In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (11 page)

Mustafa shuddered the rabbi’s words away. “I’m just a janitor, but even I feel in my heart that to die for Allah is a great thing.” Just then he looked down at his dingy no color work clothes, the color of dust. “But did you
say you’re going to the police? Then don’t mention my name,” he entreated, now anxious to leave. He reached and held the professor’s lower arm. “They, the Waqf, will be angry at me for telling the police about the shovels. They would send me off the mountain. I don’t want to lose my job.”

“Of course not,” they both said quickly. Mustafa wondered: Were they lying?

Rabbi Isaac was wrapping up the fruit in the kitchen towel. The professor watched him with an angry, despairing look. “What are you going to do with it?”

The rabbi glanced up, with a baffled expression. “Frankly, I’m not sure. All I know is, I need to safeguard it.”

“Well, don’t take it in that
shmatta
,” the professor said in a resigned tone. He sorted through different-size receptacles and chose a blue one. “If anything happens to the pomegranate, Isaac, I will never forgive you.”

Later, they stood outside, Mustafa and the rabbi, silently waiting for the taxi. The air between them prickled with the unspoken.

“You should know,” Rabbi Isaac said at last, “I don’t want to harm or destroy anything. Only to protect.” He stroked the plastic container that held the fruit. “As for you, Mustafa, I don’t know why you did this.” He rubbed his eyes, as if the events of the day had exhausted him.

“I thought you’d like it,” Mustafa repeated, but now he was wondering if he should ask for it back. In the end, they took a bus, not a taxi, which made him sadder still.

Back at the courtyard, the rabbi seized Mustafa’s hands and held them in his own.
“Hashem yivarekh otcha
,” he uttered with conviction. God will bless you.

“Allah yivarek fik
,” Mustafa blessed him back politely, in his own language, yet with no heart.

Mustafa said good-bye. Sadly, he could not find the bus transfer, and set off on foot. He walked down Ninveh Street, his foot dragging a little as he clomped along. Panting, he climbed up Strauss Street and passed swarming hordes of Jewish children with their side curls and black knickers. The right side of his neck ached, even more than usual. The pills for headaches never seemed to help the pain in his neck. He wiped the sweat beading on his skin. After this good deed, all he got was a thank-you?
Ya’allah
. Not even chicken soup. It wasn’t as good as his mother’s
freka
soup, but he would have liked some, even on this hot day.

As he wended his way through the souk, a terrible childhood memory returned to him. He had been helping his younger sister Samira with a jigsaw puzzle, a picture of a groom and bride, and he idly wondered out loud what kind of wife he might marry one day. He was twelve at the time. Samira had joked, “Better not marry, Mustafa. How’ll you kiss your bride?”

“I don’t know,” he said. It made his head hurt just to think about it.

Then his mother, who was cutting vegetables, came over and said, “Of course he won’t marry. Then he’d have children”—she touched the side of her neck—“like him.” She stared at him suddenly, still holding the knife. “Swear to me you will never marry!” He looked at her, terrified, and said nothing.

That night in the dark, as he lay in bed sleeping, he became aware of a bad smell. Through half-closed lids, he saw his mother, a shawl draped over her, sprinkle specks of ash over his body. She was softly moaning strange words. He wanted to scream, yet some instinct kept his mouth clamped shut, and he closed his eyes. He became aware of a heat on his body, and he glimpsed his mother with a pointy contraption in her hands—did Samira use it to curl her hair?—going round and round his most private part, almost touching it, then moving away while she prayed her black words. She brought her head close and blew into his ear. When he awoke the next morning, he was sure he had dreamed it all. Then he saw the pointy contraption on the counter. He asked his mother what it was for, and she shouted fearfully, “Go sweep the porch!” After that there was no more desire. Gone. As if his privates had been burned away. Her prayers had worked. He never thought about marrying again, or at least not very hard. Once he almost told his father what his mother had done, but what good would that bring? Only more troubles for his father who worked like a mule to put bread on the table.

