I wrote a short vaguely historical vaguely spooky ghost story about Jews and burial rites and I have to justify it existing so here it is.
“Are you the leader of the Jews?”
There was no good that ever came from that question. Rabbi Jacob stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob and the other on the frame, ready to yank it closed at a moment’s notice.
“Well, not all of the Jews.”
The man at the door made a frustrated little grunt. He was clad almost completely in dark grey clothing that seemed to fade into the shadows of the darkened street behind him. The collar of his coat was pulled up so high that it was impossible to make out more than a pair of sharp grey eyes beneath the brim of his hat, and the cloak he wore over the top of it concealed most of his body. There could be any number of guns, knives, or angry mobs hidden under there.
“But the ones in this town, yes? You are their priest, you lead prayers and weddings and so on?” the man said impatiently.
“Rabbi. Yes. I’m the rabbi, that’s correct.” Jacob said, stiffening his posture and assuming the most neutral expression he could manage. Being completely ignorant didn’t exclude someone from being completely dangerous–if anything, that heightened the risk. “What can I do for you?”
“Rabbi,” the man repeated, as if to seal it into his memory properly. One gloved hand squeezed the pommel of his walking stick. “And you preside over the funerals of your people, and perform the rites to send them to the next world?”
“Yyyyyes?” Jacob shifted his weight to his back foot, poised to slam the door in his face. This sounded unpleasantly like an opening for a death threat.
“To any of them, regardless of the sins they carried in life?” An eagerness entered the man’s voice.
“Of course. Though sin as a Jewish concept differs from the Christian…mm. Yes, of course.” The scholars of old might have debated the nature of the evil in men’s souls until the crack of dawn but Jacob had no intention of doing so at half-past midnight with a complete stranger.
The shadowed man took a half step forward and Jacob leaned back to maintain the distance between him. “What about a gentile?” the man pressed. “Would you tend to his corpse too?”
“Huh?”
“There is a man needing to be buried tonight who requires absolution. He is not a Jew, but a Jew’s prayers may be close enough for what is needed.”
“Um. It’s not usually a request I get.” Jacob tried to keep his voice calm and soothing. There was some kind of entrapment lingering in the conversation, he just knew it. That or a giant box of crazy that had managed to dress itself stylishly. Gentiles asking Jews intrusive but urgent questions never turned out well for their target–a day-long case of irritation was the best outcome the target could hope for.
The man’s hands pressed together as he completed the full step forward, making Jacob back up into the doorframe. Desperation was in his tone and Jacob was forced back over the threshold just to stay out of his grip “All I need is someone to accompany me to the cemetery to consecrate the body and pray for its soul. Barely an hour of your time. I cannot pay you with anything but my gratitude, but you will have it eternally.”
“And you came to me?”
The man sighed. Even the top hat seemed to slouch slightly as his body slumped. “I have asked every holy man in the city, Catholic and Protestant alike, and they have refused to come to the cemetery,“ he bemoaned. “The last one told me to visit you. Likely a ploy to make me leave faster, but you are all I have left.”
“What did this man do, that so many people refused him? Who was he?”
The man at the door hesitated. The sharp eyes vanished as his eyelids slid down, and then appeared a few moments later.
“Must you ask?” he said quietly. “Is it not enough that it is a corpse which can do no man harm any longer, and you will lose nothing but a half-night of sleep?”
The inside of Jacob’s head was ringing with warning bells like the frantic clanging of gongs announcing a fire. He swallowed and tried to ignore them.
“You say he wasn’t Jewish?”
“He was not…much of anything. He felt God had no interest in him, and returned a lack of interest in kind. Perhaps if he had been more attentive he wouldn’t lie in a pauper’s grave…or perhaps he would have not changed a whit.” The man’s voice was bitter and the sharp eyes briefly looked away from Jacob, to Jacob’s deep relief.
“Who was this man, to you?” he asked.
“Close. I would prefer to say no more. Please, rabbi. It must be done, and it must be tonight.”
Seminary did not prepare me for this, Jacob thought, and then thought again. There is absolutely something in the Talmud about this and I’ve just forgotten it, because I’m an idiot and I’m half asleep and there is a goy on my doorstep asking me to go out to the cemetery with him at midnight to bury a man whose name he won’t tell me.
