In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (4 page)

She looked weary. “Yeah. If I have to. But what the hey. Rent’s due,” she said, snapping on her helmet. “I’ll take anything. Thanks.”

“It’s a new beginning,” he called after her. “You got fired. Changes are happening, Tamar. The wheels are already turning.”

Mustafa sat near the front of the bus, surrounded by the pale
yahudi
with their crazy Jew hats—the flat, furry ones, the tall black ones, too many kinds. He breathed in and caught a whiff of potatoes and sweat and old clothes. If only he could move his head so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at them, but his stupid cabbage head refused to turn, was stuck always looking over his shoulder, at others. They were staring back at him, too, while they squeezed their hairy chins or twirled their long side locks growing out of their ears.
Ya’allah
, he groaned. When would the driver give the signal to get off the bus? Why was he doing this, going to Ninveh Street to find the Jew Isaac Markowitz? But he knew why.

From the moment the Jew had looked straight into his eyes and said the word
kohein
, strange things had been happening. One night, the
yahudi
’s address fell straight into his dream, just like that: Seven Ninveh Street. Then the next day, he peeked over the big Jew wall and had seen a powerful sight: Jews acting like his Muslim brothers. With his own eyes he saw them take off their shoes to pray! They stretched out their arms and fingers from under white shawls and rocked and sang a strange prayer. He crept over to a big-bellied policeman who stood guard at the Gate of Magharbeh. He pointed. “Please, sir, what are they doing down there?” The Israeli gave him a what’s-it-to-you look but leaned over the ledge to see for himself. Immediately he smacked a hand over his eyes. “They are koheins,” he wheezed. “It is forbidden to look at them when they say that prayer.” Mustafa gaped. Even this brazen Israeli sinner showed respect for the kohein!

Most strange of all—he was passing through the souk and he saw a dusty postcard on the ground, near the Gate of the Cotton Merchant. He turned it over—what a noble-looking man in fine white garments! On his
chest sparkled many colored stones, and on his head he wore a pointed shiny cap. Tiny gold bells and pomegranates hung from the hem of his loose robe. And there at the bottom of the postcard he read: The High Priest, the kohein. Kohein, kohein, kohein. When the curly-haired tour guide on the mountain mentioned kohein to a small group, Mustafa nearly tripped. Everywhere he turned, the word was coming at him. All this, he concluded, was a sign from Allah.

The driver nodded his head at him and Mustafa eased himself off the bus onto Kings of Israel Street. He tried to get his bearings without his tools to lean on.

“Which way to Ninveh Street?” he asked a scrawny man in a black coat hovering over a newspaper as if hungry for all the bad news in the world.

The man pointed a skinny white finger and said, “Go left at the luggage shop,” then went back to his newspaper. Mustafa rubbed his right shoulder, which always ached from the extra weight of his crooked head. And if he happened to forget about his head, others reminded him. Just this morning, while he’d been eating his lunch, he spotted two workers near Solomon’s Stables who were playing some kind of game. Maybe he could join, too—the foolish thought crossed his mind—and he came closer. They were walking sideways, he saw, a head twisted over the shoulder. They kept bumping into each other and falling to the ground. A hot knife of shame went through Mustafa. He looked away, but then he saw the imam cover his mouth, as if to hold back a chuckle. Even the imam. The knife went in deeper. Would the Jews also call him
moak
—Twisty-Head—the way they did in his village and everywhere? His face darkened and he staggered on, moving sideways, sighing to himself. Well, maybe not all Jews. Maybe not the Jew Markowitz, at least.

He tilted and listed past a small grocery with boxes of candles out front, and then, after making a left at the luggage shop, clomped along the street with its rows of cottages and low apartment buildings. A stout woman with meaty arms stood on her balcony flogging her carpet as though it were Satan. The smell of fish baking, the singsong of girls’ chanting jump rope rhymes in their long dresses, the hiss and mutter of prayers coming from half-open latticed windows, none of it mattered to Mustafa. His eyes scanned the homes as he squinted for the correct address. At last he arrived at Seven Ninveh Street.

