Oh, if I could break their code. If only I could break their code. If only, what wonders would ensue. For code it was. I knew in my guts it was code. Or a private language only the two of them shared. Maybe only one of them, for once in a while Betty turned away from Jiri’s drawn face and gave me a look of complicity, softer than the hard edge she had presented when I appeared, unannounced, with Jiri that Saturday in their apartment. A look that seemed to say, I too don’t understand a word of this. But maybe that too was part of the game, for if she didn’t understand a word, how come she spoke in that arcane, concocted language so fluently? Or was it like that man in the famous 1940 survey of Yiddish speakers — the only one in that incredible category — who said he spoke Yiddish but didn’t understand a word?
But, yet, but, still, if this indeed were so, why did their conversation sound so two-way, with the normal rises, dips and waves, the beat and strophes of quotidian exchanges? Watching them was like watching a film with the sound turned off. You know dialogue is taking place but you can’t understand it. Or better yet: a foreign-language film sans subtitles. Betty was putting me on, she was, making believe she didn’t know what was flying in that language, but yet so adamantly advocating her views.
Then an idea crossed, it actually flew through my mind. As director of the Jewish Museum of Prague, Jiri had had access to all kinds of books. My guess was that he had studied and mastered an ancient Incan dialect. For all kinds of strange, exotic sounds emanated from that soft-spoken verbal volley. I said I heard!clicks and glottal stops. Did I mention insucks? A palette of sounds from the world’s language bin coruscated in their talk. Missing only were double-hung mytes and tashraq lixiviates. It could be that they used one or two and they passed me by. Could also be they knew about them but chose, for obscure grammatical or syntactical reasons, not to incorporate them into their language.
I put up my hand just like Betty had done before. They stopped and looked at me.
“I want to wish you well, Jiri. A refu’eh shleymeh,” I said in Yiddish, wishing he’d have a complete cure. “Get well and I’ll see you soon.”
“Goodbye,” said Betty.
But Jiri waved an index finger.
“No no. Not yet, bruderl. It’s not yet time for you to go. Just a few minutes more.”
I stood rooted. As if preplanned, as if programmed, as if he couldn’t help himself, Jiri again began speaking and Betty answered. Back and forth went the words until it was difficult to discern who was asking and who replying.
Again I tried to make out words but got only sounds. Yes, I concluded, they were making it up, improvising as they went along. That was their goal, to keep me in the dark. Even if by so doing they kept themselves in the dark too. But that didn’t seem to mesh with Jiri’s beneficent character. Something was wrong here. Maybe Betty was bewitching him and once he got caught up in the flow of words his day-to-day mentchlikh personality was swallowed up by their language. Many words sounded like voodoo, a cross between Cymric and Wendish with a dash of Ural-Altaic. In short, like no language under the sun. Even under the moon.
Once, in Canada — here comes secretive speech anecdote number three — while making a film about Jewish life in the western provinces, I was invited to a rabbi’s house in Manitoba for the Sabbath. This rabbi had had a harem of wives, serially of course. He hadn’t yet converted to Mormonism, but given his libido it wasn’t out of the question. Rabbi Menashe Buchsenbaum-Vardi went around, like a United Nations ambassador, from one land to another, choosing wives: Chinese, Italian, Swedish, French, Korean (one from each), converting each new goyish bride to Judaism, then abandoning her for another country. Increase mitzvas was his religious credo. The more Jews the merrier. Meet a girl, make her, then make her Jewish. His current one, Deidre, was a cute and spunky Irish woman with big eyes and a freckled face about twenty-five years the rabbi’s junior, he with grey and white crowding his beard, she a sexy, slender thirty. During supper they also spoke a language I didn’t understand. This obviously pre-planned little scenario lasted only a few minutes during the Friday night meal and was probably a bunch of nonsense syllables they had made up for their own amusement and for the consternation of their house guest.
Insulted, I wanted to get up and leave — but something had happened about an hour earlier that rooted me to the house. Their language too fascinated me. By no means was it equal in sound, complexity, or variety of tones to Jiri’s. And even though I understood neither of these outlandish tongues, I can say definitively that I didn’t understand Jiri’s better than I didn’t understand the Canadian rabbi’s.
Rabbi Buchsenbaum-Vardi may have wanted to be mysterious, but the wordless message his live-wire, attractive, pert-nosed wife sent me was quite clear. Before the meal, when a few other people were present, Menashe announced that they had a custom of holding hands and dancing in a circle while singing Sholom aleichem, the song that welcomes the Sabbath. All of us joined hands for the dance. I found myself next to Deidre and, in the course of the dance, she squeezed my hand a few times, press and release, press and release, while innocently looking straight ahead, a shy and somewhat enigmatic smile on her face. What I was supposed to do about that obvious come-on, which needed no words, no language, no syntax, I still can’t figure out. Did she expect me to press back as a signal that she should/could slip into my bed in the guest room that night?
But back to Jiri and Betty.
Listening to their language was a challenge. Maybe they even enjoyed my puzzlement. Focusing on the words, I thought one of them said “gra”—the first word of the two-word morning greeting (“gra dnasta”) that I had heard so often on the streets of Mustara. I had spent a few days there on that island nation off southern Europe, formerly under authoritarian rule, but now — free of the Soviet yoke — a model ex-communist dictatorship.
“Have you been to Mustara?” I asked into the air, addressing one, both, of them.
They looked at me blankly but did not stop the interchange of puzzling words. For a while they even spoke at the same time, at each other, over each other, and it sounded like a duet to me, full of rich, complex tropes.
I bet, I thought, if I had the text of their words and studied it long enough, I could break the code. One word, however, that I did not hear was “Prague” or “Europe.” Maybe they used words like “city” or even “there” to avoid giving me any hints.
Another thing: I usually ask people to identify a language I don’t understand. But now, for some strange reason, I did not. Perhaps because they spoke it around me, trying to bind me with the bonds of their unfathomable words.
Then Betty jumped up, walked quickly, with an oddly stiff gait, between me and Jiri’s bed and rushed into the bathroom. She probably had held back all along from going, not wanting to leave Jiri and me alone. Now she could no longer contain herself.
Jiri spoke quickly. “Tell Yossi I sent you. Very important. He’ll introduce you to some interesting people. Also, you’ll be pleased to meet, it will be important for you to…my…he will send you to a man named… An old man who will sh…”