The dictionary had this to say:
Derived from “Pizd-” (impolite reference to female genitalia):
Pizdobol: n, a talkative fool
Raspizdyai: n, unreliable person
Pizdit’: v, to lie, dissimulate, brag
Spizdit’: v, to steal
Pizdets: n, The End. The total, final, irreversible, complete end. Of everything.
DURING ARQUíMEDIES’ final year at Princeton Middle School, on a day that would become legendary in the school’s annals, Mr. Obolensky asked Arquímedes to derive the formula for solving quadratic equations.
Arquímedes approached the blackboard, chalk in hand, and began writing equations.
“This huynya cancels that huynya, and that huynya cancels the other huynya,” he muttered, crossing out terms on both sides of the equation, unaware of Mr. Obolensky’s barely contained giggles and the tears escaping from behind tightly closed eyelids, until finally, with a triumphant flourish, Arquímedes underlined “B-square plus/minus 4ac” on the blackboard, turned to the class, and declared:
“Pizdets!”
For most, that day was memorable as the day Arquímedes got suspended because he made Mr. Obolensky piss himself laughing.
Arquímedes remembered it as the day he came home to find his father, alone, halfway through his second bottle of rioja, leafing idly through the dictionary of mat.
“What’s wrong, Papá’?” Arquímedes asked.
“Pizdets,” his father said. “Your mother left. She’s gone back to Barcelona.”
“But why?” Arquímedes asked, tears already blurring his eyes.
“Ohuyela,” said Professor Hidalgo and took another swig of rioja, straight from the bottle.
The dictionary lay on the table, open to another familiar page.
Derived from “huy” (impolite reference to male genitalia):
Huyovyi: adj, very bad.
Huynya: n, nonsense; garbage; a “thingamajig”; something useless; an object whose usefulness is not apparent; something too complicated to describe.
Na Huy: dismissive; equivalent to “fuck it” or “screw that.”
Ni Huya: nothing, absolutely nothing, “not a fucking thing.”
Po Huy: irrelevant, unimportant. “I don’t give a fuck.”
Ohuyel: adj, dumbfounded, driven mad.
Huyak!—(always with an exclamation mark)—descriptive of a cataclysmic event.
Expression: “Huyem grushi okolachivat’” fig., to waste time, to do nothing, to procrastinate; lit: “To bring down ripe pears by striking pear trees with male genitalia”.
ON THE METRO MAP over Arquímedes’ head, Kievsky Vokzal, the Kiev Railway Terminal, stood out in bold. Nearly all the rail lines intersected underneath it. A sleeper train departed for Kiev every evening, and there were morning flights from Kiev to Barcelona.
Please, God, don’t let me proebat’ that, too, Arquímedes prayed silently.
PROFESSOR IBARRURI RETURNED to claim her son a week after she left. A month later, she and Arquímedes flew to Barcelona. Arquímedes took Perelman’s Elementary Calculus. Maria Elena took Federico García Lorca’s Collected Poems and The Practical Dictionary of Russian Mat.
THERE WERE MANY THINGS of which Arquímedes was unaware.
He did not know that his parents’ divorce came about not because of their disappointment in Arquímedes but because, on one hand, the extended Hidalgo family zaebali Professor Hidalgo with disdain for everything Catalan, and, on the other, the Ibarruris zaebali his mother with scorn for everything Castilian.
He did not know that, years earlier, on her way to Moscow from Princeton, Rika had met and fallen in love with a Russian college student, a mathematician like her, though far less talented.
He did not know that Mr. Obolensky accepted the offer made by the recently divorced Mr. Greene, the English teacher, of the use of his nearby home to clean, dry, and press Mr. Obolensky’s pants, the ensuing gossip silenced a year later with engraved invitations to the Greene-Obolensky wedding.
He did not know that Professor Tomsky, his friend and mentor, resigned his professorship at Moscow State University to take up a position he had been offered in Barcelona. He did not know that Tomsky had bought a standby ticket on the overbooked flight from which Arquímedes had been barred; that he was able to board because of Arquímedes’ ejection from the airport; that Tomsky’s awful motion sickness had in the past responded only to atropine, of which he brought a considerable supply.
