In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (34 page)

From a distance he heard the voice of the trim, elegant judge with brick-red earrings. “What, what is it?” he asked his lawyer who said quietly, “I’m afraid they just remanded you for another five days.” Tears of shock and fury sprang into Isaac’s eyes. What, he was going back there? Through the blur of people—Tamar leaping to her feet, Shuki almost tearfully grasping his arm, Shani smothering a yawn—Isaac saw the gates closing.

Back at the cell, the rank odors from the elimination hole and the men’s crude squabbling and laughter assaulted him. “Well, you’re staying?” the tattooed man asked. Isaac nodded and turned away. He wanted his favorite foods back, the cottage with a toilet that flushed, his tubes of hydrocortisone lined up on the medicine cabinet, his Torah books and good-smelling air. And now there was no one. No Tamar. That gate had shut. Well, it was the right thing, for both of them. Still, he felt no relief. And here he was on the inside, left with himself. So tight, so constricted, he could barely move. Was he ever free? He always managed to find one prison or another, didn’t he? Never free to take, to claim what could be his. As if to take, was to take away from others.

“How much longer you’re here?” the men asked.

“Five days.” Isaac scratched at a wretched eczema patch on his elbow.

A freckled man with a front tooth missing said, “Me, I’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

“So’m I,” said another man whose name Isaac couldn’t recall. The bugeyed man had already been released.

“It’s you and me, Reb Isaac,” said Nissim who threw his muscled arm around Isaac’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’ll use the time for good. We
could even study Torah. Didn’t you say a man has other parts to him?”

Isaac looked up, startled.

The man with the kerchief said, “My interior decorator is back.”

“Shut up, idiot,” said Yigal, and sprayed him with curses. “But you know something, Reb Isaac?” He pinched his pig tattoo. “That jerk got it right. You are my interior decorator—right here,” and he pressed his finger deep into his sternum. “What do I need this tattoo for?” He scowled and throttled the cell bars. “When am I getting my
tzitzit
?” he shouted. “It’s my religious right!”

Nissim and Tommy and Yigal kicked the bars. “We want
tzitzit
, we want
tzitzit
,” they shouted, until by the end of the day, not three but five cell mates could be seen wearing the same white polyester
tzitzit
cloth, forgoing any shirts on top. Their muscled or scrawny or needle-marked arms jutted out from the large open flaps as they walked through the tiny cell, the
tzitzit
’s long tassels twitching at their sides, like the tails of many kites in flight.

Isaac watched in amazement from the begrimed perch of his bunk bed. What had he started? Where would it lead to?

“What’s that?” the soldier asked Mustafa at the entrance checkpoint, pointing to the plastic roll under his arm.

Without saying a word, Mustafa handed it over.

The soldier unfurled the large roll, spread it on the table, and pinched one of the plastic globes. Pop! The pink-cheeked soldier smiled. “Bubble Wrap,” he pronounced. “You’re a worker here, right?” and he handed the roll back, after puncturing another globe or two.

Mustafa clasped the plastic roll and teetered off, before the soldier thought to ask what the Bubble Wrap was for.

He made straight for his hiding place on the Haram. Grunting, he pushed the gourd-like stone off the hole. He gingerly pulled out the bag and spread out the old things: jar bases, pipes, bronze crosses, pottery fragments, ancient seals, oblong pieces the color of turquoise. He crouched low, staring at them all. They needed to be wrapped, but he held himself back and just kept staring. Each told a story. That piece of Islamic blue tile—he remembered when he first found it lying in the rubble. It was like seeing his arm on the ground, about to be crushed. A something made into nothing. The old gray coin—he had spotted that one in a wheelbarrow, about to be carted off, but thanks be to Allah, he had saved it; he had saved so many. But look how many got smashed every day. He saw it with his own eyes. Every day, Sheikh Tawil, the Waqf, and all the workers on the Haram stepped on and crushed and turned these things into dirt, garbage. That’s what they would do if they found his collection. And they might, any day now, especially with Hamdi still poking around and sneaking up on him. The thought of them crushing his things made him sick in his soul, as if they were stomping on his own neck and shoulders.

