Every time a girl walked by in a long skirt, his eyes followed her and passed on to the next girl. So many girls—too many, walking quickly to their Jew wall, or leaving it reluctantly, each gripping her small prayer book as if it were a wallet with a great deal of money inside. His neck ached as it jerked this way and that, while his eyes tried to catch all them. None of them with hair the color of Miss Tamar’s.
Soon she would have to show up, he told himself. He knew she prayed there often, maybe even every day. She would tell him everything, he’d force her, by whatever power he could. But the afternoon passed. He waited and waited. A life spent waiting, he despaired. He was dead if she didn’t appear. Less than dead. No one was lower than he. Allah, have mercy. On himself and Miss Tamar, too. He didn’t want to hurt her if he didn’t have to.
The next day after work, he spread out his empty rucksack on the hot, white plaza stones a hundred yards from the Jew wall, and sat cross-legged under a palm tree, his tools resting at his side. He took out a long loaf of bread, cut off a slice at the end and carved out the doughy insides. The spongy insides he ate immediately. These went easily down his throat. Then he poured labana down the bread cavity and packed in the soft white cheese with the wooden back of his knife. He sprinkled za’atar inside and slowly ate his way down the loaf. He tried to make his lunch take forever, and for him it was easy since he could never eat too fast or he would choke on the food. He set the loaf down in his lap and looked around, trying to make his gaze look as stupid and bored as could be. No soldiers stopped to question the moak Arab worker eating his lunch.
He got up to stretch his aching, knobby legs. An hour had passed, the loaf was finished, and each of his fingers cleaned and thoroughly wiped. How much longer could he stay here and wait? He heard the snort of an Egged bus passing under the Dung Gate arch, and he looked up to catch the next batch of tourists and worshippers exiting the bus. There was Miss Tamar, her motorcycle trailing the bus! Now she was taking off her white helmet, brushing her fiery hair out of her eyes. Ah, Allah hadn’t forgotten him after all. He watched her dismount, show her purse to a different set of soldiers, and pass through the turnstiles. He gathered up his tools and rushed over, scraping his exposed toe against a stone curb. Okh! The hole was getting bigger and bigger. What shoemaker could ever fix it now?
She saw him. She was coming toward him. “Mustafa!”
Her morning freckled cheeks made him smile, but then: A Jew is a Jew, he said to himself.
“What’s wrong with your face?” she said. “You look different.”
“Praise be to Allah, I found you.” Already he was gesturing with his tools toward the top stairs, toward the souk. “What’s happening to Rabbi Isaac? Tell me! I have to know.”
“Sure, I need to talk to you, too,” she said, following him up the steps, as the other Jews streamed downward toward their wall. “But why are we going up here?”
“We have to be careful,” he insisted, clenching his pronger. “Maybe soldiers are listening.”
“You look different, your whole face.” Her eyes swept over him. “Anyway, I’m glad you found me because we really should speak.”
They stood at the top landing, just under the arch that opened to the souk, and there he rested his tools. “Miss Tamar,” he said, his voice blunt and hard. “Will the police take away my job and put me in jail?”
She glanced down. “Why are you squeezing my wrist?” She grimaced and tried to tug her hand away.
He looked at her through dark, sullen eyes, and released her wrist.
“Now just be quiet and listen to me,” she said, rubbing her wrist.
“No, you be quiet!” he shouted. “You listen to me!” He held up his pronger. Her scared face loomed pale underneath.
“Mustafa!” she gasped. Her big green eyes went over his face, looking and looking. “Would you hurt me?”
He squeezed the pronger. “They will take my job!”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re scared. I understand. But you know who else I’m scared for?”
He said nothing.
“Your friend. Isaac,” she said. “He’s in jail and he’s refusing to tell them anything about you.”
He stared at her. A jerk, a jolt. “What did you say?”
“He’s taking full responsibility—he won’t say a word.”
“This is true?” he asked, white-faced. He almost took up her hand again, but he stopped midair.
“Of course,” she said simply. “Isaac would never say anything to harm you.”
He shook his head. “No! It can’t be. Maybe it’s lies.”