And not until five in the afternoon (the fateful cinco de la tarde of Federico García Lorca) did Arquímedes realize that he was on the wrong train.
“Blyaaa,” he said as the sign for Peterburgsky Vokzal rolled past his window.
A LAS CINCO DE LA TARDE, at five in the afternoon by Lorca’s reckoning, as the Moscow to Barcelona flight passed over Paris, the two Catalan separatist extremists combined their separate ingredients of a binary nerve gas into a seething, bubbling spot on the armrest between them.
As one passenger after another fell ill with nausea, cramps, and uncontrollable drooling, Professor Tomsky remembered his basic training as a conscript in the Russian Army, popped another atropine tablet in his mouth, and raced to the crew phone. “Nerve gas on board!” he shouted to the pilots. “Put on your oxygen masks and start emergency landing! Request nerve gas antidote kits at destination!”
Tomsky was credited with saving the lives of everyone on board except the two terrorists, for whom no one grieved.
ARQUíMEDES KNEW NONE of this as he rushed to change trains at Peterburgskiy Vokzal. His eyes on the many confusing signs, Arquímedes collided with a young woman reading an antique copy of Perelman’s Elementary Calculus.
“Dolboeb,” she growled. “Mind your ebannyi trajectory!”
Arquímedes froze, his eyes fairly popping from his head. “Rika?” he whispered.
The girl carefully closed the book over her thumb, marking her place in the text. “You know my mother?” she said.
An hour later, Arquímedes and Olga went to St. Petersburg instead, to reunite with Frederika, now Chairperson of Mathematics at the Higher Staff Academy of the Russian Naval Forces. “Arquímedes, you son of a whore, how you’ve grown!” Frederika cried, embracing him to her now-ample bosom.
Thus it was not his mother who refilled his coffee as he related his tale of woe, but Rika; and Olga who brought him chocolate. Of his epiphany he said nothing; his insights were not yet expressible in words, either ones found in Perelman’s Elementary Calculus, or in The Dictionary of Russian Mat.
Long after midnight he was conducted to the bedroom and left there to recuperate.
IN PARIS, TOMSKY, installed in a suite at the Ritz, sipped complimentary Dom Perignon as the concierge brought him reams of letters from admirers. A significant number were female; some included photographs and invitations; more than a few caused Tomsky’s breath to catch.
One of the notes was a fax. On it was a date, now more than twenty years in the past, and a telephone number with the St. Petersburg area code.
Tomsky dialed the number. As the phone rang on the other end, he thought, for a brief moment, of a girl he’d met on a train, whose love of mathematics he had contracted like a particularly benign venereal disease.
After two rings, a woman’s voice answered:
“Hello?”
“Hey, Rika,” said Tomsky.
Tired as he was, Arquímedes had not yet fallen asleep when Olga entered his bedroom, her shadow crossing the shaft of moonlight that fell from the window. He heard the parquet creak softly under her feet, felt his mattress tilt under her weight.
“It’s a binary function,” she whispered.
“What?” Arquímedes whispered.
“Eb,” she whispered. “It’s a binary function.” She rolled to straddle him.
“It’s discontinuous,” he whispered, less than a minute later.
“Mmm-hmm,” she murmured. “And commutative.” She rolled to the side, pull
ing him on top of her.
“Transitive?” he asked, quite a bit later.
“I hope not,” she said quickly.
“Distributive?” he asked.
She almost answered, “Yes,” but stopped herself in time and hid her secret smile by nuzzling his ear.
Of the many things Arquímedes did not know, this was perhaps the least important.
It came to him, as they lay intertwined, that he had never seen her body. He did not wish to wake her by turning on the light, or by running his hands over her, and tried instead to extrapolate her shape from the parts that touched him now, and tactile memories of their lovemaking.
