In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist

by Ruchama King Feuerman

Miss Tamar smiled as if she knew him for many years. “Hey, Mustafa, where are you going?” she asked in her warm, pleasant way that always made him feel so good.

  “To the Mashbir.” He had always wanted to shop at the big Israeli department store. With the money left over from the sale to Mr. Kareem he was going to buy nice underwear, the same kind in JC Penney, and maybe get the hole in his shoe patched.

  “Really?” She flipped a braid over her shoulder. “What are you going to buy?”

  “Just things.” He scuffed one banged-up shoe against the other. He saw a big Israeli man in shorts watching him with a look of envy, as if to say: Why does that pathetic one get to talk to a pretty girl and not me? Meanwhile, an old grandma on the bus stoop glared with suspicion at Mustafa. “Where is your motorcycle?” he asked.

  “In the shop, getting fixed.” She tried to explain what was wrong with it, but he couldn’t concentrate.

  “Do you know what happened?” he broke in. “A stupid boy set off a firecracker and now the guards think everyone is carrying a bomb.” He grumbled, “That’s why it took me one hour to get off the Haram.”

  “Whoa! Tell me what happened!” Miss Tamar’s eyes opened so wide, so excited, that he had to tell her the whole story, every detail, even the spanking.

  “So now I ask you, is that a good reason to bother everyone, just because of a firecracker?” He saw her staring at the brown tip of his toe just beginning to jut through his shoe, and he tucked his foot behind his other leg.

  “I keep on meaning to ask you, have you found anything else”—she cocked her head—“up there?”

  “Oh, yes!” He smiled broadly. “Miss Tamar, it’s a miracle. I found, an old clay—” He stopped. Confusion swept his face. He clamped his hand over his mouth and one eye.

  “What is it, Mustafa? A clay what?”

  With his hands still on his face, he awkwardly shook his head.

  “You have to tell me,” she insisted. She stepped close, trying to position her face to catch his one exposed eye, but then he covered that one, too. “You found something valuable,” he heard her say. “Something made out of clay. Is that it?” He opened his eyes and saw her looking at him closely.

  He lowered both hands.

  “And you’re afraid,” she said quietly. “Why?”

  “I—oh—Miss Tamar,” he choked, and couldn’t continue.

  “Please,” she begged. “Did something bad happen?”

  “No. Not something bad. I found a clay bird, a dove, with Hebrew letters on it, just like the pomegranate. But it must stay a secret.”

  “What? You found a clay dove?” She broke off, speechless. “You’ll have to show it to Isaac!”

  Ya’allah. At this, he struck his forehead. His big bragging mouth had gotten him into trouble again. Why did he have to mention the clay dove? No one had to know. Least of all the rabbi. “It’s still up there on the Haram,” he groaned. “I can’t get it off.”

  “Don’t take any chances,” she cautioned. “The main thing is—be safe.”

  Hot air swirled all around him. He felt tired and dizzy, his tongue too heavy to carry in his mouth. His foolish talking tongue. What next would come out of his mouth—how he hoped to sell the clay dove and make plenty of money? “Excuse me, miss,” he said, “I have to go.” He turned and teetered toward the Jaffa Gate arch.

  “What’s wrong, Mustafa?” she called after him. “Aren’t you going to the Mashbir?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.” The day was spoiled. Another time he would buy the underwear and fix his shoe.

  Behind him, he heard her footsteps, but since he didn’t want to answer any more questions, he tried to scuttle away.

  “I just remembered something!” she called again. “Do you have any messages for Isaac? I’m going to see him tomorrow. We’re going on a date!”

  He turned and saw her happy face and fought down a deep feeling of sadness and despair. Now he would be alone and no one would ever talk to him, not the rabbi or Miss Tamar. Just this week he noticed Hamdi was eating a falafel and laughing with a new worker. Already his old friend had forgotten Mustafa. As for Ali, his flatmate only spoke with him when he cooked a tasty dish. That didn’t count. And his brother Tariq hadn’t called in months. “I think the rabbi doesn’t want to get married!” he shouted over his bad shoulder.

  Miss Tamar had stopped next to a display of goat drums. Her face looked as though someone had slapped it. “Did he tell you this?”

