One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross

by Harry Kemelman

  It was a large room with oriental rugs scattered about, and full of massive furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were all kinds of brass lamps on teakwood tables. The walls were almost covered with tapestries or small, finely woven oriental rugs.

  “It’s like a room in a museum,” Skinner went on. “My grandfather collected most of it, although my father added to it as well. I suppose some of the things are worth something these days. I’d be inclined to get rid of all of it and make a modern room out of it, but Martha would be horrified and probably would never forgive me. She dusts and polishes in here as though it were a shrine. Actually, I have occasionally entertained some of my Arab customers here, because they’re apt to be impressed by that sort of thing. Let’s go upstairs to my office. We’ll be more comfortable there.”

  The room was as much a living room as it was an office. Most of the space was taken up by a large sofa, upholstered chairs, and a coffee table. However, to be sure, on one side was a large, old-fashioned rolltop desk, its top covered by a mass of papers, old letters, bills, receipts, the corners of those that protruded from the bottom of the pile yellow with age. All the pigeonholes were stuffed with business cards and folded-up papers. Jammed against it was an old swivel chair covered with worn and in places torn black leather. Beside the desk was a modern metal file cabinet. And on the other side was a modern metal flat-topped desk at which a youngish Arab was working. He immediately jumped to his feet when they entered.

  “Get us some coffee, Ismael. And some of those cookies that Martha bakes,” said Skinner.

  “Yes, Mr. James. Regular or Turkish?”

  Skinner looked inquiringly at the rabbi, who said, “Regular for me. Black.”

  “I’ll have the same, Ismael. And we’ll have it here.”

  “Yes, Mr. James.”

  “Martha is always annoyed when I serve coffee to a guest here in my office,” Skinner remarked. “She thinks it highly improper. But she’s not in today because it’s Sunday. It’s her day off. She’s Christian.”

  “And Ismael?”

  “Oh, he’s Muslim.”

  “So his day off is Friday?”

  Skinner chuckled. “No, he doesn’t get a day off. Not as such. You see, he lives here and …”

  He broke off as Ismael entered with the coffee. He had a pot and two cups and saucers and a plate of cookies on a tray. He placed a cup on the little semicircle of bare space on the rolltop desk for Skinner, and the other with the cookies on the coffee table in front of the sofa, on which the rabbi was sitting.

  “Is there anything else, Mr. James?” he asked.

  “No, Ismael. This is fine. Oh, and take all telephone calls, will you?”

  “Yes, Mr. James.” Ismael bowed and left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

  “You see,” said Skinner, “Ismael is my manager. He’s in charge all the time I’m away. So he can take off anytime he wants to—when I’m not here, that is. Who’s to know? So when I’m here, he’s with me all the time.”

  “He appears to have other duties besides attending to your business affairs,” remarked the rabbi.

  “Yeah.” Skinner chuckled again. “He does just about everything. He’s my chauffeur. I don’t drive. And he does the cooking Sundays when Martha is off. I guess I can count on him for practically everything.”

  “You’re lucky to have him.”

  “And he’s lucky to have me. He sort of attached himself to my father eight or nine years ago, and he’s been with us ever since. He had no family, no money, and now he lives well. He has a fine home, eats well, dresses well, and has status in the Arab community.”

  They talked of general matters for a while, and then, when the rabbi said he had to be going, Skinner offered to have Ismael drive him.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t think of troubling him. I can take the bus.”

  “Nonsense, Rabbi. You might have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes in the hot sun at the bus stop. And when one comes along, it might be jammed to the doors. It’s no trouble for Ismael to take you. I’ll tell him to bring the car around.”

  He walked to the door with the rabbi when Ismael drew up in the car. “Oh, you might have to direct him, Rabbi,” he said. And at the rabbi’s look of surprise, he explained, “He never goes to Rehavia. Neither do I. We just have no occasion to. All our business is in East Jerusalem or the Old City.… Were there any phone calls, Ismael?”

