Jews vs Aliens Page 4

  ‘So, boychiks, the way through the centre of the universe and out again is through the stomach too! What did Deborah have to say about that? Maybe we eat rugelach now, before you start making noise again.’

  So Raizl eats a pastry crumb by crumb, the poppy seed, raisins and cinnamon lingering on her tongue. Then she starts on one she made with almonds and dates.

  As the pile of rugelach on the plate diminishes, Samuel keeps rearranging the remaining pastries into a pattern. This pattern begins to make sense too. And then they begin chanting again. It starts a buzz in her ears, between her ears.

  The pattern of pastries converges at Tiptherah, a point of beauty and synthesis. She takes another, this one with sweet cheese curds and dried apricots from Odessa. A blaze of flavour at the point of her tongue, taking her far beyond Odessa. At the vortex of star-formed pastry is a tunnel, and there is something at the end of it. Light, colours rippling through an utterly new spectrum.

  Other tunnels branch from the one they travel. Are there other worlds at each end? Maybe these are the worlds that will show solidarity. She takes a look…

  It’s only Fekedynka. But the dirt roads are paved, full of odd sleek automobiles.

  At another tunnel she sees Fekedynka’s synagogue in flames.

  As a young girl she would have gladly burned that place down herself. Samuel would have no great love for it either after so many beatings at the cheder.

  But this smoke fills the tunnel, catching in her throat and infecting her with fear. The fumes flood her with a taste of iron and meat. It makes her gag. Ominous outlines begin to reveal themselves through the smoke. A tower?

  No no, leave this place…

  She’s afraid at first to look into other tunnels, but she hears music that tempts her. Like klezmer, though it’s not very good. A fat man sings a song against a backdrop of a village like hers, while people wearing furs applaud.

  She moves on to another tunnel lit by kaleidoscopic blocks of colour that warm her even more than chicken soup. The kaleidoscope turns to a living scene. Her farshtunken village again: but here’s she’s walking hand in hand with Arkady in the market. Everything is still lit by the colours of the kaleidoscope. She feels peace. She thinks she’s happy.

  But then a deep noise wells beneath her feet and wrenching bass vibrations churn her stomach and rattle her teeth, threatening to undo her. Shake her into pieces, breaking everything down…

  ‘Raizl, stay with us!’ A rough hand on her shoulder, Samuel shaking her. ‘We bring them to us, you don’t want to be going to them!’

  The deep bass carries on, but now she feels anchored against it. Something shrill spills out of an opening in the floor along with it, a column of light that hurts her eyes, noise approaching melody.

  The colours scream with the sound, and she has to close her eyes against them. Something breaks. Plates? The ceiling above her head? She grips Samuel’s hand, and remembers how he once gripped hers when he was much smaller.

  Then it’s quiet. So quiet. And a strange man’s voice addresses them in something that sounds like Hebrew.

  Raizl opens her eyes. Two men and a woman sit at their ‘table’, clad in Arabian-style robes and sandals. It must be cold for them, even with the room warmed by cooking.

  A lot of plates are broken, but someone has moved the rugelach aside. That plate is still intact and the leftover pastries have retained a somewhat shaken pattern.

  Raizl takes a deep breath, picks up the rugelach and offers it to their guests.

  These beings speak Hebrew, Samuel thinks. Not the devotional Hebrew he knows best. But it’s close to the Hebrew of Deborah’s book. One moment their old house was filled with eye-blasting light and colour and gut-wrenching noise. He forced himself to look, even if it shattered him.

  These creatures are composed of noise, and they weave their unseen colours with it.

  And now they sit here in robes and sandals, accepting Raizl’s offer of rugelach.

  Then in a blink they’re wearing warm clothes too. They must have assembled the substance from the air, the vapours of the food, anything around them. From this they create their flesh and blood, their clothes. Some would consider them gods, but Samuel knows there are no other gods before Hashem. They are God’s creatures just like he, his friends and his sister and the beasts of the field.

  Yet jealousy stirs in his mind. Hashem created Man above all other creatures, yet here are creatures far more powerful. Perhaps the Lord was not pleased with what Man has become.

