In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (20 page)

He beckoned her over to the shaded, gloomy dirt area. “My daughter eloped,” she said in a tight voice. Her left eye batted, seized by a passing tic.

He took off his glasses. “Come again?”

“Yes, an elopement.”

He gazed at the widow, awestruck. Could Mrs. Edelman produce a daughter so heedless or so romantic?

“If this gets known it will bring disgrace on both families. They took off just like that—no invitations, no wedding, no ceremony, no band. Can you imagine? What is this, Eilat or Las Vegas? A free-for-all? And I still have my other children to marry off. Ach.” She let out a short blast of exasperated air, and her brown wig bangs fluttered on her forehead. “The shame of it.”

“Does anyone know?” he inquired.

“No one, thank God!” she said vehemently, flicking a dust flake off the cuff of her jacket sleeve. “Just the parents.”

What would the rebbe have advised? In an instant he knew: “Mrs. Edelman, you must fake the wedding. Send out the invitations, rent the hall, and make a wedding Jerusalem will remember. No one will know the difference.” Quick thinking, he congratulated himself. She merely reached into a straw purse and handed him an envelope.

“That’s the wedding invitation. Done. The date is set two weeks from tomorrow,” she announced as he perused the folded stiff paper with the couple’s gold initials artfully intertwined. “The problem is, how can we say the blessings under the canopy using God’s name?”

Ah, now he understood. He thumped his forehead. To repeat God’s name—to pronounce it in vain—was forbidden, a desecration. And God’s name had already been uttered when they’d eloped at a private ceremony. The couple was in a fix. He paced the dirt expanse, almost squashing a tiny lizard scrabbling over a leaf. Then an idea struck him. “How about this. The rabbi can bungle God’s name. He can say it this way.” He recited the blessing so fast no one could possibly know he had made up a phony name of God.

Mrs. Edelman came closer. “Say that again?” He did:
Baruch Ata Yadinoy Hellowaynu Melech …

She nodded, half-smiling as she weighed the idea, only to shake her head sharply a moment later. “You have any idea who’s coming to this wedding?” She named the most illustrious scholars and rabbis of Jerusalem, Bnai Brak, Safed and Haifa. “They’d realize in a second it’s a mock ceremony. Oy. What were they thinking?” she uttered, deeply vexed.

“But the groom—he’s a good boy?” he probed.

She dabbed at her eye with a finger. “Thank God for that.”

“I’ll work on it,” he promised. The plight of the eloping couple had seized his imagination. A proper yeshiva boy and a modest devout girl had broken all Jerusalem norms. He marveled: To be that caught up in love with each other! To throw caution and one’s relatives to the wind! He scratched a patch of psoriasis behind his ear, inflamed by these thoughts.

During the week an idea for the couple would come to him, then seconds later he would dismiss it. This was no ordinary question. It required
a sage, more than a sage. Someone like Rebbe Yehudah who cared so much about the person, somehow he would arrive at the right answer. A thought niggled at Isaac’s brain: Did he care so much about Mrs. Edelman? He didn’t know if he even liked her! How did a person help someone he didn’t even like? Ach, what difference did it make? He had a problem on his hands, a baffling one. And he did want to succeed in the courtyard, as much as he was reluctant to admit this. So far it was a mixed bag. People came, he observed, mostly out of loyalty to the rebbe and rebbetzin.

Isaac contacted three of the most prominent rabbis in the States. Even these seasoned scholars were stumped. He was getting nervous, though Shaindel Bracha would reassure him from time to time, “Don’t worry, the answer will come.” The rebbetzin’s confidence both amused and annoyed him—did she expect the answer to drop from the sky?

Four days before the wedding—halfway into June—Shaindel Bracha came to him one afternoon when he sat in the kitchen, eating his lunch during a lull. She held a big Talmud flat against her lavender apron, her light brown eyes glinting with good news. “I was going through my husband’s bookcases the other day. He had bent a few pages—see? And I was making them flat, see?—so they all lined up neatly. Well, one of the pages opened to the section of the wedding laws. A nice coincidence.” She set down the mammoth Talmud for him to read. His eyes scanned: “ ‘Soon it shall be heard in the plains of Judea and the outskirts of Jerusalem; A voice of gladness, a voice of joy, a voice of a groom, a voice of a bride.’ ” He lifted his eyes and took a sip of juice. “So?”

