As inspired in an artistic narration by the Half Guinea on the night before Halloween
“What do you do with a dropped-dead Ferret?
What do you do with a dropped-dead Ferret?
What do you do with a dropped-dead Ferret?
… early in the morning!”
Neither bard nor crooner, the swarthy Mediterranean with the large brown hands of a lusty peasant and the face of a defrocked priest has perched himself on a low brick wall along St. Andrew’s Descent, a winding cobblestone road in the center of Kyiv that can lead a careless sinner to stumble headlong from the heights of the city’s grandest cathedral to the depths of depravity and despair that is nighttime Podol, the hem of the capital, stitched tightly around the backside of its Jewish quarter while shamelessly baring the soft underbelly of the Mohyla University’s readily corruptible mostly Slavic student body.
“The Ferret plunked down in the dust.
For his heart could stand no more.
He died without a fight, he perished from a fright
His soul was nearly rotten to the core.”
The Guinea’s voice is sonorous and strong. But the wind picks up in gusts, sending burnt red leaves clicking along the dark pavement, sometimes lifting briefly into flight, like frightened spirits foolishly attempting to hop from the fires of Hell.
Shadows dance across the black bumpy road. They eerily elongate with the occasional appearance of a passerby, most of them fully cloaked in anonymity by the pitch of night. Who goes there… downward, ever down, winding one’s way toward the narrow stretch of crumbling buildings squeezed in between streets against a timeless river and a wall of hills that forbid the inhabitants thereof from access to the lofty skyline above.
Some young revelers stream past the Guinea’s perch, ghostly in form, foolish in sound. The young men produce a guffaw of defiance, while the maidens squeal in helpless delight. Their footsteps thump heavily all the same, as a few trip over the uneven concrete in their path. An occasional shop or café along the way is illuminated in electric red lettering that lights the way down.
“Gather round me, most corruptible youth, fair ladies of cafes, and the gentlemen who escort them to theaters at night.
And I will tell the story of a rat who lived amongst you in the light.
His lies were often funny, his schemes mere comedies to some.
But in the end, his end was swift, so swift, he never saw it come.”
A young female amateur musician playing a violin across the road stops to reset the small sound system at her feet that accompanies her playing. But a spark flies out of the speaker, and after leaning over her equipment while continually blowing strands of fair hair out of her face, she quickly packs up and moves on.
“I saw him dragged along the cement from the very spot he fell. Why he picked the place he did to die, I could not rightly tell. But steps away from the central synagogue, the Ferret met his fate. His puny tadpole legs collapsed beneath his weight.”
What happened after that the Guinea could not reasonably have witnessed, but that hasn’t stopped others who supposedly served as his audience on that dark and windy night to relate the following details.
In short, the Ferret, fully deceased and limp as a half-empty sack of wet flour, was not carried, toted or hauled from the sidewalk area just in front of Kyiv’s main place of Jewish worship several years earlier. Incredible as it now appears, he was dragged by the heels across the heart of the ancient Ukrainian capital, with little to no fanfare.
No one knows for sure the exact hour of the Ferret’s demise, but some, with likely no basis in fact, have asserted that he died of a sudden and massive heart attack (in the prelude to a fistfight with the poet Kowalski!) in the early hours of an otherwise ordinary Saturday or Sunday, depending on who’s telling the story.
In any case, no one on the street that morning seems to have paid much attention, much less raised the alarm at seeing his cold corpse so unceremoniously moved across the city. Some say that various back streets were taken to avoid the stares of the curious. It’s just as likely that no one cared or even found the spectacle of a dead weasel, even one that had worked for years for a London-based broadsheet covering the very country that he’d died in, remotely out of the ordinary, much less interesting.
All of this becomes even less plausible, as these very same narrators of the event assert that the Ferret’s lifeless flesh ended up going from one Kyiv synagogue to another: i.e., from the Central Synagogue on Rustavelli Street to the Hassidic one on Podil.
From there, if you can really believe such tales at this point, he is said to have been simply swallowed up by a sinkhole in the street in front of the Podil synagogue and never seen again. So, it wasn’t like he was buried, much less given a funeral according to Jewish rite or that of any other religion, with the Ferret insisting throughout his life – according to much more reliable accounts – that he was a born-again Christian, albeit not a practicing one… not that anyone believed this yarn, or anything else the Ferret ever said.
At this point in the story, we have to go back to the Half Guinea, who waxes poetic once again.
“Into the darkest pit he fell, his soul now took to flight.
He crossed the River Styx by air, and finally did alight.
A land of shadows encompassed him, the air most dark and foul.
But lacking truth and modesty, his soul began to prowl.
“‘I know not where I am,’ he said, ‘nor how this came to be,
But if I fail to find advantage here, I shall know I’m no longer me… Heh, heh.’”
To be Continued.
Filed Oct. 20, 2022