In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (33 page)

The next morning, when Isaac asked for some company in synagogue,
the same crew joined him. He wondered if they felt bad for him and that’s why they came. Maybe they said to themselves, “Let’s humor the poor rabbi.”

The bug-eyed man said, “Here comes the rabbi and his little sheep, baaa baaa, ya maniac!” but Nissim just gave him a shove and the bug-eyed man spat at the wall instead. After Isaac prayed in the synagogue (they just watched), he started in with a story. They liked it, so he tried another. If the stories dealt with crime, blood, stonings, and stabbings, they listened better, so he came up with more of those.

Somehow the day got filled. At night, with so much time on his hands, he found himself thinking about his father, who he hadn’t thought of in such a long time. A hardworking man, he wore the same shoes, soled and resoled every Rosh Hashanah, a coarse man, cheap as the day was long. And brutal. He had tyrannized Isaac all the way until his death, when Isaac was fifteen. Still, his father always had a joke or friendly word to say to a schnorrer or derelict on the street. Sometimes, he would even produce a coin for the beggar. There on his torn mattress Isaac tried to understand his father’s small life, even while he asked himself: What’s the point of trying to understand one’s father? But maybe his ambitions were far greater than that. Wasn’t it true that he who understood his father understands the world, and if he understood the world, he might get a glimmering of God?

Finally, the fifth day arrived.

He showered in a grotesque stall. He washed his face and patted his beard. He retrieved his hat from his bag and put it on. His big day in court.

“So, Reb Isaac, you’re leaving us,” Nissim said, panting. He was doing push-ups on the cement floor. “For good.”

Isaac said, “Who knows what will be.”

A new fellow with a dirty kerchief around his head said to Isaac, “I had a dream about you last night. You were an interior decorator. Rearranging my furniture.” He struck a pose, one hand girlishly on hip, the other arm extended like a diva’s.

“Coxsionelle
,” someone snorted.

Gilad and Shuki his lawyer came for him. “Good luck, Rabbi,” Yigal called. “Should I pray for you?” he said half-mockingly.

“Yes. Isaac, son of Rachel.”

Yigal repeated the words to himself.

Gilad handed Isaac his belt.

They walked the hundred yards to the courthouse. Isaac stared down at his hands, at the way the morning sunlight made the hairs on his knuckles now golden, now light brown. A traffic light. Did it always look that way? Almost a little artistic. Sunlight was pouring from the sky. So much natural light after the forced unremitting glare of the cell’s lone bulb. He murmured from the morning’s blessings: Blessed is God who opens the eyes of the blind. Only five days had passed, but it seemed years.

Shuki was saying, “Here’s what I predict. The court’s going to keep remanding you. You’ll go before a judge every five days, and if security officers say they need more time to investigate the case, they’ll keep extending your stay.”

“How long could this go on for?”

The skinny lawyer wore a sharp suit today, though he looked a little hungover. “The worst would be a month. Then the state would have to charge you with a crime.”

“A month!” Isaac was stupefied. He said bravely, “That’s not the end of the world.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Shani stolidly making his way to the court.

“Oh really, Mr. Markowitz?” Shuki gave him a pitying look. “Ever hear of administrative detention? That’s always an option. In Israel, they can hold you for no reason, indefinitely. A leftover legal procedure—a present—from the British Mandate.”

“What’s their excuse for keeping me here?”

Shuki snorted. “They’re trying to teach you a lesson that’ll burn in your brain forever. This way, when you get released, you’ll think good and hard before you take any future artifacts to the newspaper.” Shuki gave him a sidelong look. “Would you?”

Isaac tried to keep up with his lawyer’s long-legged giraffe steps. “I honestly can’t predict what I’d do.”

“You know what they really want, don’t you?” Shuki said, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “That Arab worker. They want to question him, to get to the bottom of this.”

Isaac shook his head, twice. “If his own people find out what he’s been doing, he’s as good as slaughtered. And you know it, Shuki.”

“Your choice, Mr. Markowitz.” Shuki wiped at a pouchy eye. “But as long as you don’t mind your new living quarters …”

Isaac fell silent. An impossible situation.

