“I made a prayer for him.”
“Who?” Avshalom asked.
“Good-bye, Mr. Herzog. Good-bye.”
“Momma. What happened?”
“Like Kristallnacht,” she said. “They even took my mezuzah from the front doorpost.”
She began to cry, quiet at first, her lip trembling, then from the depths of her body she burst out weeping. “My beautiful mezuzah!” She swung her arms and struck out at her son. “I will never forget.”
Why would somebody steal his mother’s mezuzah? Avshalom wondered. He went to the door and could see the outline, slanting inward at the top of the doorpost, where the mezuzah had been for more than forty years. It had been pried off, that much he could tell. And it was a beautiful piece, crafted in Weimar Germany, a time when Jews enjoyed a brief renaissance before the yellow stars and cattle cars.
Two portions of the Torah from Deuteronomy inside the silver case, gone. “Hear O Israel: The Lord Our God. The Lord Is One,” he repeated to himself in Hebrew, running his fingers over the bare space on the door. “You shall write these words on the doorposts of your house.” Why would someone steal an old woman’s mezuzah? He remembered as a child being too short to reach it, kissing his fingertips and touching them to the doorpost beneath the shining silver. And later, when he had grown, he could finally see the intricate carving: flowers blooming at the top and the bottom, a jeweled crown, and tiny silver doors like a miniature ark, revealing on its parchment when opened the holy name Shaddai. What a mystical thrill he had felt, repeating that name as a youth, an all-powerful name that was older than any tree or building or person he knew.
“I know who took it,” his mother said.
“Who?” Avshalom said, closing the door and leading his mother back into the living room.
“The man who plants the flowers and fixes the garden. He is a Nazi Arab. I have seen him. He took my mezuzah. The Nazi took it.”
“Dudu took your mezuzah?”
“Yes. Yes. Dudu took it.”
“Dudu is Jewish,” Avshalom said. “Why would he take it?”
“No, no,” she cried. “He is not Jewish. I have seen him riding his donkey and goose-stepping on the street. He is the one. He took it.”
“Sit down, Momma.”
“It hurts my bones to sit. I will stand.”
“Sit down, Momma,” he said, clearing a space on the couch.
She sat, and slid the sleeves of her brown cardigan up her arm, revealing the blue numbers burned into her skin.
“Momma, I am sure Dudu did not take the mezuzah.”
“Oh, you are sure,” she said. “The laborer from Mevaseret has all the answers now. Tell me, Rashi: Why is the grass blue? Why is the moon made of Limburger cheese?”
“Stop it, Momma.”
“You are lucky you were not at the camps. You would not have survived like your father and I. You are too believing. Poor Avshi, if the Nazis had told you to go to the showers, you would have run there smiling with a towel and shampoo in your hands.”
They sat in silence. Avshalom seethed. For a moment, he wanted to strike his mother, dash her broken to the floor like a rag doll.
“Momma?”
“Son of mine,” she answered.
“What’s wrong?”
“And to think you were the smart one. I told you, the Nazis took my mezuzah.”
“Did you go to Mr. Herzog’s funeral?”
“Achh!” she said. “Funerals. I have been to too many. After your father, I never went to another. What good is it?”
“To pay your respects.”
“To the dead? You don’t understand anything, do you? When your father died, I had to take everything from his life and carry it with me. Right here.” She tapped her right temple with her forefinger. “And when Moses Solomon died, and when Esti Hertz died, all of them. Now I have to remember for Mr. Herzog, too.”
“You miss Mr. Herzog.”
“Never!” she said. “He scraped at that violin all day like a cat scratching on a pole. Miss him? No. But we are one less now. You don’t understand. You live in Mevaseret with your family and you build things with your hands. You will forget me when I’m gone. Soon, there will be none of us left. Next door there are students living, and they play rock and roll music, bang, bang, bang, all the time. What do they know of anything? I am tired, Avshi. My mezuzah is gone. Your father’s study is ruined.”
“Momma, go to sleep.”
“For what?”
“Let me tell you a story I remember from school.”
