The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six Read online

  Avram didn’t understand what the village thief meant. But he knew perfectly well, as Dalet invited him inside, that the decanter on the table was the one he’d bought for his banquet. He said so. Dalet agreed. Avram grew large with rage: How could the thief pilfer it? Dalet reiterated what he’d been told by the town elders.

  Avram couldn’t argue with them, for they were shortly to be his guests. So he took a seat and reached again inside his purse. He hadn’t any more coppers. He withdrew a fat gulden, and set it on the table between them.

  The gold glowed pure greed, but what match was that for the blaze of Avram’s desperation? One gulden was the same as another: Their glimmer was shared. Dalet could barely even see the coin in the decanter’s glare. He declined the offer.

  Avram added another gulden, and then several more. At last he emptied his purse. But it was like casting stars into sunlight. Poor Avram, his reckoning was all wrong: In matters of desire, no quantity is greater than one.

  — How much do you want, Dalet? Is my gold not enough? Do you want my silk? My lapis? My daughter Tamar? I’ll go get her. She won’t complain. My banquet will be your wedding.

  Dalet had often seen Tamar in the marketplace. She was built tall and stiff like a post, fenced in her own crossed arms.

  Though he didn’t wear his invisibility cloak in the daytime, she’d never acknowledged him, and, while he was accustomed to being overlooked, he had trouble imagining how he’d fulfill his marital duties without her participation, whether a woman could conceive children without even noticing that she had a husband. Then Dalet’s thoughts returned to little Riva. He recalled how she’d smiled at him. His memory flared anew with her unbridled light, overwhelming the decanter’s stoppered glow. Dalet put both hands on the table.

  — I’d like Riva.

  — Riva is my youngest.

  — I want to marry her. You can have the decanter.

  — I can’t give away my daughters out of order, Dalet. Tamar is already twenty-four, and Riva . . . My eldest must be married first. You know that’s the way of the world. Would you have me break the law?

  The thief sighed. His breath made the decanter shimmer, a sympathetic quivering of the desire pent up within. In that light, he saw the tumble of Riva’s auburn hair, the moisture in her copper eyes, the downturn of her mouth as she gnawed on a stale crust. He sighed again, and, wishing for what she might want, mumbled the words fresh bread.

  — What did you say?

  — I’ll return the decanter if you’ll bake some challah.

  — How about a wagonload of whole-grain import? It’s only three days old, a week at most.

  — No, Avram. I want it made here, by you.

  — I haven’t baked in ages, Dalet.

  — I’ll return your decanter when you do.

  By the time Avram got home, Dov the shoemaker and Zev the carpenter were already at his banquet, as were the tailor and the cooper and the butcher. If he’d bartered with senseless Dalet any longer, he wouldn’t have been on hand to greet Yehudah the mayor and his wife, Esther, his coveted guests of honor. More people came, and on each new face the baker looked to find the disappointment that he himself felt—that he felt toward himself—for not having a cut-crystal decanter on the table. But they couldn’t even see where it would have gone: Not knowing of it, his wife had left no place for it. To everybody but Avram, the decanter didn’t exist.

  They toasted him. They praised the beauty of his wife and daughters. They complimented the mutton he served them and admired the plates on which it was served. Avram tried to stop them, to object that nothing could compare to his decanter, but they wouldn’t let him. Dov praised his silk. Zev complimented his tortoiseshell. Yehudah admired how his money shimmered like jewelry. But the toasts weren’t celebratory; they sounded like an inventory. And if folks could make such a fuss about things so obviously inferior to his decanter, Avram knew their envy didn’t add up to much.

  At last they left, just hours before the coming of dawn. His family went to bed. Avram didn’t sleep, though. He slipped down the cellar stairs to fetch a load of wood. He hauled it next door, where his stone ovens were, and built a fire. When he turned around, he found little Riva there, still draped in satin, hair braided with amber. She was carrying his batter spoon.

  — Why wasn’t Dalet at the banquet tonight?

  — Because he’s a thief, Riva.

  — He has luminous eyes.

  — He’s got a crooked face.

  — That may be, but he’s never told a lie.

