Read Online In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman - Free Book Online Page B

thought. He didn’t know what the word meant. A cousin once said, “Your mother didn’t protect you. She left you alone in the tub when you were an infant. Twice you nearly drowned. Luckily your father saved you.” It was not once his father had saved him, and not a few times either, but many times.
    He said out loud, “You know, when I ask my mother when I can visit, she tells me it’s not a good day or it’s raining too hard or she has a backache. For many years I haven’t stepped into the village, though she likes the presents I send—the Wella Balsalm shampoo, American toothpaste, things like that. Whenever I broke or spilt something, she said, ‘Expect seven misfortunes from the cripple and forty-two from the one-eyed man’ or some other proverb, though she knows I’m not a cripple. And not one-eyed, either.” Here, he rubbed one eye hard with the back of his wrist. “Once, she cursed me. She said I made my father ill, that I brought misfortune on the family.” But it wasn’t true. His father would play backgammon after work with the other men. He would take Mustafa with him—this was when he was seven or eight and still couldn’t speak and people looked at him like he was dust or maybe a monster—but his father brought him and let him throw the dice, too:
Here, Mustafa, you bring me luck
.
    The rabbi stared. “Your mother said you bring misfortune?”
    “Yes. Instead of honor, she said I bring humiliation on the family. Everything I do is a humiliation. Sometimes I think because I live, that, too, is a humiliation.”
    Rabbi Isaac winced. “Terrible.” He fell silent. Then he asked, “Does she have other children who can take care of her?”
    “Yes, my brothers and sisters all take turns. She’s between seventy and eighty.”
    “Is your father still alive?”
    “No. My father was good to me. He made sure I had proper shoes, with no holes. Once, he took me on a picnic.”
    “All by yourself? That’s nice,” the rabbi remarked.
    “No, with the whole family. Usually I stayed behind. My mother thought if others saw me, no one would want to marry my brothers and sisters. But this time, my father said no, the boy comes with us. In the end, they all married but not me.”
    The rabbi massaged his eyes behind his glasses. “Wait a minute,” he said, and went into the cottage. Mustafa sat. A woman with a red kerchief tied under her chin sat next to him on the bench. Her stomach stuck out like a pregnant woman’s, but she looked too old to be carrying a baby. Mustafa was glad to not sit alone, but then the woman gave him a harsh look and raised one shoulder nearly up to her ear and turned, as though a wall now stood between them. “
Tzedakah, tzedakah
,” she rasped in a low, guttural voice as she shook a dented can.
    Oh, a beggar, he thought. The swish of the can, the clattering of the coins, the woman’s chanting all filled his brain, and he said out loud,
“Tzedakkah
,” just because he liked how the word sat on his tongue and how it sounded like the Arabic word for charity—
sadaqah
. The woman stopped rattling the can. She looked at him through furious dark slits, her can raised. Mustafa crouched, shielding his face with his arm. He heard the slam of the door and the shuffle of feet, and glimpsed Rabbi Isaac approaching. He pried the woman’s can away. “Mazal, if you ever …” the rabbi said in an angry voice.
    “I wasn’t going to touch him,” she bleated, turning toward Mustafa. “Even though he was sitting in my place and trying to steal my customers,” she said, pouring her hot angry breath over the custodian.“He needs to know who’s the boss here.”
    “Perhaps you should take note who the boss is,” Rabbi Isaac said, and his eyes flicked toward the tops of the trees and even higher. “I won’t let you bother my friend here, or anyone, for that matter.”
    Mustafa waved a hand to dismiss the episode (but did the rabbi really call him a “friend?”), when he got