“Look, I’ll need someone to help dig the grave.”
“Of course.”
“And a coffin. A plain pine box. And I’ll need to get my supplies from the–”
“But you’ll do it?” said the man excitedly, standing up even taller. “And do it tonight, before the cock crows?”
Jacob held up his hands to keep the man from getting even further into his personal space. “Fine. Yes. Give me half an hour and a lazy rooster.”
The cloak almost seem to inflate as the man gasped for joy. He grabbed Jacob’s hands and shook both with enthusiasm, sending Jacob stumbling. “Thank God for you, my good rabbit! Whatever God there is, thank God for you!”
The man ran off into the shadowed streets and was out of sight almost immediately.
Jacob’s hands slowly fell back to his side as he mumbled, “Rabbi,” to the darkness.
My wife is going to kill me if whatever’s at the cemetery doesn’t.
Temples are built for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds a small temple to see what kind of god turns up.
Arepo built a temple in his field, a humble thing, some stones stacked up to make a cairn, and two days later a god moved in.
“Hope you’re a harvest god,” Arepo said, and set up an altar and burnt two stalks of wheat. “It’d be nice, you know.” He looked down at the ash smeared on the stone, the rocks all laid askew, and coughed and scratched his head. “I know it’s not much,” he said, his straw hat in his hands. “But - I’ll do what I can. It’d be nice to think there’s a god looking after me.”
The next day he left a pair of figs, the day after that he spent ten minutes of his morning seated by the temple in prayer. On the third day, the god spoke up.
“You should go to a temple in the city,” the god said. Its voice was like the rustling of the wheat, like the squeaks of fieldmice running through the grass. “A real temple. A good one. Get some real gods to bless you. I’m no one much myself, but I might be able to put in a good word?” It plucked a leaf from a tree and sighed. “I mean, not to be rude. I like this temple. It’s cozy enough. The worship’s been nice. But you can’t honestly believe that any of this is going to bring you anything.”
“This is more than I was expecting when I built it,” Arepo said, laying down his scythe and lowering himself to the ground. “Tell me, what sort of god are you anyway?”
“I’m of the fallen leaves,” it said. “The worms that churn beneath the earth. The boundary of forest and of field. The first hint of frost before the first snow falls. The skin of an apple as it yields beneath your teeth. I’m a god of a dozen different nothings, scraps that lead to rot, momentary glimpses. A change in the air, and then it’s gone.”
The god heaved another sigh. “There’s no point in worship in that, not like War, or the Harvest, or the Storm. Save your prayers for the things beyond your control, good farmer. You’re so tiny in the world. So vulnerable. Best to pray to a greater thing than me.”
Arepo plucked a stalk of wheat and flattened it between his teeth. “I like this sort of worship fine,” he said. “So if you don’t mind, I think I’ll continue.”
“Do what you will,” said the god, and withdrew deeper into the stones. “But don’t say I never warned you otherwise.”
Arepo would say a prayer before the morning’s work, and he and the god contemplated the trees in silence. Days passed like that, and weeks, and then the Storm rolled in, black and bold and blustering. It flooded Arepo’s fields, shook the tiles from his roof, smote his olive tree and set it to cinder. The next day, Arepo and his sons walked among the wheat, salvaging what they could. The little temple had been strewn across the field, and so when the work was done for the day, Arepo gathered the stones and pieced them back together.
“Useless work,” the god whispered, but came creeping back inside the temple regardless. “There wasn’t a thing I could do to spare you this.”
“We’ll be fine,” Arepo said. “The storm’s blown over. We’ll rebuild. Don’t have much of an offering for today,” he said, and laid down some ruined wheat, “but I think I’ll shore up this thing’s foundations tomorrow, how about that?”
The god rattled around in the temple and sighed.
A year passed, and then another. The temple had layered walls of stones, a roof of woven twigs. Arepo’s neighbors chuckled as they passed it. Some of their children left fruit and flowers. And then the Harvest failed, the gods withdrew their bounty. In Arepo’s field the wheat sprouted thin and brittle. People wailed and tore their robes, slaughtered lambs and spilled their blood, looked upon the ground with haunted eyes and went to bed hungry. Arepo came and sat by the temple, the flowers wilted now, the fruit shriveled nubs, Arepo’s ribs showing through his chest, his hands still shaking, and murmured out a prayer.