  “Only one from the plumber to say he could be here Thursday.”

  “Thursday? Did you argue with him?”

  “I asked if he couldn’t come sooner, but he said Thursday was the earliest.”

  “Okay. We’ll just have to be patient, I guess.”

  15

  The next day Rabbi Small waited in the visitors’ room at the yeshiva, a small, bare room containing a sofa, a round mahogany table, and a few armchairs. Even though the shabby chairs and sofa were spruced up with crocheted antimacassars, there was a feeling that the room was rarely used. On the table there was a bowl of artificial flowers. When he came in, Jordan Goodman, now Yehoshua Ish-Tov, looked about curiously, suggesting that he, too, might be seeing the room for the first time.

  He looked vaguely familiar, and the rabbi assumed he must have seen him on the streets of Barnard’s Crossing—clean-shaven, of course—or perhaps in his father’s store. Then he decided it was merely that he resembled his father.

  Ish-Tov nodded shortly and sat down in one of the armchairs. “You’re Rabbi Small, and you have a message from my parents?” He was a large young man who carried himself awkwardly. His manner was one of complete disinterest and studied boredom. He slouched in his chair as though it were for him the normal posture that he slid into automatically. He was dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt open at the throat. He wore sandals on his bare feet.

  “I have no special message from your parents, only greetings. They asked me to see you—”

  “To see me, so that you could report to them how I look? My mother, I suppose, wanted to know if I had lost weight? And my father—let’s see, he’d want to know if I was properly dressed when you came to see me, was I wearing a tie and were my shoes polished.”

  The rabbi smiled tolerantly.

  Ish-Tov got up, and with arms spread, turned around as though modeling his clothes and then resumed his slouch in the chair. “All right, you can tell my mother I’m in good health. I’ve even gained a few pounds. I should probably get more exercise.”

  The rabbi smiled. “If that’s what they were interested in, they didn’t stress it. I supposed they meant for me to talk with you and see if you were, er—happy in your new life and what your plans for the future were.”

  “And being a rabbi, you could report to them on whether or not I was sincere in my return, or if I had just got caught up in another cult and been brainwashed.”

  “I suppose that was their principal concern,” said the rabbi good-naturedly.

  “Yeah, they would,” said the young man contemptuously. “Well, I don’t go baring my soul to your kind of rabbi.”

  “And what kind of rabbi is that?”

  “The kind that buys crosses,” said Ish-Tov venomously.

  Then it came to Rabbi Small that he must have been one of the young men who had been bargaining for the leather bag in the Old City and that was why he had seemed familiar. He shrugged. “A Christian friend of mine asked me to buy it for him.”

  “Well, the kind of rabbis I know wouldn’t do it.”

  “No? And you wouldn’t do it either because you are a Baal Tshuvah, one who has returned, one who has repented.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me, what is it you repent of? What did you fail to do formerly that you do now?”

  Ish-Tov looked at him in surprise. “The commandments, the mitzvoth. Formerly I did not obey them, and now I do.”

  “Which mitzvoth? There are six hundred and thirteen of them—”

  “Oh, come on. You know, the daily prayers, p
utting on the phylacteries, tfillin, wearing tsitsis, observing the kashrut regulations, the Sabbath—”

  “And the major ones?”

  “What do you mean by the major ones?”

  “Well, tfillin, tsitsis, the kashrut regulations—these are ritualistic. The tfillin and the tsitsis are reminders. The kashrut regulations about not mixing meat and dairy products and keeping separate dishes for the two are an elaborate rabbinical device for adhering to the biblical law that one must not seethe the flesh of the kid in the milk of its mother because the idea is essentially repugnant and shows a complete disregard for life as manifest in the lower animals.

  “But how about the ten commandments? Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. Did you do those formerly? Thou shalt not covet—”

  The young man grinned. “Well, maybe I did a bit of coveting.”

