Mr. Mani

by A. B. Yehoshua

  —That is only in a manner of speaking, of course, Doña Flora ... most hyperbolically. But see how Rabbi Shabbetai looks at me as he eats! Perhaps my story will take my master’s mind off his mush, hee hee hee...

  —No, no, madame. I did not mean the bed itself. Just the idea of it...

  —I mean—

  —God forbid! ‘Twas always with the most friendly respect and affection...

  —Of ... why, in all simplicity, of the sleep awaiting him there ... that was what troubled him so, madame...

  —That he might awake to discover that the world had changed while he slept ... that something had happened in it without his knowing or being a party to it ... that his idée fixe, whose sole reliable consular representative he considered himself to be, had burst like a bubble before he had time to bring it back to life...

  —So he felt, madame. “The day is short and the labor is great.” And perhaps—who knows, maestro y señor mío—he already sensed his approaching death in that much-provoked Jerusalem of his.

  —Tamara, Doña Flora, said nothing.

  —That is, she heard and saw everything. And waited...

  —She was not unreceptive to his views, provided that something came of them...

  —At night she slept. I kept an eye on her in the looking-glass I had hung on the wall, which was reflected in your old glass, madame, which in turn was reflected in the glass hanging over their bed, and I saw that she slumbered peacefully ... But look, Doña Flora, he is getting food all over his mouth and chin...

  —Here...

  —Perhaps we need a fresh towel.

  —As you wish, madame. I am at your service. Perhaps that handsome young Greek made the porridge a bit too mushy...

  —God forbid, madame! I am not interfering in anything. It was just a thought, and I have already taken it back.

  —Of course, madame. Briefly and to the point. Which is that I found your niece an admirable housewife who baked and cooked quite unvaryingly excellent food. She simply forgot at times to make enough of it, so that I had to—

  —Mahshi, kusa, and calabaza, and certain days of the week a shakshuka...

  —Fridays she put up a Sabbath stew with haminados.

  —Sometimes it had meat in it, and sometimes it had the smell of meat...

  —Of course. She did all her own cleaning and laundering. The house, Dona Flora, was as spic and span as the big looking-glass. And she also helped her father Valero and his young wife, and took her little stepsister and stepbrother to the Sultan’s Pool every afternoon to enjoy the cool water and play with the Atias children among the Ishmaelite tombstones...

  —The Atias who married Franco’s youngest daughter.

  —’Tis on the tip of my tongue, rubissa, and will soon come to me. Meanwhile, maestro y señor mio, permit me to sketch the picture for you. Is he still listening? I was, you see, in Jerusalem to shore up a marriage that needed consolidating, for it had yet to outgrow its hasty Beirut betrothal; and so I did my best to keep the young bride from sinking into too much housework, and from time to time I took her with me to my spice-and-sundries stand in the Souk-el-Kattanin, where she could sit and catch the notice of the passersby with her winning mien, so that—after walking on and stopping short and doubling back for a better look and possibly even a word with her—they might interest themselves in a spice or two. And meanwhile, the air around her began to shoot sparks—one of which, I hoped, would fly all the way to her young husband, who was busy escorting the consul’s guests to Bethlehem and Hebron. It would do him no harm, I thought, to wonder why his wife was attracting such looks...

  —God forbid! God forbid! ‘Twas done most honorably. And each day when the sun began to glow redly in my jars of rosemary, cinnamon, and thyme, and to tint my raisins with gold, I put away my goods and folded my stand and brought her to the woman’s gallery of the synagogue of Rabbi Yohanan ben-Zakkai to listen to the Mishnah lesson and be seen among the widows and old women by the men arriving from the souk for the afternoon prayer. Sometimes Yosef came too, all in a great dither, his idée fixe sticking out of his pocket; and while he said his prayers devoutly enough, he kept running his eyes over us ordinary Jews who could not forget that we were Jews and so had nothing to remember, nothing to do but say the same old prayers in the same old chants. Now and then he glanced up at the women’s gallery, squinting as if into the distance at his petite wife—who, like himself, though a year had gone by since their Beirut betrothal, still was daubed with its honey-gold coat that had to be patiently, pleasurably, licked away. And I, Rabbi Shabbetai, began to lick ... slowly but surely, madame...

