In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (25 page)

“Oh, please.” Tamar threw her eyes skyward. “Don’t psychoanalyze me.”

“Ach, all that psychology wears me out, too,” he admitted. “But really, why does the man you marry have to inspire so much respect?”

“And what’s so terrible about that?” She brushed strands of hair off her face.

“Tamar, Tamar.” He shook his head, smiling.

She slumped against the carob tree. Her makeshift ponytail braid had unloosened and she tossed it over a shoulder. “Damn.” She ripped up a chunk of grass. “You caught me out. I do want someone more than me, but most of all refined, you know? Good.” She looked up at him and then off to the side. “I have a memory of my parents fighting. I must’ve been ten. My mother was standing in the kitchen in her new velour pantsuit, screaming at my dad for some reason. Probably because he just got fired. And my dad, he took”—she made her hands into two downward plunging claws—“he reached into this big jar of mayonnaise and smeared the goo all over her new pantsuit. She kept fighting him off and calling him the most awful things, but he was just too huge, I guess.” She crossed her arms, hugged her elbows, and sat in that still huddled position, the shadow of a perfect carob leaf falling on her neck and cheek.

At that moment, he thought to hold her, to protect her, to clean off the shards of the past that still poked her, the splinters, the memories. He shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Tamar.”

“So. When I think of the family I want to have … I want a refined life, a holy life,” she said. “Anything but that crudeness.” She smiled a dented smile that reached him. “What about you, Isaac? I can tell you haven’t had an easy life.”

He drew back. “How can you tell that?”

She shrugged. “It’s written all over your forehead.”

“Well, others had it worse.”

“What’s your first memory?” she persisted.

He closed one eye, trying to remember. “I must’ve been five. I remember listening out for my father when he came home from work. Our apartment was on the third floor. I’d hear the slam of the outside door, and then he’d start to climb the stairs in his heavy boots. The first flight, then the second flight, then that pause just before he opened the door and came in. That feeling of total dread and panic in me.” He swallowed hard and shook his head. “For goodness sake, to dread your own father.” He glanced up. “But I did.” He wished he hadn’t looked at her. The caring in her eyes threatened to undo him. She looked beautiful. A passing breeze flirted with her hair, unloosened auburn tendrils around her cheeks, and blew a faint scent of apples—her shampoo?—his way.

“Was he that awful?” she asked softly.

“He could be—shall we say—rough.”

Her arms circled herself more tightly, and he understood that self-hug was intended for him. “I hardly know what to say, except—look how you’ve risen beyond your own life.”

“Have I?” His fingers played lightly with the grass, the tips of the blades tickling his wrists. “You’re seeking a holy husband. That’s a tall pedestal for any spouse to be on.”

“But that’s what’s special about you.” She lifted her eyes and met his. “I admire you, yet you’re real. I don’t think I’d rebbify you.”

He chortled at the verb she had coined. “Oh, yes, you would. There are always expectations. I spend my day with people, helping them, holding myself up to scrutiny. It takes a lot out of a person. Oh, Tamar,” he said, letting out a soft groan, “when I’m home, I don’t want to be anything to anybody. I don’t have the strength.”

She fell back against the carob tree.

“You have so much life to you,” he went on. “You’re just discovering yourself. Why not choose someone you can go on an adventure with, someone young?” His arm extended toward the sky and the rolling green earth. “I fear that whoever I married would be another voice, another opinion to deal with.”

“You sound like you’ve given up,” she pronounced with bitterness. “That’s what Mustafa said.”

He sat up. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” She went back to her grass ripping.

“I don’t know what Mustafa told you,” he said slowly, “but he may have gotten it right. I’m just too old for this.”

She looked at him in pure wonder. “Can anyone be too old for love?”

Her words pricked his heart. Too old for love, for beauty, was he? He reached out and stroked a little cyclamen with its praying petals. And she was so young. Could his middle-aged bones shift to accommodate her? It might take an act of God.

He thrust his glasses into his knapsack. “Come, let’s pick flowers,” he said.