  “And now you don’t? How about the injunction to honor your father and mother? There’s not supposed to be any scale of comparative values on importance in the mitzvoth, and one is supposed to be as important as another, but I think most people would agree that honoring one’s parents probably rates a little higher than wearing tsitsis or observing kashrut. There is also the commandment about not creating and worshiping idols. If someone fashions a bit of metal in the shape of a cross, you may regard it as making an idol. Knowledgeable Christians deny it and say that even when it includes the figure of Jesus and they appear to be worshiping it, praying to it, it is not the thing of wood or metal that they are worshiping, but that they are merely using it to focus and direct their thoughts to the being it represents, somewhat as we use tfillin for a somewhat similar purpose. But”—and he held up an admonishing finger—“when you fear this bit of metal because of its shape, and think that its shape confers on it a special power, whether for good or for evil, then you have made an idol of it, and you are worshiping it by the very act of disdaining it.”

  The young man remained silent, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair, his eyes focused on a point beyond the rabbi’s shoulder. The rabbi realized that if Ish-Tov appeared to be listening, he was not really hearing. He was reminded of Jonathon when he was younger and had done something naughty, and he had tried “to reason” with him. There was the same apparent attention while the boy probably thought only whether he would be punished or not, and what the punishment might be. To be sure, he had silenced the young man, but what credit could he derive from that? And the Goodmans had come to him not to ask him to reprimand their son but to try to understand him.

  He decided to try a different tack. “What are you studying?” he asked brusquely.

  “I study Hebrew. Right now, it’s mostly practice in reading. I learned how when I went to Hebrew School as a kid, but I kind of had to spell it out. We use the siddur, the prayer book, and since we say the prayers so often, we practically memorize them. Of course, we also learn what they mean—I mean, we translate them. Then we also get practice in conversational Hebrew and grammar and vocabulary. Things like that. And the Books of Moses. And,” he ended up proudly, “I’ve already started Talmud.”

  “Talmud! Indeed! And what are you studying in the Talmud?”

  “It’s about damages. How you’d assess damages, say you were a judge, in different situations. We don’t get very far, day to day. Maybe a couple of lines in a session on account of we argue about it a lot. We do it in English.”

  “And you enjoy it?”

  “Oh, sure, the discussions and all …” But in talking about his studies he had lost some of his unconcern. He leaned forward, and tapping on the table with his forefinger, he said, “Look, Rabbi, get one thing clear, and you can pass it on to my folks: I now have certainty. I know who I am, where I came from, and what I have to do. And that’s all I’ve got to say.” He rose abruptly to indicate that as far as he was concerned, the interview was at an end.

  “Just a minute,” the rabbi halted him. He tore a page from his notebook and wrote on it. “Just in case you want to get in touch with me, here’s my phone number.”

  Ish-Tov thrust the scrap of paper into his pocket and then with a nod left the room.

  16

  Skinner saw the panel truck from his office window on the second floor. There was a sign on the side that read Shimon the Plumber. He ran down the stairs and out the front door to meet the man who got out from behind the wheel. “You’re Gerber.”

  “That’s right. Shimon Gerber, master plumber. You got trouble?” He was a short, stocky man with grizzled hair and beard and heavy features.

  “There is almost no pressure, just a trickle, and the water is actually dirty. I called the Water Department and they checked the main. They said the trouble was on my side of the meter and wouldn’t do a thing.” He led the way into the house and into the kitchen.

  Shimon turned the faucet and watched the resultant trickle. “It’s either a clogged or a broken pipe, probably broken.”

  “How would it get broken?”

  Shimon shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands in elaborate refusal to hazard a guess about the mystery. “Look, pipes break. If pipes didn’t break and have to be replaced, how would I make a living? It could be from like old age, or from rust. It could be from a little earth tremor. We had one about a week ago. Nothing serious, the pictures on my wall jiggled.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “You don’t do nothing. I send a couple of men over and they dig up the pipe. Then I replace it with a new one, galvanized, which this one maybe wasn’t if it was put in some years ago, and then we shovel back the dirt, and everything is fine again.”

