The Place Will Comfort You

by Naama Goldstein

  “Describe your favorite one.” she says.

  The Rabbi presses his hands against the seat and stands. “My study partner will be waiting,” he says. “Once you find a subject for your presentation, come and see me during office hours.”

  “I got a subject.”

  “The Barbary macaques won’t do.”

  She turns the barrel of the pen between her fingers. “I should just drop out.”

  “At this point in the term it would go on your permanent record,” he says. “I don’t recommend it. I don’t think that’s the right choice.”

  She caps her pen. He checks his watch again. A batch of subway travelers surfaces. The beggars reemerge.

  “The freshman year is a demanding one, I’m well aware,” the Rabbi says. “I can be flexible. I don’t insist on the conventional approach.”

  “So I can do it on the monkeys?”

  “Miss Lvovy,” the Rabbi says. “Please listen closely. I am touched by your enchantment with the island. I ask that you recall our subject.” Again he checks his watch. “Have you ever tasted haminados?” he says.

  She strokes one sneaker with the other. He takes a sideways step. A pigeon makes it presence known with flapping wings.

  “Eggs in their shell,” he says. “Slow-cooked inside the Sabbath bean stew. Show me a lineage of Jews without a Sabbath legume stew. In ours you will find eggs. The color they acquire is rather beautiful, the richest caramel-brown. The flavor is like nothing else.” He doesn’t sit again, but he stays put, his shoes moored on the shores of a silver puddle. “Show me on the other hand a student so indisposed towards study that even food won’t engage her. This has worked before,” he says. “A former student of mine could not write in essay form, simply could not write down her thoughts in a meaningful sequence, though no problem orally. She, as a case in point, made up the needed credit by becoming a Moroccan chef. The presentation was a smash! The whole class feasted. We took business from the cafeteria that day, teachers and students stole in from adjoining rooms. It did a lot for the young lady’s popularity. Now, granted, she lived in Flatbush. She had access to a kitchen. You’re from New England, I recall. The dorm facilities won’t be conducive. Our kitchen is at your disposal,” Rabbi Haziza says.

  She can only stare at first. She tries but is unable to conceive of his present home. All she can say is, “You live close?”

  “On the Upper West Side. My wife is always thrilled to meet a student. You’ll find her quite an asset in research. She’s a superb Moroccan cook.”

  “I might not like the food,” she says.

  “Very well. Find some cookery books. Consider Turkey, Tangier, Bukhara.”

  “Why not Gibraltar?” she says. “Can’t I do Gibraltar?”

  Rabbi Haziza pulls out his handkerchief once more and passes it over his brow. Strange, on a day so chilly. The cold is recorded in the seized muscles of her back. Her teeth chatter.

  “Miss Lvovy,” he says. “I am not asking you to entertain appalling truths, only the barest understanding of our path in the diaspora. You must progress beyond the spell. Our community did not spring fully formed out of the Rock. I am Moroccan by derivation. My wife is Moroccan by derivation. Gibraltarian cookery is Moroccan by source. Remember your notes. Even your apes, as their name testifies, are travelers, North African exiles.”

  “The Monkeys of Gibraltar?”

  “Barbary, Barbary, Barbary,” he says.

  “I’ll leave it in your hands,” he says. “We’re listed. Telephone my wife.” The Rabbi jogs away, and down, into the sooty subway shaft.

  The beggars draw near. Dassa turns and walks in the same direction. A white-robed perfume seller lauds his vials: Nile Essence, Congo Musk, Cypriot Potion. She holds his hawking eye in an unwitting promise, so in passing him reneges. He curses. She opens her notebook and walks on through the moving crowd. “Watch yourself, child!” A woman’s angry voice.

  But Dassa never bumps into a soul. She dodges fellow walkers by continuing to register their basic pace and post, compared to hers. She riffles through the pages of her notebook, searching for the arbitrary spot she chose for writing.

  First the notes of the beginning of the term parade, columnar, bulleted and underlined, highlighted in three colors. Then the ranks break up. They scrabble into small unruly mobs of words, huddling, more and more tight-knit, until they curdle into odd unlettered shapes. Finally: blank. But only till she finds the monkeys.