“Really? Then why haven’t the police come to arrest you?”
Here, he had no words left. He lowered himself onto a stoop. He stared down at his fingers. He pressed his palms to his eyes. “Rabbi Isaac has said nothing!”
A lady pushed a stroller against his pronger, and it rolled a few meters away. He paid no attention. All the mean thoughts tearing through his mind came to a halt—one, two, three—just like that. His eyes raked her face to see what he might find. “How is he?”
“I hear he’s being treated like an animal,” she said bitterly. “Worse than a criminal. Not even allowed a toilet.”
These words cut into his skin. “Oh, Miss Tamar. That should be me in jail. Not the good rabbi,” he said brokenly. “I brought him trouble. But here”—he wiped his eyes with the butt of his wrist—“he protects me.”
Tamar put her head close to his. “You saved the pomegranate, though you didn’t have to. You did what you knew was right.” Her eyes wouldn’t let go of his. “You collected more things even though it was dangerous, even though it goes against your whole way of life. How could he not protect you?”
At these generous words, he burst into tears. He had misled them, not once, not twice, but many times, pretending to be an Arab man of honor. Even today, he had come here prepared to hurt. Mustafa lifted an arm against her gaze.
“Don’t be sad.” She hovered close, to his left, to his right, unsure how to catch his gaze.
He glanced and saw a welt on her wrist where he had grabbed her. He had done this.
“You don’t know anything,” he cried out, and he got to his feet and staggered off, his tools abandoned.
Dazed, he stumbled down the stairs toward the plaza. A dark-coated, fur-hatted Jew was snapping a picture of a little girl next to a palm tree. A beggar, his head swathed in rags, was eating a falafel, bits of cucumber falling out of the pita’s corners. He looked askance as Mustafa lumbered by. A dark-skinned woman was crying out, “The Messiah will come today, if but you would listen to God.” The Jews, the Jews. They were all around him, everywhere he turned. They meant nothing to him, and he was nothing, no more than a flea to them. And yet, Rabbi Isaac cared for him, was protecting him. The sun threw an arm of light across the stone plaza and he walked along, mindlessly following it. An anguish filled his soul, and a strange joy, too. The rabbi had put himself in danger because of him, Mustafa the janitor.
His neck pulsed and throbbed as he followed the shaft of sunlight. Did he ever get protection like that before? Not even from his own mother. Mustafa knew she never loved him from the very start of his life. But now he wondered if it all had changed, if maybe Rabbi Isaac loved him very much, and even Miss Tamar, too, might love him a little.
He lifted his eyes, distracted by the call of the muezzin. Jews were standing and moving all around him as he lurched toward the Jew wall. A guard with a face like an elf extended toward him a black paper Jew’s cap, then glancing at him, quickly withdrew the offer. Mustafa stopped in front of the large-stoned Jew wall, such a hard, broken wall with no charm or beauty at all. The Jews were calling out sounds, “Yisgadal ve’yiskadash shmei rabbah!” and they all answered a thundering ameen. The sounds swelled and lifted, high and then higher. He knelt down and lay with his cheek on the ground. “Mother,” he murmured. Oma.
He straightened, and blood rushed to his head, making him diz
zy. Still on his knees, he made a cross over his breastbone. “ ‘I will bless you and keep you and shine my face on you,’ ” he shouted. “Allahu Akbar!” he cried. “Mother Maryam, most beautiful lady!”
There was a sudden roaring all around him.
“Get up, you crazy man!” someone shouted.
“A desecration,” screeched an old man in baggy shorts.
Mustafa from, his kneeling position, stared at the old man’s white bony knees. An Israeli teenage boy came toward him, two rock fists raised in the air. Mustafa reached for his tools and remembered he had left them behind. He turned, and squinting into the light saw a young woman with hair the color of paprika—Miss Tamar!—fending off the elf guard. She rushed into the men’s section, past a wooden table piled high with books, straight to him.
“He means no harm,” she shouted to the worshippers who stood in a jagged circle around Mustafa. “He’s a little—” she made fast circles around her ear. She said fiercely to Mustafa, “Dear God, let me get you out of here.”
