In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist

by Ruchama King Feuerman

  Sometimes he feared he might not be attracted to women, God forbid. But then he recalled his teens, and after that his early twenties, when he was engaged to the lovely, treacherous Gitty. Then, desire had raged through him for days and nights on end, and he knew his fears were baseless. His desire was simply dormant.

  Ach, he was selfish, thinking only about himself, his own needs and concerns. He scratched sadly at the back of his hand. What about all the others who needed the rebbe much more? If something happened (again his temples throbbed) who would run the courtyard? Who would answer everyone’s questions? An image of the rebbe’s wife, tearful and distraught, lodged in his mind, and then an image of Tamar appeared, her standing under the olive tree in her white helmet, disappointed after her forty days of prayer, and he shook both images away. He couldn’t bear the sight of a disappointed woman. His thoughts drifted to Mustafa. He enjoyed the custodian with his odd questions, both insulting and flattering, and his brooding eyes that bespoke a certain understanding of the world. And yet when he saw Mustafa stumping toward him, he felt a suffocating feeling, an obstruction in the throat, as though choking on the man’s sadness. Those times, he wanted to be anywhere but there next to him. Of course he overcame it. And what did Mustafa want exactly with all his questions about the kohein? Isaac feared he had set the Arab off on a strange course.

  Down the hallway, he heard the the rebbe’s cough. He listened for the next cough and the next, like a mother listening out for the breath of an infant. So much depended on the rebbe’s next cough.

  He hovered over the rebbe the next morning, gave him his pills and special ointment for a corn on his big toe. The rebbe’s eyelids looked baggier than usual, and his body tilted, as if a rock rested on only one shoulder. A small wind could knock him over, that’s how frail the rebbe was. “Do you mind if I clear these books off your table?” Isaac asked, trying to keep his voice pleasant and worry free. “They’re about to topple.”

  “Just leave them,” was the rebbe’s quavery reply. He dropped his head against the couch arm. His beard had lost its puff and sheen, and clung to his jawline like lint from the dryer. A cloying, cough-mediciney scent hung heavy in the air. The shuttered windows allowed only a few bars of sunlight into the shadowy room. The rebbe preferred it that way. Lately, the light hurt his eyes.

  “Please bring me the pomegranate,” he said.

  Isaac opened the receptacle where he kept the artifact Mustafa had unearthed from the Temple Mount. He brought the reddish clay fruit to the rebbe, who cradled it in his old hands.

  The two stared at the pomegranate, not saying a word. It seemed to glow in the rebbe’s hands. “This fruit—to one, it’s an archeological find, to another, a piece of our temple.” The rebbe closed his lids. “To a Jew, even a rock speaks.”

  Isaac bowed his head tenderly toward the old man. “What’s it saying, Rebbe?”

  “What’s it saying? All you have to do is listen.” The rebbe brought the pomegranate so close it nestled in his beard. “What are you going to do?”

  Isaac’s head lifted. “About what?”

  The rebbe nodded toward the pomegranate.

  “Eh … didn’t I already do something? You sent me to the archeologist. I went.”

  “Something more needs to be done.” The rebbe spoke in a hoarse yet forceful tone. “They’re throwing away precious keilim from the holy Temple. Do you know what this is worth to us? Go to the Russian Compound, to the police.” Rebbe Yehudah’s hand motioned vaguely. “Ver vais. Who knows. But you have to do something.” The rebbe struggled to sit up while still holding the clay object. “Because I—I can’t.” He slumped back in the couch.

  Isaac tucked a pillow behind the rebbe’s back. If only the pomegranate could stay here, in the rebbe’s lap, forever. He didn’t want to handle this mess. He knew when he was out of his depth. But he said, “Rebbe, if you say so, I’ll take care of it.”

  The rebbe gazed down at the clay fruit. “Tell me about this gentleman, Mustafa. He’s an unusual fellow.”

  “Oh, yes.” The Arab was a mystery. “At first I thought he wanted to convert, but he doesn’t,” Isaac said emphatically. “He’s a religious Muslim, though not the strictest one.”

  “I understand.” The rebbe nodded. “That’s why his desire to be a kohein is interesting, in a manner of speaking. There is—how can I say?—something extraordinary about him. The way he spends time sifting among the rocks, finding things, these broken vessels, relics of holiness,” and Isaac nodded, even though the rebbe wasn’t looking at him but at the pomegranate.

  “Broken vessels,” Rebbe Yehudah repeated, and a soft sigh broke loose from his throat. “This Mustafa, he suffers terribly, the sufferings of Job. He doesn’t know what’s inside him. A man has to know what’s inside him.” His eyes stared out, one hand moving this way and that, as if passing through a shaft of dancing dust motes, sensing something there and not there. Lately the rebbe would drift in and out, and Isaac waited tensely for this spell to pass.