“A story about car engines and grease monkeys I do not want to hear.”
“There are two ships sailing on the seas.”
“Ha! What do you know of that, you only know the Kinneret and the Yam Ha Melach.”
“The ship that comes into the port is seen by the wise man as more of an object of joy than the ship about to leave the harbor.”
“Not if the ship is going into Cyprus,” she said. “I have been to Cyprus, you know . . .”
“Momma, listen, just because a ship is leaving the port does not mean you should be sad or afraid. Because, soon that ship will reach another harbor, a glorious harbor . . .”
“My smart boy,” she said. “My smart, smart boy. You are speaking Greek.” She let out a long loud yawn. “But you have found success. I will sleep now.”
Avshalom stood up and helped his mother to her feet. He took her arm and led her to the bedroom. She sat on the bed and removed her brown cardigan and handed it to her son, and she got into bed.
“Do you remember what I said to you as a child when I put you to bed?”
“You said, ‘goodnight.’ ”
“Oh, Avshi. Turn out the light. I will clean up the apartment tomorrow.”
He clicked off the light, leaned over, and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. He walked out of the room with her sweater over his arm.
“Schlaf gut, mein Kind,” she called after him sarcastically.
Alone in his mother’s living room, Avshalom began to tidy up, gathering loose papers in his arms. He still had his mother’s brown sweater draped over his left arm. He hung it over a chair and then noticed a weight, something in the pocket. He reached inside and found shining in his palm his mother’s Weimar mezuzah. She must have taken it down to clean it, polished it to a fine shine, and then placed it in her pocket and forgotten it.
She had turned over pillows on the sofa, pulled chairs out from the living room table, emptied her china cabinet, breaking two plates. She had entered her husband’s study, ransacked the bookshelves, torn papers from his drawers, then she had gone to the kitchen — and that is where Avshalom found the soup spoon, bent and twisted from the effort of prying, on the floor beneath the kitchen table. And in the bathroom, beside the sink among tubes and pills, he found a small jar of silver polish, her toothbrush lying on the floor, its bristles tarnished and black.
He held the mezuzah tight in his hand and thought of his wife and what she would say to him: “You want your impossible mother to live with us?”
Avshalom slowed his car at the edge of the city and pulled over at the top of a valley. He stepped out of his car and walked to the edge of a steep cliff. The abandoned village of Lifta lay below. Somewhere in the darkness, a solitary horse neighed. He pulled the mezuzah from his pocket, cradled it in his two hands, and shivered against a wind. He would never tell his mother about the mezuzah. He would let her think that her mind was a steel trap and would let her live with the mystery until she stepped off the planet to meet her husband. He would give the mezuzah to his twelve-year-old, David, and he would fasten it to his door when he had a home of his own.
Avshalom looked into the black sky splashed with yellow stars and the glowing horn of the moon.
“Of course we will not forget, Momma,” he whispered to himself. “Look at the stars. There are six million of them. And the moon, it is so beautiful tonight.”
The King of the King of Falafel
Mordechai HaLevi was still very young — only seventeen years old — when his father, Boaz, the King of Falafel, tried to run over his chief competitor with his rusty Toyota truck and was sentenced to three years in prison in the outskirts of Jerusalem.
The King of the King of Falafel had opened business across the busy thoroughfare of King George Street only six months earlier, undercutting the King of Falafel, selling two falafels for the price of one. Boaz told his son that Benny Ovadiah, the newly crowned king, must have been scraping vegetables off the floor of the Mahane Yehuda market and selling them in his sandwiches for such a price.
“He’s using rat meat to make his shwarmas. I know it,” Mordechai’s father said. “How else can a man sell falafels so cheap and still keep the rain off his head?”
“Maybe the angels,” Mordechai said.
“The only angel I know is the Angel of Death,” his father answered, turning his wedding ring on his thick finger.
The week before his father went berserk, Mordechai was sent across the street to plead with Benny Ovadiah, who was a war hero, saved by golden-winged angels at the Allenby Bridge. He was a religious man and would listen to reason.
