In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist Read Free

much pepper.” His mother threw a dish towel at him. “Satan is inside Mustafa!” she shouted. Oh, the commotion he caused.
Ya’allah
. The whole village came to see. Afterward, they still looked at him the same way, no matter how much he spoke. Too stupid to learn a trade, his parents decided, or to go to school. Too stupid to marry and have a family.
    A kind lady from England taught him to read, and after lessons, she brought him to a church in a nearby village. Of course he hid these church visits from his parents, though they themselves hadn’t fasted during Ramadan in years. Even then, hardly able to read, dumb as the earth and rocks around him, he knew he was doing something dangerous and forbidden, but he loved the little toys the lady gave him—cars the size of his thumb, a frog with a tongue that wiggled when he pinched the stomach—and he went with her each week. Soon he knew more English and Hebrew than his brothers and sisters. Except for his heavy Arabic accent, some might have mistaken him for an Israeli. But his family laughed at him anyway, with that crooked head and his having to walk sideways to get anywhere without bumping into things. They had all grown up and gotten regular jobs. Tariq fixed washing machines in Bethlehem, another brother was a manager in a casino in Jericho, a third became a bookkeeper. His sisters were nurses and one a hairdresser—all of them married with children. But he spoke the foreign languages better than anyone in the family, and he was proud of this. He knew somethingthey didn’t—he who had never gone to school.
    He emptied his rucksack into a bin and made his way to the Dome of the Rock shrine, or what he liked to call the Golden Lady. The Persian carpets around the holy rock needed to be straightened, and he squatted and arranged them so that they circled flowerlike around the rock. He loved this place best because of its beautiful smell. Sheikh Tawil, his boss, said it was a smell of the hereafter.
    A group of Israeli tourists thronged by, the women covering their bare arms and legs in shawls provided by the Waqf officials. Mustafa gazed at them. Sinners. Sinning according to their Torah and the Five Books of Moses that forbade them from walking on this holy ground, some parts holier than others. He had seen the rabbis’ sign on the Gate of Magharbeh forbidding Jews to enter.
    Somewhere up here they claimed was the Holy of Holies, a place only the Jewish high priest could enter on their holiest day of the year, yet look how the stupid Israelis called out, “Yooo!” or “Wow!” in their foolish shorts and bright T-shirts, not caring where they slapped their feet down. Well, every man sinned according to his own religion. In all his years on the mountain, Mustafa had gone only once to the Al-Aqsa mosque to pray. Mostly he prayed alone, when he remembered.
I am a sinner, too
, he thought, and a pang lodged deep in his chest.
    Now he stepped over a pile of rocks and nearly tripped. The workers were supposed to clean up, but look how they never finished the job. Sometimes they asked him to haul away these big chunks of stone, not things you could just sweep. Then he had to use a wheelbarrow. But why should he do this? Was he a construction laborer? So he did the work when asked, but slowly, sometimes letting the wheelbarrow tilt to the side and spill its contents. “
Laa!
Sorry!” he’d exclaim, cuffing the side of his head.
    At least he had a job. Many fifty-five-year-old men with no education or trade were beggars, made sick by years on the street. The life of a beggar could have been his. His mother’s cousin, the one who got him this job, had warned him, “Don’t stand out in any way or bring attention on yourself. It would be like drawing attention to a mistake of Allah, and on the Noble Sanctuary, that would be improper.” So Mustafa quietly did his work. The pay covered his simple needs and also came with benefits. “Work and you will be strong. Sit