In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (6 page)

“And neither do I,” he said, though he found her vehemence a little off-putting. “Some tea?” he inquired as a waiter walked by carrying mugs and a small porcelain teapot.

“Tea would be nice.” She nodded her thanks as the waiter poured her a cup. “I must tell you, I never thought I’d seek advice from a man who looks as though he’s wearing an old sheet, but he really is the most sensible person I’ve ever met.”

Isaac nodded. “True, true.” Though again he winced—at the word
sensible
. Too paltry for Rebbe Yehudah. Ach, he was far too zealous of the rebbe’s honor.

“Actually, it’s a kaftan,” he said mildly, and then he countered with a few stories of his own about Rebbe Yehudah, one involving an overdue pregnant lady, the second a lottery, the third a lawsuit—well-told stories from his rebbe repertoire. A few times Mrs. Edelman gazed in amazement or laughed out loud, and her wig shook alarmingly. Isaac was on the verge of relaxing into the conversation, enjoying his tea, when Mrs. Edelman leaned forward and asked, “I hardly know anything about you. Tell me, where did you grow up again?”

“The Lower East Side.”

“Your parents still live there?”

“Actually”—he paused to remove his hat and set it carefully on the seat cushion beside him—“neither of them is alive.”

“I see.” The widow nodded composedly. She pulled her navy skirt a little lower over her knees. “So what did your father do for a living?”

His stomach muscles pinched slightly—the chill of questions to come. Or maybe the hotel’s central air-conditioning was cranked too high. “He was a scrap and salvage man,” he said. “Ran his own business.” About his father, a man with a nineteen-inch neck span and an endless supply of coarse jokes, the less said, the better. Though his father kept the basic traditions of the Torah, it had always struck Isaac that he and his father were made from different batches of dough.

“And your mother …?”

“A wonderful lady,” was all he would allow. Simple, devoted, and practical, but unfortunately, she hadn’t been capable of standing up to her husband’s bullying. “And you?” he tried to divert her.

“My parents?” She touched her collarbone. “No, I’m not finished with you,” she said, now smiling, a little menacingly, it seemed to Isaac. “I heard you were a haberdasher. Somehow I can’t put that together with what you do now in the courtyard.”

“A haberdasher, yes.” Isaac blew on both hands, cracked and scaly with eczema. He remembered his shoe box of a store on the Lower East Side. Here an Italyaner walked in; he bought some
gotchkes
. There, a passerby saw the display window and bought himself a box of T-shirts, wholesale. The storeroom was dusty and full of mouse turd. The radiator hissed in the corner from October to April. The carbon notepads kept track of the orders. Down the street was the electronics store, up the block, Feltly Hats. Sunday afternoons, they were the big time. People went to lunch at Schmulka Bernstein’s and afterward stopped over and bought some caps, a carton of socks, and underwear. The out-of-towners, they never questioned the price. From 1980, when he first opened the store, until 1998, when he moved to Israel, the rent never changed. This was how a man could make a fair living.

“Actually,” he said, suddenly feeling a need to round himself out, “when I was younger, I hoped to teach Torah.” This, over the objections of his father who had wanted him to be an accountant or dentist, something “useful” his father would say. “And I did teach for a bit, too,” he added.

“Really?” Mrs. Edelman sat up, hands clasped in her lap, in a posture of complete receptivity. “You taught Torah?” Her brown eyes fixed on him so encouragingly that all his thoughts and ideas about Jewish education began to spill out, his desire to reach the boys who couldn’t sit still with the books, the ones the other teachers considered beyond hope. He discovered he had a special talent as a youth leader, and people in the community recognized it, too. A few summers, he ran camps. He remembered the boys. Sammy, with the mole above his lip. Aaron, who the other boys had nicknamed Weasel. Loud-mouthed Ira who was adopted. Rough boys who in a year or two would have been unreachable or even delinquents. For reasons unknown to Isaac, they gravitated toward him. Was it because he was a good listener? Or because he could tell a good story? He told them tales from the Talmud; about Resh Lakish, the wildest, most violent bandit of them all, who became a great Talmudic scholar and married Rabbi Yochanan’s beautiful sister; about Rabbi Chisda, who kept
evading the Angel of Death because he never stopped learning Torah; about the sage who proclaimed, “There are no more humble men left in the land of Israel,” and the other sage sitting quietly in the back who roused himself and said, “You forgot about me.” Whatever it took to keep them interested, to keep them there. A few of them stayed. Then, in his early twenties, Isaac became ambitious—he wanted to start a special afternoon program, not quite a school, but almost.