  She overshoots initially, but leafs back and locates the notes. Holding her place, she finds a wall out of the way, leans her back on dry graffiti, smoothes the page, and reads her work.

  Some sentences are incomplete. The penmanship was hampered by conditions and an enigmatic shorthand dominates from time to time. Gib eggs. She tries to picture the interior of the Rabbi’s home. His door, she is convinced, will be ornate. She thinks the wife will be the one to answer when she knocks.

  A female version of the Rabbi, those Gibraltan looks, the selfsame gilt of foreignness, the classy dress sense. She’ll welcome Dassa in. There will be a hallway.

  Patterned wallpaper and three brass hooks. A winter hat, keys, a light coat. Above the hooks, a photograph in a brass frame.

  The yellow metalwork competes with the exposure, an image compromised by some mechanical incompetence, a loss of light’s gradations, maybe age. The sky is the same silver of the water, the rock as black a shadow as its creatures. The largest of the figures is rotund, his silhouette describing skullcap, suit, a walking stick. The manner of the company he keeps is one of greeting, reaching, long of arm, long-fingered, naked, bony and succinct.

  The Worker Rests Under the Hero Trees

  A SLACKENING IN THE pit of Adi’s stomach warned her just as she approached the curb outside Fern Orthopedic. An individual she hadn’t noticed on the empty street was suddenly closing in, too vividly purposeful, targeting her.

  Turn back into the store, she advised herself in the calm, compelling voice of a public service ad from childhood. The voice, male, spoke in formal Hebrew, a trained narrator’s delivery of a televised manual for the avoidance of common dangers in the house and out. This sort of ad was used to fill the commercial-free gaps between the broadcast hours of Televizia Leumit, the national channel. The short productions were often highly dramatized and diverting.

  Here, out in the world at present, the message was this: On the event of torturers advancing in an unpopulated area, seek out the nearest venue of commerce. In this half-wild strip of Cape Cod, that would be Fern Orthopedic, and she had already spent far more time in there than she liked. The shopkeeper tried to lighten the message of impairment on the groaning shelves with unsuccessful humor. A male mannequin posed center-floor, jointless limbs forever crooked in sitting, face blank as a lima bean, body a gross parody of pain. No part of him remained unslung, unbraced, ungirdled, unsupported or unsoothed. He held a cane and was fenced in by a walker. His wheelchair was padded with a blue cervical pillow and his feet bathed in an electrical basin. He wore a rosary around his neck. Humor had to be the object. And today along with him there had been also a live patron who had arrived before her and stayed beyond both their transactions, no doubt still stoking the discussion of his ganglion cysts.

  What to do, then? Where to go? The safety ad narrator’s voice had shut down with the first argument as always. On her own she came to the decision to think her most hostile thoughts. Glaring curbside, she found the threat gazing back. A tired pane of Plexiglas, scratched, weather-beaten, sunk in the frame of a newspaper dispenser of the yellow plastic variety hawking the Midgmouth Town Crier. Because a change of routine was always good for the nerves, which had just now made today’s big statement, she responded with a quarter-dollar coin. She pulled out a thin copy, the edges scalloped from the past weekend’s rain. She rolled the paper and held it like a bludgeon at its base.

  At Fern’s she had deposited the polymer leg orthosis of her employers’ son, which was cracked and required
duplication. He would use a metal brace for a couple of weeks and she must remain alert to the skin of his leg. His leaning would have changed since the last time, the metal would dig in new places. Any reddening spot was to be cultivated into a callous using a pad of gauze and rubbing alcohol. She hoped not to tire of the heightened scrutiny, of what she would keep seeing so close, a body encroached on by nature and devices, brutally and long, the damaged brain in those eyes, the brittle seams of her pity.

  No tourist cars tore past as with the paper in her hand she wandered across Massasoit, a street not paved on a known footprint of America’s New English start, not housing the hand-churned icecream shop or the short row of antique vacation manors, and not leading to a beach of the Atlantic or the cranberry production plant with visitors’ center.

  The next morning at breakfast she found the Crier on her table in the caretaker’s quarters adjoining Clarence’s rooms. She had dropped it in Clarence’s kitchen, she was sure, and didn’t remember ever picking it back up. The mother must have come quietly in the night.