“There is nothing here for you,” said the god, hudding in the dark. “There is nothing I can do. There is nothing to be done.” It shivered, and spat out its words. “What is this temple but another burden to you?”
“We -” Arepo said, and his voice wavered. “So it’s a lean year,” he said. “We’ve gone through this before, we’ll get through this again. So we’re hungry,” he said. “We’ve still got each other, don’t we? And a lot of people prayed to other gods, but it didn’t protect them from this. No,” he said, and shook his head, and laid down some shriveled weeds on the altar. “No, I think I like our arrangement fine.”
“There will come worse,” said the god, from the hollows of the stone. “And there will be nothing I can do to save you.”
The years passed. Arepo rested a wrinkled hand upon the temple of stone and some days spent an hour there, lost in contemplation with the god.
And one fateful day, from across the wine-dark seas, came War.
Arepo came stumbling to his temple now, his hand pressed against his gut, anointing the holy site with his blood. Behind him, his wheat fields burned, and the bones burned black in them. He came crawling on his knees to a temple of hewed stone, and the god rushed out to meet him.
“I could not save them,” said the god, its voice a low wail. “I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so so sorry.” The leaves fell burning from the trees, a soft slow rain of ash. “I have done nothing! All these years, and I have done nothing for you!”
“Shush,” Arepo said, tasting his own blood, his vision blurring. He propped himself up against the temple, forehead pressed against the stone in prayer. “Tell me,” he mumbled. “Tell me again. What sort of god are you?”
“I -” said the god, and reached out, cradling Arepo’s head, and closed its eyes and spoke.
“I’m of the fallen leaves,” it said, and conjured up the image of them. “The worms that churn beneath the
earth. The boundary of forest and of field. The first hint of frost
before the first snow falls. The skin of an apple as it yields beneath
your teeth.” Arepo’s lips parted in a smile.
“I am the god of a dozen different nothings,” it said. “The petals in bloom that lead to
rot, the momentary glimpses. A change in the air -” Its voice broke, and it wept. “Before it’s gone.”
“Beautiful,” Arepo said, his blood staining the stones, seeping into the earth. “All of them. They were all so beautiful.”
And as the fields burned and the smoke blotted out the sun, as men were trodden in the press and bloody War raged on, as the heavens let loose their wrath upon the earth, Arepo the sower lay down in his humble temple, his head sheltered by the stones, and returned home to his god.
Sora found the temple with the bones within it, the roof falling in upon them.
“Oh, poor god,” she said, “With no-one to bury your last priest.” Then she paused, because she was from far away. “Or is this how the dead are honored here?” The god roused from its contemplation.
“His name was Arepo,” it said, “He was a sower.”
Sora startled, a little, because she had never before heard the voice of a god. “How can I honor him?” She asked.
“Bury him,” the god said, “Beneath my altar.”
“All right,” Sora said, and went to fetch her shovel.
“Wait,” the god said when she got back and began collecting the bones from among the broken twigs and fallen leaves. She laid them out on a roll of undyed wool, the only cloth she had. “Wait,” the god said, “I cannot do anything for you. I am not a god of anything useful.”
Sora sat back on her heels and looked at the altar to listen to the god.
“When the Storm came and destroyed his wheat, I could not save it,” the god said, “When the Harvest failed and he was hungry, I could not feed him. When War came,” the god’s voice faltered. “When War came, I could not protect him. He came bleeding from the battle to die in my arms.” Sora looked down again at the bones.
“I think you are the god of something very useful,” she said.
“What?” the god asked.
Sora carefully lifted the skull onto the cloth. “You are the god of Arepo.”
Generations passed. The village recovered from its tragedies—homes
rebuilt, gardens re-planted, wounds healed. The old man who once lived on the
hill and spoke to stone and rubble had long since been forgotten, but the
temple stood in his name. Most believed it to empty, as the god who resided
there long ago had fallen silent. Yet, any who passed the decaying shrine felt an ache
in their hearts, as though mourning for a lost friend. The cold that seeped
from the temple entrance laid their spirits low, and warded off any potential
visitors, save for the rare and especially oblivious children who would leave tiny
clusters of pink and white flowers that they picked from the surrounding
meadow.
