In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist

by Ruchama King Feuerman

  “Are you Miss Tamar?” he said, rubbing his neck in wonder.

  She nodded and ate her apple while staring at him with frank, curious eyes.

  He dug into his pocket, pulled out an old bus stub and a red rubber band and finally let the plants fall onto her desk. “These are for you.” The jasmine lay wilted. The honeysuckle looked like a mashed grasshopper. “They are from the rabbi.”

  She stared at him in confusion.

  “Rabbi Isaac,” Mustafa explained. “From the courtyard.” What was wrong with these Jews? Couldn’t they tell the man was a rabbi?

  Her pretty cheeks colored under her tan. “Why,” she sputtered, and a piece of apple flew from her mouth onto the desk. She flicked it into the garbage. Her finger crept slowly and touched the tip of the honeysuckle. She lifted the jasmine, sniffed it, and let it graze her cheek. She smiled to herself and placed both plants inside an envelope.

  Watching her, a lump of despair curdled inside him. Okh. She liked Rabbi Isaac. Even he could sense it. Now the rabbi would have no time for him at all—Rabbi Isaac would spend all his time with this girl. Mustafa would be left alone.

  “Thank you,” she said and tucked the envelope into her purse. She glanced up at him. “How do you know about the courtyard, or Isaac, for that matter?”

  “I visit him.” He tugged on the black strap around his kaffiyeh. “We talk.”

  “Huh,” she said, nodding in a puzzled way. “So he gave these for you to give to me?”

  “Yes.”

  She propped her cheek on her palm and gazed past him, so many expressions darting across her face at the same time that he couldn’t catch a single one. She took a small bite of her apple. “You know,” she said, between chews, “I’ve seen you before. Do you ever go to the Kotel, you know, the big Jewish wall? I bet that’s where I’ve seen you around.”

  And then he recognized her. He had seen her at the wall of the Jews, praying so hard, he couldn’t stop watching her. “The motorcycle lady,” he breathed out.

  She touched her collarbone. “That’s me.” She put down the half-eaten apple. “What’s your name? How do you happen to come there so often?”

  “I’m a janitor on Allah’s mountain. The Haram. My name is Mustafa.”

  She took another bite of apple and looked him over carefully. The door to an office opened. A man of heft with big blue eyes, his cheeks nearly covered in a mass of dark curly beard, came toward Miss Tamar. “So did you get through?” he asked.

  She made a thumbs-up sign.

  He shook his head in amazement. “Do you know it takes me thirty cold calls before I get one live person on the phone?” He took a slug of water and set it down. “Tamar, you’ve got nerve. You are blessed with chutzpah!” Then he said something else that Mustafa couldn’t hear, and she threw her head back and let out a peal of laughter so clear and lovely, like some musical instrument, Mustafa was certain he had never heard such a sound before, not even from his sisters or the Christian lady.

  He eyed the girl with suspicion. Why was she laughing like this with another man? And he ached a little for poor Rabbi Isaac. There was no loyalty in this world.

  “And how might I help you?” The handsome man turned his woolly face toward Mustafa and smiled, but his eyes stayed distant and didn’t even look at him. “What’s that?” the man asked, pointing to Mustafa’s laundry bag. Terror flickered in his small, brown eyes.

  “My things,” Mustafa mumbled.

  “Things?”

  Mustafa bent to lift the bag and the man took an alarmed step back. “Dirty clothes,” he said. “Today I go to the laundry. Fatima’s Laundromat,” he added.

  “Oh for goodness sake, Rabbi Finkle,” Miss Tamar broke in. “Mustafa’s not planting a bomb. He’s just delivering something.” She looked at Mustafa with apology on her face. “Thank you,” she said, and Mustafa nodded and stumbled off as fast as he could manage those stairs of Satan.