  ‘We’re speaking the right language?’ The first word from the woman grates like a rusty hinge. Then the next one’s soften. Each word makes her voice more like a woman’s, a human that God created.

  Samuel tries to stifle his envious and selfish thoughts. He answers, while his friends are still stunned, ‘You’re close. We use a similar language for prayer, and something else for every day.’

  ‘Yiddish,’ adds Raizl, still offering food. For all her revolutionary Odessa ways, Raizl can be so much like their mother. Perhaps he should become more like that too. In the end, he did enjoy the cooking.

  ‘We tried to change to your form as soon as we entered, so we’re sorry if we hurt your eyes and ears,’ says one of the men at their table.

  They’re very polite for accursed inhabitants, thinks Samuel. But he can’t bear to be polite himself. He needs to know so much.

  What did they want with Earth and the ancient Israelites and why didn’t they help? Samuel is not sure what to ask first.

  The three new human-like beings look about. ‘The stories we’ve heard of your world tell us of heat and light, and a very bossy woman,’ says the woman.

  ‘Have something to eat. You’ve travelled a long way. Rugelach isn’t enough. We can talk later,’ says Raizl.

  ‘Eat?’ one of the male aliens says.

  The woman jabs him with her elbow. ‘Food, remember? You put it in your mouth. That’s the stuff that drew us here, where there are so many senses to experience.’

  Raizl is thoughtful. ‘Three strangers will attract attention in a village full of yentas. We need stories for them. Arkady can get papers. Our guests are students from the yeshiva, yes? And one of you is a sister of a student.’

  ‘What is a sister?’

  ‘A pain in the tuches, that’s a sister,’ replies Samuel. ‘But my sister speaks sense when she says eat.’

  So that’s what they do. The alien woman takes a piece of gefilte fish with her fingers. After a small mouthful she seems to glow with pleasure in the food, as if a light has flickered on under her skin.

  Lev clears his throat. ‘It might be easier if you were all yeshiva students. Friends from a town not too close. But one of you will have to, um, change yourself, if you can do that.’

  ‘I expect that will be me,’ says the female. And then her face and form seems to melt. Now Samuel does look away. When he sees her again, she has become a brown-haired boy.

  Remember, they are only creatures like me. They do things we cannot do. Maybe they can help us. But they are not God.

  Finally he speaks up. ‘Do you go around visiting other worlds?’

  ‘When we can, though it’s hard to get through. We need help from the other side. We like to sample things and study them. We create sound-scores to enjoy at home,’ the first young man from space explains. ‘Yours is the only world we’ve found where beings are so different from us, and produce such a wonderful and strange variety of sounds: some sweet, some harsh. We all heard stories about a visit, then access was denied. Some woman wanted us to fight in a war. We don’t do wars.’

  Samuel translates this into Yiddish for Raizl.

  And Raizl answers, ‘Neither do we, me and my comrades. Our only war is the class war –’

  Lev interrupts, and soon they are talking about points and pathways and how these beings arrived. They pick up each other’s Hebrew idioms quickly.

  Raizl recognises some of the Hebrew words, but most of the time she watche
s. She sees how a light flickers in their faces as they enjoy their food.

  The three look so ordinary now, but Raizl remembers the dazzle of their light and their pulsing waves of sound.

  So these creatures of sound and light enjoy a vacation in the flesh. They change their size, they change their shape to look like us. They seem harmless, compared to the kind of humans she has dedicated herself to overturning.

  They talk like people now. But she is sure she hears an echo in their voices, as if they come from across empty spaces. And their talk is empty too, empty of feeling.

  It’s like people going to the Black Sea to swim and eat ice creams. But this is no time to kibitz, no time to fool around. Not in Deborah’s time when a wicked king held the Jews as slaves, and no time for kibitzing now.

  So they want a vacation, they only want to schmooze and eat and drink and make ‘sound-scores’. Raizl remembers what she saw at the end of a tunnel: the fat man singing on a stage, making an entertainment of someone’s poor life.

  They’ve assumed their bodies of flesh and blood for momentary pleasures, while that is all we have.

