In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist

by Ruchama King Feuerman

  Mustafa was facing the door, his hand on the knob. He was about to say no when he saw a tiny jewelry shop in the stall across the alley. Eighty-five shekels wasn’t much, either, but slowly, if he went on taking things off the Noble Sanctuary, it would add up. “I—” He hesitated. Would he really sell these things? What would Rabbi Isaac say if he knew? And Miss Tamar?

  “You’re simply impossible! Can’t you let a man make a living? Ninety-five shekel and not a coin more!”

  Quickly, before Mustafa lost his will, he walked back to the counter and exchanged his marble stick for the money.

  The next day, Sheikh Tawil stopped him outside the Dome of the Chain. “Why are you rushing off? I’ve been wanting to speak with you. I see you don’t clean with the same”—the sheikh held out his palms—“strength, the same joy, and it makes me sad. Don’t give up or be sad,” he said. “You never know what might happen.”

  Hope bloomed in Mustafa. Would his boss really give him a promotion? Then he remembered the sheikh’s broken words and half promises. He nodded and smiled at the sheikh, but inside, his heart was as hard as plank. No, Sheikh, this time I won’t believe you until it happens, he said to himself. “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel”—his father used to say this. A man couldn’t be a fool in this life.

  He picked up his tools and dragged along toward the construction site, staring out at the terraced Mount of Olives, at the graves scattered like dominoes on the mountain. Squinting, he saw Hamdi sitting on a garbage can near a pile of rubble, one hand squeezing his plump lips as he turned the pages of a magazine with another. On the cover it said, JC Penney. “Heh, heh, heh,” he heard his friend say.

  “Ahlan, Hamdi. Did you pick the car yet, the one you’ll rent?” Mustafa glanced over Hamdi’s shoulder and saw pictures of skinny girls and tall, slim ladies—they looked like mothers and daughters. They stood as if suspended in the air—he couldn’t see any floor. They wore short nightgowns, a few of them only in underwear and something flimsy on top that barely covered their breasts. Mustafa hid his eyes with his calloused fingers. Here in the shadow of the holy Golden Lady. Women showing the parts that should be hidden. “Hamdi. It’s not nice. Don’t look at these pictures next to the shrine.”

  Hamdi merely folded down a corner of the page, and flipped over to the next one.

  “Hamdi, you’ll lose your job,” he said craftily, “if they catch you with this magazine.”

  Sighing, Hamdi closed it, leaving his index finger between the pages. “Let me explain. I’m planning to get a woman to marry one day and I’m trying to decide which type is best. You’re a moak, you’re bent up and cripple, and you’ll never marry, so you can’t understand.” He snapped open his magazine.

  Mustafa clenched his pronger. His only friend had called him a moak! Stupid man! Handsome as Hamdi was with his movie star lips, no one would marry him. He had no brains at all. Mustafa ripped the magazine from Hamdi’s hands.

  “Crazy Arab!” Hamdi screamed and grabbed it back. “It’s mine! I get to look first. Wait your turn!” He flipped through the pages and, finding the right place, stared intently and made various markings with his fingernail. “If you tell on me, I will kill you,” he said, not lifting his eyes.

  Mustafa grabbed his pronger, dustpan, and sweeper, and scrambled as fast as he could to Solomon’s Stables, far from Hamdi and his magazine. His cleaning tools made a sad, clanking noise as he walked. Now he lost the only person who had shown him a friendly face on the mountain. Now he had no one. Not Hamdi or Rabbi Isaac or the girl.

  After work he went to Hala’s Jewelry Shop. A pretty lady in a blue hijab fluttered at his side and made suggestions while he inspected all the displays, his eyes stung by the dazzle of gold. After a minute he pointed to one gold necklace thick as a garter snake and studded with red stones. The pretty lady said, “You have good taste. It costs four thousand shekel. Do you want something less expensive? We have high-quality items here.”

  He shook his head. Four thousand shekel! It might take years, and who knew if his mother would still be alive. “I will save,” he said out loud.