  Outside, he passed the students of the Torah walking by in the full heat of the day. So many Jews. They looked like tourists with their backpacks, bottled water, and new clothes, filled with their American happiness. They never had a bad day, he thought, not one. He panted as he walked past hordes of Jewish children with their side curls and black knickers. His neck was stiff as cement, it wouldn’t move even a half centimeter. He must have twisted it further, and as he groped futilely for aspirin in his pocket, a red sharp pain streaked through his neck. His right leg throbbed as he lugged his laundry bag along. Did the rabbi think he was a fetch-it, bring-it boy? he grumbled softly to himself. But maybe, maybe he could learn something from the Jews. Rabbi Isaac had brought the young girl some wilted flowers—and what did they cost? Nothing!—and look how happy the pretty girl became. Why couldn’t he—Mustafa stopped and set down his laundry bag—why couldn’t he give his mother some of the precious things he found on the mountain? Maybe he could bring her a treasure he had dug up! What did it matter if Sheikh Tawil didn’t give him a raise, or if he had no money to buy her things? He would show her his collection. How amazed she would be. “Did you really find this, Mustafa? In the dirt? I always knew you were a clever boy!”

  He closed his eyes and imagined his mother fastening a loose button onto his shirt, smiling at him, humming as she sewed. Then he picked up his laundry bag and went toward home, filled with new purpose.

  In the days that followed, he worked fast to complete his jobs, and when Sheikh Tawil or Waleed, the new supervisor, saw him with free hands, they sent him to Solomon’s Stables. He put on a grumbling face. No one suspected this was what he wanted.

  As soon as he spotted an old coin or a pottery spout or any old thing, he scurried to his hiding place near the fallen pillars, pushed off the gourd stone and slipped it into the pouch inside the hole that he had dug out. At least once a day, he surveyed his findings: mosaic stones, blue like a fine sky, a base of a jug the color of pumpkin, ancient battered coins with pointed markings, clay tiles, an oil lamp, a candlestick base, many pottery spouts and handles, a few crosses, and so many shards. And he wondered about them. Maybe that shard had once been a cup the Prophet held hundreds of years ago. Or a vial used by the priests to light their lamps?

  Each time he buried one of his treasures, he thought: No, not for you, Sheikh Tawil. Or Sorry, Rabbi Isaac, you can’t have it, either. (But he had never promised the rabbi a single thing! Only that he would protect the old things, that’s all.) He was saving them all for his mother. Maybe at first she wouldn’t understand how special they were, but then he would explain. He would teach her how to look at the old things, the same way the rabbi had taught him how to see. She would welcome him back and show the entire village the old, beautiful things he had found—older than the Koran—that he had pulled from the dirt with his own two hands.

  He slipped another treasure into the hole and yet another. This one is for you, Oma! And this one! Until, finally, he wedged the gourd firmly over the hole and in place, and kneeled there, with both hands on the stone. There he sat, not moving, as still as the treasures buried below, and it came upon him then, after so much digging and finding and burying, that his mother did not really want those things, that these old scraps would never interest her, not a bit, they would even make her angry, and only jewelry, real gold jewelry would do, and he laid his misshapen neck and head hopelessly against the hard gourd stone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Isaac, Isaac, when’s the last time you looked inside this fridge?” Shaindel Bracha was foraging for vegetables to make a chicken soup. She held out a slick, moldy zucchini for his inspection before tossing it.

  Isaac poked his head inside the old refrigerator. Cloudy jars huddled behind a sticky carton of orange juice. A withered half-eaten drumstick sat forlornly in an open foil pan. Cherry tomatoes had wrinkled like prunes in a small container. And the smell! “It’s a mess,” he agreed. “You start on the soup, and I’ll clean out the fridge.”

  She grimaced at a soggy cucumber and plucked
out a still sturdy carrot for her soup. “You need to get married,” she said.

  He nearly dropped the jar of horseradish he was wiping down. Then, “I might as well be married,” he feebly joked, “with all the domestic chores I’ve taken on.”

  She just broke a celery stick into three pieces and plunked them into a pot.

  He turned his palms up. “What, you think I haven’t been trying? I just went out on a date last week!”

  “You’ve got to try harder,” she said tartly, scraping the skin off a carrot.

  “I can’t waste all my evenings on these pointless shidduchs.” Seeing the dismayed look on her face, he said, “The great Talmudic sage, Ben Azzai, never married. He said he was married to the Torah.” The rebbetzin didn’t look impressed. “Tell me,” he said, “why the rush now?”