The god sat in his peaceful home, staring out at the distant
road, to pedestrians, workhorses, and carriages, raining leaves that swirled
around bustling feet. How long had it been? The world had progressed without
him, for he knew there was no help to be given. The world must be a cruel place, that even the useful gods have abandoned,
if farms can flood, harvests can run barren, and homes can burn, he
thought.
He had come to understand that humans are senseless
creatures, who would pray to a god that cannot grant wishes or bless upon them
good fortune. Who would maintain a temple and bring offerings with nothing in
return. Who would share their company and meditate with such a fruitless deity.
Who would bury a stranger without the hope for profit. What bizarre, futile
kindness they had wasted on him. What wonderful, foolish, virtuous, hopeless
creatures, humans were.
So he painted the sunset with yellow leaves, enticed the
worms to dance in their soil, flourished the boundary between forest and field
with blossoms and berries, christened the air with a biting cold before winter
came, ripened the apples with crisp, red freckles to break under sinking teeth,
and a dozen other nothings, in memory of the man who once praised the god’s
work on his dying breath.
“Hello, God of Every Humble Beauty in the World,” called a
familiar voice.
The squinting corners of the god’s eyes wept down onto
curled lips. “Arepo,” he whispered, for his voice was hoarse from its hundred-year
mutism.
“I am the god of devotion, of small kindnesses, of
unbreakable bonds. I am the god of selfless, unconditional love, of everlasting
friendships, and trust,” Arepo avowed, soothing the other with every word.
“That’s wonderful, Arepo,” he responded between tears, “I’m
so happy for you—such a powerful figure will certainly need a grand temple. Will
you leave to the city to gather more worshippers? You’ll be adored by all.”
“No,” Arepo smiled.
“Farther than that, to the capitol, then? Thank you for
visiting here before your departure.”
“No, I will not go there, either,” Arepo shook his head and
chuckled.
“Farther still? What ambitious goals, you must have. There
is no doubt in my mind that you will succeed, though,” the elder god continued.
“Actually,” interrupted Arepo, “I’d like to stay here, if
you’ll have me.”
The other god was struck speechless. “…. Why would you want
to live here?”
“I am the god of unbreakable bonds and everlasting
friendships. And you are the god of Arepo.”
I reblogged this once with the first story. Now the story has grown and I’m crying. This is gorgeous, guys. This is what dreams are made of.
This is amazing!
I’ve never read the third installment and omg…I am dying…this is storytelling goals AAA it hits on all the themes I want in my work ;____;
English speakers know that their language is odd. So do
nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most
readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where
English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal
language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people
pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in
ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States
and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. Our monolingual
tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our
language feels “normal” only until you get a sense of what normal really is.
There is no other language, for example, that is close
enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without
training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that,
as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can
get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian. If you know
that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out
what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find Frisian more
like German, which it is.
We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages
assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats
and such. But actually, it’s we who are odd: Almost all European languages
belong to one family–Indo-European–and of all of them, English is the only
one that doesn’t assign genders.
More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth
whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third-person
singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talks–why? The
present-tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of
different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language
where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do
you find that difficult?
Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re
speaking, and what happened to make it this way?
English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old
English is so unlike the modern version that it’s a stretch to think of them as
the same language. Hwæt, we gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym
gefrunon–does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the
tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore”? Icelanders can still read similar stories
written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000 years ago, and yet,
to the untrained English-speaker’s eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.
The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact
that when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought Germanic
speech to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke Celtic
languages–today represented by Welsh and Irish, and Breton across the Channel
in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only
about 250,000 Germanic invaders, very quickly most of the people speaking Old
English were Celts.
Crucially, their own Celtic was quite unlike English. For
one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). Also, they had an odd
construction with the verb do: They used it to form a question, to make a
sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you
walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts
started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences
would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker–as they would today in just
about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones.
At this date there is no documented language on Earth beyond
Celtic and English that uses do in just this way. Thus English’s weirdness
began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly
different tongues. We’re still talking like them, and in ways we’d never think
of. When saying “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” have you ever felt like you were kind
of counting? Well, you are–in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but
recognizably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting
animals and playing games. “Hickory, dickory, dock”–what in the world do those
words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine, and ten
in that same Celtic counting list.