  —A parable, of course, madame, never fear ... à la fantastique, as the French would say... ‘twas merely to bring them together ... to conclude the good deed started in Beirut, Your Grace. And thus the two of us, madame, the motherless bride and myself, wandered through a Jerusalem summer that burned with a clear, bright light I first caught a glimpse of in your own wondering eyes, Doña Flora, the first time we met in Salonika. I was determined to see this marriage through, and I began taking my daughter-in-law with me everywhere ... to the courtyard of the consulate, for example, where we sat in the shade of a tree by the cistern and watched the builders lay the foundations for a new house of prayer that is to be called Christ’s Church, for the greater glory of England. The air shot sparks; the builders put down their tools and turned to look, for nothing disarms more than beauty; men walking down the lane slackened stride, even backtracked a bit, as if the sight of her made them unsure whether they suddenly had lost or found something. A gentle commotion commenced all around us, until the consul’s wife had to step outside and invite us in for a hookah and some English tea with milk while sending a servant to pry Yosef loose from one of the inner rooms. At first he was alarmed to see us there; yet as soon as he saw that all were smiling and in good spirits, he inclined his head with loving resignation and took us under his wing. In this manner I was occasionally able to get him to come home for lunch with us, to have a bite to eat and cool off in his bed with his wife, whom the eyes of Jerusalem were beginning to make him most appreciative of. I did not remain to peer into the looking-glass. I went outside and left them by themselves, locking the door behind me, because by now I had an idée fixe of my own, a much smaller and more modest one than his, to be sure, but every bit as powerful ... and with it, señores, with my craving for seed, I kept after them for all I was worth. And in those hot afternoons, at that most still and torrid hour when the air is dry and without a hint of a breeze, which is the best time for olfaction, I strode through the Lions’ Gate and down to the house of the sheikh of Silwan village, where I was shown little fagots of weeds and grasses, roots and flowers that the Ishmaelites had gathered at the old man’s behest from the mountains of Judea and Samaria, from the shores of the Dead Sea to the coast of our Mediterranean, for me to sniff and perhaps find some new species or plant from which to concoct the spice of the century...

  —In truth, madame, one sniff was all I needed. And thus, sniff by sniff and weed by weed, I smelled my way through our Promised Land...

  —A spice more aromatic and tangy than any of those I had brought from Salonika, which I had begun to run out of by that summer’s end that was harsher than summer itself...

  —In truth, madame, they were running low, and even though this drove up my prices, it did not drive the buyers away. They snatched whatever I had, be it thyme or basil or saffron or rosemary or marjoram or nutmeg or oregano, because it was the month of the great Mohammedan fast, which they broke every night with spicy meals that kept them smacking their lips throughout the next day until the boom of the cannon at sunset announced they could eat once again ... and that, su merced, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah, was the sound that sent a shiver through my son Yosef one evening, when I found him sitting by himself in the half-light by his bed, straight as a knife blade and wrapped in a sheet, striped by a sun that was in its last throes above the Jaffa Gate. He had finished the siesta I m
ade him take every day and had already smuggled his wife out through the kitchen window into the Zurnagas’ backyard, from where she could proceed to her father’s to take the children to the pool, and was now waiting for me to return from my olfateo in Silwan to open the locked door for him...

  —Yes, he was waiting, madame, wrapped with thoughtful patience in a sheet. I took some fragrant herbs and roots from my robe and scattered them on the bed to dispel the mournful ambience of struggle and sorrow in the odor of seed that hung over it and its pale homunculi, sad-faced gossamer ghosts who were none other than the less fortunate brothers and sisters of our future baby Moses, demon children spilled like pollen in that room that still shook from the blast of the cannon, which now fired again, Your Grace, into our holy hills...

  —Madame?

  —God forbid, muy distinguida rubissa!

  —God forbid, Doña Flora, with all due respect...

  —God forbid! With all due respect, but also, madame, in all truth...

  —But how am I disgusting? Surely not to him!

