In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist Read Free Page A

and you will stink.” So hismother used to say when she sent him off to sweep in a button factory at the age of eleven.
    In the distance he saw his good friend: tall Hamdi with the big stomach and the big lips like a lady movie star. Hamdi was the only one who never called him
moak
like the others. Deformed and crippled.
    Mustafa called out,
“Salaam Aleykum
,” but Hamdi turned his head to talk to a little boy, and Mustafa got no
“Aleykum salaam”
greeting in return. Well, maybe his friend didn’t see. He let loose a stream of spit into his rucksack and continued on to the bathrooms near the elementary school that needed cleaning. Afterward, he surveyed his work: a so-so job, a so-so day.
    Nobody saw him when his shift was over, and he shuffled off, moving sideways like a crab, passing under the arched Gate of the Cotton Merchant with its many-colored stones, until he made his way into the market. At a stand in the souk he bought a bottle of Coca-Cola. From a sullen teenage boy with brilliant blue eyes he bought a few moist figs. He ate them and drank the Coca-Cola for strength. He waded through the souk, buying vegetables here and there as he lurched his way toward the little room he rented from a carpet seller. No one bothered him, especially when he carried his tools of the trade. No one saw him, really, except for the children who teased. A janitor, even one with a crooked head, was always a little invisible. When he stood in front of a mirror straight on, even then he couldn’t see himself—his head turned only the other way, looking over his right shoulder.
    Now he fingered a
jalabeeya
with sequins and turquoise embroidery. Maybe he would buy the robe for his mother and give it to someone from his village who happened to pray at the Haram. He hadn’t been back in his village in years. His mother always had a reason he shouldn’t come to visit. He picked up an olivewood camel and smiled at its haughty expression. When the shop owner scowled at him between puffs on his
shisha
pipe, Mustafa set it down.
    He lifted his eyes and saw a tall Jew passing between the shadows cast by the stalls’ rooftops. It looked as if he were walking on a thin strip of sunlight. The man’s beard was threaded with gray and brown—except for a dark patch above and under his lips—and he wore a hat on his head and a black suit. A religious Jew, he thought. The bony religious kind whoprayed all day long at their ugly wall. Mustafa watched as the Jew sidestepped a hanging sheep and a boy pushing a wheelbarrow of eggplants, the man’s steps cautious but not afraid. He’s crazy, Mustafa thought. This was no safe place for a Jew.
Yahudi majnun
.
    As the man went by, Mustafa called to him in Hebrew, “Aren’t you frightened?” Then he bit down on his lower lip. Why should he offer good advice to this, this Jew? Yet a day had gone by and the only words he’d heard were that of the stupid shopkeeper’s.
    The man stopped and looked at him, staring where his head and eyes actually were. He said, “Should I be?” in a Hebrew that sounded funny to Mustafa’s ears, and pointed to his iron pronger.
    Mustafa looked at his tools and saw how terrifying they truly appeared, weapons to kill. His lips twisted into a smile. “No, no.” He shook his head. “This is for my work. I work over there,” and pointed the pronger toward the Noble Sanctuary. “I clean.”
    The man’s gaze followed the tip of his pronger. “You clean the Temple Mount?”
    “I clean the Noble Sanctuary,” he stated with an extra boldness. “I’m the janitor there.”
    The man’s watery eyes looked stunned. “You clean the mountain. This is a great deed. You are keeping our holy mountain—God’s mountain—clean and wonderful.” He leaned over and briefly took one of Mustafa’s dusty hands into both of his clean ones, and then he moved away, murmuring, “Like the kohein.”
    Mustafa stared down at his right hand, the one the Jew had touched. A kohein.