Manufactured air blew into Mordechai’s face as he entered the gleaming oasis of polished marble and glass where twisting rams horns, bronze water pipes, and wide-eyed hamsas hung decorously from the walls. Hungry patrons sat in plush chairs covered with richly embroidered swirling Yemenite stitchwork beneath a sky-blue domed ceiling. They ate from round marble tables that were smoother than ice and whiter than snow. Mordechai wiped his brow, leaving the heat of King George Street behind. Pictures of the great mystics — the Baba Sali, Ovadiah Yosef, and others — were taped on the glass beside the mandate-era cash register that ka-chinged with annoying regularity.
Benny Ovadiah stood behind the counter wearing a large black kippah pulled low onto his forehead.
“My father wants you to move away,” Mordechai said. “He is the King of Falafel.”
“But, I am the King of the King of Falafel,” Benny Ovadiah said, throwing a falafel ball in the air and catching it in an open pita.
He was right. His prep men juggled their falafel balls in the air, tapped their tongs on the counter, and sang Heenay Ma’ Tov as they made their sandwiches. The King of the King of Falafel offered thirty-two different toppings, including thick hummus, zesty tahini, tomatoes, cucumbers, pickled turnips, radishes, olives, eggplant, red peppers, onions, and chips.
“Give this to your father,” Benny Ovadiah said, handing Mordechai the fully dressed falafel.
“But when will you leave?” Mordechai asked.
“When the Messiah comes.”
When Mordechai returned to the falafel stand to tell his father, he had to shout above the noise of the ancient ceiling fan that clattered like battling swords. His father slammed Benny Ovadiah’s falafel against the wall and said, “The fucking Messiah! I’ll kill him!”
Mordechai did not love falafels, but he did love his father, so he agreed to run the business while his father was away. With the help of his friend Shuki he secretly planned to drive the King of the King of Falafel out of business to honor his departed father.
Shuki was a juvenile delinquent who did not want to serve in the army and did his best to convince society that he was unfit to die in Lebanon. He wore a T-shirt that said “Rage,” smoked filterless cigarettes, and spat on the street as he walked. He whispered ideas in Mordechai’s ear and laughed like a sick braying beast.
They paid a Russian farmer from the north to deliver pork to Benny Ovadiah’s back door, but the King of the King of Falafel could smell treif a mile away and threw it in the street in front of Mordechai’s falafel stand. The flies buzzed above the meat all afternoon until Benny Ovadiah approached Mordechai at the end of the day as he was sweeping the floor. Only an autographed team photograph of the Betar Yerushalayim football club hung on the wall next to a yellowing dogeared kashrut certificate.
“Not many customers today,” Benny Ovadiah said. “The smell is difficult, the flies are worse.”
“It is not so bad,” Mordechai said, wondering if Benny Ovadiah smelled of body odor or cumin powder.
“You are losing money. Come and work for me. You can buy cigarettes to send your father in prison.”
“I want you to leave,” Mordechai said. “Go to Katamonim. We don’t want you here.”
“You are a punk, but there is hope for you. You honor your father even though he is a maniac. It’s a commandment of God.”
“But I don’t love my neighbor,” Mordechai said, sure now that no cumin powder in the world could smell so rank as Benny Ovadiah.
“Leave!” Mordechai shouted.
“When the Messiah comes,” Benny Ovadiah said, laughing.
“There cannot be two kings of falafel.”
“Why don’t you call yourself the King of Shwarma, or the King of Fuul, or,” Benny Ovadiah said in English, “the King of Fools.” He grabbed his rounded belly and laughed again. “Or, maybe, the son of the King of Fools,” he said, opening the door to King George Street.
To gain leverage over his enemy, Mordechai stayed open on Shabbat to take advantage of hungry tourists wandering the empty streets of Jerusalem. For a while, he did a brisk business until the black-hatted ultraorthodox from Mea Shearim caught wind of it and pelted stones and bags of dung at his falafel stand.
“Go back to Germany and destroy the sabbath,” they shouted.
