by Nomi Eve
So, Shimon was a stranger, come to sell his single crate of wares. In contrast, the beggar was a natural-born filter-feeder in the holy ocean, the sort who skimmed Jerusalem’s silty bottom. Born and bred on the Via Doloroso, he had a reputation for having stolen the splinters from the original cross. When the pickpocket wasn’t wandering off with other people’s possessions, he could always be relied on to sell you a genuine John the Baptist eyelash or a prime piece of Saint Peter’s scalp. A merchant of the lowest order, but a merchant nonetheless. The Turkish gendarmes treated him with a certain measure of respect because he always gave them a decent cut.
The gendarme did not doubt Shimon’s story of self-defense and probably would have let him go immediately, therefore punishing neither man. But Shimon couldn’t control his temper, so the situation got out of hand. After breaking the pickpocket’s fingers, Shimon had stood in the middle of the shop with a look on his still-too-skinny face that made the shopkeeper and the bystanders, and then the gendarme, more than a bit afraid. The gendarme, closing his hands into fists, wondered if his would be the next fingers broken. Shimon was not generally an angry man, but when he did get angry, his temper was loud and violent. He closed his mouth very tightly when he was mad. Instead of answering the gendarme’s standard questions, he got more sullen and more angry and his lips just kept squeezing tighter together. So the gendarme, along with his reinforcements, hauled the angry, kicking, now yelling young Jew down to the station.
But Avra had been watching the whole thing. And the young Jew with the strong fists and serious temper had caught her fancy. She liked the way he looked. His strong skinny body. His light coloring. The way his chin squared off at the bottom and his forehead rounded off at the top. She thought that he was very handsome. So she went to her father, who, like his own father before him, was in close relationship with the British Consul. Eliezer managed to pull some Turkish strings. And Shimon was let out of jail in just a few hours.
Avra led Shimon through the Old City to her family’s house on Rav Pinchas Street. The police station was in the Armenian Quarter, and they had to pass through the Arab bazaar on the way home to the Jewish Quarter. Shimon walked behind Avra. Or rather, he trotted. She did not seem to be running, but she moved so fast that even though his legs were substantially longer than hers, he had to jog to keep up. And he was afraid of losing her. The spice merchant’s shop where he had gotten arrested was right at the entrance to the bazaar. This was the farthest he had ever wandered into the Old City. From the little he knew of it, the Old City of Jerusalem seemed whirlpoolish and scary. More like the entrails of some petrified prehistoric creature than a proper place to live. And they were going deeper and deeper. Down small steps. Right now. Now swerving left. Down a narrow side street. Across a street half blocked by a big green carriage and two languid donkeys in bright red halters swishing their tails. As he jogged past the carriage, the donkey on the left lifted up his tail and swatted Shimon on the arm. Now back to a main street. There were so many people. It seemed like hundreds of people. They passed a bakery with trays piled high with pieces of pistachio baklava, the bright green nuts in the center. Shimon was amazed that Avra moved in a straight line. She was so little that she fit through cracks in between bodies like an arrow. But he had to swerve constantly. Even though he was skinny he was also muscular, still somewhat bulky, and felt out of place, as if his frame belonged to a different scheme of space entirely. Shimon felt panicky and afraid, and wanted to yell, Please slow down! But instead he kept swerving and jogging, and then they were there. Avra put one foot up on the second step of the house and bent down to tie her boot. As she tied she said, “This is where I live,” and she motioned toward the arched door. Shimon looked up. The house on Rav Pinchas Street, seventy years after Avra’s grandparents had moved into it, had suffered some rearrangement in its fractions. It was no longer half-grand and half-decrepit, but was one-fourth grand and three-fourths decrepit, the front steps falling apart, the facade chipping and cracked in one hundred places. Even the door that Avra was pointing to was gashed in several places, as if someone had once tried to break in.