  The carrot went whole into the pot. “It’s not good for you to meet women in the courtyard and talk about their private things, and you not married. As an assistant, it didn’t matter as much. But now …” she trailed off.

  Had he crossed any boundaries? Nothing hit him. A quiver of revulsion passed his face at this suggestion of impropriety. He crouched at the lower shelf of the fridge and went at a congealed spot with a plastic knife.

  “You shouldn’t have to live like this,” she went on, wrestling with a homely knob of celery root, the key to excellent chicken soup, she always insisted.

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Please.” She set down the celery root. “I know you could have much more, Isaac.”

  “More?” he echoed. The word caused a strange pressure in his chest.

  “Why should a man with so much to offer be alone?”

  “Please, Rebbetzin.” With despair, he threw the plastic knife into the garbage. The congealed spot would never come out. “You sound like my mother, may she rest in peace.”

  “Mothers have been known to speak the truth on occasion.” She wiped her hands against the lavender apron and looked at him with her light brown eyes. “Isn’t it”—she glanced down a moment—“difficult?”

  He poked his head back into the fridge. None of your business, he thought. After all, did she really need to know—for Gitty he had ached plenty. But after the wedding debacle, it seemed someone had taken a sledgehammer to his lower half. Yes, his body still experienced normal urges but nothing that couldn’t be contained. The sages had good advice: “If you meet the beast, drag it to the House of Study,” and “Feed your passion and it will become even hungrier; keep it hungry and it will be satisfied.” Thank God, he knew how to distract himself.

  “I manage,” he said shortly. He was wiping down a bottle of something—duck sauce?—and he looked back at her warily.

  “You need to get married,” she said flatly. “Is there anyone you have in mind?”

  He set the jar curtly on the counter. “Certainly, Rebbetzin, you don’t expect me to produce a bride”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that!” An image of the widow Edelman flickered in his mind in her modest short wig and practical blue shoes. For God’s sake, he thought, shaking his head.

  “You’ve had years to find someone. Enough. What about that woman, Ayala Fefferburg, the one you just went out with last week?”

  Hmf. Ayala the accountant with the thick-soled shoes—a pleasant enough woman, but she wore him out with her banking metaphors. “Marriage is about investment and interest and balancing the book of life,” and ten more to match that one. Anyway, she had told the matchmaker that it couldn’t possibly work—his scratching habit drove her crazy. “With all due respect, Rebbetzin, I don’t think so.”

  “Well then, what about that young woman—the one with the bike. What’s her name?” She gently eased into the bubbling pot a whole onion, followed by a turnip.

  “Tamar, you’re thinking?” A flush crept up under his beard. An image of her sprang unbidden into his mind—the way she was always gesturing emphatically, sweepingly, in a wide open way, her lips and brows constantly moving, her features forever in motion. The rare beautiful women he had met were stingy with their movements or maybe just more self-contained. Not Tamar—and, he admitted, she was beautiful. He shook his head sharply. “She’s a fine young woman, but she’s years younger than me! I’m like a rebbe to her, a father practically.”

  “So?” she drawled, clanking a cover on the pot. “Many men marry younger. Who are you to consider yourself so exceptional?”

  “I—I …” His eyes darted here and there. “I don’t know what to say to any of this.” He took off his hat, abashed. “You should know, I have nothing against marriage, but marriage seems to have something against me. I have no mazal in this area.”

  “Make your mazal.”

  “Easily enough said.” He rinsed his hands in the sink and dried them on a striped dish towel. “Truthfully, I have grave doubts about my ever being suited for marriage.” Mrs. Edelman hadn’t been the first to predict a bachelor’s future for him.

  “Who is suited for marriage?” she rejoined. “No one I know.” She gathered up the peels and threw them into the garbage.

  He reeled. “You and Rebbe Yehudah had the best marriage of all! I saw the love between you every single day.” He gave up all pretense of cleaning out the fridge and sat down at the square Formica table.

  “Do you think it was so easy being married to a great man, to such a big zaddik?” She rubbed her arm. “It was hard.”

  “Hard?” His mouth contorted as if he had tasted something sour.

