The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  Copyright © Moshe Sakal 2014

  Originally published in Hebrew as in 2014 by Keter Books, Jerusalem

  English translation copyright © Jessica Cohen 2017

  This translation was supported in part by a grant from the Yehoshua Rabinovich Tel Aviv Foundation for the Arts

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Sakal, Moshik, author. | Cohen, Jessica (translator)

  Title: The diamond setter / Moshe Sakal; translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

  Other titles: Tsoref. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017027132 (print) | LCCN 2017027985 (e-book) |

  ISBN 9781590518922 (e-book) | ISBN 9781590518915 (paperback)

  Classification: LCC PJ5055.4.A375 (ebook) | LCC PJ5055.4.A375 T7613 2018 (print) |

  DDC 892.43/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017027132

  Ebook ISBN 9781590518922

  Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v5.2

  a

  For my grandfather

  MOSHE SAKAL

  1918–1998

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters (In Order of Appearance)

  Chapter One: Menashe

  Chapter Two: Fareed

  Chapter Three: Aunt Gracia

  Chapter Four: Honi

  Chapter Five: Me

  Chapter Six: Adela

  Chapter Seven: Sami

  Chapter Eight: Achlama

  Chapter Nine: Laila

  Chapter Ten: Fareed

  Chapter Eleven: Rafael

  Chapter Twelve: The Return

  Afterword to the English-Language Edition

  CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

  MENASHE SALOMON: a jeweler

  TOM: Menashe’s apprentice and the narrator

  ACHLAMA JAVAHERI: Menashe’s customer

  HONI KADOSH: a soldier

  AMIRAM KADOSH (A.K.A. “KADOSH”): Honi’s father, Menashe’s landlord

  SHAYU KADOSH: Amiram’s father, Honi’s grandfather

  AYELET KADOSH: Honi’s sister

  ADELA SALOMON: Menashe’s mother

  RAFAEL SALOMON: Menashe’s father

  MONA: Rafael’s mother

  AUNT GRACIA: Mona’s sister, Rafael’s aunt

  HASSIBA KADOSH: Gracia and Mona’s sister, Shayu’s mother

  MOUSSA KADOSH: Hassiba’s husband, Shayu’s father

  FAREED: a Syrian-Palestinian illegal alien

  LEILA: Fareed’s grandmother

  ABED: Fareed’s grandfather

  SHAKER: Abed and Leila’s son, Fareed’s father

  SAMI JABALI: Leila’s father

  SUAD JABALI: Leila’s mother

  SHLOMO/SALIM, JULIETTE: Menashe’s siblings

  ONE DAY IN THE SUMMER OF 2011, a Syrian citizen sneaked across the border into Israel, not far from the town of Majdal Shams. In his pocket was a piece of a blue diamond that had once belonged — so I was told — to European royalty, as well as to the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II. After entering Israel, the young man took a bus to Tel Aviv. He had not told anyone in Syria of his plans, and almost no one in Israel knew where he’d come from.

  Who was this man and what was the purpose of his trip? All we know is that he was twenty years old, the scion of two families divided by national conflict yet bound by passion and secrecy, from back in the days when the Middle East was steeped not only in blood but also in love.

  This is his marvelous story — and the story of many others who live in this land.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MENASHE

  1

  ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON IN TEL AVIV, Achlama Javaheri walked down Allenby Street on her way to a jewelry shop on Plonit Alley. When she stopped at the corner of Yehuda Ha’Levi Street, she noticed a large advertisement: ZIPPORAH UZAN FROM KIRIYAT GAT ANSWERED THE PHONE AND WON 100,000 SHEKELS! The picture showed a woman holding a huge check that said: “100,000 New Israeli Shekels.” Farther ahead, on the corner of Balfour Street, Achlama saw another poster, with a red caption that she murmured out loud: YOSSI LEVI FROM KIRIYAT HAIM WON A NEW CAR! On the corner of King George Street was a third sign, even bigger than the first two: KEREN GOLDBERG FROM REHOVOT WON AN APARTMENT!

  “Madness,” Achlama thought. “It used to be, people who won the lottery would put a paper bag over their head with holes cut out for the eyes so no one would recognize them. Now someone wins the lottery and they plaster his picture all over town, and next thing you know he’s got crooks and scoundrels and the evil eye after him.” She paused, then concluded, “The evil eye is the worst.”

  Achlama had reached Plonit Alley by now, and she stopped outside the jeweler’s storefront. Before knocking on the door, she put her nose up against the window and squinted. When she heard a buzz, she pushed the door open and walked in.

  “Ah, the brand-new widow,” came the jeweler’s deep voice, “good day to you.”

  Achlama blushed and returned the salutation. She had come to the shop because she had discovered something shocking, which she felt an urgent need to share with Menashe.

  She glanced at me and said hello. I looked down and readjusted the safety glasses on my nose.

  My uncle’s protective glasses were so large that they covered almost his entire face. The torch he held in one hand spewed fire onto a gold ring that was nearing its melting point. With the other hand he gripped a tiny piece of gold between a pair of tweezers, preparing to weld it onto the ring.

