I will miss you, says the Rabbi. I will miss you, my good friend.
And in a blink the noble Rabbi is a man, displaced, stranded high in a cold city, in a lecture room, where torpid figures meld into the shapes of desk-chair combinations. Steam spits. Beyond the windowpanes, bumbling pigeons roost in the eye of skyscrapers gray as cliffs. It is to them the Rabbi lectures. Round and small in his lovely old-fashioned suits, he hawks his line of goods to the Manhattan towers: the golden history of oriental Jewry, Sepharad. Samples include clarifications of the Laws for living penned in Egypt, rabbis counseling to Spanish kings, poets of Yemen penning glorious unrequited hymns to distant Zion. Habits of celebration among Syrian Jews of modern Brooklyn. The Rabbi labors on, regaling the skyline.
But towers are content in rising up, blind to interiors. When she checks back, the Rabbi has returned to the room, still wistful— bitter, never—sweetly tolerant of life’s indignities. An easy A. He is forever gentle with the girls and would extol even the most insipid commentary. Anything. Today not even drivel issues forth.
The radiator chokes down a wet sneeze. The Rabbi starts, looks over.
There she sits. In attendance all along, everything a teacher wishes for, an audience to whom his story is alive. He widens his eyes: How have I been coming across? She stares back: good, poignant. The Rabbi smiles with a mild rise of the brows: Now don’t go overboard. He isn’t here for sympathy but for the purpose of providing texture to the thoughts.
And indeed there he is, again back in boyhood, the same roly-poliness of his adulthood, but scaled down and in a sailor suit, navy and white. He sits in the shade of a stunted Mediterranean tree, in a circle made of many more small boys, all sailor-suited, partaking of the Torah which flows from their schoolmaster’s lips. It is a Friday afternoon. A procession of mothers marches by, over a dusty footpath, conveying cauldrons of raw stew to a communal hearth. Their sons may sense them but they don’t look up, rapt at their master’s feet, enthralled, naive. Little do they know. The beatitude will soon be shattered when the War compels them all to sail for asylum in New York, where they’ll be charged with roomfuls of dull-witted college girls. The last of the Gibraltan mothers marches past the children, the flicker of a long, dark hem. Then she is gone, with her cauldron of stew. The blue ocean thrashes against wet crags upon which monkeys, vehement, alarmed, guffaw and rant as if they might be heard above the waves. A frantic pantomime display. The waves overwhelm every sound.
“Please. If you would, please, Miss Lvovy. Your thoughts regarding Kurdi bridal rites. Hello there.”
Rabbi Haziza breaks away from the Gibraltan scene, standing full grown in a Manhattan lecture room, forehead wrinkled, hair thinning, suit brown. For the first time since the beginning of class he disunites his hands, awaiting.
“This week’s assignment, chapter nine.”
“I don’t remember?” Dassa says.
“Not the end of the world,” the Rabbi says. “Happens to all of us from time to time. We’ll leave the subject open, then. Something you found evocative. An aspect of Jewish life on the slopes of Mount Ararat. Or the life cycle of Iraqi Jews, or Parsi, should you have skipped ahead for extra credit.”
She is months behind.
“Anything at all you’d like to comment on?”
No. The attention drifts to more pressing concerns. In her bunk bed every night Dassa experiences with stark immediacy the life of her dorm-roommate’s feet. Margaliss, a tiny girl, steps every night out of her Dr. Schorll’s, climbs up the wooden ladder to the upper berth, below which Dassa lies. And it begins. The feet dangle over the border of the mattress. Hands reach down and anoint with Vaseline Intensive Care: heels, arches, toe by toe, each digit attended to with loving, squelching deliberation. The slickened feet are aired out briefly, then secured in white cotton socks, before retiring. The roommate’s hips are slight, her legs tender, without muscle. When she disrobes completely there is the shock of a soft paunch and cumbrous breasts with huge, dark areolas.
“Evocative or curious,” the Rabbi says. “A question is at least as good as exposition.”
“To me I personally!” She would enjoy some privacy right about now. She stops, slows herself down. “It’s just. I mean for someone like myself, they, those, like, I’m from Rhode Island?”