  She nodded and took a seat across from him. “The problem was, he thought I had the same capacity to give, just like himself. He never asked me to help out or do more, you understand. He just thought I was like him. But I’m from Brooklyn. I didn’t go through what he did. While he was hiding out with his mother in sewers for months during the war, I was getting piano lessons. What did I know about hardship?”

  Isaac, his eyes on the rebbetzin, kneaded his hat.

  “Once,” she said softly, “we’d just finished making a batch of potato kugels to give out. I was exhausted, so was he. But now we had a wedding to go to, a nice young man and woman getting married, both of them—what do some call it?—simple-minded. The parents on both sides opposed the marriage. No one was coming to the ceremony. My husband was to be the officiating rabbi, caterer, and also be a guest. I didn’t have any koyach left, not one ounce of energy. But if he did—and he was older than I, not a well man!—if he could go, then how could I not? So we went. He married them, took their pictures, danced for this couple the whole night, with such joy.” She smiled, remembering. “I pushed myself to go, not because he asked me but because he thought”—she traced her brow with a light finger—“he thought I was like him.”

  He pondered this. “Don’t you miss him?” he asked. Where, after all, were the tears?

  She smiled. “Foolish Isaac. There are people who are dead while they’re alive. And people who are alive, even though they’re dead.” She paused. “He’s alive. I can practically hear him talking to me sometimes.”

  His chest constricted with pity. Dead is dead. Poor woman.

  Isaac continued to preside over the courtyard. But by night his dreams presided over him. In one dream, he saw the rebbe lying in a coffin, wrapped like a Torah inside the holy ark, and then he creakily sat up and pointed a bony accusing finger right between Isaac’s eyes. Another night Isaac dreamed he was standing underneath his wedding canopy with a stick figure dressed all in black. The figure broke in half and turned into Tamar and Mustafa who chased him with brooms and pelted him with garbage, jasmine, and pottery shards. And then another awful dream: pomegranate seeds raining from the sky like red tears. He woke up, shaking in bed, his teeth clenched. He took a cup of Sabbath wine to calm himself. What did it all mean? Maybe he should have found a way to help Mustafa, appease Tamar. Maybe he should have found a way to rescue the pomegranate. Maybe he should have done a lot of things. Following these nocturnal torments, the courtyard seemed a picnic.

&nbs
p; Well, not quite.

  One day when there was a lull, a tall black man showed up, a basketball wedged in the crook of his arm. He was huge, and he swung toward the door. Isaac asked, “Excuse me, who do you want to see?”

  “Rebbe Yehudah,” he said, in a deep Southern drawl, his hand on the knob.

  Isaac coughed into his fist. “Excuse me, when were you last here?”

  “I’d say, oh, eight months ago,” came the reply.

  “And you could walk in, just like that?”

  “Sure. Rebbe Yehudah always said I could.” He gave a little tug to his ear. “Whenever I’m in town. The thing is, he likes to watch me bounce the ball, so I just let him know I’m here, and then I go back out over there”—he jerked his thumb toward the empty dirt area—“and dribble for him. Simple. Name’s Ezekiel.”

  “So, Ezekiel. You dribble a ball, for the rebbe …?” Surely Isaac would have remembered meeting him. Had this Ezekiel visited when Isaac had been on his lunch break?

  “Well, I would’ve taken a few shots, but there’s no hoops here.” His broad fingers did a tap dance on the ball. “Just ten minutes. He always stays by the window and watches. And you know, my game is always a little better afterward.” He grinned. “Rebbe Yehudah tells me he wishes he could say a blessing with the same power that I bounce the ball.” He shook his head. “Man!”

  A few yards away a man with sandy-brown sideburns shook his head and mouthed silently, “Man!” to himself, and scribbled something in a pad.

  Isaac put a hand on Ezekiel’s mountain of a shoulder. He would have to be quick. In and out, like an incision. “The rebbe died.”

  The shoulder jerked and flung his hand off. “What’re you saying?!”

  Isaac nodded. “Just three weeks ago. I’m sorry we couldn’t notify everyone. We didn’t know how to find all the people who visited him.”

  “Rebbe Yehudah? That sweet old man?” A sob caught in his thick throat. He threw the ball with a vicious bounce against the courtyard wall. “That’s not right!”