As a mass of snow might fall off a roof, revealing chimneys and gables and tiles, he saw, in a sudden flash of insight, the shape of the universe itself. He saw the great huyak from which all started, the great unified force, mat, that ruled the infant universe, and, diffusing through infinite dimensions, spawned its finite derivatives: zaebat’, naebat’, vyebat’, raz’ebat’, proebat’, pereebat’, and pod’ebat’. He saw the great huynya of the universe as a whole, and the pizdets at the end of time, described in infinite-dimensional mathematics that yielded finite values for each of its four-dimensional manifolds. There was, he knew, only one person who could understand him.
“Hey, Rika!” he shouted, leaping from his bed.
It had been over twenty years since Rika last saw him naked.
“You son of a whore, how you’ve grown,” she said for the second time that night, in a rather different voice.
IN BARCELONA, MARIA ELENA IBARRURI stared at the windows on her screen. In one was the email from Arquímedes announcing his departure from Moscow, and the flight for which he had bought the ticket. In another, a news report with passport photos of the terrorists.
She recognized them both: a couple she’d met at a Catalan Cultural Association meeting. A couple who had taken her generous donation for Catalan-language books to be distributed to schools in small Catalan towns.
Her nails pierced the soft pads of her hands. She did not notice the pain at first; and when she did, she clenched her fists even tighter.
She did not wipe her hands of blood before picking up her phone and dialing a number in New Jersey. The white digits turned crimson on the phone’s buttons.
The phone rang.
“Hello?” said a male voice.
“Hello, Diógenes,” said Maria Elena Ibarruri for the first time in many years.
IT WAS UNUSUAL for the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton to invite three scientists at once, much less three scientists all related to each other. Nature, Science, and Scientific American all dispatched journalists to interview the newest family-in-residence. Questions were asked and answered.
“We’ve time for one last question,” Professor Ramchandran, Director of the Institute, announced.
The Science reporter raised her hand. “Why was this fundamental discovery overlooked so long?” she said. “With all the thousands of mathematicians working all these years, why did it take so long to develop the Grand Unified Theory of Everything? What were they doing all this time?”
“Oh, I think I’d like to answer that, if you don’t mind,” Professor Ramchandran said mildly. “My colleagues and I—we huyem grushi okolachivali.”
OLGA WENT INTO LABOR in the middle of her lecture to an advanced analytic geometry class. She went on uninterrupted, though at the end, contractions came every five minutes.
She walked, with some assistance, to the street where Arquímedes waited with a car. The ride to Princeton Hospital took scant minutes; she was conducted to a delivery room and placed in stirrups minutes after that.
Of mat, not a single word escaped her lips.
On one side, Arquímedes held her hand; on the other, Rika. Maria Elena, Diógenes, and Tomsky waited just outside.
In Tomsky’s pocket, Rika’s phone rang.
“Push!” the doctor said. “Fully dilated and crowning,” she added to the nurse, who glanced at the clock and made a note on the chart.
“Push!” she repeated.
Outside, a vote had been hastily concluded, and Maria Elena elected as the bearer of news. She poked her head into the delivery room.
“Querido,” she said to Arquímedes. “You have a phone call.”
“What, now?” Arquímedes said. He winced as Olga squeezed his hand.
“It’s from Stockholm,” said Maria Elena.
“What?” said Arquímedes. “Stockholm? Oh. Oh. Ni huya sebe! Olga!” He moved to pass her the phone, thought better of it, and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?” he said. “Yes, this is Arquímedes Hidalgo Ibarruri. No, I don’t think Olga can talk to you right now. Well, if you insist.” He turned the phone toward her. “Olechka? It’s the Nobel—”
Olga bit back the obvious response and pushed.
MANY YEARS LATER, having attended thousands of deliveries and heard mothers swear in dozens of languages, Doctor Aureliano would remember Baby Girl Hidalgo as the first baby who cried, “Blyaaa!”
ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS
Siobhan Gallagher
Santa was placing the last of the gifts under the Christmas tree when he heard a wee cough from behind him. He turned around, big grin on his face, to see little Abby there in her PJs.
“Santa,” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, “did you get me a katana, like it says on my list?”