  She filled a coffee filter with grounds, eyes on the front page. The lead story was of course a cranberry plant feature. The lower article displayed a color photograph, a man in his late twenties, square built, a touch fleshy, black curls balmed and beard groomed calligraphic, fine and very dark along his jaw. She switched on the coffeemaker and returned to him. Portuguese, she thought first, then Cuban, remembering the community by the shore. He stood smiling in proud leisure as if he had always known the cameras would come, fist to hip before a turquoise wall that glittered like an overpierced face with all manner of fishing tackle, pretty and sharp. She got as far as the headline: LOCAL COLLECTORS EMBRACE ONLINE AUCTIONS, FIND HISTORY. Then she went off to wash for the day. By the evening the paper joined the Boston Globes delivered daily from the distant seeming city, heaped in new and near-new condition in the milk crate where she kept them between recycling dates. She considered keeping her eye open for a covered container to replace the milk crate, maybe something more attractive that might go with other small furnishings that she might add to what Clarence’s mother provided.

  When the night came to fix the papers for disposal, she read through the days in a sitting. The plague in China was continuing its drift forward while the carnage back home had receded to the inner pages. In Lowell a Cambodian dry cleaner was celebrating a second generation’s dirty clothes. Thirteen Hindus had been massacred in Kashmir, elders to children in one predawn. The missing dictator of South Boston had been twice spotted in Belfast. Burlesque was on the rise in the western suburbs. The war was coming next Monday. The boys of Brit pop phenom Ladzilla enjoyed a witty rapport and in Holyoke a grandmother had died in the sight of neighbors, stabbed by her old lover who knifed himself too after a chase. One neighbor described him as having done like the Japanese, though the man had arrived from Cape Verde. The war would come in the first week of the next month. Creperies were back. Girls’ schools were unprepared for the economic decline with no women alumni donating. In the south a child kidnapped six years ago had been found alive but very different. Sour plums would add spark to a cold meat sandwich.

  Just past five that morning, the spool of twine having rolled off along a crooked floorboard, she unfolded the Crier and snapped it flat. In the photo feature the man with the nice beard and impressive tackle, a Felix Esquivel, was quoted saying this: “I just puzzle over how they used to make them. They’re terrible. Either they had a whole lot more time then or there was a lot more fish.” She turned the page. On the reverse side came into view two words alone.

  Neer Shabazi.

  The name appeared in unexceptional print within a single small article continued from the first page, but the letters pulsed like a gaudy zone. She did not see letters at all. She saw a narrow teenager with black, wing-shaped brows on a young forehead complected medium brown. She saw a row of white apartment buildings, rust trailed down them in long stains as if from ducts at the lower corners of repeated porch rails, in the city where they had both lived. She recalled the upper-story view, the rocky hills west of Jerusalem blurred through a haze of distance and factory mists.

  She had gone through so much before happening on this, disaster and achievement, violence and attempts to change the law, caricatures, thumbnail portraits, telling and less telling shots, recipes worth studying or not, mystifying rows of numbers, the outside layer of Sports, readership letters, and her own reactions by turn curious, afraid, sorrowful, hostile, tickled, proud, hopeful, distracted, despairing, prurient, and exhausted, dreading the workday when she saw the time. At last she felt peace. Neer Shabazi, here where she lived now. A morning breeze blew through the kinked Venetian blinds, scented of seaweed. Birds had wakened in the walnut and were agitating for activity. At the gate the bottle gleaner sorted through the recyclables with a methodic chiming. Neer, here where she was now, this peaceful place, this cape of cod.

  Spell the name, the phone voice at the cranberry plant requested when the workday kicked in at nine, and recited the letters back in a convincing show of ignorance. For nearly two weeks Adi was made to go along with this. No matter how she pressed, the voice promised only that he would receive the message if he was there. One morning she picked up a call to hear a man verifying her name in the proper accent. She said in Hebrew that it was she speaking. He identified himself, unnecessarily. She asked did her name mean something, and he said, Of course. The younger Poresch girl from the top-floor flat.

  Seven years old. She had been making her way home late after school one day, having attended her extra music lesson in the Con-servatorion by the city hall. The streets would have been wakeful in the dimming afternoon but emptied of contemporaries in her school uniform. In her backpack would have been the bone-colored plastic recorder which she had considered a great thing.