  Avram stared at his daughter for a while, trying to discern whether the thief had gone ahead and seduced her without his permission. However, he saw no abrasions, none of the blunders that a man might leave in the night, and he attributed her own fervid state to his good wine. He stooped to gather flour and water. He mixed his batter in a great vat. He kneaded it. Riva went to sleep in the corner. He covered the dough with a white shroud. He wrapped his daughter’s shawl around her febrile shoulders, and carried her to bed.

  The town awoke to a scent as strangely familiar as the touch of a lost lover. Husbands and wives whispered to each other, but it wasn’t gossip about the banquet. All they said was: fresh bread. They dressed in a hurry, no time for jewels and finery. They crowded around the bakery.

  Avram opened the door to get away from the heat of his oven. The people in the street engulfed him. They wanted to know when the bread would be ready. They jangled their money.

  Avram sold them all the challah he had, all but the loaf he’d set aside for the thief. Those who came late wanted to buy that. He was offered a gulden, five, ten. He was barricaded by a veritable auction, and might have been detained all day had he not promised to bake a bigger batch the following morning.

  Concealing the loaf under a silk swathe, he went at last to see Dalet. Though he didn’t say where he was going, little Riva followed him down the road, and refused to turn around.

  — You can’t come with me. What do you want?

  — Why isn’t the bread you baked for us?

  — It’s ransom. You wouldn’t understand.

  — Dalet must have stolen something that you love very much.

  Recalling his decanter, Avram couldn’t bear to be detained by his daughter’s banter any longer. He permitted her to accompany him if she promised not to talk to the thief, and to shun his crooked gaze.

  They entered Dalet’s hovel together. Accustomed to hardwood luxury, Riva was shocked by the conditions in Dalet’s shack, scarcely the size of Avram’s pantry, a slum of rot and rust, in which the thief sat, rough and unwashed. Heeding her father’s orders, she didn’t say hello, and stared at Dalet’s ruined shoes while her father addressed him, unwrapping the swaddling, unveiling the precious loaf.

  Dalet cradled his hands around the warm heft. He split off a braid, and gave it to Riva. Then he handed a portion to the baker and took a piece for himself. Seated around his hobbled table, they ate together.

  At last Dalet stood. He retrieved the decanter from behind some rubbish—stolen goods ages abandoned—and handed it to the baker. The light within lifted as Avram held it out for the admiration of his daughter.

  She shrugged and asked if she could have more challah. The glow dissipated. Avram stepped outside and held the crystal to the sun to see why it no longer seemed so spectacular. As she watched him turn it, Riva found the bread in her hands replenished. Filling her mouth, she furtively glanced at the thief. In the combined light of their eyes, the decanter seemed to vanish.

  The following night, Avram brought the decanter to Dov the shoemaker as a gift. Dov had been to the bakery that morning to buy bread for the evening’s feast, a bacchanal to rival Avram’s own banquet. The shoemaker had placed his order with the pomp of a prince. But in the dozen hours that had passed, he’d collapsed. He absently set the decanter in a corner. Avram was too hungry for a taste of his own bread to wonder what had overcome the shoemaker. Only little Riva saw how Dov’s gaze dropped,
from everyone whose eyes met his, to the floor.

  His rug was gone: Dalet had stolen the carpet Dov was said to have purchased from a dybbuk. It had cost a fortune, but how do you bargain with a demon? And, after all, people didn’t see such a rug every day. The colors weren’t earthly: none of the usual mud and silt. Woven from the purple and gold that embellish dreams, it set hopes at folks’ feet.

  Girls ached to dance with Dov. He could have carried any one away to bed or altar in a single leap. He declined. Other men caught them when they swooned, and spun them around as if—who needs a dybbuk’s carpet?—there weren’t any gravity.

  Dov slept in his shop that night, to escape the oppressive festivity of his bacchanal. And in the morning, he took up the old boots on his bench: Dalet’s shoes, toe-holed and hobnailed, fixed ad hoc over the years by anyone with a hammer, yet somehow still possessed of the pedestrian integrity that Dov had learned from his father. He glanced at his own boots, purchased prefabricated from the peddler who lately came to town four times a year, selling chic city shoes, styled in filigree and leaf, that aged a lifetime in a season. Disposable footwear: Everyone but Dalet had bought into that. When the thief had refused, the previous afternoon, to return Dov’s dybbuk carpet for cash—when Dalet had instead insisted that the shoemaker resole his boots—Dov had offered him enough new shoes to last a decade. But, as the whole town knew, Dalet was obtuse: He refused to be wealthy like everybody else. What was Dov to do? He tied on his smock and got to work.