  —No, our Yosef would not be angry. He would not even be upset. He would understand how justified my little idée fixe was ... Why, in my honor he even had his own idée fixe devour it, so that now the two of them thrashed about together in his soul, which yearned to join the throng of believers gathered before the great mosque—forgetful Jews who soon, with God’s help, would remember and bow, not southward to faraway Mecca, but inwardly to themselves, happy to be where they were, beneath the sky above them...

  —In truth, madame...

  —How was it possible, you ask? Oh, but it was!

  —More than once. In the mosque and in the Dome of the Rock too.

  —In truth, mí amiga, a frightful provocation...

  —Yes. To them too. Not just to the Christians.

  —A double provocation, the entire justification of which lay in its doubleness, and therefore, in its peaceful intentions, since according to him, once all remembered their true nature, they would make peace among themselves.

  —He felt too much compassion to feel fear, Doña Flora. You see, he had already racked his brain for all the chastisements he would chastise them with for their obduracy, for all the pain and sorrow he would inflict on them and their offspring, and he was now so full of compassion that he never dreamed that before he would have time to pity them all they would seize and massacre him...

  —But how, madame, do you restrain a thought?

  —The consul? But that was the very root of the evil—that boundlessly audacious English consular enthusiasm that made him think that the entire British fleet was at anchor just over the hills, somewhere between Ramallah and el-Bireh, covering his every movement...

  —How, Doña Flora? How? Time was already running out!

  —Because I had begun to despair of his accursed idée fixe, which devoured every other idée that it encountered as if it were simply grist for the mill, like that which madame is now spooning into His Grace. I was persuaded more than ever that the marriage must be made to bring forth a child, which alone could do battle—yes, from its cradle!—with the unnatural thoughts of a father by means of a simple cry or laugh, or of the riddle of its own future, and thus, Doña Flora, thus, Your Worship, began the race between my son’s death and the birth of his son. It was the month of Elul, whose penitential prayers broke the silence of the night, that time of year when—perhaps you remember, madame—wondrous breezes are born that get their odors and tastes from all over, taking a pinch of the warmth of the standing water in the Pool of Hezekiah, adding a touch of dryness from the scorched thistles in the fields between the houses of the Armenians, mixing in the bitterness of the cracked, furrowed graves on the Mount of Olives, whipping up a flying incense that whirls from street to street. Only now do I realize, señor y maestro mío, that the true spice, the spice of the future, will not come from any root, leaf, berry, or pollen, but from the shapeless, formless wind, for which I shall uncork all my vials and bottles to let it blend with their contents and infuse them with strength for the Days of Awe, awful in every sense of the word...

  —No, Doña Flora, no, su merced, I made sure he did not miss the services. The consul and his wife had gone to 8135.5 Jaffa on consular business, and the air was tremulous in that subtle way it is in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, as if the Merciful One, the chief judge Himself, had secretly returned to the city from His travels and was hiding in one of its small dwellings, in which He planned to spend the holy fast day with us, the signed list of men’s fates—“Who by fire and who by water, who in due time and who before his time”—already in His pocket, although He was afraid to take it out and read it. Yosef seemed more at peace with the world too, full of an inner mirth that took the edge off even his idée fixe, while Tamara had been busy cooking her delicious holiday dishes, her eyes, which were inflamed with dust all summer, now clear and wide—indeed, Rabbi Shabbetai, they were so like madame’s that are looking at us right now that the growing resemblance between Constantinople and Jerusalem sent a shiver down my spine. And so I awoke him before dawn, and took him to the synagogue, and stood with him not far from the cantor, so that we could be quick to snatch the tidbits thrown to the worshipers from time to time—a verse from “God the King Who Sitteth on His Mercy Seat,” a word from “O Answer Us,” or even a whole section of “Lord of Forgiveness”—and raise our voices on high in token of our piety and in hope that the Master of the Universe would hear us and let us have our way for once...

  —What say you, Dona Flora? I never knew!

  —Old Tarabulus? Who does not remember him? Why, he would bring tears to our eyes every Sabbath eve in the Great Synagogue with his “Come, My Love”!

  —Truly?