He talked on and on to Mrs. Edelman, about the backer who had lent him a sum of money; and the backer’s fine daughter, the lovely, dark-haired Gitty, who was fired up with the same idealism as himself; the rundown building they’d refurbished together, making their dreams come true; his old yeshiva buddy Heshy, garrulous, sunny, and built like an ox, who he had recruited to help teach since he bore the official title of rabbi, and Isaac’s own rabbinic ordination was at least a year away. He remembered that moment when Gitty had turned to him and said, “You’re going to accomplish amazing things, Isaac.” Those had been the best months in his life, getting ready for the wedding and getting that place into shape, tearing down—

“You were engaged?” Mrs. Edelman broke in.

“Why—” Isaac broke off, stupefied. His ears and neck went cold, then hot. How could he be so stupid as to have relaxed? He was a fool. “Yes, engaged,” he said, and expelled a sour gust of air. “To Gitty.”

“And then …” Mrs. Edelman’s eyes coaxed him on.

“And then, nothing. It didn’t work out. She broke it off.” Simultaneously his elbow began to itch and he was overcome with a near violent urge to yawn. The yawn he smothered with his hand. The itch couldn’t be contained, though, and he scratched through his suit jacket.

She sipped her cup of tea and patted a napkin against her lips. “So your heart was broken,” she concluded.

He was reaching for his hat. “One might say such a thing,” he replied with a small ironic smile, as if to surgically detach himself from his own history. Gitty had broken it off two days before the wedding. She was tearful but wouldn’t explain the breakup, though he begged her to. The day of his canceled wedding, a black tornado of a flu descended upon him that he couldn’t shake for weeks, and he’d had to let all his plans for the school program drop. Anyway, he’d run out of funds. Four months later, Gitty
married Heshy, his recruit, and Isaac finally understood everything. She had chosen his yeshiva buddy, quick-witted, extroverted Rabbi Heshy with the big arms, broad thighs, and slap-happy can-do manner, so different from Isaac, so similar, in fact, to his own father.

“I’m curious. Whatever happened to the school you were planning?”

At this, he signaled a waiter passing with a white teapot. “Care for more tea?” Another yawn overtook him that he tried to cover with his palm. What was wrong with him? Up since 6:00 a.m., he supposed.

Her eyes darted from Isaac to the waiter. “I think it’s getting late,” she said firmly. The waiter shrugged and moved on.

They walked out the hotel lobby, while Isaac viciously scratched his elbow, releasing flakes, he was sure. He waited like a gentleman for her bus to arrive while trying valiantly to stave off more yawns. The night air had a sting to it on this April evening. He wished he had brought a scarf. Cold, itchy, tired. The world—or maybe just his body—could be such an uncomfortable place sometimes. Mrs. Edelman said, “So you’ve been living in the rebbe’s home for a year now?”

“That’s right.” His neck craned for the bus.

“Don’t you want a place of your own? Or perhaps you can’t afford it.”

Why oh why was she asking him these questions when she had already disqualified him? “I can certainly afford my own place. But what a privilege to be able to assist the rebbe. When I marry, I’ll rent my own place. Or maybe buy.” Scratch, scratch.

Mrs. Edelman nodded and let out a big yawn of her own. “Excuse me for saying this,” she threw out as the bus rounded the corner, “but I can’t see you ever getting married, if you’ll forgive me.”

A lump of silence. Then, “Just because you and I are probably not a match,” he said stiffly, “doesn’t mean I’m unmatchable.”

“I know a serious man when I see one,” she stated, and a flush traveled from his itchy sock all the way to the black hat on his head. It was true. All his setups ended like this. Why he even bothered to date was a mystery to him.

