The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

by Joel ben Izzy

  “Advice?” asked Yaakov.

  “Yes,” said the beggar. “Dig deeper.”

  Yaakov returned to the stove, under which he found the same hole, and began to dig again. This time he found a box. Though it was small, he opened it to find it filled with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds—a greater treasure than he had ever imagined.

  He even had enough money to build a small house of study, at a place where two roads meet. Legend has it that this building still stands today. It is a place for travelers to stop and rest, to think about where they have been and where they are going. You will know you have arrived there when you see these words, written on the wall in gold letters: “Sometimes you must follow your dreams very far to find that which is closest to your heart.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Buried Treasures

  I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG when I arrived at Lenny’s cabin. It was too quiet. The sun was just setting as I knocked on the door. I heard no answer, then knocked again. Finally I pushed open the door.

  In the darkness I could see the usual stacks of books, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I saw Lenny in his chair, staring into space.

  “Lenny?” I called. No response.

  The room still smelled of the same things—mildew, age, and cigar smoke, but there was another smell. Whiskey. There, at his feet, was a bottle of Old Crow, lying on its side. I listened for a time; his breathing was heavy and slow. I looked right into his eyes—wide open, but no one was there.

  I picked up the bottle and poured the rest down the kitchen sink. The wastebasket was overflowing, so I stuffed it down, figuring I might as well take it outside.

  “Lenny?” I whispered in his ear. Nothing. I had no idea what to do. I moved into his field of vision—nothing. From the look in his eyes, he was in some dark place, a trance.

  I waited for ten minutes. Finally, I realized there was nothing I could do, and turned toward the door.

  “Tell me something,” I heard him say.

  I went back to him. He hadn’t moved. I watched and waited. Finally, after a long time, he turned to me and spoke again.

  “Tell me something,” he said again. His voice sounded far away. “When does the night end?” There was a long pause, during which time he seemed to be chewing something. “That is the question asked of the rabbi by his disciples.” His voice sounded mournful, almost pleading. He turned to stare at me, but his eyes did not seem to focus.

  “‘Does it end when you can see the morning star?’ asked one.

  “‘No,’ said the rabbi. ‘That is not the time.’

  “‘Is it when you can see all the lines on the palm of your hand?’ asked another.

  “‘No, that is still not the time,’ said the rabbi.

  “‘Then when?’ asked the disciples.

  “‘When you can look at your neighbor’s face and see that it is your own. Then, at last, the long night is over.’”

  OVER THE NEXT several days I wondered what, if anything, I might do to help Lenny. Though I’d had no direct experience with the matter, I knew that stopping an alcoholic who had started drinking again was like fighting with the wind. I had trouble enough dealing with him sober, but drunk? What could I do?

  It wasn’t just worry I felt, but guilt as well. I remembered a story I’d heard from a friend of mine who had worked in Micronesia for a time, on the island of Pohnpei. The people there swore it was true. There was a boy who was a gifted runner, the fastest in his school. But he was in a horrible auto accident, which left him a paraplegic; the doctors said he would never have use of his legs again.

  One day as he lay in the hospital, an old woman came in, her body decrepit with age. “God!” she said aloud. “It’s not fair! You take his legs, so young and strong. Why not take mine instead?”

  According to my friend, she never walked again, but he went on to become the greatest runner the island had ever known. I thought of that story as I wondered what to do about Lenny. It seemed something had been exchanged between us; he had taken my misery and given me the joy he’d kept hidden.

  I WAS STILL TRYING to figure out what to do some days later when I got a phone call from a man who identified himself as a doctor.

  “May I speak to Mr. ben Izzy?” he said. His voice was older, and gruff.

  “Speaking.”

  There was a long pause, and I could tell he was confused. “Excuse me, I need to speak to Mr. ben Izzy. Is your husband home?”

  I tried to muster up my deepest, loudest whisper. “I’m Mr. . . . ben Izzy.”