  Achlama watched him tensely. The ring glowed red and a tiny crater bubbled up on its surface. The jeweler quickly attached the piece of gold to the crater and welded it to the ring, then dipped the ring in a cup of clear liquid, where it sizzled briskly. He lifted it out with the tweezers and placed it delicately on his workbench.

  “What are you in the market for today?” he asked with a smile.

  Achlama looked at the main display table. Under the glass were rows of gold chains with pendants set with garnet, turquoise, amethyst, and citrine. A small red-striped ceramic dish contained antique rings of yellow, red, and white gold, some of them diamond studded. Gold earrings set with turquoise stones were arranged in a nearby case. And in the last case, adjacent to the jeweler’s bench, strings of white and gray pearls with gold and silver clasps were laid out in circles inside each other.

  “I’m just looking today,” said Achlama. She glanced at the turquoise earrings.

  “The eye covets what the heart desires,” said the jeweler.

  Achlama sighed. “Really, Menashe, I’m just looking.”

  “You are welcome to look as much as you’d like,” the jeweler said, “just remember that everything is for sale.” He accentuated and drew out “everything.”

  Menashe opened a few small wooden boxes of gemstones and chose one stone from each
box. He compared them all, then carefully arranged them on his workspace with the tweezers. He pierced nine small holes in a rectangular gold board and began setting the stones on the board in three rows.

  “And he made the breastplate of cunning work, like the work of the ephod,” the jeweler intoned, quoting from the bar mitzvah Torah portion he had recited forty-nine years earlier. “Of gold, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen. And they set in it four rows of stones: the first row was a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle: this was the first row. And the second row, an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond. And the third row, a ligure, an agate, and an amethyst.” When he got to the word amethyst — achlama — he pinned his blue eyes straight on his customer; she turned her head awkwardly and looked around.

  There was a polishing machine tucked away in an alcove, where I sat listening quietly while I polished rings — an apprentice’s job.

  The air-conditioning soon dried up Achlama’s sweat, and her breath steadied. She approached the jeweler’s bench, carefully avoiding the thorny cacti growing in planters along the perimeter of his workspace. She took a deep breath and was about to say something, but then she looked at me.

  “You can speak openly,” Menashe told her. “That’s my nephew, Tom. He’s helping me out in the shop.”

  “Yes, we’ve met. A nice young man. Very handsome.” She still wasn’t sure.

  “Say what you have to say, Achlama,” the jeweler urged her. “Besides, you should know that whatever you leave out, he’ll just make up anyway.”

  “Why, is he a wizard?” She smiled nervously.

  “No, he’s a writer. Sees through walls. What you don’t tell him, he’ll find out on his own. Or worse — he’ll invent it. If he decides your life is worth writing a story about, God help you.”

  “All right.” Achlama took another deep breath, hesitated briefly, and forged ahead. “You know, Menashe, that my husband left me many years ago. After he left, I heard lots of stories about what he was doing for money — gambling, all kinds of dirty business, and worse. He brought shame on our family. We weren’t living together anymore, but you know that with us Persians you never get divorced. We stayed married on paper, so people wouldn’t talk. His poor parents, he killed them…When he went into prison for the second time, his father had a heart attack. His poor widowed mother used to visit him every week with food and newspapers. I never visited. I sent the kids with their grandma so they could see their father. I didn’t want to see him ever again, after he walked out on me like that. He didn’t pay any alimony, and I had to feed those children on my own and make sure they got a good education. And they never lacked for anything. They grew up like princes.”

  Menashe nodded. Achlama had been coming to his shop for years, and he’d heard it all: the years of struggling, how she brought up the kids and cleaned houses for money. And recently, the husband’s death and her inheritance: a large sum of money, an apartment, and a vacant lot in Jaffa.

  “I have something to show you, Menashe,” Achlama said. She took a small box out of her pocket and handed it to him.

  “What is this?” Menashe asked.

  He thought she was giving him a piece of jewelry to repair. But when he opened the box, he was astonished to behold a precious stone: the family’s blue diamond, which he thought he would never set eyes on again.

  2

  A few months ago I came back to Tel Aviv after five years in New York, where I’d studied history in college by day and worked as a security guard at the Israeli consulate by night. I spent my long shifts in the dark consulate offices on Second Avenue and Forty-second Street sitting opposite a flickering television screen with my textbooks, seminar papers, and flashing cell phone. I didn’t carry a weapon, but if necessary I could alert the guards at the building’s main entrance.

  Every year on the High Holy Days, my uncle Menashe arrived for ten days. And every year I gave him the bed in my studio apartment and slept on the couch. On his first day in New York, he always asked me to take him to Ground Zero, where he would pose for the camera, standing erect with a fedora on his head. Only after the ritual photo shoot did Menashe feel that his annual visit to the city could really begin. In the afternoons he went to meet his friends at the Cactus Society. He’d been an avid member for years and loved to learn about new species, buy seeds (which he smuggled into Israel in his suitcase), and take photographs to hang in the gallery of pictures on his living room wall.