  Confusion broke over him again. Both he and the rabbi—neither would ever marry. He was sure Rabbi Isaac had said this. “Yes!” he said. He walked quickly, limping on the leg with the torn shoe, before she would ask him something else. He passed the tourist information booth, a fabric and knickknack store, and the police station. He didn’t have time for such questions. The main thing was—get the clay bird off the mountain. He needed to come up with a plan. He would try tomorrow. Then the day after. Soon Allah would smile on him.

  He looked over his shoulder—Miss Tamar stood next to the goat drum stand like some lost little girl—then he turned back and walked on and on, past the Citadel of David, past the post office and the Three Religions Doll Museum, nearly stepping into a steaming clump of donkey turd, going as fast as he could to escape all Miss Tamar’s annoying questions, until he realized he was walking straight into the Jewish Quarter when surely he needed to be going the other way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Pale and anxious, Isaac sat next to Tamar as they waited for the bus to rev up. It was a mistake. He could literally smell the mistake: a perfume scent on Tamar not unlike honeysuckle. A three-hour bus ride sitting next to a beautiful, lively, intelligent young woman. Was he a twenty-year-old to go running off in the middle of a Jerusalem workday? Horseback riding yet, just the two of them. It had a vaguely illicit feeling.

  He propped a miniature volume of the Talmud on his lap. It would set the proper tone between them. Then there was the matter of praying mincha. Where on earth would he find a quorum of ten men at a horse ranch?

  Tamar was rearranging her things on the overhead compartment railing. She wore a periwinkle blouse, its droopy poet sleeves filling him with nostalgia for a time period he barely knew. She had swept up her auburn hair in a high ponytail, a few wavy strands hanging around her face. The middle doors to the bus opened and a frazzled woman struggled with a baby carriage. Tamar rushed over before he got a chance and helped the woman maneuver onto the bus. He noticed how she attracted a pleasant attention. While they’d been waiting in the ticket line, three separate people had asked her the time.

  More people came on the bus and he sank low in his seat. He knew they looked a poor fit, a pretty young woman and a middle-aged man in a silly visor hat.

  The bus driver pushed pedals, pulled knobs, coaxing the bus to life. At the outskirts of Jerusalem Isaac uttered a short prayer for a safe journey. The bus bumped along dusty Jericho streets, and Isaac stared out at trees with intensely red and purple leaves; old Arab houses; lush fruit and vegetable stands; a banana plantation; quiet, still palm trees; and elderly Arabs moving slowly in the impossibly hot and humid air, even at eight in the morning, on this July day. A tiny woman crouched over a hemp mat with watermelon seeds spread out and drying in the early sun.

  He took out a bag of peanuts. Not far from the road, an Arab man and a teenage boy were prodding sheep along. The older shepherd wore a kaffiyeh and an NYPD T-shirt, the younger one in a black Chicago Bulls T-shirt. Tamar gestured toward them, smiling a little. “Love these guys with their mishmash of cultures.” Then she thumped the side of her head. “What am I saying? How could I love them? They hate me.”

  “Who? Palestinian Arabs? Or Israeli Arabs?”

  “Puh-leez.” She rolled her eyes at him. “Makes no difference. I’m the enemy of both. I’d be dumb to think otherwise.”

  “Don’t you wonder why?” Isaac asked her.

  “Duh. They think we took their land. Well, it’s our God-given land,” she reto
rted. “Says so in the same Bible that Mohammed supposedly valued.” She gave him a baleful stare. “Don’t tell me you have a problem with that?”

  “No,” he said, amused. “Why would I?”

  “Well, you shouldn’t. God promised he’d return us to this land. That was twenty-five hundred years ago. And here we are. Doesn’t that just blow your mind?”

  He watched her as she spoke, riveted by her eyebrows, first plunging, then hiking up again. He said, “It does. All the time. Though I have to admit—when I first came to Israel, I wasn’t in an idealistic frame of mind. To me, Israel was a vacation, an escape, just a place to recover.” He winced, recalling his first weeks in Israel just after his mother had died. “And then something came over me. I’d be riding on a bus or walking along Jaffa Road, and I’d feel the most amazing sensation. That I was fulfilling my destiny—not only my personal destiny, but God’s plan for the Jewish People. It’s an extraordinary feeling.”

  Tamar nodded, her eyes reflective. Isaac listened to the hum of the bus, feeling a camaraderie between them. He ate a few peanuts and gestured with his bag toward Tamar, who shook her head. “The strange thing is, ever since I’ve gotten to know Mustafa I’ve started praying for the Arabs.”

