So where would we get a tenth man for the minyan?
There were only nine Jews on the whole planet.
Then Snodle said, “There’s always Kadak.”
“Shut up, you’re dead,” Reb Jeshaia said, but it didn’t do any good. Snodle kept suggesting Kadak.
You should understand, one of the drawbacks of my species, which maybe a butterfly wouldn’t know, is that when we die, and pass on, there’s still talking. Nuhdzhing. Oh. You want to know how that can be. How a dead Jew can talk, through the veil, from the other side. What am I, a science authority, I should know how that works? I wouldn’t lie on you: I don’t know. Always it’s been the same. One of us seizes up and dies, and the body squats there and doesn’t decay the way the tourists’ do when they get shikker in a blind pig bar in downtown Houmitz and stagger out in the gutter and get knocked over by a tumbrel on the way to the casinos.
But the voice starts up. Nuhdzhing!
It probably has something to do with the soul, but I wouldn’t put a bet on that; all I can say is thank God we don’t worship ancestors here on Zsouchmuhn, because we’d have such a sky full of nuhdzhing old farts telling us how to run our lives, it wouldn’t be worth it to keep on this side of the veil. Bless the name of Abraham, after a while they shut up and go off somewhere.
Probably to nuhdz each other, they should rest in peace already and stop talking.
But Snodle wasn’t going away. He died, and now he was demanding we not only sit shivah out of courtesy for having lived here so prosperously, but we should also, you shouldn’t take it as an imposition, sit shivah for him! An oysvorf, that Snodle.
“There’s always Kadak,” he said. His voice came from a nowhere spot in the air about a foot above his body, which was dumped upside-down on a table in the yeshiva.
“Snodle, if you don’t mind,” said Shmuel with the one good antenna, “would you kindly shut your face and let us handle this?” Then seeing, I suppose for the first time, that Snodle was upside-down, he added, but softly he shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, “I always said he talked through his tuchis.”
“I’ll turn him over,” said Chaim with the defective unwind in his hop.
“Let be,” said Shmuel. “I like this end better than the other.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” said Yitzchak. “The gonifs come in a little while to take away the planet, we can’t stay, we can’t go, and I have lust-nest concubines lubricating and lactating on Bromios this very minute.”
“Kasrilevka,” said Avram.
“Kasrilevka,” Yitzchak agreed, his prop-arm, the one in the back, curling an ungrammatical apology.
“A planet of ten million Snodles,” said Yankel.
“There’s always Kadak,” said Snodle.
“Who is this Kadak the oysvorf’s babbling about?” asked Meyer Kahaha. The rest of us rolled our eyes at the remark. Ninety-six tsuris-filled eyes rolled. Meyer Kahaha was always the town schlemiel; if there was a bigger oysvorf than Snodle, it was Meyer Kahaha.
Yankel stuck the tip of his pointing arm in Meyer Kahaha’s ninth eye, the one with the cataract. “Quiet!”
We sat and stared at each other. Finally, Moishe said, “He’s right. It’s another tragedy we can mourn on Tisha Ba’b (if they have enough turns on Kasrilevka for Tisha Ba’b to fall in the right month), but the oysvorf and the schlemiel are right. Our only hope is Kadak, lightning shouldn’t strike me for saying it.”
“Someone will have to go find him,” said Avram.
“Not me,” said Yankel. “A mission for a fool.”
Then Reb Jeshaia, who was the wisest of all the blue Jews on Zsouchmuhn, even before the great exodus, one or two of them it wouldn’t have hurt if they’d stayed behind to give a little help so we shouldn’t find out too late we were in this miserable state of things because Snodle seized up and died, Reb Jeshaia nodded that it was a mission for a fool and he said, “We’ll send Evsise.”
“Thanks a lot for that,” I said.
He looked at me with the six eyes on the front, and he said, “Evsise. Should we send Shmuel with one good antenna? Should we send Chaim with a defective hop? Should we send Yitzchak who is so crippled with lust he gets cramps? Maybe we should send Yankel who is older than even Snodle and would die from the journey then we’d have to find two Jews? Moishe? Moishe argues with everyone. Some cooperation he’d get.”
“What about Avram?” I asked. Avram looked away.
“You want I should talk about Avram’s problem here in front of an open Talmud, here in front of the dead, right here in front of God and everyone?” Reb Jeshaia looked stern.
“Forget it. I’m sorry I mentioned,” I said.
“Maybe I should go myself, the Rabbi should go? Or maybe you’d prefer we sent Meyer Kahaha?”
“You made your point,” I said. “I’ll go. I’m far from a happy person about this, you should know it before I go. But I’ll do it. You’ll never see me again, I’ll die out there looking for that Kadak, but I’ll go.”
I started for the burrow exit of the yeshiva. I passed Yitzchak, who looked sheepish. “Cramps,” I muttered. “It should only wither up and fall off like a dead leaf.”
Then I rolled, hopped and unwound my way up the tunnel to the street, and went looking for Kadak.
The last time I saw Kadak was seventeen turns ago. He was squatting in the synagogue during Purim, and suddenly he rolled into the aisle, tore off his yarmulkah, his tallis and his t’fillin, all at once with his top three arms on each side, threw them into the aisle, yelled he had had it with Judaism, and was converting to the Church of the Apostates.
That was the last any of us saw of him. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you ask me. Kadak, to begin with, was never my favorite person, if you want the truth. He snuffled.
Oh, that isn’t such an averah, I can see you think I’m making a big something out of a big nothing. Listen, Mr. Terrific-I-Flap-My-Wings-And-You-Should-Notice-Me, I’m a person who says what’s on his mind, I don’t make no moofky-foofky with anyone. You want someone who beats around the bushes you should talk to that Avram. Me, I’ll tell you I couldn’t stand that Kadak’s snuffling, all the time snuffling. You sit in the shoul and right in the middle of the Shema, right in the direct absolute center of “Hear O Israel, the Lord, Our God, the Lord is One,” comes a snuffle that sounds like a double-snouted peggalomer in a mud-wallow.
He had a snuffle made you want to go take a bath.
A terrible snuffle, if you’ll listen to me for a minute. He was the kind, that Kadak, he wouldn’t care when he’d snuffle. When you were sleeping, eating, shtupping, making a ka-ka, he didn’t care… would come a blast, a snort, a rotten snuffle could make you want to get rid of your last three or four meals. And forget talking to him: how can you talk to a person who punctuates with a snuffle?