In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (16 page)

His head jerked. “What?”

The commander took over the job of wrapping the pomegranate, which he went about with surprising gentleness. “This pomegranate isn’t yours. It’s state property.”

Isaac got to his feet. “You—” his mouth opened and shut. He stood, trembling, outraged.

“I’ll need to get some tests done on it, anyway. Maybe it’s the real thing, maybe it isn’t.” Commander Shani eased the fruit into the carry bag and placed it in a closet compartment. “There.”

“How long—?” Isaac choked. “How long will it take?”

The commander took a bite out of the cinnamon roll. He gave an exaggerated shrug while chewing. “You know our bureaucracy.” His voice was muffled. He slid over the plate of rolls. “Take. It’s kosher. I promise.”

Isaac raked his short nails against his elbow. “And what if the pomegranate disappears. Same as the red heifer. Would you say you were just doing your job? Protecting the Jewish State?”

The commander looked at him through bullet-black eyes. “Better watch what you say.” He wagged a finger. “You wouldn’t want any of this to get into the news. I am Commander Shani, and don’t you forget it.”

Good-bye pomegranate, Isaac thought. Sweet pomegranate. As good as buried, he feared. His eyes ached. His elbows itched, his scalp chafed, his calves and ankles tormented him with a thousand pricklings. What
could he do? Nothing. No choice. And he, Isaac, had let the rebbe down. Did one cry over such things? He did cry.

Later that day, when Shaindel Bracha asked after the pomegranate, he said tersely, “That mamzer policeman took it from me.”

“Oh! Oh!” she said, her rounded features made sharp and lovely by her sorrowful expression.

Isaac took his place at the helm of the courtyard. The stream of blessing requesters and advice seekers flowed throughout the day. A wisp of a man smoking one cigarette after another coughed and asked for a blessing for a long life. Isaac said curtly, “A man drills a hole in his boat and asks for a blessing for a safe journey?” The man looked puzzled, then gave him a hurt look, glared, and left. A single woman with bad breath came looking for a
segulah
charm to get married. She had already done just about every
segulah
in the book, a few that struck him as downright voodoo, and now she wanted to do one that involved holy verses, tin foil, and a brassiere, of all things. As she spoke, her breath, an odorous blend of old cheese, onions, and unclean socks, hit him full force, and he bowed his head to minimize the assault.

In the end, together with a list of psalms to say, he handed her a toothbrush. “What’s this?” she asked. “It’s a special
segulah
toothbrush,” he replied.

And Mazal was leaving her greasy paper plates and plastic bags all over the courtyard. He came up to her as she sat under the olive tree, a plump knee propped up on the stoop. “This is a garbage pail,” he said firmly, pointing to one only two feet away. “Understand?” Mazal was picking her back tooth with a plastic fork and she stopped a moment. Then she went on picking. The place could try the patience of a saint.

From the sidelines, the rebbetzin tried to coach him and give tips: “Why did you tell him to learn an extra hour of Torah? He learns plenty!” Or “No, not Psalm 51 for that man. Psalm 121 is what he needs to say.” Or “Where is your heart, Isaac? When someone tells you something like that, you hold his hand.”

Her advice startled him, then rankled him. She assumed far too much. Just because she had been married to the rebbe, did she actually think she
could
be
the rebbe? Maybe grief had addled her thinking.

But who would have thought so many regulars would return? Well, not everyone—the widow Mrs. Edelman certainly had stayed clear. But look who came back! The teenage Hassidic boy plagued with acne; the indifferent mother of triplets; the portly, violent rabbi; the overwrought CEO of a high-tech company; the suicidal matchmaker in her flowery housecoat; and yes, Mazal, too. He knew it was the residual aura of the courtyard that brought them back. He was here on borrowed holiness, holiness by association, but how long that grace period would last was hard to tell. Could the rebbe have really wanted him to take over? He didn’t have the credentials.

One afternoon as he stuffed stray plastic bags into the garbage he glanced up and saw Mustafa seesawing his way into the courtyard. His blunt hands hung at his side like the cleaning implements he often carried. Isaac winced at the cruel set of his neck. And yet Mustafa had a wonderful head of hair, unusual for a man his age, and expressive eyes dark as carobs. He could get married, Isaac thought, if not for that twisted neck.