  He cleared his throat and went on. “Right. Well, I’m afraid the news is not good.” Now I was confused. I hadn’t seen a doctor in months. What bad news could he have to give me?

  “Well, her lab tests came back and confirmed what we’d feared. I’m afraid it’s cancer. Late-stage metastatic lung cancer.”

  “Who?”

  “Why, your mother, of course. She asked us to call you as soon as we had the results of the surgery.”

  “Surgery?”

  “This morning. You didn’t know? Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  I waited, numb.

  “I’m sorry. There must have been a mistake. A social worker was supposed to have called you.” He took a deep breath. “Your mother came in to the hospital yesterday with difficulty breathing. She said she’d been bothered by a cold for over a month. We thought it might be bronchitis, but it turned out to be a collapsed lung. We took X-rays but they weren’t conclusive, so this morning we operated, just exploratory surgery. To tell you the truth, though, I didn’t need to see the lab results. It looks bad in there. I’m afraid she doesn’t have long.”

  I could not believe the words I was hearing. I thought of the messages my mom had left on my answering machine. She had sounded like she had a cold. Not that she’d complained about it—she hadn’t—but I could hear it in her voice as she told me how well things were going. In a daze, I wrote down the information—the hospital in Southern California, phone numbers, and so on.

  “How long?” I managed to ask.

  “You’d better come now.”

  THERE’S A ZEN STORY that has always haunted me. It tells of a master who had a very particular way of indicating he had made a point. After he finished speaking, he would raise his hand, his index finger bent ever so slightly, and say, “Ah-ha!”

  This gesture was his trademark, and no other monk would think of using it. It happened, though, that one of his students, having seen this gesture many times, took to imitating it. He never did this in the presence of the master, of course, but often, in discussions with other students, when making a point, he would raise his hand, his finger up just so, and intone, “Ah-ha!”

  One day the master called him before the class to answer a question. So pleased was the student with his answer that, when he finished, he boldly raised his hand, index finger up, and said, “Ah-ha!”

  The class was shocked at his audacity and wondered how the master would respond. He merely asked him to repeat the answer, which he did gladly, again adding the signature, “Ah-ha!” This time, though, the teacher grabbed his wrist, pulled his hand down to the desk, removed a cleaver from behind it, and chopped off his finger. The student screamed in agony and went running from the room, blood spurting from his hand. Before he reached the door, though, the teacher called after him.

  “One more thing—” said the teacher.

  “What?” screamed the student.

  The teacher smiled, raised his hand with his finger just so, and said, “Ah-ha!”

  It was not a story I’d ever told; from the moment I heard it, I had tried not to think about it. Yet that’s the story that came to me, again and again, as the plane began its descent to Los Angeles International Airport. This, then, was the way God worked. Just when you thought you understood something about life—wham! Then, a moment later, “Ah-ha!”.

  I tried to put the story out of my mind, along with my anger—an airplane is no place to be furious at God. Ins
tead I tried to be mad at the flight attendants, with their smug service and cheap pretzels, but it didn’t help. I was mad at me. Mad for having been so disconnected from my mother. Mad at myself for having gotten sick. And mad at my voice for not working.

  Below me spread miles and miles of megalopolis. Near the airport I could see vast parking lots, some that must have had ten thousand cars, and freeways, everywhere freeways, branching off in all directions with traffic at a Friday afternoon standstill. Through the brown air I could see the endless grids of streets, square blocks with houses, extending until they vanished into the haze. As the plane descended, I found myself doing the same thing I’d always done when I’d flown into Los Angeles—holding my breath for as long as I could.

  I did not want to think about where I was going and what I had to do. Instead, I replayed the day before. After the phone call, in one of those strange coincidences that seem to occur around a death, Elijah and Michaela came running in to tell me they had found a dead bird on the porch.

  “We need to bury it,” said Elijah. I found a shoe box, which the kids decorated with construction paper to make it into a coffin. Elijah carefully wrote “BIRD” on the box, and Michaela decorated it with stickers of butterflies. As we buried the bird in a corner of our yard, I did my best to explain that Grandma Gladys was dying and soon they would be going to a real funeral.

