In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist Read Online Free PDF

of girls’ chanting jump rope rhymes in their long dresses, the hiss and mutter of prayers coming from half-open latticed windows, none of it mattered to Mustafa. His eyes scanned the homes as he squinted for the correct address. At last he arrived at Seven Ninveh Street.
    As he entered, he gently touched the black spokes of the courtyard’s iron gate. First he saw a pregnant woman. What a mountain of a stomach she had, rising like plump dough begging to be punched down. Mustafa ducked, looking for a big tree to hide behind but found only a scraggly olive tree. Back in his village, the pregnant women gasped and turned corners when they saw him, ran into neighbors’ homes with their eyes covered. He knew why. They were scared the babies inside them would end up like him. Luckily, this pregnant one had turned her eyes down, down into her prayer book.
    A dark-haired little boy with freckles gazed wide-eyed at Mustafa. Little boys made him nervous. One minute a friend, the next minute an enemy, putting a stick in your path to trip you, burping in your face, throwing pebbles at your back. He groped in his pocket for some kind of knickknack to give the child and came up only with a bus slip. He thought of the toys the kind Christian lady had given him when he was a young boy, but he’d had to hide them from his parents. A Muslim’s soul can’t be bought, they would have shouted at him, though his parents hardly prayed or studied the Koran like their more religious neighbors. He almost buried the toys, then decided no: it made him too sad. The Christian lady then showed him the library, how anyone who could be quiet was welcome there, and she taught him to read—Arabic and English and some Hebrew. After he got comfortable among the aisles and shelves, he figured out a good hiding place for the toys: in the back of
Encyclopedia Brittanica
, volume
X
or
Z
, or the history books of countries that no one cared about. In this way he kept the toys for almost a year, and then one day, they were gone. A librarian must have dusted the shelves. What did it matter? He remembered most how the Christian lady told him he was smart and clever with languages, and that it was the biggest shame in the world he never went to school. He liked to repeat these words, not the biggest-shame part, but the clever-with-languages part.
    The freckled little boy was crouching in the dirt. Thanks be to Allah, he had found a lizard to torment. A rich soup smell came from somewhere in the courtyard. He turned his head to follow it and saw the Jew from the souk, Isaac Markowitz, in a black jacket like all the other Jews in this place, and when he spoke, the men and women listened very hard like he was an imam or what they called a rabbi. Yes, a rabbi, Mustafa decided.Oh, why had he come? he chided himself. A mistake. “Never trust the Jew,” his mother always said, and he never would. But then his mother was always saying, “Never trust Mustafa. He’ll mess up everything.”
    The
yahudi
, Isaac Markowitz, approached him. Mustafa beheld a tall man with skin the color of an onion, a nose like a parsnip, skinny lips buried in his short black-and-gray beard, and bony hands dipping into his pockets only to jump out a moment later. “Shalom,” he said, standing before Mustafa. “Did we meet once?” Before Mustafa could answer the question, a prick of light flickered in the man’s watery eyes. “I remember you.” The tall man spoke a stiff, choppy Hebrew. Why, he, Mustafa, spoke better Hebrew than that. “We met in the Old City.”
    Mustafa tilted backward and almost lost his balance.
Ya’allah
. They had met two weeks ago, and yet the Jew remembered. “Yes,” he said. “We met in the souk. I am Mustafa. And you are Rabbi Isaac.”
    The tall man coughed into his pale fist. “Actually, no. Just call me Isaac.” But Mustafa shook his head. Even he, an Arab man, could tell that here stood a rabbi.
    They looked at each other a minute, neither of them