Avra looked at Shimon looking at the house and decided for certain that she would marry this man. Maybe it was because she liked the thought of meeting her husband at the scene of a crime. Maybe she just wanted to get married. Maybe she just really liked the way Shimon looked. For whatever reason, Avra knew that she needed him, and something in Shimon’s gaze told her that he needed her too. Shimon scratched his nose and half smiled. He leaned on the stone wall in front of the house. The sun was high now over the Mary Church. Avra squinted so that she could see Shimon better. She smiled back at him, and they both let out a little laugh.
Shimon joined the family for lunch. Before the meal was over Avra reached her hand into her pocket and touched the smooth little olive-wood Last Supper that was still there. It must be noted that that Last Supper was one of the only things that Avra ever stole that she actually thought of keeping for herself. Not as a religious totem of course, but because it had become an ambassador from the country of her and Shimon’s first meeting. But she didn’t. As she had with all of the other objects she stole, Avra eventually found herself secretly giving it back. Not to the original owner, but to someone else who owned something else she had once taken.
The next day, Shimon and Avra took a walk through the Jewish Quarter. This time, Shimon did not have to jog to keep up with Avra. They walked together, in close companionable strides.
Shimon joined the family again for lunch. And then for Shabbat. He had planned on returning to Petach Tikvah right after he had sold the soap. But he didn’t go anywhere. Instead, he stayed in the Jewish Quarter with the family of Avra’s mother’s brother, a ritual slaughterer with a strange absence of eyebrows and a patchy grizzled beard. Avra’s uncle traded Shimon board for help in his shop. Shimon courted Avra in the evenings. The rest of his time he spent learning how to carve, weigh, muck out, and stuff the intestines of what seemed to him an entire herd of cows. At night he thought he heard them mooing. The work did not suit him at all. He knew that his fingers were meant for the soil and not for all this blood.
Five weeks after their first meeting, the young couple brought together by that carton of still unsold aromatic river Volga Russian soap were married. The night before the wedding, Avra stole a long beautiful feather from the tail of a priceless golden parakeet kept in a fancy cage by one of the Russian Orthodox priestly brothers. Then she took the feather to the face of the goddess whose eyes and nose and lips she had stolen so many years before. And for no good reason, she left the feather there, outside in the dark, resting on the ruin of an archaeological wonder. There, where the lips should have been.
This is how my great-grandmother, Avra Schine, a born thief, came to marry Shimon, a man from southern Russia with strong fists and very fast feet. She moved with him to Petach Tikvah, far from the Old City. But the dirt roads and wide, open pastures of Petach Tikvah were airy and empty, walled only by the wandering eyes of the neighbors who watched closely and carefully protected their things. So Avra stopped stealing (for a while) and turned her art inward, so that, like her grandmother Esther, she became a woman of fiercely original speech.
MY FATHER WRITES:
Shimon and Avra were married in 1909. That year, Shimon, with the generous help of his uncle, purchased building materials from two merchants in Jaffa—the supply store of Mr. Briteman and the hardware store of Mr. Rokach (the father of the first mayor of Tel Aviv). Among the documents that were found under Shimon’s bed in 1968 were the detailed bills of these purchases. On one of the bills there is a unique handwritten comment, “Ship by 20 camels.” With the materials, Shimon built a tiny house on his uncle’s lot. Shimon and Avra were very poor. They lived in this house for more than forty years.
I WRITE:
Four months after they married and moved into their own house in Petach Tikvah, Avra woke Shimon up in the middle of the night and confessed
to him that she was a compulsive thief. She did not confess because she wanted to be honest with her new husband, but because in the absence of the ability to continue doing what she was born to do, she needed some other release. That night, Avra told Shimon the life history of her sticky hands, from thimble to silver spoon to shoes and precious stones. She told him the stories of everything she had ever stolen and everything she had ever put back. With her first confession, Shimon moved several inches closer to his side of the bed, and then drew his legs up to his middle and wrapped his arms around them, so as not to be touched by her words. He would not look at Avra, and instead nervously stared at the door. Would the Turks be coming to arrest her? He thought that he could hear the heavy tramping of boots coming toward their house, though there was no such noise, only the insistent, high-pitched chatter of his wife’s revelation. No Turkish police in sight, only crickets and Avra’s confession and the late-night rustling of leaves and branches.