The second thing that happened was that yet more
Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business. This wave began in the
9th century, and this time the invaders were speaking another Germanic
offshoot, Old Norse. But they didn’t impose their language. Instead, they married
local women and switched to English. However, they were adults and, as a rule,
adults don’t pick up new languages easily, especially not in oral societies.
There was no such thing as school, and no media. Learning a new language meant
listening hard and trying your best.
As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was
fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a
language–the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much.
So the Scandinavians did more or less what we would expect: They spoke bad Old
English. Their kids heard as much of that as they did real Old English. Life
went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we
are today: The Norse made English easier.
I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles
it’s risky to call one language easier than another one. But some languages
plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told
he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would
lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his
competence, only the masochist would choose Russian–unless he already happened
to speak a language related to it. In that sense, English is “easier” than
other Germanic languages, and it’s because of those Vikings.
Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good
European language–but the Scandinavians didn’t bother with those, and so now
we have none. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once
lovely conjugation system: Hence the lonely third-person singular -s, hanging
on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out
the hard stuff.
They also left their mark on English grammar. Blissfully, it
is becoming rare to be taught that it is wrong to say Which town do you come
from?–ending with the preposition instead of laboriously squeezing it before
the wh-word to make From which town do you come? In English, sentences with “dangling
prepositions” are perfectly natural and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a
wet-fish issue with them, too: Normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in
this way. Every now and then a language allows it: an indigenous one in Mexico,
another in Liberia. But that’s it. Overall, it’s an oddity. Yet, wouldn’t you
know, it’s a construction that Old Norse also happened to permit (and that
modern Danish retains).
We can display all these bizarre Norse influences in a
single sentence. Say That’s the man you walk in with, and it’s odd because (1)
the has no specifically masculine form to match man, (2) there’s no ending on
walk, and (3) you don’t say in with whom you walk. All that strangeness is
because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good old English back in the day.
Finally, as if all this weren’t enough, English got hit by a
fire-hose spray of words from yet more languages. After the Norse came the
French. The Normans–descended from the same Vikings, as it happens–conquered
England and ruled for several centuries, and before long, English had picked up
10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones
began to develop English as a vehicle for sophisticated writing, and it became
fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more
elevated tone.
It was thanks to this influx from French and Latin (it’s
often hard to tell which was the original source of a given word) that English
acquired the likes of crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion. These
words feel sufficiently English to us today, but when they were new, many
persons of letters in the 1500s (and beyond) considered them irritatingly
pretentious and intrusive, as indeed they would have found the phrase “irritatingly
pretentious and intrusive.” There were even writerly sorts who proposed native
English replacements for those lofty Latinates, and it’s hard not to yearn for
some of these: In place of crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion,
how about crossed, groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?
But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was
cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words
for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with
varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin.
Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin–note how one imagines
posture improving with each level: Kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is
straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but
fallible monarch.
Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun
nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs begin/commence and want/desire.
Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: We kill a cow or a
pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman
England, English-speaking laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French
speakers at the table. The different ways of referring to meat depended on one’s
place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down
to us in discreet form today.
The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary partly explain
the striking fact that English words can trace to so many different
sources–often several within the same sentence. The very idea of etymology
being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and
exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are
much duller. The typical word comes from, well, an earlier version of that same
word and there it is. The study of etymology holds little interest for, say,
Arabic speakers.
To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon
worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most
European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from
Old English, Old Norse, French, and Latin. Greek is another element: In an
alternate universe, we would call photographs “lightwriting.”
Because of this fire-hose spray, we English speakers also
have to contend with two different ways of accenting words. Clip on a suffix to
the word wonder, and you get wonderful. But–clip an ending to the word modern
and the ending pulls the accent along with it: MO-dern, but mo-DERN-ity, not
MO-dern-ity. That doesn’t happen with WON-der and WON-der-ful, or CHEER-y and
CHEER-i-ly. But it does happen with PER-sonal, person-AL-ity.
What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic
endings, while -ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the
accent closer–TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous–while Germanic ones leave the accent
alone. One never notices such a thing, but it’s one way this “simple” language
is actually not so.
Thus English is indeed an odd language, and its spelling is
only the beginning of it. What English does have on other tongues is that it is
deeply peculiar in the structural sense. And it became peculiar because of the
slings and arrows–as well as caprices–of outrageous history.