They passed a large parking lot. His eyes bounced off the array of cars, sophisticated and newfangled, contraptions from another planet. He saw a scooter parked between a Subaru and a Toyota Camry. He recognized that Vespa. A white helmet dangled from the handlebars. He turned his head. Twenty yards away sat Tamar perched on a bench near an acacia tree. She held some strands of hair off her face. One leg was tucked under, her ruffled blue dress draped over her knees and calves. How beautiful she looked. Like a fruit-bearing tree in the desert. Lovely, sweet Tamar. She had come for his sake, because she cared for him. The sages wrote, “Righteous women bring the redemption,” and sometimes—he thought this now—a woman could be salvation itself.

“What’s wrong?” Shuki asked him. “Why are you stopping?”

His breath caught. She looked like a country maiden, the wind flirting with her hair as she walked toward him. In her pretty blue dress she appeared a vision of womanhood. Before he could stop himself, he burst out, “I need you, Tamar.” His voice was husky with emotion.

“I’m here,” she said in a steady voice. No “I need you” back.

“Well now.” He touched his beard uncertainly. Something deflated inside him.

“I’m so sorry for everything you’re going through,” she murmured. “Is it really awful?”

He shrugged.

Shuki energetically motioned with both arms toward the magistrate building, to keep them moving. “How much time do we have?” Isaac asked him.

“I’ll find out. It could be a fifteen-minute wait or it might be three hours.”

Tamar turned toward Isaac with determination. “I have to talk to you right away.” But then they stopped in front of a large table that blocked the entrance to the building. Isaac stared at the most massive security he had ever seen. The police guards emptied their pockets and bags, but Shuki, flashing a lawyer’s card, passed through unchecked. Then Isaac and Tamar went through the metal detectors. When they emerged, they followed
Shuki up to the third floor.

Shuki took him aside for a moment. “Be careful what you say here.” Then he tilted his head toward Tamar who was standing a few yards away, looking for something in her purse. “What’s with her? You two … involved?”

Isaac shook his head. “She’s just here to help me.”

His lawyer smiled thinly. “Excuse me, Isaac, you’re a dangerous man. You don’t know anything about women and you don’t know anything about the law.”

Isaac started a moment, then patted his lawyer’s wrist. “Thanks, Shuki, for that information.”

Shuki made notations in a notebook while Tamar and Isaac sat on a long wood bench that extended the length of the high-ceilinged hall.

“So.” Isaac spoke matter-of-factly. “You said you had to talk to me.” He stared ahead at three slight Chinese men in an anxious huddle. Smoke rings touched and blended. Light poured in from old European windows lining entire walls. Each window, big as a door, astonished him. All that extravagant light.

“Yes, it’s about”—she looked down the hall at a guard—“Assaf.”

He nodded. Mustafa was never far from his thoughts. “Tell me what he’s up to.”

Tamar related an insane tale of the custodian kneeling before the stones of the Kotel, crying out things that managed to offend all three religions in one blow. Isaac clamped a hand to his forehead. “
Oy gevalt
, how did he get out of that mess?”

“Well, I had to get him,” she said quietly. “It got a little intense there. And that’s the least of it.” She motioned for him to sit. “He’s got some plan at—uh, Yoffi HaGalil?” Her voice hiked up and then quickly dropped, making secret reference to their code. “He found a new breed of poppies and he wants to remove them—one in particular, this … white poppy I was telling you about. But you know how crazy they are over there. It’s risky business and he knows it. He wants to throw the bag of poppies over—the fence. All different kinds of poppies. He’s got a whole crazy scheme. He even has a date and time set. This coming Tuesday. At nine thirty.”

“But … why?” He stared dumbly at Tamar.

“He keeps saying the poppies don’t belong to him or the sheikh or the Arabs. He says they belong to you.”

“Me?” Isaac’s mouth dropped. What forces had he unleashed in that poor man?

“He says the poppies aren’t safe up there. One of his friends is always poking around. It will be discovered any day, he fears.”