  Taly came home just as we were saying Kaddish for the bird. After the kids went back to playing, I told her about my mom. She was stunned at first and then started to ask questions—“Have they tried . . .” and “What about . . .”—none of which I could answer.

  Later that evening, as I searched our room for clothes to throw into my suitcase, she came in and sat on the bed. She motioned for me to do the same, but I didn’t; I was too angry. So she sat there, watching me.

  “So, what are you going to do?” she finally said.

  I shrugged and kept on packing.

  “This is important, Joel. This is what life is all about.”

  “It sucks,” I whispered, packing the underwear I’d found and looking for socks.

  “That’s right. But this is life. Your life. And it’s important.”

  “It sucks,” I reiterated.

  “Yes, it does. But that doesn’t change anything. You have work to do.”

  “Sucks.”

  “They’re in the bottom drawer, on the left.” I didn’t catch her meaning, so I looked, and there were a half-dozen pairs of socks, rolled up in balls. “Joel, you’ve been given a chance. The chance that few of us get and fewer take.”

  I knew what she meant. Just after we’d started dating, her own mother had died, also of lung cancer. As the end neared, Taly flew off to be with her. As soon as she arrived at the hospital, her mother turned to her and said, “We have to talk.”

  “Now?” asked Taly.

  “Soon.” Fifteen minutes later she slipped into a coma and never came out.

  I could see Taly reliving the memory. “Joel,” she said at last, “you have to say good-bye.”

  I grabbed several balls of socks from the drawer, came to her ear and whispered, “Say good-bye? . . . How the . . . hell am . . . I supposed . . .”

  “Joel, you don’t get it. The time for self-pity is over. You need to say good-bye to your mother. And she needs to say good-bye to you.”

  “But how . . .”

  “I don’t know. But I believe in you. And when you see her, say all that you have to say. Don’t wait. Because soon, it will be the last time.”

  LAX WAS AS CROWDED as I’d ever seen it, and as I waited in line for the rental car, I wondered what I would do when I saw my mother. I tried to picture her and remembered a photo on my mantlepiece, taken on her seventieth birthday, with her wearing her red-and-orange party dress. She looked so happy. But now that seemed so far away. I thought of the joy on her face as she had watched me perform, in so many times and so many places. How had we come to be so far apart? She had brought me into this world, I reminded myself. And now I was here to usher her out.

  When I finally got my car and made my way to the freeway, the traffic was moving like molasses. In that way sad memories have of linking up, I found myself remembering my father’s death. He had been placed in a nursing home after the hospital gave up on him. During a visit there, the social worker recognized me and asked if I would come tell stories. I agreed, but it was a disaster of a performance, with incoherent residents muttering to themselves in wheelchairs pointing in all directions. As I began my first story, a woman toward the back began screaming for the nurse. The cry spread, and before the story was through I had lost half my audience. Yet there was my father, in the front row, hunched over in his wheelchair, craning his neck to see, and loving every minute of it. That was the last time I had seen him alive, and the closest I had come to saying good-bye.

  With traffic at a standstill, my mind raced in circles, back to the last time I had seen my mother healthy—at the benefit show I’d done at the temple for her seventieth birthday, when that picture had been taken. I could see her face, lit up with joy, Elijah and Michaela seated on either side of her. That’s what I wanted to see, her laughing and smiling. I thought of a joke I’d just received the day before in an e-mail. It was about a Jewish man in England who had been chosen by the queen for knighthood. When she tapped him on the shoulder with her sword, dubbing him Sir Cohen, he was supposed to say certain ancient phrases in Latin. But when the time came, he forgot the Latin words. He panicked for a moment, then said the only words that came to mind, the first of the Four Questions: “Ma nish-ta-na ha-leila ha-ze?” The queen looked at him for a moment, puzzled, then asked, “Why is this knight different from all other knights?”