She tilted her head. “Don’t you realize? Here’s what the officiating rabbi should do: Prior to the ceremony, let him study precisely this section in the Gemara devoted to marriage. When he reaches the ‘Seven Blessings’ section, he should stop and save that part for the wedding ceremony. The rabbis can then continue studying and legitimately recite the seven blessings out loud, with God’s actual name, and no one would be the wiser.”

Isaac’s elbow jiggled and his juice spilled near the Talmud.
“Gottenyu!”
He stared at the text, his lips twitching as he read, and then gazed in shock at the rebbetzin. “You’re right—it is sheer genius! Who told you this?”

“I—” she opened her mouth. Her plump white cheeks flushed. She said finally, “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he demanded.

“Oh, just a hunch.”

“Try me,” he insisted.

“Well, you see, I—” Her hands, red from kitchen work, splayed outward. “What difference does it make? If the answer works, use it.” With the hem of her apron, she discreetly wiped at the spilled juice.

Isaac hastily closed the Talmud and kissed it. She was right. Let him simply be grateful to whoever the Talmudic genius was. Obviously, only a true scholar could have arrived at such an ingenious solution. And yet, how simple it was, how clever, kind, and absolutely legal. Right away he phoned Mrs. Edelman with the proposed solution, and the widow was beside herself with happiness—and respect, for once. The wedding took place not long after in the Hotel Tamir to the great relief of both sets of parents.

After all the commotion subsided, Isaac was left with a strange feeling. Who could this man be who had figured out what had eluded the top sages of America? Only one person had that capacity. Rebbe Yehudah. He shivered.

A week later, he and Shaindel Bracha were in the rebbe’s study going through his books and papers. It was siesta time, when the children came home from school, and the courtyard took a brief break.

“You know what amazes me?” he said.

Shaindel Bracha blew off a string of dust from a book binding and shook her head.

“I can’t stop thinking about the solution to Mrs. Edelman’s problem,” he said.

“Thank God, it worked out for the best.” She shut the book with a clap and the little ties of her head scarf gave a jump.

He gave her a sidelong look. “And who came up with that solution again?”

“I don’t believe I ever told you.”

“Well, I wish you would. Did the answer just fall into your lap?” he said with a faint snort.

She glanced at him, then opened another book, flipped through the pages and wiped the cover. “Actually, yes,” she said suddenly, and wedged
the book back onto the shelf. “Who do you think bent down those passages in the Gemara? My husband, may he rest in peace, just before he died.” She wiped down the book with a damp cloth, kissed it, and returned it to the shelf. “Don’t you realize? It was like a finger pointing straight at the passage telling us what to do.”

His mouth dropped. “Are you saying your husband is sending you messages?” His voice spiked on the last word.

She shrugged.

And he remembered her words from a few weeks ago: “Some people are alive even when they’re dead. I hear my husband speaking to me every day.”

He stared at her forehead and white cheeks, flecked with dust. He had heard of such things. Messages sent via dreams and who knows what other methods. The whole notion was more than disturbing. He didn’t abide by such methods. Dead is dead. “Is that why you’re looking through his books now? Trying to find more”—he coughed delicately—“messages?”

“Don’t mock me, Isaac. I’m just dusting.” She gave him a tired, sharp glance, and began inspecting another book. “So tell me. What’s happening with the pomegranate?”

He gathered up some loose pens from the bookshelves. “Not much.”

She raised a silver brow. “What do you mean by not much? What about that reporter …”

“Yossi?” He placed the pens in a chipped mug. “I left him a message but got no answer.”

She merely fixed him with those silver brows, and he raised his arms in self-defense. “All right, all right, I’ll try again.”

