Айзек Азимов: Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

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?

So when he went off to convert to the Apostates, sure there was a scandal… there weren’t that many Jews on Zsouchmuhn… any thing was a scandal… but to be absolutely frank with you, I’ll speak my mind no matter what, we were very relieved. To be free of that snuffle was already a naches , like getting one free. Or seven for five.

So now I had to go all over there and back, looking for that terrible snuffle. It was an ugliness I could live without, you should pardon my frankness.

But I went through downtown Houmitz and went over to the Holy Cathedral of the Church of the Apostates. The city was in a very bad way. When everyone had gone to Kasrilevka, they took everything that wasn’t bolted down. They also took everything that was bolted down. They also took the bolts. Not to mention a lot of the soil it was all bolted down into. Big holes, everywhere. Zsouchmuhn was not, at this point in time I’m telling you about, such a cute little world anymore. It looked like an old man with a krenk. Like a pisher with acne. Very unpleasant, it wasn’t a trip I care to talk about.

But there was a little left of that crazy farchachdah Cathedral still standing. Why shouldn’t they let it stand: how much does it cost to make a new one? String. The dummies, they make a holy place from string and spit and bits of dried crap off the streets and their bodies, I don’t even want to think about what a sacrilege.

I rolled inside. The smell, you could die from the smell. On Zsouchmuhn here, we got a groundworm, this filthy little segmented thing everyone calls a pincercrusher. Lumbricus rubellus Venaticus my Uncle Beppo, the lunatic zoologist, calls it. It isn’t at all peculiar why I remember a foreign name like that—Latin is what it is, I’m a bissel scholar, too, you know, not such a dummy as you might think, and it’s no wonder Reb Jeshaia sent me on this it-could-kill-a-lesser-Jew mission to find Kadak. I remember because once I had one of them bite me in the tuchis when I went swimming, and you learn these things, believe you me, you learn them. This rotten little worm it’s got pinching things in the front and on the sides, and it lies in wait for a juicy tuchis and when you’re just ready to relax in a swim, or maybe to take a nap on a picnic, chomp! , it goes right for the tuchis. And it hangs on with those triple-damned the entire species should go straight to Gehenna pinch-things, and it makes me sick to remember, but it sucks the blood right out of you, right through your tuchis. And you couldn’t get one off, medical science as hootsy-tootsy as it is, you could varf from the size of a doctor’s bill, even the hootsy-tootsies can’t get one off you. The only thing that does it, is you get a musician and he bangs together a pair of cymbals, and it falls off. All bloated up with your blood, leaving a bunch of little pinch-marks on your tuchis you’re ashamed to let your lust-mates see it. And don’t ask why the doctors don’t carry cymbals with them for such occasions. You wouldn’t believe the union problems here on Zsouchmuhn, which includes musicians and doctors both, so you’d better be near a band and not a hospital when a pincercrusher bites you in the tuchis , otherwise forget it. And when the terrible thing falls off, it goes pop! and it bursts, and all the awful crap it had in it makes a stink you shouldn’t even think about it, the eyes, all twelve of them could roll up in your head, with the smell of all that feh! and blood and crap.

Inside the Cathedral of the Church of the Apostates, the smell. Like a million popped pincercrushers. I almost went over on my face from that smell.

It took three hands to hold all of my nose, a little whiff shouldn’t slip through.

I started reeling around, hitting the strings they called walls. Fortunately, I rolled around near the entrance, and I stretched my nose a couple of feet outside, and I took a very deep breath, and snapped my nose back, and held it, and looked around.

There were still half a dozen of them who hadn’t run off to Kasrilevka, all down on their stomachs, their feet winding up and unwinding, very fast, their faces down in the mud and crap in front of the altar, doing what I suppose they call praying. To that idol of theirs, Seymour, or Simon, or Shtumie, whatever they call it. I should know the name of a heathen idol, you bet your life never, better I should know the Latin name of a miserable worm that stinks first, let me tell you.

So there they were, and let me assure you it pained me in several more than a couple of ways to have to go over to them, but… I’m looking for Kadak.

“Hey,” I said to one of them. A terrific look at his tuchis I got. Such a perfect tuchis , if ever there was one, for a pincercrusher to come and chomp!

Nothing. “Hey!” I yelled it a second time. No attention. Crazy with their faces down in the crap. “Listen, hey!” I yelled at the top of my voice, which isn’t such a soft niceness when I’m suffocating holding my nose with three hands and I want to get out of that place already.

So I gave him a zetz in the tuchis. I wound up every foot on the left side, and I let it unwind right where a pincercrusher would have brunch.

Then the dummy looked up.

A sight you could become very ill with. A nose covered with crap from the floor, a bunch of eyes filled with blue jelly, a mouth from out of which could only come heathen hosannahs to a dummy idol called Shaygets or something.

“You kicked me,” he said.

“All by yourself you figured that out, eh?”

He looked at me with six, and blinked, and started to fall over on his punim again, and I started to wind up I’d give him such a zetz I’d kick him into a better life.

“We don’t accept violence,” he said.

“That’s a terrific saying,” I told him. “Meanwhile, I don’t accept an unobstructed view up your tuchis. So if you want I should go away and stop kicking you, so you can go root around in the dreck some more, what you’d better do is come up here a minute and talk to me.”

He kept looking. I wound up tighter. You could hear my sockets creaking. I’m not such a young one anymore. He got up.

“What do you want? I’m worshipping to Seymool.”

Seymool. That’s a name for a God. I wouldn’t even hire something called a Seymool.