  I could almost hear her laughing. It was the sort of joke she would love. The timing was right too; Passover was her favorite holiday, just two weeks away. I wondered if she would live that long.

  Lost in thought, I missed my exit. I was frustrated, but relieved as well. With nothing but jokes I couldn’t tell, I felt unprepared. I felt like I should at least be wearing my hat; then I remembered that it was gone. I thought of Lenny—what would he have said? I could imagine him smiling and saying, “Here’s another gift for you Joel, you lucky guy.”

  Thinking of gifts reminded me that I’d brought nothing, not even flowers. As I pulled off at the next exit and began winding my way back to the hospital, I spotted a huge shopping center. I managed to find a parking place in the lot and went in to find that they had everything except flowers—at least, not real ones. Plastic roses. Plastic daisies. Plastic chrysanthemums—these, I decided, were worse than nothing. Then, as I was leaving, I spotted something that might be useful—a magic-erase board, the kind you write on, then lift the sheet so the words disappear. It was pink and purple, and on the top was a picture of the Little Mermaid. It would be just the thing for writing out words she could not hear, as I always did in conversations with my mom.

  I couldn’t remember where I’d parked my car, so it took some time before I found it and started to drive, only to discover that the hospital was directly across from the shopping center. I drove across the street and parked, looking up at the hospital, finding the fourth floor, trying to guess which was room 413. I dreaded entering the building and the hospital smell I knew would greet me. As I made my way up the elevator, I found myself thinking of a dozen places I’d rather be and a dozen things I’d rather be doing.

  I found the door and peeked through the little glass window. And there she was. Half-asleep, tubes in her arms, hair unkempt—she looked terrible. She was dressed in a yellow gown instead of the usual hospital blue or green. The color was most likely intended to brighten things up, but I felt no brightness at all, just a dark inevitability.

  I entered quietly and stood at her side, staring at her, for several minutes. “This is my mother,” I kept thinking, as though to remind myself. “I’ll never see her healthy again.” I kissed her softly on the forehead.

  Her e
yes opened. She spotted me, and I could see her face brighten. “Hello good-lookin’, what’s cookin’?” she said weakly. It was the way she often greeted me. When I didn’t answer she added, “How are you?”

  Her face wore a look I knew well, one of hope and expectation. I had seen the look for as far back as I could remember. Tell me something good, it said, brighten up my day. Instead of trying to answer, I shrugged, with a tilt of the head and the “notso-good” sign. I pointed back to her, as if to say, “And you?”

  “Me?” she said, smiling. “I’m doing fine.” Even my mom couldn’t say this convincingly. “Well, not exactly fine.”

  I waited.

  “Actually, I’m not doing so well. I have late-stage metastatic lung cancer.” She hyper-enunciated her words, as though sounding them out to see how she liked them. She didn’t, so went on to something cheerier. “Yesterday morning, before surgery, they took me to see the oncologist. Such a nice young woman. Very patient. And she enunciates her words so clearly. Her office is decorated so beautifully, such nice artwork, in all the colors I love. Fall colors.”

  This, then, was my mother—perhaps the only woman in the world who could see her oncologist and come back excited about how nice the office was. I waited for her to go on. She sighed.

  “There are things they could try, like chemo, radiation, but they really won’t work. It’s gone too far, and too fast.” This fit with what I had once been told by a doctor—that, ironically, lung cancer that strikes nonsmokers is the most vicious kind, and when it strikes them, it rips through like a tornado. She waited for me to respond.

  Never, in the months since I’d lost it, had I wanted my voice so badly. I could feel the words inside me, trying to push their way out: “Don’t worry,” I would say. “It will be all right.” I would tell her a story, the Passover joke, anything to make her laugh. But I couldn’t. Instead I held her hand.

  “Joel,” she said, “I’m dying.”

  She looked at me a long time, still waiting for me to speak. I nodded, holding back tears.