  The three guests pick up their Yiddish quickly. Raizl puts them upstairs in the room she’s taken over from her mother, so they’ll be out of the way. She goes back to the pallet in the kitchen. It’s warm there, and it’s where she slept as a child.

  If the visitors broke a few dishes on arrival, they are now the tidiest of guests. They’ve been given names: Hymie, Yaakov and Herschel.

  They spend a lot of time in Samuel’s room. She hears chanting and talking. They go out at night and look at the stars with the tzaddik’s telescope.

  Then they go to Odessa for a look around. It’s just as well they’re away, before they get a visit from the matchmaker urging them to marry someone’s daughter.

  When the guests return, they say how much they like Fekedynka. Especially the food. They’re not so interested in fine things, but in strong tastes and aromas and sounds.

  Raizl cooks another meal, more chicken soup for the schnorrers out of space.

  Of course, she did try to get them to help in the kitchen. Yaakov-from-Meroz obliged. Not for him grating potatoes or any hard graft; he created something that looks very much like gefilte fish out of nothing, or ‘emanations’ as Samuel likes to say. But she didn’t see anything emanating there, just some gefilte fish.

  But then she took a bite. It tasted like damp sawdust. An imitation.

  She remembers when she took Samuel on walks where they’d find flowers, collect them and look them up in a big book, their father’s treasure. She should have tried harder to convince him to study this kind of science. He could have done something useful, instead of this…

  Get rid of them, she’s about to hiss at Samuel, who is now chopping onions. He has the book, he must know the curse to send them back. But she has also seen how the aliens flicker when something affects them. She remembers those bone-rattling notes, the unmaking chords at their heart. Surely the goniffs could be good for something. Even Deborah thought so.

  Meanwhile, she tutors her pupils in Russian. At the end of it, a few coins. She goes to help sister Hannah with her babies, and tells her that Samuel has guests. Better say that, before the chitchat goes around.

  Hannah has other concerns. ‘There’s been trouble,’ she says. ‘Drunk boys in the market mouthing off about a pogrom. They called it a cleansing, though they’re dirty schmucks themselves. They were throwing rocks, while soldiers supplied vodka.’

  On her way home, Raizl calls in on Mordecai. At his smithy the windows are boarded up and glass still glitters on the ground beneath them. He shows her a collection of spiked poles. Is that enough? Oleg said that he expects more arms to arrive, but they’re overdue.

  Raizl runs home. She goes up to Samuel’s room, where the three guests would be. She flings the door open. ‘Listen! Do you want to experience real life on this Earth? Soon you’ll see it in all its horror. Life isn’t just a bowl of chicken soup.’

  They’re all crowded around the open window. A cold wind blows through the room. Samuel turns around, holding his telescope. ‘Ssh! They’re showing me the stars with inhabited planets.’

  Raizl is lost for a response. Then she goes downstairs and gets the megaphone she brought from Odessa. Time to try it out at last.

  Back in Samuel’s room, she shouts through it: ‘Wake up, you schlubs!’

  Alien guests and humans alike jump at the sound.

  And maybe the creatures of sound and light jump a little more.

  Doctor Oleg passes on the bad news. Comrades in Odessa have been arrested and arms were seized.

  Faces of her friends flash before Raizl’s eyes, but she doesn’t have time to worry. Without these arms, they need other help. They knock on doors, get promises of a loan of a horse or cart. A few pistols are donated; the blacksmith will work overtime. They enlist the support of the Jewish toughs who hang about the market: these goniffs don’t give a shit about politics but they’ll pile in if a fight breaks out.

  Raizl is at home, writing out a chart of Yiddish and Russian words. Then the blast of a shofar from the village synagogue interrupts her train of thought.

  Since it isn’t a holiday, that only means one thing.

  It probably started in the market. It usually does. And that’s where Raizl’s group will go, while others patrol elsewhere.

  Raizl shouts for Samuel, then gets herself ready. Heavy coat and scarf over her face, her stoutest pair of boots, her pistol in one hand and an iron stave in another. She picks up the megaphone and slings it across her chest with its strap. Though she doesn’t expect to make speeches, they might need to communicate.