  —O my son!

  —Yes, that old prayer shawl that was black with age ... of course I do ... it was already that color when I was a child ... I always felt drawn to it too, but I never dared touch it...

  —Truly? Oh, the poor boy ... my poor son...

  —O my poor son ... you speak of him with such love...

  —No, I will not cry.

  —Oh, madame, oh, Your Grace, what sweet sorrow I feel at the thought of my boy standing wrapped in that grimy prayer shawl by the hearth of your salon in Constantinople, pretending to be the great Tarabulus...

  —Of course...”This Day Hath the World Conceived”...the Rosh Hashanah prayer...”Be We Thy Sons or Slaves”...

  —No, I will not sing now ... ah, the poor lad ... my poor son ... because you see, even though I knew that all things were decided in heaven, I knew too that “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”...and so I kept after him ... because to whom could I pass on what consumed me if I let go of it? Your most agreeable brother-in-law Refa’el Valero had little children of his own, and his Veducha was pregnant again, and they certainly did not need another child, not even if it was only a grandchild ... and so, because if I was not for myself who would be for me, and if not now, when, I began to pursue him through courtyards and down alleyways on his visits to Jews and to Gentiles. I never let him out of my sight, until I acquired a most infernal knowledge of Jerusalem myself, of the city of your tender youth, Doña FLora.

  —Why, I was able to pop up anywhere, like a wise old snake...

  —Because—and this I learned from Yosef—it is a city in which all places are connected and there is a way around every obstacle. You can traverse the whole of it by going from house to house without once stepping out into the street...

  —For example, for example, by climbing Arditi’s stairs you can get to Bechar and Geneo’s roof, and then through their kitchen to the courtyard of the Greek patriarch, from where, if you cut straight through the chapel, you need only open a little gate to find yourself in She’altiel’s salon. If She’altiel is home, you may have a cup of coffee with him and ask his leave to proceed, but if he is not, or if he is sleeping, you need not turn back. Just tiptoe down his little hallway without peeking into the bedroom and you will co
me to five steps belonging to the staircase of an old building destroyed by the accursed Crusaders, which lead directly to the storeroom of Franco’s greengrocery. Once there, you need only move some watermelons and sacks aside and stoop a bit to enter the little synagogue of the Ribliners, where you will find yourself behind the Holy Ark. If they happen to be praying, you can join them, even if they are Ashkenazim, and if they are in the middle of a Mishnah class, you can ask to go to their washroom, which is shared by the guard of the Muslim wakf—who, no matter how sleepy he seems, will be happy to take half a mejidi to lead you across the large hall of the Koran scholars and back out into the street, where you will look up in amazement to espy the house of your parents, may they rest in paradise, the very house of your childhood, madame...

  —From the rear? Why from the rear?

  —But it is all built up there, madame ... the buildings are now conjoined ... that empty space is no more...

  —Never once, Doña Flora. I myself was amazed that I was not once lost ... because in Constantinople—does Your Grace remember?—does he?—that happened to me all the time, not just as a boy but as a young man too, and without the slightest effort, hee hee ...For example, rubissa, if I was sent to fetch something for Rabbi Shabbetai, some tobacco, or coffee, or a sesame cake, or cheese, I would end up wandering from bazaar to bazaar, past the rug dealers, past the fabric stalls, past all the colorful, good-smelling dresses, across the Golden Horn without even noticing, passing from Asia to Europe—and there, madame, I would get so hopelessly confused that I could no longer find my way back, so that evening would come—does Your Grace remember?—and Rabbi Shabbetai would see that there was no tobacco, no coffee, no sesame cake, no cheese, and no Mani, and he would have to leave his books, go downstairs, find some horseman or soldier from the Sultan’s Guard, and give him a bishlik to go to Galata and bring me back home to Asia, frightened and white as a sheet ... hee hee hee ... he remembers ... by God, he is smiling! Even after so many years, that Constantinople of yours is a maze for me ... your crooked Stamboul, which to this day I cannot get straight in my head ... whereas Jerusalem, madame, could not only be gotten straight, it was getting too straight for comfort ... night by night I felt it tighten around me...