Now he entered Damascus Gate and walked on a downward incline along the main street that was filled with only his people, the scent of his Arab brothers, the bustle of their stalls and vendors and little shops. He bought three
kanafeh
pastries of sweet cheese and pistachio from an old woman and ate them as quickly, faster than his twisted throat would let him. The food turned to mud in his pipes, turned to cement. “Water!” he
choked out. She handed him a glass of carob punch, and he slugged the stuck
kanafehs
down. He thanked her without words. His head was hurting too much, all the crazy words batting about in his skull:
pomegranate, Arabs, Jews, King Solomon, life, death
. But he had done a good job, setting the professor and the rabbi straight about the Koran. He had answered them well, even with all the knowledge and verses they had to confuse him. He had shown them, hadn’t he?

In his rented space on David Street, he made instant couscous from a box. He was tired and ate slowly. But now, alone in his room, the events of the day struck him in a different, terrible light. The professor and the rabbi had mocked him. He saw the looks they had given each other, looks of pity or impatience when they thought he wasn’t watching. The rabbi had fooled him, too, getting him to take things off the mountain like that. Tricked him like any Jew would! In the tiny grains of couscous, he tasted shame and humiliation, and his throat burned with every swallow.

Isaac sat up on his bed and flicked on a light. He looked at his watch: 12:30 a.m. His head ached. He tried to ease into a comfortable spot, but sleep wouldn’t come. Fear kept him awake. The rebbe, just turned eighty-three, was sicker, frailer than ever. Shaindel Bracha had to hire a part-time nurse just last week. Between the three of them, they cared for him. Any moment the rebbe could leave them—the thought repeated like the banging of a shovel.

He went to the bathroom. Such a plain room with two blue towels, a mirror the size of a woman’s fist, a washing cup, but look at all the books stacked high next to the toilet:
Civilization and its Discontents, Quantum Theory, The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Unbeatable Yankees, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Anorexia and the Starved Soul
. His eyes went up and down the titles. The rebbe’s bathroom university. The rebbe had once explained, “People come from all over. A man must talk to everyone in his own language.” Isaac flushed the toilet and washed his hands. None of these books could help him tonight.

He entered the rebbe’s study, opened his Gemara and tried to let the tides of Talmudic logic pull him in, but the thick scent of jasmine flowers filtered through cracks in the shutters and fused with his worried thoughts. The rebbe could die with a blink, a sneeze, a hiccup, just like that.

His soles prickled, and he got to his feet and began to pace. How could the rebbe die? Again he felt that banging against his temples. Not possible. He pressed his fingers deep into his forehead. The rebbe was like an oak tree, sturdy, long-lived. Underneath its branches, a person could feel safe, enveloped in goodness. The rebbe was his friend, his teacher, his world, his everything. The man had no airs. If a floor needed washing he
grabbed a mop even though ten others would have gladly spared him the chore. He enjoyed a salmon steak, a symphony, his own recipe for herring. And yet what a recipe for a human being, a blend of heaven and earth, earth and heaven. Many times Isaac’s skin became soothed just being around the rebbe, near him, tending to him. He paced back and forth until the prickling sensation and the pounding in his head subsided and he sat down.

The rebbe had told Isaac he would have a chance to fix things. “God isn’t a miser,” the rebbe promised. “He’ll throw many opportunities your way. You’ll see.” But if the rebbe weren’t there to make him see, how would he recognize an opportunity when it came? Had there been opportunities? A decade ago he’d had a chance to buy an apartment in his mother’s building for bubkes. Through pure orneriness he’d said no, though he had the money. It later turned out, everyone who had bought an apartment saw their Lower East Side investment triple within four years. Then he had an offer to teach a Torah class in the evenings to troubled teenage boys. Ah, his old dream of reaching wayward young men. What had stopped him? He wasn’t qualified, that’s what, not even a rabbi. He wavered and delayed, and in the end, the offer went to someone else.