As her stories grew in number, Shimon felt his stomach clench up and his lips tighten. He felt his anger coming toward him from across the darkened room, like the hand of an outstretched stranger. Pulling the covers up to his ears, he tried to hide from his wife’s words, but she kept talking and talking. He didn’t respond. Soon his lips were locked painfully tight over the anger that was inside of him now, making his head horribly heavy.
Avra kept speaking. And though Shimon tried not to listen, what happened was that in a couple of hours he found himself letting the covers drop away from his face and looking at Avra as she spoke. Eventually Shimon sat up and began to ask questions. By the time the sun came up, he found himself completely engaged in what she was saying. Eventually the stories actually began to amuse him. The anger left his head and joined the invisible crowd of spare emotions congregating on the far side of the darkened room. Shimon scratched his left ear and licked his lips. He felt curious and warm. From the moment they first met, Shimon thought that Avra’s lips were the most beautiful and reddest lips he had ever seen, and they seemed even redder now, made up with the tantalizing pigment of petty crime and confession.
Soon he wanted to know the specific details of each lift. He began asking: “The French rabbi who lost his heirloom silver— what city in France did he come from?” . . . “What was the viola recital like? Who was playing? Were they any good?” . . . “And how far was it from the Omar Mosque to the Soap and Spice stall? Exactly?” . . . “The Jesus tattoo was being drawn for a member of what Christian sect? And for what part of their body? Back? Shoulder? Or maybe hips?”
Shimon asked Avra some things that she obviously knew and others that she obviously didn’t. But no matter what the question, she gave answers. She would say, “Hip. The tattoo was for the hip of a Dutch pilgrim who wore an eye-patch and whistled as he walked down the Via Dolorosa.” Avra spoke with a delightful authority in her voice, and like Nachum, she was verbally physical. Her hands built the word houses of her mouth and soon the husband and wife were lying not in bed but in a very sudden and very stolen village that had landed between their sheets.
Shimon asked on: “What pagan goddess was it who was missing her eyes, nose, and lips? Athena? Artemis? Mistress of Love? Wisdom? Of the Hunt?”
Avra told him everything. And as she spoke, Jerusalem, the city of gold, made a guest appearance in Petach Tikvah, city of gentle fields, palm trees, and too much summer dust.
Finally, at dawn, Avra finished. She was leaning on her side now; her small face was flushed and her eyes were sparkling. She licked her lips and then said, “There was a bird. I do feel somewhat bad about borrowing its feather.” And then she told Shimon about the tail feather she had stolen from the Christian brother’s rare bird the night before their marriage. As Avra spoke, the feather landed a second time on the goddess’s face (with equal softness and yellow grace). And as it landed, Shimon had an image of a giant yellow bird flying over their wedding canopy just as he was stomping on the glass. He smiled in the waning darkness. He felt as if someone had just read him the best chapter in a good book. “Or perhaps,” he mused, “this was all a play; perhaps my wife just gave a star performance?” He had not thought of Avra as an actress before. But there was definitely good drama in her criminal indiscretions. Reaching out a hand, Shimon tenderly touched his bride’s cheek. She kissed his fingers. He felt the heat of their connection. Soon they moved toward each other and embraced, and then they both fell asleep.
When Shimon awoke, he was newly horrified. Avra was still sleeping. She was curled on her side, facing him, her hands open, fingers spread out wide. He felt once again crushed and crowded. And he cursed himself for not having gotten angry. He had the awful feeling that all of the things Avra had ever stolen were there in the room with them. There in bed with them both. Stacked in the curve in between Avra’s flat belly and open hands. Surely the police would track her down and throw her in jail! And maybe him too, for harboring a criminal!
