by E. Z. Rinsky
Yisroel’s face darkens a little bit. He nods slowly.
“‘Tsaphnat’ is how I’d pronounce it. Tsaphnat-Paneah. It’s a bit of an obscure term. The nickname Pharaoh gave to Joseph. It’s only mentioned once or twice.”
“It means he who solves riddles, right? Because he interpreted dreams?”
Yisroel frowns.
“Yes, that’s if you think it was written in ancient Egyptian. Which most commentators do. Though, worth noting that if you read it as if it’s Hebrew, it translates more literally to concealer of faces.”
I think of the wax mask of Rico’s face and a little shiver shoots down my spine. Just in time, his wife carries in a cup of brown tea, stuffed with sprigs of fresh mint. She brings a chair with her, too, from the kitchen, because there’s no coffee table in here. Puts the tea down on the chair.
“Let it cool a moment,” she advises him, as if he’s experiencing hot beverages for the first time.
“Thanks.” Courtney smiles. Then Rivka leaves.
“Why would Pharaoh nickname him that?” I ask the rabbi.
“Great question,” he says, and smiles. “And for that, we need to go back to the start of the story. Do you know the basics, or—”
“Assume we know nothing,” I say. “I tried reading it last night, but it felt like reading Shakespeare. Missed a lot.”
“Okay.” He nods. “I’ll do the standing-on-one-foot version of what may be the most interesting—and most difficult to understand—story in the Old Testament. Maybe anywhere, if you ask me. Joseph was Jacob’s son. Jacob, his four wives, and their twelve sons—and an unclear number of daughters—lived in Canaan—somewhere in modern-day Israel. Joseph, despite not being the oldest, was Jacob’s favorite son. He even gave him a coat of many colors as a present. That sounds familiar, right?”
We nod.
“So, this favoritism was an issue. If anyone should have been the favorite, it should have been the oldest brothers. Joseph parading around in his father’s coat made his brothers jealous. But then it gets worse. Joseph starts having dreams. He tells his family that he had a dream: The sun, moon and twelve stars were bowing to him, Joseph. The sun was clearly his father, the moon his mother. In other words, he was prophesying that all his family would bow to him. As you can imagine, this didn’t go over well. The brothers, out of jealousy, decided to kill Joseph—the dreamer. They threw him in a well and left him for dead. He was then picked up by a group of traders, who brought him down to Egypt as their slave. He was sold as a slave to a member of Pharaoh’s guard, and then for reasons we probably don’t have time for, arrested and thrown into prison.”
“No, wait,” Courtney says, sipping on his tea. “That could be important to us. Why was he arrested?”
Yisroel checks his watch.
“The owner’s wife tried to seduce Joseph. When he refused her advance, she was so upset that she claimed that he assaulted her.”
Courtney scratches his cheek and looks at me.
“A refused advance . . .”
I nod grimly. Becky.
“Okay. Let’s keep going. What happened when he was in prison?”
Yisroel grins. I think he’s happy to have such attentive students.
“Nothing much happened in prison for a while, until one of his cellmates, a wine steward told him about a dream he’d had. Joseph correctly interpreted the dream: that it meant his cellmate would be taken from prison and returned to his former post, as Pharaoh’s cup bearer. Well, sure enough, the wine steward was taken out and exonerated. A few years later, Pharaoh himself had a series of dreams he didn’t understand—”
“About the cows,” I say. “Sorry, I remembered that bit.”
“Yes.” Yisroel nods. “Two dreams. One about cows coming from the Nile, one about stalks of grain. Nobody could interpret them to his satisfaction. Until this wine steward told him about Joseph, the boy who had interpreted his so accurately.”
I cross my legs. Think about Sampson, who was continually dissatisfied with his dream interpreters, until Oliver came along . . . from prison . . .
