The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (10 page)

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 children 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.

They put her onstage anyway. In the first town, they set her on a trapeze suspended from an oak tree. As the applause for Hodel and Hinde’s acrobatic tussle climaxed, Shimmel shoved Heyh from her perch. She passed over the crowd in a perfect arc of flight, but, when her hands released at the peak, she failed to catch the beam with her feet. The shame cast across her face as she hit the side of the barn made Shimmel shut his eyes in pain. The crowd, though, wasn’t the least bit upset by her act, loudly laughing at her as she crawled behind a rock and cried. People couldn’t take their eyes off the unfortunate girl. They scarcely noticed Teyvel when he took the stage and swallowed a five-foot-long rapier while standing in a ring of fire.

In the next town, Shimmel hoisted Heyh onto the tightrope as Hodel and Hinde exited the stage, to loud cheers, with a double-headed backflip. The high wire was strung above a river. Heyh walked toe-to-heel like she’d been taught, smiling at her audience far below. As she got to the center, though, she felt the rope shivering in the breeze. Her knees started to tremble. The line began to shake. Her legs struggled to compensate. The wire wriggled faster, sending giggles through the crowd below her. She looked down. She remembered she couldn’t swim. She tried to back up, misjudged the length of her foot. Down she went. She hit the water belly-first, and sank.

It was Shimmel who fetched her. As he pulled her to the surface, she heard folks’ jeers, even heartier than on the day before. She didn’t ever want to perform again. She wished that she had drowned.

Teyvel wished that she’d died as well when, for the second day in a row, nobody paid attention to his act after her collapse, and Hodel and Hinde were getting impatient about how their routine was forgotten by the time Heyh’s was finished. But most of the troupe was starting to recognize her value: As much as folks enjoyed being elevated by feats they could never physically achieve, they also sought the affirmation of watching someone fail more dramatically than they’d ever done. They needed a buffoon, a slapstick scapegoat to comically relieve them of their own inadequacies. Heyh did it spectacularly.

As the season went on, Shimmel and Iser and Schprintze choreographed increasingly elaborate routines for her. They’d have her juggle fire on the tightrope, which would ignite when she dropped a flare, inflaming her clothing as she tumbled into the lake beneath her. Teyvel, meanwhile, made every effort, short of murder, to kill her. He set out his knives under her trapeze, or loosed Shimmel’s horse while Heyh struggled to get out of a pond.

She no longer smiled for the crowd as her act began. She paled. Her tear ducts swelled, and still they ran dry by the end of each day. Hodel and Hinde each budded breasts that summer, and were promptly deflowered by Teyvel. Glukel grew pregnant with Iser’s child. Shimmel and Schprintze had their annual fling. Koppel and Fishke started sharing the same bed. Everyone was wanted but Heyh. Everyone was loved and admired. She begged, day after day, to quit the circus, to be left on the side of the road.