Shuli has a productive day of study. He hardly looks up until evening, when all heads turn toward the open front door. The stranger who steps through it is beardless and dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. But his tzitzit hang out, and he wears a black velvet yarmulke of a respectable size.
“This could be him,” Shuli thinks. What a perfect time to have his full faculties restored and to make a passably tidy impression.
The man sets his feet solidly to the ground. “The longer it takes me,” he says, “the longer until you eat.” At that, a pair of students hop up from their chairs and follow him outside.
“Is that Mr. Leibovitch?” Shuli whispers to Gilad, truly shocked by how young and modern looking he comes across.
“Him?” Gilad laughs. “He works at one of the steakiyot in the shuk. But when that guy shows up, it means Dudu’s not far behind.”
The books are closed, and the surfaces cleared, and onto the tables, a giant spread is set. The polo-shirt man scans the students and, choosing himself, volunteers a third helper to oversee the dinner.
One table is for the meats and another holds a beautiful array of salads, and stacked on yet another table is a pyramid of bread. There is a table of sweets and sodas, and bottles of beer, which the boys throw back as if dying of thirst.
Watching these lovely young men in a state of joy, feasting on food after feasting on Torah, actualizes for Shuli an ideal version of his father’s deathbed counsel and his disturbing stiff-armed dream. This, right here, might be what Heaven on Earth looks like. To see them in their abandon, Reb Shuli can think of nothing more pure.
Shuli looks to Rav Katz. Yes, time was being taken from Torah learning, the evening studies fully disrupted, but, much like awarding a triple recess, Shuli feels the rebbe has erred on the side of merriment for the greater good.
It’s then that a little man, his face hidden beneath the broad brim of his hat, pops through the door.
* * *
—
Katz crosses straight toward him, his hand outstretched. The boys fall in behind their rebbe, making a big deal over their guest’s arrival. Some of the more confident, and drunker, even clap him on the back.
The visitor wears a plain black suit, and plain black shoes, neither more polished nor more scuffed than anyone else’s in that dusty city. He’s narrow in build but has a solidity to him, the kind of person that might surprise a larger man were they to fight.
This observation is followed, in Shuli’s racing mind, by another hundred, all of which lead to the same place: This man has to be Leibovitch. And Leibovitch, very well, might be the one.
Katz silences them all and turns the floor over to the man, who wants to say a few words. He first asks for a beer for a l’chayim and then, raising it up, says, “Im ein kemach, ein Torah.” One can’t study on an empty stomach, which makes the room roar. And Shuli, loosed from his trance, recognizes how hungry he is.
Gilad, as if reading Shuli’s mind, comes over with a heaping plate for his American friend. He presents it grinning, kind soul.
While Shuli shovels the food down, Gilad twists one of his gossamer peot.
“That’s Dudu,” he says to Shuli. “I told you he’d come.”
“Chemi,” Shuli says, his heart swelling. “My old pal Chemi has arrived.”
part four
XXIV
Dudu refuses to lead grace at the end of the meal. He won’t hear of it, and calls for a Kohen to have the honor. The students chant birkat hamazon and then pair up again for a bit of extra study. While they learn, Shuli keeps stealing glances at Leibovitch, who chats with Katz on the opposite side of the room. So often does Shuli do it, an exasperated Gilad keeps hitting his hand against the table to draw Shuli’s attention back to the text. It goes on like that, until Leibovitch pulls out his iPhone, at which point a giddy Shuli closes his Gemara outright.
Leibovitch works the room, smiling and laughing and pinching cheeks. Shuli watches transfixed as he begins taking pictures of the students. There are portraits and candids. There are selfies with Dudu—everyone making silly faces as they horse around. And interspersed are the occasional posed shots, Dudu giving direction. “You two, lean back,” he says. “And you, make it serious, focus on the sugya like it’s really giving you trouble.”
When the students head home for the night, Leibovitch lingers, talking to Rav Katz. Shuli reads at his table, waiting for his chance—he just needs a second alone. When Leibovitch says good night to the rabbi and steps out the door, Shuli pushes back his chair.
He’s at the door himself when Katz says, “Nice dinner, no?”
Shuli, holding the handle, answers, “Nice dinner, yes.”
“A good man.”
“Generous,” Shuli says. Then, opening the door, crossing the threshold, he says, “Fresh air,” tipping his hat and rushing toward the front gate.
Shuli steps into the alley and it’s already empty. The panic. Shuli’s heart. Could it have been more than a moment? How could Leibovitch be gone?
There’s no movement in the deep shadows that puddle along the walls. No one climbs either staircase. No footsteps echo back. Listening hard, Shuli hears what he always hears at that hour, distant engines, and the scream and howl of stray cats.
Catching something in the corner of his eye, Shuli spins around to see a shirt swish on its laundry line. He can’t imagine where Leibovitch has gone.
The only possibility Shuli can think of is if he raced up the close staircase at top speed, taking the steps two at a time. So Shuli does the same, his shoes barely grabbing on the slickness of the stone.
At the top, practically throwing himself through the arch, Shuli stands on an empty sidewalk, scanning a deserted street. No one turns the corner, scuttling up toward city center. No one sprints down to the park, where Shuli had slept.