“Saalam aleykum
,” the Arab worker greeted him with a certain reluctance.

“Aleychum shalom.”
Isaac invited Mustafa with his hand to sit. He set a bag of nuts on the stoop to put Mustafa at ease. The custodian ignored it. He hunched forward and sat, not saying a word, and just when Isaac was going to ask him if there was something wrong, the custodian blurted, “Why does the kohein do this?” He held out his fingers, as if about to cast a hex.

Isaac averted his head.

“Ya’allah!”
Mustafa exclaimed. “Everyone looks away from the hands—just like you. Why?”

“You see, the kohein is obligated to bless his people with love,” Isaac explained. “And wherever there is love, there is God’s divine presence. The love and holiness are flowing out from between the parted fingers. So great is the holiness, out of reverence we look away.”

Mustafa rubbed the leathery cords of his neck and sighed.

Isaac had never heard him sigh before. It was a forlorn sound. He continued quietly, “The Hebrew word for love—
Ahava
—comes from the root of
hav
—to give. The more you give to someone the more you love
him.” Love. The word lodged low in his throat, like a pellet. He might talk about love, but what did he know about it?

“It’s the same in Arabic,” Mustafa said in a thoughtful voice. “
Hubb
is the word for love.” His dark face opened into a smile, and Isaac noticed a gap between the custodian’s front teeth wide enough for a small coin to slip through.

Isaac said, “Take some nuts,” and jostled the bag between them by way of encouragement. Mustafa’s hand crept up to the bag, and he took. Maybe there was some hope for both people, Isaac thought. At least they agreed to share the word for love, and maybe a bag of nuts. And could be even more. He once read about a research study that proved Palestinian Arabs shared a greater gene pool with Ashkenazi Jews than they did with Arabs of different countries. Many Arabs, such as the famed Mejali clan, were actually Jews who had been forced to convert to Islam in 1010. A few in isolated villages such as Yattah and Sakhnin still lit Shabbos candles and held on to other Jewish rituals, often at great risk.

“How is the pomegranate?” Mustafa asked, cracking another shell. “I dream about it sometimes.”

“Oy, Mustafa,” Isaac said with a huge ache, “so do I. I no longer have it. The police commander took it into his custody. I doubt we’ll ever get the pomegranate back.”

The Arab worker cried out and half-stood, his peanut shells flinging to the ground. “
Laa!
It’s not his to take!” He lifted his arms and a fetid odor wafted out from his armpits. “Allah will strike that man down!” He wiped his eyes with the hanging black strap that bound his kaffiyeh. “Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “I’m collecting more holy relics. I’m protecting them.”

Isaac’s head spun. Why would an Arab custodian take on this mission? “May God bless you, Mustafa,” he choked out, and embraced the custodian. “How can I thank you?”

Mustafa spoke into Isaac’s suit jacket, “Please, could you help me with my neck?”

Isaac untangled himself. “Excuse me?”

“My neck. I want you to make it straighter.”

Isaac regarded him, dumbstruck. “Dear Mustafa,” he said when he got his words back, “how could I fix your neck?” Where did this idea come
from? Just when he thought that maybe, maybe, they spoke a common language.

Mustafa held out his arm to indicate the courtyard. “I see things, I see people coming here all the time to get better. Most leave smiling. They got something from you. Why not me?” He tapped his collarbone. “For many years I stopped thinking about my neck getting better. Then I met you. And I thought about this last night and I decided to ask.”

God in heaven, what next? Make the legless walk? “Mustafa, dear man, you don’t think I’d heal my own skin if I could?” Isaac yanked up his jacket sleeve to reveal his elbow, raw and blotchy with eczema. Then he jacked up his pants to show a red patch of psoriasis on one of his calves. That, he thought, ended the discussion. But Mustafa looked at the ground, his face darkening.

Isaac said quietly, “Have you ever been to a doctor?”

“Once,” Mustafa mumbled. “No hope. A nice lady brought me. The doctor said it was too late for me because I was born that way. The doctor couldn’t even make the pain go away.”