And Rabbi Haziza merely gazes at her, seeming smaller even than before, abandoned. His only ally in the class deserts him, fuses with the heartless New York skyline and becomes a flinty speck. He is alone again. And she feels sickened. He is lost to her. But it’s his fault.
A muffled argument of car horns rises from the street. One of the pigeons on the windowsill is dozing. The other pulls up a loose feather, burrowing for pests. The feather coasts towards the street. The radiator gurgles and is still.
She walks back to the dorm through the exhaust of pretzel carts, vapors of toasted dough corrupted by burnt salt. It’s November, cold and clammy after a night of rain, but the clouds overhead seem unportentous, otherwise engaged. A vendor whisks out a white sheet of tissue paper, snaps it in the air, and with his other hand poises a pair of tongs. A flock of Perl Memorial girls approaches him. They take no notice. It isn’t kosher. Dassa walks behind them.
—top of the Empire State Building. The drops are blowing up instead of down, I’m freezing cold. But do I kvetch ? He—got the notes for Rabbi Semp’s—
She passes the pretzel vendor and again he tries to lure, but Dassa, also, shuns him. She doesn’t eat. The head is buoyant, full of holy noise. The rift between her and Rabbi Haziza has only upped the giddy static.
—maybe this is news but you are not the only one who lives in—Somewhere privatecold? He says, You should put on—the Kree’ah laws.
She watches the girls’ striding ankles. Perl Memorial enforces a modesty code but no uniform, and yet as if by decree the girls all wear the same clothes. Modern tailoring conformed to the prescribed lengths, the permissible clingage, has produced the same results across the land. The skirt in vogue is mid-calf length and narrow. The fabric could be said to be a stretching of the law, frenetic rayon, at rest indeed smooth, disconnected from the limbs, but each step sets in motion a flurry of ripples, fluttering connotations of the body beneath. Three razor-sharp pleats at the back fan out, fall back in line, fan out, revealing opaque cotton tights and hints of variation. The forms beneath the cloth assert their differences in generalized terms. Dassa anatomizes the defects, as always finding a bad case of nerves relieved in private furies against girls. They yammer on.
Out comes this pair of gloves, not really me, but cute— Body stood up to her. She’s—Somewhere private— Pink, angora. At this point I’m a little— Punch your stomach right under your navel, just enough to— But for a parent you rend by hand, though you can start it— Fuse your nervous sys— One on. He says, Maybe the other hand isn’t as cold. I say, It is, it is! But he keeps noodging me, So put it on! So put it on! What are you waiting for? And all I do is cry, because, the ringfinger? Is drooping. Drooping.
Before Dassa can adjust her pace, the group comes to a standstill, and she plunges unprepared into the fluid interaction of the Perl Memorialites.
“Oh. My. Gosh. Ohmygosh! It’s gorgeous!”
“Mazel Tov!”
“Hey!” It’s Margaliss, with naked joy detecting Dassa in the crowd. The little roommate yields a stream of dialogue just as Dassa’s powers of perception are sucked into the maw of an invisible revolving door. Now she must push the grinding cage back to the starting point, only to be ejected back onto the street. What’s the idea of a revolving door? She thinks about this. Draft prevention.
“I’m sorry?” she says. “What?”
“Yirmy Meltzer and His Vilde Khayes,” Margaliss says. “They’re back from their European tour and they’re coming to Queens. We’re all gonna go Wednesday to celebrate with Shayna. You?”
“Oh, you should come, you should come!” someone else cries, maybe Shayna. “They’re hysterical. And they always
put up a screen so we can dance.”
They pelt each other with their favorite tunes.
“The Tshulent Tzha-Tzha.” “My Mammeh Tzippoyreh.” A Shindig for Shabbos!” “Ahh!” They exclaim, as if bested but glad of it, until “The Valtz for the Vedding” gets a bigger response. But “A Kopf Full of Torah” merits a screech.
“No-nononono!” Margaliss adjudicates. From the neck up, she’s adorable, with a toddler’s suckle lips and wine-red ringlets, and they listen. But she doesn’t speak. She dances, right there, in front of a Korean deli. As quickly as the Perl Memorialites can gasp in unison, they form a living wall around the girl, locking Dassa into the construction. Margaliss shows how it’s done.