  “How soon will—”

  “This morning I’ll come down with a couple of men with picks and shovels. In a couple of hours, if we’re lucky, we’ll find the pipe—”

  “What do you mean, if you’re lucky?”

  “The pipe is in the ground. Who knows if it’s straight from the meter to the house? The tank is in back, so it could be it curves around”—he made a broad curving motion with his hand. “You’ve got maybe the original plans, blueprints?”

  Skinner shook his head. “But why wouldn’t it go directly to the tank?”

  “Because sometimes when you’re laying pipe, you find there’s a big rock in the way. So do you blast it out with dynamite? Sometimes you do, and sometimes you decide to go around, or over. If we find it first shot, it takes a couple of hours. The ground is hard, and Arab workers—it’s not that they’re lazy, but they like to work easy. Maybe it’s just one length of pipe. Whatever it is, I come down and take a look at it, get my supplies, replace it. The men shovel back the dirt, and it’s as good as new.”

  “How far down will they have to go?”

  Again the contractor shrugged. A quick glance over the terrain, and he said, “Maybe four, five, six feet. You not only got to go down to the pipe, but under a little, so we can have some work room.”

  “Well, all right,” said Skinner. “I’m in your hands.”

  The contractor smiled broadly. “And I’m in God’s hands. Don’t worry, this time of year, I’m a busy man. Right now, I’ve got half a dozen different jobs I’m working on. I start a job, I got to finish as quick as I can.”

  Sure enough, Shimon came with a couple of Arab workmen. From his office Skinner could hear him giving orders in Arabic with an occasional Hebrew phrase interspersed. Although they were within feet of each other, they spoke in loud voices as though they were calling across a field.

  Skinner immediately left his office and went to the back door to see what they were about. Shimon with wide arm motions was showing his men the direction in which he wanted them to dig, and the two Arabs, now resting, nodded every now and then to show that they understood. Shimon saw him standing in the doorway and waved to him but made no move to come over. The men started to work, and the contractor watched them for a few minutes, shouting instructions. Then he went back to his truck parked on the side of the road, got in, and drove away
.

  The two Arabs had been digging assiduously while their boss was present, but now that he was gone, they slowed down. Then one, the older one, stopped altogether, sat down on the ground, and lit a cigarette while his comrade continued to dig. Then he stopped and lit a cigarette, while his older colleague went to work with a shovel, piling up the earth he had loosened. They continued that way, the one with the shovel idling while the one with the pick worked, and when the shoveler worked, the one with the pick rested.

  Skinner watched them through the window. Once he went out and came over to see how far they had progressed. They grinned and nodded to him. He remarked that the day was warm, and the younger one said something about the ground being very hard. Skinner did not stay long, having learned from past experience that the innate politeness of the Arab worker made it unthinkable for him to talk and work at the same time.

  He went back indoors and went about his business. Later he looked out and saw that they were sitting on the ground, eating their lunch. And that afterward, instead of returning to work, they had both stretched out in the sun and appeared to be enjoying a siesta. This struck him as too much, and he went out to remonstrate against them. They jumped to their feet when they saw him and grinned and motioned to the trench.

  They pointed to the rusty pipe they had unearthed. It had involved their digging a trench almost five feet deep, six feet long, and three feet wide.

  Skinner nodded in appreciation and asked in Arabic, “So now what?”

  “We wait for Shimon to get back.”

  It was almost four o’clock before the bearded Shimon pulled up in his truck. Skinner came out to greet him. He waved in greeting and explained, “I was tied up in another job.”

  Then he jumped into the trench and examined the exposed pipe. He called out to Skinner above him, “There’s a crack underneath that I can feel with my fingers. But the connectors look good at both ends. You’re in luck. It was this piece, and we don’t have to continue digging to the meter. I’ll probably be able to unscrew this length of pipe and fit another one in using the same connectors.” He held up both arms to the workers and they grasped him by the wrists and helped him out.