“Joseph indeed interpreted Pharaoh’s dream to his satisfaction: There would be seven years of grain surplus in Egypt, followed by seven years of famine. Joseph even advised the king to start saving grain now, so that they’d be the only people in the region with food when the famine hit. Pharaoh was so impressed by this young Hebrew that he instantly pulled him from jail, and made him his second in command over all Egypt.”
“And that’s when he gave him the nickname?” I asked.
“Yes.” The rabbi nods.
“So it’s about how he interpreted the dreams? How he solved the riddles of what the dreams meant?”
The rabbi tugs on his beard and meditates on this for a moment.
“Well, if you’re going to interpret it as meaning revealer, then yes. As I mentioned if you read it in Hebrew it has an almost opposite meaning. As a concealer of something—faces. And so, following the Hebrew translation, I believe the nickname is an allusion to what happened next in the story.”
Courtney leans forward in his seat, like an eager little puppy. Glad this is taking his mind off Mindy.
“What happens next?” Courtney asks.
Yisroel smiles.
“Sure enough, as Joseph predicted, the next seven years were great for crops. And the Egyptians were able to save a lot of leftover food for a rainy day. They accumulated huge storehouses of grain, all under Joseph’s supervision. And then the famine hit. People came to Egypt from all over the region, because their leaders hadn’t had the foresight to save up food. And to Pharaoh’s great delight, Egypt was making a fortune selling away some of their extra food. And then . . . then ten boys showed up at Pharaoh’s palace. Ten Hebrews who themselves were starving, and needed food to bring back for their parents.”
“Joseph’s brothers . . .” I murmur. “The ones who threw him in the pit and left him for dead.”
Yisroel nods.
“Yes. An interesting twist, isn’t it?”
“Coming full circle.” I nod.
“Here the story becomes a bit difficult to understand. There would seem to be two obvious routes to take here right?” Yisroel asks.
I nod, without really knowing for sure what he’s talking about.
“Yes,” says Courtney.
“And those are?” Yisroel asks, grinning.
“Well.” Courtney sips on his tea. “Either laugh in their face. Tell them the tables have turned, and now they’re going to get their just deserts. Or to show he’s the bigger man, and forgive them. Give them the food.”
Yisroel nods.
“But Joseph, strangely, takes the middle ground. See—the thing is, it’s been so long, and he’s wearing Egyptian clothes . . . he recognizes his brothers, but they don’t recognize him. It makes sense, really. Even if they thought this Egyptian viceroy bore a resemblance to their brother . . . it couldn’t be him . . . second in command over Egypt? So Joseph, well for lack of a better word, toys with them. First he accuses them of stealing from him, makes them terrified that he’s going to kill them. And then he insists on keeping one of them as a hostage until they go back to Canaan and bring their father and youngest brother, Benjamin down too. This whole sequence of events, this elaborate toying, I confess has always been difficult for me to understand. But finally, after all these games, Joseph can take it no more. Sobbing, he reveals himself: ‘It is me, Joseph! Is my father still alive?’ And the brothers embrace. And instead of sending food back to Canaan, he invites the whole family down to Egypt, and sets them up in a good spot. The family flourishes for many years in Egypt, until eventually a new Pharaoh arises, and since he has no debt to Joseph, he has no problem enslaving the Israelites. And that is more or less the story of Joseph.”
Courtney finishes his tea.
“So that’s how the Jews got down to Egypt,” I say. “You hear all the time about them being slave to the Egyptians, but not about how they got there in th
e first place.”
Yisroel nods.
“Yes. It’s quite a tale, isn’t it?”
I nod silently, mind frantically trying to connect all of this to Oliver Vicks.
“Wait a second,” Courtney says. “Forget the toying . . . I don’t understand. If Joseph was so powerful, and had apparently forgiven his brothers, why didn’t he contact them earlier? His poor parents thought he was dead . . . he could have helped them right away! Why did he let this drag on for years and years?”
Yisroel breaks into the widest grin of the day and slaps Courtney on the shoulder.
“We have a natural scholar here! That, my friends, is the question.”
“And the answer?” I say.