Alone in the rebbe’s study, he couldn’t help thinking the rebbetzin had short-circuited their conversation, it had made her that nervous. Could the rebbe really be communicating to his wife via the grave? Ridiculous! And yet, the past year in the courtyard, he had seen enough to know anything was possible. But no miracles had yet to occur in his own life. No seed had taken root. The rebbe had died too soon.

He glanced out the window. No supplicants in the courtyard except for two odd fellows—a short man in too-tight brown pants, and a tall one in baggy, elephantine trousers—odd, not only because of their clothing but also because they kept to themselves, not once approaching him. He
watched them now as they pored over their large prayer books. But why come here if only to pray? Well, he supposed for some the courtyard itself was a magnet. He listened to his phone messages. One from Suri, the matchmaker. Another message: Mr. Shmolensky the widower wanted to join him for Shabbos lunch.

He stood by the phone, at a loss. How he hated a machine full of messages to return. But if there were no messages waiting for him, he stalked the cottage like a man bereft. Isaac glanced out the window again. Still, no one there. He might as well call Yossi, he decided. The answering machine picked up. Over some loud, random-sounding music—jazz?—he heard the reporter’s voice bleat out, “Yep, it’s Yossi. Can’t get to the phone. Leave a message. Then wait by your phone until I get a chance to call you back,” followed by a ghoulish bout of maniacal laughter. Isaac rolled his eyes. “What’s happening with the ‘story of the century’?” he said into the phone. “Hopefully you meant this century. Do get back to me.” Just before he hung up, he heard a clicking noise. He stared askance at the receiver. Was there another phone somewhere in the cottage? Probably a malfunction.

Then he stared out the window and waited, not for Yossi’s return call or even a courtyard case, but for something, something else. And he thought of the rebbetzin and Mrs. Edelman and all the world’s widows, waiting for their husbands’ messages from a different world, plucking them up as they cleaned and tidied, a crumpled note found in a pocket, an old sock in the back of a drawer, a button under the bed.

The sun had it in for him: hot, hot, hot. His ears and eyelids were streaming with sweat; it hurt his eyes to blink. Mustafa bumped and dragged along Bab el-Silsileh Road until he located a carpentry shop, and next to it a sign: Al-Ghazali Antiquities Inc. A young girl in a flowing
jalabeeya
glided by, a basket of sabra fruit balanced on her head, her steps so graceful every shopkeeper leaned out of his stall to watch her.

A white-haired vendor sitting on a reed-bottomed chair offered him water, and then pointed to his own neck and held up a packet of aspirin. “No thanks, father,” Mustafa said to the elderly man, though a minute later a stitch crackled and burned in the knob of his neck. Oh, why had he said no to the aspirin? Fool! Wisdom always came to him a minute late.

The antiquities shop looked like Miss Tamar’s office, with its gray cabinets and files and fresh white walls. A cactus plant squatted on a ledge. Behind a counter stood a tanned man with a kaffiyeh and sunglasses, and he smiled at Mustafa as if the custodian were the equal of any Arab.
“Salaam Aleykum
,” he said to Mustafa in a low voice as soothing as warm milk. “I am Mr. Kareem.” He put his hands, parched and older-looking than the rest of him, on the counter, and his two thumbs circled and caressed each other like lazy seals sunning and playing on a rock.

“I wish to speak to Yusef al-Ghazali.” Mustafa worried the kink at the base of his neck and looked around.

“He’s out for the day. I am his assistant.” The thumbs continued to caress each other. “How can I help you?”

Mustafa opened his plastic orange bag to reveal a marble stick, slim and elegant. Mr. Kareem pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead and touched the stick with the tip of one finger and then the other. “Where did you get this?” he asked in his soft, milky voice.

“From one of the wadis.”

“One of the wadis,” Mr. Kareem repeated, gently pulling his sunglasses back into place. “Well, it is pretty. Maybe someone will want it. I will give you sixteen shekel for it.” His hands came together and the thumbs resumed their languid dance.

Mustafa looked at the marble stick. What could he buy with only sixteen shekels? Maybe a scarf for his mother and that was all.