As he entered, he gently touched the black spokes of the courtyard’s iron gate. First he saw a pregnant woman. What a mountain of a stomach she had, rising like plump dough begging to be punched down. Mustafa ducked, looking for a big tree to hide behind but found only a scraggly olive tree. Back in his village, the pregnant women gasped and turned corners when they saw him, ran into neighbors’ homes with their eyes covered. He knew why. They were scared the babies inside them would end up like him. Luckily, this pregnant one had turned her eyes down, down into her prayer book.

A dark-haired little boy with freckles gazed wide-eyed at Mustafa. Little boys made him nervous. One minute a friend, the next minute an enemy, putting a stick in your path to trip you, burping in your face, throwing pebbles at your back. He groped in his pocket for some kind of knickknack to give the child and came up only with a bus slip. He thought of the toys the kind Christian lady had given him when he was a young boy, but he’d had to hide them from his parents. A Muslim’s soul can’t be bought, they would have shouted at him, though his parents hardly prayed or studied the Koran like their more religious neighbors. He almost buried the toys, then decided no: it made him too sad. The Christian lady then showed him the library, how anyone who could be quiet was welcome there, and she taught him to read—Arabic and English and some Hebrew. After he got comfortable among the aisles and shelves, he figured out a good hiding place for the toys: in the back of
Encyclopedia Brittanica
, volume
X
or
Z
, or the history books of countries that no one cared about. In this way he kept the toys for almost a year, and then one day, they were gone. A librarian must have dusted the shelves. What did it matter? He remembered most how the Christian lady told him he was smart and clever with languages, and that it was the biggest shame in the world he never went to school. He liked to repeat these words, not the biggest-shame part, but the clever-with-languages part.

The freckled little boy was crouching in the dirt. Thanks be to Allah, he had found a lizard to torment. A rich soup smell came from somewhere in the courtyard. He turned his head to follow it and saw the Jew from the souk, Isaac Markowitz, in a black jacket like all the other Jews in this place, and when he spoke, the men and women listened very hard like he was an imam or what they called a rabbi. Yes, a rabbi, Mustafa decided.
Oh, why had he come? he chided himself. A mistake. “Never trust the Jew,” his mother always said, and he never would. But then his mother was always saying, “Never trust Mustafa. He’ll mess up everything.”

The
yahudi
, Isaac Markowitz, approached him. Mustafa beheld a tall man with skin the color of an onion, a nose like a parsnip, skinny lips buried in his short black-and-gray beard, and bony hands dipping into his pockets only to jump out a moment later. “Shalom,” he said, standing before Mustafa. “Did we meet once?” Before Mustafa could answer the question, a prick of light flickered in the man’s watery eyes. “I remember you.” The tall man spoke a stiff, choppy Hebrew. Why, he, Mustafa, spoke better Hebrew than that. “We met in the Old City.”

Mustafa tilted backward and almost lost his balance.
Ya’allah
. They had met two weeks ago, and yet the Jew remembered. “Yes,” he said. “We met in the souk. I am Mustafa. And you are Rabbi Isaac.”

The tall man coughed into his pale fist. “Actually, no. Just call me Isaac.” But Mustafa shook his head. Even he, an Arab man, could tell that here stood a rabbi.

They looked at each other a minute, neither of them speaking. Mustafa could tell the rabbi was surprised he had come, even though the man had told him to. But people said things all the time. Mustafa should have known it meant nothing. Once again, his own stupidity had deceived him.

They walked to a stone bench under an olive tree and sat down. An old woman brought over a bowl of oranges. The rabbi motioned for him to take. Mustafa stared at the bowl as though it were some test or trick and shook his head.

“Tell me, Mustafa, something must have brought you here.” The man paused. “Not every day does an Arab man from the Temple Mount come to the courtyard.”

Mustafa opened his mouth but nothing came out. He thrust his hands into his pockets as if he might find his words there. He never should have come.

The rabbi leaned his head toward him. “Some spirit must have brought you here, yes? After all, you must be a very spiritual man. You’re in a very exalted profession. You’re taking care of our mountain, keeping it clean.”

Here Mustafa nodded. A feeling of joy came over him. “Do you remember”—he hesitated—“how you said I was like the kohein?”

The man paused then nodded.