Running back to the stairs, Shuli sidesteps his way down to the landing, which, like its twin on the other side, offers a commanding view of the block.
He looks back up the stairs. He looks down at the alley. Leibovitch couldn’t possibly have—as Shuli fears—vanished in place. It’s then he considers the rusted metal door set into the landing’s wall, at his side. Like countless others in the neighborhood, covering nooks where people keep their junk tucked away, Shuli hadn’t ever paid it any mind.
It was dented all over, it’s lock jutting out, the cylinder askew. Where a handle would go beneath, there was only a teardrop-shaped hole torn in the metal. The only embellishment on the door was a Star of David affixed near the top, welded in place.
When Shuli looks back to the lock from the Star of David, he’d swear there’d been a change. As if a light that was on had gone off. Or maybe he hadn’t noticed how black that teardrop hole had been before? What if there was more than a cubbyhole behind?
Shuli gets down on his knees to peer through. Seeing nothing but darkness, he stands and dusts off the legs of his pants and—what other options remain?—he begins knocking on that door. He starts lightly, with an open hand, tapping as Gilad had against the table. The more he hits, the more he’s sure that, for Leibovitch to pull off his disappearing act, this is the only door that fit the trick. Shuli hits harder. He hammers urgently and madly, using both fists.
He is going to bang until that door opens, or until Leibovitch steps out of a shadow and makes himself known. He will pound and pound until he finds relief, or until the ground splits from the noise, rupturing and swallowing him up—putting an end to his troubles.
Shuli does not let up until he feels, mixed into the rhythm of his banging, a latch unlatch, and the metal door opens out. Leibovitch pulls Shuli inside by his sleeve, jerking the door shut.
He flips the switch to what must be the light Shuli had registered, and Shuli finds himself on a balcony, built atop the roof of the house below. At its back is a little shed of a structure, alm
ost a lean-to. Above them, another balcony literally hangs over, sandwiching this hideaway on a kind of mezzanine carved out between the alley and the street above.
“The boys could have followed you!” Leibovitch says. “If you wanted money, you should have asked me then.”
Leibovitch reaches into his jacket and pulls out his wallet. And Shuli understands what he must look like in his rumpled suit and Katz’s hand-me-down shirt, and how he must seem like, stalking this man and banging like a crazy person against his door.
Dudu takes out a fifty-shekel bill and hands it to Shuli.
Taking it, Shuli lines up the Hebrew in his head and says, “It’s not money I need.”
“Well, when you figure out what you’re after, I hope your desire is quickly met.” Dudu undoes the latch. “If you don’t mind,” he says, “my privacy—it’s hard won. The students don’t know I keep a room for when I visit. No one else has ever chased after.”
Leibovitch inches the door open, peeking down the stairs and, opening it farther, looking up toward the high street. The coast clear, he tries to usher Shuli back onto the landing. But Shuli steps forward, hooking a finger through the teardrop hole in the door and yanking it closed with some force.
He slides the bolt.
“The pictures,” Shuli says.
“What pictures?” Leibovitch wants to know.
“At the yeshiva. Tonight. The students say you take them for your wife.”
“And the students told me,” Dudu says, switching to English, “that you are an American who comes to study from out of nowhere with young boys.”
“What are you saying?” Shuli says, appalled, and switching to English too.
“I’m saying, are you making trouble for me, or am I going to make trouble for you?”
The harshness of it. The lengths this man will go to protect.
Shuli moves to the front edge of the balcony. He takes hold of the iron railing meant to keep one from tumbling down to the house’s garden below, and he stares out into the distance, once again startled by the miraculousness of Nachlaot. A few feet from the staircase, and the view between buildings, and over the rooftops, somehow reaches out into the valley, the lights of distant neighborhoods sparkling in the distance.
“Those pictures are not for your wife, now are they?” Shuli says, not only undeterred but feeling a rush of love for this man and his unerring defense of kaddish.com.
“She likes to see, to keep current. My wife takes such pleasure in supporting Rav Katz and his students, as do I.”
“No,” Shuli says. “They’re for the website.” He steps toward a window and tries to peer into Dudu’s apartment. All he sees is his squinting reflection in the glass. “It’s from here that you do it, yes? It’s from here that it runs.”
When Shuli turns back, Leibovitch stands there, unguarded.
“Who are you?” he says.
“Me? How can you not know? The efforts I’ve made to find you.” He shakes his head. “Around the world,” Shuli says, “when you refused to answer.”
Shuli walks up to Dudu and—the moment he’s been waiting for—considers taking his hands.
“At first I wasn’t sure,” Shuli says, “but then I thought about it, Reb David Yerachmiel Leibovitch.” And he runs through it all again. “I thought, a David can go by ‘Dudu,’ just as a Yerachmiel can turn into a ‘Yuri.’ But also he can be called ‘Chemi’ for short, if he were to go by the second diminutive of his second name.”
“It’s you!” Leibovitch says, astonished. “The madman from Brooklyn who doesn’t give up.”
It’s rapture for Shuli. Hearing this is pure bliss. The madman from Brooklyn, exactly.