No, these things were not garbage but treasures. He could have sold
them all to Yusef al-Ghazali. Maybe he could have been a rich man. He could have returned to his village with jewels and presents for all. His whole family, his mother, too, would have surrounded him and said, “Come, come visit us, Mustafa!” He closed his eyes.
Laa
. What was he doing? He rubbed the skin around his neck. Then: No, there was no water to be gotten from that dry rock. Anyway, she would never forgive him, if she knew the truth. He had broken the only piece of jewelry she ever had, a bracelet with brown stones. It happened when he was thirteen, a few days after she had held the iron pronger over him in the middle of the night. The family had gone on a picnic and only he was left behind. Alone, he opened the jewelry box and touched the bracelet. He held it up to the window and the brown stones caught the light and he saw the stones were golden, not a flat brown. Then two stones popped out just like that, and he was so frightened he buried the bracelet and the stones deep in the earth, near a goat’s pen. His mother discovered it was gone a week later. She wailed and nearly tore off her eyebrows. All his sisters fought among themselves, saying the bracelet should have been theirs when they got married one day. Oh, even if he brought her all the presents in the world his mother would never forgive him, if she knew the truth.

He let out a loud sigh and rubbed his closed lids, and he saw the rabbi and the girl. Ah, look, Rabbi, he breathed, see what I bring to you with my two hands. No more stealing, no more selling these things. I protected them for you. These are for you, they belong to you. His knees pressed into the ground as he peered tenderly into the hole. He spread his hands over the opening and parted his fingers in two as if he had been a kohein his entire life. He wasn’t a kohein and never would be. Why would he want to be like a Jew? But the love that came from between the priest’s fingers—maybe this would be okay to have.

But he had hurt Miss Tamar. He had seen the red mark on her wrist. He had done this with his own rough hand, and he would repent for this mean thing all his remaining days.

He wrapped the pieces once, twice, three times, the dove at least seven, so that it looked like a small soccer ball. He sang softly,
“Sali ala al-nabi, sali ala al-nabi
,” so that the holy Prophet would assist him. Mohammed, peace be upon him and salvation, was a man of truth, not lies. The Prophet would have rescued these precious things himself, Mustafa was sure, but
now only he was here to do the job. A man who didn’t speak or act when action was required was no more than a mute devil. So his father once said, and he never forgot it. After he wrapped the old things in Bubble Wrap and taped them down, he realized he had a problem. The bag was too big. How would he fit it back into the hole? He grabbed his dustpan and pronger, and dug and dug until the hole was big enough to receive the bag. And there he hid it. He wouldn’t even allow himself another peek into the bag. It was too dangerous. Others might see, and then all would be lost. So it must be kept secret. The big day was coming and he had to be prepared.

On his way to clean the bathrooms, he got stopped by a young boy from the elementary school. “Please, Mister Garbage Head, could you get my ball down?” He pointed to a ball stuck high in the stubby arms of an olive tree. With a clever push of his dustpan, Mustafa freed the ball and it went bouncing, bouncing down the steps leading away from the Golden Lady, and the boy scrambled after his ball with not a word of thanks.

“Any bananas today?” Isaac asked the cook’s assistant, a bulbous-nosed man with a head shaped like a baked apple. He was doling out watery eggs onto a plastic plate.

“What do you think this place is—a restaurant?” the assistant wisecracked.

Isaac lowered his head. If he had learned anything in jail, you didn’t make trouble with the cook or his assistant. As he took his plate of cottage cheese and eggs toward a table, he saw a uniformed man pass by with a thick pelt of black hair. Commander Shani. Isaac blinked. Then the man was gone.

Isaac stood, clenching the sides of his breakfast tray. The commander often made brief appearances walking through the jail section or mess hall, and each time it took a minute for Isaac to get his bearings.