He shrugs.
“Many people have tried to answer that. Some answers are more satisfactory than others.”
“Is there an answer that you like?” asks Courtney.
Yisroel is silent for a moment, then nods slowly.
“The most common answer, which I confess I still find difficult, is that he let time languish this long in order to fulfill his prophetic dream. His brothers really did bow down to him, fulfilling his prophecy. Had he contacted them earlier, this wouldn’t have come to fruition.”
“And is that what you believe?” I ask, sensing that it’s not.
“I . . . I have another thought. Though it doesn’t cast Joseph—normally thought of as a hero—in the best light.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Yes?”
“I think, simply, that Joseph had a flair for the dramatic. A very serious flair. He understood what a pivotal point this was in the history of the Jewish people. And he understood that the longer he waited to reveal himself, the more shocking it would be . . . he wanted to make a story that would be told for generations and generations. And he succeeded.”
“That’s kind of cruel.” I laugh. “Toying with people’s emotions just for the sake of a grand, dramatic finale.”
Yisroel nods. Then tugs on his beard, hesitates, and says:
“There’s another thought I heard once at the Shabbes table . . . I haven’t thought of it again until now but . . . I had a psychologist here as a guest, and he said, sort of as a joke, that if he had to diagnose the biblical character of Joseph objectively, based on this toying, his obsession with his prophecy coming true . . . well, it wouldn’t be pretty—”
“Megalomaniacal,” says Courtney. “Ruthless, lack of empathy . . . sociopathic maybe . . .”
Yisroel nods uncomfortably.
“But,” I add, “he always seemed to believe, genuinely, that he was doing the right thing.”
“And now you understand why so many people find this part of our canon so difficult.” He checks his watch. “I have to teach a class across town in fifteen minutes. I’m so sorry, I would have loved to chat for longer. It was a pleasure.”
We stand up and shake hands with him, thank him. He grabs his suit jacket, shows us to the door, and then follows us out.
“This man you’re looking for,” he asks us, outside. “He’s done something horrible, hasn’t he?”
I don’t say anything. Courtney nods.
“I meet a lot of people,” Yisroel explains. “Many are dealing with very nasty situations. I know the look.”
He smiles at us, then rushes down to his minivan. Throws his briefcase into the front seat. He turns on the minivan, rolls down the window to wave good-bye again.
“How did Joseph die?” I suddenly shout after him.
Yisroel grins.
“Old age. Natural causes.”
We’re five minutes from the rabbi’s house, trying to escape a suburban labyrinth, when Mindy calls. Courtney’s driving, so I answer.
“We just finished at the rabbi. How’s it—”
She cuts me off, breathless:
“What’s Becky’s number?”
“Becky?”
Courtney slams on the brakes right in the middle of the narrow street, seizes the phone from me and puts it on speaker.
“Mindy?” he shouts into the phone, as only someone unaccustomed to using them would. “Are you alright?”
“Fine. Left the red dome. Got a cab. I’m on the way to Pueblo.” She’s rattling off words like an auctioneer. It sounds like the window in her cab is rolled down and she’s holding the phone out in the breeze. “I need to speak to Becky. I think I’ve figured something out.”
Courtney pleads with his hands and eyes: What’s going on?
“The books are at her apartment?” I ask.
“What? No. Just text me her number, yeah?”
Courtney picks up the phone and obliges.
“Why do you need to speak to Becky? What did you find?”
“Just, em, I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later okay?”
“No.” I snatch the phone from Courtney. “Mindy, tell us what’s—”
“I have to concentrate, buzz you later.”
She hangs up.
“What was that?” Courtney asks, his eyes as wide as polished dinner plates.
I shake my head.
“I think your girlfriend just screwed us.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“She knows something. She’s keeping us in the dark.”
Courtney snatches the phone from me and calls her back. His nostrils are flared in anticipation, and I can tell when it goes to answering machine because his face sours like a puppeteer just yanked the drawstring to pull the skin back tight over his bones. He hangs up and calls again. Same deal. He slowly places the phone in the cup holder.