  She turned in her seat, nonplussed. “Praying for Arabs? What kind of prayer could you possible say for people who want to murder you?” Again the working of her brows, like some kind of machine cranking up. “Like in Fiddler on the Roof when the rabbi prays for the tsar to be well and ‘keep far away from the Jews’?”

  “I’ll grant you, it’s a tough one.” He picked a shell off his pants. “The only thing I could come up with—that they should want to have a good life and love their children more than they hate us and want to destroy our children.”

  Tamar considered. “I could handle that prayer.” After a few moments she asked, “What’re you reading?”

  He showed her the cover. “Babylonian Talmud—tractate Nashim.” He pointed with his chin toward her book. She held up: Discover the Fun in Fundraising. Then she said, “Why am I even reading this?” She launched into a whole saga about work. Her bosses were expecting her to pinch-hit as a fund-raiser while still carrying a secretary’s load. Meanwhile, no pay raise was forthcoming.

  “Did you ask for one?” he wanted to know.

  She shook her head. “It’s a yeshiva. I feel funny asking.”

  To which he answered firmly, “Ask.”

  Almost simultaneously, they put aside their own books and stared out the window. He pointed out foliage, fleeting animals, and bits of Israeli history inspired by the scenery. They broke a Shalom candy bar in two and ate it.

  At a mountain north of Jericho, Isaac half-stood, pointing. “The Sartaba Mountains,” he murmured excitedly to Tamar. The very mountain where, in ancient Israel, the Jews had waved lights to let the whole country know they had sighted the first sliver of New Moon. The mountain was mentioned in the Talmud. Ancient Jewish history before their eyes. He sucked in the passing views, memorizing them. He so rarely left Jerusalem. Gold, beige, and peachy stones of Jerusalem gave way to low, majestic mountain ranges, rocky desert on the Jordanian side, Israeli agricultural villages on the other, green houses for growing flowers, fruits and vegetables.

  “Did that reporter ever get back to you about the pomegranate story?” Tamar asked, bringing him out of his reverie.

  He frowned. “Not only didn’t he call me but yesterday I contacted the papers he said he wrote for and they’d never heard of him.”

  She made a face that screamed Yikes!

  Yikes was right. But he didn’t want to think about this now. He was entranced by the views. Except for Hebron and Rachel’s tomb and other holy sites, he had never properly toured Israel. But wasn’t all of this land holy and worth seeing?

  They almost missed their stop an hour later, a treeless area with vast tracts of dry grass and hills. They walked along a dusty dirt path, the sun pressing on them like an iron, until they spotted the horses, maybe six of them, corralled by a wood fence. The ranch loomed ahead, a few tall bony trees scattered around it. The utterly secular nature of this outing struck him as absurd. He, Isaac, a haberdasher from the Lower East Side, was going to mount a horse!

  “I always wanted to marry someone I could roll down a hill with,” Tamar remarked as they climbed a low mound.

  “Oh, really?” He stared at her above the rims of his glasses, one brow faintly arched. “I thought you wanted a Torah scholar.”

  “I see no contradiction there.” She looked candidly at him. “Can you roll down hills?”

  “Tamar, be glad I’m going horseback riding.” But he smiled as he said it.

  At the ranch, he removed his jacket. He walked down a wood-paneled hall, gazing at black-and-white-framed photos of celebrities posing with a big-cheeked man who appeared to be the ranch’s owner. The hall led to a bar. Tanned youths in shorts and T-shirts slouched on high leather-topped stools. The room with its mounted saddles and gleaming bottles struck him as utterly alien—not even a piece of home.

  The horse instructor, a muscled, square-jawed Israeli, strode toward them. “Do you want the half hour, the hour, or the two hours?” His voice was low, manly, a slow cowboy drawl in the holy tongue.

  “Half hour is fine,” Isaac said just as Tamar answered, “At least one hour.”

  They stared at each other. “I’ve never ridden before,” he said mildly.

  “We didn’t travel all the way from Jerusalem for a half-hour ride,” Tamar said in a cajoling voice, “did we?”