And what about the women he had dated? A stream of Rochels and Leahs and Mindys and Yocheveds passed through his mind, a decade and a half of
shidduchs
, bleak blind dates. But what about Dvora, for instance, with the bright brown intelligent eyes and the touch of sarcasm. He had liked her. More than liked her. And yet he had sat opposite her, waiting for something to happen, for a certain feeling to carry them both to the next stage, but the feeling never came. He realized later that he was supposed to make it happen,
do
something,
say
something, but why should finding the right person and getting married be an act of will? Shouldn’t he feel as though he had no choice, as though swept out to the ocean by strong currents? It was as if his desire gave off the most muted, faraway signals like a distant foghorn on the open seas. Dvora complained later to the matchmaker, “It’s as if he wasn’t there. Flat.” And Isaac could only agree—he felt the same flatness, too.

Sometimes he feared he might not be attracted to women, God forbid. But then he recalled his teens, and after that his early twenties, when he was engaged to the lovely, treacherous Gitty. Then, desire had raged
through him for days and nights on end, and he knew his fears were baseless. His desire was simply dormant.

Ach, he was selfish, thinking only about himself, his own needs and concerns. He scratched sadly at the back of his hand. What about all the others who needed the rebbe much more? If something happened (again his temples throbbed) who would run the courtyard? Who would answer everyone’s questions? An image of the rebbe’s wife, tearful and distraught, lodged in his mind, and then an image of Tamar appeared, her standing under the olive tree in her white helmet, disappointed after her forty days of prayer, and he shook both images away. He couldn’t bear the sight of a disappointed woman. His thoughts drifted to Mustafa. He enjoyed the custodian with his odd questions, both insulting and flattering, and his brooding eyes that bespoke a certain understanding of the world. And yet when he saw Mustafa stumping toward him, he felt a suffocating feeling, an obstruction in the throat, as though choking on the man’s sadness. Those times, he wanted to be anywhere but there next to him. Of course he overcame it. And what did Mustafa want exactly with all his questions about the kohein? Isaac feared he had set the Arab off on a strange course.

Down the hallway, he heard the the rebbe’s cough. He listened for the next cough and the next, like a mother listening out for the breath of an infant. So much depended on the rebbe’s next cough.

He hovered over the rebbe the next morning, gave him his pills and special ointment for a corn on his big toe. The rebbe’s eyelids looked baggier than usual, and his body tilted, as if a rock rested on only one shoulder. A small wind could knock him over, that’s how frail the rebbe was. “Do you mind if I clear these books off your table?” Isaac asked, trying to keep his voice pleasant and worry free. “They’re about to topple.”

“Just leave them,” was the rebbe’s quavery reply. He dropped his head against the couch arm. His beard had lost its puff and sheen, and clung to his jawline like lint from the dryer. A cloying, cough-mediciney scent hung heavy in the air. The shuttered windows allowed only a few bars of sunlight into the shadowy room. The rebbe preferred it that way. Lately, the light hurt his eyes.

“Please bring me the pomegranate,” he said.

Isaac opened the receptacle where he kept the artifact Mustafa had unearthed from the Temple Mount. He brought the reddish clay fruit to the rebbe, who cradled it in his old hands.

The two stared at the pomegranate, not saying a word. It seemed to glow in the rebbe’s hands. “This fruit—to one, it’s an archeological find, to another, a piece of our temple.” The rebbe closed his lids. “To a Jew, even a rock speaks.”

Isaac bowed his head tenderly toward the old man. “What’s it saying, Rebbe?”

“What’s it saying? All you have to do is listen.” The rebbe brought the pomegranate so close it nestled in his beard. “What are you going to do?”

Isaac’s head lifted. “About what?”

The rebbe nodded toward the pomegranate.

“Eh … didn’t I already do something? You sent me to the archeologist. I went.”