Shuli isn’t sure if he should hug him, or bow down, or launch into one of the infinite speeches he’d prepared for this occasion. He settles on the simple and straightforward, the singular reason he was there.
“I’ve come to get back what’s mine.”
Chemi suddenly appears quite unwell. He goes to the rear wall and sits on an overturned pail.
“It’s gone,” Chemi says, before Shuli can even propose a reversal of the kinyan. “Every penny. You’ve come for the money, but the money is gone.”
He shows Shuli his empty palms, to prove it.
“The money?” Shuli says, trying to make sense of such a thing, utterly baffled.
“A family to support, you must understand.”
But he doesn’t understand, not at all. He was there for his rights. To make a deal in the other direction, so that he could again bear the burden of mourning.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Chemi says. “You, or someone like you. The police, or a gang of thugs from the rabbinate to set me straight where I’m bent.”
“Why bent?” Shuli says, honestly trying to make sense of what this man, his Chemi, was trying to tell him.
“If there’s no money, do you want to hit me? It’s the least I can do.”
“To hit you? But why?” he says.
Shuli goes back to the edge of the balcony and looks down to the dome of the yeshiva, almost close enough to touch.
He gathers up all the terrible truths that, for some stretch now, he’d unconsciously been collecting. The nightmarish bits of thread he’d been storing away, like a magpie, to suddenly weave together.
Shuli walks to the window. He presses his face to the glass, framing his eyes with his hands, so that he may better see into the darkness. What he makes out, in that simple, sad room, are—flashing like fireflies—all those busy little router lights.
Shuli is back, standing before Chemi, not wanting to believe what he already knows.
“Where are the students?” he says. “Where is the minyan? I’m begging you. Take me to those who are hired to mourn.”
XXV
They sit facing each other at the tiny table, in the tiny apartment, surrounded by giant stacks of loose papers, and binders in knee-high mounds. There’s a laptop on the floor, and a printer, and assorted backup drives of varying sizes. There’s a cot against one wall, with file boxes forming a hedge in front. Along the wall opposite is a counter with a sink and a microwave, and a mini-fridge tucked below. The bathroom—a toilet and shower sharing a single tiled stall—is visible through the only interior door. And then there is the crate at their feet, cords snaking out, and the router, whose lights Shuli had seen blinking in the dark, broadcasting its terrible lies.
Chemi sips at a mug of tea and laughs a gloomy laugh.
“For that, you fly around the world after twenty years? Over some old dot matrix kinyan for an online Kaddish?”
“For my father in Heaven—for his soul and mine.”
“What does it have to do with souls? A kinyan like that is bells and whistles, less binding than a handshake. That’s really why you beat down my door?”
“The transaction stands,” Shuli says, grabbing the table. “I gave you my birthright. I need it back. It’s not yours to keep.”
Chemi mulls this over. And the calm with which he listens drives Shuli mad.
“I left my kids for this!” Shuli yells. “My wife! My fucking job!”
Chemi sighs. He fishes in his jacket pockets and, standing, gives a twirl around, surveying the apartment. He then steps between boxes to the cot. Reaching over to the wall, Chemi lifts a little tin amulet from its nail.
“Here,” he says. “A new kinyan. Give me back that fifty and I’ll give you this.” Shuli accepts it and passes back the fifty-shekel note Chemi had forced on him outside. “I hereby return what you came for. Mourning again belongs to you.” And with that sour victory, Shuli closes his hand around the amulet, acquiring.
* * *
—
They sit there going over the awfulness of what Shuli has uncovered. Whenever he feels like he comprehends the gravity of it, Shuli again takes in the
extraordinary mess of folders and dusty binders, the massive sheaves of intimacies betrayed and trusts squandered, of souls left to burn.
Shuli has trouble holding on to the size of it and keeps circling back to the start. “In my case,” he says, “on behalf of my dear, deceased father?”
“Not a prayer,” Chemi says. “Not one.”
“And the twenty-eight hundred? The people listed on the site?”
“Two thousand seven hundred and ninety-four,” Chemi corrects him.
“They’re real?”
“For each, a premium paid, and then—”
“A Kaddish unsaid.”
Shuli squeezes his eyes shut and tries to multiply his personal pain, to expand it out to all those touched by this treachery. He blinks and stares at Chemi. “It’s just—so many people.”
“I’m as surprised as you by the number, but they keep coming. Sometimes once a day. Sometimes once a week. Let’s say, every month, a dozen on average sign up to pay.”
“But when I went back online to find you, the number went up twice right then.”
“The big number, on the home page—that’s real. But when you first log on, it rolls back a couple of digits before counting ahead.”
“It knows to do that? You can program such a thing?”
“It encourages. The mourner feels like he’s watching deals being done. It makes a customer less lonely when opting for a lonely choice. I do feel for them.”
“You don’t feel anything for any of us,” Shuli says, at a boil.
“You think you and I are so different? So maybe I don’t go by the letter of the agreement, but I see that the memories of these people are not erased.” Chemi gestures toward his archive. “It’s all here. Every contract. Every file. It’s its own kind of memorial. I’m kind of like a son who knows what must be done but pays someone else to do it.”
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