The movements called for are precise, swift, governed, not involving the hips. One claps in a certain way, shuffles sideways in a certain manner, hoofs and scrapes in a particular sequence of steps. The face is almost solemn, tranquil with know-how. Red curls fly out as barrel-shaped Margaliss spins and then halts.
“That’s The Posken,” she says. “It’s a cinch. I can teach you.”
Dassa’s empty stomach snarls and bubbles. “Me?” she says. For this phase of the day she likes to be alone. The hunger will mount, and then plateau, and then she’ll be rewarded with a special shake with all its festive scents, sights, sounds: vanilla dust clamoring in her blender, four ounces of skim milk to four of water, six cubes ice. Finally, the filling of the glass. The level will rise thickly, dense with vegetable gums and bright with Yellow Number Five, rich with a generous percentage of endorsed Daily Allowances, richly deserved. The warmth of sweatered shoulders pushing into her is not part of the plan.
Margaliss waits. The other faces are arrested in anticipation, in a pitiful dare. There is no temptation. Dassa is the staunch descendant in a line of women who hate to dance. And no mean feat, this remove, pitted against a calendar full of occasions for cooperative steps. A Jew must dance. Again and yet again the circles form, the summoning recurs, hands on the women’s side of the division reaching out to draw a girl in. Dance for the giving of the To rah, for the victory of Ester and the hanging of Haman, a newborn brought into the Covenant, a bride joining a groom. There’s no avoiding it, but at the very least a girl can pick the hand with which to link. Her mother’s, say. Within the pandemonium a daughter can seek out the strawberry blond wig for special days, the guarded smile for such occasions, the warmth and roughness of the dishpan hand. For several revolutions, then, the strange grip on the other side can be endured. And soon, abetted by the circle’s many shrinkings and expansions, a mother and her daughter neatly trim themselves away, and head for the buffet.
“We’re going to Slice of Zion before,” Margaliss says.
The others turn on her.
“We said we’d vote!”
“Kosher Delight.”
“Nah, Lou G. Siegel!”
“Avshalom Shawarma.”
“Ooh, I could kill for his Lemonchick Kebob,” Margaliss says, and in this moment, seeing the girl’s vast, vastly satiable love of broiled meat, Dassa feels something so like rage that she must break away immediately.
“Wednesday I got plans,” she says, and glances both ways crossing the one-way street.
By a subway shaft a patter of leather soles catches up with her, and she prepares to find out whether she goes mute in times of peril as her dreams have claimed. She won’t find out today. It’s only the Rabbi, who’ll soon hurry past on the way to his train. They both must go their separate routes, move on, pick up the pieces.
He falls in step with her. “Miss Lvovy, good afternoon.” He is slightly winded. “Are you in a hurry, Miss Lvovy? Do you have an evening class?” His pronunciation is so crisp, it is the clean lack of an accent, a neutral, supremely logical implementation of the English alphabet. He wonders could she spare a moment, gestures towards a green street bench. In class it is apparent that he isn’t tall. But that she towers over him, this is uncomfortable news.
She sits. Like pressure on a dented soda can, the sitting frees her stomach of a pesky crimp. The Rabbi lowers himself, too, but perches only at the very edge, so that his feet won’t hang short of the ground. As always, he seems absent something. Absent Gibraltar, yes, but moreover. Absent a walking stick. The old-fashioned kind, not hooked, having an ornamental bulge on top, an intricate brass knob to fill the fist. A graceful prop would really pull his look together, plus afford him more security on the high bench. His shoes are russet, pointy, buffed. He wears a three-piece mahogany suit, a creamy shirt and a blond satin tie. His yarmulke is of blond satin. A faintly lustrous hankie, blond, protrudes from his breast pocket. He is not so swarthy as she had pictured oriental Jews before enrolling in his class. There is in fact an illusion of fairness, not because he is light, but because the tans of his skin and his thinned hair, his brows, his irises, are so complementary, he seems monochromatic, made of gold. This must be how Jews of Gibraltar look.