But he merely turned to her and said, “There is something I must do for the rabbi, Miss Tamar. It is the truth! And no one can stop me.”
She tugged his sleeve and garbage bag and pulled him along toward safety.
CHAPTER THIRTY
When Isaac woke up, he saw a grizzled blond face looming above his. It belonged to Tommy the Penitent. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were twitching. Isaac stared out, clutching his tzitzit fearfully.
“Rabbi, I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” Tommy rasped. “I have to talk to you.”
Isaac was hit with the man’s harsh breath. “Yes,” he said, his voice still slurry from sleep. “What is it?”
“You know, I used to be the biggest drug dealer in Jerusalem?”
Isaac nodded mutely—Whatever you say, Tommy.
Tommy went on, “One day, I stopped at a friend’s house, a woman I used to go out with. We used to smoke a lot together. I was the one who turned her on to the stuff. We were still kind of friendly.” As he told the story, Tommy’s face relaxed a little, became less deranged, more regular. “Anyway, when I stopped in, I could tell she was stoned—on drugs I’d sold her. Her eyes had that look and she was talking in that way, well, you wouldn’t know, Rabbi. Just then her little boy wandered into the room, and he had all these welts on his arms. He was just three or something. She screamed at him, and he ran out of that room, and I just knew she was the one who’d given him those welts.” Tommy stopped, though his mouth still seemed to be moving in ten different directions. He pressed his lower arms against his stomach and bent forward as if to stop an intense internal spasm. “So could you tell me this, Rabbi. The sins between you and God can be fixed just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“but the sins between you and man? Not so easy. How can I fix what I caused to happen to a three-year-old boy?” He clenched his jaw so hard, a wobbly blue vein, like a streak of lightning, pulsed across his forehead. “Just a baby. And look what I turned his mother into.” He looked around the room as if trying to decide what to bang his head against. Then he fell into ranting, “I’m going to Gehenna, I’m going to burn in hell.”
Isaac watched him. He didn’t say anything, just looked at the man with compassion. Minutes passed. Tommy was quiet now. Isaac lifted himself up on his elbows. “Hell?” he said. “Maybe you are going there. But one can lower the temperature one degree at a time until it is no longer hell.”
Tommy pushed a blond shank of hair off his face. “What?” he said.
Isaac nodded. “The sages said so explicitly. It’s written in the Talmud.”
Tommy straightened. He pinched his chin and looked out with a thoughtful eye. “How do you do that?”
By now Isaac had gently shifted to a sitting position. “Through good deeds, Torah, and prayer.” He paused. “I’m going to pray now. You can come if you like.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Tommy said.
Isaac washed his hands at the sink, tried to straighten out his clothes. The place still stank but at least this morning no one was branding him an informer. The other men seemed to notice the difference in Tommy. Definitely fewer mutterings. “Good going,” the tattooed man said, slapping Isaac in the middle of his back. “Include me in your prayers,” he said, when Isaac went off to daven in the jail synagogue. “It’s my day in court.”
“What’s your name?” Isaac called after him. “So I can pray for you.”
“Yigal, son of Rachel.”
Ah, Isaac thought. Another Sephardi.
After shacharis, Isaac stood in the cafeteria line with the other men for a breakfast of runny eggs and cold cereal. The jostling and shouting of men, the push to get to the bananas before they got grabbed up, the clatter of trays and chairs, the search for a safe spot among so many scary-looking men, the loud chewing and spitting and complaints and the presence of so many guards, made the cafeteria an even more terrible place than the cell. But at least it didn’t stink. Isaac was glad to be sitting next to Nissim, who took on the role of guide. He pointed out which prisoners probably had lice, who to flatter (the cook’s assistant), and which prisoners were most likely crazy or suffering from drug withdrawal. Isaac filed away the useful information.
Back in the cell, he made an attempt to clean up the area around his bunk bed. He would have cleaned up the whole place, but he didn’t want to get in anyone’s way. After he had collected a small bag of garbage, he saw a huge brown cockroach under a bag of potato chips, and he jumped, startled. The men laughed, not meanly, but in a way that somehow included him.