  What she had learned at the Conservatorion that afternoon who remembered, but the first full tune the teacher taught to them stayed. Slow-paced fingering within one octave, to these words: The worker rests under the hero trees—pause, and the same again—The worker rests under—the last notes altered to resolve—the hero trees— and climbing higher so the phrase closed like a call before response—The river wind through eucalypti leaves caresses the bent neck. A melancholy song but accessible to beginners, written before the time of radio for the men and the imported trees who had dried up the malarial swamps and built this city, the neck referring to the lives the disease had claimed.

  It would have been something to walk home and consider certain trees great, but on that mid-year day this wouldn’t have been the song. With the recorder on her back she had reached Alfasi Street, or Captain Wingate, or was it Alterman? On a street within a radius of more or less three blocks from Mendeleh Shapira, where she lived, a man in a white shirt had taken her hand. Together they had turned to bring her home by a new way. The man knew to predict that this new way would pass a garden. In the garden stood a dwarf poured of cement. On the dwarf’s feet would be seen genuine Dutch clogs.

  But before they had reached the Dutch dwarf, an Israeli boy had approached, medium-brown skinned, a son of Yemeni Jews, teenaged, with a familiar thinness and floating gait. At some distance he had stopped his floating, and had looked, and kept looking, and finally had said, She’s my neighbor from my building. This was true. The man in the white shirt had walked away with calm dispatch.

  The Silhouette was empty when she arrived to meet him, closer to the happy hour than lunch. Behind the bar watching Comedy Central was a serious young woman with a punk pompadour, hair bleached to a frazzle, teased and fastened with conspicuous clips. The television was fairly loud but the near absence of the bartender’s voice seemed unrelated to the blare. Adi read her lips, guessed at their message and responded a little too loudly. The woman poured a liberal shot, then added mixer and pushed over a napkin.

  At the end booth Adi sat facing the entrance. In this way she faced also the television. She gazed up at the skittering light, sucking
a thin streak of cocktail through the stirrer. For a while she kept noticing also the bartender with her aura of damaged hair.

  Soon Adi was sinking into her seat. She pushed a broad strap off her shoulder and let the weight of her backpack shift entirely off.

  On the screen a figure popular in cinema was collaborating with the regular crew of a TV skit show. Normally he was cast grimly but now he was eager for a laugh, his eyelids popped wide. His pleading smile mesmerized her, his premature timing. Her skin crawled. Worse was to know that since his poor performance the guest had died, and died violently, at the hands of the mad wife for whom he had been caring many years unbeknownst to the public. A passing van blocked the afternoon shining through the bar door. She felt her face frozen in an anxious gawk. This would be the sight of her to anyone walking in. She rose and moved to the seat across, facing the area of the toilets and games.

  To touch a major influence. To reconnect with the past. To press the hand that eighteen years ago had blocked a push to turn her life badly against her. A girl who had left the country that had raised her risked surrendering this kind of opportunity. Yet here it was.

  The television continued to broadcast the skit, involving a catchphrase that drew increasingly uproarious laughter on being repeated. The phrase was “Honeychild, don’t you even go there,” and each new character would arrive at this same exclamation after a setup with the guest. During one tense interlude between catchphrase and uproar, Adi heard footsteps. She splayed the fingers of both her hands and clamped them over the vinyl edge of her seat. A man in a blue uniform strolled past. Not Neer Shabazi, but a thickset repairman, hair nutmeg-colored striped with white. He stopped by the pool table and set upon it a heavy canvas tote. He smoothed away the strap and undid a zipper.

  He stood not far from her booth. She could see the marbled rose of his hands, the thickness of his fingers, but she couldn’t identify the implements that he went on to produce from his bag and arrange side by side on the green felt. Several objects were box-shaped, flat and rectangular and appearing to be covered with narrow drawstring sacks. He set down a tool with a coral grip. Beyond the pool table an electronic lottery screen flashed the minutes remaining to the next drawing in gold on blue. A wall-mounted jukebox was colored to appear flaming, a transparent window in the middle displaying greenish stacked disks.