  “All right,” he said. “One hour,” he told the instructor, staring at his jaw. It jutted like no other Jewish jaw he had ever seen, something out of a men’s magazine or tobacco advertisement. The instructor’s feet made solid contact with the earth as if each step were saying, “I am a man, I am a man.” Walking beside him, Isaac felt like the scrawny “before” picture in the muscle men ads. But didn’t the sages write, “Who is a valiant man? One who conquers his evil impulse”? A different idea of manhood.

  Above each stall, a different horse’s name was inscribed in black curlique letters: Six-Day, Yom Kippur, Independence, Suez, and Madonna.

  “What’s with Madonna?” Tamar asked the horse instructor. “I thought the last war was ‘Operation Peace for the Galilee’.”

  “Too long,” he bristled. “Never will I call a horse ‘Operation Peace for the Galilee’.”

  It was a clunky name for the Israeli war in Lebanon. “How about Galilee, then?” Tamar offered.

  He stopped, his hands on a stall gate. “That sounds better. I’ll think about it.”

  “And your name?” Isaac asked, trying to keep a sardonic edge out of his voice.

  “I am Assaf,” he pronounced in that Israeli-male way that gave weight to simple statements. He led out the horses, making kootchy-coo noises to each one. Tamar placed her hands on the saddle, a foot in the stirrup of Six-Day, a frisky, dark brown horse. Assaf stopped her. He pointed to her skirt. “What’s this?”

  “I wear it to be modest,” she explained.

  “You can’t be modest in a skirt—not on a horse!” He put a hand on his incredible jaw. “You are making a mockery of religion and a mockery of my horse!”

  “No, look!” She mounted the horse with agility, the material of her Aline denim skirt hooping outward over her legs. “See?” She sat prettily atop Six-Day, who was sniffing the flicking tail of Independence, intended, apparently, for Isaac.

  Assaf grunted. “B’seder.” All right.

  When Isaac tried to stick his foot in the stirrup, the horse took a few steps forward, and he almost tripped to the ground. In the end, they needed two people to help him mount.

  They rode single file, first Assaf with his golden retriever to keep him company, followed by Isaac, sitting rather tentatively on his horse, and at the end, Tamar. No galloping, hardly any trotting. Geriatric, just as Tamar had promised. But as the horses resignedly ambled their way over a hill, the place
at last began to live up to its name—Yoffi HaGalil, the beauty of the Galilee. The grass had become greener, the hills more rolling. Poppies, jonquils, and anemones lay like colored jewels spilled onto a plush carpet.

  Below, at the edge of a hill, appeared a fat blue ellipse of the Kinneret Sea. His lungs filled, bursting with pride at the beauty of the place, and he sang, “This land is your land; this land is my land, from the Red Sea waters, to the Golan farmlands. From the Dead Sea salt beds, to the Be’er Sheva deserts, this land belongs to you and me …” changing the words in the Woody Guthrie song. Tamar laughed at his improvisations.

  He felt relaxed and unencumbered by problems, though problems he had. Itai Shani’s warning finger and the reporter’s phony credentials registered for a moment in his brain, but he blocked them out. Later he would think about everything. Later. The day was too beautiful. A wind from the Kinneret Sea fanned across the hill, making the grass shiver. The air against his skin swirled with a lightness, lighter than what he was used to in Jerusalem.

  Assaf rode on serenely, his dog yapping at an orange butterfly flitting between the horses’ legs. The instructor gave names to the flowers (the astonishing pink doe-faced one with the upraised praying petals was a cyclamen), told tales about the Kinneret Sea and showed the spot where years ago an American photographer got shot by terrorists and had a wildlife site dedicated to her. “She was lucky,” Assaf said, his deep brown eyes pensive. “If she’d died today, she’d get no monument. Too much competition from other terror victims.”

  Isaac threw another look at Tamar. Lucky, indeed! As they rode on, he couldn’t stop turning back and communicating to her through mock eyebrow raisings and exaggerated expressions which set off hysterics in Tamar. She had plaited her ponytail, and with her laughing extravagantly, enough laughter for a whole family, she looked like a girl of sixteen.

  Later they sat eating a picnic lunch under a carob tree. “You seem so relaxed,” she said.

  “I am.” He took water from his canteen to wash his hands and made the blessing over bread. He bit into an avocado, tomato, and lemon sandwich she had prepared. “Excellent,” he declared. He dabbed at his mouth with a floral napkin. Her little feminine touches moved him considerably.