I’m not sure how long the blue Saab has been behind us, honking angrily. Middle America. In NYC we’d already have our windshield smashed.
Courtney dutifully pulls us to the curb and lets the Saab pass.
“Well,” he says quietly, and doesn’t add anything.
Suppressing the I told you so reflex is surely my most noble gesture in recent memory.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I mean,” Courtney says. “She didn’t have to call at all.” He sounds like a guy trying to find the silver lining of his parachute not opening.
Hey, at least I’m more aerodynamic.
“Yes she did. For Becky’s number.”
“I guess we could drive down to Pueblo,” he says. “Go to Becky’s place.”
“Why? What are we going to do, threaten her at gunpoint to tell us what she found? She obviously doesn’t want to cooperate with us. She wants to find the books herself and take them to London . . . Just like she told us she wanted to on Tuesday.”
“She wouldn’t do that to us,” Courtney says.
I can barely contain an eye roll.
You’ve known this girl for less than a week.
“Okay,” I say. “Well, let’s be pragmatic. That’s what you always say. What now?”
Courtney seems to take a long time to wet his lips enough to speak again. Struggling to keep it together.
“I’m not sure this changes very much,” he says. “We still need the books. Or Oliver. Barring those, there’s also your suggestion to get as far away from this godforsaken flyover state as possible.”
We sit in silence for a moment. Two kids bike past on training wheels, their mom in hot pursuit, snapping photos with her phone. A squirrel shoots up an oak tree. It feels strange that the world is continuing to operate as usual around us.
“Let’s see where Sampson’s head is,” I say. “Haven’t heard from him since I told him to stop calling.”
Courtney nods in agreement, and hands me the phone.
I dial his cell phone, and am surprised by how long it rings. Last time we called him he picked up instantly.
“Frank! Courtney?” he gasps on speaker, like he just came up for air. “Where are you?”
“We’re in Colorado,” I say. “Not too far from you.”
“Listen . . .” he says, forces softness into his voice. “Anything I said before, I apologize. I shouldn’t have threaten
ed you. I’m sure you two are in a tough spot. I appreciate that. Maybe you’re thinking I didn’t offer you enough money for this job, you’re thinking about holding onto the books until I shell out a bit more. Come on by and let’s talk about it. I’m one hundred percent open to paying you fellas more. But you just have to bring me those books by tomorrow.”
I shrug at Courtney: Not a bad idea, actually.
He looks at me like I’m an idiot and mouths: We don’t have them.
“I’ll give you whatever you want.” Sampson is still talking. Negotiating against himself. “Anything. I’ll give you a million dollars. But I need them by tomorrow afternoon. If I don’t get the books back to Sophnot by sunset, I . . . I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“Is everything okay?” Courtney asks.
I swallow a bitter laugh.
Yeah, everything’s just dandy.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sampson says, a little too adamantly. “It’s just, well, I mean I spoke to Sophnot. He called me yesterday from prison. And it’s the first time, well, I mean I have to confess, I’m a bit concerned about what he will do if he doesn’t get them back in time. I don’t claim to understand his methods, of course, I don’t know how he could do anything since he’s in SCF but . . . Just bring them to me. Tomorrow.”
“What did he say, exactly?” I ask.
“He . . .” Sampson sounds like he’s on the verge of tears. “He knows about Mindy, somehow. About me showing her the books. I wasn’t supposed to do that. I knew that. I knew I was sinning, but I thought maybe Father would understand I had the purest intentions . . . Anyways he’s not upset, exactly. He does understand. But he’s talking now as if I have the books and am holding out on him. As if he doesn’t trust me. I just want to make this all right. He has so much love, so much love . . .”
I rub my temples.
“James,” I say. “You have to understand. Oliver Vicks is not your friend. He’s trying to make your life miserable. And as we tried to explain to you the other night, he hasn’t been in prison for years.”
