Or maybe phonic mesmerization. Maybe even aphonic.
One thing was obvious. They were talking about me. About me? Yes, about me. I don’t know how doubt is shredded, but the phrase “without a shred of doubt” is applicable here. For once in a while Jiri’s eyes slid in my direction — I who was standing at the foot of his bed, while Betty, who sat in an easy chair almost blending into it, now bent close to him, her chin over the edge of his blanket — even though he looked at, faced, Betty. She didn’t look at me either, but occasionally nodded or tilted her head to the left where I was standing, to the tune of — yes, again—“tara glos,” too old. But after a while that phrase disappeared. By the shifts in tone, the up-and-down decibels of their private lingo, small gestures in body language, I gathered they were arguing, negotiating whether or not to reveal something to me.
This wasn’t the first time this happened to me, but it never lasted long. I seem to be a magnet for secretive speech. Here’s number two, the third will come soon. Once, in Jerusalem, where I had been filming a documentary about the Western Wall, I had to see a dentist. As I sat in his waiting room, two sixteen-year-olds entered. They had long curly payess and wore the typical black hats, tieless white shirts, and black suits of the ultra-Orthodox community. They sat down next to me on the small red plastic-covered bench and immediately began to chatter in Yiddish. But it was a Yiddish that would have been Greek even to Sholom Aleichem. They spoke in quick gushes, swallowing without even a blessing most of the syllables, then slowed down and feigned an accent, perhaps Warsaw Yiddish, that distorted and stretched some of the vowels and shortcutted others. They obviously used this private cant in public — a kind of kosher Yiddish Pig Latin — to bamboozle all eavesdroppers. Like me.
During Jiri’s and Betty’s argument, displeasure pulsed in Betty’s pursed lips and longer nose. Why was she the Cerberus of whatever information Jiri wanted to share with me? When she finished, she leaned back in her chair, her face set in stone, a tamped fire in her hazel eyes.
“Don’t forget, in Prague…” Jiri said softly.
At this, Betty was propelled forward again. From her erect position she moved toward Jiri’s bed, chin out, eyebrows up. Aggressive she looked despite her silence. Her hand was up, all five fingers outspread, as if signaling Stop!
“…go see Yossi in back of the Altneu…”
“You told him that already.”
I interjected quickly, “You said he’s almost a relative. Is it something like your father’s father’s second cousin by marriage?”
Again Betty moved, hands out, as if to block, intercept, Jiri’s words.
“Who’s asking personal questions now?” she muttered. “It’s only no good when Betty does it.”
Jiri didn’t even turn to her.
“No, bruderl, it’s more complicated that that. Call him a family friend.”
For a moment they fell silent. Maybe they were catching their breath, ready for the next volley of vowels, consonants, and Danny K double talk.
Again I looked up at the framed Miro above Jiri’s head. Out of the apparently inchoate dots and lines, curlicues and orbs, a map of the Old Town of Prague materialized, and in the squiggles of the print I saw a path that led to the Altneushul from the Old Town Square. It seemed my unconscious was already attempting to take still vague plans and make them real. I navigated through starbursts and pastels — mauves and velvet greys — and splashes of primary colors from point A to point B. But when I looked again the map was gone and other configurations, algebraic unknowns, surfaced.
Then again began their Ubangi. Its rhythm, klippetop, klippetap, klippetop, klippetap, reminded me of words on horseback. I saw John Wayne galloping, klippetop, klippetap, across a field; the Lone Ranger klippeting toward the sunset. But when Jiri spoke alone, the horses were stabled, returned that sweet gentle tone I first heard when he sat before me in the Eldridge Street shul.
I listened to them. Had Jiri said aloud in English, Let’s not talk over his head, behind his back, I would have jumped up — well, I was standing already — and exclaimed, No, no, please continue, I love listening to you. Their words transported me to some distant civilization; the sentences like a tape running backward, full of!clicks from African languages. As if conversations were stretched out on tape, then cut up and pieces arbitrarily spliced together; as if that recently discovered defective gene for language were suddenly blossoming in their words, giving them the timbre of connected speech, but which upon closer examination was partial Gibberish, spoken — as everyone knows — in the tiny equatorial principality, formerly a Dutch protectorate, now known as Gibber.
A nurse floated into the room. To the three of us a fourth was suddenly added.
“Time for your blood pressure, Doctor, and a little sponge bath too, hon.”
She swooshed the curtain bunched up by the wall until it surrounded Jiri’s bed. Although the nurse didn’t ask me to move, I stepped into the hallway. A man passed me in a wheelchair. A hefty woman aide pushed a tall aluminum food cart slowly down the hall. Although there were other noises in the hospital, I still heard the rush of sounds that Jiri and Betty had created.
“Okay,” the nurse told me a few minutes later. “You can go back now.”
Jiri looked refreshed.
“I’m going, Jiri. I hope you feel better soon.”
“Wait, please don’t go yet.”
Truth is, I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t appreciate just standing there, a mute, even dumb listener to their two-way conversation.
I went back to my place by the wall, near the foot of Jiri’s bed.
“You have brothers or sisters?” Betty asked suddenly.
“No. I’m the only child.”
At once they continued their chant, interrupted only by a brief intermission. Again Danny K sounds bobbed in, nonsense words from his presto patter like “garip kasay” and “hatip katay.” But if it was Danny’s lingo I should be able to understand it. I had mouthed those words often enough. Nevertheless, they eluded me.
Still, I was entranced by the music of their words. I tried to come up with something to compare it to. You write all the letters of the alphabet on one-inch square cards and carefully arrange them from A to Z. Then someone puts the cards in a metal capsule, like the ones used for dice, shakes them up, and pours the letters out all ajumble, which is the way the letters of the alphabet existed originally, when they were modified from the Hebrew. Then, in 433 BCE, along came the Greek poet, Alphabeticus, the first person to put a Western alphabet into alphabetical order, a brilliant stroke no one had ever thought of before. A well-deserved homage it was to name the alphabet after that great poet from Ionina.
Shaken-up letters, that’s what it felt like listening to them.
Note how much time I spend describing their speech, detailing my confusion, my fascination too. Angry as I was that they were hoodwinking me, I still admired that language, if language it was. The swinging trapeze inventiveness of it. Its Stravinsky rhythms and James Joyce sounds. A fine pretense they made at conversation. Spoke it they did, yes. But did they understand it? Perhaps neither knew what the other was saying. Putting on a show. Sheer bluff. The entire charade for my (dis)benefit. Perhaps they had even reached the outer limits of non-communication. Two people speaking a concocted Greek to each other, Greek to me and maybe to them too. Going even further than the dying language I had once read about, high in the Uzbek mountains, where the last living speaker lived alone, speaking to himself a language he only barely understood. We know that languages are constantly dying, while new ones are not being born. Except the one this couple invented for the sole purpose of excluding me. Soon, at the newly rebuilt Tower of Babel, we will all speak one tongue. Not Betty’s, I hope.