“Well, I want to know, what does the kohein do?”

The rabbi ran his thin fingers through his speckled beard. “Do?” he repeated in a polite though confused voice.

“Yes, yes,” Mustafa said. “What does he do in your”—he faltered, then allowed—“temple?”

“Well, let’s see.” The rabbi’s eyes grew thoughtful. “The priest led the sacrifices, slaughtered the animals, sprinkled blood,”—he flicked his fingers outward as if throwing spices into many pots—“directed the prayers and confessionals, he—”

“No, tell me. What did he do like”—here his voice dropped—“me?”

Rabbi Isaac’s hands paused in mid-air. He looked at Mustafa through mismatched eyes, one light blue, the other gray.

“You said I was like a kohein,” Mustafa explained. “But a kohein is very important, and I …” he trailed off as he glanced at his old work clothes.

“Oh.” Rabbi Isaac was quiet. Then he began to speak. “He burned incense on the altar each morning when he cleaned out the lamps. He lit the lamps the night before. He swept up the ashes from the sacrifices. He maintained a plumbing system on the Temple Mount. This way it was easy to clean up the blood.”

“Me too,” Mustafa said, tapping his chest. He cleaned the bathroom, he made sure to replace the burned-out bulbs. He swept and hosed down the place, just like the kohein. Mustafa gazed in wonder. “Now I understand. The kohein is a janitor.”

The rabbi rubbed his parsnip nose. “I—” He scratched the side of his jaw. “In a way, yes. A holy custodian,” he assented. “The word
kohein
means ‘to serve.’ It says in our Torah, God chose Israel to be a nation of koheins, of priests—chosen to serve.”

At these words, Mustafa’s head exploded with happiness. Picked by Allah! To serve! A moment later his mind went black, like a prayer rug had been thrown over his head. “Allah only picked the Jews?” He said this with disbelief and despair.

“A good father makes each of his children feel chosen,” the Jew said
with a cryptic smile hovering on his skinny lips. “Each child has a special task in this world.”

Mustafa struggled to understand. He fished around in the dark of his mind and a memory came to him: “Once, my father, peace upon him, said to my brother Tariq: ‘You are the brains of the family.’ And to another brother he said ‘the hands,’ because he could fix things; and to my sister Samira, he said ‘the face,’ because she was pretty and made others look pretty, and soon everyone had a part of the body, except for me.” He paused, thinking about that day, when his father had been alive and healthy. “And when my father saw me sad because he had nothing left to give, he said, ‘You, Mustafa, are the back of the family.’ I didn’t understand, but now I do. A back must bear the weight of heavy things. So must I.”

At this, the Jew’s eyes opened very, very wide.

Mustafa stood, his feet quick and happy. “Thank you,” he said. “Good-bye.” He wanted to say the word, taste it in his mouth:
kohein
. At the gate, he turned his head and saw the Jew sitting on the stoop, kneading the skin on his neck, staring after Mustafa with a puzzled expression. Mustafa scuttled away. He had got what he had come for.
Good-bye, Jew, and thanks
.

The next day, as Mustafa coaxed peanut shells into his dustpan, he caught his image in the mosque’s glittering windows. He patted down his beard, smoothed the brown and gray coils of his hair so he didn’t look scruffy. “
Ya’allah
, Mustafa, you’re a handsome kohein, yes you are.” A kohein’s work was dirty work—all that mess of blood and entrails. A kohein couldn’t be weak or delicate. He had to be strong to hold down the animal, to insert the knife, to not fear the blood. He was picked by Allah for this work. Chosen to serve. Like a fragrant spice can change the taste of meat or good music can change the mood in an entire house, a single word had lifted him.
Kohein
.

He speared a piece of cardboard, a sheet of a newspaper, and a baby’s sock: “Three in one blow!” he exulted. He moved stealthily between trees and rocks, between the Golden Lady shrine and the Gray Lady Al-Aqsa mosque, between groups of worshippers leaving and tourists coming, and he searched and found the stray bag, the crumpled paper, the half-eaten
cookie. His arms were strong, knotted with muscles. He was a warrior, he was serving Allah. His crooked head was a perfect camouflage. No one expected him to lunge and spear when he did.