Chapter 1
He hadn’t visited his grandfather in weeks. It was pure carelessness and laziness. He liked the old man with the cloudy eyes. The bright common room of the retirement home was furnished with simple IKEA furniture. The old man sat motionless in the daylight, which blurred his contours. His hand clasped the handle of an ochre-colored coffee cup. The few remaining gray hairs were carelessly combed to the side. His pale, wrinkled skin matched the pastel white tones of the room and furnishings. Only his dark kippah interrupted the scene like an ink stain on a freshly printed page. He looked at Yuri thoughtfully with his cloudy, almost gray eyes.
“Yuri, how are you?” he asked, slightly concerned. “You look tired.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately, but it’s nothing serious. I think the upcoming deadline is stressing me out a little.”
After taking a deep breath, the old man said, “It’s just paper, no need to worry.”
Yuri remained silent and stared blankly at the tabletop.
“Yuri.”
He looked up from the table.
“There’s something else, isn’t there? You’re not really here. What’s bothering you?”
He ignored his inner uneasiness and said, “I remembered something. The story of when Father left Beit Zera.”
The dull eyes seemed to gain a little sharpness and the old man edged closer.
“That’s an old story,” said the old man, “why bring it up now?”
Yuri had only tried to talk to his father about it once. The hurt was still palpable today. He had first learned about the circumstances of the exile from his grandfather many years ago.
“I saw something a few nights ago that reminded me of it.”
“You saw something, or you saw them?” asked the old man with a serious expression.
“I saw something, and it reminded me of the story,” said Yuri. “What did you call them again?”
“The functionless.”
Yuri only vaguely remembered “the non-functionals.” His father had once said that the old man had lost his mind when he found God. His memory was sketchy. He wasn’t sure if he had ever heard the whole story.
“That’s it, the non-functionals,” Yuri said, more to himself than to the old man.
The old man looked at him intently: “Yuri, you shouldn’t see the Non-Functionals, it’s not good.”
“I’m not sure what I saw. It just reminded me of the story.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Can you tell me again what it was like when you saw them?”
The old man nodded. “You know your father doesn’t like to talk about the whole thing. But you remember that we left Beit Zera when he was about twelve years old,“ the old man seemed to be thinking hard, ”I think it was 1972... yes, that was definitely it, a year before the war broke out. Because of the accusations made against him... That he was supposed to have done this injustice to the poor boy. Fischer’s boy, not a nice thing. The boy was different, always a little slow. Like his parents...“
He paused, as if searching for the right words: ”He already had difficulties in the children’s home, and they had to find a solution for him.“
”What kind of difficulties?“
”The other children teased him terribly, which wasn’t good. But long story short, there were many voices calling for him to be taken out of the children’s dormitory and given to his parents. The children were still separated from their parents back then, you know. In the socialist education model, the idea was that the community educates, not the parents... It was a different time.“
He paused, as if searching for the right words.
”Before that happened, I saw them.” He looked at his coffee cup.
“The others thought I was telling a fiction. That I just wanted to help your father. But I saw them, a few nights before the boy died. It was late and incredibly humid. I went outside alone after visiting friends. There was always a nice breeze, but that day it was just warm air blowing in your face, horrible. And then I saw them. At first I thought they were Arabs, at least not anyone from Beit Zera, you can believe me, I was terrified. But there were four naked people standing in the moonlight. Very thin and pale, and Fisher’s boy. Yes, and that... that was basically the end of it, these ‘people’ ran away. They ran away fast. I’ve never seen anything like it, and the boy, well, he just said they were his friends. But when we were with his parents, he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He said he was just sitting there, all alone. The Fischers, I tell you, they were a weird bunch. I told them what I saw. They just said I was crazy. And then, of course, I didn’t tell anyone else... I wish I had.“
The old man now looked sullenly at the coffee cup, which he raised to his mouth for a big sip.
“And why the name, the Functionless?” asked Yuri.
“Yes, that,” he thought for a moment and then continued sadly, “you see, everyone has been given their own light by the good Lord,” he paused for a moment, “but sometimes it just doesn’t work out, like with the fisherman’s boy. The children teased him. His parents were difficult people, they went through a lot, by God. But he had no place. It just wasn’t for him. Whether it was the time or the place, it never worked out for him.“
”Are you saying that he had no function, so to speak?“
”Yes, that’s how I imagined it, his friends, the nighttime visitors. Maybe they were of the same ilk and took the boy with them. Out of pity, so to speak.”
Yuri thought of his father, who would have reprimanded his grandfather for his chatter. He looked at the sad old man with the dark blue kippah.
“But Yuri, that’s not good,” said the old man. As if he sensed that Yuri’s interest was not without reason. “God takes his children to him when it’s time, not these... people.”
He didn’t know what to say, so instead he rocked restlessly in his chair. The old man looked at his coffee and rocked too. They sat like that for a while before Yuri accompanied the old man to his room, said goodbye, and left the home. He thought about it as he smoked a quick cigarette in the cool wind.