He found a table in the far corner where Yigal and Tommy were eating. Yesterday he managed to snag a banana, but not today. Too bad. A banana would have gone nice with the cottage cheese. He removed a hair from the eggs. His beard, now much thicker, was constantly shedding. As he stared at his unappetizing breakfast he wondered about Dalya with the eating problem—had she put on any weight? What about the
segulah
singles? Maybe there’d be some weddings to go to when he finally got out of here. How was the rebbetzin managing on her own? He tried to imagine her in the courtyard, talking to people, tilting her head in her warm way as she chopped celery and carrots. She would be different from her husband in the way she tended to people. Who wants imitations? he thought, and he remembered how Tamar once said that to him. A verse from Psalms came at him out of nowhere: “My soul thirsts for you, my whole body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where
there is no water.” Isaac closed his eyes a moment. He wanted Tamar.

Nissim slid a breakfast tray next to his. Tommy and Yigal at the other end of the table both looked up for a moment and then slouched over their food.

They ate their breakfast in comradely silence while the noise of the cafeteria crashed down all around them.

“Uh, Reb Isaac, I have to tell you something.” Nissim picked up his fork and poked a tine under a dirt-encrusted nail. “I was praying the other day …”

Isaac broke in, “Really?”

Nissim finished, “I was praying for them to keep you in jail a little longer.” His fork dropped, and it made a clattering sound. “Just a few more days,” Nissim said pleadingly. “Is that like a big sin?”

Isaac had no idea what to say. Yigal and Tommy at the other end were looking on curiously, and Nissim’s Adam’s apple was working overtime. “No, it’s not a sin,” Isaac said, and Nissim smiled.

Yigal threw down his waxy napkin. “Reb Isaac, I got to ask you something, too.”

Isaac gazed over at Yigal in his sleeveless T-shirt, and his eyes went past the pig tattoo so quickly he might not even have noticed it. “So ask.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped this messing around, whatever it is you do out there”—Yigal flicked a hand in upward dismissive waves—“and start putting your head here,” he jabbed a finger into air, as though poking holes into dough, “where it belongs, in this jail?”

“Eh—What?” Isaac looked at Nissim and Tommy and they were nodding along with Yigal’s question. “What do you mean?”

“Be our rabbi here in jail. Take care of us,” said Tommy. “ ’Cause you know we’ll be staying when you leave.”

A heat suffused Isaac’s face and neck. He saw the appeal in their bleary eyes. They wanted him? He didn’t know what to say. These men, they were from another planet. They appalled him with their spitting and curses and blasts of flatulence apropos of nothing. They talked about their girlfriends and wives in the most disgusting manner. And they stole and stabbed—lots of them. Sometimes he was too scared to sleep in their presence. They brought him painfully back to his father’s world, at the junkyard, a rough-and-tumble place of coarse, hard men. Besides, he needed so
much fixing himself.
He
would be
their
rebbe? And yet … just the other day, he said to Nissim, “No, you shouldn’t call your girlfriend a mattress. This is not to be done.” Nissim made a motion with his head, as though listening. The others listened, too. When he spoke of how a man should earn his money or care for his elderly parents or rest from working on the Sabbath, they listened some more. Could a flock know enough to want its shepherd?

Isaac blew his nose with feeling. “Come, let’s make a
l’chaim
,” he said to the men. He was saying neither yes nor no, only that he thought it was good. He gestured toward their plastic cups of watery milk. Something in the awkward manner in which they stood reminded him of the boys from his long ago summer youth groups. They touched their cups together, until Isaac saw Gilad glaring at them, and he sat back abruptly.

Isaac returned to his miserable breakfast. Actually, the runny eggs didn’t taste so bad anymore, or maybe it just didn’t matter. As he chewed and swallowed, a rich feeling settled on him. He touched his beard, his jaw, the bones that made up his face. Here in jail, alone, in this tight, filthy place, he felt vivid to himself and to others, a man in his own right.