A surprised look came over her; her eyes turned ironic and wary. Just then, Assaf’s retriever shambled over and, plopping in a heap onto his lap, sniffed for crumbs. “Come on,
shnorrer
.” Isaac pulled the dog to his feet.

He plucked two cyclamens and slipped one into the dog’s collar. “Bring it to the lady.” He prodded the dog in Tamar’s direction, but it tore off toward the ranch. So Isaac offered his own cyclamen. As she reached for it, he stumbled a little, and the petals accidentally grazed her neck.

They stood facing each other, two inches apart. The scent of apples intensified. He smiled at her. Her lips caught his smile, and there they were, under the carob tree, two magnets held opposite each other, separated by a small space, yet trembling upward. His knees wobbled.

“Tamar, I—”

“Hey!” Assaf strode powerfully toward their little hill, pointing like an angry prophet at the wilting pink flower in Isaac’s hand. “No plucking! This is a nature reserve. It is forbidden!”

Isaac dropped the flower and it fell sadly on its side.

On the bus ride home, he kept his eyes on the sky and followed the sun’s course. He couldn’t find a
minyan
at Yoffi HaGalil and was anxious to arrive in Jerusalem before sundown, in time to pray. He glanced at Tamar, at her swan’s neck, at her thigh a mere four inches away from his own. He heard her soft breathing.
Gott in Himmel
. Was he meshuga? He hadn’t worked out in his mind the toll such a ride would take on his body. They had gotten too close too fast.

Summoning his old willpower, he turned his attention to a radio show playing on the bus. A velvety woman’s voice was saying, “The prime minister’s right not to take Fatah seriously. They’re just flexing muscles. Let them have a sense of pride restored.”

Pride, schmide, Isaac thought. In these wink-and-look-the-other-way phrases, he heard a failure of will. “What do the Arabs take us for, complete idiots?” he groused as a Knesset legislator complained that the Palestinian Authority was running circles around them.

But Tamar was looking out at the views, her face lit with a post-Galilee glow.

He stared past her sweet profile and out the window as the bus passed through the Beit Shean Valley, now going along the Jordan Valley Highway. Formerly inspiring joy, each scene now smote him. All was fleeting. He saw a country disappearing before his eyes. It amazed him how one
half of the nation was drunk on the idea of peace, offering up land, holy sites, like a fire sale: everything must go! The leaders were worse with their doublespeak, calling each slain person another “sacrifice for peace.” Everywhere he saw only the ideology of expediency. A land that had lost its soul.

Tamar had just squeezed out some cream, and was rubbing the white stuff into her hands. She looked at him now, a hesitation or inquiry in her eyes. What did she want? Hadn’t they spent the whole afternoon talking? He frowned, trying to recapture his train of thought. All he knew was, this country was getting dismembered, city by holy city. When—a wrench under his rib—would they come for the heart? Without Jerusalem, the country had no beat, no pulse.

The sun had peaked two hours ago and was on its downward arc, sending little orange and pink clouds streaking across the sky. All was fleeting. Isaac could sense rumblings deep in the earth. He was on a precipice. Images crowded his mind: Shani smiling and giving him a sinister wink; the pomegranate, abandoned and forlorn; the strange men hanging around the courtyard; Yossi the sly reporter. How to piece it all together? The anxiety he had managed to put on hold now broke loose.

He gestured, “Please come here,” and she picked up her things and followed him to the back of the bus. “I think my phone is being wired,” he confided in a low voice. He glanced distractedly at her sunburned forehead and cheeks (they gave her an extra gleam of loveliness) and her slim hands still massaging cream, one hand taking care of the other. “Maybe I’m even being followed.” As soon as he articulated his suspicions, he knew they were true.

Tamar’s hands stopped moving, and she gave him a shocked look. “Followed?” she let slip, and her eyes darted around the bus.

