfusard, archaeologist, believed civilization began in the east. Some thought he was a crackpot, too.
One of Feigen’s radio’s cackled in the background. The voice reported the Belgian Fascist Party, the Rexists, had won twenty-one seats in their parliament, Britain warned Italy not to meddle in Palestine or Egypt, Mussolini declared total victory in Ethiopia. It would take more than a golem descending over the Quai de Rive Neuve to save Fingers, to save any of us.
He held up the bronze object, the simurgh. “It laughs at me, the Persian bird; my colleagues in Berlin called this a phoenix, evidence that Chinese travelers had passed through what I called Suolucidir, but they were wrong.”