  “Your wife is a lucky woman,” she said coyly, and he didn’t bother to explain. But Hamdi was right, Mustafa thought. He could never marry, even if he had wanted to. No woman would ever have him. Outside, in the alley, a new fear assaulted him, like a bad wind passing through his soul. Maybe his mother wouldn’t welcome him back home, even after he brought her the gold necklace. Laa! He flung his arm out, scattering that thought to the dry hamseen wind.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Isaac sat under the olive tree. The Jerusalem night air was cool against his neck, a reprieve from the stuffiness of his bedroom. Pink clouds swirled in the dark sky. Probably smog from a factory nearby, but smog had made the night beautiful and mysterious. Random memories came into his mind, his mother putting a parsley garnish on a piece of salmon, the smile on her face when she saw Isaac’s report card, the way she folded laundry as she sat before the TV watching her favorite soap opera. She poured all her caring into that laundry, folding every shirt and sock just so. Maybe that’s why he had become a haberdasher, and so, surrounded by all that clothing, he could feel close to her throughout the day. Once, she actually stood up to his father. Isaac still remembered that evening. He was fourteen at the time and he longed to buy a set of Talmuds. His father was dying of emphysema at this point and could no longer go to work. Isaac’s request (the third time in the past six months) brought on an intense coughing fit, and after the coughing subsided, his father spat a clump of mucus into a soup bowl and rasped, “No.”

  His mother put down a shirt she was sewing and said, “If Isaac broke a leg, would you give him the money to go to the doctor?” His father thought about it and said yes. Then his mother said, “Pretend he just broke a leg. Now give him the money,” and his father, amazingly, did. Isaac still used that same set of Talmuds.

  Above, a bird flew into the olive tree, sang something, and twittered away. He thought of the verse, “A bird in the sky may carry your words …” Who knew—the fanciful thought struck him—maybe it was his mother saying, “Isaac, I should’ve stood up to him more.” Or maybe his father was saying, “A little Torah study—it’s not such a bad thing.” A message from the grave, he thought. He was beginning to wonder if maybe such a thing was possible. An urge to sing something swelled in him. Instead, he took a bus to the Kotel in the dark of the night.

  At the ancient wall, he placed both hands flat against the hot stones. They got hottest at night, having cooked the whole day in the Jerusalem sun. He opened his siddur and prayed, letting his needs wash between the words.

  But what were his needs? Someone once told him, “Isaac, you don’t have needs. You have hurts.” The truth was, he still carried the hurt and pain of what his old yeshiva buddy Heshy had done to him. His friend had taken his bride and stolen his school. And from that point on, Isaac got permanently off his game. No, his bride and school weren’t taken from him. He lost the woman, and he lost the school. And Heshy became the better man. True, they both did him wrong. At the same time, some part of him had sided with them, as if he deserved to lose. He didn’t want it all badly enough and he never fought for it. The whole episode stuck in his memory like a knife left in the stomach.

  He uttered psalms and prayed until the late, late hours, slept a little on a bench, washed his hands, and prayed some more. Then, as the sun pushed its way up to seize the sky, he placed his hands against the stones. They had changed again, cooler now, having absorbed the night’s chill. Nothing stayed the same.

  He turned around and looked back at all the praying men behind him, old men with open shirts and hairy gray chests; the good-looking soldiers; the short, the tall, the upright, and bent over; the teenagers in cutoff shorts; and the Hassidic men encased in black, all of them bobbing like seals in the ocean on this early morning. An image popped into his mind, a mass migration of seals at an Arctic shore. He had read how the mother seal could dist
inguish the cry of her own pup three miles away even among thousands. Could God hear Isaac’s cry among all these men? Could he hear what he did not even know how to say or ask for? Isaac made a tiny yelping sound, then another. A dry-eyed weep. Nobody knows who he is until he tells his story to God, Isaac thought on the bus headed back toward his neighborhood. And even then the story keeps changing.

  Later in the day, he heard a distant vroom-vroom sound. His ears pricked. It was the rumbling of a motorcycle, and a sudden panic ballooned in his chest. He realized, with a clammy sensation in his palms, that he had been listening out for that sound for weeks. He dashed around the courtyard, plucked a stray sock here, gathered an old newspaper there, tossed a plastic cup and a popsicle stick into the garbage, rushed and rushed to make it look neat and presentable.

  The rusty iron gate creaked open, and Tamar stepped inside in a pale blue dress with a little ruffle on the hem with her long forthright Tamar strides. She pulled a sprig of honeysuckle off the bush and announced, “I’m back.”