  Craftsmen, naturally, have standards: A good pair of soles deserves heels at least their equal, and the bottom of a shoe shouldn’t make a mockery of the top. Dov labored at his bench all day long, hunched and pinched, remaking each piece of those old clodhoppers, replacing every stretch of leather, each iron fitting. Folks pounded at his door, but he mistook it for the echo of his mallet. They called to him through the window, but he thought it was the whine of his grindstone. Only after his job was done did he notice that the day was gone.

  Dov lit a lantern and slung Dalet’s boots over his shoulder. He opened his door. Nobody was outside anymore—but everyone’s shoes were. The line of footwear stood unbroken from Dov’s shop to the town square. Dov picked up the first pair. He recognized from the pitch of the arch that he’d made them for Zev the carpenter. They required new straps. The next pair in line needed to be reheeled, and, on those after that, the leather had cracked.

  On his way to the thief’s hovel, Dov worked over those shoes in his head. He weighed what size nails he’d need, and followed the thread of each anticipated suture over hill and through pasture to Dalet’s door. He stepped inside. He seated the thief, and, down on his knees, adjusted the boots to fit Dalet’s feet.

  — Come to me if they hurt.

  — Let me fetch your carpet.

  — Another day. I have too much work.

  The following morning, Dov fixed Zev’s shoes, and brought them to him in the afternoon. Zev looked upset.

  — Is the stitching too tight?

  — The gems I set aside to pay you with, they were stolen last night.

  — What would I do with a pile of rocks? I need you to build some shelves in my shop.

  Who can say what makes a village change its ways? Of course, the thief was the first to see a difference. On market day, desire no longer radiated, as if an act of nature, from the town square. And if Dalet broke into the home of the cooper or the butcher, he often couldn’t distinguish one luxury from another: Objects didn’t quite lose their luster, but each gave a light so similar to the others that they might as well have been a line of yahrzeits. For a time, Dalet didn’t know what to steal. The tailor’s porcelain figurines? An emerald brooch from the tinker’s wife? Why bother? Folks didn’t care a farthing for such baubles anymore.

  The treasures began to stockpile in Dalet’s hovel. He foisted what he could on itinerant beggars, but how many candlesticks and goblets could he expect them to haul? Furniture gridlocked his floor, paintings plastered his walls, and if he burdened his bed with another piece of linen, he’d be lying on the ceiling.

  He couldn’t sleep. Wrapped in his cloak, he wandered the night. He tried to chat with Shlomo the watchman, to pass the time in conversation, but, whenever Dalet spoke, Shlomo acted as if his were the voice of an apparition: The watchman dropped his lantern and fled. So listless Dalet talked to the moths. They appreciated his company as long as he stood by Shlomo’s lamp. He gave them voice lessons, lest they think that only butterflies could be pretty. And he told them about his beloved Riva, whose beauty he beheld without either sight or sound.

  On that matter, they didn’t appear convinced. All his life, the thief had stolen people’s needs, and folks hadn’t been content—had they?—merely to possess memories. If Dalet really needed Riva, if he truly loved her, the moths reasoned with beating wings, he’d quit meddling in other people’s desires. He’d go to Avram’s house and steal her.

  Lacking an education, Dalet couldn’t argue with them. He buttoned his invisibility cloak, and strode over to Avram’s home. He climbed the stairs, and found Riva’s room.

  She lay uncovered atop a feather bed, linen tangled at her ankles and blankets rumpled on the carpet. In her sleep she’d unlaced her slip. The loose ribbons dangled from the fingers of two little hands resting on new breasts beneath flush nipples. Dalet knelt to lift her, so much lighter than the marble nymph he’d pilfered from Yehudah’s garden the night before. The statue now rested in his hovel, numb to desire. Riva, though, she wasn’t stone sculpture. She wasn’t a rug or a decanter.

  The moths had been mistaken. What Dalet wanted couldn’t be stolen; love had to be given.