Midday, Yigal, the tattooed man, was returned to the cell.
“Stuck here another five days,” he announced, rubbing his pig tattoo.
Isaac offered his sympathies as the men rang out with curses, dry spits, and the cracking of nutshells.
“Guess your prayers didn’t work, Rabbi,” Yigal said half-mockingly.
Isaac turned up his palms. “Sorry, they’re not foolproof.”
He was so tired from not having slept the night before, that he managed to nap in the thick of the noise. He woke up an hour before supper. Yigal said with a look both sly and shy, “I saw how you gave Tommy the tissues last night.”
“Oh,” Isaac said, abashed. “I thought everyone was asleep.”
“No. I was watching. You treated him like a real person, Rabbi.”
“I’m not a rabbi,” Isaac said, for the fiftieth time, though lately he was getting tired of correcting the men. Let them call him what they want, as long as they didn’t curse him.
Another night passed. Curses, bugs, loud snorings, and the yellow lightbulb never dimmed.
The next morning, Isaac, spur of the moment, asked the men to join him in the jail synagogue.
Tommy consented with a duck of his head.
Isaac turned to Nissim, who paused for a long moment. He said, “B’seder, Reb Isaac,” lifting his hands in defeat. “You want me to come? I’ll come.”
At the last moment, Yigal peeled himself off his mattress (“Anything to escape this stinking zoo”), and joined the small group escorted by Gilad, the beefy-necked guard.
The jail synagogue was a small whitewashed room, with a burgundy velvet cloth covering the rather small holy ark. Isaac’s tense shoulders dropped a notch or two, an ease coming over him, here among the battered benches, the shelves of Torah books, and the tall wooden lectern stationed in front of the ark like a soldier. Gilad had temporarily returned his tefillin, and Isaac now wound the tefillin straps around his arm and prayed, breathing deeply. Here, the air smelled fine. As he davened, he was conscious of the men watching him with flat, uncurious eyes. He offered them a chance to don tefillin, but except for Tommy, they all refused.
“So,” said Yigal, slouching with his elbows on the lectern. “Why do you wear tzitzit?” He smiled sarcastically.
Isaac lifted up his shirt slightly so that they all could see the white cloth and the long tasseled fringes poking out. “Anybody know the answer?”
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Nissim was flipping the pages of a book of Psalms as if it were a deck of gambling cards. Without raising his eyes he said, “I heard tzitzit is supposed to be a forget-me-not string tied around your finger.”
“That’s right. It’s supposed to remind you to do all the mitzvahs.” Isaac gazed at the fellow in surprise. “How did you know that?”
“I did have a bar mitzvah,” Nissim said, “like everybody here.”
“So that’s the whole reason?” Yigal said in a disappointed voice.
“It is the way,” Tommy pronounced, one eye jerking in its socket.
“Do you know what the word tzitz means?” Isaac asked.
They shrugged.
“It means to look. Any animal can see. But how to look, to look the right way …”
Nissim, placing a hand over his huge chest, said, “My heart wears tzitzit. I don’t need tzitzit.”
“Okay, hero, let me ask you.” Yigal leaned across the lectern. “Were you wearing tzitzit when you gave your cousin Abutbul a flat tire?”
Isaac blanched. A flat tire, he’d just learned, was jail-speak for a stabbing. Not Nissim, he winced.
Nissim brusquely shrugged the tattooed man’s hand away and averted his eyes.
“My uncle wore tzitzit,” Yigal suddenly offered. “He said it kept his eyes only on his wife for their whole marriage. Ya’allah.” He spread out his arms as if embracing a bear. “All 220 pounds of her.”
The men’s snorting, honking laughter sprayed the room. Isaac ignored it.
Nissim was poking a finger deep in his ear to relieve an itch. Just then, Tommy pushed out a big yawn. Isaac threw a worried glance around the room. He was losing the men. With a pang, he realized he didn’t want to lose them. He might never have this opportunity with these men again.
Yigal let out a loud burp.
In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist Page 24