“You’re close to failure,” the Rabbi says, and this is more fantastical than anything she could have dreamed up alone. The monkeys, in a sudden hush, observe a life raft sailing, through the air and out, over the waves. “There’s time for you to make a comeback,” he says, “only just. I should have caught it earlier perhaps, but that’s the nature of a college, the sheer numbers. A student can slip by. When I consider now that at the start of the semester you were among the strongest girls—”
The raft crashes far from its mark. She doesn’t like the stamina of strongest, the sputter of consonants. Hardiness is an adversary, constantly setting her back. The more she checks the scale, the more the progress of the indicator seems to slow. One can still tweak the skin over one’s ribs. One shouldn’t be able to do that. There is an ample pinch of buttock, cushions of pudge about the kneecaps. The upper arms still register a tremor when one sternly wrings the flesh and then lets go. Her hips she likes, she will allow this. Sharp, pleasing to the touch, framing a quiet hollow, inner functions simplified of late, the bloody clockwork stopped. She can and does give herself credit where it’s due.
He strums the space where the tip of his cane should be. “Of course, you’re not surprised,” he says. “This doesn’t come as a surprise.”
More of a discombobulation. Hers is such a visible medium, there is inherently display, petitioning, but closemouthed. Anything offered in response must be spat out.
“I propose,” Rabbi Haziza says. A beggar in pigeon-gray garments comes and begs. The Rabbi reaches in a pocket, drops two quarters and a nickel in the man’s hand. Almost immediately another man moves in. Him the Rabbi turns down, shaking the emptied pocket. The beggar looks at Dassa. He stinks of drink but seems frightfully sober, rapidly assessing and inferring. “I suggest independent work,” the Rabbi says. Behind the bench, doors open, letting out a smell of forced-air heating and a flood of people, into which the beggars are absorbed. “I strongly recommend you take advantage,” the Rabbi says. “I’ve never failed a student,” he says. “I don’t wish to now.” Down the street, a bus backfires, repeated shrieks alert of a reversing truck. “A presentation is one option that occurred to me,” he says. “You could, of course, take on an extra paper, but since the last two posed some hardship, I thought—”
“What’s my subject?” she says.
“Yes!” he says. “Yes, good. Well. I would like to give you the full range of possibilities. We’ve covered a fair number of communities so far, their rites of passage, holiday observances, attire, history. Any of these you’d like to zero in on would be fine. Or you might want to branch out in a new direction.”
“I can do it on the monkeys,” Dassa says.
His hands fly up and fasten on his yarmulke as if a stiff breeze threatens. The fancy walking stick would have gone banging to the sidewalk. In the time he would have taken to avail himself of his hands again, scramble down, try to retrieve, she would have reached out and secured the rolling cane. He’d take his seat again, beholden, compromised. Flipping her palm up, she inclin
es the cane towards him, but he doesn’t take it, only grasps the brink of the green bench with his small hands. She sees their aging iridescent skin.
“The monkeys,” he says.
“Of Gibraltar. Where you’re from.”
“The monkeys,” he says, reaching for his breast. He pulls out the handkerchief and dabs his nose. “They aren’t Jews, you understand.”
“Everybody knew about the monkeys,” she says. “Nobody knows what. You never covered that.”
“I see.”
“So that could be my subject.”
“Miss Lvovy.”
“None of us knows what it is. The reputation that they have. The Monkeys of Gibraltar, okay. What about them?”
“Apes,” he says. “Barbary macaques.” He folds his handkerchief. “I don’t know why you test me.”
“If you made something up I wouldn’t know the difference. How can I test you? I’m asking.”
“Asking what, Miss Lvovy?”
“Why the reputation?”
“Noise,” he says. “The Spanish tried for a surprise attack. The apes were startled first, raised an alarum, the British took it as a personal favor and bestowed the status, as they will.” He checks his watch.
She sees the face, white, with no numerals. He pulls a cuff over the platinum dots. She snatches at her bag, tears at the zipper and pulls out a notebook, then a pen. “What kind of noise?”
“Ape sounds.”
“Made by the monkeys?”
“By the apes.”
“Which look like what?”
“Like apes. Furry, humanoid, stocky, tailless. Apelike, Miss Lvovy.”
She frowns as she masters the buckling notebook, digs in a full stop. She squints at him. “They do expressions?”
“Very active faces. Grins. Pouts. That’s the cue to make your getaway, the pout. They’re threatened, you’ll be harmed. After a quarrel they reconcile by chattering their teeth. Now, Miss Lvovy.”
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