Cars packed with families arrived from as far away as Nahariya, Afula, and Yeroham to savor the delights of Benny Ovadiah’s King of the King of Falafel.
“What spell has he put on them?” Mordechai wondered. “What angel watches over him?”
Even his most loyal customer, Reuven the Watcher, walked away from the King of Falafel saying, “Your falafel tastes like sand. I wouldn’t feed it to the dead.”
Mordechai gave away free samples, concocted the fruit falafel, painted a new bright red sign, shouted down his adversary through a megaphone, and continued to lose business to Benny Ovadiah. He even considered calling himself the King of the King of the King of Falafel, but did not have enough space on his tiny storefront.
Shuki suggested they steal the pita bread that was delivered to Benny Ovadiah’s front door hours before the King of the King of Falafel opened for business.
“Falafel without pita is like the Dead Sea without salt,” Shuki said.
They were amazed to discover that without his pitas, the King of the King of Falafel did not fold up and blow away. He thrived, in fact. People lined up all along the street, jockeyed for position, and shouted across to Mordechai and his empty stand. Finally a policeman on horseback arrived to calm the crowd, but he too dismounted and joined the hungry line.
“What’s going on?” Mordechai shouted to one of the patrons.
“It’s amazing,” a young girl called back. “He is serving falafel on manna from heaven.”
When his father wrote him asking how business was, Mordechai lied; when he asked after the nudnik who called himself ‘king,’ Mordechai said the filthy dog was on the run: “He’s in the mikvah now, preparing for the Messiah.”
“He should drown,” his father said.
One day Shuki drank a jar of olive oil and bit into a shwarma at Benny Ovadiah’s restaurant. He threw up on the floor right in front of the King of the King of Falafel and screamed, “Bad lamb! Bad lamb!”
But Benny Ovadiah had seen Shuki hanging out with Mordechai and beat him with a broom.
“Don’t break your teeth. I’m not leaving,” Benny Ovadiah shouted as he brought the broom down onto Shuki’s head.
“What about the Messiah?” Shuki said.
“Show me the Messiah.”
Frustrated and tired of falafel, they ate hamburgers at the new McDonald’s, where Shuki tried to lighten the mood, moving the buns of his burger like the mouth of a hand puppet. “I am the red heifer. I taste better with cheese.” And he bit into the burger, laug
hing.
“I am the pink heifer,” Mordechai said, holding his burger. “Cook me some more, please.”
“Stupid!” Shuki said, hitting Mordechai on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “Don’t you remember from religion class in school where God told the children of Israel to purify themselves?”
“Take a shower,” Mordechai said, laughing. “With soap!”
“He told them to sacrifice a red heifer, a pure red heifer without blemish or spot, because only the ashes of a red heifer can purify Jews so they can rebuild the Temple.” Shuki paused and beat a drum roll on the table. “And-bring-the-Messiah-the-King-of-Israel.”
“But there hasn’t been a red heifer in Israel in over two thousand years,” Mordechai said, remembering the mysterious passage.
“Yes,” Shuki said, “that is true. But now . . .” And he began to hum, and then Mordechai joined in and they were singing, “Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach!”
They drove out of the city under a starless sky toward the west and the coastal plain. The air became warmer as they descended. Shuki rolled down his window and lit a cigarette. Mordechai fiddled with the radio dial as they drove, finding Jordan Radio in English, then Arutz Sheva, the Jewish settlers’ pirate station, and finally Galei Tzahal, Army wave radio. They sang along in English at the top of their lungs.
“Remember when we were young?” Mordechai asked Shuki as they turned off the highway.
Shuki knew the kibbutz guard by name, because he used to hitch down every week to make out in the banana fields with a girl he’d met on a school trip to the Holocaust museum. They waved and drove by him, but they didn’t stop at the girl’s room, they kept going along the dirt road past the bulls kicking up dust, and on to the dairy. The air smelled of fresh cow manure and trees.
“Cows are so dumb,” Mordechai said. “All they do is shit. They live in shit, they sleep in shit. . . .”
The Ascent of Eli Israel Page 11