  “Isaac.” The rebbe’s finger shook as he pointed at his lap. “Vos hut ir gezayn?” What do you see?

  Isaac stared, puzzled. “I see the pomegranate.” In fact, it was wobbling a little in the rebbe’s lap.

  “One pomegranate?” said the rebbe. “Not two?”

  “Only one.” Isaac carefully gathered up the pomegranate and replaced it in its plastic container. “Why do you ask?” he asked, snapping it shut.

  The rebbe merely grasped the bottom half of his beard as if holding on to a rope. Isaac gazed at him. A thread of anxiety blended with a thread of fear.

  “Where’s my wife?” Rebbe Yehudah said suddenly.

  “Out shopping.”

  At this, Rebbe Yehudah looked very sad. “Please call the ambulance.”

  Isaac registered a sudden pinch in his gut. “What?”

  “Call now,” the rebbe repeated. “I think I’m having a stroke.” His eyes stared straight ahead. He let out a contorted sigh.

  “A stroke?” Isaac leaped up as if his clothes were on fire. “Nurse?” he shouted. But it was her afternoon off. He ran to the phone. His fingers stumbled out the number to the ambulance. In a flash he slipped off his watch and held it up before the rebbe. “What do you see?”

  “Two watches.” The rebbe shook his head. “Please, Isaac, who has time for this? In less than a minute I won’t be able to speak.” As if on cue, he clutched his head and closed his eyes.

  “Rebbe Yehudah? Are you in pain?” he asked stupidly. He crouched and rubbed his rebbe’s neck, his back, as if it made a damn difference!

  “Just listen,” the rebbe said, his eyelids shut. “The rebbetzin needs your help to run the courtyard. Stay awhile.” He spoke slowly, squeezing out each word.

  “Of course, Rebbe.” He clasped the rebbe’s hand.

  “As for the pomegranate, follow it. It will take you—” The rebbe shook his head. He opened his mouth wider but no sound came out. “Eh blemeh,” came the garbled sounds. “Eh shlupeh.”

  “Rebbe!” Isaac was on his knees. He said brokenly, “Tell me what to do! Oh, Rebbe!” His tears fell on the rebbe’s wrist and fingers.

  The rebbe’s mouth was stuck in a crooked grimace.

  “Don’t die. Don’t leave me, Rebbe, please, it’s forbidden to die!” Isaac begged like a kid. He got up. Nothing was real. Everything was moving too slowly and too fast. “Oh, where is the ambulance, where’s Shaindel Bracha, shopping today of all days?” and he rushed, throwing items into a small suitcase just as burly ambulance men came bursting through the door.

  “He needs his robe,” Isaac cried out while the husky bareheaded men hefted the rebbe onto the stretcher. “Gentle, gentle,” he fretted.

  As best he could, he wrapped the rebbe in his old purple robe.

  The medics were carrying him away. Rebbe … “Please, Master of the Heavens, please!”

  Isaac lurched, followed the stretcher outdoors into the crowded courtyard. Neighbors and store owner
s had gathered in anxious bunches. How had word spread so fast? When they saw the rebbe, their faces crinkled in despair. Women rooted frantically in their apron pockets for psalms. Two amputees rolled into the courtyard in their wheelchairs.

  “What happened?” one asked fretfully.

  The restaurateur from across the street put a finger to his lips. “The rebbe,” he said in a tearful voice.

  The gate opened and Shaindel Bracha appeared, holding a basket of vegetables, the tips of her scarf stirred by a passing breeze. Isaac’s heart dropped when he saw the look on her face.

  “Yehudah?” she called in a soft, apprehensive voice. The medics were going past; the rebbe’s skinny leg flopped off the stretcher. “Yehudah?” The basket fell from Shaindel Bracha’s hands, and eggplants, onions, and turnips rolled in every direction. She scurried over to the stretcher. She held his foot as if it were his hand. “Yehudah?” she asked in a voice so much on the edge of hope and heartbreak, Isaac’s insides writhed. The medics carried the stretcher to the ambulance parked on Ninveh Street, with the rebbetzin holding on to the rebbe’s black-stockinged foot and her calling “Yehudah?” every few steps in that awful hoping voice.

  “Master of the Universe,” Isaac whispered. A moan rose from the men, women, and even the children in the courtyard. Rebbe, Rebbe …

  Shoulders hunched, Isaac burrowed through the people toward the ambulance. Let me hold the rebbe’s foot, too—the thought shot through him. A foot, just a foot. He tripped on an onion just as he lunged for the doors. They closed, and the ambulance took off.