“Still, the whole thing is absurd,” he said. If the Waqf catches him taking antiquities off the mountain, they’ll jail him. If they find out his reason, they might kill him. To make matters worse, the police would think it’s a bomb coming over the Kotel and blast him to bits. “Who would catch this bag, anyway?”

“He wants people from the”—she stopped, apparently stumped for the code word—“ranch staff to be stationed there—at the other side of the fence. Someone would grab the bag and make a dash for it.”

Isaac tried to picture it. How would Mustafa get the bag over? A toss? It would break. Lower the bag by string? Float it down attached to helium balloons? “Meshuga! Tell him I said no!”

Tamar shook her head, and a tendril of red hair fell over her eyes (he had to restrain himself from brushing it off). “That Mu—Assaf, he’s got his own way of doing things. You think I didn’t tell him it’s nuts? But he wants to do it. He keeps saying it’s his present to you.”

Isaac leaned forward, kneading his hat. “A disaster.” He stared at his hat. He’d nearly mangled it. “So what do you think?”

“At first I thought: Forget it, but now …” she threw him a defiant look “I intend to be there. Because Assaf will do it anyway.”

At this, he got to his feet, shocked.

“Don’t stop me, Isaac,” he heard her say.

He looked out the window at Safra Square, at the gleaming new municipality buildings, and back at Tamar. “For God’s sake … it’s insane, Tamar. I never expected this from you. On our trip up north you didn’t seem to like Arabs too much.”

“No, I don’t. Not the Arabs who want to murder us. And excuse me for my prejudice.” Tamar flushed, her chin jutting in a stance both aggressive and defensive. “But I have to do the right thing. I can’t bear to let him down.”

It was no use. He could tell he wouldn’t be able to talk sense into her.
“How’s Mazal?” he asked abruptly. “Did she have an operation yet?”

“In a few weeks.”

“And what about your job?” He sat down beside her.

“You really want to know?” She gazed at a couple sitting across from them, feeding their plump baby. “Oh, forget it.”

“No, tell me.”

“Well,” she rested her chin on clasped fingers “I quit my job—I realized they’d never promote me—and so I got a new one. It’s at a women’s yeshiva and I’ll be a full-fledged fund-raiser.”

He beamed. “That’s wonderful! Is it a good salary?”

“Quite decent.” Then she frowned. “But you should see these twenty-year-old beginners.” She shook her head. “It’s like they’ve got a lock on holiness, only they know where it lives. They’re these
authorities
.”

He chuckled softly. “And where do you think holiness lives?”

Across from them, the plump baby gurgled and reached her tiny fist at a passing smoke ring.

Tamar peeped at him. “Remember that time on the bus when you took off your hat and gave it to the old Yemenite? That’s where.”

He couldn’t speak. Her glance sent a shock of hope through him, making his breath quicken. “So what’s with you and me?” The words just slipped out.

It got quiet.

“I don’t know.” Her fingers crept along the grooves of their bench. “You’re a difficult man, Isaac. One gets the idea that with you it would be uphill forever.” She looked out the window. The light made her hair look lit by fire. “I don’t think you like change that much.”

He straightened. Deny it, say it’s not true. Would he let her slip through his hands again? She did want him, even he could sense this, he—a basically unwanted man. Maybe it was because she wanted a father figure, as he’d once suspected. That bothered him just a little. He blinked. And thought: He wasn’t just a man to her. He represented a world, a structure, the very opposite of chaos. What was he in her eyes if not a talisman, a good luck charm?
Gott in Himmel
—his eyes stared out—
he
was the
segulah
.

“You’re right,” he said, bowing his head. “I don’t care for change.” He stared ahead, past the Chinese men and the couple with the baby until his
eyes fell on Shuki, who motioned “It’s time.”

All through the court proceedings, while Shuki spoke before the judge (a woman this time), and then Commander Shani had his turn, Isaac heard everything through a daze, under a spell. Images of Mustafa scavenging among the Temple Mount debris pushed through his thoughts, then receded. Commander Shani was making his points but he hardly listened.