“So why waste my time?” the widow went on, reading his mind. “Or anyone’s?”

He pondered this. “A single person can be compared to a captive held in jail, waiting to be redeemed,” he said at last. “He could be saved the next
minute or in another twenty years. One never knows. Don’t the sages say that redemption can come in the blink of an eye?”

Mrs. Edelman let out a faint snort. “I fail to see how that answers my question,” she said, and boarded the bus.

Then he took his own bus back to the courtyard.

At the cottage on Ninveh Street, he hung up his jacket in the tiny hallway closet. Certainly he could afford his own place—and a bigger closet—what with the $15,000 he got in interest every year from his old business he had sold. But a good atmosphere enveloped him here in the home of Rebbe Yehudah and his wife, Shaindel Bracha, not too hot, not too cold. Like a womb, he supposed, that was always the right temperature. When he married, he could always take a job as a clerk somewhere, to supplement his income.

Rebbe Yehudah’s wife stuck her plump head out of the kitchen doorway, though it was late, already past ten in the evening. A piece of classical music played softly somewhere in the cottage—Dvorák? The rebbe favored the work of that composer. “How did it go?” Shaindel Bracha asked, her tightly woven snood covering every speck of hair. She glanced down at his arms, and her pale brown eyes went wide with alarm. “
Oy vey
, you’re bleeding!”

He glanced down and past his scabby bloodied elbow toward a memory, the school Gitty and Heshy had started, modeled so closely after his own (they even had recruited his former students). It was a great success, he’d heard. The school had saved many a teen and young man. As for himself, he never did get his rabbinic ordination.

“It’s nothing,” he said to the rebbetzin, pulling a tube of hydrocortisone from his pocket. He shmeared a fingernail amount onto his elbow, asked after the rebbe’s health, and shuffled off to sleep in his own room next to the study.

On the way back from synagogue the next morning, Isaac saw a small man in a Russian-style cap waiting in the courtyard. “Where do I put this?” the man asked, a pencil tucked behind a cauliflower ear. He pointed to a crate at his feet.

Isaac bent and read the return address on the box. Shaindel Bracha had
been expecting a delivery of white silk fabric for the factory that she and the rebbe oversaw a few blocks away. War veterans stitched intricate pictures of wine goblets, candles, doves, and flowers onto Shabbos challah covers, using a special device that allowed amputees to work with their feet to operate the sewing machine. From this small business and German reparations from the rebbe’s Bergen-Belsen days, the courtyard survived.

“I’ll take it,” he told the delivery man.

Inside the cottage, Shaindel Bracha was stirring about, preparing a hot lemon drink for the rebbe and setting up a huge pot of chicken soup. The rebbe’s flu symptoms had lifted slightly. Isaac set the box against the wall in the hallway. He glanced out the kitchen window while pouring himself a glass of tea. People began drifting into the courtyard—a balding scribe, a depressed matchmaker, a businessman from South America, a Sephardic former soap opera actress. He always told them to come after eight thirty, but some couldn’t or wouldn’t wait.

The morning began. Isaac fielded questions from a portly rabbi who hit his children and wanted to mend his ways, an ex-convict, an eighty-year-old woman who couldn’t sleep in the same room with her husband—the cries emanating from his nightmares destroyed her sleep. How did they all find their way? They just did. Isaac went back and forth, relaying people’s questions to the rebbe and then passing back the answers. And all the while, Shaindel Bracha cooked the food in the tiny kitchen and organized the volunteers who delivered the food packages at the end of the week to needy people. Twice a day, she checked on the sewing factory. The rest of the day she tended to her husband.

Midday, a barren midwife got into a scuffle with the ex-convict, and Isaac had to intervene. Mazal the beggar kept releasing short blasts of flatulence, followed by softer, more elongated rumbles. Whenever she lifted one of her substantial haunches to one side, Isaac noticed how the courtyard people scurried to give her a wide berth. Before Isaac could properly address this situation, he caught sight of thirteen-year-old Dalya, just let out of school. She looked nearly starved, as she always did.