His grin faltered. “Well, I don’t believe that’s a safe gift for—”
“Because I wanna be like that girl in that movie, the one who wears a yellow jump suit.” Abby pretended to wield a sword in both hands. “And she killed all these guys all by herself!” She made chopping motions with her air sword. “It was so cool.”
“Do your parents know what you’re watching?”
Abby stopped and looked up at him. “So did you get me a katana?”
Santa cleared his throat, not about to disappoint her, for Abby had been very good this year, and started riffling through his bag. “Ah, I think I have something for you here.” He pulled out plastic toy nunchucks and handed them to Abby. At least with those she couldn’t chop an arm off.
Abby looked from the nunchucks in her hand then back at him, a pout on her face. “These suck.”
“Excuse me?”
“How am I supposed to kill zombies with these?” She held up the nunchucks.
“Zombies? What?” Her parents really ought to monitor what she’s watching.
“Yeah, I’ll show you.” She skipped down the hallway, toward the back of the house.
Now, he had a right mind to turn around and go back up that chimney, and maybe if he were this girl’s neglectful parents, he’d have done just that. But Abby seemed oh-so-sincere. He would go and see, then kindly explain that there were no such things as zombies, and give her a nice puppy instead.
Santa followed Abby out to the backyard. A light snow had fallen, coating the ground with white fluff.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Watch.” Abby picked up a river stone from her father’s zen garden and threw it against the back wall of the yard. A loud clack broke the night’s silence.
Nothing happened.
“Well, Abby, I’m afraid to tell you—”
She tugged on his coat. “Shhhhh.”
Moans, low and dry, filled the air, followed by shuffling feet and a stench that could only be described as death.
A hand, dripping rot from its fingers, gripped the top of the wall.
“Holy—” He bit down on his tongue; he’d promised not to curse in front of the children this year. “What…Where…?” He gaped at the hand as it tried to haul itself over the wall.
“They can’t climb the wall,” Abby said calmly, “but I can’t play outside unless they’re gone. So, can I have a katana?”
“You’ll need more than that.” Santa reached into his bag and yanked out a shotgun. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
“Pssh,” she said,
taking the gun from him. “I play first-person shooters all the time.”
“Oh good.” He handed her some ammo. “Because Santa is getting the hell out of here.”
©Mike Jacobsen seemikedraw.com.au
THE VELVETEEN GOLEM
By David Sklar
The village of Plodnik had a problem.
It wasn’t a problem with arranged marriages—most of which were doing just fine—or with the crazy guy with the fiddle who liked to hang out on rooftops—he wasn’t bothering anyone, and so far he hadn’t broken his neck. It wasn’t that the nearest Chinese food was two thousand miles away in China, or even that kosher Chinese food wouldn’t be invented for another fifty years. And it wasn’t even that the village was too poor to have its own rabbi.
The problem was that Plodnik was situated in Tsarist Russia at a time when the Russians thought of the people of Plodnik as the problem. And that was on good days. On bad days, the problem was Cossacks, who were apparently so named because every once in a while they would sack the village, just ’cos.
So the people of Plodnik decided they needed a champion, someone to defend their village from persecution. But the men of Plodnik weren’t trained to battle Cossacks, and it seemed unlikely that they would be up for the job. There were one or two women who might have fared better, but they were too busy raising their kids, who had the temperament of Cossacks anyway.
So at last, the people of Plodnik decided they needed to make a golem. But how? As I mentioned, they were too poor to have their own rabbi, let alone a tzaddik so knowledgeable in the ways of life and death. Sol the Ditch-Digger handled the funerals in Plodnik, and Moishe the Tailor did weddings—because he seemed to know something about tying the knot—and circumcisions. So the villagers went to Sol the Ditch-Digger, figuring he knew a bit about clay and might have some thoughts about turning it into a person.
“The problem,” Sol said, “is that I don’t make anything from clay, but only from the absence of it. What I make, I make by taking away, not by building. So if I could do what you ask, it would be an un-man—not a golem, but a hol-em. I don’t think you’re ready for that.”
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