He put a finger to his lips. “Something fishy with that reporter. I think he was sent by the police. I’ve gotten them nervous, you see. They think I’m a rabble-rouser, stirring up trouble with the pomegranate.” He snorted. As it was, he had done far too little. The rebbe had instructed him to follow the pomegranate. Had he done so? Not really, though he’d never quite grasped the rebbe’s meaning. “And Mustafa has me nervous. What if he comes back to the courtyard? The police could arrest him if they realize he took the pomegranate off the mountain.”

“Well,” she paused to neatly recap the tube of hand cream, “Mustafa did say he found something extraordinary on the Temple Mount.”

“What? When was this?”

“I bumped into him the other day. He told me he’d found a clay dove, something with letters on it. He’s collecting other things, too.” She tucked the tube into a side pocket in her knapsack and turned to look at him. “He seemed frightened, actually.”

More things? What special providence allowed this man to find what no others could? That was Isaac’s first thought. A moment later he clopped his head—it was insanity! “How could I let him do this? He’ll get in trouble, huge trouble!”

“I told him to be careful, too,” she said.

“Do you have any idea where he lives in the Old City?”

“Not a clue. But he does stand out,” she said with a wry tilt of her head. “I bet if you asked people …”

His shoulders slumped. “It’s not exactly the friendliest neighborhood.”

“Wait.” She was looking here, there, her eyes weighing. “I know he was checking out a few jewelry stores. He wanted to buy something.”

“A jewelry store?” Why would a poor custodian be buying jewelry? How little he knew of Mustafa’s real life.

“Yeah, I think he liked my opal bracelet.” She held up her wrist to show him. “Oh, and once he mentioned something about doing his laundry somewhere. Fatma’s Laundromat?” She nodded. “Something like that.”

“You mean Fatima’s,” he corrected her. “Well, we should be back in half an hour. Maybe I can find him in the Old City market.” As he bent down and began to ready his bags and things, he could feel her eyes on him.

“Are you going to try to find him now?” She stopped. “Today?”

“Yes.” A small quaver in her voice made him glance up. For the first time, she looked a few years older than her twenty-eight years. “Why do you ask?”

“Actually, I was hoping we’d go out to eat. Nothing fancy,” she said hastily. “A falafel or pizza. A nice ending to a great day.”

Oy. He wasn’t up for this. “I’d love to, Tamar, but I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s urgent.”

She clasped and unclasped her hands. “Are you sure”—she ducked her head slightly—“maybe you’re not overreacting a little? I mean, do you really
know you’re being followed?”

“I don’t know anything. I pray it’s all a figment of my imagination.” He tapped the side of his visor cap. “But do me a favor.” He slipped a pen from his jacket. “Take this number down.” He scribbled his home phone and the professor’s number on the back of a brochure from the horse ranch. Together they came up with secret substitutes for words if indeed his phone was being taped: Poppies—stood for pomegranate. Yoffi HaGalil—the Kotel. Assaf—Mustafa, because it sounded alike. Madonna stood for the rebbetzin, no comparison intended.

He glanced out the window. The setting sun had done things to the sky—thick lines of red, orange, pink—made the heavens look like a floozy with too much makeup.

“Give a hand to the rebbetzin if for some reason I’m gone, though. Let’s hope my fears are just nonsense.” He rubbed the corners of his eyes under his glasses. “You’ll help me, yes?”

She promised him everything. And then scribbled down her own phone number.

For the third day in a row, Sheikh Tawil addressed the enraged workers. “You must be patient with the inspections,” he told the men scattered in clumps around the El Kas Fountain. He explained how it was for the sake of the holy shrine and the mosque and the safety of the whole Haram. Such sacrifices were necessary—sacrifices of time and also honor, because he knew it was a painful and humiliating thing for a Muslim to be checked whenever he came to or left his own mountain. When a gray-mustachioed worker observed that no bomb had ever gone off on the Haram before, Sheikh Tawil sternly corrected him. Thirty years ago a Christian tourist by the name of Mike Rohan set fire to the Al-Aqsa mosque and caused serious damage. Riots broke out everywhere. Ever since then, no one could ever assume the Haram was safe. Even from one of our own, he darkly concluded.