  ‘And what are you going to do, boys?’ Raizl turns towards Samuel and Lev. ‘Cast some more spells?’

  ‘No, we’re going out! We’ll defend the synagogue.’

  She nods at her brother. ‘There’ll be a group heading there now. And where are your guests?’

  ‘They went out to do some… recording, they called it.’

  A curse on Meroz and all its inhabitants.

  In Odessa, Raizl was able to dodge and run through the streets, shelter in buildings and alleys and emerge again.

  But this is a village of ramshackle shops and dirt roads, exposed in a valley to an enemy that comes from all sides. From other villages, from the towns and even the cities, their enemies prepare to sweep through any place that stands after October’s pogroms.

  Some of these attackers are peasants, armed with pitchforks and scythes. But there are also soldiers among them, officers and Cossacks too.

  She wants to vomit. Did Yankel speak of bravery? She’d flee if there was anywhere to go. The enemy will sweep them aside as easily as dust off a wooden floor, then go on to the next village.

  She has her pistol. She’ll take a few of them out of action, out of life before they kill her. But she doesn’t want to die.

  Then their guests appear in the crowd. Just behind her. Swathed in coats and scarves, like everyone else. Hymie, Yaakov and Herschel, the yeshiva boys from Meroz. They are pressed up close to her, and even though they just look like boys, it makes her shudder. They make noises to each other that bear no relation to a human language.

  They don’t write anything down, but they look at each other, look at the scene in front of them as if comparing notes.

  Then there is a gunshot. Bayonets extended, swords and clubs raised, the Black Hundreds spill into the village.

  There are screams from the front – are people getting trampled?

  ‘Let’s go,’ Raizl shouts. ‘We have to move forward.’

  Pogromists come straight into the market, horsemen in front. Closer they come, then Raizl runs forward and shoots. The first horseman rears and falls. Yankel and Sheindl start a volley at the other horsemen, but not before other shots ring out.

  Comrades scatter, but one ducks into the butcher’s to emerge with a meat hook, showing a clear intention to use it.

&nb
sp; The Bundists keep shooting, but in a flash they’re surrounded and pushed back against the tavern. A Jewish thug called Mendel comes out of the tavern and starts throwing rocks. Someone starts shooting from the upstairs windows, just missing a Cossack but bringing down his horse.

  But they’re only a handful cornered here, plus the schnorrers out of space.

  ‘A curse on Meroz!’ Raizl echoes the prophetess Deborah.

  She knows it’s the end. She has chosen to live the life of a rebel, and she did the best she could. Now it’s over but she’ll make a good exit. She shoots and shoots. When she runs out of bullets, she’s prepared to use a pole and then kick and punch if she loses that.

  And she’ll sing. This song will be the last thing in her ears, not the curses of the Black Hundreds. ‘We are the hated and driven,’ Raizl begins, lifting the megaphone to her lips.

  Mordecai’s bass voice booms out. Sheindl and Yankel, everyone joins in. ‘Hated are we, and driven from our homes, Tortured and persecuted, even to blood; And wherefore? ‘Tis because we love the poor....’

  Yaakov-from-Meroz visibly shudders. Raizl can feel it move through him and convulse him. ‘That… that… that terrible tune. Those words,’ he complains in Yiddish, pulling his hat tighter over his ears. ‘Farshtunken! Miserable!’

  They sing louder. Then Raizl pulls his hat off, exposing his ears. ‘Put that in your sound-score, you putz!’

  Luminescence moves through his face, similar to the glow excited by the pleasure of good Jewish food. But now it expresses pain, shown by the way his too-human features contort. The light is stronger. And Raizl understands. Soon he will lose control, and stop being Yaakov.

  Yes… Sound affects these creatures most, for that is what they are made of.

  She sings through the megaphone. ‘We are shot down, and on the gallows hanged, Robbed of our lives and freedom without ruth, Because for the enslaved and for the poor, We are demanding liberty and truth.’

  The alien’s body swells. And the other one gives a cry, worse than a fox in heat or a cat meeting its end.