  “So you are.” His eyes took her in. A brush of lipstick, some winking stone in each ear, her abundant red hair caught up in a side part with a clip, and that lovely dress. She looked like a seminary girl of nineteen. He glanced down—she had on heels. Gottenyu. He wiped his damp hands discreetly against his suit jacket.

  “So how’ve you been?” he said, trying to aim for a neutral yet welcoming voice.

  “Pretty good, thank God.” She brushed off pebbles from the stone bench and sat down.

  The sun pressed down on him, hard and unrelenting, and he took a step closer, bringing him into the umbrella of the olive tree’s shade. He made a half motion as if he would sit next to her, then abruptly he straightened. He stood, mute.

  She inquired in awkward tones about his eczema.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” he said, and gave a little reminder scratch.

  She nodded as if groping for conversation. “You have regards from Mustafa.”

  “Mustafa? How do you—” He stopped and stared at a little honeysuckle wisp that she dangled before him.

  “He delivered this to me, remember?” she said, and he blushed. “He told me an amazing thing. How he found a pomegranate and other stuff on the Temple Mount. That true?”

  He hesitated and nodded.

  “Could I see it?”

  “Ah,” he said, and bit down on his lip. “I must tell you: it’s been confiscated by the police. Terrible doings.” He exhaled heavily. “Anyway, I wanted to ask: Have you met any”—he broke off, confused, and then ended—“have you met your goal at work yet?”

  “Funny you should ask,” she said, after a moment. “I thought I did. I’m still waiting for my promotion, though. It’ll happen. The great thing is, they really appreciate me at this place.” While she spoke, his eyes went over her dress, her hair, the jewels in her ears. She glanced up, and he quickly looked away.

  “How is it you always get me to blab about myself? So what about you?” she said.

  He fell silent. His world had changed. Why burden her?

  “You must miss him,” she said softly.

  The past few weeks, no one had said this to him. A phrase from Psalms came to Isaac: “ ‘No one knows me … no one seeks out my soul.’ ” He nodded. “I do miss him. Little things I hadn’t expected, or hadn’t even noticed when he was alive. But nu, now that he’s gone—”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the way he would talk to himself when he didn’t realize anyone was listening. I’d wake him up from his nap, like he asked me to, though truthfully he could’ve used another hour of sleep. And I’d hear him say things to himself in a cajoling voice, like a mother trying to get her baby to eat. ‘Come, Yehudah, let’s get up to serve your creator. Come, Yehudah, you can do it. Up, up you go.’ ” The sweetness of the memory made Isaac smile and wipe at his eyes.

  He looked up at Tamar, and their eyes held each other’s. “He had such a”—he paused, rubbing his thumb and finger together—“an elegant soul.” He gazed down sorrowfully. “For want of a better word.”

  Her eyes looked wistful. “Who will ever take his place?” she asked.

  “His rebbetzin oddly enough thinks I should,” he said quietly.

  Tamar stared.

  “The truth is,” he said with a self-conscious smile, “I don’t understand what I’m doing here.” Briefly he filled her in on his absurd “promotion.” “I’m not a holy zaddik. I’m no big scholar, either. Like you said: Who can take his place? Not me.”

  She mulled this. “Well, think about it. You don’t have to be him,” she said. “Who wants imitations? You just have to be the best Rabbi Isaac.”

  “Hmf,” he said, though that title Rabbi Isaac didn’t have a bad ring to it.…

  Then she looked straight at him with her intensely green eyes. “Isaac,” she said, and he tensed. “Did you miss me?” She lifted her chin in an almost haughty posture, as if fortifying herself against rejection.

  He blushed under the veil of his beard. “Such a statement wouldn’t contradict the truth,” he said in a Talmudic lilt.

  She tilted her head teasingly at him. “You like me, don’t you? Don’t deny it.” Her puckish smile dared him not to, and he nodded, almost shamefacedly. “Anyway, it’s just a date I’m talking about.”

  “A date?” How had they leapfrogged to this?

  “Yes. You should ask me out, and you should ask me to go horseback riding. At Yoffi HaGalil. It’s a beautiful area that overlooks the Galilee Sea right between Safed and Tiberias.”

  “Horseback riding?” he sputtered. “What do I know about riding a horse?”

  “You don’t need to know anything. They teach you, it’s slow and geriatric,” she soothed him.