  When the call came three days later, Shaindel Bracha was talking with Isaac in the kitchen about the ingredients to buy for the food deliveries. She answered the phone. A moment later, her face disintegrated. Crumpled like a pastry, the nose dissolving into the mouth, mouth into chin, chin into neck. But she didn’t make a sound. She just held out the phone tightly. And he answered the call he had been dreading all these weeks and months. The rebbe had died. Isaac was needed by the ritual burial society to prepare the body.

  He took a bus to a small stone building just off Sabbath Square and entered a spacious white-tiled room. The kabbalist’s body was covered by a sheet on a narrow table. Isaac and three other men got to work. They washed a single arm and covered it. Next, a leg got revealed and only a leg, carefully washed and covered. Limb by limb, exposing and concealing, they went through the entire body. Though the corpse’s eyes couldn’t see, the soul could, and in this way the deceased was spared indignity and shame.

  The men whispered the instructions, they whispered the prayers from Song of Songs, but Isaac couldn’t really hear the words. His chest was raw, like cinder block, his throat numb. Still, he performed his duties. A blood spot bloomed on the rebbe’s liver-spotted arm and he put iodine on it, to stanch the blood. They immersed the unwrapped nude body into a mikvah of water, they chanted, “He is pure, he is pure, he is pure,” and then wrapped his thin body in a sheet and wiped it down, like a baby. They dressed him afterward in white pantaloons—the kohein’s clothes. The tunic fit well. Isaac should know. Eighteen years a haberdasher. Clothes of ancient times and for all times. He whispered into the rebbe’s cold stiff ear, “You outfitted me for this world, Rebbe, I’m dressing you for the next.” Now they were tying slipknots that spelled God’s name into the belts at his knees, waist, and chest. When it came time to tie the knots, Isaac’s fingers got confused, so the other men had to take over. Their hands worked cleverly, like girls playing cat’s cradle, as they called out loud the letters of the alphabet: Aleph, Bais, Gimmel, Daled, Hey. As if asking God himself to rearrange the letters and come up with a word or phrase that would make death comprehensible. Because at that moment, Isaac saw a crazy world.

  All too soon, they wheeled the corpse into the large refrigerator, placed a lit candle near the head, and everyone gathered around. The leader, a silver-beard man, addressed the sheet-wrapped figure. “Yehudah, son of Rebecca, we the men of the hevra kadisha ask your forgiveness if we did anything wrong while performing the tahara. Maybe we weren’t respectful or kind enough. We tried to do the best we could.” He held out his palm for a moment and said, “Please forgive us, Yehudah son of Rebecca. We pray that things go well for you.” Then they all backed out of the cold room.

  The lifeless shape smote Isaac. He never should have performed the tahara. It was better for strangers to do these last ministrations. Good-bye, Rebbe. A huge wave of grief swam over him, about to overtake him, pull him down to the bottom of the sea. He crossed his arms over his abdomen, bent and squeezed his elbows in an unsuccessful attempt to halt his weeping, as if stanching tears were as easy as stanching blood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mustafa sang to himself as he cleaned the bathrooms. “Kohein,” he hummed. Afterward, he crawled under a caper bush to get every last ticket stub from the Islamic Museum. He mopped the fountain area three times and wiped the floral glass windows of the Golden Lady until they shone like a bride’s face. Look, look how beautiful he made the Golden Lady, he thought as he wiped the sweat off his face with the edge of his kaffiyeh. It was good for a man to take pride in his work. He nodded at the floral windows. Helwa. Beautiful.

  But instead of praise for his hard work, he only got rebuke. “Why are you working shway shway, like a snail?” Sheikh Tawil asked while Mustafa was vacuuming inside the Al-Aqsa mosque. His boss’s almond eyes narrowed with an employer’s shrewdness. “Are you trying to avoid work at the construction site? Your dithering won’t help!”

  Mustafa lifted his hands halfway and dropped them at his side.

  “Go to the construction site now!” the sheikh ordered.

  “I have to finish vacuuming the rug!” Mustafa pointed at the patchwork of carpets in the Gray Lady mosque. “The worshippers will kneel on crumbs and dirt.” As it was, the carpets needed shampooing. “I just need to finish the job.”

  “Oh! All right! Twenty minutes then.” The sheikh walked off with his careful steps, and with a sharp flick of his cane, sent a fat dust ball skittering out of his path.