  He also took advantage of his visit to stop by the jewelry shops on Fifth Avenue (“a little industrial espionage”). When he went into one of these stores in his starched suit, dapper yellow fedora, open-necked silk shirt, red-gold pendant around his neck, and white gold band inset with Persian turquoise on his finger, the proprietors recognized immediately that this was a customer who knew a thing or two about jewelry. And they treated him accordingly — with suspicion and respect.

  Menashe had a principle: He never bought anything from another jeweler. He feigned indifference to the items he saw in the fancy Fifth Avenue displays, but sitting on the airplane on his way back to Israel, he conjured up new ideas for his own jewelry.

  Menashe always found a backhanded way to ask me about my maternal aunt Rachel, his ex-wife. When I was ten, Rachel found God and moved to Jerusalem. She took Maya, their only daughter, with her. That was in 1991, the year when, I later learned, Menashe’s shop was robbed and he lost the blue diamond that Achlama was now attempting to return.

  I am the only person who is still in Menashe’s life from his old family. Maya was married off to a Hassid and moved to London a few years ago, and she has almost no contact with her father. I see Rachel occasionally when I visit my family in Jerusalem. But I don’t tell Menashe about her; there’s hardly anything to tell.

  A few years ago, Menashe left his native Tel Aviv and built a house in the rural town of Gan Yavne. Every morning he drives to the shop on Plonit Alley in his old Mazda. As a child, I sometimes heard stories about various women in his life after he and Rachel separated, but as far as I know he never had a significant relationship again.

  After I came back from New York, I started editing Hebrew translations of English books for publishers. The pay was insulting — at most I made thirty-five hundred shekels a month, and that was only if I worked extremely fast. One day Menashe called and said he had a proposal for me. We arranged to meet at his usual café on the beach right at the edge of Jaffa, where you can look out over the Mediterranean all the way to the horizon: Tel Aviv sprawls out on the right, the rocks of Jaffa on the left, and straight ahead lies Andromeda’s Rock, a plain-looking rock that juts out of the water with an Israeli flag billowing on its peak.

  “Look at the sea,” Menashe said as he sipped a beer. “This city is bent on destroying itself. It just keeps destroying, then building, then destroying again. But the sea is the one thing that can never be destroyed. It will be here long after we’re gone, long after the city slowly sinks into the sand.”

  I listened quietly and thought about my beloved Tel Aviv, this ragged city I had returned to after years of absence.

  Down on the beach, fishermen spread out a large net and slowly waded into the water until they were almost submerged. Each held a corner of the net, making sure its edges stayed just above the water so that any fish they trapped would not be able to jump back in.

  As Menashe’s beer glass emptied, he grew dreamy and contemplative. He leaned his head on his hand, and the big turquoise ring protruded from his finger. After a long silence, he asked how I was settling back in. I said it wasn’t as difficult as I’d expected, but added cautiously that I didn’t think the process was over yet.

  “What’s for sure,” he said, “is that since you came home, I’ve lost my excuse to go to New York. My friends from the Cactus Society know I’m not coming this year, and they’re grumbling about me being a cheapskate. I told them they’re all invited to Israel. I’ll take them on a night tour of the cactus garden in Holon.” He pl
unged into silence again. An Arab boy riding a scrawny horse passed by on the beach.

  “Was there something in particular you wanted to talk about?” I asked.

  “I’ll get to that soon,” Menashe said, and took an olive from a little dish on the table. He nibbled the flesh and then sucked on the pit for a long time. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” he said finally. “You know that you’re like a son to me. Of what little family I had, you’re really the only one who still cares about me. Rachel doesn’t care if I’m dead or alive. If you could only have seen how she used to look at me when we first met! She was so in love with me. I was in love, too. But we were young, and we didn’t know that being in love wasn’t enough. And then Maya was born, and the rest you know.” He sighed, then abruptly changed his tone. “Listen, I want you to come and work in the shop with me for a while.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Why not?”

  “What do I know about jewelry? I’ve never done anything with my hands.”

  “Then I’ll teach you. What a jeweler needs, first of all, is to be sensitive. Everything else can be taught. You’re still young, but you’ve seen a thing or two in your life. You polish the words you write, and I can teach you how to polish gold. Show me your fingers.”

  I held out my hands.

  Menashe took my soft hand in his rough one. Every evening he scrubs his hands with a special cleaner that removes the black stains from his skin. But some of them don’t come off. “Yes,” he said, “you have delicate fingers.”

  “I used to play the piano,” I reminded him.

  “You don’t play anymore?”

  “Menashe, I haven’t played since I was thirteen. My teacher committed suicide, don’t you remember? For the record, though, I should point out that he killed himself after I’d stopped taking lessons. Anyway, why don’t you find someone experienced, or a jewelry student from Shenkar?”

  “You know I don’t trust anyone. Only family. And there’s something else. I’m in my sixties, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve been working in this shop for forty-five years, since I was seventeen. That’s nothing to sneeze at either. If, God forbid, something happened to me, who would take care of the shop? Who would even care? All the work I put into it is worth nothing if there’s no one who knows what to do with it all. I want to be sure that my shop is in good hands.”