  He rolled his eyes at geriatric and looked at her tanned forehead catching the light between the branches of the olive tree. “I have work to do.” His arm swept the desert-colored stones of the walls and ground. “Here, in Jerusalem, in this courtyard.” He had no business gallivanting off with a teenager practically. Okay, she was twenty-eight. But horseback riding? Sheer madness!

  Tamar stood. The high heels she wore made her closer to his height. She put her head square in front of his. “Look,” she said, “we both need a break from Jerusalem.”

  He glanced a moment at a wisp of red hair falling against her cheek like a lovely comma. The idea struck him as absurd, embarrassing, and wonderful.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Rich dirt, rich dirt. Riches buried everywhere. How else to explain this, his second discovery on the Haram? It happened a day after the Prophet’s birthday, in the lunar month of Rabi Al-Awwal (Mustafa took this as a good omen). He was sweeping a few feet away from the tour guide, the one he didn’t like, the Israeli with the hair in his eyes (but why did Mustafa always stop to listen to him?), when the tour guide dropped this curious remark: “Women who gave birth would offer a turtle dove sacrifice in the temple. Afterward, the mothers received a dove-shaped token as a kind of receipt.”

  Mustafa, who was busy tilting his dustpan into his rucksack, jerked suddenly, and bits of garbage spilled. A token the shape of a dove? He had seen something like this in his collection, he was sure of it. But he had dismissed it as junk! He knocked the side of his head. Could it be? He took off for his hiding spot, his hands clasping the dustpan and broom like walking staffs.

  His breathing came in fits and starts. Pale weeds poked his ankles. With a sharp shove, he dislodged the round stone covering the hole he had enlarged. The bag lay there in the dirt like a dead animal, and he groped his hand into the bag, seeking with his fingers, his hands, then his eyes. He held up a sliver of clay, light as a grape. Yawaladee! It was shaped like a bird! Maybe this was the same token the mothers had used long ago. He gently turned over the clay piece and saw the Hebrew letters: Lekarban—For Sacrifice—and his armpits went damp. Another miracle. A clay bird so old it had come into this world hundreds and hundreds of years ago, even before the Prophet himself
. He touched the bird’s tail with the tip of his finger. His prayers to Allah, the Finder of Lost Objects, had opened his eyes.

  He paced between the chunks of pillars lying on the ground, stopping every few seconds to gaze at the Hebrew letters. In his mind he saw the mothers in the temple courtyard after birth, sluggish and plump, surrounded by the white cooing birds. Ah, how could it be, all this time he had looked at the clay bird but his eyes had passed over it, as though nothing. Like Rabbi Isaac once said, no one knew how to look with his eyes anymore.

  The rabbi. Laa. His throat went dry as sand. He wasn’t going to give the bird to Rabbi Isaac. He would sell it for money. A lot of money. “But how can I take the bird?” he groaned. This one was more special than the others, much more. The Hebrew letters. The bird for their sacrifices. It belonged to the Jews. It wasn’t his to give away. Still—he had found it. He had saved the bird and so it was his. Besides, if he gave it to the Jews, there’d be trouble. He could lose his job. Sheikh Tawil would kick him off the Haram in a second. He whacked the side of his head again. Laa. Why was he thinking such thoughts? He owed nothing to this man who wouldn’t even try to help the pain in his neck go away. The truth was, Allah had dropped a piece of good luck on the earth just for him to find. He who always had his luck in the sky and his brains in the dirt.

  As he gathered supplies for washing the windows, he plotted: He would take the dove off the mountain and bring it to Mr. Kareem. “Let me speak to the owner!” he would insist until the owner came. The bird had to be worth a lot of money. His life would change. He would buy new shirts and throw out all the frayed ones with the chipped buttons. His black shoes looked terrible, especially the left one with the hole. Now—only new ones, not the cardboard junk, but proper shoes from the big Israeli store, the Mashbir. Maybe he would buy new underwear, a loose-fitting kind he had seen in JC Penney magazine. A man should look good on the outside and the inside. He would buy his mother the red-stoned necklace with the gold ropes, so many jewels she wouldn’t know where to put them all; and for his sister Samira, a dishwasher, the best; for his nieces and nephews, presents on each of their birthdays; and for his brother Tariq, who complained of the heat in his bedroom, a ceiling fan with gold trim. Maybe something for Hamdi, too, who he already forgave for his mean words, but why was his old friend keeping far away from him, as if he were the wronged one, and not Mustafa?