He got out of bed and left the house without waking her. All that day he was tired, angry, and tense. He felt as if some awful trick had been played on him. As if someone had actually copied Avra and misplaced his real wife. Or maybe Avra had done it to herself. Taking herself elsewhere, leaving him with a talking shadow. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know what to do. But he did know that the woman in bed last night had been some other Avra, a woman he neither recognized nor wanted in his home.
Shimon came home from the orchard that night in a miserable mood. He did not know what he would do, but he knew that he needed to do something. Avra smiled at him, and asked him how he was. He just nodded and grunted and sat at the table in a nervous lump. She served him dinner, and then sat down to eat her own platter. But before she even cut her meat, she told him, without a bit of nervousness, shame, or fear in her voice, that their neighbor had a string of turquoise beads mined from somewhere in Australia that she was just longing to lift. Shimon was astonished. She looked at him with a smile and added, “But of course, I won’t do it.” And he did not respond. That night they barely spoke. The next day when he came home from the orchard she told him that the local rabbi had a miniature copy of the Book of Psalms bound in purple leather that she desperately wanted. And again, she smiled and said, “But of course, I won’t do it.”
More days passed and more objects were coveted—this little hoe with a red handle, that baby’s blue knit cap, a letter from Baron Rothschild, written to the settlement’s most prestigious citizen and on display in the local museum explaining the importance to the Jews of developing local industry, specifically, an industry for the domestic fermenting of wine. Avra wanted to steal many things. Each time she ended with the same words, “But of course, I won’t do it.”
Aside from her confessions they barely spoke. Shimon was miserable. He was ashamed that he had actually listened to her entire litany that first night without offering a single rebuke. And he was mortified that he had asked all those questions. And now, why wasn’t he reacting? Why wasn’t he telling her to be quiet? What was happening to him? How could he condone her criminal lust, let alone goad her on?
Soon Shimon decided that he needed to take action. To do something either to prevent or repent for his wife’s crimes. So he began making rounds. First, he went next door on the pretense of borrowing a hammer and in this way made sure that the turquoise beads were still decorating his neighbor’s neck. Next, he went to the rabbi and asked him a basic question that he knew the answer to about shmita year and the proper religious way to grow wheat—and in this way made sure that the miniature Book of Psalms had remained on the right-hand corner of the rabbi’s desk. Later he checked on the Rothschild letter. He also visited the young Polish couple with the new baby and admired the child’s knit blue cap.
When he saw that the things his wife coveted actually remained in their proper places, he started to think that in speaking to him about stealing, his wife was finding a harmless way to sate her bad habit. Shimon went home and walked inside quietly, without let
ting the door bang. Avra was out back in the garden. He could hear her singing to herself as she planted seeds.
That night, just as he had that first night, he asked questions. In response, Avra talked them all over the world. She talked them to Poland where they visited with the grandmother who had knitted the baby’s blue cap. They sat with her for several minutes and admired her handiwork. Both of them felt the longing and family love that she used to connect each stitch. Then they took their leave of the old Polish grandmother and Avra talked them to England where they visited Baron Rothschild himself, and advised him on the drafting of his letter, telling him that “Yes, the Jews need work. Yes, the land needs planting.” Next, they traveled back in time. Going to the ancient realm of the Psalms where they picnicked on a hilltop with the author of the rabbi’s miniature book, dreaming toward Zion, loving God in each blade of grass growing there.
Avra’s stories filled the evening and made their house warm. Whereas in Jerusalem she had stolen objects and put them in different places, now the objects Avra coveted remained in place and instead, Shimon, her new husband, felt himself the one transported. He wondered how far it was from their bedroom in Petach Tikvah to the places Avra told. But he knew that there was no accurate or easy way to measure. Resting his chin on his palm, he watched his wife talk. Wisps of dark hair were coming loose from her bun and falling into her eyes. She didn’t brush them away, but spoke from behind the tendrils. Shimon breathed in deeply and thought, “If my Nachum Grief could have a sense of humor, perhaps my Avra Love can have a sense of crime.” Smiling, he reached out and took his wife’s hand. There seemed no harm in this.