  Mustafa struck his head. Why didn’t he say, “Yes, oh honored sheikh, I will go immediately.” Maybe now his boss would think, That fellow Mustafa, he has a big mouth, he doesn’t deserve a promotion like I thought. Sheikh Tawil had promised him a promotion, hadn’t he? Or was it a raise? He tried to recall the sheikh’s exact words. Before he had a chance to think, his friend Hamdi appeared from behind a column, his unwieldy belly straining against a frayed, straw belt. “Ya, Mustafa, I never see you anymore. Always you are busy, brother. Never time to help me, like you used to.” His large eyes bulged with hurt and complaint.

  “Soon, Hamdi, soon I’ll help you,” he promised. He had been neglecting his only friend on the mountain.

  Hamdi shrugged and, gingerly holding his belly, sank down and sat at the base of a column. He pulled out a magazine with a shiny car on the cover. While Mustafa vacuumed, Hamdi flipped through the pages, his broad, dark face thoughtful. His free hand squeezed his plump movie star lips. “Yeeeh!” he exclaimed. “Yawaladee! Look at that one! So pretty.” He carefully ripped out a page, folded it into a square and put it in his back pocket.

  “Are you planning on buying a car?” Mustafa joked, after he switched off the vacuum cleaner.

  “I’m going to rent one for a day,” Hamdi said importantly. “I have to make the right choice. I would take you with me, but you’re too busy all the time with your work. Never time to help me,” he repeated, aggrieved.

  Mustafa hung his head. To appease his friend he said, “Let me see the car.”

  “When you have time for me, I’ll have time for you,” Hamdi said.

  Well, he had to go to Solomon’s Stables. “See you later, Hamdi,” he said tentatively, but Hamdi merely ripped out another picture from his magazine.

  Mustafa ambled past small hills of sand and ground rock that formed a rampart. His glance fell on a wood crate and a crumpled can of Coca-Cola, and he made a note to clea
n there later. He climbed down steps, sideways. Step one, step two. Careful, careful, do not fall, he spoke to himself. The area was dusty and cluttered with white slabs of rock, smashed shards of pottery. With mitts on, he loaded the smaller rocks onto a wheelbarrow. Each rock he lifted sent fine dust into the air, making him sneeze. The rocks looked strange, older than any he had ever seen. Rich dirt. Maybe a treasure was hidden in it, and an image of the sweet red pomegranate jumped into his head.

  Ya’allah—he knocked his forehead. Why had he given the treasure to the rabbi? Maybe Sheikh Tawil wouldn’t be happy with him. This was the one he needed to make happy, not Rabbi Isaac, no matter how nice the rabbi was to him. In fact, hadn’t the rabbi and the professor mocked him the other day with their questions about the Koran? His throat burned and prickled at the memory. He crouched down now, looking closely at the old rocks. He tipped his bucket of debris into his wheelbarrow, and as it poured, he examined the stones and rocks and dust with eagle eyes. After an hour, he found a piece of Islamic blue tile and nothing else. He put it into his pocket and continued hauling rocks.

  At the bottom of the steps lay the neck of a jug. Before he could reach for it, a worker took a step and the jug cracked under foot. Laa. Mustafa’s heart pinched. What could it have been used for? He went on dumping and loading the rocks. As he let his haul of stones fall into the wheelbarrow, a coin peeped from under a rock. He wedged it out and that’s when he saw a cross, bronze-colored, dented at the edges. He knelt clumsily and stared at it. “What’s wrong with you, Twisty Head?” the man next to him shouted.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled, and hastily stuffed the cross and coin into his rucksack. “I must go, I’ll be back in a minute,” he said to some workers nearby. He walked fast toward the Gray Lady mosque, where Sheikh Tawil was surely praying the afternoon prayer. Since he had a few minutes until his boss came out, he scrambled over to look at the Jews praying at their wall below. He stared, struck by the sight of so many Jewish women, swaying from side to side, or bopping their heads like some birds pecking at the ground for crumbs. His eyes fixed on a tall girl, her red hair waving like a flag. He recognized her because she came so often, and on a motorcycle, too. She prayed like she was the only one there, her long red hair moving and praying with her, and he thought Allah would have no choice but to grant her wish, even to her, this Jewish girl. A few feet away, a bride angled her arms behind her head while a photographer snapped her picture in front of the Jewish Wall. Suddenly, her dress ripped under the arm. Mustafa sneezed in shock and pity, but when he opened his eyes, the bride had disappeared. Where could she be? He craned his crooked neck and saw three old beggar women surrounding the bride, stitching at her dress with needle and thread. On the men’s side, a big party was happening, a dark-haired boy reading from the big scroll of their Torah while women threw candy at the boy from behind a fence. Maybe he should come back late at night and see if he could find any candy. So much excitement at the Jewish Wall. He guffawed. Out of one slab of ugly rock they made such a big holiday.