“Pain?” Isaac repeated. Why had he never even considered the pain.

Mustafa nodded again, a creaky nod.

“I’m so sorry, Mustafa,” he said gently. “If the doctors can do nothing, there’s nothing I can do. How I wish I could.” It would change the man’s life, the way he literally looked at the world. Maybe he wouldn’t have to be alone. The thought smote Isaac. A man’s loneliness. And what was his, Isaac’s, own excuse?

Mustafa said nothing, merely got slowly to his feet. More shells spilled to the ground, near the honeysuckle bush, and Gilgul crept over to sniff them. Isaac cast about for something to change the mood, to perk up the custodian, and his eyes fixed on the scraggly honeysuckle bush. Some words slipped into his mind just then.
You’re all alone
. Someone had said that to him recently, but who? And then he remembered. Had two weeks passed since he had last seen her, standing right there before the bushes, before she had deserted the courtyard?

“Wait,” Isaac called out. Mustafa turned with hope in his eyes. Isaac took two long strides and wrenched off a sprig of honeysuckle and then a sprig of jasmine. “Tell me, do you know Chabad Street in the Old City of Jerusalem?”

Mustafa nodded. “Everyone knows this big street. It’s in the Jewish Quarter. Sometimes I pass a shop there when I need to buy aspirin.”

“Ah, yes.” The pain. It was hard for him to bear. Then, “Could I trouble you to drop these off at a certain address?” Isaac held out the two sprigs.

Mustafa stared with his dark carob eyes and extended his hand.

“Please, if you could give them to a young lady who works at a place called Gates of Wisdom Yeshiva. Her name is Tamar. A redhead,” he added. Saying her name out loud, a knot just below his rib tightened and then unloosened by a thread. Surely she would understand his meaning: Here was his olive branch. Let there be peace. No hard feelings. Come back to the courtyard. “You will take it?”

“I will take it,” Mustafa repeated in a slow voice, bobbing his neck slightly.

Isaac seized his hand. “Thank you, Mustafa, you are wonderful!”

For a moment the dusty planes of Mustafa’s face shifted and he smiled, in fact beamed, and it hurt Isaac to see how a few nice words could transform the custodian. It took so little. Isaac watched as Mustafa put the sprigs into a baggy gray pocket. Suddenly he wanted to grab them back. It was too daring. His gesture would be misconstrued. Another botch-up. She would get the wrong idea.

He took a step toward the Arab. “Please,” Isaac said, scratching furiously at his wrist, “don’t crush them.”

Could it be so hard for the
yahudi
to make his neck a little straighter? The question kept going through Mustafa as he dragged alongside three Armenian priests in long black robes and edged past a tall boy leading a donkey with a television set strapped to its back. Sweat poured off Mustafa as he teetered along. He didn’t understand. Hadn’t the old rabbi cured the professor’s mother? He heard this in the car with his own ears—how the old rabbi made her cancer go away. In his village, they used to hint that Jews had secret powers, that they could do things. Why not fix his neck? If the old rabbi had done it, then so could the younger one. If he could gain just four or five centimeters he would be happy. But maybe they cured only Jews, he thought. The
yahudi
. His legs ached, and he put off delivering the rabbi’s foolish plants.

But the next day, after work, he found himself hobbling along on tired legs as he passed through Suq el Lahamim, the pungent odors of slaughtered sheep rising up like a heat wave, and then on to the next alley, the Street of Spices, his eyes getting dazzled by brown, green, and yellow powders spilling out of rough sacks, his nostrils prickling with the different scents. And so he passed, one shaded alley after the other, until the good busy smells of the Muslim Quarter dropped away, and there he stood in the harsh white light and stone of the Jewish Quarter where he smelled nothing, except bread, maybe, and potatoes. He would find the girl, he would give her the plants, as Rabbi Isaac had asked. He lurched down Chabad Street, heaving a bag of dirty clothes. Later, he would go to the laundromat. After he delivered the plants. He entered a three-storied building, with the words
Gates of Wisdom Yeshiva
etched into the sand-colored stone, and slowly wended his way up some twisting stairs that turned the corner when he least expected.
Ya’allah
. He might trip and die
on such stairs.