  A breeze ruffled Riva’s curtains. She shivered in her sleep. Dalet removed his invisibility cloak and tucked it around her shoulders and hips and thighs and feet. Then he left her, shutting the door and shuffling home alone.

  In the morning, Riva’s sisters went to wake her, to work in the bakery with their father. All they found in her bed was an empty slip. They picked up her blankets. They shook out her sheets. Carrying her linens in their arms, they hurried to Avram.

  He stood at the door to his bakery, staring into an overcast sky. They told him that Riva was missing. They held out the bedding. Avram raised a hand, as if he’d already guessed. One by one they stopped talking, following his eyes: The storm clouds ahead looked luminous.

  All over town, folks stepped out of their shops to squint at the shock of light on the horizon, showering radiance across the sunless sky.

  — Is that Dalet’s hovel?

  — Impossible. His shack is too small.

  Yet even those who expressed doubt began to walk toward the light. They followed the road brightening toward Dalet’s house. As they turned the final bend, the brilliance was too much. Folks covered their faces.

  Only Avram didn’t, searing open eyes looking for his daughter until, at the crux of the blaze, he saw spreading shadow. It unfurled like a cloak, and wrapped around an emerging double filament. The sky fell black.

  • • •

  The pyrotechnics of desire left the house and village unblemished. Gradually Avram recovered his eyesight. For many weeks, people searched for Riva and Dalet. Plank by plank, they dismantled his hovel. They found only trifles.

  Yet the couple, though never again seen, did not abandon them. Periodically a loaf of bread would be missing from a batch, or a supply of wood would come up short. Folks accepted these losses. Any imbalance was attributed to the hidden lovers. Even as years passed, and their faces were forgotten, their names were murmured to bless, and mend, any inadequacy. The town no longer had a thief, and no longer needed one.

  HEYH THE CLOWN

  When Heyh was a small girl, her mother traded her to the circus for a sack of potatoes. That was the exchange rate in those days—just price for a child her size—half the value of a laborer, and twice that of a cadaver.

  Only in this particular case, the circus made a mistake: Whereas most childr
en are natural acrobats, suggestibly flexible, Heyh was a klutz. In fact, none of the troupe had ever seen a human being so helplessly clumsy. Romping around on feet broad enough to carry a grown man, she knocked over scenery and props, or stumbled on imperceptible obstacles: faded shadows, diminished echoes. When that happened, she tried to catch herself with hands large enough to paddle a boat. Were she not so squat, she might have been seriously hurt.

  Compared to Heyh, a sack of potatoes had ballerina grace. Yet, what coordination her body lacked, she compensated for in the mobility of her face. She’d wide blue eyes and full red lips that captured her emotions and projected them farther than—poor girl, she also had an astigmatism—she could possibly observe. The other newly purchased children made fun of Heyh, just to see her cry. They mimicked her gait, walked into imaginary walls and slipped on make-believe banana peels, but she didn’t perceive that they were mocking her. So whenever she stepped out from under the tent where the troupe lived and practiced together in winter, her companions beat the tears out of her with fists.

  The adults beat her as well, but only as a disciplinary measure when she fell off the tightrope or missed the trapeze. It was part of her training, as was lobbing rocks at her to encourage agility. None of which improved her performance. Any ordinary guild would have given up on Heyh. A circus, however, is a family, and, if they couldn’t sell her by the time the weather turned warm and the troupe began to travel and perform, they’d find some role for her to play.

  Because Heyh had such ample hands, Iser the juggler tried to teach her his skills with sticks and balls. To her unfocused eyes, however, the objects traveled as a blur, and she was at a loss to catch them when they fell from the air. Nor did her massive feet help her to stand on the back of a galloping horse like Shimmel the acrobat did in his opening act; affronted to be saddled with such an awkward load, the animals all threw her to the ground. Schprintze the contortionist refused to waste time on a girl whose movements were so disjointed, and Teyvel the sword-swallower said she was too short to fit a saber all the way down her throat. By springtime, all the other children had acts of their own: Koppel was a fire walker, Fishke did some sleight-of-hand, the sisters Hodel and Hinde were tumblers, and Glukel had paired up with Iser as the target in his new knife-throwing routine. Only little Heyh still couldn’t do anything.